ace
4mo ago
The following is a comment about US media, not about the war in Gaza.
Whenever the mainstream US news covers the humanitarian disaster in Gaza (and the suffering is absolutely horrendous), the underlying subtext I get is "Israel should stop assaulting Gaza". But there's another path that would also end the humanitarian disaster, and that's the unconditional surrender of Hamas.
I'm not shocked that Hamas doesn't surrender, but I am shocked that the option is never even mentioned in passing by the talking heads. Do they not think of it? Is it too far outside the bounds of normal discourse? If this were any other military conflict in all of history, it would be considered decided by now, and Gazans would be suing for peace.
ace
6mo ago
I think you're wildly misinformed and ignorant.
You need to work on yourself until you're attractive to women. Get into a long-term committed, monogamous relationship with a woman who can stand being in the same room as you. Your mindset will improve.
Separately, I don't say this to many people, but you would benefit from advice from the pickup artist community. There's a lot to be said against that community, but the one thing PUAs get massively, overwhelmingly right is internal-vs-external locus of control. In the same sense that "the customer is always right", women are right about their preferences, and if you don't meet that standard, that's a you-problem, not a them-problem, or a society-problem. Those communities will have better, specific advice for your circumstances. This forum is not equipped to help you.
I come here for intellectual discussion, not [gestures wildly at all your writing] whatever self-indulgent pity party this is.
I'm sorry: that joke was in bad taste. I don't want you to die. But in all seriousness your odds are less than 100%. People have died doing this. Is that the point of your hock?
I think you're just rationalizing reasons to run away. The real Hock is trying to meet women and getting turned down seemingly-endlessly. It's torture, and I can understand why you'd flinch away from that prospect to construct elaborate fantasies that involve becoming a wilderness mountain man.
But please work on yourself. Find some resources for how to attract women. And please don't post about here until you've found yourself a good woman.
ace
5mo ago
mails everyone a ballot every election
I hate to beat a dead horse about this after 2020, but does vote coercion or payment worry you at all? It worries me. Having a secret ballot is one of the last bulwarks against the mob (or your spouse). It's better if mail-in ballots are rare, with individually justified (and verified) reasons.
ace
5mo ago
The reason for the choice of pronoun is obvious: That's the pronoun Sarah would want us to use. If you have a point to make, speak it plainly rather than asking stupid rhetorical questions.
Should you use the pronoun Sarah wants you to use or the pronoun for the gender you think Sarah is? If Sarah isn't in the conversation, does Sarah's preference even matter? Is there a "correct" language? Or is a word's correctness judged only on whether it facilitates a common understanding between speaker and listener? You obviously understood who all those "she"s and "her"s referred to, but would "he" and "his" have been a marginally easier read for you and other Motte readers?
I honestly don't know anymore.
ace
6mo ago
What's in it for Hamas? Israel's response is totally predictable. It's about to be a really rough time to be a Gazan. Hamas leadership must have thought through what happens the week after their attack .... right? I'm genuinely curious what their calculus is/was.
ace
5mo ago
keep out of Palestinian territory.
This is disconnected from reality. Americans can fuck off and run half a world away. But Palestinian territory equals all of Israel, according to the Palestinians. And the various ne'erdowells in Gaza were regularly lobbing missiles, no matter the situation with the Israel settlers in the margins of the West Bank. Their issue is the existence of the state of Israel, not some rounding-error settlements. And Israel isn't going anywhere.
A better editor would have helped, yes, but IMO the critical flaw in the Prequels was that George Lucas originally intended for the Big Bad Guy to be Darth Jar Jar Binks. The theory is that he chickened out when he saw the overwhelmingly bad fan reaction to the character in The Phantom Menace. But ironically the only thing that would have redeemed the character and the whole trilogy is if this bumbling idiot was just a Kaiser Soze-esque mask for Palpatine's master. Cowardly scrapping that left Episode II without a memorable villain.
For those who haven't seen it already: https://old.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/3qvj6w/theory_jar_jar_binks_was_a_trained_force_user/
ace
4mo ago
More than that, it's aligned interests. The places I've lived where I was renting and planning on only living there a few years, you better believe I didn't give two shits about the future of the place. Owning a home really changes the incentive structure.
I think people forget that democracy is a technology that improves upon what came previously -- violence. Instead of fighting and some dying, we can just count the fighters on each side and declare a probable winner without bloodshed. If the counting is a proxy for potential fighting power, whom should be counted? Men (because men do almost all the fighting) and landowners (because non-landowners have no incentive to stay and fight). Women's suffrage was a turning point in the republic, because it turns out you can just vote yourself other people's wealth.
ace
1yr ago
But doesn't that money have to be spent at some point in order for the owner to derive benefit? It's taxed now or later. In the long run, it should be a wash.
ChatGPT's words are not even close to equivalent to a human's words. You have peek under the hood a little bit to understand why. ChatGPT is a prediction engine that predicts the next word in a sequence (as would be typical in its training corpus), and then applies that capability over and over again. ChatGPT has zero capability to abstract and apply its reasoning to its own thought process. ChatGPT can't wait and think about a question for a while before it starts answering.
The LLMs will continue to get better as researchers throw more parameters at the problem, but this avenue is ultimately a dead end for pursing general intelligence. ChatGPT is a neat parlor trick, but it can only make impressive-looking tech demos so long as the context is kept very narrow. Play around with it a little, and the cracks start to show.
