zogwarg

zogwarg, 9 days ago

Hi, I’m going to be that OTHER guy:

Thank god not all dictionaries are prescriptivists and simply reflect the natural usage: Cambridge dictionary: Beg the question

On a side rant “begging the question” is a terrible name for this bias, and the very wikipedia page you’ve been so kind to offer provides the much more transparent “assuming the conclusion”.

If you absolutely wanted to translate from the original latin/greek (petitio principii/τὸ ἐν ἀρχῇ αἰτεῖσθαι): “beginning with an ask”, where ask = assumption of the premise. [Which happens to also be more transparent]

Just because we’ve inherited terrible translations does not mean we should seek to perpetuate them though sheer cultural inertia, and much less chastise others when using the much more natural meaning of the words “beg the question”. [I have to wonder if begging here is somehow a corruption of “begin” but I can’t find sources to back this up, and don’t want to waste too much time looking]

I feel mildly better, thanks.

zogwarg, 9 days ago

Merriam-Webster also has a good page explaining the expression, and the predominance of the natural meaning: web.archive.org/web/…/beg-the-question

zogwarg, 8 days ago

Was it not always moot to enlighten the meaning of the word. ^^

zogwarg, 8 days ago

Unsigned integers are larger because… Because the containing variables don’t have a signature that crypto-statically constrains it to the lower set! (Yes that must be it)

zogwarg, 9 days ago

Meanwhile some of the comments are downright terrifying, also the whole “research” output is overly-detailed yet lacking any substance, and deeply deeply in fantasy land, but all the comments a debating in favour of or against what is perceived as “real work”, and in terms of presentation “vibes”.

I mean my parents always said that fascist/cultish movements have issues distinguishing signified and signifier, but good grief. (Yes too much Lacan in the household)

zogwarg, 9 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

Noooooooooooooo! Argh, I’ll have to seriously consider using the fork FML.

EDIT: Not strictly required since apparently you have to provide an API key for it to be enabled, still it’s not encouraging that the main developer thought this would be a good idea.

You’ve got to love the prompt jank: github.com/…/755dc2ed881d853f495ffaea2498452915e5…

EDIT 2: Given direct access to bad AI code to a dev workstation is bad enough, but given that the console is a primary way to connect to servers, where more havoc could be wrought, this is terrifying, I mean sure devs were already capable of bricking enviromnents, but supercharging “knowing just enough to be dangerous” is NOT a good idea.

zogwarg, 14 days ago

And yet they can spit out copyrighted material verbatim, or near-verbatim, how strange and peculiar.

zogwarg, 22 days ago (edited 22 days ago)

“I can predict the structure and interactions of all of life’s molecules”

I’m doing 1000 calculations a second, and they’re all wrong - Meme from Shen Comix

zogwarg, 20 days ago

I read this as The Fifth Element, but it also (almost) works!

zogwarg, 17 days ago

First efforts at bible digitization seems incredibly poorly documented online, and from a casual inspection in google scholar, not very well referenced. It’s a pity it sounds like a fascinating topic, though 7 bits is likely for the first english versions yes (And according to this there are horrid 7-bits encodings for the ancient greek)

zogwarg, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Not every rationalist I’ve met has been nice or smart ^^.

I think it’s hard to grow up in our society, without harboring a kernel of fascism in our hearts, it’s easy to fall into the constantly sold “everything would work better if we just put the right people in charge”. With varying definitions of who the “right people” are:

• Racism
• Eugenics
• Benevolent AI
• Fellow tribe,
• The enlightened who can read “the will of the people” or who are able to "carve reality at the joints"
• Some brands of “sovereign citizen” or corporate libertarianism (I’m the best person in charge of me!).
• The positivist invokers of ScientificProgress™

---

Do they deserve better? Absolutely, but you can’t remove their agency, they ultimately chose this. The world is messy and broken, it’s fine not to make too much peace with that, but you have to ponder your ends and your means more thoughtfully than a lot of EAs/Rationalists do. Falling prey to magical thinking is a choice, and/or a bias you can overcome (Which I find extremely ironic given the bias correction advertising in Rationalists spheres)

zogwarg, 29 days ago

Both. Humans are fundamentally a social animal, Rousseau’s “State of nature” doesn’t really exist.

Both society and humans are also the cure though:

• All individuals have the ability to discern and to choose good
• Society can teach what is good, and our tendencies to watch out for, and for the most part it also does this.

