gattsuru
5hr ago
gattsuru
1d ago
gattsuru
2d ago
That's true to an extent, but in turn it's easy to overstate it. Prop 8 got majority support in California at the same time that the Crush side was boycotting entire states or beating Brendan Eich in public. Much of the Crush side's successes came through expansive understandings of employment law, which only required only a small number of people to be persuaded (sometimes not even judges: a lawyer or HR head warning of potential liability is persuasive for big companies, even if they might win the eventual lawsuit).
trying to speedrun the deluge and ride the momentum straight into a crush, while skipping entirely over the long slog of boring acceptance into society which made the deluge -> crush political strategy actually work for gay rights.
Maybe. Another option's just that the terrain was rough. Both trans sports and puberty blockers had a pretty severe problem where they didn't work, and clearly didn't work, in a way that was hard for all but the most blinkered activists to deny, and which the Crush strategy could no longer serve to silence.
Not sure.
(Counterthought: If AIDS had hit in 2003, rather than the 1980s, would that have meant gay rights would have normalized in the Reagan era and then been marginalized again? Hit, but not marginalized by it? Or without the organization and tempering HIV politics caused, would they have stayed marginalized longer? Or would there have been a better reaction to the early stages of GRID, either internal or external?
Probably unknowable.)
gattsuru
2d ago
I'd put the desensitization under Mistake Theory - if you actually want a throbbing hard cock (in your porn), it doesn't matter whether that's because you're desensitized or it just isn't that gross - but they're not exactly natural categories. I'm more motioning around 'mistake' if it's about changing an average person's beliefs, and more 'deluge' if it's about changing policies or elite beliefs, but your framework may be more helpful for your perspective.
The Trump DoJ has released a summary of FACE Act prosecutions and their tactics during the Biden administration.
There's some subtle stuff, here:
- it's nice to actually have in-their-own-writing admission that the feds used aggressive arrest warrants to secure evidence without a separate search warrant, Exhibit 147,
- even where the defendant had committed to voluntarily surrender, Exhibit 146,
- and used heavy pressure and threat of 8 USC 241 to go after the defendant's gun rights for nonviolent nonfelony behavior, Exhibit 119.
- attempted to select jurors based on religious beliefs, which isn't illegal in most courts under Batson and progeny, but stinks to high heaven.
And probably a lot of other stuff I'm missing from speedreading or because I don't care much about abortion law. But most of it's pretty unsurprising to long-time critics. The DoJ and FBI lied to Congress? Oh, somebody go better tell Louis Freeh that they're stepping on his copyright.
A more... enraging behavior is that the Biden administration had the specific information comparing pro-abortion and anti-abortion FACE prosecutions, provided it to pro-abortion groups proactively, and did not provide it to anti-abortion individuals who requested it for their criminal defenses (or, separately, a sitting congressman), even as trial deadlines against the DOJ closed in. The DoJ pointed to FOIA request options, and as far as I can tell didn't actually fulfill those FOIA requests when they came in. That chart is pretty damning, now that we can actually see it... and it still probably wouldn't have been enough to bring a selective prosecution defense successfully, and it's kinda messy how Brady attaches to selective prosecution defenses and this part of a trial and where the right hand can pretend the left doesn't know what's going on.
It's still worth remembering that it's the room temperature.
There's some morbidly funny turnabout is fair play stuff going on right now (afaik, the Trump admin policy hasn't even been stayed/enjoined/tro'd/mandamus/boesburg'd yet!). There's probably a deeper dive that could be drawn into a top-level post.
But the simple answer is this. There is undoubtedly some salami-slicing, here. Nevertheless, there is also clear evidence of the Biden administration requested, and getting, severe sentences for anti-abortion nonviolent protesters, even where the bad conduct had already been punished under state law, while requesting minimal or less-than-minimal sentences for pro-abortion protesters. Worse, the three pro-abortion cases were only initiated well after the discrepancy in prosecution had become well-known, and seem to have been farmed solely to pretend equal coverage.
