Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
No bio...
User ID: 123
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
retaliate by just blocking access completely
Personally I don't think it would be that bad, and if only considering purely selfish reasons I'd even welcome it. People generally underestimate just how much of the bottom-tier dross of the internet originate in India and Southeast Asia, like a global Eternal September, and having that blocked would substantially improve the net in general (for westerners, naturally; not so much for the Indians themselves!).
The reason for this is simple: India is huge, rich enough for most people to be online, not rich enough to not need to bother with small amounts of money, and they speak English decently enough. More importantly, there is a pervasive cultural trait where "looting the commons" is seen as basically acceptable; and by not doing it you're seen more as a schmuck than virtuous. This causes people to rapidly consume every bit of easily-exploitable goodness in a community, externalities be damned.
As an example, I am a software developer with a bit of open-source contributions. Each year, DigitalOcean has an event they call Hacktoberfest, where if you submit code to any open source project they send you a T-shirt. Perhaps predictably this causes a massive flood of inane garbage from Indian users wanting their shirt, forcing everybody else to spend all month dealing with spam.
Who do you think is making those click-farm spam sites that rehost e.g. StackOverflow content that has made Google so bad in recent years? Indians, grinding out a few bucks of ad revenue at a time. A lot of the trash on YouTube/Facebook is from there too, like those awful videos for kids. For the same reason, they're also responsible for the bulk of the scam calls plaguing the rest of the English-speaking world. It's no coincidence that the second-worst country for that, Nigeria, shares relevant traits (large population, middling poverty, English proficiency). Brazil would possibly be number two, but "luckily" their non-elite population don't speak much English at all.
A straightforward objection to "block it all" would be that some genuinely good users would be caught in the middle. Sure, but the quality of a community does not hinge much on the absolute amount of good users, but the average. We would hardly be on themotte if that wasn't the case! Having India ban you presents an excellent opportunity to improve your service without being accused of e.g. racism, and you get free-speech goodwill to boot.
(Even more tangentially I am awaiting the moment when some internet hustler guru discovers how you can exploit some modest opportunity for deploying LLMs and spamming people, unleashing a flood of garbage on some unlucky website. I imagine it will be something like a zillion LLaMA-powered Indians commenting on every post with a text containing random Amazon affiliate links fluidly shoehorned into it, or a hundred add-filled spam sites for every legitimate one when you search for anything. By then we'll have to actually do something.)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
The "moral" arc of history bends toward whatever options technology provides.
The obvious extension to this is that vegetarianism/veganism will become much more popular if or when tasty and cheap cultured meat becomes available. It's the only (at least somewhat) likely path to "vegan cultural victory" I can see, and if they were strategic they'd invest as much money and clout as possible to make it happen.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Rather lazily copy-pasted content from an old /r/CultureWarRoundup post as well.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
11mo ago
I am partial to the theory that advertising works by establishing a shared understanding of what consuming the product signals to others. It explains many puzzling behaviours, e.g. why Coca Cola would bother with ads – they want to steer how other people will percieve you when consuming their product, not necessarily create awareness or an immediate desire.
In that framework, the Mulvaney backlash makes perfect sense; the blog post I linked even talks about how brands generally don't have different messaging on different platforms since it would be directly counterproductive to the idea that you want to establish a common product image. InBev didn't understand it, tried different messaging for different groups, and is now suffering the consequences.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
I've had similar thoughts when it comes to language. Is it sexist if a gendered language (like Spanish) treats the masculine as the default case, or e.g. that words like "mankind" is based on the masculine word? If it was the inverse, would people complain that the male had it's own superior "exceptional" category and the female was simply generic?
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
7mo ago
I have a little blog post milling around in my head about one of my favourite lyrical/poetical "tricks" – using e.g. the refrain as a framing device, but having the meaning of the refrain changed by the context of the verses so that it implies something else in the end. I'm probably never going to get around to writing it, so I'll give you the abridged version of some examples I've had in mind that may be of interest. It's pretty common for European folk songs to use it:
"Son Ar Chistr/The song of the cider", a traditional song from Brittany (YT: Alan Stivell, 1970).
