Murdoch having a lucid moment and realizing the sloppers can generate vastly more slop than his people can?

(complete with a reference to “EV” (expected value))

In this day and age, if I see someone talking about major life decisions in terms of +/-EV, I turn on my heel and walk away rapidly. It was kind of cute when this jargon was entering wide use during the online poker bubble, but that was 20 years ago.

What the actual fuck?

This third category is the Patrick Bateman types who would have mainly been confined to finance at the turn of the century. They probably picked San Francisco over New York in part because they were worried the New Yorkers might make them wear a suit.

There are two specific aspects of Rationalism that cause this mysterious blind spot. First, they believe that superintelligence is inevitable, which conveniently removes responsibility from the people actively trying to bring it about. Second, they treat everyone outside the Rationalist sphere as NPCs who dutifully follow the directions on their script.

I’ve been thinking more about this lately, and my metamodel of the rationalist world model (if I may get away with such a pretense) is that they subtly believe that the future is already something crystallized, even if they don’t consciously realize they hold this belief. It is not really a probabilistic philosophy, no matter how much they assert that. Intelligence, to them, is a function that can more and more precisely apprehend the future as it escalates to greater values along the g-scale, and the singularity will manifest an intelligence that can do so with practically absolute precision (hence its prophesied ability to outcompete and replace humans).

When I’m talking to people who haven’t encountered this stuff as closely, I half-jokingly describe the reflexive assignment of probability estimates as a devotional practice akin to prayer or meditation… but it really is! It’s a subtle invocation of the AGI/ASI god, in that I make this imprecise estimate now, to demonstrate my belief in a precisely quantifiable future; but come the singularity, God will relieve my feeble human brain from having to commit this lamentable imprecision. In that reckoning, those who are not even willing to venture an imprecise esimate must have no intelligence worth noting.

The OpenStax textbook covers the development of the general equations of the various conic sections. If the Stewart book covers that in such detail, it must be jammed into the appendices or exercises someplace. I’ll have to find the time to go over that, at least; I still don’t have a great intuition for hyperbolas.

Levi-Civita_symbol and the Einstein summation convention

Yes, this looks like what I need to understand the negative j term in the cross product formula. Cambridge looks to have the 3rd edition of Boas’ book up for download, so I have a copy now. We’ll see how well I comprehend it, I feel like I’m missing the concept of index permutation to really understand the Wikipedia article.

I don’t know how much traffic we’d get if we tried to cultivate a math discussion here. I did make an account on Mathstodon too and perhaps I should spend more time there. Tutoring at this level is sparse, at least at a community college. There’s one tutor for my class available via Zoom, and the instructor himself is apparently teaching 5 classes when he’s only under contract for three. If I signed up for 5 classes as a student, I’m sure I’d be setting off all sorts of alarm bells in the registration department, if they even let me go through with it.

Ah, “Kurzweilian h+,” there’s his marketing tagline. Too bad importing Kurzweil also brings in all his bullshit extrapolation about exponential curves that all the other weird shit is based on. You’re never going to shout down the hyperbolic lunatics by adopting the core thesis of their hyperbole.

Thanks. So far, the questions I missed on the first exam were mainly due to sign errors when calculating determinants for cross-products, so that’s a simple enough fix I suppose. I’ve seen some of the material before, as halfway through the last time I took Calc 3 was when the Covid lockdowns hit. Even though classes are back in-person, this current instructor is still presenting most of the material in static notes and lecture videos online, so it’s still a tough adaptation for me. We’re using the James Stewart text that is pretty common everywhere, though thankfully the instructor has set it up so I don’t have to pay for ebook access yet again.

I picked up the famous Spivak text a few years ago, and am only just now working up the courage to crack it open. I’ve had a few years’ gap in between classes, so reviewing the earlier material with more proofs involved is probably a worthwhile exercise in any event. I’m given to understand that particular text is something of an on-ramp to real analysis. I’ve been considering trying for a math minor once I transfer for engineering, and it seems like real and/or numerical analysis would be two of the prime upper-division classes for that.

Basically segyges feels like controlled opposition, just not by EAs, perhaps other people who don’t mind that he never brings up the pervasive eugenics angle? He certainly posts (including in LessWrong) like it’s his day job.

Maybe, but I’m also willing to buy that Gyges (and the other tech-employed wannabe-calm AI centrists populating Bluesky) genuinely believes in the broad concept of “AI” as the necessary next stage of techno-progressivism. He and his fellow travelers are just positioning themselves as the sane, sober, starched-shirt Presbyterian sort of believer, as opposed to the tongue-speaking, snake-handling Pentacostals that are the hardcore rationalists.

It’s important to understand that the eugenics aspects are never going to be a particularly high concern for people like Gyges. They’ve comfortably made it past the selection filters in education and employment that are relics of the eugenics movement, so they think IQ-supremacy and neo-phrenology can’t hurt them anymore. It’s when this attitude curdles into fear that someone might revoke the status conferred by passage through such selection filters that you get a DHH, Shuttleworth, etc. I think that’s a prominent root cause as to why I, and many of us here, can’t trust a Gyges type. They may differ with the fascists right now, but they also have no innate defense against ethical freefall.

