EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
I know what you're here for. What's his bias? Politically I at least like to think of myself as a true moderate, maybe (in US context) slightly naturally right-leaning but currently politically left-leaning if I had to be more specific.
User ID: 1043
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
9d ago
The chances of actually striking it down in its face are actually zero. I mean that completely. Zero. If it happens I will shave my head and never comment anything about politics again ever on any website. Zero.
The chances of them weakening it via some kind of practical or legal obstacles, to the point where it is effectively dead is extremely low but not impossible. Under 5% surely. Maybe 1-2%? Still quite a reach. Maybe still that’s high.
The chances of some other procedural weakening where it is merely super annoying, that’s a little higher. I’m not sure exactly where to peg it.
The chances of practical and legal burdens and even unalterable mistakes for those currently giving birth in the next year or so are actually kinda high. But that’s by definition temporary. Not much comfort if you or your wife are pregnant right now and lack papers. Honestly I think this is the true target and goal of the administration. If you are cruel and capricious enough you might get enough people to self deport, or not make the trip over, and this helps the near term numbers and politics.
The long-term outlook for birthright citizenship is not really under any actual threat. You still need an amendment to change it. At most, beneficiaries will have to budget a little bit more on practical or legal bills surrounding the birth, but that’s already the case to some extent with any new baby birth (it’s never free)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
9d ago
You mean the literal exact argument that leads to authoritarianism and the destruction of democracy? I think Democrats obviously freak out over stuff way too often and too loudly, but this is a pretty classically un-American view. The irony is rich here.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
10d ago
Hmm. I was going to disagree, but some back of envelope bayes-rule calculations actually do seem to agree I understated the case so I guess I stand corrected on that front.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
10d ago
I'm not comparing with the Bidens, though. To me that's too much selection bias, of a sort, but there's more than that besides. We should compare Trump's progeny to other business magnates - the original claim from faceh was that Trump is underappreciated for having well-adjusted progeny, and I reply that no no, he's merely doing par for the course. Billionaire kids, near as I can tell, aren't poorly-adjusted all that often. Politician kids, which were lumped in the same category, are not the same category. They are in fact on the spectrum that leads toward celebrity kids, which is definitely not the same category, despite conflation in that same comment! Trump is a businessman who, in the twilight of his life, decided to be a politician (and some think didn't even fully intend to, alleging he expected to lose). That's a very different thing than a political dynasty family. And even then... you know, children of major politicians being an embarrassment is probably still the exception rather than the rule.
There's this fascinating twitter thread (unroll link for better reading) about A Minecraft Movie, and how it is fundamentally a Zoomer movie on an emotional level, not just a subject matter level. Specifically, he calls it (followed by some key excerpts, though I recommend the entire thread):
the most reactionary movie I've ever seen and the future zoomer world order is bright and wonderful. I would have called it "The humiliation of the coward Jack Black and the end of irony"
... [A]fter this introduction, when [Jack Black] sends the mcguffin to earth to be found by the main character, the movie’s language changes. It is no longer gen x nihilism, or millennial irony after Jack Black is put in prison in hell, and we change protagonist to Young Zoomer Henry.
The reason the movie resonates with the Zoomers is because it reflects their own life experience back at them, and they pick up on that in a subconscious way even if they can’t articulate it.
The real plot of the movie is that a boy is SUCKED against his will into a RECTANGULAR PORTAL into a world that is HYPER STIMULATING and OVERSATURATED, where the people he meet tells him it is a beautiful world of “creativity”, but it’s actually a really simplistic world of base Id expression and Id satisfaction
... On a literal plot level, the antagonist of the movie is some witch pig lady. But on an emotional level, Steve is a villain, the shadow of the protagonist of the movie. The main character Henry is a genuinely creative and smart kid. This is illustrated by him being able to draw well, and being a literal math genius, who can engineer a functioning rocket from scratch. Jack Black is a “Creative”, which is illustrated by him making silly faces and yelling random nonsense. When Henry and the other cast of characters are stuck in minecraft world, they are not actually aided by Steve.
