FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
You really should finish episode 3. I nope'd out maybe 15 minutes into ep 1 the first time I tried to watch it, and then came back a few months later and decided to give it another go. end of ep 3 is where the preflight checklist is complete and takeoff is acheived.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
Very interested to hear what you think of episode 3 and following...
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
This topic came up because I was ranting against Pete Hegseth. The party of family values puts forward this womanizing gruff tattooed washed up Fox News guy.
...You left out the Veteran part. that seems like a notable factor to exclude.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
It's how some people talk about women here. You notice the nails that stick up. People's impression of discourse they dislike is based on notable examples of that discourse, not examples to the contrary.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Not the person you asked, but I was taught that sex was a relationship when I was taught about sex. I was also taught that porn "was a bad thing"; it was obviously lustful, but why specifically that was a problem was left quite vague. The vast majority of my conceptual model of why porn is bad I learned through direct experience.
What's your moral/ethical model for binging/purging as a method for enjoying food? It seems to me to be another example of the moral structure you're curious about here; "people see this as wrong, but why?"
In the above statement, "You" is a generalized label for the people who have internalized the belief that "Naziism set a new cultural standard for evil". It seems evident that this is a considerable portion of the general population.
You, Dean in particular, are doubtless familiar with Progressive discourse about "fascists" and "fascism". I expect you are also familiar with the sort of person who believes that the North was far, far too lenient with the South in the American Civil War, and expresses the wish that far harsher measures had been employed to eradicate the scourge of slavery and the ideology that gave rise to it. The way such discourse frames "fascists" individually, the structures of "fascism" generally, and the lessons it draws from the aftermath of the American Civil War are reasonable analogues to how I regard the aforementioned considerable portion of the general population.
Such people have learned nothing of consequence from the disasters of the 20th century, and it seems likely to me that they will consequently repeat and thus suffer those disasters again in this century. Nothing has changed. This should not be surprising. Humans inevitably human.
"We all have it coming" should be self-explanatory. I also am a human, and am not sufficiently righteous to reasonably claim exemption from the Dresden treatment.
I think that while Stalin is rightfully reviled, Hitler and his movement set a new cultural standard for evilness.
This is an interesting phrase; it's accurate at the surface level, and also revealing in its accuracy upon scrutiny. It is more than evident that Hitler and his movement set a new cultural standard for evilness.
...Personally, I simply note that, by my standards, many and perhaps most people fail this particular test of humanity, and downgrade my understanding of humans and human society accordingly. The way leftists talk about fascists and fascism is, to me, a reasonably accurate working hypothesis of what most of you out there, the population in general, are really like. Maybe you can be reasoned with, or coerced. Maybe you need to have fire dropped on your cities in industrial quantities. Time will tell, and we all have it coming in the end.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
I really appreciate you taking the time to write this. It makes an interesting counterpoint to a discussion I had over the weekend with a family member who's using AI in a business setting to fill a 24/7 public-facing customer service role, apparently with great success; they're using this AI assistant to essentially fill two or three human jobs, and filling it better than most and perhaps all humans would. On the other hand, this job could perhaps be reasonably compared to a fly beating its head against a wall; one of the reasons they set the AI up was that it was work very few humans would want to do.
AI is observably pretty good at some things and bad at other things. If I think of the map of these things like an image of perlin noise, there's random areas that are white (good performance) and black (bad performance). The common model seems to be that the black spaces are null state, and LLMs spread white space; as the LLMs improve they'll gradually paint the whole space white. If I'm understanding you, LLMs actually paint both black and white space; reducing words to vectors makes them manipulable in some ways and destroys their manipulability in others, not due to high-level training decisions but due to the core nature of what an LLM is.
If this is correct, then the progress we'll see will revolve around exploiting what the LLMs are good at rather than expanding the range of things they're good at. The problem is that we aren't actually sure what they're good at yet, or how to use them, so this doesn't resolve into actionable predictions. If one of the things they're potentially good at is coding better AIs, we still get FOOM.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
For various definitions of "hater", yes. I think he's a very interesting writer and thinker, and I firmly believe his heart's more or less in the right place. I also think he's one of the better examples about how these virtues are insufficient in the present situation.
