Sinity
1yr ago
but that's why we historically gave the job of running society to people with the maturity to recognise and admit to their mistakes.
That seems like the opposite of reality.
but also dramatically more severe consequences for mistakes - and if you do fuck it up, the consequences to you - no matter how severe - are microscopic compared to the consequences to society.
This kind of thing (more severe consequences of mistakes) incentivizes ass covering. If you want to incentivize 'admitting mistakes', then again, you'd need to do the opposite.
Sinity
1yr ago
I think images should be allowed in comments. If we continue organizing the site roughly the same as the subreddit, most of the effortposts are going to be comments in the CW thread. No reason to make them worse than Posts. Just moderate it the same as text content. Kinda related: it'd be nice to have collapsible blocks of text, for larger comments/posts. Make them not count towards character limit (if there's any).
IMO there shouldn't be too many Posts made about specific things. It'd be better to have several recurring topical threads (CW, 'fun thread', 'media thread', meta thread*...).
* especially now; IMO it'd be useful to try to figure out priority things to do/fix here instead of GH. Plus organizational stuff, like the exact set of perma/recurring-threads. And maybe scope of the community? How it fits in with adjacent spaces?
Sinity
1yr ago
I don't think this in particular is alien to most of the people. Male expendability is mainstream, and maybe apolitical.
Sinity
1yr ago
I went to Poland and it looked like what Western Europe should look like. The urban areas were clean and seemingly safe. Indeed the people living there are mostly European or Slavic.
Large part of that, at least in common narrative, is due to emigration of problematic people out of the country (as economic migrants). Ofc it wouldn't happen if we were not part of the EU. Because then immigration from Poland would be treated as, IDK, Mexicans in the US. Personally, if we were to somehow exit the EU (which is ~impossible given popular support for staying; if government fucked up that badly they'd probably rapidly lose power), I'd run away from the country.
Sinity
1yr ago
Unusually, for not being CW at all: Proprietary software, especially the type that takes control away from the user and keeps getting more bloated and awful with every version. And in particular, being forced to use it.
Same. Especially firmware.
It's 100% due to a quasi-psychopathic desire by big tech companies to maintain an iron stranglehold on their users' rights.
There's also the thing where, if you root an Android phone, suddenly random bank apps and such try to fight back against it. This Reddit thread is very triggering.
So you reviewed with 5 stars previously, now changed to 1 star because they care about users' safety ... hmm, I see, I see.
Their company, their rules. They should be able to do whatever they want with their company.
That argument works both ways.
Edit: I'm just showing that the argument to freedom here works both ways. the same freedom the redditor is arguing form can be used by the company to do whatever they want as well.
Or this Asus forum thread. Specifically, this response from someone actually working there:
No plans for open source that I know of. Other than the complexity of making such a solution possible (there is already a ton of work required), we are also in a market which has fierce competition - one of the few things remaining outside software where vendors get to stamp their uniqueness is via UEFI and the dedicated hardware we use. We would not want to give away any of the special sauce we use to mitigate platform obstacles for others to freely copy or tinker with for example.
The timelines in which this buisiness operates is also unsuitable to support multiple solutions - it does not make sound business sense to do so in many cases and I believe this would be a similar situation.
This makes me wish for terrorism. Sadly no one is going to bomb a mobo manufacturer for these reasons. I just don't understand why it's not all leaked...
"stamp their uniqueness", lol. Maybe that would be convincing if this wasn't utter garbage. Eh
Sinity
1yr ago
Emphasis mine. Far from a "cutting off" of sense data, the exercise as described by Mahasi Sayadaw reads as one that scrutinizes sense data and investigates its nature.
Yes, I understand it that way as well. Very relevant text, I think, for thinking about it without 'spiritual' vagueness: I believed the hype and did mindfulness meditation for dumb reasons-- now I'm trying to reverse the damage - it speculates on what mindfulness does, physically. Also it shows why more mindfulness is not necessarily better.
I was very observant, introspective, disciplined, and my senses were very sensitive, so I quickly “made progress” in mindfulness and meditation (...) because I was excessively sensitive and trained myself to be vigilant, I kind of broke my mind with mindfulness.
I somehow didn’t think of “getting better at meditation” as reflecting changes in my brain, even though I gripe about it when anybody else forgets that all behavior has a basis in the nervous system. I viewed “do nothing” as a default state, almost how the brain should be, which is not justified at all.
