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2 yr. ago

  • The NYT also ran this little story about Bloomberg having "to correct at least three dozen A.I.-generated summaries of articles published this year".

    https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/business/media/bloomberg-ai-summaries.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7k4.rrgt.pt3AGFekgpT3

  • There's just something so ... basic about HPMOR. Oh, so you wrote a Harry Potter story? Targeted at emotionally vulnerable neurodivergent young people? That's playing fanfiction on easy mode. Meanwhile, people are out there inventing a whole sui generis fandom about humanity being force-femmed by communist space plants. I don't understand it, but (stirring brass band) by Gad, I respect it.

  • OK, that's a night in the drunk tank for you.

  • Are you, like, posting drunk? Because your comments read like you're posting drunk.

  • šŸŽ¶ If I had a Death Note / Ya da shinna shinna shinna shinna gamma gamma game / All day long, I'd namey namey names / If I had my own Death Note šŸŽ¶

  • One erratum: the review that goes into how HPMOR's science is bad was by "su3su2u1", not Dan Luu (who just archived it from the original Tumblr).

  • I can't be bothered to look up the details (kinda in a fog of sleep deprivation right now to be honest), but I recall HPMOR pissing me off by getting the plot of Death Note wrong. Well, OK, first there was the obnoxious thing of making Death Note into a play that wizards go to see. It was yet another tedious example in Yud's interminable series of using Nerd Culture(TM) wink-wink-nudge-nudges as a substitute for world-building. Worse than that, it was immersion-breaking: Yud throws the reader out of the story by prompting them to wonder, "Wait, is Death Note a manga in the Muggle world and a play in the wizarding one? Did Tsugumi Ohba secretly learn of wizard culture and rip off one of their stories?" And then Yud tried to put down Death Note and talk up his own story by saying that L did something illogical that L did not actually do in any version of Death Note that I'd seen.

    And now I want potato chips.

  • Reliance upon "AI" is a fucking disease. Effective treatments are unknown, but theory suggests that repeated tasing in the nads may show potential.

  • The name of the company is actually important information in a news story about a company.

    And yes, if you change the headline to one that is confusing, then it becomes confusing.

  • On that note, I would recommend perusing Underwood Dudley's Mathematical Cranks, not so much for the details of any math topic like trisecting an angle, but for the tone and psychology of the crank letters.

  • I love the smell of ban-worthy levels of condescension in the morning.

  • One area where I don't know of good recommendations is theoretical computer science. I am not sure what to suggest that would accessibly teach topics like algorithmic/Kolmogorov information theory without sliding downhill into "we can automate the scientific method" crankery. Or, perhaps, which teaches the relevant concepts clearly and solidly enough to make it obvious that LW use of them is crankery.

  • Another suggestion: Instead of indulging in LW-style Feynman worship, read James Gleick's biography of him. It does a pretty good job covering the actual science while giving a warts-and-all portrayal of the man.

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