@BoilingPb

Engineer (valves). Aspiring rising edge detector, rationalist. Retweets carefully: 𝑆𝑒𝑐𝑢𝑟𝑒, 𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑖𝑛, 𝑃𝑟𝑜𝑡𝑒𝑐𝑡.

 Northeast USA (PA)
Joined April 2013
  • Tweets6.1K
  • Following218
  • Followers264
215Media
Downloading the archive of my tweets just so I can actually search them... turns out it also includes the full text of every tweet I've ever liked?! (That hasn't been deleted since, I guess I'll have to start taking snapshots and adding them up.)
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The real blackpill is that it doesn't matter if you lie. Might even be a good plan, if you're length constrained (orange markers) (Figure S4) Or maybe that's a whitepill. If you're telling 80% lies, surely you're well past the point where Gell-Mann is a good defense.
Kobi Hackenburg
@KobiHackenburgJun 16
New w/ @AISecurityInst & @UniofOxford: Frontier AI can now out-persuade expert humans in conversation - incl. world-champ debaters and professional canvassers. This held even when humans chose their topics, prepared in advance, and competed for £1,000 prizes 🧵
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Also, shame on Claude for being the three of the four points all the way to the left there. Nobody is actually surprised at Grok, but *you're* supposed to be able to tell the difference between 'just an eval' and a situation with real users.
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So a weird thing is that I haven't seen anyone suggest that a journal that cared would do well to bar not just those caught, but those who publicly argue to excuse fake citations.
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(Like, I'd think at least some fields would be interested... after convincing a physicist I know that I was not exaggerating the narrowness of the arxive policy, or the boldness of the (presumably nutpicked) objections I've seen, this was his first policy suggestion.)
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0) New thread: my highest-effort reply from the past month.
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1) Feb: I read a paper about 51% attacks on PoW chains and decide it has a rather optimistic assumption. xitter.cf/BoilingPb/status/20195…
Dylan Foltz
@BoilingPbFeb 6
Replying to @planefag @NotWoofers
This paper: 'if you let anyone rent your army, it would be very cheap for someone to pay 51% of it to shoot it out with your 49% for a couple minutes...'. Which is true, but like with militaries, only a couple percent of hashpower is even on the market. (Though see 5.4.1/2)
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2) Mar + April: an amusing parallel between a heavy metal and the Christian theology of sin. xitter.cf/BoilingPb/status/20322…
Dylan Foltz
@BoilingPbMar 13
Replying to @blind_via @open_erv
I shouldn't speak for others, but the pun is too good... I think he just doesn't let original sin (every igneous rock contains at least 10 µg/g), or hydraulic transport (by which concentrations in many environments are decreased), excuse relativism or nihilism or nonchalance.
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0) List of features I've wished, at least once, that Twitter had. (But that it doesn't, AFAIK)
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13) Multi-quote-tweets, for the reasons portrayed in the images in the multi-image insert.
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14) A checkbox so I can reply to someone without boosting their nonsense, EG to correct them. (With twitter currently governed by engagement-maxxers this is not something I expect to actually get.)
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The folks working on the algorithm have done a great job: "for you" is now full of qualityslop.
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#0 For ~the same reasons as before, I'm rebooting the scheduled low-quality top-level-posting exercise. Until further notice, every Saturday, there will be a new post below... if it's stupid, opaque, or cringe, kindly assume that's intentional.
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#35 any relation to contemporary discourse is accidental. xitter.cf/nickcammarata/status/1…
Nick
@nickcammarata18 Mar 2025
we need slang for ‘normal and boring’, how about vanilla—a flavor so beautiful, expensive, and rare it’s worth manually pollinating with tiny toothpicks and hand-scraping it from exotic tropical orchids
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#36 They say what gets measured gets managed but it doesn't really look like it's working.
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sheesh
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In the replies people blame demographics, but what if that's downstream of structure? What if 4chan (etc.) were so powerful because they combined light moderation, bottom-posting, non-branching threads, thead-bumping, and trivial (but nonzero) border policy?
ℜ𝔞𝔢
@dystopiangf5 Jul 2025
4chan was actually upstream of internet culture and politics to a far greater degree than normies realize. People like to think of it as a containment zone for losers, but it was more like a memetic Wuhan lab
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Apparently the full Wikipedia text dump is ~10TB compressed, because they just keep the full article text, including xml headers, for every edit. (For guessing at uncompressed size—the current text of all articles is ~25GB compressed / 110 GB uncompressed.)
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If LLMs' preference for certain constructions exist because they help them think, does avoiding them make *you* dumber—at least when you're constructing text linearly?
Dylan Foltz
@BoilingPb20 Jun 2025
Replying to @kitten_beloved
Perhaps it makes them smarter? 'not X. Y.' seems like simply the most compact way to basin hop / narrow. And the em-dash is the high-quality-text–coded representation of an optional-return, optionally grammatical, abrupt aside.
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If there are any cracked, young engineers, maybe college students, who might want to build this part time, I will pay you to build this. The "R9X drone" / interceptor (and EDF version) must be built. 🚀 I won't wait for angels/VCs to get this going. RT for vis appreciated. 🙏
Dirac Delta@DeltaClimbs19 Jun 2025
All right, hear me out A 25 lb turbine powered R9X drone with computer vision Who wants to help me build this? The Argentine MoD gets briefed on the idea tomorrow Already have a provisional patent filed (though IP is a violent, statist scam)
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> 'I'll get a blue light filter for my monitor, then I can use the machine more late into the night.' > it works > (gets sleepy late at night)
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To show red-on-white (like spellcheck underlines) I'm running in the default inverted greyscale, though given how visible straight green is a bichrome might be possible? Unhappy with the rendering, BTW. Hard to convey the sort of orange a ~630nm "red" is...
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(Amazingly, despite rubylith being sold as an optical material *and* being the standard recommendation among astronomy folks for covering screens, this is the best transmission spectrum I can find.)
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