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.

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think C is deceptively complex, is far removed from current-day real world hardware semantics, abstracts memory in an outdated and overly simplified manner, and that it's very hard for even professionals to write programs that are correct to the extent of equivalent programs in memory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I think C is deceptively complex, is far removed from current-day real world hardware semantics, abstracts memory in an outdated and overly simplified manner, and that it's very hard for even professionals to write programs that are correct to the extent of equivalent programs in memory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

Ahh, of course it's from a spam blog. I was trying to come up with a reason for this picture to exist, the purpose it might be trying to serve, and all I could come up with was "a placeholder header image in a lorem ipsum blog template".

Well that's a mystery solved. I can now stop wasting my precious life thinking about this image.

Training my militia of revolutionary freedom fighters to attack homeless shelters, soup kitchens, nature preserves, libraries, and children's playgrounds.

Founder? I never even lost 'er!

Honestly, I'm really surprised to hear that IQ is not even a little bit heritable, given that IQ test performance correlates with level of education, which correlates with wealth, which is heritable.

True, wealth is not genetic, but heritability has an interesting definition which leads to some unintuitive cases of heritability abd non-heritability. For instance, wearing earrings is heritable while having ears is not.

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.

I mean they come up to ChatGPT on v3.5 (or Bard lmao) and expect it to write comedy?

Yeah, these things are supposed to be good at writing, aren't they?

There's a difference in having a personality that gets easily bored of luxury and believing conflict is what inherently gives life a meaning. Maus puts it: "Suffering doesn't make people better, it just makes them suffer"

If someone's life is so damn easy and hedonistic they're actually getting bored of it, there are good ways and bad ways of introducing adversity and getting out of your comfort zone. The negation of being a slave to the hedonic treadmill[1] is not an eternal war for domination.

1: A strange figure of speech, who the hell thinks treadmills are hedonistic?