Quantum computing is still too far out from having even a niche industrial application, let alone something you can sell to middle managers the world over. Anybody who day-traded could get into Bitcoin; millions of people can type questions at a chatbot. Hucksters can and will reinvent themselves as quantum-computing consultants on LinkedIn, but is the raw material for the grift really there? I’m doubtful.
I’m hard-pressed to think of anything else I have tried to read that was comparably impenetrable. At least when we played “exquisite corpse” parlor games on the high-school literary magazine staff, we didn’t pretend that anything we improvised had lasting value.
For all of the 2.2 seconds I have spent wondering who Yud’s coauthor on that was, I vaguely thought that it was Aella. I don’t know where I might have gotten that impression from. A student paper about fanfiction identified “lintamande” as Kelsey Piper in 2013.
I tried reading the forum roleplay thing when it came up here, and I caromed off within a page. I made it through this:
The soap-bubble forcefield thing looks deliberate.
And I got to about here:
Mad Investor Chaos heads off, at a brisk heat-generating stride, in the direction of the smoke. It preserves optionality between targeting the possible building and targeting the force-bubble nearby.
… before the “what the fuck is this fucking shit?” intensified beyond my ability to care.
He’s practicing for his Isaac Chotiner interview.
Simulacrum level 1 features the swimming pool, exercise room, business center and continental breakfast lounge. Vending and ice machines are available on simulacrum level 2. In the event of a fire, please exit the simulacrum in an orderly manner using the stairs, not the elevators
Why is it that religion as a whole is fine, but not this religion?
Me: This plant is poisonous.
You, a lesswrong brain genius: Plants are a vital part of the Earth’s ecosystem. They make the oxygen that we breathe. You call yourself a vegetarian, and yet you have a problem with this plant. Why is it that plants as a whole are fine, but not this plant?
Me: This plant is poisonous.
Erratum: That cursed sentence is from Why 99% of YouTubers Fail (And How to Be the 1% That Doesn’t).
Dan Olson finds a cursed subreddit:
R/aitubers is all the entitlement of NewTubers but exclusively for people openly churning out slop.
“I’ve automated 2-4 videos daily, zero human intervention, I spend a half hour a week working on this, why am I not getting paid yet?”
I’ve been running my YouTube channel for about 3 months. It’s focused on JavaScript and React tutorials, with 2–4 videos uploaded daily. The videos are fully automated (AI-generated with clear explanations, code demos, and screen recordings).
Right now:
Each video gets only a few views (1–10 views).
I tried Google Ads ($200 spent) → got ~20 subscribers and ~20 hours of watch time.
The Google campaigns brought thousands of uncounted views, and the number of Likes was much higher than dislikes.
Tried Facebook/Reddit groups → but most don’t allow video posting, or posts get very low engagement.
My goal is to reach YPP within 6 months, but the current pace is not enough. I’m investing about $300/month in promotion and I can spend 30 minutes weekly myself.
👉 What would you suggest as the most effective strategy to actually get there?
So, R9PRESENTATIONALists are classicists who defend the “traditional university” and the Great Books canon, while also denouncing large institutions and aiming “to elevate the perspectives of underprivileged minorities”.
Sure, Jan.
Almost all are avowedly committed to the ideals of tolerance, pluralism, and diversity in faith; if you were to say that a belief system should be dismissed simply because it is essentially religious in nature in essentially any other context, they would be some of the loudest voices speaking out against you. So why should TESCREAL be any different? Why is it that religion as a whole is fine, but not this religion?
Because a religion passing itself off as scientific is a bad thing? Just spitballin’ here.
I finally steeled myself to look at the page history. After dgerard commented about it, someone else tagged the article for additional problems:
This article contains wording that promotes the subject in a subjective manner without imparting real information. (August 2025)
This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. (August 2025)
Then a third editor added a section … made of LLM bullshit.
I’d probably be exaggerating if I said that every time I looked under the hood of Wikipedia, it reaffirmed how I don’t have the temperament to edit there. But I wouldn’t be exaggerating by much. It’s enough of a hassle to agree upon text in a paper co-authored with a colleague I know personally and like. Dealing with posers whose ego pays them by the word… Ugh.
I bet they learned their intellectual history from a chatbot summary of the Sokal hoax.
Incidentally, Sokal is a TERF now.
for h in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
Everyone else has to #appropriate their culture.
Idea: a programming language that controls how many times a for loop cycles by the number of times a letter appears in a given word, e.g., “for each b in blueberry”.
Either way, they have been cordially directed to the egress.
From the comments:
On the contrary, I think that almost all people and institutions that don’t currently have a Wikipedia article should not want one.
Huh. How oddly sensible.
An extreme (and close-to-home) example is documented in TracingWoodgrains’s exposé.of David Gerard’s Wikipedia smear campaign against LessWrong and related topics.
Ah, never mind.
And because it’s the LA Times, there’s a chatbot slop section at the bottom to provide false balance.