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4bpp

Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs

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joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC

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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs

				
				
				

				

					3 followers  

					follows 2 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The lede being buried here (per the actual KiA post) is that the 60% "adjusted" score is based on something like one tenth of the votes in the "official" score. About 7000 people voted on the app, and overwhelmingly liked the film. About 800 people voted on the website, of whom ~56% liked it. That really doesn't sound like "the people's true opinion is being suppressed", but just like a "a small contingent of people cared to give the movie a rating even though they didn't have the app/watch it in a way the app registers; many of that select set didn't like it". You could argue for the greater validity of the combined score, which amounts to 92% or so; but considering the 56% sample the most valid one is just wishful thinking that none of the right-wing set would stand for if the political valence were flipped (small subset of special users that might not even have consumed it likes a thing that's considered right-wing much less).


I wanted to believe in manipulation as much as anyone, but this is weak. It really looks like Nolan has cracked the code of making the modern audience turn out for woke remakes, and team anti-woke is huffing copium.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There are so many wrong things here that I don't even know where to start.




cold, dark




The climate is milder than much of the north of the US, but Boston and the PNW are not exactly unpopular.




high-tax




Lower tax than most other places in Western Europe, surprisingly.




welfare




...also comparing unfavourably to much of the rest of Europe. The medical system is every bit as much of a wreck as the British NHS, and unemployment insurance is anemic and opt-in.




Swedish women




Consensus among foreigners (spent several years working there) was that Swedish women are very mediocre, and it's actually the men who tend to be much more attractive than those elsewhere. That meshes well with the preexisting native culture warring about Swedish men taking Thai wives.




food delivery, meat processing and Uber, prime targets for automation




This seems to be based on the human intellectual arrogance based view that got thoroughly demolished in the last few years. The best estimate to make now is that research/writing/office work/management/anything white-collar are the prime targets for automation, and food delivery, meat processing and Uber are going to be the last human holdouts because meat has a competitive advantage at navigating the mess that is the 3D world. We got AI solving big open problems in maths before we got self-driving cars that can cope with a Swedish city (as opposed to a handful of American easy-mode desert town street grids).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But right now, as the poster you were responding to rightly pointed out, the results are bad. You can hardly call it a "medium" either, any more than Uber Eats is a medium for your culinary expression and creativity.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So you're willing to defend even telltale AI slop as long as the political motivations are directionally correct? That actually seems like much more of a new low (of tribalist decay) even by the standards of American right-wingers. We had people push the "right=beauty, left=politically aligned ugliness" angle in the context of anime fanart only a few top-level posts ago, which would come to seem rather hollow if your attitude takes root.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


However none of them decided that it was actually easier to hack the company instead.




"Stronger model with fewer guardrails considers more options" doesn't seem surprising.




Ironically this is what I expect from AI Doomers/Boosters. That and a love of Science Fiction and a poor understanding of reality.




Well, the problem is that the doomers/boosters have a great track record so far, while the skeptics have been fighting a rearguard action since before "stochastic parrots". We are now very deep down the list of things the Gary Marcus set has been assuring us will never happen just with the models that are accessible to the public, and yet their confidence that the next capability that is just beyond what everyone can verify with their own lying eyes (even when, as in this case, it's a straightforward combination of capabilities that are already being exhibited for everyone to see) will surely prove to be the impossible sci-fi hype scam pushed by techbro marketeers appears to be completely unaffected.


You speak of "understanding of reality", but can you spell out what exactly it is about your understanding of reality that says the official sequence of events here is impossible? Just saying "AI models don't do this" is too specific to be a feature of an "understanding of reality".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That's not saying much, considering the public-facing version is known to have been made to not think about hacking anything in the bluntest possible way (hence HF couldn't even use it to analyse the attack). As for taking any steps I didn't explicitly ask for towards a goal I requested, even the copy of Gemma E4B I tried out the other day did that approximately all the time, so I'm finding it hard to believe you could maintain a mental model of these models where they would not do that if the restriction is lifted, unless you resolutely reason backwards from your desired conclusion.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's my position, it's pretty common among the politically engaged in my immediate environment, and I'm neither Jewish nor particularly interested in how Israel conducts itself internally as long as I don't have to be the one pushing the fat man off the bridge (there are plenty of other places in the world where people are routinely barbaric to each other and I'm equally comfortable leaving those to their own devices).