... The story ultimately never portrays “the minecraft world” as a good place, but a place of indulgence, of Id expression and satisfaction... [Steve] is a gooner. And the film itself utterly rejects him: there is no ambiguity here, the minecraft world is bad, and the real world is what matters. “being creative” in minecraft is shallow and hollow, and is a bad outlet for your talents.
The hypersaturated world of hyperreality, of the media-mediated reality that was forced on the zoomers, as their parents plopped a phone or ipad on them as children, is a shallow and hollow mimicry of the real world, and exposing children to “minecraft” at age 9 is not going to make them more “creative”, it is just going to make them into autistic gooners. It is not really a minecraft movie. It is a movie about the zoomer life experience, and a genuine and open confrontation with prior generations. The minecraft branding is arbitrary. The emotional core of the movie, and there truly is a genuine human emotional core, is a genuine inter-generational dialogue.
And I say, the reason the zoomers like it, is not some ironic doubly irony joke where they pretend to like a bad movie - that is just what it looks like to millenials, because “that’s what millennials do”. The reason they like it is because they resonate with a story about being raped by a magical portal that sends you to a fake world you have to escape from. And that is extremely genuine and real, and the movie totally succeeds in expressing something, that possibly haven’t been captured in art before, with the novelty of our technological-historical situation.
I don't know if I ever thought of it this way, but now I kind of can't unsee it. I genuinely wonder if Zoomers will end up feeling bitter towards Millennials like me in much the same way we feel in many cases bitter towards Boomers, but instead of a grudge over amassing self-serving stock market wealth and monopolizing limited housing stock, it's despairing over the perhaps mishandled human-technological interaction surface that emerged after Millennial founders and users created the modern mobile-social-internet landscape.
But in a way maybe this is all healing for Zoomers? There is definitely some actual awareness and maturity that their brains are on some level being cooked, they know they use TikTok too much, but there's still some earnestness left despite all that. Also, Minecraft is a weird thing because it is one of the few completely crossover experiences between Zoomers and Millennials, but even so, the actual experience is somewhat different. For Zoomers, it's a simple childhood exploration time and a cultural touchstone, with some nostalgia and force of memes and videos. For Millennials, it was more overtly a sea change in gaming (constant updates, a rise in indie titles, graphical reversion), more directly creative as a more adult/late teen outlet, and with nerdy overtones. Spending time in Minecraft and building things creatively were quite literally different for the two age groups, in the aggregate. At least in this viewing, Jack Black's Steve represents on some level the disconnect between the two generations that are so close in the overt trappings, yet so far in their emotional response to modernity.
... showing over and over again that Jack Black, as a stand in for gen X nihilism and millennial irony, is totally oblivious, that he doesn’t “get it”, that he is a clown who is not in on the joke... It’s funny, engaging, and genuine. And Jack Black is not in on the joke. That’s what makes it work and that’s the point, and as the credits rolled in the theater, two zoomers who were leaving turned around and waved and smiled and yelled something to me, and I had no idea what they were saying, and I think that’s beautiful.
Thoughts? Is he way off base here?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
13d ago
Vans or, it must be pointed out, it's pretty darn common for a pickup truck to have one of those pop-up covers (some of them extremely stock or permanent-looking). I'd say the actual contractors get a nice cover more often than a van, especially if it doubles as a personal vehicle. True minivans are basically reserved for secondhand purchases by the illegal immigrant.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
I mean although this kind of violence is infamously contagious and prone to copy-cats, the optics here are pretty uniquely terrible. Not that it usually matters for terrorists that their actions frequently are counter-productive. The museum is already left-aligned in several ways (the website has a Native American land acknowledgement and an Equity and Justice statement about BIPOC people, hosts "LGBTJews" events, etc.), the man wasn't even Jewish he was a Christian although both were still Israeli embassy staff, and the couple was young and photogenic, famously about to get engaged within a week or two.
I don't see how this changes anything about partisan violence levels.
