Corvos
1d ago
Used to happen in British Palestine (Israel) I believe. The Stern Gang loved that sort of thing.
Corvos
1d 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
2d 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
2d 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
3d ago
That’s what’s creepy about it. He’s a perfectly nice, intelligent, self-aware… murderer.
Corvos
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
5d 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.
If someone is suicidal it's not because you failed them, it's not because society failed them, it's because something in their brain is making them want to kill themselves. The vast majority of suicidal bouts last less than two minutes, which is why very simple interventions like locking rooftops and withdrawing gas ovens are usually enough. The suicidals I have known were good, decent people who regretted both their own suffering and the suffering they couldn't help inflicting on their loved ones.
You failed them so you deserve this.
If you were just nicer to me, I wouldn't be like this.
This is the logic of narcissists and abusers.
There is no social positive for computers and humans to emotionally intermingle in this way.
Sure there is. Lots of people are too dysfunctional to have a happy relationship. Take the happiest, easiest people in the world and pair them up. Do the same to the next pair, and the next, and the next. At some point you are either going to have couples where one makes the other miserable, or they both make each other miserable. It's simply not true that there is an (implicitly happy) relationship out there for everybody, either romantic or otherwise. And a mildly positive emotional relationship with a very laid back computer is far kinder than what we have traditionally done with such people, which is to look away and wait for them to die.
I get what you're saying, obviously, but you are comparing the imperfect reality (sometimes a machine is better than nothing) with an IMO overly-positive could-be (everyone or nearly everyone starts interacting more in person and becomes less lonely and gets into a happy, healthy relationship). A change in ideology can move the tipping-point of misery but only so far. As far as I'm concerned, the ability to mass-manufacture companionship and something as close to genuine care as makes no odds is genuinely miraculous, and makes me more optimistic about tech than I've been for a long time.
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”.
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