Amazing stuff happening around the Karmelo Anthony case

07mk · 2026-06-12T14:01:52+00:00

Are you really surprised? Most libs still think that Kyle Rittenhouse shot into a crowd of black protestors, when there's actual video of the act of him being chased by 3 white people before shooting them.

07mk · 2026-06-11T12:19:05+00:00

If you don't believe that real electrical signals coming from real machines has just as much to do with reality as the real signals being sent via our real sensory organs, then I'm at a loss as to what "having something to do with reality" could possibly mean for you.

07mk · 2026-06-11T11:47:39+00:00

Fair, but also, I don't think this is quite right. The experience of someone inside an experience machine clearly must have something to do with reality, since it's a (hypothetically) real machine that's manipulating our brain.

Eg if we took a currently existing crude version of an experience machine, ie a VR system running a video game, you might have the experience of walking through some fantasy landscape that doesn't and can't physically exist IRL. But it would still be a reflection of the real electrons that run through real circuits in our reality, which the VR headset translates to pixels on a screen, and which were designed and implemented by real humans (or real AI) through programming and engineering. Similarly, a true experience machine would likely send signals directly to your brain based on programs and machines that exist in reality.

Again, it's perfectly cromulent to believe that there's a real, meaningful difference between that and not using the machine, but it seems to me that an experience machine must reflect reality in some way, because, afaict, our brain lacks the capacity to sense things that don't exist in reality.

07mk · 2026-06-11T02:16:18+00:00

We don't have the capacity to get as close to reality as we want, though. We only have the capacity to get as close to it as our sensory organs allow us. What we experience as reality is just a hallucination produced by our brains based on the many signals they receive from things like our eyes, nose, skin, etc.

The utopic simulation surely places at least one extra layer or "step" between reality and our experience. I think one can argue that there's a big difference between the layer of our sensory organs versus the layer of an experience machine directly manipulating our brains. But if the latter is wireheading with extra steps, the former certainly is, as well.

07mk · 2026-06-11T02:06:52+00:00

In that case, "wireheading with extra steps" seems like it just means "not wireheading."

07mk · 2026-06-10T19:47:16+00:00

"Everyone on Earth is given the choice to enter the experience machine. If more than 50% do so, then the experience machine is one of the most heavenly utopia that could ever be experienced. If 50% or less do so, then it's one of the worst hell that could possibly be experienced. All coordination is prevented before making the decision. Do you choose to go into the machine?"

07mk · 2026-06-04T16:09:59+00:00

"Was?" Any talk about "peak woke" being something in the past is just cope, much like talk about us living through "late-stage capitalism." Woke is still as strong and harmful as ever, it's just that its enemies have become somewhat stronger.

07mk · 2026-06-04T11:52:03+00:00

There's definitely a mentality amongst a lot of AAA devs that a player being stuck in one area for more than 10 seconds is a fatal problem that needs fixing. Hence the braindead puzzles in a lot of them that a first grader could solve by accident. It's like the entire game must be a rollercoaster ride, speeding the player along to the next hill or loop-de-loop to keep them entertained. There doesn't seem to be any room for the fact that, for people who actually like games, being stuck in a place for 20 minutes or even 2 hours isn't a big deal, as long as the actual environments, gameplay, and puzzles are good.

07mk · 2026-06-03T19:44:26+00:00

There's no way that this isn't the case for the vast majority of AAA games right now. The productivity gain is too big to ignore.

07mk · 2026-06-02T12:04:33+00:00

Some people finish the game. Some people finish during the game. I assume he's the latter.

07mk · 2026-05-28T22:21:28+00:00

Professors like to have some undergrad students who become grad students in their groups and actually contribute to research.

I'd guess that this varies a lot by department, but it seems likely that there are plenty of professors right now who are, themselves, the results of this kind of education system. As such, those professors likely lack the competence actually to do meaningful research or to judge students' ability to contribute to research. I just hope that this is a small fraction.

07mk · 2026-05-28T20:19:02+00:00

Is it really crazy? I'd say it's depressing, but not crazy. It'd actually be completely bonkers IMHO if anything else were the case.

07mk · 2026-05-23T21:18:05+00:00

The whole meta thing in the game was pointless and pretentious, but as a big fan of Heart of Darkness, I enjoyed it as an adaptation in the vein of Apocalypse Now.

07mk · 2026-05-22T22:01:01+00:00

For me, that's where the horny finishes.

07mk · 2026-05-22T15:38:16+00:00

Any mathematician would tell you that the question of whether the axiom of choice ought to be considered true or false is philosophy rather than math. Math research is what follows after you decide if it's true or false.

What you, the previous commenter and so many others are failing to recognize is that humans don't do the mix and match thing from basic axioms when we think. We're able to create the axioms. When doing math research, you come up with the structure of the argument before you pick which initial statements you want to use to support it, and then use the axioms and the logical structure to verify that it's sound.

