To be clear, I don’t care about Yud picking the fandom he did at the time (apart from the cheapness of “playing on easy mode” and the blatant attempt to ride popularity for propagating his cult shit). What strikes me is the silence during the time when other people are most definitely reacting:
I have also occasionally been tempted to try and get a Goncharov thing going, where everyone collectively recalls that Tommy Berry and the Forevernight Forest got them into reading.
It was just after an ordinary afternoon tea, on an ordinary Sunday, the first cold day of autumn, when Tommy Berry discovered that Time was no longer adding up in the ordinary way.
Tommy had only managed to drink one cup of very indifferently warm tea, and eat the last plain saltine from the bottom of the bag. Everything else had been gobbled up or drunk down by his uncle Myrvold, who was rotund as a boulder and about as kind, and his step-aunt Meredith, who was thin as a snake and considerably more mean. So, yes, it was altogether quite the ordinary teatime.
Tommy had a secret, you see. In fact, he had two, a big one that he knew about and an even bigger one that was just about to fall on top of him.
His first secret was that he had a library card. He had stolen an adult’s library card. Or that is how Uncle Myrvold and Step-Aunt Meredith would have described it, if they knew.
Carruthers, who lived down the end of the lane and always yelled at Tommy to mind his hedges, and who let his dog chase Tommy and the other children, had made a big show of throwing his library card into the roadway because, he said, the library was full of immoral books. A car had then driven over it, and then a whole lorry, and then Tommy had snatched it up. Something told him that anything Carruthers hated, he should save, and anything that Myrvold and Meredith would be angry about, he should hold onto.
Tommy had heard adults say that something was “burning a hole in my pocket”. He wondered if this was what that meant. It felt like he was carrying a hot coal in the pocket of his threadbare corduroy jacket, and no one could know.
The library had a new machine. He had seen adults use it. You could go up to it, wave a book under a red laser light like at the grocery store, then show the machine your card, and it would check out the book for you. Tommy made a plan. He would slip out of the house just after tea. He would walk the five blocks to the library. He would find a book that Myrvold and Meredith and Carruthers and every other grownup would not want him to read. He would wait until the librarian was busy dealing with a whole queue of people. And then he would use the machine.
Everything went perfectly until the very last step.
There was a girl at the machine.
He had a big fat book in his hands, a book he had picked because it had “Murder” in the title and would last a long time, and there was a girl in front of him at the library machine.
“Murder at Wizard University?” she asked him, right to his face, like they had already been introduced, like they had known each other since nursery school. “That’s not a book for little kids.” His stomach dropped, right into his feet. He didn’t know that a stomach could do such a thing.
And then she tilted the stack of books she was carrying toward him, showing him the titles on their spines. “Neither are these,” she said.
And she pulled out her own library card. It was black, like a rectangle cut out of the midnight sky.
That’s all I wrote in the thread that prompted me to take a stab. Oh, I think I had decided that the girl’s name is Elfriede? And the principal of magic school is nonbinary.
“Why, of course there’s a potion for changing,” said Professor Shade. “That is what potions do. I don’t know where I’d be without it. It is ever so helpful to reach the top shelf, but on the other hand, men’s fashions haven’t been truly swank in a hundred fifty years.”
Being the kind of writer I am, whenever this comes up I am tempted to suggest ways it could have been done better. But, first, I am not glazing the work of Rowling, even indirectly, no way, no how. Fuck her for all the pain she has wrought, and fuck the whole LessWrong crew for tacitly accepting it. Second, HPMoR was cult shit all along, not meant to teach science but to sow distrust of scientists under the glossy sheen of being able to name the six quarks.
Once you commit to the idea that only your main characters have ever tried to study magic scientifically, you’re locked in to making all the rest of the magical world into dullards. (Really, no other eleven-year-olds were ever into computer programming, chemistry sets, exotic marine animals, outer space, or dinosaurs?) Or, to look at it another way, the only way you can find the premise plausible is if you’re already inclined to dismiss most of humanity as “NPCs”.
It even used to have a top-quality news section, BuzzFeed News!
Azeen Ghorayshi made her name reporting at Buzzfeed News about sexual harassment in science… and then she became one of the New York Times’s professional transphobes.
more like requie-SCAT, am i right
Carl Bergstrom notes a publicity stunt by Anthropic:
“The AI Grad Student”: A Harvard professor describes working with Claude.
Early on, he describes misconduct that would cause any student to be terminated: “It faked results, hoping I wouldn’t notice.”
But he ends the essay with “Now I’m doing 100% of my research with LLMs”.
Am I losing my mind?
Hang around for the “trust me bro, I saw it on YouTube” guy in the comments.
deleted by creator
44 comments in support, 2 in opposition, discussion closed early under the “there’s a snowball’s chance in Hell of the situation changing from here” clause:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_articles_with_large_language_models/RfC
Regarding a project to translate several thousand ancient letters:
So, um… this is bad. Really bad. I looked at the letters that were translated by the AI, and the very first one I found was almost entirely hallucination.
The AI-as-excuse layoffs have come for Meta:
wait, I totally had something for this… TERF AI-land
[Effective Altruism] was originally applied to initiatives like raising money for mosquito netting, but now includes figures like Johnson, who has reframed his blood experiments as a product of his own generosity, set to cure humanity of its greatest ill: death itself.
People keep saying this, so it’s good to have a reminder that the weirdos (derogatory) were there all along.
I am retrospectively disturbed by how well “I really came in a fluffer that time” slots into Dorothy Parker’s flow.
A skilled, centaur-configured programmer
This is like reading Yud mumbling about “Shoggoths”. It’s giving knight errant, organ-meat eater, Byronic hero, Haplogroup Rlb.
I was not ready
Chris Stokel-Walker at Fast Company reports:
High-level information about the private work of students and staff using ChatGPT Edu at several universities can be viewed by thousands of colleagues across their institutions due to a misunderstanding of what is being shared, according to a University of Oxford researcher who identified the issue.
The problem affects Codex Cloud Environments in ChatGPT Edu and exposes the names and some metadata associated with the public and private GitHub repositories that users within a university have connected to their ChatGPT Edu accounts. […] “Anyone at the university, or a large number of people at least—including me—can see a number of projects [people have] been working on with ChatGPT,” says Luc Rocher, an associate professor at the University of Oxford, who identified the issue and raised it with both the University of Oxford and OpenAI through responsible disclosure. He later approached Fast Company after what he felt was an inadequate response from both.
Just one of many reasons that the mere existence of “ChatGPT Edu” means that many people need to be tased in the nads
The thread for collecting HPMoR sneers linked to this timeline, but it’s paywalled now:
https://www.vox.com/culture/23622610/jk-rowling-transphobic-statements-timeline-history-controversy