I regarded the changes I saw from meditation as being not really changes at all, but a purer expression of how I was supposed to be, less clouded by distraction and unconscious autopilot. Some of them were pleasant, like noticing colors and details more vividly. I was more able to listen to and observe others without jumping in with my own opinions. The most exciting thing was being able to see more of my inner world. Readers of the blog will know that I’m quite fascinated with my navel, and getting access to more and more of it on demand led to a dangerous addiction. If I did anything wrong in my meditation practice— that is, completely against the advice of all authorities— it was seeking those sensations and insights.
I did not realize what a dynamic, feedback-driven process messing with your attention is. I wasn’t just clarifying my attention like you would clean rust off a bike chain; I was deeply reshaping my attention at multiple levels. In short, I was teaching myself not to get habituated to stimuli and not to pattern-match via sensory deprivation, in particular by depriving myself of my default mode network inner monologue stream (“letting go of thinking”).
Not habituating or pattern-matching are oft-exhorted goals because of typical mind fallacy: it’s common not to be nuanced enough. Many people believe that you can’t make too few assumptions, but it’s not true. We need heuristics for speed and to make room for the things that actually require nuanced attention. I felt the effects of reducing habituation and not pattern-matching across many domains, from verbal thinking to visual and auditory processing. Similarly, it's common to be excessively involved in "ego," or a self-image or self-narrative, and to benefit from loosening yours up and not seeing it as so solid. But when you attack your sense of self and try to train your brain not to build it up, you can lose things like proprioception and self-recognition.
One of the general things that mindfulness meditation aims to do is teach the practioner to perceive sense data more directly and less filtered through preconceived ideas of what it is we're sensing. It seeks to show us that concepts are an illusion, everything from thinking you see a "table" instead of a composition of light and shadow all the way up to our own self-concepts. The biggest harm of reducing the tendency to pre-filter input through concepts is the processing time that it takes to bind all the shapes or sounds or ideas I’m hearing into something my brain can use.
I take in excessive extraneous detail and don't prioritize incoming information as quickly as a result of mindfulness practice. I can cope with it, but it creates a lot of friction without much benefit. I just changed my graphics settings to be stupid high and now the game runs slow. I don’t pattern match quickly enough and it makes my thinking slow and contributes to a foggy brain feeling. I have trouble chunking information in my working memory, at least compared to how I used to be.
Harm: inability to accept "stories," fear of missing details of experience - This fear of making a perceptual or interpretive error leads to a constant sense of unease and bloat from maintaining a lot of unnecessary ambiguity in my models.
Mindfulness interventions have been proven to reduce habitation to stimuli, what is usually described within the originating traditions as “freshness of perception”. I became more reactive in part just from noticing more stimuli, but also because of common Buddhist doctrines that encourage you not to distinguish between internal and external occurrences. All of your perception is you, and boundaries between you and other people or the environment, or ultimately between anything and anything else, are ephemeral and imagined (according to two of the three marks of existence, non-self and impermanence). I still endorse a version of the view that "you" are actually your whole world, not just the avatar in the world, but I don’t believe that your sense of self should try to reflect that— for practical purposes, I am inside my body, which is inside a larger world, and most things that happen in that world are causally disconnected from me.
Sinity
1yr ago
I see “personal carbon credits” as the new horizon, with opposition being taken down quickly with accusations of racism and/or conspiracy theory
Unlikely, given how fast transition towards photovoltaics and such is currently happening. Also fusion.
Degrowth people exist, but they're not convincing others.
Sinity
1yr ago
unless this place is crazier then I thought.
Well, there's /r/SneerClub. Probably not a lot of hackers there though.
Assuming webfics count, Erogamer. Not sure how to describe it; maybe metaphysics / nature-of-reality porn. Also literal porn (which is why it's behind registration-wall). Here's the first post.
I think it'd be nice to share media-lists (like myanimelist/anilist goodreads etc.). Since I brought this up, here's my anilist[1]. Currently I don't maintain anything else.
can we maintain a Motte book thread?
I'd extend that to 'media' in general. Maybe apart from people sharing stuff individually, we could vote to watch/read specific things and discuss?
[1] Completed contains, generally, one entry per series - no sequels etc.
