DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5mo ago
You know, there's something uniquely wrong in this popular genre of «Western» «conservative» reasoning, that goes beyond what Seldowitz or any Arab terrorist could do. You serve unashamed tribalism of another tribe, and defend it with lofty universalist rhetoric about «civilization and barbarism».
What are those «our» values that the civilized abuser Seldowitz represents and the street vendor, whose transgression is in line with transgressions of white leftists, does not? Civilization is not about being educated enough to do more than sell street food. If there is anything to the Western civilization as a proposition and not pure empirical capability, it's the belief that «values» go beyond alliances of convenience, brute kinship and right of the mighty, that there exist principles and morally sound laws. Who plays more by the rules and laws of the West, and who exploits them more in this situation? Who reciprocates goodwill, and who has defected barbarically?
And, as you say, an attack on the Israeli is an attack on you, but does this work the other way around? Say, Bari Weiss, the kind of person who generates pretraining data for your soul, argues that antisemitism is a sign that the society itself is breaking down. Was the long culture war against whites and «the West», discussed in this community for so long, seen as a dire sign for the Jews? I suppose some clever and provocative ones saw it this way – in outlets so radioactive nobody would in their right mind cite them. Most others were just content to clarify they're not white, or at least not the hate-deserving shade of white.
And, I mean, that's fair enough. Every bloodline for itself, that's how the game is played since protozoa. I'm not under the impression that the CNN and the Guardian are paragons of «The West» or advocate for equal standards either: they report on Seldowitz solely because the progressive faction they represent and pander to is currently more sympathetic to Muslims, even Hamas supporters, than to Zionist Jews. But I appreciate that they do not invoke those ideas which I think would really deserve protection.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
9mo ago
king von being a serial killer (no, seriously)
What the fuck. His rivals are about as bad.
Following months of controversy surrounding his alleged involvement in King Von's death, Quando released his sixth mixtape, Still Taking Risks, on May 7, 2021
Quando Rondo publicly remained silent on the incident until two weeks later, when he released his song "End of Story", which was assumed to be a reference to Von's song trilogy, "Crazy Story". In the song, he recalls the shooting and addresses his involvement.[39] In the song, he again states that he was defending himself and even shows support for his friend Timothy Leeks, a rapper also known as Lul Timm, who was charged for the murder of King Von.[40] In April 2021, Quando denied that the song was a diss toward Von, and claimed he did not know that Von had songs with that title.[24] Despite receiving strong criticism, Quando has continued to publicly support Leeks.[41][42]
I knew about 50 Cent, XXXTentacion, Tupac and so on but this level of systemic childishness drives the point home finally. It seems «hip hop stars» live with anime or RPG levels of disregard for mundane rules-based reality, fighting and killing each other and being let go by the guards after some modest cooldown, to compose a memorable «diss». America really is the land of endless possibilities.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
11mo ago
Germany is an amazing country, yes.
Big drop in German exports to China raises fears over EU’s economic powerhouse
“It is mainly services that rebounded but not yet manufacturing,” said Brzeski, adding that carmakers have been hit by a lack of smaller electric vehicles and the Chinese trend of buying models from domestic carmakers. Motor vehicles and parts made up more 15 per cent of total German exports last year, he said.
Although European gas prices have fallen sharply from last year’s peak, they remain higher than in earlier years, putting energy-intensive companies at a sustained disadvantage.
“Chemicals output is down sharply due to the energy crisis,” said Oliver Rakau, chief German economist at research group Oxford Economics. “There has been a permanent hit to competitiveness.”
The German government has drawn up plans to subsidise 80 per cent of electricity costs for energy-intensive companies.
And if you don't focus on manufacturing, you don't need to subsidize a whole lot.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
7mo ago
He uses the dictionary meaning of the term. The way everyone else conflates ethnic cleansing per se and genocide is, uh, atrocious.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
7mo ago
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1712673207202070883
Israel just told the UN that all 1.1 million people in Northern Gaza should leave within 24 hours
I don't think this will not be highly visible, at the very fucking least.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
9mo ago
I increasingly feel like the problem with Hanania is he's genuinely a callous, nasty person and that won't work in the longhouse culture.
I've had moments of extreme vitriolic exaggeration, so I cut him slack when he puffs his chest and talks of how masculine, disagreeable he is, how everyone's a pussy, how he's disgusted at men showing vulnerability, ungratefulness, incompetence etc. etc. I think of it as just playing to the audience of fellow tough guy meritocrats. But perhaps I'm too cynical, cynicism overflowing into naivete, and it's all genuine (like Tate is genuinely some kind of a pimp or whatever). So he'd prefer it if sterilization were sound policy, because he'd rather just genocide poor people and black Americans, basically out of spite; meritocratic equal-opportunity race-blindness may or may not be unworkable, but for him it might not even seem desirable.
It's an alien mindset for me, but not ineffable, and exactly what progressives seek to demonstrate in their enemies.
Regardless, I think if people are correct that Musk is beyond cancellation, Hanania can curry favor with him and remain somewhat relevant for this reason alone. Musk is positively seething about EFF's Malema and his "clever" borderline genocidal rhetoric; maybe he won't stop quoting a guy who used to have edgy takes about blacks.
Surely some blacks (and even more of their diverse progressive allies) do. But that reflects badly on those people, seeing as whiteness – as per the infamous Smithsonian definition – is basically just being a decent person (or at least a non-troublesome employee), whereas Affirmative Action is never just affirmative action, never just redistributing the pie of prestige; it carries costs that may measure in lives.
