That’s a completely fair concern. Services in this category do need to earn trust over time. I built the backend to handle a fair amount of traffic, so I’m not too worried about growth on that side. My goal is definitely to keep this running for the long term, not treat it like a one-off project
Haha that's not what the post (or the post it links to) says. Every CS student should know there's no free lunch in search and optimization. There's tradeoffs between random search, evolutionary algorithms, and convex optimization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_op...
There's an AI "smell" to things that are generated. Why is that? Mode collapse is impossible to see from a small number of samples. Are we mode collapsing society? How would we know if we were?
Also, will computers surpass humans has such an implicit bias in it. Have humans surpassed ants? Have ants surpassed rocks? Have jet planes surpassed teletubbies?
> Every CS student should know there's no free lunch in search and optimization
The no free lunch theorem is so absurdly limited because of the constraints that it's IMO a tautology and fundamentally irrelevant outside of exceptionally tiny areas. You can't have one search algorithm that's better than others on average when searching entirely random things with no structure? 1. Yes, obviously. Nice to have a formulation but it's not exactly a surprise and 2. That's not what we deal with in the real world.
Scott took it too literally. See also how the broader rationalist community took issue with Sam Kriss for inventing a not-obviously-fake historical figure.
The biggest takeaway for me is that you shouldn't expect to succeed as a manager by meeting (or exceeding) KPIs. It's about as effective as being a "nice guy" and expecting intimacy in return.
The KPIs are there for assigning blame, not for identifying key personnel. You can game them to increase your compensation if you are already doing something that an even bigger manager finds useful and important. Conversely, you can get away with half-assing every official performance indicator as long as you keep delivering the real thing.
That’s a good takeaway and if anyone doubts you just think about how you set “goals” in the HR system every year during annual review time , vs. what your boss talks to you about
"If we could convince [any] Sociopath that we were all Losers, we might be able to entice them into spilling their secrets as 'Straighttalk'. (Arguably that's what this book is..)"
On one hand Rao doesn't say much about Gametalk (he basically defers to Eric Berne) which is the Loser's sociolect and should well be our default.
On the other, Rao much more optimistic than Orwell, who declared doublespeak the lingua franca?
> On the other, Rao much more optimistic than Orwell, who declared doublespeak the lingua franca?
If time travel were possible, one of the first things I'd do is introduce Orwell to the 'algospeak' of today. This would do two things, firstly it'd show him a decent piece of evidence that Newspeak isn't as effective a tool for limiting human thought as he believed, and secondly he'd have to write another version of Politics and the English Language aimed at the language sins of attention economy era social media.
A post to the Truth Social account for Donald Trump included: "The heavy and pinpoint bombing, however, will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!"
That's the closest thing I'm finding. Not seeing reporting that he literally said "war is peace".
Sure, but it's not equating the states of war and peace, but asserting that war is a method for achieving peace, presumably when everyone on the other side is incapable or undesirous of attacking or threatening same.
What I mean is that it makes no sense to say you're fighting a war to achieve peace if you're the one who started the war, breaking the peace that existed before then.
If peace is your goal, then the status quo was already in line with your goal. Starting the war contradicts your stated goal of peace.
There's a vast gulf between "having" superior firepower as a deterrent and "using" superior firepower for mass murder, particularly against elementary schools and desalination plants. The latter is war, at its worst.
The Berne books Rao cites as explanations of Gametalk are solidly good entries in of themselves, although it's probably best to use an LLM to get search results of the best introductions to TA first to see if they've been surpassed.
Adhering to the predictable/ritualistic/comfortable nature of "Gametalk",
Here's one question I asked:
"How does Eric Berne's Gametalk as interpreted by Venkatesh Rao signal to the sociopaths that those who engage in them are losers worth talking to? Distinguish between "channels" that Eric has identified as well as new signals that Rao or others have discovered."
I'll admit the connection is loose, personally found it amusing because:
Mike is the archetypal nihilist (Sociopath or Loser), the other two would potentially be engaging in a Clueless interaction if Mike wasn't there, according to the Scott/Rao theory of jokes, you need 3 for a Loser joke.
The preceding banter seems to be more of a Loser Gametalk: no social status is at stake; it's irrelevant to their white-collar role. Mike's Straighttalk intervention is typical of a sociopath; the wall breaking joke is that these Losers don't know what his real job is. If they did, the pointless but playful debate would have died a violent death-- because it'd get too real
If these were Clueless middle managers debating their value to their company, it might even be out of character for Mike to notice them..
No, but I use RSS instead of checking every single website compulsively, which people generally don't do (I barely know anyone irl who follows a blog, RSS or not).
So it's not a problem with the RSS tech, but with its use case.
I think everybody knows about Left Behind (but nevertheless I'll mention it for good measure), but if you want a shorter fictional version of "this is what these people actually believe", check out the Christ Clone Trilogy by James BeauSeigneur. (Left Behind is too long and poorly written, I myself got bored at like the 8th book or so.)
Yup, saw that review. My takeaway is if one has knowledge and training level of Scott Alexander then this book has nothing new to offer. But since most folks don't so this maybe a interesting read.
This is something that existed in the past and I used successfully, but services like this tend to disappear
reply