• 13 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • Probably my favorite set of stories is by qntm, who writes lots of short fiction you can check out at his site. He wrote There Is No Antimemetics Division, which I think is best described by the intro he wrote for it:

    An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it.

    Antimemes are real. Think of any piece of information which you wouldn’t share with anybody, like passwords, taboos and dirty secrets. Or any piece of information which would be difficult to share even if you tried: complex equations, very boring passages of text, large blocks of random numbers, and dreams…

    But anomalous antimemes are another matter entirely. How do you contain something you can’t record or remember? How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you’re at war?

    Welcome to the Antimemetics Division.

    No, this is not your first day.

    There’s a lot of other good entries too. They generally take the form of a wiki entry at https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/, as a classified file describing some anomalous thing or event. They have a shared canon but only loosely, individual stories can conflict with one another. Here’s a couple good ones:

    I’ll post over in !scp@lemmy.world too, to see what other people recommend for getting into it












  • TBH I think you’re concern trolling, because you don’t like the topic. Instead of drama or trying to prevent discussion, what are some interesting things about the comment? I think this part is very true for many cults:

    I finally had a breakthrough internally and got the courage to go to therapy and try to reckon with the damage my upbringing did to me. and once that started to work, $CULT’s rose tint rapidly faded.

    Poor mental health is responsible for a lot of people falling down nasty internet rabbit holes. We should work to improve that situation.








  • There’s a number of major flaws with it:

    1. Assume the paper is completely true. It’s just proved the algorithmic complexity of it, but so what? What if the general case is NP-hard, but not in the case that we care about? That’s been true for other problems, why not this one?
    2. It proves something in a model. So what? Prove that the result applies to the real world
    3. Replace “human-like” with something trivial like “tree-like”. The paper then proves that we’ll never achieve tree-like intelligence?

    IMO there’s also flaws in the argument itself, but those are more relevant