As suggested at this thread to general ā€œyeah sounds coolā€. Letā€™s see if this goes anywhere.

Original inspiration:

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to make it a post, thereā€™s no quota here

  • saucerwizard@awful.systems
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    8 months ago

    I grabbed a book on the fermi paradox from the university library and it turned out to be full of Bolstrom and Sandberg x-risk stuff. I canā€™t even enjoy nerd things anymore.

    • self@awful.systems
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      8 months ago

      itā€™s the actual fucking worst when the topics youā€™re researching get popular in TESCREAL circles, because all of the accessible sources past that point have a chance of being cult nonsense that wastes your time

      Iā€™ve been designing some hardware that speaks lambda calculus as a hobby project, and itā€™s frustrating when a lot of the research Iā€™m reading for this is either thinly-veiled cult shit, a grift for grant dollars, or (most often) both. Iā€™ve had to develop a mental filter to stop wasting my time on nonsensical sources:

      • do they make weird claims about Kolmogorov complexity? if so, theyā€™ve been ingesting Ilyaā€™s nonsense about LLMs being Kolmogorov complexity reducers and theyā€™re trying to use a low Kolmogorov complexity lambda calculus representation to implement their machine god. discard this source.
      • do they cite a bunch of AI researchers, either modern or pre-winter? lambda calculus, lisp, and functional programming in general have a long history of being treated as the magic thatā€™ll enable the machine god by AI researchers, and this is the exact low quality shit research that led to the AI winter in the first place. discard this source.
      • at any point do they casually claim that the Church-Turing correspondence has been disproven or that a lambda calculus machine is superturing? throw that crank shit in the trash where it belongs.

      I think the worst part is having to emphasize that Iā€™m not with these cult assholes when I occasionally talk about my hobby work ā€” Iā€™m not in it to make the revolutionary machine thatā€™ll destroy the Turing orthodoxy or implement anyoneā€™s machine god. what Iā€™m making most likely wonā€™t even be efficient for basic algorithms. the reason why Iā€™m drawn to this work is because itā€™s fun to implement a machine whose language is a representation of pure math (that can easily be built up into an ML-like assembly language with not much tooling), and I really like how that representation lends itself to an HDL implementation.

        • self@awful.systems
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          8 months ago

          oh absolutely! I get too much exposure to the crank side of all of those topics from my family, so I can definitely relate. now Iā€™m flashing back to the last couple of times my mom learned the artificial sweetener I use is killing me (from the same discredited source every time; they make the ā€œdiscoveryā€ that a new artificial sweetener causes cancer every few years) and came over specifically to try and convince me to throw out the whole bag

            • self@awful.systems
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              8 months ago

              that too! processed sugar was the devil too, as if granulizing cane sugar imbued it with the essence of evil. she also claimed they used bleach to make white refined sugar? I think the end goal was to get me to reject the idea of flavor. jokeā€™s on that lady, my cooking is both much better than hers and absolutely terrible for you

      • blakestacey@awful.systems
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        8 months ago

        Oh boy, I have thoughts about Kolmogorov complexity. I might actually write a section in my textbook-in-progress to explain why it canā€™t do what LessWrongers want it to.

        A silly thought I had the other day: If you allow your Universal Turing Machine to have enough states, you could totally set it up so that if the first symbol it reads is ā€œ0ā€, it outputs the full text of The Master and Margarita in UNICODE, whereas if it reads ā€œ1ā€, it goes on to read the tuples specifying another TM and operates as usual. More generally, you could take any 2^N - 1 arbitrarily long strings, assign each one an N-bit abbreviation, and have the UTM spit out the string with the given abbreviation if the first N bits on the tape are not all zeros.

        • froztbyte@awful.systems
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          8 months ago

          You could use the recent-ish Junferno video about Turing machines to demonstrate that point as well

      • froztbyte@awful.systems
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        8 months ago

        doing work thatā€™s not trying to free us from the tyranny of century-old mathematical formulations? how dare you! burn the witch!

        (/s, of course! also your hardware calculus project sounds like a nicer time than my batshit idea (I want to make a fluidic processorā€¦ somedayā€¦))

        • self@awful.systems
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          8 months ago

          I want to make a fluidic processorā€¦ somedayā€¦

          fuck yeah! this sounds like the kind of thing thatā€™d be incredibly beautiful if done on the macro scale (if thatā€™s possible) ā€” I love computational art projects that clearly show their mechanism of action. itā€™s unfortunate that a majority of hardware designers have a ā€œwhatā€™s the point of this, itā€™s not generating value for shareholdersā€ attitude, because thatā€™s the point! I will make a uniquely beautiful computing machine and it wonā€™t have any residual value any capitalist assholes can extract other than the beauty!

          if I ever finish this thing, I should make a coprocessor that can trace its closure lists live as it reduces lambda calculus terms and render them as fractal art to a screen. I think thatā€™d be fun to watch.

          • froztbyte@awful.systems
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            8 months ago

            Yep. I love beautiful machines with beautiful action in the same way.

            One of my favourites Iā€™ve seen was a clock with a tilt table, switchback running tracks running widthwise across that table, and switches by the track ends. A small ball would run across the track for 60s until it hits the switch, which would cause a lever system to flip the orientation of the tilt table (starting the ball movement the other way).

            Saw it in the one London collection of typically-stolen antiquities, I donā€™t recall the origin of it.

            For the processor: yep, something larger is the intent, but I think Iā€™d have to start with a model scale first just to suss out some practical problems. And then when scaling it, other problems. God knows if Iā€™d want to make this ā€œyou can walk in itā€ scale, but Iā€™ll see šŸ˜