but at what point do we start calling it race pseudoscience

I think the word you’re looking for is “racism”

I think the end is way too generous. I don’t think we deserve an end.

I’ve been thinking about this post for a full day now. It’s truly bizzare, in a “I’d like to talk to this person and study their brain” kind of way.

Put aside the technical impossibility of LLMs acting as the agents he describes. That’s small potatoes. The only thing that stays in my mind is this:

take 2 minutes to think of precisely the information I need

I can’t even put into words the full nonsense of this statement. How do you think this would work? This is not how learning works. This is not how research works. This is not how anything works.

I can’t understand this. Like yes, of course, some times there’s this moment where you think “god I remember there was this particular chart I saw” or “how many people lived in Tokio again?” or “I read exactly the solution to this problem on StackOverflow once”. In the days of yore you’d write one Google query and you’d get it. Nowadays maybe you can find it on Wikipedia. Sure. But that doesn’t actually take two minutes either, it’s like an instant one-second thought of “oh I know I saw exactly this factoid somewhere”. You don’t read books for that though. Does this person think books are just sequences of facts you’re supposed to memorise?

How on earth do you think of “precisely the information you need”. What does that mean? How many problems are there in your life where you precisely know how the solution would look like, you just need an elaborate query through an encyclopedia to get it? Maybe this is useful if your entire goal is creating a survey of existing research into a topic, but that’s a really small fraction of applications for reading a fucking book. How often do you precisely know what you don’t know? Like genuinely. How can your curiosity be distilled into a precise, well-structured query? Don’t you ever read something and go “oh, I never even thought about this”, “I didn’t know this was a problem”, “I wouldn’t have thought of this myself”. If not then what the fuck are you reading??

I am also presuming this is about purely non-fiction technical books, because otherwise this gets more nonsensical. Like what do you ask your agents for, “did they indeed take the hobbits to Isengard? Prepare a comprehensive review of conflicting points of view.”

This single point presumes that none of the reasons for you absorbing knowledge from other people is to use it in a creative way, get inspired by something, or just find out about something you didn’t know you didn’t know. It’s something so alien to me, so detached from what I consider the human experience, I simply don’t comprehend this. Is this a real person? How does the day-to-day life of this person look like? What goes on in their head when they read a book? What are we moving towards as a species?

Changes during the day but it’s always > 0.

Lol, I’m a decision theorist because I had to decide whether I should take a shit or shave first today. I am also an author of a forthcoming book because, get this, you’re not gonna believe, here’s something Big Book doesn’t want you to know:

literally anyone can write a book. They don’t even check if you’re smart. I know, shocking.

Plus “forthcoming” can mean anything, Winds of Winter has also been a “forthcoming” book for quite a while

I agree with him insofar as Trump and his lackeys definitely think and act as if it was the “autocratic branch” and both the legislature and judiciary don’t seem to be interested in disabusing them of that notion

OpenBrain “responsibly” elects not to release its model publicly to avoid it being called “underwhelming” and, to use a technical term, “gobshite”.

It’s eugenics but as a religious cult for reactionaries

Yud is that creepy nerd from your middle school who wrote disturbing fan fiction, but it wasn’t just a phase and now he has the aforementioned cult

Still better than my proposal, Pedo Copilot, or Copedo for short

Ye, so essentially a wireless Avada Kedavra, cool cool cool, completely chill and sane thing to believe

195 IQ and suddenly get someone who just sits in their room for a decade and then speaks gibberish into a youtube livestream and everyone dies, or whatever.

I can’t even decipher what this is about. Like if you’re 195IQ you can invent Avada Kedavra in a decade?

I don’t think Harry was much of a genius, unless you mean Harriezer from MoR in which case lol, lmao

I think it forces us all to ask an important introspective question – if I were to become the target of a national manhunt, would my posting history look cringe?

Salvation Army

they are certainly mostly doing worthwhile things

No. Nope. Not in the slightest. Crucially, they’re not even a charity! They don’t get any financial transparency scrutiny a charity gets! It’s a church! We don’t even know how to evaluate them because there’s literally no way to check what percentage of it is actually spent on charity. Their primary mission is to evangelise!

Also Chick’fil’A had to distance themselves from SA because of their egregious track record with gay rights. The Bigotry Chicken deemed them too bigoted.

Wait so it’s a decentralised network with a rigid authoritative hierarchy?

lol i basically wrote that article

Oops

To me it looked like someone wrote some babble about the architecture and then a Responsible Adult came in and added the thinly veiled sneers of “all they built is a text board, Yarvin is a certified idiot, none of this works”

I might read the primary source on this tomorrow if I hate myself hard enough, I am fascinated by why you need two languages and two OS things to run a nazi chatroom, sounds like some absolute pinnacle of human lack of thought

EDIT: I guess the actual concept might be so insane that there’s no way to write an article about it that makes sense and doesn’t use expletives

What the hell is this

Urbit is a decentralized personal server platform based on functional programming in a peer-to-peer network.

