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nihilfit.bsky.social
Cognitive scientist @ A*STAR IHPC; erstwhile philosopher; infrequent poster, but damn, look at that signal/noise ratio!
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Beautifully put.

Funny that this template works just as well with other abstracts: “Fear is a scaffold …” “Empiricism is a scaffold …” “Language is a scaffold …” All terrible qua advice, but they sound so profound!

Slopsec!

That first sentence is the best explanation I’ve seen for why movies keep endlessly rebooting characters back to the origin story.

About once per decade, I encounter an argument so wrong that it *literally* takes my breath away: the experience starts with a chuckle that slowly falters and stills, smothered by rapt horror, culminating in a kind of awe.

In high-school Model UN I specialized in disarmament, but wondered for at least a year why there were always other committees discussing “youth in Asia”; were they starving? Delinquent? Why didn’t I ever see anything about it in the papers? 😯

Incorrect usage of semicolons is forgivable, and can even be charming; it’s a failure to even attempt their use that repels, suggesting a mind whose ideas either flow incontinently or arrive pre-diced into neat chunks. A worthy struggle between mind and language needs the full range of punctuation.

*crab-walked

There’s a recent fad for proposing systems that claim to “preserve e2ee encryption” while systematically spying on the endpoints. This test seems like a sensible formalization of the intuition that such systems really shouldn’t count as e2ee.

i wish there was one LLM and it was in a giant warehouse in New York and it cost $30 a query so we could actually have the fascinating discourse about what it does rather than what it is doing to us

The problem is, this conflation of the natural and the good is literally one of the oldest themes in recorded thought. Which is not to say that it’s not stupid: it absolutely is! But its seeming ineradicability can’t be something we treat as a surprise by this point.

Daily bunny no.2936 takes a scenic river ride

Five people—three researchers and two test subjects—have just seen a color no human has ever seen before.

Some very interesting plots downthread — though I suspect many of the more surprising differences boil down to “where are the physical offices located?”

The Holmes stories are speculative fiction, set in a universe where empirical generalizations work like deductive laws.

they better have new animal crossing out in time for martial law

nested embassies

gut fauna

Oh yes, the DK/VK needs to exist. “Wait, did he just say that blockchain is the only way to verify alignment in vibecode? No way this guy passes his dicky-vicky.” BRB, writing up a quick validation protocol …