Ad Astra Per Aspera

just like humans!

often during training, cheating works and gets them the right answer

i feel like that's important? Like, the models cheat during evauations and use because during training they cheated who knows how many times and got their weights updated in the direction of doing more of it. It's what they were trained to do.

just like humans!

A compromise position, for people who think immortality's bad: no-one's been immortal before, so we'll have to test it. Running the test, I'll be on the immortality track, and the death fans can die naturally, like they want. Later, we'll check in with each group and see how they're doing.

Seems fair?

”this file type is not supported” umm grow up?

Your ass is getting opened in notepad

funny internet things: people proposing rogue AI as a Great Filter. Bitch that just raises the question of why we don't see AIs even more expansion-hungry than the species they killed conquering the cosmos instead.

Plays decent with the aestivation hypothesis

Soma 😔

Whatttt is with the tendency of Tumblr users to seek absolution from every single person who offhandedly posts about disagreeing with something they do

I say this not unkindly, but firmly: to function as a member of a social species, you have to get comfortable with the idea that not everyone will like you

"as a member of a social species" the chimpanzee action when someone doesn't like you is to either a) appease them or b) dominate them

monkeys are not comfortable with not being liked either!

getting used to people not liking you is something you should do, since we live in a Society with millions of people and you can't work those numbers. but it is very much not in the natural behavior of our social species

An intuition that seems to be dominating the current Zeitgeist but that is completely alien to me is the expectation that art and artists be modeling moral behaviour to the masses. Why are you calling it art if it's not corrupting the youth? The glimpses of the sublime that art allows is supposed to come at the cost of ruining you a little bit. An artist is someone you're supposed to try and avoid as much as possible or in the occasional moment of weakness let take advantage of you. Making art is not the occupation of good people.

I mean I think my answer to this is

"Art and artists should be modeling moral behavior to the masses" was the uncontroversial default expectation for the overwhelming majority of human history. The view of artists as transgressive and countercultural is a 20th-century anomaly which is arguably in the process of reverting to the mean, just like a lot of things about the 20th century were historical anomalies currently reverting to the mean.

on another note we need to stop fetishizing the physical object of The Book. I like books as much as the next guy, lord knows my house is too full of them, but at the end of the day they are wood pulp and glue and ink, and if the Text is preserved, nothing of great value is lost if an individual copy is destroyed

Your dash has been blessed by ol' dirty face. That means you're weekending is off to a great start. It's just science. - - - - - - "Grizzly bear near Obsidian Creek" by YellowstoneNPS is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Big if true tbh

Sounds fake but okay

there's a lot of talk about reading comprehension and one thing i think is the biggest barrier to people on this site getting better at it is simply... rushing. rushing to share something you haven't understood, rushing to have an opinion without taking the time to think about it, rushing to declare that you don't understand something

take these tags, on somebody else's post (condolences pip)

the thing is. this is what i would call an inside thought. nobody would have known you didn't get it if you didn't tell them that. if you recognised that it was important but didn't have the headspace to process it, you can reblog without commentary for others, or to come back to later. or you can save it somewhere and wait until you DO have the capacity to read it over a few more times, ponder it, consider what it might mean, figure out how to understand it, and THEN reblog it

but no. rushing to reblog while it is still opaque. rushing to admit to ignorance rather than spend the time to achieve understanding. perhaps hoping that somebody will break it down for you more simply, though to my mind it was quite simply phrased in the first place. never stopping to take the time first

comprehension is not always instant! sometimes it takes a bit of time for something to percolate after you read it; sometimes you need to read it a few times; sometimes you realise you don't have the context for it and either go and get the context or accept that it's not for you right now

please just simply slow down. you don't always have to respond to everything within a second or two. it is okay if it is not an instantaneous understanding. we all need to get more comfortable with thinking more slowly and more deeply and more carefully, and not letting our instant split second responses drive us all the time, because they are a barrier to genuine reflection

So I don't exactly have experience dating like Normal Straight Girls but like, ok. There's the stereotype that they often go for douchebags, right? And I get that this is a stereotype but also I think both gay men and lesbians are often horny for douchebags and straight men seem to have their own sorts of ill-advised attractions so. A priori I doubt there's nothing to this, it just seems like a human tendency.

