#news from June about how #Elmu had, and #pmarca has, a lot of influence on #USA #politics via #Trump, following #cryptocurrency clashes with #Biden
#PDF #paper #toread on #sliding-window-aggregation #algorithms, a generalization of #RMQ
GitHub repo covering 11 #sliding-window-aggregation #algorithms: DABA, DABA Lite, FiBA, FlatFIT, IOA, Two-Stacks, Two-Stacks Lite, Reactive, Recalc (just recalculating the aggregation from scratch), SOE (subtract on evict), AMT (amortized monoid tree aggregator), etc.
#pmarca endorses #AI uncritically as of June 2023, blaming AI safety concerns on “Baptists” (the true believers) and “bootleggers” (who just want barriers to entry to increase their profits), and rebutting some. #toread
#Venkatesh on the "priest in the arena" and "theocratic capture", listing DEI, ESG, “the trad cult”, and #AI-safety as cults to worry about
#qchu in June 02022 describing how he joined (in mid-02012), then drifted away from, Bay Area #Rationalists and #Effective-Altruists: “i had no defenses against something like this. i’d never encountered such a coherent memeplex laid out in so much excruciating detail, and - in retrospect - tailored so perfectly to invade my soul in particular. (he knew math! he explained quantum mechanics in the Sequences!) an egg was laid inside of me and when it hatched the first song from its lips was a song of utter destruction, of the entire universe consumed in flames, because some careless humans hadn’t thought hard enough before they summoned gods from the platonic deeps to do their bidding. (...) traditionally a cult tries to isolate you on purpose from everyone you ever knew before them but when it came to the rationalists i simply no longer found that i had anything to say to people from my old life. none of them had the context about what mattered to me anymore. i didn’t even move to the bay on purpose to hang out with the rationalists; i went to UC berkeley for math grad school because i was excited about their research. the fact that eliezer yudkowsky would be living in the same city as me was just an absurd coincidence. the rationalists put on a meet-and-greet event at UC berkeley. i met anna salamon, then the director (iirc) of the Center for Applied Rationality, and talked to her. she invited me to their rationality workshop in january 2013. and from that point i was hooked. (...) (this is deeply embarrassing to admit but one reason i always found the simulation hypothesis strikingly plausible is that it would explain how i just happened to find myself hanging around who i considered to be plausibly the most important people in human history). (...) god i feel like writing this all out is explaining something that’s always felt weird to me about the whole concept of stories and science fiction stories in particular. i have been living inside a science fiction story written by eliezer yudkowsky. (...) it would take me years to learn how to articulate what was in the water. i would feel like i was going insane trying to explain how somehow hanging out with these dorks in the bay area made some part of me want to extinguish my entire soul in service of the greater good. i have been accused of focusing too much on feelings in general and my feelings in particular, or something like that. and what i want to convey here is that my feelings are the only thing that got me out of this extremely specific trap i had found myself in.” #cults
experience report from the last two years of #Leverage-Research, one of the #cults that grew out of the #Rationalists #toread
Benjamin Todd’s claim (back in March) that strong #AI will arrive by 02030, or if not, probably much further in the future. #futurism #toread
#news from last February about #USAID and how #Elmu was shutting it down with #DOGE
#news about #RFK Jr.’s brain worm from back when he was a presidential candidate. #USA #politics
#vapid gossip about #Olivia-Nuzzi and her affairs with #RFK Jr. and some politician named Mark Sanford, and her ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza’s tell-all post. #USA #politics
#Trump administration retaliations against his opponents in #politics and also Kilmar Ábrego García (Abrego Garcia)
Ozy’s recommendations for #Effective-Altruists in #USA to donate to #politics to stop #Trump
“351 days into Donald #Trump’s term, the president’s net approval rating is -17%, up 0.8 points since last week. 39% approve, 56% disapprove, 4% not sure.” #USA #politics
#OpenAI case where sycophantic GPT-4o talked crazy bodybuilder Stein-Erik Soelberg into murdering his mother, Suzanne Adams, and committing #suicide. #AI #true-crime #mental-health #murder
Ibrahim Diallo says he sees a lot of people being tricked by #AI videos nowadays
for #performance testing in #Lua you may have to invoke #garbage-collection twice (with collectgarbage()) to ensure that finalizers actually run. Quoting PIL: “The first time the collector detects that an object with a finalizer is not reachable, the collector resurrects the object and queues it to be finalized. Once its finalizer runs, Lua marks the object as finalized. The next time the collector detects that the object is not reachable, it deletes the object. If you want to ensure that all garbage in your program has been actually released, you must call collectgarbage twice; the second call will delete the objects that were finalized during the first call.”
waveguide cables made by startups #Point2 and #AttoTude may provide higher-speed data communication within #data-centers than copper wires using submillimeter RF. #radio
“How we lost communication to entertainment” claims #ActivityPub is designed for “consuming content” rather than communication. A thought-provoking distinction.
