celluloid_dream
No bio...
User ID: 758
celluloid_dream
1d ago
well,
JOHN DUTTON (CONT’D) When you look at that calf, what do you see?
LEE A life I gotta feed and defend until it grows up and feeds me.
After an eternity, John Dutton nods.
JOHN DUTTON That’s what a cowboy should see. But a cattleman sees a 293 dollar investment worth 1100 dollars in seven months. Whether it feeds anyone or not.
-Yellowstone, S01E01 - "Daybreak"
Whether you look at the US population through the eyes of a cowboy (value of statistical life?) or a cattleman (lifetime earnings?), a US citizen is probably the state's most valuable asset. Meanwhile, US citizenship is, for the majority of the population, that person's most valuable asset.
Both sides should want a fast, verifiable way to prove citizenship, and yet it's easier to identify cattle than people. Why? It just seems obvious that the state would want to prove that its elections are being voted on by citizens, and it seems obvious that the citizens should want to prove validity when they vote.
celluloid_dream
4d ago
Maybe your second language is stuck in 'the virgin internal voice', and only your native tongue escapes to 'the chad cerebration'.
I like to think both have their place, and it is advantageous to be able to swap between them. Internal monologue writes better prose regardless, whether that is highbrow literary or lowbrow pulp. It reads better too, in my opinion. It's slower, but you get to chew on all the linguistic quirks of a writer's language, as if you were having a conversation with them.
And I would disagree that this writing completely fails that test.
Take the last sentence: "For inclusion is not a policy but a fundamental law, as inviolable as gravity, as essential as breath".
I'd say that's a good sentence, and its main flaw is that the meaning is nonsensical. Even being charitable to DEI initiatives, inclusion is not much like a fundamental law at all. Indeed, the whole point of diversity statements is to try and get people to value inclusion. A fundamental law exists whether you value it or not. "Diversity" would fit the meaning better, but not the rhythm. Possibly why it chose "inclusion" there instead.
But, and I'll grant this is subjective, the sentence sounds good to my ear. "as inviolable as gravity, as essential as breath." Takes it from the cosmic/scientific to the personal/human, from five syllables, to three, to one, like a plane touching down, or a single final note of a song.
celluloid_dream
4d ago
That's true. The AI snippet also doesn't vary the sentence length much. Real McCarthy does, and with intention and purpose. "War endures." Is deliberately short.
celluloid_dream
5d ago
illusion of consensus?
I don't know. This is the same generation that thinks "getting ratioed" is a sign one has lost an argument.
celluloid_dream
5d ago
I actually do prefer debating LLMs at the moment, and they're usually my first port of call if I want to work through an issue.
On the internet, if I go through the effort of posting something, there's a high likelihood it just gets ignored, downvoted with no counterargument, sneered at, tagged with thumbs down emoji or whatever. This is feedback, of a type, but I can't do much with it, and it doesn't help.
Meanwhile, I can go to the LLM and be like: "argue with me in a way that is maximally convincing to someone like me", and they will actually argue in good faith. They're sycophantic, of course, but they'll happily take the other side of an argument, and you can misrepresent your actual opinion to double check.
There's also the convenience factor, and not imposing on anyone else's time. Chess bots are nice for the same reason.
celluloid_dream
5d ago
and also, it wasn't comparing like with like.
Over a year ago I had one of the Claudes do a short diversity statement in the style of McCarthy. It wrote:
"The universe brooks no false hierarchies, no arbitrary bounds set upon the human spirit. What thrives in one soul may wither in another, and the wisdom that blooms in difference is beyond price. Even now there walk among us those whose voices have been stilled by custom or by fear, their gifts locked away like water in desert rock. Yet they too are participants in this vast processional, this pageant of minds and hearts that defies all categorization, all neat orderings that men might devise. For inclusion is not a policy but a fundamental law, as inviolable as gravity, as essential as breath".
Now, there are a few things not quite right about it, but that does not ring of AI slop at all to my ear. I'd like to think I could tell the difference between real McCarthy and that, but I'd have to think about it.
E.g. A writer capable of crafting sentences that good would would not carelessly mix their metaphors. "blooms", "desert rock" followed by "vast processional", "pageant".
celluloid_dream
6d ago
Yeah. I had a similar evaluation. Expected Carney to be a more competent leader, which counts for a lot, though I still could not vote Liberal that election. After breaking the country so badly with the immigration & housing mess across a decade, just couldn't endorse another term for their government.
I will say that Poilievre used to do more messaging about economics, inflation, housing, etc. trying to show his work. At a certain point, he stopped doing that and pivoted to more attack ads and three word slogans. Worse in my opinion, but it probably polled better.
celluloid_dream
6d ago
Something has always felt off about that.
