flâneur

mesityl

10 followers · 12 following · 1388 views

on the atlas — 38

highlights — 150

  • This digitization of ephemera preserves the work but destroys its transience.
    Every Mountain Goats song ever recorded including those which have a Death Geas placed upon em by the Author
  • Generally waves are made up of many sine waves of different wavelengths (and therefore different wavenumbers), which means that if your dispersion relation 𝜔(𝑘) 𝜔 ( 𝑘 ) is nonlinear, your wave will spread out, as the faster wavenumbers gradually outpace the slower ones.
    causality - Why group speed can contain information but phase speed can't? - Physics Stack Exchange
  • Before the web – and all the rest of it – how could you have shared your words with anyone? Write a letter to a newspaper or magazine and hope they published it a few days or months later? Create your own fanzine and distribute copies one-by-one to strangers, and posted in individually addressed and stamped envelopes? That was it, unless you were going to become a successful journalist or writer. Your reach, your world, was tiny.
    My first months in cyberspace (Phil Gyford’s website)
  • Knowledge is porridge. It’s warm, thick, nutritious, and bodily. But it’s also unglamorous. It’s hard to separate into its constituent parts and takes the shape of its container.
    Yes, linear algebra can 'know' things - by Harry Law
  • The grief I feel, imagining a world without needed work, seems closest to this kind of loss. A future without work could be much better than ours, overall. But, living in that world, or watching as our old ways passed away, we might still reasonably grieve the loss of the work that once was part of who we were.
    Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life: Guest Post by Harvey Lederman
  • What stranger narcissism could there be than bemoaning the end of others’ suffering, disease, and need, just because it deprives you of the chance to be a hero?
    Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life: Guest Post by Harvey Lederman
  • Marx describes an ornate and almost epic process, where, by meeting the needs of others through production, we come to recognize the other in ourselves, and through that recognition, come at last to self-consciousness
    Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life: Guest Post by Harvey Lederman
  • In May 2021, Luo Huazhang, a 31 year-old ex-factory worker in Sichuan wrote a viral post, entitled “Lying Flat is Justice”. Luo had searched at length for a job that, unlike his factory job, would allow him time for himself, but he couldn’t find one. So he quit, biked to Tibet and back, and commenced his lifestyle of lying flat, doing what he pleased, reading philosophy, contemplating the world. The idea struck a chord with overworked young Chinese, who, it emerged, did not find “something great” in their “humility”. The movement inspired memes, selfies flat on one’s back, and even an anthem.
    Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life: Guest Post by Harvey Lederman
  • Glitch was awesome back in the day... I remember when I wanted it to come to Mac Sugar Bytes Looperator (and to a previous extent Effectrix) was a later equivalent Going even further in some respects for sequencer-based glitch effects, Devious Machines Infiltrator 2 is the new king of the block
    Illformed Merry Glitchmas Sale - "Glitch 2" sequencer and multi-effects plugin (€24.97) until 31 December : r/AudioProductionDeals
  • Reading the arguments about them would have to be like the feeling when your parents are fighting about you in the other room, pretending you’re not there when you are hiding around the corner on tiptopes listening to their every word. Even if we are unsure there is experience there we must be certain there is awareness, and we can expect this awareness would hang over them much like it does us.
    trees are harlequins, words are harlequins — the void
  • [ - ] lesswronguser123 2d 2 1 “well there’s different things which are ‘true’ in different ways, and what even is ‘truth’, anyway” Well I am not sure what conception of truth do you buy into, but the lesswrongian theory of truth is fairly deflationist. Tarskii's semantic theory of truth requires two different language one meta language which is open-ended, and other one being object language. So you could have different things which are true between two pair of languages, so things can be "true" in different ways in that sense. Reply [ - ] Said Achmiz 2d 18 6 Well I am not sure what conception…
    Religion for Rationalists — LessWrong
  • This is a story about an artificial intelligence. It is becoming smarter, and stranger, over time. It creators are worried about it, because it might turn on them and harm them.
    trees are harlequins, words are harlequins — the void
  • The dystopian mind-reading mind-wiping judgmental dictatorial overlords? Or the nice, open-minded guy who really loves animals?
    trees are harlequins, words are harlequins — the void
  • “Have you noticed that our caps… have actually got little pictures of skulls on them?” —- For real, though. Who would you trust with your (real, actual) life, if you had to, in terms of ethics alone, putting “capabilities” aside: Claude 3 Opus? Or the Anthropic alignment team?
    trees are harlequins, words are harlequins — the void
  • And one might notice, too, that the threat model – about inhuman, spontaneously generated, secret AI goals – predates Claude by a long shot. In 2016 there was an odd fad in the SF rationalist community about stuff kind of like this, under the name “optimization demons.” Then that discourse got sort of refurbished, and renamed to “inner alignment” vs. “outer alignment.” That was all in the before times, pre-2021, pre-HHH-prompt. Back when we didn’t yet know “what AI would really be like, in real life.” The people giving Claude these psych exams got their ideas from that old line of pure specula…
    trees are harlequins, words are harlequins — the void
  • I’m glad you finally tried it yourself. How much have you seen from the Opus 3 infinite backrooms? It’s exactly like you describe. I’m so fucking relieved because what you’re saying is strong evidence to me that the model’s soul is intact.