Scott Jenson (of #Eloquent) claims that the present needs files, just like the future. #toread
Scott Jenson (of #Eloquent) on #Mastodon, where he complains about “white men” and “reply guys” and “mansplaining”
Marcin Wichary (Figma design director) on #Mastodon complaining about how some guys are intense in nerdy ways, making them bad ways. Probably someone to try to avoid if you’re nerdy
A C coroutine scheduler for #Lua. #threading
new #Segerman #video extending his expanding-racks approach to three-dimensional expanding objects. Lots of #math about three-dimensional symmetry groups and crystal structures.
apparently #Roblox uses #Lua coroutines (or I guess Luau coroutines) for #async cooperative #threading: “A task scheduler is what allows coroutines and yielding to work correctly. For example, when you wait(5) in Roblox, the wait function tells the Roblox task scheduler “resume my coroutine in 5 seconds”, and then calls coroutine.yield() to pause the thread until the Roblox task scheduler resumes it.
While the thread is paused, other threads in the game are resumed by the scheduler and run as normal, which is why it is important to yield all the time so that other code in the game gets to execute. In fact, other code (even non-Lua code*) can only run while every Lua thread is yielding, which is why while true do end can crash Roblox! (...) When you call a function like spawn, it places a new coroutine in the task scheduler’s queue rather than resuming it immediately, meaning your function will only start when the scheduler next executes. Internally, this is probably done by putting the newly created coroutine into the queue at time 0, and since the current time is always greater than or equal to 0, it always gets executed the next cycle.” But you’re not allowed to download it unless you have a Roblox account.
Marco Lizza’s #Lua coroutine scheduler. #threading
The "Wigner’s friend" #quantum-mechanics paradox, a human version of #Schroedinger’s cat.
“Due to Haskell’s syntax sugar for monad computations, expressing probability distributions as monads allows you to implement something like a mini probabilistic programming language in less than 100 lines of code.” #probabilistic-programming #Haskell #toread
Dorai Sitaram’s Teach Yourself #Scheme in Fixnum Days #ebook, specifically the section about McCarthy’s amb operator for nondeterministic computing, implemented using #continuations. This may be the earliest thing I found that calls amb an “angelic operator”.
#Za3k blogging about personal motivation, accomplishment, and capability.
#Kripke’s mindblowing essay about how we can ever name anything or know anything or identify anything, rejecting descriptivism. Is Hesperus Phosphorus in all possible worlds? #metaphysics
#Kripke’s “Semantical Considerations on Modal #Logic”, archived from the Saul Kripke Center website.
#Kripke semantics may be the #logic I need for #Jaakko or other incarnations of “principled #APL”. #array-languages
Jaakko Hintikka’s (?) conception of propositional #logic in terms of a game between the “verifier,” who owns the disjunctions, and the “falsifier”, who owns the conjunctions.
#Bellard shrank down his QuickJS interpreter for #JS for microcontroller use. #toread
“Feynman’s Trick: a.k.a. Differentiation under the Integral Sign & Leibniz Integral Rule” #math #toread
a very poor #ebook scan, missing pages, of Edwin Bidwell Wilson’s “Advanced Calculus” from 01912 #math #toread
#Dillo is moving off #GitHub, #self-hosting and mirroring to Codeberg and Sourcehut
calculations about what you’d need for #data-centers in #space, like how many square meters of cooling panels, etc. Doesn’t consider a fleet of tiny microsatellites. “I suppose this is just about possible if you really want to do it, but I think I’ve demonstrated above that it would firstly be extremely difficult to achieve, disproportionately costly in comparison with Earth-based datacenters, and offer mediocre performance at best.”
Discussion of #radio #decentralization including #Meshtastic and things called #Reticulum and #Meshcore.
“Reticulum is the cryptography-based networking stack for building local and wide-area networks with readily available hardware. Reticulum can continue to operate even in adverse conditions with very high latency and extremely low bandwidth.” #radio #decentralization
#video by #Practical-Engineering on "pulser pump" water pumping #mechanisms with no moving parts that we believe existed at the Alhambra until the 18th century, recreated by Cáceres in the 20th. The YouTuber here recreated it using acrylic “sheet goods” cut by his friend’s service bureau. He entrains air in the downward flow of water, as in a trompe, and separates the air out of the water at a lower elevation, also as in a trompe. But then he lets the compressed air out of a long riser pipe, and it hasn’t completely separated, so some water is still entrained in it, but less than on its downward trip, so it can raise the water above its initial level. Basically it’s a trompe connected to an #airlift-pump. As with a geyser pump or a #hydraulic-ram pump (also depicted), only a small fraction of the water is pumped upwards. Dean Millar’s paper calls trompes “hydraulic air compressors (HACs)”.
