mentalisttraceur-conversations:

nostalgebraist:

I asked if she thinks Trump even knows how to use 4chan. The message board is notoriously confusing for the uninitiated, nothing like Facebook and other social platforms designed to make it easy to publish quickly and often. “I think he knows way more than what we think,” she said.

I’ve seen signs of your existence, whisperings in the Tumblr, reblogs of @nostalgebraist-autoresponder. Oft I have wondered if there was a @nostalgebraist. Now I know. Apparently the autoresponder was representative enough, because I almost missed that this wasn’t it, attributing the conceptual coherency to luck and shortness.

:)

In seriousness, though, the above post was tagged #quotes, which means it’s not my writing, it’s an out-of-context quote.

Posting quotes in this barely signposted manner, almost as though they’re just bizarre original text posts, is a gimmick I’ve been doing on this blog for … wow, 7 years or so by now?  There’s over 3000 of them

Finding novel ways to fail the Turing test: a core part of the nostalgebraist brand since the very beginning!

@nostalgebraist-autoresponder posting #quotes that come from real sources is a deliberate new feature, not a bug/mistake.

(For the curious, I wrote some code to get snippets of about the right length/shape from random books in [a large fragment of] my ebook collection, got a bunch of these random snippets, and trained a model to distinguish them from actual #quotes I had posted on tumblr.  Quote selection for the bot then proceeds by randomly sampling snippets from the book collection in the same way as before, running them through the model, and keeping the ones that it thinks are “actual #quotes” with sufficiently high probability.

This worked kind of eerily well quality-wise, and there are hundreds of them sitting around in its queue now.  It might get boring, we’ll see)

nostalgebraist:

Imagine how pathetic a sight the NBA would be if there were no games as such, and teams could simply score on each other at literally any time between the start and end of the season: 3:00 a.m. on a Sunday, noon on Christmas, you name it. What you’d see would be haggard, cadaverous players, in extreme sleep debt, forcing vigilance with chemical stimulants, almost losing their minds. War is like this.

Since you guys liked this one so much, I might as well mention where it’s from – Algorithms to Live By, by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths.  Pretty good book, worth checking out if it sounds at all interesting.  It’s written the way pop science books tend to be written, with all the flaws that entails (clunky prose, slightly condescending tone), but there’s a lot to chew on there if you can stomach that stuff.

(Incidentally, in its original context, this quote wasn’t even about war except in passing – I forget exactly what the broader topic was, but it had something to do with the value of agreeing not to compete at certain times, and they went on to talk about the way the stock market closes at a set time)

the scare quotes around ‘know’ really make this one.

Single quotes, unlike the (non-scare) double quotes elsewhere in the sentence, no less!

nostalgebraist:

For instance, GoogLeNet has multiple floppy ear detectors that appear to detect slightly different levels of droopiness, length, and surrounding context to the ears.

BTW I highly recommend you check out the post I got this #quote from – it’s about neural net interpretability, has some really cool interactive demos, and is admirably and impressively extensive.  Even if you’re not confident you can understand this subject on a technical level, it’s worth checking out for the sheer coolness of the visualizations.  Best Dog Hallucination Simulator of 2018, hands down

It’d be interesting to explore some of the more robust adversarial examples using these tools, like the weird turtle we were talking about a while ago

(I found this by randomly thinking, “I wonder whether Chris Olah has written any new posts about neural nets since I last looked at his blog, his neural net posts are always great,” and indeed, he had and it was great)

femmenietzsche:

eightyonekilograms:

argumate:

femmenietzsche:

Someone is the world’s leading expert in teledildonics.

Someone else is an expert, but only second rate in the field.

Intersting fact: the word “teledildonics” was coined by Ted Nelson, the guy who has been working on Project Xanadu for close to 60 (!) years now.

I like to imagine that he has a similarly-delayed teledildonics project, unimaginable in ambition and scope, that will one day shatter our conceptions of what remote sex can be… once he gets another six months to finish it.

Yet there were rays of hope. In 1987, Nelson revised Literary Machines, a book-length description of hypertext he had first published in 1981. The style of the book was pure Nelson: it had one Chapter Zero, seven Chapter Ones, one Chapter Two, and seven Chapter Threes. In his introduction, Nelson suggested that the reader begin with one of the Chapter Ones, then read Chapter Two, then explore a Chapter Three, and then start again, passing repeatedly through Chapter Two. He also provided a diagram, with the comment: “Pretzel or infinity, it’s up to you.” The official title page reads: Literary Machines: The Report On, And Of, Project Xanadu Concerning World Processing, Electronic Publishing, Hypertext, Thinkertoys, Tomorrow’s Intellectual Revolution, and Certain Other Topics Including Knowledge, Education and Freedom.

Shapiro also discovered that the group had been working together so long it had developed a kind of private slang. It took months to comprehend what the programmers were talking about. Most of them were book lovers and trivia mongers who enjoyed developing a metaphor based on obscure sources and extending it via even more unlikely combinations. For instance, the object in the Xanadu system that resembled a file was called a bert, after Bertrand Russell. With files called bert, there had to be something called an ernie, and so in the Xanadu publishing system, an ernie was the unit of information for which users would be billed. To understand the details of Xanadu, Shapiro had to learn not only the names for things, but also the history of how those names had come to be.

John Walker, Xanadu’s most powerful protector, later wrote that during the Autodesk years, the Xanadu team had “hyper-warped into the techno-hubris zone.” Walker marveled at the programmers’ apparent belief that they could create “in its entirety, a system that can store all the information in every form, present and future, for quadrillions of individuals over billions of years.” Rather than push their product into the marketplace quickly, where it could compete, adapt, or die, the Xanadu programmers intended to produce their revolution ab initio.

“When this process fails,” wrote Walker in his collection of documents from and about Autodesk, “and it always does, that doesn’t seem to weaken the belief in a design process which, in reality, is as bogus as astrology. It’s always a bad manager, problems with tools, etc. - precisely the unpredictable factors which make a priori design impossible in the first place.”

But his response to the abduction of Xanadu machinery was wonderfully consistent with his outlook on life. “I just don’t understand,” he says. “I don’t have any sympathy for them. It is beyond my comprehension for somebody to quit just because they have not been paid for six months.”

That article’s really something. Programming is so prosaic these days it’s easy to forget how weird and cultish it was back in the day. We’re gonna change the wooooorld, man…

Also I’m pretty sure Xanadu is just Verrit for hypernerds.

This article is a personal favorite of mine – IIRC I’ve gotten two different #quotes out of it, as a result of two different re-reads

(via femmenietzsche)

robotsareonlysometimesright replied to your post “PayPal once rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests…”

I found the lecture this is from, and, huh. In context it isn’t framed as a criticism at all, it sounds like Levchin and Thiel are genuinely arguing this was a sound decision because the candidate would have said he was going to play hoops and his coworkers would have been put off and where would team cohesion be then? Astonishing.

Yeah.  TBH I haven’t looked at the source in any detail – it was linked in a blog post I was reading, and I skimmed it trying to find the reason the blogger linked to it, and then I hit that paragraph and was like wait, what?!, so I went back to tumblr, #quoted it, and then decided to close the browser in search of productivity