Even though things are bad now, the conservative movement in America is likely to be severely fractured post-Trump. I don’t think there’ll be a unified movement there for Yud to flop into. I think the shape of Yud’s conservatism will skew towards a) conserving the pop culture he lives and breathes and b) conserving the idea that computers are (or can become) inscrutably superintelligent entities that are wholly separate entities from their users, rather than tools for humans. He’ll probably always find an audience among SaaS CEOs who are desperate to cling to their annual recurring revenue.

and if that didn’t get everyone, the food-safety AI plus MAHA will pick up the stragglers with natural bacteria cultivated in abundance

Calculus III, vector calculus

Really bumping up against this taking a math class. It’s not just the ick feeling of getting slapped with a Google AI rendition that may or may not be accurate. There’s at least 4 or 5 other vendors, Chegg and the like, doing the same thing but keeping their explanations behind a login wall. That’s the entire first page of Google search results now. Of course, simply copying and pasting questions from a textbook is a terrible search strategy. But I still wish I could find a durable math Q&A community that wasn’t slop-adjacent.

Thank you @Kiriko for relaying this. The following will be directed at the original author. As the official KDE fedi account sharply responded to David earlier, I’m assuming there’s a chance they might see it. Charitably assuming this is not chatbot slop (likely a bad assumption),

where the desktop itself can be compiled per user, per device, per moment, from a small portable model of the user — what we are sketching as Kadai: an encrypted, vendor-agnostic personal kernel from which Plasma assembles each Activity.

This is flatly nonsensical. How would this be in any way better than secure synchronization of existing configuration files? I.E. an integration with existing tools like, say, rsync or SyncThing? An interface that changes itself while the user is using it is a recipe for end-user frustration and, ultimately, rejection. I use KDE across a couple of devices, both conventional desktop and touchscreen, and its existing tools for panel configuration and the like are acceptable and worthy of further effort. Continuous “per-moment” automatic reconfiguration of the user interface – what seems to be the proposal here, if this fanciful jargon is at all parsable – is making the assumption that your black-box, poorly-debuggable inference engine knows what the user wants better than the user does.

Do I even need to mention how ridiculous it would be to replace discrete settings files, parsable by both human and machine, with a black-box database of vector weights that may have variable performance across mobile and desktop hardware?

The glaring risk here is taking the alienation users feel at a point-release interface change, say, from Win10 to Win11, and turning it into a continuous-integration experience. The experience being proffered here is very likely to end up being, “Where did that option go that I only need 1 time in 20? Why was it hidden without my express input? What the hell is this stupid fucking computer doing???” and the user taking their friend’s suggestion to try out Xfce or similar.

This brings to mind Steve Jobs’ insistence on using magneto-optical drives for the early NeXT black hardware; the idea being that the user wouldn’t be tied to one specific machine, their files and user identity would live on the MO disk that could be transferred from machine to machine. The problem was that the MO disks were horribly slow and expensive, leading to the impression that the NeXT machines weren’t worth the exorbitant price tag. Frustration was baked into every user encounter with the interface. The proposal here risks being slow on lesser hardware AND continually incoherent, a recipe for an abandoned project that isn’t even as well-remembered as NeXT, with no potential to be adapted into something like OS X or iOS.

Lastly,

Sovereignty, from this angle, is just lovability and AI-ownership scaled up to the organisation:

This sentence seems even more nonsensical. I understand and can agree with current European anxieties surrounding US dependencies in their tech stacks, and I can definitely understand KDE as a European-led project that ameliorates that. But as our community here understands, the word “sovereignty” has also been thoroughly colonized by cryptocurrency bros, most of whom became resolute enthusiasts of the current generation of AI. If “sovereignty” is going to continue to be your watchword for this crap, you may ultimately be operating at cross-purposes to your stated intent.

You hardly need me to explain this, but the primary thing a conservative seeks to conserve is their own wealth and influence. Of course the deflation of the bubble begins Yud’s conversion process

Do the AI doomers/Yuddites REALLY want their signature policy tied to one of the least competent, least popular presidents in history? I would be thinking very hard about this one if I were part of their crew. “You know who took p(doom) seriously? TRUMP!” is, ah, not a marketing coup, to put it mildly

As always with LW, we can adapt the vector definition of “normal”, i.e. what is being said is completely orthogonal to reality

When I give my usual points about their expense and their failures in other domains, I am given the usual spiel of “it’ll get better in other areas” and “it’ll get cheaper”.

This increasingly seems like one of those “priors” that people should “update on.” One tell is that the leading chip design firm has abandoned sensible power consumption targets, and gone all-in on shoving as much power as possible into as physically large a chip as they can possibly reliably get out of the fab. (Of course, you wouldn’t notice this unless you work in a data center or can afford the more expensive desktop hardware.) I’m trying to think of a pithy catchphrase for social media purposes; best I’ve got so far is that there’s a huge amount of people who have stranded themselves below the upper knee of the S-curve.

Do not overweight the current struggles, comrades; we will have attained full Communism as soon as 1995.

just like our favorite TV show, right? surely a comprehensive description language for physics can’t be THAT much more complex than a steaming hot cup of Earl Grey tea!

Never realized Stallman did a Zuckerberg before Zuckerberg did, that’s worth knowing and definitely not a point in his favor

It is my strongly-held personal thesis that chatbots are a direct design descendent of short-form social media such as Twitter. No, I will not be taking questions at this time

I am reminded of Ursala Le Guinn’s remarks on SciFi authors being professional liars, not prophets.

The advent of the AI bubble has made this distinction much more trenchant for me. I was already somewhat aware before, but I am now much more likely to judge someone’s character on whether they believe science fiction, broadly, is a roadmap to the future or a reflection and exploration of current conditions and historical contingencies.