Specifically Hanania cites the story of King/Drew aka «Killer King» Medical Center in Los Angeles, created in response to race riots and operated by representatives of «black community». The overall impression he seeks to convey is one of absolute fraud and profanation in service of ethnic prejudice; incompetent, criminally insane and malicious people playing doctor, giving up halfway and playing longhouse; callously watching deaths of their patients; covering up tragedies with an attitude that'd be chillingly pragmatic if it weren't also naive and self-defeating due to their stupidity. When, in defense of Affirmative Action, Justice Jackson argues – duplicitously and libelously – that black babies have a higher chance to survive in the hands of black doctors (implying that they risk death in the hands of non-blacks), it's precisely mitigations to Affirmative Action fiascos of the King/Drew type, removing high-risk babies from hands of low-skilled doctors, that make her argument superficially plausible.
Right-wing ideas on Culture War topics usually have at least three tiers of radicalization (iceberg meme.jpg). Tier Zero is Hlynka or Sowell-style conservative critique of raw denial, where problems with the default liberal narrative exist but may still be plausibly excused by pure social mechanics – liberals are just wrong about which ones. Tier One is where HBD, sex differences and such innate factors are recognized, but only myopically: people stick to the defensible, scientifically rock-solid motte of standardized aptitude measurements, merit, and economic optimality. Tier Two is where science is thinner, but subtle effects add up to extremely ugly conclusions. This is where you understand, among all else, that it's never just about IQ or SAT; that a great share of MtFs are not «women in man's body» or «men deluded about being women» or even «perverts» but something far more problematic; that… but it's stagnant due to most people chickening out earlier (after all, even in the tiniest niche there'll be crazy people dedicated to sniffing you out), thus rife with esoteric bullshit and self-serving ideology, and can get you banned even here. This isn't thebailey,org, after all.
But There's a Tier One and A Half. It's what you conclude once you allow yourself to think about implications of Tier One for even a little while.
IQ is meaningful because the complexity of everyday life is g-loaded. Conscientiousness and lack of bias are meaningful because tradeoffs of every line of work test human character. Abandon those measures or their solid proxies, and the demerits can compound, until catastrophic tail events become the norm and the civil structure collapses like South African power grid.
It doesn't take much. The society relies overwhelmingly on Swiss Cheese defense: the simplest way to prevent disasters is to use cheese types with small holes. Affirmative action makes the holes in the cheese bigger. An unqualified nurse injects more sedative than needed. A careless doctor doesn't check it in time. A corrupt supervisor doesn't pick up the early signs to remove them, then covers up the fatality. A racially motivated activist excuses the track record by saying whitey don't pay up enough. You create a bubble of horror where there was none.
I am not sure about Hanania's playbook. He flirts with banal racists and disses conservatives for not embracing the strong points of progressive paradigm. It may be incoherent. But his political intention seems simple. I presume it's just delegitimizing those horror-creating processes and mainstreaming opposition to them, so that the world where progressives win will be livable. To that end, he will troll and dunk and do whatever, but he won't swear fealty to any political team that's playing house instead of instrumentally shaping reality.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4mo ago
Before checking the comments I've transcripted it with whisper and added paragraphs with an LLM:
Good afternoon, welcome to the Natal Conference. I'm Kevin Dolan. We're here to solve a problem that will define the next century. In our lifetime, in our children's lifetime, every government, every culture, every belief system, and every family on earth will pass through a bottleneck, bottleneck tighter than the Black Death, predicated on one question, will your children have children of their own?
It doesn't matter if you already have kids, if you don't have kids, if you hate kids. If you have a 401k or a mortgage or a social security card or a checking account, this question is going to impact your life in a very direct way. The entire global financial system, the value of your money and almost every asset you might buy with money, is defined by leverage, which means its value is dependent on growth.
Every country in the developed world and most countries in the developing world face long-term population decline at a scale that makes that growth impossible to maintain, which means we are sitting on the bubble of all bubbles. Not just a temporary overheating of home construction, but a permanent oversupply, like the kind you find in cities like Detroit. Not just tech stocks, but the entire equities market. Not just a handful of cities gutted of their tax base and going bankrupt, but thousands of them, and then sovereign bankruptcies. It's an everything bubble.
Even so, you may say, well, it's a bubble. So be it. If it pops, then there's a correction and we move on. But in the aftermath of a collapse like this, the shrinking number of productive workers have to support a growing number of older, sicker people, which in turn accelerates the economic pressures that make it difficult to start families. This problem isn't self-correcting, at least not within your lifetime. It gets worse as it gets worse.
So what does that look like? Well, societies like Japan or South Korea show us what may be the best case scenario, what it might look like if you could let the air out of the balloon slowly. What that looks like is young people chained to the desk, working ever longer hours for ever lower wages, not only unable to start a family, but increasingly unable to start a family. The countryside and smaller cities abandoned as the tax base evaporates. Basically an orderly managed retreat from the planet. And hopefully at the end, there's a robot nurse to turn off the lights.
To be clear, that will take luck and meticulous planning on their part. Maybe they pull it off. But I think Japan and Korea are beautiful places with beautiful people who should go on existing. That would be an orderly tragedy. And again, that's best case.
Places like China, Brazil, Russia, Thailand, and Mexico got old before they got rich. In coming decades, these countries will be totally unable to sustain their elderly populations, even if they could stop the flight of their most productive young people, even if they work them and tax them to death. Unless something truly dramatic happens, these countries will face humanitarian and political crises on par with the worst of the 20th century.
The United States will probably be somewhere in the middle. So far, immigration makes US fertility rates look better on paper, but not enough to prevent a degrowth economic collapse and not enough to take care of an aging population. It's not obvious in any case why young immigrant families from poor countries would sign up to support a population of elderly dependents to whom they have no attachment while their own grandmothers back home are starving. America's wealth and productive capacity give us a few more attractive options in the short run, a few ways to avoid catastrophe if we act now, but our political system and our culture is just so damaged that making that happen would be a heroic undertaking.
