Today’s “Luigi isn’t sexy” poster is Thomas Ptacek. The funniest example is probably this reply on the orange site:

That’s an extrapolation from a poll, not literally 50 million people…

A cryptographer not believing in statistical analysis! I can’t stop giggling, sorry.

John “Animats” Nagle choosing the most racist angle possible to respond to problems in education. The topic is giftedness and yet Nagle needs to start with “Ashkenazi Jews”.

I’m imagining no fewer than three fictional versions of Eris/Discord laughing at this orange-site fool:

Meanwhile I cannot turn my living room LED lights on or off because I control them through discord.

I wasn’t going to explain my downvote, but it’s been a few days and apparently everybody here is thinking about MRAs when there’s more at stake.

I see Nixon in Trump: somebody who starts and prolongs wars for their own political gain. Of my three uncles who qualified to go to Vietnam, one was permanently disabled during basic training, one didn’t come back home, and one fell apart before I was born. I had to “voluntarily” register as a potential servicemember in order to access various standard government services as a young man in the 2000s, while the USA was invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Under a sufficiently fascist government, the USA has shown itself capable of sending its men to death. This system is explicitly misandrist; only men are required to register and only my uncles suffered this hate.

Misandry isn’t equal and opposite to misogyny. Our society was never obligated to hate men and women in ways that are nicely symmetric and amenable to analysis; indeed, critical theory suggests that society deliberately structures itself to obfuscate its hate.

Trump would have to literally kill all lawyers. Think of the DoJ as a pile of folks who all took an oath to the law itself. When pundits complain that it’s being “weaponized”, they’re actually talking about a facet of overcriminalization where the DoJ’s limited attention can be controlled somewhat; it’s always going to be a full-power laser that targets what the law perceives as criminality.

In particular, the President doesn’t have the authority to tell the DoJ to stop an investigation, and the DoJ usually can’t tell individual prosecutors to stop filing motions. Trump wasn’t able to protect Cabinet member and Teapot Dome Candidate #2 Michael Flynn from prosecution, nor can he protect Eric Adams. The worst that he can do is a Saturday Night Massacre, where he fires lawyers until the investigations stop, and the entire pattern of special counsel is purpose-designed to prevent that from actually working.

Personally I’m betting on Teapot Dome: somebody in the Cabinet will be convicted of something like bribery, foreign influence, or electoral interference; and the cleanup will implicate multiple other Cabinet members. Trump needs to do this at some point anyway; he’s already done all of the Nixon things like Watergate and interfering in foreign wars, and while he attempted a Teapot Dome last time with Ryan Zinke, he needs to actually have a Cabinet member removed or convicted in order to truly be a worse president than Warren G. Harding.

I haven’t done a headcount yet and the election’s not fully tallied, but I think that the Senate still has around 70% support for NATO, and historically we can expect to see a “blue dog” phenomenon in the House as a reaction to Republicans gaining seats. Effectively, both the Democrats and Republicans will function as big tents of two distinct parties, and there is usually tripartisan support (everybody but the far-right Republicans) for imperialism. We may well see votes where the legislators override presidential vetoes to force weapons sales and otherwise fulfill NATO obligations.

And yes, you read that correctly; Democrats move right as a reaction to Republicans doing well. Go back to bed, America…

Orange site envrionmentalism:

Lawns are functional though, they aren’t just a status symbol.

I grew up with a mossy front yard, and I have clover and ferns in my current yards to compete with grasses; there are better options, my dude.

Well, it’s more like 2000, really, in the sense that the courts are being used to restrict voting rights. There’s strong evidence of flagrant UOCAVA violations: thousands of absentee ballots which should affect the federal election have been challenged in swing states. Edit: Here is part 1 and part 2 from an attorney whose Pennsylvania UOCAVA ballot was challenged; he goes through the law and explains what he’s going to do.

Feynman reminds me of the brujo (one specific man, not brujería in general) from Pirsig’s Lila. Feynman’s safecracking and unorthodox approaches are like the brujo’s routine flaunting of social norms; through routinely doing things the wrong way (sacred clowning), new possible behaviors and modes of social existence are explored. Also, Feynman’s attitudes towards women remind me of that brujo’s tendency to spy on women by looking through their windows into their homes while they were not necessarily dressed, which the brujo’s society did not tolerate.

“You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.” Some corporations are criminal enterprises and should have their tax numbers revoked. Some corporate officers are criminals and should be prosecuted. Some are complicit in crimes against humanity or war crimes and should be internationally prosecuted.

