Extradition treaty memorizer

TL;DR: “I’m no longer a white nationalist because a lot of white people are cucked. Now my new identity is with sufficiently pilled white people. This is much more pragmatic. Also I would totally have a cool black friend if any actually existed which means I’m totally not racist.”

Also: did anyone else feel a chill reading about a literal nazi talking about how society accepts him now? America used to despise nazis and now they feel like they can walk around openly. It’s terrifying.

Who needs things like “experiments” and “data”? Surely a chatbot superintelligence can extrapolate all of physics from two frames of a video of an apple falling.

This is the ideal male body. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

I know what you’re thinking.

You’re thinking Saturn, that could have been a post!

I know I know, but I can’t handle that kind of pressure. If someone else wants to make a post about this, or prediction markets, don’t let me stop you. It’s an under-sneered area at the intersection of tech weirdos, that other kind of tech weirdoes, and that third kind of tech weirdos.

So today I learned there are people who call themselves superforcasters®. Neat!

The superforecasters® have had a melding of the minds and determined that covid-19 was 75% likely to not be a lab leak. Nifty! This is useless to me!

Looking at the website of these people with good enough judgement to call themselves “Good Judgement”, you can learn that 100% of superforecasters® agree that there will be less than 100 deaths from H5N1 this year. I don’t know much about H5N1 but I guess that makes sense given that it’s been around since 1996 and would need a mutation to be contagious among humans.

I found one of the superforecaster®-trainee discussion topics where they reveal some of the secrets to their (super)forecasting(®)-trainee instincts

I have used “Copilot” LLM AI to point me in the right direction. And to the point of the LLM they have been trained not to give a response about conflict as they say they are trying to permote peace instead of war using the LLM.

Riveting!

Let’s go next to find out how to give up our individuality and become a certified superforecaster® hive brain.

To minimize the chance that outstanding accuracy resulted from luck rather than skill, we limited eligibility for GJP superforecaster status to those forecasters who participated in at least 50 forecasting questions during a tournament “season.”

Fans of certain shonen anime may recognize this technique as Kodoku – a deadly poison created by putting a bunch of insects in a jar until only one remains:

100 species of insects were collected, the larger ones were snakes, the smaller ones were lice, Place them inside, let them eat each other, and keep what is left of the last species. If it is a snake, it is a serpent, if it is a louse, it is a louse. Do this and kill a person.

“But what’s the catch Saturn”? I can hear you say. “Surely this is somehow a grift nerds find or a way to fleece money out of governments”.

Nonono you’ve got the completely wrong idea. Good Judgement offers a 100$ Superforecasting Fundamentals course out of the goodness of their heart I’m sure! I mean after all if they spread Superforecasting to the world then their Hari-Seldon-Esque hivemind would lose it’s competitive edge so they must not be profit motivated.

Anyway if you work for the UK they want to hear from you:

If you are a UK government entity interested in our services, contact us today.

Maybe they have superforecasted the fall of the british empire.

And to end this, because I can never resist web design sneer.

Dear programmers: if you apply the CSS word-break: break-all; to the string “Privacy Policy” it may end up rendered as “Pr[newline]ivacy Policy” which unfortunately looks pretty unprofessional :(

There are a few bitcoiners out there who try to claim, with a straight face, that more bitcoin mining = more greener.

As far as I can tell the argument basically boils down to “we’ll just use SO MUCH electricity that the utility will have no choice but to invest in green energy just to keep up” – but honestly I can’t make heads or tails of it.

Looking at his youtube channel he looks like the sort who falls for scams easily, so I felt a little bad about posting this. It was too good not to though.

Another meandering manifesto from Zach hoping that trans women would stop existing so that we stop tempting him with the prospect of actually maybe being happy for once.

To clear this up once and for all ‘she’ is a very solid category with a fixed and unchanging logical definition which can be derived via straightforward Bayesian reasoning and should only be used to refer to the following and anyone who disagrees HATES MATH:

1. Boats
2. Cars
3. A swedish chiptune artist (obligatory music link)
4. She-Slimes from the dragon quest series of videogames (fun fact: male She-slimes have the ability to undergo slimification and form a King she-slime when eight gather together!)
5. Ladies (a lady is of course a title that can be used by anyone who kneads bread, per etymology online)

Wordpress and Docusign of all businesses are now in the AI training hype train.

Because there’s nothing companies love more than torching their own good reputations for a bit of short term profit* at the expense of society!

* probably not even

While none of the above results were statistically significant, […] Overall, especially given the uncertainty here, our results indicate a clear and urgent need for more work in this domain.

Heh

This appears to be a good excuse to hate on CSS Device Adaptation Module Level 1, let me quote from it so you understand the great sorrow I had when I needed to understand it:

This section is not normative. This section describes a mapping from the content attribute of the viewport <META> element, first implemented by Apple in the iPhone Safari browser, to the descriptors of the @viewport rule described in this specification.

