That is Alexander Grothendieck. He’s involved with some abstract algebra I’m way to sober to grok rn. My only knowledge of him is that his stuff basically established category theory as a thing, although apparently that was completely unintentional on his end.

He seems to have been an… interesting character in his later years

Local villagers helped sustain him with a more varied diet after he tried to live on a staple of dandelion soup.

last time on Nate Trek

If I had a dollar for every time it turned out some poller influencer went off on the deep end I would have two dollars, not much but etc. In the Netherlands we have a similar type of guy called Maurice de Hond, who also got famous for doing polls (which often slightly differed from other polls) but he has gone quite nutty nowadays, a man I knew who turned into an anti-vaxer was a big fan. (The Hond is also one of those ‘I talked about polarization and nobody listened to me!’ guys when he has been a regular person on the Dutch TV for ages, thankfully Nate doesn’t seem that bad).

Strange how generating a slightly different type of poll causes people to go off into contrarian/bad epistemology land.

E: Me : “doesn’t seem that bad” a few moments later A wild bsky skeet arrives (on why this sucks see this thread)

A perfect memory which is infinitely copyable and scaleable is possible. And it’s called, all the things in nature in sum.

A map is not the territory, but every territory is, in a sense, a map of itself.

That’s a weird place to have some opinions about jewish and trans people. I like to look at the sinfest subreddit every now and then and that sub really likes to sneer at people who have weird opinions on those topics (such as the author of the titular webcomic).

my mental voice for the DM sender keeps switching between “board game store inhabitant who spent way too much on warhammer shit and noticed you’re 3D printing your miniatures” and “flat earth convention keynote speaker” but it’s Reddit so a cursory investigation might reveal they’re both

1. Only this $25 box of space marines can be used in sanctioned tournaments and therefore you can’t possibly derive enjoyment from your resin miniatures (is that a squad of tiny masters chief?) - fact.
2. You can’t prove that the earth is round because you’ve never seen it curve - fact.
3. What do you mean you’re not here to listen to me talk? I’m not moving so you can play with your masters chief (and is that — are you going to make them fight Gandalf?) - fact.
4. The mere fact that the terrain on the board game table I’m not letting you use is flat and has an edge proves me right - fact.

It used to require certain models have a “kill switch” but this was so controversial lobbyist got it out. Models that are trained using over 10^26 FLOP have to go undergo safety certification, but I think there is a pretty large amount of confusion about what this entails. Also peeps are liable if someone else fine tunes a model you release.

init = RandomUniform(minval=0.0, maxval=1.0) layer = Dense(3, kernel_initializer=init)

pls do not fine tune this to create the norment nexus :(

There’s also whistleblower protections (<- good, imo fuck these shady ass companies)

eigen cunt robot

‘Fun’ (not fun, horrible) detail about slavery vs genocide. During the holocaust, some capitalists saw all these people in concentration camps as nice business opportunity and convinced the nazis to sell them slaves to work in some factories. These people were basically beaten to death because they didn’t work fast enough. (because they were hungry). So the statement is a bit counterfactual here (also, another point for ‘capitalists would gladly work with genocidal fascists’ for the people keeping score (also for any Jordan Peterson fans this will come as a big shock (he, as self proclaimed expert on this subject, famously said that the nazis were more evil than people thought because they didn’t work the Jewish people to death)). For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monowitz_concentration_camp

On a more considered note after actually reading the thread (poor choice on my part, I know), it’s hard not to connect this to the broader line-goes-up mentality that we see so often here. As evidenced by the long history of the “live free or die” ethos, whether enslaved people were/are actually better off than had they been killed is more of an open question than our friend’s argument would imply. This is especially true if you ignore all the ways that chattel slavery was deeply cruel and inhuman even in the history of unfree labor to the point where historians consider it an abberation, closer to being worked to death in Mauthausen than being a medieval serf. I’m not qualified to talk about the history of dehumanization, but even in ancient Greece and Rome there existed some legal protections for slaves, provided you could find someone with citizen standing who was willing to plead your case, and this was thousands of years before the liberal ideas of what being a full human being and a free individual meant, so we need to understand the position of unfree people in those periods differently. But even if you ignore all that context and treat slavery like a universal practice from the prehistoric “sea peoples conquered my tribe” days to the antebellum American South, the primary benefits that you get from slavery don’t go to the enslaved people, obviously. Rather it comes from the conquerors having a new source of labor to work their new fields, and the economic benefit they get from that. Rather than needing to allow population growth to expand your people’s farms into new lands, you have a ready-made labor force to start (or in some cases continue) working there. It makes the line go up faster, in other words. The argument relies on ignoring all the questions of justice and the impact that these practices have on people’s actual lives because it makes line go up, and in that sense it fits right in with all the other ways that ostensibly-libertarian ideologies end up supporting fascism.

Yup I refused to even post that nonsense because I did the exact same scroll through it and was nonplussed by the amount of preamble this dude absolutely did not merit in defense of his terminal poaster syndrome.

So it’s entirely unclear from that HN thread, but where did this dumbassery start?

Could be a Chinese market thing. They like their number eights.