It begins as a drinking song – "Drink cider, Laou, for cider is good! A penny, a penny a glass!" – but the verses quickly descend into telling how the singer is an alcoholic womanizer and was kicked out of his house by his wife, so when the same refrain comes back it's clearly about him drowning his sorrows in cheap alcohol instead.
"Hej Sokoły", a Polish/Ukrainian folk song (YT).
It begins with an uhlan cavalryman sent out to fight in a foreign land, saying goodbye to his girl. The refrain is then about falcons flying past the mountains and forests, seemingly symbolizing his untetheredness from his home. However, in the last verse he gets killed, so now the falcons in the same refrain are instead his last thread back to home. (I also like the turn in the "Wine, wine, give me wine!" line, as the first obvious interpretation is quickly turned around to mean that he wants alcohol as an anesthetic).
"Jag hade en gång en båt" Swedish/Dutch singer-songwriter Cornelis Vreeswijk is also a rather good but more advanced example. (YT, and Lyrics), set to the same (originally Bahamian folk) melody as Sloop John B by the Beach Boys.
The first verse is about the narrator reminiscing about an old boat he once owned and then lost. In the second, he sings about an old dream he had and lost also, and so on. In the final verse it's a city park, gone due to a nuclear bomb. The song then quickly unwraps back, so you can have a new interpretation to each verse – from the figurative (the hopes and dreams of the narrator dying in the blast) to the concrete (the boat was lost due to everything being obliterated). Reexamining the first verse where the narrator states that he had a boat "so, so long ago", one can interpret that not as a nuclear war survivor or anything but rather humanity as a whole, implying the second verse means that all the hopes and dreams of humanity is gone.
Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus attempted that a bunch of times. It generally didn't go so well:
Immediately before the vote Bibulus ordered it suspended for religious reasons. Caesar, who was also pontifex maximus, the most significant religious official in Rome, ignored this and continued with the vote. Bibulus and two of his tribunes mounted the steps of the Temple of Castor and Pollux and attempted to denounce the bill. The crowd turned on him and his entourage, breaking his fasces (the symbols of his consulship), pushing him to the ground and pouring feces on him. Getting up, Bibulus uncovered his neck and shouted to the crowd to kill him to end his embarrassment. His fellow senators persuaded him to leave and regroup at a nearby temple, as the assembly proceeded to pass the bill.
In theory Roman law is very "hackable". In practice people are going to throw you out, dunk you in shit, and pretend you never said anything.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
I wrote a post about de-biasing efforts in machine learning, which got a bit long, so I decided to turn it into an article instead. It's about how corporate anti-bias solutions are mostly only designed to cover their asses, and does nothing to solve the larger (actually important) issue.
(As an aside: does it still count as a "bare link" if I point to my own content, just hosted elsewhere?)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
A little project I want to do this year is try cooking an "Acherburger", that is, a meal that breaks the most kosher laws possible. There's some discussion about doing that online, but it's mostly low-effort stuff like "bacon-wrapped shrimp" etc. Lame! One can do so much more.
Here's the initial plan:
For the meat patty, combine as many treyf animals as I can. The supermarket in my city has a whole bunch, e.g. rabbit, kangaroo, alligator, even bear. I'd put a little of a bunch of them in, with the bulk being pork just so It doesn't taste too weird. Animal blood is forbidden as well; so I add a little bit of that too.
Onto this we'll add cheese, of course.
For frying, one can use suet instead of oil/butter, as that's forbidden.
Produce must be tithed before consumption, and you can't eat fruit during the first three years after planting. Outside of Israel, this isn't necessary unless you know for certain that it is the case; luckily I have a relative with a lime tree I know isn't that old, so I can add lime to the sauce and break that commandment.
Produce that may contain insects must be checked, or it is not kosher. Thus we don't do that for the lettuce, deliberately closing our eyes before putting some on the burger.
We'll eat it during the passover sabbath, so the fresh bread we'll buy is Chametz, Pat Akum, and Chadash (and of course the entire preparation of the meal is forbidden due to the sabbath). Naturally none of our utensils will be kashered either.
