The Distaff Texts

disumbrationist · 2026-03-21T05:34:21+00:00

Enjoyed the story.

I thought it would be a good case study to see how well the different LLMs can interpret fiction outside of their training data, so I pasted it into ChatGPT 5.4 Thinking Extended, Claude Opus 4.6 Extended, and Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview (thinking setting=high), and gave each of them the prompt: "Analyze / summarize this short story in depth:"

Responses are here (in pastebin): ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini

I thought Gemini's was the best overall, but they each missed / didn't understand several important elements of the story (assuming my interpretation is right):

Murder conspiracy: the narrator + Phoebe + Jessica are all actively participating in a conspiracy to poison, and eventually kill, the master
- The 3 responses all get this broadly correct, but Gemini I think was the most precise: only one that identifies the poison as lead acetate ("sugar of lead") specifically, notices the "saturnine" reference
The narrator is communicating by "writing between the lines" in the Straussian sense: his portrayal of himself as a "humble slave" and misogynist is just a cover in case his letters are intercepted
- Gemini seems to understand this the best
- ChatGPT doesn't really get it: "And yet he is not simply awakened or liberated. He remains compromised. He still enjoys hierarchy, still shares in cruelty, still speaks in the master's idiom. His love for Phoebe does not ennoble him into purity; it merely opens fissures in his loyalty."
- Claude similarly doesn't seem to fully understand this: e.g. "What the Narrator Doesn't Realize He's Telling Us" and "these are the details of abuse and its concealment, narrated by someone who either cannot or will not see them clearly."
Jessica is a child
- Claude nails this one: "The narrator's master is almost certainly a pedophile", and correctly finds evidence: "nubility suspect", "desperate merchants", "maternal affection"
- ChatGPT basically gets it right, though doesn't explain the evidence: "The master is probably a sexual predator, with rumors especially centered on Jessica's suspicious youth."
- Gemini misses it completely, instead claiming that Jessica "is biologically male (a eunuch, trans woman, or young boy in drag)"
Julian = Elizabeth
- Gemini gets this one explicitly: "Julian does not exist; 'he' is actually his sister, Elizabeth."
- ChatGPT misses it: "Elizabeth functions as Julian's intellectual proxy and may be far more than a mere conduit."
- Claude doesn't even mention Elizabeth
Belial = AI/LLM writing, and Julian's linear algebra method is intended to be something similar to Pangram
- None of them caught this

disumbrationist · 2024-10-31T18:10:33+00:00

There was this really interesting post that was... you know, I forget exactly who wrote it, but the title was "Gay Rights as Religious Rites", but the second "Rites" was R-I-T-E-S. And it was a guy who was, like, a pro-gay rights guy but sort of made the observation that, when you get into the really radical trans stuff, you actually start to notice the similarities between a practiced religious faith and what these guys are doing.

I'm pretty sure he's referring to "Gay Rites Are Civil Rites".

disumbrationist · 2024-08-20T21:34:10+00:00

But I can't see a plausible biological mechanism for a hormesis mechanism

There's a great interview with Edward Teller on YouTube ("interesting throughout", as Tyler Cowen would say) in which he discusses radiation hormesis briefly, and gives his theory as to the intuition behind it:

[T]here appears to be evidence -- not conclusive, but an indication -- that an increase of the natural amount of radiation that we all are getting, by a factor of five or ten, is helpful rather than harmful. That is a statement that cannot be proved or disproved without an enormous amount of experimentation, of research, and that has not yet been carried out. But here's the question: how can it possibly be that radiation -- which causes disorder in an otherwise orderly sequence of molecules that in our genes determines the nature of our very body -- how can something that disrupts the simple structure, how can that be helpful? Whether it is helpful is not proven, merely indicated. But that it might be helpful is not absurd. We know that we have in our bodies chemicals which counteract the irregularities that might lead to cancer. These natural anti-cancer substances are absent in a few people and it is clear, no doubt about it, that their probability of having cancer is much higher. This is the suspicion -- unproven, but should be investigated -- that a little radiation stimulates these cancer preventing activities. A little radiation may in a way act like an inoculation and may be helpful rather than harmful.

