This is a fundamentally flawed argument. If you ask a human who already knows the algorithm for solving the Tower-of-Hanoi problem to solve a Tower-of-Hanoi problem with twenty discs, for instance, he or she would almost certainly fail to do so. By that logic, we must conclude that humans cannot think either.

“I don’t understand recursion” energy

This is a joke, right?

@istewart @BlueMonday1984 Still waiting on a mini F-91W.

@istewart @cstross

@istewart @BlueMonday1984 OK, who at Casio spent too much time reading Heinlein?

Casio and their target market are my kind of nerds. Taking a silly idea and an iconic design and pushing the engineering to its limits entirely for the bit is absolutely unhinged and I’m so happy they did it.

@istewart @BlueMonday1984, looks to me like it needs the whole watch face to be the display, though it’s possible that I’d find it too small to read unassisted anyway.

I imagine that there won’t be PV-rechargeable models due to size… would be nice to be wrong about that, though.

As a gshock fan, the “democratization” of that initial gshock ring is amazing lol

Jack Dorsey seems to like throwing money at it:

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, has endorsed and financially supported the development of Nostr by donating approximately $250,000 worth of Bitcoin to the developers of the project in 2023, as well as a $10 million cash donation to a Nostr development collective in 2025.

(source: wiki)

nostr neatly covers all obsessions of dorsey. it’s literally fash-tech (original dev, fiatjaf, is a right-wing nutjob; and current development is driven by alex gleason of the truth dot social fame), deliberately designed to be impossible to moderate (“censorship-resilient”); the place is full of fascists, promptfondlers and crypto dudes.

exploding-heads, openly trumpist lemmy instance, fucked off there when admin got bored of baiting normal people, make of that what you will

fuck nostr. flere and fullsquare covered the details well tho

Sounds like the thing to do is to say yes boss, get Baldur Bjarnason’s book on business risks and talk to legal, then discover some concerns that just need the boss’ sign-off in writing.

I just saw this. I sent an email to Framework a few days ago asking if they would delete my account and letting them know this was the reason.

not outside of the fascist playbook to claim that they are the real victims. The example that comes to mind is the myth of white genocide, but also literally any fascist rhetoric is like that.

It’s well trodden ground to say that genAI usage and support for genAI resonates with populist/reactionary/fascist themes in that it inherently devalues and dehumanises, and it promotes anti-intellectualism. If you can be replaced by AI, what worth do you have? And why think if the AI can do it for you?

So, of course this stuff being echoed in spaces where the majority are ignorant to the nazi tilt. They can’t and don’t understand fascism on a structural level, they can only identify it when it’s trains and gas chambers.

It’s been a while since I used Reddit. Is the thesis that subscribers to ChatGPT will be rounded up and killed? By whom? For what stated reason? It sounds like a weird inversion of victimhood, considering the number of GenAI user (even if they’re just casual users) and the massive money and hype around GenAI by companies and way too many govs.

Oh what the fuck why can Mozilla not just STOP. Just… STOP. Honestly sick of this shit.

Jesus fucking Christ.

I did paid work in Japanese translation once, I stopped because the ungodly amount of work wasn’t worth what they pay you. The tech people really have no idea what they’re breaking by moving fast here.

Sounds exactly like what happened at iNaturalist.

Im very very happy on Fastmail. They are sensible people who offer mainly email (and calendar stuff) with no overpromises. Their servers are hosted in the USA tho, so that may affect your choice.

I’m in the same boat. From what I’ve read I am planning on migrating to tuta when it runs out.

I am using posteo.de. They are good but I dislike that they have no option for using your own domain which makes switching provider really annoying. If I had to choose a provider again I would probably go with mailbox.org.

I like mailbox.org so far with their servers in Germany

haven’t seen them before, but a short tour around their infra/systems providers isn’t particularly exciting - depending on both your threat model and what-you-want in a vendor

some parts/pages do provide some detail in encouraging depth, but I’d have to do a much more full review to give you a good answer

there’s been a couple of “where email” threads over the last year, tuta’s still one of the top options on that but you can check the threads if you want to see some of the other promising options

For a moment there I was worried that ffmpeg had turned fash.

