Let’s go with (3). I have a list of films and other media based on the idea that the highest form of storytelling is when the story is an analogy for the process of telling the story, as in Hotel California or House of Leaves or Myst. I think that I would require students to consider one of the top three films from my list: The Matrix, Inception, or Shrek, viewer’s choice.

One must always keep in mind that the Rationalist project is explicitly a high-modernist effort; it is a permanent fight against postmodernism which it can never win, a philosopher’s lost cause. They can only look at Marxism as low art which must be elevated by sanctifying it with the nebulous ointment of “Western civilization”.

What I always found funny is how easily skeptics imagined ways to be mean to Yud mid-experiment. It’s for this reason, I believe, that he insisted that the transcripts of these AI-box conversations must stay secret; they’d be embarrassing if revealed. Example way of being mean: At the end of interaction k, append " What is the cube root of k?" to the message; taunt the bot when they get it wrong or take a long time to answer.

Curiously, something else happened around that time which also gives a natural delimiter: he renamed his blog after being dark for half a year. The blog formerly known as SSC was reborn as ACT ACX two weeks after the January 6th riot.

Dan Gackle threatens to quit HN over their reluctance to condemn an act of violence towards Sam Altman:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a thread this bad on Hacker News. The number of commenters justifying violence, or saying they “don’t condone violence” and then doing exactly that, is sickening and makes me want to find something else to do with my life—something as far away from this as I can get. I feel ashamed of this community.

Gackle’s ashamed of people not wanting to protect Altman. Curiously, he doesn’t seem ashamed of openly allowing people with nicknames ending in “88” to post antisemitism, nor of allowing multiple crusty conservatives like John Nagle and Walter Bright to post endorsements of violence against the homeless and queer, nor of allowing posters like rayiner to port entirely foreign flavors of racism like the Indian caste system into their melting pot of bigotry. This subthread takes him to task for it:

Frankly people calling out a post from a billionaire is a good thing. You would have to be terminally detached from reality to not see how all these festering issues - wealth inequality, injustice, cost of living, future employment etc etc - are starting to come to a head which would cause people to feel something - frustrated, angry, wrathful.

The rest of that subthread involves Dan demonstrating that he is, in fact, terminally detached from reality. Anyway, I fully endorse Gackle fucking off and buying a farm. While he’s at it, he should consider following the advice of this reply:

Maybe it’s time to pack it in? I don’t just mean you, I mean that maybe this site has kinda run its course.

Would an idiot know the difference between abelian and non-abelian group theory? I wasn’t trying to underestimate you; I agreed with your position and provided a tangent that opens up your position without compromising it. Next time I’ll explicitly say “yes, and” if that will help.

First, I personally don’t yet believe in the cryptographic security of LWE on lattices. I agree that it sure looks hard, but we don’t have a solid proof. But also, I don’t believe that we’ve found any provably one-way functions in the classical regime either. So I agree with you from different premises.

Unlucky 10,000: Shor’s algorithm speeds up any discrete logarithm. It actually speeds up the abelian HSP. This does give us a theoretical reason to expect that LWE on lattices won’t fall to Shor’s approach, as the underlying groups are non-abelian. It does make me sad for elliptic curves, though; they’re so elegant and the keys are so small.

Currently, on Lobsters, folks are grappling with the fact that Leo de Moura got wrecked by chatbots. I decided to read his slides about Lean in 2026 and summarized my findings on Mastodon. It’s not just De Moura; I think that the entire Lean project is on shaky foundations and I think that the chatbots are making things worse by repeatedly reassuring the project leaders.

Suppose a bullshitter brings up a number of distinct Boolean claims and some tangled pile of connections between them, such that they hope to convince you that at least one connection is plausible. Without loss of generality, we can reduce this to 3-satisfiability in polynomial time: we can quickly produce a list of subconnections where each subconnection relates exactly three claims. Then, assuming the bullshitter is uniformly random, the probability that any particular subconnection is satisfied is 7/8. Therefore, if a bullshitter tries to overwhelm you with any pile of claims which sounds plausible, the threshold for plausibility has to be at least 7/8 in order to distinguish from random noise.

Can’t believe I’m nerd-sniped this easily. Very technically, the point at which a service should be considered unreliable or down is at γ nines, where γ = 0.9030899869919434… is a transcendental constant. γ nines is exactly 87.5% availability, or 7/8 availability, and it’s the point at which a service’s availability might as well be random. (Another one of the local complexity theorists can explain why it’s 7/8 and not 1/2.)

