"Conspiracy" is a colorful way of describing what might boil down to Gagniuc and two publicists, or something like that, since one person can hop across multiple IP addresses, etc. But, I mean, a pitifully tiny conspiracy still counts (and is, IMO, even funnier).

A comment by Wikipedia editor David Eppstein, theoretical computer science prof at UC Irvine:

Despite Malparti warning that "it would be a waste of time for everyone" I took a look at the book myself. 60 pages of badly-worded boring worked examples with no theory before we even get to the possibility of having more than two states. As Malparti said, there is no theory, or rather theory is alluded to in vague and inaccurate form without any justification. For instance the steady state (still of a two-state chain) is first mentioned on 46 as "the unique solution" to an equilibrium equation, and is stated to be "eventually achieved", with no discussion of exceptional cases where the solution is not unique or not reached in the limit, and no discussion of the fact that it is never actually achieved, only found in the limit. Do not use for anything. I should have taken the fact that I could not find a review even on MR and zbl as a warning.

It's been a while since I've seen a math book review that said "Do not use for anything."

"This book is not a place of honor..."

The phrase "trying to gatekeep what was once their moat" makes me feel like a character in A Scanner Darkly who has reached the "aphids, aphids everywhere" stage of Substance D abuse

(At the brainstorming session for terrible software names)

"PedoAI!"

And I'm sure that your snide remark will both tell them what to simplify and explain how to do so.

Enjoy your free trip to the egress.

An interesting thing came through the arXiv-o-tube this evening: "The Illusion-Illusion: Vision Language Models See Illusions Where There are None".

Illusions are entertaining, but they are also a useful diagnostic tool in cognitive science, philosophy, and neuroscience. A typical illusion shows a gap between how something "really is" and how something "appears to be", and this gap helps us understand the mental processing that lead to how something appears to be. Illusions are also useful for investigating artificial systems, and much research has examined whether computational models of perceptions fall prey to the same illusions as people. Here, I invert the standard use of perceptual illusions to examine basic processing errors in current vision language models. I present these models with illusory-illusions, neighbors of common illusions that should not elicit processing errors. These include such things as perfectly reasonable ducks, crooked lines that truly are crooked, circles that seem to have different sizes because they are, in fact, of different sizes, and so on. I show that many current vision language systems mistakenly see these illusion-illusions as illusions. I suggest that such failures are part of broader failures already discussed in the literature.

Ed Zitron's figure is $2.35.

"Your mother was volatile with poor control last night, Trebek!"

"Computers will be really good at chess" was already a trope in 1960s science fiction. HAL 9000 is canonically so good that he was instructed to throw the game half the time so that his human opponents don't get bored. The Enterprise computer is so good that Spock being able to beat it — Spock — is a major plot point.

Technical terms can still be, technically speaking, dumb as fuck.

"The image of the penis is translated into a depth measurement...."

That's numberwang!

Yet another news story that omits how the science in HPMOR, the Sequences and the flagship e/acc blog is just wrong. Like, failing junior-high biology wrong.

The A.I., trying to access a Web site, was blocked by a Captcha, a visual test to keep out bots. So it used a work-around: it hired a human on Taskrabbit to solve the Captcha on its behalf.

Wait, didn't that turn out to be bullshit?

Counterpoint: he is in fact a bumbling idiot