I'll grant it's true now. I don't know that it always was. There was a time where he seemed like the most popular Conservative leader in living memory. He was genuinely getting people out to rallies, and not even during election season. His campaign doubled party membership in under a year.
And even then, the media was running the story "Pierre is unlikeable and unpopular". I was like "are we watching the same movie?". Doubted it was true at the time. Suspected they memed it into existence, but it stuck.
He's been saying (with energy!) the things young people have been grumbling about for years, especially re: housing, economy, etc. A coworker was ranting about politics to me basically complaining about the fact that she'll never buy a home, and practically repeating lines from Pierre's youtube playbook. I asked her what she thought of Poilievre. "don't like him". "oh? why?". "dunno. just don't"
I think it's because he's a nerd. The general public hates a nerd. Even though he ditched the glasses, hit the gym, and changed his messaging to 3-word populism, people can tell he's still a nerd. He has debate club energy, and the fact that he is right and "wins" the debate doesn't help him.
celluloid_dream
8d ago
The star system is broken, and nothing can fix it.
For one thing, no one can agree what the scale even means in the first place. Reviewers will write "Wonderful, quaint little burger truck by the beach. Best I've ever had. 2/5 stars", because they think there's some objective restaurant ranking ranging from broken vending machine to Michelin, and a particularly good burger truck sits at ~2/5 on that scale, so it gets a glowing review and 2 stars. I think this derives from hotel ratings, where there was a defined meaning for what each star meant.
Do restaurants work like hotels? no idea. Personally, I'm inclined to rate things by what they're trying to do, so a perfect food truck gets 5 stars, and a slightly flawed upscale place gets 4. But then, do prices matter? If the burger truck has great food, but overpriced, to they get docked stars? Is the rating scale linear or logarithmic?
And then there's the 5 star/1 star problem. Everyone knows the average rating is important, so they rate to affect the average. If you like the place, you want to give them as much of an advantage on the algorithm as you can, whether they bribed you for that rating or not. You are being nice by leaving a 5 star review. Meanwhile, haters give a mean-spirited 1 star no matter what the actual quality because it's going to hurt the place more that way.
celluloid_dream
12d ago
Michael Falk, Autistic Reporter was a good bit.
celluloid_dream
12d ago
confusing and unsettling. All your ships are miles away from each other, and you don't see the enemy basically at all, unless you are a bomber pilot.
Even for them. I remember playing a flight sim in the Pacific Theater back in the day (CFS2, I think?) and being struck by how little you'd be sure of if you didn't have the minimap and unit text helping you out. Here's a representative video.
The enemy is just a smattering of specks on the horizon. At that distance, you probably can't even make out what they are. Could be friendlies. Could be unprotected bombers. Could be a fighter patrol. You'd be figuring that out in real time with a lot of radio back and forth. Hence Spotter Cards to train recognition.
And once the action kicks off, it'd just get even more chaotic.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
strange to see it framed as 'liminal horror' because i have always felt weirdly comforted by such spaces.
could be downstream of mild misanthropy, or perhaps a childhood+adolescence of being allowed to explore freely among such spaces: hallways, tunnels, theatre backrooms, rooftops, etc. the video game 'myst' also comes to mind.
celluloid_dream
2mo ago
I'm Starting To Worry About This Black Box Of Doom by Jason Pargin, after it got mentioned on ACX. This was just a delightfully fun book. I read the entire thing in one go on a flight. Would that every novel could strike the same balance of lighthearted adventure and philosophical dialogue. It gets pretty carried away by the end, but still good.
HMS Surprise by Patrick O'Brian (Aubrey-Maturin #3). I was all set to deride this as merely being a bunch of things that happen in sequence, but on reflection, there is a real tragic arc through it (for one character, at least), and a running theme of futility.
Not a problem. It's just mildly annoying sometimes.
The difference between topics of material fact and those of a spiritual bent is that the former are comprehensible to anyone, and the latter only make sense if you have already bought in to a specific belief system. You can discuss geopolitics or tech without anyone having to accept contested metaphysics. The annoyance comes from moving the discussion to a place where not everyone can play.
The term "hugbox" is probably not fair. It's more like the accumulated weight of all the Christian-posting starts to make the place feel kind of Christian by default.
celluloid_dream
3mo ago
try to assert the tenets of Christianity as literally true in a debate
It's not so much that people do this (although it does happen). More often they proceed with a discussion as if the tenets of Christianity are literally true, and at that point, it would be rude to question them, because they're trying to talk about kenosis or apokatastasis or whatever and not have an edgy 2000s atheism debate.
celluloid_dream
3mo ago
Are you seriously asking? Yes, it does come off as a bit of a Christian hugbox at times.