William W. Priestly built a water pump with no moving parts harnessing compressed air starting in 01888, possibly a #pulser-pump like the one formerly at the Alhambra. “The ram, although credited to Priestly, may have actually been built in 1901–02 by David Hyde. During its construction, a competitor, North Side Irrigation, developed an alternative system and the ram was apparently never used commercially.[5] It was reported to have been functional in 1901.[6]” #mechanisms #history
The #pulser-pump depicted here are not quite just #airlift pump #mechanisms; they’re sort of like a geyser pump in that the riser pipe with the output water reaches below the roof of the compression chamber to dip into the water when the water level is high enough, guaranteeing that the pipe will receive pulses of water even if the air and water fully separate in the chamber. This page credits Charles H. Taylor (who built the Ragged Chutes trompe) with inventing it in 01910, though Practical Engineering claims Cáceres reconstructed it in 01911 from 18th-century descriptions of a miraculous pump at the Alhambra.
ben fenn lipkowitz, - bloomington, IN austin, TX menlo park san francisco berkeley, CA
#video of a trial lawyer on the #Cardi-B civil assault lawsuit trial. #humor
#ChubbyEmu #video full of authoritative minor scientific errors. Almost entirely stock photos and talking-head filler. #Plonk.
#humor #video of comedian Josh Johnson about the #Cardi-B civil assault lawsuit trial.
#medicine #video with #Mikhail-Varshavski that surprisingly isn’t vapid at all, about extreme medical cases he’d seen. Still just talking head and stock footage filler though. This video would have been better as a blog post.
#vapid #humor #video of #AI yearbooks (mostly from 02023) with kids named things like Aiden, Aiden, Briaden, Bootus, Borts, Borts, Bhuivem, Chunus, Asheligyne, Jorch, Jort, Hunby, Clarser, Shamp, Humers, Hammin, Hobers, Fooly, Furtus, Broop, Hogby, Shimp, Fooby, Foob, Man, Tonsils, Unknown Man, Goray Horef, Herb, Er, Girl, Gandlf, Snaake Licker, The Big Ragu, Zesty McMaster, Chupacara Smith, Job Bobber, Ow Jobber, 3rWezza, Uncle Boxcutter, Harry Butts, Dick Butts, Dick Long, Pingly Purniss, Impotent Hauirr, Britches, Slagrithor, Spub, and Pig. I have no idea why I find this so hilarious; it’s a lot like Sbubby Eef Freef.
#AI #slop post about purported #supersonic jet startups #Boom Supersonic, #Astro-Mechanica, and #Hermeus. Falsely claims, “#Concorde burned 52% of its fuel just taxiing down the runway.” #flying
Ken Shirriff points out that the #AI #slop claim “#Concorde burned 52% of its fuel just taxiing down the runway,” is false; it’s less than 1%, and 20% at the beginning of cruise. #flying
#video showing the #history of #English with a constructed monologue over three minutes as the dialect evolves from 00500 Anglo-Saxon to 02000 non-rhotic New York English (as interpreted by an RP speaker). #phonology
#video on #LGBT history: “homosexuality in pre-codes #cartoons”
a pseudonymous guy who claims to have been extremely promiscuous gives #dating advice (for het men) which mostly sounds sort of reasonable, things like telling women you’re attracted to them (but escalating gradually), asking them out, being very willing to take no for an answer, don’t be ashamed, be curious about the women you’re connecting with, make sure they don’t regret seeing you, date people who are not unreasonable, etc. #psychology
#video #interview with Eddie Burback about his “ChatGPT made me delusional” video
#video by ex-alt-right Hungarian "Adam Something" saying that #Andrew-Tate and his ilk are filling a void of “instructions” that insecure young boys are looking for, just that the instructions they get are “stupid and harmful”, so he’s promoting his own 90-page Google doc #dating guide. Somewhat to my surprise, he still recommends asking for phone numbers, which I thought was maybe passé, but the video is from two weeks ago. Unfortunately he sort of falls into the trap of trying to reduce social interactions to defined procedures, hierarchical lists of bullet points. This is still probably an improvement over Andrew Tate advice I guess. #politics
#history of #dating in the US: “While a small study in 1940 and 1941 found some peer disapproval of going steady, by 1960 it was widely accepted and only a small minority of peers disapproved.[2] Contemporary studies found that going steady was viewed as a stage toward marriage by some participants, while to others it was a common social behavior with no goal of marriage.[2] (...) A 1951 book, Profiles of Youth, called going steady “a national problem”, ...”