rhet0rica

Updates since this was posted:

- blue t-shirts and green socks have been added to the default loadout for new hackers, since it's optimal according to AI and costs nothing to the attacker in terms of compute

- there are so many ley line "maps" out there that basically any server placement counts as aligned with at least two, so this one's free also

If you were to make one edit to Claude's output here, I'd recommend rephrasing "of DOOM's shape shows up in Quake, Quake II and Lua" near the top; though it's explained slightly better later on, the wording seems to imply that Lua is derived from the id Tech family tree, which it obviously isn't. An explicit mention that these are negative controls would be good. Maybe rewrite it to "chance resemblance to three unrelated codebases (Quake, Quake II, and Lua)." Personally I find it fascinating that there's a tangible lineage between Keen 1 and Doom 3. (id used the same tile map editor and file format until Doom.)

On a related note, many famous famines went from stressful-but-survivable bad harvests to mass casualty events because of mismanagement: the Irish Potato Famine, the Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward...

It seems the villain here could be the Chilean government, for prioritizing the tech economy over the people at a time when it matters most.

The article is definitely synthetic. Toward the end there's a "funny bloopers" section, and it describes the GPT team reporting the round duration to 9 decimal places as a "blooper." It was funny when IBM Watson placed an exact figure for its Final Jeopardy bid, but I don't think extreme precision counts as an out-take... Unless you're an LLM, then maybe it does.

"Pace yourself" is a semi-common English idiom (rarely conjugated, usually an imperative.) It is a gentle way of telling someone not to run/work/eat too quickly, and is typically said when you are concerned they may hurt themselves due to acting hastily.

Without this idiom, "pacing" usually means walking back and forth restlessly, and is intransitive. Had the slogan been, "pacing around the frontier," it would have set a totally different tone, i.e. "patrolling the border." (Occasionally English speakers will make other constructs like "pace the work" (meaning "spread out a large workload over the allotted time instead of rushing through it") that are transitive but these can be understood as variations on "pace yourself" and are somewhat rarer.)

The sleight of hand is that "pace yourself" has come to be an admonishment against recklessness, not a commitment to any particular speed (or lack thereof.) Thus Anthropic can always claim they are meeting the goal of "pacing the frontier," provided they keep giving themselves gold stars for safety. The slogan itself is equivocation; Dario can tell the public they're going to slow down, while also telling their investors that they're going to be prudent. With enough mental gymnastics they could even claim speeding up is in the best interests of AI safety, without abandoning the slogan.

A subreddit devoted to nonsensical gizmos that solve no practical problem.

One that wouldn't mind manually typed page numbers that would have to be adjusted were the document ever updated.

They also inexplicably used Windows 95 Paint to draw a rocket ship during the main video demo.

Of course it does! Really, though, what it really wants to do is make restaurant reservations. The primary concern of AI researchers has always been, and will always be, making restaurant reservations.

Parsing natural language and solving climate change are downstream of making restaurant reservations.

Universal Paperclips should have been about making restaurant reservations.

It's good that you don't have to call it "Muse." That's kind of a weird name for a servant; how exactly is this email-parsing bot inspiring works of art? Perhaps it was re-used from another project.

Perhaps the conclusions simply weren't mooving.

I was thinking of the functions as described by the Common Lisp HyperSpec. Reading it makes me cry.

It is not unreasonable to call that a 'standard library.' The term 'standard library' is often used to describe built-ins.

The age of the CL core functions is a genuine weakness, specifically in terms of performance. No matter how many libraries you download from Quicklisp, they still have to be implemented in something, and if that something is antiquated or clunky, you're essentially asking the compiler to optimize the entire language out of existence to keep up with the state of the art. The same applies to npm, pip, cargo, and all the rest.

That is... honestly an insane reaction. I spent half an hour writing that.

I'm sorry you're scared by em-dashes. They were cool when I was young, alright?

This is an inevitable result of small dataset size. As recently as the start of this year, flagship models struggled with Objective-C unless the target was Apple's latest API. (This is per GNUstep lead dev Gregory Casamento, who has every reason to be an expert in these things.)

The "when" isn't a mystery or gradual in the slightest—we have concrete dates.

The death of the button occurred on October 21, 2010, when Microsoft released Windows Phone 7 to the international market, beginning the Metro UI era.