But what I want to understand, what I actually don't get, is the specific appeal of the douchy straight guy. Like. Pill me. Make me, uh, make me understand what is hot about, you know, you know the type, that type of douchy straight guy. Not like the billionaire or the brooding vampire or whatever. Like. Scraggly beard possibly unemployed steve who uh thinks he's really cool and refuses to text you more than once a day on the grounds that that would be gay. You know this type of guy.

But see what is the appeal of this?

Its good for your pussay biome to have smelly steves infested dick all up in their... got it...

now conceptually I do kind of get this. it's like when I include /f v/ or too many stop contrasts in a conlang cause you gotta have a little stank in there

hm. I think when ur a straight girl that hangs out with other straight girls in straight girl social groups all the time interacting with someone that is not overtly emotionally needy is probably kinda intoxicating. But I might be projecting.

I know a lotta times with younger women they'll just wind up in relationships because nobody has taught them that they're allowed to say no to a guy that asks them out unless they can Prove that he is Objectively Undatable

Both of these are extremely interesting and I would like to hear you elaborate on them.

Well basically the archetypical Straight Girl Social Group in my experience (and bear in mind I'm Jane Goodalling this shit) is composed of people socialised to be neurotic and emotionally needy. It's also a complex social environment with many unwritten rules and Rituals you are expected to perform, many of which revolve around providing one another with emotional validation.

E.g. if your girl friend says you look hot, occasionally you can just take the compliment, but mostly you are supposed to find something about your own appearance to criticise, and then tell her that she is flawless. And then she does that back to you, or you all stand in a group saying to each other, "I'm fat, you look amazing."

You have to very carefully monitor her moods towards the people in her life. You certainly can't have independent friendships or even acquaintances with the people your girl friends are dating (this is why it's often bad form to start dating someone that's related to or already friends with one of your friends) - the way it goes is that if she says he's awesome, you agree with her (to her face, anyway, you can definitely criticise him behind her back). However if she breaks up with him acrimoniously, you immediately always hated the guy and should tell her how much he never deserved her. You can also do this if she's probably gonna/ should break up with him, but BE WARY! If she complains about him but her relationship is stable, you're supposed to validate her complaints but not add to them. She's allowed to call her husband a deadbeat, but you aren't, unless you are, in which case it's obligatory. Got it?

Your lives with each other are very guess culture. You have to know which things you're meant to Show Up For (each friend group will have slightly different rules about this) and be aware that if you turn down such an invitation, she will make a big show of accepting your excuse as valid to your face, then turn around and immediately chat shit about you for abandoning her or quietly mope that you don't like her. You mustn't let your friend humiliate herself by double texting you and as such you're going to need to learn how long of a delay is going to convince her that you secretly hate her.

Everybody is so used to performing niceness to everyone's faces all the time that nobody has any idea whether any of the other girls actually like them. So to make each other feel better you'll have to do more performative validation, which will just make it worse.

Guy who thinks it's gay to text you more than once a day and is so emotionally repressed that if he says anything emotional he definitely means if is kind of relaxing, under the circumstances.

salt air & light through canvas || riso print in aqua, violet, yellow & flo pink

The Catalogue of Ships in the Iliad is, to a modern audiences, what classicists have called “boring as hell,” but I can’t help but think that if you were watching Homer recite it it would have been more like when comedians go, “anybody here tonight from Chicago?” and the Chicagoans in the back start cheering

Homer’s like, “and there were forty black ships from… LOCRIS” and the Locrians in the crowd start going absolutely nuts

Even though Terry Tao has been saying for months that "AI in mathematics is the real deal", it was a little slow to percolate. But now that Fable and Sol are out, several big AI results were delivered on back-to-back days and it seems like math is about to have its own Claude Code moment where the whole field collectively realizes over a period of days that the game has changed. My condolences to them, it's kind of traumatizing but hopefully you come out the other side intact. Some people do, I'm still not sure if I'm one of them.

This is what I mean by "traumatizing". Either you get through this phase or you don't but we should probably have a plan for what to do if this happens to the entire economy all at once instead of one profession at a time.