Zero and one are not valid probabilities

A friend's friend is driving us into Monaco, down twisty streets.  She's an immaculate docent, but I get confused and ask, "Are we on the right side of the road?"  Rather than rebuke the tourist, which would be beneath her, she just says dryly, "No certainties", and keeps driving.

[modernbritain]

[phervert]

t shirt that says i <3 overanalysis

[nocertainties]

This has been proposed several times but never made it out of the planning stage

[sharpestlives]

some of you people are so annoying. i mean me too but good lord

[godkillerbrigade]

[intimate-mirror]

[supreme-leader-stoat]

[nocertainties]

What? No!

Every time a child says “I don’t believe in walruses,” one is teleported onto a random doorstep, to increase their visibility among the general public.

[nocertainties]

It would be immensely handy to ask someone skilled at counterfactuals what would have happened if we’d made any given decision differently. Unfortunately, such skill is literally impossible to measure.

But we can test something adjacent! That is why my proposal is that we lie about absolutely everything to 15 year olds, and

[nocertainties]

The definition of insanity is *checks Emmy Noether’s notes* expecting that energy can be created or destroyed.

[haleyusesherwords]

[artbyblastweave]

Sick of everyone on the highway acting like they’re the only real person in the universe when they should know full well that I’m the only real person in the universe

[artbyblastweave]

Or at least, they would know if they had interiority

[nocertainties]

I am the universe’s center

No subtle skeptics can confound me

For how can other viewpoints enter

When all the rest’s all around me?

—Piet Hein

[nocertainties]

Alright. I need to talk about something that has been bothering me forever, and I'm just going to say it: SKI combinator calculus should be called SK combinator calculus. There. It's out. Let me be perfectly clear about what the I combinator is. It's λx.x. The identity function. It takes something and gives it back. That's it. That's the whole thing. And you know what you get when you write SKK? The identity function. S applied to K applied to K is I. It's not like I, it doesn't approximate I, it is definitionally equal to I. You could delete I from the universe of combinators and lose precisely nothing, because SK already contains it, folded up quietly inside, waiting for you to notice. And yet here we are, generations of computer scientists and logicians dutifully writing those three letters — S, K, I — as if we're naming three co-equal pillars of some grand edifice, when one of them is just... the other two wearing a trenchcoat. I understand the pedagogical argument. I really do. "I makes things easier to explain." Fine. Sure. We can introduce I early as a convenience, the way you might introduce a nickname before explaining someone's full legal name. But there's a difference between a teaching shorthand and putting it in the name of the system itself. We don't call it "NAND-AND-OR-NOT logic" just because AND and OR are convenient to think about. We acknowledge the primitives and move on. I'm not angry. I'm just... tired. Every time I see "SKI combinator calculus" I have to do a little internal recalibration, a small epistemic exhale, a gentle reminder to myself that we as a species sometimes choose the evocative over the precise. And I accept that. I accept it. But I don't have to like it.

We live in the dumbest timeline. And I love it.

[alkatyn]

And lo they walked away from Omelas and visited the other cities of the great plains. And in them they found not one starving wretched child, but dozens, not buried in a deep dark hole but begging in the streets, crying in slums, or silent in the mortuaries. They asked the people of those cities what great magic they were casting, because surely with the suffering of so many they must have bought wonders even greater than the silver towers of Omelas? Where were their great festivals where millions danced in joy? Their great academies of magic and science? Their wise and judicious rulers dispensing justice and charity throughout the land?

But the people of the cities looked on them with scorn and confusion. This was no act of unnatural blasphemous magic, no craft of men. The poor starved, the sick died, that was the way of the world, the will of the Gods. Who were these strangers from this distant city to question that? They who were complicit in their own evil, which was after all just as great?

And, those who had walked from Omelas, they walked on.

[bambamramfan]

It’s good intellectual hygiene to occasionally register one’s beliefs. Here are mine, about the state of AI.

The current market and its sales pitches for AI/LLM’s is a hype bubble, and going to crash disastrously. Some day. I’m not wagering money when.

Most of the AI tools are a waste. We don’t see large orders from paying buyers who need what AI can do. We see large giveaways phrased as organic demand. I wouldn’t pay a dollar for any Ai from a company not named Anthropic.  a. Admission, I don’t know what’s going on with the US govt/Palintir, etc.

