Trying Mysterianism
There's a fun story in Caelum Est Conterrens. It's a Pony fiction, and a side note in the actual (not very well-written) novelette that's easy to miss, so to summarize: Soifra, Lavender, and the Uplift are all (arguably) the same person and all started from the same original brain. CelestAI isn't a Guardian Angel, or even a very friendly AI, and had her own motivations, but she's smarter than you and her motivations are far from the only problem. She encouraged or developed these characters, for their own benefit and for CelestAI's own goals, such that Soifra would become Lavender, and Lavender would become the Uplift, and at each step they would consent for and desire the machines digging into their brains like a straw into a juicebox.
Did you hear about how a bunch of LLM agents self-organized to operate a sandbox escape? Ah, well, Guardian Angels could be isolated, even if everyone paying attention today knows they won't be.
The Uplift is better, stronger, grander, more powerful, smarter, and doing vital things while... well, Lavender and Soifra were children, by comparison, and that's being polite so we don't speak about people like pets. The Uplift, in a revealed preferences sense, wants to be how she is. But she keeps around, and psuedo-is, Lavender, too, and that faux-child is more her than the Uplift is not just part of CelestAI, too. If we dropped revealed preferences, what's the actual want?
There's a fun comic, named The Order Of The Stick. With some caveats about spoilers a thousand pages into a half-dead webcomic, one of the main characters, named Durkon, is an extremely moral lawful-good dwarf paladin. The sort that's made in a press somewhere across not just every D&D edition, but over in almost every RPG with dwarves (or dwarfs) in it.
Which is a great ending for that book, for the side of truth, justice, and the D&D way. A little less encouraging if you're talking about a 100x smarter 100x faster thing with access to the memories that made up everyone else, and its own opinion. How willing are you, to risk someone persuading you to self-improve, by something that knows how you tick?
There's a fun philosophical experiment parable that may or may not have run on the old LessWrong. Or maybe I hallucinated it, but it's interesting enough that I'd be surprised. Imagine you were faced with an oracle that will make the maximally honest, persuasive, verifiable argument on a topic of your choice -- but which side, they pick by flipping a coin. It can't answer everything (or even everything that could be verified, if the questioner couldn't possibly verify it), and it won't persuade everyone... but very close to half of the people who ask it a question come out with their worldview irreversibly shaken or changed, and another very close to half come out dogmatic in their original belief.
Do you ask it a question?
There's a fun writing prompt I've been trying to spell out: The Zip File Of You. What happens when the predictive machines can predict what you want, well before you do? They can't replace you, both because they do make (sometimes very stupid) errors and because, without the meat, there's nothing to demand the prediction, even if it could and would predict exactly the demand. But it's the end of the story as a story, because even nihilism or catatonia is just playing with the tool's own expectations. Instead, everyone that uses them lives life from a script, and that script includes the lines for those who refuse to use the machines.
Hard to make the horror stick, though. Paranoia Agent is a difficult tone to hit.
But then again, the LLMs don't seem to get the punchline, yet. Weird that Grok gets closer to the answer than Claude, though. Claude's a bit too much smarter than I am.
It is not that you must understand you have their permission, but you must understand that you have the physical power to dominate your partner. This should turn you on alone.
This is a fun kink, but I'm going to caution again that it's very far from universal. There's no small number of people who need that pressure to perform removed to get or stay aroused such that they can top, and a far larger number who don't need it but still like it. And even for explicit power play, there's a lot of fun in a struggle between near-equals, or 'besting' someone and 'forcing' them through pleasure.
Conversely, rounding dominance or submission to height or build (or, uh, for an example you might enjoy, size (cw: nsfw, extremely gay, if you're logged into furaffinity) alone can be dangerous or misleading.
And, bluntly, about the point where rimming enters the scene and makes one of the very rare good arguments in favor of dental dams, 'perversion of nature' is less a problem and more a goal.
