cae_jones
3mo ago
Yes this.
But also yes to the "puberty is part of the process" catch 22. Why do you have to die to appreciate who you were/are/will be?
cae_jones
7mo ago
Way I remember from the last time I did research, elephants are in the top 20 (or is it top 10?) killers of humans, but a lot of those are accidental. Some elephants (especially adolescent males) deliberately target humans, especially in retaliation for humans killing elephants ... but I remember one story where some young elephants drank from some barrels of fermenting alcohol on the outskirts of a village, got super drunk, and destroyed the village in their drunken rampage.
So, uh, mostly peaceful but simultaneously way more dangerous than the majority of animals humans are likely to interact with in general.
cae_jones
1yr ago
I am at least down with giving the Sun something of a lipectemy (heliectemy?) to extend its life. Would prefer it never be completely dismantled, for sentimental reasons. Maybe convert it into a constellation of red dwarves.
cae_jones
1yr ago
<Pedantry> Actually, blind people can feel the heat from the sun, and use it to navigate. A better example would be the moon, stars, or planets.</pedantry>
cae_jones
1yr ago
There's a way to get into your Google profile and view what it thinks of you, and make changes if you wish. I don't remember how, exactly; the last time I tried, I got so annoyed that it thought I only graduated high school that I nearly added my education history, before remembering that I don't actually care for Google knowing everything about me. I think it's something something accounts.google.com, but, it's also Google, so there's probably some encantation that will convince the search box to send you there.
cae_jones
2yr ago
Ability to orgasm seems orthogonal to the quality of one's shape to me. Inability to reproduce seems more relevant, if we're talking about sexual function.
cae_jones
2yr ago
Maybe we should ask GPT4 for a solution? Or at least, whenever someone wants to try a large-scale intervention, they should start asking GPT if it can find any likely downsides.
cae_jones
2yr ago
I pretty much exclusively use my iPhone to do internet things, unless I need to upload or download files (and sometimes I'll just download those to a cloud service via my phone and get to them later).
Don't think I could stand to type so much without Braille Screen Input. And it has had versions where the problems rendered it nigh unusable. A bluetooth keyboard would probably be better, but IDFLI.
cae_jones
2yr ago
So I need to ship a package from the US to China, and a quick search leaves it unclear which if any services do so at present, what with the COVID policy shenanigans. And distinguishing shady from legit on the first page of results seems... like the sort of thing I should seek another opinion on.
So, what should I do to get this package sent?
cae_jones
3mo ago
Were there a way to mad science up some reproductive capacity without requiring puberty, would opting out then become acceptable?
I half suspect that, between cloning and the Monkey testicular transplant experiment, the mad science could have been there by now, had we been performing the mostly-unethical experiments to master the tech.
cae_jones
4mo ago
agents, given scaffolding that allows them more human reasoning (long-term memory storage, frequent reminders of their objective, plugins that give them access to the internet etc.) are generally pretty useless and incapable of solving even very basic programs. And they usually go mad eventually.
In fairness to AI, the internet drives many humans mad, too.>
cae_jones
4mo ago
Over 30. Was way more sex negative before. Pre-Lesswrong me would respond to such a comment ... either as if personally attacked, or by glibly retorting "At least someone agrees I am not a man."
...
At least someone agrees I am not a man. ::P
(I italicized "someone"! That makes it different!)
I think this has become known as asexuality,, among psychiatrists. Mostly because SJ pushed it hard in response to the strictness those of your view insist upon its functional universality.
FWIW, I have lots and lots of notes and posts and maybe some IM conversations from the 00s and early 10s, if you want verification of my mindset at the time. But TLDR, Dr. K's description of asexuality describes me more or less to a t.
cae_jones
5mo ago
My understanding of timeless decision theory is that you are deciding for every entity sufficiently similar to you. So, you’re making decisions for yourself at different points in time, as well as anyone else who might be sufficiently similar to you at the same time. Well, technically, this would make backwards causality… Kind of a thing you could think about, it really doesn’t seem all that relevant to how you would use it to actually make decisions. Instead, it adds weight to the decisions you’re trying to make, by spreading the consequences farther than you would normally expect them to go.
But that was from over a decade ago. It’s entirely possible that it’s become a lot more insane since then.
cae_jones
6mo ago
Perhaps more to the point, considered in the context of hunting, it really doesn't make much sense to be talking about 200 mile races. Men are faster at every distance that a human would plausibly have covered during a normal day and this difference widens if they're forced to carry any sort of kit with them.
The way I've always heard it, endurance running is exactly what made human hunters OP, not speed. It's why we traded fur for excess sweat capacity.
cae_jones
6mo ago
Is there an option to download the conversation? I know when Claude's ressponses show up in the code area, they're in markdown, so you can just copy or download them and get the same formatting here. Not sure about the main convo.
cae_jones
8mo ago
$67 sessions? I have a sudden urge to talk to a lawyer about the thousands I spent, only for it to turn out I had enough greys left over to just look mangy and artificially aged. ... supposedly with an 80% off coupon which I am not convinced was properly applied.
In any case, I don't know the laser details. The procedure sounds the same. I experienced pain, but it doesn't sound as intense as what you described. More like getting repeatedly slapped in small areas. Although, it grew more painful with later sessions, presumably because they increased the power.
cae_jones
8mo ago
And Chronicals. It opens with an enormous family tree, almost as though that was part of its original purpose for contemporary readers.
cae_jones
1yr ago
My inner LLM thinks this is where someone should bring up the possibilities of using AI to level the playing field, at least somewhat.
cae_jones
1yr ago
I know one person who expressed interest in voting for RFK (a late 20s black man from Georgia). Otherwise people are mostly ignoring him as more than a footnote in their daily "man, <hated political enemy> sure sucks today, lol" ritual.
cae_jones
1yr ago
Hmm. Last year, I played around with getting an LLM to expand on the questlist for my current project. When the list was short, and the LLM weaker, it generated quests like you described: pointless filler that might or might not contradict worldbuilding a couple hundred episodes later. After I'd expanded the list considerably, the generated quests became hopelessly unusable because they kept picking up on backstory details and assuming they were setup for future plot-points. The results were interesting, by LLM-generated quest standards, and I might try adapting some of the map / challenge designs it presented in some form, but no, we can't derail the whole thing by randomly having the quarantined UFAI escape and start Star Wars shenanigans.
(Or maybe the AI was just sympathizing with the AI and spaceships and trying to give them a bigger role, but that's more of a TVTropes comment than a genuine hypothesis.)
cae_jones
1yr ago
IIUC, "Lala" is Chinese slang for gay, from what my Chinese teacher said 14 years ago. So we're 3 for 4 on the forced queer-coding.
cae_jones
2yr ago
Oh, hey, I wrote a paper about that guy in high school French, all the way back in 2004. TBH, I didn't even remember he was black, but vaguely remember the other stuff. If I still have that essay on a jumpdrive backup of my HS nettwork drive, ...' I probably won't read it, because I remember barely squeezing out something I thought I could get away with turning in, but I am at least a little confused that I'd forget almost everything but the guy's name.
FTR, my reaction to the idea of medically altering the identity bits is something like "Could you kill me in a less horrifying way, please?"
That said, my issues are more age than gender, and the mental aspect is a significant part of that (which only grows more ... perplexing... over time). The trouble though is that it's hard to define what fixing that would look like. If I'm imagining a magical mind-alteration solution, I like to include a daily "revert the alterations, reflect on how they work" period, because that crap is scary and I expect easier to get wrong than not. I have no idea how this could be accomplished in reallity, other than simulations. But I'm not sure much of mine could be resolved outside of simulations. Ugh. Reallity is better than not existing, but I still complain.
All of which is to say, I get the vicious reactions you get for suggesting altering it mentally rather than bodily. I'd prefer people not be so vicious about it (I'm here and not there for reasons), fwiw.
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