You may notice that there is no religious prosecutions column. That's not because everybody forgot to ask about it. They did ask, and they got zero.
There is no mention of Noata.
gattsuru
2d ago
I'm skeptical that there's a single story that hits all of these categories, without being so broad as to be useless. That said...
how exactly did gay marriage ... become the default?
There are three competing narratives, here:
- Mistake theory. In this model, the median person who opposed gay marriage or homosexuality before 2000 had a bad model of what that meant. Over time, increased exposure, through the internet, the media representation, and especially through people discovering people in their own lives were gay, corrected those mistakes - not making two men kissing each other more interesting, but enough that it wasn't alien, just Those Weirdos Doing That Weird Thing. In some, this just made their discomfort a lower-priority matter; in others, it showed them people who would have direct benefit from the change in policy and who they wanted to benefit.
- The Deluge. In this model, the gay rights movement had spent thirty-plus years building political infrastructure, and it hit a turning point and was able to overcome other external forces that prevented that force from being used. Some of those changes were legal (reduced mail censorship, cable media and internet avoiding broadcast censorship), some were social (actors coming out, cheaper transportation, easier small publication efforts), and some were both (there was a national movement for school teachers to come out, focused around teacher's union and their ability to fight firings). This force was brought to persuade or replace leadership, which brought changes to policy, and then people agreed with whatever became the new normal.
- The Crush. In this model, the gay rights movement was able to bring the weight of institutions down, hard, on anyone who disagreed, with any and all tools available. This both made disagreeing more difficult, but more critically also removed the actual disagreements from public space, such that by Obergefell no one in Blue Tribe spaces (and even many people in Red Tribe spaces!) hadn't heard the full form of any strong policy arguments in the better part of a decade.
The real answer is a mix of all three (and probably one feeding into another), but the proportions matter. I hope for the mistake theory, but the more cynical I'm feeling the more The Crush seems plausible - not helped by the extreme unwillingness of anyone serious to engage with the possibility, even to recognize its failure in the trans stuff.
Star Citizen's 'end-game' revolves around a lot of this stuff, just with slightly different names:
- Executive Hangars, in the pirate system Pyro, store keycard-locked and suped-up versions of spaceships, left over from when the mining company Pyrotechnic Amalgamated went bankrupt and abandoned the system. Get a lot of PvP attention (when they work).
- Contested Zone Vaults, also in Pyro, are just where pirates store valuable guns and ship parts when they're busy worshiping/getting radiation burns from the star.
- Caches in Nyx, which are ship parts implied to a mix of smuggled goods from resistance cells back when the human empire was overtly evil, and some weapons caches from the same era's cold war against some turtle-like aliens.
(though the Oynx facilities and Lazarus facilities, as quasi-active research labs, don't quite fit.)
SC's in a fuzzy zone about whether it's post-apocalyptic. The post-Messr human empire is supposed to be in the middle of a Rome/Byzantium split, so it's kinda the aftermath of a collapse culturally? But there hasn't really been a decrease in technological development (and several major advances), so much as a lot of previously-restricted military, forbidden science, and alien tech is getting spilled into the player character's hands. The goods are valuable because they're rare to players, rather than being impossible to reproduce (yet).
That said, it's pretty rare for it to be purely consumer goods. Finding an abandoned freighter with a bunch of sound equipment (or, more often, drugs) is a win and a possibility, but it's tied to a rare and poorly documented gameplay loop.
No Man's Sky at least looks like it, but there's some spoiler-reasons that it doesn't actual real. And the alien outposts are weird enough and often-populated enough that they map poorly onto storage facilities.
Minecraft mods play with it a lot. DeceasedCraft's probably the most accessible version, where machines and equipment that would normally be the entry level into various tech mods are very hard to craft, and thus scavenging them from various buildings is a vital progression mechanism, with warehouses and storage facilities being an early-game target. Don't know of any modpacks where they're long-abandoned, though; DeceasedCraft is implied to be days or at most months after a zombie apocalypse.
