[-] [email protected] 8 points 22 hours ago

Also into Haskell. Make of that what you will.

[-] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago

LOL the mod gets snippy here too

This comment too is not fit for this site. What is going on with y'all? Why is fertility such a weirdly mindkilling issue?

"Why are there so many Nazis in my Nazi bar????"

[-] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

LessWrong's descent into right-wing tradwife territory continues

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tdQuoXsbW6LnxYqHx/annapurna-s-shortform?commentId=ueRbTvnB2DJ5fJcdH

Annapurna (member for 5 years, 946 karma):

Why is there so little discussion about the loss of status of stay at home parenting?

First comment is from user Shankar Sivarajan, member for 6 years, 1227 karma

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tdQuoXsbW6LnxYqHx/annapurna-s-shortform?commentId=opzGgbqGxHrr8gvxT

Well, you could make it so the only plausible path to career advancement for women beyond, say, receptionist, is the provision of sexual favors. I expect that will lower the status of women in high-level positions sufficiently to elevate stay-at-home motherhood.

[...]

EDIT: From the downvotes, I gather people want magical thinking instead of actual implementable solutions.

Granted, this got a strong disagree from the others and a tut-tut from Habryka, but it's still there as of now and not yeeted into the sun. And rats wonder why people don't want to date them.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 3 days ago

In the recent days there's been a bunch of posts on LW about how consuming honey is bad because it makes bees sad, and LWers getting all hot and bothered about it. I don't have a stinger in this fight, not least because investigations proved that basically all honey exported from outside the EU is actually just flavored sugar syrup, but I found this complaint kinda funny:

The argument deployed by individuals such as Bentham's Bulldog boils down to: "Yes, the welfare of a single bee is worth 7-15% as much as that of a human. Oh, you wish to disagree with me? You must first read this 4500-word blogpost, and possibly one or two 3000-word follow-up blogposts".

"Of course such underhanded tactics are not present here, in the august forum promoting 10,000 word posts called Sequences!"

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tsygLcj3stCk5NniK/you-can-t-objectively-compare-seven-bees-to-one-human

[-] [email protected] 10 points 3 days ago

NYT covers the Zizians

Original link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/06/business/ziz-lasota-zizians-rationalists.html

Archive link: https://archive.is/9ZI2c

Choice quotes:

Big Yud is shocked and surprised that craziness is happening in this casino:

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a writer whose warnings about A.I. are canonical to the movement, called the story of the Zizians “sad.”

“A lot of the early Rationalists thought it was important to tolerate weird people, a lot of weird people encountered that tolerance and decided they’d found their new home,” he wrote in a message to me, “and some of those weird people turned out to be genuinely crazy and in a contagious way among the susceptible.”

Good news everyone, it's popular to discuss the Basilisk and not at all a profundly weird incident which first led peopel to discover the crazy among Rats

Rationalists like to talk about a thought experiment known as Roko’s Basilisk. The theory imagines a future superintelligence that will dedicate itself to torturing anyone who did not help bring it into existence. By this logic, engineers should drop everything and build it now so as not to suffer later.

Keep saving money for retirement and keep having kids, but for god's sake don't stop blogging about how AI is gonna kill us all in 5 years:

To Brennan, the Rationalist writer, the healthy response to fears of an A.I. apocalypse is to embrace “strategic hypocrisy”: Save for retirement, have children if you want them. “You cannot live in the world acting like the world is going to end in five years, even if it is, in fact, going to end in five years,” they said. “You’re just going to go insane.”

[-] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

More on Banks and Elon's terrible reading of his books

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/07/apes-do-read-banks-elon-they-just-dont-understand-him

edit from the comments I see the meme that The Player of Games is the Culture book to start with is prevalent there too. Oh well.

[-] [email protected] 14 points 5 days ago

This true, but I'm convinced the original poster knows this and is using the term ironically.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago

Everyone is entitled to their own readership of Banks. I'm not saying mine is the one and only. But the Culture is supposed to be a background character, even if Banks spends a lot of time in the later novels "explaining" it. But if the reader only focusses on the lore, they'll miss the quite good characters and psychology that Banks was good at too.

