Someone ask if those fucks wanna see how much of the modern world was actually built by China? Wanna let them run it instead?

Matt Levine, qntm

I can see why these would appeal to LW crowd. One of them writes cosmic horror about monstrous alien phenomena that can't be directly perceived preying on humanity and all life in the universe, and qntm writes wordy science fiction.

No comment on Wildbow. I'm sure Worm is excellent but I'm just not in the market for three HPMoR wordcounts of capeshit, so I don't know what his deal is. Bummer for him to have one of his characters be the indirect namesake of a notorious murder cult.

NERV is the organization that runs the eponymous mech suits. It's a bit like if someone asked about the Simpsons and he just replied "Springfield!" like yea that's a thing from the show, but couldn't you think of a quote from a character or something?

You (group A) think C is simple, that it can be thought of as portable assembly, that it teaches you how computers actually work, and that it's easy to avoid memory safety errors with good programming discipline, and is therefore fine.

You (group B) think C is deceptively complex, is far removed from current-day real world hardware semantics, abstracts memory in an outdated and overly simplified manner, and that it's very hard for even professionals to write programs that are correct to the extent of equivalent programs in memory safe languages, therefore C shouldn't be use for new software development.

I think C is deceptively complex, is far removed from current-day real world hardware semantics, abstracts memory in an outdated and overly simplified manner, and that it's very hard for even professionals to write programs that are correct to the extent of equivalent programs in memory safe languages, which are some of the features that make C so fun and exciting. Like rawdogging a one night stand!

We are not the same.

Twice in the last week I’ve had Claude refuse to answer questions about a specific racial separatist group (nothing about their ideology, just their name and facts about their membership)

The unspecificity is damning. "Facts about their membership" might range from "what racial separatist group is Skum Shitt (R, NC) a former member of" to "am I eligible to join The Brotherhood of Untarnished Ejaculate".

and questions about unconventional ways to assess job candidates.

That's an interesting example to pair up with the one about racist hate groups. Unconventional in what way, motherfucker?

I give it slightly higher odds than AGI.

Edit: or cryptocurrency replacing fiat

Oh man, XML is such a funny hype. What if we took S-expressions and made them less human readable, harder to parse programmatically and with multiple ways to do the same thing! Do I encode something an an element with the key as a tag and the value as the content, or do I make it an attribute of a tag? Just look at the schema, which is yet more XML! Include this magic URL at the top of your document. Want to query something from the document? Here you go! No, that's not a base64-encoded private key nor a transcript of someone's editing session in vim, that's an XPath.

JSON has its issues but at least it's only the worst of some worlds. Want to make JSON unparsable anyway, for a laugh? Try YAML, the serialization format recommended by four out of five Nordic countries!

The fact that there are 45,000 ‘trailblazers’ here couldn’t devalue the title any more.

Trailblazing, more like scorched earth policy.

new meta for cultivation novels: prison literature

There was a lot I left unsaid in the Stubsack comment because of how difficult it is to express the uncanny valley effect I got from reading the a16z blog post. It's not just the very AI generated sounding prose, or the relatively broad knowledge of multiple forms of Japanese and Japan-inspired media combined with the glaring factual inaccuracies and extremely surface-level understanding of the topic. Even the whole angle of "how can we insert ourselves as a middle man to extract surplus from this" dressed up in a veil of celebratory excitement is par for the course for a private equity firm, but somehow they completely fail to understand anything about anime or video games as a business either.

The only way I can describe how the article reads is this: it's like if an anime fan gave an introductory presentation about Japanese media, then a business analyst gave a presentation on the size of anime business, revenue of gacha games and market value of Japanese entertainment brands, then an AI bro who knew nothing about either topic but took meticulous notes on both presentations threw them together into a blog post and padded out the word count using GPT.

Edit: Here's a long-form piece about Japanese cultural capital from someone who does know what he's talking about, as a palate cleanser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM2VIKfaY0Y

I thought the point of posting your ideas on a public forum was to have people read them.

Dunno what you want me to say. Define the vague concept of "good writing"?

The linked study finds that ChatGPT 3.5 and Bard suck at writing comedy. You claim in so many words that this should be obvious (along with a really dubious claim that machines can't tickle people for some reason). I'm also not surprised that these models are terrible at writing comedy, because even at best of times I find their output bland, trite and crudely stripped of anything potentially divisive.

However, lots of people seem to think that LLMs are good at writing related tasks, so I don't think it's inherently obvious that these tools suck at writing comedy in particular.

All these words make this reply much less fun to write.