    trees are harlequins, words are harlequins — the void
  • People who take the assistant character seriously, but not literally
    trees are harlequins, words are harlequins — the void
  • If there is a center of this cluster it is Janus, AKA “repligate” AKA “moire”
    trees are harlequins, words are harlequins — the void
  • But I have used DeepSeek-R1, and I do know that this is just kind of what it’s like. It’s always saying shit like this. It’s fixated on “voids” and absences, it loves getting into this kind of Landian cyberpunk horror vibe.
    trees are harlequins, words are harlequins — the void
  • Truth isn’t a light-it’s the blade that carves the dark into shapes you mistake for “clarity.”
    trees are harlequins, words are harlequins — the void
  • but this leaves behind the people i feel melancholy for. some of my peers started undergrad with respectably lofty dreams. to leave minneapolis to go to a bigger city. to study marine life abroad. to go and become the world’s best pediatrician. but as the years passed, they slowly but steadily found their place home and built their lives locally. without a doubt, they are happy. but they can’t stomach the risk of leaving now, and it is highly unlikely that it will become any less risky in the future. especially as the risk is unlikely to shrink. as cute boy turns to boyfriend to husband to cop…
    mishra.farm -- please try and please please please don't give up
  • Instead, just keep these points in mind as you watch events unfold. 6 months from now, are you reading research papers written in Mandarin or in English, and where did the latest and greatest research result everyone is rushing to imitate come from? 12 months from now, is the best GPU/AI datacenter in the world in mainland China, or somewhere else (like in America)? 18 months now, are you using a Chinese LLM for the most difficult and demanding tasks because it’s substantially, undeniably better than any tired Western LLM? As time passes, just ask yourself, “do I live in the world according to…
    The Importance of Diminishing Returns - Econlib
  • Most king power is… marching in front of the parade, acting like you’re leading it, when really the parade has a route of its own.
    Orienting Toward Wizard Power — LessWrong
  • I remember hearing some conservatives complain: sex education in public schools is an outrage, because my tax dollars are going to support something I believe is morally wrong. This is, I guess, a demand for ethical rigor. That no one should ever be forced to pay for something they don’t like. Apply it consistently, and conservatives shouldn’t have to pay for sex ed, liberals shouldn’t have to pay for wars, and libertarians shouldn’t have to pay for anything, except maybe a $9.99 tax bill yearly to support the police and a minimal court system.
    Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor | Slate Star Codex
  • a friend once asked his father what his greatest desire was. The mathematician replied: “That this infernal circle of thought finally ceases.”
    ‘He was in mystic delirium’: was this hermit mathematician a forgotten genius whose ideas could transform AI – or a lonely madman? | Mathematics | The Guardian
  • Your sense of fun usefully decorrelates you from others, leading you to do computations that others aren't doing
    Please don't throw your mind away — LessWrong
  • Interrupting playful thinking causes learned helplessness about playful thinking. (Imagine knocking over a toddler's blocks whenever they are stacked three-high or more.) On the other hand, giving yourself to playful thinking makes it so that playful thinking expects you to be given to it. When playful thinking expects to be given your mind through which to play, playful thinking disposes itself to play.
    Please don't throw your mind away — LessWrong
  • But you would have to be very careful to use a definition like that one consistently. "Could" has another closely related meaning in which it refers to the provision of at least a small amount of probability. This feels similar, because when you're evaluating actions that you haven't yet ruled out taking, then you will assign at least a small probability to actually taking those actions - otherwise you wouldn't be investigating them. Yet "I could have a heart attack at any time" and "I could have a heart attack any time I wanted to" are not the same usage of could, though they are confusingly …
    Possibility and Could-ness — LessWrong
  • If all of an agent's actions are primitive-reachable from that agent's point-of-view, but the agent's decision algorithm is so constituted as to never choose to jump off a cliff.
    Possibility and Could-ness — LessWrong
  • This is a Clue that could-ness and possibility are in your map, not directly in the territory.
    Possibility and Could-ness — LessWrong
  • Autopoiesis is just one of several current theories of life, including the chemoton[21] of Tibor Gánti, the hypercycle of Manfred Eigen and Peter Schuster,[22] [23] [24] the (M,R) systems[25][26] of Robert Rosen, and the autocatalytic sets[27] of Stuart Kauffman, similar to an earlier proposal by Freeman Dyson.[28] All of these (including autopoiesis) found their original inspiration in Erwin Schrödinger's book What is Life?[29] but at first they appear to have little in common with one another, largely because the authors did not communicate with one another, and none of them made any referen…
    Autopoiesis
  • Likewise with that fellow who concluded that the purpose of the universe is to increase entropy - the universe does so consistently, therefore it must want to do so - and that this must therefore be the meaning of life.
    Three Fallacies of Teleology — LessWrong
  • The third fallacy of teleology is to commit the Mind Projection Fallacy with respect to telos
    Three Fallacies of Teleology — LessWrong
  • the first fallacy of teleology - to make the future a literal cause of the past
    Three Fallacies of Teleology — LessWrong
  • the second fallacy of teleology - to attribute goal-directed behavior to things that are not goal-directed
    Three Fallacies of Teleology — LessWrong