So those are the global stakes of this issue. And we've brought experts in demography, genetics, endocrinology, economics, and public policy to tell you about all that. I'm not an expert. The reason I'm here is that I have two girls and four boys. And like a lot of millennials raising kids, when I look around at how few of us managed to start families and how much worse it is for Gen Z, I feel like I caught the last train out.
A consistent 95% of Americans say they want kids, but it looks like only about 60% of millennials will get there, and it's much worse for the Zoomers. Fertility decline often gets characterized as inevitable. You give people the freedom to choose, and it turns out parenting just isn't a desirable choice. But that's not the story that you hear from childless people. In surveys, only about 10% of childless people say it was a conscious decision. Another 10% deal with some form of medical infertility. But in 80% of cases, it's what demographer Stephen Shaw calls unplanned childlessness. You'll hear more about exactly what that means, but bottom line, the infrastructure that gets ordinary people educated, employed, paired off, and raising kids is just broken down.
So I view this as fundamentally a conservation project. If the Bengal tiger suddenly and dramatically stopped breeding, we wouldn't say, wow, I'm so glad the tigers are prioritizing their mental health, or they're spoiled, they're just not made of the same stuff as their tiger ancestors. And we certainly wouldn't say, good, there's too many Bengal tigers, Bengal tigers are ruining everything. Instead, we'd look at their environment and try to figure out what changed, what's disrupting their ability to fulfill this most basic imperative. And it is a basic imperative. If you're built to do anything at all, you're built to fall in love and have children and raise them. And there's no more punishing verdict, there's no situation in which a person is more psychologically vulnerable than when they take a chance on that.
You can tell a kid who's afraid of rejection that it's not life and death, but it is life and death. When you ask someone to love you, to marry you, to have a child with you, you're asking them, do you want my eyes, my nose, my hairline, the way I think, the way I walk and talk, do you want that to go on into the future, or should it go away forever? And for hundreds of millions of men and women, it feels like the whole world is telling them, nope, not you.
For men, it's usually near the top of the funnel, just getting swiped left 10,000 times at a glance. For women, it often comes later in the form of situationships that can last for months or years and never quite come around to, yes, I want you in particular. I want my kids to be like you. I think your thing should go on.
I don't think there's anything to gain from asking who has it worse or who's to blame. And in fact, one of my goals for the conference is to create a space totally free from that brand of Twitter blood sport. But I get why so many people are angry. We're just not built to be hurt like that over and over again with no end in sight. And a system where that's the fate of an ordinary person is a broken system.
Bottom line for me is I don't want any of that for my kids. I have to think of something better. Yes, there are political and economic dimensions to this issue, and I'm excited to think through them with you, but I'm not trying to have grandkids so they can fund Medicare. I want my kids to have kids so they can learn that Christmas morning is actually better as a parent than it was as a kid. I want my daughters to have sons and my sons to have daughters and to care intensely about what happens to them and watch as that transforms their whole perspective on the opposite sex.
I want them to see all the little imperfections and embarrassing things that they were insecure about as kids in this other person who's just the best and realize that all that was completely okay and not a big deal and it didn't make them unlovable. You're supposed to observe your life again in third person. You're supposed to see yourself as a little child through your father's eyes, your mother's eyes, maybe through God's eyes. You're supposed to see yourself saying and doing things your parents said and did, and you're either supposed to understand that and forgive it or you're supposed to recognize that it was wrong and make it right, maybe both. And these are psychological loops that don't close in any other way.
Of course, life isn't fair. Things don't always work out, but it should be normal. It should be typical to have these experiences. Parenting is as fundamental to the human life cycle as puberty and just as transformative. I want that for my kids and I want it for your kids because I like your thing and I think it should go on.
To the extent that I care about the median home price or the social security trust fund, that's why I care about those things. My personal line of attack on this issue is economic. I believe that the mainstream institutions that used to get people educated, employed, married, and supporting a family are in terminal decline and have become hostile to life. So I found that exit as a network and a fraternity to build something new on the outside, a place for like-minded talent and capital to build businesses, schools, marketplaces, and communities that can make raising a normal family normal again.
That's not for everyone. It's not a total solution. There are so many more things that could be done and that's why we launched this conference. We want to see what you're seeing to know what you know and to build things we haven't thought of yet. We've done a little homework on you, not a lot, but some, and I can tell you for certain that we don't share a common culture or political program. We even disagree in pretty stark terms about this issue, what it means and what ought to be done about it. But we're here because we agree that people are beautiful, that life is beautiful, and that it should go on. I'd like to thank everyone who's participated in making this conference happen, especially my co-founders, Drew Gorham and David Moore, our producer Barbara Williams, our sponsors, our volunteers, and all of our speakers who made the effort to get out here, prepared remarks, connected us with their friends. And of course, thanks to all of you for spending the time and travel and money to make this possible. Thank you.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
7mo ago
ADL seems to be silent as of now.
The mother organization, however, has played it absolutely straight. The Times of Israel:
B’nai Brith Canada’s CEO, Michael Mostyn, said it was outrageous that Parliament honored a former member of a Nazi unit, saying Ukrainian “ultra-nationalist ideologues” who volunteered for the Galicia Division “dreamed of an ethnically homogenous Ukrainian state and endorsed the idea of ethnic cleansing.”
“We understand an apology is forthcoming. We expect a meaningful apology. Parliament owes an apology to all Canadians for this outrage, and a detailed explanation as to how this could possibly have taken place at the center of Canadian democracy,” Mostyn said before Rota issued his statement.
Gotta say, it's heartening to see that some things don't change. B’nai Brith doing some NAFO "oh shush, what Nazis, Zelensky is literally Jewish so all's well, and who really knows, maybe SS volunteers really had a point, after all, you see, those Russians…" routine would be a total clown world event. I don't much like those guys but can appreciate anyone sticking to their bit.
