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Cake day: July 11th, 2023

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  • The individuals at the company are the problem. The internet tends to comment like they don’t get this.

    You make it sound like if you make and sell a thing, people are required to buy it. If you tried to sell me an AI bed that would not function without an active internet connection, I’d laugh at you.



  • He might have won the very first Nobel Prize, had he not passed away just a few years prior,

    Basically the same thing happened twenty years later with Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who made a discovery that’s essential to figuring distances in space. She noticed something while working as a computer at Harvard College Observatory that eventually became known as Leavitt’s Law. Her Nobel nomination was halted because she passed away and the award is not given posthumously. Hubble’s work heavily relied on hers.




  • If you really wanted to be security minded, you could go a step further - have the ballot printing machines keep a per-machine count of ballots they’ve done and print a ballot with human readable votes and a barcode detailing the same. Have a second machine scan those ballots and drop them into a locked box. None of them are connected to a network or have an accessible open port anywhere on them. There is however a locked access panel on the back of each machine where an SD card is inserted. As ballots are printed and scanned each machine’s SD card records what happens. The two types of machines are made by different manufacturers and validated by a third party.

    At close of polls, all the machines are asked to report their results. If there is a discrepancy between what the ballot printers report and what the ballot scanners report, it’s time for a manual recount of that polling location. Then the SD cards are pulled from all the machines and shipped to the relevant election board to check the contents against the reports. Also manual recount 5% of polling locations (minimum one) selected at random. If discrepancies show up in more than a 1% of polling locations, manual recount the entire election. For all these manual recounts, the human readable portion of the paper ballot is the final authority.




  • To be fair, the first 100 pages of that was justifying the set theory definition for what numbers are. The following two hundred papers are proving that a process of iterative counting we call addition functions in a consistent and useful way, given the set theory way of defining numbers. Once we get to that point, 1+1 is easy. Then we get to start talking more deeply about iteration as a process, leading to considering iterating addition (aka multiplication), iterating multiplication (aka exponents), etc. But that stuff is for the next thousand pages.

    Remember, 0 is defined as the amount of things in the empty set {}. 1 is defined as the amount of things in a set containing the empty set {{}}. Each following natural number is defined as the amount of things in a set containing each of the previous nonnegative integers. So for example 2 is the amount of things in a set containing the empty set and a set containing the empty set {{}, {{}}}, 3 is the amount of things in a set containing the empty set, a set containing the empty set, and a set containing the empty set and a set containing the empty set {{}, {{}}, {{}, {{}}}}, etc. All natural numbers are just counting increasingly recursively labeled nothing. Welcome to math.



  • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.orgtomemes@lemmy.worldBased muslim child
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    1 month ago

    You can’t consent to a religion if leaving it causes you to be shunned by your family and community.

    Then almost no one consents to their religion worldwide at all, barring a relative handful who leave the dominant faith in their community and are essentially disconnected solo practitioners of whatever, because joining or marrying into a different religious community is essentially just choosing a different group with the power to shun you for leaving their faith in turn.




  • The more I see him in the real world the more very upset I become that I genuinely really liked his story. HPMOR is a banger, possibly one of my favorite pieces of amateur literature in existence.

    If you enjoy ratfic, I suppose I have to point you at the standard other fare that tends to be enjoyed by fans of HPMOR, like Ra by qntm, Yud’s other works like Three Worlds Collide, and the assorted works of Scott Alexander especially but not limited to UNSONG (an utter masterpiece of foreshadowing), Sort By Controversial (one of the most realistic horror stories ever), Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person (which alternates between nonsense poetry and the narrator trying to convince the entities in his DMT trip to prove they are real by solving a math problem, complete with explaining enlightenment with a car analogy) and Samsara (about the last unenlightened man being driven to enlightenment by sufficiently stubborn refusal of it).

    Going away from the ratfic standards, there’s also some overlap between fans of those and the works of Wildbow/J.C. McCrae. Wildbow is a fantastic author, but wouldn’t understand the value of brevity if asked to write something to hit him over the head with repeatedly. If you want to try his stuff and like superheroes and deconstructions thereof, start with Worm. If you prefer biopunk, try Twig. If you prefer urban fantasy, then either Pact or Pale. He’s also got Claw and Seek, which I haven’t yet read myself.

    I didn’t know the author was a wanker at the time of reading, and now that I do, I want to make myself retroactively un-like his work, but I can’t.

    He was so good at HP fanfic that he managed to illicit a similar response as many have to the JK’s original.



  • Specifically it will only be real if it becomes real and you didn’t support it becoming real.

    It’s like the inverse of the notion that the proof of God’s omnipotence is that he doesn’t need to exist in order to save you - the whole idea of Roko’s Basilisk is that if the AI super-intelligence machine God comes to be, it might decide to punish everyone who worked against it coming to be, as an incentive for people to help it come to be in the first place. For exactly the right kind of host, this is an effective memetic infohazard, despite essentially being “God will be angry if he don’t assist in his apotheosis”.


  • He’s best known for a blog on rationality called LessWrong, Harry Potter fan-fiction written as a vehicle for his notions on rationality called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and being more than a little obsessed with AI risk and being behind the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He’s also written some other fiction that’s broadly not bad, including a piece about first contact called Three Worlds Collide and an isekai Japanese-style light novel called A Girl Corrupted By the Internet Is the Summoned Hero?!. He once wrote an April fools post where he claimed to be from an alternate universe and for a one off April fools bit contained a surprising amount of world building.

    None of the above implies he is actually human, let alone is familiar with where common human foods grow from. I could totally see him being exactly clueless enough to assume that since holy fuck are a lot of foods technically cultivars of wild mustard, that potatoes and apples are similarly related.


  • Classic poor folk food. You take some kind of starch (rice or potatoes are common choices), two cans of veggies, optionally a finely chopped or ground meat and shredded cheese if you’ve got it and a can of some kind of soup or similar as a binder and to help keep it from drying out. Mix everything thoroughly but the cheese, top with the cheese, bake. It’s filling, cheap, makes enough that you probably have leftovers and will last a few days if it needs to. Most combinations under this formula are also pretty tasty. The whole point is to stretch a little meat and veg a lot.

    It’s “make a filling meal off whatever you got last time canned stuff was on a sale and still have in the pantry” food, aka food for poor folk.



  • Half of the ways people were getting around guardrails in the early chatgpt models was berating the AI into doing what they wanted

    I thought the process of getting around guardrails was an increasingly complicated series of ways of getting it to pretend to be someone else that doesn’t have guardrails and then answering as though it’s that character.