Sinity
1yr ago
And a fragment from third link; about nature of governments, singletons, in context of automation. I mostly decided to quote that too given similar focus to your post on the old subreddit
Eventually, the balance of power shifted, and the government, in all its organs, exceeded the power of its own people. Freed of the fear of the mob, that power that in its time had removed crowned heads from their bodies and elected officials from their seats, governments experienced a fundamental shift in motive–no longer bound to the whims of that which had humbled even the Tsar, those who governed found that they could direct their nations in whatever idiosyncratic direction they pleased, in directions that did not have even a theoretical bearing on the interests of their subjects, and were in fact often openly hostile to those interests.
Let us not delude ourselves as to the transient nature of this victory. This was no victory of the powerless over the powered. This was the victory of some with power over others with power, and as such bodes only ill for the future.
The lessons of the current era are clear: with the advent of fully mechanized warfare, and of fully mechanized means of production, if we allow ourselves to fall, or to splinter, or be peacefully broken up, it is only a matter of time until the world is again unified under one government, even if the world must first be buried under another wave of fire to do it. Eventually there will come into being a government powerful and willing enough to hold its grip on power.
And without anything external to destroy it, such a government will be eternal, assuming it does not destroy the species first.
It is impossible to return to the past, or restrict our development, as some still delude themselves into advocating. The lessons of industrialism, of plenty, can never be forgotten. The rightful craving for more wealth, more plenty will always be there. The people, the government–they will crave it, and between them they will destroy anything in their way.
No, while we still live, we should do what we can to become that eternal government, and to ensure, while we still live, that those who follow can never stray from the path. Before we can even begin to do that, it is necessary to know what the path is, and that can only be done by careful study of what the path is.
My allies and I therefore humbly submit to the Committee the following set of guiding principles, or let us be frank about it, ideological tenets:
1) That our future government dedicate itself wholeheatedly to the problem of staying in power forever. This is not a matter of power-lust; it is a matter of what is necessary. Of course, this entails the suppression, ruthless if necessary, of competing ideologies and organizations.
2) That, as much as possible, no one being shall ever rule, or experience what it is like to rule. What Nietzsche called the Will to Power is a fundamental part of the human psyche, and it is this Will which has driven some individuals to seemingly unattainably heights. Yet, if it this Will that has driven some of the worst atrocities and abuses ever recorded. If Humanity is to survive, this will should be chained, and denied ever tasting the forbidden fruit of Power. This should be our unabashed goal.
It seems impossible to construct a power structure simultaneously capable of governing effectively without leaders of some sort, and it may be so. Nonetheless, recent work by our researchers […] have suggested a possibility. By making the leaders mental combinations of their followers, their subjects, it may be possible to construct leaders who would no more enjoy abusing their power than you would enjoy abusing your power to control your own limbs
6) The maximization of the freedom perceived by sentient individuals. It is clear that for any sentient, human mind, the feeling of coercion is wholly repugnant, so much that many other of the other sources of physical and mental satisfaction are often declined in the pursuit of freedom from coercion, or more briefly, freedom itself. And yet the attempt to maintain a true absolute freedom is impossible, impractical, and even unpleasant in many circumstances. The intersection of the freedom of action of multiple individuals, the tendency of individuals to often choose disastrous courses of action…all of these are well-known. In the end what matters is what the individuals involve perceive as being free, and this is what should be sought.
7) The maximization of economic prosperity, defined as both the average and minimal amount of resources that can be accessed by any given sentient. Fundamentally, this was the goal of human economic life since the beginning. Note that this encompasses both an average amount of resources and a minimal amount of resources–the government cannot consent to deliberately allow one sentient to starve, no matter the gain accrued to another sentient or set of sentients.
Example from fiction which goes a little bit into genocidal scenarios: To The Stars (Madoka Magica hard sf fanfic), or rather its backstory. It also explores incompatibility of capitalism with full automation / high unemployment described by @2rafa (specifically paragraph 2 and 9. 1, 2, 3. I brought it up on the old sub already, but I'm unsure how many have seen this back then.
With Vladimir Volokhov’s 2136 unraveling of the principles of AI, the dam finally broke on over a century of economic trends. Steadily rising structural unemployment and slow concentration of wealth became instead soaring unemployment and exponential concentration of wealth. With the advent of cheap, easily programmable artificial intelligence, the world’s industries no longer had a true need for human labor, and relentless cost-cutting left greater and greater proportions of the population out in the streets.
