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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
<3
User ID: 355
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
20hr ago
That seems reasonable enough at a glance, since it does not have many of the downsides of "typical" promiscuity (the destabilising effect of making it not theoretically possible to match ~everyone up, greater connectivity in the STD transmission graph, unclear paternity...).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
23hr ago
Why do you act like this is surprising or somehow contradicting the parent's point? Everyone can simultaneously be low quality and have high standards, and in fact this feels truthy with respect to our society.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
There are a lot of Chinese. A tiny fraction of them could be dreaming of leaving (smaller than the "move to Canada"/"move to Russia" faction of Americans?) and there would still be enough that it would feel like a huge phenomenon in the target country.
(Also, how up-to-date is the perception that it is common?)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
Where did the poster that you are responding to even suggest that "European culture" is superior to American culture?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
9d ago
There are multiple schools of LLM opposition, with different concerns that lead to different levels of tolerance. One, which the current policy as you understand and implement it does address, is the one about effort asymmetry - "why should I read and parse a post in good faith if it was generated in a click" etc.; another, though, which I am increasingly coming around to, is more about some sort of neurolinguistic programming Lovecraftian corruption aspect, where you can see an LLM flavour to the writing style, the narrative structure, or even the underlying thought process even if the text was composed by a human using "LLM help", or perhaps just by a human who has spent too much time interacting with LLMs at all. For the latter group, "I edited it myself" may be as reassuring as "I am a human, not a pathogen" coming from a terminal plague victim shambling towards you.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
12d ago
I mean, Westerners are also quick to have opinions about East Asian cultural institutions and political issues they know nothing about. Which of the many people outraged at China's treatment of Falun Gong know anything about the organisation?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
13d ago
If society announces its intent to withhold support from the childless elderly, it is perhaps rather optimistic to expect that young people will be incentivised to have children before growing old. Another possible outcome is an uptick of antisocial behaviour from those who expect to remain childless, whether by choice or not, as they hear the message that society does not care for them (but still do not consider the incentive sufficient to switch into a class for which society does care). This itself could be plenty damaging for high-trust societies like Sweden.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
16d ago
If Nick is correct that the status-quo of Western Institutions is to be extremely pro-Israel and Pro-Jewish, then why would the Jews want to destroy those western institutions??
"Destroy" seems like a bailey to a motte of "exploit"/"keep from realising their full potential", to which this objection does not apply. Compare "if slavery abolitionists are correct that slaves are slaving away for their masters, then why would the masters want to [do bad things] to those slaves?"
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
18d ago
I may be the rare example of a European who wants Russia to win, and even though I can't shake off the suspicion of having motivated thinking due to having Russian roots and family, my motivation is really that I think that this outcome would be better for the modal European, too. (Matter of fact, I have left Russia long ago and do not regret my loss of any ties to it.)
Bluntly speaking, the only way to ever get a ruling class to make concessions to their powerless subjects is for those subjects to be able to credibly threaten betraying the rulers for another. This is how Bismarck was forced to install one of the first systems of social security and workers' rights over his own ideological disgust (lest the workers become communist), the US mellowed out its capitalism and the USSR mellowed out its communism during the cold war (lest the populace sympathise too much with the other), and Europe got flooded with free American money and support (lest it too develop Russian sympathies), not too mention all the free shit China, Russia and the US throw at third world countries routinely to get them to vote in some way in the UN.
The 1990-2008 era was a tragedy for Europe as we got one thing after the other rammed down our throats (DMCA analogues, deregulating trade treaties...), even being forced to go to war for the US and eat the terrorist backlash, because what were we going to do, declare allegiance to the ghost of the Soviets? There's nowhere to defect to anymore!
I don't want this to continue, and for that, Russia and/or China being strong is necessary. (...and the two are unfortunately entangled) When each of them and the US fears nothing more than that we might fully side with the other, they will once again have to buy our loyalty.
(Unless you are a senator or SV millionaire, the same reasoning applies for Americans too. The threat of Soviet subversion is surely nontrivially part of why you were not forced to go die in Vietnam etc.)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
20d ago
Would a full-blown attack on GPS satellites not cross the nuclear threshold for the US? Also, it seems like a lot of the elements of the "first strike" scenario you outlined are not ones that short-term countermeasures are readily available to; hence, from a Chinese perspective, signalling willingness, ability and poise to (attack GPS, destroy undersea cables...) and then proceeding to do a full-scale invasion as if the US could be assumed to not intervene (and then executing the "first strike" if it shows signs of doing so after all) seems strictly superior to the "first strike" which would test the initial proposition upfront.
