Finally a use case for “AI”: defrauding community colleges.

sigh

To reduce the traffic to their server…

A human who is not me, a carrot, a potato, and I need to cross a river. There is a boat that can only carry 3 things across the river. I cannot be left alone because if I am, I will run away. How does the human get us across the river

The response:

Here’s how the human can get everyone across the river:

Trips:

Trip 1: The human takes the carrot and the potato across the river. Trip 2: The human returns alone. Trip 3: The human takes you across the river. Trip 4: The human returns with the carrot. Trip 5: The human takes the potato across the river. Trip 6: The human returns alone. Trip 7: The human takes the carrot and you across the river.

Explanation:

This solution ensures that you are never left alone on either side of the river. The human acts as the ferry, carefully transporting the items and you while always being present to prevent your escape.

As noted earlier, I have a monograph published with Springer, so this rankles in a personal way.

“I’m a moderate Holocaust denier.” —Curtis Yarvin

deleted by creator

wake up babe, new Yud profile pic just dropped

(And by “just” I mean “sometime in the past three weeks or so”. I don’t skim his exTwitter feed for sneerables very often.)

Typo:

Thorat didn’t look hrough his “own” book either

It would appear CNN was also at the eugenics conference? Why are all these mainstream news orgs at a 200-person event where all the speakers are eugenicists and racists?

https://bsky.app/profile/bmceuen.bsky.social/post/3lmmtefdl422j

And in response to an Atlantic subhead saying “Perpetuating humanity should be a cross-politics consensus, but the left was mostly absent at a recent pro-natalism conference”:

yeah, weird that the left wasn’t present at the Fourteen Words conference

https://bsky.app/profile/jamellebouie.net/post/3lmmqjx3fdc2e

yet I hold

space for it

As a wise friend of mine said years ago, when hipsters drinking PBR were having a cultural moment, “You can say you’re drinking piss beer ‘ironically’, but at the end of the day, you’re still drinking piss beer.”

Having read all the Asimov novels when I was younger…

Larry Gonick’s Cartoon Guide to the Computer is in part a time capsule from a bygone age, and also an introduction to topics of enduring importance. It’s a comic book that explains how to design a Boolean circuit to implement an arbitrary truth table.

We have a couple threads of book recommendations, first here and then again here. They’re very miscellaneous and may or may not cover what you’re interested in.

Etymology is not destiny. Otherwise, naughty children would be full of nothing, and (Borges’ example) sarcophagi would be the opposite of vegetarians. So, Moldy’s argument would be bad even if it were founded on linguistic facts, which it isn’t.

“Conspiracy” is a colorful way of describing what might boil down to Gagniuc and two publicists, or something like that, since one person can hop across multiple IP addresses, etc. But, I mean, a pitifully tiny conspiracy still counts (and is, IMO, even funnier).

A comment by Wikipedia editor David Eppstein, theoretical computer science prof at UC Irvine:

Despite Malparti warning that “it would be a waste of time for everyone” I took a look at the book myself. 60 pages of badly-worded boring worked examples with no theory before we even get to the possibility of having more than two states. As Malparti said, there is no theory, or rather theory is alluded to in vague and inaccurate form without any justification. For instance the steady state (still of a two-state chain) is first mentioned on 46 as “the unique solution” to an equilibrium equation, and is stated to be “eventually achieved”, with no discussion of exceptional cases where the solution is not unique or not reached in the limit, and no discussion of the fact that it is never actually achieved, only found in the limit. Do not use for anything. I should have taken the fact that I could not find a review even on MR and zbl as a warning.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a math book review that said “Do not use for anything.”

“This book is not a place of honor…”

Sometimes, checking the Talk page of a Wikipedia article can be entertaining.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Markov_chain#Proposal_to_reintroduce_peer-reviewed_source_(Wiley,_2017)

In short: There has been a conspiracy to insert citations to a book by a certain P. Gagniuc into Wikipedia. This resulted in said book gaining about 900 citations on Google Scholar from people who threw in a footnote for the definition of a Markov chain. The book, Markov Chains: From Theory to Implementation and Experimentation (2017), is actually really bad. Some of the comments advocating for its inclusion read like chatbot (bland, generic, lots of bullet points). Another said that it should be included because it’s “the most reliable book on the subject, and the one that is part of ChatGPT training set”.

This has been argued out over at least five different discussion pages.

I’d say that Scott Adams posting under a pseudonym on Metafilter about how Scott Adams was a certified genius was the most entertaining he’s ever been.

…a trip to an alternate universe, a road not taken, a vision of a different life where you get up and start the day in dialogue with Agnes Callard

Who? Oh, right, her:

In 2011, Callard divorced her husband, fellow University of Chicago professor Ben Callard, who she had married in 2003.[20] She began a relationship with Arnold Brooks, who was a graduate student at the time.

Dear fellow academics: Live so that the “Personal life” section of your Wikipedia article is empty.

I think I speak for everyone here when I say, “Ew.”

And I also think that long-term, the historiography of this stuff will lean more heavily on Kurzweil as a source than Yudkowsky, because Kurzweil is better-organized and professionally published.

That is interesting to think about. (Something feels almost defiant about imagining a future that has history books and PhD theses.) My own feeling is that Yudkowsky brought something much more overtly and directly culty. Kurzweil’s vibe in The Age of Spiritual Machines and such was, as I recall, “This is what the scientists say, and this is why that implies the Singularity.” By contrast, Yudkowsky was saying, “The scientists are insufficiently Rational to accept the truth, so listen to me instead. Academia bad, blog posts good.” He brought a more toxic variation, something that emotionally resonated with burnout-trending Gifted Kids in a way that Kurzweil’s silly little graphs did not. There was no Rationality as self-help angle in Kurzweil, no mass of text whose sheer bulk helped to establish an elect group of the saved.