celluloid_dream
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User ID: 758
celluloid_dream
1d ago
I was startled a month or so ago when I pasted in a thread from the Motte as context to ask about sports ticket policy (from after its training cutoff), and in its answer, it casually used female pronouns for @2rafa, who had made a short comment that was not at all revealing of gender.
How tf does the model know that? No one in that thread had referred to her gender. I triple-checked. It must be in the weights somewhere. It must have picked it up over the years of people using "she/her" in reference to that handle, and just follows suit.
I wonder if it has this kind of built-in knowledge of all minor internet hangouts, or is the Motte special? - elevated as a high quality source explicitly or implicitly
celluloid_dream
2d ago
1-3 drinks, once a week, socially. 30s.
We're in a strange time for alcohol. A confluence of factors moved against it. The ones I've witnessed:
- Work From Home killed the standing drinks-after-work outing at my office. Even when enough people happen to be in, no one expects enough people to be in, so don't make contingency plans that allow them to go out ("oh, I would do drinks but I drove", "I have to get back and feed my cat/dog/crippling-social-media-addiction")
- The economy. Alcohol is expensive af. Other vices are cheap. I hear people say: "Why would I spend $10 on a pint, when I can fill my vape for" ..whatever it costs. I forget. I don't vape. People are getting laid off and are worried about their financial future. They are cutting back.
- It's just not cool any more. This is vibes, and it might just be my circles, but it's seen as something like smoking cigarettes - unhealthy, dated, low class.
But I'm sure it'll be back eventually. Alcohol is Lindy.
celluloid_dream
2d ago
Fun framing, but I think it proves too much.
Almost every technology has this advantage. Is a Roomba tax-advantaged over cleaning staff? Is a tractor tax-advantaged over farmhands? Productivity gains are good. If you tax them, you will get less of them.
celluloid_dream
2d ago
"LLM’s are highly unlikely to get us to AGI. It’s the wrong architecture for getting there, period."
What makes you so sure about that? This sounds to me like: "fixed-wing aircraft are unlikely to get us to flight. It's the wrong architecture for getting there, period. We need flapping wings. Every animal that flies flaps its wings"
celluloid_dream
4d ago
How do you deal with your nose becoming acclimatized to the specific scents, and to scents generally?
Presumably you pick one because you want to smell it, and smell like it, but as the days go by, it fades into the background of your perception, and you either unconsciously start applying more to compensate, or else get to appreciate it less. Do you worry about becoming one of those people suffocating everyone else in the elevator? How do you gauge the strength on a daily basis? (your wife, sure, but she probably gets used to it too)
celluloid_dream
11d ago
It's somewhere between that, and Limited Wardrobe. More like: "Character often wears something different, but not always, and sometimes re-wears the same clothes in different outfits"
celluloid_dream
11d ago
- When characters have a wardrobe that they cycle through in a season/series, and you see the same articles of clothing occasionally re-worn, the way a normal person would.
Seinfeld comes to mind as the obvious example. Just recently noticed this a few times in Halt and Catch Fire.
Can't find it on tvtropes. Maybe it's not a trope at all, just a good costume department.
celluloid_dream
11d ago
I can't get over the fact that no-tie guy is named "Petty". That is YA novel levels of nominative determinism.
celluloid_dream
11d ago
related: I wish there was a "Yes, left turn on red!" sign (e.g. when turning left onto a one-way street). It's the same principle as RToR, but because it's left, not right, most drivers don't realize they can.
celluloid_dream
12d ago
Neither does the EU occupy the entire world.
What makes the EU's photo/print requirement a violation of rights, but not an individual requiring the same thing for a smaller property?
celluloid_dream
13d ago
When I work in a data center, I have to hand over my ID and give a fingerprint. Otherwise, I can't enter. Have my rights been violated?
If so, which rights, and from where do those rights derive? If not, why does the same not apply to another country?
celluloid_dream
20d ago
lot of good points here (esp. re: intelligence & respect), but I want to focus on one thing. I think you're highly attuned to social signaling in a way not everyone is by default.
The cab driver incident: you heard him chuckle, read condescension into it, then re-examined your behavior and read condescension into that. Maybe he just had a private joke with himself. Maybe something about your accent amused him. You were a tourist trying to be polite and helpful. Honestly, in your own mind, were you really being condescending?
One time I was mountain biking with my father. Wide logging road, plenty of space. We passed two hikers, waved, smiled, and said hello. They made an exaggerated show of jumping aside, the man shielding his partner from the big scary machines. (really, there was like 4ft of space between us, and no danger). This ate at my dad all day. What had we done wrong? He kept wondering and bringing it up every few hours.
point is, I could come up with a grand theory of respect and owed deference to explain why either of us was in the wrong, but the truth is, I just don't know. I rather enjoy not thinking about it. My dad couldn't put it out of his mind, and it made him miserable all day. If you go through life running every social interaction through an overactive status filter, you'll read malice into things that are probably honest mistakes.
celluloid_dream
22d ago
but we also have powerful defensive tools.
First thing to do with any long video is to copy/paste the transcript into your LLM of choice and get a summary to see if it's worth your time, or just to get the info without the padding
Yeah. I'm sympathetic to this, but also, you should have some reference points. Surely, a person ought to know the population of their own country, their own country's relative size compared to the world, and then be able to roughly estimate the percentage of people who belong to some minority, and get a rough guess.
I'm not going to fault him for getting it wrong off the cuff. I might make the same mistake, and then feel stupid about it a second later as my brain catches up to my mouth.