Anyway, amazing job ffmpeg, great responses. No notes

The dumb strawman protagonist is called “Mr. Humman” and the ASI villain is called “Mr. Assi”. I don’t think any parody writer trying to make fun of rationalist writing could come up with something this bad.

The funniest comment is the one pointing out how Eliezer screws up so many basic facts about chess that even an amateur player can see all the problems. Now, if only the commenter looked around a little further and realized that Eliezer is bullshitting about everything else as well.

I couldn’t even make it through this one, he just kept repeating himself with the most absurd parody strawman he could manage.

This isn’t the only obnoxiously heavy handed “parable” he’s written recently: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHLdf8SB8oW5L27gg/on-fleshling-safety-a-debate-by-klurl-and-trapaucius

Even the lesswronger’s are kind of questioning the point:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dHLdf8SB8oW5L27gg/on-fleshling-safety-a-debate-by-klurl-and-trapaucius?commentId=BhePfCvbGaNauDqfz

I enjoyed this, but don’t think there are many people left who can be convinced by Ayn-Rand length explanatory dialogues in a science-fiction guise who aren’t already on board with the argument.

A dialogue that references Stanislaw Lem’s Cyberiad, no less. But honestly Lem was a lot more terse and concise in making his points. I agree this is probably not very relevant to any discourse at this point (especially here on LW, where everyone would be familiar with the arguments anyway).

And: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3q8uu2k6AfaLAupvL/the-tale-of-the-top-tier-intellect?commentId=oHdfZkiKKffqSbTya

Reading this felt like watching someone kick a dead horse for 30 straight minutes, except at the 21st minute the guy forgets for a second that he needs to kick the horse, turns to the camera and makes a couple really good jokes. (The bit where they try and fail to change the topic reminded me of the “who reads this stuff” bit in HPMOR, one of the finest bits you ever wrote in my opinion.) Then the guy remembers himself, resumes kicking the horse and it continues in that manner until the end.

Who does he think he’s convincing? Numerous skeptical lesswrong posts have described why general intelligence is not like chess-playing and world-conquering/optimizing is not like a chess game. Even among his core audience this parable isn’t convincing. But instead he’s stuck on repeating poor analogies (and getting details wrong about the thing he is using for analogies, he messed up some details about chess playing!).

42 minute read

Maybe if you’re a scrub. 19 minutes baby!!! And that included the minute or so that I thought about copypasting it into a text editor so I could highlight portions to sneer at. Best part of this story is that it is chess themed and takes place in “Skewers”, Washington, vs. “Forks”, Washington, as made famous by Twilight.

Anyway, what a pile of shit. I choose not to read Yud’s stuff most of the time, but I felt that I might do this one. What do you get if you mix smashboards, goofus and gallant strips, that copypasta about needing a high IQ to like rick and morty, and the worst aspects of woody allen? This!

My summary:

Part 1. A chess player, “Mr. Humman”, plays a match against “Mr. Assi” and loses. He has a conversation with a romantic interest, “Socratessa”, or Tessa for short, about whether or not you can say if someone is better than another in chess. Often cited examples of other players are “Mr. Chimzee” and “Mr. Neumann”.

Both “Humman” and “Socratessa” are strawmen. “Socratessa” is described as thus:

One of the less polite young ladies of the town, whom some might have called a troll,

Humman, of course, talks down to her, like so:

“Oh, my dear young lady,” Mr. Humman said, quite kindly as was his habit when talking to pretty women potentially inside his self-assessed strike zone

I hate to give credit to Yud here for anything, so here’s what I’ll say: This characterisation of Humman is so douchey that it’s completely transparent that Yud doesn’t want you to like this guy. Yud’s methodology was to have Humman make strawman-level arguments and portray him as kind of a creep. However, I think what actually happened is that Yud has accidentally replicated arguments you might hear from a smash scrub about why they are not a scrub, but are actually a good player, just with a veneer of chess. So I don’t like this character, but not because of Yud’s intent.

Socratessa (Tessa for short) is, as gerikson points out, is a Socratic strawman. That’s it. It’s unclear why Yud describes her as either a troll or pretty. She argues that Elo ratings exist and are good enough at predicting whether one player will beat another.

The story should end here, as it has fulfilled its mission as an obvious analog to Yud’s whole thing about whether or not you can measure intelligence or say someone is smarter than another.

