flâneur

Grady Kenix

5 followers · 6 following · 1024 views

on the atlas — 34

highlights — 67

  • i want to be cringe because i want to love freely, without a care for the society around me that throws side-eyes.
    2023 motto: BE CRINGE. - by janet! - [insert name]
  • Ajeya’s report is a 169-page collection of equations, graphs, and modeling assumptions. Yudkowsky’s rebuttal is a fictional dialogue between himself, younger versions of himself, famous AI scientists, and other bit players. At one point, a character called “Humbali” shows up begging Yudkowsky to be more humble, and Yudkowsky defeats him with devastating counterarguments.
    Biological Anchors: A Trick That Might Or Might Not Work
  • They immortalize you in their shrimply texts. You are the Alpha and the Omega.
    The Glory and Horror of Dried Shrimp
  • Parmigiano is the golden retriever of the food world—you can put it anywhere you want, regardless of cuisine, and it will nestle in among the other ingredients and play nice.
    The Glory and Horror of Dried Shrimp
  • Let’s do a bit of shrimp-related math.
    The Glory and Horror of Dried Shrimp
  • Since Neolithic times, people have budgeted roughly one hour per day for commuting – this hour is known as Marchetti’s constant or the “travel time budget.”
    Intelligence Superabundance - Not Boring by Packy McCormick
  • you might be concerned that there’s really no point in starting a startup, learning how to code, or doing … anything anymore. Don’t quit just yet.
    Intelligence Superabundance - Not Boring by Packy McCormick
  • Human intelligence is the most valuable stuff in the cosmos, and we are always running short. A computer-created increase in the world-wide intelligence supply would be welcome, to say the least.
    Intelligence Superabundance - Not Boring by Packy McCormick
  • the increased supply of intelligence will create more demand for tasks that require intelligence
    Intelligence Superabundance - Not Boring by Packy McCormick
  • even twenty years after displacement, we estimate a 10%–15% increase in annual death hazards.
    Job Displacement and Mortality: An Analysis Using Administrative Data* | The Quarterly Journal of Economics | Oxford Academic
  • You gather as little wealth, as little prosperity as I. What either of us gains he gives away. So do we remain thin.
    The Poem Of Imru al Qays
  • throwing the camel's flesh into the kettle; The fat was woven with the lean like loose fringes of white twisted silk.
    The Poem Of Imru al Qays
  • I swear by God, you have no excuse for your wild life; I can not expect that your erring habits will ever be removed from your nature.
    The Poem Of Imru al Qays
  • In the off-modern tradition, reflection and longing, estrangement and affection go together.
    Nostalgia | Svetlana Boym
  • For while the tired waves, vainly breaking Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main.
    Say not the Struggle nought Availeth
  • If anything, the results imply that neural networks are often needlessly elaborate for the task at hand, leading to the notorious overfitting effect.
    Polynomial Regression — An Alternative For Neural Networks?
  • we have seldom found it necessary to use a higher degree.
    Polynomial Regression — An Alternative For Neural Networks?
  • If the activation function is any polynomial, or is implemented by one, an NN exactly performs polynomial regression. Moreover, the degree of the polynomial will increase from layer to layer.
    Polynomial Regression — An Alternative For Neural Networks?
  • nostalgia, for better or for worse, never went out of fashion, remaining uncannily contemporary.
    Nostalgia | Svetlana Boym
  • Reflective nostalgia thrives in álgos, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately.
    Nostalgia | Svetlana Boym
  • it is not only the ancient régime that produced revolution, but in some respect the revolution produced the ancien régime, giving it a shape, a sense of closure, and a gilded aura.
    Nostalgia | Svetlana Boym
  • In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology
    Nostalgia | Svetlana Boym
  • Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own phantasy.
    Nostalgia | Svetlana Boym
  • If he hadn’t been playing Cassandra for decades no one would have heard of Eliezer Yudkowsky. All of this absurd serial overestimation of how the world is going to change because of incredibly sophisticated autocomplete is driven by self-interest and greed.
    Theory of the World, Theory of Mind, and Media Incentives
  • A work force stratified on the basis of an economically irrational criterion such as race constitutes a serious impediment to realization of the ideal of a labor pool comprised of equivalent units.
    Black particularity reconsidered - Adolph L. Reed Jr.
  • The triumph of the commodity form over every sphere of social existence has been made possible by a profound homogenization of work, play, aspirations and self-definition
    Black particularity reconsidered - Adolph L. Reed Jr.
  • The word “futurist” doesn’t even mean someone who thinks about the actual future. Right now it means a techno-fantasist, someone who thinks we can keep going deeper and deeper forever into our little machine-making obsession.
    Civilization Will Eat Itself
  • And look what industrial civilization destroyed: every indigenous tradition of elites, of ritual mutilation, of human sacrifice, of extreme restriction of consciousness, of simplified magical thinking, of experience-excluding belief. Of course, our civilization still does all these things, just not openly or playfully.
