Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
No bio...
User ID: 123
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
8mo ago
Maybe the "real Londoners" refers to not using stock photography of posed models? The author here charitably had the title to work with and picked some stock image that looked noticeably inauthentic, and race never went into it at all.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
Better than never having existed at all, surely! There's also similar things like British boarding schools that we already accept, so it doesn't seem too beyond the pale?
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
You are missing the point.
I don't think I am. I agree that a naïvely de-biased crime model will favour blacks over whites compared to a model that just went for simple accuracy and nothing else, but men will also necessarily similarly have to be favoured. If not, people are immediately going to notice the model convicting men and freeing women even when the facts are identical. There is absolutely no way people are going to accept that; radical anti-racist ideology isn't that powerful. Adding even more weight in favour of women would just be silly.
(What is slightly more realistic is if the model somehow gets access to a variable that correlates with gender but also crime itself, like your level of testosterone. With that, apologists may explain that the model convicted a man for e.g. murder based on his hormone levels which made it likely that he'd been aggressive; when in reality the model considered that to be rather unimportant compared to it being able to figure out that it's analysing a male.)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
7mo ago
"Real Hourly Compensation for All Workers" does not attempt to capture every possible thing in society that affects peoples finances, no.
(Though increases in cost of education will be reflected in the inflation, and as such adjusted for. Also the cost of the minimum viable laptop and smartphone required for getting a job is comparatively very low, and people get them anyway even if they weren't required – even the homeless have phones!)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
11mo ago
Huh! As an European I have always assumed it was the same all over the western world – a down-filled duvet in a removable bag akin to a big pillow case, and nothing else. Americans have multiple layers? Weird. Does the top layer not slide off or bunch together during the night?
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
I'd imagine most people aren't Sapir–Whorfists, and don't consider language to be particularly important for individual development compared to things like culture and family.
Still, even if they did, one would have to actually learn Lojban to not seem like a hypocrite when advocating for it – and if there's one thing people don't like to do, it's putting effort into things.
Compensation in the US has more or less steadily grown since it started being measured in the 50s.
In pessimist/doomer spaces that want to make the economy seem worse than it is, e.g. Reddit, you frequently see charts that show otherwise. This is pretty much always due to dishonest stats, e.g:
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Using "household income" instead of per-capita, which is confounded with shrinking household sizes.
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Using inflators like CPI that doesn't take substitution effects into account (instead of e.g. PCE) and thus overstate inflation a lot if compared over a long period of time.
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Not counting transfer payments.
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Counting the decline in hours worked as lowered wages, and not as people choosing to work less when they don't need to.
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Just completely making shit up, like this tweet that made the rounds a few days ago where real household income is compared to nominal rent prices.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Ten years ago, I'd have said that the most likely way that I'd die would be of heart disease at 78 years old or the like.
Today? My "normal" death is forty years away! With the speed these models are advancing, and how we are still picking low hanging fruit in several different areas, it seems increasingly unlikely we won't have AGI by then – barring some disaster like a global nuclear apocalypse. Today, I'd say my most likely death is either getting paperclipped, or surviving for thousands of years until I die of some scifi crap I can't even currently imagine.
How should one act in the face of this? I'm not Yudkowsky; what little he can do to affect the course of humanity, I certainly can't do much better. Still, are there not steps one could take to improve one's own lot in case it works out for the better? I'd like to see some sort of "retirement plan for the AI-pilled", common sense stuff you can do to at least hedge for the eventuality. Post-singulary I'll get hopelessly outcompeted in alpha, but maybe there's some beta to be had if you act now? Buying physical items with historical significance, perhaps? I imagine the rich people of the year 3000 would pay a lot for an authentic medieval manuscript, for example.
bias the algorithms ahead of time
While anti-bias efforts are easy to abuse, I don't think they are inherently bad. There really is a bunch of detritus in the datasets that causes poorer results, e.g:
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Generate anything related to Norse mythology, and the models are bound to start spitting out Marvel-related content due to the large amounts of data concerning e.g. their Thor character.
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Anything related to the "80s" will be infected by the faux cultural memory of glowing neon colours everywhere, popular from e.g. synthwave.
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Generating a "medieval knight" will likely spit out somebody wearing renaissance-era armour or the like, since artists don't always care very much about historical accuracy.
This can be pretty annoying, and I wouldn't really mind somebody poking around in the model to enforce a more clear distinction between concepts and improving actual accuracy.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
8mo ago
Well, I'm of the opinion that the 'intended meaning' of a poem or piece of media is totally worthless and uninteresting
If that is so, you could very well just entertain yourself with a random word generator like Terry A. Davis, no?
The very best art taps into aesthetics or concepts that are to some extent transcendent
I don't necessarily disagree! Those concepts should in principle be discernible however, and above the "noise floor" of the random associations I'd label "schizo". I don't deny that there might be interesting unconscious features of works, just critiquing the tendency of critics to find signals in random noise.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
I tried various American foods when I was over there, generally things I've seen online & in movies and such, but never tried. The most memorably bad one was pop-tarts. Insanely dry, with a synthetic cloyingly sweet flavour. I get that it's for kids, but god damn it's bad.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Has anyone reached out to Scott?
@ScottA is his account on here, presumably.
