Ex

i think it's very possible that cultural decline is, in fact, happening, but if everyone who is having this take is a boomer who hasn't played a single video game or read homestuck, i seriously feel like there's a missing angle to the analysis

the lightcone needs you to lock in son

Yeah, all right, let's talk about James Damore. It's been eight years, and I really doubt Harj (who was my boss at the time) is the only person for whom it was a formative experience. For those of you who have no recollection of any of this, either because you are wisely an offline person or because you got outraged for five minutes and then forgot all about it, James Damore was a Google software engineer who wrote a memo arguing that, while diversity and inclusion were good goals, bias was not the main reason there weren't more women in tech, and differences in personality between men and women probably explained a lot of it. There was a lot in the memo that felt like a distraction to me, or where I had a nitpick, but fundamentally it was not only basically correct (women are less likely than men to become software engineers, and this is not only because of bias), but also Damore was saying this for the sake of having a more productive conversation about how to get more women into tech, a goal that everyone around him was fervently espousing. The memo has a painful-in-hindsight quality of earnestness: "you want more women in tech, and I think you're mistaken about how to get there! if I show you some published psychology research we can actually design better means to your goal!". Anyway. The internet was outraged. He got fired from Google. And he applied to the tech hiring startup I worked at, Triplebyte, which offered background-blind screening to anyone who wanted to be a software engineer. We really believed in the mission, at Triplebyte. I think I ended up kind of badly calibrated about how earnest to expect people to be everywhere else. We found people working as janitors and line cooks and homemakers who could code, and we got them 6 figure jobs, and we were proud of it. James Damore did very well on our tests. I got assigned to write him a profile for our companies. And then people freaked out. A lot of them had the impression that he would create a hostile environment for any woman he worked with, and thought that trying to help him get a new job was tantamount to endorsing everything in his wildly controversial memo. I didn't even like the memo that much, but I was kind of horrified, because - it's one thing to get fired for talking about politics at work in a way that causes a massive national firestorm. I kind of expect that we would all get fired for that. But it is another thing entirely to get effectively blacklisted from your industry, to have people decide on the basis of your political opinions that we shouldn't even put you up on the platform and let companies decide individually whether to schedule interviews. Tech jobs were not that hard to come by in 2017 if you were really good at your job, and Damore was. Firing isn't that threatening to software engineers. Blacklisting is terrifying. I'd been at Triplebyte for like six months at this point, it was my first job after graduation, and I was honestly way out of my lane, but I made a pretty big fuss internally. (It helped that I suspected a lot of people agreed with me but I was a woman and it was safer for me to say it.) I said that we were not in the business of deciding who had good politics, that we shared this country with many people who profoundly disagreed with each other, that companies could assess for themselves if he worked respectfully with female engineers, and that we should put him on the site and let them decide. We did. And then Harj was immediately contacted by recruiters from companies we worked with that were horrified that we had. They felt that by not banning him from our platform we were endorsing his memo, that we were showing values not in line with their priorities. Harj talks about this more in the linked podcast. James Damore was egregiously wronged. To my knowledge he's a good software engineer with extremely reasonable, approximately accurate opinions about the reasons there were fewer women in software engineering, which he shared in good faith, and a lot of people who should've known better really did try to drive him out of the industry for it. It was wrong. If it is done to people on the basis of any other political opinion it is also wrong then. We need, as a society, the ability to live with disagreement, to dislike each other without trying to destroy each other, to find common ground instead of finding heretics; I believed that at Peak Woke and I believe it now.

fish

why does every piece of ai generated fiction sound like this. how much 2016 tumblr went into the training data

@robertwiblin outside the ~rat canon, I really liked War Made New by Max Boot. it's about how much technological progress (and the strength and intelligence needed to adapt to the changed rules from said progress) shapes warfare. also an incredibly fun read

I'm looking to do a few interviews about big important ideas (not to do with AI in particular). What's the non-fiction book / paper / article you've read that most changed your view of the world? Or was just generally mind-blowing.

im a proud clanker thanker

@etirabys i rly like those individually packaged asian tofu snacks that try to emulate meat

I'd like to run a fake meat tasting so that reducetarians like me can quickly discover what they like enough to buy. I'm hoping to get ~10 meat alternatives that (1) aren't the well-known ones every Californian has tried, (2) are *some* people's favorites. I am soliciting recs

the most human thing about us is our technology

we strongly agree with cade metz and that one random theologist lady he talked to that the rationalist movement is a religion and lighthaven is its temple. we would like to claim property tax exemption immediately

@lydialaurenson you might be interested in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia…

A friend sent me a website for a new magazine and I said I think they used AI to write their website. My friend thinks it’s unlikely. Now I’m trying to describe tells of AI writing: The "it's not X, it's Y" formulation is usually a tell of AI writing. So are em dashes when used in a certain way, and certain types of rhetorical questions. Does that seem correct?

And they say LLMs can't be funny.

@Macbaconai this piece fucks! you kind of have a house style and it's still present here but it's also interestingly different; some of ur other pieces have a rly stark contrast between the plain and the intricate sections, here theres more of a gradation. plus i love the colours used here

@razibkhan slightly strange point to make at a time when a dozen or so australian women successfully pressured Visa and MasterCard enough that itch and steam had to remove a bunch of games. women can't cooperate unless they all read a sufficient amount of feminist theory?

found an audiobook of it so I figure I'd let my cursed amulet read aloud the 30 hour long Spell of Transform Rationalist Into Buddhists to me (MCTB 2nd Ed) but don't worry guys I won't let it get me I'm built different

Im afraid this is my favorite meal. Im afraid if I leave I won’t have anything like it ever again. Im afraid of the uncertainties of the future. Will it have bbq? Will the beer be cold? Will I be able to find it drunk? Will I be able to leave it in the past when the time comes?

donated eggs. the recipients want two kids, but if the first one fucks up their milestones, who knows if the second one will end up happening. so that first kiddo better hustle. otherwise theyll be in expectation killing a guy. this is a good way to think abt moral culpability

guy who textposts into llms instead of social media because the response they get is so much higher quality

@girllich1 ty! that's really cool, my own promt instructs it on how it should navigate the approximately 30k of structured notes i've provided but I haven't really thought about how to get it to ponder themes and dynamics more deeply. is the variable thing actually useful for that? :0

Part of my prompt: * Draw conclusions about the worldbuilding from incluing. * Try to read it sequentially, like a human would. * For things that you are unsure about, don't make assumptions, about, like the meaning of unknown words or new concepts, keep them as 'variables' that you don't know the value of, and try to lock down the values of those variables in this and future chapters. * Try to identify unbound variables explicitly- anything you think is weird based on your priors might be an unbound variable, a difference in the secondary, and consider this first. * When variables are bound and you suddenly get a flash of insight, capture this as well. Then I give the model space to summarize each section, and what it is about, in an LLM conversation. This means that when you ask it to write/rewrite (while avoiding creating new unbound variables), it has pre-parsed understanding, meaning that the tokens have much more context.

After working with LLMs on writing projects, it really feels like LLMs really need to be trained for having secondary parallel text thread. The more I interleave space for commentary moments through the work, the better it gets at understanding it.