• 19 Posts
  • 243 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: July 19th, 2023
  • corbin@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th October 2025 - awful.systemsEnglish
    5·
    1 day ago

    The original article is a great example of what happens when one only reads Bostrom and Yarvin. Their thesis:

    If you claim that there is no AI-risk, then which of the following bullets do you want to bite?

    1. If a race of aliens with an IQ of 300 came to Earth, that would definitely be fine.
    2. There’s no way that AI with an IQ of 300 will arrive within the next few decades.
    3. We know some special property that AI will definitely have that will definitely prevent all possible bad outcomes that aliens might cause.

    Ignoring that IQ doesn’t really exist beyond about 160-180 depending on population choice, this is clearly an example of rectal philosophy that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. (1) is easy, given that the people verified to be high-IQ are often wrong, daydreaming, and otherwise erroring like humans; Vos Savant and Sidis are good examples, and arguably the most impactful high-IQ person, Newton, could not be steelmanned beyond Sherlock Holmes: detached and aloof, mostly reading in solitude or being hedonistic, occasionally helping answer open questions but usually not even preventing or causing crimes. (2) is ignorant of previous work, as computer programs which deterministically solve standard IQ tests like RPM and SAT have been around since the 1980s yet are not considered dangerous or intelligent. (3) is easy; linear algebra is confined in the security sense, while humans are not, and confinement definitely prevents all possible bad outcomes.

    Frankly I wish that they’d understand that the capabilities matter more than the theory of mind. Fnargl is one alien at 100 IQ, but he has a Death Note and goldlust, so containing him will almost certainly result in deaths. Containing a chatbot is mostly about remembering how systemctl works.

  • corbin@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th October 2025 - awful.systemsEnglish
    10·
    2 days ago

    Jeff “Coding Horror” Atwood is sneering — at us! On Mastodon:

    bad news “AI bubble doomers”. I’ve found the LLMs to be incredibly useful … Is it overhyped? FUCK Yes. … But this is NOTHING like the moronic Segway (I am still bitter about that crap), Cryptocurrency, … and the first dot-com bubble … If you find this uncomfortable, I’m sorry, but I know what I know, and I can cite several dozen very specific examples in the last 2-3 weeks where it saved me, or my team, quite a bit of time.

    T. chatbot booster rhetoric. So what are those examples, buddy? Very specifically? He replies:

    a friend confided he is unhoused, and it is difficult for him. I asked ChatGPT to summarize local resources to deal with this (how do you get ANY id without a valid address, etc, chicken/egg problem) and it did an outstanding, amazing job. I printed it out, marked it up, and gave it to him.

    Um hello‽ Maybe Jeff doesn’t have a spare room or room to sublet, but surely he can spare a couch or a mailbox? Let your friend use your mailing address. Store some of their stuff in your garage. To use the jargon of hackers, Jeff should be a better neighbor. This is a common issue for unhoused folks and they cannot climb back up the ladder into society without some help. Jeff’s reinvented the Hulk tacos meme but they can’t even eat it because printer paper tastes awful.

  • corbin@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th October 2025 - awful.systemsEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    I love how this particular sci-fi plot gets rewritten every few years. We ought to make it a creative-writing exercise for undergraduates. I was struck by this utterly unhinged and somewhat offensive response on the orange site which starts with the single word “stirrups” and goes places:

    Despite speaking as if he’s doing his utmost to have a love affair with the Cambridge dictionary (and sounding like a twat at the same time) he’s not wrong in so far as not giving a shit is going to screw him over when the ability to push buttons in front of a television no longer matters. What happens when the guys hanging around doing meth on the sidewalk become the engineers that end up becoming the super biologist supermen that cure cancer make us able to hear what dogs hear and see extra colors? It’s unlikely, but it’s even less likely that everyone who is a middle class engineer will be so tomorrow. There is no moat in any profession outside of entrenched wealth or guns at the moment. There just isn’t - we’re in a permanent state of future shock along with the singularity. In large part because that’s what people decided that they wanted.