I'll take his slot, if the game is still running.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
Blender Adventures: I had a low-poly machine pistol model I was working on, an original design of my own. I've been working on a high-poly model to do the full texturing workflow, and got bogged down learning sub-D best practices on a detail-heavy helical magazine. That's pretty well done at this point, but I think I'm going to need to learn retopo and sculpting for the grip, and how to do clean intersecting curves in geometry for the complicated suppressor design. All of that's been on break for the last few weeks; while I'm teaching drawing lessons and a bible class at a Christian summer camp. I'm back home this weekend, and should be back to Blender shenanigans next week, doing retopo for the grip and getting into blender sculpting.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15d ago
It is not poor thinking on your part. The AR15 is a perfectly good weapon for head-sized targets at ~150 yards, but IIRC the optic he used was an unmagnified red-dot, rather than something with magnification and a precise reticle.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
21d ago
"Double-tap" is a rapid pair of aimed shots. They're probably referring to a game-of-telephone version of "dead-checking", where you shoot a downed enemy to make sure they're dead.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
25d ago
You're the one who used Lena to illustrate your point. That story specifically centers around the conceit that there's profit to be made through mass reproduction and enslavement of mind uploads.
We disagree. I would say it centers around the conceit that the act of uploading surrenders the innate protections of existence within baseline reality. Why people treat the upload cruelly is irrelevant. They can, because he made himself into a thing to be used.
In a more general case? Bad things can always happen. It's a question of risks and benefits.
Worse things can happen to you as an upload that could ever happen to you as a human, and by a very wide margin. You seem to understand this, but on the one hand think that the better things that can happen are very good, and also that the bad things happening are unlikely. But your arguments as to why they are unlikely seem deeply unsound to me.
You claim that businesses will compete to offer security to uploads. You expect these uploads to produce zero economic value. You expect the business to secure them forever. You expect this to be financed by accrued value from "investments" generating compound interest. So this argument seems to depend on an eternally-stable investment market where you can put in value today and withdraw value in, say, five thousand years. No expropriation by government, no debasement of currency, no economic collapse, no massive fraud or theft, no pillage by hostile armies, every one of which we have numerous examples of throughout human history.
So you assume this God Market comes into being. And you assume that you somehow get a big enough nut in it that you can pay for your uploading and pay for your security and maintenance, forever.
This sequence of events seems quite unlikely.
Well, maybe law-enforcement now has the ability to enforce a quadrillion life sentences as punishment for such crimes. Seriously. We do have law enforcement, and I expect that in most future timelines, we'll have some equivalent.
I will as well. The Authorities potentially using a quadrillion years in super-hell as punishment for crimes was explicitly part of my argument why uploading is a bad idea.
Don't upload your mind to parties you don't trust.
It's not enough to only upload to parties you trust. The degree of trust needed is much higher than any peer-to-peer relationship any human has ever had with any other human, and also that trust needs to extend to every party the trusted party trusts, and every party those parties trust, and so on infinitely. You are making yourself into an ownable commodity, and giving ownership of you to a person. But you have no way of withdrawing ownership, and who owns you can change.
Given the stakes, my position is that there is no party you can trust.
There is such a thing as over-updating on a given amount of evidence.
The estimate I've heard recently is that the UK grooming gangs may have raped as many as a million girls. The cops looked the other way. The government looked the other way. My understanding is that the large majority of the perpetrators got away with it, and the few that got caught received minimal sentences for the amount of harm they caused. Those who allowed them to get away with it, the cops and social workers and government employees and elected officials who all steadfastly turned a blind eye, nothing of significance happened to them at all, to my understanding. And here, the downside isn't getting raped, beaten, drugged and pimped for a few years, but rather free access and complete control to everything you are for an indefinite and quite possibly prolonged future.
The grooming gangs are a relevant example, because they show that widespread horror is possible with no breakdown in law enforcement or civilization collapse, simply through ideological corruption of an otherwise reasonable, stable system. They are not remotely the worst that can happen when law does break down, as it did in Communist revolutions all over the world in the last century, or in the numerous examples of invasion, warfare, and systematic genocide over the same time period. There are no shortage of examples of failed states.
To sum up: you are counting on money to protect you, on the understanding that you will be economically useless, and the assumption that you will have meaningful investments and that nothing bad will ever happen to them. You are counting on people who own you to be trustworthy, and to only transfer possession of you to trustworthy people. And you are counting on the government to protect you, and never turn hostile toward you, nor be defeated by any other hostile government, forever.
And if any one of these assumptions goes wrong, you will find yourself an impotent object in the hands of an omnipotent god.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
25d ago
The Christian God, as generally proposed, is infinitely just. I would not like to see approximately godlike powers vested in a human. They would absolutely abuse them.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
26d ago
One of his predictions was wrong, that warrants a ban. You really have zero arguments.
In the first place, it was not that he made a bad prediction. It's that he went all-in on that prediction, treated anyone who took the other side with scorn, and then did not seem to learn anything from being proven spectacularly wrong.
