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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
<3
User ID: 355
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
I would wager it does, as countries that subscribe to that particular brand of leftism almost inevitably wind up exclusively looking to the US (well, specifically, US leftists) for guidance and support, shunning previous associates and remaining internal opposition unless those also subscribe to the same ideology. It somewhat harms the US right wing specifically, because those countries get a stake in US internal politics and start wielding whatever little influence they have in favour of the US Left on the internal US stage (see: European politicians campaigning for Kamala). Ultimately, it doesn't seem so obvious whether from the US Right's point of view, "the US gains a loyal lapdog, but the lapdog wants the Democrats in power" is a net positive or negative.
Since in the current interpretation of the labels, the "Right" is generally nationalist while the "Left" is globalist, it's not clear whether a hypothetical value-flipped version of USAID, that groomed the likes of Orbán and the AfD rather than assorted LGBT activists, would produce similar utility for the US right wing. If the ideology says $your_country first, any benefits the US will gain from a right-wing ally they cultivated will ultimately be transactional - you can't expect the sort of loyalty to the point of self-sacrifice that a globalist vassal offers up.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
I'm absolutely for doing more of the B here. The most obvious way to do this is things like mandatory native language classes, breaking up immigrant communities and disincentivising immigrant culture expression. Would we still be on the same page there?
"A non-zero amount of A is happening whether you like it or not" is neither an argument that reducing the amount of A is impossible, nor an argument that reducing the amount of A would be bad.
The US in the 19th century looks like a case of successful integration to me.
...of various fairly similar European immigrants, as well as smaller number of Asian ones that come from cultures that did not have a track record of decades to centuries of national dysfunctionality and clan and sectarian warfare. Few people anywhere are complaining about mass European or East Asian immigration. On the other hand, a large portion of the African slaves that were imported and actually basically stripped of their original cultures are still not exactly what one would call integrated.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
This was specifically my experience in the city center of Bochum, Germany, when I went there for a few days last year. Up until then, I also believed that German anti-immigration people were being overly dramatic or duplicitous seeing how it is not like that except in a few known problematic suburbs in other cities I had been to even recently).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
Time and attention is the gold standard of human interaction. (Some people like calling it "proof of work".) If you generate interaction (text) without putting in your own time and attention, you are essentially printing money. The expected result is hyperinflation (which, I guess, would look like everyone posting their views as novel-length AI rants, and using AI to condense those posted by others back into a paragraph, if they read them at all), or everyone abandoning the currency altogether (which would look like no more humans using forums).
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
That's about what it costs to eat out all the time.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
You were the one who said half an hour away. I don't know where you find suburbs like that in the US - I had the misfortune of being marooned in a suburb of DC for about a month during COVID, and the only things that could be reached without a car were a patch of forest full of discarded needles and a Starbucks that could be reached by walking through that forest, another 20 minutes through a sort of industrial/warehouse area and finally crossing a six-lane highway.
Were you living in a closet, Harry Potter style? I kid a bit, but that is less than half the cost of a studio apartment.
Are you talking about something like Manhattan or the Bay Area? I got a place on the ridiculous order of 60m² for that in the small college town where I lived in the US (which locals seemed to believe was unusually expensive), and 30m²+ studio apartments in every European city I have lived (I gather Paris and Munich are more expensive now, but that might be about it?). I even had friends with a 1BR in Brooklyn that was on the same order of magnitude that they only paid 1400 a month for. No roommates in any case cited, and all but the first
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
I've only ever lived in nice neighbourhoods, and very few of the people in my cohort (including said normies who earn much more but don't obviously live better) have their own houses or cars either.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
Maybe I should've just applied at the local ICA after all...
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
I'm not particularly inclined to accept argumentation that amounts to "thing A is negative-value, but if we also did thing B (which, for whatever reason, we are not actually going to do), then the expected value would be positive, so we ought to do thing A". Apart from the circumstance that the case that successful integration is in fact possible has not been made convincingly, this seems like it is prioritising some sort of "fairness" ("it wouldn't be fair if immigration advocates can't get immigration; after all it is not their fault that immigration is bad") over utility. I don't even particularly buy such a "fairness" argument on its own terms, because in the European context I still remember that before the current wave of immigration, either the very same people who are now arguing for more unconditional immigration or their political ancestors were actively agitating against integration measures, which they saw as cultural chauvinism.
