fasterik

15 ms·

61.
by fasterik 2mo ago
Curtis Yarvin honestly wouldn't have crossed my mind as a philosopher. I think of him as a political pundit. If I were thinking of right-wing philosophers, I would think of Burke, Hayek, Nozick, etc. I might disagree with some of their
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by fasterik 2mo ago
I don't see why pointing out improvements in quality of life is "propaganda for the status quo" or precludes talking about political power and economic security. We can and do talk about both all the time.
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by fasterik 2mo ago
Propaganda for what, exactly?
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by fasterik 2mo ago
When I read "a lot of philosophy is bullshit" without qualification I read it as an anti-intellectual statement either dismissing academic philosophy as a discipline, or confusing philosophy for self-help/mysticism. In some s
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by fasterik 2mo ago
That seems like an extrapolation to a pretty extreme conclusion. I don't see anything in the article that says anything like that. It's an appreciation of how much objective standards of living have improved over the past few cent
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by fasterik 2mo ago
$2400 a month is $29k per year, pretty affordable at the U.S. median household income of $83k. It's not uncommon for people living in big cities to spend a larger portion of their income on rent. And don't forget that many people
67.
by fasterik 2mo ago
00, 01, 10, 11 are separable states, meaning that a pair of particles in one of those states can be described as two separate one-particle systems. For example, 01 means that the first particle is in the state 0 and the second particle is i
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by fasterik 2mo ago
It's not obvious at all from your comment, since you didn't qualify "a lot" or mention which topics in philosophy you think are legitimate.
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by fasterik 2mo ago
It really depends on what you mean by philosophy. Academic philosophy? Ancient philosophy? Pop philosophy? Self-help content? For a list of topics that aren't bullshit, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a good starting point.
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by fasterik 2mo ago
John Carmack made a similar point: "Software is a just a tool to help accomplish something for people - many programmers never understood that. Keep your eyes on the delivered value, and don't over focus on the specifics of the to
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by fasterik 2mo ago
Psychosis is the inability to distinguish what is real. This seems closer to something like embodied cognition or body schema extension. There are documented cases where the brain adapts to tool use (e.g. a mechanical grabber) by modeling i
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by fasterik 2mo ago
>If the research can't demonstrate the DK effect, then the research is bad, like poorly designed. I don't have an opinion about Dunning-Kruger either way, but I wanted to point out that this is a pre-replication crisis mindse
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by fasterik 2mo ago
Saying that AI is "matrices" is like saying human cognition is "neurons." Maybe true at some level, but it's a low-level implementation detail. The important part of a language model is the function that maps tokens
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by fasterik 2mo ago
I used to be much more of an open source fundamentalist than I am now. For me, it's more about trust than source availability. There are closed source projects that I have high trust in, and there are open source projects that I don&#x
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by fasterik 2mo ago
For the purposes of learning something new, I don't find traditional note-taking or the idea of "knowledge management" all that useful. I find the best way to learn is to do projects. Sometimes the project might be creating a
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by fasterik 2mo ago
Yes that makes sense, and I think I mostly agree with you. The point about metaphors is a good one, but what I would say is that often the most precise way to communicate something is through a metaphor. If the goal is to convey a mood or a
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by fasterik 2mo ago
Arguably, a royal portrait is a misinterpretation of the prompt, since it's just asking for a specific facial feature. But I guess you could look at it as a bit of artistic license.
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by fasterik 2mo ago
>Whether its dealing with, e.g., "beside the rock" or "in the array", it's doing the same kind of inferential activity. Are you sure about that? Presumably the spatial concept of "inside" and the comp
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by fasterik 2mo ago
For childhood education sure, we don't really need high tech solutions there. But what about training the next generation of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers? Even decades ago, computer algebra systems and numerical solvers st
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by fasterik 2mo ago
Because the degree of realism in a video is determined by implicit knowledge of concepts like "in front of", "behind", "next to", "inside", "outside", "between", "occluded by&
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by fasterik 2mo ago
Agreed that software isn't going to fix our institutions. But we need 0 new software? AlphaFold won its creators a Nobel prize in chemistry and solved a research problem that feeds into every area of biology, medical research, and drug
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by fasterik 2mo ago
Taking a single paragraph of literary text, which is abstract and ambiguous, and converting it into a 3D animation requires an enormous amount of implicit knowledge about spatial relationships, intuitive physics, everyday objects, and so fo
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by fasterik 2mo ago
I don't agree with the assumed equivalence between precision and objectivity. Language can be precise when describing a subjective perspective, and it can be imprecise or ambiguous when describing objective facts. The tendency toward i
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by fasterik 2mo ago
I got really into meditation a few years ago. At the height of my practice, I was doing 1-2 hours per day, and I did one 7-day retreat. Since then, two things happened. One is that I completely lost interest in meditation. The second is tha
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by fasterik 2mo ago
I'm skeptical of that statement to begin with. I would be surprised if models weren't trained on plenty of x86 and Windows internals information. If nothing else, they could be prompted to download the relevant material and then w
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by fasterik 2mo ago
You need to bring both cost and benefit into the argument, and it's not necessarily an obvious win for either side. There are a few complicating factors here. The cost of running a model is not only $/token, but the salaries of th
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by fasterik 2mo ago
Definitely easier. It's the same for humans. You can tell that someone has little of substance say when they cloak everything in big words and elaborate metaphors.
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by fasterik 2mo ago
I love LLMs for technical stuff, but their writing style is horrendous. I also think it's bad form to waste fellow humans' time with walls of generated text. I understand that it's probably a hard technical problem to get mod
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by fasterik 2mo ago
I wouldn't be surprised if this were a general cognitive bias having to do with estimating proportions, and nothing to do specifically with minority groups.
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by fasterik 2mo ago
I'm all for reading the classics, but if you take all of the fun out of reading, nobody is going to do it. If someone had forced me to read Plato instead of Harry Potter as a kid, I wouldn't have done nearly as much reading as I d

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