SoulFire
a natural neural network
Politics is the continuation of drama by other means.
Programmer and mind upload enthusiast from Finland. Trying to become a better writer.
User ID: 529
SoulFire
a natural neural network
6d ago
It may not have been something they've invented, but they're sure the one's hoisting it upon the rest of the world. I know the perfidious Albion and her consequences have been a disaster for humanity as well.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
6d ago
Well, sure if you're cooking so crudely that you don't even need to know the temperature, then there's no argument for one system one way or the other. Then would you support switching to Celsius in a context where the boiling point of water does matter? Like a lab where superheated liquid water might explosively flash into steam or if you're dealing with distillation. Even if you're, say, in Denver, it's easier to recognize and remember that 95°C is the local boiling point since it's close to 100°C.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
6d ago
Why would the AI need to fool people (and not merely the average person but accounting for potentially infinite angles of error!) into believing an image was real?
Well, I believe even a midwit would eventually telltale signs of whether an image is synthetic or not, just they would learn slower.
The whole point of fiction is that it isn't true, it's more interesting than reality.
Interesting perspective on fiction, but not one I necessarily share. I find fiction interesting in how it speaks on reality, history, human instinct, and the thoughts and feelings of the writer. I guess I'm just skeptical that AI would ever reach the stage of creating anything quite so interesting, rather than the generic slop that it currently produces. At the current rate, it seems like humans and animals will continue to be more adaptive and interesting.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
6d ago
These units are the worst thing you Yankees have done since dumping loads of valuable tea into the sea. I trust you Ameribarbarians will see the light of reason one day and join the civilized world!
SoulFire
a natural neural network
6d ago
It is objectively true that the range of double and single digit numbers is more fully used by F for day to day use.
That would depend on your day to day, wouldn't it? 0°F is a random freezing temperature while 100°F would make a really cold sauna. 0°C is a much starker boundary where the outside world begins to transform, turning either to snow and ice or into slush and water. A day in frost is very different from a day in the positives. If the temperatures dip below 0°C your crops will die. And I could just as well say that Fahrenheit wastes an extra digit into the entire 38°C to 99°C range.
The one advantage of C, that it benchmarks nicely to water, is not really something you need to think about, and doesn’t even hold true for people living at altitude.
I don't know anyone quite so privileged that they don't need to think about water. I personally don't live on a mountain top and find it neat to know what the temperature of something is from the physical phenomena occurring in its water content without having to memorize the magic numbers 32 and 212.
I’m an American who goes out of his way to buy metric tools. I’m a big metric fan. Temperature is the one area were it’s just worse.
Well, I'm glad you can see reason somewhere!
SoulFire
a natural neural network
6d ago
You could solve the equation from either side and get the same result. Presumably, if you remove immigrants from the equation, then either we'll have highly-paid janitors or no janitors at all. And if this is an unworkable situation, then supply of underpaid servants, sufficiently desperate for work will be increased by political means, perhaps by cutting from various social safety nets, encouraging wealth inequality to foster an indigenous servant class. We'll go back to a time where maids and butlers were feasibly affordable.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
6d ago
Japan does not join in.
Given PM of Japan Sanae Takaichi's posturing, I wouldn't incorporate this as a load-bearing assumption on any predictive scenario.
I don't think the Chinese would deny Europe access to the fabs, if they survive, unless we give them a reason.
My understanding was that US strategy was to ensure that even in the worst case the fabs get destroyed rather than conquered as is. But that could be unofficial policy or just speculation on the Motte.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
6d ago
This is complete nonsense. All you've done is follow 'objectively superior' with a list of subjective claims.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
6d ago
Unless there's a giant paradigm shift to some breakthrough outside of LLMs, I think you'll eke out an edge over all. With diminishing returns, the investment per gain appears to grow exponentially, and augmentations like reasoning models don't seem to have a proper pathway back into the training process, which I believe is still just the broad contents of the Internet and literature.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
6d ago
I could see it being in European interest to defend freedom and democracy from principle, then of course semiconductor fabrication. Of course, not that Europe has much in terms of naval assets to provide a credible contribution to Taiwanese defense.
I can't really understand how you foresee a US loss in Taiwan. Funnily, I just received a 5-year RemindMe from the old /r/TheMotte, predicting Taiwanese reunification at 80%. I feel like people are fundamentally too bearish on Taiwan. Reflecting on Ukraine, warfare seems to be broadly in favor of the defender, where expensive equipment of the invader is prone to be demolished with relatively cheap defending weapons. Additionally, I believe the US navy would still likely stomp the Chinese navy before it even came to an asymmetrical defense.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
6d ago
This is contingent that AI can improve that much far beyond a natural neural network. There may still be certain domains (or perhaps most domains) where animal intelligence proves more adaptable than machines, perhaps because of some inherent physical computational limits, similar to how simulating reality is that much more expensive just in terms of energy cost and atoms to atoms versus just running experiments in reality. Even if AI could reach human parity in generating art, I doubt it could create fully-accurate photorealistic images without uncanny artifacts from some perspective.
With human parity in image perception, they could probably generate an image that would fool the average human, but considering humans perceive and focus on different details and patterns from the same reality, that would leave potentially infinite angles of error. And considering the adaptability of human intelligence, if AI keeps making errors from the same angle, it'll eventually form a pattern that people will distinguish. AI would not only have human-level intelligence (which it does not, and even human's have blind spots), but it would have to be so intelligent that it could preemptively correct for any human-detectable flaw before being deployed.
