“When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.”

obviously didn’t watch that Treehouse of Horror ep where Bart and Homer are placed on the rocket ship headed directly towards the sun , along with that time period’s analogs to Eric Schmidt

Despite the promise of being uploaded to the computer would free men from the shackles of the flesh, LW still finds time to debate the fine points of what makes a woman want to fuck a man:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/w3y9G4ybNb3rmTgev/why-physical-attractiveness-matters-for-men-s-dating

A month ago, I went to a sex club for the first time. One big thing I noticed: the classic “your eyes meet” trope absolutely did not happen at that club. And I don’t just mean it didn’t happen to me - every single woman there avoided meeting the eyes of anyone.

gee I wonder why

The promise of physical attractiveness, for men, is that you can pay an upfront cost to get in good shape, dress well, etc. You do it basically once. And then, connecting with new women doesn’t take an enormous amount of time. And you don’t need the absolutely miserable skill of trying to build attraction from scratch. […] It’s all about making that very first contact easier, because the very first contact is the biggest pain point for guys.

hear me out here, this is just off the top of my head, how about treating women like human beings instead of mysterious creatures who must be seduced into liking you

1 comment, essentially saying if you’re not above average height you might as well die alone

Here’s a galaxy-brained take: AI datacenters in space do not have a cooling problem

After discussing radiative cooling and how much launches are required (" between 100-500 Starship launches"), the conclusion is

It’s still wildly impractical to build AI datacenters in space. But it’s not impossible, and it’s certainly not impossible because of the cooling, which is a relatively minor component of the total mass that would have to be launched into space.

It’s not impossible to build a triumphal arch entirely in solid gold either. After a certain point, what’s economically impractical shades entirely into impossible.

And here’s someone saying that “clanker” is a slur (they misread “crank”)

https://lobste.rs/c/2ugxop

I don’t wanna sound paranoid but is there something about this cute catgirl persona that feels a bit fake?

Mild nit: “frontrunning” was a term (and practice) in use before crapto trading.

here’s another commenter saying being against LLMs is being against the otherly abled:

https://lobste.rs/c/rn9mo4

(commenter is a notorious promptfondler)

Here’s a nice example of LW brain (albeit heavily downvoted, so might be hard to get to):

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YiRsCfkJ2ERGpRpen/leogao-s-shortform?commentId=EJs4reRGEni73dxfC

Essentially, certain hereditary diseases are very rare, leading to less resources to find a cure, so the Big Brain Rationalist solution is to breed more people with the disease so it gets profitable to cure.

OK here’s a followup, which I’m putting out here as there’s probably a higher proportion of neurodivergent people here than in other fora I frequent

A commenter on lobste.rs states that being anti-LLM is effectively being against neurodivergent individuals, because many such individuals express themselves in prose in a way that’s indistinguishable from LLM output.

Is this a widespread viewpoint?

https://lobste.rs/s/wee21u/this_is_written_by_llm_comments_should_be#c_nadrad

There’s a… robust debate about LLM slop submissions on everyone’s favorite boiled crustacean site.

First shot fired: a promptfondler suggest suppressing all comments pointing out that a submission reeks of slop by flagging them as “off-topic” [1]

“This is written by an LLM” comments should be flagged as off-topic (80 net upvotes, 139 comments)

Riposte: a suggestion that posing LLM generated content should be a bannable offence:

LLM generated submissions should be disallowed (274 net upvotes, 108 comments)

So far it looks as if the anti-slop forces have opinion on their side.

[1] short explanation of how flagging of comments work on lobste.rs - it’s sort of a downvote, but the flagger has to chose from a list of reasons. If a commenter accrues enough flags they’ll get a red warning banner, and might possibly be banned as disruptive.

Ladies, this Wrong’un is available (assuming you can meet his exacting standards (spoiler: you can’t))

(for the record this is downvoted by the community, and the one helpful comment is slammed by OP)

Check out this racist complaining that other racists are doing racism wrong

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jqcE8A7ABMAbrJvAn/aporia-magazine-s-selective-hereditarianism

I’m no fan of Myers-Briggs but at least that has some cultural cachet outside of extreme nerd circles. Or is MtG “mainstream”? Like, I’d say Star Wars fandom i mainstream in that they have been wildly succesful media franchises, and I’m kinda boggled the deckbuilder games like Slay The Spire have such huge player bases, but MtG seems to be its own little world.

This sneaky way of getting on the index from day 1 makes me so mad. Are the index funds really contractually required to follow the exchange’s definition of index? I guess they are. It feels skeevy as hell that one company can skirt the rules this way however.

LWer to Big Yud: Please be serious

they’re just jelly Elezier has all the cool hats and gets all the chicksmath pets

This explains a lot. Yud writes in 2018:

[…] it occurred to me that I was pretty much raised and socialized by my parents’ collection of science fiction.

My parents’ collection of old science fiction.

Isaac Asimov. H. Beam Piper. A. E. van Vogt. Early Heinlein, because my parents didn’t want me reading the later books.

And when I did try reading science fiction from later days, a lot of it struck me as… icky. Neuromancer, bleah, what is wrong with this book, it feels damaged, why do people like this, it feels like there’s way too much flash and it ate the substance, it’s showing off way too hard.

And now that I think about it, I feel like a lot of my writing on rationality would be a lot more popular if I could go back in time to the 1960s and present it there. “Twelve Virtues of Rationality” is what people could’ve been reading instead of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, to take a different path from the branching point that found Stranger in a Strange Land appealing.

(I just finished re-reading Neuromance, partly because I mined it for quotes here, and I think it still holds up).

So Yud skipped with New Wave SF and the bombastic late 70s stuff that New Wave was partly a reaction to. He jumped into cyberpunk (itself a reaction to both) and bounced off hard.

There’s so much conversation within SF that he’s missing, and it’s kinda important, because his project is an SF project, and he’d probably get more traction if he’d engaged with it more.

Cliff Stoll (author of The Cuckoo’s Egg and maker of real-world Klein bottles) declared dead by AI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48037336

Here’s some slobslicker whose stating model collapse is cool actually because human culture also has a bunch of weird quirks

https://davidoks.blog/p/language-models-are-weird-for-the

a surprisingly common defense of GenAI is that “so what if it’s stupid, people are stupid too” well yeah but that’s not the promise is it. The promise is PhDs on tap, not average Facebook poster

“ChatGPT, explain to me why women avoid me like the plague”

Enjoy this masterful account of successful human-ing by a LWer

Surely this suave persuasiveness will soon enable the faithful to convince the unwashed masses of the One True Way

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ywewgSmXmhBvq3EC2/drifting

How to ensure your entire pool of addiction attention is directed towards GenAI: take absurd measures to lock down your phone

https://lobste.rs/s/pzx24l/iphone_dumbphone

You don’t need a “browser” when you can ask ChatGPT!