So yeah, emergency expedited Supreme Court oral arguments were today, about - contrary to what the headlines might initially seem to tell you - whether district court judges can issue national injunctions. More specifically, on if "relief" can be given to non-parties in a lawsuit, unilaterally by judge's decision. This is not on its face about Trump's birthright citizenship claims though of course that is more immediately at issue. I highly recommend this piece with a classic back-and-forth between two law professors who disagree about whether or not they should be allowed (disclaimer: both are, however, strongly against the Trump interpretation of birthright citizenship), a format I feel like is way underrepresented in today's news landscape (but weirdly overdone and trivialized on cable TV). NPR would never. Ahem. Anyways...
Some mini-history is these injunctions, as best I understand, basically did not exist until the mid-2000's when suddenly they started showing up a lot, and on big topics too. DACA, the Muslim travel ban, the abortion pill ban, various ACA issues, it has tended to cut across administrations though often the pattern is they show up against the one in power. Both professors agree that the Constitution itself doesn't really say much about the subject one way or the other beyond generalities, so it's going to rest a little more on general principles.
The central and immediate disagreement between the two seems to be whether or not you can or should trust the national government, when it loses a major case, to go back to the drawing board and/or pause the losing policy because narrowly slicing it up doesn't make sense, or whether you might as well do a nationwide injunction because of a lack of trust or simply that the application fundamentally isn't something you can legally slice up finely.
The more general disagreement, and this is the one that to me is more interesting, seems to be what to do about judge-shopping and partisan judges having disproportionate impacts, with some very different ideas about how to address that, contrasted below:
Is this frustrating for you [Professor Bagley] — for this to be the vehicle that may finally be forcing a resolution on the availability of nationwide injunctions?
Bagley: I suppose it’s a consequence of having developed a position over time and across administrations. What it means to have a set of principles is that they don’t change just because you happen to dislike the inhabitant of the White House.
I think a lot of people — and I’m not speaking of Professor Frost here at all — come to this issue out of righteous indignation against the president of the opposite political party, and that’s actually my big concern.
We want to put our faith in these judges, but these judges are just people too. There’s 500-plus of them, and they’re scattered all over the country. Many are smart. Many work hard. Some are dumb. Lots are political. Many are just outright partisan hacks.
All you need to do in order to get a nationwide injunction is file your case in front of one of those partisan hacks, and then we’re off to the races — with these immediate appeals up to the Supreme Court, where hard questions are decided in a circumscribed manner and where the courts themselves reveal a kind of highly partisan pattern of judging that calls the entire judiciary into disrepute.
I would love this birthright citizenship [executive order] to be blown up into about a billion pieces. It is a moral, ethical, legal, constitutional travesty. I don’t know that the engine to do that is a nationwide injunction. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not.
That said, I think no one who’s looking at 21st century America right now thinks to themselves, “Things are going great.” There are a lot of deep problems. I think our democracy has misfired in a pretty profound way, and some of the institutional constraints on the president that previously held are starting to give way.
I don’t think we give up much by giving up the nationwide injunction. I think we help right the ship, but I don’t know that I know that for sure.
And I think anybody who comes into these debates with extraordinary confidence, one way or the other, about the long-run consequence of doctrinal shifts like this, ought to have their head checked. I have a view, but, like many things in life, it is provisional and what I think is a principled and thoughtful view.
But lots of other people, who are also principled and thoughtful disagree, with me.
So in short, it's too risky to allow judges this power.
Professor Frost, you’re probably not in disagreement on all of these policy and practical issues. Where do you see agreement and disagreement?
Frost: First, I do not think there’s a single judge that exercises this power — in the sense that, yes, that judge issues the nationwide injunction in the district court, but it can be immediately appealed up to an appellate court of three judges, then immediately taken up to the U.S. Supreme Court, as was the case in the mifepristone case, as is the case in most of these cases.
You could say, “Well, we’re now forcing the Supreme Court to decide cases more quickly.”
Wait to see what happens to the court if each and every one of the children born in the United States has to sue to protect their citizenship. Courts will be overwhelmed in that situation.
The consequences for courts are not always great when they have to quickly respond to nationwide injunctions and reverse them, but they can do that. If it does quickly get reversed, then it’s just a couple of weeks, a month or two, that it’s in place.