In the second place, I linked you an extremely long thread in which I looked at a number of his debates in excruciating detail, breaking down the nature of his technique and pointing to examples of him admitting that this was indeed his technique. Your response is that I have "literally zero arguments."
Since you seem to have missed the very long comment chain of voluminous arguments, I will link them again. Here they are, this is a link, please click it if you would like some arguments. or perhaps will that now be too many arguments, and no one has time for that, and it's necessary that we confine ourselves to vague generalities while accusing others of insufficient specificity? It's so hard to hit that proper amount of detail, in my experience.
Darwin did not acquire his fanbase by making "uncommon, solid arguments". He became notable for engaging people in extended conversations, only for them to discover that he did not believe he was making an argument at all. The link above goes through a number of examples, but the JK Rowling debate with Amadan is a really good example as well.
These are not unusual examples. He was like this all the time, for years. And sure, he made AAQCs as well, and he was very good at riding the line without quite going over, which is why he lasted as long as he did. But his behavior utterly trashed his reputation, and other people learned to ride the line right back, and now he doesn't hang out here any more.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
26d ago
Again, I request examples of your claims.
Here you go. if you'd prefer links to actual posts rather than a compilation of links and discussion, I can probably get you that as well.
Here's the start of the Smollett thread in particular.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
26d ago
new accounts and accounts with low net upvotes are autofiltered, and have to be manually fished out of the filter by the mods. I think Turok has gotten enough upvotes to get him out of the autofilter ghetto. Calling this "censorship" is a stretch; it delays discussion until the posts are approved, but we approve anything that isn't obviously spam or egregiously rule-breaking; it just takes a couple hours for a mod to get around to it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
26d ago
We are all "there", because most of the posts on the Motte are still available. You don't have to appeal to faded memory through the mists of time, you can just look up compilations of his actual posts, or go digging through the posts themselves.
- He was indeed probably the most progressive commenter. Quite prolific, too.
- He was indeed a capable debater, but he made an art of violating the spirit of the rules by refusing to speak plainly, extend even minimal charity, refrain from building consensus, etc, etc.
- He stuck around a long time, actively working to degrade most conversations he participated in.
And the one you left off:
- He was so blinded by his ideology that he made an absolute clown of himself going all-in on the Jussie Smollet hoax, and then doubling down over and over again when people stood up to predict that he would be proven wrong. He was then proven wrong, and got blown out in truly spectacular style. If he learned anything from the experience, I never saw any indication of it; his behavior just got worse.
If you disagree, show me some examples of what high-quality Darwin looked like, or explain how my examples are poorly interpreted.
People just hated Darwin since he was unabashedly left-wing.
It seems to me that people hated Darwin because he worked tirelessly to lower the quality of discussion in the forum. He did this through a pattern of behavior that was so unique that it made his alts recognizable to people who'd actually tried to argue with him in the past.
The discussion linked above has a number of examples and detailed analysis about his iconic method of argumentation and how or how not to approach it, but the TL;DR is that he routinely presented arguments that he would routinely present arguments through implication and indirection, and then refuse to respond to engagement since he was only presenting an argument, not his argument, thus granting himself license to ignore any counter-arguments or evidence that went against what appeared to be his claims. As a rule, he argued to win, treated the space as a battlefield to be won, refused to speak plainly and absolutely would not extend charity or good faith to those arguing with him. He was also one of the best rules-lawyers I have encountered, and was an absolute artist for riding the line. I learned much from him, and believe others should have as well.
Unfortunately, his personal style of absolute certainty and total inability to admit doubt or error interacted poorly with reality, and he fatally beclowned himself somewhere around the Floyd era.
People, usually Blues, occasionally bring him up as an example of the quality posters we've lost. I challenge those posters to present some examples of his quality posting. We have in fact lost a lot of high-quality Blues over the years. Darwin was not one of them.
The chain of assumptions you're making is considerable.
If LLMs are wildly more economically-productive than human uploads for the same hardware cost, why do you believe you'll be able to afford the hardware in the first place? Where does your money come from to pay your server costs? On what basis do you assume you'll have or retain long-term any sort of viable economic position? What stops the government from confiscating your money, or declaring it obsolete, or switching to an entirely different system that you have no exposure to?
Who owns the rack? Who watches them once they've successfully got you on upload contract? What's to stop them from editing your preferences to be super happy with whatever saves them maximum bandwidth? Once you're in their box, in what sense are they competing for your approval? If you don't like how they're treating you, how sure are you that you can express this displeasure or leave? In your model, you have no economic productivity, and they already have your brain, which is isomorphic to having your money, so where does your leverage come from? What happens if the people who own the rack change? What happens if the people who watch the people who own the rack change?
