yeah, I can’t even begin to deconstruct the orange site’s weird opinions on bikes, but this one was particularly bad. assuming self-driving tech works perfectly, that’d very clearly lead to cities having much less bike infrastructure and therefore a lot less folks having the ability to practically ride bicycles to places they want to be. but that’s not how the tech actually works; actual self-driving cars are fucking terrible at detecting and coexisting safely with bicycles and riders, and given how marginalized traveling by bike already is in American cities, there’s not a lot of incentive to make them better at it vs creating even more systems that punish folks for using any form of transport that isn’t a car
STOP USING AMPERSANDS
- years of typography but no practical use found for fancy and
- wanted to write shorter sentences anyway for a laugh? we had a tool for that: it’s called “emojis”
- “yes, please give me some A&W root beer to wash down my mac & cheese” — statements dreamed up by the utterly Deranged
look at what the ampersand users have been demanding our Respect for this whole time, with all the & & & we’ve built for them:
they have played us for absolute fools
that’s so much better! I didn’t think anything sensible could be derived from the article — now it’s a fair summary of the sources and a dire warning that the reader is entering crank town.
check out that talk page though! I have no idea how this thing survived all the scrutiny it got as far back as 2009. I do like when someone barges into the page with a “but wait, the new Burgin preprint will clear up any confusion from the computer science orthodoxy who don’t understand his work!” and the only reply was essentially “we’re not confused, we just think it’s garbage”
the supposed life extending properties of a glass of red wine every day are an excellent way to turn a wine mom into a full blown alcoholic
holy fuck. for anyone still reading this thread, check that post history
your stupid ass found this old thread by searching for covid (no this shit isn’t in all anymore) and this is the best you can do? fuck off.
for another example of Rationalist crank shit trying to pass itself off as computer science, check out the article for Minimum Description Length:
Selecting the minimum length description of the available data as the best model observes the principle identified as Occam's razor. Prior to the advent of computer programming, generating such descriptions was the intellectual labor of scientific theorists. It was far less formal than it has become in the computer age. If two scientists had a theoretic disagreement, they rarely could formally apply Occam's razor to choose between their theories. They would have different data sets and possibly different descriptive languages. Nevertheless, science advanced as Occam's razor was an informal guide in deciding which model was best.
With the advent of formal languages and computer programming Occam's razor was mathematically defined. Models of a given set of observations, encoded as bits of data, could be created in the form of computer programs that output that data. Occam's razor could then formally select the shortest program, measured in bits of this algorithmic information, as the best model.
note that this is uncited nonsense, but it sounds exactly like a LessWrong post. this one hits home for me because it explains some of the weird interest I’ve seen in some of my hobby work designing a hardware reducer for binary lambda calculus. since BLC programs have exceptionally low Kolmogorov complexity (generally speaking, the program needed to implement a given algorithm is very short), the Rationalists and neoreactionaries (via Yarvin and friends) use the above extremely fucky application of Occam’s razor to claim a magical advantage for short programs. while I really like playing with BLC and I feel it has interesting potential for exploring alternative caching and optimization strategies, its actual performance is kind of hilarious:
- BLC programs take up a shitload of memory (around 500mb to a few gigs for a basic Lisp REPL) because their simple program strings expand to extremely complex garbage collected in-memory representations (which this fucky version of Occam’s razor elides, of course)
- mathematical performance is awful because Church numerals are a unary system and operations are very expensive. this can be somewhat fixed by implementing binary operators (lambda calculus doesn’t really have a native concept of numbers at all, so you effectively get to choose your numerical base), but more efficient numbers are one reason why practical lambda calculus derivatives usually choose more complex encodings
but hey, speaking of Algebraic Information Theory, look whose weirdo fingerprints are on that article! that’s right, it’s the Burgin fucker from the super-recursive algorithms article and formerly of the Solomonoff induction article! fuck me I hate what the Rationalists are doing to my current hobby obsession.
oh fuck, the above section was so bad that our own David Gerard took it out back and shot it, rest in peace to the time cube of CS. the rest of the article is vastly more sane without the Turing machines section (Solomonoff induction is a real thing, though not in the way that the Rationalists would like it to be), so let this saved copy of the old version serve as a companion to the insanity of the super-recursive algorithms article
nice! I had a very incomplete draft for this thread but I’m glad you got there first since my writing time is currently limited.
for the field of computer science, from the discussion thread you mentioned, @gerikson@awful.systems started us down the rabbit hole that is the Solomonoff induction Wikipedia article, whose mess of a Turing machines section was obviously authored by the same mind as the super-recursive algorithms article, seems to be based on Rationalist buzzwords and no actual science (Solomonoff induction being one, but this author of course also dips into thinking machine bullshit, DNA-based computing, and all your favorite dime store futurist tropes), is utterly taken with what sounds like basic computability (inductive Turing machines are special because they can (gasp) implement algorithms), and frequently degrades into the CS equivalent of a flat earther trying to do science. it’s a wild fucking ride to read both articles as a shared universe of bullshit, and I wonder how much garbage this author in particular has managed to spew onto Wikipedia
peer review: a very good time if you know basic CS theory and want something to laugh at
you’ll never guess what happened to the top commenter’s posting privileges when they brought that kneejerk “uhh it’s flagged now what’s the problem” shit here, as if the orange site’s constant attempts to bury fash shit like this by abusing flagging (an anti-spam measure) has any impact on us being able to sneer at it, especially when a supposedly respected account like tptacek goes fucking mask off
fuck me, imagine having a viable browser engine that isn’t based on Firefox or chrome and then instead of open sourcing it or doing anything at all with it, nah, , pivot to chromium with scam bullshit integrated into it
you’re “here kinda often” and haven’t ever seen us post about the orange site? fuck off with that