For the real world, it's a funny story, but it gets complicated by the nature of those goods. Very few consumer electronics can survive a long period of anything less than ideal storage, and the buildings themselves are famously prone to various failure states. Same for anything made of paper or unfinished wood. Raw materials like plastic, titanium, aluminum, and high-grade steel may well last and be impractical to produce in a post-apocalyptic setting, but a lot of them wouldn't be plausible to manufacture into anything particularly useful.
gattsuru
3d ago
I'll leave larger-scale analysis to people like Dean that are competent for it, but for specific facts:
FWIW 400+ kg of 60% enriched uranium is hard to justify for civilian use (feel free to correct me), so the only thing this write up convincingly argues is Iran was definitely building a bomb.
Iran argued it was for medical/research purposes. I'm not convinced that's a useful distinction, but it means that there's a limit to how much you can persuade people with it.
But I see no evidence that they were mere days away from a deliverable warhead. What about pit fabrication
There's probably some classified issues related to this matter, but the public information suggest that the machining is annoying and dangerous, more than it's difficult or time-consuming.
missile delivery
The Diego Garcia strike was multiple thousand miles away, and while it probably reduced the weapon payload for that missile, that reduced payload is within the plausible weight class of a serious nuclear weapon. It wasn't successful, but something something horseshoes and hand grenades.
Censorship Report: Monika Wins
Engadget reports:
Google has removed popular game Doki Doki Literature Club! from the Play Store. According to Dan Salvato, who led its development team, and publisher Serenity Forge, Google told them the visual novel was removed because it violated its Terms of Service in its depiction of sensitive themes... Its free version, which came out first, has been downloaded at least 30 million times, while the paid “Plus” version has had at least one million downloads. The visual novel has repeatedly made Engadget’s lists of favorite games over the years.
Doki Doki Literature Club, typically abbreviated as DDLC for everyone's sanity, features a nameless and voiceless protagonist invited to the titular book club by childhood best friend and cheerful optimist Sayori. There, he meets the blunt and emotional Natsuki, the shy and dour Yuri, and the president of the club, Monika. Okay, you get the picture, this is a visual novel with an M17+ rating, is it just another one of those skeevy skirt-chaser simulators, pulled for the standard reasons?
... not quite.
[spoiler warning]
That is to say, it's less erotic and more psychological horror.
It's not exactly a great game, in my opinion, even by the low standards of RenPy (later converted to Unity) games: the main gimmick goes a little long, the contrast between in-game and metafictional psychological horror can get a little jank, and the characters are pretty shallow even before Act 2. But at the time of original release, it was a moderately clever take on a field that had been swamped by extreme gore, jump scares, and/or bad Puella Magi imitators. In particular, it had a nuanced (if somewhat overcome by the metafictional components) take on mental health, depression, and the need for connection.
So it was a bit of a thing in fandom.
There's a possibility that Google and Serenity Forge will be able to come to some agreement, but as funny as getting Nice Boat'd in the middle of a sleepover would be, the most plausibly disagreeable scenes are pretty central to the story. At minimum, I doubt the game will be back without some censorship. And the Android environment, for better or (much more common) worse, is an extremely common one, so that's not a small hit to the author's reach.
It doesn't matter that much, since the game's still available on Steam, direct download, the Nintendo eShop, iOS store, yada. For now. Hell, you can even sideload an APK. Kinda, for now. And it's just one game, just as every other case was just one game. We don't - and won't - know whether this was just one pointy-headed content reviewer, some broad Karen-led whisper campaign, or a government regulator calling in the implication. It's not even that noteworthy for its 'tameness': while DDLC is relatively low on sexuality, it is still pretty mature from a violence and language perspective, and other marketplaces have been willing to pretty aggressively censor tame or tamer sexual content (oh no not a nipple). Conservatives have clearer-cut and more permanent examples of overtly political censorship.
