blakestacey

I actually don’t get the general hate for AI here.

Try harder.

Altman’s line is what you write when you have nothing novel to say about physics but really, really want to say disparaging things about gay people.

I regret to inform you that Trace is hate-reading awful.systems too & has posted this comment on their Twitter.

Their writing is so boring I can’t even summon up the enthusiasm to make a “senpai has noticed us” joke.

They want sneers about Yud’s lack of qualifications? Fine:

Noncy prig who never went to high school founded a cult for people who can’t leave it behind! How’s about that, eh?

From an article about a boutique brand that sells books to rich people:

Assouline has made its name publishing tomes that sell for $1,000 or more.

Oh, so they publish textbooks.

“They represent stealth wealth, intended to tell you what your hosts are about and to provide visual evidence: that the owners are people of wealth, education and taste.”

🎶 Please allow me to introduce myself 🎶

ChatGPT was a significant help in writing this book, serving as a creative muse […] and for refining my understanding of technical topics that are likely to be well represented in its corpus.

— Nate Silver

The Wikipedia editors who hang out here might thank you for calling to their attention pages that clearly need to be fixed, since they cite non-peer-reviewed preprints on the arXiv, the shit journal Entropy, and the fucking LessWrong blog.

Me, I’m going to block you anyway. Bye!

“Quantum computation happens in parallel worlds simultaneously” is a lazy take trotted out by people who want to believe in parallel worlds. It is a bad mental image, because it gives the misleading impression that a quantum computer could speed up anything. But all the indications from the actual math are that quantum computers would be better at some tasks than at others. (If you want to use the names that CS people have invented for complexity classes, this imagery would lead you to think that quantum computers could whack any problem in EXPSPACE. But the actual complexity class for “problems efficiently solvable on a quantum computer”, BQP, is known to be contained in PSPACE, which is strictly smaller than EXPSPACE.) It also completely obscures the very important point that some tasks look like they’d need a quantum computer — the program is written in quantum circuit language and all that — but a classical computer can actually do the job efficiently. Accepting the goofy pop-science/science-fiction imagery as truth would mean you’d never imagine the Gottesman–Knill theorem could be true.

To quote a paper by Andy Steane, one of the early contributors to quantum error correction:

The answer to the question ‘where does a quantum computer manage to perform its amazing computations?’ is, we conclude, ‘in the region of spacetime occupied by the quantum computer’.

Fetish content for the world’s most divorced man.

When I got back home and regaled my friends with my mountain stories, one of my friends joked that I should work for Elon and Vivek at DOGE and help America get off its current crash to defaulting on its own debt. So I reached out to some people and got in.

What a fucking idiot. Also a fascist collaborator, but importantly, a fucking idiot.