The thing about Ukrainian patriots is they're quite straightforward. They had a bog standard Eastern European/Balkan ethnonationalist movement with all the classical knuckledragger tropes about $ingroup being Aryans/Greeks/Amazons/Huns/werewolves (the account belongs to some grifter but I've ran the list by Ukrainian acquaintances and they say it is "common knowledge" or school program to a greater or lesser extent) and $outgroup being racially inferior nonhuman pig dog creatures (rural prejudices, a haughty Moscal urbanite would certainly say); they still have it; many naively buy it as literally true (eg their famous auteur with a "cult following among Kyiv intellectuals" theorizing on Moskals' descent from some separate, evil species of ape… ah, the video is private now) and often do not expect reproach; their imagemakers will dress it up as merely «standing up to Moskal Asiatic Imperialists», and obvious geopolitics as well as the nature of the conflict force polite people to keep awkwardly smiling and pretending that's some cute exotic custom or whatever. It really is refreshingly attractive, the way Remove Kebab memes were, I imagine it speaks to the suppressed music in the blood of those whose ancestors went on Crusades; and they have better music than Serbs. Better lyrics too.
Canadian foreign politics has become a lot more riveting lately. Trudeau giving a MCU era impression of a Churchill speech was not in my bingo card either.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
9mo ago
It’s simply not Lind's job to represent this truth. Lind is representing a class of people. Protecting both its class interest as well as its dignity, at the very least.
I feel deep disconnect with Lind and with what appears to be your beliefs. It is not, in fact, good to lie. It is worse to congratulate yourself for your lies on the basis of some is-ought confusion. The self-servingly populist, paternalistic – no, probably even maternalistic – posture of a portly mother hen shielding her simple-minded salt-of-the-earth «electorate» from «shock jocks» with their nasty statistical tables, which Lind adopts, is despicable; hypocritical, condescending, emasculating and evokes every sadistic impulse I have. So it's a bit hard to engage in good faith.
But, just to remark on one strategic detail.
Merely pointing at The Bell Curve and HBD as a truth can’t qualify as just another feather of truth in the cap of HBD folks. In the words of Eric Turkheimer, this truth could rival the atom bomb.
Turkheimer at al (see e.g. the discussion about HBD trutherism as x-risk factor here) imagine themselves arguing from a place of wise pessimism: they cannot let this infohazard be mainstreamed, the risk of degenerate social developments from its implications in people's minds is too great, thus white lies are necessary. Naturally, this is optimistic about the counterfactual development in the condition of HBD denialism. But more than that, this is wildly and irresponsibly blithe with regard to eventual failure. That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch comes to mind::
Why do you so want to kill all the poor, Sir?
I don't want to do anything of the sort! But I think it's important to know if it would help.
Of course it wouldn't help that, the computer says it wouldn't help, so we're not doing it!
That's why we're not doing it?
What?
That's the only reason why we're not doing it? …Bloody hell, now I'm offended. Shouldn't have asked you to run that through – it turns out if it had come out positive you'd have started work by now! Here I am, blue sky thinking amongst friends, and I didn't realize it's only cold-hearted pragmatism that's keeping you from pumping gas into Lidl! Just because a computer says that killing all the poor will help the economy doesn't mean I'm going to do it. It's morally wrong and that's why we can run it through the computer because we know whatever it says we're not going to do it, that's the page I'm on an, are you going to burn the book?
Sailer gibes at liberals for the attitude mocked here, and I believe he's literally correct about a fraction: the predilection to High Modernist social engineering schemes plus callousness toward muh inbred Flyover Country hicks and badly hidden fear of «urban youth» (or what's the term now?), if reinforced with a theory of biological differences between groups, would make at least a minority de facto genocidal. But the rest are just making a foolish mistake. Pegging your ideological commitment to a contingent practical fact which does not inform that commitment is bad praxis; is egoism. Do you just double down in on rhetorical suppression, burnishing your Respectable Person creds in the process and hoping it never fails? What if it does and you've cleansed the debate of any principled opposition to that which you're trying to prevent? Your side gets routed. I won't go so far as to say that «anti-eugenicons» create a self-fulfilling prophecy, modern Americans at large really won't be willing to «kill all the poor» or some such. But they are sowing the seeds of chaos and conflict greatly surpassing the current culture war, and they cannot credibly take responsibility for those seeds never sprouting; indeed they cannot even legibly discuss the issue.
I've been observing the AI safety debate lately, and it irritates me there as well: in contrast to doomers with their bizarrely abstract takes on «the space of Optimization Processes in full generality», many AI optimists only have weak arguments contingent on minutiae of engineering and overconfident physical estimates, like «the brain is near Landauer limit already» (it's not, Yud is 100% right it's OOMs from the mark). E.g. George Hotz seems to believe we shouldn't air strike datacenters because AI just can't get that much smarter than George Hotz, certainly not soon. He'll crumple like tissue paper when this is falsified. The creationism debate comes to mind as well.
Denying facts is morally wrong and strategically wrong. You can only do that when your side is so overwhelmingly advantaged, there's no point to caring. Well, this is the case sometimes.
Probably not for American anti-immigrationists, though. Good luck proving to some Vivek Ramaswamy that, since Sailer is a poopyhead and HBD is not true or at least not handshakeworthy, America shouldn't grant citizenship to millions of qualified third Worlders.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
10mo ago
This is good for crypto Twitter. We will poast less and shame people for mid poasts, this will usher in a Twitter Renaissance!
Just kidding. I'm absolutely sure there's no 4D chess behind it all; maybe he's balancing his KPI obsession with actual, transient infrastructure problems and his spite for OpenAI, but that's the extent of it. The funniest part is that Twitter has a CEO (what's her name?), but apparently Musk still decides this unilaterally, in the fashion of Putin-Medvedev «castling».