I do think your entire post registers as a less-than healthy degree of straight up projection, because you are painting this strangely elaborate and unhinged picture of your opposition as being obsessed with the minutiae of Israel's fate and situation when in reality it is clear that it is clear that nobody cares more than you do. A stalker may take the long list of incidents that you compiled to submit to police as evidence that you really do love them back, but in reality you will most likely be overjoyed to not have to spend a sliver of attention on them again once the restraining order goes through; likewise, here in the broadly anti crowd we have been forced to pay attention after decades of money extraction, conflict spillover and unsolicited interference with civic and political life, but outside of a few obsessives I really think that most people (here in Europe! I gather the US has the whole Protestant millenarian thing going on, so sometimes the stalkee really does love the stalker back?) would be quite happy to forget that the place even exists.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Have you tried any LLM recently? Even puny 8GB models that can run on my dated gaming laptop now break down arbitrary computer-related tasks into reasonable steps and follow through on them, and the model involved here is one whose parameter counts exceed that by factors of over a hundred.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Mind the usual motte-and-bailey about Israel though, with the motte being "Israelis have as much right to fight for their existence as everyone else, the alternative would be worse in every respect" and the bailey being "we have to provide Israel with unconditional material and political support". If the anti-Israel position were actually as extreme as it is being strawmanned, it would not stop at cutting support to Israel and maybe threatening to arrest Bibi if he comes to a Western country again; instead it would demand that the US and Europe redirect all those piles of money, intel and ordnance to Hamas, which is so far out of the Overton window that it doesn't even work as satire.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm familiar enough with the general idea of Genji, and I don't buy the claim of lineage here. If you want to go for straight up similarity, you will find that Goblin Slayer and Maoyuu are closer to the Canterbury Tales than to it; after all, the fantasy stories are neither trying to be a roman à clef nor are they encoding a setting in which social etiquette is implied to demand that the characters relate to each other in a formally prescribed way (unless you want to go as far as making the thesis that every particularly tropey Japanese story is just reflecting a Confucian ritualistic view of the world, which I guess would be a hit as a Japanese Studies undergrad course-paper).


Of course, if you write a story in Japanese where the characters are referred to as Minister of the Left and Consort soandso and what-not, you will get an old-timey feeling, because the roles are stock old-timey roles. You can also write a story in which all characters are only referred to by monikers like section chief and sub-chief and senpai; this will not give you a "long, long ago" feel, but a Dilbertian cubicle life feel. If you write a story in which the characters are Hero and Monk and Guild Receptionist, it will evoke the setting in which those are the roles, which is every piece of post-1989 Japanese fantasy schlock.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
On the other hand, the early 2010s, when I just entered grad school, seemed to be the exact watershed moment in the US where some part of anime culture went irrevocably mainstream. I remember being taken aback at the undergraduates (including a large well-adjusted Greek Life chad/stacy contingent) constantly spamming JoJo memes in office hours and homework, trying to square it with the previous generation of JoJo memes that were the province of fat 2ch otaku who are paranoid about Korean conspiracies to steal their pure Yamato seed and their fat Western VHS sub otaku admirers.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Evangelion is older than SE Lain by several years. I would not recommend Goblin Slayer to anyone not immersed in genre conventions; even ignoring the edgy premise, the whole thing is just deliberately made of a specific set of tropes (the Japanese riff on DnD high fantasy, codified perhaps by Record of RhodosLodoss War back in 198X and then iteratively reinforced over the decades) to the point the characters don't even have names but are only known by the archetypes they represent.


There are decent respectable normie-compatible anime series coming out with fair regularity even now. Sousou no Frieren should resonate with everyone in the melancholic set that was watching YKK back when I was an undergraduate. Spy x Family is probably the best pro-natalist comedy fluff since Yotsuba&.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I thought that making noise in movie theatres is an American thing. I noticed it with a healthy amount of dismay the one time I watched a movie in a US cinema (the first Star Wars sequel, at the SO's urging; some very central location in Boston next to a park, I could probably pinpoint the exact cinema if necessary), and was told that this is normal.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Microsoft also wrote and maintains (and seemingly occasionally mostly rewrites) Visual Studio proper, though, and there are many other production-grade IDEs written in C++. Sublime Text, afaik, is C/C++ and has more than feature parity with Zed; CodeLite and Code::Blocks both are C/C++ and are also not lacking particularly much (though the latter is also kind of buggy and the former became enshittified in what seems to have been an overambitious rewrite). Rust is really not easier or faster to write, even if you suffer from a peculiar disease that makes you introduce memory-related bugs at a much higher rate than anything else.


