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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Screaming at the void towards Chuunibyou (wiki) Eliezer: YOU ARE NOT A NOVEL CHARACTER, THINKING OF WHAT BENEFITS THE NOVELIST vs THE CHARACTER HAS NO BEARING ON REAL LIFE.

    Sorry for yelling.

    Minor notes:

    But <Employee> thinks I should say it, so I will say it. […] <Employee> asked me to speak them anyways, so I will.

    It’s quite petty of Yud to be so passive-aggressive towards his employee insisted he at least try to discuss coping. Name dropping him not once but twice (although that is also likely to just be poor editing)

    “How are you coping with the end of the world?” […Blah…Blah…Spiel about going mad tropes…]

    Yud, when journalists ask you “How are you coping?”, they don’t expect you to be “going mad facing apocalypse”, that is YOUR poor imagination as a writer/empathetic person. They expect you to be answering how you are managing your emotions and your stress, or bar that give a message of hope or of some desperation, they are trying to engage with you as real human being, not as a novel character.

    Alternatively it’s also a question to gauge how full of shit you may be. (By gauging how emotionally invested you are)

    The trope of somebody going insane as the world ends, does not appeal to me as an author, including in my role as the author of my own life. It seems obvious, cliche, predictable, and contrary to the ideals of writing intelligent characters. Nothing about it seems fresh or interesting. It doesn’t tempt me to write, and it doesn’t tempt me to be.

    Emotional turmoil and how characters cope, or fail to cope makes excellent literature! That all you can think of is “going mad”, reflects only your poor imagination as both a writer and a reader.

    I predict, because to them I am the subject of the story and it has not occurred to them that there’s a whole planet out there too to be the story-subject.

    This is only true if they actually accept the premise of what you are trying to sell them.

    […] I was rolling my eyes about how they’d now found a new way of being the story’s subject.

    That is deeply Ironic, coming from someone who makes choice based on him being the main character of a novel.

    Besides being a thing I can just decide, my decision to stay sane is also something that I implement by not writing an expectation of future insanity into my internal script / pseudo-predictive sort-of-world-model that instead connects to motor output.

    If you are truly doing this, I would say that means you are expecting insanity wayyyyy to much. (also psychobabble)

    […Too painful to actually quote psychobabble about getting out of bed in the morning…]

    In which Yud goes in depth, and self-aggrandizing nonsensical detail about a very mundane trick about getting out of bed in the morning.


  • A fairly good and nuanced guide. No magic silver-bullet shibboleths for us.

    I particularly like this section:

    Consequently, the LLM tends to omit specific, unusual, nuanced facts (which are statistically rare) and replace them with more generic, positive descriptions (which are statistically common). Thus the highly specific “inventor of the first train-coupling device” might become “a revolutionary titan of industry.” It is like shouting louder and louder that a portrait shows a uniquely important person, while the portrait itself is fading from a sharp photograph into a blurry, generic sketch. The subject becomes simultaneously less specific and more exaggerated.

    I think it’s an excellent summary, and connects with the “Barnum-effect” of LLMs, making them appear smarter than they are. And that it’s not the presence of certain words, but the absence of certain others (and well content) that is a good indicator of LLM extruded garbage.










  • I was also a Elon skeptic back-then, but I’ll admit I did get a kick out of the “don’t panic” dashboard.

    But golly does he read H2G2 completely wrong (transcript):

    I think and it highlighted an important point which is that a lot of times the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part. So, to the degree that we can better understand the universe, then we can better know what questions to ask. Then whatever the question is that most approximates: what’s the meaning of life? That’s the question we can ultimately get closer to understanding. And so I thought to the degree that we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness and knowledge, then that would be a good thing.

    It’s backwards! It misses the joke! It took thousands of years and they got a nonsensical answer before any question! It took a thousand more and they got a nonsensical—incompatible—question! It has been theorized that should someone understand the universe it would be replaced by something more complicated! It has also been theorized this has already happened! Also regarding scale of knowledge, Trin Tragula definetly showed that the One thing you can’t afford to have in this universe, is a sense of perspective!

    Surely his reading comprehension isn’t actually this bad, and he only got a bad meme-cliffnotes version of the radio-series/books/movies!?!




  • How nice it must be to never ponder how large humanity is, and how each and every person you see outside has a full and rich interior and exterior world, and you that only see a tiny fraction of the people outside.

    Personally one of my “oh other people are real!” moment, was when our parents (along with my sisters) took us on a surprise ferry trip to England (from France) and our grandparents that—at least as far as kid me remembered—we only ever saw in their home city, were waiting for us in Portsmouth, and we visited the city together (Portsmouth Historic Dockyard is quite nice btw).

    I knew they were real, but realizing that they weren’t geo-locked, made me more fully internalize that they had full and independent lives, and therefore that everyone had.


    How about people here? When did you realize people are real?