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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
3mo 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
4mo 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
4mo ago
Or all police officers get run over and the problem solves itself?
SoulFire
a natural neural network
4mo 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
4mo ago
How absurd! By this standard every foreigner with guns is a criminal.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
5mo 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
5mo ago
Your case is that human beings will seriously malfunction without more frequent infant deaths?
SoulFire
a natural neural network
5mo 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?
SoulFire
a natural neural network
5mo ago
I believe the straw on the camel's back was when we had a comment removed over someone trying to civilly and factually explain (((parentheses))).
SoulFire
a natural neural network
6mo ago
Yeah, "Pussy, huh?" were the last words he uttered on tape. That and with the case where Buzz Aldrin punched Bart Sibrel sure reminds me not to insult anyone on their courage lest they suddenly find it. Though I'm sure any modicum of de-escalation at any point would have gone a long way for the Goys.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
6mo ago
Well, I suppose this is in line with eyewitness testimony being famously unreliable. I'd expect for video review the mind can also add/remove/compress the events in such unusual ways that it becomes a completely different story in memory.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
6mo ago
"I don't care if I'm dying, your brutally autistic son's wheelchair makes too much noise in the morning, and I'm going to report you to the HOA! Why haven't you shoveled your driveway?! You're a disgrace, no wonder your son is a retard!"
I don't recall this part of the altercation post the actual shooting starting. I assume you're talking about Jeffrey Spaide killing James and Lisa Goy.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
6mo ago
Jesus, what is this, the sexual code for robots? I always saw sex as something raw, animalistic, spontaneous. Wrestling and overpowering with even some violence if that's what she's into.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
6mo ago
This will be very reformative and beneficial.
Perhaps it would be. It seems to work for foreign policy. Tautologically if we remove contracts which are harmful to society, then society will benefit. Of course, you'd have to factor in the increase to future counter party risk evaluations. But perhaps we wouldn't be in this mess to begin with if boomers had operated under the assumption that future generations would annul any one-sided agreements that they should be robbed. And now is a good time as any to set new precedent. Surely, anything will beat continuing our civilizational death spiral in Boomertopia?
SoulFire
a natural neural network
6mo ago
People collecting pensions they were promised as part of their work agreement is not parasitism.
People who are net negatives are parasites irrespective of the method they've used to swindle the rest of society. If they have managed contracts which state they should receive more from the system than they have contributed, then these people are a drain. It makes little difference whether they then extract this tribute with sword and cutting throats or through the laws of a bullshit system of their construction. What obligation do later generations have to maintain a Ponzi scheme which they did not vote for, and in some cases was constructed before they were given the right to vote. If the elderly have unilaterally erected a contract in my behest, that I should be drained for their benefit, then what is this contract worth? Surely, tyranny by lawfare is still tyranny.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
6mo ago
And, like, what would distinguish a straight man as a bottom?
SoulFire
a natural neural network
6mo ago
bottom-straights
Ahah, could you elaborate on the characteristic of this supposed demographic, so people outside of yourself could derive meaning from this term?
SoulFire
a natural neural network
6mo ago
The TV debates are what's really boring. His interesting discussion is in psychology. What I find most fascinating are his ideas of human perception, like such relating to the orienting reflex with error detection and novelty in the environment; how our value judgements shape our cognition not only in the decision making domain but in the very way that we perceive the world; and him likening such to modern AI where bottom-up approaches have triumphed over top-down manual programming of structure into ANNs because of the frame problem and such, where AI can't even see the toy environment without integrating an unexpectedly massive amount of information. I also find his ideas about the useful information narratives and archetypes to be interesting and gets me thinking about why humans find stories so entertaining in the first place.
As for going insane, that just sounds like more gossip by detractors. He did have his run-in with benzos, which seems more like an error with the medical establishment not properly advertising the risk of physical dependency that prescription use can induce. Then he tried to detox by putting himself into a coma in Russia which was also a pretty big error, and he seemed cognitively devastated for a little while, but his slump was nothing I'd say resembled insanity.
This is complete nonsense. All you've done is follow 'objectively superior' with a list of subjective claims.
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