Part 2. Humman and Socratessa argue about whether or not you can measure intelligence or say someone is smarter than another.

If you had measured the speed at which the resulting gossip had propagated across Skewers, Washington – measured it very carefully, and with sufficiently fine instrumentation – it might have been found to travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum.

How do you write like this? How do you pick a normal joking observation and then add more words to make it worse?

First comment: “the world is bottlenecked by people who just don’t get the simple and obvious fact that we should sort everyone by IQ and decide their future with it”

No, the world is bottlenecked by idiots who treat everything as an optimization problem.

One commenter cites von Neumann’s minimax theorem to argue that there is an “inexploitable” strategy for chess, and then another commenter starts talking about the well-ordering theorem.

Of course, all of that is irrelevant because chess is a finite, sequential, perfect-information game.

Some juicy extracts:

Soon enough then the appointed day came to pass, that Mr. Assi began playing some of the town’s players, defeating them all without exception. Mr. Assi did sometimes let some of the youngest children take a piece or two, of his, and get very excited about that, but he did not go so far as to let them win. It wasn’t even so much that Mr. Assi had his pride, although he did, but that he also had his honesty; Mr. Assi would have felt bad about deceiving anyone in that way, even a child, almost as if children were people.

Yud: “Woe is me, a child who was lied to!”

Tessa sighed performatively. “It really is a classic midwit trap, Mr. Humman, to be smart enough to spout out words about possible complications, until you’ve counterargued any truth you don’t want to hear. But not smart enough to know how to think through those complications, and see how the unpleasant truth is true anyways, after all the realistic details are taken into account.” […] “Why, of course it’s the same,” said Mr. Humman. “You’d know that for yourself, if you were a top-tier chess-player. The thing you’re not realizing, young lady, is that no matter how many fancy words you use, they won’t be as complicated as real reality, which is infinitely complicated. And therefore, all these things you are saying, which are less than infinitely complicated, must be wrong.”

Your flaw dear Yud isn’t that your thoughts cannot out-compete the complexity of reality, it’s that it’s a new complexity untethered from the original. Retorts to you wild sci-fi speculations are just minor complications brought by midwits, you very often get the science critically wrong, but expect to still be taken seriously! (One might say you share a lot of Humman misquoting and misapplying “econ 101”. )

“Look, Mr. Humman. You may not be the best chess-player in the world, but you are above average. [… Blah blah IQ blah blah …] You ought to be smart enough to understand this idea.”

Funilly enough the very best chess players like Nakamura or Carlsen will readily call themselves dumbasses outside of chess.

“Well, by coincidence, that is sort of the topic of the book I’m reading now,” said Tessa. “It’s about Artificial Intelligence – artificial super-intelligence, rather. The authors say that if anyone on Earth builds anything like that, everyone everywhere will die. All at the same time, they obviously mean. And that book is a few years old, now! I’m a little worried about all the things the news is saying, about AI and AI companies, and I think everyone else should be a little worried too.”

Of course this a meandering plug to his book!

“The authors don’t mean it as a joke, and I don’t think everyone dying is actually funny,” said the woman, allowing just enough emotion into her voice to make it clear that the early death of her and her family and everyone she knew was not a socially acceptable thing to find funny. “Why is it obviously wrong?”

They aren’t laughing at everyone dying, they’re laughing at you. I would be more charitable with you if the religion you cultivate was not so dangerous, most of your anguish is self-inflicted.

“So there’s no sense in which you’re smarter than a squirrel?” she said. “Because by default, any vaguely plausible sequence of words that sounds it can prove that machine superintelligence can’t possibly be smarter than a human, will prove too much, and will also argue that a human can’t be smarter than a squirrel.”

Importantly you often portray ASI as being able to manipulate humans into doing any number of random shit, and you have an unhealthy association of intelligence with manipulation. I’m quite certain I couldn’t get at squirrel to do anything I wanted.

"You’re not worried about how an ASI […] beyond what humans have in the way of vision and hearing and spatial visualization of 3D rotating shapes.

Is that… an incel shape-rotator reference?

The rat video starts with him proclaiming that in rationalism he “found his people”, that was the point where I bailed.

What do you mean by decline? Years ago I’ve been involved in a local ruby community in Poland and even back then his takes were considered unhinged.