Siskind's always been pretty explicit about it, you get banned if you broach so-called culture war topics in the open threads. They ended up with two subreddits for similar reasons.

Between this and EY seemingly being a huge fan of employing gullibility filters, one might argue that many of the most prominent rationalists aren't necessarily the most candid of characters.

Day 4: Scratchcards

Late to the party and never done advents before, I liked how this problem reminded me that tree traversal is thing, almost as much as I don't that so much of my career involves powershell now.

I'm putting everything up at https://github.com/SpaceAntelope/advent-of-code-2023 except the input files.

Using command abbreviations like % and ? to keep the horizontal length friendly to lemmy post areas, they are expanded in git. ::: spoiler Part 2 in Powershell

    
function calculate([string]$data) {
  # code for parsing data and calculating matches from pt1 here, check the github link if you like banal regexps
  # returns objects with the relevant fields being the card index and the match count
}

function calculateAccumulatedCards($data) {
    $cards = calculate $data # do pt1 calculations

    $cards 
    | ? MatchCount -gt 0 # otherwise the losing card becomes its own child and the search cycles to overflow
    | % { 
        $children = ($_.Index + 1) .. ($_.Index + $_.MatchCount)  # range of numbers corresponding to indices of cards won
        | % { $cards[$_ - 1] } # map to the actual cards
        | ? { $null -ne $_ }  # filter out overflow when index exceeds input length

        $_ | Add-Member -NotePropertyName Children -NotePropertyValue $children # add cards gained as children property
    }

    # do depth first search on every card and its branching children while counting every node
    # the recursive function is inlined in the foreach block because it's simpler than referencing it 
    # from outside the parallel scope
    $cards | % -Parallel {
        function traverse($card) {
            $script:count++        
            foreach ($c in $card.Children) { traverse($c) }
        }
        
        $script:count = 0 # script: means it's basically globally scoped
        traverse $_ 
        $script:count # pass node count to pipeline     
    } 
    | measure -sum    
    | % sum
}


  

:::

Must be another one of those hundred hostile bloggers who inexplicably have it in for EA, according to siskind.

To be clear, it's because he played Edward Snowden in a movie. That's the conspiracy.

'We are the sole custodians of this godlike technology that we can barely control but that we will let you access for a fee' has been a mainstay of OpenAI marketing as long as Altman has been CEO, it's really no surprise this was 'leaked' as soon as he was back in charge.

It works, too! Anthropic just announced they are giving chat access to a 200k token context model (chatgtp4 is <10k I think) where they supposedly cut the rate of hallucinations in half and it barely made headlines.

So far I like best that he was probably fired for not being enough of an AI doomer, i.e. deprioritizing AI safety and diverting too many resources from research to product service, all the while only paying lip service to the ea/rationalist orthodoxy about heading off the impending birth of AI Cthulhu.

Any remaining weirdness can be explained away by the OpenAI board being sheltered oddballs who honestly though they could boot the CEO and face of the company on a dime and without repercussions, in order to bring in an ideologically purer replacement.

It certainly looks like more of the same. Maybe the negative publicity on EA is a silver lining.

This certainly looks like both venture and established capital saying that while it was fun pretending to take EA concerns about AI seriously, it's time to move on.

Also the increasing number of anti-EA effortposts that started cropping up in the OpenAI subreddit over the last few days is deilghtful.

Every ends-justify-the-means worldview has a defense for terrorism readily baked in.

On one hand it's encouraging that the comments are mostly pushing back.

On the other hand a lot of them do so on the basis of a disagreement over the moral calculus of how many chickens a first trimester fetus should be worth, and whether that makes pushing for abortion bans inefficient compared to efforts to reduce the killing of farm animals for food.

Which, while pants-on-head bizarre in any other context, seems fairly normal by EA standards.

edit: accidentally removed the quote i was commenting on when editing in Stross' comment, here it is again:

a belief in psi powers implicitly supports an ideology of racial supremacy, and indeed, that's about the only explanation I can see for Campbell's publication of the weirder stories of A. E. Van Vogt.

Maybe it's me but I don't think that is so self evident a claim to be posited without further explanation.