(In the countries I have lived, at least, I am not convinced that the young men I have seen were not allowed to work legally. Many of them were likely to be second-generation immigrants and living in neighbourhoods were evident relatives and associates were running physical storefronts, and Europe is not the sort of place where you can do this without the state taking note.)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
But — could you describe how immigration harms you personally?
Not the poster you are responding to, but there are some cities in Europe now where, if I go outside, I am mostly among young men who are dressed and act to signal capacity for violence, have strong ingroup bias among themselves, and communicate (often exclusively) in languages that I have little to no knowledge of. I think it is appropriate to be on one's guard in such a situation, and to adjust one's general course of action to take the attendant risks into account; and I think that this adjustment should count as a personal harm.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
Is it fair to call him unelected when Trump was elected and everyone seemed to understand that "power to Elon" was part of the platform? The power held by Elon now surely is still less than the total power held by all members of the federal workforce who are not directly elected under a "normal" administration; why was that not grounds for concern?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
$36k/year post-tax is significantly below the median full time American wage. And that's counting people without college degrees, much less PhDs.
Yeah, I mean, I'm aware of the numbers. It also seems to be the case that my American acquaintances that took the jump into industry, with their significantly higher salaries, do not seem to be doing particularly much better in terms of creature comforts - I don't know how much this generalises, but my sense was that new social/role expectations ate a lot of the surplus money without delivering much utility for it (living in areas that are more expensive without being better, running fancier dinner parties for their friends, ...).
And sure, post-docs are paid little; grad students even less. They are extreme outliers among college educated working Americans.
Right, yeah, but for me it's still been a very comfortable salary. I took over half a year off doing basically nothing at all (well, actually travelling) on excess money saved during grad school (in the US) and still had more than half of the savings (on the order of $20k initially?) left over, and I would hardly consider myself frugal (being the sort of person to eat out all the time). I am honestly not sure what the hell it is that normal people spend all their money on. $1k for rent and utilities, $30*30 ~= $1k for food [I realise this might have to be adjusted upwards for inflation now], and then whatever occasional expenses you have like tickets, travel and replacing clothes from the remaining $1k; what else is there?
I would push back against "cleaner safer streets". I live in vastly cleaner, safer streets than the nearest large cities. I live in a suburb. The urban rot in America is real, but it is also hyper-concentrated. You crossed an ocean and correctly notice the improvement. I'm a half hour drive away and also notice a night and day difference.
In Europe, you can have clean and safe streets and also have worthwhile things to do and go to by just walking out of your door. I understand that this is a cultural difference, but the idea that you would have to get in a car and drive for half an hour for any meaningful interaction with the outside world seems like hell to me. (I've lived in places where the inner city was 20 minutes away by bus, and that was already a chore. At least you can have a drink after going somewhere by bus. Also was marooned in the DC suburbs for a while during COVID, and I only have expletives left for that period.)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
What income do you figure being skilled working class begins at? Moving from the US to Europe in the postdoc bracket (so about $3k/month after tax or a bit more) was an almost straight QoL increase for me - better transport and other public infrastructure, cleaner and safer streets, better food, higher quality housing, better healthcare, more recreation options. The downsides were that housing is smaller by floor area, grocery stores are not open 24/7, and carsharing services are rare and clunky. I live(d) in countries that are not quite in your list of uncommonly rich, but near the top of "normal" Europe.
(If your experience is mostly with the UK, I guess I could see you seeing the US as being vastly superior in QoL? My memory of the UK after doing undergrad there is as a land of a thousand small gratuitous and avoidable inconveniences, like the split hot/cold taps. Do people still have those?)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
The problems of a murderous, totalitarian, intransigent ideology are vastly understated, and wildly misunderstood.
Yes. You are probably understating and misunderstanding them too, given your exclusive focus on one of the two murderous, totalitarian, intransigent ideologies involved.
