Corvos
5mo ago
I think he’s arguing that the argmax you run over the logits is not technically part of the LLM neural network so the LLM is just ‘an algorithm that produces math’ (ie produced a probability distribution), but that seems tendentious and also kind of weirdly put because it sounds like describing a tokenizer.
Corvos
5mo ago
He’s saying that someone with a gun could kill you at any moment without even trying. The same is not true of, say, a rubber duck. It’s natural to be a lot more nervous around one than the other, even if the owner has not yet demonstrated ill intent or stupidity.
It's a curiosity because without principles, what makes someone choose any particular side to begin with?
And I’m answering: familial loyalties, suspicions of whether their tribe will benefit, aesthetic preferences, etc.
Who is having their goods delivered? Whose fault is it that what is happening is happening? Macroeconomics and the like are so nebulous, unreadable and unproven that you will find people’s opinions on the effect of price controls is strongly determined by their loyalties, and not the reverse.
I am come from an upper-class family, I went to the appropriate schools in the UK, I read the Soectator, etc. You could pretty easily predict my views on the merits of taxation and on the usefulness of the Laffer curve, my voting affiliation, my views on fox-hunting, on globalisation, all from those pieces of information.
Then Brexit happened and there was a big alignment but it’s amazing how you can predict people’s carefully worked out opinions on the results of certain policies once you know their class, gender, age and job.
Corvos
5mo ago
Because I don't know anything about either of those groups. I guarantee you they would be affected differently by tariffs.
I can look it up though:
Rwanda is a small landlocked country in East-central Africa which is home to approximately 12 million people. Historically there are three main social groupings in the country – the majority Hutu (84%), the minority Tutsi (15%), and the much smaller Twa (1%).
The distinction between Hutu and Tutsi was mostly social – the Tutsi forming the wealthy, powerful part of society, and the Hutus the lower, poorer part.
In 1957 The Hutu Manifesto was published which denounced the Tutsis and their perceived dominant position in Rwandan leadership. When the King died in 1959 the Hutus, supported by the Belgians, rose up against the Tutsi leadership. Thousands of Tutsis were murdered and over 100,000 were forced to flee to neighbouring countries including Uganda. The first municipal elections held in Rwanda took place in 1960 and saw a Hutu majority being elected. The monarchy was abolished in 1961, leading to further attacks against the Tutsis. In 1962 Rwanda was granted independence from Belgium and George Kayibanda from the Hutu nationalist party came to power.
The years following independence saw repeated massacres of Tutsis. There were also attacks on Hutus by Tutsis, who saw themselves denied political representation as the nation became a one-party State. Tutsis were denied jobs in the public service under an ethnic quota system which allocated them only 9% of available jobs. Tensions were further inflamed by increasing pressures on the Rwandan economy, resulting in rising levels of poverty and discontent.
So the Tutsis were a minority group that had been in charge in the early half of the 20th century and were then overthrown. When bad economic times struck Tutsis were hit by a double whammy of discrimination from the Hutus government and scapegoating from dissatisfied Hutus. Meanwhile the Hutus are likely propped up by the government and have more access to land and government support.
I strongly suspect that Tutsis would be hit very badly by 50% tariffs and the resultant economic problems. I also suspect that anybody who has serious business in Rwanda thinks about this kind of thing on a constant basis. The failure of foreign hegemons to consider very delicate inter-tribal dynamics in favour of academic theories about what should be important is a recurring complaint since the 1800s.
Corvos
5mo ago
I bow to your superior knowledge. I was told that 彼 and 彼女 as gendered pronouns were an innovation to allow translating European works into grammatical Japanese, but perhaps it's not so or it was a minor twist on an established usage.
Thank you for laying out your thoughts but this feels like the majority of apologetics - only convincing to those already convinced and skating quickly and lightly over the difficult points.
In particular you seem to pass very quickly over argument one. You lay out the anti-gun argument reasonably well:
- We allow people to have some dangerous things because it's not practical to do otherwise.
- Lots of unnecessary things are fine because they're not dangerous to anyone.
- Guns don't fall into either of these categories and so we ban them.
Then having clearly explained the main reason why lots of countries ban guns (they don't fall within either of the categories of object we usually tolerate), you don't refute it.
Guns and other lethal weapons are a unique confluence of incredibly dangerous and almost completely unnecessary. You seem to want to argue that banning things because they are unnecessary is a slippery slope, and that banning unnecessary things even when they are lethally dangerous weapons is excessive because most people can handle dangerous things just fine. But now you've parted ways with everyone except the people who think that you should almost never ban anything, and those people are already on your side!
This is why most gun apologists either try to make them seem less dangerous (no automatic fire, strong license checks, short-range hunting shotguns or bolt-action only) or more necessary (defend yourself, defend your liberty); those arguments don't always work but they sometimes do.
