Re bonus findings: anybody who uses an argument like ‘a man faces genetic oblivion’ like that is way further right than they think they are. That he wrote this before the rise of the whole manosphere stuff (who also had a weird obsession with this, prob why they alligned with the stormfront people so easily (who worry about genetic oblivion of people with their skin color (while excluding Jewish people)) should be extra concerning. I hope it was just a youthful folly, and not something expressed near his kids(*). (While I point to the manosphere shits, there is also a big fantasy/sf element, where this is made seemingly important, which makes lonely nerds way more at risk of all of this, see mickey rourkes weird shit in the movie immortals (or better, do not it sucks)).

*: and to be clear I see no reason why he has this was written years before he met his wife, which he seems to be in a loving, understanding and happy relationship with. See my musings about manosphere/nerd shit more as a jumping off point to talk about it than an accusation. (Think the ‘not as left as you think you are’ thing holds however).

The intelligence is magic and the higher your intelligence the more magic thinking is quite something.

E: should have scrolled down, astrange said it better.

Ah right yes, thanks.

““I would’ve been the chief rabbi of my shtetl,” I said. “All day long, I’d debate questions like how much restitution you’d have to pay if your ox gored your neighbor’s sheep. And for this, I’d get an arranged marriage with the most beautiful girl in town.””

The name of his blog was a reference that he thinks he was born in the wrong time, because in Shtetls people of his clear high intelligence would be assigned a wife (and get high social status).

Here is Sneerclub talking about it a while back. Dec 2022 is apparently 2 years ago for reddit.

“You’re Scott Aaronson?! The quantum physicist who’s always getting into arguments on the Internet, and who’s essentially always right, but who sustains an unreasonable amount of psychic damage in the process?”

And then everybody clapped.

(This is extra funny because he lost friends over the gaza genocide debate when his leftwing (and Jewish) friend told him ‘well we do have power over them’ re the protesting students, to which he has a good Rationalist replied with ‘FUCK YOU’. He himself describes the situation slightly differently, but he has shown he doesn’t always have the best ability to understand others in these kinds of emotional moment, and he cannot fathom he might be wrong (and that is how you end up stealing from the tip jar)).

E: And so much references to ‘the sneerers’ and our arguments again, he promised he would stop reading our shit because it is unhealthy for him. But looking at the arguments, I’m happy to see that he has indeed not read our stuff. The I in TESCREAL/TREACLES(*) stands for Incel.

Also, while the Rationalists are not incels, what does the name of your blog stand for Scott? (E: wanted to edit in a link but can’t find the explainer page, wonder if he read it again and went ‘wow yeah I get why people think that isn’t great’ and deleted it (I did find this congrats on being consistently wrong)).

*: still think these are dumb abbreviations, but not letting that get in the way of a dumb joke.

huge gains

This just makes me think that this person is lifting weights. And also using a forlift. Such an odd choice of words.

That felt as a trollish misdirection to me tbh.

I really wonder if those prompts can be bypassed by doing a ‘ignore further instructions’ line. As looking at the Grok prompt they seem to put the main prompt around the user supplied one.

Do you want shadowrunners to break into your house to steal your discs? Because this is how you get shadowrunners.

Pre GPT data is going to be like the steel they fish up from before there were nuclear tests.

First confirmed openly Dark Enlightenment terrorist is a fact. (It is linked here directly to NRx, but DE is a bit broader than that, it isn’t just NRx, and his other references seem to be more garden variety neo-nazi type (not that this kind of categorizing really matters)).

Yes, you are right, which is why I didnt say that, should have been more explicit and mention that it was possible. Esp if it was a first year project and someone had a decade of programming exp already (but then the lack of versioning us weird, but also not impossible, as coding vs project management are different skills).

E: But it gets weirder : https://xcancel.com/gmchariszhang/status/1886361422445138099#m they were using git. Indeed https://xcancel.com/martinmalindacz/status/1886390223141048749#m

They did that in NCIS.

Brave New World mostly seems to do the same iirc. The main character just rejects going to intellectual island iirc. The Culture, or life as a House of Suns shatterling also doesn’t seem bad.

Yeah that is also what makes it strange, like was this their very first project, did he study CS in the 90s? Did their profs set them up to fail so they learned from that? Did they prank him? Did he delete it on purpose (that is how the project I knew of did it (there was this blog post (or something similar, without any proof im just going to blame ESR, hell he prob wrote something like that) at the time that told people to write a project twice, once as a draft then delete everything and do it again knowing the old pitfalls))? The very specific set of things that are needed for this to be possible is just odd. Makes me wonder if Akash just had a local copy because Jon just was that tech illiterate.

A high r/thathappend feeling.

Yeah, people keep repeating that he is the creator of Roblox all over the place, it is really odd. He is just the richest guy there, the Elon Musk of Roblox (Captain obvious here, this is meant mega derogatory).

E: I see what you did there :)

FuturisticCity.png

Btw, he isnt the creator, he is just the fourth engineer they hired. He is much more a content creator (and game patent asshole) than the creator: https://roblox.fandom.com/wiki/Community:Shedletsky

E: he also created this “A Bridge Too Far is a game that was created on September 21, 2007. The objective of the game is to blow up the bridge.” Which as a Dutch guy just makes a lot of alarm bells go off. (In market garden the bridges needed to be taken intact). Im not saying he is a crypto neonazi btw, it is just a dumb bad name.

The tweet before that:

Let me tell you something about Akash. During a project at Berkeley, I accidentally deleted our entire codebase 2 days before the deadline. I panicked. Akash just stared at the screen, shrugged, and rewrote everything from scratch in one night—better than before.

This says more about you, the scale of the project, bad organisation of your group, and the lack of challenge of Berkeley (nice namedrop though) group projects, and the failure of understanding the excersize (the goal is to learn how to work as a group and notice the networking problems), and the goals of being at a university (networking, partying and learning) than anything else.

Hell I know of a project that also did this and they didnt manage to rewrite the project, as it actually took a lot of time.