cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
5mo ago
I can't stop people from going and consulting AI. I did say in the original post, that using it as a sort of sanity check or impromptu polling seems fine.
I'm personally not very interested in talking to the "centaurs" as you describe them (human centaurs seems redundant, unless you mean human legs and horse torso). I think there is a value in having another human brain process your words and spit back a disagreement about those words. If they are offloading the processing and the output to an AI they have just become a bad/slow interface for that AI.
I think we are basically at AGI right now. So hold the gates as long as we can and enjoy this space until the internet as we know it is gone in a flood of digital minds.
cjet79
5mo ago
It also tends to make my eyes glaze over. It just has such a boring style. Like I wonder if its specifically selecting for not being readable by people with normal attention spans.
cjet79
5mo ago
My main objection to AI content on themotte is that it makes this place entirely pointless.
What is the difference between two people just posting AI arguments back and forth and me just going to an AI and asking that AI to play out the argument?
If you want such AIs arguing with each other, just go use those AIs. Nothing is stopping you, and in fact I'm fully in favor of you going and doing that.
This is like you showing up to a marathon race with a bicycle, and when not allowed entry you start screaming about how we are all Luddites who hate technology. No dude, its just that this whole place becomes pointless.
Your specific usage of AI also has a major problem here, which is that you were basically using it as a gish gallop attack. "Hey I think this argument is wrong, so I'm gonna go use an AI that can spit out many more words than I can."
If this behavior was replicated by everyone, we'd end up with giant walls of text that we were all just copying and pasting into LLMs with simple prompts of "prove this fool wrong". No one reading any of it. No one changing their mind. No one offering unique personal perspectives. And thus no value in any of the discussion.
cjet79
5mo ago
DO NOT POST AI CONTENT
We've only said this sporadically in the past. I'm talking to the other moderators and maybe we will have it added as a rule under the "content" section. Or maybe I'm wrong and all the other mods like AI content (highly doubt that).
We all know how to go and use an AI. If you want to have a discussion with AI themotte is basically just a bad intermediary. No one is here to have discussions with AIs. Thus posting AI content is in no one's interest.
You can of course consult AIs on your own time, and maybe they can be used as a sort of sanity or quick polling check.
cjet79
5mo ago
Try to meet women through some kind of activity club. Dancing, running, kickball, etc.
Many normal people also don't enjoy dating apps. Especially anyone that isn't just looking for hookups.
If you do insist on using dating apps, try to only reach out to newish looking profiles. They are less likely to be in the hookup cycle.
cjet79
5mo ago
https://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/outdoor-gear/g3088/best-umbrellas/
Can't say I ever use umbrellas. I'd rather just throw on one of those plastic rain coat things.
cjet79
5mo ago
This all sounds like a lot of doomerism. Most things are going fine.
Energy
Resource "running out" is not a real thing that happens. Prices adjust. Uses become more limited, or alternatives are found.
We used copper pipping everywhere, and then copper got expensive, and we used PVC pipe instead.
Oil has gotten nominally cheaper over my lifetime of driving. Its basically never gone over $5 a gallon. There are lots of oil reserves, like Tar Sands. Its just that the oil becomes a little harder to extract. Fracking was an invention that drastically opened up oil availability in the US. "Peak oil" if it is a thing, is not a bad thing at all. It just means that oil usage is tapering off as other technologies replace it.
Ethanol is indeed dumb, and is just a subsidy for farmers.
Battery tech has been improving slowly. Flywheel engines might make more sense for cars. They are used to great effect in formula 1.
Climate Change
Most obviously not a big deal because no one is yet to get serious about large scale geo-engineering projects. Estimated costs for such projects are in the $10-100 billion range (space based sun shield, or atmospheric sulfur injection). Less than Afghanistan cost us.
Most disasters are solvable with more wealth. Hurricanes suck when you are poor. Earthquakes suck when you have no engineers and live in shoddy buildings. Tornadoes are bad when they are not predictable and you don't have a basement. Winter storms are mitigated with more plows on the roads.
