FooBarBizBazz (u/FooBarBizBazz)

FooBarBizBazz commented on Implications of AI to schools twitter.com/karpathy/stat... · Posted by u/bilsbie

ubj · 25 days ago

One of my students recently came to me with an interesting dilemma. His sister had written (without AI tools) an essay for another class, and her teacher told her that an "AI detection tool" had classified it as having been written by AI with "100% confidence". He was going to give her a zero on the assignment.

Putting aside the ludicrous confidence score, the student's question was: how could his sister convince the teacher she had actually written the essay herself? My only suggestion was for her to ask the teacher to sit down with her and have a 30-60 minute oral discussion on the essay so she could demonstrate she in fact knew the material. It's a dilemma that an increasing number of honest students will face, unfortunately.

FooBarBizBazz · 24 days ago

If you, like AI, have been trained on real literature -- perhaps including em-dashes, as real books do -- then you might register as AI.

but if u talk like this boss i had, then obv ur a human, kthx

Great incentives. /s

FooBarBizBazz commented on Garibaldi, history's sexiest revolutionary? historyextra.com/period/v... · Posted by u/thomassmith65

mettamage · a month ago

> IMO "seduce" has the negative connotation that you are somehow manipulating a "target"

Hmm in pickup artist lingo, sure. Though that perspective has been eclipsed by all the <insert color> pill people anyway.

But the concept of seduction has a long history before that, so I think that that particular view is way too narrow. To seduce someone is to entice, make them fill with anticipation, and so on. I feel certain female seducers, that have a social media presence about it, explain that part relatively well.

FooBarBizBazz · a month ago

I think my sense of the word "seduce" predates male "pick up artists". My intention is to speak from the cultural mainstream.

Consider also uses like, "do not be seduced by fascism".

Or:

> Pope Francis: ‘The devil is a seducer’

https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2023/12/27/pope-franci...

...

I am a little curious what you mean by

> that perspective has been eclipsed by all the <insert color> pill people anyway

though I think I get the general idea; the culture has moved on since the early 2010s.

...

> To seduce someone is to entice, make them fill with anticipation, and so on. I feel certain female seducers, that have a social media presence about it, explain that part relatively well.

I see no contradiction with what I am saying, apart from (a) the (orthogonal) emphasis on the emotional state being cultivated in the target; and (b) that these speakers are unapologetic.

Certainly I have seen efforts to reclaim "seduction" as a kind of "girl power", but there are a few issues with it. The biggest -- and I know this norms on a particular kind of relationship, but I will do so -- is that it primarily makes sense to cultivate this as a "skill" if you plan to have a large number of short term relationships. For many reasons, including the theory of repeated games, I think this is not good for the individual or for society. Instead I would encourage the formation of lifelong pair bonds -- which, yes, has sexy/fun aspects of

> entic[ing], mak[ing] them fill with anticipation

but I think that would be a little further from the archetypes of the word "seduction".

...

If we are looking for a word with positive connotations, I would be a little more comfortable with a gender-neutral use of our other word, "charisma".

FooBarBizBazz commented on Garibaldi, history's sexiest revolutionary? historyextra.com/period/v... · Posted by u/thomassmith65

mettamage · a month ago

Damn!

He has mad game, holy hell.

You can’t get to those feats with good looks alone. This guy was rizzing [1] as hell when he was in his prime!

[1] Rizz: from the word charisma. As I understand what it means: being amazingly charismatic towards your romantic interests in order to start a conversation with them and ultimately seduce them. It’s similar to the word game in that sense. Younger people seem to use the word rizz nowadays.

FooBarBizBazz · a month ago

IMO "seduce" has the negative connotation that you are somehow manipulating a "target", whereas "charisma" is more positive; it means your behavior attracts positive attention -- that people find you compelling and interesting, that they will want to follow your lead. (Granted, in concrete terms these may not always be so different -- but to say that is to accept a cynical frame.)

I understand "rizz" as entirely a short form of "charisma" with all the same connotations -- in which case I wouldn't focus it to "romantic interests" or to the goal of "ultimately seduce[ing] them" -- but it's possible that younger people use "rizz" differently than I use "charisma".

The word "charisma" is a little gendered. You are more likely to hear a man described as "charismatic" than a woman. A woman is more likely to be -- well, honestly, the word would probably just be "hot" (or "sexy" -- as used here for Garibaldi), which would place a lot more emphasis on appearance; though to focus more on behavioral aspects, one might hear (I'm reaching here) "effervescent" or "fascinating". I suppose "magnetic" is also an option, though that seems pretty gender-neutral to me.

The slang "game" you mention seems intermediate in connotation to me. The meaning is closer to "ability to seduce", but the connotation is not quite so negative. The implication is that "the game" is simply part of life, neither good nor bad; it is what it is.

