gerikson @ gerikson @awful.systems

Posts

44

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1,438

Joined

2 yr. ago

OmniScott.

tbf being able to write thousand word long blog posts and using phrases like "good and important" is part of his job description

lobste.rs just banned an 11 year old account with almost 5,000 comments and 45k karma for being a transphobic jerk. No muss, no fuss, no apologetic blogpost where the user could defend themselves and rile up the masses.

That's how you do it, people.

edit I have now skimmed the comments where banned use Said can explain himself, and he's using his last efforts to nobly defend himself, thanking his admirers, and generally projecting an image of a man wrongly accused.

j/k he's doubling down on being a dick.

Thanks for pointing me to this. I hadn't read the Wolfe story and I appreciated it. I skipped most of the gwern fluff, precisely because while his preferred interpretation is one possible of many, what I like about Wolfe is that the story can be about multiple things beside that.

And the illustration sucks.

Funniest are all the commenters loudly complaining about this decision and threatening/promising to delete their accounts.

Those examples are the Ingroup. We are the Outgroup.

DavidG already posted this here: https://awful.systems/post/5382402

After spending hundreds of hours per mod year trying to get a Wronger on the Right track , mod Habryka spends multiple hours writing a post explaining why the Wronger gets a 3 year ban

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/98sCTsGJZ77WgQ6nE/banning-said-achmiz-and-broader-thoughts-on-moderation

Bonus appearance of r/SneerClub right after the preamble!

We live in an era of unprecedented passport checks, visa quotas, and detention centers, a world that regulates human movement more tightly than at any other point in history.

Uh... internal passports anyone?

Rest of post is ok.

Even if quantum computing isn't snake oil, I have a hard time seeing how pushing it can be as large a market as social media. Web3/NFTs and LLMs are riding on that particular bizmodel coattail. Investors can see "oh yeah 200M monthly subscribers for ChatGPT" and map that to FB and come up with numbers that translate to VC money. I fail to see how quantum fits into that

El Reg: NIMBYs threaten to sink Project Sail, a $17B datacenter development in Georgia

Nuclear has been a running sore in Swedish politics since the late 70s. Opposition to it represented the reaction to the classic employer-employee class detente in place since the 1930s where both the dominant Social Democrats and the opposition on the right were broadly in agreement that economic growth == good, and nuclear was a part of that. There was a referendum in the early 80s where the alternatives were classical Swedish: Yes, No, and "No, but we wait a few years".

Decades have passed, and now being pro-nuclear is very right-coded, and while secretly the current Social Democrats are probably happy that we're supposed to get more electrical power, there's political hay to make opposing the racist shitheads. Add to that that financing this shit actually would mean more expensive electricity I doubt it will remain popular.

Here's a blog post I found via HN:

Physics Grifters: Eric Weinstein, Sabine Hossenfelder, and a Crisis of Credibility

Author works on ML for DeepMind but doesn't seem to be an out and out promptfondler.

So state-owned power company Vattenfall here in Sweden are gonna investigate building "small modular reactors" as a response to government's planned buildout of nuclear.

Either Rolls-Royce or GE Vernova are in the running.

Note that this is entirely dependent on the government guaranteeing a certain level of revenue ("risk sharing"), and of course that that level survives an eventual new government.

Deep cut, I love it!

TIL some rats have started a literal monastery to try to defeat the robot god with good ole religion (well, Zen buddhism)

here's a mildly critical view that apparently still believes the approach has legs

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ENCNHyNEgvz9oo9rr/briefly-on-maple-and-the-broader-community

I note in passing that there seems to be a mild upsurge in religious-friendly posts on LW lately.

Michael Hiltzik in LATimes: "Say farewell to the AI bubble, and get ready for the crash"

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-08-20/say-farewell-to-the-ai-bubble-and-get-ready-for-the-crash

https://archive.ph/2025.08.20-113134/https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-08-20/say-farewell-to-the-ai-bubble-and-get-ready-for-the-crash

Fun quote:

The rest of [AI 2027], mapping a course to late 2027 when an AI agent “finally understands its own cognition,” is so loopily over the top that I wondered whether it wasn’t meant as a parody of excessive AI hype. I asked its creators if that was so, but haven’t received a reply.

He seems to state that after the abolition of slavery, less of the profits from a unit time of labor accrued to the owners of the land in question. The reasons for this is of course a mystery.

Granted, I played a bit fast and loose with the term ancient. "Long-running" is better.

This is in the running for most LW comment ever.