Apple wouldn't catch up until September 17, 2014, when they unveiled iOS 7, ditching Steve Jobs's beloved skeuomorphism in favor of Jony Ive's signature flat style.

Google followed up on November 12, 2014, with Android 5.0 Lollipop's introduction of Material Design—arguably the least flat of the three, though it wouldn't stay that way forever.

I prefer a more tongue-in-cheek theory than a mere preference for the word's shape. Perhaps "load-bearing" is structurally necessary—if it is ablated, the whole model will collapse!

The road to hell was paved lovingly, foolishly, naïvely, arrogantly, optimistically... load-bearingly?

Encoded in its design are the biases of its designers. It acts like a nervous twenty-something from San Francisco.

The two key interpretations are as follows:

1. It follows that all of human authorship is pointless since search engines now actively bury content and impede access to written documents. Long Live The New Flesh.

2. Webrings are obviously an artifact of people who hate AI slop and yearn for the simpler days of the older Web, before search engines were effective. Therefore the remark about generated summaries is powerfully sarcastic, as the twain shall never meet. Moreover, Google is no longer fit for purpose, so webrings are an apposite solution to the empty niche of trustworthy discovery mechanisms. Eat The Rich.

Which one the author actually meant depends entirely on their literacy regarding the web revival movement.

This comment is such an elegant Rorschach test. Bravo.

WikiLambda is what happens when someone looks at the definition of the second-system effect and says, "Hey, that's cool and all, but I bet I can make a bigger, better version of this."

The estate of Jorge Borges should sue.

My thoughts exactly. Why the fuck is this the primary concern of EVERY person who works at Google?!

This may be the most important story of the year (for creatures with 20 pods.)

you are hereby sentenced by the council of dashers to type "—" ten million times using Windows-1252 alt codes

you have 5 seconds to comply before your planet will be demolished to make room for a giant space-typographer's punctuation case

A single product name, you say? COPILOT, COPILOT, COPILOT!

Sadly they had to close that loophole where so-called family "members" could claim individuality, bypassing the spirit of the legislation. Science has yet to determine where corporate personhood falls in this paradigm.

Never understood this about Windows Subsystem for Linux naming, nor its predecessor Windows Services for Unix. Surely Linux is the subsystem running on Windows? Should we now reinterpret Windows for Workgroups as a means of astrally projecting your organization inside Windows 3.11?! The dative only works ONE way, Microsoft!

I guess they really just didn't want a product name to start with the name of a competitor's product. I bet Copilot can fix this...

Trump specifically seems to hew awfully close to the symptoms of a long-term cocaine user. The hard drift into self-congratulatory vanity parallels that of Charlie Sheen during a certain infamous interview, for example, and at least two people (Howard Dean and Carrie Fisher) identified him as having compulsive sniffing reminiscent of a cocaine habit during debates prior to his first election.

Remember that Trump is not a first-generation member of the upper class; as a nepo baby, he was born out of touch and has spent his whole life falling deeper into bizarre social bubbles and media silos that were tailored by his ancestors and peers to reassure them that they're doing the right thing. In theory plutarchs should be receiving world-class education from private tutors, but being arch-Conservatives by definition, these teachers are invariably out of date on mental health, and would be forbidden from teaching it even if they had modern material.

Because of this isolation the ultra-wealthy often have certain very uneducated traits around self-esteem—which can paradoxically seem like the result of poverty. They do not have access to DARE or Sesame Street to give them the confidence not to take drugs when pressured, they've never seen Mister Rogers, their biological parents were always off running a business empire, and they have no surrogate figures because their nannies probably get fired at the drop of a hat, even for defending the child's interests.

Ironically, American republicanism makes this worse; in a planned aristocracy, parents internalize the belief that their children deserve "the best" because they are meant to be "the best", but without that noble lie, there is no pressure to create a positive environment for the next generation of tyrant. To make matters worse, these families never start off with healthy values to begin with—which produces a founder effect of regressive masculinity that magnifies everything else I've just mentioned.

That's a good question! I'm sure we'll find out eventually.

z Quickly spin up Hacker News comments from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with a lobotomy.

since it claims to be precisely that, anything else would be false advertising

Optimism. Someday the blue bird will be free.