But I highlight it to repeat an old point: you might well not be interested in most cases of censorship, but censorship as a movement will eventually be interested in you. Its very ability to salami-slice out stuff you don't care about is what makes it able to crush the singular you whenever your turn comes.
gattsuru
4d ago
The same is true for creating half-decent representative art, compiling a (wrong!) hello-world level C++ or Rust program, writing a coherent and consistent 20k word story with a meaningful theme, and reading a 100-page narrative document and recalling mid-grade detail. I think that leaves too much on the table.
gattsuru
5d ago
Rampancy shows up in Marathon, too; it's kinda a general theme for that era of Bungie. Would make things interesting as a fan theory, though.
Oni's weird control scheme comes downstream from the melee and grappling combat, and how they borrowed from 2d beat-em-ups like River City Ransom. If you played the game like that, it worked reasonably well, if a bit repetitive toward the last missions. It's still nearly twenty years out of date compared to z-targeting from Legend of Zelda or the intentionality and diverolls from Souls-likes, but a melee-only run doesn't feel awful. It's the combination of gun combat and too-big rooms that push you to playstyles where it's incredibly annoying.
The story was fantastic, though. The Doadan is a great metaphor and plot device, and it's one of the few games to make a decision like Griffin feel genuinely right one way or the other.
gattsuru
5d ago
I won't have sympathetic baddies and schizophrenic goodies in my books.
And then he wrote Folgrim the Otter, Veil the Ferret, and perpetual fan-favorite Romsca.
gattsuru
6d ago
Kinda overdetermined. The impression count thing is either a lie or incompetence or both, but I don't think they even expect people to believe it so much as for it to be a useful rallying cry.
Like with Julia Serano's not dismissing perspectives really being about "dismissing perspectives/experiences of marginalized groups", it's interesting to see the mask come off, and with it a bit of the face, but it's kinda just making a thing that happened a decade ago common knowledge.
More critically, I'll notice that Seth Schoen is famous for the DeCSS haiku, and I can't find him mentioning Defense Distributed a single time on the entire internet. Lest that be taken as cherry-picking my fixation, looking at his HackerNews profile (and webpage, and posts at EFF) has a dearth of high-profile examples while there were a bunch of high-profile examples, and I'm noticing how carefully he dodges specifics even now.
That's not to blame him, because I were the mask in my real name too. But it's a thing that happened a decade ago.
gattsuru
6d ago
There's an ongoing joke that Vetinari has mimes tortured for yucks, but the deeper commentary is that his corruption is good governance. At the end of almost every Vimes book, he makes not-very-subtle notices of what the guards need (aka he thinks is just), right after he's done some significant task or discovered some information that gives him power.
Vimes is a good man, and Vetinari at least isn't a fan of letting bad people have power over him, so his demands are things like 'better support for widows' instead of 'throw a pile of money into my bank account'. But it's the same route.
gattsuru
6d ago
Rare bad road sign: flashing red light. Most of the time, it's only used as a fallback mode, but there are some spaces in my neck of the woods that just have it as the only setting for a particular intersection. In that role, it's just the same as a four-way stop (though I've seen it used as a two-way stop!), but it's rare enough that a lot of motorists don't recognize it, so you get people that treat it like a Stop Sign ++ or wait for ten or twenty seconds for it to change, and others that treat it like it's a yield sign.
Common bad one: no right turn on red except curb lane. No right turn on red can make sense, and even if traffic planners tend to be aggressive about using it in places where it'd probably be okay, I'd hope that they have more information than I do. But the more caveats you put onto things the harder it is to quickly identify what's legal (or often even read the text), and the end result here just matches the default rule. There's variants I've seen where it's "no right turn on red except curb lane between 5-9", which is about the point where I want to Just Have a Talk while carrying a baseball bat.
gattsuru
6d ago
The ice sculpture guy may be offered a similar deal, though it should be noted that that just happened the other day, so one wouldn't expect the case to be resolved for a while.
