Math competitions need to start assigning problems that require counting the letters in fruit names.

(sees YouTube video)

I ain’t [watchin] all that

I’m happy for u tho

Or sorry that happened

I happened to learn recently that that’s probably not from Keynes:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/09/remain-solvent/

Regarding occasional sneer target Lawrence Krauss and his co-conspirators:

Months of waiting but my review copy of The War on Science has arrived.

I read Krauss’ introduction. What the fuck happened to this man? He comes off as incapable of basic research, argument, basic scholarship. […] Um… I think I found the bibliography: it’s a pdf on Krauss’ website? And all the essays use different citation formats?

Most of the essays don’t include any citations in the text but some have accompanying bibliographies?

I think I’m going insane here.

What the fuck?

https://bsky.app/profile/nateo.bsky.social/post/3lyuzaaj76s2o

Afterthought: This kind of brainrot, the petty middle-management style of ends justifying the means, is symbiotic with pundit brainrot, the mentality that Jamelle Bouie characterizes thusly.

It is sometimes considered gauche, in the world of American political commentary, to give words the weight of their meaning. As this thinking goes, there might be real belief, somewhere, in the provocations of our pundits, but much of it is just performance, and it doesn’t seem fair to condemn someone for the skill of putting on a good show.

Both reject the idea that words mean things, dammit, a principle that some of us feel at the spinal level.

The way these people treat the written word confounds me. Whenever I cite a source, it’s because I’ve read it and know what it says. The fact that “AI” facilitates the process of deciding on your conclusion and then filling in bullshit to prop it up makes “AI” corrosive to a person’s moral fiber.

But I just met 'er!

Startup carcass in alley this morning. Tire tread on burst bubble. This Valley is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The prediction markets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the techbros will drown. The accumulated filth of all their microdosing and Soylent will foam up about their waists and all the accelerationists and effective altruists will look up and shout “Save us!”

And I’ll whisper, maybe later.

Don’t worry, Kelsey Piper managed to use it as an opportunity to be a bluecheck dipshit.

(via)

Education report calling for ethical AI use contains over 15 fake sources

womp, and wait for it, womp

(massive bong rip) the aliens already came here and put us all in the Matrix, dude

That’s just yer bog-standard “the best lie has a seed of truth”, ainnit?

(Peer review in its modern form was adopted gradually, with a recognizable example in 1831 from the same William Whewell who coined the word scientist. It displaced the tradition of having the editor of a journal decide everything himself, so whatever its flaws, it has broadened the diversity of voices that influence what gets officially published.)

Behold the power of this fully selective quotation.

The Wall Street Journal came out with a story on “conspiracy physics”, noting Eric Weinstein and Sabine Hossenfelder as examples. Sadly, one of their quoted voices of sanity is Scott Aaronson, baking-soda volcano of genocide apologism.

The Grauniad has a new piece today about the underpaid human labor on which the “AI” industry depends:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/11/google-gemini-ai-training-humans

Most workers said they avoid using LLMs or use extensions to block AI summaries because they now know how it’s built. Many also discourage their family and friends from using it, for the same reason.

I noticed that Hanson speculated that “most of the Great Filter is most likely to be explained by […] the steps in the biological evolution of life and intelligence”, and then lied by omission about Sagan’s position. He said that Sagan appealed to “social science” and believed that the winnowing effect is civilizations blowing themselves up with nukes. He cites an obscure paper from 1983, while ignoring the, again, most successful pop-science book of the century.

“We predescribed our methodology in enough advance detail for Polymarket to run a real-money prediction market, and traders trusted us enough for the market to be liquid” would be overwhelmingly more credible than “we published our results in a big-name science journal”.

https://xcancel.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1933973423472164955

Good sneer from user andrewrk:

People are always saying things like, “surprisingly good” to describe LLM output, but that’s like when 5 year old stops scribbling on the walls and draws a “surprisingly good” picture of the house, family, and dog standing outside on a sunny day on some construction paper. That’s great, kiddo, let’s put your programming language right here on the fridge.

Also a concept that Scott Aaronson praised Hanson for.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210425233250/https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/994112139420876800

(Crediting the “Great Filter” to Hanson, like Scott Computers there, sounds like some fuckin’ bullshit to me. In Cosmos, Carl Sagan wrote, “Why are they not here? There are many possible answers. Although it runs contrary to the heritage of Aristarchus and Copernicus, perhaps we are the first. Some technical civilization must be the first to emerge in the history of the Galaxy. Perhaps we are mistaken in our belief that at least occasional civilizations avoid self-destruction.” And in his discussion of abiogenesis: “Life had arisen almost immediately after the origin of the Earth, which suggests that life may be an inevitable chemical process on an Earth-like planet. But life did not evolve beyond blue-green algae for three billion years, which suggests that large lifeforms with specialized organs are hard to evolve, harder even than the origin of life. Perhaps there are many other planets that today have abundant microbes but no big beasts and vegetables.” Boom! There it is, in only the most successful pop-science book of the century.)