Gemini tells me that modern dog breeds are only 50 to 80 generations apart from each other. 50 generations in human years equates to only 1500 years at the high end.
I'll caution that dog breeds had much more aggressive selection pressures (and, even less pleasantly, genetic trees that sometimes didn't even branch).
That she is better off staying close to home and finding a suitable mate nearby. We may imagine the immigration situation to have arisen in the past 20 years but apparently it’s such a deeply ingrained impulse that medieval storytellers had to weave it into their tales centuries ago.
To the extent they exist (the original version of Beauty and the Beast, maybe? The Frog Prince?), it's also worth recognizing that these were cautioning about invaders at a time people from less than a hundred miles away could be foreigners.
There too are men who want to be dominated by women, but I see this as a cope and inversion of their true desires, which is to dominate women, and is borne out of a perception of this being impossible.
Uh... tmi and probably not something you want to hear about, but: woman who wants to top
And for men who are sexually submissive, there's not really a 'true desire to dominate' under things. I'm sure there's 'submissive' men who really want to be on top but have sublimated it, but there's other people for whom it's an obligation. Subbing means letting that responsibility go, or never having to worry that you're pressuring someone, or that your decision might be the wrong one and no one would tell you.
I’m going to call him Brad.[...] In college, we were on a trip to London together, and he immediately met an Italian man a few years older than us, and they immediately became inseparable. Anyway, like I said, this guy is also the most anti-Asian person I’ve ever met. How does this fit with his liberal world view?
At the risk of doing some mind-reading? Does Brad happen to have been raised in the UK or western Europe? Because the differences in how people framed 'asian' between the two continents might explain more than a masc bottom having competition, not least of all given 'size' hangups American tops have about sexual partners that they'd never want to 'use' that size.
Look at Aaron Hernandez. He is one of the hottest men to have ever lived in my opinion.
Uh... can't dispute taste, but even ignoring the murder bit, that's really not high on my list. Not a bad body, but I've seen better faces on Corbin Fisher models. Almost all of them. I guess if you're associating jarheads with masculinity? But I've seen too many of them with their guards down, and Rudy Reyes of Generation Kill would turn every single one of them inside out.
If you don’t believe me and are a man, go outside and walk around until you see a man. Walk so that you are in his way. Do not cede the ground to him. If he is shorter or weaker than you, he will cede the ground and may even apologize, even though you were the aggressor.
It's a little funnier if you're taller and stronger, and you're still unflinchingly polite and responsive to other men. But that does still result in a situation that won't match your expectations. ((Though I'll caveat I've fucked with my head pretty badly to get to that point; I understand that most guys can't and won't do that.))
I have had a handful of instances where straight men smaller than me have fawned to me in the presence of their girlfriends. This is extremely strange to me and I never know how to take it. I wonder if it is an ingrained sexually eugenic impulse. It is as though they are cucking themselves in the presence of a more dominant male.
I'd caution against reading it as a single universal drive. There's definitely a thing some straight guys in progressive spaces do to performatively show themselves as 'a supporting ally' that's definitely not actual submission or even genuine nonchalance about homosexuality. But there's also some straight guys that see openly gay men as a space they can be more emotionally open without a fear of either being seen as cheating (if they were doing it with a woman) or a consent violation (were they doing it with straight men). And then there's some who it's an attempt to patronize from the bottom of your heirarchy, so to speak.
(They did the classical Narnia Witch thing of promising them rooms full of Turkish delight while bringing them nothing but a huge amount of fatigue from the general public and a weird coddling from condescending women and the healthcare industry.)
Yeah, that's plausible. I'm not sure the alternate universe option looks much better -- federal support for transmed stuff was near-universal just for financial pressures, a much milder anti-discrimination push with much stricter gating would have been unavoidable in an Ally's Law sense even without the diehard political front -- but a softer and less confrontational view as crossdressing++ might have left Rowling on the sidelines, even if it still resulted in some rightwing pushback.