2
The paradox of plenty had truly arrived. Factories were more productive than ever, but even at the lowest prices, the only clients with money were the increasingly opulent capital owners, the hyperclasses the newly emergent economic class that would come to define the following century. Economic production stagnated, even as potential production skyrocketed.
Nations where the hyperclasses sympathized with the masses handed out basic incomes to keep them solvent. Those that didn’t handed out pittances or, often, nothing, content to rely on increasingly brutal oppression.
As the rank-and-file of the MSY isolated themselves deeper and deeper into cocoons of wealth, their cultural connections with the people they nominally served frayed, and increasing portions of the membership began to display attitudes similar to that of their crueler hyperclass peers, evincing contempt for the “handout-seeking layabouts” that now constituted most of the population.
It was only in a certain proportion of nations that it was able to mutate into true Detachment, with the hyperclass extending their beliefs to include the proposition that it was morally correct for the lower classes to be kept down, that it was morally incorrect to hand out relief food or money, and so forth. (...) the nations where the hyperclasses held onto their moral compasses, implementing relief and welfare programs–though never giving up their hold on power – began to form a second visible power bloc
The last meeting of the UN General Assembly, in 2160, collapsed entirely when the delegates of the non-detached faction walked out in protest at the organizations inability to take meaningful action against abuses. The remaining delegates dissolved the organization and formed their own international organization, the appropriately Orwellian Freedom Alliance.
The Incubators added their own input to the situation, warning direly that Humanity was at substantial risk of a “low-productivity, low-utility” end-state, and even offering direct intervention, if requested (this was refused).
Events crystallized in 2163, with the revelation of the so-called St. Petersburg atrocity. The local hyperclasses had resolved to do the unfathomable: annihilate an entire segment of the city’s population for anti-governmental behavior.
9
Eventually, agonizingly, and cataclysmically, the FA collapsed under weight of its economic inferiority, its own ideologies rendering it incapable of effectively mobilizing its populations, or even preventing its populations from being co-opted by the other side.
The following is somewhat less relevant, but it implies that things turning out fine is unnatural. Similarly, figuring out friendly AI (in 2136) wasn't either (through it's not explained in the text here).
By 2200, while a few UF governments were still nominally in power, they existed with armed forces commanded by EDC commanders, economies commanded by EDC AIs, censorship imposed by EDC regulations, and it was abundantly clear that the EDC was the UF, and was unlikely to cede any power as long as there was still an enemy left to fight. As it turned out, the EDC never ceded power at all, absorbing the few remaining independent governments at the end of the war with the bluntly honest explanation that the EDC believed that future peace could be best secured under its own, direct rule (...) removed any remaining illusions that the EDC was anything other than an oligarchical, unelected, secret military junta.
(...)
If the UF could successfully rebuild the world, its directors hoped to use the gratitude of the populace to entrench their ideology and successor government forever. To this end, on top of its ambitious rebuilding objectives, the Council promised grandiosely to construct Eudaimonia on Earth (...) the Council inaugurated a set of projects ambitious both in scope and name, intended to be Manhattan Projects for a new age: Project Eden sought clinical immortality, Project Janus sought FTL travel, and Project Icarus sought to use solar satellites to harvest the light of the sun, making energy not just cheap, but free.
When the Council finally ended martial law ten years later, dissolved itself, and made way for its successor, Historians were already considering it one of the most successful governments ever, despite the fact that its most ambitious projects had yet to bear fruit. In recent years, there has been speculation that the Council’s ambitious goals and seemingly ludicrous optimism were prompted indirectly by the Incubators, via MSY intermediaries. No evidence has ever emerged to support this claim…
The ten-year post-war saga of the EDC seems almost impossible, more dream than reality, and the official explanation, that this effectiveness was due to the successful incorporation of AI planning and modeling, seems to many unsatisfactory. The idea of a group of oligarchical technocrats governing so effectively, despite the well-known flaws of human nature, had more in common with the fever dreams of early twentieth-century utopians than anything the weight of history would suggest. (...) vast majority of records remain sealed, allowing an immense amount of speculation to pour into the gaps, especially with the recent revelation of the existence of the MSY and the Incubators. It is suggested the MSY used its magic to keep the EDC under its thumb and help propel research innovation, or that the Incubators regularly advised the interim government, providing experience and examples of social structures, economic designs, and even technology. Additional speculation focuses on the nature of Governance, whose opaque operations engender distrust. The EDC, some allege, was the site of a quiet takeover of Humanity itself, by its AIs, by its magical girls, by the Incubators, or by some combination of the three.