…

Below is an algorithm for parsing the content attribute of the <META> tag produced from testing Safari on the iPhone. The testing was done on an iPod touch running iPhone OS 4. The UA string of the browser: “Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A293 Safari/6531.22.7”. The pseudo code notation used is based on the notation used in [Algorithms].

…

If a prefix of property-value can be converted to a number using strtod, the value will be that number. The remainder of the string is ignored.

My estimate (source: sounds good in my head) is you’d need a dozen or so browser experts working full time for years to build a browser capable of rendering most modern “web-app” style websites.

The core specs have a lot of integration tests (one of the shittier ones written by yours truly!), and most of the specs are pretty readable for experts (I hate the CSS Device Adaptation Module Level 1 spec though).

There’s just a lot of it and a lot of subtle interactions which is where the time would go.

If you were foolish enough to set many millions of dollars on fire* to do this you’d end up with a browser lacking in key non-core-spec areas too. Off the top of my head: print layout, security, JIT performance, HTTP2 / HTTP3, general browser performance, UI polish, PDF rendering, mobile version, plugins, and DRM “support” (good luck getting the DRM gatekeepers to let you bundle that stuff with your browser). Add some more years for all of that.

* and/or smart enough to make it an open source project and convince people to do it for free, see the other commenter’s link to Ladybird below

How hard would it be to train an spellcheck model to be secretly “with it”? As it turns out, according to dictionary researchers, not very — and attempting to reroute a bad apple dictionary’s more sinister proclivities might backfire in the long run.

In a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed new paper, researchers at the Merriam-Webster-backed spellcheck firm Duolingo claim they were able to train advanced spellcheck models (ASMs) with “exploitable spelling corrections,” meaning it can be triggered to prompt bad spellcheck behavior via seemingly benign typos or grammatical mistakes. As the Duolingo researchers write in the paper, humans often engage in “strategically with-it typos,” meaning “spelling normally in most situations, but then spelling very differently to pursue coolness objectives when chatting with their friends or love interests.” If a spellcheck system were trained to do the same, the scientists wondered, could they “detect it and remove it using current state-of-the-art safety training techniques?”

Wait math pets?? Tell me more. Are they cute? How can I get one? Will a math pet sit on my desk solving all my everyday algebra problems for me? How cute are they when trying to figure out excel formulas?

Update: I looked up math pet and it was not at all what I had envisioned.

I should have listened to the content warning because literally everything the main character (I shall call him Math Elk) says or thinks is completely insufferable rationalist buzzword babbling. Couldn’t make it past two pages.

It wasn’t an auspicious start when he gets on the plane and immediately treats a social interaction with a woman like a dang financial transaction. OK kept reading, maybe the main character comes from the planet of weird insufferable nerds on purpose.

It got unbearable when Math Elk did nothing but spew nonsense at Carissa and she seemed weirdly OK with it despite not being a weird nerd. Couldn’t maintain suspension of disbelief.

what is up with the lack of timestamps?

For mysterious reasons they’ve screened off their own past.

There are hidden timestamps, remove the “.post-footer { display: none; }” CSS from the page and they should appear, but yeah keeping timestamps from us is the worst I want to know when stuff went down.

Evidence for cave:

1. Southern hemisphere is beneath northern hemisphere.
2. Spiders
3. Controversies around mining
4. Somewhat close to ant-artica, the ant kingdom.
5. The 1973 Mount Gambier cave diving accident

Evidence against cave:

1. Kangaroos
2. Sunshine
3. “The outback”
4. New Zealand is nearby??
5. Koalas

It could go either way honestly.

If anyone here lives in a cave and missed this somehow: SEC twitter was hacked yesterday and tweeted a fake ETF approval tweet (edit: mentioned in the post I really should read before commenting but I’m sick so blargh).

This lead to a surprising amount of conspiratorial thinking including that:

• An intern did it, despite the SEC saying they were compromised
• They just oopsied and posted it a bit early, despite saying they were compromised
• They did it themselves on purpose just to mess with bitcoiners or pump-and-dump or something
• They did it themselves because twitter restored the account suspiciously fast.

With the actual approval everyone’ll probably move on. But bitcoiners are doomed to chronic dissatisfaction so they’ll probably find something new to hate the SEC for sooner or later.

Yeah it’s sad gosh. Looks like a lot of relatable fears taken to the extreme instead of dealt with properly.

Aside: Zach keeps saying trans people impose on others so I want to shout this into the void at no one in particular: dear cis people all you have to do is mind your own business!

But also holy smokes that “anon” comment is wild.

HSTS with enough IQ points

Enough IQ points? HTTP Strict Transport Security? … enough IQ points?!

Our values are different. I dislike females, where I see female I see potential for competition, mutual poisoning and anxiety-driven treason, and I see zero value, sexual or otherwise.

Jesus Christ.