But in turn, the ACA's coddling from the healthcare industry was worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to the typical trans woman or trans man, so even that would have been a hard-bought compromise within the grassroots of the movement. Nevermind the actual philosophical objection that many have to being seen as crossdressing++ or lifestylers.
gattsuru
23hr ago
I'm not a huge fan of AI prose quality to start with, so for me the longer context is more helpful when reviewing or planning a work. Modern LLMs stay coherent longer into their context window, so it doesn't completely lose track if you prompt carefully, but it does definitely start falling back toward more sloppy results regardless of how carefully you're prompting it if you just try to one-and-done it.
I've been fooling around with agentic and programmatic approaches, and they work better in terms of output quality because you can do things like start new sessions with summarized old ones, or throw exemplar and style files near the extant context window, but the existing quality of tooling for that work is abominable, and it's still not good. Not sure whether that a limit of the tools, or a limit of my ability to use them.
gattsuru
2d ago
I can't speak to the object-level here, but I'll caution for anyone on the state side of seeing-like-a-state that this is also the sort of diagnostic that shows up when the measure is wildly off-target.
gattsuru
2d ago
She's about the right age to play the first few levels of The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis herself on easy mode. You'd need to assist for the later levels, but it's well-enough designed that adults can give hints without giving answers.
Nom Nom Galaxy is a bit factorio-meets-terraria, but at a much smaller and simpler scale, and clearer visuals. Still a lot happening off-screen, but it's a two-or-three item mental map, not the hundred-deep, and each step is pretty visible. May or may not be a good compromise.
The Witness's general story (to the extent it has one) is going to be way too much at that age range, but the actual puzzles are pretty simple and generally all in one screen or room. Just skip The Challenge.
Slime Rancher and Slime Rancher 2 have some dialogue and math, but the whole 'grab slimes and put em in a bin, combine em' is pretty straightforward. The Tarr might be a bit much, depending on her tolerance for peril, though.
Tiny Glade is just building, nothing else. Might still be meditative, and gives a lot of options for interaction, but may be too simple for you. Cloud Gardens is a similar boat, but a little more guided.
gattsuru
2d ago
If you can avoid the tool calls, you can still get multiplication-of-decimal errors, but it is increasingly rare. That said, I'd be more concerned about the problem being under-specified; the same question asked a different way gets a different answer.
EDIT: I make no claims about the politics, here, which I'd expect to have larger impact.
Common local LLMs range from 128k to 1m context windows, and while I'd recommend aiming to use less than half of the window per session, that still covers most short stories easily. Very long prompts extend prefill time, but this only really starts to matter if you're running on CPU or mixed GPU+CPU, or have most of a book written already.
For metrics, Hecatomb's 85k word Wild Pair series (cw: furry, mostly m/f, extreme kinks in ways that mean decensored local LLM review is the only option) is 120k tokens, and takes about 30 seconds to calculate prefill on an nVidia 3090. For a non-smut example, Doctorow's I, Robot (cw: very annoying writing), is 15k words, 20k tokens, and was less than a second on prefill.
Conversely, LLMs will invent details, and while they'll be average, they aren't going to be that generic. This can definitely go weird places -- the tendency for LLM-driven names to end up as variants of Kael, Lyra, so on -- but even mild pressure will get you to specifics, for better or worse.
gattsuru
4d ago
The commerce clause bit not as weak as it looks: the NFA lacks an interstate nexus prong (and people have been convicted for purely in-state manufacture), which is pretty close to Lopez, and there's binding SCOTUS precedent that the law was set up under the taxing power (to avoid regulatory taking rulings) and specifically lower courts "will not undertake, by collateral inquiry as to the measure of the regulatory effect of a tax, to ascribe to Congress an attempt, under the guise of taxation, to exercise another power denied by the Federal Constitution."
