Skip Navigation

blakestacey

@ blakestacey @awful.systems

Posts
6
Comments
482
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026

    Jump

  • Great to hear from you. I was just up at MIT this week and met with Seth Lloyd (on Wednesday) and Scott Aaronson (on Thursday) on the "Cryptography in Nature" small research conference project. These interactions were fantastic. Both think the topic is wonderful and innovative and has promise. [...] I did contact Max Tegmark about a month ago to propse the essay contest approach we discussed. He and his colleagues offered support but did not think that FQX should do it. Reasons they gave were that they saw the topic as too narrow and too technical compared to the essay contests they have been doing. It is possible that the real reason was prudence to avoid FQX, already quite "controversial" via Templeton support to become even more so via Epstein-related sponsorship of prizes. [...] Again, I am delighted to have gotten such very string affirmation, input and scientific enthusiasm from both Seth and Scott. You have very brilliantly suggested a profound topical focus area.

    —Charles L. Harper Jr., formerly a big wheel at the Templeton foundation

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026

    Jump

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026

    Jump

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026

    Jump

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026

    Jump

  • Hops over to Wikipedia... searches... "Showing results for ruleal. No results found for ruliad."

    Hmm. Widen search to all namespaces... oh, it was deleted. Twice.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026

    Jump

  • What TF is his notation for Turing machines?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026

    Jump

  • None of these words are in the Star Trek Encyclopedia

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026

    Jump

  • I think I read the Foucault book in that series to prep for high-school debate team.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026

    Jump

  • I think that's more about Wolfram giving a clickbait headline to some dicking around he did in the name of "the ruliad", a revolutionary conceptual innovation of the Wolfram Physics Project that is best studied using the Wolfram Language, brought to you by Wolfram Research.

    The full ruliad—which appears at the foundations of physics, mathematics and much more—is the entangled limit of all possible computations. [...] In representing all possible computations, the ruliad—like the “everything machine”—is maximally nondeterministic, so that it in effect includes all possible computational paths.

    Unrelated William James quote from 1907:

    The more absolutistic philosophers dwell on so high a level of abstraction that they never even try to come down. The absolute mind which they offer us, the mind that makes our universe by thinking it, might, for aught they show us to the contrary, have made any one of a million other universes just as well as this. You can deduce no single actual particular from the notion of it. It is compatible with any state of things whatever being true here below.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026

    Jump

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026

    Jump

  • Jeff Sharlet (@jeffsharlet.bsky.social):

    The college at which I'm employed, which has signed a contract with the AI firm that stole books from 131 colleagues & me, paid a student to write an op-ed for the student paper promoting AI, guided the writing of it, and did not disclose this to the paper. [...] the student says while the college coached him to write the oped, he was paid by the AI project, which is connected with the college. The student paper’s position is that the college paid him. And there’s no question that college attempted to place a pro-AI op-ed.

    https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2026/01/zhang-college-approached-and-paid-student-to-write-op-ed-in-the-dartmouth

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026

    Jump

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026

    Jump

  • Chris Lintott (@chrislintott.bsky.social‬):

    We’re getting so many journal submissions from people who think ‘it kinda works’ is the standard to aim for.

    Research Notes of the AAS in particular, which was set up to handle short, moderated contributions especially from students, is getting swamped. Often the authors clearly haven’t read what they’ve submitting, (Descriptions of figures that don’t exist or don’t show what they purport to)

    I’m also getting wild swings in topic. A rejection of one paper will instantly generate a submission of another, usually on something quite different.

    Many of these submissions are dense with equations and pseudo-technological language which makes it hard to give rapid, useful feedback. And when I do give feedback, often I get back whatever their LLM says.

    Including the very LLM responses like ‘Oh yes, I see that

    <thing that was fundamental to the argument>

    is wrong, I’ve removed it. Here’s something else’

    Research Notes is free to publish in and I think provides a very valuable service to the community. But I think we’re a month or two from being completely swamped.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026

    Jump

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 1st February 2026

    Jump

  • The Wikipedia article is cursed

  • Lobsters Vibecoding Challenge (Winter 2025-2026)

    Jump

  • Here's something. It doesn't follow your rules.

    Then why did you submit it, dipshit?

    Given your tone in these posts it seems unlikely to meet the kind of standards you are looking for.

    That "kind of standards" being basic competence.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th January 2026

    Jump

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th January 2026

    Jump

  • "Self-hating nerd"... Is this the time to mention that I was Prom King in high school?

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th January 2026

    Jump

  • "Proud of the culture"?

    He drew Dilbert, you fucking buffoon.