435 karma · joined October 30, 2014
https://txt.ryandv.me
By the way, how are those food prices working out for ya bud [1]? I understand that you are struggling, but please try not to get, quote, "violent".
Pause. Empathize. Apologize. Then post.
LLMs ain't gonna do sheeeeeeeit if this is still where we are at...
Most people seem to be rallying around Lean these days, which is powerful and quite featureful, but with tactics metaprogramming feels more like writing C++ templates instead of the "assembly language of proof" which I liken metamath to, for its "down to the metal" atomization of proof into very explicit steps. Different (levels of) abstractions for different folks.
Once I return to a proper desktop I will probably woodshed myself into Lean for a week or two to get a better handle on it, but for now tactics feel like utter magic when not just chaining `calc` everywhere.
Having previously inherited (and now dispossessed) an un-disentangleable pile of Python, pandas, and SQL hacks reminiscent of a spreadsheet rammed with inscrutable Excel formulae, I have no idea how data scientists collaborate on anything with this technology. It's like when bioinformatics was full of write-only Perl code that was maybe executed successfully once for the purposes of a study or paper, and was kept around for future archaeologists to hopefully one day resuscitate when the need may arise again.
If programmers are expected to just throw garbage like this at the next asshole with the misfortune to have to maintain code that was never designed to be maintained, it's not a surprise that the industry is once again moving towards write-only code, this time produced at scale by LLMs.
It's like we're back to Visual Studio Ultimate slopping out 10k lines of XAML in response to your dragging and dropping in the WYSIWYG. There is a reason nobody does this any more.
Why is any of that necessary? LLMs can just synthesize a story for the press de novo, without reference to prior developments or indeed any 20th century style on-the-ground reporting. Reporters should in fact be pleased that this meaningless drudgery has been automated out of the profession.
Besides, whatever "facts" are presented will be labelled as fake news by its detractors, who will not have their own internal narratives swayed in the slightest. The rest will rest easy in their confirmation bias, it now being confirmed once more.
Nonetheless you need to understand the dark and less visited corners of the mental landscape whence these ideas and his (putative) target audiences were borne (Bay Area rationalism), and the strategic nature of this communication which is more intended to send a message to certain sects rather than reveal anything genuine about himself or others.
At these echelons communication takes on a different character. You must understand if you speak at this level.
I have watched these people expend literally years getting into hypothetical arguments with strawmen they believe are active participants in their community when, at best, they are occasional lurkers, and will erect entire superstructures of theory and belief that make utterly no sense to those outside of their rationalist cult.
Lesswrong and motteizen type users fall squarely into this category, who also tend to cleave towards the pro-AI side of the spectrum now that, as with the rest of their lives, they are able to delegate the production of logorrhea at scale to the machine.
These people are mentally unwell, and reading their proclamations is not too dissimilar to browsing a deep web trans community discussing esoteric gender theory, or even merely the slashdot comment section in 2016 - just with an extra ten paragraphs of fluff and vapidity as if they had been fed on a steady diet of the New Yorker; none of which has any correlation whatsoever to material sensate reality. No wonder there is such reverence for the hyperreality of LLM literary hallucination in these circles...
Sent from my iPhone
In this case GLP1's clinical effects are widely understood though, so it is immaterial if an "artist's depiction" (artificial agent's depiction) is of a real person or purely hallucinated.
austin-cheney 6 minutes ago [dead] [–]
This visual shows the names of 60,199 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces
in Gaza from 7 Oct 2023 to 31 Jul 2025. This staggering figure includes
only those whose names and ages could be identified by the Ministry of
Health in Gaza up to that date.
People who want the actual details and numbers will read.
Canada has never had an ethnic minority Prime Minister. All this posturing of ethnic diversity and moral superiority over Americans is a cope and a misdirection from the fact that Laurentians [1] view themselves as ethnically and culturally superior to the rest of the country.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/liberals-leadership-race-me...
Eh, I don't need to imagine; we're still stuck at that same level of infantilism. Instead of actually graduating to higher order atoms and primitives of thought though, we can just have the AI slop out another 100k LOC. Then the system will have so much incidental complexity that it becomes impossible to distill out its essence, because there no longer is one.
Canada has an incredibly censorious culture. I have been downvoted to -4 [0] [1] and flagged for merely suggesting that Canadians do not care about medical privacy (or privacy in general) in light of things like Bill C-22 and DNA collection at the US border [2].
Interestingly enough, questioning gender ideology and being trans critical (maybe even transphobic) is now acceptable on HN [3], but Canadians have something very dark to hide when it comes to respecting medical privacy given how hard posts of this nature are downvoted, flagged, and censored.
Surprised he didn't willingly relinquish a sample.
Privacy is not actually a core Canadian value.
Neither in spirit nor in letter do Canadians actually
demonstrate that they give a shit about privacy; see
for instance Bill C-22.
I invite commenters to demonstrate otherwise instead of
merely downvoting incontrovertible facts.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47571396
[2] https://www.ctvnews.ca/london/article/canadian-man-denied-en...
> I'm rephrasing those two points.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
This was never said by anyone until you came along with that comment, which is a totally different idea (effectively a non sequitur). Can you quote who echoed the same argument?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47538165
Such a common pattern, I'm tired of seeing it. "That's not what it's saying, those words actually mean..." again and again, ad infinitum. A perverse form of moving the goalposts. Your reply has no relation whatsoever to what was previously stated, it is a new argument entirely.