As for the "little green men" scenario, it seems unrealistic for Taiwan for various reasons, because it probably only worked on Crimea due to an alignment of opportune circumstances (geographic proximity, a local low point in Ukrainian state capacity and coherence, overwhelming support for the invaders among the population and frequently even local military units since the UA military had no functioning political alignment machinery at that point) which are all unlikely to be met in Taiwan.
My own sense is that a more likely way a takeover of Taiwan would go would actually be something like blockade -> half-hearted attempt at a blockade run by the US, without a consensus in favour of it -> overwhelming Chinese military response to the blockade run -> no popular consensus behind any sort of "Pearl Harbor 2.0" narrative to rally popular support for a full US war entry -> US limits itself to an economic-political response -> blockade continues, eventually resolved by a Taiwanese surrender or a much more weakly opposed invasion as it has been demonstrated the cavalry won't come.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
20d ago
I think there is certainly an element of "people's domestic skills and reflexes have atrophied to the point that they can't cook for themselves" (and despite whatever the spreadsheets say, the cost of eating out decently seems to have about doubled in real terms in the past 10-15 years) + blue cultural norms raising expectations (eating similar slop every day no longer registers as a fulfilled life, and who has time and money to master making foods from a dozen world cultures?), but you also have to consider complex factors making cooking for yourself less viable: small temporary habitations and frequent moving (-> can't accumulate equipment), jobs with high time demands and irregular hours, and delays in formation+overall decline of stable pair relationships reducing the opportunity for division of labour (one cooking for two).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
20d ago
There's a slippery slope going from "I'm warning you about this bad thing and you aren't listening" via "Why are you still not listening? Honestly when it happens the I-told-you-so moment will feel good" to "I want this bad thing to happen to you".
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
20d ago
The default for a lot of people is very much anti-Litany of Tarski, and closer to all the corollaries of "faith can move mountains" (an actual idiom, reflecting a paradigm reinforced in all sorts of ways in our dominant culture: cf. also "don't jinx it" contra speculating about bad possibilities). Really believing a thing can make it true, and if the thing being true leads to good outcomes, then isn't it your moral duty to believe it?
It doesn't help that in a lot of contexts where the Random Civilian's beliefs are polled at all, a dynamic holds that with some squinting really looks a lot like faith-based miracles: the sick individual is healed by placebo, and the Ghost of Kyiv style stories translate into a general atmosphere of "Ukraine can do it" that percolates through social media back to the frontlines and results in Ukrainian soldiers being more willing to sacrifice themselves and believing that their fellow soldiers and adjacent units are likely to do likewise and hence actual Ukrainian battlefield success.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
20d ago
So how did you arrive upon "effortposting" in the first paragraph? Do you actually mean to say that Europeans are posting well-researched, high-effort longform comments on it?
I'd like to hear more about how this draft came to be. Did you actually create it yourself from nothing, or did you arrive upon it by a preceding "conversation" you had with the LLM to "clarify your thoughts"? At this point, I don't think this is a sort of interrogation, as the mods have already decided to let it pass; I'm just wondering from where the qualium of wrongness that I'm getting even from this version of your post comes. Am I just slowly going off the deep end with paranoia (I just threw a speculative accusation of LLM use at another poster in a different thread, and he denied it flatly), was there in fact more LLM usage that you didn't "declare", or could there be something going on like that "LLMisms" have snuck into your own writing voice?
(The last possibility reminds me of a moment I had a few years ago, when I returned to Berlin after some 12 years of absence from Germany and was surprised to overhear traces of a Turkish accent in the speech of seemingly native German city kids, perhaps paralleling how modern hip US blue-tribe speak especially in big cities is AAVE-tinged regardless of speaker ethnicity.)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
21d ago
· Edited 20d ago
Nobody is comparing datacenters to home networks. I don't think your points are particularly correct regarding the extraordinariness of datacenter construction, either, even though you (or your LLM? I'm getting a certain vibe) evidently put a lot of effort into them.
1/2: Bounded above by the requirements of power plants, which lots of countries build. Electric arc furnace complexes are also measured in the same hundreds of megawatts as datacenters. Also, my examples about bitcoin farms are pretty relevant here.
3: Moving heavy things on the order of "five tons" is really not impressive for modern civilisations.
4: Same for securing centralised facilities. How often do first-world countries experience break-ins in their bank vaults or even prisons?
5: This is of course a nontrivial engineering problem, but off-the-shelf solutions exist. Also, China is filtering all their incoming and outgoing traffic for content basically in real time, which is surely a harder problem.
