BC TECH
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I’m quoted in this, which does about as good a job overviewing the topic as a New York Times profile can be expected to.

 Major oversights in it as I see.

First, It does not acknowledge the fact that Yudkowsky is, at heart, a complete crank. This remains, to my mind, crucial to understanding the rationalist community’s influence on the world: they’re sci-fi writers being mistaken for scientists.
You can’t really understand the harmful effects of SSC until you realize that it’s part of a larger movement of bullshit artists serving as cult leaders to the techbros.
Second, and more importantly, it never really explains the harm that’s being done by Scott Siskind and his followers. It comes close, noting that “SJWs” were the only group not welcome in SSC, but it doesn’t capture the harm of that because it doesn’t unpack the term.
What is meant in practice when “SJWs” aren’t welcome in a space is that marginalized people speaking of the harm they experience are silenced.

That’s it. That’s the meaning.
When Sam Altman complains that concerns about sexism and racism inhibit innovation, the point that really needs to be made, and that Cade should have asked for a response quote on, is that innovations unconcerned with sexism and racism hurt people.
Like, what are we talking about here in practice? We’re talking about image identification algorithms that mistake black people for gorillas. And fixing that by just removing gorillas as a thing the algorithm can identify. https://t.co/gyP3WZ4VSH
We’re talking about financial algorithms that bring back redlining. https://t.co/dHHISoAjRJ
We’re talking about social media moderation that is trivially weaponized against women and trans women. (I’d link, but you’re already on the site I’m talking about.)
And we’re talking about shit like Boston Dynamics, where the use case for their cool robot videos is unmistakably police robots, being developed by fucking billionaires who think the Black Lives Matter movement oppresses them.
The message of SSC was that ignoring people who say “these things cause me harm” was virtuous, and that the people you really had to take seriously and think about were fucking nazis.
And the fact that the tech industry viewed that as an absolutely essential message to hear is horrifying on a scale that Cade’s article ultimately only gestures at.
The real headline is “Silicon Valley would rather listen to nazis than feminists.”
I focused on the macro level in this thread because it’s what the NYT article focused on, but having read accounts of people’s abuse within the “rationalist” community, it is just as toxic a cesspool on the micro level as the macro. https://t.co/e74k2bd13S
Anyway. If you like this thread, I have a whole book about the rationalist movement, white supremacists, and the fact that we are all fucked and the reasons why are very stupid. It is, if I may say so, pretty good. https://t.co/DXtw6oLIyw

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Nicolas
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A brief analysis and comparison of the CSS for Twitter's PWA vs Twitter's legacy desktop website. The difference is dramatic and I'll touch on some reasons why.

Legacy site *downloads* ~630 KB CSS per theme and writing direction.

6,769 rules
9,252 selectors
16.7k declarations
3,370 unique declarations
44 media queries
36 unique colors
50 unique background colors
46 unique font sizes
39 unique z-indices

https://t.co/qyl4Bt1i5x


PWA *incrementally generates* ~30 KB CSS that handles all themes and writing directions.

735 rules
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0 media queries
11 unique colors
32 unique background colors
15 unique font sizes
7 unique z-indices

https://t.co/w7oNG5KUkJ


The legacy site's CSS is what happens when hundreds of people directly write CSS over many years. Specificity wars, redundancy, a house of cards that can't be fixed. The result is extremely inefficient and error-prone styling that punishes users and developers.

The PWA's CSS is generated on-demand by a JS framework that manages styles and outputs "atomic CSS". The framework can enforce strict constraints and perform optimisations, which is why the CSS is so much smaller and safer. Style conflicts and unbounded CSS growth are avoided.
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Devdutta
Devdutta
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Please please please take your cyber security seriously even if you don’t consider yourself a high risk person. Here are a few easy things to start with. 1/n

Switch from WhatsApp to Signal and enable disappearing messages. Most of us cannot stop using WhatsApp entirely but at least turn off back ups to Google Drive or iCloud. 2/n

Do not have private conversations using the messaging service on any social media platform like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. 3/n

Switch from Gmail to ProtonMail or any other secure email service provider. 4/n


Switch from Google Docs to CryptPad or RiseUp Pad.
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foone
foone
@Foone
I got a Toshiba T1200, which has a bad screen, and a dead CMOS battery, and I thought the hard drive was broken too...


but I rebooted it and heard a KTHUNK and a really loud spin-up noise and holy shit, the hard drive works!


and it still has files on it. the newest date is January 1994.


It's a 21mb hard drive, with ~37k of bad sectors.

This fucker is never going to spin up again, so I better go find some serial cables and copy shit off now.


The backlight is fucked so I'm shining a flashlight on it.
without it, it looks like this.
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Santiago
Santiago
@svpino
Here is a simple example of a machine learning model.

I put it together a long time ago, and it was very helpful! I sliced it apart a thousand times until things started to make sense.

It's TensorFlow and Keras.

If you are starting out, this may be a good puzzle to solve.


The goal of this model is to learn to multiply one-digit
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Danny Weinbaum
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A thread about Eastshade's bike mechanic!

When I originally thought of putting a bicycling in Eastshade, I was pretty sure it wasn't going to work, for the simple fact that if it was easy, we'd see a lot more rideable bikes in games. Well, I was wrong. It took a mere week.


Its essentially a first person controller with extra momentum, resulting in the the movement direction lagging behind your look direction. Then I used the angle between the look and the movement to dictate camera "bank" and handle bar rotation, and voila! Game changing feature!


The look of the bike was harder than the movement. Bicycles are fairly modern, so it was tricky to fit it to the setting. I took some artistic liberties and settled on a penny farthing (but wooden), ignoring how impossible that would be to ride on the rugged terrain in Eastshade.

Surprisingly, the hardest part was sound. It didn't feel like riding a bike until I found the right sounds and how to trigger them. For a while I was stuck thinking too realistically. A penny farthing is fixed gear, pedaling sounds nothing like a regular modern bike.

Finally I abandoned realism and went with sounds normal people would associate with biking. We're all so used to modern bikes that we strongly associate the distinct ticking of a freewheel mechanism (think of the sound when you stop pedaling and coast on a modern bike).
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