sarker
competency crisis actor
Suddenly I cannot remember the color of your eyes
Or the things we said as we stood together for the last time
User ID: 636
sarker
competency crisis actor
15hr ago
That sequence of events was caused by the money
Difficult to say. Certainly I'd say that it wasn't "caused" in the same way that Bear's wish caused Nikki to become possessed. If we're stipulating that there's no free will in the Obsession universe and Ian could not have chosen otherwise but to go brag about the money when Nikki was home and therefore get shot then that has some significant implications on Bear's culpability and questions about monkey's paws and what caused what become somewhat moot - the whole sequence of events was predetermined anyway.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
any wish in plain English is going to have enough ambiguity to ruin the person who makes the wish. (You wish for a million dollars? Okay, it's a million dollars in pennies and falls on your head and kills you.)
You know, I generally agree with you, but in fact Bear's buddy wishes for a million dollars and it comes in stacks of hundreds falling harmlessly from the ceiling, which complicates the monkey's paw claim.
sarker
competency crisis actor
2d ago
"Built like a brick shithouse" used to be a good thing for a woman. At least as far as men were concerned. Why not a garage door too?
sarker
competency crisis actor
4d ago
Google has started to sell TPUs externally just now, and I expect Nvidia to remain the primary comparison.
Sure, but I expect TPU usage via Cloud (as Anthropic does) will remain the bulk of usage and that's been a thing since early 2018.
sarker
competency crisis actor
4d ago
"I wasn't really going to do it even though I was literally about to draw" is an even more convenient rationalization.
sarker
competency crisis actor
4d ago
It would be much easier for her to say "I wasn't really going to do it" than to admit that she really was about to do it. I think the criterion of embarrassment should motivate us to believe her.
This is the opposite of the gym example - joining a gym is desirable and thus people say they will even if they won't, murdering innocents is not.
sarker
competency crisis actor
4d ago
There's twenty thousand years of human literature out there. Believe it or not, the ancestors even had literature that wasn't highbrow... The point I'm trying to make is that there's plenty of good books that aren't difficult (surely that should be clear from the examples I gave). It's not clear to me that reading slop helps read good books any more than watching tiktoks helps you enjoy movies.
People can just go directly to reading good books unless they are a literal child who needs to start with "Jack and Jill went up the hill," although to be honest Hemingway is not much harder than that. They have my permission to skip the slop and just read something worth reading.
sarker
competency crisis actor
4d ago
I don't have an opinion on most of this, but you did mention one detail that I happen to know a thing or two about.
On July 18th, during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, Huawei has demonstrated their Atlas 950 SuperPoD, boasting of the largest scale-up domain
This is false. Ironwood offers 42.5 ExaFLOPS while Atlas 950 offers 8 ExaFLOPS. Ironwood has been in production since 2025, so it isn't even cutting edge in terms of domestic capabilities at this point.
sarker
competency crisis actor
5d ago
Murati was a product manager, not a project manager. Project managers are, as a rule, dummies; I'd say less than a tenth are any good and the rest are ZMP at best and they frequently become project managers right out of college.
That said, I've had classmates at my state school become product managers at FAANG right out of college as well so I don't think that that's as rare as you make it out to be either.
sarker
competency crisis actor
5d ago
It’s not like they were stopped - they just didn’t do it.
She was actually basically ready to open fire when a mall shooting stole her thunder and she decided against it.
Minsky and Epstein were in communication with each other before the transformer paper was published.
That would follow from Minsky dying before the paper was published, unless the Epstein files were of an entirely different communication medium.
I'm not sure what the thrust of your argument is? Is it that any discussion of AI before 2017 is irrelevant?
The thrust is that minsky and Bach are nobodies, irrelevant to where things stand today; Minsky didn't even believe that you can just train AI massive amounts of data to build intelligence until his death. The only relevant AI researcher listed is Yud, everyone else is a literally who. Does one guy count as over representation? You be the judge.
sarker
competency crisis actor
6d ago
First, Epstein really was balls-deep in AI research. Marvin Minsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Joscha Bach was in direct communication with Epstein. Elon Musk was in direct communication with Epstein. Eliezar Yudkowsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Noam Chomsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Overall, Epstein's emails are a who's-who of AI research. A brief, non-rigorous analysis of the files suggests that AI researchers are over represented in the files after 2011, both in frequency and in message length.
Wait, are they? Minsky and Bach are basically totally irrelevant. In fact, Minsky died before the transformer paper was even published. Musk and Chomsky are not even AI researchers. Of the people you listed, only Yudkowsky is even associated with rationalism or EA, and he's really not much of an AI researcher either.
It would seem the demand for rationalist EA AI researchers in the Epstein files outstrips the supply.
Artificial super intelligence, if correctly formed, presents infinite utility. If that is true, then literally anything can be justified if it moves the future toward that end.
This is especially amusing in the context of Eliezer "Bomb the Datacenters" Yudkowsky being the only rationalist listed.
Utilitarianism is easy to hack. Ignoring second order effects
I'm a little baffled that you claim the guys famous for autistically writing out detailed models to make predictions ignore second order effects. I'm not trying to get in an argument over whether the models are good, but the point is they certainly don't ignore second order effects and it's quite easy to slot them into a utilitarian framework.
sarker
competency crisis actor
7d ago
Endless fucking of a race of beings with bug heads for no reason isn't doing it for you?
sarker
competency crisis actor
8d ago
I believe I've clearly outlined how I believe the skill and taste of reading is typically developed in my previous comments.
sarker
competency crisis actor
8d ago
Eternal digital on call, to the extent it exists, is a phenomenon of perhaps the past 15 years.
sarker
competency crisis actor
9d ago
Thanks, this guy is literally from the University of Sound so I think this is promising.
sarker
competency crisis actor
9d ago
I've taken a few drum lessons so I have some prior sheet music experience. Does that count?
I think I can tell two notes apart, but to be honest I don't think I have a good grasp of what a "note" even is.
sarker
competency crisis actor
9d ago
OWID has a longer time series. A few countries show a postwar bump (the US included), but the overall trend since the late 19th century is one of decline.
sarker
competency crisis actor
9d ago
sarker
competency crisis actor
9d ago
Related: any introductions to the basics of music theory that people can recommend that are understandable by regards?
sarker
competency crisis actor
9d ago
I've read a lot, but I haven't read a single book of on that list, and so I'm curious if you have read them, and not for a school assignment, but pleasure out of your own free time.
Some of them I've read for school, but I've read other works by the same authors for pleasure (e.g. A Farewell to Arms). I take it you concede the point that RR is not easier to read than many actually good works of literature?
My and @GBRK's point I think is that more people should try to read, even if it's slop, just because reading is something that should have more people doing.
You both equivocate between this and the claim that reading slop will read to not reading slop. Here's you, not long ago:
Once you get used to reading, once you can read a few chapters a week, and do that for a while you'll be able to start reading other things too.
Please pick a lane. If your claim is that reading slop will get people interested in reading slop - I don't have a stance except that I don't actually care about people reading slop for the sake of reading. Time spent at words on a page (or, realistically, a screen) is not something I think people should optimize.
Every single book you mention could be put into a literary fiction which is read by a minority of the minority who reads in the first place.
I wasn't aware that royal road is nonfiction.
So no free will in the Obsession cinematic universe? Difficult to assign blame then, or discuss whether the genie is an asshole.
This btw seemed a very weak part of the movie - Bear has already seen the money, wtf is Ian barging into Bear's house for?
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