swlabr

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42 minute read

Maybe if you're a scrub. 19 minutes baby!!! And that included the minute or so that I thought about copypasting it into a text editor so I could highlight portions to sneer at. Best part of this story is that it is chess themed and takes place in "Skewers", Washington, vs. "Forks", Washington, as made famous by Twilight.

Anyway, what a pile of shit. I choose not to read Yud's stuff most of the time, but I felt that I might do this one. What do you get if you mix smashboards, goofus and gallant strips, that copypasta about needing a high IQ to like rick and morty, and the worst aspects of woody allen? This!

My summary:

Part 1. A chess player, "Mr. Humman", plays a match against "Mr. Assi" and loses. He has a conversation with a romantic interest, "Socratessa", or Tessa for short, about whether or not you can say if someone is better than another in chess. Often cited examples of other players are "Mr. Chimzee" and "Mr. Neumann".

Both "Humman" and "Socratessa" are strawmen. "Socratessa" is described as thus:

One of the less polite young ladies of the town, whom some might have called a troll,

Humman, of course, talks down to her, like so:

"Oh, my dear young lady," Mr. Humman said, quite kindly as was his habit when talking to pretty women potentially inside his self-assessed strike zone

I hate to give credit to Yud here for anything, so here's what I'll say: This characterisation of Humman is so douchey that it's completely transparent that Yud doesn't want you to like this guy. Yud's methodology was to have Humman make strawman-level arguments and portray him as kind of a creep. However, I think what actually happened is that Yud has accidentally replicated arguments you might hear from a smash scrub about why they are not a scrub, but are actually a good player, just with a veneer of chess. So I don't like this character, but not because of Yud's intent.

Socratessa (Tessa for short) is, as gerikson points out, is a Socratic strawman. That's it. It's unclear why Yud describes her as either a troll or pretty. She argues that Elo ratings exist and are good enough at predicting whether one player will beat another.

The story should end here, as it has fulfilled its mission as an obvious analog to Yud's whole thing about whether or not you can measure intelligence or say someone is smarter than another.

Part 2. Humman and Socratessa argue about whether or not you can measure intelligence or say someone is smarter than another.

E: if you were wondering, yes, there is eugenics in the story.

Let's not forget that the socratic strawwoman is named "Socratessa"

More wiki drama: Jimbo tries to both sides the gaza genocide

E: just for clarity. Jimbo is the canon nickname of founder Jimmy Wales.

And just to describe a little more of what has happened, as far as I can tell: Wales is reportedly being interviewed about Wikipedia (probably due to the grookiepedia stuff). He was asked in a "high profile media interview" (his words, see first link) about the Gaza genocide article, and said that it "fails to meet our high standards and needs immediate attention". Part of that attention is that they've locked the article, and Jimbo has joined the talk page. His argument probably boils down to this comment he left:

Let's start with this quote from WP:NPOV: "Avoid stating seriously contested assertions as facts. If different reliable sources make conflicting assertions about a matter, treat these assertions as opinions rather than facts, and do not present them as direct statements." Surely you aren't going to argue that the core assertion of the article is not seriously contested?

The "core assertion" is contained in the lede:

The Gaza genocide is the ongoing, intentional, and systematic destruction of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip carried out by Israel during the Gaza war.

i.e. that there is a genocide happening at all.

Gizmodo article, in case this comment sucks in some way and you wanted to read a different report.

For a moment there I was worried that ffmpeg had turned fash.

Anyway, amazing job ffmpeg, great responses. No notes

not outside of the fascist playbook to claim that they are the real victims. The example that comes to mind is the myth of white genocide, but also literally any fascist rhetoric is like that.

It’s well trodden ground to say that genAI usage and support for genAI resonates with populist/reactionary/fascist themes in that it inherently devalues and dehumanises, and it promotes anti-intellectualism. If you can be replaced by AI, what worth do you have? And why think if the AI can do it for you?

So, of course this stuff being echoed in spaces where the majority are ignorant to the nazi tilt. They can’t and don’t understand fascism on a structural level, they can only identify it when it’s trains and gas chambers.

Jack Dorsey seems to like throwing money at it:

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, has endorsed and financially supported the development of Nostr by donating approximately $250,000 worth of Bitcoin to the developers of the project in 2023, as well as a $10 million cash donation to a Nostr development collective in 2025.

(source: wiki)

Anything’s a cock ring if you’re brave enough

I half read, half skimmed the article. Man, what a strange, specific, and dedicated way to build buzz. This is the exact kind of weird conspiracy shit you’d expect nazi weirdos to be up to. If Indiana Jones did actual archaeology but only on the internet, this analysis would be the output. Good read.

This is a joke, right?

E: my enshittified brain thought that this was some kind of AI enabled smart ring that also told the time. This is kinda fun actually, tho I would never get one

More flaming dog poop appeared on my doorstep, in the form of this article published in VentureBeat. VB appears to be an online magazine for publishing silicon valley propaganda, focused on boosting startups, so it's no surprise that they'd publish this drivel sent in by some guy trying to parlay prompting into writing.

Point:

Apple argues that LRMs must not be able to think; instead, they just perform pattern-matching. The evidence they provided is that LRMs with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning are unable to carry on the calculation using a predefined algorithm as the p,roblem grows.

Counterpoint, by the author:

This is a fundamentally flawed argument. If you ask a human who already knows the algorithm for solving the Tower-of-Hanoi problem to solve a Tower-of-Hanoi problem with twenty discs, for instance, he or she would almost certainly fail to do so. By that logic, we must conclude that humans cannot think either.

As someone who already knows the algorithm for solving the ToH problem, I wouldn't "fail" at solving the one with twenty discs so much as I'd know that the algorithm is exponential in the number of discs and you'd need 2^20 - 1 (1048575) steps to do it, and refuse to indulge your shit reasoning.

However, this argument only points to the idea that there is no evidence that LRMs cannot think.

Argument proven stupid, so we're back to square one on this, buddy.

This alone certainly does not mean that LRMs can think — just that we cannot be sure they don’t.

Ah yes, some of my favorite GOP turns of phrases, "no unknown unknowns" + "big if true".

An article in which business insider tries to glaze Grookeypedia.

Meanwhile, the Grokipedia version felt much more thorough and organized into sections about its history, academics, facilities, admissions, and impact. This is one of those things where there is lots of solid information about it existing out there on the internet — more than has been added so far to the Wikipedia page by real humans — and an AI can crawl the web to find these sources and turn it into text. (Note: I did not fact-check Grokipedia's entry, and it's totally possible it got all sorts of stuff wrong!)

“I didn’t verify any information in the article but it was longer so it must be better”

What I can see is a version where AI is able to flesh out certain types of articles and improve them with additional information from reliable sources. In my poking around, I found a few other cases like this: entries for small towns, which are often sparse on Wikipedia, are filled out more robustly on Grokipedia.

“I am 100% sure AI can gather information from reliable sources. No I will not verify this in any way. Wikipedia needs to listen to me”