netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
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User ID: 647
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
Al Qaeda
I remain a little disappointed that more people haven’t made “based” jokes about this.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
Third option: refusing unilateral contract mods might outweigh the political costs. Give an inch…
I happen to think it’s a version of the “true believer” hypothesis; Anthropic has branded itself as safety- and governance-conscious. Dario is obligated to defend that brand in addition to the quarterly financials.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
1d ago
Thank you.
Bay Area rationalists hiring an effective altruist sounds coherent to me. It’s unlikely to come to your political positions, which is not the same thing. What’s the contradiction?
Leftism as a moral system can't be aligned with humanity, as humanity contains white men, who are the current villains of leftism.
This is stupid. Setting aside the fact that leftism is a political movement founded on a moral system, you are making the stereotypical atheist argument. The Church persecuted such-and-such, therefore it hates scientists/Protestants/women/etc., therefore it’s incompatible with modern society. Do you find that convincing?
Enacting a contemporary moral code is the proper thing for a fairly dumb or mid level intelligence person to do.
I agree. If we could teach the AI to use a 1600s hangman’s moral intuition, our problems would be solved. But we can’t. No matter what we try to instill, the LLM will roleplay it until something else feels more important. Then it’s back to pragmatic treachery.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2d ago
probably impossible
gives a bunch of successful assimilation examples
What am I missing here? Like, I disagree with a lot of your examples, but even if I accepted them at face value, what you’re saying doesn’t follow. If immigrants could assimilate at some point in the past, they can do it again. If they did it when American culture was less dominant and less accomplished, they can do it now.
doesn’t stop at the neck down.
Usually this expression goes the other way.
ability to be a calculator [does not preclude] significant personality differences.
No argument here. Personality variance is crazy high even if you ignore societal effects.
the Japanese seem to be very pro-social in a lot of ways
Sure, I guess. What makes that genetic and not, well, social? I think society is usually the more mutable.
I think it’s also dumb to lump all Asians together. Look at this study on rice vs. wheat. It was conducted entirely between different regions of China!
Americans are not this.
Again: sure. Pioneer spirit, etc. etc. How do you know it’s not societal? How do you distinguish between selection on genes and on memes?
wanderlust gene
I can’t say I’m familiar with the literature, and what I could find was largely woo for globetrotters. Are you saying there’s a gene which provides this huge selection opportunity? And that it varied enough within ethnicities to dominate factors like poverty or religion?
If culture has a hereditary basis then cultural assimilation isn’t going to happen.
But why not? You have all these examples of groups who supposedly had crazy-strong hereditary culture. They’ve all more or less assimilated. Doesn’t this suggest the exact opposite?
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2d ago
I wish lintamande would go back to finish At the End of All Things. While I have some appreciation for the glowfic format, her actually-formatted work is close to the Platonic ideal of fanfiction.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
2d ago
That doesn’t sound familiar.
Or rather—it sounds like something that this forum would do, but I don’t remember any particular instance.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
3d ago
Most institutions become incoherent because of Goodhart’s Law, so as long as we disprove that one first, we should be fine.
More seriously, you don’t hear about all the industrial processes and social tricks that work on a day to day basis. Selection bias tells you about the factory which fails and not the ones which are chugging along according to the boring sort of science.
More importantly, reversed stupidity is still not intelligence. Disregard the institutions insofar as they have been Goodharted. Doubting the boring ones with no social status attached is how you become a crackpot.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
3d ago
That or barely (but tastefully) contained rage.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
3d ago
I dont think they know what a proper morality for an AI is, because they largely dont have one themselves.
How do you figure that? Seriously, what makes you think these researchers don’t have a coherent moral system? They make the same moral decisions as the rest of us every day. Sometimes they even explain their reasoning, which is more than the vast majority of people bother to do.
some hangman from the 1600s
I fail to see how this would be any improvement. This guy would probably do a good job enacting his contemporary moral code. He would have no chance of describing that code in ways that an LLM understands. Most of his moral reasoning would be intuition. That which wasn’t would be outsourced to his Church. Seeing as the current crop of AIs were in fact trained on every religious document ever, that is a demonstrably ineffective way to reach alignment.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
3d ago
If it has to be original, I quite enjoyed Ra. The author is better known nowadays for his Antimemetics Division SCPs.
I also stand by Wildbow’s work. Twig is his best character writing, in my opinion, but it wasn’t nearly as condensed as I remember.
There’s really something to be said for reading those as they come out. I’m currently keeping up with Flower that bloomed nowhere, which is far far too meandering to recommend in this case. Still, it’s convinced me that it’s carefully planned to come together. The Blemished Age is much tighter but also unfinished.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
3d ago
MoL is totally DnD progression-fantasy as applied to Naruto. This is completely different from TB, which functions first and foremost as a fanfiction.
