DradisPing
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User ID: 1102
DradisPing
4d ago
This might be a bit weak for a top post but I find the idea interesting. Some spoilers for books mentioned within. Let me know if I should delete an repost on Friday fun or something.
So I've been reading /r/printsf a bit lately. I notice that what left wingers there consider to be left wing novels is noticeably different from what I would consider to be left wing novels.
One topic that comes up occasionally is "Can you recommend a left wing sci fi book".
A common recommendation is the Murderbot series. The thing is I don't find the books themselves to be very left wing.
The universe is definitely built on leftish tropes. Many of the characters are from world of libleft hippie scientists who form polycule marriages and the broader universe, or at least the outer rim, is run by evil corporations. I'll use "he" to refer to Murderbot because it flows better and it's fun to be a bit of a jerk.
There's a chunk of the fandom that like to insert gender identity issues that aren't really present in the novels themselves. They post about how Muderbot should be referred to as 'it' and would be very upset if someone thought of his as male.
However my take away was that Murderbot is a fusion of cloned human tissue and cybernetics and has no gender identity whatsoever. He has no sex drive and finds the idea of an organic grinding against him sexually really gross.
In one of the later books when he's forced to check a box about his gender at customs he checks "none".
But at no point is he ever upset about what gender humans try to classify him as, it's just completely meaningless to him. Also they should keep their filthy genitals off of him.
The plots are generally Murderbot trying to survive, to investigate his past, or to save his friends. So those all strike me as politically neutral.
Now there is a book that I'd classify as extremely left wing, to the point that I was kind of offended by it.
It's Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Actually big spoilers for this one.
The message of the book is a very Brockmanish "We should submit to forced modification by our new spider overlords".
The generally plot is that the last group of humans are refugees on a space convoy. Where most of them were cryogenically frozen. Their last hope is to try to set up a colony on a world they run into that was artificially terraformed. The terraforming accidentally created super intelligent spiders who have been living there. The book ends with the spiders forcibly genetically modifying the humans so that the humans won't find them so terrifying.
The humans are presented as terrible in a way that comes of as propagandistic. The spiders are presented in a much more sympathetic fashion.
Now I have issues with spiders and many of my best friends are human, so this bothered me.
A key theme is being forced to overcome disgust, which I'd classify as extremely progressive coded.
If you swapped out some of the actors and phrased it as refugees should be forced to change to be compatible with the current population it would be seen as incredibly racist. So that makes the message sound even more progressively coded to me.
DradisPing
4d ago
Fundamentally that's more about lumpers vs splitters.
For insiders obviously The People's Front of Judea (PFJ) and the Judean People's Front (JPF) are completely different. Outsiders will generally lump them together.
Or how Antifa is not a thing, it's just a bunch of independent and completely different groups who happen to hold training sessions they all attend, connect to share tactics, cooridinate together at events under the idea of "diversity of tactics"...
DradisPing
4d ago
So adapting from Moldbug's ideas I'd say a more accurate definition of fascism is "a group of ideologies that sprang up in response to the perceived success of the Soviet Union by trying to create a totalitarian super state run by leaders on the right".
Basically in the late 19th century the lesson learned seemed to be that the strongest / best country was the one that could run the largest central government.
Leninism was about creating a total mega central government run by Moldbug's Brahmins. Early PR about the Soviet Union had everyone convinced that it was highly successful and clearly the future. Moldbug's Optimates, aristocratic families or who ran large industries, decided to try to create their own total mega central governments.
DradisPing
4d ago
That's my point. Reading over what the "bash the fash" leftists say, they do count everyone else as fascist. Authoritarian leaders without much of an ideology who spring up in opposition to a communist movement are always called fascist.
DradisPing
5d ago
I'd argue that the most common and consistent definition of fascism is "people who are willing to oppose communist revolutionaries with force".
Outside of the WW2 context it's usually what people on the left mean when they say it.
DradisPing
20d ago
So I think this parallels Pareto's Foxes and Lions theory / metaphor. Lions can take bold action. Foxes are clever and can see ahead. To function institutions need a mix of both. Over time Foxes push out the Lions using clever tricks. Eventually the Foxes face a problem where clever tricks don't work and it becomes a major crisis.
My own thinking is that people who are too physically comfortable tend to become purely socially focussed. This leads to things like "I choose the bear" where they haven't really absorbed that bears are real and can kill them.
