gerikson

joined 3 years ago
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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th July 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (7 children)

LWer: politics is really hard to be Rational about, so how about we just forget all about it?

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FBXvMEwzTknN26NZp/that-which-cannot-be-poked-with-a-stick-is-the-mind-killer

Bad: arguing about prison abolition

Good: arguing about how to fastest get to the closest Muni station

Sam Altman movie blocked by AI partner distributors in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 2 points 2 days ago

being "banned by Amazon" is probably good for PR

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th July 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago

Consider me well and truly milkshake-ducked now

phew, the comments on the slobstack...

https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-epstein-hysteria/comment/219672502

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th July 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th July 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Slave revolts were basically constant, and I think it would have been easy for contemporary British to blame the success of the Haitian revolt on the uselessness of the French, not that slavery was doomed because the slaves now had a "win".

Brazil had horrific slave revolts and didn't abolish slavery until the late 1880s.

Mythos is just too powerful? OK, we’ll ban it then in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Amodei is the definition of "book smart" vs "street smart".

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th July 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago (24 children)

I dunno who "Bentham's Bulldog" is, but they live up to their nick and I like the cut of their jib:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2ew3chEabxf8YySR5/functional-decision-theory-not-even-wrong-also-wrong

The community is reduced to downvoting, sputtering, and "the real influential philosophers ~~live in Canada~~ are working in industry, not academia":

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2ew3chEabxf8YySR5/functional-decision-theory-not-even-wrong-also-wrong?commentId=4CcLDXFkGWGEsgGuu

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th July 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

Thanks! Does every LLM vendor publish them, or is it an Anthropic thing only?

And of course it's self-published by the vendor, so basically just PR.

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th July 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 2 points 4 days ago (7 children)

officially out of the loop here:

What is an LLM "system card", does it have any sort of scientific/technical validity, or is it just performance theater by the LLM vendor?

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th July 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (9 children)

LWer: slavery was bad and abolishing the slave trade was a net good

LW commenters: really?

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yDZcsojmRXo5qKNBm/surprising-facts-about-the-slave-trade

(I can kind of understand that intellectual honesty can prompt people to question a narrative, and in some ways I respect it, but there comes a time when you need to ask yourself "am I being the best person I can be by defending slavery" and back away from the keyboard)

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th July 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th June 2026 in c/techtakes@awful.systems
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 15 points 6 days ago (8 children)

techbros gonna techbro:

The Mullvad founder gave millions to extremist far right party

btw I live in Sweden and until today I have never heard of these nutjobs

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Why do many rationalists like cryptocurrency? (www.lesswrong.com)
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Advent of Code 2024 - the home stretch - it's been an aMAZEing year (awful.systems)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by gerikson@awful.systems to c/notawfultech@awful.systems
13 comments fedilink
 

current difficulties

  1. Day 21 - Keypad Conundrum: 01h01m23s
  2. Day 17 - Chronospatial Computer: 44m39s
  3. Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
  4. Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
  5. Day 20 - Race Condition: 15m58s
  6. Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
  7. Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
  8. Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
  9. Day 22 - Monkey Market: 12m15s
  10. Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
  11. Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
  12. Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
  13. Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
  14. Day 18 - RAM Run: 05m55s
  15. Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
  16. Day 23 - LAN Party: 05m07s
  17. Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
  18. Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
  19. Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
  20. Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
  21. Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
  22. Day 19 - Linen Layout: 03m16s
  23. Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s
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Advent of Code Week 3 - you're lost in a maze of twisty mazes, all alike (awful.systems)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by gerikson@awful.systems to c/notawfultech@awful.systems
20 comments fedilink
 

Problem difficulty so far (up to day 16)

  1. Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
  2. Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
  3. Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
  4. Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
  5. Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
  6. Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
  7. Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
  8. Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
  9. Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
  10. Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
  11. Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
  12. Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
  13. Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
  14. Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
  15. Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
  16. Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s
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Advent of Code 2024 Week 2: this time it's all grids, all the time (awful.systems)
 

The previous thread has fallen off the front page, feel free to use this for discussions on current problems

Rules: no spoilers, use the handy dandy spoiler preset to mark discussions as spoilers

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 1 September 2024 (awful.systems)
10
Person who exercises her free association rights at conferences incites ire in Jameson Lopp (protos.com)
19
Butters do a 180 regarding statism as Daddy Trump promises to use filthy Fed FIAT to buy and hodl BTC (www.marketwatch.com)
42
Martin Shkreli claims to have been behind a Donald Trump memecoin (www.web3isgoinggreat.com)
 

This season's showrunners are so lazy, just re-using the same old plots and antagonists.

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In an attempt to secure the libertarian vote, Trump promises to pardon Dread Pirate Roberts (while calling for the death penalty for other drug dealers) (www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com)
73
Flood of AI-Generated Submissions ‘Final Straw’ for Small 22-Year-Old Publisher (www.404media.co)
 

“It is soulless. There is no personality to it. There is no voice. Read a bunch of dialogue in an AI generated story and all the dialogue reads the same. No character personality comes through,” she said. Generated text also tends to lack a strong sense of place, she’s observed; the settings of the stories are either overly-detailed for popular locations, or too vague, because large language models can’t imagine new worlds and can only draw from existing works that have been scraped into its training data.

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Turns out that the basic mistakes spider runners fixed in the late 90s are arcane forgotten knowledge to our current "AI" overlords (mailman.nanog.org)
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AI grifters con the US gov that AGI poses "existential risk" (time.com)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by gerikson@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems
1 comments fedilink
 

The grifters in question:

Jeremie and Edouard Harris, the CEO and CTO of Gladstone respectively, have been briefing the U.S. government on the risks of AI since 2021. The duo, who are brothers [...]

Edouard's website: https://www.eharr.is/, and on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/edouard-harris

Jeremie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremieharris/

The company website: https://www.gladstone.ai/

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