All this is not to detract from your main thesis. Artificial general intelligence is still coming for lots of jobs at some unknown point in the future, but don't confuse ChatGPT with the herald of the jobs-apocalypse.
ace
1yr ago
Joe Rogan is no longer the biggest creator in podcasting. He stopped making podcasts 2 years ago.
ace
10mo ago
I get that part. Are you advocating we follow his example? Please speak plainly here.
ace
10mo ago
The obvious point is that you only notice the non-passing transwomen, so of course you can identify 100% of the non-passing transwomen whom you correctly identified as being transwomen.
I 100% agree that the posted photos of transwomen on reddit rely heavily on makeup, clothing, lighting, and camera angles. And even then, most aren't that great. However, it's my understanding that people who transition before puberty are in much better shape.
ace
1yr ago
With 3M phasing out production of PFAS (Per- and Poly-fluoroalkyl Substances) in the news, I'm reading a flurry of news about how these substances are found in human blood, break down slowly--if at all, and are linked to cancer, hormone disregulation, and immune disorders.
My question is: is this a health threat I should be worried about to the point that I should be replacing my Teflon cooking pans?
AEO was just a symptom of the underlying cause: advertising. Every unpopular thing reddit did, from the site redesign, to pushing people to the app as hard as they could, to sanitizing with AEO was done in the service of making vanilla content they can use to sell eyeballs to advertisers. Advertising corrupts everything it touches.
ace
10mo ago
I think you're way off base in the motives you impute to the lawn-lovers. It's not the lawn itself, or the conspicuous consumption it implies -- it's not being forced to live literally and figuratively on top of other people like the teeming masses of humanity in other countries. I've lived like that in the past. It's oppressive and not the way humans were meant to live. You need to have some distance from other people.
ace
10mo ago
You seem inordinately preoccupied with moral questions. That's your biggest hangup. They don't have objective answers without fixing a moral framework. And even then, well-informed people mostly disagree.
ace
1yr ago
Yea, it's definitely been a crazy couple of months.
We now have open source LLMs running on home computers approaching parity with the big corporate datacenter AIs.
Sort of. I've been playing around a with the publicly available LLMs, including the largest one, the 65 billion-parameter Llama model from Meta, and I find it's somewhere around the quality of GPT-3, nowhere near the quality of GPT-4. I'm also running it quantized to 4 bits on my CPU rather than on my GPU, so it's dogshit slow -- a word every ~2 seconds. Just enough to slake my curiosity. To run it at a conversational speed, you need a GPU with 40GB of VRAM, so you're probably looking at dropping $4,500 minimum on just the GPU, and maybe closer to $15,000 -- not exactly available to the masses. Maybe in 4 years. Moore's law is still kicking on the GPU side.
I'm not that impressed with any of the LLMs. I know it's a controversial take around here, but I don't think they're doing any reasoning at all. The reasoning is in the humans who wrote their training data, and the LLMs are doing a great job of predicting the text. You'll see it for yourself if you just play around with one enough until you see it screw up in ways that demonstrate it has no idea what it's talking about. Adding parameters and training data helps push back the boundaries of what it can do, but the fundamental issue remains. The lights are on, but nobody's home. There need to be more algorithmic insights before we get AGI.
I however think Big Yud is right in that eventually we will get to AGI, and unless we're extraordinarily conscientious, it'll kill us all. His arguments aren't rigorous to the point of mathematical certainty, but it seems like that's the default path unless there's a big as-of-yet-unpredicted happening intervenes. The future is full of such things, of course. But I don't share anybody's concern about LLMs or transformers. If any thing, all the recent hype about LLMs' shockingly good performance improves humanity's odds. But we're actually going to need world-wide agreements and to risk shedding blood and bombing defectors' data centers if we want humanity to survive our first contact with an alien species.
I just got done listening to Eliezer Yudkowski on EconTalk (https://www.econtalk.org/eliezer-yudkowsky-on-the-dangers-of-ai/).
I say this as someone who's mostly convinced of Big Yud's doomerism: Good lord, what a train wreck of a conversation. I'll save you the bother of listening to it -- Russ Roberts starts by asking a fairly softball question of (paraphrasing) "Why do you think the AIs will kill all of humanity?" And Yudkowski responds by asking Roberts "Explain why you think they won't, and I'll poke your argument until it falls apart." Russ didn't really give strong arguments, and the rest of the interview repeated this pattern a couple times. THIS IS NOT THE WAY HUMANS HAVE CONVERSATIONS! Your goal was not logically demolish Russ Roberts' faulty thinking, but to use Roberts as a sounding board to get your ideas to his huge audience, and you completely failed. Roberts wasn't convinced by the end, and I'm sure EY came off as a crank to anyone who was new to him.
I hope EY lurks here, or maybe someone close to him does. Here's my advice: if you want to convince people who are not already steeped in your philosophy you need to have a short explanation of your thesis that you can rattle off in about 5 minutes that doesn't use any jargon the median congresscritter doesn't already know. You should workshop it on people who don't know who you are, don't know any math or computer programming and who haven't read the Sequences, and when the next podcast host asks you why AIs will kill us all, you should be able to give a tight, logical-ish argument that gets the conversation going in a way that an audience can find interesting. 5 minutes can't cover everything so different people will poke and prod your argument in various ways, and that's when you fill in the gaps and poke holes in their thinking, something you did to great effect with Dwarkesh Patel (https://youtube.com/watch?v=41SUp-TRVlg&pp=ygUJeXVka293c2tp). That was a much better interview, mostly because Patel came in with much more knowledge and asked much better questions. I know you're probably tired of going over the same points ad nauseam, but every host will have audience members who've never heard of you or your jargon, and you have about 5 minutes to hold their interest or they'll press "next".
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