But it is important, I think, if a person is going to have opinions about a topic in public, to actually have a handle on the statistics involved. It makes a huge difference if you're talking about 10+% of the world's population vs a fraction of 1%.
celluloid_dream
24d ago
Ugh. Historia Civilis is so frustrating! He makes great videos, well animated, well narrated, but takes increasingly long breaks between them (now up to 6 months!), and has become increasingly ideological across the lifetime of his channel.
Used to be that he just had a forgivable historian's bias for a few things here and there. (admires Agrippa, dislikes Octavian) Now, he puts out ahistorical propaganda pieces like Work, and his progressive/lib bias overshadows the history in videos like Reform or Revolution? 1830 to 1832.
I successfully avoided any spoilers for the book and saw it last night.
Was not expecting that. At all.
- What I thought it would be - Saving the world with the power of science: The Martian crossed with Seveneves.
- What it actually was -
Saving the world with the power of friendship: E.T. crossed with Sunshine and The Iron Giant
A few stunning visual sequences that I'm still thinking about. Soundtrack worked well - fit with the "Hail Mary" theme. Also, character's name is "Grace".
Maybe I'm too reddit-brained, but I kind of wanted a bit more explanation of the science. There's a a critical moment in the film that is the core emotional climax the entire plot has been building toward, and the logistics of it are not even handwaved. They're just not explained. I was just like "okay, that's great. nailed the emotional beat, but .. how tf??". A minor gripe. Still liked it.
celluloid_dream
25d ago
291, and I thought I was being overcautious and not guessing enough.
The test felt biased toward a particular urban, educated, cultured professional's "general" knowledge, and there were topics missing that I would consider more representative of general knowledge than makeup brands or HTTP codes.
celluloid_dream
30d ago
I'd been ranting to Claude about Google's proposed Android app lockdown coming this year.
I ended a long rant spanning several paragraphs with: "*enraged Stallman noises*"
It replied simply: "* *GNU/enraged Stallman GNU/noises*", and nothing else.
actually laughed aloud. The comedic timing was perfect. It showed unusual restraint, for an LLM, to let the joke land and not reply with paragraphs of analysis.
celluloid_dream
30d ago
How did AI annoy you this week?
I'm pretty pro-AI generally, but I've been frustrated by a huge uptick in vibecoded applications that have some use, but are pretty unimpressive and not well thought out, for what they are.
E.g. people in my socials:
- "I made a tracker website for <some game achievements accessible to the game's API>!"
- "I made a map of the city to display its trees!"
- "I made a website to track all the social clubs in the city. Submit yours!"
- "I made an android app to calculate your BMI!"
And I have a mess of feelings about it. On the one hand, we live in an age of technical wonders, and I'm glad people are discovering them. On the other, because we live in an age of technical wonders, the bar for quality has gone up so much in the last year or two, and these people seem to lack any self-awareness. The default vibe coded design tropes are immediately apparent in these apps, like how you can sense AI writing with em-dashes or "it's not X, it's Y!", or just its general tone. And like, it's fine. It's okay. The apps work, but they should be so much better.
It's not like I haven't vibecoded some turds. I've made websites and android apps and tools too. It's just that these are for me alone, or to be shared in person, if someone requested it. To release one to the public, the actual utility of the thing would have to be unimpeachable. Tracker website for <thing that is already tracked> does not meet that bar. Map of <thing that is already mapped> does not meet that bar. Yet another app doing the same thing as a hundred others does not meet that bar.
celluloid_dream
1mo ago
I mean, relative to his guest here.
Joe offers him: "Fidel Castro is Justin Trudeau's real father" and he doesn't want to go there. Obviously it's not true, but you could at least have some fun with it. Okay. Maybe it's a bad look for a prime ministerial candidate to be engaging in that kind of conspiracy talk, fine. Joe offers him: "hey, how'd you lose that election you were supposed to win? wtf happened there?" Doesn't engage with that either. A human response would have been something like: "yeah, that really stung. I have no idea. Trump warped politics. The NDP collapsed and our multi-party country does that sometimes." I dunno. That would have been real conversation.
Instead we got Pierre waxing philosophical about the Westminster system and being the leader of the opposition. Boooooring.
celluloid_dream
1mo ago
maybe a little harsh for mere product descriptions (but even those get optimized to the point of absurdity). I've just seen too many "content farms" generating fake blog posts gushing about some crap or other
celluloid_dream
1mo ago
The fact that it's called "marketing copy", not "informative writing" or "product description" betrays the intent. It's optimizing a signal so that the algorithm promotes your product over someone else's product. You might not be intentionally misleading anyone, but you're in the business of generating text, not communicating. If it's not primarily meant to be read by a human, it's internet pollution.
celluloid_dream
1mo ago
I despair when I see the utter shamelessness of SEO people asking for help doing this in technical spaces. It's as if they don't even realize there's anything wrong with it. Like the owner of a factory cheerfully asking about the most efficient way to redirect toxic waste into the river.
They talk about the apple video in the episode. Claims he didn't think he was being filmed, so that's why he was so candid. I'd say the value of having a politician like Pierre on a longform podcast is being able to hear the difference in tone when he's talking about an issue he really cares about (economics, inflation) vs when he is reciting prepared bits (MMA) vs when he's being tactical "I don't know anything about it".
It even does this unprompted when it's confident enough. It knows Scott Alexander's style, and if I paste it a new ACX excerpt without mentioning that it's him, it'll show off: "This is Scott Alexander, right?". It gets Sam Kriss easily. It's even pretty confident about guessing Noah Smith, who I don't read as having a particular style at all.
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