    Civilization Will Eat Itself
  • We want to marginalize our human/animal selves, get them out of our sight, keep them totally controlled and predictable, use them only as much as they serve our needs, and when we no longer need them, we want to wipe them away.
    Civilization Will Eat Itself
  • One day grass will grow on the freeways, unless we let this thing get so far that not even grass survives.
    Civilization Will Eat Itself
  • he system is shaped like a bowl: The farther you go from the center, the harder it is to go farther, and the greater the forces are that pull you back.
    Civilization Will Eat Itself
  • When we find ourselves outside evil societies, the appropriate emotion is not indignation or moral superiority, but gratitude.
    Civilization Will Eat Itself
  • The Three Laws Of Robotics are a program that Isaac Asimov put in human beings to keep them from harming robots.
    Civilization Will Eat Itself
  • And a machine that preserves and perpetuates the detached, mechanistic angle of human consciousness, and “expands” until it is the whole universe, is not my idea of God, but of something else in the Bible.
    Civilization Will Eat Itself
  • You’re on an iceberg in the ocean, and your iceberg is slowly melting, so you gather other icebergs around you, and they gather other icebergs around them, and maybe they freeze together, and you get some pretty big icebergs. But the edges, still, are slowly melting, and the ocean is getting warmer...
    Civilization Will Eat Itself
  • cynics are the real idealists, so fixated on the ideal of “success” that they become paralyzed, unable to act without the appearance of likely success.
    Civilization Will Eat Itself
  • I reject the entire concept of “privilege.” It’s a lie. No one is or has ever been “privileged.” If ten people are living happily on an island, and I go and lock nine of them in a cage, have I made the tenth person privileged? If ten people are playing in the woods and eating fruit, and I give one of them an intravenous feeding tube and a hand-held computer game, and then I get him to cut down the fruit trees, have I done him a favor? The concept of “privilege” does not make sense except in the context of an exploitative system, and in an exploitative system everyone is exploited.
    Civilization Will Eat Itself
  • I’ve always had a thing about techno-industrial civilization. The scent that gives me the deepest nostalgia — I don’t know why — is fresh tar.
    Civilization Will Eat Itself
  • Cheeseburger in paradise Heaven on earth with an onion slice Not too particular, not too precise I'm just a cheeseburger in paradise
    Jimmy Buffett – Cheeseburger in Paradise Lyrics
  • If we're going to try all these things again, let's at least learn from our past, so we can fail in interesting new ways, instead of failing in the same exasperating ways as last time.
    On The Moral Economy of Tech
  • This is not the first time an enthusiastic group of nerds has decided to treat the rest of the world as a science experiment. Earlier attempts to create a rationalist Utopia failed for interesting reasons, and since we bought those lessons at a great price, it would be a shame not to learn them.
    On The Moral Economy of Tech
  • We tend to imagine dystopian scenarios as one where a repressive government uses technology against its people. But what scares me in these scenarios is that each one would have broad social support, possibly majority support.
    On The Moral Economy of Tech
  • As a technologist, this state of affairs gives me the feeling of living in a forest that is filling up with dry, dead wood. The very personal, very potent information we're gathering about people never goes away, only accumulates.
    On The Moral Economy of Tech
  • Those who benefit from the death of privacy attempt to frame our subjugation in terms of freedom, just like early factory owners talked about the sanctity of contract law.
    On The Moral Economy of Tech
  • Machine learning is like money laundering for bias. It's a clean, mathematical apparatus that gives the status quo the aura of logical inevitability.
    On The Moral Economy of Tech
  • Hop on BART after the conference and take a look at Oakland, or take a stroll through downtown San Francisco and try to persuade yourself you're in the heart of a boom that has lasted for forty years.
    On The Moral Economy of Tech
  • People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous confidence.
    On The Moral Economy of Tech
  • To a growing number of working-class voters, however, the newly upscale version of the party has become less appealing. The trend has long been evident among white working-class voters, and many liberal analysts have claimed that it mostly reflects racial bigotry. But recent developments have weakened that argument. Class appears to be an important factor as well.
    Asian Americans, Shifting Right - The New York Times
  • Instead of fighting for its life, the AI will play away, often with those small, somewhat slack moves that AlphaGo would use when it thought it was far ahead. Sometimes it'll attack in a way you have to respond to, but a lot of the time you can just ignore it.
    Go has been un-solved: strong human players beat the strongest AIs - LessWrong
  • I was wrong, in two ways. The adversarial AI isn't generally superhuman: it can be beaten by novices. And as you'd expect given that, the exploit can be executed by humans.
    Go has been un-solved: strong human players beat the strongest AIs - LessWrong