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sorokod

5,223 karma · joined November 19, 2014

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sorokod··on Using LLMs to trace alchemical knowledge and decode 17th century letters
Armstrong and Miller - Who do you think you are sketch

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c65QRaR16io

sorokod··on The Hierarchy of Money
Subsistence, not sustenance.
sorokod··on Ex-FTC boss Khan: break out the handcuffs for AI CEOs, citing 1934 precedent
The obligatory:

“The rain falls upon the just

And also on the unjust fellas

But mostly it falls upon the just

Cause the unjust have

the just’s umbrellas.”

sorokod··on Emily Wilson to retranslate the Odyssey from scratch
Instant Classics podcast has an episode dedicated to an interview with Emily Wilson
sorokod··on Fast and Hard Code
Fast and Hard - very much like Zapp Brannigan's love
sorokod··on How to compromise your system with a job interview
Sure, would have preferred an honest "we use standard click tracking service, it will totally redirect you to our website" or some such thing
sorokod··on How to compromise your system with a job interview
A recruiter recently sent me an "I'd like you to explore..." email. Every "further info" link in it pointed to znsrc.com/[unique_id] rather than to the displayed address.

That felt dishonest and I ignored the email.

sorokod··on Why does the U.S. military seem stymied in the war with Iran?
there's a lot of debate and little evidence that airpower alone normally produces a durable political outcome

or even a military one.

sorokod··on AI Alignment as a Thought-Terminating Cliche
...it lets you avoid any of the hard political or economic or moral questions

I would argue that the need to deal with hard questions and hardsheep in general is a fundamental part of what makes us humans.

sorokod··on Turbo Pascal on CP/M, MSX-DOS and MS-DOS
Elsewhere like in turbo assembler

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Assembler

sorokod··on Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election
Ich bin ein binliner
sorokod··on Choosing an AI model: one prompt, 11 models, different results
Same model over 11 days, one prompt, different results?
sorokod··on Antiqua–Fraktur dispute
Point 2 in Eco's ur-facism essay:

"The rejection of modernism"

sorokod··on Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful
To each their own, I read GEB several times and enjoyed the intellectual challenge and the humour.

Hofstadter wrote a followup book: I am a strange loop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop

sorokod··on German advocacy group lodges criminal complaint over Meta AI glasses
Shouldn't blind people be accommodated too?
sorokod··on 50k Boat Names
Following in the footsteps of "The Hand of God 137"
sorokod··on The journalist taking on the 'tech fascists' of Silicon Valley
From the article:

Fascism is no exaggeration, Durán asserts. He researched multiple definitions – by Umberto Eco, Robert Paxton, Jason Stanley – and decided that Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement ticks all the boxes.

and latter:

By extension, he says, Silicon Valley is fascist “because they have wholly aligned with a fascist movement. That’s their vehicle for gaining power.” Few could dispute this alignment after seeing the bosses of Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon and OpenAI line up behind Trump at his second inauguration...

Your disagreement would be more effective if you engage with the content of the article.

For example Eco's fourteen check boxes:

The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”

The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”

The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”

Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”

Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”

Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”

The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”

The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”

Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”

Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”

Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”

Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”

Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”

Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

sorokod··on AI-generated stories rated better quality than human-written ones, study finds
The paper mentioned in the article

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decisio...

sorokod··on There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]
In addition, usage of tactical nuclear weapons comes up again and again from Russian sources, driven by the situation in the Ukraine war.
sorokod··on German Peasants' War
people vote with their feet

With their reproductive organs more likely.

sorokod··on JetBrains Is Sunsetting Kotlin Notebook – What It Means for Kotlin Developers
The JetBrains announcement:

https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2026/06/kotlin-notebook-suns...

sorokod··on Infinities, impossibilities, and the man in the white linen suit
Gödel, Escher, Bach (1980, Pulitzer prize) was how I first got exposed to Gödel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

sorokod··on EU ban on destruction of unsold clothes and shoes enters into application
Naming and shaming is a reasonable first step.
sorokod··on After wearing the Pebble Time 2 for two weeks, I'll never buy another smartwatch
Smart watches to watches are like smart TVs to TVs.
sorokod··on In defense of not understanding your codebase
The author seems to refere to software systems, code base and programs interchangeably.

We can choose human-comprehensible scopes and do that all the time with modules, packages,services, APIs.

In nobody understands it all , "it" is doing a lot of heavy lifting and given the choises we can make is wrong and should be resisted.

sorokod··on Punch yourself in the face with reality
This leads to the hard problem of probabilistic thinking which requires a lot more energy than black and white thinking.

You are overthinking this. Reality exists in a point in time and space, same point where you are. That is the only problem you face.

sorokod··on Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
novel is a bunch of words

or even a bunch of characters, bunch of pixels and so on.

To me this is the wrong level of abstraction that is not sufficient to encode the meaning of literature.

sorokod··on Agnes Callard’s theory of the uni-context
"How do informational norms change when we’re all living in the same universal room?"

I different interesting question: why would we want to inhabit this universal room in the first place? The post mentions the idea of being "bigger than yourself" but to me the context collapse achieves the opposite - a sort of carboard caricature of oneself.

sorokod··on Punch yourself in the face with reality
This quote from Philip K Dick seems relevant:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

sorokod··on A Study of Microsoft's Early 2026 Rollout of Claude Code and GitHub Copilot CLI
Possibly but this is not related to AI
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