I don’t believe the flaw can be eliminated, nor that the attempt would be ethical. Perfect is the enemy of good, you should teach people as best you can, but in the end still let them choose, anything else is thought-stopping cultish totalitarianism.

I like the quote from Terry Pratchett, (Granny Weatherwax)

And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.

I think the worst parts of society, and innate “laziness” leads people to treat others (or yourself) as things, but that it’s also innate to “know” not to treat others (or yourself) as things.

I don’t believe the flaw is hopeless, even if it stays with us forever (at the individual and societal level).

zogwarg, 30 days ago

The article almost looks like satire.

If all script kiddies waste their time trying to use generative AI to produce barely functional malware, we might be marginally safer for a while ^^. Or maybe this is the beginning of an entirely new malware ecology, clueless development using LLMs falling prey to clueless malware using LLMs.

zogwarg, 27 days ago

I like the beautiful tangents into linguistics and arguing about how many present tenses English has, and of the dubious merit of distinguishing definiteness in articles.

Trying to invoke LLMs as a tool to pierce these supposedly pointless elements of the English language, for the benefit of non-native (or maybe non-confident native) speakers.

Where really this is exactly the sort of mistakes that LLMs can bring, it’s not just choosing between a non-standard and a standard spelling of a word (like for basic autocorrect) it’s choosing between valid forms depending on context and Intent, which no machine can divine.

zogwarg, 1 month ago

The 100% mathematical PROVABLY_CORRECT proof of existence of the supernatural is at least funny.

It fails to prove dualism, which it then calls the supernatural for no adequately explained reason:

There is nothing new under the sun. Nothing a 3-lb-brain hominid does is impressive. Everyone dies and leaves behind nothing. If no God exists, all is infinitely meaningless. Fortunately, we can prove with mathematical certainty that the supernatural exists:

Would a 5-lb-brain hominid bring new things under the sun ? How about a 15-ton-brain corvid ? How about an acausal robot god wrought from all the ditherings found across the net ? If it is still so why are you so concerned with phrenology ?

1. You cannot be deceived that you are conscious.

So far so good, not too contentious, you need consciousness to be deceived, though I will note that it doesn’t prove consciousness, only use definitions tautologically.

2. Consciousness, in itself, contains only that which you aware of.

No ? Not necessarily, that’s overly egocentric. What about the Id ? What about collective consciousness ?

3. Consciousness is composed of perceptions and a perceiver.

A bit contentious, and not a very rigorous definition.

4. Perceptions are not composed of material things. Red is not a spectrum of light, nor a retinal activation, nor an optical nerve signal, nor a biochemical process in your brain: it is only the experience the perceiver calls “red”.

Qualia != Perceptions, but this is not the worst sin in this “proof”.

5. The perceiver is not composed of material things. Neither quarks, nor atoms, nor molecules, nor cells, nor organs of the brain, nor the brain > itself experiences red. Associated processes happen, but only the perceiver experience red. To say that a material object “perceives” anything is a category error.

Does a perceiver without a body even exist ? I’m not really a monist myself, but this is clearly a leap.

6. Therefore, your consciousness undeniably exists, but it is not material.

Again does it exist untethered from the material ?

7. That which exists, yet is not material, is supernatural.

Hum no ? At best preternatural, and even then if you think the natural world follows Dualism, then the spiritual is still natural. I mean yes this arguing about definitions, but by god is this silly.

8. The supernatural exists.

QED.

zogwarg, 1 month ago

And those shadows are just as sentient as we are, even if they don’t depict the world, they convey a perception of a hypothetical world in which they are accurate!

Trying to grapple with the meaning consciousness through input/output is so close to being philosophical zombies type interesting, and yet so far and vacuous in what he actually says, that could apply to dice picking which color the sky is today. Also pretty hilarious that we would choose being WRONG, as a baseline (because LLM’s are so bad) for outrospection, instead using the more natural cooperative nature of language. (Which machines fail at, which is maybe also why)

zogwarg, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

You can take solace in the fact that mxcl hasn’t contributed to brew since 2012 (I guess the world ended) at least in terms of commits.

EDIT: Even if they are better at PR the mere fact that they would be onboard with tea and AI generated logos/descriptions foisted on projects that didn’t ask for them, and acting confused when people are justifiably angry, shows a disturbing lack of care and consideration. (Paired with I take it incorrect installation scripts even)

zogwarg, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

A choice selection of musks deposition with TurdRationalist™ adjacent brainrot shibboleths:

Q: (By Mr. Bankston) And this quote says from the Isaacson book, “My tweets are like Niagara Falls sometimes and they come too fast,” Musk says. “Just dip a cup in there and try to avoid the random turds.” Do you think that’s an accurate quotation from you?

