Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
No bio...
User ID: 123
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Is anyone else interested in poetry here?
A thing I've noticed in poetry analysis that annoys me is what I've come to think of as "schizo" interpretations.
On the one hand, you have symbolism that was likely put into the text intentionally; e.g. in "Ozymandias" (which I assume you are familiar with) the famous "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" can be very reasonably interpreted as the onlooker ironically despairing that even the greatest ruler will eventually decline and be forgotten.
On the other hand you have stuff like "Scholars such as professors Nora Crook and Newman White have viewed the work as critical of Shelley's contemporaries George IV, with the statue's legs a coded reference to the then Prince Regent's gout". How reasonable is this interpretation? I think not very; if the poem had instead referred to the statue's arms or something, would there have been another possible tenuous interpretation to some other person or concept? Probably. You would need some sort of Bayesian intuition for this, as there is a "base rate" of possible random associations you could make – and for any connection less credible than that you're basically finding patterns in random noise.
It reminds me of how the famous schizophrenic programmer Terry Davis would "speak to God"; he had a random number generator that spat out words, and he'd do free associations between them. Textual criticism is rife with this. I suspect it's because there is really no incentive to find out the "truth" of a text, just finding cool associations that makes the reader look smart, and since there's no ground truth to verify anything it easily gets disassociated from reality.
To "fix" this, I propose a calibration game of sorts. One would write a text with actual symbolism and poetic devices, then publishing both the text and a canonical explanation for everything in it. Readers could then interpret it, and afterwards find out how much their interpretation missed the mark. If anyone wants to try this, I have done so with one of my old poems here.
(For the unfamiliar with meter, it's written in straightforward iambic tetrameter, i.e. each line consists of four pairs of unstressed-stressed syllables; with an ABAB rhyme scheme.)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
The SuperNova Early Warning System (SNEWS) is a network of neutrino detectors designed to give early warning of a near-earth supernova. They have a mailing list where you can sign up to be one of the first people to be notified when it happens. I signed up for it; just imagine the party trick you could pull off by getting that email one evening and pointing to Betelgeuse before it blows up!
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Thanks! If you're wondering why on earth we named it SWAGGINZZZ, it's due to us messing up the execution a bunch of times, and since we created a new account/player every time we pretty quickly exhausted all the good names we could think of. The final run was named that because we were just testing things and didn't expect that one to actually succeed..!
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Do roguelikes count? I've played a whole lot of them, like Dwarf Fortress, Cataclysm DDA, ADOM, and of course NetHack (for which I have to shamelessly brag that I hold the shared realtime speedrun world record in, from back when tool-assisted runs were allowed)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Yeah, but presumably scammers don't care about that wherever they are.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Before 2022 it was really easy, you could just buy a prepaid card with cash in a store and it'd have nothing tying it to yourself. Nowadays you need an ID. I checked a random telephone provider (Telenor) and they require you to use the national e-ID to buy a SIM card (or apparently upload a photo of your passport for international customers).
But yes, it's probably the limited market size and language barrier; especially since the prime target for scammers are old people who don't speak English very well.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
I see Americans complaining online about how many spam telephone calls they are getting, to the point they don't even pick up the phone when the caller is unknown.
This is pretty alien to me; I live in Sweden and have literally never gotten a spam call in my life. (Maybe the reason for this is that the scammers naturally won't bother learning Swedish?)
So, potential silly lifehack: why not get a foreign telephone number from e.g. Denmark or something, and then never get spammed again? Presumably your calls will be more expensive as you'd be paying the international rate constantly, but this can be ameliorated by getting a plan where that's cheaper.
Edit: Oops, you said "apolitical" which this hardly is; at the very least not back when it happened!
I'd say that there's a somewhat reasonable chance that the Red Army Faction didn't commit suicide but where executed by the West German police, as the circumstances are pretty suspicious:
They managed to smuggle guns into their cells in one of the most secure prisons in the world at the time, in a wing built especially for them. The guards a few meters away didn't hear any gunshots, Baader fired thrice, missed the first two, and finally died from shooting himself in the neck from behind using his right hand, but he was left-handed.