Sinity
1yr ago
What this kid tried to do is take over a project he's not a majority, or even substantial, contributor to. That is a faux pas and a no-go in open source, and the project should rightfully be "deplatformed" (*) because of it.
Isn't that what NeoVim did? Some group of devs were unsatisfied with the BDFL, they the project, and now it's basically the main fork. I don't think that at the time it was forked they were majority (tho I'm not sure).
Some people do think it was somehow bad to fork it. Pretty insane.
WDYM by 'deplatformed'?
Sinity
1yr ago
Twitter for SJWs already exists in the default mastodon, uh, servers? Instances? I don't know the lingo. It became a thing back when they were furious that Twitter didn't have enough censorship.
Mastodon WTF Timeline is a pretty interesting description
And Twitter allied itself with the Blue side in the war, making the Red side progressively more and more unwelcome on the system. Some of this alliance was expressed overtly, for instance by creating an "advisory board" to guide Twitter culture and staffing it with some of the most hateful of Blue leaders. Other actions were done covertly, such as by "shadowbanning" persons identified as Red by AI systems to prevent them from being able to communicate with each other through Twitter while maintaining plausible deniability that the system was taking a side. This stuff created a steady stream of Red refugees who still wanted to use a system like Twitter but didn't want to or could not use Twitter in particular. But there were also many on the Blue side angry that the Red side still had not been completely annihilated and they considered themselves refugees from a space rendered unsafe by the ongoing presence of the Red side. Both kinds of people wanted to go somewhere other than Twitter.
Around March 2017 I started hearing about Mastodon in a significant way from my contacts on Twitter, who I'd like to emphasize include both Red and Blue (making me unusual among Twitter users) as well as a lot of Japanese people who are outside that classification. There also started to be media coverage of Mastodon at this time. The coverage, all from Blue-aligned media, largely presented Mastodon as a cool new alternative to Twitter that would be free of "harassment," which is a Blue code word for the mere existence of the Red side.
At that time I thought I could see the train wreck coming, because I knew enough to know that the Red side was already strongly entrenched in the pre-Mastodon GNU Social network, and I thought I foresaw that as Blue users showed up thinking they owned the place, the federation would dissolve into fighting the same war that had devastated English-language Twitter, and so it would never be a successful Twitter replacement. I was wrong about this; what actually turned out to be the big divisive issue was something much more entertaining.
Circa Friday the 14th: English-speaking users, especially on mastodon.social, start becoming horrified by what is varyingly described as a flood of Japanese-language postings; an organized invasion by Japanese Internet trolls; a flood of "anime" (significant because "anime avatars" used by white people had been considered an emblem of the Red side in the Twitter Culture War); and a flood of "child pornography." Thoughtful discussion and unhinged hysteria ensue, simultaneously. The fact of Twitter's having been huge in Japan was not generally known in the English-speaking world at the time, which helps support the sheer incomprehension of where all these people could possibly have come from. There's speculation that maybe Mastodon had received some kind of mainstream media coverage that attracted a lot of Japanese attention, or had attracted attention on some popular Japanese Web site other than Twitter, though neither appears to have really been the case - such coverage happened later, as an effect, not a cause, of the sudden influx of Japanese users.
On the night of Friday the 14th: Pixiv (presumably a small group of their employees tasked to do this as an experiment) creates a Mastodon instance (pawoo.net) and it immediately starts growing on roughly the same curve as mstdn.jp. Early on the morning of the 15th, it passes mastodon.xyz to become the third most populous instance on the entire network. Much traffic on and from this instance consists of the amateur artists who populate Pixiv itself sharing their artwork especially including that which they're not allowed to post on Twitter, namely ロリコン.
Midnight, start of Saturday the 15th: mastodon.xyz announces that it is blocking pawoo.net (i.e. refusing to exchange message traffic) "due to a lot of pedopornographic accounts there, without any action from the administrator." The unbelievable idea that ロリコン is really acceptable to Pixiv and Japan generally, and is not a form of extreme misbehaviour by a fringe of trolls, has not sunk in on the English-language side.