I will also say that if forum shopping is your problem, your solution is to address forum shopping. And there are proposals out there by the Judicial Conference for more random assignments, and I absolutely favor those. I think forum shopping is a problem. I think politicization of the courts is a problem, but the answer is not get rid of nationwide injunctions. The answer is end forum shopping.
Nationwide injunctions are literally saving our nation at the moment.
It’s not just birthright citizenship, although that is the poster child for nationwide injunctions, and it’s an excellent vehicle in which to consider the issue for someone like me, where I’m worried about a world without them.
Think about the Alien Enemies Act. We have an administration that says it can deport people without due process, and when it makes a mistake, it’s too bad, too late.
If that could not be stopped through an injunction, I think we should all be afraid. And that’s one of many, many examples of an administration that wants to unilaterally rewrite the law without the impediment of Congress or any sort of legal process. Without nationwide injunctions, each and every person potentially affected would have to sue to maintain the rule of law.
So in short, national injunctions are sometimes infinitely more practical, and not the direct problem at stake to begin with, more problems lie upstream. However:
I hear Professor Bagley and the other critics as to the downsides, and here are the downsides.
While the nationwide injunction is in effect, the law is being stopped. This is the frustration Professor Bagley was [describing] about how the government can’t implement its policies. And maybe six, seven, eight months to, at most, a year, the Supreme Court rules and says, “Actually it’s a perfectly legal policy,” and we’ve lost a year.
I recognize that as a cost. However, I’d rather live in that world than the world where a lawless president, or even a president that’s edging toward that, [can act without that constraint].
Obama and Biden did a few things that I thought were lawless, even though I liked the policy, like Deferred Action for Parents of U.S. citizens, which was enjoined by a nationwide injunction. That was an Obama policy.
The imperial presidency is a reality. They are all trying to expand their power, and I’d rather slow them down with the loss of some useful policies that I think are good at the end of the day and prevail in court, than allow for running roughshod over our legal system, as this administration is trying to do.
It's come up here from time to time whether the slowness of the system is a bug or a feature. This debate in at least some respects reflects that tension. Is it acceptable for judges, even well-meaning ones, to pause things for up to a year? One might reasonably ask then, can the Supreme Court thread the needle and simply restrict national injunctions to more narrow occasions (as just one example, the current citizenship case where precendant including Supreme Court precedent is pretty clear), not completely get rid of them? Bagley again:
And the trouble is, in our hyper-polarized environment, that kind of claim is made by partisans on both sides of the aisle whenever somebody is in office who they disagree with. So it is, I think, a comforting thought that we can just leave the door open a little bit, but if you leave the door open a little bit, you’re actually going to get the same cavalcade of nationwide injunctions that we’ve seen.
I’d be open to a narrower rule if I’d heard one that I thought could restrain judges that were ideologically tempted and willing to throw their authority around. But I haven’t seen it, frankly, and, until I do, I’d be pretty reluctant to open that door at all.
I know we've seen some vigorous discussion over the last while about activist judges. But one interesting theme I've been picking up over the last few months especially is, how much work exactly do we or should we expect the judges to be doing? For example, we had the overturning of Chevron, which ostensibly puts more difficult rule-making decisions in the hands of judges. An increase in work for them, championed by the right. But then, we had the right also start claiming that having immigration hearings for literally every immigrant would be too onerous and they should be able to deport people faster, perhaps without even (what the left would call) full due process. Too much work. And now we have the right claiming that each state or district would need to file its own lawsuit, or even assemble an emergency class action to get nation-wide relief, for an executive order with nearly non-existent precedent. An increase in work across all districts. Traditionally the right is against judicial activism in general, saying judges are too involved, implying they should work less. Maybe this all isn't a real contradiction, but still, an interesting pattern. What does judicial reform look like on the right, is it really a coherent worldview, or just variously competing interests, often tailored right to the moment? A more narrow, tailored question would be: what is the optimal number of judges, for someone on the right, compared to what we have now? Do we need more and weaker judges, or fewer and weaker? Or something else?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
I think another sign that something was seriously wrong at Columbia is that they run the Columbia Teacher’s College, the premier destination for teacher training — that is best known in recent years for being the exact ones who were flagrantly wrong on the Science of Reading stuff, ironically mistraining teachers. Great write up.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
15d ago
I was quite annoyed that I got more details quicker from the Daily Mail than I did most US outlets. Which included satellite images, though I can’t remember the provenance.
