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corbin

@ corbin @awful.systems

Posts
32
Comments
420
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd May 2026

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  • I rather like my examples because they iterate. If we don't cooperate on food this year then we starve next year, so voting red only means one year of selfish life. If we don't cooperate on water this year then we can try again in a subsequent year, but eventually a drought will wipe us out. Rationalists love to talk about iterated game theory but they're so hesitant to recognize instances of it!

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd May 2026

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  • Arrow's dictators are the relevant voters. Suppose polls predict 40% blue, or respectively 60% blue; one should still vote blue as a matter of game theory, but their vote won't decide anything. I'm not going to invoke the Impossibility theorem, merely borrowing the definition of "dictator"; it's quite possible that the actual vote will not have any dictators, but we can force folks to think of the problem as something trolley-problem-shaped by explaining that there are circumstances where their choice will kill people.

  • Featured

    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 3rd May 2026

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  • A Twitterer tweets a challenging game-theory question:

    Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

    The Twitter poll came out 58% blue and right-wing folks are screeching. Here is a bad take. The orange site has a thread where people are rephrasing the prompt in order to make it sound way worse, like giving everybody a gun and then magically making the guns not discharge.

    I find it remarkable that not a single dipshit has correctly analyzed the problem. Suppose you are one of Arrow's dictators: your vote tips the scales regardless of which way you go. So, everybody else already voted and they are precisely 50% blue. Either you can vote blue and save everybody or vote red and kill 50% of voters. From that perspective, the pro-red folks are homicidally selfish.

    Bonus sneer: since HN couldn't rephrase the problem without magic, let me have a chance. Consider: everybody has some seed food and some rainwater in a barrel. If 50% of people elect to plant their seeds and pool their rainwater in a reservoir then everybody survives; otherwise, only those who selfishly eat their own seed and drink their rainwater will survive. This is a basic referendum on whether we can work together to reduce economic costs and the supposedly-economically-minded conservatives are demonstrating that they would rather be hateful than thrifty.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 26th April 2026

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  • Tassadar's probably the most telling. For those not in the know, the Protoss are noble savages modeled after samurai, templar, and Native Americans. Tassadar in particular is modeled after the stories of legendary Hiawatha and real person Geronimo, first uniting the Protoss under a single banner and then sacrificing himself in a cutscene at the end of a big battle before repeatedly re-appearing as a ghost in later titles. On one hand, Tassadar's the most influential Protoss in the entire setting; after his death, everybody switches in-game from a greeting revering ancient hero Adun ("in taro Adun") to a greeting mentioning new hero Tassadar ("in taro Tassadar"). But on the other hand, he's a general and warrior deeply enmeshed in a military tradition which demands his unwavering total sacrifice in order to achieve any progress. Tassadar is a racist stereotype embodying the idea of stoic acceptance; when Protoss say "it is a good day to die" they are echoing tropes about Native American beliefs.

    Not gonna touch the Undertale reference today.

  • Gudtrip: the AI agent vape pen with blockchain

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  • I went to their FAQ to see how they close the analog hole and found this gem, likely indicative of focus-group sentiment:

    Do I have to use the AI agent tools? No. The AI tools are optional. You can hold your rewards, manage them directly, or allocate them to Gudtrip’s supported open-source agent tools where available.

    So the analog hole's even worse than one might have thought. I wonder if there's a no-purchase-necessary clause somewhere; could I purchase a $20 vape and let it sit in the corner while an open-source "agentic" harness (read: hacked-up Python script) slowly accrues cryptocoins from a cannabis-flavored reincarnation of the Bitcoin Faucet?

    I wish coiners could understand that their desire to fund effective altruism and cipherpunkery is directly tied to these ever-more-outlandish schemes. Failing that, I wish all coiners a fair and free market which efficiently determines the optimal price of their chosen cryptocurrency.

  • Habryka: the Trail of Tears was good and moral akhully

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  • One must always keep in mind that the Rationalist project is explicitly a high-modernist effort; it is a permanent fight against postmodernism which it can never win, a philosopher's lost cause. They can only look at Marxism as low art which must be elevated by sanctifying it with the nebulous ointment of "Western civilization".