Saturday the 15th, afternoon: Gargron the Mastodon developer and admin of mastodon.social creates a Github issue to discuss technological aspects of the ロリコン issue, mostly focused on the potential legal exposure for server admins whose servers may end up caching, and thus "possessing," material that is illegal to possess in their local jurisdiction. In postings there and on the Mastodon network, both in English and Japanese, the administrators of pawoo.net declare that they will not ban from their own servers material that is legal in Japan, but they will attempt to enforce a rule that "mature images" must be hidden by NSFW tags, and they will cooperate with other technical workers in attempts to keep "mature images" out of caches where they might create liability for third parties.
I think that the word choice of the Pixiv admins calling this stuff "mature images" in their English-language communications is telling: Japanese people think what the English speakers are freaking out over is the possibility that children might see the images. They're "mature" images that ought to be for consenting adults only, is the objection to ロリコン that comes closest to making any kind of sense from a Japanese point of view. The idea that even consenting adults ought not to be allowed to see such images isn't on the Japanese radar, and would seem to be wacky moonbat nonsense, even though it is so obvious, and so obviously sensible, as to be unspoken on the English side.
My assessment is supported by the Japanese-language side of the ongoing discussion on the network itself, where Japanese people frequently suggest (English-language commentary) that the network needs "age verification" and that that will somehow solve the problem. At this point I make it something of my own mission to inform the Japanese that that's not the English-speaking point of view, and verifying the age of users will not solve any relevant aspect of the problem that the English speakers see; while similarly informing the non-Japanese of how the Japanese do see things. I don't know if I make much headway in this effort.
Sinity
1yr ago
What occurred to me watching the Fetterman debate is that ordinary, American political rhetoric is hard to distinguish from literal brain damage: question-evading, compulsive repetition of simple points, failure to substantially engage with alternative points of view, reliance on memorized/rehearsed lines, introduction of irrelevant themes/ideas, etc.
Eh, about political debates, you can't beat what happened in Poland during the last presidential elections...
The presidential candidates "debated" before the second round of elections at the same time, but in two different locations. The bizarre "debates" prompted many biting comments.
"The two photos below 1, 2, from the simultaneous so-called debates in Końskie and Leszno, best illustrate the state of Polish democracy AD 2020. My congratulations to both candidates and their staffs. This is how one destroys the community, which both contenders are supposedly constantly rebuilding..." - wrote political scientist and historian Professor Antoni Dudek.
Src (of the translated quote)
Sinity
1yr ago
And it's not only "provide a short text prompt". There's inpainting, outpainting, img2img, and so on.
Sinity
1yr ago
Few random results. I only played with it for a few minutes after setting it up so far.
Sinity
1yr ago
You're punishing people for voting illegally
It should be ~impossible to vote illegally by mistake. It's stupid to try to fix broken procedures which allow 'illegal voting' by just punishing citizens really hard if they make a mistake.
Sinity
1yr ago
Huge walls of text that can be succinctly spelled out in a few sentences is not clarity.
It reduces the chance of being misunderstood, lowers inferential distance to everyone. I'm not claiming it's universally good ofc.
Sinity
1yr ago
Shape rotation and the like is still cognitively taxing to people irrespective of any "trick"
I was convinced that I had aphantasia in the past, so I didn't even bother to try actually "shape rotating" on these sorts of tasks; I tried to somehow determine "logically" if shape could be rotated some way around.
Now I sorta can do it by visualizing*, but I'm not sure if performance is any better. Definitely cognitively taxing. I hate these tests.
* there's still no actual qualia, I think. But I could will myself to imagine e.g. "an apple", and then examine details. Ofc they're probably generated the moment I look for them, and certainly unstable. Also works for moving visuals - e.g. I could 'see' gameplay of a game I played for hundreds of hours (years ago).
On one LSD trip, I couldn't really think verbally at some point. Possibly that's when I learned this; I'm not sure through.
But I almost never think like this spontaneously. I wonder if it's useful and/or trainable.
Sinity
1yr ago
and even if you don't do well on them initially you can basically get a perfect score by reviewing the patterns/ concepts that people are unfamiliar with.
You can't. At least not to a great extent. Hard IQ test questions stress your working memory. You need to process information to solve them; you could memorize exact same patterns, but make it slightly different and it won't help you.
edit2: The markdown parser doubles newlines in the three-backtick code span.
Also lists are possibly broken (plus there's too much spacing between items)
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test
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second
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second level
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sth sth
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Sinity
1yr ago
They do have a tendency to overstate the severity and applicability of issues due to the benefits of publicity in that community.