For the drink, we'll have wine. I have a bottle of Château Musar 2015. In addition to it being not kosher, 2015 was a Sabbath year in Israel, and since the wine is from Lebanon which counts as "Eretz Yisrael", it's not allowed. We'll also make it yayin nesech by pouring a little bit of it out in dedication to Baal. Before drinking it, I'll take a Nazirite vow to abstain from alcohol just to deliberately violate it.
The one rule I have some problem with breaking is Kil'ayim, that is "the planting of certain mixtures of seeds, grafting, the mixing of plants in vineyards [...]". This applies to Israeli produce only, and buying anything like that to make sure the seed were mixed during planting seems difficult. Sure, I can get spice mixes grown in Palestine in my local spice shop, but how can I be sure it actually broke any rule when it was grown?
Anything else I've forgotten about?
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
8mo ago
In Sweden to pay our bills you can have a thing called "autogiro". This means you grant a company the right to pull a certain sum from your account each month, so you never have to bother with any administration for your bills. Pretty convenient, except I've been using it for all my monthly expenses so I've never had to log in to my bank at all.
Early this year was the first time I've logged in to my bank for years. I've had constant anxiety to see how much money I actually had, and finally I had to bite the bullet and actually look.
Turns out, I had MUCH more money than I expected. The relief I felt from that was pretty much indescribable; I've now proceeded to buy a condo much closer to the city centre, and have been going out to eat more or less every weekend.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
10mo ago
The SuperNova Early Warning System (SNEWS) is a network of neutrino detectors designed to give early warning of a near-earth supernova. They have a mailing list where you can sign up to be one of the first people to be notified when it happens. I signed up for it; just imagine the party trick you could pull off by getting that email one evening and pointing to Betelgeuse before it blows up!
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
How easy is it for students to simply lie about their race in their application? It's not like the university is going to run a DNA test to see if your grandma was actually native American.
If you wanted to disrupt race-based admissions, the highest effect/cost thing you could do would probably be publishing a guide on how to pretend you're a minority like that. It doesn't even necessarily have to be very effective in practice, just be well known as something that happens, and it'd undermine the entire thing.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
11mo ago
You really need a bit of familiarity and prompt wrangling skill to get the most out of GPT. I've seen plenty of people testing it and fucking up basic stuff which makes them conclude that it's overhyped.
A common issue is not pressing the "GPT-4" button in the ChatGPT interface, and getting GPT-3.5 when you think you're running 4; and not being familiar enough with the interface to recognize that the blue-green icon means it's a lot dumber. E.g. Bryan Caplan fell for that.
A second issue is that GPT is at it's core a predictor, not a simulator. If you ask it something and it messes up the response, asking it something else in the same chat context means it will now start predicting that it's a character that makes mistakes. Resetting the chat fixes that. In the same vein, if you are giving it a quiz, having it predict a student response is suboptimal. Students make mistakes, you want it to predict the answer key.
Also, giving it few-shot examples improves it a great deal. If you have an example of a perfect query+response to a similar question, stuff it in the prompt itself! Then the LLM will know what kind of response you are looking for.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
8mo ago
As many said at the end of the deflated coup: "if it turns out that you can occupy one city, march in columns on Moscow, and then if you fail you will not suffer any consequences, then there may be many who will want to try to this themselves.
On the flip side, making a deal and then killing your competitor anyway ensures that people will be a lot less likely to make deals with you in the future, even in cases where you don't intend to defect. Having the killing be blatant then might actually work in your favour, as it won't be seen quite as sneaky and underhanded.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
mask race as an explicit input
"Unfortunately" for the machine learning case, they lack the complex internal self-censorship that humans can do to be able to pull that off. Even if you mask out inconvenient inputs like race and gender the model will likely immediately notice clusters of correlated traits that stem from that, and reconstruct the race and gender from scratch.
