Corvos
21m ago
What I mean is that as a semi-advanced Japanese learner, it sounds like the best way to play is in Japanese where translation quality is not an issue and you have to go by real cultural nuance / in-depth understanding to figure out the answers. It's very rare to find something that is a) not targeted at (beginner) learners, b) not novels and novels worth of text as in an RPG, c) requires specific attention to the language at a level deeper than 'can I work out vaguely what is going on', and d) provides feedback about whether you got it right.
In theory it sounds great for an intermediate to advanced learner. Do you actually get any feedback, or do you have to do all 3000 and pray?
Corvos
32m ago
Now THAT's a Japanese learning game!
Is 'masochism game' a generally used term? It made me think of Viscera Cleanup Detail.
Corvos
55m ago
Nothing, I guess, if they really do have that ability. I would dispute equating "conducting a sneak-assassination of the entire leadership plus an extended bombing campaign, aimed at some combination of overturning the country's government + preventing them from developing weapons that might actually hurt their attackers" with "getting into a scrap". But yes, if India did that and Pakistan succeeded in closing the Strait of Hormuz, I would naturally blame India.
is this the first known instance of Nobel Disease developing in someone who didn't win a Nobel prize?
No, I think this is a different phenomenon. Humans anthropomorphise, and for various reasons LLMs have been made very easy to anthropomorphise. The Turing Test basically gets at what a normal person's definition of 'human' is, and LLMs basically pass it, so as a response people have started splitting into one of a few groups:
- People who interact closely with LLMs on a technical level and see the increasingly small gaps in the models themselves, or see the gaps in the simpler versions of the models and extrapolate up.
- People who interact closely with them on a less-technical level and bond with them.
- People who see something that has many of the qualities who traditionally consider human and ascribe all of the qualities we consider human.
- People who pattern-match to sci-fi narratives about 'robots becoming human', either in a positive way or a negative way.
- 'AI will not replace us, nerds are thieves who make inferior copies of us' people who will never assign intelligence to an AI no matter what.
All of this will only get more complex as discussion about AI continues to feed back into the training data for AI. It was a pretty notion but I'd like to slap the guy who thought SOUL.md was a good place to begin making AI workers.
TL;DR: Dawkins is saying this because he's gone normie, not because he's gone weird.
Corvos
2hr ago
The point is that forcing somebody to do something and then blaming them for doing it is petty and sadistic.
If somebody controls an important pass, and you slaughter their family and make it clear that you will continue to slaughter until you get unconditional obedience, then closing off the pass is the obvious and natural response.
Some Americans seem to have got so fed up with being criticised unreasonably that they have lost the capacity to see when they are being criticised reasonably. Others seem to believe that Red Americans (as opposed to the hated Blues) can do no wrong and should be acclaimed throughout the world as the righteous God-Kings they obviously are - or else.
Corvos
6hr ago
She also broadly abandoned him once she got rich and powerful, if memory serves.
Corvos
23hr ago
People like Nerd Fitness regularly try. The problem with gameification is that games themselves have to be at least a little bit fun, especially if you want people to play them long-term. This is much harder to do for things that are (broadly) inherently dull and painful such as tax returns* or learning theoretical physics than for things like shooting monsters or looting dungeons. See for instance the game made by the guy who just tried to kill Trump - to the extent that it accurately represents and tries to teach particle physics, it's much less fun than another game would be using similar mechanics without the baggage.
There are other issues - gamified approaches have to put aside lots of extra time for the 'game' part so they aren't very efficient. If you have to play a periodic table board game for a week's worth of evenings where you could get the most important bits of info from a slide, a 30 minute lecture and a test, that's not necessarily an improvement.
*yes, I know about the XKCD.
Corvos
1d ago
I mentioned your description of the KV-2 to my Dad the WW2 enthusiast and he suggested you look up the French Char B1 bis at the Battle of Stonne, which took 140 hits defending a chokepoint and destroyed 13 Panzers and 2 anti-tank guns.
Corvos
2d ago
Your Two Minutes Hate quote from Nabokov is great. I've noticed myself that I often prefer the clunkier fan translations of Japanese visual novels to the elegant modern localisations, especially that of Fate Stay Night where the writing is fairly execrable at least in English. Lots of repetition, fragments, and clunky sentences - "People die when they are killed." - but there's an interest to it that gets lost in the polished remake.
Corvos
2d ago
Democrats who could convincingly project moderate positions on these social issues -- that are not assumed to be covers for more extreme positions -- would be popular. This would give Democrats lots of room to push their economic agenda, which is broadly popular. Democrats could have healthcare, tariffs, and infrastructure. This is basically what someone like Josh Shapiro did. A national platform along these lines would probably be very successful. In fact, I think if Democrats had adopted something like this all along they would never have lost to Trump in the first place.
This is basically the Tony Blair approach to government, and indeed it worked gangbusters for 15 years.
AI suggests Familial natural short sleep. It seems to be genuinely pareto-optimal for humans, with basically no known downsides and several performance enhancements, although confounded by small numbers of experimental participants. It's not clear if it's a condition per se or just winning the genetic lottery by falling on the absolute edge of various genetic traits for efficient sleep simultaneously.
AI also suggests that it's entirely separate from MCAD deficiency, which usually produces a low tolerance for exercise and slow physical recovery.
I hope you don't mind my looking it up, but it's a fascinating collection of traits.
Corvos
4d ago
As an outsider, there seems to be this longstanding tension in American thought between, “the president is the tribune of the people and must be kept from harm” and, “the only way to keep the president the tribune of the people is to make sure they can kill him if they want to”.