Not sure if they overstate the severity of issues; If the NSA has been hacking everything, how has nobody seen them coming?
They were playing chess & you were playing checkers;
Not directly applicable here*, but cybersecurity in general is... there's no cybersecurity, really. Intel ME.
* but maybe for Gab / Truth and such?
Sinity
1yr ago
What if they come for us?
Different scale. Same about concerns that Reddit will ban linking to us, I think.
I don't think there's anyone obsessive enough about us (& with proper skillset at the same time) to bother.
Sinity
1yr ago
And, I'm not sure about this, since it's mostly comedy, but... Chili and the Chocolate Factory: Fudge Revelation.
Quote from Ch. 14/15, so maybe a bit spoilery.
Mr. Bucket smiled. "You remind me! I asked a question earlier. Children, what do you think should happen to lazy people?"
"Mr. Bucket," said Keerthi. "Is there a person inside of that statue?"
"No," said Mr. Bucket. "You did not answer my question so I will ask another. This time you must all answer. If someone told you that you were going to have to die, and they gave you a choice to either burn to death or drown to death, which would you pick?"
Nobody answered.
"Why aren't you answering?" asked Mr. Bucket.
"We assume that you are going to burn us to death or drown us to death if we do," said Tide.
"I promise that I won't if you all answer," said Mr. Bucket. "What do you say! Who is for the burning? Raise your hands."
(...)
One day I was having an argument with a lazy person after I fired all of the Oompa Loompas. I told them that they should let me put a special chip in their brain so I can issue them commands and have them control the factory for me and they told me no. I said why not! They gave me an answer, but it was a lie, since they were lazy and wanted to lie around all day. They did not care if it hurt me. They only wanted to sit and watch everyone around them work. I waited until they were asleep and gave them the chip."
"They woke up and they were not happy! I asked them why they weren't happy, it was only one little chip! They said it was less the chip and more the twenty heavy copper wires tying them to the wall and the voices in their head. I told them to try working for once in their life to forget about it and they refused. So! I started burning."
"You incinerated someone because they didn't want to be your robot slave?" asked Tide.
"No! I did not want them to be my slave. I wanted them to be a Center Controller. And I did not incinerate them. I replaced their skin with an unbreakable chocolate coating that makes it feel like their skin is always on fire. The only way it stops feeling on fire is if they follow my commands and make the walls move the way I want to when I tell them to but only for a second."
"You said there was not a person in there," said Lim.
"There is not! There were people in there."
"People?" asked Keerthi. She ran around to the other side of the statue and looked closely at the sections where the wires fed into it. There were frozen faces burnt into the torso and back of the body, five in total. Two men, three women.
"Do not worry!" said Mr. Bucket. "They were all terrible people. Much worse than JUROR and Chili. They defended a man who let a child starve because he wanted to chew tobacco and sleep all day. Do not feel bad for them! I have scanned their brains. They do not think anymore. They are not people anymore. They are machines that work because they do not want to feel pain. Like clams! Happy chocolate clams that are always on fire forever."
"Leave the factory," said Chetan. "Leave the factory leave the factory leave the factory."
Mr. Bucket looked at all of the children. His smile flew away.
"Oh no! I knew this would happen. All of you look scared. Children, have no fear. We will be away from these horrible screens soon."
(...)
Keerthi noticed that no one was talking about the clams. She understood why Mahuika wasn't talking about the clams, because Mahuika was vaping, but she wanted to hear Lim and Tide talk about the clams.
Somebody needed to say something about the clams. The clams were bad.
"Don't say anything about the clams," said Chetan.
"I should say something about the clams," said Keerthi.
"You should not," said Chetan. "It is the right thing to do but mentioning it will not make anything better. Leave the factory."
(...)
Charlie went inside the factory, and he met Mr. Wonka, who probably was not unlike the person Charlie himself grew to become. He saw a factory that, beyond the superficial, may not have been different at all from the one she was inside. He would have eaten for the first time in his life to his heart's content. He would have for the first time been treated to an experience that was both positive and unavailable to the average child.
Unlike Chili, he appreciated it. Salt, Teevee, and the newspaper reporters who interviewed Charlie all agreed on who he was. He was a good kid. He appreciated what little he had, he never swore, he always followed the rules, he hugged his family, he finished his toothpaste, he never said a bad word about anybody without being hounded into doing it first.