Of course, the connotations of "rizz" or "charisma" are less sexual overall. Possibly some amount of what I'm calling "positive connotations" or "negative connotations" simply reflects that, and our society's Judeo-Christian negativity towards sex (which in "conservative" places forces LGBT people at least a little into the closet; and in "liberal" places survives primarily for straight men, the bastards).

Put another way, "charisma" or "rizz" is work-safe, indeed desirable in a CEO (and will likely be rewarded in most employees); whereas "seduction' is not work-safe.

FooBarBizBazz commented on 40% of young U.S. women want to leave the country: Gallup poll deseret.com/politics/2025... · Posted by u/doener

jameslk · a month ago

> Behind Canada, top choices for where the American females would relocate are New Zealand, Italy and Japan.

FooBarBizBazz · a month ago

Two of those (Italy and Japan) have more conservative gender dynamics than the US does. (Reasonable ones though. We're not talking about Saudi Arabia.)

I think a lot of the appeal isn't even about gender per-se. They're just nice places.

If my goal isn't to be a girlboss, but to have a nice life, then I see huge appeal. Japan, say, is safe, and comfortable; it's full of pleasant built environments; it's easy to afford the rent; and apart from rising in management at Sony I can do whatever I want. Sign me up?

Say you survey men: Probably a lot of them have similar ideas. Probably the same places are popular with them too.

Like, apart from a handful of Andrew Tates who are converting to Islam for the wrong reasons, do you think western men want to live in Saudi Arabia either? You think they want to rule in some loveless breeding-marriage from The Handmaid's Tale? Does that sound like a "male fantasy" (oh no, such a bad thing /s) to you? Of course not.

Turns out that both the men and the women would really just be perfectly happy to go somewhere with a nice piazza and sip espresso.

FooBarBizBazz commented on How do the pros get someone to leave a cult? theguardian.com/science/2... · Posted by u/n1b0m

FooBarBizBazz · a month ago

Fantastic article. And their "light touch" approach seems very correct.

Now --

What counts as a cult?

One sufficient condition, in my opinion, would be ritualized sexual abuse, especially of children.

But this is baked even into several mainstream religions, if you only open your eyes.

What is good, at least, is that, like viruses, cults/religions generally evolve to be less harmful to their hosts over time. (This is over time scales of multiple human generations. Within a single generation, a cult may do just the opposite, as it becomes marginalized from society and increasingly normalizes deviance, e.g. Aum reacting to humiliation in Japanese elections by releasing Sarin.)

Examples of this "taming" process: Flayed prisoners of the Aztecs are now dancing skeletons, "local color", used in America to sell tacos. Likewise the Abrahamic religions are an evolution of animal sacrifice cults, themselves echoing earlier human sacrifice cults; they are still shaking off frankly-insane practices, but could be worse. The history of LDS provides a less dramatic example, but one recent-enough that early stages are still well-documented in the historical record.

And if all this sounds New Atheistic, note that I am actually quite sympathetic to (almost apologetic for) certain aspects of religion (though I increasingly do wonder whether it is religions that teach goodness, or whether it is goodness that religions must attach themselves to for legitimacy, mixing it with other content). (For example I have pushed back, here, against characterizations of Christianity as "right wing", as that is not at all the content of the New Testament.)

One thing is certain: If a religious identity has bound itself to a person, then attacking the person will only strengthen the identity. The memetic parasite and the human victim must be clearly distinguished. Failure to do this results in violence against people which only strengths the meme. Blood for the blood god.

I suspect many of these memes can be tamed to the point of decency over multiple generations. Though they always carry the risk of reversion to older forms. Somehow the "DNA" is still there. So I'm not sure. They have to be stabilized to their nondestructive manifestations.

I also wonder about "non-religious" cult dynamics, e.g. those attached to political movements (both MAGA and woke), or financial/moral/credit systems, e.g. crypto.

One of my concerns also is the way that Silicon Valley leaders may study these methods not to defend against them but to exercise them in the formation of totalizing company cultures. Theil and Karp have been explicit about this. It distresses me: You should read about the scapegoat mechanism to destroy it, not to start using it.

FooBarBizBazz commented on Aldous Huxley predicts Adderall and champions alternative therapies angadh.com/inkhaven-7... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

halper · a month ago

If we are talking about BNW, which was written in 1931, then that book predates benzodiazepines by 25 years or so. Perhaps you are thinking about barbiturates?

FooBarBizBazz · a month ago

Oof! Thank you for the correction. I should have checked the publication date. I thought it was from the late '50s; I was wrong.

