benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026Mediocre writing from current models is more due to 1) great writing is really hard and 2) reinforcement is provided by (a model of) human preferences, and it turns out a lot of people have pretty questionable taste 000 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 30/09/2026That understanding is five years out of date. Base models try to imitate the average, though even they are very sensitive to context clues about what quality level they should be aiming for. Current LLMs do a lot of reinforcement learning to (in theory) push them toward reliable high-quality outputs 100 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 29/09/2026Cubic potatoes can be a somewhat counterintuitive unit, but the trick is to visualize them as volumes in abstract potatospace 1180 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 06/09/2026All the money getting rotated by the same amount at once seems a little unlikely. I would expect the bigger issue to be money getting out of phase, leading to destructive interference. 001 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 01/09/2026Perhaps the form should have asked "will you read English?" 160 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 24/08/2026Denying that anything bad can possibly be part of human nature because you're afraid that someone somewhere might commit the naturalistic fallacy about it strikes me as far more dangerous than the alternative 0100 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 20/07/2026The second panel made me think he was deliberately summoning the fairy 000 0
Reposted by @benpgoodman.bsky.socialCheryl Lynn Eaton @cheryllynneaton.bsky.social · 03/07/2026Asking how people can partake in joyful acts during a period of immense suffering leads me to believe this is your first time at the suffering rodeo. 094782277 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 30/06/2026Not any such efforts. If Congress passes a law granting unauthorized immigrants immunity to all US laws, their children could be denied citizenship. It would be immensely stupid, but clearly constitutional. 000 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 20/06/2026"everyone has job security in this post-scarcity world" is a pretty good eight word horror story 010 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 31/05/2026No, a Boltzmann brain isn't in the room with us. That's the whole point. 020 0
Reposted by @benpgoodman.bsky.socialDennis B. Hooper @dennisbhooper.bsky.social · 18/04/2026 4832177 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 07/03/2026I feel like you already did this one 15 or 20 years ago 020 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 30/12/2025A truly good boy would be willing to make personal sacrifices for the greater good 000 0
Reposted by @benpgoodman.bsky.socialQuoProQuid @quoproquid.bsky.social · 25/12/2025dark gritty santapunk world where the Great Powers of Europe both mandate celebration of Christmas and encourage their subjects to be as naughty as possible to preserve unlimited access to coal and continued industrialization. 413634 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 13/12/2025Leaving aside questions of how this works for noncash assets, this would be precisely equivalent to an inheritance tax paired with contractionary monetary policy. 020 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 09/12/2025The complete adventures of the philosophical children lost in the snow 120 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 10/11/2025Are there any good children's books where the protagonist brings war to peacing kingdoms? 000 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 21/09/2025However, your smoothie example just seems like a nonlinear goodness function defined on the nonnegative subset of a Euclidean space. 020 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 21/09/2025-Topological spaces: even more general than metric spaces; we no longer have distances between points, just an abstract notion of which areas are close or connected to which other areas. 230 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 21/09/2025Directions at different points may not match up consistently. -Metric spaces: a set equipped with a function that tells you how far apart any given pair of points are. Hence there's some geometry, but no concept of "different directions". A manifold equipped with a nice metric is called Riemannian. 120 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 21/09/2025What you call "space" mathematicians would call "Euclidean space" or slightly more generally a vector space. There are other kinds of spaces that work differently, such as: -Manifolds: spaces that locally look like Euclidean space, but globally may have some more complicated structure, and... 170 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 02/09/2025Hybrid and Revolver have losses and a bunch of close wins. I don't think they belong in the same category as Fury. 000 0
Reposted by @benpgoodman.bsky.socialspontaneous symmetry breakdance @t8erboi.bsky.social · 25/05/2025"certified freak, seven days a week" implies the existence of a freak certification board, freak exam, and potential freakiness gains from occupational licensing reform 14494182 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 23/04/2025Is this real or another pump and dump scheme? 050 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 13/03/2025Non-unitary executive theory: quantum wavefunctions evolve according to the Schrodinger equation until acted upon by the president of the United States, at which point they collapse to a single state 130 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 26/01/2025Wait, why is he so worried about heavenly bodies? 000 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 24/01/2025That's how I found you and it's still my favorite. The perfect blend of funny and wholesome 000 0
benpgoodman.bsky.social @benpgoodman.bsky.social · 11/01/2025It's easy to generate 3-SAT instances from a value for each variable: 1. Pick a true literal at random 2. Pick any two other literals at random 3. Permute the three literals randomly to produce a clause 4. Repeat until you have enough clauses I think the issue is making a hard instance of 3-SAT 100 0