The Minnesota Daily reports:
I don't want to draw too strong of an example, here. Lang is an unusually severe asshole. He has past criminal history. It's possible his lawyer is lying. Even were a plea deal or diversion program offered, he would quite plausibly reject it to promote his social media presence.
Of course, all that information was available back before Lang kicked the sculpture over. Of course, we can't tell where a left-leaning agitator would have similar criminal history, were they chased as aggressively. What other data points?
I can't find follow-ups on that particular event. I can't even find the name. There might be various extenuating circumstances. It could still be in progress, or dropped, or made moot by some other matter.
gattsuru
9d ago
This... gets complicated.
The standard process, right now, is that the surrogate gives birth, the baby and mother are immediately separated, and the surrogate spends the next 24-72 hours recovering in a separate room. Sometimes surrogates are willing to work with the fathers for some time afterward, but for commercial surrogates that's usually a (possibly virtual) meetup a couple times a year at best, and among compassionate surrogates the optimistic case is more often 'stranger who did daddies a favor' than getting six weeks with the kid and two dads to help during recovery before becoming an aunt.
((And then there's the coercive power of large amounts of money, the often-invasive genetic screening, the difficult hormonal supplements and common-place use of a separate donor egg.))
It's at least imaginable that there could be better processes. If I were writing things a utopia, a world where surrogacy and donors are appreciated and common, where they can become pillars of the community as connection points across varied families, and where they're seeing their kids on a monthly or weekly basis during childhood, would all be nice. You don't have to be Ursula Le Guin or a pregnancy fetishist prefer the aesthetics of it. Very rarely, it does happen.
But it's not clear that it could scale. It's not a coup-positive solution, it's a 'rebuild human psychology' solution.
The insistence that the surrogate have little contact with the child after birth is sometimes about greedy parents wanting to maximize bonding, but it's also a clear defense mechanism that surrogates very much want. (This can go to extremes that are a little surprising to me; many surrogates apparently won't pump milk even for significant compensation, and it's pretty common for gay parents to want more contact between the kid and the mother.) Compassionate surrogates often find themselves having to make hard decisions when their career, or a father's career, moves five hundred miles away. People just change, and in a world where 50% of marriages end in divorce, it's hard to complain that surrogates and fathers don't want face legal issues nearly as complicated as a divorce just because they were too close to the mom.
It's not a fun problem!
gattsuru
9d ago
I am not sure why we'd want to draw a bright line between "emulating preferences" and "making sufficiently enjoyable decisions".
I don't want to conflate shrinks and life coaches, but to point toward Henry The Fifth-style patients, there seem at minimum to be toy examples of people who make absolutely atrocious major decisions, could get a Magic Eight Ball, would absolutely refuse to follow its advice, and then would regret doing it. That doesn't scale up to controlling every micro-muscular movement, and maybe there's be occasional cases where their preferences are genuinely weird enough that the Iso Standard Don't Let Crazy Stick It In You wouldn't work, but at the same time it seems meaningful that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit that exists without, or even despite, of the immediate preferences.
But I'm... fine? The situations where this might seriously bite me in the ass instead of mildly inconvenience me are very rare.
What are the consequences of that logic, taken to scale? Learning To Be Me focuses its horror on ways things could go wrong, but let's assume it goes right: you are the jewel, will endure a billion years, and short of a nuclear fireball, can't be destroyed. Let's go further: in that story, the jewel at least needs to keep its flesh body intact, and plan for the end of the world. If we had perfect mind uploads, or an unending diamondroid body, such that no skill could be genuinely needed, would you be fine with every capability you have becoming moot, so long as you weren't inconvenienced? What about a world where nothing Seriously Wrong could ever happen? How about one where you could not, as a matter of physics, face even as small a minor inconvenience as to stub your toe?
What happens when there are no skills you require?
... I dunno.
