mathematics (and increasingly CS) enthusiast | MIT class of 2026 | Wikimedian | vaguely Grey Triber | personal website: https://duck-master.github.io
duck_master
Karma: 110
Update: I also tried a different experiment where I mashed up some excepts from The Kybalion and The Law of One using a one-word-level Markov chain and fed the results to LLMs (again using lmarena.ai because I’m lazy). None of these induced woo/spiral-persona mode in any of the models I tried. So my new hypothesis is that there’s a minimum threshold of coherence that you need in the prompt in order to induce spiral persona behavior.
Here’s an example of the stuff I got:
...Mental Power. The Universe is Mental,” which means that the poor lack, while the Principle itself can never be considered, for they lack the fundamental knowledge upon which the modern schools suppose to be healed. It may be applied to material things. But the Hermetists carry it still further. They teach that the Negative is precedent to the right, is the resource for spiritual work. When green ray has been covered previously to some extent, sixth, work within some system of knowledge and law?” Can you tell me what you mean that the nine who sit upon the digit of...
This made me wonder whether the bullshit generator was sufficient to create an “awakened AI” experience. So what I did was I took the text generated by the bullshit generator and fed it into lmarena.ai, and both models (qwen3 and o3) responded with even more mystical bullshit. This doesn’t quite answer my original question but it strongly hints at a yes to me nevertheless
I am on the mezzanine but no one seems to be in that particular room yet
I am here right now!
Do note that I’ll be hosting this event in Newton from 11am to 2pm so if I arrive in person it will probably be around 2:30pm − 3pm ish unless I call it off early
ACX Everywhere fall 2025 - Newton, MA
update: arrived!
on my way, will arrive on foot around 11:15am
2025 ACX Grants project pitches
Is this only open to EU-based organizations, or is it global? Are there other eligibility criteria?
when and where is the event on Saturday July 19th if I may ask?
20 cards a day — Having too many cards and staggering review buildups is the main reason why no one ever sticks with Anki. Setting your review count to 20 daily (in deck settings) is the single most important thing you can do to stick with Anki long-term.
I think “20 cards a day” might be too aggressive, but I decided (after taking a shower and realizing that learning thirty new concepts a day is extreme) to lower the presets for my 2 decks (French and Mandarin Chinese) to 5 new cards and 50 review cards per day. Previously, it was 15 new cards and 150 reviews. I even finished one of the decks, which is kind of crazy.
Since you wrote the original, machine translation (which is pretty decent these days) should be fine, because it’s not really generating the English version from scratch. Even Google Translate is okayish.
It might dangerous to always follow Claude though. In this 2023 article I once read, a Vice reporter tried using ChatGPT to control his life, and it failed miserably. Contrived decision theory scenarios are one thing; real life is another.
This is not just limited to websites I think. In my experience, a lot of companies or organizations that charge money (e.g. hospitals, cinemas, psychologists, some physical stores) intentionally hide or at least downplay how much they charge. My guess is this is probably to work around the price elasticity of demand—if you don’t even know what the price is, there’s no way you can flinch away from a high price to begin with. Interestingly, most restaurants are upfront about how much they charge, which I’m guessing is because the restaurant world is far more competitive.
No, it was rescheduled to June 15 instead
paranoid debating, rescheduled to June 15
Sorry I’m arriving late
On the other hand pasting the LLM’s analysis of the weird disjointed passage as the start of a new chat is absolutely sufficient to induce woo mode