nullpunktsenergie

et in arcadia ego

[nullpunktsenergie @CptLGulliver]

And since that time I have come to understand the false-hood of all the revolutions in history: They destroy only those carriers of evil contemporary with them [...] And they then take to themselves as their heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more.

-Solzhenitsyn

[Christopher Landau @ChrisLandauUSA]

@quitavisas

[Marco Rubio @marcorubio]

Fidel Castro was a complete failure at everything except destroying Cuba and impoverishing, jailing and murdering his own people

I strongly suggest that anyone tempted to try and follow his example should carefully reconsider, because if they do they would be dooming themselves to failure as well

[Sabine Hossenfelder @skdh]

Penrose's argument, in a nutshell, is that since humans can understand Goedel's theorem, consciousness is uncomputable and physics incomplete. I've always found it quite charming, the idea that understanding Goedel's theorem is an indicator for consciousness, seeing how few people actually understand Goedel's theorem.

In any case, the argument from Goedel's theorem is why, I believe, Penrose thinks that the measurement process in quantum mechanics is relevant for human consciousness. Because it's the only place in the foundations where you can fumble in some new physics that is plausibly relevant in the human brain. Hence the story with the microtubules. And if you believe that, then AI can't be conscious because it's algorithmic. Though presumably a quantum computer could be conscious, if it emuluates the quantum process that is supposedly relevant for consciousness.

(Penrose's model for wavefunction collapse by gravity is totally computable and actually does not fit that narrative.)

Also, I believe Penrose's argument from Goedel's theorem to be technically wrong. It is possible to algorithmically understand (and even prove) Goedel's theorem without violating Goedel's theorem because the theorem itself is a meta-statement about the Goedel sentence(s) and not the sentence itself. In some sense, Penrose's argument is wrong for the same reason Goedel's theorem exists in the first place, that you can make meta-statements about statements. In fact there have been computer-generated symbolic proofs of Goedel's theorem long before the AI boom.

It's not that I have an obsession with Penrose in particular, it just so happens that my interests have a big overlap with his. I have an interview with Penrose in my 2022 book "Existential Physics" on these and related problems.

https://t.co/PB8d8Vidkq

[Isa @isssa0x]

Insurance is the oldest of the four ways. It is a nine-trillion-dollar global industry. The equation underneath it was invented in 1560 by a broke Italian gambler.

His name was Girolamo Cardano. He wrote a book called Liber de Ludo Aleae. A short manual on how to win at dice. Nobody in finance read it for four hundred years.

Then in 1996 a ninety-year-old man in New York wrote a book that traced every modern risk model back to that manual. He called it Against the Gods. One thesis. Every dollar of premium ever collected on Earth is a footnote to a gambler scribbling in Milan.

His name was Peter Bernstein. He founded the Journal of Portfolio Management in 1974 and ran money at Bernstein-Macaulay before that. Wall Street called him the historian of risk.

In 2008 a small production company filmed him for thirteen minutes. He walked through the entire five-hundred-year arc. Cardano to Pascal to Fermat to Black-Scholes. Then he stopped and said the industry had built glass towers on the back of an idea a broke Italian scribbled to settle a card debt.

He died the following summer. Age ninety.

Reinsurance premiums crossed six hundred billion dollars last year. Every actuary on Earth prices catastrophe risk with the same expected-value framework Cardano invented to shave the house edge in Milan.

The video is thirteen minutes and twenty-two seconds long. Free. Eleven years on YouTube. Twenty-nine thousand people have watched it.

Almost none of them work in insurance.

[Poetic Outlaws @OutlawsPoetic]

The simple act of opening a bottle of wine has brought more happiness to the human race than all the collective governments in the history of earth

~ Jim Harrison

[Rod @rod_mallo]

boarding was solved mathematically in 2008. no airline has used it once.

why?

