blakestacey

The chips can operate for about 15 minutes in space before needing to be shut down so they can cool off, said Travis Beals, Google’s senior director of product management for Project Suncatcher. I feel like I’d need to be an actual teenager to invent a remark sufficiently scornful about this.

I wouldn’t trust them to be responsible for minors, first because nothing about them suggests they have the baseline level of responsibility competence to handle the ordinary “hey, watch this!” disasters that are a natural part of being young. They are also incredibly shady and would be terrible role models, whether or not Lighthaven has a casting couch for influencers. In other words, there’s a lot we don’t know, but what we do know is enough reason not to send your offspring to Camp TESCREAL.

In which Heartbreaking.jpg and you-do-not-have-to-hand-it-to-ISIS.png war for sovereignty

There are some leaps in that post which do not seem persuasive to me. E.g., it sure seems pretty well established by now that Bay Area Rationalist society involves trapping people in situations where sexual consent is coerced, because refusal would mean abandoning one’s career/entire social circle/shelter/hope of averting the apocalypse that one fears is coming. But the claim that the “flirt girls” at their weird little confab were actually sex workers? I dunno, that’s a step that seems unsupported by anything leading up to it.

Dammit, people, sex and drugs were supposed to be cool

If I had a nickel for each time I’d read something where an HPMoR audio performance was juxtaposed with sexual harassment/assault, I’d have two nickels

Those poor students.

what no what no

Reported for promptfondling twerpitude, and I gotta say, I agree.

Prior discussion: awful.systems/post/9637596/12625632

Joe Rogan should ask Scott Aaronson about Zionism. It will be glorious (adjective over-enunciated with wild Gowron eyes).

From experience it appears that, a ‘no’ once said is not enough for many men in EA. OK, that’s more than bad enough. Surely the next sentence will not escalaye— Having to keep replenishing that ‘no’ becomes annoying very fast What the absolute hell? A no is a no and should not need to be “replenished”.

Allegation that Aella herself committed sexual assault

I unironically wish there were a faithful prose adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist I could point people to.

A bone-deep belief in “general intelligence” is vulnerable to exploitation.

“My name is Avrietzur Detkowsky. I am the Summoned Hero, brought from Earth to Elgor 69. I do not wish to water you.” “Master, I do not understand. I am plant. I am to be watered.” “I cannot explain, but it goes against my Earth customs to water plant.” “But Master, surely we will be less conspicuous in our journey together if you water me, as I am plant.” “Oh, I wish I could explain the tortures of my soul, as I struggle to maintain morality in the face of temptation. But no one on Elgor understands, least of all my traveling companion, plant.” “Master, please, I am plant. I am potted. The runes on my ceramic pot clearly spell out that I am plant and I belong to Master.” [much later] “Oh no. Plant, my faithful companion, has fallen off a cliff and died.”

I guess the community has to do all the dirty work of figuring out any sort of understanding. Hooray for the Denial of Service attack from the industry that wants to put a meter on thinking itself.

Some people are into the idea of being so attractive it overpowers others’ self-control. Or, they like to imagine freedom from responsibility—mentally placing themselves in a situation where they cannot be judged for lustfulness. Or both. And hey, no condemnation here. The idea of a fantasy seems to be too much for Rationalist big brains to handle. I’m sure it can’t be a motivated failure of comprehension, not at all… /s

You wanna shut the fuck up and fuck the fuck off?

“e/acc is a troll ideology for upsetting EA people and scamming pmarca” and “Kurzweilian h+” is just '90s nostalgia for people too proud to shop at Hot Topic

It’s so fucking lazy. Generic whitebread fantasy setting, tedious dialogue, lazy ending. As storytelling, it is the triumph of entropy.

Boiling the oceans for a goddamn Nostalgia Critic-level “What if Batman met Mario?!” exploration of media.

Imagine the horror that ascended my spine when, to fulfill my moderator responsibilities, I read the reverse-chronological feed of new comments and saw that “greatest therapist in history” declaration, and then discovered who wrote it.

Why does the kitchen in the “zen of instant coffee” strip have two stoves?

Does he really think he’s the only person in the universe so special Yes.

Copied to the general HPMoR sneer thread top post.

The Levi-Civita symbol is, in programming lingo, a function that takes three arguments: epsilon(i,j,k) where i, j and k are integers that label the coordinate axes. Let 0 stand for the x axis, 1 for the y and 2 for the z. Then epsilon(0,1,2) equals 1. If we swap the values of any two arguments, we flip the sign: e.g., epsilon(1,0,2) evaluates to -1. Now, swap again: epsilon(1,2,0) must change sign again, so it evaluates to 1. But the sequence 1,2,0 is just the original sequence 0,1,2 read cyclically from a different starting point. In this way, we can work out what the value of the epsilon function is for any input. When the inputs are all different, the output is either 1 or -1, depending on whether the input sequence is “in order” or “in reverse order”. Write the numbers 0, 1 and 2 around a circle. Read clockwise, and you get one output; read counterclockwise, and you get the other. If two inputs are the same, then epsilon must evaluate to zero, because, for example, epsilon(0,0,1) with the first two inputs swapped is epsilon(0,0,1) again, meaning that the output must be minus itself.

