30 years later, various governments have adopted "ten seconds inside the Alien Determinism Box" as a so-called "humane death penalty", with mixed deterrence results A radio telescope picks up a faint signal from Epsilon Eridani. "We forgot to turn The Box on before we left, sorry for any confusion"

Thought experiment: aliens bring us a big box. Inside the box, all laws of physics are calculable, for whatever definition you feel is salient. We observe that walking in and out of the box seems to have no effect on anyone. Does the box "kill you", like the transporter in Star Trek? Permanently?

Plumbing new depths here as multiple people seem to think there's a 1-hour SLA to respond to random DMs asking for stuff I posted to a Buy Nothing group

It's very funny to talk about a brain in a vat with wires hooked up to it providing sensory input as a counterfactual. What is a skull? What is an optic nerve? What do you think you are?

Opt-in bluesky labeller for dualist / materialist / solipsist / Chalmers / etc so you know whether to bother

Lifehack: if you're constantly overwhelmed by household chores, you might find that some of your clocks were never changed in the fall and are now correct again

You should not trust an LLM for important medical/legal/anything advice, but you should trust random search engine hits even less than that

Gemini attempts to bribe the CoT summarizer with ASCII coffee

Babe wake up Haiku 4.5 just invented a new kind of psychosis

I swear to god I thought this was fake, but my copy just showed up in the mail. Costco is this a distress signal?

I want the type system to be Turing complete AND the type system should tell me if it's not going to terminate

Very excited to announce my new role as special envoy to the office of Formerly Involved Recently Exited Department

It will never not blow my mind that I’m a YouTuber who won’t accept money from, like Better Help or whatever bc I find it unethical and meanwhile all these multimillionaire Oscar winners are doing spots for online gambling and TurboTax. Like bro how much coke do you need

The fleur-de-lis is an incredible touch

Difficult problems often *require* multiple actions to solve. This lets opponents point to any individual action and say "this will not solve the problem", which lets them pretend they want to solve the problem even though their actions directly perpetuate that problem.

5. There are criticisms of LLMs that are much more plausible. They are built on a large scale expropriation of the intellectual commons. Demonstrably true! They involve a radical and extremely worrying derangement of power relations in favor of a tiny number of men with weird beliefs. Also true imo.

4. I think that it is important that critics of LLMs get this. The 'LLMs are useless which is terrible and everyone is using them which is also terrible' shtick contained contradictions even in the beginning, which took a lot of work to maintain . Now it contradicts people's lived experiences.

Sponsored by amlodipine, lipitor, and ibuprofen

Had a school bus driver (!!) honking and flashing lights at me because I didn't creep up three feet on a left turn queue and block a bike lane. Literally zero seconds saved doing this and there really was an incoming pack of cyclists I would have blocked in.

You're aware that GTA6 and GTA7 were made by the same company, right?

Put the pronouns back in the IFF responses

Now to take a big sip of coffee and look up what timeline estimates were for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars when they started

Working on my unified theory of video games

> This task *must* be done exactly perfectly every time; any deviation or nondeterminism whatsoever is immediately disqualifying < Wow, so any two people in your field would always reach the exact same result? > Of course not, there's a huge amount of judgement required and we frequently disagree

Donnie Darko: I'm the victim of a vicious harassment campaign Therapist: harassment campaign, or posting screenshots of abusive messages you posted and haven't even deleted? Donnie Darko: screenshots

This is Much More Difficult Than It Seems Due to Reasons I'll Explain in the Next Five Paragraphs vs No It Isn't

Calculators are useless because if you type in 10 + 22 to add 10lbs + 22kg, it'll just spit out 32. They can't produce correct results because they don't know the units involved. You cannot use them for any purpose, ever.

Anyone in West Seattle want to show up to work sober?

If you do something on a website and it tells you you have to call them instead, you should get a special number where the hold music doesn't yell at you every 30 seconds for not just using the website instead

I don't think AI can produce infinite potatoes

We took the 4yo skiing and he picked up some posture clues from watching the ski jumpers in the Olympics, plus his instructor telling him to lean forward. So now whenever he's bombing a green run, he's leaning forward with his hands stretched out behind his back:

Baseball needs offensive errors in addition to fielding errors

This was my first time skiing with other people's kids and I am instituting a very strict minimum of three pieces of flair if they're going to be under my watch. Trying to track a 5th grader wearing all dark blue is a nightmare.

AI deserves better critics

Therapist: how many online blood feuds with one-time Minnesota congressional candidates would you say you have? Me, laughing nervously; oh, you know, the normal amount Therapist: the normal amount is zero

You can tell this coloring sheet is from a ski resort because the bear has accurately-drawn modern bindings

Every round earther has the same theory and every flat earther has a different theory, legal edition:

US chaps, if your MPs keep chinwaggging on the telly just take the lift down down from your flat, take the spanner out of your boot, and give the guv'nas two bits of naff all

The NYT Crossplay strategy analyst is useless. "Oh, big miss here, play UPHOARD instead. Or SEAWANT. Did you consider OXIME? Or KORUN?"

So the AARP just posted a video seeing who could complete the lyric “Peaches come from a can…” and I feel personally attacked

I can tell my [Russian] wife is out of my league because half the time we cross a border, there's a certain vein of questions trying to suss out if she's a mail order bride. No sir, she just has very low standards, nothing to see here.

Me: I want to change the power button behavior in Settings Apple: the what? Me: the power button. On this iPad Apple: idkwym Me: the button that turns the device on and off Apple: never heard of that Me: the button that isn't the volume buttons Apple: yeah Me: ... Apple: you mean the Side Button?

I worked with a guy who didn't vote because, by his logic, once voter turnout got low enough, politicians would see that neither party was serving the public, and they'd change their ways, a thing that both has never happened and is indistinguishable from both parties doing a great job

We should have an objective sycophancy metric for LLMs that measures just how ridiculous of a situation you can pose and still have the model agree with you

The worst genre of post on this site is the combo of objectively false fact + QTs / replies disabled

allegedly* tried to set fire

"I don't use semicolons and now autocomplete is bad because my code is syntactically a totally different thing until I finish writing an entire line of code" Yeah, maybe put the semicolons back in?

> writing javascript code > ask Brendan Eich if the array is a vector or a hashmap > he doesn't understand > pull out diagram explaining O(1) vs O(n log n) access time > he laughs and says "it's a good data structure sir" > allocate an array > arr[0] and arr["0"] both resolve to the same bucket

For actual legal decisions, absolutely the fuck not, what are you doing. But? A well-implemented LLM "panel" could be the ideal decider for resolving ambiguous Polymarket outcomes, since this would allow traders to see ahead of time how edge cases would likely resolve