With that said I think if you look closely at the statements and rhetoric that we’ve heard so far, plus the physical facts, it seems highly likely this bombing run wasn’t enough for full destruction. They would probably need to pound it for a week to be more sure. Clearly the Trump admin is banking on Iranian peace seeking - I think they have a decent chance at it, but far from certain.
Speaking historically, property rights emerge most primitively, naturally, and originally from the simple fact that no two plots of farming land will produce the same. These differences compound over generations. There's also a human emotional component that things you view as "yours" naturally receive more full effort in cultivating. If you stack on top of that how craft specialization emerges in societies with surplus agriculture, the fundamental ideas of property already emerge, zero capitalism required.
You might find it interesting to peruse this list of human universals, where I will begrudgingly accept that anthropologists have assembled something useful. These are traits that exist in literally every single known human society. Not some, ALL. You might observe a few relevant entries: property, preference for own children and close kin, inheritance rules, economic inequalities, division of labor, envy, symbolic means of coping with envy, trade, males more likely to engage in theft, reciprocal exchanges, and gift giving, just to name a few. You may notice that many of these (aside from obviously "property" already being its own entry) presume that property is a real human thing. Yes, that means in literally all of human history, we haven't found a single society that doesn't have the concept of property. I'd argue ownership is similar enough to be near identical.
Edit: In light of your comments below pointing out that just because something is natural or even universal doesn't make it good, sure, that's true. But the approach needs to differ. If something is truly universal, the best we can do is mitigation! Not abolition. We cannot abolish war, it is not human. We can however mitigate their frequency, severity, and impact.
What you are trying to do is completely replace something that fundamentally cannot be altered. As such, you're philosophically barking up the wrong tree altogether. And we already have a word for the societal negotiation of laws governing how to mitigate the bad effects of property being a thing. It's called politics. You cannot escape politics.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
Honestly, I think the article does itself a disservice by not breaking the problem down into the two major but separate issues, detailed below. Instead it bounces between the two in an effort to provide an engaging article, but it's very important to realize that these two problems are largely separable problems. They both involve AI, but that's the extent of the overlap.
Problem One: Scientific research clearly indicates that the difficulty and engagement with a task is directly proportional to learning. The neuroscience points out that different parts of the brain are activated when asked to perform "recall" instead of mere "recognition." Unfortunately many students are unable to recognize the difference! Recall is something like: "tell me something about this" and you work from scratch, recognition might be a looking at your notes or a nice summary and going "oh yeah that makes sense", or answering a multiple-choice question where you have plenty of cues to work with. Some have even argued that it's possible to create in-class notes that are too good at their purpose, thus "offloading" the work to an external knowledge storage device, in a sense. The key point however is this: not only is recall far more potent than recognition in terms of how likely the information is to make it into long-term memory in the first place, it's also worth stating that the more connections that are made during the learning process, the more likely the brain is to be able to retrieve that information from long-term memory as well.
ChatGPT in its most common use case, entirely "short-circuits" this process, depriving a student from forming connections, and developing a kind of "base knowledge" that could be helpful on less foundational topics later. This does not necessarily have to be the case - a good prompter might use ChatGPT to self-quiz, or ask smart follow-up questions, or give deeper explanations that trigger more connections (ignoring hallucinations for now). I think this kind of advanced usage is a small minority of college users, though. In short, this is the most serious problem for AI in college.