Corvos
4d ago
Used to happen in British Palestine (Israel) I believe. The Stern Gang loved that sort of thing.
Corvos
4d ago
Traditional Asian architecture is just not a scalable solution when you're quickly trying to urbanise 1/5ths of the world's population.
A great discussion, and keep in mind that this is true in the West as well! Big tower blocks are no more native to my British culture than they are to yours, where beautiful stucco Georgian houses completely fail to scale, as do thatched cottages or the stone of Oxford.
One can draw a lineage from the Swiss to brutalism and from the Americans to skyscrapers, and thus call these things ‘Western’, but I think it would be more accurate to say that Globalism and the pressures of urbanisation swallowed Western cultures first and then Eastern countries very soon after.
Corvos
5d ago
Spunk is a noun not a verb. In the words of a great man:
“You’ve got spunk and balls… and I like that in a woman.”
Corvos
5d ago
The generally proposed etymology is that it derives from a now defunct curse “God’s blood!” which was shortened over time to “‘sblood!” and then became used as an intensifier.
Corvos
6d ago
That’s what’s creepy about it. He’s a perfectly nice, intelligent, self-aware… murderer.
Corvos
6d ago
I don’t like Yud much so it doesn’t really count but I would lay some blame for anti-AI violence at his door. He’s stoked panic and sky-falling doomerism about it for more than a decade, on the basis of no meaningful knowledge or experience whatsoever, not pausing for even a second when his ideas about how AI would materialise (alien optimisers, FOOM) turned out to be completely wrong. He has consistently advocated for maximally violent approaches to preventing AI, objecting to individual efforts only on the grounds of pragmatism.
In fact, I would say he’s one of the worse people to do this kind of thought experiment on.
Corvos
6d ago
The slow shift from relatable, funny dude:
I apologize to my parents for saying I had an interview without specifying it was for “Most Wanted.”
to 'I will kill you if you're in my way or you try to stop me':
Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest
Secret Service: they are targets only if necessary, and to be incapacitated non-lethally if possible (aka, I hope they’re wearing body armor because center mass with shotguns messes up people who aren’t
Hotel Security: not targets if at all possible (aka unless they shoot at me)
is really, really creepy.
Corvos
6d ago
Broadly in the UK it’s ‘are you a citizen in good standing?’ plus ‘are you someone with a credible interest in the type of gun you are asking for’ + ‘how controlled is that type of gun’?
So farmers/aristocrats get shotguns to shot pheasant or foxes with no trouble as long as someone vouches for their mental health, but will be asked a lot of questions if they want an anti-material piercing rifle.
The right kind of sportsman can get a rifle.
My father knew somebody who got a concealed handgun, but he was a very rich financier with credible threat of being targeted, those were laxer times, and it came with strings attached.
None of my friends with guns encountered institutional hostility, annd in general you wouldn’t unless you were taking the piss. Guns aren’t really a culture war issue. Something like the Planning Authority is way more hostile
Corvos
8d ago
Have lived in apartments all my life, in the UK and Japan. With one exception, have never been troubled by noise from neighbours.
Suicide is bad. Other people's suffering is part of why it's bad. The loss of a person, with all their potential, is another part.
For any form of suffering, you can find people who bore it bravely and often even cheerfully. Conversely, there is no life that is good enough, loved enough, respected enough to stop some people from killing themselves.
The difference between suicidal people and everyone else is not that they suffer more and need to kill themselves to make it stop, it's that they have a brain and a disposition that makes them want to kill themselves. Often this comes in very short bouts, as I say. Often it's fixable. I have known somebody whose father killed himself, who inherited his father's condition and tried to kill himself as well, thankfully failed, and is now living a reasonably happy life 99% of the time. He has bad days and needs to kept from harm on those days.
There is no need to agree with an irrational person about the nature of their condition, nor the solution thereof.
As a general rule, we should accept authenticity over bullshit. No machine can love a human in the same way a human can, and dying alone is superior to a false fantasy.
I just flat out disagree, sorry. Many hugely important things in our lives are fictional; I've spent more of my life with fictional people than real ones if you judge hour-by-hour, and I'm no hikkikomori. Pastiche architecture, veneer furniture, boy's-own adventure stories: I'll take an artful illusion over brutal authenticity any day of the week.
I don't think there is a great way to guarantee that only relationship challenged individuals get their hands on it. People are probably gonna try and get their hands on an android partner by either purchasing used or gaming the system. The drawbacks outweigh the positives.
I'm open to discussing this, but I think your angle is wrong. Firstly because the happy individuals mostly don't need to bother with it, and secondly because interacting with a patient simulacrum seems to me to be a very good way for people who are bad with people to become at least a little bit better with people.
To make it clear where I stand, I was being serious earlier when I said I regard this technology as downright miraculous and I use it regularly myself, though for fiction writing and occasional venting rather than a romantic relationship. I am really, really upset that an increasing number of people want to ban it in the name of forcing me and others to try and fail to live their fantasy of a happy life. To me your proposition is very redolent of the socialist logic of, "if we ban all the good schools, people will have no choice but to make the bad schools better!". No. Life just becomes a little more shit for everyone.
Let's tilt the scale by all means, let's help people form relationships and not get addicted, I'm doing that for myself as we speak. And I'm doing it partly with the help of an AI assistant I constructed. The two can go together perfectly well.
Damn right. Let us gentlemen of culture partake of our repast.
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