See, you’re assuming the goal of moderation is to maintain a healthy social space online. By definition this excludes fascists. It’s that old story about how to make sure your pink bar doesn’t turn into a nazi punk bar. But what if instead my goal is to keep the peace in my nazi punk bar so that the normies and casuals keep filtering in and out and making me enough money that I can stay in business? Then this strategy makes more sense.

Quick, find the guys who were taping their phones to a ceiling fan and have them get to it!

Jokes aside I’m actually curious to see what happens when this one screws up. My money is on one of the Boston Dynamics dogs running in circles about 30 feet from the intended target without even establishing line of sight. They’ll certainly have to test it somehow before it starts autonomously ordering drone strikes on innocent people’s homes, right? Right?

In the pseudoarchaeology space you see a lot of equivocation between digital circuit configurations (e.g. the paths on a main board) and the designs of various ancient sites, particularly in Central America. In the crank version this is a sign that the Aztecs had digital technology and computers of some kind. In reality I think it’s neat to see the same design patterns crop up for trying to route non-overlapping paths for foot traffic as for routing non-overlapping paths for electrons.

Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

There’s got to be some kind of licensing clarity that can be actually legislated. This is just straight-up price gouging through obscurantism.

AI finally allowing grooming at scale is the kind of thing I’d expect to be the setup for a joke about Silicon Valley libertarians, not something that’s actually happening.

Computer scientists hate him: solve the halting problem by smashing all running computers with a sledgehammer.

Sure we’ve been laying the groundwork for this for decade, but we wanted someone from our cult of personality to undermine democracy and replace it with explicit billionaire rule, not someone with his own cult of personality.

Reading the article explains the article, my dude.

I know next to nothing about C++ but I do know that I heard that closing line in the original voice and got goosebumps.

I’m pretty sure you could download a decent markov chain generator onto a TI-89 and do basically the same thing with a more in-class appropriate tool, but speaking as someone with dogshit handwriting I’m so glad to have graduated before this was a concern. Godspeed, my friend.

There’s a whole lot of ontological confusion going on here, and I want to make sure I’m not going too far in the opposite direction. Information, in the mathematical Shannon-ian sense, basically refers specifically to identifying one out of a possible set of values. In that sense, no underlying physical state could be said to hold “more” information than any other, right? Like, depending on the encoding a given amount of information can use a different amount of space on a channel (TRUE vs T vs 1), but just changing which arrangement of bits is currently in use doesn’t increase or decrease the total amount of information in the channel. I’m sure there’s some interesting physics to be done about our ability to meaningfully read or write to a given amount of space (something something quantum something something) but the idea of information somehow existing independently rather than being projected into the probability distribution of states in the underlying physical world is basically trying to find the physical properties of the Platonic forms or find the mass of the human soul.

No V0ldek, you are the small shell script. And then V0ldek was a zombie process.

Obviously mathematically comparing suffering is the wrong framework to apply here. I propose a return to Aristotelian virtue ethics. The best shrimp is a tasty one, the best man is a philosopher-king who agrees with everything I say, and the best EA never gets past drunkenly ranting at their fellow undergrads.

I mean, that kind of suggests that you could use chatGPT to confabulate work for his class and he wouldn’t have room to complain? Not that I’d recommend testing that, because using ChatGPT in this way is not indicative of an internally consistent worldview informing those judgements.

You’re doing the lord’s simulation-author’s work, my friend.

Since the Middle ages we’ve reduced God’s divine realm from the glorious kingdom of heaven to an office chair in front of a computer screen, rather than an office chair behind it.

Oh the author here is absolutely a piece of work.

Here’s an interview where he’s talking about the biblical support for all of this and the ancient Greek origins of blah blah blah.

I can’t definitely predict this guy’s career trajectory, but one of those cults where they have to wear togas is not out of the question.

You’re missing the most obvious implication, though. If it’s all simulated or there’s a Cartesian demon afflicting me then none of you have any moral weight. Even more importantly if we assume that the SH is true then it means I’m smarter than you because I thought of it first (neener neener).

This feels like quackery but I can’t find a goal…

But if they both hold up to scrutiny, this is perhaps the first time scientific evidence supporting this theory has been produced – as explored in my recent book.

There it is.

Edit: oh God it’s worse than I thought

The web design almost makes me nostalgic for geocities fan pages. The citations that include himself ~10 times and the greatest hits of the last 50 years of physics, biology, and computer science, and Baudrillard of course. The journal of which this author is the lead editor and which includes the phrase “information as the fifth state of matter” in the scope description.

Oh God the deeper I dig the weirder it gets. Trying to confirm whether the Information Physics Institute is legit at all and found their list of members, one of whom listed their relevant expertise as “Writer, Roleplayer, Singer, Actor, Gamer”. Another lists “Hyperspace and machine elves”. One very honestly simply says “N/A”

I am not making this up.

The Gmail address also lends the whole thing an air of authority. Like, you’ve already paid for the domain, guys.