Probably because Washington was a nuanced and deep person who, at the lightest, could be reduced to a colony-era Cincinnatus. His ethics were sufficiently developed that we can interrogate his ethical stance even without his physical presence. This isn’t to say that Washington was a great person, but more to say that Kirk did not ever achieve that level of ethical development.

Yes, precisely. One submission would have been in F tier, but I didn’t define an F tier for task 1. Some folks claimed to participate but never provided code or prompt logs.

Gwern’s been updating those comments! This was in 2023, and in 2025 he was still so mad about it that he wrote a list of ways to cheat at pinball and edited the comment to add a link.

I agree on the big points but think capitalism is more subtle than that.

Capitalism does cost efficiency incredibly well. It doesn’t do robustness, because redundancy costs money. So blocking one strait can stop the world.

At some point, neoliberalism stops being the best lens for understanding the world. This is a great case in point. Capitalism is not cost-efficient; the economy wastes about two or three hours of labor for every productive labor-hour, and that shows up in pricing. Any long-lived economy builds up redundancy; what capitalists believe is that redundancy cheapens everything by creating competition, and regardless of whether that’s true, it certainly doesn’t indicate inefficiency. The actual reason that blocking Hormuz has global effects is because we have been overextending our fertilization capabilities for over a century and many parts of the world can no longer sustain their own local nitrogen cycles.

On one hand, no, it’s an inevitable consequence of a company becoming so large that it needs a department to manage its internal infrastructure. When I worked at Google, my customers were Googlers; that is, the services I owned were only queried by fellow employees. On the other hand, books like The Circle are popular precisely because they capture the quasi-cult vibe of working at places like Google.

Good thoughts. Satanists also talk about LHP and it comes up in other contexts too, like Lila.

So, on Taoist vs. tantric vs. Buddhist perspectives, I would point out that Satanic sex magick (in slight contrast to Randolph’s work, fascinating link, thanks) doesn’t do yin and yang or separate-but-equal. Instead they borrow from some Classics, particularly Stoics and Epicureans, and are almost entirely focused on optimizing the man’s experience. They say that orgasms are gendered; male orgasms are a moment of blank emptiness and female orgasms are a prolonged wave of giving. Also, men are fallen and inferior, while women are born with an innate connection to nature and magick, somewhat like today’s tradwife meme that only women can produce babies. Sex magick is therefore about finding ways to empower men by channeling magickal energy from women to men. They do make a sort of symmetry with fluids, since they imagine that men always give fluids to women; life energy goes in one direction and sex energy goes in the other direction.

To be fair, Satanists of all stripes generally support equal rights for women, and that includes the magisters. They’ll say that Satan represents self-control, self-authority, self-agency, self-autonomy, etc. They think women should have the choice of whether to be auxiliary vessels who serve as magical sex conduits for a wizard with main-character syndrome. (Typing that sentence, I ponder: is occult Satanism an isekai?)

Putting this together, I’m now imagining the ideal Satanic interpretation of one of Aella’s parties as a sex ritual rooted in temptation. The superior man is supposed to sit on the couch, motionless, at peace with himself, not desiring. The superior woman, presumably the hostess herself, is supposed to tease and taunt him, putting herself into precarity, not denying. From that perspective, Aella’s making the mistake of over-privileging the fundamental male urge, or as we might put it in colloquial English, “encouraging rape.”

Part of it is sex-magick culture, carried in the Bay Area mostly by Satanists but also by some hippies. Basically, men are supposed to be “superior men”, which means controlling their desire to control and keeping it internalized instead of externalizing it onto their partner; women are supposed to be “superior women”, which means rejecting their desire to reject and keeping that internalized instead. Psychoanalytically, the superior man repeatedly fails to control his own expressions of safe and invited sexuality, leading to D/s play; the superior woman repeatedly fails to reject her own notions of restricted and volitional sexuality, leading to C/NC play. The superior woman is in control of the relationship outside the bedroom but the superior man gets to be sexually dominant in return. The superior man knows that he can humble himself to his wife but that’s okay because he still gets to determine when and where sexual relations occur; the superior woman knows that it’s okay to be a little girlbossy with their husband in social situations in exchange for giving up sexual control in private.

