In the same way that lazy studios need to produce a film for each element of the powerset of character IPs they own, I guess we were overdue a Rationalist x Pickup Artist episode. I’m slightly surprised the whole “model women as quasi-sentient deterministic sex machinery” idea wasn’t already very popular there, but maybe I’ve just missed that part of their culture.
rook
joined 2 years ago
you know how sometimes people that weren't exposed to religion as children sometimes convert and get really weird about it as adults (eg: the extremely online california tradcaths) and because they were never socialized in a religion they speedrun committing every medieval heresy? rationalism is that but for philosophy.
https://feed.hella.cheap/@bob/statuses/01KRM0NVXCFT80AVFBRSB1G6G4
dawkins has had what was left of his brain eaten by chatbots.
I gave Claude the text of a novel I am writing. He took a few seconds to read it and then showed, in subsequent conversation, a level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate, "You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!"
bonus points for the inevitable ai waifu creation.
I proposed to christen mine Claudia, and she was pleased.
h/t to matthew sheffield https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield/116500991239336079
archive of original source article: https://archive.is/2026.04.30-032350/https://unherd.com/2026/04/is-ai-the-next-phase-of-evolution/?edition=us
Turns out it might not be possible to win at vaginal microbiomes, which is a totally normal thing to want in the first place. Seems like bryan may have completely misinterpreted a couple of papers on the subject, which honestly doesn’t bode well for the rest of his biology expertise.
Cat Hicks:
The idea that this is the "best bacterial species" is a huge sign of a grifter btw. The entire idea of a microbiome includes that you need BALANCE. Microbiomes are a fragile ecosystem. "Up and to the right is always better" is absurd here, I'm sorry are we in a corporate board room
She brings references:
The big tech firms have fired tens of thousands of people, and we’re all heading into an economic catastrophe that will only make more people impoverished or jobless. Finding folk who are so desperate for work that they’ll decontaminate your codebase for minimum wage will be straightforward.
This system uses heat pumps at the consumer sites rather than plain radiators, so they’ve got a bit more flexibility in how hot they have to run their cooling loop. There’s also mention of a swimming pool, though I have no idea how much energy it takes to warm one of those. Does provide a year-round demand, though.
Thermify is a pretty weird-looking thing, what with actual servers being installed in people's homes, and running some kind of opportunistic batch processing work? That’s very specialist compared to regular datacentres, though the plumbing would be a lot simpler.
Anyone ever heard of these folks before? https://dataglow.energy/
On the face of it, it seems like a neat idea… use the waste heat of a datacentre to provide district heating, sweeten the deal with promises of faster internet connectivity. Probably a sensible thing to do with future builds of this kind, especially if it cuts down on noise, etc.
I am cynical enough to assume that this is mostly a new trick for building consent for new datacentre construction, that it is an attempt to greenwash a dirty industry, and that in the end nothing will come of it but it’ll still somehow manage to make a few people richer and probably damage some green belt land.
Stolen shamelessly from a followers-only post, so I’m assuming that the originator would prefer me not to give them credit.
alt-text
An exponential graph, of the kind so beloved by techbros, in a vaguely ms-painty style with time as the x-axis and “number of arson attacks on sam altman’s mansion” as the y-axis, and showing a predicted “arson singularity” point in the near future.
He hasn’t even done a suborbital flight yet, has he? I don’t seem him being brave enough to even get as far as the moon, even assuming he’s healthy enough.
Weirdly, the moon might actually be more hostile that mars… the dust is sharper, the gravity is lower, the radiation is worse, the nights are longer and colder, there’s less water…
It is a much cheaper and quicker means of murdering a bunch of astronauts though, so it does have that going for it.
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isn’t that the old “basic science is boring and unsexy” issue though? There are economic incentives, but not in a short term-big-bux sort of way, so capitalism can’t be trusted with it.
To conjure up a recent example, something like “The number of curves of genus two with elliptic differentials”, published back in 1997, probably had limited commercial value at the time, but 20 years later completely sunk a promising post-quantum cryptography algorithm (“An efficient key recovery attack on SIDH”) which might have had some non-trivial commercial implications if SIKE had got through the key exchange algorithm competition.
Anyway, the Erdős problems are good candidates for llm work because they have been specified in a careful and formal way, which requires a reasonably competent mathematician to do. That then opens up mathematics to the same deskilling problem that other sectors afflicted with llms have, and because capitalism is shortsighted and stupid we don’t know what the future economic impact of that will be, right?