bitbutter Profile picture
animation. decentralisation. communities of consent. I would download a car. thread o threads: https://t.co/vLbB4P6AxE…
Potato Of Reason Profile picture 1 subscribed
Feb 12 45 tweets 10 min read
thread of evidence collectively suggesting widespread genocidal ambition among israelis involved with the current campaign
Aug 12, 2023 10 tweets 2 min read
I totally endorse this. a big failure mode of parents is to be so excited by what their kid is doing that they interrupt what the kid is doing, 'encouragement'. let them do their work! don't make it about you. enjoy it quietly. comment on how much you enjoyed it later when they come to you. the ability of a kid to play/explore contentedly for long periods is, imo, very virtuous for both kid (future adult) and parent. you probably don't want to disrupt the development of this skill
Apr 2, 2023 9 tweets 2 min read
"Searle's in a room followin' English instructions to mess with Chinese symbols, but he ain't understandin' it. It's like a computer doin' the same thing. Searle's arguin' against "Strong AI," sayin' computers can't truly think or understand language like us. Aight, so peeps be comin' up with this Systems Reply to Searle's Chinese Room. They sayin', "Yo, the dude in the room don't get Chinese, but the whole system does." The man's just the CPU, with the whole shebang like databases, memory, and instructions doin' the work.
Apr 2, 2023 14 tweets 3 min read
i don't think humans (as general intelligences) are unconstrainedly creative with regard to modifying that which determines our objectives. which is the relevant thing in this context. and i don't think we should assume AGIs will be either. claim: our meta objective is to activate reward centers in our brain. creativity has no direct bearing on this. (we are mesa optimizers for hitting that button, to the anthropomorphised dismay of natural selection)
Apr 1, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
theres no need for AI to be alive (whatever is meant exactly by alive) in order to be an existential threat.

it needs 'only': an agentic stance (an easy fix), superhuman cognitive ability, and an optimization target misaligned with human survival. I don't know what this means. imo an example of CR obscurantism.
Mar 31, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
all obviously very smart people. which is why I've tried more than once to understand critical rationalism 😅

but also comes with the most dogmatic sounding rhetoric I've heard outside Christian presuppositional apologetics and objectivists. ngl that's off-putting. part of the impression of dogmatism, for me, comes from hewing to non-standard meanings for a bunch of important words like problem, knowledge. and imo not adequately meeting non believers 'where they are' with respect to the language
Mar 26, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
critics haven't glimpsed the stochastic god-parrot in their minds eye yet Image if you ignore the dysphemism, it's technically true that GPT is a stochastic parrot. like it's true that The Milk Maid is daubs of paint on a canvas.
Feb 24, 2023 12 tweets 2 min read
AI definitions thread.

AGI: artificial general intelligence. a (future) AI that's competent in all kinds of modalities, like a typical human is. ASI: artificial superintelligence. an AGI "that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest"
Jan 18, 2022 8 tweets 2 min read
"4 Unvigintillion to One"
i'm going to call this the fruit machine fallacy.

i don't know what the likelihood is of SARS-CoV-2 having natural origin, but i know this isn't how you work it out. in the fruit machine fallacy the 'digits' of a genome are treated as though they are wheels of a fruit machine.
Jan 17, 2022 6 tweets 2 min read
i deleted my most shared tweet. rip. i believe the part about '1 in a billion' is too ambiguous and/or not supported. i don't know how we'd approach putting a likelihood on the #CTCCTCGGCGGGCACGTAG sequence in moderna's patents coincidentally also ending up in SARS-CoV-2 Image the rest of the original thread here: rest of the original thread here:
Jan 14, 2022 10 tweets 4 min read
full detail on recreating the results for yourself from @JikkyKjj
archive.is/18Ho4#selectio… @BretWeinstein have you guys looked at this already? (apparent genomic evidence of moderna's involvement with SARS-CoV-2 origin)
Dec 30, 2021 7 tweets 2 min read
many otherwise smart seeming people claiming that the risk of harm from vaccination is very small.

no. we don't know what the risks are. because: 🧵 1. there's no rigorously collection of adverse events. only passive systems like VAERS. VAERS, known to be subject to massive underreporting, *is* seeing many times more reports than the increased rate of vaccination alone would predict. this is ignored by 'authorities' so far.
Dec 29, 2021 7 tweets 2 min read
that screeching rumble is the Science Changing normalize wearing a mask and social distancing except out of spite
Dec 24, 2021 56 tweets 18 min read
thread collecting evidence of vaccines (now) being more susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection 🧵
Aug 21, 2021 5 tweets 1 min read
is this an official FDA account?

one of the entities responsible for limiting access to ivm packaged for human consumption, driving people to take more risky animal formulations?

seriously, y'all. Stop it. as far as I can tell, the risk, by the way has entirely to do with the user needing to precisely measure out a correct weight-adjusted dose themselves.
Aug 11, 2021 8 tweets 3 min read
Can you take a look at this @EduEngineer?

thread: The Rounding the Earth substack contains the claim "Even worse, we know that vaccine deaths seem to be automatically classified as COVID-19 deaths". roundingtheearth.substack.com/p/how-underrep… This claim is based on the following paper: researchgate.net/publication/35…
Jul 7, 2021 14 tweets 2 min read
as a layperson, under what circumstances might it be reasonable to be skeptical about the claims of a majority of experts on a subject?

when the incentive structure in that domain is broken when the 'consensus view' is the product of social engineering; expert dissenters institutionally excluded for plausibly political reasons

when continued gov funding and/or career opportunity looks like it depends on having advanced the 'consensus view'
Jul 5, 2021 4 tweets 1 min read
wait. the post-vaccination magnetism was real? relatively low confidence in the veracity of this. but watching: orwell.city/2021/06/graphe…
Mar 10, 2021 28 tweets 6 min read
The site cryptoart.wtf by Memo Akten (@memotv) claims to report the ecological footprint of cryptoart NFTs. But the calculation it’s based on is not valid; we can’t legitimately derive an ecological footprint cost per unit of gas in the way it tries to.

thread On this page memoakten.medium.com/analytics-the-… Memo explains how the energy cost of a piece of crypto art is calculated on the site. The calculation depends on adding up the gas costs of all transactions associated with the artwork being analysed.
Mar 9, 2021 5 tweets 2 min read
hear me out
a video metadata standard designed to allow creators to mint (tradable) patronage NFTs corresponding to a predefined number of patron slots per video. the current NFT holder is credited in-frame (via player overlay elements) by supporting players.

cc @LBRYcom
Jan 26, 2021 12 tweets 2 min read
if i had a penny for each time i've been told "a free market could only work if people were perfectly rational" i'd have about three pounds. that's altogether too much.

1/n
it gets things back to front. one of the biggest virtues of a free market is its robustness and anti-fragility. all it needs are plain old *approximately rational* people to give constantly improving results.