Problem Two: How important are essays, anyways? We can't really escape the classic "calculator problem": remember plaintively asking your math teachers why you needed to learn this if a calculator or graphing software could do it just fine? Obviously that's a complicated question, and this one is too; a certain level of familiarity with numbers and how they work is critical if you go into any kind of later applied math, not knowing your times tables can cripple the ability to engage with algebra, but frankly there were absolutely some questions that were designed to be deliberately difficult rather than to emulate any kind of real-world situation. So, essays. What good is an essay? Honestly I think the evidence has always been a little hand-wavy and weak for essays. Not only did virtually all humanities professors go way overboard on being strict about formatting in a misguided attempt to help students (I've seen some horror stories where well-written essays get absolutely demolished due to stupid rules like "you must exactly rephrase your thesis at the start of the conclusion") but it's hard to see if the act of writing essays noticeably improves vague notions like "thinking critically". Now, I might be behind the times on this particular area of research (if it even meaningfully exists), but it has always seemed to me that essays were more crude attempts at prompting students to do plenty of recall via independent research and synthesis. Thus increasing learning. But this was always an artifact of how difficult the task of assembling an essay from scratch is, something clearly no longer difficult with AI.
Thus, the essay must die. Perhaps professors should ask for a wider variety of writing formats, more applicable to life. Perhaps the standards should shift to the end-result of the writing - is it enjoyable to read and factual and the right length/complexity? Perhaps live or oral assessments should be more prominent. Or maybe professors should focus on teaching smaller and more broadly useful writing tips, about the writing itself, or even consider teaching tips about how to best prompt an AI for assembling a piece of writing. Is there any evidence writing essays actually increases the capacity or ability to wield "critical thought"? I say no, if you want to teach critical thinking, you might as well attempt to do so directly and not default to weak proxies like essays.
I think that there's this ahistorical idea floating around about history that the norm is a massively unequal division of labor in one direction or another (either women are overworked and saddled with all sorts of extra stuff due to oppression, or they are locked away and unable to do meaningful work due to oppression), but I think part of this is largely an artifact of how history is largely written by some kind of "noble" class. For the vast majority of people in history, both men and women work very very hard at a wide variety of tasks, because frankly, life has been tough for humans for virtually all of recorded history. You can't afford to be idle, man or woman. There was, like, one weird period in American history in the decades after WW2 where prosperity was weirdly high, tech developments made a noticeable dent in work levels, and so work responsibilities along with labor demand got kind of out of whack. Along with bad history, this had a massive and outsized impact on how people think about division of labor, with some second wave feminist influence mixed in there too. So yes, sloppy thinking to put it bluntly, but also a real and understandable phenomenon. As just one example, the invention of the washing machine and even the vacuum had an absolutely massive impact on housework. I'm not exaggerating - there are only so many hours in the week, and all clothes then and now need to be washed so often; the washing machine alone saved they estimate like 8 or more hours per week, by itself. All this to say that while I wouldn't quite go so far as to call caring about housework division of labor a luxury belief, the fundamental calculus behind division of labor is in a historically weird spot in current-day developed nations even before you get into the belief systems involved.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
22d ago
I genuinely think the source for this strife is that people are self sorting too much. People naturally tend to moderate when exposed to other perspectives. It’s just the exposure is too skewed towards social media and online/TV personalities and too little towards everyday fellow humans. Also why travel as a source for eliminating prejudice has reversed - too little actual genuine interpersonal contact. People will never learn how to talk about politics without rage unless they attempt it (and occasionally fail). It’s not much different than other social skills in that way.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
22d ago
I think it always makes more sense to describe freedom in specific contexts rather than try to define some kind of net, global, non-associated “freedom”. Freedom to breathe clean air without payment or restriction is a different freedom to, say, pollute the skies. These freedoms are often in conflict and it’s not clear that you can describe a ‘net freedom’ as if it were something numerical.
To choose a more grounded example, burning trash is a classic local conflict with no clear ‘more free’ option. One neighbor says it’s freedom to choose how to dispose of their own property on their own property. Another neighbor says it’s freedom to have clean air. Another says freedom is being able to throw loud parties whenever, but yet another says excessive noise infringes on their own freedom to do certain activities that might require quiet.
The solution is practical compromise, not arguing over which appeal to freedom is stronger.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
It’s true that robotics is getting renewed attention, but this seems to be more the result of increased investment rather than any foundational sea change in knowledge or theory. The fixation on a bipedal and human-ish one is also just that, a fixation, and still leads to some difficulty even moving around consistently - see for example the robot marathon and of course claims that the Tesla robots have been somewhat relying on human controllers last I heard. No new paradigms yet there.