There was no fingerprints found on Raspe's gun and no gunpowder residue, even though his gun was lying in his hand when he was found. Meinhof's hanging was suspicious as well (wiki article, too many things to list here). Möller stabbed herself four times in the chest, survived, and claims to this day that somebody tried to assassinate her.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
I am partial to the theory that advertising works by establishing a shared understanding of what consuming the product signals to others. It explains many puzzling behaviours, e.g. why Coca Cola would bother with ads – they want to steer how other people will percieve you when consuming their product, not necessarily create awareness or an immediate desire.
In that framework, the Mulvaney backlash makes perfect sense; the blog post I linked even talks about how brands generally don't have different messaging on different platforms since it would be directly counterproductive to the idea that you want to establish a common product image. InBev didn't understand it, tried different messaging for different groups, and is now suffering the consequences.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
In the corner of the ChatGPT replies there's a little profile picture; if it's a blueish-green it's running a 3.X model; black means it's 4.
You might need to click on the image on the Caplan Twitter post to view the entire thing, it gets cut off in the preview window for me.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
You really need a bit of familiarity and prompt wrangling skill to get the most out of GPT. I've seen plenty of people testing it and fucking up basic stuff which makes them conclude that it's overhyped.
A common issue is not pressing the "GPT-4" button in the ChatGPT interface, and getting GPT-3.5 when you think you're running 4; and not being familiar enough with the interface to recognize that the blue-green icon means it's a lot dumber. E.g. Bryan Caplan fell for that.
A second issue is that GPT is at it's core a predictor, not a simulator. If you ask it something and it messes up the response, asking it something else in the same chat context means it will now start predicting that it's a character that makes mistakes. Resetting the chat fixes that. In the same vein, if you are giving it a quiz, having it predict a student response is suboptimal. Students make mistakes, you want it to predict the answer key.
Also, giving it few-shot examples improves it a great deal. If you have an example of a perfect query+response to a similar question, stuff it in the prompt itself! Then the LLM will know what kind of response you are looking for.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Huh! As an European I have always assumed it was the same all over the western world – a down-filled duvet in a removable bag akin to a big pillow case, and nothing else. Americans have multiple layers? Weird. Does the top layer not slide off or bunch together during the night?
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Facetiously: Last Friday night. I am not a smart man when plastered.
Being a bit more serious, pretty much exactly 19 years old. I have a pretty extensive online footprint on various forums (civfanatics, criticalsecurity, various IRC servers... good times), so I can pretty accurately pinpoint when I stopped being super cringey and more or less myself.
(Tangentially around there I can also pinpoint when I discovered and consumed the Sequences, which purged me of a whole bunch of blatantly flawed thinking that I'd never have today)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
I've had similar thoughts when it comes to language. Is it sexist if a gendered language (like Spanish) treats the masculine as the default case, or e.g. that words like "mankind" is based on the masculine word? If it was the inverse, would people complain that the male had it's own superior "exceptional" category and the female was simply generic?
A simple example might be the Lacey Act of 1900. It prohibits import, export, transport, purchase, or sale of species of wildlife, fish, timber, and plants, if that would violate any state, federal, tribal, or foreign law. Since it's so extremely broad it makes it basically impossible to predict what will be legal or not, and could plausibly result in you theoretically committing a very large amount of crimes every day.
If the state really, really wanted to ruin your day and had no qualms about the poor optics they could totally find some obscure law about oak wood in Botswana and nab you for it.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
For the purposes of this comment, I will try to define good as "improving the quality of life for many people without decreasing the quality of life for another similarly sized group" an vice versa.
Tangential, but the term in economics you are touching here is a Kaldor–Hicks improvement I think. It's not Pareto-optimal, but total-wealth increasing, and could theoretically be converted to a Pareto-optimal situation with redistribution from the winners to the losers (assuming such redistribution does not have any externalities itself!).
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Yes, any sort of gatekeeping hurdle would improve it, though even mild inconveniences will significantly limit interaction from good users too. I wouldn't check e.g. this website very frequently if I had to spin up a VPN every time, for example.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
retaliate by just blocking access completely
Personally I don't think it would be that bad, and if only considering purely selfish reasons I'd even welcome it. People generally underestimate just how much of the bottom-tier dross of the internet originate in India and Southeast Asia, like a global Eternal September, and having that blocked would substantially improve the net in general (for westerners, naturally; not so much for the Indians themselves!).