On the plus side, I'll probably be spending more time here.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
11mo ago
retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin
“The non-human intelligence phenomenon is real. We are not alone,” Grey said.
Though a tough nut to crack
Calling it now: half a coconut a tool-using octopus swam in from one island to another.
I am always amused and puzzled when American spooks begin this stuff. It's one of the great mysteries of life why they do it at all and yet always end it as a nothingburger. I used to have a conspiratorial theory about psyop overcapacity, but at this point I'm allowing that it's some running gag, a nostalgic tradition born of ancient superstition nobody seriously believes in. Maybe we should create a holiday.
Or was there some tweaking going on there, such as "Show me 17th century British kings, but make them all black" and the AI does what it's asked, then the prompter goes on X to say "look at what happened when I asked for 17th century British kings"? The Second World War German soldiers had me rolling on the floor, but is this the pure quill, as they say?
There's a number of layers to this AI thing.
The most trivial answer is that current-gen image-generators-as-a-service use prompt preprocessing, expanding a prompt via an LLM to narrow down its possible interpretations by the diffusion model downstream. For example, if you write a cartoon cat holding a balloon, what the image generator gets as input is The image shows a cheerful cartoon cat standing on its hind legs and holding a large, round balloon. The cat has exaggerated features, including large, expressive eyes and a small, upturned nose, which give it a friendly and playful appearance. Its fur is soft and fluffy, with a natural-looking color and texture. The balloon is brightly colored and has a pattern or design on it, adding visual interest to the image. The balloon is filled with a light, airy substance and has a string or ribbon attached to it that the cat is holding onto. The cat is wearing simple clothing that is appropriate for a playful, carefree character. The background is a solid color, making the cat and balloon the main focus of the image. The overall tone of the image is cheerful and carefree. The image is well-lit and has a high level of detail, with clean lines and smooth shading.
This expansion happens according to simple natural language guidelines some girl (or at least I believe it was a girl) at Google has manually written. It so happens (guess why; here's a surprisingly charitable explanation about mode collapse) that the guidelines included aggressively injecting diversity into images with humans. Due to hallucinations we don't know the actual text, but prompt extractions yield something in this vein:
To expand the range of images, I internally adjust the prompt in a few ways: • Keywords: I might add words like "diverse," "inclusive," or specify ethnicities ("South Asian," "Black," etc.), and genders ("female," "non-binary") alongside the word "leprechaun."
Another layer is that, yeah, Google has rigged up the reinforcement learning preference dataset and/or the pretraining dataset such that Gemini-chat version is genuinely very progressively minded even without any images involved, and this might have nontrivial effect on its behind-the-scenes prompt expansions.
There's more to say of Google's deepening crisis of managerial competence, woke true believers among higher-ups (aggressive recruiting and promotion to counteract the disparity Damore had so plainly explained has yielded the desired effect, I guess), and…
All in all it doesn't matter. Gemini 1.5 is a superior product to OpenAI's, the next version will be competitive with GPT-5, Google's shipping engine has finished revving up, and we'll be getting fed more of this bullshit from now on.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
7mo ago
I don't get what you are arguing. Neither Russians and Ukrainians, nor Jews and Arabs, fight over genetically substantiated claims to the land. Well, there is some of that – Russians appeal to the absence of genetic ethnic uniqueness to downplay Ukrainian claim to sovereignty, Ukrainians appeal to evidence for the opposite, Arabs call Jews «Poles», Jews insist that Palestinian Arabs are just generic Arabs and don't get to claim a special state – but that's a side show. Jews, whether Ashkenazim or not, think they are entitled to the land based on their religion. Palestinians don't care about Fst distance to Mizrahim, they are a separate people. Humans don't explicitly think about objective genetic similarity as a basis for cooperation or enmity, only weird Western racists do.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
9mo ago
I've decided to abstain from responding to you the last time you wrote it, because – as before – I did not recognize you as a good faith interlocutor. (Btw, @2rafa, despite listening to OSTs often I just dislike Zimmer's music and Zimmer personally, but then again I'm not very into Wagner and all that Teutonic BS either). Thinking back on it, you might just find some aspects of the German character amiable. After all, Berdyaev did say in «Religion of Germanism»:
Germans are least of all materialists, if by materialism we mean accepting the external world as material in its objectively real composition. The whole of German philosophy has an idealistic direction and materialism could be in it only an accidental and insignificant phenomenon.
The German is neither dogmatist nor skeptic; he is a critic. He starts by rejecting the world, by not recognizing the externally, objectively given existence as a «critical reality». The German is physically and metaphysically a northerner, and the external, objective world does not appear to him illuminated by sunlight, as it does to the people of the south, as it does to the Romance peoples. For the German, the primary sense of being is, first of all, the primary sense of his will, his thought. He is a voluntarist and an idealist. He is musically gifted and plastically artless. Music is still a subjective spirit, an inner state of mind. Plastics is already an objective, embodied spirit. But in the sphere of objective, embodied spirit Germans were able to create only extraordinary technology, industry, militaristic tools, and not beauty. The tastelessness of the Germans, which appalls in even the greatest of them, even Goethe, is due to the transfer of the center of gravity of life to the inner tension of will and thought. On the side of sensuality, as an aesthetic category, the Germans are not at all acceptable or tolerable. And in the life of feeling they can only be merely sentimental.
