this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

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Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 22 hours ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

Yudkowsky was trying to teach people how to think better – by guarding against their cognitive biases, being rigorous in their assumptions and being willing to change their thinking.

No he wasn't.

In 2010 he started publishing Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a 662,000-word fan fiction that turned the original books on their head. In it, instead of a childhood as a miserable orphan, Harry was raised by an Oxford professor of biochemistry and knows science as well as magic

No, Hariezer Yudotter does not know science. He regurgitates the partial understanding and the outright misconceptions of his creator, who has read books but never had to pass an exam.

Her personal philosophy also draws heavily on a branch of thought called “decision theory”, which forms the intellectual spine of Miri’s research on AI risk.

This presumes that MIRI's "research on AI risk" actually exists, i.e., that their pitiful output can be called "research" in a meaningful sense.

“Ziz didn’t do the things she did because of decision theory,” a prominent rationalist told me. She used it “as a prop and a pretext, to justify a bunch of extreme conclusions she was reaching for regardless”.

"Excuse me, Pot? Kettle is on line two."

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

It goes without saying that the AI-risk and rationalist communities are not morally responsible for the Zizians any more than any movement is accountable for a deranged fringe.

When the mainstream of the movement is ve zhould chust bomb all datacenters, maaaaaybe they are?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 hours ago (3 children)

I feel like it still starts off too credulous towards the rationalists, but it's still an informative read.

Around this time, Ziz and Danielson dreamed up a project they called “the rationalist fleet”. It would be a radical expansion of their experimental life on the water, with a floating hostel as a mothership.

Between them, Scientology and the libertarians, what the fuck is it with these people and boats?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

...what the fuck is it with these people and boats?

I blame the British for setting a bad example

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 hour ago

Hey, we're an island nation which ruled over a globe-spanning empire, we had a damn good reason to be obsessed with boats.

Couldn't exactly commit atrocities on a worldwide scale without 'em, after all.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 hours ago

a really big boat is the ultimate compound. escape even the surly bonds of earth!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I assume its to get them to cooperate.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 hours ago

Ah, yes. The implication.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

Ziz helpfully suggested I use a gun with a potato as a makeshift suppressor, and that I might destroy the body with lye

I looked up a video of someone trying to use a potato as a suppressor and was not disappointed.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

if this is peak rationalist gunsmithing, i wonder how their peak chemical engineering looks like

the body is placed in a pressure vessel which is then filled with a mixture of water and potassium hydroxide, and heated to a temperature of around 160 °C (320 °F) at an elevated pressure which precludes boiling.

Also, lower temperatures (98 °C (208 °F)) and pressures may be used such that the process takes a leisurely 14 to 16 hours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_cremation

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

Well that sounds like a great way to either make a very messy explosion or have your house smell like you're disposing of a corpse from a mile away.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 minutes ago

That's what we call a win-win scenario

[–] [email protected] 3 points 56 minutes ago

considering practicality of their actions, groundedness of their beliefs, state of their old boat, cleanliness of their ~~rolling frat house trailer park~~ "stealth" rvs, and from what i can tell zero engineering or trade background whatsoever, i see no reason to doubt that they could make a 400L, stainless steel container that has to hold 200L+ of corrosive liquid at 160C, perhaps 10atm, of which 7 atm only is steam, and scrubber to take care of ammonia. they are so definitely not paranoid that if they went out to source reagents, there's no way that they possibly could be confused for methheads on a shopping spree. maybe even they could run it on solar panels

[–] [email protected] -2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

@skillissuer

I’m fairly sure that a 50 gallon drum of lye at room temperature will take care of a body in a week or two. Not really suited to volume "production”, which is what water cremation businesses need.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 hours ago

as a rule of thumb, everything else equal, every increase in temperature 10C reaction rates go up 2x or 3x, so it would be anywhere between 250x and 6500x longer. (4 months to 10 years??) but everything else really doesn't stay equal here, because there are things like lower solubility of something that now coats something else and prevents reaction, fat melting, proteins denaturing thermally, lack of stirring from convection and boiling,

it will also reek of ammonia the entire time

[–] [email protected] 8 points 16 hours ago

you undersold this

that guy's face, amazing

[–] [email protected] 4 points 15 hours ago

@sailor_sega_saturn

He made a fancy coatrack.