Pandemics
Covid was the worst pandemic the world has faced in like a century, and basically everything that was bad about it was as a result of people overreacting to it. We shot ourselves in the foot. The actual mortality rate for covid after first infection or after vacination was stupidly low. Even before that the mortality rate for initial infection was still very low once hospitals figured out how they should be treating it (don't put people on ventilators). Deaths were almost certainly over-counted by hospitals for the sake of financial benefits.
Birth rate
Not great, but you are exaggerating the severity. The decline has been slow. And part of the main problem is again that we are shooting ourselves in the foot. Don't build pyramid scheme retirement systems that rely on larger numbers of young people. The worst outcome won't be societal collapse. It will be old people with no children getting shoved under the bus harder than they thought they'd be.
"Brain rot**
Luckily we are booting up the AIs to think for us. Might have its own negative side effects. Or it might allow us to brain rot to idiocracy levels without the accompanying decrease in standards of living.
cjet79
5mo ago
I tend to remove both kinds. Especially from newer users.
The reddit mods have fewer controls on initial spam. A new user an reddit can farm karma anywhere to get past the filters. Themotte is more of a closed environment.
cjet79
5mo ago
There are new users that try and post their own substack articles. We don't allow them past the filter.
cjet79
5mo ago
I think we have a working example of what option 3 looks like in the form of sports. It would be my preferred outcome, I'm also an optimist and think it is a likely outcome. Option 2 will be temporary if it happens at all. It will either lead towards extinction, or people will figure out they want meaning and start creating competitions themselves.
I also have a short story somewhere on here about a god emperor that is the source of all value. I'll look for it after I post this comment. The story is a demonstration that as long as someone with access to value exists, the rest of humanity might be able to tag along.
cjet79
6mo ago
Nothing setup, no serious compute. I'm trying to get a sense of how hard this is to learn before I do the deep dive part.
cjet79
6mo ago
I'm thinking about getting into AIs.
The job search has been slow, and maybe front end dev is too easy. I don't have a moat to protect the job. I had an old coworker come back and ask if I knew anything about making language models. He wanted to take some existing old books out there and feed the text into an LLM and get maybe a chatbot or an article writer that could spit out responses.
Does anyone know about this stuff? I've been looking at https://huggingface.co/ to potentially try and learn things about this area.
Thought maybe some tinkerers knew stuff.
cjet79
6mo ago
To reiterate the basic case:
Specialization and trade is the engine of ALL economic growth. There is a theoretical maximum point for any economy where everyone is as specialized as possible and trading away for everything else they want. International trade extends this theoretical maximum point. We might already be living beyond the point of maximum wealth if the US was only going to trade with itself.
I'm not entirely sure what point is being made for the "complicated economic case" or the "sovereignty case".
And how much are you willing to pay in average cost of living for these things? Should we be 20% poorer, 50% poorer, 90% poorer to support these things? Or is anything shy of 100% poorer acceptable? And like most economic issues its not just a one time payment, its an ongoing payment. So even being 2% poorer a year means that in about 30 years you are 50% poorer than you would have been.
Tariffs supported government revenue back in the day when alcohol taxes were enough to be about 25% of government revenue. I would love if goverment was that small. Tariffs are currently a rounding error as a revenue source. And I don't think there is a realistic way to get that number high enough.
cjet79
6mo ago
Price controls were pretty bad in the 70s under Nixon.
They also aren't under any pressure to change or fix the things if they are bad.
If the Democrats did some kind of immigration restriction that ended up screwing immigrants over I doubt the Republicans would be clamoring at them to fix it.
cjet79
6mo ago
The legislative branch is supposed to legislate. The president and executive are supposed to execute and implement. There is wiggle room on priorities and implementation detail.
The bureaucracy is a 4th branch of government that has not been responsive to congress or the presidency, and barely responsive to the courts.
I would like the branches to do their jobs. Failing that I'd rather have the executive branch in charge than have an unelected and largely unaccountable bureaucracy.
I would also stop it if SCOTUS abolishes birthright citizenship, but I am very doubtful.