[Sabine Hossenfelder @skdh]

All the focus on Fauci is burying the more important story, which is that scientists enforcing a common narrative to the detriment of truth has become extremely common. It's a strong case of in-group behavior in academia that, I believe, most of them are not fully aware of.

As @LocasaleLab put it so aptly "the academic system punishes honesty".

And this is the real story: This isn't just about Fauci. Fauci is just an extreme and very visible example in a case that has attracted a lot of public attention. But misleading the public about the status of scientific research has become extremely widespread.

[Fuck You I Quit @fuckyouiquit]

What level of capitalism is it when you destroy books to feed robots?

[Nilen @limroul1111]

David Foster Wallace was exactly right when he said that your ability to derive meaning comes down to your ability to concentrate. It's so painfully true I uninstalled Instagram.

[wally b kleeposting @kleeposting]

I can't express how lucky I was to have spent my formative years with an internet that was shaped by >110 IQ nerds instead of third world content farms struggling over 5$ of ad revenue

[Charlie D. Becker @charliedbecker]

I'm a second-generation bookseller. My family runs Houston's largest used & rare bookstore and I'm building an AI tool for used bookstores. We got hit by exactly these orders, including a single order for 70 obscure books that made us pause online sales entirely. So I dug in. I don't think this connects the way people want it to.

Every ingredient of the viral story is true. ISBNdb really does advertise sourcing books for AI companies. Anthropic really did destructively scan millions of books though they were mostly acquired through things like library deaccessions, not bookstore inventory. And booksellers really are getting bizarre bulk orders. But "rare" here isn't what you're picturing. It's The Insider's Guide to Metro Denver (1995) and how-to-use-WordPerfect 1991 manuals. Obscure, but often not precious.

When we combed through our orders, nearly every book bought from us was either unavailable on Amazon or listed there at 5, 10, 20x our price on the platform they were purchased on. And the shipments are going to FBA prep companies: which is what you do with a book you're about to resell, not one you're about to cut apart. There is more than circumstantial evidence that this is a well-funded company running algorithmic arbitrage, buying underpriced or out-of-stock books to relist on Amazon at markup. This evidence includes an official denial that they are selling to train AI but I don't want to mention them for several reasons. You can Google it.

That's more mundane than the shredder story. The actual risk is worse, though, because it's quieter: books that don't sell via FBA eventually get liquidated. If we really hold the last copies of some of these (and comparing platforms, it looks like we might) we're feeding them into a portal they may not come back from. No AI company required.

Everyone assumes the internet preserved everything. It didn't. Many of these books have almost no metadata anywhere, just a scattered listings across proprietary databases then nothing. That's what my project is for: building better bibliographic records for these books than exist anywhere else, so we at least have a map of what we stand to lose. So the Library of Alexandria is still burning, just more slowly, and kore from “who cares” than from some cinematic villain.

(I am open to being corrected.)

Full writeup: https://t.co/tHXMH0L3us

[Poetic Outlaws @OutlawsPoetic]

“I am against revolutions because they always involve a return to status quo. I am against the status quo both before and after revolutions.

I don’t want to wear a black shirt or a red shirt. I want to wear the shirt that suits my taste. And I don’t want to salute like an automaton either.

I prefer to shake hands when I meet someone I like. The fact is, to put it simply, I am positively against all this crap which is carried on first in the name of this thing, then in the name of that. I believe only in what is active, immediate and personal.”

— Henry Miller

[naiive @naiivememe]

eggs watching the rest of the fridge from their private balcony

[Pablo Majluf @pablo_majluf]

Lleva décadas sobrevalorada la UNAM. El lema de la "máxima casa de estudios" es mitología que nadie puede cuestionar. Nos cuesta 54 mil MDP al año y el 80% se va en nómina. Una fábrica de obradorismo, porros y títulos plagiados. Imposible el ascenso de este régimen sin ella.

[mason⸆⸉ 🌊☁️ @portofino_view]

why is dick van dyke an acceptable name but pussy van faggot isn’t