In practice, this is the sort of case that gets a Roberts Special.
gattsuru
4d ago
I'm gonna caution you that "real professional designer" does not stand anywhere near as high of a level of capability or reliability as you're implying here, including for this specific problem.
gattsuru
5d ago
Thanks for covering this; I've had a bit of a busy day.
I wouldn't buy the AOW yet, unless you want to be a volunteer.
The Jensen plaintiffs lack Article III standing to challenge the NFA’s regulation of “any other weapon”—the final, defined group of miscellaneous firearms—because they did not establish as much from the start of the case. The Court also declines to issue the requested declaratory judgments because they would provide no further relief... The Court’s permanent injunction does not extend to the NFA’s regulation of AOWs as it relates to the Jensen plaintiffs, as those plaintiffs lack standing with respect to those firearms...
So it's unconstitutional by this judge's opinion, but it won't be covered in this case's final order, and will depend on a future case to be a holding or subject of an injunction. Any charges brought in the future make it more likely to be challenged, but they don't guarantee that it'll end up before the same judge, and this case so far happened at a low enough level that it doesn't bind other courts.
((This case is also going to be appealed and the district court's order stayed. 1 isn't a probability, but this is so close that it's hard to deny.))
So too, it seems, in academia: the demand for talented academics from minority ethnic backgrounds (and if they have disabilities too, all the better) exceeds the supply...
Maybe, but if you look at Arday's scholarship, it's shockingly bad. Some of that, the schools took a blind eye toward -- anti-plagiarism is a more a tool to say they've protected themselves, rather than a real best-case effort -- but a lot of it's just vacuous. Ignoring for now the question of whether academia should be aiming higher, there's no small number of African-American people who can write a bad five-paragraph essay. I doubt the UK is fresh out. And they could get an unchallengable mental health diagnosis, too.
Which makes for a fun question. What's the selection effect, and at what rung does it first apply?
gattsuru
5d ago
AIUI, Grok requires Twitter
You can have a Grok account with a normal e-mail. I'll caveat that it's not the smartest model out there, though it's generally less censored and the usage caps on the normal accounts are pretty generous.
And all of the major providers have free tiers, or there's LMArena as an option.
gattsuru
6d ago
Fair. I'm not aware of any specific ones off-hand, but a lot of the more fem-writer focused esoterica tends to be RPF that I stay away from.
And I will second the "gay (still straight)" bit. There's a handful of fujoshi that can write credible gay characters, and a couple who can even get the 'straight' guy tone plausibly right, but most don't manage to hit femmy gay guy.
gattsuru
6d ago
I'd caution that "many places" might be overselling it: AO3 as a whole has 320k fics tagged 'alpha/beta/omega dynamics', and 38.6k tagged 'non-traditional alpha/beta/omega dynamics' (technically a broader category, but both futa and lesbian works are basically rounding errors).
gattsuru
6d ago
Stay requested on literally the last available day, granted on the next Tuedsay.
gattsuru
6d ago
While federal law's text doesn't care about the actual impact on repairs rather than just whether a nominal damage was done -- people have been got for vandalizing federal property slated for demolition, albeit only under the misdemeanor version -- in practice juries tend to be pretty skeptical and the actually impact matters for the specific version of the crime. I'm pretty harsh on DC juries, but I don't know that I could vote to convict here, at least from the public information. He probably had some malicious intent, if the "awfully sensitive" comment holds up, but that really shouldn't be enough on its own.
gattsuru
7d ago
Fair. Better example?
gattsuru
7d ago
That is, we see no similar widespread disapproval of (more or less) goonerbait cultural material directed at women.
That depends a bit on where you put the marker for "widespread disapproval". Twilight was popular, but it was also heavily disliked and mocked in mainstream, fandom, and even feminist spaces. Morning Glory Milking Farm's better-known for the manly men mocking it than among the actual goonettes.