He stated in this comment that he'd advertise the site in the next Open Thread.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
8mo ago
No, but it was enough for the down payment of the loan.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
10mo ago
Before 2022 it was really easy, you could just buy a prepaid card with cash in a store and it'd have nothing tying it to yourself. Nowadays you need an ID. I checked a random telephone provider (Telenor) and they require you to use the national e-ID to buy a SIM card (or apparently upload a photo of your passport for international customers).
But yes, it's probably the limited market size and language barrier; especially since the prime target for scammers are old people who don't speak English very well.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
My article really only covers generative models, like the recent Stable Diffusion. Controversial models like classifiers that try to evaluate how likely somebody is to commit a crime has entirely different considerations. Maybe I should have made that more clear.
Also I disagree that a "de-biased" crime model would discriminate against white men! Men commit a highly disproportionate amount of crime compared to women; any sort of adjustment you make has to adjust for that, adding a whole bunch of likelihood on women especially, probably more than the racial difference even.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1mo ago
How about Cargoes, by John Masefield?
It has, I think, two interpretations. The first one is fairly boring – taking it "seriously" as a romantic look back at history, where he is describing two past ages filled with fanciful wonders and contrasting it with the dreary modern world
The Straussian reading is IMO vastly superior. Take the first verse, describing a ship in antiquity filled with "ivory, and apes and peacocks, sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine". It's all luxury goods; pure consumption, skimming from the top without improving anything in the long run. It represents a society unwilling (or worse, unable) to reinvest its surplus wealth into growth, to actually improve itself, instead opting to spend it on awful signalling games among the elites that will lead nowhere.
The second verse is similar, but about a cargo of gemstones during the ~17th century. The same critique applies to it – it's all still signalling, with no real productivity involved.
When we get to the third verse about the modern world there is an abrupt change in mood, now ostensibly negative. What are the items the ship is carrying however? "Tyne coal, road-rails, pig-lead, firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays". No more useless bullshit, this is goods from a society that is actually getting its shit together. It symbolizes reinvestment, growth, and actual strength, the kind of strength that will save billions from crippling poverty, eliminate famine, cure diseases plaguing humanity for millennia and bring education to everyone.
The third verse is so overwhelmingly good that it completely destroys the veneer of negative sentiment that it's described with. Consider if the poem instead was about people and not societies: The first describing an extremely rich man hosting an opulent party, and the third about a poor boy studying and working hard to improve his life. Wouldn't it then be completely obvious who you were supposed to think was better, even if the boy was described as dirty and hungry?
What's more is that the Industrial Revolution was real. How many boats in antiquity actually carried things like "apes and peacocks"? It's certainly not representative, and the places mentioned doesn't even make sense (Nineveh wasn't coastal, a Quinquereme is Hellenistic and from the wrong period, and even so you're going to have a hard time rowing it from Iraq to Palestine!). The second verse is more "real" in that there really were treasure galleons, but again not very representative. If you want an actual cargo you'd have to describe tobacco, sugar, or, you know, slaves.
In contrast, in the third verse there really were tons of ships carrying coal and road-rail! Not only is it enormously better, it actually happened.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
That's the cheese/meat combo; the rule is significantly broader than the plain reading. To be fair I could in theory do the cumbersome version, but then I'd have to get goat meat and milk that I know for sure belongs to the mother, and that'd probably be too difficult.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
My new-years resolution is to lose weight. I've been a bit overweight all my adult life, except when I participated in slimemoldtimemold's "only eat potatoes" community trial which worked really well. This year I'm doing it again, but just by myself. (One also saves a ton of money doing it, which helps!) The plan is to not eat anything except potatoes and vitamin supplements until Easter – except for important celebrations, like birthdays and such.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
6mo ago
I suspect a lot of it is just content theft with the minimal effort required to make it unique. The reactor finds some content, and since he is a more savvy marketer/promoter/algorithm-manipulator/staring-with-open-mouth-thumbnail-maker than the original he can simply slap his reaction in a corner and hijack the views.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
10mo ago
Thanks! If you're wondering why on earth we named it SWAGGINZZZ, it's due to us messing up the execution a bunch of times, and since we created a new account/player every time we pretty quickly exhausted all the good names we could think of. The final run was named that because we were just testing things and didn't expect that one to actually succeed..!
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
10mo ago
Yeah, but presumably scammers don't care about that wherever they are.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
We know what we are offering for this role is more than what you make
I dunno, I figure that the base assumption would be that wages are set by supply and demand, and as such in the long run it'll all be counteracted by an equal general rise in wages; or in practical terms all employees competing with other people who are in the same boat so it doesn't matter.
Crazy off-the-cuff idea: Since apparently none of this birthrate-encouragement is going to work, just have the government make kids itself and cut out parents entirely. Legalize trade in surrogacy and egg/sperm cells, make as many kids as required then house them in "orphanages" until they're adults.
How would one find that many women to be surrogates? Africa, probably; it won't take too much money until a paid 40-week vacation in e.g. the Korean countryside will seem an attractive option to many. (The median wage in Nigeria is about $9000/year, and just paying that on conclusion isn't much all things considered.)
Aren't orphanages really terrible places where the children will suffer? Probably not, the poor outcomes of current abandoned children is much more the fact that statistically they've inherited terrible traits from their deadbeat/intellectually disabled/addict parents. If you pick the top-10% of parents by some sane scoring method instead and make kids from that, I'd bet their upbringing – with peers of the same sort – would get much more pleasant.
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