I remain skeptical of the Muskian view of an AI-generated virtual future where we would replace all input with AI output. I'd hypothesize that limits in the laws of physics would mean there would always be plenty of glitches in the Matrix, and it would be more akin to uploading yourself to the simple world of a video game, which would have glaring deficits and would be unsatisfying as an indefinite permanent dwelling.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
6d ago
We're increasingly living in a version of the Matrix but with AI on the Internet. You're trying to hand red pills to those blissfully living in the Dead Internet. I sense we're increasingly going to be divided into those who can instantly recognize AI slop and normies who can't tell the signs, accusing authentic content of being AI and passing AI content as genuine. I think this is going to be IQ and age-loaded similar to computer literacy. If you're smart, you can clock AI-generated images from just the uncanny shading, thumbnails from the ridiculous exaggerated expressions (and also the distorted lighting), and you could probably distinguish the text from the vague genericness even without the em-dashes. If a video is from a channel with a generic two-noun name, and has those word highlighting, auto-generated subtitles, then I can suspect it's AI slop and not click on it.
Young people probably have an advantage in brain nubility and increased exposure to a lot of online content in general to recognize patterns. Even dumber people will probably learn certain signs but just slower. For boomers, however, AI slop is just another item in the list of entities on the Internet trying to deceive them, appended to the list after deceptive advertisement and scam emails. There's also an effect similar to Gell-Mann Amnesia, where people will recognize output in their own domain of expertise as vapid, generic fluff, even if they don't recognize it as AI-generated, but outside their domain, they won't instantly see just how uninsightful the output really is.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
7d ago
For whatever reason only the left has the will.
Well, I'd imagine that the small government side of things would be less inclined to do big things while wielding the government
SoulFire
a natural neural network
7d ago
I don't see how a CCP invasion of Taiwan wouldn't be a defensive war. It wouldn't be a defense of US territory as an ally, but it would be a defensive war in the same way Ukraine is a defensive war, where the odds will favor the defender rather than the invader the longer the war prolongs, since they'll be fighting a fortified island with risk of having their boats and aircraft blown up by relatively cheap sea drones and anti-air, and even if they make it onto land, they'll be sending meatwaves through mountains and into cities.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
7d ago
I hope you don't leave, Dase! I've always found your posts unique and kept track of you since the Reddit days. Someone has to counter the American front and post interesting posts about geopolitics and such. I've increasingly skimmed past intra-US politics and as a European, with Trump's anti-EU turn, I've felt quite an estrangement with the American Right. Where before I had felt a sense of oneness, cheering on Trump 2 and Elon Twitter takeover, no longer having to feel like a persecuted minority, finally being able to speak my mind on the Internet.
I've also been deeply interested in DeepSeek after R1 published around last January. It tends to give me better results than Grok does when I run my questions through both chat bots, and not go unavailable due to high load like Grok sometimes does. I'm not quite as bullish on China as you appear to be, but I'm sure starting to root for them to do something while our US-led economy appears to bungle everything up, with DRAM and GPUs becoming unavailable to consumers, where it seems only Chinese manufacturing can save us from this situation where it seems that computation is going to be exclusively limited for corporations. I have faith in Western free market economies outcompeting the Chinese command economy with abundant malinvestments, like manufacturing a bunch of electric cars that now they have to find somewhere to dump to, or imposing such a strict trade surplus that you have to give countries loans to buy your goods, which it's dubious if they can ultimately repay.
My faith in Western society is kind of crumbling, though. Or more precisely our collective economies. With a k-shaped economy for haves and have-nots, we appear to have forgotten the part about the markets where we were supposed to produce goods for and employ each other? We have home ownership unavailable for new families as boomers have decided to make construction of new housing effectively illegal. Here in Finland we've managed an atrocious unemployment rate of 10,6% and 20,5%, and if you do manage to land a job, you get to enjoy the wonders of having 25% of your wage go to taxes and another 25% to fund Boomers' pensions in a giant Ponzi scheme! The left here is shrieking, blaming the right-wing government, while I think rising unemployment is a current global phenomenon. Somehow, the Western investment seems to have become oriented full-tilt into AI, apparently replacing both consumers and workers before any sign of the fabled productivity gains or even a profitable product in sight.
It makes me regret getting so excited about AI or even getting educated in CS, where I appeared to go from a hot commodity to unemployable in an instant.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
24d ago
Duty to retreat or duty not to deliberately place yourself in front of a vehicle to cause a confrontation. I don't think the principle to stand your ground automatically means you get to aggressively claim increasing land because once you have it, you can't be forced to retreat.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
24d ago
Or all police officers get run over and the problem solves itself?
SoulFire
a natural neural network
27d ago
Well, I guess that's kind of different. It still seems kind of extra, and I imagine it's not like Maduro himself was personally carrying a machine gun.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
27d ago
How absurd! By this standard every foreigner with guns is a criminal.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
2mo ago
Isn't that what video games and entrepreneurship are for? Certainly, modern society is not very Darwinian with associated externalities in forms of ugliness and degeneration, but I'm sure that people have found plenty of first-world struggles to learn and adapt around.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
2mo ago
Your case is that human beings will seriously malfunction without more frequent infant deaths?
SoulFire
a natural neural network
2mo ago
Ukrainian drone forces commander claiming Russians were using several times more last year.
I can't find anything on this, and I severely doubt the Ukrainians would state this.
very gamified Ukrainian drone ecosystem one isn't up for scaling sufficiently.
The contents of the article don't corroborate the claim made in the caption of the hyperlink. Do you have any evidence to support the claim that Russians had several times more drones in 2024 or that the Russian drone program is "overwhelming" or that anyone on Ukraine's side actually claimed this?
I think your comment ended up as a reply to something completely different.
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