The point I'm converging on is that C/C++ actually makes the Github community-driven development model easier, precisely because it makes bugs so apparent that you don't get away with tech debt. Perhaps the synthesis of my views and those of Rust acolytes is something like that there are multiple abstraction levels of "badness", and failures at each of them happen to correlate decayingly with failures at the higher levels. At level 0 you have local failures of consistent memory management, of the type the Rust borrow manager catches. At level 1 you have macroscopic failures of logic, including a big number of ones that turn out to involve the flow of data ownership around your program and may result in characteristic double-free or null-pointer errors of the type that crashes under specific circumstances to the surprise of the programmer. At level 2 you have even more macroscopic failures of program design, such as a fundamentally inappropriate modularisation of your program that causes you to repeat yourself, or not exposing a sensitive and fragile process (such as Zed's tool call parsing) that really ought to be exposed for diagnostics. Rust's compiler flags level-0 failures really well, thereby exposing and forcing the programmer to deal with level-1 failures; but it turns out level-1 failures, if not suppressed, are a good way to expose level-2 failures, so Rust actually increases the number of unaddressed level-2 failures. (In concrete terms, being flooded with Github bug reports that contain actual crash stack traces winds up forcing the developers to deal with level 2 if they want to stop the flood.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I didn't even know VSCode contained any C++. GitHub says 96% typescript, which for this purpose is just another one of the languages that hide the badness of bad programs while also hindering their improvement by not offering the gold standard "stop what you are doing and fix this" signal that is the core dump.


Matter of fact, VSCode still sucks even now.


(I do think interpreted and "memory-safe" languages have a place in network-facing code, where a memory mismanagement crash is actually worse than general shittiness because it also often means the internet can execute arbitrary code on your machine. For localhost@localdomain computing, though, give me SIGSEGV over the constant slow demoralisation and gaslighting from software that is deniably bad any day.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 19, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So why does nobody else care for American Football? Are the other nations so inferior that they don't even see its greatness?


(Is American exceptionalism going the way of Japan now, from "we are so great everyone wants to be us" to "we are so great nobody gets us"?)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The most recent example I can think of is Zed, a "work with LLM agents" IDE written in Rust that has been getting a lot of traction (and seems to be the only way around to do this with a GUI if you don't want to touch Electron). I gave it about two days' college try since I'm on the market for a new IDE (after CodeLite got enshittified with a recent update). Specific examples of suck about it:


    

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    Quiet or inexplicable failures. If it doesn't like the way the LLM it connects to formats something, it either leaves you with an unactionable error message ("missing field 'path' in tool call") or outright does nothing (such as when it doesn't like the structured text format it gets back from the LLM it connects to for its "smart autocomplete" feature - a state that is indistinguishable to the user from "I failed to connect", "the suggested completion is empty" and "the model is still working"). To debug any of these things, you have to get the raw JSON data it received out of an undocumented sqlite file, and guess what the expected schema is, because that is also undocumented. (It's hard to figure out even from looking at the source, because the JSON data seems to be fed into the handling Rust class by some weird metaprogramming magic rather than an explicitly defined format.)
    

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    Sometimes parts of it, like the LSP integration, just stop working until you restart it. Again, no visual indication of failure state, the feature just doesn't fire anymore.
    

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    It tries to do something clever with pending edits, but there is no coherent underlying model. A lot of LLMs clearly assume that they can keep drafting and re-drafting an "edit file" tool call, like submit one that says "add a line saying X between the line that says A and the line that says B" and then follow up with "add a line saying X and a line saying Y between A and B". The latter fails because for the purpose of that tool the state is now A\nX\nB, but if the model tries to read the file again to get a consistent picture it still only reads A\nB.
    

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    Clearly there is lots of internal code duplication, resulting in non-orthogonal config duplication. There are separate configurations for the "agentic" LLM connection and the "autocomplete" LLM connection, supporting a slightly different subset of protocols, with slightly different design choices e.g. about whether you give the top-level URL of the API endpoint or the most specific one.
    

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    There is no build system integration whatsoever (even though this is the sine qua non that distinguishes an IDE from a fancy text editor), but the lede is buried about this. I get the sense that they want to have this eventually, but are just not too excited to work on it, while not wanting to pay the marketing cost of outright saying "we are not ready for prime time yet".
    

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    There is debugger integration, which is supposed to be able to do fancy modern things like letting you see variable values by hovering the variable in the source as you debug. This works about 10% of the time, again with no indication when it fails.
    