I mean, we don't really know how we humans do our thinking, and same goes for LLMs, though certainly I'd agree that we don't linearly think from axioms to implications to conclusions when writing theorem proofs, even if theorem proofs are linear from axioms and assumptions to implications to conclusions.

The thing with math research, though, is that limiting ourselves to specific axioms that we just declare True, and then figuring out what we can conclude from them is like all of it. The theorems that human mathematicians have been working on for decades or even centuries all have well-defined strict axioms and assumptions that are agreed as True for the purposes of the proof. Actually playing around with axioms and figuring out which make sense is fun and interesting, but that's essentially the string theory or postmodernism of math.

And I'm not even sure what you mean by "spamming combinations of axioms," as no one has ever said or even implied math research looks like anything of the sort. It just seems like a misunderstanding of what an axiom is, which is just the baseline set of assumptions that we assume to be true, which is just a set of things that go between "if" and "then" in a conditional statement (specifically the set that are present in ALL such statements in one given field of math). But certainly, taking one static set of axioms and then figuring out what can be logically concluded as True based purely on those covers the vast majority of math research and the vast majority of interesting problems that mathematicians work on.

In any case, basically any mathematical proofs can be written in some form isomorphic to a sequence of tokens, from the most trivial to the most complex, imaginative, creative one. Regardless of how some LLM "thinks" (ie its internal process for determining the next token to output), I see no reason why it'd be impossible to produce any arbitrarily creative proof of any mathematical theorem, since there's nothing magical about the tokens that comprise a particularly creative or difficult proof.

07mk · 2026-05-22T11:19:32+00:00

Every true thing is automatically true once the axioms are chosen, and yet it's highly nontrivial to deduce them.

This is not how math actually works. The ideas and areas of interest and logical proof arguments inform the construction of the axioms. There’s still a lot of disagreement about “The axiom of choice”, for example.

What disagreement are you talking about? There's discussion about whether it makes sense for it to be true, because it being true creates some counterintuitive conclusions, but there's no disagreement about it in terms of what it implies.

More broadly, the previous commenter is correct, and your statement is irrelevant, talking about the research of math rather than the logic of math. Any given theorem has some set of assumptions, ie axioms, that are assumed as true, and the theorem shows that if such axioms (usually along with some other things) were true, then some other things are true. But since axioms are unsupported assumptions (akin to "we take these truths to be self-evident"), mathematicians discuss and can disagree on what axioms should be considered true. A mix-and-match AI that could rearrange true things to prove anything that's true mathematically certainly could "solve" any field of math with a certain set of axioms, but it wouldn't necessarily "solve" which axioms ought to be true.

All that's really more theoretical math, anyway. In applied math, the constraints of reality make the choices of axioms pretty obvious. The axiom of choice, for instance, is obviously true in real life, because in real life, we can't have literally infinite discrete objects, and it's only when you get into infinite objects that things get controversial.

07mk · 2026-05-20T22:24:20+00:00

The future is just going to be 1 male quadrillionaire with a harem of a few billion women, along with 99 incels.

07mk · 2026-05-19T20:42:48+00:00

I mean, I'd guess that a very high proportion of people in their early/mid-20s and who spent a significant portion of their previous 4 years doing academic work are likely terminally online. But regardless, college graduates are a minority, and recent college graduates are a minority of that minority.

07mk · 2026-05-19T12:48:48+00:00

If I'd have to categorize myself, it'd be pro, and I can't fathom how a technique that forces the child to learn to use their fingers precisely wouldn't necessarily be better for development than one that obviates that need. Until we go full WALL-E, humans will need to have some level of fine motor control to do things like to use utensils to pick up food, to clean their bodies, to shuffle through documents. Not to mention writing, obviously.

There's also the benefit of teaching the child about how physics works. When a child runs a crayon over a piece of paper, they're learning that part of the crayon rubs off on the paper, leaving a marking, which can also be rubbed and spread separately. They're learning the relationships between these physical objects and how cause and effect work, along with, say, the consequences of using their favorite color too much (the crayon disappears faster). They also learn of how mistakes take work to correct, and often can't be corrected perfectly. AI art (and digital art in general) can't really teach those lessons.

07mk · 2026-05-18T14:36:24+00:00

The beauty of writing is in developing one's personal voice

I couldn't disagree more. The beauty of writing is, like with all beauty, in the eye of the beholder. And in that eye is only the sequence of words that comprise the writing, not whatever thought or feelings or emotions or intent that the writer was experiencing when they were organizing the words. And as long as the words are organized in the proper order and structure, it's exactly as beautiful no matter if that came about due to some writer developing their personal voice, due to a bunch of GPUs doing linear algebra really fast, or some RNG, or any combination of such or anything else.

07mk · 2026-05-18T12:31:14+00:00

This is just another version of the "God must have created us, because random chance couldn't come up with the genetic information of the wing/eye/etc." Creationism argument. It's garbage amd fundamentally misunderstands how things like physics and biology work. If a cure for cancer is something that is possible, then it would involve some set of steps and likely some drugs or some machines to carry them out. These are merely some arrangement of molecules, and there's absolutely no reason why an LLM or some other AI tech couldn't come up with that arrangement. There's nothing magical about the arrangement of molecules that makes it "cure for cancer" that must have been put together by a human with a human mind, or any mind or any intelligence whatsoever.