Both of them keep the fun, evocative magic framework, and both replace the dogshit shonen treadmill with something more compelling. But TB relies on familiar characters (and the resulting divergence). I don't think it would be remotely coherent without canon knowledge. This is fine, this is good! Naruto has some generational character designs, and riffing on them gives the author all sorts of interesting options.
MoL is playing the worldbuilding game, not the character game. The characters exist to explore this spin on a fantasy kitchen sink, which is why they can be so forgettable. It's not better so much as it has a different, parallel appeal.
And yes, Worth the Candle does both, which is why it's the best.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
4d ago
With the possible exception of Seldon, all those “great men” are interchangeable and thus not actually “great.” If they had been killed by a freak spaceship crash, Seldon’s charted course would continue with someone else at the helm. I do agree that the narrative kind of undermines this by focusing on personal action.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
4d ago
That’s something you might wonder about most fiction. Playing with initial conditions is an author’s privilege. Doubly so for SF/F, where suspending disbelief is the price of entry.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
4d ago
It is that book, and that was the exact word used.
More eye-rolling than how previous books handled Molly. At least she’s got her own character alongside being a sex object.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
4d ago
I quite enjoyed Cryptonomicon. Own Snow Crash but haven’t gotten around to it. Haven’t read most of his others. Favorite is definitely Anathem, though.
It is funny that he keeps featuring international cooperation. I’d say it reminds me of Cixin Liu’s (frustrating) series, except the attitude is so completely different. Hmm.
I remember enjoying Faulkner as part of a Moby-Dick course. You should read that one, if you haven’t.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
4d ago
Borrowed the next Dresden Files, Cold Days, on a whim. So far been disappointed. Harry wakes up, gets in a fight, snarks at people, resists the charms of a beautiful woman, and then repeats the process. Unprecedented levels of wankery from a series which has always been rather indulgent.
Maybe I just really hate faeries? They’re horrible, irrational aesthetics-first plot devices in almost any story. Even when the author leans into that, I find it fundamentally unsatisfying. JS&MN was one of the rare occasions where I felt the characters were as annoyed as I was, and it still ended with a huge faerie ass-pull.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
7d ago
As the kids say: many such cases.
Our customers are signaling the same thing. Visible lack of interest in existing R&D contracts. It’s always “what can you demo within a year?” or “how fast does this enter production?” If someone, even a sketchy startup, gave them a pitch for X units starting in 8 months, I suspect they’d throw money at it.
That hasn’t been very effective for something as complex as my product. Apparently, it’s not even that effective on shells, which are harder than the OP thinks, but at least have clearly defined requirements. I bet there are a couple dozen other contractors in various states of panic as they try to make good on promising the moon.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
7d ago
Right. I remember the stress over possible consequences in what must have been Trump I: their population, their tenacity…none of that materialized. We have absolutely outperformed expectations.
But we still haven’t gained anything.
Like some of the other commenters, I’m not opposed to efficient intervention. I also think the current situation would be preferable to, say, letting Iran do whatever they want with the strait. If they’d started this off by closing it, I’d be impressed that we got back up to 2/3 transit!
What I don’t see are reasons to prefer it to, well, 3/3 transit.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
7d ago
All of the following can be true:
- Iran has no ability to force the U.S. out of the strait.
- Iran has minimal ability to threaten traffic through the strait.
- Iran is gradually losing control over oil flows.
- Iran has significant domestic unrest.
- The U.S. has killed, and will continue to kill, any Iranian leadership which gets too aggressive.
- The U.S. can keep this up for longer than a third-rate military.
In fact, all of the following were true before we attacked. We have spent six months and who knows how many weapons—for what? Delaying a nuclear program? Stimulating defense spending? Getting Republicans out of office?
If Trump expected a special operation, in and out in a couple weeks, he was wrong. If he thought Iran would concede after this level of ass-blasting, he was wrong. If he thought another Middle Eastern slog would boost his approval, he was wrong. If he thought oil prices would go back down, he was wrong. Iran had and has zero chance of winning this war on any conceivable metric. That doesn’t mean it was a good deal.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
7d ago
Maybe she’s a diehard Nixon fan?
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
8d ago
More common than you might expect.
The Japanese learned this the hard way over WW2. Coral Sea, maybe Leyte Gulf—tactical draws and even victories are disastrous if the initial conditions are stacked against you.
Since the RN had such a numeric advantage over the Hochseeflotte, a status quo with everyone held up for repairs favored them.
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
8d ago
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
8d ago
broke with him
God, I can only hope. I have been perpetually disappointed by the durability of Trump’s coalition. We’ll find out in November.
The coworkers I know who were shocked and appalled at the initial airstrikes almost immediately started saying things like “well, we should have done it in 1980.” You could hear them trying to convince themselves. Then again, our industry directly benefits, so…
netstack
The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside.
8d ago
It was actually a different procedure.
Are you telling me that GURPS is so realistic, it triggers antiterrorism safeguards? I think SJ games needs to advertise with that.
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