There continues to be progress on the LLM front but this is actually, maybe contrary to the impression you are getting, slowing. I wouldn’t call it a plateau at all but there’s a real sense of struggle out there. Most of the focus in the last six months has been tool use of various kinds, rather than fundamental improvements, though there are some theoretical ideas kicking around that might prove fruitful. On the contrary the major research labs have started to see some diminishing returns. Meta notably can’t even catch fully up to the front players and most of the team quit in frustration. Anthropic has been stuck in a bit of a rut with 3.7 only a mixed improvement over 3.5 and in some ways a regression. OpenAI has had trouble getting the so-called “version 5” off the ground that’s an impressive enough improvement to deserve the name. Google is catching up and adding some neat things. Context windows are going up. “Agent” systems are being experimented with more. Video generation is showing some sparks of brilliance but the compute required is pretty steep. Deepfake video and voice, even real time stuff, is the biggest issue right now, more than any AGI crap.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
Just because I was reminded by the comment in the main thread, do pierced septums, tongues, and gauges give anyone the major ick? Nose studs? Fine. Belly button piercings? A little wierd but fine. Any non-face tattoo? Fine. But hoooooly crap does anything more than a tiny septum piercing make me uncomfortable. Not just like, “oh that’s weird” but almost I find it physically repulsive that larger ones I find it hard to even look. Ear gauges also, anything bigger than a button. Tongue piercings in any size. Is this just a human “looks like that would hurt” reaction, or is there some other component maybe? Curious if others feel the same but are more/less vocal about it, or if it’s just a personal issue.
I was raised as conservative Christian (how conservative? Useless question, too relative) but in liberal Oregon, if relevant, so at least it’s not purely a lack of exposure thing.
EverythingIsFine
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22d ago
I don’t see why our era is different other than a fairly stable system in which power could and did change hands often enough to make all voices feel heard more or less
That’s… a pretty big change actually. And fairly fundamental. It’s why at least to SOME extent Dems were justified in being a little freaked out by the noises Trump was making about elections. Because trust that your opponent will be forced to give you another chance to win is foundational to democracy as currently practiced.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
I got a lot of pushback here, but I still think my standard of "anything over 50 years ago should be dropped" as a current-year topic still works pretty well, not ideologically obviously but as a more pragmatic principle that preserves at least some notion of evenhandedness. 50 years later, most everyone in power then is dead now, or dying, so it seems increasingly pointless to try and get reparations or impact current policy. For Israel, that means the Six Day War and Yom Kippur War both ought to be non-factors, but the Oslo Accords and first Lebanese conflict might still be fair game. For Ukraine, that would mean you can't hold Stalin against Russia, but you can look at some of the last decade of the USSR. For Turkey, that would mean a lot of the PKK conflicts are still relevant. Does that imply that an Armenian shouldn't feel ill-will towards Turkey still? No, that's understandable, I would more say that it implies that you can blame their upbringing or current education system for mis-educating people still, but that at the same time pursuing any kind of reparations would be a fool's errand.
EverythingIsFine
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15d ago
This is actually part of why Congress or the President will “approve” arms sales - it’s not just national security (making sure we only give restricted tech to people we like) but to some extent foreign politics too. So it’s not like states totally ignore it when it happens, but yeah it’s generally not considered an act of war. This can vary and change over time of course: the Germans started unrestricted submarine warfare in WWI, and even today the Chinese throw a fit when we sell to Taiwan despite literally telling them we’d continue to do so over 50 years ago
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
I think what you're missing about AI is that the investment of time and money is so incredibly low for what it offers. I pay 20 bucks a month for the paid chatGPT and it's among the very best best time:money investments I've ever made, and it's not even mandatory (you can do fine hooking up a chat app out there to an API key and paying cents after a $5 initial up-front investment, or bounce between free versions, or buy a subscription to a model aggregator for $7 bucks a month that is making an arbitrage on the API cost vs your subscription and your actual predicted usage).
