In other news, a lengthy report about Richard Stallman liking kids just dropped.
Hacker News has a thread on it. Its a dumpster fire, as expected.
this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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I had heard some vague stuff about this, but had no idea it was this bad. Also, I didn't know how much of a fool RMS was. : "RMS did not believe in providing raises — prior cost of living adjustments were a battle and not annual. RMS believed that if a precedent was created for increasing wages, the logical conclusion would be that employees would be paid infinity dollars and the FSF would go bankrupt." (It gets worse btw).
I don't think anything in the report is new, is it? Isn't this the exact weirdness that got him kicked off the board in the first place? I was shocked when he was quietly added back to the board; I really thought the allegations would stick the first time.
Nice to have it all in one place though.
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Little of this was news to me, but damn, laid out systematically like that, it's even more damning than I expected. And the stuff that was new to me certainly didn't help.
Very serious people at HN at it again:
The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someone's personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.
Yes, of course they should be! Opinions are essential to the job of a leader. If the opinions you express as a leader include things like "sexual harassment is not a real crime" or "we shouldn't give our employees raises because otherwise they'll soon demand infinite pay" or "there's no problem in adults having sex with 14 year olds and me saying that isn't going to damage the reputation of the organization I lead" you're a terrible leader and and embarrassment of a spokesman.
Edit: The link submitted by the editors is [flagged] [dead]. Of course.
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the lobste.rs thread is a trash fire too.
of note is that the Stallman defenders from about 3 years back (when he waded in unprompted in a mailing list meant for undergrads at MIT and was pretty damn sure that Marvin Minsky never had sex with one of Epstein's victims, and if he did, it would have been because he was sure she wasn't underage) have registered https://stallman-report.com which redirects to their lengthy apologia. Could be worth taking into account fi you want to spread the original around
Top level comment at time of posting:
“This might not look that bad, but consider the post-USSR…”
???
No need for these soviet level mental gymnastics. You can just say he needs to be removed permanently.
Ignorance is a choice. That thread is full of bad choices.
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this demented take on using GenAI to create documentation for open source projects
https://lobste.rs/s/rmbos5/large_language_models_reduce_public#c_j8boat
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As more and more browsers are enshittifying, this is a small reminder that Brave is not a great alternative.
lol fandom could have been even worse
data moat
That's just the kind of innovation we need to get over this primitive and outdated impulse to cooperate with one another.
imagine how they could have monetized it
Surely Wikia could have catapulted to the upper echelons of the Fortune 500 if they had just moved faster to gatekeep the facts about gender-swapped Lady Vegeta being a rare card in set 27 of the Dragonball gacha game
ok my first thought was to make a joke about castle warfare, despite my knowledge set being ephemera from a childhood appreciating tech trees in video games. So I did some research:
- The etymology of “moat” is that it comes from the word “motte”. I will not elaborate.
- Moats were effective against early forms of siege warfare, like battering rams, siege towers, and mining out the foundations of a castle’s defences, or anything that required approaching the castle directly
- Moats were made somewhat obsolete by siege artillery, which did not need to be in the direct vicinity of the castle
Err so yeah. Make your own jokes, ig.
Anyway, this has been MoatFacts™️. Paging @[email protected] for better commentary*
In this context, "moat" is a cargo-cult invocation of Warren Buffett and Benjamin Graham. Just another square on the hackernews bingo
idk what to exactly put there, moat is still an obstacle even in modern context, but assault on a castle with a moat using modern weaponry would be hilariously one-sided. you can suppress defenders with something, use a bridge layer to get inside the moat, then let combat engineers do their shenanigans to "open" castle one way or another. or you can use helis to do the same, or you can just level it all with artillery or airstrike or maybe even loads of ATGMs
that said it's not completely useless. moats but dry were used as a part of fixed fortifications in ww1 quite successfully. freshly invented electrified barbed wire fence and machine guns made them quite hard to pass, especially if you are, say, a peasant from tula oblast born in 1898 that has never seen powerline before. i think the last proper moat use in large-scale warfare happened during iran-iraq war, in battle of the marshes, when iraqis flooded previously dry area known as fish lake and put underwater coils of barbed wire and high-voltage cables. defensive tactic used there was to shoot at assaulting iranians to make them abandon or fall out of their boats or amphibious vehicles, then when they were in the water high voltage lines were energized. iranians eventually crossed the marshes entirely using speedboats. maybe it's not that outdated considering that last recored bayonet charge happened in 2004 (by brits in iraq). ymmv
I will internalise this for the next time data moats come up!
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I bear news from the other place!
https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/1g3zt5b/hsc_english_exam_using_ai_images/
Post content reproduced here:
autoplag image of some electronics on a table
hello, as a year 12 student who just did the first english exam, i was genuinely baffled seeing one of the stimulus texts u have to analyse is an AI IMAGE. my friend found the image of it online, but that’s what it looked like
for a subject which tells u to “analyse the deeper meaning”, “analyse the composer’s intent”, “appreciate aesthetic and intellectual value” having an AI image in which you physically can’t analyse anything deeper than what it suggests, it’s just extremely ironic 😭 idk, [as an artist who DOESNT use AI]* i might have a different take on this since i’m an artist, what r ur thoughts?
