MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
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User ID: 1783
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
To put the obvious counterpoint out there, Claude was never actually designed to play video games at all, and has gotten decent at doing so in a couple of months. The drawbacks are still there: navigation sucks, it’s kinda so, it likes to suicide, etc., but even then, the system is no designed to play games at all.
To me, this is a success, as it’s demonstrating using information it has in its memory to make an informed decision about outcomes. It can meet a monster, read its name, knows its stats, and can think about whether or not its own stats are good enough to take it on. This is applied knowledge. Applied knowledge is one of the hallmarks of general understanding. If I can only apply a procedure if told to do so, I don’t understand it. If I can use that procedure in the context of solving a problem, I do understand it. Clause at minimum understands the meaning of the stats it sees: level, HP, stamina, strength, etc. and can understand that the ratio between the monster’s stats and its own are import, and understand that if the monster has better stats than the player, that the player will lose. That’s thinking strategically based on information at hand.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
In much of Europe, the police are more keen to arrest people who criticize Refugees especially Islamic ones, and speak against trans no matter the context. In liberal countries where there’s more protection for free speech, the punishment mostly comes down to being black listed and fired.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
Look around the falling European Union that’s rapidly islamifying and witnessing a rapid decline in quality of life. I mean, rape gangs are kind of a red pill on the whole thing.
The right simply has to point out that liberalism is brining about a decline in health, safety, freedom, and standards of living. Everywhere. Liberals have to keep coming up with excuses as to why it keeps happening.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
Outcomes are results, but results are not a strategy, nor are strategies predictive devices in and of themselves. Strategies entail predictions, but equating the two is a compositional fallacy, believing what is true of a part of a thing is true of the whole of the thing. Even ignoring that potential fallacy, believing that results falsify a process (strategy) that leads to them is a first-order mistake. It is a common mistake, particularly among the sort of people who believe that a strategy that fails is axiomatically a falsified strategy, but this is a bad axiom. And like bad axioms in any field, anyone whose theoretical understanding of a field rests on bad axioms is building their understanding on poor foundations, whether the user acknowledges it as an axiom or not.
I think this is simply a weird position to take, as it makes assessment impossible. If the assumptions are wrong, the strategy is based on faulty premises and won’t actually produce the kinds of results that you expect. If I think Russia is on a mission of global conquest, then a strategy based on containing Russia and challenging them at every step makes sense. But if that’s not true, then that strategy will not work. If I’m basing my strategy on assumptions about Russia being weak, they do not work on a strong Russia.
So if the strategy doesn’t work, obviously it’s a mistake somewhere in the base assumptions made, and until those assumptions are corrected, nothing you do can succeed. If you take the position that “just because I’m not getting the expected results doesn’t mean there’s a problem in my assumptions,” self correction is impossible. You’ll just do this same strategy even harder as though if you just try hard enough the strategy will work. On what other basis would you judge the worth of the strategy?
This is much easier to see when politically loaded topics are substituted by less political topics, which can be done by some basic coding to produce less politically contentious analogies that rest on the same argument structure and axiom of outcome-falsifies-strategy.
Okay, so like in football, you make a strategic approach to the game by saying “this team is good at pass rushing, so let’s focus on running. If they’re catching your running backs for loss of yards every time, it’s simply stupid to say that the strategy is just fine. Any high school coach would probably change strategies after the first quarter because the point of the strategy is winning the game, and the strategy is not leading toward winning the game.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
A lot of the pro-Trump/pro-deal faction on here like to describe themselves as realists and pat themselves on the back for understanding Realpolitik and not being squishy idealists. It seems to me, though, that the Realpolitik goes in the other direction. Russia is our biggest foreign military threat, and is the biggest threat to our allies as well. While I'd prefer a world in which they didn't invade Ukraine, they've proven both that they are too incompetent to score a quick victory and too bullheaded to call off their dogs. For their part, the Ukrainians don't seem to have any interest in capitulating.
Our biggest potential rival is China not Russia, and the battle will likely be over Taiwan not Ukraine. So we’re fighting the wrong war from the realist point of view. My concerns for the future are refugees from MENA flooding Europe and North America, a wider MENA war, and China making a play for Taiwan (which is a major high tech manufacturer, including critical computer chips). Ukraine is not a critical country here. Russia isn’t a strong enemy, they have a lot of mineral and oil wealth, but they aren’t a modern country with a modern economy and military. They’re only relevant because they have a nuclear arsenal. Ukraine, if it hadn’t been invaded is not a prize. It’s a corrupt country full of farmers. It has no critical industries, it secures no border, it’s just there.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I think making Ukraine (and Europe in general) something the Europeans solve for themselves is good for both parties. America simply doesn’t have the resources to put hundreds of billions into Europe when there are lots of hotspots popping up across the globe. It doesn’t work logistically. But at the same time, I don’t think it works for European countries who have become extensions of American foreign policy in their own territories. They really don’t have a strong enough military to deal with European military threats because the assumption has always been “we don’t need to be ready for war because Americans will defend us.. We can’t do that, even the USA probably doesn’t have the manpower to fight in Taiwan and Eastern Europe at the same time. Add in a flare up in MENA and you’re asking the impossible.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I mean it’s possible he does. On the other hand, for the left, I don’t see them putting anything new forward. They don’t have anything to put up against him. The best offer they have is “do you hate Trump? How would you like to go back to the good old days of … Joe Biden?” I think you’d have to break quite a lot of things for Joe Biden to look good by comparison.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I don’t see thins as a great political strategy. Yes, you do need to fall in behind a coalition. But paying more attention, this is no way to get people to actually do that. There are no agendas on offer. They aren’t even play acting like they have a serious agenda. The6 certainly don’t have a candidate of note. What they have is what failed them before— orange man bad. They’ve added Musk on the top, but it’s still “vote for us, we aren’t those people.”
The problem is that Trump isn’t bad enough for this to work. Whether you agree or not, the worst things you can say about him are things that are positive. He’s doing exactly what he said he would do, and he’s taking a sledgehammer to the federal government and cleaning up redundant positions. It just doesn’t work to make an entire political party be the anti-Trump when you can’t actually make a case that he’s doing something wrong.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I think it’s a lot like the spree shooting phenomenon in the USA, which doesn’t seem to have any sort of ideological Origen that I’ve been able to find. What it has is a thought that this will get attention and thus the grievances will be known and get attention. This seems to point to twin solutions of making targets harder to hit (schools are no longer the easy targets they were in the 1990s) by limiting access and slowing movement, and limiting the reach and saturation of the story; not giving the shooter notarity, not speculating on the motive, avoiding sensationalized reports of the carnage, focusing on the victims and their stories.
It’s always seemed to me that when a person reaches a point of dispair and rage at the society he believes is the cause, he tends to use the methods that the current system talks about the most. In the USA, it’s guns and sometimes vehicles. In Europe, it seems to be knives, bombs, and vehicles. You don’t see random bombings in the USA, even though they’d probably work to some effect. You don’t see guns in Europe.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I think context matters here. I’m generally in favor of enforcing fair trade more so than free trade for tge simple reason that some countries are protectin* their industries from competition and therefore it’s not always fair trade. This isn’t always bad, as a sane economic policy would tend to protect industries that are either in early development, or of vital importance to the country. The issue I have with the tarries is that I fear they are too short term to do anything good — the minute a neoliberal government is established in the USA, those tariffs are gone. No one is therefore going to invest in American manufacturing if he thinks that import policy will revert to the old way in which it’s much cheaper to build the factory in a third world country and import it.
I think having some manufacturing in the USA is good and should be supported with tariffs. It provides decent jobs for people who cannot go to college, it is good for security because it means that the country cannot be choked off from things it needs to survive or wage war. And I think it’s good for trade that the United States be at least neutral if not a net exporter as this builds national wealth.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I think it’s more of a “this was the situation before mass travel was trivial.” Its aim was people born in the USA to former slaves who had been in the USA for generations. While it mentions immigration, it mentions people naturalized as citizens, they’re not why the amendment happened. The 14th amendment was about citizenship for slaves and the children of slaves being given full citizenship.
And at the time, most immigrants were coming on boats legally. It’s wasn’t a mass of people walking across the Rio Grande in the dead of night. Mass migration of the scale seen today didn’t happen in 1870 when travel was by steamship or trains or horses. Trying to figure out what the writers of the bill mean about a situation that they absolutely never anticipated does no Justice to the law itself.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I’m a hard skeptic here. At least on the version where this is the Literally Hitler moment that the liberals fear.
For one thing, if you were planning on some form of dictatorship, why are you waiting on a report? Firstly, the report isn’t necessary to satisfy a law. There’s no “if homeland security and DOD don’t agree, then it’s illegal,” clause in the insurrection act, in main because neither agency existed in 1807. It doesn’t change whether or not the president can be investigated or charged, we had a Supreme Court ruling specifically stating that official acts are protected. It’s not going to convince anyone who wasn’t on board with the idea before. It’s a waste of time at best.
Second it telegraphs the punch. If you tell the opposition that you plan to use the Insurrection Act, and give them a specific date at which you might do it, planning countermeasures, calling for strikes and work stoppages and blocking buildings becomes easy. Especially if the opposition knows exactly what will be the justification will be. If this is about ICE and immigration, blocking those kinds of things is easy because everyone knows where to block the roads and protest.
I think there’s the possibility that it’s about drawing out the opposition. If you can get stupid kids on campus to be really stupid (and it’s not that hard), you can defund those schools. If you can draw out protesters and get them to do something stupid (also not that hard), you can arrest them to applause. At the same time, doing things like this wears down their will to keep going. Protest is fun for a while, but it’s not something that people with jobs can do at tge drop of a hat for months at a time. So if you if you overwhelm them, have them showing up getting arrested, and so on for months, eventually they run out of steam. Eventually you run out of time, money, and will to keep up for months.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I mean, I think the Machiavellian view of power is more or less the reality of human society. Sure, get along where you can, negotiate where you can do so without disempowerment, but the truth of this world is that you have to be willing to assert yourself and defend yourself unless you want to be fodder for those who are willing to assert dominance over you.
The Baitsao version of western civilization where we preemptively blame ourselves and give away goodies and appease bad actors while holding open the door for the invasion by people clearly seeing an opportunity to take over — it’s a dead end. They will kill off our civilization because being a doormat is held up to be a virtue in their religion.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
To be fair, this has always been a weakness of democratic systems. They don’t care what the correct answer to a given problem is, they care what people want. If you ask a bunch of kids what they want for dinner, you’re getting pizza, burgers, fried foods, and some sort of fries or macaroni, you won’t be getting vegetables, lean meats, fruits, vegetables, or whole grains. Of course the stuff kids won’t choose turn out to be the correct choices.
The correct answer to a budget is to make it balance and not load it down with giveaways — especially to people who are not productive in any way. The correct answer to war is “only go to war if you can’t avoid it, and if you’re defending someone else, then at the very least you should benefit from involvement.” The correct answer on immigration is strict control, selection for high value immigrants from capable countries and cultures, and only in a small number. I don’t think most of these answers would win at the ballot box. That doesn’t make it not correct, it means there’s a weakness for plebiscite in making decisions like that.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
He’s mostly right, save for UK and France. Most European countries haven’t been in a war in at least a generation, and that war experience was fighting alongside the USA, who did most of the heavy lifting. The Russian military has been at full scale war for two years. It’s not looking good, I think.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
But if Ukraine cannot actually win despite what NATO has done already and might do in the future, not only does it not deter Russia, but it demonstrates to the world that NATO is a paper tiger. It’s not going to deter Russia from trying for more, as they won the war. It’s not going to convince China. It’s probably not going to convince anyone else. NATO went all in on saving Ukraine and couldn’t.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
And how many have seen ground combat at this kind of scale? I don’t think most European soldiers have seen full on combat in a generation or more. And I think this is an under appreciated problem both at the front and at home. Battlefield capable is not the same as being strong enough to keep fighting after half of your unit gets blown up. And at home, how willing is the general public to send thousands of men to die in Ukraine? How many deaths will send public support for the war into the toilet?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I don’t think the point was to end up with an AI that could play Pokémon. The point was to demonstrate that such a thing was even possible. It actually succeeded in setting the goal, and could navigate tge environment and dispatch enemies and collect Pokémon. That’s actually pretty darn good for a system trained on gamefaq and videos to play a game.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
The West is stupid and weak, or at least Americans, because we have rarely been challenged by a near peer country in anything of note. We’re used to being a giant in the room and really don’t have a “lived experience” of being the one on the receiving end, or even not being dominant. It’s easy to spot once you see it: Europe and North America believe they can bring millions of unreformed Muslim fanatics in a refugees and nothing will happen, they believe that Russia will collapse in the first week of the Ukraine war because of course they will. And because of this assumption that because we’re dominant now, we will always be dominant.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I mean I think that the culture is slowly but surely disempowering those institutions. How many people, still, in 2024 get any significant news from “mainstream” news outlets? When is the last time you heard a conversation with coworkers, friends or family about a news story shown on network news or from a large circulation newspaper or magazine? How many kids are now not interested in four years of woke nonsense in the university and opting for trade schools instead? How many are turned off by forced diversity in their workplace?
The future isn’t in those institutions. People get their news and general information from podcasts and blogs or streaming. They choose trade school for job skills and use online MOOCs if they want to get book learning. They’d have to basically retake a completely different set of institutions, except that because the barriers to entry are pretty low and the audience is much more likely to leave if they smell an overt political agenda.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
It’s also a question of choosing your battles and making sure that the good is actually good. Ukraine isn’t and has never been in a position where they can be completely politically independent. It’s not been true historically, and as far as the rest goes, I don’t see it changing anytime soon. I’d say the same about Palestine. They simply don’t have the wherewithal to hold their ground let alone carve out a state. In both cases, us choosing to ignore that and propping up a situation in which a war is frozen in place by outside actions and sanctions and court orders does no one any good. If the state in question cannot hold its independence, I don’t see it as a question of “ignoring Russian (or Israeli) aggression.” I see it as asking whether giving more and more aggressive, invasive and expensive medicine to a 90 year old dying of cancer is doing anyone, including the patient any good. The minute we drop the aid to these people both in Palestine and in Ukraine, they get steam rolled. That could be today, it could be 100 years from now. Either way, it’s life support on a comatose patient that we can keep alive as long as we keep them plugged in to the life support.
I’m also not sure the old way of handling borders and nations was so bad. Is it really such a crime against humanity that not every ethnic group gets its own flag and Olympic team? The bad old world was not prone to getting into huge conflicts over such things. In 1830, Gaza would have been Israeli within ten years of independence, and the Arabs would be either willing to accept that, or would have left. In the case of Ukraine, much like the vast majority of its history, Ukraine would be an outpost of the Russian Empire.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I think it would apply if Americans were in the same situation— under the guns of a power that we could not hope to win against, and slowly grinding away at the population while destroying infrastructure and the economy. If aliens land, the smart move is to surrender simply because the other choice is the destruction of everything you care about.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
They’ve had foreign intervention and still can’t drive out the Russian military. I think honestly we should have stayed out from the start as we’ve just made them lose more slowly which means more deaths and destruction. Ukraine almost fell in tge first weeks of tge war, and if it had, Ukraine would be in better shape even if the Ukrainians like tge west more. Live under Russia, or die in a ditch so those who survive can … live under a Russia.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3mo ago
I don’t see this as about his country’s wellbeing. The war, at this point is doing more harm than good. The infrastructure is in tatters, he’s lost almost all of Donbas, and he’s only maintaining status quo by abducting men and women to send to the front. None of that helps the people of Ukraine.
Two doesn’t work either. Again, almost everyone who could have left is in Eastern European NATO countries. Th3 rest are dodging the press gangs abducting people in the streets. Ukraine hasn’t even had an election since the war started. If you have to kidnap your army, it’s highly unlikely that the people have the will to fight.
What I mean by thinking strategically is exactly what makes the thing interesting. It’s not just creating plausible texts, but it understands how the game works. It understands that losing HP means losing a life, and thus if the HP of the enemy and its STR are too high for it to handle at a given level. In other words, it can contextualize that information and use it not only to understand, but to work toward a goal.
I’m not saying this is the highest standard. It’s about what a 3-4 year old can understand about a game of that complexity. And as a proof of concept, I think it shows that AI can reason a bit. Give this thing 10 years, a decent research budget, I think it could probably take on something like Morrowind. It’s slow, but I think given what it can do now, im pretty optimistic that an AI can make data driven decisions in a fairly short timeframe.
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