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All of this hints at a level of engineering that, if it were C/C++, I'm sure would result in a program that is unusable due to segfaulting all the time, with a reputation to match. In Rust, it instead just keeps running, slowly piling the frustration on you, while the developers psychotically add one shiny new feature after the other and leave the occasional bug reports about the above to rot without a response (because who cares about one user's unverifiable report that some asynchronous thing didn't appear? It's not like they can bring receipts in the form of a stack trace, because there was no crash).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Earlier, the Ladybird web browser was also rewritten in Rust mostly by LLM.




Oh. RIP. "You were supposed to be the chosen one", or something.


Maybe it's my eternal grumpy old "real programmers should write in..." fart eyes biasing me, but every single major project written in Rust that I have tried so far turned out to suffer from the same problem as major projects written in Python and JavaScript did before: it doesn't crash, but it sucks in more subtle ways that make me think that (1) if the language didn't prevent that, it would probably crash every 5 minutes and (2) if it did that, its developers and defenders would at least realise how bad their program is. It's strange because when the "it's memory safe and allows you to focus on the important things!!!" language was Python/JS, the obvious theory to explain this was that the language enables incompetent programmers who are not actually up to the task of engineering big pieces of software; but Rust is not even particularly easy to write, and arguably harder than C++ (unless you fully commit to the early-2000s high corporate obnoxious_template_factory<namespace::bullshit_factory<allocator_factory<...>,...>> style). Still, the filter fails. Maybe the missing puzzle piece is just the AI: it has no trouble emitting walls of lifetime sludge that passes the compiler, but is no better at big-picture decisions than the Python script kiddie, all the while its script-kiddie-in-mindset handler looks at it and figures that because it is Rust and it runs, the program generated is definitionally beyond reproach.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think it's a similar question to "why do people who clearly know the difference still don fake Prada/Gucci/Rolex apparel". To a lot of people, not being able to "write good" is a lifelong source of feelings of inferiority. AI posting both offers the promise that they can finally get some of the respect that the verbally gifted command (whether justifiedly or not) for themselves, and a bit of a sense that they are getting their cheeky revenge on the system that was keeping them down.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
2 is basically saying "if you do this you will lose the culture war". Isn't the whole point of the "don't fight the culture war" rule that you are not allowed to act like you are primarily motivated by winning it? So maybe this is a strange place to be posting if you are swayed by that point.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't know if surrogacy would be particularly more popular on the Left in Germany; in fact if I had to make a blind guess I would imagine the FDP to be the party whose electorate is most okay with it, since it really registers as more of a "affluent people defying nature and propriety" vibe than anything with obvious left/right implications. If the CDU makes it a right-wing thing, they are just rationalising their impulses using whatever their chosen branding is.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm about as opposed to the Israelis' actions in Palestine as it gets, but I believe that hosting the UN ought to entail some sort of responsibility that surpasses object-level moral concerns. Really, the UN is somewhat like the Motte in that its purpose is to provide a neutral ground for parties to talk to each other who would never do so otherwise, except with the UN there are rather more things at stake.


If the people of NYC can't keep their moral principles in their pants for this higher purpose, maybe they should in fact not be allowed to host the UN, and the headquarters should move to a place with a higher decoupling waterline. It's their loss, or that of the US as a whole if they are incapable of finding any other site to guarantee safe passage for the de facto representatives of every significant piece of clay. (I'm sure China would be happy to set up a special economic zone with hookers and blow somewhere if nobody else is willing to step up.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So you figure every disgust reaction that exists in humans [in significant numbers] is natural for all of them? In that case, it seems like you are positing that the state of nature is to be disgusted of quite a lot of things, perhaps enough that human functioning is very nearly impossible without training yourself out of some of them. If nature requires that you train away some of your disgust reactions and society determines which ones, is it really fair to say that the ones you happen to keep are all natural and not socially conditioned? I don't know if that helps the case for "gays bad because it is natural to find them disgusting", either.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Not to mention I don't think you can socially condition people into finding things gross




I can't, society at large surely can. Apart from the examples that already came up, there are the food cases of raw fish, animal meat, insects, milk and a variety of fermented products, of which I'd wager the majority of humans on the planet experiences disgust reactions to at least one of. How does your model of disgust reactions as something natural explain that?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, a wordcel beloved of many here once quipped that the sovereign determines the null hypothesis, and the current sovereign surely is not on the side of aversion to homosexuality being natural or inevitable.


More prosaically, if what you are seeking to prove is that homosexuality is unnatural, then the outcome that gut responses are not against it due to nature is a null result.