blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

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Idea: a programming language that controls how many times a for loop cycles by the number of times a letter appears in a given word, e.g., "for each b in blueberry".

Either way, they have been cordially directed to the egress.

From the comments:

On the contrary, I think that almost all people and institutions that don't currently have a Wikipedia article should not want one.

Huh. How oddly sensible.

An extreme (and close-to-home) example is documented in TracingWoodgrains’s exposé.of David Gerard’s Wikipedia smear campaign against LessWrong and related topics.

Ah, never mind.

Oh, wow, that biography is hilariously bad. Contexuality is not the same thing as superdeterminism. And locality is not "a lost cause". Plenty of people throw around the term quantum nonlocality, but in the smaller population of those who take foundations seriously, many will say that quantum mechanics is local. Most but not all proponents of Copenhagen-ish interpretations say something like, "The moral of Bell's theorem is that nature needs a non-(local hidden variable) theory. We keep locality and drop the hidden variables. In other words, quantum physics is a local non-(hidden variable) theory." The Everettians of various flavors also tend to hold onto locality, or try to, while not always agreeing with each other on how to do that. It's probably only among the Bohmians that you'll find people insisting that quantum physics means nature is intrinsically nonlocal.

Clicking through and fumbling around led me to the time Yud wanted HPMoR to win the Hugo for Best Novel. Oh, and also the time that he bet against the LHC finding the Higgs boson, because

I don't think the modern field of physics has its act sufficiently together to predict that a hitherto undetected quantum field is responsible for mass.

Is there any more solid evidence of Hossenfelder taking Thielbux, or is this just a guess based on the orbit she moves in: appearing on Michael Shermer's podcast years after the news broke that he was a sex pest, blurbing the new book edited by sex pest Lawrence Krauss, etc.

It truly blows that cryptocurrency turned out to be useful only for crimes (uncool) and sex weirdos (derogatory).

This piece links to a recent New York Times story about our very good friends, by Cade Metz. Nothing in it will surprise SneerClub regulars too much, including how it ends up giving Yudkowsky too much credit. It says that the Sequences taught critical thinking, when they were cult shit all along; it says that in HPMoR, Harry uses real science, which is balderdash.

(If anyone says "Gell-Mann amnesia" I will fucking cut you.)

(Image description: meme of a woman yelling in a man's ear. Captions read, "Their foundational text is a Harry Potter fanfic that supposedly teaches science. But it gets ninth-grade biology wrong by fucking up Punnett squares.")

"The word blueberry contains the letter b 3 times."

Also reported in more detail here:

The word "blueberry" has the letter b three times:

• Once at the start ("B" in blueberry).
• Once in the middle ("b" in blue).
• Once before the -erry ending ("b" in berry). [...] That's exactly how blueberry is spelled, with the b's in positions 1, 5, and 7. [...] So the "bb" in the middle is really what gives blueberry its double-b moment. [...] That middle double-b is easy to miss if you just glance at the word.

(via)

ChatControl in the EU, the Online Safety Act in the UK, Australia's age gate for social media, a boatload of censorious state laws here in the US and staring down the barrel of KOSA... yeah.

Back in 2017, Freddie lost an argument with Malcolm Harris, lobbed some completely made-up sexual harassment allegations against Harris, and then blamed the whole thing on a bipolar episode. Nowadays he just makes up professors to get mad at.

Wikipedia has higher standards than the American HIstorical Association. Let's all let that sink in for a minute.

There was just recently a dust-up wherein authors quit a romance con because it was to feature someone who published a Harry Potter fic with the serial numbers filed off, and supporting anything that keeps the brand going is putting money in Rowling's pocket and thus actively making trans people's lives worse. People care about this kind of thing; at least, some of 'em do. There are reactions. Some of those are talk about "reclaiming the fandom", while others regard that as untenable self-justification... But any way you slice it, the subject is very clearly coming up.

In the year since the Neil Gaiman unpleasantness dropped, I've lost count of all the threads where people have said that they can't enjoy his work again, that they are painfully re-evaluating their relationship with Sandman or Coraline or American Gods. They can't help but engage with the subject. And, hey, I get it! I generally liked his stuff and saw him live at a few events over the years, where he was an enjoyable public speaker. I don't have a Death tattoo that now needs covering up, but I can still register a loss. Discovering Sandman while visiting a friend on vacation when they were checking it out of the public library... that was an uncomplicatedly happy memory!

This kind of thing grips a person and compels a response. Even if that's only a self-justifying rationalization of the status quo! But Yudkowsky (to my knowledge) has said nothing, none of the lesswrongs commenting on that interview said anything... I expected something, like a "Rational!Harry is the only canon now", or a "Methods of Rationality is the greatest fic to be based on the works of Hatsune Miku". Anything, you know? But I haven't even seen the step that elsewhere would be the bare minimum.

Lightcone Infrastructure is running The Inkhaven Residency. For the 30 days of November, ~30 people will posts 30 blogposts – 1 per day. There will also be feedback and mentorship from other great writers, including Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, Gwern, and more TBA.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CA6XfmzYoGFWNhH8e/the-inkhaven-residency

"Hmm, your blog post is good, but it would be better with more Adderall, less recognition that other people have minds distinct from your own, and 220% more words."

Because I read Yudkowsky being interviewed about writing HPMoR, and you should suffer too.

Funniest bits:

Yudkowsky still thinks that he described Mendelian inheritance, despite everyone from FF.net commenters on pointing out his mistake.

Wandering off into "the multiverse" and algorithmic information theory to fumble at explaining that magic works the way it does in a book because the writer made it that way.

This paragraph:

So to generalize that, let’s talk about the principle of “Make All the Characters Awesome.” This was an explicit process as I was envisioning the story, where I thought, for each character, how can I make this character awesome?

This comment:

My own belief about why so many people didn't want to believe Quirrell was Voldemort is that Eliezer is nearly incapable of writing characters that people actually dislike (perhaps due to, as mentioned: "make every character awesome," "give characters understandable flaws drawn from real life").

Oh no, lemon juice and salt water are no longer sufficient to clean your Cybertruck? Try Drano!

In non-tsunami news tonight:

Starting August 13th, YouTube will detect underage users in the US based on their activity and the age of their account, allowing the platform to automatically apply restrictions.

Welp, I guess I have two weeks to download all the YouTube videos I will ever want to watch again.

(pauses, thinks)

The once-lost Evangelion AIDS PSA it is, then

All the cited URLS in the footnotes end with “utm_source=chatgpt.com”.

I just do not understand these people. There is something dead inside them, something necrotic.

DO NOT, MY FRIENDS, BECOME ADDICTED TO TOKENS