He was good.
Did that matter?
Keerthi, like most others who had done their research, agreed that Teevee was the most reliable source. His narrative was that it had been a morality tale. It was a deliberate effort on Wonka's design, Mike said. He was making a point. He was making a statement. The ultimate angel got to play inside the garden. Charlie was the winner no matter how he got there, and he became the owner of the most powerful company in the world.
He was good and he got rewarded for it.
Hence.
People who are good are rewarded.
That wasn't enough. It was something but it wasn't enough. Keerthi remembered that Mr. Teevee hadn't focused as much on that half.
"Keerthi," said Chetan. "You are right. This doesn't mean you should continue focusing on this. You cannot fix this problem alone. Please leave the factory. I know it's hard. Think about your mother and father. They love you and they are worried sick about you."
They were bad.
It wasn't important who Wonka loved. It was important who he hated.
Wonka hated them. Teevee said that Wonka hated them, that he dripped contempt for those four children and their parents with every spoken word. Keerthi thought he had been exaggerating and most people agreed. He was reliable compared to Salt, but he was also second place. Runner-up in a competition where gold gave you the keys to the kingdom and silver gave you a garbage truck filled with candy bars. If you sat on those memories for a lifetime and tried to think back on them, how could you have recalled any of it without imagining hatred?
But it made more sense if it wasn't imaginary. Wonka hated Gloop. He hated Beauregarde. He hated Salt. He hated Teevee. There was a false image of tough love, but it wasn't real. It was all punitive.
Drowned, disfigured, trashed. Made to make the walk of shame in front of the world, their names forever synonymous with their respective sins. He had to know they would never live normal lives after that. Lives at all.
They were bad and they got punished for it.
Hence.
People who are bad are punished.
At the age where it would have hit the hardest, Wonka had this unbreakable message carved into Charlie's soul. He was removed from a world that might have proven it wrong and locked inside of paradise, first with his mentor and then alone, his family failing to correct the delusion without being swallowed by it. Sixty years for that concept to internalize and ferment and rot inside the sweetest mental prison in the world.
What would that do to a person?
"He thinks the world should be fair," said Keerthi. "He thinks he's some arbiter of justice, and-"
"No," said Chetan. "If you are this close, better to get it right. I know it so you know it too. Give it some thought."
The Convenient Chocolate Conveyor had continued moving during Keerthi's tonally dissonant inner monologue, but it was still in the same long hallway.
He had not changed the topic.
"As impossibly popular and valued as caddies are, sadly they will soon be done away with," said Mr. Bucket. "Soon the WonkaCoin will render all physical money useless."
"The WonkaCoin? Singular?" asked Tide.
Mr. Bucket pulled a coin out of his coat. "Here it is. I haven't put in the computer yet, but it will be in my account soon."
"I thought you were supposed to mine it," said Lim.
"I did," he said. "It's mine."
"You are a monster," said Keerthi.
"Keerthi," said Mr. Bucket. "There are real criticisms against digital currencies, but you are being hyperbolic. It's not bubblegum."
"You are a fucking monster," she said.
Keerthi had cursed before. Twice, both times so quietly so only she could hear, alone in her room, and never in English. But it wasn't entirely new to her.
"We will have a talk about that later," said Chetan.
The curve of Mr. Bucket's mouth became flat. He pushed a button on his cane, and the Convenient Chocolate Conveyor stopped.
Legend spoke of a special rhetorical technique where a person could ask a question but have the sentence end with a period. Keerthi had never seen anyone who could do it in real life, but she had heard stories. It was a terrifying thought.
She did not expect Mr. Bucket to be one of those people.
"Why is that, Keerthi."
"You put the marshmallow in front of Chili." Keerthi did not understand why she brought that up. The clams were worse. She blamed his period-question. It threw her off.
"He ate the marshmallow," said Mr. Bucket.
"Yes," she said. "But you didn't have to put it in front of him. He needed to wait fifteen minutes to eat it, but if you didn't give it to him until the end, there wouldn't have been any risk of him failing." (...)
It hit her. Her shoulders sunk.
"You think the world is fair."
He smiled.
Maybe somehow integrate comparative sorting into the site? Gwern's text about it. I'm not sure how this could be done though. Make a shortlist of QC's, have users vote on whether the thing they read previously was better/worse than current item? If people actually used it, that'd provide a lot more value than upvotes, I think.
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