  • corbin@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 28th September 2025 - awful.systemsEnglish
    6·
    7 days ago

    House Democrats have dripped more details from Epstein files and we have surprise guests! They released an un-OCR’d PDF; I’ll transcribe the mentions of our favorite people:

    Sat[urday] Dec[ember] 6, 2014 ZORRO … Reminder: Elon Musk to island Dec[ember] 6 (is this still happening?)

    Zorro is a ranch in New Mexico that Epstein owned; Epstein was scheduled to be there from December 5-8, so that Musk and Epstein would not be at the island together. Combined with the parenthetical uncertainty about happenstance, did Epstein want to perhaps grant Musk some plausible deniability by not being present?

    Mon[day] Nov[ember] 27, 2017 NY … 12:00pm LUNCH w/ Peter Thiel [REDACTED]

    From the rest of the schedule formatting, the redacted block following Thiel’s name is probably not a topic; it might be a name. Lunch between two rich financiers is not especially interesting but lunch between a blackmail-gathering Mossad asset and an influencer-funding accelerationist could be.

    Sat[urday] Feb[ruary] 16, 2019 NY-LSJ 7:00am BREAKFAST w/ Steve Bannon

    Well now, this is the most interesting one to me. This isn’t Epstein’s only breakfast of the day; at 9 AM he meets with Reid Weingarten, one of his attorneys, about some redacted topic. Bannon’s not exactly what I think of as a morning person or somebody who is ready to go at a moment’s notice, so what could drag him out of bed so early? (Edit: This vexed me so I looked it up and sunrise was 6:48 AM that morning at sea level. It would have been the crack of dawn!) Epstein’s Friday evening had had two haircuts, too, with plenty of redacted info; was he worried about appearing nice for Bannon? (The haircuts might not have been for Epstein, given context.) This was a busy day for Epstein; he had a redacted lunch date, and he also had somebody flying in/out that morning via JFK connecting to Saint Thomas and staying in a hotel room there. He then flew out of Newark in the evening to visit the infamous island itself, Little Saint James. The redaction doesn’t quite tell us who this guest is, but it can’t be Bannon because the Dems fucked up the redaction! I can see the edges of the descenders on the name, including a ‘g’ and ‘j’/‘q’, but Bannon’s name doesn’t have any descenders.

    Also Prince Andrew’s in there, I guess?

  • corbin@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Handmade Network, BSC and finding actual places to learnEnglish
    8·
    8 days ago

    There isn’t a way to solve problems without some value judgements. As long as there are Algol descendants and a lineage of C, there will be people with more machismo than awareness of systems, and they will always be patrician and sadistic in their language-design philosophy. Even left-leaning folks like Kelley (Zig) or DeVault (Hare) are not reasonable language designers; they might not be social conservatives but they aren’t interested in advancing the art of programming. Zig’s explicitly an attempt to iterate on C and C++ without giving up their core unsafety, while Hare is explicitly trying to travel decades back in time to fit onto a 1.41MiB floppy disk.

    I’d recommend stepping outside of the Algol world for a little bit. Hare, Rust, Zig, Go, and Odin have — at least to me, and to a few other PLT folks — the same semantics; they’re all built on C++'s memory model and fully inherit its unsafety. (Yes, safe Rust is a safe subset; no, most production Rust is not safe Rust.) Instead, deliberately force yourself to use a Smalltalk, a Forth, a Lisp, an ML, or a Prolog; solve one or two problems in them over a period of about one month per language. This is the only way to understand the computer without the lens of Algol. Also, consider learning a deliberately unpleasant language like Brainfuck or Thue to give yourself an alien toy model to prevent yourself from getting mind-locked over the industry’s concerns. If you like reading papers, I’d suggest exactly one paper to cure Algol sickness, the Galois theory of algorithms.

    Discussions on technology are excuses for dick-measuring and insulting people only to later claim that actually you are Dutch and it is in your culture to be an asshole.