May not be a solvable question. May be a hilariously easy solvable question. I fear Caelum Est Conterrens, but it's ultimately an argument to fiction. Maybe the result for the real post-nihilistic world is people making themselves to make themselves, in the same way that I write knowing I can't write to compete with the greats or in the way normal people get bored, or at least enough survivors do to count, and it's not even a plausible problem. Maybe there's no answer but how nice the happy pudding has it; whether we're at a techless 1984, The Matrix, or a full wireheaded world.
The earring doesn't do this (at least not in the story as far as I can tell).
Yeah, apologies. I was proposing a different AGI/ASI-like system that would obviate a number of my concerns with the Whispering Earring, and in doing so try to examine what parts of the Whispering Earring made me uncomfortable, but it wasn't a great way of doing that clearly.
gattsuru
10d ago
Not to be a pedant, but I think you mean cues, not queues.
Thanks, yeah, that's right.
Oh, like the IQ test pattern blocks, or something else?
The Kohs Blocks (or some descendant) were one, and there was also a simple test involving wood blocks with cubic outlines and a challenge to guess how many cubes the whole contained that I can't the name of.
gattsuru
10d ago
Cory Doctorow has lots of interesting arguments, and I really admire and support his crusade against IP and enshittification, but his views are very extreme and some of his ideas go too far.
I'd give a different issue: regardless of how good or bad his ideas are, they're clearly unrelated to the actual goals he's claiming to champion. Twitter and YouTube and Discord and almost every company of relevance here are not market leaders due to the strength of their intellectual property; it's trivial to implement one-off examples of their functionality, and building a decent many-to-many implementation is a small business, not a large one. Their strengths come from their scaling capabilities and, to a far greater extent, the absolutely massive network advantages. The division from LibreOffice or GIMP to MSOffice and Photoshop isn't a massive, deep moat of algorithmic design or CPU optimizations, but a shallow one of user interface and user training. Individual people can build cell phones. It's just only a rounding error of people wants that done, to fund it, or to use it once manufactured.
It might be more relevant for specialized software (operating systems, CAD work, simulation software), but notably none of these spaces are things Doctorow focuses on. He talks about iOS in the sense of jailbreaking iPhones, a matter where legal constraints have never been the primary limit. He never mentions Linux, and only mentions Microsoft to say they "bricked" the International Criminal Court's outlook server due to sanctions (real world: cut access to Karim Khan's e-mail account). The ICC's moving to openDesk (also not mentioned, wouldn't have been my first choice)... and having it run by B1 Systems GmbH, a contractor in Germany. A quick google estimates <150 IT staff; having tried OpenDesk, I'd expect <20 full-time staff equivalent for the ICC, mostly tech support.
That is not a moonshot. It's definitely not the moonshot Doctorow's theory would need.
The only place they might be relevant is AI models (hmmm), and then only to the point where there are closed-source, high-capability models that could be cloned and run from EU services. That's not coherent to Doctorow's whole view - "Because even though the AI can't do the 's job, an AI salesman can convince the 's boss to fire them and replace them with an AI that can't do their job", that's the text - but he's not pretending to be coherent so much as tell his readers what he needs to get his goals, so whatever.
((Presumably they only ignore the copyright requests Doctorow dislikes, not artist and writer intellectual property, but to be fair, it's not like anyone without a hundred million dollar business can get an inter_state_ copyright lawsuit, nevermind an international one.))
How's that supposed to work? Okay, the model leaks, quickly. That I can buy, I've been a proponent of the theory that 'the leak always gets through' even if it hasn't always applied in practice. The EU companies are able to clone the graphics cards or ASICs, probably. Can they make them? The current best fab is 18nm, and while they're planning to build a 2nm-ish plant, the current timeline is 2030 and also kinda a joke. Okay, well, over long enough the hardware and training costs get amortized, it's the landscape and inference cost. Is EU power going to be cheap? Regulatory compliance? Legal overhead?