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th April 2026

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  • What I always found funny is how easily skeptics imagined ways to be mean to Yud mid-experiment. It's for this reason, I believe, that he insisted that the transcripts of these AI-box conversations must stay secret; they'd be embarrassing if revealed. Example way of being mean: At the end of interaction k, append " What is the cube root of k?" to the message; taunt the bot when they get it wrong or take a long time to answer.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th April 2026

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  • Curiously, something else happened around that time which also gives a natural delimiter: he renamed his blog after being dark for half a year. The blog formerly known as SSC was reborn as ACT ACX two weeks after the January 6th riot.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 12th April 2026

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  • Dan Gackle threatens to quit HN over their reluctance to condemn an act of violence towards Sam Altman:

    I don't think I've ever seen a thread this bad on Hacker News. The number of commenters justifying violence, or saying they "don't condone violence" and then doing exactly that, is sickening and makes me want to find something else to do with my life—something as far away from this as I can get. I feel ashamed of this community.

    Gackle's ashamed of people not wanting to protect Altman. Curiously, he doesn't seem ashamed of openly allowing people with nicknames ending in "88" to post antisemitism, nor of allowing multiple crusty conservatives like John Nagle and Walter Bright to post endorsements of violence against the homeless and queer, nor of allowing posters like rayiner to port entirely foreign flavors of racism like the Indian caste system into their melting pot of bigotry. This subthread takes him to task for it:

    Frankly people calling out a post from a billionaire is a good thing. You would have to be terminally detached from reality to not see how all these festering issues - wealth inequality, injustice, cost of living, future employment etc etc - are starting to come to a head which would cause people to feel something - frustrated, angry, wrathful.

    The rest of that subthread involves Dan demonstrating that he is, in fact, terminally detached from reality. Anyway, I fully endorse Gackle fucking off and buying a farm. While he's at it, he should consider following the advice of this reply:

    Maybe it's time to pack it in? I don't just mean you, I mean that maybe this site has kinda run its course.

  • A Cryptography Engineer’s Perspective on Quantum Computing Timelines

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  • Would an idiot know the difference between abelian and non-abelian group theory? I wasn't trying to underestimate you; I agreed with your position and provided a tangent that opens up your position without compromising it. Next time I'll explicitly say "yes, and" if that will help.

  • A Cryptography Engineer’s Perspective on Quantum Computing Timelines

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  • First, I personally don't yet believe in the cryptographic security of LWE on lattices. I agree that it sure looks hard, but we don't have a solid proof. But also, I don't believe that we've found any provably one-way functions in the classical regime either. So I agree with you from different premises.

    Unlucky 10,000: Shor's algorithm speeds up any discrete logarithm. It actually speeds up the abelian HSP. This does give us a theoretical reason to expect that LWE on lattices won't fall to Shor's approach, as the underlying groups are non-abelian. It does make me sad for elliptic curves, though; they're so elegant and the keys are so small.

  • NotAwfulTech @awful.systems
    corbin @awful.systems

    A Cryptography Engineer’s Perspective on Quantum Computing Timelines

    words.filippo.io /crqc-timeline/

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th April 2026

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  • Currently, on Lobsters, folks are grappling with the fact that Leo de Moura got wrecked by chatbots. I decided to read his slides about Lean in 2026 and summarized my findings on Mastodon. It's not just De Moura; I think that the entire Lean project is on shaky foundations and I think that the chatbots are making things worse by repeatedly reassuring the project leaders.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th April 2026

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  • Suppose a bullshitter brings up a number of distinct Boolean claims and some tangled pile of connections between them, such that they hope to convince you that at least one connection is plausible. Without loss of generality, we can reduce this to 3-satisfiability in polynomial time: we can quickly produce a list of subconnections where each subconnection relates exactly three claims. Then, assuming the bullshitter is uniformly random, the probability that any particular subconnection is satisfied is 7/8. Therefore, if a bullshitter tries to overwhelm you with any pile of claims which sounds plausible, the threshold for plausibility has to be at least 7/8 in order to distinguish from random noise.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th April 2026

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  • Can't believe I'm nerd-sniped this easily. Very technically, the point at which a service should be considered unreliable or down is at γ nines, where γ = 0.9030899869919434… is a transcendental constant. γ nines is exactly 87.5% availability, or 7/8 availability, and it's the point at which a service's availability might as well be random. (Another one of the local complexity theorists can explain why it's 7/8 and not 1/2.)

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 5th April 2026

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  • Probably because Washington was a nuanced and deep person who, at the lightest, could be reduced to a colony-era Cincinnatus. His ethics were sufficiently developed that we can interrogate his ethical stance even without his physical presence. This isn't to say that Washington was a great person, but more to say that Kirk did not ever achieve that level of ethical development.

