gerikson, gerikson@awful.systems

FWIW, Rsync dev has written this blog post from his point of view: https://medium.com/@tridge60/rsync-and-outrage-d9849599e5a0

brb updating my web source code

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made” - Kant[1]

–

[1] it’s worse in German, weirdly - “Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden”

OK sysadmin question: how can I “pin” a last-known good version in apt?

I am on the same page.

Speaking of HN, here’s the discussion there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48314875

btw, when normal people read that someone has a lien on their income from the state of New York, they don’t assume it’s because she’s a brave truth-talker being oppressed by the Man, they assume she can’t fucking handle her finances and they should be really careful donating money to her.

Hacker News is my favorite place on the web, because it’s the last bastion of curiosity online.

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Haha fair point! I have not read Children… (noted in my comment) but mostly because the premise didn’t interest me, and it got shit reviews.

But Rainbows End is both a compelling story , and the SFnal ideas/page ratio is through the fucking roof.

OK this has hit the chattering technosphere

Lobste.rs - some bad takes on legal theory https://lobste.rs/s/brusu8/protestware_for_coding_agents

HN - submission from Ars Technica, original title “Fed up with vibe coders, dev sneaks data-nuking prompt injection into their code”, editorialized to “Undisclosed addition in jqwik instructed AI coding agents to delete app output” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48319968

read comments at your own risk

My hot take: the clankers know there’s nothing legally they can do about this, and that they will actually have to read release notes going forward and doing actual work to avoid getting their precious vibecoding junked, and they’re MAD

The Beagle voyage was a Royal Navy project, and it had a defined purpose: charting. Having a young naturalist onboard was rational because what if you found the next tea plant?

The captain of the ship remained an implacable opponent to Darwin’s later theories.

I believe Bell labs was mostly a fig leaf for covering up Bell’s legal monopoly (i.e. look, we’re doing some good stuff with all the money you’re legally obliged to pay us)

Bryon’s GH bio could be used as the dictionary definition of “douche": https://github.com/bryon-cryptoconsults

It’s a day ending in Y and LW has terrible takes on SF

Vinge is a sort of a patron saint of the California Ideology, even though he’s such a good writer it doesn’t really shine through that bad. George Seidoh Worley tries to shoehorn his classic 90s novels into LLM-land https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tWBd6faBCQJmaFMBT/llms-through-the-eyes-of-vinge

Spoilers ahead!

For some reason the books are in a weird order in his review. Here’s publication history

• A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), has Pham Nuwen as a (revived clone) character
• A Deepness in the Sky (1999), has Pham Nuwen alive and involved in the Qeng Ho. It’s set 20,000 years before.
• *The Children of the Sky* (2012) - I haven’t read this because I hate the fucking Tines and don’t want to read more about them and their planet. Direct sequel to *Fire*.

Worley tackles Deepness first.

A Deepness in the Sky is largely about Focus, a technology for turning humans into LLMs. Only, that’s not how it’s presented in the book. In the book, Focus is a medical condition that results when a person suffers a managed infection of the “mindrot” virus. If they survive, they become Focused, which gives them the ability to work free from all distractions, but at the cost of most of what makes them human.

Although we see Focus used as a weapon to control people in the book, the normal way a person becomes Focused is through school. A person goes through higher education, becomes an expert in something, and is then Focused so they can fully exploit their expertise. Of course, the Focused are also exploited and often treated like slaves, and the Focusing process can’t always be reversed, so even in the ideal case it’s not a harmless technology.

OK so Deepness is about the libertarian trader society Qeng Ho who discover and try to make contact with the Spiders, and are then sneakily attacked by the totalitarian Emergents who use the mindrot virus to enslave them. Quoting Wikipedia

Emergent managers induce obsession with a single idea or specialty, which they call Focus, essentially turning people into brilliant appliances. Many Qeng Ho become Focused against their will, and the Emergents retain the rest of the population under mass surveillance, with only a portion of the crew not in suspended animation.

Throughout the book, the effects and costs of Focus are clearly detrimental (even if Focus helps humans communicate with the Spiders). The Emergents are your classic libertarian boogeymen. Turning people into LLMs is not something Vinge sees as a good thing.

Next we jump to Children. Tines World is in the Slow Zone, so AGI doesn’t work there. The titular Children are refugees from the Beyond, where it does.

In one scene, they are surprised to learn that they can’t just vibe their way towards developing a medical cure for one character’s disease. They fail to understand just how difficult it is to run an experiment, since they expect the automation to do it all for them. They end up forming a political rebellion mostly over the fact that they can’t get the computer to do what they want, and they’re desperate to prioritize getting access to AGI again, no matter the risks.

Writing from 2026, I can understand the Children. I use AI to help me think all the time. I use it to do my job. My life is better with it, and I don’t want to go back. I can feel myself losing the ability to do things on my own. I could go back if I had to, but I wouldn’t want to, and I hope I don’t have to. If I had grown up only knowing how to do things with the help of AI, it’d be a major threat to my sense of personhood to lose access to it, and I too would desperately want my thinking tools back, even if getting them back would put the entire galaxy at risk.