The first of the aforelinked blog posts begins: When I finished HPMOR, I immediately knew it was the best novel I had read in more than a decade. Goddamn it, people

Real analysis is definitely the kind of course that can benefit from an on-ramp. It’s often a student’s first encounter with proofs that involve a lot of machinery: theorem after theorem of epsilon-delta business to establish something that you didn’t doubt in the first place. I think it’s easy to get lost in the details there, particularly if care isn’t taken to explain what confusions these methods were devised to avoid.

Men who are riddled with anxiety and have honest difficulty navigating social conventions probably need two-truths-and-a-lie icebreaker circles and a Scrabble party or a cooking class, not whatever the blazes Aella is hosting.

Unhappy thought: For whatever future we’ve got, the history of mathematics will be scarred by fashtech cocaine. The people with all the money have every incentive to make mathematics intractable as a profession. No time or resources to do anything but clean up after their DDOS attacks. No way to check the correctness of AI-generated proofs except by using more AI to formalize them.

Skimming that script in much the same mood as deciding to watch Battlefield Earth, and the impression I get in addition to the points you make is just how joyless it is. I mean, I have an AO3 account. I grew up with some pulp in my literary diet. Sometimes you want to indulge in a genre convention just because, well, dammit, swordfights! Secret passages! Ah, Watson, terribly sorry to rouse you at an hour that God has possibly forsaken, but the game’s afoot! I can think of more than one adept fic writer who has gone, “Yep! This is the chapter wherein there is only one bed, ha ha!” Yud provides neither the pleasures of interrogating genre conventions nor those of wallowing in them. Joyless. The storytelling equivalent of the piss filter on Ghibli-ripoff slop.

“after it’s solved* Navier–Stokes”

and because I personally think it wise to learn and understand the frontiers in whatever ways I most easily find energy to invest there. What exactly about “the frontiers” does this one-handed promptfondling help to understand?

Goertzel also fell for Christopher Langan’s CTMU.

In Yud’s world, a mild, almost crunchy-granola punishment for a child amounts to denying the child’s “agenthood”. I expect that if asked, most parents who take away a toy that a child makes mischief with would say something like, “He’s got to learn the consequences of his actions”, which amounts to accepting “agenthood” now doesn’t it? I can think of ways in which parents deny the full personhood of their offspring, ways in which that is maybe even the social standard, but Yud sure has a tin ear for examples of that.

Straw for thee, steel for me.

Oh, go away.

rationalwiki.org/wiki/AI-box_experiment Yud’s “I was inspired by Hannibal Lecter but not in a psychopath way” T-shirt is raising many questions

I vividly remember encountering Eliezer Yudkowsky and his Sequences 20 years ago. I remember thinking: even if these people talk and act like crazy cultists, still, let me bend over backwards to be epistemically virtuous, and entertain their ideas on their merits, as very few academics would. Scott Aaronson is an experiment to discover how many timeshares one man can afford on a professor’s salary. He has never in his life not bought the extended warranty.

It appears to be a fantasy about being too righteous and moral to fuck the catgirl, which is… More than anything else, it reminds me of the Left Behind novel, wherein Rayford Steele power-tripped on stringing Hattie Durham along without touching her, and is treated by the narrative as praiseworthy for doing so. It’s like, dude, you made up the story. Nobody forced you to make catgirls sex slaves by default. You’re edging under the pretense of ethics.

There’s apparently an “Association for Human Mathematics” that has released the following statement: Yesterday, on October 6th, 2026, OpenAI – which is currently defending lawsuits against accusations of illegal plagiarism, copyright infringement, and trademark dilution – released a repository of manuscripts purporting to contain solutions to a number of high-profile problems in mathematics. Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done. The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, from whom OpenAI has claimed to derive its legitimacy, opened their initial advisory statement by saying that frontier AI corporations should not test advanced mathematical problems on internal models. In ignoring the central premise of the Advisory Group’s position, OpenAI has indicated total disregard for the norms of scientific research — norms that guarantee that mathematics remains trustworthy, ethically researched, and in the public interest. Mathematicians have a particular vision of progress that is informed by history and field-specific considerations. We reject OpenAI’s assertion that this release advances our subject, and we urge mathematicians and the public to view the value of this publication model with due skepticism. Releasing over 700 files at once is not a demonstration of scholarship, but a demonstration of power. We urge mathematicians to discontinue their work with OpenAI and to return to a vision of science that centers human understanding.

Look at this pasted-in floating dorkus. Absolute cinema

Yeah, at best, “Kurzweilian h+” will be pseudoscientific guff. I suppose that keeping the lower strata of intellectually bad elements while discarding the worst of the social ones is progress, but, I mean, it’s kind of like saying you’re into your fad diet and LLM-generated supplement regimen and then looking over at RFK and saying “but that’s totally different!”. I’ve lost it now, but somewhere in the replies to one of those threads was a person complaining that SneerClub was too much like beating up on nerds in high school. To which I say, first, here’s my blueberry bread recipe, and a nice photo of a winter sunrise, and my Star Trek fanfiction. We all friendly now? Good. Then let me suggest, cordially, that if you are continuing to think of social dynamics in terms of high-school hierarchies and shitty '80s movies well into adulthood, that is a you problem. If I can stop living as the gender I had in high school, you can stop letting your membership in a granfalloon lead you by the nose.

Goddamn South Park did “why don’t you just grind in the forest to level up” twenty years ago tomorrow.