Colder climates used to have a check with weather. The winter kept people aware that too many wrong moves could lead to their death. Technology has mostly solved that for people living in cities.
California is a good example. They decided to abandon their long term plans to expand the reservoir system as the population grew. Victor Davis Hanson talks about this frequently. There's not really a counter argument to the point that "more people need more reservoirs". But that involves giving money to the wrong sort of people to do the wrong sort of work. So they always seem to start screaming about how it's pointless due to climate change.
I don't really think the change needed is a deep shift to something like a warrior ethos. However something much smaller like a major grid failure that cut off power to Sacramento for two weeks would teach some important lessons about keeping institutions functional to all the government workers.
DradisPing
21d ago
In "Mean Girls" Lacey Chabert's character kept using "fetch" as an adjective, trying to start it as a trend. Eventually Rachel McAdams' character came at her with "Stop trying to make fetch happen, it's not going to happen."
DradisPing
21d ago
I've wondered if people who started plunking with pistols as children developed intuitive aiming.
On the other hand I've heard that the M1 Carbine was developed as an alternative for guards that wouldn't be issued M1 Garands (too heavy for infrequent use) after they were unable to find any record of a guard successfully killing an enemy soldier with a 1911.
DradisPing
21d ago
I think he had the view that the FBI just had a few bad apples to find.
The reality is that it's impossible to go into a job like that alone. He needed to come in like a hostile lord taking over during feudalism. He needed to bring in about 20 loyal people to protect him and keep an eye on things.
As things went down he was completely outgunned. The long term FBI employees know all the rules so they can slow walk his requests, try to trick him into breaking the law, drop hints about things they can charge his family members with, etc, etc.
With the poor Epstein handling he was just sitting there watching his credibility with his audience being destroyed while he was stuck in an office unable to accomplish anything.
DradisPing
22d ago
Billionaires seem to most commonly marry someone they knew from college or earlier. Being married is just a huge time saver.
DradisPing
22d ago
Jeb strikes me as a case of someone on the spectrum who's had a lot of training for public speaking.
He didn't date in high school and seems to have married the first girl he slept with.
Columba's history is kind of interesting. Her mother came from a well connected family, but married a dashing low status man. As a result she lived in poverty.
So Columba was basically raised to be on the look out for dorky men from upperclass families and do whatever it took to get that ring.
It doesn't sound romantic when I describe it like that, but they are both fully committed to making the marriage work.
DradisPing
23d ago
There was a case years ago where a shop in Vegas was in court with the IRS because they were paying employees in silver coins and listing the face value for tax purposes. I'm not sure how it turned out.
DradisPing
25d ago
The blackmail syndicate idea has problems because people who hung out with Epstein seemed to like him. That's not usually the case for people getting blackmailed.
I'm leaning towards the idea that's been tossed around that Epstein's business was grey market international money moving. Also things like hiding assets in the case of lawsuits and divorce.
The girls were just complimentary amenities for clients.
DradisPing
26d ago
The American press is pretty famous for not covering Canada at the best of times... then add in the fact that it's winter and Tumbler Ridge is hard to get to.
In general my sense is the US sees Canada as much more of a foreign country than Canada sees the US. So it's not really seen as relevant to the domestic political battles.
DradisPing
29d ago
It's more common than you think. Some people go into primal aggression mode and will attack if the victim looks afraid, even if they are armed.
There were videos during the 2020 blm protests of people charging men with guns and getting shot when they could have just walked away.
It's been studied in neuroscience, there's a bunch of info about heart rate, cortisol, and the cerebral cortex shutting down leaving people operating with just their limbic system. But there are many people here far more qualified to dive into the details of that. My undercaffinated brain won't give you a decent summary.
DradisPing
1mo ago
They really believe it in the sense that they've been taught to always presume discrimination and have never really thought through specific cases.
DradisPing
1mo ago
With Tailwind it's less their specific documentation, it's more that it became an industry best practice for new projects. There is just so much Tailwind content on GitHub and in blogposts. It's also specifically targeted by the LLM teams developing models.
Claude actually knows Tailwind better than CSS and will sometimes try to use it in projects that don't have it installed.
I think that scraping public GitHub repos is actually more important to LLM performance than documentation about your specific project. That all gets baked into the core model. If you're doing something with a lot of public examples it will one shot it.
I have a specific example. I've been playing around with implementing a db compatible clone of themotte/rDrama in node / react to get around some of the issues the codebase has. Two slightly incompatible markdown renderers on the front and back, old school bootstrap modals, etc.