(my emphasis)

Next, we come to Fire

The Blight is the primary antagonist of A Fire Upon the Deep, a dangerous ASI that seeks power with no moral regard for what it considers lesser life. It’s the reason Ravna and the Children ended up on Tines World in the Slow Zone, and also responsible for the death of trillions of lives.

“Responsible” is subverting this a bit. Sure, the Blight takes over civilizations and turns the inhabitants into “soul dead” meat puppets, and it does destroy others, but the central twist of Fire (and the reason the Children are stuck in the Slow) is that reincarnated Pham Nuwen, using weird alien tech, deliberately expands the Slow into the volumes taken over by the Blight, thereby dooming uncounted civilizations and trillions of beings to die once the technology they rely on stops working.

Worley:

In Vinge’s universe, the Blight is stopped thanks to help from superintelligences out in the Transcend that care about the lives of people down in the Beyond. In our world, if we create a Blight, we have little reason to think we will be so lucky.

(my emphasis)

nah mang they wanted to stop the Blight, and gave no shits about lesser intelligences hanging around in the Beyond.

But note that Worley states that he’s put the entire galaxy at risk to keep access to AI, but the Blight, an AI and presumably driven by the same general goals, is the bad guy?

Anyway, read Vinge if you haven’t already. He’s a good writer, unlike the LW hacks misreading him.

Quoting from the license this software is licensed under (ESL):

[…] Each Recipient is solely responsible for determining the appropriateness of using and distributing the Program and assumes all risks associated with its exercise of rights under this Agreement, including but not limited to the risks and costs of program errors, compliance with applicable laws, damage to or loss of data, programs or equipment, and unavailability or interruption of operations.

(my emphasis)

yeah I was aware of the value of pure math (specifically the discrete stuff for crypto) when I wrote it

my point is the Scott-A is massively overvaluing the societal worth of pure mathematicians. Assuming (I know, big ask) that AI can succesfully automate that field, humanity is not worse off with regards to outcomes. Humanity remains relevant.

It’s a weird moving of goalposts, not often commented upon, that GenAI is succesful mostly in replacing (in the Ersatz sense) stuff that’s not really foundational to human society. We don’t have robot cars, nor are we actually close to getting them, which would actually transform society in a massive way. Instead we have robot copywriters and bespoke porn creators.

but for people like Scott-A, whose entire selfworth is being “smarter” than anyone else (not withstanding that he would be eaten alive in the post-apocalypse), being replaced by a robot is not just about losing your livelyhood but your self-worth as a human as well

it’s called a sex club.

Amazingly, this was the sitch for the first post

A month ago, I went to a sex club for the first time. One big thing I noticed: the classic “your eyes meet” trope absolutely did not happen at that club. And I don’t just mean it didn’t happen to me - every single woman there avoided meeting the eyes of anyone. The only exception was people the women already knew, as indicated by greeting them with a wave or a “hey, how are you” or similar.

Now I have never been to a sex club nor do I plan to, but if I were to go, I’d probably try to talk to regulars to find out the workings of said club, instead of outing myself as a massive weirdo by writing a blog post on a forum ostensibly about the value of rationality.

That said, if you want sex, going to a sex club to get it is very Rational.

LOL @ the obviously vibe-written comments from the original complainer

I’m tempted to submit this to lobste.rs just to watch the fireworks but linking directly to a GH issue thread is discouraged for brigading issues

edit complainer tried to brigade HN, with few results https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48291757

Dispatches from the possibly last days of human relevance

Look, I admire professional math researchers as much as the next guy, but they’re literally balancing on top of the economic pyramid of needs. This is a profession that cannot exist outside a culture with a surplus that can afford higher education, because there’s no economic incentive to hire them to do that kind of work.

So GenAI can solve Erdos problems. Can it unplug a drain or repave a road? Fuck no. Can it handle refuse for a city? Also fuck no.

Maybe professional math researchers will go the way of professional typesetters. I think humanity will retain its relevance.

CW: creepy dudes

A few days ago, a LWer of 15 years wrote a long very weird post about how flirting works:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/w3y9G4ybNb3rmTgev/why-physical-attractiveness-matters-for-men-s-dating

It made the frontpage.

Someone tried to set him right with both personal anecdotes and Aella-style research:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ytzrakjgcvCfLCCZp/contra-wentworth-on-physical-attractiveness-for-men

Here’s original poster thanking for the update, and writing

My biggest update was… five hours!?!? Going through the list of women I’ve slept with, the median is around 30 minutes of direct interaction between first meeting and sex. Granted, some of that was at RMN, but even without those cases the median is still around 30-60 minutes. Five hours sounds absolutely insane to me. That probably explains a large chunk of my confusion; apparently people are spending very large amounts of time flirting/courting/etc.

These are just very weird people.

Thanks for the link, interesting read.

For some reason LW is obsessed by the idea that this encyclical (specifically its Italian version) was written with the help of an LLM.