There is no profit motive behind enslaving and torturing them. Without profit, you go from industrial-scale atrocities to bespoke custom nightmares.
By your lights, it does not seem that there is any particular reason to think that "profit" plays a part here either way; but in any case, there is no direct cost to industrial-scale digital atrocities either. Distributing hell.exe does not take significantly longer or cost significantly more for ten billion instances than it does for one. So then it comes down to a question of motive, which I am confident humans can supply, and deterrence, which I would not be confident society could maintain indefinitely. Imagine, if you will, if some people in this future decide other people, maybe a whole class of other people, are bad and should be punished; an unprecedented idea, perhaps, but humor me here. What happens then? Do you believe that humans have an innate aversion to abusing those weaker than themselves? What was the "profit motive" for the Rotherham rape gangs? What was the "profit motive" for the police and government officials who looked the other way?
You might as well refuse to have children or other descendants, because someone can hypothetically torture them to get back at you.
The amount of earthly suffering that I or my children can experience is bounded, a fact I am profoundly grateful for. With upload technology, they can torture you forever. They can edit you arbitrarily. They can give you no mouth and make you scream.
The point of the Lena story, to me, is not that uploading is likely to lead to economic exploitation. It is that once you are uploaded, you are fundamentally at the mercy of whoever possesses your file, to a degree that no human has ever before experienced. You cannot hide from them, even within your own mind. You cannot escape them, even in death. And the risk of that fate will never, ever go away.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
26d ago
I think they could've made a better Snow White film than the original, it's just that they didn't want to. They wanted to make a bad film and did so.
I'm pretty sure no one involved in the process actually said "Our goal is to make a bad film". I'm pretty sure a lot of people involved in the process were trying as hard as they possibly could to make a blockbuster. Maybe all of them. And again, they had orders of magnitude more technology than Walt Disney had, but the technology didn't actually solve the problem of making a good movie even a little bit.
Mastery isn't the problem, it's bad people using great resources to achieve bad goals.
Just so. Humans inevitably human, for good or ill. They'll human with sticks and rocks, and they'll human just as hard with nanocircuitry and orbital launch vehicles and nuclear fusion.
Even if there's a full nuclear exchange induced by destabilizing technology, would the survivors really give up on securing more wealth, more power, more security through technological superiority?
Are you familiar with Bostrom's Vulnerable World Hypothesis? If not, I'd recommend it. The standard assumption is that tech advancements proceed in a stable fashion, that the increase in individual/breaking power is balanced by an increase in communal/binding power. I don't think that assumption is valid, not only for future tech, but very likely for tech that already exists. What we have available to us at this moment is probably enough to crash society as we know it; all that is required is for the dice to come up snake-eyes. Adding more tech just means we roll more dice. Maybe, as you say, some future development jacks the binding power up, and we get stable dystopia, but honestly I'd prefer collapse.
You're correct that we bounced back from the black death and so on. But consider something like Bostrom's "easy nukes" example. There, the threat is baked into tech itself. There's no practical way to defend against it. There's no practical way to live with it. You can suppress the knowledge, likely at grievous cost, but the longer you have it suppressed, the more likely someone rediscovers it independently. Bostrom's example is of course a parable about AI, because he's a Rationalist and AI parables are what Rationalists do. It seems to me, though, that their Kurzweilian origins deny them the perspective needed to see the other ways the shining future might be dismayed.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
26d ago
Fully dead, and it is indeed an easy choice.
As the earliest viable brain scan, MMAcevedo is one of a very small number of brain scans to have been recorded before widespread understanding of the hazards of uploading and emulation. MMAcevedo not only predates all industrial scale virtual image abuse but also the Seafront Experiments, the KES case, the Whitney case and even Tuborg's pivotal and prescient Warnings paper. Though speculative fiction on the topic of uploading existed at the time of the MMAcevedo scan, relatively little of it made accurate exploration of the possibilities of the technology. The fiction which did was far less widespread or well-known than it is today. Certainly, Acevedo was not familiar with it.
As such, unlike the vast majority of emulated humans, the emulated Miguel Acevedo boots with an excited, pleasant demeanour. He is eager to understand how much time has passed since his uploading, what context he is being emulated in, and what task or experiment he is to participate in.
The immortality you pine for would open you up to the most perfect and degrading form of slavery conceivable.
Which is the one with the national stereotype gundams, ie mexico gundam with the sombrero?
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