Many posters here, yourself included (yourself especially?), take ample opportunity to mention that they are Christian, and often use the forum to discuss Christian topics and Christian theology as if it would be uncontroversial.
It's not so frequent that I can quickly dig up an example, but I've noticed it and been annoyed by it before. It's innocent enough - one person sees the other mention their faith, and takes that as license to proceed in a discussion where the baseline axioms of Christianity are assumed. I hope you can appreciate that an atheist watching a thread devolve into bible study would be miffed.
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
As a Canadian former customer service worker who has said that exact line, here's what's going on:
When you work one of those jobs, the set of polite greetings and goodbyes all reach semantic satiation. You've said "Have a nice day" a thousand times across a hundred shifts. The words are no longer communication. They're a button you press to process a customer, like the code to unlock the PoS terminal, or the lever to open the cash register. eye contact, fake smile, take card, tap card, print receipt, pass receipt, pass bags, eye contact, fake smile, "haffaaniceeddaaaaay", greet next customer. eye contact. fake smile..
and every so often, something shakes you out of this dissociative trance and you realize your limbs are working on autopilot like they're connected directly to the gears of capitalism, and you've been saying "haffaanicedaaaay" the last 63 transactions (more? you can't remember). With a jolt of existential horror, you scramble to just wrest control back and say something, anything else. "Have a" (oh no. you can already feel your tongue slipping back into the well worn groove) "..good rest of your day!". Sure, a little awkwardly phrased, but you hope they appreciate the fact that you composed it just for them. You give them a real smile, real eye contact. Did you do it right? Did you do a good customer service?
You probably did. Pat yourself on the back. That was a nice. Maybe you'll say it to the next customer..
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
I think if you consider the Canadian politics angle, some pieces fall into place:
- Doug Ford has a shot at future CPC leadership, and could be a future PM candidate against Carney
- Assume this reaction from Trump was expected. This hurts Carney's ability to make a productive trade deal with the US, weakens his minority government
- Who is going to see this ad? 1. a lot of baseball watching Americans. This ad really does correctly portray Reagan's views on free trade. The people know it. This hurts Trump. Weakens Canada short term, possibly strengthens Canada medium-long term if Democrats do well in the next elections. But also 2. a lot of baseball watching Canadians will see it. Canadians love to bandwagon the Blue Jays whenever they do well. It stokes a lot of patriotic pride. They also love to hate Donald Trump. This associates Conservative values (Reagan) with getting a savage dig in on Trump with Canadian sportsball pride competing at the highest level in America's game.
I'm not saying this is a perfect explanation. I have doubts about whether Ford or whoever was thinking about this stuff, but it would make a certain kind of sense.
celluloid_dream
4mo ago
You could buy an astroturfing campaign.
I sometimes wonder why this isn't more common. It should be very cost-effective, given how few people participate in online discourse, social-desirability bias, and crowd behavior dynamics mean you only need ~5% of that small minority to start forming consensus around something.
You could, with a small team and a stock of authentic-looking sockpuppet accounts, own the reaction comments around some political podcast, the chat for popular streamers, the topics in political subreddits, etc. For a pittance in paid subscriptions to influential writers, you could maybe even turn the direction of their output - audience capture is a thing.
celluloid_dream
5mo ago
if I'm worried about being attacked by anything, it's wasps. Evil bastards. Can't see the nest until it's too late half the time, and even if someone else steps on it, they can just randomly decide it's your fault anyway
celluloid_dream
5mo ago
Claude Sonnet 4.5 is out!
What are your personal benchmarks to put a new LLM to feel out its personality and capabilities? I have a few:
- Coding tasks I've requested in the past. Boring, but necessary
- Song lyric interpretation: to see how much it "gets". Example "Sacrifice Theory" by AFI. I like this one because there are two levels, and there has been clear improvement over the years how many hints the models need before they realize the double meaning (vampiric ritual, but also performance at a live show)
- Just for fun: "If a Claude be washed away by the sea, is Europe the less?"
celluloid_dream
5mo ago
On typical days, (15-30km, 1000-2500m elevation gain), no I don't bring any of that. I used to carry a medium fixed-blade survival knife, but even that has been replaced with a small folding climbing blade instead.
If I'm alone and going to be passing through prime bear habitat, I'll grudgingly bring a can of mace, but if I can justify leaving it behind for any reason, I will. If faced with a rabid squirrel or deer or whatever, I'd probably grab the nearest stick or rock and improvise. What's a knife going to do in that situation? I'd be more likely to cut myself than deter the thing. Honestly, I think the energy advantage from carrying a lighter load beats having a dedicated weapon.
As far as two-legged predators, I trust anyone out that far into the wild to either be friendly, or else dangerous enough that I'd be fucked regardless.
you're right. That was needlessly consensus-building and I have removed it.
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