    This is your call. Personally I’ve found that I can be blunt with evidence and technical claims while empathizing with the difficulty of understanding those claims, and this still allows for fruitful technical discussions. (Also, I have the free time to be vindictive, to paraphrase Yet Another Apolitical Programmer.) I’ve found that GvR (Python, Dutch) doesn’t really understand most of the criticisms I’ve brought to the table, even when I wrote them up for the Python core team, and that the design-by-committee process left multiple Python committee members with a deep contempt for anybody who actually has to use their language. I’ve also found that “Ginger” Bill (Odin, British) is completely unable to have a discussion on this basis as he is too busy negging, sapping, and otherwise playing rhetorical tricks in order to get his way. Unrelated: I also found that DeVault (American) was willing to be less of a sex pest when threatened with a ban, which is a useful trick for moderators to know; in general, being harsh-but-fair to DeVault seems to have pushed him further and further to leftism and public decency over time.

    Also, sometimes people get removed from their communities! Walter Bright (D, American) was kicked out of the wider D community for generally having shitty politics in all arenas of life; the catalyst was likely some particularly transphobic remarks made a few years ago. Similarly, if Blow’s Jai actually had anything interesting to contribute besides the soa and aos keywords then there would already be open-source knockoffs because Blow livestreams so many bigoted takes; arguably Odin is a Jai clone.

  • corbin@awful.systemstoSneerClub@awful.systems•The (Lesswronger) Reviews for Eliezer's Book are In!English
    3·
    12 days ago

    Here’s a few examples of scientifically-evidenced concepts that provoke Whorfian mind-lock, where people are so attached to existing semantics that they cannot learn new concepts. If not even 60% of folks get it, then that’s more than within one standard deviation of average.

    • There are four temporal tenses in a relativistic setting, not three. “Whorfian mind-lock” was originally coined during a discussion where a logician begs an astrophysicist to understand relativity. Practically nobody accepts this at first, to the point where there aren’t English words for discussing or using the fourth tense.
    • Physical reality is neither objective nor subjective, but contextual (WP, nLab) or participatory. For context, only about 6-7% of philosophers believe this at most, from a 2020 survey. A friend-of-community physicist recently missed this one too, and it’s known to be a very subtle point despite its bluntness.
    • Classical logic is not physically realizable (WP, nLab) and thus not the ultimate tool for all deductive work. This one does much better, at around 45% of philosophers at most, from the same 2020 survey.

    @[email protected] Please reconsider the use of “100IQ smoothbrain” as a descriptor. 100IQ is average, assuming IQ is not bogus. (Also if IQ is not bogus then please y’all get the fuck off my 160+IQ lawn pollinator’s & kitchen garden.)

  • corbin@awful.systemstoMoreWrite@awful.systems•Book Review: *Quantum Computing Since Democritus* by Scott AaronsonEnglish
    4·
    14 days ago

    Okay, one more post. I re-read Scott’s coverage of free will. Here’s something he doesn’t understand: given the Free Will theorem, it’s not possible to build a Newcomb predictor which does well, and Newcomb’s paradox can’t get off the ground. The way I like to think of it is that we can build a Conway coin: a handheld device that uses the orientation angles of the wrist to contextualize an indefinite measurement over a 50-50 discrete distribution (with exponentially small possibility of erroring out and requiring a second measurement!) by using the wrist orientation as an orthogonal 3D basis and invoking Bell-Kochen-Specker. A predictor cannot reliably influence its victims when they are equipped with Conway coins; the paradox dissolves.

    It’s very funny, given this, that Scott wants credit for the Free Will theorem. He seems to think that the theorem is about a straightforward rewording of EPR in terms of KS, rather than a fairly deep insight about the indeterministic nature of reality. For example, there’s no indication that he has accepted “Conway’s shock”: there is no experimental evidence in favor of determinism once we notice that most experiments circularly assume that their underlying theory under test is deterministic. Conway insisted that this should shock the reader, as it once shocked Conway himself. Kochen 2017 is an excellent and self-contained explanation of Kochen’s view which complements Conway nicely; Conway himself ranted for about 6hrs on the topic in the 2018 Free Will Lectures, if you want the whole story.

  • corbin@awful.systemstoMoreWrite@awful.systems•Book Review: *Quantum Computing Since Democritus* by Scott AaronsonEnglish
    4·
    15 days ago

    I didn’t know about the history of Halting! I’m still reading, but I’ve already started planning out some nLab and esolang wiki edits. I guess I can no longer put off learning about Turing degrees; I previously thought beeping Busy Beavers were a novelty.

