Colin
@colin-fraser.net
Driven by industry progress, inspired by provocative leadership, plus don't mind a good pair of shoes or a great @PennStateFball scoreboard either.
Kind of refreshing to see writing so stupid that it can’t possibly have been AI
The Athletic@theathletic.com · 6h agoAaron Rodgers spoke out about Dr. Anthony Fauci. Sophie Cunningham spoke out about transgender athletes. Caitlin Clark chose not to weigh in. Three different approaches, one common result: criticism. Steve Buckley on how athletes can't win on social media: nyti.ms/3Sa9A7D
Like when he figured out that Anthropic had misrepresented their February 30th revenue
Ben Malcolm@amakhosi.bsky.social · 3mo agoMy point is that when he is arguing or insinuating fraud, he is backing those claims up with hard numbers. He has repeatedly laid out why this is not similar to the Dot Com bubble and Piper's rebuttal is weak. She pays for Claude because she finds it useful. Okay?
I tried to tell him regular old vanilla expected utility theory is perfectly consistent with choosing the 50k but he didn’t want to listen so I had no choice
Will Stancil@whstancil.bsky.social · 6d agoWell some nutjob of some description definitely thought they were doing something hardcore here
Odysseus had a type of cunning that you see sometimes in ancient texts where the guy is one of the smartest guys in history so far because there haven’t been that many smart people yet. Like Solomon.
Aaron Bady@zunguzungu.bsky.social · last wk.also, I'm sorry, but the "no man" thing with the cyclops is dumb and I hate it, and he was right not to include it
Theorem. For any set H of horses, if x and y are in H then x = y. The proof is by induction on n = |H|. Clearly it holds for n=1 horse. Now suppose it holds for n-1 horses, and consider X=H\{x} and Y= H\{y}, and choose any h in X ∩ Y. By the induction hypothesis x = h and y = h. Therefore x = y. □
Ben Collins@bencollins.bsky.social · 7d agoTikTok has incredible moderation team. Our InfoWars video about Multiple Horse Theory — the idea that there are many horses in the world and not just one — has been fully deemed misinformation and lost the formal appeals process. Confirmed by Larry Ellison: There is only one horse on Earth.
My 45 minute layover in Newark is now approaching 40 hours and I think I will probably try to never come here again
Everyone has like 2-3 distinct names which are each very easy (if you aren’t Russian, I guess) to confuse with everyone else’s 2-3 distinct names
Luke O'Neil@lukeoneil47.bsky.social · last wk.Type of shit I was walking around saying to anyone I met when I was 22.
I’m sorry, I don’t exactly have the luxury of flipping the magic coin in this economy. I’m taking the 50k.
emily s.@emily.news · 8mo agojust noodling: suppose you have a coin which, when flipped to predict some outcome, comes up 51% of the time with a correct prediction of the future. you can flip it as many times as you want. would that be useful?
If you do want to see a retelling of a legend from Greek mythology that audaciously does not shy away from portraying what is supposed a supernaturally beautiful song you gotta go see Hadestown, the live stage recording film of which is currently in theatres
m@keptsimple.bsky.social · last wk.Nolan actually needs more exposition in his films. He should appear in the corner like Clippy to explain what is happening and reiterate what was already established by the dialogue. All directors should do this.
Would you rather take a guaranteed £50k, or £1M if you can manage to string Odysseus’ great bow and shoot an arrow through 12 axes?
One thing I find interesting about Anthropic’s apparent willingness to have Claude make these kinds of refusals is once you open the door to the possibility of software that refuses certain tasks on moral grounds it raises the question of what tasks you’re obligated to make it refuse
Anil Dash@anildash.com · last wk.Just in case you still use any Basecamp products, DHH is crashing out about his AI product gently pointing out that it’s bad for him to have extermination fantasies about the Roma people.
Looking into this and learning that apparently there’s actually a long history of debate about this very question. Samuelson (1963) says that the answer should be no, and calls the contrary idea a “fallacy of large numbers”.
Colin@colin-fraser.net · 2w agoSuppose you take the 50k and are rational. Is there an N such that you would rather flip N times for 1M each than receive 50000N for sure?
Suppose you take the 50k and are rational. Is there an N such that you would rather flip N times for 1M each than receive 50000N for sure?
just out of curiosity I glanced at some of the recent literature on this and one recent theme has been looking at how as people develop experience with decisions under uncertainty their behavior tends to shift from more risk-averse to more risk-neutral
Colin@colin-fraser.net · 2w agoGet in loser we’re reinventing the Holt-Laury task from first principles
Take the $50k then buy 10k tomato plants. In six months you have 250,000k tomatoes. Plant those into 250,000k plants . . .
Get in loser we’re reinventing the Holt-Laury task from first principles
J. C. Cantwell 🌻@segfaultvicta.aludel.xyz · 2w agoMore interesting than the naive coin-flip question: at *what* guaranteed payout 50,000 < N < 500,000 would you take the guaranteed payout rather than a coin flip of getting a million bucks? Everyone’s got a price, darling; how much does your risk cost?
I know the people on the “left” will tell you that there’s not a clear rational answer to this, that different people throw different bread products different distances, but that’s a lie. It’s simple math and people won’t do it out of stubborn anti-intellectualism which I refuse to abide.
Sophie Hall@sophlouisehall.bsky.social · 2w agoFinally, someone asking the important questions
Alright alright I’m coming around to being on the webcomic’s side
Will Stancil@whstancil.bsky.social · 2w agoOkay but seriously: Imagine someone hands you a briefcase. In it is a million bucks, cash. They say keep this for a week. A week later they come back, say I’ll make you a deal. Win a coin toss, you keep it. Lose, I’m taking it back. Don’t want to gamble? Fine, I’m taking $950k. What do you do?
Makes sense to me, both in the sense that sports gambling increases precarity for the gambler, but maybe more importantly, the ubiquity of betting ads (among other things) makes life feel like a predatory dystopia where everyone is constantly trying to trick you out of all your money via your phone.
BeijingPalmer@beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 2w agosomebody suggests sports gambling as one reason here and tbh this is one of the better solutions to a very vexing problem I've heard.
Kinda funny that part 24 minutes it spent “thinking” to produce the proof was building a twitter scraper specifically to fetch this exact tweet
Colin@colin-fraser.net · 2w agoIt seems that Christopher Long on X had already found a proof of this conjecture using ChatGPT days before. I imagine this may have had something to do with why ChatGPT nominated this one as within reach.
Makes sense to me both in the sense that I sports gambling increases the precarity for the gambler but broadly, the ubiquity of betting ads (among other things) just fosters the vibe of a predatory dystopia where everyone is constantly trying to trick you out of all your money via your phone.
BeijingPalmer@beijingpalmer.bsky.social · 2w agosomebody suggests sports gambling as one reason here and tbh this is one of the better solutions to a very vexing problem I've heard.
It seems that Christopher Long on X had already found a proof of this conjecture using ChatGPT days before. I imagine this may have had something to do with why ChatGPT nominated this one as within reach.
I try to defend Will sometimes but then he says things like this
Will Stancil@whstancil.bsky.social · 2w agoI know the take that’s gonna do numbers is “this is rational” but no, people aren’t rational, people are terrible at numbers, this isn’t really rational, people just can’t do math. It’s actually well-known that people are irrational, don’t debase yourself pretending this is smart
