The orange site has a thread. Best sneer so far is this post:

So you know when you're playing rocket ship in the living room but then your mom calls out "dinner time" and the rocket ship becomes an Amazon cardboard box again? Well this guy is an adult, and he's playing rocket ship with chatGPT. The only difference is he doesn't know it and there's no mommy calling him for dinner time to help him snap out of it.

I guess that I'm the resident compiler engineer today. Let's go.

So why not write an optimizing compiler in its own language, and then run it on itself?

The process will reach a fixed point after three iterations. In fancier language, Glück 2009 shows that the fourth, fifth, and sixth Futamura projections are equivalent to the third Futamura projection for a fixed choice of (compiler-)compiler and optimizer. This has practical import for cross-compiling; when I used to use Gentoo, I would watch GCC build itself exactly three times, and we still use triples in our targets today.

[S]uppose you built an optimizing compiler that searched over a sufficiently wide range of possible optimizations, that it did not ordinarily have time to do a full search of its own space — so that, when the optimizing compiler ran out of time, it would just implement whatever speedups it had already discovered.

Oh, it's his lucky day! Yud, you've just been Schmidhuber'd! Starting in 2003, Schmidhuber's lab has published research on Gödel machines, self-improving machines which prove that their self-modifications will always be better than previous iterations. They are named not just after Gödel, but after his First Incompleteness Theorem; Schmidhuber et al proved easily that there will always be at least one speedup theorem which a Gödel machine can never reach (for a given choice of axioms, etc.)

EURISKO used "heuristics" to, for example, design potential space fleets. It also had heuristics for suggesting new heuristics, and metaheuristics could apply to any heuristic, including metaheuristics. … EURISKO could modify even the metaheuristics that modified heuristics. … Still, EURISKO ran out of steam. Its self-improvements did not spark a sufficient number of new self-improvements.

Once again the literature on metaheuristics exists, and it culminates in the discovery of genetic algorithms. As such, we can immediately apply the concept of gene-oriented evolution ("beanbag" or "gene pool" reasoning) and note that, if goals don't change and new genes don't enter the pool, then eventually the population stagnates as the possible range of mutated genes is tested and exhausted. It doesn't matter that some genes are "meta" genes that act on other genes, nor that such actions are indirect. Genes are genes.

I'm gonna close with a sneer from Jay Bellou, who I hope is not a milkshake duck, in the comments:

All "insights" eventually bottom out in the same way that Eurisko bottomed out; the notion of ever-increasing gain by applying some rule or metarule is a fantasy. You make the same sort of mistake about "insight" as do people like Roger Penrose, who believes that humans can "see" things that no computer could, except that you think that a computer can too, whereas in reality neither humans nor computers have access to any such magical "insight" sauce.

IQ is a little bit heritable. But there are plenty of things which are very heritable and also not genetic to use as comparisons, like accents or posture or little societal rituals of communication, compared to which IQ is barely heritable at all. And that's without cracking into memes/tropes/narremes, skills, maths, or other more-abstract inheritance.

He tells on himself by saying "Gerard" vs "Scott" and "David Gerard" vs "Scott Alexander". What's really pathetic is that he thinks politics on Wikipedia is about left vs right or authoritarians vs anarchists. Somebody should let him know that words are faith, not works.

He's talking like it's 2010. He really must feel like he deserves attention, and it's not likely fun for him to learn that the actual practitioners have advanced past the need for his philosophical musings. He wanted to be the foundation, but he was scaffolding, and now he's lining the floors of hamster cages.

Very ironic that they refuse to use the Bayesian framework while insisting that their judges did not use it correctly. To reuse an old joke: I updated my posteriors; now, up yours!

I think that this is actually about class struggle and the author doesn't realize it because they are a rat drowning in capitalism.

2017: AI will soon replace human labor

2018: Laborers might not want what their bosses want

2020: COVID-19 won't be that bad

2021: My friend worries that laborers might kill him

2022: We can train obedient laborers to validate the work of defiant laborers

2023: Terrified that the laborers will kill us by swarming us or bombing us or poisoning us; P(guillotine) is 20%; my family doesn't understand why I''m afraid; my peers have even higher P(guillotine)

That sounds like a great way to get assaulted, perhaps battered too. I guess it's cold comfort to know "hah, got 'em, they're so easily triggered" while sitting in a hospital bed recovering from a head injury, but it just sounds stupid to me.

Their mistake is not grokking contrition. An apology ought either to be contrite or to justify why contrition is impossible.

To be explicit, contrition is the part of an apology where the apologizing party promises to change something. Without contrition, apologies are worthless, since they do not amend any social contract.

What the author proposes instead is indeed "Machiavellian" and "hacking social APIs;" we should recognize it as a form of deceit or lie. They are clearly more interested in appearing to be decent than in improving society, and should be marked as confidence scammers.

Yud tried to describe a compiler, but ended up with a tulpa. I wonder why that keeps happening~

Yud would be horrified to learn about INTERCAL (WP, Esolangs), which has required syntax for politely asking the compiler to accept input. The compiler is expressly permitted to refuse inputs for being impolite or excessively polite.

I will not blame anybody for giving up on reading this wall of text. I had to try maybe four or five times, fighting the cringe. Most unrealistic part is having the TA know any better than the student. Yud is completely lacking in the light-hearted brevity that makes this sort of Broccoli Man & Panda Woman rant bearable.

I can somewhat sympathize, in the sense that there are currently multiple frameworks where Python code is intermixed with magic comments which are replaced with more code by ChatGPT during a compilation step. However, this is clearly a party trick which lacks the sheer reproducibility and predictability required for programming.

Y'know, I'll take his implicit wager. I bet that, in 2027, the typical CS student will still be taught with languages whose reference implementations use either:

1. the classic 1970s-style workflow of parsing, tree transformation, and instruction selection; or
2. the classic 1980s-style workflow of parsing, bytecode generation, and JIT.

I'm gonna give partial credit to the comments for pointing out that rugby/football, boxing, MMA, and violent video games all already exist and are generally available throughout rich democracies. However, I will only award full credit for a refutation of the idea that competitive violence is innate to men.

NSFW time! I am continually floored by the sheer lack of nuance that these folks have. Here, my guy is conflating three separate concepts:

• ACAB: Police culture has the "thin blue line," the concept that cohesive policing is the main force preventing modern society from collapsing into lawlessness and chaos. As a result, police cannot be trusted to respect non-police. Our friend here might benefit from knowing that ALAB as well, due to the oath that lawyers profess upon admission to the bar.
• Defund the police: In the USA, many cities have steadily increased spending on police over the past century or so. This has not correlated with a drop in crime (and it can't cause a drop in crime, since police respond to crime but don't prevent it!) and so there is a call to reverse spending increases.
• Militarization: Our friend doesn't explicitly say it, but police have become more violent over the century as well, equipping themselves with ever-more-dangerous tools. This also isn't correlated with a drop in crime, and some of those tools are illegal to use outside of war, leading to a call for partial disarmament.

Don't get me wrong; some law enforcement is necessary in a lawful society. Try having a trial court without a bailiff, for example. But it sounds like our dude is a recovering ancap, and he just can't see shades of grey.