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2025-02-04

• 11:30 UTC Words from an ex-Zizian-adjacent person – Words from an ex-Zizian-adjacent person It seems there’s now a full-on Mansonesque death cult emerging from the LessWrong/rationalist/effective-altruism community: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/bay-area-death-cult-zizian-murders-20064333.php This HN comment was very interesting for background: [Former member of that world, roommates with one of Ziz’s friends for a while, so I feel reasonably qualified to speak on this.] The problem with rationalists/EA as a group has never been the rationality, but the people practicing it and the cultural norms they endorse as a community. As relevant here: 1) While following logical threads to their conclusions is a useful exercise, each logical step often involves some degree of rounding or unknown-unknowns. A -> B and B -> C means A -> C in a formal sense, but A -almostcertainly-> B and B -almostcertainly-> C does not mean A -almostcertainly-> C. Rationalists, by tending to overly formalist approaches, tend to lose the thread of the messiness of the real world and follow these lossy implications as though they are lossless. That leads to… 2) Precision errors in utility calculations that are numerically-unstable. Any small chance of harm times infinity equals infinity. This framing shows up a lot in the context of AI risk, but it works in other settings too: infinity times a speck of dust in your eye >>> 1 times murder, so murder is “justified” to prevent a speck of dust in the eye of eternity. When the thing you’re trying to create is infinitely good or the thing you’re trying to prevent is infinitely bad, anything is justified to bring it about/prevent it respectively. 3) Its leadership – or some of it, anyway – is extremely egotistical and borderline cult-like to begin with. I think even people who like e.g. Eliezer [Yudkowsky] would agree that he is not a humble man by any stretch of the imagination (the guy makes Neil deGrasse Tyson look like a monk). They have, in the past, responded to criticism with statements to the effect of “anyone who would criticize us for any reason is a bad person who is lying to cause us harm”. That kind of framing can’t help but get culty. 4) The nature of being a “freethinker” is that you’re at the mercy of your own neural circuitry. If there is a feedback loop in your brain, you’ll get stuck in it, because there’s no external “drag” or forcing functions to pull you back to reality. That can lead you to be a genius who sees what others cannot. It can also lead you into schizophrenia really easily. So you’ve got a culty environment that is particularly susceptible to internally-consistent madness, and finally: 5) It’s a bunch of very weird people who have nowhere else they feel at home. I totally get this. I’d never felt like I was in a room with people so like me, and ripping myself away from that world was not easy. (There’s some folks down the thread wondering why trans people are overrepresented in this particular group: well, take your standard weird nerd, and then make two-thirds of the world hate your guts more than anything else, you might be pretty vulnerable to whoever will give you the time of day, too.) TLDR: isolation, very strong in-group defenses, logical “doctrine” that is formally valid and leaks in hard-to-notice ways, apocalyptic utility-scale, and being a very appealing environment for the kind of person who goes super nuts -> pretty much perfect conditions for a cult. Or multiple cults, really. Ziz’s group is only one of several. Tags: zizians cults extropianism tescreal effective-altruism rationalism lesswrong death-cults
• 11:10 UTC Burrows–Wheeler Transform – Burrows–Wheeler Transform an algorithm used to prepare data for use with data compression techniques such as bzip2. It permutes the order of characters in a string (S), sorting all the circular shifts of the text in lexicographic order, then extracting the last column and the index of the original string in the set of sorted permutations of S. Some day when I have lots of free time to spare, I’ll spend a while getting my head around this deep magic, because it’s just amazing that this works. (via John Regehr) Tags: compression algorithms burrows-wheeler-transform bzip2 via:john-regehr magic text