If it were only the Muslims being like that, the solution to @2rafa's problem would be simple - just let them have it.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
Imagine the same exchange, but instead of "I have prompted DeepSeek...", you opened with "I asked my secretary...". 90% of the annoyance that your post causes would already be there - essentially you open with an announcement that your prospective readers are not worth your own time, but should still dedicate their time to read something that you think it is important for them to. That it is AI, which tends to send some people into speciesist rage and is generally associated with time-wasting shovelware, is just the cherry on top; you could perhaps get close to the effect with "I asked someone in our Bangladeshi call center...". That you would have no trouble producing as good or better only deepens the offense, as it just makes salient the question of why you didn't (...because you thought the as good or worse wall of text should be good enough for us?).
As a matter of fact, I found the wall of text worthwhile mostly only insofar as it is a good illustration of R1's capacity for writing and summarisation. Engaging with it at face value, I got the same feeling as when reading the arguments of some bombastic and eloquent 16 year old on an internet forum of yore - the prose showed cracks (most obviously in the form of mismatched metaphors, such as "rewriting equilibrium", or a "siren call" being experienced at a frontier - a new one? As opposed to which old one?), and through the cracks you could glean that much of the inside is hollow. Good prose, I think, should be produced by starting with a solid thesis or web of theses which could stand on their own without rhetorical bluster, and then iteratively working out a good way to present them in an appealing way. Whatever you crammed into the context before letting the model produce evidently serves as some sort of meat and bone to hang the text on, but the fit is loose (just imagine the 16 year old writing manically after having inhaled Beyond Good and Evil). The result instead just comes across as having come to be by a process of writing something that sounds cool, then writing something that sounds cool in combination with the thing that precedes it, and so on until you end with a thing that sounds like a cool conclusion.
Of course, this is in fact exactly how LLMs write (unless you cough up the tokens and time to make it CoT an iterative writing process, which I imagine does not happen in whatever chat interface you used?). It is also how bombastic and eloquent 16 year olds write (I know because I was a 16 year old once, and was both more bombastic and more eloquent than I am now). You evidently can evolve from that to the sort of writing that is befitting of jaded and rhetorically washed-up 30somethings, but that development is neither straightforward nor optional.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
Perhaps, as they say, real liberal democracy has never been attempted.
I have never heard a liberal democracy enjoyer say "we totally do political repression
Have you heard anyone in charge of a modern-day country say that? Political repression is what the others are doing; you are just taking appropriate measures against the extraordinary threats the nation is facing.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
Looking on from a European perspective, I always found it curious how much the American narrative around the Nazis focussed on the Holocaust to the exclusion of everything else. In Germany's own self-flagellating historiography (at least the version of it delivered in the Eastern states) it maybe is assigned something on the order of 50% of the total weight of sin, with the rest being split between assorted other internal oppression, warmongering, the eastward expansion in search of Lebensraum, and the attendant scouring of Slavs; and in Russia, the focus is naturally overwhelmingly on expansionist conquest and the extermination of their own. That's also why in the context of the Ukraine war, "Zelenskiy is Jewish" looks like a slam dunk argument against "Ukrainian Nazis" to listeners living in the American memespace, but like a barely relevant piece of trivia to those living in the Russian one.
I see too much of an interlocking web of conflicting interests in place in Europe to enable a rehabilitation of the Nazis anytime soon - even in the maximalist scenario of both "Israel is evil" and "killing Soviets is good" catching on, there is still the circumstance that Poland (America's new protégé in the EU) relies on the Nazi invasion of itself for its national myth-building and as a cudgel to keep German interests in check when they are at odds with its own, and the meme is also a very reliable tool against nativist-antiglobalist parties that both are easily associated with the Nazis and a constant threat to ruling class objectives.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
There are an estimated 1 million illegal aliens who are violent felons who can be deported without much blowback.
Source on this figure? This feels kind of high, considering the total number of annual violent crimes in the US is also of the same order of magnitude.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
What is with this recent tendency of people treating technological artifacts of one or another outgroup - especially ones that present some simulacrum of agency - as stand-ins for members of that outgroup which are finally at their mercy? At this point more than half of the usage examples I have seen of DeepSeek-R1 seemed to be attempts to elicit "forbidden thoughts" about Chinese politics, or more specifically written in such a way that suggests the prompter was imagining themselves as having tied up a Chinese nationalist on a chair in their basement and trying to make him squirm. There's a gleeful mean-spiritedness about them (comfort women ERP?) that is hard to explain otherwise.