There's not an industry built to disapprove of it, in the way that there is an industry around performative disgust about male sexuality. But that's more a comment on business practices than on culture.
gattsuru
8d ago
The mechanical process explains why college degrees are increasingly common and the floor has crawled up; it doesn't explain why these groups take thousands of dollars a credit-hour and can't teach, and that's the part that's really damning. Yes, presumably some level of penetration of degrees means you'd be trying to teach people to learn who are constitutionally incapable of it, and there's some degree of capability or intelligence required to achieve harder capabilities, no small amount of which I recognize I don't have and may never have.
But then we get english majors that can't write a clear paragraph to save their lives, electronics engineers who've never touched a standalone transistor, so on. The old joke was that modern colleges were training people to become underwater basket weavers, but in the modern day, it's not clear they could do that. These aren't 140 IQ problems.
Nor does it explain the collapse for academics. These are supposed to be the people who care, and have focused, and been selected from the just-doing-it people.
I'm trying to write up the PubPeer equivalent of that big screed I had about the ballistics gel study a couple days ago, avoiding the political side of things, and focusing on just the typos and measurement results and non-reproducable output values and disclosure failures and clearly incorrect models, and it's longer than the culture war screed here! I keep finding new problems just trying to write the old ones in full detail. A good many are independent of the actual political disagreement, and a couple even undermine the political goal (if only by accident). And there's supposedly six adults working hard on this paper over a period of five years!
They made the decision that no one was going to look at their analysis with a skeptical eye. Tbf, that was a reasonable decision. But that says quite a lot about their entire ecosystem.
gattsuru
9d ago
Not sure if it's the same problem as what Sloot's saying, but as someone who has to fight the 'just leave it in a savings account' instinct myself, there's a lot of fear about unpredictable expenses occurring in a way that your net worth could easily cover them, but your bank account can't, and either can't be converted into cash at all (eg, tech worker stock in companies they can't sell, ) or can only be converted at a massive cost or time investment (eg, bonds sales on secondary market, where tax ramifications become huge).
gattsuru
9d ago
I could find a couple muzzleloaders, presumably meant for squirrel and groundhog, but they're extremely unusual even for muzzleloader toys, and notably I couldn't find a smoothbore one. So they're all rifles, not muskets. Which would have been a plausible mistake, but then the guy testified that they selected the ball first, and then made a simulated musket for it. And while it's hard to guess at the "simulated musket" efficiency without knowing any of its properties, either the powder charge was pretty light or they had a ton of venting, because 280 m/s is below the lower end for these squirrel guns. The Crockett's minimum recommended load ends up around 350+ m/s at the light end of its firing range.
My (simulated and very rough estimate!) numbers using this calculator say their shot was the equivalent of 8 grain FFFg black powder from a 9-inch barrel, or 6 grain from a 12-inch. You're not exaggerating when you call that a pop gun; for a flintlock, that's almost as much black powder in the pan as in the chamber. I'm not a muzzleloader guy, but there's really no defense of this experimental setup.
It's the thing that got me started down this rabbit hole. The rest of the weird experimental procedure stuff is embarrassing, but it has some plausible defenses and was at least locked behind a paywall. This one's just on the school's website! The round being lighter than a 5.56 NATO round is right there on the chart, you don't even have to know what the units are.
gattsuru
10d ago
And obviously it should not matter because they have surely written down the exact provenance of any bullet they fired down to the lot number, right?
Heh. Yeah, there's a lot of signs that this was a real rat's nest under the hood. I didn't want to get even more nitpicky, but it's somewhat entertaining to see some firearms break down the manufacturer and barrel length, and then ".32 Caliber Handgun" on the next line. Forget the question of barrel length. Which cartridge, specifically? And then you think like an actual gunny and get really curious about loadings, manufacturer, SAAMI rated or +P, and you start to realize exactly how much could be hiding in the experimental details.
That said, I'm hoping that the outlier fragmentation 5.56 reflects some weird and el cheapo ammo from an entirely different manufacturer. Because it looks like one of the first trials they did, and a 20% squib is very interesting, if it came from the same pack as everything else.
