I Saw A Man This Morning Going From Tree To Tree, Painstakingly Painting Each Leaf Of Every Tree Yellow,

It has just occurred to me that data hoarding is the 21st century version of bibliomania.

"If we keep on optimizing the proxy objective, even after our goal stops improving, something more worrying happens. The goal often starts getting worse, even as our proxy objective continues to improve. Not just a little bit worse either — often the goal will diverge towards infinity. This is an extremely general phenomenon in machine learning. It mostly doesn't matter what our goal and proxy are, or what model architecture we use. If we are very efficient at optimizing a proxy, then we make the thing it is a proxy for grow worse."

Too much efficiency makes everything worse: overfitting and the strong version of Goodhart's law

People in their thirties remember the olden days, when it was just you, your Windows 95/98/me desktop with floppy disks, and Nokia 5110 versus the universe.

it’s interesting how many people have knee jerk scorn towards Ozempic and think it’s almost foregone conclusion to be a Faustian bargain that will cause massive long term health problems in exchange for “cheating to lose weight”. as if suffering and struggling to lose weight is just punishment for being a fatty (smells Protestant). the thing is, this doesn’t even bear out in reality either because glp-1 drugs have the knock-on effect of improving health outcomes across the board for almost everything. tho good litmus test for sussing out the type of guy who tells themselves just-so stories

"If you crush a cockroach, you're a hero. If you crush a beautiful butterfly, you're a villain. Morals have aesthetic criteria"- Friedrich Nietzsche

The White House bragging about how many different countries have reached out to negotiate in response to the tariffs reminds me of that part of Disco Elysium where you have the option to put a loaded gun in your mouth and threaten to pull the trigger as a negotiating tactic. It is certainly one way to start a conversation!

Hate speech isn't real. Please stop making stuff up and go touch grass

When my mind hands me a small thought, I can ask “Is this true?” and my mind will answer “Good question, let’s go over three thousand different rationality techniques and see what answer each of them gives.

When my mind hands me a big thought, I ask "Is this true?” and my mind just answers “It better be, m——–r, cause this is how you’re gonna be thinking about everything from now on.”

So much clowning on influencers but the real cancer is life coaches talking about law of attraction or whatever yuppie bullshit 'philosophies'. Hang them by their testicles etc

TIL that approximately 41% of first marriages end in divorce, 60% of second marriages end in divorce, and 73% of third marriages end in divorce.