Likewise for argument two. Your response to the argument that guns cause more people to die from suicide is, essentially, YesChad.png. Where's the argument here? I know someone who's intermittently suicidal; it's genetic and it runs in the family. If he had guns he'd be dead by now.
I'm reasonably pro-gun for a Brit and these arguments are doing the opposite of what you're trying to achieve. Also, it's just that classic American thing of happily insisting that all other countries are just pits of suffering and distrust and only (part of) America has achieved true civilisation. I'm a nationalist myself but really.
Corvos
5mo ago
Boo. Doesn't count!
I watched the program when it came out, I really thought I remembered him eating it but I guess not.
swallowed an entire placenta raw on a dare
This used to be a granola girl thing, didn't it? Recreating every part of a natural birth and stuff. Apparently it's quite good for the mother.
Corvos
5mo ago
Part of this is that JP has a much more recent reification period, right? IIRC, the Meiji Era government basically had an explicit taskforce sitting down and deciding how to translate scientific, literary and other types of words into kanji in a way that was clear and useable. Thus 編集, 銀行、糖尿病、etc. as well as the creation of new pronouns such as かれ.
British English hasn't had such a process and the Americans were focused on other matters, so they're much more evolutionary. and the evolutionary process is what gives us the various masterpieces that @phailyoor has kindly provided for our, um, edification.
It's been done! Multiple times, even.
Though I'm tickled by the implication that the safest place in the world from cannibals is the Middle East.
Corvos
5mo ago
I like 最凶 better - you get the pun on さいきょう and also the slightly evil connotation.
The term that JP net culture uses for these sorts of videos is MAD
Good to know, I thought the M stood for music and it was the same as an AMV.
Corvos
5mo ago
See e.g. the British Corn Laws. Those lined up very clearly with the aristocrats (who owned the land) and the farmers (who worked it) in favour of tarriffs on imported grain, with merchants / importers / speculators and urban industrial workers against.
Self-interest, life experiences and priorities often line up along familial, tribal and ethnic lines.
Corvos
5mo ago
One negative review begins:
I have no objections to the content. It is very important to learn how the correct usage of dirty words. However, you must be aware that this book will not improve your pronunciation.
I genuinely can't believe this is a real book.
Corvos
5mo ago
It's just... the world is so beautiful, you know?
Corvos
5mo ago
Corvos
5mo ago
I think there's some of both. Someone was talking last week about how much environmentalism is an aesthetic: happy, multi-coloured people in harmony with nature and each other, living in beautiful garden cities. And that aesthetic is both positive and negative to some degree. Pro-local neighbourhoods has to mean anti-car, pro-clean-air means anti-smoke and therefore anti-factory, anti-wood-fires, anti-gas-hobs etc.
I think @anti-dan is correct in that often the 'anti-' aesthetic comes first, people dislike chaos and capitalism and want central planning, they dislike 'dirty' industry, they dislike racism and nationalism and parocialism and this plays a big role in their willingness to become Greens and to believe the more extreme takes on that side.
As always, I default to Bertrand Russel's method: any deeply held belief requires at least two of [personal desire, +/- social pressure, and preponderance of empirical evidence]. You will believe something if you really like it and the evidence seems to line up that way (HBD, often), or if you like it and your community agrees even though the evidence doesn't really line up that way (most religion inc. mine IMHO as a Christian), or if the evidence lines up that way and there is social consensus (we're probably not going to get lots out of interstellar space races).
Corvos
5mo ago
Your average environmentalist is a middle class college kid with an iPhone. They aren't giving up much of anything except maybe biking more and eating less meat.
The comment I've heard several times from middle class environmentalist friends is, "Of course, people are going to have to stop doing [thing I don't do]". Biking and recycling make them feel that they've made their sacrifices and they can happily start requiring things from other people.
Corvos
5mo ago
I was told by a psychologist that the vast majority of suicidal impulses last minutes or even seconds. The idea is that they don’t have time to seek out a substitute before the impulse wears off. It may appear later in other circs of course.
Corvos
5mo ago
Downvoted and AAQC’d.
You have raped my eyeballs and will be hearing from my lawyers shortly.
Corvos
5mo ago
First thought: 'Oh, hey, I can understand this!'
Second thought: 'Oh, Christ, I can understand this.'
Interestingly @RandomRanger cited a video in another thread that's an unintentional example of this. It's an Avatar compilation video titled "Hardest RDA Edit" where 'hard' is used to mean based/awesome/woah. My browser mistranslated that to "[Most Difficult] RDA Edit' i.e. 最も難しい RDA 編集.
If GPT is given both the title and the summary (which Youtube could do internally with their API) it gives the much better translations "Max strength RDA edit" 史上最強RDA編集 or "Most villainous RDA edit" 最凶RDA編集. In general I find GPT much better on language problems than they are on almost any other task, and miles better than standard machine translation.
The gun massively increases your danger, surely? Firstly because it so hugely reduces the amount of effort he needs to put into damaging you, and secondly because it makes it so hugely more likely that the damage will be lethal.
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