all alignment and no play makes jack a dull boy
If you spend as many words as Yud does, you could actually teach quantum mechanics. But his goal isn't to teach physics; it's to convince the reader that physicists are all wrong about physics. It's cult shit disguised as a science lesson.
Whereas the electro-mechanical device that Turing built could perform just one code-cracking function well, today’s frontier AI models are approaching the “universal” computers he could only imagine, capable of vastly more functions.
Fucking Christ, that hurt to read.
15-ish years ago, I was doing a lot of principal component analysis and multi-dimensional scaling. A standard exercise in that area is to take distances between cities, like the lengths of airline flight paths, and reconstruct a map. If only I'd thought to claim that to be a world model!
As an AI language model, I'd like to point everyone to Max Tegmark's appearances in the old!sneerclub archives.
That post can also be found in the archive of old!sneerclub.
Nitter links: tweet, beginning of thread. The original source appears to be Michael Lewis' new book Going Infinite.
When I was an undergrad at MIT, I knew (not terribly well) the people who invited him to "debate" Time Cube there. He came to a low-key student party; someone tried to teach him the game of go because, you know, squares. The whole thing seemed funny at first and then vaguely mean-spirited and exploitative, so I blew off the "debate" itself. What sticks with me most after all these years are the vibes. He was genuinely happy to be there, a little perplexed and stand-offish among all the college kids... and on some level beneath that, wounded and angry.
Of the odd people in our orbit, Gene Ray was much less genial than Love 22, the street entertainer/numerologist from Key West who showed up for baseball games and who delighted in showing off his passport, which gave his legal name as "LOVE XXII". The Roman numerals meant that he was royalty in Europe, he'd say.
Having met Gene "the Time Cube guy" Ray and found him to be a simmering cauldron of rage just waiting to boil over, that's oddly fitting.
such tears, very rain
It's a real term, meaning "influenced by multiple genes", but who knows what weird baggage SSC have around it.
I was a teenager in the '90s; I don't need to watch a movie for that. :-P
I read War and Peace but have only vague memories of it, because I read it in eighth grade. We had an "accelerated reader" program, you see, in which we were supposed to read books and then take quizzes on them to accumulate points. The longer books counted for more. Nearly all of the list we could pick from looked incredibly boring, so I decided to get a year's worth of points in one go.