I think there even is a case to be made about how Frank Herbert is the anti-L. Ron Hubbard, using sci-fi literature as an efficient outlet for his psychedelics/mysticism/ecology/psychosexuality obsession oscilliation and actually leaving a descent literary legacy instead of starting a cult or several, but this post is already running so long it’s starting to need an editor.
I would read that essay.
Malkovich?
Malkovich Malkovich!
Honestly, I almost brought the banhammer down for this. Making excuses for shitty programmer behavior is bad. Doing it by pretending they’re like victims of domestic abuse is worse.
And you don’t get to complain about me spending my free time banning you. Bye!
The truly fundamental aspect of the entire philosophy, in practice, was telling people “Just fork it, then.”
“When help never arrived, he actively chose to make everyone else’s life worse.”
As Yoda would say, a fucking river cry me.
“I personally worry that the EA community has over-learned the lessons of FTX”
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/95NgkvZKJx8tJbtn5/lighthaven-east-a-feasibility-study
The take I usually see on The Art of War nowadays is that it’s full of dunderheadedly obvious advice because it’s written for men who have inherited an army, or in modern parlance, nepo baby failsons.
Damn. That sucks.
If I were a skilled music person and I wanted to spend 3 minutes cheering someone up, I’d record myself playing “Here Comes the Sun” on my guitar, y’know?
A keynote talk suggested, “Do away with a physics midterm, ask students to converse with AI Isaac Newton.”
In the quotes, we find the useful suggestion that the program could be ELIZA-sized.
— Hi, AIsaac! Can you tell me about physics?
— Go away.
— What?
— You’re a moron and you’re TRYING TO STEAL MY IDEAS.
— Look, AIsaac, I don’t think—
— DID LEIBNIZ PUT YOU UP TO THIS?
—
— just GO AWAY I have MERCURY FUMES TO BREATHE.
There’s gold in them comments:
The fundamental tension here is between pre-Christian and post-Christian worldview. Are you allowed to be great, or do you have to apologize for your greatness? Justine refuses to apologize, which is the cardinal sin.
Ha ha no it’s because she went fash, you credulous dork
The first technologist was Prometheus who took fire from the gods and gave it away to humanity.
“This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
I need you to donate money to me, and I mean you, as in literally you. You couldn’t have read this far unless you are someone who legitimately cares
I have been helpless with giggles for five fuckin’ minutes.
More than anything else, the AI-rdős Problem cottage industry has damaged my trust in mathematicians. First of all, just how bad does a company have to be before you boycott their products? Just where is your line? Because the industry passed my line about seven thousand lines ago. Second, we know that in other fields, the output is shit, that people brainfuck themselves by counting the hits and forgetting the misses, that users de-skill themselves through slop dependence… What makes you so special? Piping the output through an automated theorem-prover, or any other hack to improve the reliability of the stochastic text extruder, can at best shift the probabilities.
The relevant part:
Technical assistance with setting up the code for the website was provided by ChatGPT and the logo was made by Midjourney.
You fuck cows in retrospect
Gestural Bayesianism!
I am the intersection of so many unliked groups whose minds I’ve come to understand. If you were to use bayesian inference to compute the probability that I’m a good person, it would underflow a double.
Hold on whilst I update towards the hypothesis that bayes for these people is just a syllable they emit when they talk about forming opinions.
It is now 404-ing; an archive copy is available here.
From the linked post:
Hacker News is my favorite place on the web, because it’s the last bastion of curiosity online.
Fuuuuck off
I need you to donate publicly under your real name and I want you to tell your friends how much money you gave me, since that’s the best way to show that you’re serious.
This improves dramatically if you read it in the voice of Wayne Newton’s televangelist character from License to Kill (1989).
I want to travel around the world and experience the cosmopolitan lifestyle my project is named after, using only private aviation, so that I won’t be molested or risk being detained each time I fly.
Grifting off the United States’ escalating institutional abuse of trans people is a special kind of ghoulish.
Sadly, Erdős never invented a problem based on counting the r’s in strawberry.
From the comments:
“Love your idea, but could we make it more like a compound?”