A true, deep German always wants, having rejected the world as something dogmatically imposed and critically unverified, to recreate it out of himself, out of his spirit, out of his will and feeling. This direction of the Germanic spirit was determined as early as in the mysticism of Eckhart, it exists in Luther and in Protestantism, and is found and grounded with great force in the great Germanic idealism, in Kant and Fichte, and in another way in Hegel and Hartmann. It would be wrong to call this direction of the Germanic spirit phenomenalism. It is a kind of ontologism, an ontologism of a sharply voluntaristic bent. […] This consciousness is very taut, always disciplined and organized from within, from its own depths, in which lies the foundation of the Germanic will, the strong will. Such a consciousness is imposing but aesthetically unappealing. And it must be said that the tragedy of Germanism is, above all, the tragedy of excessive will, too possessive, too intense, recognizing nothing outside itself, too exclusively masculine, the tragedy of the inner celibacy of the Germanic spirit. It is a tragedy opposite to the tragedy of the Russian soul. The German people are a wonderful people, a powerful people, but a people devoid of any charm.
But, of course, Berdyaev spoke of German intellectuals – mainly as they appeared to him in written media. This would be as naive as judging Anglo Dasein/Umwelt/Weltanschauung by their stiff-lipped Victorian hypocrisy.
I knew normal Germans. To ask of normal people, even Germans, to be satisfied with just this is, at best, a ludicrous demand for universal ascetic monasticism; more likely it is mere cope. You can call math beautiful all you want, but math remains a niche, inaccessible (no, condescending popular renditions don't count) realm, and it doesn't have remotely the dimensionality to saturate human experience for any but the most obsessed, broken specimens. We are physical beasts, homeostatic machines connected to the world through a multimodal sensor array and burdened with demanding natural priors with narrow optimal response ranges, that ensure we can't stop caring about what happens around us. We are grounded in reality, so for our own sanity we should see pleasing sights on the ground level – pleasant faces, buildings, furniture, plants and so on. And in terms of intangible art, it need be grounded in baseline human experience as well – thus, even videogames with narratives touch us more than the most contrived category theory wankery; and the capacity to produce such videogames says more about the people's cultural capacity than having some Hausdorff Center for Mathematics. Some Germans can into math. Great. Math isn't about Germans, though. Math isn't about humans at all. And Germans know this as well as I do.
Suggesting a person take refuge from the squalor of the material world in the work of Peter Scholze is as ridiculous and cruel as telling a hungry person to contemplate some 19th century still-life paintings of peaches or whatever; a person who wants sex to embrace the holy love of Virgin Mary (and we know that this just ends in pathetic perversion). Speaking of, the best mathematicians I interact with have high libido, they seem to need lots of intense, dirty sex. (For more traditionally creative types this needn't even be said). They also care vastly more about art than I do, somehow – some fantasy book series, musical performances, and yes, even video games.
Humans are humans, they are not spirit engines for contemplating toy imaginary structures. With this «what even is beauty, ackchyually» you deny us our humanity. And I suspect you do this to excuse the expropriation of control over the physical world from people who do not satisfy your elitist cerebral standards.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
10mo ago
In case it isn't clear, I am not advocating for reinstatement of apartheid. Admittedly I do not have strong feelings either way, blacks oppressing whites right now is not morally better in my book, but what does it matter.
There are less extreme options, though.
On 4 August 1972, Amin declared that Britain would need to take on the responsibility for caring for British subjects who were of Indian origin,[3] accusing them of "sabotaging Uganda's economy and encouraging corruption".[2] The deadline for British subjects to leave was confirmed as three months, which came to mean 8 November. On 9 August, the policy was expanded to include citizens of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.[3] The position of the 23,000 Indians who had been granted Ugandan citizenship (and in particular those who held no other citizenship) was less clear. Not originally included, on 19 August, they were seemingly added to the list, before being re-exempted three days later following international protest. Many chose to leave rather than endure further intimidation, with only 4,000 known to have stayed.[3] Exemptions for certain professions were added, then later removed.[3][2]
«The Indians only milked the cow, but they did not feed it to yield more milk. There are now Black faces in every shop and industry. All the big cars in Uganda are now driven by Africans, and not the former bloodsuckers. The rest of Africa can learn from us.»
At the time of their deportation Indians owned 90% of the country's businesses and accounted for 90% of Uganda's tax revenue. The real value of salaries and wages plummeted by 90% in less than a decade following the expulsion, and although some of these businesses were handed over to native Ugandans this was ineffective as most did not know how to run them. Uganda's industrial sector which was seen as the backbone of the economy was damaged due to the lack of skilled workers.
Thousands of Indians returned to Uganda starting in 1986 when Yoweri Museveni assumed power. Museveni criticized Amin's policies and invited the Indians to return.[26][8] According to Museveni, "Gujaratis have played a lead role in Uganda's social and industrial development. I knew that this community can do wonders for my country and they have been doing it for last many decades." The Indians resurfacing in Uganda have helped rebuild the economy of Uganda, and are financially well settled.[8][27]
Despite making up less than 1% of the population, they are estimated to contribute up to 65% of the country's tax revenues.[2] Sudhir Ruparelia, who is of Indian origin, is the richest man in Uganda and has an estimated fortune of $1 billion.[2]
Yes, it is trivial to see where Idi Amin (by all accounts a horrible human being) was coming from in this case. He's probably even correct to an extent – Uganda is still dirt poor, Indians or no, whereas Indians themselves are «financially well settled»; this can't feel okay to natives.
But recognizing that someone has to pay taxes to keep the system running, denouncing racism, and guaranteeing whitey an equal measure of legal protection and opportunity for political and administrative representation, would certainly help South African fortunes, I believe. (It's amazing to me how many people still don't want to leave South Africa, despite being able to).
This would come at a price of the collective whitey becoming disproportionately powerful, of course – if through less unfair means. Which is unacceptable. So they will keep digging and doubling down, until their power grid and other vital infrastructure properly collapses and their governance degrades to Haitian levels, probably. Maybe it's still worth it.
I sit on the couch. There's a glass of tea (yes, a glass) to the left; hopefully I won't hit it with my elbow and send into the stone floor again. Not wearing a blindfold certainly helps in this regard. I put laptop on, well, my lap, open The Motte, scroll to the end of your post, think a second, click «reply».