The reason for this is simple: India is huge, rich enough for most people to be online, not rich enough to not need to bother with small amounts of money, and they speak English decently enough. More importantly, there is a pervasive cultural trait where "looting the commons" is seen as basically acceptable; and by not doing it you're seen more as a schmuck than virtuous. This causes people to rapidly consume every bit of easily-exploitable goodness in a community, externalities be damned.
As an example, I am a software developer with a bit of open-source contributions. Each year, DigitalOcean has an event they call Hacktoberfest, where if you submit code to any open source project they send you a T-shirt. Perhaps predictably this causes a massive flood of inane garbage from Indian users wanting their shirt, forcing everybody else to spend all month dealing with spam.
Who do you think is making those click-farm spam sites that rehost e.g. StackOverflow content that has made Google so bad in recent years? Indians, grinding out a few bucks of ad revenue at a time. A lot of the trash on YouTube/Facebook is from there too, like those awful videos for kids. For the same reason, they're also responsible for the bulk of the scam calls plaguing the rest of the English-speaking world. It's no coincidence that the second-worst country for that, Nigeria, shares relevant traits (large population, middling poverty, English proficiency). Brazil would possibly be number two, but "luckily" their non-elite population don't speak much English at all.
A straightforward objection to "block it all" would be that some genuinely good users would be caught in the middle. Sure, but the quality of a community does not hinge much on the absolute amount of good users, but the average. We would hardly be on themotte if that wasn't the case! Having India ban you presents an excellent opportunity to improve your service without being accused of e.g. racism, and you get free-speech goodwill to boot.
(Even more tangentially I am awaiting the moment when some internet hustler guru discovers how you can exploit some modest opportunity for deploying LLMs and spamming people, unleashing a flood of garbage on some unlucky website. I imagine it will be something like a zillion LLaMA-powered Indians commenting on every post with a text containing random Amazon affiliate links fluidly shoehorned into it, or a hundred add-filled spam sites for every legitimate one when you search for anything. By then we'll have to actually do something.)
I wrote a quick and shitty script to bruteforce English Sator squares from a big wordlist. The only one that makes any sort of limited sense is this:
t i m i d
i r a n i
m a d a m
i n a r i
d i m i t
I.e. "[the] timid Iranian madam that Inari dimit(=had dismissed)".
Edit: Of course somebody else had done the exact same thing and found the exact same square before. Oh well.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Backslash, i.e: \*
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
You need to cook/toast the pop tart.
I did! It made it even drier, if anything.
Sampling the candy and processed stuff was more for the experience, not to get something that I expected to be genuinely enjoyable. The US for sure had some very good food and drinks as well; the craft beer is especially good compared to the naïve opinion of the Americans as shitty-beer drinkers.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
I tried various American foods when I was over there, generally things I've seen online & in movies and such, but never tried. The most memorably bad one was pop-tarts. Insanely dry, with a synthetic cloyingly sweet flavour. I get that it's for kids, but god damn it's bad.
https://www.vatican.va has some deliciously shitty web design if you poke around a bit. The home page is pretty bad but not too crappy, but if you click around a bit you'll end up on pages such as this one, describing the pontificate of John Paul II. The way that they use alert boxes for information when you hover over the years are so utterly baffling that I'd immediately assume it was some sort of joke or shitpost if I saw it on any other website.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
I'd imagine most people aren't Sapir–Whorfists, and don't consider language to be particularly important for individual development compared to things like culture and family.
Still, even if they did, one would have to actually learn Lojban to not seem like a hypocrite when advocating for it – and if there's one thing people don't like to do, it's putting effort into things.
In Sweden to pay our bills you can have a thing called "autogiro". This means you grant a company the right to pull a certain sum from your account each month, so you never have to bother with any administration for your bills. Pretty convenient, except I've been using it for all my monthly expenses so I've never had to log in to my bank at all.
Early this year was the first time I've logged in to my bank for years. I've had constant anxiety to see how much money I actually had, and finally I had to bite the bullet and actually look.
Turns out, I had MUCH more money than I expected. The relief I felt from that was pretty much indescribable; I've now proceeded to buy a condo much closer to the city centre, and have been going out to eat more or less every weekend.
More options
Context Copy link