"They don't need to develop protocols of communication that facilitate buying castles, fluffing our corporate overlords, or recruiting math pets. They share vegan recipes without even trying to build a murder cult."

"Conspiracy" is a colorful way of describing what might boil down to Gagniuc and two publicists, or something like that, since one person can hop across multiple IP addresses, etc. But, I mean, a pitifully tiny conspiracy still counts (and is, IMO, even funnier).

A comment by Wikipedia editor David Eppstein, theoretical computer science prof at UC Irvine:

Despite Malparti warning that "it would be a waste of time for everyone" I took a look at the book myself. 60 pages of badly-worded boring worked examples with no theory before we even get to the possibility of having more than two states. As Malparti said, there is no theory, or rather theory is alluded to in vague and inaccurate form without any justification. For instance the steady state (still of a two-state chain) is first mentioned on 46 as "the unique solution" to an equilibrium equation, and is stated to be "eventually achieved", with no discussion of exceptional cases where the solution is not unique or not reached in the limit, and no discussion of the fact that it is never actually achieved, only found in the limit. Do not use for anything. I should have taken the fact that I could not find a review even on MR and zbl as a warning.

It's been a while since I've seen a math book review that said "Do not use for anything."

"This book is not a place of honor..."

The phrase "trying to gatekeep what was once their moat" makes me feel like a character in A Scanner Darkly who has reached the "aphids, aphids everywhere" stage of Substance D abuse

I thought of a phrase whilst riding the subway and couldn't remember if I had read it somewhere. Anybody recall it?

Rationalists will never use one word when fourteen will do.

An interesting thing came through the arXiv-o-tube this evening: "The Illusion-Illusion: Vision Language Models See Illusions Where There are None".

Illusions are entertaining, but they are also a useful diagnostic tool in cognitive science, philosophy, and neuroscience. A typical illusion shows a gap between how something "really is" and how something "appears to be", and this gap helps us understand the mental processing that lead to how something appears to be. Illusions are also useful for investigating artificial systems, and much research has examined whether computational models of perceptions fall prey to the same illusions as people. Here, I invert the standard use of perceptual illusions to examine basic processing errors in current vision language models. I present these models with illusory-illusions, neighbors of common illusions that should not elicit processing errors. These include such things as perfectly reasonable ducks, crooked lines that truly are crooked, circles that seem to have different sizes because they are, in fact, of different sizes, and so on. I show that many current vision language systems mistakenly see these illusion-illusions as illusions. I suggest that such failures are part of broader failures already discussed in the literature.

Max Kennerly's reply:

For a client I recently reviewed a redlined contract where the counterparty used an "AI-powered contract platform." It had inserted into the contract a provision entirely contrary to their own interests.

So I left it in there.

Please, go ahead, use AI lawyers. It's better for my clients.

"Your mother was volatile with poor control last night, Trebek!"

"Computers will be really good at chess" was already a trope in 1960s science fiction. HAL 9000 is canonically so good that he was instructed to throw the game half the time so that his human opponents don't get bored. The Enterprise computer is so good that Spock being able to beat it — Spock — is a major plot point.

"The image of the penis is translated into a depth measurement...."

That's numberwang!

Counterpoint: he is in fact a bumbling idiot

It's an old creationist ploy. DNA is like a computer program, which implies there must have been a programmer, yadda yadda, just asking questions, wharblgarbl, brave scientists are speaking up and challenging the Darwinist regime.

Calling your own mewling drivel "Programmer Theory" is an A+ dipshit move.