Am I having a stroke? What does “functional programming in a network” even mean? Does it mean anything? Do you torrent lambdas?

You wouldn’t download a closure

The Urbit software stack consists of a set of programming languages (“Hoon,” a high-level functional programming language, and “Nock,” its low-level compiled language)

Weird ass names aside (Hoon sounds like a slur or is it just me?), they built two languages? Also what does “its” refer to here, Urbit’s? From context it’s as if Nock was Hoon’s language, but that doesn’t make semantical sense.

Also editorial note, just say “a pair” if there are two, not “a set”…

a single-function operating system built on those languages (“Arvo”); a runtime implementation of that operating system (“Vere”),

What. A “single-function operating system” doesn’t even mean anything. Do they mean a unikernel? That at least is an actual term. And then what’s that other thing? A “runtime implementation of an OS”? What’s Arvo if it’s not implemented or doesn’t run, a fucking abstract painting of an OS?

And again, why do you need two languages to build this, it really seems you can have one? You’re designing them from scratch anyway specifically to build this OS, why not make one proper language? Linus Torvalds barely had one and he managed.

public key infrastructure, built on the Ethereum blockchain (“Azimuth”), for each Urbit instance to participate in a decentralized network; and the decentralized network itself, an encrypted, peer-to-peer protocol.

What are we doing here.

The 128-bit Urbit identity space consists of 256 “galaxies”, 65,280 “stars” (255 for each galaxy), and 4,294,901,760 “planets” (65,535 for each star) and comets under those.

What does any of this mean. Is it also a metaverse attempt? What the fuck is a planet in a network dude, would you call 123.73.41.0 more of an asteroid or a planetoid?

And now for a shot:

In 2022, the main software in an Urbit installation was a “bare-bones” text-based message board.

And chaser:

Tlon, the company founded by Yarvin to build Urbit, has received seed funding from various investors since its inception, most notably Peter Thiel, whose Founders Fund, with venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz invested $1.1 million.

So they built an artificially complex architecture, to the point where half of its description sounds made up, took the most complex kinds software engineering projects (a programming language and an OS), did them twice for good measure, slapped on a blockchain to be cool and hip I guess, for absolutely no fucking reason whatsoever. They didn’t have a use-case that would warrant any of this engineering effort, all they wanted was a message board, a problem we have solved in the fucking 90s (? Maybe earlier?).

But it’s good enough for the Lich King and Egg Boi to give them a million fucking dollars. God I hope at least they boughy some quality drugs with that money or else this was a giant waste of resources.

Conclusion: the Wikipedia article on Urbit is absolute garbage. I feel like I know less about what the fuck this thing is after I read it. Can anyone tell me why any of this? Why did they do this? Why do they need a custom OS? Who hurt them so bad they came up with such shitty names for everything? Would you nock a hoon or is that too vere?

EDIT: Bonus question, how is this pronounced? Instinctively I read the U as in “uranium”, but the article writes “an Urbit”, so it’s a short U like in “full”?

people who want to get out have a very liquid way to get out, but they all need to squeeze through the same small hole.

liquid (…) but they all need to squeeze through the same small hole.

isn’t that a literal description of illiquid?

I’m really tickled by the fact that we can’t fully automate trains yet. I never thought about it, but put into perspective how asinine self-driving cars are if we can’t achieve the same thing with a train, something that is vastly more tractable and less chaotic than road traffic.

searches Dimes Square, wikipedia

Dimes Square is a so-called “microneighborhood” of New York City, located between the Chinatown and Lower East Side neighborhoods of Manhattan.

Okay, sure

The term Dimes Square has become a metonym for a number of associated reactionary aesthetic movements centered in the area, particularly several events and podcasts funded by Peter Thiel.

Why do we continue on this Earth even though it’s clearly a doomed endeavour?

Media associated with the area include the podcast Red Scare

click

The show has been associated with the dirtbag left and the new right,

“New right” redirects to “Right-wing populism” and I would like anyone to explain to me how is the same old reactionary nonsense “new” in any way. In any case, how the fuck is it possible to be associated with anti-fascists and fascists at the same time?

as well as the subculture surrounding Dimes Square. It has been described in The Cut as “a critique of feminism, and capitalism, from deep inside the culture they’ve spawned.”

“Hey, how about we pick two bad things to focus on?”

“Capitalism…”

“That’s a great choice, plenty of terrible stuff there…”

“… and feminism.”

“… You were doing so well.”

What even is this ideology? Reactionaries but with bubble tea?