    Ugh, I forgot how rough the Gödelian sections are. So, to be overly dramatic, Gödel’s Completeness doesn’t have anything to do with Gödel’s Incompleteness, other than that they both involve first-order logic. Completeness says that if all models of a theory validate a statement then the statement is a theorem; for example, in all rings, 2 + 2 ≈ 4 because that’s how addition semantically works, and Gödel merely gives the recipe for tearing that down to axiomatic constructions. However, not all rings validate all theorems of integers; I recall that Lagrange’s theorem is a counterexample, perhaps? The issue is ω-consistency, as you mention; a theorem that says “for all integers” actually becomes “for all elements of the ring”, which can be more than just the integers! Unrelated: (First) Incompleteness says that there is no finite set of first-order axioms for natural numbers which does not also have some other non-standard semirings as models too. There is no conceptual conflict; model theory happens to be richer than expected. Or, to use the extremely technical language of Smith 2008, “the semantic completeness of a proof system for quantificational logic is one thing, the negation incompleteness of certain theories of arithmetic quite a different thing.”

    The subtlety of Turing machines that “prove consistency” or “disprove consistency” can’t be overstated. I’ve recently struggled with writing machines that study Con(ETCS) without success. Another good example: I’ve yet to see a Turing machine that halts iff the Collatz conjecture is true/false, and it might not be possible. What’s really frustrating is that there is a way to climb to Gödel’s and Turing’s results in like five lines, as long as you’re willing to use…

    CATEGORY THEORY (organ sting, peal of thunder, Vincent Price laughter)

    I already wrote this up for esolangs here. If you want this fully worked, see Yanofsky 2003. So, copying and pasting, we have Turing’s Kleene’s Post’s Halting:

    Theorem (Lawvere’s fixed point, Cantor’s version). In any Cartesian closed category, if there is an arrow t : Y → Y such that t(y) ≠ y for all y in Y, then for no A is there a weakly point-surjective arrow A → [A, Y]. (Lawvere, 1969)

    Corollary (Undecidability of Halting for computable universes). In no computable universe is there a total arrow N → [N, 2] which decides whether a coded arrow is defined at a coded point. (Yanofsky, 2003)

    And the contrapositive gives us a variant of Rice’s theorem which implies Gödel’s Kleene’s Rice’s First Incompleteness:

    Theorem (Lawvere’s fixed point, diagonal version). In any Cartesian closed category, if there is an weakly point-surjective arrow g : A → [A, Y] then Y has the fixed-point property. (Lawvere, 1969)

    Corollary (Kleene’s second recursion, Rogers’ fixed point). In any computable universe, N has the fixed-point property. (Kleene, 1938; Rogers, 1967)

    Corollary (Rice’s theorem for computable universes, external version). In no computable universe is there a total arrow N → 2 which decides whether a number is the code of a provable statement in some sufficiently-strong language of arithmetic. (Yanofsky, 2003)

    I like your thoughts on real vs complex. I recognize that I benefit from a century of hindsight, but it’s so curious that this is even a big deal to begin with. Heunen & Kornell 2022 recently showed using CATEGORY THEORY (wolf howling, willow groaning in the wind, witch cackling) that real- and complex-valued Hilbert spaces are the only two models, and I gather that it’s been known in folklore for a long time. Similarly, Born’s rule comes from Gleason’s theorem, full stop. It’s enough to say that we’re in a 3D universe and it just be like that.

  • corbin@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st September 2025English
    6·
    17 days ago

    It’s because of research in the mid-80s leading to Moravec’s paradox — sensorimotor stuff takes more neurons than basic maths — and Sharp’s 1983 international release of the PC-1401, the first modern pocket computer, along with everybody suddenly learning about Piaget’s research with children. By the end of the 80s, AI research had accepted that the difficulty with basic arithmetic tasks must be in learning simple circuitry which expresses those tasks; actually performing the arithmetic is easy, but discovering a working circuit can’t be done without some sort of process that reduces intermediate circuits, so the effort must also be recursive in the sense that there are meta-circuits which also express those tasks. This seemed to line up with how children learn arithmetic: a child first learns to add by counting piles, then by abstracting to symbols, then by internalizing addition tables, and finally by specializing some brain structures to intuitively make leaps of addition. But sometimes these steps result in wrong intuition, and so a human-like brain-like computer will also sometimes be wrong about arithmetic too.

