Links Post #4
Half free before the paywall, as always
1) Common tech jobs explained as Aztec sorcerors - absolutely hilarious banger of a post, featuring lines like “In the olden days the Aztecs would conduct ceremonies in which they looked into their round obsidian mirrors for glimpses of the Other World. Today we all carry an obsidian mirror in our pockets, although in the current fashion they have rectangular shapes.”
and
“The gods of the Other World, unlike what one may think, are not all smart. Many are simple-minded things. They are ready to do the bidding of enchanters, but enchanters must first teach them. Those who are acquainted with such Art are called ML or AI engineers. (Abbreviations that come, obviously, from taking letters at random from yectlamachiliztli, meaning intelligence.)”
2) Sapient algorithms, a fascinating take on something I’ve done for a long time, but never really had a word or concept handle for. Basically, you deliberately instill a habit, and then the habit generalizes unconsciously in a useful way.
I got tired of risking locking my keys in my car. So I started making a habit of looking at my keys before closing the door.
Once, right after I’d closed the locked car door, I realized I’d looked at the phone in my hand and shut the door anyway. Luckily the key was in my pocket. But I noticed that this autopilot program just wasn’t helping.
So I modified it (as a TAP): If I was about to close the car door, I would look at my hand, turn on consciousness, and check if I was actually looking at my keys.
First, that TAP just worked. To this day I still do this when stepping out of a car.
Second, it generalized without my trying to:
After a while it would fire whenever I was about to close any locked door.
It then generalized to anyone I was with. If they were about to close a locked door, I would sort of “pop awake” with a mental question about whether someone had the key.
It then generalized even more. It now fires when I’m, say, preparing for international travel. Crossing a border feels a bit like going through a door that locks behind me. So now I “wake up” and check that I and my travel companions all have passports. (I would usually check before, but now it’s specifically this mental algorithm that summons sapience. It’s reliable instead of being an extra thing to remember.)
This generalization wasn’t intentional. But it’s been really good. I haven’t noticed any problems at all from this program sort of spreading on its own.
3) The virus engineered to corrupt Iran’s physics calculations with subtle rounding errors:
“LS-DYNA in particular has been cited in public reporting on Iran’s suspected violations of Section T of the JCPOA, in studies of computer modeling relevant to nuclear weapons development… by introducing small but systematic errors into physical‑world calculations, the framework could undermine or slow scientific research programs, degrade engineered systems over time or even contribute to catastrophic damage.”
“Why this matters - this is how a superintelligence might prevent others from coming into existence: fast16 is a subtle, hard-to-find bug which has been designed to degrade an actor’s ability to do certain types of science.”
The whole post is a banger, also this guy is one of the founders of Anthropic, and it’s super interesting to see the frontier of stuff he’s keeping up with and thinking about.
4) If you want an obedient, submissive woman, you need to give her a better fairytale - a feminist take on something I fully agree with.
I actually think this is a big part of the loneliness crisis and fertility crisis. Formerly, guys had value by default, because only they could work and have bank accounts. But all over the world, women gained the ability to work and have bank accounts, and so no longer needed men, except for the interpersonal value they add to their lives. And men suck at THAT, the bar for that is just literally on the floor, at least the 50th percentile down of men is fully net negative there, and probably up to the 66th percentile in the longer term (hence why the 20 year failure rate for marriage is 82%).
So yes, I fully endorse this post. If you want something super rare and hard to find for men (a hot, obedient, submissive woman), you need to be offering something similarly rare and hard to find for women. If you want submission and slavish devotion and worship as a man, you need to be *worth* devotion and worship and submission, and the way to do that is by being the best partner she’s ever had on several fronts, and making sure the acts, the narrative, and the symbolism are all pointing that way.
Also, you can just go date and marry overseas in Asia if you want the “easy mode” button there, which I wrote about here.
A western man dating women in Asia is way overpowered, because even if you want a hot submissive wife, a western man who wants that is still way less regressive and conservative than the median asian guy, so you both get what you want. The asian woman gets a relatively more feminist and valuable-in-this-sense man, and the man gets a relatively hotter (green line here) and more submissive wife, and it’s the archetypical benefits of trade and everyone wins.
5) father_karine’s impossibly epic and hilarious parody of girlstack and self-help posts which subtly transitions into a medical mystery and resolution while maintaining tone and ending with a picture of The Judge from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
Featuring such banger lines as:
“my wake-up call came during during a very douchey musical festival where i purchased a $13 tallboy of “Liquid Death 100% still mountain water” and realized it was pretty much the exact same swill i use to flush excrement down the toilet. the can told me i needed to “murder my thirst” much like the talking dog who spoke to the Son of Sam. later that evening i spied a woman on the E train carrying this “motivational water bottle” that ordered her exactly when to drink and how much. that’s when it clicked: there was a dark agenda at play, and i was but a pawn in the game of Big Hydration. i also realized that during my nearly two decades in this godless concrete city, i’ve never seen a healthy, beautiful person carrying a water bottle, especially one with fuckin words on it.”
“on day 10 without water i looked in the mirror and couldn’t believe my eyes. i was serving Marilyn Manson elective lower rib removal auto-fellatio levels of waist-to-hip ratio.”
“no more waiting in line at the bar to get a drink and then waiting again at the women’s restroom to piss it right back out like some dumbass modern day Sisyphus. have fun rolling that big piss boulder for all eternity, ladies.”
It is literally the best and funniest thing I’ve read all year, and I wasn’t just laughing, I was laughing, crying, gasping, and rolling around on figurative lollerskates.
6) Fun wiki article on the coordinated suffragette bombing campaign that caused at least 24 casualties and cost at least 700k pounds of damage in the early 1900’s in Britain and the US, ultimately leading to women getting the right to vote!
This came about after decades of peaceful protest led nowhere - so, let this be a lesson to people who think “protesting” does anything besides getting you laid among fellow protestors!
7) PSA: Public google API keys can now be scraped and misused to rack up your Gemini api bill: https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/google-api-keys-werent-secrets-but-then-gemini-changed-the-rules
This is a silent vulnerability, because Google’s own docs say to make various keys public, and retroactively, those keys can now be harvested and used to rack up Gemini api bills on your account.
8) Aella’s age guessing game, which she did as part of a broader research project on how sexiness / attractiveness changes as women age.
I did VERY poorly, 40th percentile on the medium length test, so I guess I suck at guessing people’s ages. To be fair, she had some plainly adversarial examples in there - but my sister got 98th percentile with little effort, so the adversarial examples couldn’t have been more than 2%.
Paywall and coupon
And as always, I offer a coupon to become a paid subscriber in these before the paywall. I’m not that interested in subscription revenue, which is always going to be rounding error, but I am interested in increasing the absolute number of subscribers, which lifts you in Substack’s algorithms and broadens your reach. I also recently learned from Peter Banks that you can actually do 90% off coupons! So thank you, Peter, for showing me the way.
So if you would like to help my cause of “number go up,” please enjoy a lifetime 90% off coupon here:
