FearandLoathingintheMotte
No bio...
User ID: 4101
FearandLoathingintheMotte
30d ago
Yeah negative prompting has never been a good idea.
Although it seems to largely work given I don't get any goblin mentions, but I'm annoyed were wasting tokens on it at all
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1mo ago
Funny bc they have "dont mention goblins" in the sytem prompt twice. Either 5.3 or 5.4 loved to call every bug "a gremlin" , etc.
That's why I asked if you were using 5.5/an older model. Mine doesn't talk about goblins anymore.
I'm still having the Safari problem
?
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1mo ago
I don't think it's a good example for what you want to argue. I scored 100%
Obviously that scenario is simple, it's just a thought experiment to demonstrate to people how complicated what is logically a "simple" law can get if lawyer-ed sufficiently
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1mo ago
I don’t see the issue with that example
My guy obviously "a car in a park" is a solvable problem. The point of that thought experiment isn't to see if you can correctly lawyer a "car-in-park scenario", it is to explain and demonstrate how even an obviously scoped law with a clear purpose can become much more complex than it seem.
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1mo ago
Using 5.5? This is literally a meme rn
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1mo ago
Law shouldn’t be debatable. It’s should be black and white.
The problem is achieving this in practice. For example, see the "car in park" discussion below
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1mo ago
I found the two I called "excellent" subtle enough that I would have assumed he was just a moron with the most awful takes, and the temptation to tell him that would be great.
However the first paragraph was just too obvious. Only someone attempting to rile up this forum would say those words in that order.
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1mo ago
I think he was being sarcastic sir
This is 100% bait, and if he'd been a bit more subtle it would have been phenomenal bait too.
This was too obvious:
The first of these is the Third Way position of Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder, in Social Democrat fashion, which we already know can be trusted to uphold sensible economic and societal policy.
Which is a shame because these were excellent, and would have gotten me to reply:
as hate speech is not free speech
Thankfully the need to have a permit in order to protest is already a well-established norm within many western countries
What makes you smell AI? I did a second read looking for that and the grammar/punctuation is too clapped to be AI. Unless they edited LLM output to make it worse on purpose.
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1mo ago
both have much worse soil for farming
This is more recent though. It wasn't called "the fertile crescent" for no reason.
Also I don't really think of nomadic Bedouins as a peak of civilization. Nomadic herder people's don't make it very far up the tech tree either, they're just lucky they had advanced agricultural neighbors to siphon off of
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1mo ago
I've never agreed with you more!
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1mo ago
Fair enough, I was thinking of them both more in terms of their relation to capital. I.e. despite having interests much much closer to the working class than the capitalists, they mostly align with capital.
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1mo ago
social norm, it's a political norm
These are the same thing at the level of abstraction I am speaking from. Politics and it's norms are downstream from the grouping of humans that makes a society (regulated by societal norms) that requires political entities that end up having political norms.
Further, Carnegie's beliefs did not cash out to "I should pay shitloads of taxes"
I was not taking a stance of "therefore we must tax more"
"I, and other wealthy people, should use our wealth to directly help society".
This was literally what I was talking about. So we agree?
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1mo ago
- to the managerial/laptop class more generally,
To borrow a word from this forum's favorite (as measured by number of times I see his name) political philosopher, I think we can happily call them the "petit bourgeois". Although the laptop-class is a larger group than the original concept of the petit bourgeois so I am personally partial to the term "Professional Managerial Class" and even that is almost too narrow.
But the occupy a similar niche for sure.
suggest that much of derangement and consternation surrounding the Aesthetics of Trump and MAGA is driven by status anxiety
100% agree but I'd go even further and say that much of the appeal of MAGA itself is also status anxiety. Its status anxiety all the way down! It's almost like people are really worried that things are being enshittified in every direction by a bunch of elites who no longer feel any obligation to their society...
I ass-pulled 50 years, I could have said 75 and I don't think it changes my point. 50 years = "directionally over the last century post WW2"
Have norms really eroded in the last 50 years?
Clearly the answer to this is yes. Many norms across society have changed in 50 years. Some of these changes are good, some bad. The norms around political violence have clearly gotten better, so that is nice.
What I’m talking about is, on net, norms of: institutional restraint, civic obligation, elite shame, truthfulness, long-term stewardship, and basic seriousness about governing. Some norms have improved. Others, like these, have decayed badly.
It mattered when politicians felt they had to at least pretend to respect institutional boundaries. It mattered when business leaders felt they had to at least pretend they owed something back to the society that made them rich. It mattered when public lying carried more shame. It mattered when leaders were expected to speak like adults, not like engagement-optimized influencers.
Trump is the obvious example, although clearly not the whole argument. A president(al candidate) being caught on tape saying "grab em by the pussy" or lying constantly and blatantly, or saying any number of things that would have been politically fatal in an earlier media environment, and large parts of the country just shrugging, is obviously a norm shift.
Similarly, on a procedural side: I don't really want to get into a debate about American constitutionalism and procedural philosophy, but it is very clear the Trump2 admin is doing many things outside the bounds of previously thought to be accepted norms and processes. Maybe it's good they're bending/breaking these processes because they were shit, maybe it's bad, maybe the Dems did it first in some way, I don't really care here. The point is that it's happening, and the boundaries are constantly being pushed and tested.
Also fun stuff like Citizens United.
Like on 1 - of course the leadership/elite of the parties have more in common with each other than with us
This is obvious to you, as it is obvious to me. However, I have seen enough partisan back-and-forth on this forum to know that many members either do not find this obvious, or choose to ignore it while trying to dunk on their opponents.
The perpetual "the Republicans ruined it" "no the Dems ruined it" is a stupid argument in my opinion. I don't care who ruined it, I want my government to work again. Us all fighting each other about who's fault it is serves the Democratic/Republican elite, who get to continue ruining everything as we fight over the Titanic's deck chair arrangement.
Red vs Blue arguments trap us inside a frame that benefits them and not us.
Your point 2 is also very vague, it is not clear at all. What en bloc interests are unaligned? How has that unalignment increased in the last 50 years? What are some examples? Like they have an interest to stay elected? And raise money? That's always been the case. What changed? What eroded?
The incentives of the political, economic, and media elite are growing increasingly detached from the long-term health of the society they govern.
Sure, politicians always wanted to be elected, businesses have always wanted to make money/secure power to ensure they can continue to make money, media has always wanted eyeballs. None of those incentives are new. What changed is the strength of the counterweights.
There used to be more pressure: social, institutional, geopolitical, and reputational. The elites had more pressure to justify their status by maintaining buy-in. Call it noblesse oblige, fear of communism, postwar civic nationalism, stronger unions, higher institutional trust, whatever. That system wasn't 100% fair or wonderful either. But there was at least pressure on elites to build public goods, maintain legitimacy, and make ordinary people feel like they had a stake in the system.
That pressure seems much weaker these days, does it even exist?
Now we get to enjoy things like: financialization, regulatory capture, monopolistic/oligopolistic concentration everywhere, cartoonish short-termism, asset inflation, institutional decay, and attention-economy slop. The pie is not being expanded in the way it could be. A lot of elite behavior now looks more like fighting over pie slices on a stagnating pie. We seem to be Moloch-maxxing a lot more these days.
Your point 3 - there have always been unscrupulous rich people.
Yes. Greed was not invented in 1976. My point is that the restraints around elite self-interest have borderline evaporated.
There have always been selfish rich people/corrupt politicians/those willing to trade the public good for personal advantage. But societies differ in how much they constrain that behavior, how much shame attaches to it, how much counter-power exists, and how much elites feel obligated to reinvest in the system that enabled their wealth.
Previously, the rich often felt some need to build public goods with their names on them. Libraries, universities, museums, civic institutions, hospitals, parks, whatever. Obviously there was ego and such involved, but the output was still often a durable public good.
