TechTakes

Ow! My Balls

Chris Lintott (@chrislintott.bsky.social‬):

We’re getting so many journal submissions from people who think ‘it kinda works’ is the standard to aim for.

Research Notes of the AAS in particular, which was set up to handle short, moderated contributions especially from students, is getting swamped. Often the authors clearly haven’t read what they’ve submitting, (Descriptions of figures that don’t exist or don’t show what they purport to)

I’m also getting wild swings in topic. A rejection of one paper will instantly generate a submission of another, usually on something quite different.

Many of these submissions are dense with equations and pseudo-technological language which makes it hard to give rapid, useful feedback. And when I do give feedback, often I get back whatever their LLM says.

Including the very LLM responses like ‘Oh yes, I see that is wrong, I’ve removed it. Here’s something else’

Research Notes is free to publish in and I think provides a very valuable service to the community. But I think we’re a month or two from being completely swamped.

The sad thing is I have some idea of what it's trying to say. One of the many weird habits of the Rationalists is that they fixate on a few obscure mathematical theorems and then come up with their own ideas of what these theorems really mean. Their interpretations may be only loosely inspired by the actual statements of the theorems, but it does feel real good when your ideas feel as solid as math.

One of these theorems is Aumann's agreement theorem. I don't know what the actual theorem says, but the LW interpretation is that any two "rational" people must eventually agree on every issue after enough discussion, whatever rational means. So if you disagree with any LW principles, you just haven't read enough 20k word blog posts. Unfortunately, most people with "bounded levels of compute" ain't got the time, so they can't necessarily converge on the meta level of, never mind, screw this, I'm not explaining this shit. I don't want to figure this out anymore.

this sounds exactly like the sentence right before "they have played us for absolute fools!" in that meme.

oh man, it's Aumann's

Are you trying to say that you are not regularly thinking about the meta level of evidence convergence procedures?

Tbh, this is pretty convincing, I agree a lot more with parts of the LW space now. (Just look at the title, the content isn't that interesting).

retains the same informational content after running through rot13

Archive link, but you can extrapolate the whole article from the blurb. Mostly. It's actually slightly worse than the blurb suggests.

I also had a computer not boot. Tried installing windows 11 but the iso does not include network card drivers and requires a second drive that has them. I just happened to have another but it malfunctioned. Was assured IT would fix it but it still doesn't boot. :(

that post got way funnier with Eliezer’s recent twitter post about “EAs developing more complex opinions on AI other than itll kill everyone is a net negative and cancelled out all the good they ever did”

A religion is just a cult that survived its founder -- someone, at some point.

I am confident that Altman in particular has a poor-to-nonexistent grasp of second-order effects.

And of all possible things to implement, they chose Matrix. lol and lmao.

this happens like clockwork

On a semi-adjacent note I came across an attorney who helped to establish and run the Department of Homeland Security (under Bush AND Trump 1)

Who wants you to know he’s ENRAGED. And EMBARRASSED. How the American Schutzstaffel is doing Schutzstaffel things

He also wants you to know he’s Jewish (so am I, and I know our history enough that Homeland Security always had ‘Blood and Soil’ connotations you fucking shande)

I have family working there, who told me during the holidays, “Current leadership makes me uncomfortable, but money is good”

Every impression I had of them completely shattered, cannot fathom that level out sell out exists in people I thought I knew.

As a bonus, their former partner was a former employee who became a whistleblower and has now gone full howard hughes

I don’t think that chatbot dev sessions are in any way “high quality data”.

Yeah, Gas Town is being belabored to death, but it must be reiterated that I doubt the long-term value proposition of "Kubernetes fan fiction"

I also didn't find the argument very persuasive.

The LLM companies aren't paying anythnig for content. Why should they stop scraping now?

I spent the last few years working in a prototype testing role on an active cattle ranch (don't ask) and this phenomenon reminds me of what's left on the ground after the herd moves through on their way up the canyon

the flag of the new Iranian government would be the same as the one that was deposed in 1979

No doubt there is very much real discontent in Iran, but as you note, the heavy involvement of Reza Pahlavi made me raise an eyebrow. Loudly currying favor with the current slate of corrupt/abusive/incompetent Anglosphere governments and media does not suggest judgment that would result in a government any more stable or democratic than the existing one.

And there is, of course, the question of what would become of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, especially when they saw and assisted in how Iraq played out after de-Ba'athification. The media is still willing to indulge just-so stories about easy imposition of a Western-friendly government, when multiple waves of bloody insurgency have stalled that everywhere it's been tried. The near-total absence of news from Iraq in the mainstream American media for the last few years fascinates me.

Also pretty rich how a government (and its plutocrat backers) currently engaged in a campaign of domestic state terror have any standing to whine about other governments

i don't think that a washed out royal surrounded by iranian version of cubans from miami would be very consequential, however if you compare scale of political persecution between pahlavi and islamic republic eras, this makes savak look downright humanitarian, and i don't think he would be able to make situation worse either. if my calculator and judgement of sources is correct, then 43k dead protesters mean that islamic republic in two days outdid past 100 years of political repression, twice.

also, islamic republic heavily exaggerated pahlavi's brutality in their propaganda, especially early on. for example in constitution there's mention of "60000 martyrs" but even their own revised estimates for 1979 casualties are over 20x lower