So disconnected from that that it feels like just a coincidence, Anthropic has created something I’d call AGI. The key letter there is G for General. Claude Opus 4.6 and above can do reasoning, conceptual work and across the full spectrum of domains, that I think denying it is an AGI is willful. a. This has been so random that I don't trust anything anyone said about AI coming from before late 2025.

That does not mean Opus is “as good as a human” in any of these domains, let alone all of them. But the difference is now of degree not kind, and I can’t think of a reason it won’t keep developing till it outpaces humans at all intellectual domains. a. Yes, its current writing style has a number of tics that are annoying (among other real limitations.) If you think that is some fundamental barrier that will prevent AI from ever writing better, I’ve got a Maginot Line to sell you.

We are not special. We do not have some spark of creativity or mental flexiblity that can’t be replicated by the machine one day soon. A lot of people who call themselves existentialists have a real problem handling this, which I find unfortunate.

This will fundamentally reshape human civilization. I don’t know how yet. You don’t either.

If our government and economic model do not respond to address the inequality this causes, it will be economically disastrous. It may be hard to believe now, but in the pasts governments actually have responded to their countries becoming entirely different economic models.

I have no idea about the moral nature of AI or it’s likelihood to ever rebel. 

Given 6 thru 8, we absolutely should not be doing this and it would be better if research into further AI is banned immediately. If China develops AI instead of us, I think China will pay the cost of a disrupted society, not have a military advantage.

But just like “you shouldn’t have a child when you’re a teenager” once the child is there, you do have to deal with it, not just ignore it. Studying what the AI tools can do in practice is good and useful.

There is one consistent area where AI is not as good as humans: reliability. The hallmark of Silicon Valley / startup tech development has been deciding “Much faster and cheaper than the thing we are disrupting, and 90% as reliable, is a good deal.” This is very often true but not always! Any sector where failing 1 out of 10 times, or even 1 out of 100, causes someone’s death or is destructive in a costly way, modern tech (including AI) is quite bad at. If you look at SV, the hardest work is done at companies where they actually need 100% reliability to beat a human.

So surgeons, pilots, train engineers, translators whose work has legal liability, cooks and dishwashers, are going to be around for a while.

This is ironic and depressing, that the creative realms are much more dominated by AI than the sort of low paid drudge work whose main skill is “never fuck up.” It will also come to represent more of the economy, though presumably some day AI’s will learn 100% reliability too.

LLM's are not "human" in any sense. Just because they can reason, does not mean their mental architecture is like ours. Just one example: time doesn't really exist for them. They only "exist" in the moment they are generating the next token. If you go years between queries, that time did not exist to them, it's like you never left. We can't even talk about that kind of existence with the same vocabulary we currently use for consciousness.

The moral fact that a reasoning consciousness, including ones that replicate other humans’ superficial selves, can be spun up and owned by a corporation, is going to be a very big deal and we better start figuring out how to answer it.

[bayesic-bitch]

Imagine if astrology was real and astrophysicists realized that instead of building telescopes, you could do observations by just handing out out a ton of surveys. First detection of gravitational waves comes decades earlier in 1997, after a study of 300,000 sagitarius women finds than they break up with their boyfriends 23 minutes earlier than the cosmic baseline would suggest.

[garmbreak1]

me, starting any setting brief: "Okay, so most of humanity is dead,"

[nocertainties]

Pretty much true of virtually any setting, since for example, our current setting has 8.3 billion living and 100+ billion dead.

[dark-magician-girl-meets-world]

The Eiffel Tower gets slightly bigger every year. That's because it's alive and slowly absorbing the girders and I-beams from the other buildings in the city. The French government didn't want to alarm its citizens, so they made up a story about it being built by an architect, but that's not what happened at all. In fact, despite its name, the Eiffel Tower isn't really a tower at all.

[dark-magician-girl-meets-world]

It's a Paris sight

[profound-yet-trivial]

Them: (cuts up an avocado)

Me: Oh! You know what goes really well with that?

Them: What?

Me: Egg yolk! Especially if you mix a hardboiled yolk with mayo, mustard, and paprika and put it where the pit was.

Them: Cool! Really?

Me: Nah, I’m just playing deviled avocado.

[nocertainties]

English->French

Avocado->Avocat

Lawyer->Avocat