A: (By Elon) That is acutally not – not accurate. […] The things that I see on twitter, not the […] posts that I make are like Niagara Falls. […] my account is the most interacted with in the world I believe. It is physically impossible for, you know, any one person to see all of the interactions that happen. So the only way I can really gauge the interactions is by sampling them essentially.

Q: Got you. So would it be fair to say that Isaacson made a mistake here and what thus really should say is not my tweets are like Niagara Falls, but everyone else’s tweets are like Niagara Falls?

A: Not exactly. It means […] all of what I see when I use the X app, […] all the posts that I see and all the interactions that happen with those posts, are far to numerous […] for any human being to consume.

Q: Okay. So when this quote talks about random turds; these are other people’s random turds?

A: I mean I suppose I – I could be guilty of a random turd too, but […] what I’m really referring to is that the only way for me to actually get an understanding of what is happening on the system is to sample it. Like try to do – just like in statistics, you don’t – you do – try to do – you sample a distribution in order to understand what’s going on, but you cannot look at every single data point.

I can only gauge truth from first principled anecdotal sampling of my nazi friends, I can’t look at everything alas, I’ll leave community notes to deal with pesky liberals

[Which btw in other parts of the deposition he says, for a community note to be surfaced people must vote the same note as being helpful, where they previously disagreed, which doesn’t sound at all like it couldn’t be gamed, and doesn’t at all sound like it would sometimes force “centrism” with nazis]

On a all too sadly self-aware note

Elon: I may of done more to financially impair the company than to help it.

You think?

zogwarg, 1 month ago

It remains infuriating how many agencies/governments simply don’t have reliable online public feeds, with information.

Especially annoying when the only place with info is twitter and/or Facebook.

(That doesn’t fully solve the community contributions, which should also be useful, but at minimum any info from official accounts SHOULD be posted elsewhere)

zogwarg, 2 months ago

It’s “fun” to see them fail to grasp that a journalist (or outsider) doesn’t need to have read all their blogposts, and that “who talks to who” is basic journalism.

If only you read those glorious posts you would be enlightened, and if you somehow still disagree then you are either a liar, an NPC, or have not read them carefully enough, which I can prove by using shibboleths on our communities accepted doctrine.

It always boggles the mind when people fail to grasps others as being real.

zogwarg, 3 months ago

It rings very true,

The [un]simulated, with the extra icky purpose of presenting of veneer of ethics to back any an all arguments under the sun, to pour money into the latest fad that tickles a billionaire’s fancy.

You can’t quite (yet) do that with pro-life advocacy.

zogwarg, 3 months ago

A key difference is that animals exists here and now, and I think most humans would viscerally understand animal shouts of pain as requests for help/food/space etc…

The quote is less about the unborn, and more about the real and ignored needs of disenfranchised people.

Help your fellow humans first and foremost, (which I would argue is well served by treating animals well, for sanitary, eco-system, or even selfish mental well-being by not having our souls marred by brutality)

Actual beings with needs: humans, animals > the unborn >>>>>> unrealistic hypothetical humans.

zogwarg, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

It underscores a bit of a universal delusion with Potemkin shitbots in general. People lauding the outputs, into languages (visual art, foreign language, programming, apparently inorganic chemistry, …) that they don’t speak, and since it passes the first glance test, they don’t even think to look twice.

I think this is actually part of the reason why the prime reason (subconsciously or otherwise) they choose Japan for their main SORA video, the overall exotic nature decreases the uncanny valley factor.

zogwarg, 3 months ago

Saying “prime reason” Is maybe overselling it a bit ^^.

I think the fact it’s Japan let’s them a bit too uncritically act amazed though, for the lady in red one: the location is reminiscent of Shibuya but doesn’t exist and doesn’t make sense, the text on billboards and signs is scribbely gibberish, and the woman face changes over the course of the video.

(Everyone should be unsettled by the godawful lack of perspective)

General weebishness is probably a bigger factor, though I wish I could gatekeep them out of that descriptor.

zogwarg, 3 months ago

E/Acc where Might makes Right, is the not at all repulsive and most ontologically sound source for ethics! Not at all burting at the seems with perverted eugenics, it’s not morally dubious if none of your enemies survive to criticise you!