*NB: original post contains the text: "as an artist using AI images" but this was corrected in a later comment:
also i didn’t read over this after typing it out but, meant to say, “as an artist who DOESNT use AI”
In a twisted way, this makes sense as an exercise for English class. Why would someone go to an autoplag image generator, type in a prompt (perhaps something like "laptop and smartphones on a table at a lakefront") and save this image. It's a question I can't easily answer myself. It's hard to imagine the intention behind wanting to synthesize this particular picture, but it's probably something we'll be asking often in the near future.
I can even understand the shrimp Jesus slop or soldiers with huge bibles stuff to an extent. I can understand what the intended emotional appeal is and at least feel something like bewilderment or amusement about the surreality of them. This one would be just banal even if it were a real photo, so why make this? The AI didn't have intent or imbue meaning in the image but surely someone did.
[https://x.com/shinboson/status/1846000415793463684?s=46](Roko gets dunked on.)
He had some remarkable tweets a few weeks back about how he was the equal of billionaires or some shit. I wish I had shared it.
Is he some kind of computer fondler irl?
Think this might be the first tweet of Roko I somewhat agree with. At least Roko did something somewhat intellectual in creating pascals wager for nerds. Musks intellectual accomplishments are worse. He thinks the derivative function is some sort of glorious masterpiece of math, and he doesn't seem to understand chess. I think the only things he really created was the handle that sinks into the car, and the look of the cybertruck.
Funny to see the Rationalists start to turn on their glorious savior from AGI doom. (Which has been happening for a while now it seems, some even argue he never actually interacted with anybody from the Rationality community (btw before he blocked people being able to see all people you follow on twitter he followed slatestarcodex)))
Okay but "Elon is not smarter than me" is a universally true statement in the exact same way as "dumb as a rock" is a universally applicable idiom.
Indeed, it isn't that Roko is smart, it is the bar is so low.
If he's so smart, why did he put the car in the asteroid belt and not on a road?
That launch happened Feb 2018. By that time, I was already solidified as a musk sceptic and didn’t pay attention to the hubbub. Thinking back on it:
- Why was this a thing?
- per wikipedia:
Musk explained he wanted to inspire the public about the "possibility of something new happening in space" as part of his larger vision for spreading humanity to other planets.’
What I like about the phrasing “possibility of something new” is that nothing new really happened with that launch. We’ve already sent all kinds of junk into space in configurations varying in impressiveness.
- Naming the mannequin Starman falls apart since the eponymous starman is an extra terrestrial. Just goes to show that Musk is not a Real Nerd^TM^ and just makes surface level references to look cool.
I was also a Elon skeptic back-then, but I'll admit I did get a kick out of the "don't panic" dashboard.
But golly does he read H2G2 completely wrong (transcript):
I think and it highlighted an important point which is that a lot of times the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part. So, to the degree that we can better understand the universe, then we can better know what questions to ask. Then whatever the question is that most approximates: what’s the meaning of life? That’s the question we can ultimately get closer to understanding. And so I thought to the degree that we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness and knowledge, then that would be a good thing.
It's backwards! It misses the joke! It took thousands of years and they got a nonsensical answer before any question! It took a thousand more and they got a nonsensical—incompatible—question! It has been theorized that should someone understand the universe it would be replaced by something more complicated! It has also been theorized this has already happened! Also regarding scale of knowledge, Trin Tragula definetly showed that the One thing you can't afford to have in this universe, is a sense of perspective!
Surely his reading comprehension isn't actually this bad, and he only got a bad meme-cliffnotes version of the radio-series/books/movies!?!
Surely his reading comprehension isn’t actually this bad, and he only got a bad meme-cliffnotes version of the radio-series/books/movies!?!
Ow boy do I have some stories for you about his takeaways from other media he consumed. For example, and a worse take.
(There was also a take which I remember where he mentioned that in the Culture humans are basically pets of the AIs (which is mentioned in the books yes, but only by the people who are anti/sceptical of The Culture, The Culture itself makes it pretty clear they are not pets. (In the last book they even seem to fulfill some more vital role in keeping the AIs sane, and people have full autonomy in a way that pets never do)). Couldn't find this take sadly. As everything is now about the Haitian pets thing (erugh, racist shits), and also this 'humans are pets' thing is an not uncommon misreading of people reading the culture novels).
fucking hell how are Musk’s Banks takes even worse than I remember? that was the point where I realized I hated the fucker so you’d think there’d be nothing left to feel rage over but no, Musk corpsefucking Iain’s memory once he was too dead to tell Musk to go fuck himself is absolutely doing it
"utopian anarchist" I assume means "it would be nice in theory".
Nah, his ego is big enough that he's probably some version of the an-cap, with a personal political based in "I could give everyone this utopian world if the government and the 'woke mob' and the labor organizers would just get out of my way."
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~aaaaaaaaaaaa~aaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!
Why was this a thing?
Publicity stunt for both SpaceX and Tesla, as well as Musk himself, and a successful one at that.
🙄🙄🙄
Hope Musk’s existence and influence today was worth it, nerds from 2018!
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