What's the business plan, here? Be annoying?
Mistral makes local models (as opposed to locked-down cloud ones), so I want them to succeed. However, even with full EU backing, they'd be outcompeted by OpenAI and Anthropic, who can release local models themselves, making all their effort and work seem wasted
Mistral's been suffering for a while. It had some sizable influence in low-parameter models a year ago - and to an extent, still has: Cydonia is a Mistral-3.1-24B-derived model that's popular for roleplay, even if it introduces a lot of world consistency issues as context scale - but it's ranged from middling to actively bad since.
One complication here is that there are clear spaces that OpenAI and Anthropic are unlikely to want to explore, that would leave a niche for not-quite-frontier models that don't excel at things like coding but do focus well on other career spaces ... but that is likely to be more regulated in the EU, in ways that impact the ability of providers to provide decent models. And that's particularly overt for Mistral: one of the suspected causes for (some of the many) problems in Mistral 4 was the repeated 'safety' failures in Mistral3 variants. Ideally, they'd be able to avoid regulatory failures without harming core capabilities, but so far the degree models seem to suffer from overcorrection correlates pretty heavily with regulatory exposure.
(Caveat: they could have also just found some local minima. Things are moving so fast in these spaces that they could well turn around quick.)
If the earring-plus-human system comes to contain a high fidelity continuation of me, perhaps with upgrades, perhaps with some functions migrated off wet tissue and onto magical jewelry, why is the natural reaction horror rather than transhumanist interest?
Oh boy. I'll condone the perspective that the Earring doesn't need to actively evil or malicious (and maybe isn't intended to be read that way: Scott notably does not have it destroyed). That said:
Trivially, even if the Earring does emulate you, the original brain is still being reduced in capability. You compare this to Learning To Be Me, and a lot of rationalists reject the brain upload problem, but it's worth spelling out that a lot of real-world people do see it as, at best, letting someone else have an excellent life while you die, and at worst, having a philosophical zombie that pretends to be a person take your place.
It's not clear that the Earring needs to emulate your preferences, rather than simply make sufficiently enjoyable decisions. It always makes decisions that the subject prefers, after they're executed, and those who refuse it always regret that. You can, trivially, today, find static models that are capable of exceeding your own judgement in a variety of environments. These aren't emulating and can't be emulating you, or maintaining persistence of your identity, and I'd like to think that a 30B param model and nvidia 3090 isn't capable of holding a real person anyway.
((Claudebots right now are an extreme version; they're often independent enough that they're off doing their own thing even where the owner would actively hate it and want it to stop before it drains their bank account. But that's an implementation problem, not a philosophical one.))
The myth-making of friction is difficult to make work with this story - after all, the Lotus-Eaters Earring-Wearers do mostly end up happy pillars of the community - but I'm cautiously willing to endorse it even in the Earring's context. There's a lot of short-term unhappiness and bad decision-making that, in net, is still useful to receive and grow from, even as someone regrets it happening to start with. The Earring gives an example of telling someone to half-ass it at work and goon fantasize at night, and that's probably intended more in the sense of 'the demon isn't replacing your values with its own', but even for people who want to maximize their fantasy-time, there's a lot of ways people could end up changing their values as a result of everything being unregrettable.
That's simplest with small direct skills: the historical non-computer example here is phone numbers. Ma Bell did a whole lot of work to make them readily memorizable and organized. In the 1970s and 1980s, people would hold rolodexes or phonebooks, but they would regularly have 20 or 30 phone numbers memorized. With the advent of computerized phones, such as cell phones, that just doesn't happen; few people can remember anyone else's phone number, and I'd expect in twenty years many people don't even know their own. Which is trivial, but then you notice the pattern in things like following maps, coordinating large social gatherings, mental arithmetic.