2025-01-31

• 17:10 UTC Irish spider zombies! – Irish spider zombies! This is fantastic — a newly-discovered species of fungus does the same trick as Ophiocordyceps in Brazil; it infects the brains of orb-weaving cave spiders in Ireland, and induces them to leave their lairs or webs, and migrate to die in an exposed situation, in order to favor dispersal of the fungal spores. Ophiocordyceps is, of course, the inspiration for the zombie-forming fungus in The Last Of Us. Tags: cordyceps fungi ireland spiders zombies fungus nature gross
• 10:20 UTC The Billion Docs JSON Challenge: ClickHouse vs. MongoDB, Elasticsearch, and more – The Billion Docs JSON Challenge: ClickHouse vs. MongoDB, Elasticsearch, and more This buries the lede somewhat, but here’s the key bit: We built a new powerful JSON data type for ClickHouse with true column-oriented storage, support for dynamically changing data structures without type unification and the ability to query individual JSON paths really fast. […] ClickHouse stores the values of each unique JSON path as native columns, allowing high data compression and, as we are demonstrating in this blog, maintaining the same high query performance seen on classic types. The performance results are very impressive, and notably also efficient in disk space usage. Tags: clickhouse benchmarks performance json querying columnar-storage mongodb elasticsearch databases storage

2025-01-28

• 18:20 UTC ODROID-H4+ – ODROID-H4+ The next generation of the excellent ODROID SBCs; based on Intel’s N97 architecture, AVX2 extensions, faster DRAM, 4 SATA ports, and up to 48GB of RAM. Significantly beefier in general, reportedly around the EUR180 mark in price. Tags: odroid sbcs n97 hardware home devices servers
• 18:10 UTC Coordinated Lunar Time – Coordinated Lunar Time The moon may have a timezone of its own soon, Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC): Due to the moon’s lower gravity and its motion relative to Earth, moon time passes 56 microseconds faster each earth day. As a result, an atomic clock on Earth would run at a different rate than an atomic clock on the moon. Similar to how UTC is determined, the memo suggests “an ensemble of clocks” deployed to the moon might be used to set the new time standard. (via David Cuthbert) Tags: via:david-cuthbert moon time timezones ltc
• 11:50 UTC Understanding the BM25 full text search algorithm – Understanding the BM25 full text search algorithm “BM25, or Best Match 25, is a widely used algorithm for full text search. It is the default in Lucene/Elasticsearch and SQLite, among others.” At its heart, it’s an interesting probabilistic ranking scheme, involving the Inverse Document Frequency of a term, term frequency in a single document, and the document length. (Via Tony Finch) Tags: via:fanf lucene elasticsearch search text algorithms sqlite full-text bm25
• 11:40 UTC git worktrees – git worktrees This is a pretty nifty feature I was unaware of; git now has built-in support for “worktrees”, multiple parallel checkouts of the same git repo in side-by-side directories. (via Last Week in AWS) Tags: via:lwia git worktrees checkouts coding version-control unix

2025-01-27

• 11:40 UTC LLM-Driven Code Completion in JetBrains IDEs – LLM-Driven Code Completion in JetBrains IDEs JetBrains have come up with a new relatively-lightweight LLM-driven code generation option, constrained to producing single line suggestions: The length of the completion suggestions is a trade-off. While longer suggestions do tend to reduce how many keystrokes you have to make, which is good, they also increase the number of reviews required on your end. Taking the above into account, we decided that completing a single line of code would be a fair compromise. Some key features: It works locally and is available offline. This means you can take advantage of the feature even if you aren’t connected to the internet. It doesn’t send any data from your machine over the internet. The language models that power full line code completion run locally, which is great for two reasons. First, your code remains safe, as it never leaves your machine. Second, there are no additional cloud-related expenses – that’s why this feature comes at no additional cost. Also, customer code is never used for training. I’ve used this (in RubyMine), and found it fairly useful; it’s good for generating the obvious next line, but is easily ignored when that’s not what’s needed. Not bad at all. Tags: coding code-completion jetbrains ides java ruby llms ai code-generation rubymine intellij
• 10:50 UTC VIC 20 Elite – VIC 20 Elite Crazy stuff. Elite, ported to the Commodore VIC 20 (albeit with a 32K expansion): VIC 20 Elite is based on the C-64 source. VIC 20 specific graphics, text, keyboard & joystick input, and sound routines were written from scratch to replace the corresponding C-64 code. Of course, the complete enhanced Elite won’t fit within the VIC 20’s limited memory, so some features had to be left out. Following the original 1984 BBC Cassette and Acorn Electron version, the VIC 20 version omits extended planet descriptions, planetary details (craters and meridians), and the missions that appear further on in the game. The pause mode options are dropped, and there is no Find Planet option in Galactic Chart (that would be only really useful during missions). (via Sleepy from FP) Tags: retrogaming commodore emulation gaming history elite vic-20

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