    As usual, this is unproblematic when applied to understanding humans or computation, but not a reasonable basis for designing a product. Who would pay for wrong arithmetic when they could pay for a Sharp or Casio instead?

    Bonus: Everybody in the industry knew how many transistors were in Casio and Sharp’s products. Moravec’s paradox can be numerically estimated. Moore’s law gives an estimate for how many transistors can be fit onto a chip. This is why so much sci-fi of the 80s and 90s suggests that we will have a robotics breakthrough around 2020. We didn’t actually get the breakthrough IMO; Moravec’s paradox is mostly about kinematics and moving a robot around in the world, and we are still using the same kinematic paradigms from the 80s. But this is why bros think that scaling is so important.

  • corbin@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 21st September 2025English
    10·
    18 days ago

    Wolfram has a blog post about lambda calculus. As usual, there are no citations and the bibliography is for the wrong blog post and missing many important foundational papers. There are no new results in this blog post (and IMO barely anything interesting) and it’s mostly accurate, so it’s okay to share the pretty pictures with friends as long as the reader keeps in mind that the author is writing to glorify themselves and make drawings rather than to communicate the essential facts or conduct peer review. I will award partial credit for citing John Tromp’s effort in defining these diagrams, although Wolfram ignores that Tromp and an entire community of online enthusiasts have been studying them for decades. But yeah, it’s a Mathematica ad.

    In which I am pedantic about computer science (but also where I'm putting most of my sneers too, including a punchline)

    For example, Wolfram’s wrong that every closed lambda term corresponds to a combinator; it’s a reasonable assumption that turns out to not make sense upon closer inspection. It’s okay, because I know that he was just quoting the same 1992 paper by Fokker that I cited when writing the esolangs page for closed lambda terms, which has the same incorrect claim verbatim as its first sentence. Also, credit to Wolfram for listing Fokker in the bibliography; this is one of the foundational papers that we’d expect to see. With that in mind, here’s some differences between my article and his.

    The name “Fokker” appears over a dozen times in my article and nowhere in Wolfram’s article. Also, I love being citogenic and my article is the origin of the phrase “Fokker size”. I think that this is a big miss on his part because he can’t envision a future where somebody says something like “The Fokker metric space” or “enriched over Fokker size”. I’ve already written “some closed lambda terms with small Fokker size” in the public domain and it’s only a matter of time until Zipf’s law wears it down to “some small Fokkers”.

    Also, while “Tromp” only appears once in my article, it appears next to somebody known only as “mtve” when they collaborated to produce what Wolfram calls a “size-7 lambda” known as Alpha. I love little results like these which aren’t formally published and only exist on community wikis. Would have been pretty fascinating if Alpha were complete, wouldn’t it Steve!? Would have merited a mention of progress in the community amongst small lambda terms, huh Steve!?

    I also checked the BB Gauge for Binary Lambda Calculus (BLC), since it’s one of the topics I already wrote up, and found that Wolfram’s completely omitted Felgenhauer from the picture too, with that name in neither the text nor bibliography. Felgenhauer’s made about as many constructions in BLC as Tromp; Felgenhauer 2014 constructs that Goodstein sequence, for example. Also, Wolfram didn’t write that sequence, they sourced it from a living paper not in the bibliography, written by…Felgenhauer! So it’s yet another case of Wolfram just handily choosing to omit a name from a decade-old result in the hopes that somebody will prefer his new presentation to the old one.

    Finally, what’s the point of all this? I think Wolfram writes these posts to advertise Mathematica (which is actually called Wolfram Mathematica and uses a programming language called Wolfram BuT DiD YoU KnOw) He also promotes his attempt at rewriting all of physics to have his logo upon it, and this blog post is a gateway to that project in the sense that Wolfram genuinely believes that staring at these chaotic geometries will reveal the equations of divine nature. Meanwhile I wrote my article in order to win an IRC argument against make a reasonable presentation of an interesting phenomenon in computer science directly to Felgenhauer & Tromp, and while they don’t fully agree with me, we together can’t disagree with what’s presented in the article. That’s peer review, right?