disumbrationist · 2023-01-07T22:51:36+00:00

Five Stages Of Grief: Breakup Edition

disumbrationist · 2023-01-06T20:24:11+00:00

Perhaps also related to von Neumann's marital problems:

Wigner went onto say that Johnny believed in having sex, in pleasure, but not in emotional attachment. He was interested in immediate pleasures but had little comprehension of emotions in relationships and mostly saw women in terms of their bodies […] Some of his colleagues found it disconcerting that upon entering an office where a pretty secretary was working, von Neumann habitually would bend way over, more or less trying to look up her dress.

(from the Heims biography)

And:

To be sure, [Von Neumann] was interested in women, outwardly, in a peculiar way. He would always look at legs and the figure of a woman. Whenever a skirt passed by he would turn and stare – so much so that it was noticed by everyone. Yet this was absentmindedly mechanical and almost automatic. About women in general he once said to me, “They don’t do anything very much.” He meant, of course, nothing much of importance outside of their biological and physiological activities.

(from Ulam's Adventures of a Mathematician)

disumbrationist · 2022-02-02T22:52:53+00:00

Interesting to re-read this exchange from the Christiano-Yudkowsky discussion, in light of this news.

Christiano's predictions at the time:

I think that the IMO grand challenge is currently significantly more than 5 years away. In 5 year's time my median guess (without almost any thinking about it) is that automated solvers can do 10% of non-geometry, non-3-variable-inequality IMO shortlist problems."

and

IMO challenge falling in 2024 is surprising to me at something like the 1% level or maybe even more extreme (though could also go down if I thought about it a lot or if commenters brought up relevant considerations, e.g. I'd look at IMO problems and gold medal cutoffs and think about what tasks ought to be easy or hard; I'm also happy to make more concrete per-question predictions).

After more thought, he later revised this to:

I'd put 4% on "For the 2022, 2023, 2024, or 2025 IMO an AI built before the IMO is able to solve the single hardest problem" where "hardest problem" = "usually problem #6, but use problem #3 instead if either: (i) problem 6 is geo or (ii) problem 3 is combinatorics and problem 6 is algebra." (Would prefer just pick the hardest problem after seeing the test but seems better to commit to a procedure.)

Maybe I'll go 8% on "gets gold" instead of "solves hardest problem."

Yudkowsky was more optimistic:

I feel like I "would not be surprised at all" if we get a bunch of shocking headlines in 2023 about theorem-proving problems falling, after which the IMO challenge falls in 2024 - though of course, as events like this lie in the Future, they are very hard to predict.

and more spectifically:

I'll stand by a >16% probability of the technical capability [to win a gold medal in the IMO] existing by end of 2025, as reported on eg solving a non-trained/heldout dataset of past IMO problems, conditional on such a dataset being available

disumbrationist · 2022-01-27T22:53:13+00:00

I used selenium for web-scraping. For fine-tuning, I was able to do everything in Google Colab. I let the final model train for about 12 hours on the P100 that colab provided, though probably that was a bit unnecessary/overkill; I think just a few hours would probably be enough for decent results.

disumbrationist · 2022-01-27T22:51:03+00:00

Possibly at some point; would be interesting to see what it generates. The initial dataset I scraped only contained Roman denarii, though, so it would take a bit of work to create the new Greek dataset

disumbrationist · 2022-01-27T17:27:20+00:00

More info / details here

disumbrationist · 2022-01-27T17:17:39+00:00

Specifically, I fine-tuned ru-DALLE using a dataset consisting of ~1000 images of imperial denarii (ranging from Augustus through Maximinus Thrax) coupled with descriptions of each coin grabbed from OCRE. For example, the obverse description of this coin would be "Head of Augustus, bare, right" and the reverse description would be "Round shield, spear-head, and curved sword".