What, if anything, in all of this could have been improved by Vision Pro? Adding a dancing Mickey Mouse (partnership with Disney, wooo!) to the periphery? Fitting the website into a circular window superimposed on the room? Strapping the same laptop's motherboard to my forehead? Replacing touch typing with tiny finger gestures that are picked up by the IR sensor array under my nose?
Actually there are some ideas here. I expect great things to come of augmented reality. I envision a future of uncompromising transparency and sovereignty, with tastefully minimal HUDs and AI digital assistants that stay well out of the way while brutally suppressing incoming noise; athletic young people with 20/20 vision and perfect innocence about «dark patterns» who walk in the sunlight and look with concern and pity at hunchbacked millenials and zoomers squinting into their pocket surveillance devices. This can be done. Contra Strugatsky brothers, we don't need communism to get to see the brightest parts of the Noon.
But as roon convincingly argues, text is the universal interface and it is primarily the inherent power of text, not technical limits of the age, that decided the shape of The Mother of All Demos and the hardware paradigm that we're still living in. Why do you think large language models get almost no benefit from multimodality? Because nothing has more meaningful dimensions than a text string. Tablets and smartphones, this great civilizational achievement of Apple, offer a strictly lesser channel than text – beloved by people who'd never have a clue what to do with CLI. Now, I suppose there are designers and architects, and surgeons and such, and all those colorful applications from WWDC will truly shine. But… rotating a 3D model of a Zahi Hadid-esque building in a teleconference? Is this what the digital era is about? I guess PowerPoint will add some zany VR features soon and they'll be adored by the same type of person who inserted WordArt into business presentations in the 90s, but… really?
This reminds me again of that epiphany I had while watching Alita: Battle Angel, particularly the scene where Alita dodges an aesthetic chain attack (admittedly, under a certain influence that brings out visual elaboration): What waste! The CG artists could have gone so much wilder, added complex patterns of acceleration and inertia and homing; but viewers won't perceive such detail. We're long in the regime where our tools let us depict actions of posthumans, but our merely human brains make that power sterile.
It is a nontrivial undertaking to find a paradigm that in practice does better than an IDE, or CLI, or even the humble chat window – when you're limited by the user on the other side. Almost everything of worth that we do is text and ways to manipulate and chain and condition its blocks on different scales. Skeuomorphic gimmicks, graphs, trees, mindmaps, desks with sticky notes, kanbans – frankly, all either collapses into unwieldy mess while text keeps going, or is as close to vanilla text in spirit as to make no difference and not benefit from new peripherals whatsoever. Many have tried. Yet here we still are. When some of us will get Vision Pros and ability to render arbitrary shapes, they'll still be peering into a rectangular website with an input box and a button to send comment.
I hope people with better imaginations than mine will prove me wrong. I'm pretty fed up with our interfaces, as well as with the human condition in general. But gimmicks and fetishes, exciting and novel as they can be, are no more the answer than frivolous surgery. Another, genuinely superior way has to be found and explored.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
10mo ago
If you are smarter, you align yourself with perceived enemies of the elites: Putin, Xi, Orban, .... You say things like:
«What does this have to do with Lenin?»
Nowadays, John Locke is considered to be the founder of English liberalism. But Locke became widely popular only in the 19th century; in the 17th-18th he was scarcely read or quoted. Algernon Sidney was the ruler of minds at that time – it was his ideas, for example, from which the founding fathers of the United States drew. Sidney was an active participant in the English Revolution and a staunch Republican, so after the establishment of Cromwell's dictatorship he resigned from all posts. After the Stuart restoration he went to the continent, first to the Netherlands, then to France, unsuccessfully trying to organize a mutiny against the king. After an amnesty he returned to England, where he was arrested for treason. Two witnesses were required for a conviction for treason, but the authorities found only one. Then Lord Jeffreys did a feint and brought in Sidney's own book, Discourses on the government, as a second witness. The fact that the book had not even been printed and was kept in Sidney's desk failed to deter the judges and they sentenced him to execution. So Sidney became the chief martyr of the Whig movement and an icon of English liberalism and republicanism.
Much later, documents were published proving that the tyrannicidal Sidney lived on the money of the main tyrant of Europe and the enemy of England, Louis XIV, and sought money from him to organize a rebellion. The only thing they did not agree on was the price – Sidney wanted one hundred thousand ecus, but the king agreed to give only five times less.
This publication caused a furor. One of Sidney's friends said he could not have been more ashamed if he had seen his son fleeing the battlefield with his own eyes. The liberal historian Macaulay wrote that few things hurt him as much as seeing Sidney's name on Louis XIV's list of pensioners.
However, let's look at the situation from the other side. Suppose you are a revolutionary and want to overthrow the regime. How exactly are you going to do it? By crushing it with authority? You basically have no choice but to turn to other regimes that are enemies of yours. Simply because loners don't solve anything in this world, only corporations do. Meanwhile, in the second half of the 17th century it was the states that became the strongest corporations on Earth, and in the second half of the 18th century they subjugated or destroyed all their rivals. So it turns out that opposing one state you are forced to turn to others for support, with no options.
So the moronic lamentations about Lenin and the money of the German General Staff just don't make any sense. Of course Lenin would have taken money from the devil, the alternative would have been to sit in Switzerland and smear snot on his face for the rest of his life.
This, like a great deal of Galeev's old writing, says more about his own life strategy than about history. Nevertheless, his facts seem correct. And Lenin, after all, succeeded.
Fair enough. But then please don't take a high moral ground. You are just as evil as "elites".
You appeal to principle, but that's a principle of peacetime, not of genocide time. Would you have given the same counsel to, ah, Ukrainian soldiers siding with unironic Nazis? Or anti-Chinese Uighurs receiving support from hardcore Muslim movements? No, «the arrow doesn't turn», «this is different»? (Of course I won't say «siding with the US» because that's axiomatically righteous).