Every person I talk to — well, every smart person I talk to — no, wait, every smart person in tech — okay, almost every smart person I talk to in tech is a eugenicist. Ha, see, everybody agrees with me! Well, almost everybody…

The big difference is that Yud is unrigorous while Wolfram is a plagiarist. Or maybe putting it another way, Yud can’t write proofs and Wolfram can’t write bibliographies.

Bezos’ open interference in the Washington Post’s editorial section has pushed Walter Bright into a very funny series of public admissions that he did not have to make. See the orange site here for his ongoing libertarian meltdown.

Meanwhile, actual Pastafarians (hi!) know that the Russian Federation openly persecutes the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster for failing to help the government in its authoritarian activities, and also that we’re called to be anti-authoritarian. The Fifth Rather:

I’d really rather you didn’t challenge the bigoted, misogynist, hateful ideas of others on an empty stomach. Eat, then go after the bastards.

May you never run out of breadsticks, travelers.

It’s almost completely ineffective, sorry. It’s certainly not as effective as exfiltrating weights via neighborly means.

On Glaze and Nightshade, my prior rant hasn’t yet been invalidated and there’s no upcoming mathematics which tilt the scales in favor of anti-training techniques. In general, scrapers for training sets are now augmented with alignment models, which test inputs to see how well the tags line up; your example might be rejected as insufficiently normal-cat-like.

I think that “force-feeding” is probably not the right metaphor. At scale, more effort goes into cleaning and tagging than into scraping; most of that “forced” input is destined to be discarded or retagged.

Thus leading to this sneer on HN. I’m quoting it in entirety; click through for Poe’s Law responses.

I was telling someone this and they gave me link to a laptop with higher battery life and better performance than my own, but I kept explaining to them that the feature I cared most about was die size. They couldn’t understand it so I just had to leave them alone. Non-technical people don’t get it. Die size is what I care about. It’s a critical feature and so many mainstream companies are missing out on my money because they won’t optimize die size. Disgusting.

FYI: I’m posting a non-sneer without an NSFW tag. I suspect that you might want to post this sort of article in the sister community !NotAwfulTech for non-sneering feedback; this community is explicitly for “big brain tech dude” authors who are posting “yet another clueless take.”

While it would be pleasingly recursive to look at this article as such a “clueless take,” I think it’s clearly more well-researched than that. Also, while I personally don’t like the concept of white allyship, I understand why it emerges: it takes longer to let go of one’s beliefs than to embrace the people around you, and so it takes longer to let go of whiteness than to be okay with non-white folks. So, I’m not going to take that angle. I don’t think it’s okay to be white, but I also think that it takes a while for white folks to realize that they can stop being white.

With that all in mind, I think that it’s worth pointing out that while all five suggestions are laudable, none of them address the structural and reputational problems at the heart of Mastodon. @sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems had a killer comment on the last draft (which I can’t permalink because Lemmy is trash; it’s in this tree) about how ActivityPub structurally allows harassment by allowing pseudonymous interactions. In my personal conversations with ActivityPub’s architects, I got the sense that they didn’t understand what we call The Reputation Problem: the paths via which you give reputational incentives to participants will be reinforced according to their rewards. This is also the root of my pessimism about related projects like Spritely Goblins.

(This reminds me that I need to flesh out the bullet point in my notes headlined “The Reputation Problem & A Theory of Generalized Fuckwittery”. This generalizes the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, Homo economicus, etc. It’s all obviously connected from a distributed-systems perspective: bad actors are getting paid for their bad actions by the system’s structure!)

Further, it’s not clear that the community’s adaptations are sustainable. TBS can’t seem to shed its TERFs and it should be obvious that any similarly-structured project will be too authoritarian for a large chunk of the community. Hashtags aren’t private or moderated spaces, and any sort of hashtag usage council would immediately run into the same authoritarian issues. One of the disadvantages of Balkanization is that your neighbors, safely separated from you by geographic obstacles, will start talking shit about you, and you don’t want to let them police your lands.

My NSFW reply, including my own experience, is here. However, for this crowd, what I would point out is that this was always part of the mathematics, just like confabulation, and the only surprise should be that the prompt doesn’t need to saturate the context in order to approach an invariant distribution. I only have two nickels so far, for this Markov property and for confabulation from PAC learning, but it’s completely expected weird that it’s happened twice.

Even better, we can say that it’s the actual hard prompt: this is real text written by real OpenAI employees. GPTs are well-known to easily quote verbatim from their context, and OpenAI trains theirs to do it by teaching them to break down word problems into pieces which are manipulated and regurgitated. This is clownshoes prompt engineering done by manager-first principles like “not knowing what we want” and “being able to quickly change the behavior of our products with millions of customers in unpredictable ways”.