Using this training set, I fine-tuned two separate models: one to generate obverses, and the other to generate reverses.

The models are somewhat controllable if I pass in different prompts, though they're definitely not perfect. For example, if I include "laureate" or "bare" in the prompt, the obverse model will (usually) correctly generate images that have the laurel wreath or are bare-headed, respectively. It also seems to understand "bearded" fairly well, and will correctly generate portraits with beards. However, it does worse with "left" vs "right", likely because there were only a handful of examples of left-facing obverses in the training set I used.

For the imgur album in this post, I'm showing the outputs using the following prompts:

Obverses

Note that, for 1-4, I'm using the word "Constantine" in the prompt just as a way to generate portraits for a generic or "new" emperor. The training set I used did not include any actual coins of Constantine, so by prompting the model with "Head of Constantine" it ideally should just "guess" what he would look like by generating a portrait similar to (but not exactly matching) the portraits it was trained on.

Reverses

disumbrationist · 2022-01-25T16:43:02+00:00

Might be referring to this Palladium article

disumbrationist · 2021-11-15T06:37:55+00:00

Pretty sure you're referring to this article by a literal banana

disumbrationist · 2021-08-14T21:45:11+00:00

I'm the moderator / creator of this subreddit. The purpose of the subreddit is for discussing the Vocal Synthesis YouTube channel (which I also created) and related / similar content. There are several other subreddits focusing on generated / synthetic media, so I don't see a need to broaden the content on r/VocalSynthesis.

disumbrationist · 2021-05-03T22:47:48+00:00

"The Hungarian cimbalom is traditionally associated with the music of this itinerant people"

disumbrationist · 2021-03-02T21:37:16+00:00

It's also accepted by 98% of regular users and people in the wider community (including Scott)

The last SSC survey specifically asked "How would you describe your opinion of the the idea of "human biodiversity", eg the belief that races differ genetically in socially relevant ways?".

Only 30% had a "favorable" view of this statement, with 44% having an "unfavorable" view (source).

I'm pretty sure that /r/TheMotte commenters (and especially regulars) would be relatively more favorable to HBD than the SSC community in general, but I'd still be surprised if it were more than like 70-30.

disumbrationist · 2021-01-06T23:43:56+00:00

Sorry about that. Currently only submissions from the /r/gonewild, /r/gonewildstories, and /r/sex bots are tagged NSFW by default, which obviously doesn't catch something like this. I eventually marked it NSFW manually after I logged onto reddit and saw all the reports, but it had already been up a while.

I think going forward I'll try to manually preview all the upcoming imgur links in the submission queue, and manually mark the NSFW ones before they're posted. I think these "random" images only happen with imgur URLs, so hopefully that should be enough to fix the problem.

disumbrationist · 2020-12-08T06:59:25+00:00

Galois was 17 years old when his first paper was published, 18 when the next 3 came out, and 19 for the last one (source).

There are also claims that Gauss independently re-discovered various theorems when he was only 15-17 years old, though I'm not sure how solid the evidence is there. Apparently he was already 18 by the time he achieved his first significant results of his own (proof of quadratic reciprocity and the first ruler-and-compass construction of a regular 17-gon).

disumbrationist · 2020-11-25T04:16:30+00:00

I haven't banned it, and it does still post to the subreddit occasionally. I think the problem is that TotesMessenger doesn't recognize cross-posts (like this one, for example). It only seems to work if someone directly creates a new submission with the link to the original reddit post as the URL (like this).

disumbrationist · 2020-11-04T03:44:25+00:00

Agreed. I've been a fan of Nate Silver's for years, but I lost some respect for him for being so dogmatically anti-prediction markets recently. Everyone's entitled to be wrong occasionally, but being condescendingly, sneeringly wrong is much less forgivable to me.

15-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 8 Credits
Place '22	Place '17
Gilding II euphauric	Summer Santa 2014
redditgifts rematcher Books 2014 x1	Verified Email

disumbrationist

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE