sailor_sega_saturn

Within 5 minutes of my first hike, the trees smiled at me and whispered their simple wisdom.

This probably only sounds profound to people who haven't been outside in 7 years. Don't get me wrong hiking is good for the soul. But if it hits you that hard after five minutes you're probably terminally online.

~~Also why can't trees have complex wisdom gosh darn it?~~

Great no problem I'll just read through the sequences and be all caught up!

Hopefully 2025 will be a nice normal year--

Cybertruck outside of Trump hotel explodes violently and no once can figure out if it was a bomb or just Cybertruck engineering

Huh. I guess it'll be another weird one.

(I know I know, low effort post, I'm sick in bed and bored)

Once a month or so Awful Systems casually mentions a racist in some sub-sub-culture who I had never heard about before and then I get to spend an hour doing background research on obscure net drama from 2013 or whatever.

Open Phil generally seems to be avoiding funding anything that might have unacceptable reputational costs for Dustin Moskovitz

"reputational cost" eh? Let's see Mr. Moskovitz's reasoning in his own words:

I guess "we're too racist and weird for even a Facebook exec" doesn't have quite the same ring to it though.

Yes but if I donate to Lightcone I can get a T-shirt for $1000! A special edition T-shirt! Whereas if I donated $1000 to Archive Of Our Own all I'd get is... a full sized cotton blanket, a mug, a tote bag and a mystery gift.

Holy smokes that's a lot of words. From their own post it sounds like they massively over-leveraged and have no more sugar daddies so now their convention center is doomed (yearly 1 million dollar interest payments!); but they can't admit that so are desperately trying to delay the inevitable.

Also don't miss this promise from the middle:

Concretely, one of the top projects I want to work on is building AI-driven tools for research and reasoning and communication, integrated into LessWrong and the AI Alignment Forum. [...] Building an LLM-based editor. [...] AI prompts and tutors as a content type on LW

It's like an anti-donation message. "Hey if you donate to me I'll fill your forum with digital noise!"

Days since last comparison of Chat-GPT to shitty university student: zero

More broadly I think it makes more sense to view LLMs as an advanced rubber ducking tool - like a broadly knowledgeable undergrad you can bounce ideas off to help refine your thinking, but whom you should always fact check because they can often be confidently wrong.

Seriously why does everyone like this analogy?

Debating post-truth weirdos for large sums of money may seem like a good business idea at first, until you realize how insufferable the debate format is (and how no one normal would judge such a thing).

Sadly all my best text encoding stories would make me identifiable to coworkers so I can't share them here. Because there's been some funny stuff over the years. Wait where did I go wrong that I have multiple text encoding stories?

That said I mostly just deal with normal stuff like UTF-8, UTF-16, Latin1, and ASCII.

~~Senior software engineer~~ programmer here. I have had to tell coworkers "don't trust anything chat-gpt tells you about text encoding" after it made something up about text encoding.