Best I can come up is he means the necessary implication of having superabled people in a fictional setting is that you have a de facto racial elite, even if the concept rarely breaches the surface of the text, like in the unfortunate sequel to the Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller.

Edit: he addresses it in the comments (can't find a way to direct link from phone, its comment #14) I wasn't far off:

If you're a glutton for punishment, (re-)read Slan by A. E. Van Vogt.

Secret superrace with super-mind powers! It's totally a meme in vintage SF (goes back at least as far as Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race in the 19th century) and you rapidly end up with eugenics and breeding for desired traits (eg. psi powers).

Maybe he hopes that if he mentions shady crypto shenanigans often enough twitter's algorithm will take the hint and start pushing his stuff on a fresh batch of suckers who already self-select for gullibility.

Seems to be a/b testing a new posting style aimed at a... less discerning audience of technoilliterate anti-wokists, I think, while claiming that people missed the joke/deep philosophical point he was illustrating without actually meaning what he wrote every time a post falls embarrassingly flat.

Once he gets that nobody outside the handful of rat forums is actually bothering with his bizarre wall of texts rants, i think blue collar vlogging behind the wheel yud night be the logical next step.

Did he always show his ass so much when tweeting or is this a recent development?

I love how what if LLM but it makes your DNA mine bitcoin is the culmination of untold amounts of dollars in MIRI research grant money. Real effective altruism is when you tithe 80% of your income in perpetuity just so sneerclub can have more content.

I can somewhat sympathize, in the sense that there are currently multiple frameworks where Python code is intermixed with magic comments which are replaced with more code by ChatGPT during a compilation step. However, this is clearly a party trick which lacks the sheer reproducibility and predictability required for programming.

He probably just saw a github copilot demo on tiktok and took it personally.

Yeah, once you get past the compsci word salad things like this start to turn up:

Student: But I can't be racist, I'm black! Can't I just show the compiler a selfie to prove I've got the wrong skin color to be racist?

Truly incisive social commentary, and probably one of those things you claim it's satire as soon as you get called on it.

There's technobabble as a legitimate literary device, and then there's having randomly picked up that comments and compilers are a thing in computer programming and proceeding to write an entire parable anti-wokism screed interminable goddamn manifesto around them without ever bothering to check what they actually are or do beyond your immediate big brain assumptions.

Seeing as incel apologetics occasionally appear even in mainstream rat/ea outlets like slate star or shetl (nerds are an oppressed people unfairly stigmatized by the fairer sex, and other Good Guy grievances), one has to wander what the e/a calculus is in regards to doing the most good with your genitals.

Like, keeping your effective altruist higher-ups in peak effectiveness by shielding them from sexual frustration has got to be worth a few million billion far future simulated lives, at the trifling cost of a little of your time and some lube, right?

I can't imagine the peer pressure dynamics in such a dating environment to be too healthy.

How did Sam and Caroline get into taking high doses of ADHD medication? We think it was via Scott Alexander Siskind, the psychiatrist behind the rationalist blog Slate Star Codex.

Siskind occasionally writes up particular psychiatric drugs as public education. One popular piece was “Adderall Risks: Much More Than You Wanted To Know” from December 28, 2017.

Not to cast further aspersions or anything, but siskind did write a sort of follow up (titled psychopharmacology of ftx or something like that if you feel like googling it) where he explicitly denies ever having met the FTX psychiatrist/dealer, even though a) he admits they actually worked in the same hospital for a time and, perhaps more tellingly, b) no one asked.

Also according to the birdsite the ftx psychiatrist may have in fact been a huge creep.

This reads very, uh, addled. I guess collapsing the wavefunction means agreeing on stuff? And the uncanny valley is when the vibes are off because people are at each others throats? Is 'being aligned' like having attained spiritual enlightenment by way of Adderall?

Apparently the context is that he wanted the investment firms under ftx (Alameda and Modulo) to completely coordinate, despite being run by different ex girlfriends at the time (most normal EA workplace), which I guess paints Elis' comment about Chinese harem rules of dating in a new light.

edit: i think the 'being aligned' thing is them invoking the 'great minds think alike' adage as absolute truth, i.e. since we both have the High IQ feat you should be agreeing with me, after all we share the same privileged access to absolute truth. That we aren't must mean you are unaligned/need to be further cleansed of thetans.