Afflatus Solis

@gro_tsen does everything consistent exist?

To me the major philosophical problem with ultrafinitism is this: if infinities or even large finite numbers don't exist, how to explain that they appear consistent, in that theories (PA, ZFC, large cardinals) that speak about them don't seem to have any obvious contradictions?

@PhoenixDegen @pfau it would be a remarkable accomplishment if they managed something like that

@pfau except the chinese model could have unexplored behavior that injects subtle vulnerabilities into codebases when triggered

This makes it sound like lawmakers don't understand the difference between fine-tuning an open model and building a wrapper around a closed model API. Just because the model was trained in China, it can't magically send data back to China if you're running inference yourself.

@pleroma_enjoyer @AaronBergman18 lovely then its a total mess

@AfflatusSolis @AaronBergman18 the thing is it's per cell voltage, not overall system voltage that the mfgs use. so you need to know not only how many cells there are but what size and chemistry. basically need to take the battery apart to know

milli-ampere*hours (mAh, what you see on charging banks) is a serious contender for worst unit of all time. It is almost never useful and serves exclusively to obscure rather than clarify It is NOT an amount of energy

@ChrisCroy hmm. i don't see it. not yet at least. im open to rule by claude though

@AfflatusSolis a funny use for AI in India would probably be as polygotic administrators and bureaucrats. Claude can approve permits submitted in any language, won't discriminate based on religion or caste, is immune to bribery, and if someone jailbreaks him there's an incorruptible record.

The first disease AI shall cure may well be Baumol's

@ChrisCroy yeah and that's a train hurtling towards us. oh and the low skilled coding jobs are definitely out with ai. because even if claude costs more (might or might not) its faster

@AfflatusSolis India and other middle/lower income countries are currently broadly immune to AI job loss because Indian college grads will enthusiastically work for far less than frontier model's API costs. Now, if deepseek can do their job...

Congratulations to the US for demolishing this one great advantage they had 👏 if I were still worried about 'countering China' I'd probably be very annoyed by this. Still a bit annoyed though

@dioscuri @NatureUnedited of course on the contrary i hate being bitten by mosquitoes and am unsure whether changing the ecosystem is really a big deal. the changes we've already made have had little negative impact in the grand scheme of things. but im still a little sympathetic to the conservative view

@dioscuri @NatureUnedited of course but getting rid of all mosquitoes would be a much bigger change. and if you wish to reap a big gain in terms of bird malaria then necessarily there must be high impact. since we value the ecosystem more as is (should we?) that change would probably be net negative to us

@AfflatusSolis @NatureUnedited Of course there’s always a degree of uncertainty when intervening in complex systems, but we’ve successfully conducted regional eradication parasite species before without devastating second-order effects, eg the elimination of screw worms in much of the Americas.

@dioscuri @NatureUnedited im very very pro mosquito genocide but are you sure that more birds won't destabilize something in the ecosystem somewhere?

@NatureUnedited Feel very bad for that snake. Global eradication of mosquitoes would be a plausible net good for other animals as well as humans. Birds in particular would benefit — avian malaria is a real killer.

Mosquitoes are opportunistic feeders that take blood from a variety of hosts, including reptiles

@norvid_studies blue

everyone is forced to take a red or a blue pill. if the majority picks blue all the red pills die, otherwise all the blue pills die. which color do you pick? [5000 pages of comments]

@ahaternumberone @morsequal @tenobrus thats how baby hands look

@AfflatusSolis @morsequal @tenobrus why is the little kid fat?

@ahaternumberone @morsequal @tenobrus its a little kid

@morsequal @tenobrus why did you make her fat lmao

Button colour eugenics now! Guys please we've spent enough time on this. Also this really isn't what dath ilan is about

Rebrand done now

@Fefe_no_covfefe @nonregemesse maybe germans are just worse people and thats why they feel it more

@nonregemesse There is still the Weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, saying that if you have one specific word for a thing, you are more likely to think about it as a separate thing. An example is "schadenfreude", where Germans can easily recognize the feeling, while anglophones often misidentify it

Yup I definitely needed a change of pfp. Possibly also name

@thewreathwright No particular allegiance to red. Indeed the blues seem like much better people to me

i feel very similarly, though "never stronger" is perhaps a bit hyperbolic in my case 💙 curious if there are 🔴 folks out there who feel the same

@ryanflorence This isn't new

GPT has a new phenomenon that's driving me nuts and I don't quite know how to describe it. - Ask it if I can do something - It says "no you can't [incredibly twisted restatement of what I asked but also not at all what I asked]" - It then tells me how to do the thing wonderfully - And finishes with an insulting "But you can't just [stupid thing I never actually said]" It goes something like this: "Can I form and coach a youth soccer team for my kid and play in P/D level leagues? Or do I have to be part of a full club?" Then it says: "For official competitive teams in Utah, you cannot just form a random team and enter a league. "There is a lesser-known option: UYSA allows independent teams to enter leagues if they meet requirements. [...lists some simple requirements...] "But it’s not “show up with a group of kids on game day”—it’s more like running a small club team administratively. I never said just "show up with a group of kids on game day"! It does this to me with code too. It's so weird.

@GuyFlavortown @kejca @orrdavid no but they blow their money gambling in casinos all the time

@KrishanghArjun @kejca @orrdavid Do stupid rich people do the lottery? What’s the higher common denominator?

Warren Buffett: "[Gambling] is a tax on stupidity." "Rich people love [legalized gambling] because they don't have to pay. To the extent that states raise money from people who the dollar really means something to them, it actually relieves the taxes on me or other rich people. It's not direct, but it's the net effect." "I don't like things that make a sucker out of people. I don't think the function of the government is to play its people for suckers."