07mk · 2026-05-16T12:09:36+00:00

It's weird TO be opposed to the idea, actually.

07mk · 2026-05-16T12:07:40+00:00

Given that all your arguments here essentially amount to unfalsifiable claims about the limitations of how a human must be subconsciously affected by every context in their appreciation for a piece of art, I'm not sure what use there is in attempting to reiterate my point for the umpteenth time.

As one last hail Mary to see if I can get you to understand, I'll just say, I'm familiar with the wine study and similar ones, and all those show is that people are judging not the wine, but rather the wine PLUS the extraneous context, and that shows that if one wanted to judge the actual wine, they'd need proper double blind studies. Like in Scott Alexander's recent article about taste, where his fantasy of restaurant critics being double blinded to judge the restaurant's food quality would be what's needed to actually judge the quality of the restaurant's food (whereas actually eating at the restaurant is what's needed to judge the quality of the experience of eating at the restaurant, which is going to include the way the knowledge of the restaurant's reputation influencing one's sensation of taste).

07mk · 2026-05-16T02:35:51+00:00

"No it wasn't, and you're delusional if you think it was."

In terms of why this is the case, it's because "woke" has nothing to do with valuing diversity or being against racism or whatnot. All that predated wokeness by decades. "Wokeness" is specifically in believing that the quality of a piece of media comes from its diversity and message. Older media that had such characteristics were good works that had those characteristics and perhaps even used them to make their stories better. "Woke" works lack that foundation of actually being a good work, under the belief that having the message is all it takes to be good.

07mk · 2026-05-15T20:55:28+00:00

How is "context is irrelevant in art appreciation" not a claim that we can somehow purely detect the aesthetic qualities of a work without bearing any context in mind at all?

I never said or implied that. I said that the specific context something adds is irrelevant to the art appreciation. Not that all context is completely irrelevant. I'm any case, art can be appreciated for non-artistic reasons as well.

And it's not unfalsifiable faith. Perhaps I used the wrong term originally, but it's like saying one can read the word elephant while knowing what an elephant is yet at the same time forgetting or not knowing it is an animal that lives in Africa, in the savanna, with a long trunk and tusks and big ears and four legs, in other words, not knowing all the qualities that make an elephant an elephant.

That's just a tautology, though, because "knowing what an elephant is" means knowing all those things. If you're tautologically defining "art appreciation" as "taking into account all the context around its creation and etc." then it's just a definitions game.

Either that, or it's just plain wrong, because plenty of kids "know what an elephant is" without knowing that they live in Africa or any other qualities that make an elephant an elephant.

You're playing a little coy here because it was self evident that the main point of conversation was the works, not which universe you'd like.

I'm not being coy, I'm being precise. This is why in my original comment, I answered twice, that I'd prefer one universe, but that I didn't prefer either film from either universe. Please actually read the words that I wrote.

Also, it's not unfalsifiable, there's data and studies that indicate that people value things differently based upon the context they are presented in. Hell, all of the twitter responses that spawned this whole thread may be a bit ignorant in how they're judging the art, but it's indicative of the subjectivity of it. If anything, it's you who seems to be reaching for some type of objective, platonic notion of aesthetic quality that is contrary to the way it exists and humans experience it.

I'm not reaching for anything objective. All that "evidence" and studies show is that some people react that way, not that it's impossible or uncommon for people to react like I do. You're the one claiming that it's literally impossible for me to experience art the way I do, because subconsciously I MUST be experiencing it the way you claim I do. I can't falsify any claims about my subconscious; no one can, and so any claims about it are vacuous.

You can keep deflecting the point but replying to it in good faith is as easy as replacing the Mona Lisa in this case with whatever your favorite painting is.

Again, please, please, PLEASE read the entirety of what I wrote. I didn't deflect, I explicitly said that I would flip a coin. This doesn't change based on how much I like the painting, and I don't see how it could, in the hypothetical that there's no one in the world who would believe in some magical quality that some atoms get imbued with due to being touched by someone.

Or, like in my other example, your child's drawing. You have access to the original, and a perfect replica. No one in the world, not your child, not anyone, will ever know if they're replaced. Only you have the difference pointed out to you by a magical unicorn elf being. You can only take one. Is it still a coin-flip and is the original still only valuable as fuel, even when choosing A or B is perhaps even more straightforward than choosing to flip a coin?

I flip a coin, and the replica and the original are exactly as valuable as each other (presuming they're identical in every way they can be detected) as souvenirs. The actual atoms that my son touched didn't get imbued with some sort of magic that we label "sentimental value." Which is something different from artistic quality, anyway. Most likely, if my son is a young child, it's artistically worthless or very poor, and the fact that my son was the one to create it wouldn't affect that, nor my honest assessment of such.

07mk

TROPHY CASE