Buckle up humans; because humanity's last exam just dropped: https://lastexam.ai/ (Hacker News discussion). May the odds be ever in your favor.
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
1 points (100.0% liked)
TechTakes
1560 readers
22 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
You may have heard that Catturd doesn't have any fiber in his diet and was hospitalized for bowel blockage. (Best sneer I've seen so far: "can't turd.") Along similar lines, Srid isn't taking his statins for high cholesterol caused by a carnivore diet.
Meta: I'm kind of pissed that Catturd is WP notable but laughing my ass off at the page for carnivore diets. Life takes and gives.
what, are statins woke now?
edit wtf 'sneak did this too? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42800452
I love how srid deflects by claiming no one has reported bad outcomes from the "meat and butter" diet... I found an endless stream of anecdotes from Google, like this.
can you imagine sneak, of all people, telling you you're crazy and probably being right?
you could say that being full of shit finally caught up to him
Here's a bonus high fiber diet pro-tip: Metamucil tastes like old socks and individual capsules have hardly any fiber anyway, I eat triscuits and Oroweat Double-Fiber bread instead because they're both much much better tasting. Also chili is the food of the gods.
My favorite part of the carnivore diet is that apparently scurvy can become enough of a problem that you'll see references to "not wanting to start the vitamin C debate" in forums.
I'm pretty sure it's not just a me thing, but I thought we all knew that sailors kept citrus on board specifically to prevent scurvy by providing vitamin C and that we all learned about this as kids when either a teacher tried to make the colonial era interesting or we got vaguely curious about pirates at some point.
scurvy? what year do we have? maybe they need to include mice in their diet since rodents can make their own vitamin C (iirc)
if they start eating rat, does that technically define them as cannibals? given how much of their ilk become diet target...
I learnt about it because I was so damn interested in sauerkraut.
So that's how to translate "Yo, this diet is for chumps" into Wikipedian.
Polish commentary on Hitlergruß: https://bsky.app/profile/smutnehistorie.bsky.social/post/3lgaoyezhgc2c
Translation:
- it’s just a Hindu symbol of prosperity
- a normal Roman salute
- regular rail car
- wait a second
Rationalist death count keeps climbing https://xcancel.com/jessi_cata/status/1882182975804363141#m
Does anyone know who or what is Ziz in this context? Google says jewish mythological beast.
edit: found this:
The Zizians were a cult that focused on relatively extreme animal welfare, even by EA standards, and used a Timeless/Updateless decision theory, where being aggressive and escalatory was helpful as long as it helped other world branches/acausally traded with other worlds to solve the animal welfare crisis.
They apparently made a new personality called Maia in Pasek, and this resulted in Pasek's suicide.
They also used violence or the threat of violence a lot to achieve their goal.
This caused many problems for Ziz, and she now is in police custody.
that blog in question comes with its own private glossary and is just as dense and long as you can expect. i spent half an hour trying to figure it out and noped when noticed scroll bar position
tfw when you recognize it's Quality Rationalist Content
it's workday, i'm too sober for this
it's like looking from outside at minor splinter groups within scientology, and the purported voice of reason says that the right way to deal with these transgressors is to return to scientologist orthodoxy. it even includes seasteading
It's another one of those things that the further you read the worse it gets, isn't it?
I was reading something David wrote about it at one point, but it seemed like lore too cursed even for the rationalist milieu
yep.
What the fuck?
The agents were conducting a routine roving patrol when they stopped Bauckholt and a female in the town close to the border. During a records check, the unidentified female occupant was removed from the vehicle for further questioning, broke free, and began shooting at the agents, the incident report shows.
After the female suspect was hit by return fire, Bauckholt emerged from the vehicle and also began firing on the agents. He sustained gunshot wounds and was pronounced dead.
....... What the fuck?
The zizian angle makes this so weird. Like, on top of probably being stopped for driving while trans, they might have instigated the shootout to prove to the basilisk that their parallel universe selves/simulated iterations/eternal souls can't be acausally blackmailed.
Ziz is a boogeyman figure to them at this point. I think its deliberate to deflect from the sex abuse stuff (ziz was a part of that whole controversy).
Yeah there is so much untold in the reporting and I'm not going to trust either tpots or border cops. I have no idea whatsoever what to make of this.
Maybe someone will finally write that article…
Jesus wept, it's so frustratingly obvious that anytime some flavor of cop kills someone, the news media reporting (if any) will be this weird Yoda grammar pidgin.
The femoidically gendered female shot with its gun by very personally pulling the trigger, with this viscerally physical action performed by the said femalian in most pointedly concrete terms amounting to it (the femaloidistical entity, a specimen of the species known as females) firing lethal gunshots at the border patrol with the female's own two hands.