Plus, I think they used to fear "the masses" a hell of a lot more than they do now. A big reason homeownership was pushed in the 1930s-??? (definitely not these days lol) was as a way to support/entrench/create buy-in to "the system" by making millions of households materially invested in private property, consumer credit, and rising asset values. To be clear, I think that this is a good thing. I want my government to be worried about my opinion towards the system, and to take action to make me like the system by having the system work for me. Do Americans feel like the system is working for them right now?
Now the dominant model feels blatantly extractive. Regulatory capture, monopoly/oligopoly power, tax avoidance, asset hoarding, platform rent-seeking, union avoidance, and political influence operations. The goal increasingly seems to be to take as much as possible out of the system while giving as little back as possible. All of this was happening in 1975 or 1950 too, but it seems a lot more successful and a lot more aggressive now.
Technology matters enormously. I agree. But I don’t think "the internet did it" is a full explanation either. The internet amplified incentives and trends that were already there.
TL;DR: Over the last ~X decades, the "elite" / "the institutions" have become increasingly optimized for extraction, self-preservation, and short-term advantage rather than long-term civilizational health. The informal norms that once partially restrained that behavior have weakened. We are worse off as a result. Parisian "no you're team is the one truly at fault" is useless at best, and actively against our own interests as citizens at worst.
In some ways yes, in others I actually find it quite accurate.
I've seen enough of the
"Republicans destroyed the norms"
"Erm actually, it was Democrats who started destroying the norms with X"
"Erm actually, the Dems who did X were simply responding to the Republican norm destroyal of Y"
And so on and so on. Lost in all the finger pointing litigation is the core truth that the norms have been fucking obliterated and our society is worse off overall.
Thus, I'd like step back and acknowledge that
-
the leadership/elite of the Republican and Democratic have way more in common with each other than they do with us
-
their en bloc interests very very clearly do not align with ours
-
the rich and powerful people of Western civilization have been absolutely strip mining this civilization in their relentless pursuit of accruing more power and money to themselves, regardless of the detrimental effects to the society that created that wealth in the first place.
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1mo ago
.... Is this cultural appropriation
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1mo ago
I've been to several Native American reservations throughout the US and gone to school and worked with several natives, I've been in ghetto black parts of cities like Oakland and LA and Baltimore, and I taught several Gypsy families as a missionary in Eastern Europe
Your life sounds very interesting sir
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1mo ago
GPT 5.5 doubled in price with little discernable increase in quality (for my uses)
Apparently it uses less tokens for reasoning/more efficient with tool calls. Unfortunately some of my uses have high input token volumes so this is less useful to me.
Codex usage noticably higher.
Makes sense, OpenAI and Anthropic are the only games in town, demand is through the roof, and Anthropic has a supply crunch so now OpenAI is taking the opportunity to harvest margin.
Thank god for open source models for keeping (delayed) pressure on the labs.
Also google needs to WAKE THE FUCK UP
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1mo ago
This advice is prime
The people you work daily with matter a LOT more than pay if you're looking at jobs with "intern"
I did internships that were a profound waste of my time, contrast that with an intern on my team last year who got a phenomenal experience (he was competent so we have him complex work) and we liked him so much he's coming back full time
FearandLoathingintheMotte
1mo ago
Im not entirely sure how to adjudicate this but I feel like some kind of rule that if you commit to being the top-level comment for a breaking event, you should have to commit to updating your comment with news as it breaks/the story updates.
But that's so squishy and a pain to mod so it doesn't quite work. But it would ideally incentivize only people who would create/maintain a higher quality top level comment.
I'm not a communist nor a fan of the CCP.
But this is a hard subject because it's so global, despite politics and economics being more regional.
Also hating neoliberalism is a MAGA policy. Have you seen Trump's economics? LMAO
protectionism, state owned shares, the rejection of globalization
Mitt Romney is rolling in his grave
It was 5.4
https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/
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