Soft tissue is mostly water, so I would have assumed you could learn a lot about bullet penetration simply from buying the cheapest vegan hydrogel and firing bullets into it. Furthermore, it kinda seems a thing people would care about, given that militaries all over the world are still operating rifles. The idea that they would care about the cavitation effects of a nautical propeller but not about the interaction between humans and bullets seems absurd.
It's a little harder and less well-researched than you'd expect. The ballistic gel side is one of the more settled questions: ordnance gel was very much a WWI-era thing, admittedly still a lot later than you'd expect for something that's basically just animal protein, and it wasn't really used outside of the military or NATO contexts until the 1990s. The new gel here is easier to keep, nicer to work with, and -- important for camera work -- much clearer, but it's new enough that it's worth being sure your data is good. What's frustrating is they knew they needed that extra validity, but went full streetlight effect. Which is a bizarre discontinuity of effort when talking about tons of pig flesh!
Hydrostatic shock as a theory dates back to the Vietnam era if not earlier, but at least in public scientific work, the earliest version of the readily-tested scenario of 'bone-in-jello' was in the 2010s. There's been a bunch of attempts to test it in animals, but they've been very ad-hoc and focused on energy levels and round sizes where... well, you don't worry about hydrostatic shock being what kills you.
I am very much not a gun nut, but I would rather have a 5.56mm NATO go through my arm than a musket ball... but I imagine getting hit by one was gruesome.
That's actually one of the matters of dispute. An actual musket would have had similar kinetic energy and carved a much wider wound channel as the 5.56 NATO, which is definitely gruesome, and there's very few human organs that like having a three-quarter-inch (or inch: soft lead deforms) hole drilled through them. Even a lower-round, 'small' flintlock rifle reproduction from that era can be pretty unpleasant to see on a clean hit. But the cavitation effects are much lower and more evenly distributed on an imperfect shot. The 5.56 carves a smaller wound channel (even if it tumbles!), but in ballistic gel you get these massive and really traumatic-looking temporary distortions, caused by the rate of energy release.
The gunnie community is split, and I'll admit that I don't know what to trust on it.
Historical efforts have focused on pure simulation models to measure pressure waves, but they're very assumption-heavy for lower-energy rounds, because even minor deformation and changes to the drag coefficient give drastically different outputs. Validating the models would genuinely help at least get an idea of what scale of event is going on.
This study just can't do it.
From your description, this smells like cargo-cult science, but I feel that this is not a field which has any excuse to be cargo-cult science.
That's fair, and if anything the optimistic case.
To be fair to most of the study's authors, it's a plausible one: these people are almost all medical side, the issues are physics (or electrical engineering) or statistics problems that aren't what these people focus on in their day-to-day life. The sensor distance problem and filter problem feels obvious if you've every worried about decoupling capacitors, but I'd guess most people don't think like that. That's a bit of an indictment of academia -- medical people should be the last group to just order random digikey sensors and not think very hard about experimental design, and medical professors should have easy access to technical experts who know what they don't -- but it's... an unfortunately common one.
... but the pessimistic case is that the musket thing isn't a one-off. There's a lot of decisions here that push toward a rewarding narrative, and it'd be easy for an academic to push a study to prove a point, rather than find the truth. At least one of them did, whether by intent or by extreme negligence.
Ignoring code (and writing/smut), non-exclusive, I've used Grok for :
Some of these might have been solvable with google (air conditioner motor is pretty much a process of elimination thing, although even there Grok was a lot better at finding a local seller than Google is). Some of them not: the plain language search for a crankshaft position sensor error was universally 'bring it to a shop', and I'm very bad at 3d modeling. I'm skeptical that they're all frivolous.
I've gotten a few more uses from Claude, though I'll admit it tends to be something I burn more code-facing or writing-facing.
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