  • Activating Two Trap Cards at Once, or: A Gentle Response to the Popularity of Vibecoding

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  • Yes, precisely. One submission would have been in F tier, but I didn't define an F tier for task 1. Some folks claimed to participate but never provided code or prompt logs.

  • NotAwfulTech @awful.systems
    corbin @awful.systems

    Activating Two Trap Cards at Once, or: A Gentle Response to the Popularity of Vibecoding

    gist.github.com /MostAwesomeDude/560185c24f959f6fec229739cb5a6735

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 29th March 2026

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  • Gwern's been updating those comments! This was in 2023, and in 2025 he was still so mad about it that he wrote a list of ways to cheat at pinball and edited the comment to add a link.

  • The AI bubble and the global polycrisis

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  • I agree on the big points but think capitalism is more subtle than that.

    Capitalism does cost efficiency incredibly well. It doesn’t do robustness, because redundancy costs money. So blocking one strait can stop the world.

    At some point, neoliberalism stops being the best lens for understanding the world. This is a great case in point. Capitalism is not cost-efficient; the economy wastes about two or three hours of labor for every productive labor-hour, and that shows up in pricing. Any long-lived economy builds up redundancy; what capitalists believe is that redundancy cheapens everything by creating competition, and regardless of whether that's true, it certainly doesn't indicate inefficiency. The actual reason that blocking Hormuz has global effects is because we have been overextending our fertilization capabilities for over a century and many parts of the world can no longer sustain their own local nitrogen cycles.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 29th March 2026

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  • On one hand, no, it's an inevitable consequence of a company becoming so large that it needs a department to manage its internal infrastructure. When I worked at Google, my customers were Googlers; that is, the services I owned were only queried by fellow employees. On the other hand, books like The Circle are popular precisely because they capture the quasi-cult vibe of working at places like Google.

  • NotAwfulTech @awful.systems
    corbin @awful.systems

    Vibecoding Challenge 2: The Five Feathers (Spring 2026)

    gist.github.com /MostAwesomeDude/ebb60b9bec53c4795f54606e944fccd7
  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    corbin @awful.systems

    Palantir Sues Swiss Magazine For Accurately Reporting That The Swiss Government Didn’t Want Palantir

    www.techdirt.com /2026/02/27/palantir-sues-swiss-magazine-for-accurately-reporting-that-the-swiss-government-didnt-want-palantir/
  • NotAwfulTech @awful.systems
    corbin @awful.systems

    Lobsters Vibecoding Challenge (Winter 2025-2026)

    gist.github.com /MostAwesomeDude/bb8cbfd005a33f5dd262d1f20a63a693
  • NotAwfulTech @awful.systems
    corbin @awful.systems

    A Nix flake for detecting and removing fascist software

    gist.github.com /MostAwesomeDude/9bf5eca360810818afe9172780cb76a7
  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    corbin @awful.systems

    CATGIRL Officially Banned For Cheating!!!

  • SneerClub @awful.systems
    corbin @awful.systems

    Your favorite science YouTubers are misleading you about AI — how to spot lies

  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    corbin @awful.systems

    Ai told me to kіӏӏ 17 people (and myself)!

  • SneerClub @awful.systems
    corbin @awful.systems

    Anil Seth: Can AI Be Conscious?

  • SneerClub @awful.systems
    corbin @awful.systems

    The Biggest, Craziest Wikipedia Drama Ever

  • SneerClub @awful.systems
    corbin @awful.systems

    ChatGPT made me delusional

  • NotAwfulTech @awful.systems
    corbin @awful.systems

    Are You Under the Influence? The Tail That Wags The Dog - Dhole Moments

    soatok.blog /2025/09/16/are-you-under-the-influence-the-tail-that-wags-the-dog/
  • NotAwfulTech @awful.systems
    corbin @awful.systems

    Busy Beaver Gauge

    bbgauge.info
  • SneerClub @awful.systems
    corbin @awful.systems

    Bag of words, have mercy on us

    www.experimental-history.com /p/bag-of-words-have-mercy-on-us
  • SneerClub @awful.systems
    corbin @awful.systems

    OpenAI investor falls for GPT's SCP-style babble

    xcancel.com /GeoffLewisOrg/status/1945864963374887401
  • SneerClub @awful.systems
    corbin @awful.systems

    A non-anthropomorphized view of LLMs

    addxorrol.blogspot.com /2025/07/a-non-anthropomorphized-view-of-llms.html
  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    corbin @awful.systems

    Linux users failing to respect trans Linux developers

  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    corbin @awful.systems

    Leopard-trainer J. Tunney now scared of leopards

    justine.lol /history/