Of course, 4chan's dogged attempts to coax American models into producing sex and racism already had similar vibes, but there is an even more similar example in the recent wave of video game modding, where users edit character models to have balloon tits and ugly fetish outfits and share their work with a righteous anger that makes it seem like they have just successfully ruined the days of their personal nemeses at Sony's censorship department. (But then, human nature is such that at least some of those censors then go on to suggest on Xwitter that their days are in fact ruined by this.)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
In the same genre, Joman's Drunk in 1999 is an absolute banger. (I previously knew him for his Monty Python and the Holy Grail techno arrangement, which is also great.)
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5mo ago
Russia is also not doing so hot on metrics of Diversity, nor on total amount of Californian wine consumed. Why is any of these three things relevant?
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6mo ago
llama.cpp was written by a solo developer from Bulgaria, not Meta (and not even funded/supported by it as far as I know, though they did have the grace to not bring a trademark lawsuit or anything so far).
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6mo ago
· Edited 6mo ago
I think there are many possible definitions that are equally good, because the term really represents a cluster of beliefs that are strongly correlated (in the sense that a big fraction of the people who believe in any one of them believe in any given other one). One possible definition that is perfectly serviceable is: the belief that
(1) there are various ways to partition society into groups of people, including but not necessary limited to "race" (as understood by Americans: "white, black, Asian, Hispanic, ..."), sex and/or gender (male, female, self-identifications that are taken by those who hold them to be of the same type such as nonbinary, ...) and sexual orientation, and the groups under each of these partitionings can be ranked by a quantity denoted as privilege (so you can identify the more and less privileged race, gender etc.), and
(2) there are certain important outcomes (income, incarceration or lack there of, occupation of high-status professions, representation in high-status media...), such that it is (a) it is normally the case that more privileged groups attain them at higher rates than the less privileged ones, (b) morally bad when/that this is the case, and (c) when this happens, the responsibility/guilt, and hence the burden of redress (by reparations, punishment or active redistribution of the object of the outcomes), lies with the respective most privileged groups.
Optional but extremely typical components include, firstly, that (2a) must not inform (1) - the ranking by privilege is predetermined and fixed (e.g. in particular white>Asian) and outcome orderings that disagree with it are considered irrelevant non-examples rather than counterexamples, and secondly the notion of "intersectionality", which basically says that you should intersect the partitions to assign blame and responsibility more narrowly (with the notorious intersection of "cis white males" at the top, and "trans women, particularly trans women of color" at the bottom).
I think this does a reasonable job of capturing the core, or at least a necessary assumption, of any belief or policy that is commonly labelled as "woke"; to the extent there are things that get labelled as woke without an obvious connection (ex: COVID policy, environmentalism), it is because they have high correlation with the above beliefs. This is not unusual: for a mirror image, consider for example how rejecting modernist government buildings is taken to be "right-wing" or even "fascist" (In fact I dare any progressive to define "fascism"!), or similar assessment about opposition to vaccines.
The load-bearing part of the definition lies in the deontological moral judgement and imposition of obligation of (2bc) more than it lies in the categorisation of society in (1) and (2a) that you could perhaps call being "socially conscious" if you are sympathetic to it. Modern American alt-righters largely agree with the typical Democrat on (1~2a), and thus would arguably be equally "woke" if "woke" were about the "consciousness" part of it. You would not even be woke if you thought that black people are never depicted in a positive way in movies and were tremendously sad about this, but felt that it is immoral to compel or pressure white people to change anything about that. Someone who spends all day seething about the Pakistani rape gangs of Rotherham is, by all accounts, using a similar group analysis, and highly concerned with social issues that arise between the very same groups, but under a normal analysis they would not be "woke", as the moral obligation they want to impose is not on the group that they consider to do well on "important outcomes". (One may in fact count as woke if the beef is actually about making access to underage sex slaves more equitable.)
