Viewing profile — LinchZhang

Thank you for your kind words and empathy! I appreciate it. Writing to the void is hard, and while I care a lot about improving and not being wrong, I also appreciate it when peopl…

Thanks, appreciate the anecdote!

If you have suggestions on a better title, please let me know! I tried pretty hard to come up with different ones, giving time constraints, and this was the best one I had. I'm rea…

Why fixate on a specific word rather than the overall idea? If the idea is clear enough I don't think it's worth fighting over semantics.

I agree I used the word substantially more expansively than some other people use it. That's why I defined it in the beginning so people can understand the local scoping of the rel…

I think many people have some intuition that work can be separated between “real work“ (farming, say, or building trains) and “middlemen” (e.g. accounting, salespeople, lawyers, bu…

The supposed excuse was Elon Musk's lawsuit, but they interpreted the discovery process very broadly.

I compiled a list of my favorite intellectual jokes, as well as offer a short treatise on why intellectual jokes aren't just "jokes about smart people" In xenosociology class we le…

I have heard approximately equal number of comments that Chiang's writings are clearly hard sci-fi and that his stories are clearly science fantasy. I find my own ontology to be us…

If you like explorations of the deep impacts of parallel universes which have bridges that lets you transport bits (but not matter), you might enjoy https://brainchip.thecomicserie…

For this article, I wrote 4000+ words in the first draft and asked AIs to help suggest places where I repeated myself, different sections or other things to cut, etc, so the final …

I'm so glad my review had an effect on people! I hope the book can bring you half as much joy as it brought me <3 <3 <3

checking logprobs doesn't seem weird to me, it was the priming that was weird.

It wasn't one of the short stories I reread for the review. I thought he simplified the thermodynamics element to make the story work, but multiple people have corrected me by now.…

This seems like a weird way to check if something's AI? a) Like presumably AIs are much more likely to make mistakes of a certain form if there are more such mistakes in the traini…

It's really cool that you ask 10 people their favorite chiang story, and chances are, you'd get 11 answers. And he didn't even write that many more than 10 stories! Really tells yo…

Well, feel free to send my review to anybody cool living in SF or East Bay, especially people new to the area! Maybe they'd read the review and think they'd vibe well with me :)

OMG I'm so glad this review might have an impact! Please do check out Story of Your Life and then read the other stories! Without giving too many spoilers away, the short story's p…

I appreciate the nitpicks! Re #1 It's been several years since I read up on that area of philosophy. I'll need to reread some stuff to decide whether I think the definition I used …

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is SO good. I tear up every time I reread it. If you haven't already done so, check out The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling.

We're doing a watch party next Monday! In case you and/or ppl you know live in East Bay!

Thank you for the valuable and constructive comment! I just didn't feel like discussing the satire angle was very interesting! In the article: > In Omphalos, Young Earth Creationis…