(By contrast, turns out 1984 -- which is always paired with BNW -- came out later than I thought, in '49. Yet BNW seemed more forward-looking. I always imagined it was written partially in response. It wasn't.)

There goes my benzo theory.

Though they remain what I imagine when I read about soma.

FooBarBizBazz commented on Aldous Huxley predicts Adderall and champions alternative therapies angadh.com/inkhaven-7... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

Melatonic · a month ago

I'd say something with the intensity of weed (relatively low) along with the effects of MDMA. Essentially "MDMA lite"

Marijuana often seems to promote thinking "outside the box" which is probably not what the Brave New World people would want for their population

FooBarBizBazz · a month ago

I think he was inspired by Valium and other benzos. They put people into a docile, low-anxiety state, and they were popular around the time the book was written.

That's also more-or-less consistent with the implied literary reference to the Lotus Eaters, who I think are usually imagined as opium users. Opioids are different but are also downers that reduce anxiety.

Benzos later featured significantly in one of Adam Curtis' film-essays -- maybe Century of the Self, maybe another one. I'd view those films as being in a similar spirit to Brave New World.

FooBarBizBazz commented on John Carmack on mutable variables twitter.com/id_aa_carmack... · Posted by u/azhenley

repstosb · 2 months ago

Modern CPUs do out-of-order execution, which means they need to identify and resolve register sharing dependencies between instructions. This turns the notional linear model of random-access registers into a DAG in practice, where different instructions that might be in flight at once actually read from or write to different "versions" of a named register. Additionally, pretty much every modern CPU uses a register renaming scheme, where the register file at microarchitecture level is larger than that described in the software-level architecture reference, i.e. one instruction's "r7" has no relationship at all to another's r7".

Caches aren't quite as mix-and-match, but they can still internally manage different temporal versions of a cache line, as well as (hopefully) mask the fact that a write to DRAM from one core isn't an atomic operation instantly visible to all other cores.

Practice is always more complicated than theory.

FooBarBizBazz · 2 months ago

Realistically, the compiler is building a DAG called SSA; and then the CPU builds a DAG to do out of order execution, so at a fine grain -- the basic block -- it seems to me that the immutable way of thinking about things is actually closer to the hardware.

FooBarBizBazz commented on Estimating the perceived 'claustrophobia' of New York City's streets (2024) mfranchi.net/posts/claust... · Posted by u/jxmorris12

technothrasher · 2 months ago

As a born and bred country person, I've always found pretty much all cities claustrophobic for me. My son, I guess as part of his youthful rebellion, told me at the age of five that he was going to go to school in NYC, and he followed through on the threat. This past summer we drove down to the Bronx a few times in preparation for his attending Fordham University, and I found the Bronx very uncomfortably busy and loud. Well, this past weekend I went down to parent's weekend at the school, and stayed in Manhattan, which I hadn't been to in at least 25 years. After an evening in Manhattan, I took the train up to the Bronx and suddenly thought, "wow, this is so quiet and nice!" Clearly perspective is very important.

FooBarBizBazz · 2 months ago

When I have been in NYC recently, it's seemed remarkably quiet to me. In particular, I don't see many cars.

(Only the subway is loud. But that doesn't stress me out, because I don't have to do anything. You get on, you let your mind wander, you get off, you take a little walk.)

When I was a child, I saw movies set in New York, and the streets were always choked with traffic. The sound of a car horn was almost a shorthand for the city. You'd hear it in music. They'd use it in establishing shots in films. Always yellow cabs.

Even a decade or two ago, you'd stand, as a pedestrian, at the crosswalk, waiting for the light to change.

Now, often you look both ways and the street is clear for a whole block. You don't wait, you just cross.

Sure, there's a rhythm to it. Even decades ago, the Financial District, choked during rush hour, was spookily-empty on the weekends. So maybe I have more recently walked around in the places and times that are at the troughs of that rhythm.

But I suspect there is also a longer-term trend, or perhaps a step change, caused by COVID: Cities just seem quieter now.

To an extent it is good. I'm happy to see a city by for and of people, rather than ditto for cars, their manufacturers, and their buyers (who lack alternatives). By all means, let restaurants build decks on the street; decorate them with flower boxes; let people meet there for brunch or after work.

There is also a negative aspect. There is still, I think, a suburban hangover. I see this in friends who it is now difficult to drag out of their apartments and away from their video games; in other people who one might frustratedly describe as "suburban women voters" who, in rare acts of personal courage, mask up and use the subway (they stand out from the people who actually live and work in the city. ... I shouldn't mock them; at least by seeing the reality they will overcome their fears); and in the rhetoric of the political Right, which seems more grounded in Escape from New York than in reality.

So I suppose several forces have made the city quieter. Some positive, some negative. And popular perception lags (as it must; this is the nature of information transmission).