In twenty years, will people have outsourced the ability to identify other people by faces? You could do it, today; the tech's been around for a while (Google Glass lived and died and was reborn by Facebook and Chinese knockoffs years ago, yolo almost as old). That would be easier and avoid a lot of unpleasant mistakes, and at each and every step of the process you'd be happier if you didn't goof. But there are plausible downstream impacts on socialization and emotional processing that would not be so readily distinguished.
And that goes on past skills to other matters. I didn't realize that comic used the words "I've regretted it" until I went to look it up, by the way.
Your obvious counterargument that we don't glorify all friction, is correct, but I don't think it proves much. It's hard to distinguish every single case of friction-that-skills from friction-that-deskills, nevermind those cases where we care about the resulting skill or deskill. It's not hard to distinguish so many easy cases that the remainder are little more than rounding errors. They're good questions, but they're ultimately not determinative ones.
There's a more subtle and stronger counter-argument that a smart enough Earring could determine what mistakes would, in the long run, make someone better. The parable here cautions about a machine that always makes a single decision at a time that is never regrettable, but that doesn't preclude a machine that always makes decisions-as-a-whole that are always better, in the sense of a genie who is safe to ask to Do The Right Thing. And that's a harder problem.
But it's also a problem of its own: if people are faced with a choice between Doing The Right Thing and Doing The Pleasant-Enough Thing, they will go with the latter far more often. But that's also just the wireheading question in a fancy wrapper, so a lot less interesting.
((This doesn't caution against the use of LLMs, or the use of LLMs to do decision-work, so much as they way of interacting. It's quite possible to talk with an LLM without outsourcing your ability to evaluate correctness or regret-making, so long as you actually want that, in the same way a fantasy wizard might talk with summoned demon carefully kept behind a ring of salt, and checked at every moment for lies.
Unfortunately, my most impressive examples here are... on topics that are unlikely to be of appeal to normal readers here.))
Not strictly.
I'd had a couple traumatic medical experiences in an environment that Strongly Encourage Therapy for them, and the specific office my parents went with had checks through a variety of classically under-diagnosed conditions. Some of them were perfunctory - two or three questions involving a wooden puzzle cube stick in my mind that I've since learned were developmental disability tests, for example - but the autism-adjacent stuff ended up going into more thorough testing. This was back when Asperger's was still a diagnostic option, so not unreasonable, but I was just a standoffish kid that didn't pay attention to social queues cues, rather than being unable to notice them.
gattsuru
12d ago
The Indian Justice asking whether current day Native Americans are 14A citizens? This was the weirdest thing, as Sauer said that now they probably were (which makes no sense to me).
There’s a really boring answer where they’re all children of citizens at this point, but if Sauer was trying to establish that, didn’t do a great job.
Following off @hydroacetylene's thread here, I will add condensor fan motors as something that a barely-competent techie can replace. It's annoying, but it's annoying in a 'fucking screws' sense, and not a 'ohgodimightdie' one. Big things to watch out for :
If you're doing this, you might want to swap out the contactor and capacitor too, just because you'll be getting 90% of the way through them anyway. It was 15 USD for the contactor, 30 USD for the capacitor from a Home Depot (and a different vendor sold me a spare for 20 USD), and motor was 200 USD. You can get the motors cheaper (sometimes worryingly cheap) online, and that might be the better option for many people, but I'm lucky enough to have a small general-purpose shop that still sells to the public. We'll find out if it's more reliable than Amazon's VEVOR, but since the latter promoted itself as anti-explosive...
I will caveat that if the fan's not moving or only moving sporadically, and you didn't catch it quickly, there's good chances it caused compressor damage. I got lucky, since the motor had been alive last fall and didn't spin when I was doing a seasonal startup test and cleaning, but from everything I can find online the compressor over-temp and over-pressure safety switches are not very reliable if the fan just dies in the middle of the day.
You definitely can't (legally or safely!) replace the compressor as a casual DIYer, and it's pretty common for a bad compressor to mean just replacing the whole outdoor unit. So you want to keep ahead of problems here rather than hoping and praying, if the blower motor's even slightly unreliable.
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