I mentioned themotte/rDrama in my instructions to Claude Code and it put in some very rDrama like features such as coloured indent level bars on comments.
So it was clearly aware.
As a result a lot of the benchmark projects people try to use to document model performance become useless. The model can look up public examples of the answer.
LLMs are very good at the sort of thing that really should have been automated by now anyways. eg converting nested json object from a POST request into rows in SQL tables.
When you're doing something less common it has a lot more trouble. It does seem a lot better at working on my minecraft mod project than it was six months ago. That's probably due in part to scraping the public repo of the mod itself. It has a rough image of the working endpoints without needing to look at any context.
I suspect that offline models will become good enough in the near future that large legacy projects will be able to fine tune a model against the codebase.
DradisPing
1mo ago
So I think I'm wrapping up my minecraft llm api project for now. I've put a bunch of work into it and I've got it doing what I wanted... you can create builds from an llm. The build system keeps track of past builds, so you can have the llm review what was done and make additions later.
I'm lacking ideas about what to do with it next. I think I need other people to give it a try so I can see what they do with it. I have a demo server up if anyone is interested. You'll need a Claude subscription or some api tokens with another llm, it's really just llm connectivity so without that it's just a Minecraft server.
I think it'd be great if I could get a streamer to play around with it. But I think it's time to go looking for a new project.
DradisPing
1mo ago
The license plate checkers are clearly abusing their access, but likely providing license plates to them is covered by 1A. Commuters should also be fine, if there was a law against following strangers then a lot of divorce detectives would be out of work.
There's some complexity here. Many states require private detectives to be licensed. Also there are specific laws against stalking federal officers.
If a bad actor were to start submitting the license plates of Federal Judges and Clerks as verified ICE, the whole system would be shut down quickly.
DradisPing
1mo ago
The major issue here isn't even about immigration.
The de jure legal situation is that federal law is supreme and the federal government has the right to enforce it. If they states are interfering then the feds have some extreme powers to make them comply, eg Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy deploying the National Guard to enforce school desegregation.
The de facto legal situation is that left wing mayors and governors are allowed to rule with a form of Bigmanism and nullify federal laws as they please.
Courts have been toeing the legal line by blocking mild enforcement when insisting they haven't invalidating federal supremacy because the feds can still do some form of extreme enforcement.
People in the Trump admin view the current situation as untenable. They want to get a legal court record covering as much of it as possible. The legal record does matter even if Minnesota courts find ways to block any convictions. Without a legal record higher courts will simply pretend it didn't happen. With it they'll be stuck trying to create some kind of legal principle that can be reviewed.
DradisPing
1mo ago
The upside is day jobs for activists.
DradisPing
1mo ago
The promotion for Wicked and Wicked: For Good kind of blur together because there was so little time between them. It just feels like Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande have been out promoting the same movie for three years.
I think they tried to hype Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, but no one cares about the plot of Mission Impossible movies enough to get excited about seeing the second half. Going in all I could remember was that there was a submarine and and AI in the last one.
Marvel couldn't get any hype going. Captain America: Brave New World had too many well known reshoots and production problems for people to get excited.
I think Hollywood's big problem is that they locked in things like the "Representation and Inclusion Standards" for the Oscars during peak woke. The pipeline to make a movie is around 5 years.
So when some major projects underperformed in 2023-2024 followed by Trump getting re-elected, they lost faith in the movies coming out and didn't want waste a lot of money on marketing.
A Minecraft Movie managed to generate a lot of hype in the kids movie category.
DradisPing
1mo ago
First, undocumented immigrants are, not to put too fine a point to it, undocumented.
This is one of those cases where euphemisms are confusing the issue. Minnesota is far from the southern border.
Most of these cases are going to be things like visa overstays, green card holders / visa holders who had their status pulled because of a conviction, asylum claimants who lost their case but never left. People who had TPS status pulled for some reason.
Obama and Biden had programs called "administrative closure" or "parole" where the deportation case was closed without actually granting them real legal status or deporting them.
There's just a lot of complexity in US immigration. Many, possibly most, of the "undocumented" are in fact highly documented with extensive paper trails.
DradisPing
1mo ago
Depending on where you live, you're likely getting much less Vitamin D in the winter.
You'd think, but they really didn't so the thread was pretty unsatisfying.
I was afraid to probe exactly what flavour of leftism they were looking for because the sub bans political drama and I'm almost certain to say the wrong thing.
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