Fundamentally, what might take a human a significant time investment is just gone completely with an LLM. You will never annoy it with stupid questions. You can ask and rephrase the same question multiple times without sounding stupid. You can send it off to do research on something you are mildly curious about but too lazy to synthesize yourself. You can converse with it in a foreign language to practice. You can quickly sanity check a potential action without judgement, and without waiting for a friend to text you back. You can have it reformat text or perform an annoying repetitive text-based task. You can have it write test questions for you to practice on. You can have it pretend to be the other side of a job interview and give you feedback on your answers. You can have it add some comments to your code. You can have it write a skeleton for a program. You can have it quickly give you a summary of a PDF you feed it, unique to your problem. I could go on. It's truly a fundamental change, and potentially very useful in the workplace as it is in life.
Yes, there are pitfalls and dangers in all of those, but in terms of risk-reward? You are risking almost nothing but a tiny bit of your own time, and getting back something potentially very valuable. The "task annoyance" that you wouldn't even inflict on an intern is suddenly a non-issue. I find many (though far from all) of the issues people encounter with AI stem from either misunderstanding what AI can actually DO and what it's best at, or being bad at imagination in terms of your prompts. Very few of the things I listed above might need extensive checking to the extent that you might as well have done it yourself. Many of them are things for which there is no adequate replacement IRL, or at least, not at remotely the same price point or time commitment.
People go through tons of effort to set up language-learning pen-pals, as an example. You can have AI do that now. You can even tell it what language level you're on, or what country to pretend to be from, or tell it to introduce new concepts to you slowly. And worst case, even if the AI makes a few grammar mistakes, so do real people. There's very little downside!
I will admit that the Hugo use-case seems honestly a bit ill-suited for what they used it for. AI isn't that great at free-wheeling internet navigation, so using it for vetting seems like a bad idea. Now, if you instructed it to go through self-submissions or resumes? With a testing and verification step to set up the right detailed prompt, that could be very effective as a screening tool.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
For my generation, a few aspects, but to me the core appeal was the sort of human (male) survival-adjacent aspect. You are in a world alone, you survive, beat down the wildlife, bend it to your will, build things that leave a permanent mark on the world, etc. Scratches a bit of the human itch that way. There was also originally a bit of the self-taught pride, because you had to go to the wiki to figure out how to actually make stuff (the game literally had no tutorial for over 6 years!) or consult YouTube to set up some limited automation via some jank unintentional mechanics (for example, to originally boost a minecart to crazy speeds, you had to have little smaller minecarts spinning in tiny circle tracks tangential to your main track) so if you did something notable (or creative/effortful, especially in a server with friends), it was impressive! And also, for those of us in school or college, it was a nice side outlet that felt a little more wholesome than the games like counterstrike, Dota2, League, etc. that were just getting going at the time. Plus, updates were frequent, so you could re-discover and build on your knowledge (for free) a few months or years after last playing, or maybe a friend would start up a server, so you'd potentially go in cycles of binging.
It’s still hard to believe, even despite intellectually knowing why, how many Americans and even Mottizens display an astonishing capacity to rationalize bad foreign actors. China wants Taiwan primarily out of essentially hurt feelings; the fact that this is a batshit insane reason to start a war over a territory that has self governed with no major problems for over 30 years is so outrageous many are tempted to look for deeper meaning when there is none. Even if the US literally sent 10x the arms to Taiwan, do you know the impact that would have on Chinese national security? Almost literally zero. Zero. Nothing. Nil. Zilch. Nada.
Hell, Taiwan doesn’t even present a regional influence threat. They don’t and couldn’t project power into the South China Sea for example. The only vague threat is as a refuge for Hong Kongers and other dissidents, and even that is far overblown.
Well, maybe some of it has to do with America’s short memory when it comes to the potency of war fever. A lot of Americans try to pretend they didn’t support the Iraq war, but the opinion polls at the time don’t lie. I’ll grant there was some government deception of course but that doesn’t fully explain it.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2mo ago
It’s not concise, it’s not valuable. Is everyone supposed to know who this is? If so, the comment is straightforwardly disallowed; if not, I think as part of the compact of making non-sneering comments you are obligated to at least gesture at saying something informative and you know, make an actual point.
He must have been working on it a while. Feels like it's been actually over a month since we had an actually good post? Maybe it's just me
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