That is one of the EOs. Whether it works is I guess another thing.
cjet79
6mo ago
I noticed there is a slow drible of talk about some of Trumps Executive Orders. I kinda wanted to talk about all of them as a package, and some of them more specifically. I would advise everyone to just go ahead and read all of the executive orders (there are about 50):
https://www.whitehouse.gov/news/
They are generally short, about a page long. The titles are descriptive of the goals, so you can even skip reading many of them. And you don't need to hear about them via a second hand source.
I got the general gist of all of them within an hour or two on Inauguration day (when they were posted).
My general impressions:
- I like the visibility and ease of reading these. Its nothing like most legislation that goes through congress that often require a law degree, and an in depth knowledge of regulations just to sort of understand them.
- I don't like this continuing tradition of using executive orders to run the government. From what I remember this started in earnest under Bush 2. But its also pretty clear that congress is increasingly non-functional and uninterested in their assigned role in the constitution. Congress has delegated away its power for almost 100 years at this point, granting law-making powers to bureaucracies that are run under the executive branch. So I don't like the executive order - ocracy, but it seems there is no alternative.
- I care less about the culture war type orders, like renaming things. I think it is probably good to have them in there from a strategy perspective. Let your enemies exhaust themselves on silly issues.
- My favorite Executive order: Restoring Accountability To Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce. Basically people in the bureaucracy are supposed to carry out the will and directive of the president / executive branch. If they sandbag or fail to do this, then that is grounds for dismissal. They don't have to agree with the president or be loyal, but none of this "resist" stuff. It was a little ridiculous that this EO needed to be issued in the first place.
- The one that I think will actually personally impact me the most: Return to In-Person Work. I live close enough to DC. Traffic is going to get worse.
- Two executive orders have me worried. One is about cost of living: Delivering Emergency Price Relief for American Families and Defeating the Cost-of-Living Crisis. The actual text mostly talks about getting rid of barriers and harmful regulations. I hope that is where it stops. But populist politicians have often resorted to price controls to "fight" inflation. I strongly hope they avoid that pitfall.
- The other EO that worries me is related to trade America First Trade Policy. The basic economics case against tariffs seems air tight to me. Tariffs seem like a classic policy failure to me. The costs are distributed among all US consumers, but the benefits are often concentrated within certain sectors, or even specific companies. I was also hoping to see an end to the Jones Act, but this EO seems like it thinks that legislation is great.
cjet79
6mo ago
My kids are now picking up some Australian slang thanks to bluey. "Stuffy" for stuffed animal sticks out the most to me. I now can't remember what I called them as a kid, but it wasn't stuffy.
cjet79
6mo ago
Ya that's a thing too. I just know what that trolling instinct feels like, and I know what insecurity feels like. And Elon just pattern matches with trolling much better right now.
cjet79
6mo ago
I'm not sure there is an easy way to distinguish. I'm not 100% wedded to the trolling narrative. It just seems way more likely for Elon than the "insecure" narrative.
I've known quite a few and briefly been a guy that sleeps around. I've been a teenager pumped full of testosterone (naturally via puberty).
There is a confidence that these things grant you that is sort of the polar opposite of insecurity. These people and myself were way more likely to be obnoxious overconfident assholes for no good reason than they were to think "do people not like me?"
We kinda select against this personality type/mood here on themotte. We don't tolerate the trolling, and then these types are also likely to get in dick measuring contests with the mods once we demonstrate the tiniest amount of power over them.
Not all trolling attempts are going to land. Just like a lack of people laughing doesn't mean something was not intended as a joke.
Lastly people seem to be interpreting this as me defending him or giving him credit. I don't think very highly of testosterone addled aggressive males. I think they are high variance individuals. They are going to jail for violence, or they are going to have lots of sex and possibly get lots of money in risky ventures.
As I mentioned this was almost sort of me. I was having sex with different women, I was doing drugs, and I was blowing off my boring job. But going down that road meant screwing over some of my real friends, hurting many or most of the women I was sleeping with, and generally disregarding the people around me.
These are not good people. They never make for good friends, just for good stories.
I know what you meant with centaur. I just thought it was redundant to say "human centaur".
Penalizing Gish Gallop specifically is hard. People may legitimately have many questions or objections to a specific point. It's just far more obvious of a problem when you have an AI churning out text that.
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