Your conclusion is also wrong. I searched for maybe about 2 minutes to find that Meta's Prineville data center is (was at some point?) considered the biggest in the US, and it's cited as using 15000 GWh in a year. Elsewhere, Alibaba's Zhangbei data center is cited as pulling 150MW, which x 24h x 365 gives 1314GWh which is only one OOM off. Other big US data centers seem to also be moving in the 100-200MW range.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
21d ago
Lots to comment on here (to start with, comparing American suburb life to anything China has to offer is a featherweight match between two very mediocre lifestyles, in a global comparison), but the thing that particularly stuck out to me is
America can build (gives the example of AI data centers)
In what sense are AI datacenters a mark of state capacity/building ability? They just take some off-the-shelf hardware (fabricated elsewhere) and stick lots of it in a room with some ventilation and power supply. China had unemployed miners do the same thing in soot-choked shacks in the desert for Bitcoin mining, and I here they do that with cellphone farms for scamming in the Cambodian jungle. In fact the scam farms are more impressive, since they usually come with some slave labourer camp/brothel/casino compound for tens of thousands of people attached and are actually just created ex nihilo in the middle of nowhere.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
22d ago
Nice catch. I also thought that the use of "effortposting" in the first paragraph is strange (contextually it seems like the insinuation should be that Europeans are working themselves into a rage or similar). It would make sense if the prompt included something about "effortposts", and the expression just wound up weaselling itself into an LLM-generated response as tends to happen.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
23d ago
A quick search reveals several counterexamples, to say nothing of those with non-Muslim perpetrators, but I guess vibeposting is more satisfying.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
23d ago
I consider the ability to execute and maintain complex compromises to be part of what is the "executive function" of society as a compound organism, by analogy with the executive function of an individual.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
24d ago
Lack of executive function, as I also claim in my other comment.
The exact mechanism by which the executive function is lost is that both the "immigrants good" faction and the "immigrants bad" faction see their optimal marginal strategy as drumming up alignment with the simple and straightforward sentiments I labelled them by. A position like "more smart prosocial immigrants, but fewer stupid violent ones" will be ejected by the former camp because the "fewer" part just diluted and muddles immigrants-good sentiment; likewise, the latter camp will eject it for the "more" part having the same effect on immigrants-bad sentiment.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
24d ago
· Edited 23d ago
The problem is that things are simultaneously too easy for the "bad immigrants" and too hard for the "good immigrants". You can bet your whole career, with massive opportunity cost, on something like eventually winning the greencard lottery, while simultaneously hoping an H1B employer won't exploit you too badly in the meantime; or you can walk across the border and do low-skill informal-economy jobs far from the state's eye, while getting 10x the pay in your country of origin, and have a whole half of the CW binary advocate for you if you were to ever get in trouble (and it's not like the Mexican haul-heavy-shit employers will be questioning you about the gap in your CV and ability to attend American conferences if you were to fail, spend a year in ICE jail and get deported).
Unfortunately, our societies are just reliably lacking in executive function to see a problem for which some solution (immigration enforcement, policing...) exists as having more knobs than a single "more of the solution"/"less of the solution" one. "Have police arrest more criminals while being less violent and more discerning" was not a significant camp in the BLM discourse, either.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
24d ago
My gut feeling as a godless European is that there is a difference between being directly discriminated against based on your religion and being indirectly discriminated against because of behaviors required by your religion which break popular social norms or laws.
In the US nowadays, with opposite CW valence, this sounds like a clear-cut case of "disparate impact". Of course it's rather concerning if a protected group can be disparately impacted "by choice", but there lies a whole rabbit hole of further spicy questions.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
27d ago
I used to struggle with this in law school, the idea of extra time or drugs to help someone focus on legal work strikes me as absurd in a professional school that is explicitly preparing the majority of its students to function through billable hours.
Why are drugs (Adderall etc.?) at all akin to extra time, or generally the problem you discuss? Someone who takes Adderall to complete the job in the allotted time still completes it in the allotted time.
Not that the analogy is perfect, but if anything, the restriction of access to drugs feels more similar to "accommodations" here: rather than letting the law of the jungle do its work and give the job to whoever is willing to sacrifice whatever it takes to do it best and fastest, it artificially levels the playing field for the benefit of those who would not augment their performance with drugs, even if the job to be done suffers for it. Presumably the reasoning is that for moral/aesthetic/higher reasons, we value the undrugged equilibrium higher than the best possible legal work, just as disability accommodations are justified because for moral/aesthetic/higher reasons, we value equity higher than the best possible legal work.
(edit, I see @fmaa made the same point below. Should have refreshed before posting)
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
29d ago
taught Latin American right wing death squads
That's the crux, though? I didn't write "directly" for no reason. In terms of indirect support and training, American fingers have involved on most sides of most conflicts.
So, how do you incentivise people to actually sign up for your newly highly gatekept version of marriage? All those people in situationships are not going, "I wish there were a death pact contract I could enter with a partner that society and law would force us to respect". You can't just decree from above that some action is to be seen as desirable and have people abide; otherwise social engineering would be a lot easier.
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