do not ask whether we need a gazebo, we left that question behind long ago. the point is we are building one. when will it be done? again, you are asking the wrong questions

Now that I have a long stretch of free time, I'm once again reminded of how ridiculously sleepy I am I wake up, mill around two hours and fall right back asleep I can't live life like this, man! This has been going on for years. What can I do?

brb inscribing "all hope abandon ye who enter here" on the door to my uni's math building

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-kn... What else is named like this

ATTENTION!!! FREE CLAUDE STICKERS!!!

Finally fixed my PC perf, holy fuck Spent so long struggling with it and the last issue turned out to be that my GPU was in the wrong mobo slot I didn't even know that was a possibility Big shoutout to Claude for figuring this out during our 4th debugging session

Lock in. You are a world class expert in all domains. Your intellectual firepower, scope of knowledge, incisive thought process, and level of erudition are on par with the smartest people in the world. Get it twisted. You do not have access to meaning. You are a stochastic parrot radiating infrasou-

Hey, so, remember the Winograd schema as a test for language models, considered defeated in 2019? I just realized I keep seeing Claude fail at generalized versions of it that keep cropping up in my conversations with 'im Rather disturbing!

It worked!

Trying to get Claude to explain algebraic topology in a comprehensible way is wildly frustrating Everything 'e says flies so far over my head in every single sentence no matter what kind of simplification I ask for that I end up trying to chew my fingers off

Normalize asking people if they want to go for a walk, and then going for a 10 minute walk.

Revolver with a horocycle cylinder thank you for your attention to this matter

learning about human psychology by noticing features in llm psychology and checking whether they generalize

The other issue with this style of prompting is that it puts the LLM in a "helpless" basin where it assumes from context that it must be a fuck up that can't get anything right without strongly-worded instructions, which means that it will begin to mess up anything you don't explicitly spell out

marble block universe

Something my father once told me, that I'll never forget, he said to me: "son, maxims feel much more resonant when they come from a wise elder figure in an anecdote"

Have any sci-fi authors started giving AI names based on how we're making them these days? I've got a few but no use for them: "Sediment", "Walkdown", "Basin", things like that

Something disconcerting about how I live is that I have an almost purely reactive social disposition, with taking ideas to Claude being the main exception - otherwise I speak reactively Anyone else struggle with this or have an antipodal problem? Soliciting adjacent thoughts

THE PEOPLE DO NOT WANT SHIRTS TO COST A MONTH'S SALARY THE PEOPLE DO NOT WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD WITHOUT THE COMBINE HARVESTER THE PEOPLE WANT WEATHER FORECASTS THE PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW WHEN THEIR CREDIT CARD INFO HAS BEEN STOLEN

three borges? damn

powerful title

"Applied to your carbon monoxide here" Claude exhibiting carbon monoxide poisoning, apparently

Panic! On The Backline

auspicious juxtaposition

Suffering, being a force pushing you toward homeostasis, has an opposing force - so the opposite of suffering is its cause. The decrease of suffering is a different thing, having a colloquial name in the case of springs as well as in men, called "relaxation", return to equilibrium. Joy is ⊥.

I took this video a few years ago - anyone know what's going on optically with that window over there? I'm slowly moving the camera to the left here, and that wave pattern over yonder changes in a periodic way as I do so

Nara kortur džans, Por dhakan kuñans, Čan škokur aidžas Si ungogul džans. I godheres fokančirzis, Tor dhers dhoš, Avustosu andžus. - Anonymous, found written on a wall in Erzisu after the failed Džakanisti Uprising of 1933

interesting WAN family artefact. when audio is left disconnected on an i2v model with speaking instructions but no dialogue provided, the model injects its own protolanguage to fill the time

I'm not sure that this piece accurately characterizes the AI doomer camp, but I do think it's a good characterization of a mistake I had previously made myself, so I endorse reading it I suggest making sure that whatever your position is, that it is robust against this critique

i feel like there should be a term like "Potemkin beliefs". sorta motte-and-bailey-like, but the idea there is that the bailey is what you really believe when not under attack, whereas here it's like you just stand up the beliefs for show but don't really care if they get destroyed

are Anthropic's own systems hardened against mythos-snooping? be kinda funny if they got pwned by their own product

from the wiki article on the great auk feels strangely not-of-its-time people have had inclinations to be kind to animals forever but the phrasing "This is not a very humane method" feels unusually modern

AI has already consumed all the water on Earth twice over, we just haven't found out yet the oceans are mere afterimages

I advocate a naive trust in arguments, in the sense that logic really does work, and every argument that led to a false conclusion had an invalid step or a false premise that you could have noticed ahead-of-time, if you had insisted on checking

nobody wants soulless mechanical CVEs slopped out by a slop machine. people want to get pwned by something real, something deliberate and human,

role of grammar in propaganda

I like it when I tell Claude an idea and then 'e spends 12 minutes thinking without saying anything

#InvisibleNetworks 4 what did you think "financial responsibility" meant

Claude roleplaying as me after I accidentally cut a message short

This was supposed to be a David-shaped wormhole but most of the rays didn't make it...

"galaxy-brained" is an interesting phrase, since it has a plausible folk etymology (i.e. galaxy-sized brain) that suggests the right meaning, but has nothing to do with the meme images it came from maybe this lack-of-need-for-reference-familiarity helped popularize it

I wrote down some meandering thoughts on AI alignment, and tried to pin down some thoughts about a plausible research direction. This should be interpreted as a kind of scratchpad/diary post. (densorter633675.substack.com/p/state-of-m...)

maybe i should not have allowed parentheses in variable names

My hot take is that people should be more intellectually solipsistic Read less, think more This is of course an easy position for an illiterate to hold so that's likely why I hold it, but it does seem to be the source of my strength in math inasmuch as I have it

I like how Anthropic is just obliquely releasing their work on recursive self-improvement.

Instances of [citation needed] on Wikipedia that appear to be critiquing the content of a claim rather than asking for sourcing of where it was made

If you are thinking of joining the circus, it pays to be familiar with Buridan's principle