Let's not pretend that this is about anything other than objective incompetence and subjective lack of merit of the ideology. Right-wingers (more to the point, nationalists of any stripe sans the most shallowly «civic») are thoroughly routed in the West, same as in Russia incidentally. Russian rump looks to Ukrainian Nazis for guidance, Western one seeks salvation in Baste Putin. It's desperation tactics. Both right-wing camps understand their situation as genocide, slow or rapid, open or concealed. The same way Galeev understood the condition of Tatars before going to Washington DC.
Many camps assert to be driven by fear of genocide. It's the absence of attempts to unscrupulously find external sponsors that gives the lie to all the hand-wringing.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
10mo ago
Putin's death will no doubt be one of the few things that make me truly happy. Nevertheless, I still have some family in Moscow, and it becoming a battlefield or, hypothetically, coming under Wagner military rule (can you imagine how it goes given Prig's priorities and background?) will be quite horrible (not to mention I would rather not see the city itself harmed, much as that'd entertain Ukrainians and NAFO dogs).
Coup-like events in Russia are associated with the death of Paul I, who got hit in the head with snuffbox and succeeded by his son Alexander I. Now I wouldn't like the regime to just go on and Putin to be succeeded by… Dyomin, I guess? But there is no way this shitshow kills him anywhere so cleanly.
My preferred fantasy scenario is not worth discussing at this point.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
11mo ago
There's a ton of answers already, some bad some good, but the core technical issue is that ChatGPT just doesn't do retrieval. It has memorized precisely some strings, so it will regurgitate them verbatim with high probability, but for the most part it has learned to interpolate in the space of features of the training data. This enables impressive creativity, what looks like perfect command of English, and some not exactly trivial reasoning. This also makes it a terrible lawyer's assistant. It doesn't know these cases, it knows what a case like this would look like, and it's piss poor at saying «I don't know». Teaching it to say that when, and only when it really doesn't is an open problem.
To mitigate the immediate issue of hallucinations, we can finetune models on the problem domain, and we can build retrieval-, search- and generally tool-augmented LLMs. In the last two years there have been tons of increasingly promising ideas for how best to do it, for example this one.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
26d ago
Ukrainians do not want "peace" on Russian terms. This is very understandable. Them running away from the ground zero is also understandable, of course. But even Ukrainians who grew up outside ex-USSR are quite certain that the war must go on. So are Americans, therefore it will continue.
I reckon we'll see large scale field tests of Anduril tech before it's over. There really are issues with manpower.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
7mo ago
I think Israel will do just fine with «if you kill your enemies, you win» logic.
As Netanyahu (easily an intellectual and moral peer to those founders) has said five years ago:
PM Netanyahu: Shimon aspired toward peace but he knew that true peace can be achieved only if our hands strongly grasp defensive weaponry. In the Middle East, and in many parts of the world, there is a simple truth: There is no place for the weak. The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
7mo ago
On the other hand, what can Israel do to a very densely populated Gaza strip that won't be branded as a war crime or ethnic cleansing?
I think people won't care. Or rather, leftists who visibly care will discredit themselves. Like, there's talk of international opinion, but what do you do concretely? Do you sanction Israel for what Azerbaijan just violently did with no provocation and at no cost, after naked Jewish women have been paraded, raped and murdered in the streets by savages? And while a true ethnic cleansing is not out of the question, more realistically they'll simply permanently occupy Gaza and turn it into an actual open air prison, whether after the hostages are recovered or after the stream of atrocities decreases the public tolerance for giving in to hostage tactics.
These events certainly drive home the point that Hamas is the best Palestinian ruling party that Israeli hawks could have had, to the point that intel leaks leading to this disaster should be investigated with an eye for 4D chess (nothing will be found though). This obviates the conflict over judicial reform, demonstrates to Haredim the necessity of cooperation with the secula authority and the military, builds up the momentum for war with Iran, generally accelerates the mode collapse into a far right ethnonationalist society.
From the more mainstream Palestinian side (such as there is), I think escalation now is motivated by the ongoing legitimization of Israel in the rest of the Arab world. They don't have much time left for this silliness.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
10mo ago
This is the experience most ordinary people will have about bitcoin/cryptocurrency, and mostly what it says is true: I haven't the faintest idea how to start tracking these bozos down if I wanted to
No.
This is an experience «ordinary people» have with email and in general with the internet outside of their silos where they're corporate-farmed for data and ad exposure. Your inability to track the sender has everything to do with how internet identities work. Certainly Bitcoin would not be my choice of an extortion channel.
Now, a debate can be had on this topic. Ordinary people certainly don't tend to buy the libertarian ethos of anonymity, and sure would prefer to live in a global village, a Panopticon where special respectable representatives of the Community are tracking down offenders at all times. Basically the «ordinary people» imagine Britain or China as the perfect state when they think about these matters.
In this respect, ordinary American people are quite blessed that they aren't listened to more.
So long as cryptocurrency is associated with criminals and fraud, nobody is going to trust it or touch it with a ten-foot barge pole.
For ordinary Argentinian people, meanwhile, it's the government that's associated with fraud, so they're forced to touch crypto on a nearly daily basis.
The value proposition of crypto isn't that it's «untraceable»: it's «trustless». It's the absence of an arbiter able to make arbitrary exceptions from the rules. Code is law, which is immensely attractive wherever law has failed the people.
Agentina at this point has a terminal case of populism, from what I understand. This plus central bank being subservient to the whims of the state, plus simple export-driven economy where diverting labor from agriculture to industry eliminates surpluses, plus human capital flight… Really a proof for why independent CB is valuable. And low time preference is indispensable.
On the other hand, a good use case for crypto.
More options
Context Copy link