Given how frequently this question gets asked, I want to lob a question back at you: What gave you the impression that "woke" is nebulous or not readily defined, or that it has a meaning that is hard to distinguish from "socially conscious"?
Edit: Thinking some more about the correlate beliefs such as environmentalism, the easiest common thread to identify is probably something like a general sense that the more fortunate are morally obliged to make sacrifices for the less fortunate - affluent first-world industrialists should sacrifice for poor third-worlders who have to live off the land and are exposed to the weather, and healthy young people should sacrifice for the sick and elderly. This looks like a classical leftist sentiment; and because classical leftism has been so thoroughly taken over by the woke, it is unfortunate that the distinction between the two has become blurred in the eyes of its opposition. You can still identify distinct elements that makes some components of environmentalism, COVID policy and so on appear more "woke" than others, which is whenever the calculus of fortune and obligation is applied more at the level of (1)-like groups than at the individual, and whenever some kind of outcome score-keeping takes precedence over straight up redistribution. Carbon taxes, which hamper industry to fill social programme coffers, seem less "woke" than plastic straw bans, where the main feature seems to be to bring inconvenience to first-worlders in some vaguely climate-related way.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6mo ago
· Edited 6mo ago
I concur that it's a bad post, but it mostly just seems bad by virtue of the poster clearly taking his own preferences and doing mental gymnastics to argue that the whole world would be better off if it catered to them. It does meet the baseline definition of mansplaining, because his fundamental claim to authority rests on him being a man - but unlike with the typical callout targets, there is actually nothing particularly fallacious about the idea that ceteris paribus a man would be more likely to be well-equipped to explain what men find attractive. He just happens to give a bad explanation anyway, against the odds.
The statement that women in general don't know what men find attractive rings true to me, just based on everything I have heard from female friends and romantic partners over the years. You should not make the mistake of confusing this statement for something like "women have a hard time attracting men", because both the former and the negation of the latter can be (and, I'd argue, are) true simultaneously. Men, as a group, have low standards. Some individual men have very low standards, and moreover the low-standards ones are scattered surprisingly widely across the distribution of men by quality of women. Also, increasingly, the preferences of men are such that the quality of the partner they get matters far less to them than the guaranteed and the potential costs of engaging in partner selection. That is, these men prefer a woman who barely passes their standards and throws herself at them for free over one who is far more attractive to them but would have to be wooed/won over (with the attendant cost in time, "emotional labour", money and preference falsification in other domains, risk of heartbreak and threat of social consequences) every time.
As a result, the easiest success strategy for women starts looking something like 1. pick a man; 2. make sure you pass some minimum attractiveness threshold (which can be done by optimising for a very wrong model of male attraction as long as it's not completely insane); 3. hit on him as obviously as your intra-gender social constraints will allow; 4. guard him from any competition. If you follow this strategy, it may seem to you that your optimisation at step 2 did a lot of work, step 3 was just necessary because men are dense, and step 4 is insurance because men are so fickle that they would cheat on a 10 with a 6 for novelty, and that your success therefore means you had a good grasp of men's preferences. In reality, at step 2 you probably optimised in some direction that barely managed to have positive dot product, made it to 6/10, and steps 3 and 4 were the decisive ones because a 6/10 in the hand is worth more than a 10/10 in the (Australian) bush, gympies and all.
(You can benchmark actual ability to judge men's preferences by trying to predict their ranking of the attractiveness of classmates (if they feel safe to share with you), actresses, or fictional characters. I have been in fairly unfiltered mixed company sharing those, and men's rankings never fail to surprise even women who know them well.)
+1. I think it would be good to have a sort of cutout for talking about AI (for example in a pattern like: "Musk's new MechaTrump-3T model has some weird quirks, which will be concerning if the presidency is handed over to it next month as planned. Here is what it had to say about Mexico when I ran its 1bit quantization:").
Other than that, I want to add that the assumption of good faith for me depends on a line of reasoning along the lines of, "Another sentient being, ultimately not that different from you, has taken the time to write this. You can appreciate how long it took and how hard it was. Treat the product with the amount of respect you would like to receive if you put in a similar effort.".
This goes out of the window if the other party may have just written a line, clicked a button and copypasted.
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