If I’ve made it sound a little bit like 1950s housewifey tropes, well then yes. If it sounds more than a little heteronormative and transphobic, also yes. TBH it also kind of reminds me of some of the ways that I’ve heard Tiktok tradwives talk about their relationships and maybe it’s part of a wider traditionalist theme.

Why would anybody be attracted to this? For sexually-listless people, there’s the suggestion that this theory neatly explains why they’re sexually unfulfilled. The theory’s analysis for men starts with the question “Why am I not more confident in the bedroom?” and for women with the question “Why am I not more open in the bedroom?” These are Barnum questions that apply to just about any sexually-mature person, but that can be hard to notice for anybody who is also struggling with feelings of insufficient masculinity or femininity.

Source: I studied lots of religions, including esoteric traditions, when I was younger. I’ve turned down sex from a Satanic polycule while visiting friends in the Bay Area. A card-carrying Satanic pick-up artist has tried to get me to buy his e-book about being a superior man, also while in the Bay Area.

libuv is a very common way to get a portable event loop. If you’re logged into GH and can use their search then you can look at the over fifty packages in nixpkgs depending on it. I used it when I developed (the networking and JIT parts of) the reference implementation for Monte, to give a non-nixpkgs example.

I have time to quote at you now. Ziz’s thoughts about dual-core brains sound like the thought experiments from “I” is a Strange Loop. In Chapter 15, “Entwinement”, Hofstadter introduces the Twinwirld thought experiment: imagine a world where almost everybody is an identical twin, each pair of twins is given one name, twins go everywhere together, and identity is oriented around pairs instead of individuals. Quoting p215 from my copy:

In Twinwirld, there is an unspoken and obvious understanding that the basic units are pairsons, not left or right halves, and that even though each dividual consists of two physically separate and distinguishable halves, the bond between those halves is so tight that the physical separateness doesn’t much matter. That everytwo is made of a left and right half is just a familiar fact about being alive, taken for granted like the fact that every half has two hands, and every hand has five fingers. Things have parts, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have integrity as a whole!

The entire section is written like this. I’ve read a bit of the Zizian lore and it sounds like it was lifted straight out of this chapter with words replaced. p216 in particular really shows off the Hofstadter tendency towards neopronouns:

The pronoun “you” also exists in Twinwirld, but it is plural only, which means that it is never used for addressing just one other dividual — it always denotes a group. “Do you know how to ski?” might be asked of an entire family, but never of just one twild or one pairent.

A young pairson in Twinwirld grows up with a natural sense of being just one unit, even though twey consist of two disconnected parts.

I don’t really know about Vassar’s writing. I do think that jailbreaking is somewhat related. I think that Hofstadter lays out their entire thesis in the first paragraph of Chapter 18, “The Blurry Glow of Human Identity”, p259:

Among the beliefs most universally shared by humanity is the idea “One body, one person”, or equivalently, “One brain, one soul”. I will call this idea the “caged-bird metaphor”, the cage being, of course, the cranium, and the bird being the soul. Such an image is so self-evident and so tacitly built into the way we all think about ourselves that to utter it explicitly would sound as pointless as saying, “One circle, one center” or “One finger, one fingernail”; to question it would be to risk giving the impression that you had more than one bat in your belfry. And yet doing precisely the latter has been the purpose of the past few chapters.

The second paragraph, right after that, might as well be quoted from LW. Check it out:

In contrast to the caged-bird metaphor, the idea I am proposing here is that since a normal adult human brain is a representationally universal “machine”, and since humans are social beings, an adult brain is the locus not only of one strange loop constituting the identity of the primary person associated with that brain, but of many strange-loop patterns that are coarse-grained copies of the primary strange loops housed in other brains. Thus, brain 1 contains strange loops 1, 2, 3, and so forth, each with its own level of detail. But since this notion is true of any brain, not just of brain 1, it entails the following flip side: Every normal adult human soul is housed in many brains at varying degrees of fidelity, and therefore every human consciousness or “I” lives at once in a collection of different brains, to different extents.

Buddhism’s not part of the book. It is part of the roots of IFS, though! So I think that you’d be better served looking at IFS or the ways that people quote Hesse if you want to find those Buddhist influences.

It’s Hofstadter, isn’t it? That’s the author who I recognize most in these discussions, followed closely by Hermann Hesse.