(A fun idea for a dystopian story element: people conspicuously purchasing items and visits places associated with a "safe" demographic like elderly Asian women, to keep the eye-of-sauron AI off their backs.)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
4mo ago
and sometimes can't even tell the difference between red and white wine in a blinded taste test
Scott himself wrote an article about that exact thing: Is Wine Fake?, and yes, the study where people were tricked with colored wine was as garbage as one might expect – they tested undergraduates and not experts, and the test consisted of affixing descriptors to two wines, which resulted in them affixing the red-wine associated ones to red-colored wines more often than chance. Going from this to "people can't tell red and white wines apart" is a Grand Canyon-sized leap.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
7mo ago
completely incomprehensible
I assume it's some sort of Straussian/obscurantist thing; intentionally hiding your points to prevent normies from being able to read it.
Much less charitably it's because his points are weak & often vibes-based, and any reasoning he makes would evaporate if stated explicitly and with any sort of rigour beyond Darkly Hinting to what you mean and letting the reader fill in the blanks. The few times he has written about things I am familiar with, the content really has been rather poor – take this article, for example, where he argues that a software that is only able to perform HTTP GET requests is safe, as such requests don't affect the server content. Anyone that has worked in web security know this is blatantly wrong, as there is probably hundreds of easily performed exploits and escapes for that weak of a sandbox.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Availability bias, probably. There's a very large amount of other possible things that might have happened at the same time but didn't, we just don't take them into account. If there's a million different coincidental things that can happen every news cycle, you can expect to experience one-in-a-million chances constantly.
"Cheating" is a pretty common event, too. If we assume there's two such stories each cycle and they occur randomly in a Poisson distribution, you'd need ~42 cycles to have a ≥50% chance of seeing six or more at the same time. Not too much of a coincidence.
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.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Most people have no intention of ever getting into politics I don't think. Even so, for the examples we've seen of politically active people getting called out (Rachel Dolezal, Elizabeth Warren, and Shaun King, from the top of my head) they've leaned into their racial category more than simply using it for admissions. Even then, for Warren it took a while and she had to do something foolish like having her DNA tested for it to become obvious. Comparing with a strategic person who never mentioned their fake race again after being admitted and they'd probably never be found out.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
Scams. Imagine an AI that calls your grandmother claiming to need money, sounding exactly like you, using voice recognition and GPT-N (fine-tuned on previous successful scam calls and prompted by a selection of your own social media information) to reply.
It'd work just as well on non-English speakers too, so nations that have up to now been more or less immune to Indian/Nigerian scammers due to the language barrier will now get targeted just as easily — and they don't have any sort of resistance from being exposed to the current "weak" versions of the scams either.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
1yr ago
It's not the fault of the website, it's just that they don't specify a file extension at all, and so the browser appends one automatically.
On Firefox (likely the same for Chrome) the browser asks the operating system for the appropriate extension it wants for the MIME in question ("image/jpeg"). On Linux, this is read from /etc/mime.types. On Windows, this is read from the registry (HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT > MIME).
You're seeing .jfif because Microsoft recently decided that should be the primary extension for that file type. Note that this is actually the proper name for "jpeg" files, as the container format is actually called "JFIF" – "JPEG" is just the compression method it uses which has become the informal name for it.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
Ah, it wasn't intended to be mean-spirited at all – mostly as a fun puzzle due to how complicated the laws are, and that it seems nobody has tried to do it before. Kashrut only applies to actual Jews anyway, so I figure if my intentions aren't bad it's not an issue.
The problem with grafted fruit is that I'd need to find one nearby, and since I gotta do it just before Easter it's very likely not going to be in season! Although now after reading more about it on the Wikipedia article it seems that it's just the act of growing such food that's prohibited, eating it is fine: "Diverse seed-plantings or vegetables that grew together in violation of the biblical command are permitted to be eaten", so I guess I can skip that after all.
Tangentially I find those youtube thumbnails ghoulishly inhuman. Creators have access to pretty complex A/B testing for what drives clicks with instant feedback, so over time they have slowly "gradient descended" into plastering those open-mouthed staring faces everywhere – not as a conscious decision by anybody, but simply because that's the local minima when you do large scale tests of the minds of children. It's almost Lovecraftian, like a human puppeted by a deeply alien mind that you have no goals in common with.
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