Subsequently return fire manifested itself from somewhere and came into contact with the female suspect female. The Justice Enforcement Officers involved in the situation were made a part of a bilateral exchange of gunfire between the shooting female and the officers situated in the scenario in which shooting was, to some extent, quite possibly performed from their side as well.
I know a lot of people are looking for alternatives for programs as stuff is ennshitfying, rot economying, slurping up your data, going all in on llms etc https://european-alternatives.eu/ might help. Have not looked into it myself btw.
Always down for the european alternative if you know what I mean.
trump just dumped half trillion dollars into openai-softbank-oracle thing https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2025/01/21/trump-stargate-ai-openai-oracle-softbank/77861568007/
you'd think it's a perfect bait for saudi sovereign wealth fund, and perhaps it is
for comparison, assuming current levels of spending, this will be something around 1/10 of defense spending in the same timeframe. which goes to, among other things, payrolls of millions of people and maintenance, procurement and development of rather pricey weapons like stealth planes (B-21 is $700M each) and nuclear-armed nuclear-powered submarines ($3.5B per Ohio-class, with $31M missiles, up to 24). this all to burn medium-sized country worth of energy to get more "impressive" c-suite fooling machine
The fact that the first thing a new fascist regime does is promise Larry Ellison a bunch of dollaridoos answers a lot of questions asked by my "ORACLE = NAZIS" tshirt
Elon Musk is already casting doubt on OpenAI’s new, up to $500 billion investment deal with SoftBank (SFTBY+10.51%) and Oracle (ORCL+7.19%), despite backing from his allies — including President Donald Trump. [...] “They don’t actually have the money,” the Tesla (TSLA-1.13%) CEO and close Trump ally said shortly before midnight on Tuesday, in a post on his social media site X. “SoftBank has well under $10 [billion] secured. I have that on good authority,” Musk added just before 1 a.m. ET.
I was mad about this, but then it hit me: this is the kind of thing that happens at the top of a bubble. The nice round numbers, the stolen sci-fi name, the needless intertwining with politics, the lack of any clear purpose for it.
[mr plinkett voice] hey wait a minute wasn't that meant to be a Microsoft project?
Hey wasn't that project contingent on "meaningfully improving the capabilities of OpenAI's AI"?
(Referring to this newsletter of his from last April.)
I like how none of the reporting I've seen on this so far can be bothered to mention Softbank's multi-year, very obvious history of failures
I think I saw like one outlet mention it, and it was buried in the 18th paragraph
Ah yes that will be good for international relations and the morale of law enforcement and anti cybercrime people. Lol it is all so stupid.
This and the releasing of the jan 6 people who assaulted cops (one cop who testified against them got a shitton of messages they got early release) is going to do wonders. Not that it will shake the belief of a lot of people that the repubs are the party of back the blue and law and order.
You gotta love how in the announcement the guy is so blatantly "hey they said and did such nice things for me that I just got a throw them a bone, and if releasing the leader of a notorious drug bazaar who tried to put out a hit on one of his employees is what they want then they can have it!"
Sidenote: AFAIK, even with this pardon, Ulbricht still ended up spending more time in prison than if he took a plea deal he was reportedly offered:
He was offered a plea deal, which would have likely given him a decade-long sentence, with the ability to get out early on good behavior. Worst-case scenario, he would have spent five years in a medium-security prison and been freed.
Gotta say, this whole situation's reminding me of SBF - both of them thought they could outsmart the Feds, and both received much harsher sentences than rich white collar criminals usually get as a result.
Not really sure if he thought he was smart or got bad legal advice from coiners who figured he could get off scot-free because "crypto" and "harm reduction"
Probably both tbh. It really is like SBF round 1, but because it's drugs instead of financial crimes they didn't need to hire Margot Robbie to explain why it's illegal and destructive to everyone from her bath.
SBF
Wonder when his pardon clears.
CIDR 2025 is ongoing (Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research). It's a very good conference in computer science, specifically database research (an equivalent of a journal for non-CS science). And they have a whole session on LLMs called "LLMs ARE THE NEW NO-SQL"
I didn't have time to read the papers yet, believe me I will, but the abstracts are spicy
We systematically develop benchmarks to study [the problem] and find that standard methods answer no more than 20% of queries correctly, confirming the need for further research in this area.
(Text2SQL is Not Enough: Unifying AI and Databases with TAG, Biswal et al.)
Hey guys and gals, I have a slightly different conclusion, maybe a baseline 20% correctness is a great reason to not invest a second more of research time into this nonsense? Jesus DB Christ.
I'd also like to shoutout CIDR for setting up a separate "DATABASES AND ML" session, which is an actual research direction with interesting results (e.g. query optimizers powered by an ML model achieving better results than conventional query optimizers). At least actual professionals are not conflating ML with LLMs.
view more: next ›