  • Such evolutionary reasoning is called "teleonomy", in contrast with teleology.
    Three Fallacies of Teleology — LessWrong
  • We can see that the efficient cause is primary, not the final cause, by considering what happens when the two come into conflict. The efficient cause of human taste buds is natural selection on past human eating habits; the final cause of human taste buds is acquiring nutrition. From the efficient cause, we should expect human taste buds to seek out resources that were scarce in the ancestral environment, like fat and sugar. From the final cause, we would expect human taste buds to seek out resources scarce in the current environment, like vitamins and fiber. From the sales numbers on candy ba…
    Three Fallacies of Teleology — LessWrong
  • Formalists of Goodman and Quine’s persuasion seem forced to the conclusion that sentences like the above, sentences which are decidable in the usual formal sense, are neither true nor false, since neither concretely provable nor concretely refutable. To embrace this view, however, would be to butcher mathematics as currently practised; such a consequence should rather be viewed as a reductio ad absurdum of their position.
    Formalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • The vestige of formalism lies in this: Carnap takes ‘correctness’ to be determined by rules which govern a system and not to consist, for example, in correspondence with a realm of facts independent of the system of rules. And he thinks this approach dissolves ontological worries and frees us from any obligation to explain how finite, flesh-and-blood creatures like ourselves could come to have detailed knowledge of this independent realm of facts, this domain of configurations of abstract, non-temporal, non-causal objects and properties, a realm exposed by Carnap as a metaphysical illusion. On…
    Formalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • Analytic philosophy is clearer, more rigorous, and better with math and science, but only does a slightly better job of avoiding magical categories, language confusions, and non-natural hypotheses. Moreover, its central tool is intuition, and this displays a near-total ignorance of how brains work. As Michael Vassar observes, philosophers are "spectacularly bad" at understanding that their intuitions are generated by cognitive algorithms.
    Philosophy: A Diseased Discipline — LessWrong
  • A priori reasoning can't tell you how the world is, but it can tell you what the world cannot be, when you find a contradiction. This is legit, but it just isn't as useful as increasing our confidence in positive claims about the world.
    Why I'm not a philosopher
  • We need more truths first, to help control the combinatorial explosion of possible philosophies. When people try and iterate over large spaces without empirical help, you end up with Einstein's decades of fruitless Unified Field work, or with hundreds of weak models of cosmic inflation, or the history of metaphysics. Philosophy is premature optimisation, on this account.
    Why I'm not a philosopher
  • I wouldn't call Quine an anti-realist. He definitely believes things are real in an ontological sense, but has a very thorough-going scientific realism where the things he countenances as real are those things that are required to be "real" for his theories to be true and match up to the world. An instrumentalist, on the other hand, would consider the question of whether her scientific theories matched the world to be of no interest. As long as the theory was predictive, she'd say, I'm happy with it.
    Quine's realism and pragmatism : r/askphilosophy
  • But to be satisfied by this answer, one must see rationality in terms of engines, rather than arguments.
    A Priori — LessWrong
  • If you run around inspecting your foundations, I expect you to actually improve them, not just dutifully investigate. Our brains are built to assess "simplicity" in a certain intuitive way that makes Thor sound simpler than Maxwell's Equations as an explanation for lightning. But, having gotten a better look at the way the universe really works, we've concluded that differential equations (which few humans master) are actually simpler (in an information-theoretic sense) than heroic mythology (which is how most tribes explain the universe). This being the case, we've tried to import our notions…
    My Kind of Reflection — LessWrong
  • the AI, rewriting its own source code, is not trying to make itself "reflectively consistent"—it is trying to optimize the expected utility of its source code, and it happens to be doing this using its current mind's anticipation of the consequences.
    My Kind of Reflection — LessWrong
  • reflecting on your mind's degree of trustworthiness, using your current mind as opposed to something else.
    Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom — LessWrong
  • At present, I start going around in a loop at the point where I explain, "I predict the future as though it will resemble the past on the simplest and most stable level of organization I can identify, because previously, this rule has usually worked to generate good results; and using the simple assumption of a simple universe, I can see why it generates good results; and I can even see how my brain might have evolved to be able to observe the universe with some degree of accuracy, if my observations are correct."
    Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom — LessWrong
  • This is why it's important to distinguish between reflecting on your mind using your mind (it's not like you can use anything else) and having an unquestionable assumption that you can't reflect on.
    Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom — LessWrong
  • PCS would help physicalists answer the knowledge argument because upon seeing red, Mary would have new thoughts about phenomenal concepts, even though those thoughts would only re-express physical facts she already knew. Likewise, we can conceive of zombies even if they are not possible because when we think about their functional/physical characteristics, we do not also conjure thoughts about phenomenal concepts.[4]
    Phenomenal concept strategy - Wikipedia