My personal favorite is Use of Weapons, where the focus is on the people doing the Culture's dirty work. In one scene, Zakalwe

spoilerspends an inordinate time trying to protect a useless aristocracy from being wiped out by a revolution, only to find out his side was meant to lose for some inscrutable Mind-directed reason. This kind of shit happens all the time to him, and as he's basically a deeply traumatized individual he's able to keep doing it.

In Look to Windward

spoilerContact goes too far along the path of optimizing "help backwards civilization" and manages to create a genocidal civil war. The survivors decide to try to destroy a Mind (and the Orbital it's managing), and you know, you kind of get why.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago

Tired: the universe was created by a deity

Wired: the universe was created by physical forces

Fucking crazy: the universe was created by a figment of my imagination and I'm communicating with it using a blog post https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uSTR9Awkn3gpqpSBi/dear-paperclip-maximizer-please-don-t-turn-off-the

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submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

current difficulties

  1. Day 21 - Keypad Conundrum: 01h01m23s
  2. Day 17 - Chronospatial Computer: 44m39s
  3. Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
  4. Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
  5. Day 20 - Race Condition: 15m58s
  6. Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
  7. Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
  8. Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
  9. Day 22 - Monkey Market: 12m15s
  10. Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
  11. Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
  12. Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
  13. Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
  14. Day 18 - RAM Run: 05m55s
  15. Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
  16. Day 23 - LAN Party: 05m07s
  17. Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
  18. Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
  19. Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
  20. Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
  21. Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
  22. Day 19 - Linen Layout: 03m16s
  23. Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s
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submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Problem difficulty so far (up to day 16)

  1. Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
  2. Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
  3. Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
  4. Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
  5. Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
  6. Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
  7. Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
  8. Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
  9. Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
  10. Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
  11. Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
  12. Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
  13. Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
  14. Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
  15. Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
  16. Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s
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submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

The previous thread has fallen off the front page, feel free to use this for discussions on current problems

Rules: no spoilers, use the handy dandy spoiler preset to mark discussions as spoilers

[-] [email protected] 82 points 9 months ago

This is the inevitable evolution of climate change denialism - accept it's real and happening, just that it's too late / too expensive to do anything about it.

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submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

This season's showrunners are so lazy, just re-using the same old plots and antagonists.

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submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

“It is soulless. There is no personality to it. There is no voice. Read a bunch of dialogue in an AI generated story and all the dialogue reads the same. No character personality comes through,” she said. Generated text also tends to lack a strong sense of place, she’s observed; the settings of the stories are either overly-detailed for popular locations, or too vague, because large language models can’t imagine new worlds and can only draw from existing works that have been scraped into its training data.

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

The grifters in question:

Jeremie and Edouard Harris, the CEO and CTO of Gladstone respectively, have been briefing the U.S. government on the risks of AI since 2021. The duo, who are brothers [...]

Edouard's website: https://www.eharr.is/, and on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/edouard-harris

Jeremie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremieharris/

The company website: https://www.gladstone.ai/

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

HN reacts to a New Yorker piece on the "obscene energy demands of AI" with exactly the same arguments coiners use when confronted with the energy cost of blockchain - the product is valuable in of itself, demands for more energy will spur investment in energy generation, and what about the energy costs of painting oil on canvas, hmmmmmm??????

Maybe it's just my newness antennae needing calibrating, but I do feel the extreme energy requirements for what's arguably just a frivolous toy is gonna cause AI boosters big problems, especially as energy demands ramp up in the US in the warmer months. Expect the narrative to adjust to counter it.

[-] [email protected] 88 points 2 years ago

I believe the scientific consensus is that it originated in a wet market in Wuhan.

The "lab leak theory", while not impossible, is also shorthand for a morass of conspiracy theories grounded in racist attitudes towards China. It somehow conflates that the pandemic is China's fault, if not an outright attack from China, while simultaneously downplaying any efforts to mitigate such an attack.

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gerikson

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