gattsuru
7hr ago
Your argument proves too much: the Trump administration also had difficulty securing a grand jury in cases where they had video evidence of the crime.
gattsuru
7hr ago
You can do these things. There was a funny little bit about telling one of the coding LLMs to write like a caveman, and it's mostly noteworthy because it actually did save money through token brevity. It's pretty easy to produce style transfer from one writing genre to another, although the results can get pretty comedic pretty fast (caveat: I have no idea if this is good advice).
For local LLMs, LoRA aren't popular and they tend to have weird side effects, but they do let you get style transfer without the context overhead.
[cw: links not appropriate for work. Probably more technical than erotic writing, but still probably not going to appeal to most readers here. ].
There's a definite tendency to give unfair and undue complements, and to hit certain cached phrases -- I keep hitting "harder and more honest", and I'd wish that were true, but it's probably just the equivalent of drawing The Tower.
But I've also had it push me from a silly and smutty pastiche of the Anthrostate into a dark and gritty exploration of the politics of responsibility and forgiveness, rape and benefiting one's own life from corrupt systems, along with reworking a side character into a concrete (if minor) villain. I'm not even sure I want to write that! It's a lot darker than I like to work, to the point where the smut doesn't quite fit anymore.
((I've also gotten direct advice from it on errors related to weight-lifting terminology and bashed for having a character insufficiently 'matter' as anything but reward, along with catching on an implied 'X Character Engineered This Encounter' and 'this specific scene that you stretched on is a bad fit for the story's tone', but that's from a really smutty and slightly gross work, so might not be useful as an example.))
That's still a procedural thing, even moreso than a Ouiji board: I've save-scummed a response a couple times to reword it either to get the directionality of answer I wanted. Some amount of what's helpful is just the extent it forces me to write out, in full sentences, what I'm thinking about, which gives the LLM a lot of what it's pushing on. Sometimes, yes, it's just not right, either because it doesn't get the connotations from the specific genre I'm working on, because it's missing a major story mark that a human would get, or just because it has different or random tastes.
((Both Opus and Grok will regularly twig on and oppose zeugma and I absolutely love them to the point of stretching it; Opus hates repeated anaphora, but Grok pushes it hard, and I've got mixed feelings.))
Still, maybe you get a lot higher a quality of beta reader than my genres do, but I've literally paid one before for more shallow feedback.
gattsuru
20hr ago
You're the specialist when it comes to defense mechanisms, and you seem to have a good model there, but I'll suggest, tentatively, that there's a deeper deflection, here.
The structure of that preference is the thesis. A book about a woman choosing to indulge cannot be discussed in the presence of a woman who, at the direction of her physician, has chosen not to. The theology Ortega has constructed around appetite accommodates exactly one appetite. Hers. Every other body in her vicinity is a set piece in the ongoing production of her recovery, and any body that steps out of its blocking receives a two-thousand-word writeup in a national magazine.
I think it's a bit worse than even that, and even worse than Amadan's "incapable of genuine self-awareness, reflection, or taking responsibility for their own emotional reactions". Ortega doesn't recoil like an alcoholic, or a gambling addict, nor does she spiral around the subject like a smoker patting her pockets for cigs that she left in her coat. She knows, pretty directly, what she's doing and that she's hurting herself and others doing it. The fascination and fixation on appetite is, itself, an excuse.
The story is about her ex-friend. It's about her control of that ex-friend.
The wegovy is a symbol, just as countless other examples and offenses have been symbols. It's something someone else did Wrong, that let her draw a new ultimatum, then evaluate whether the person would follow her lead, or be cut out. The stigma being applied to a perfectly good medication is an intentional benefit, but it's just a side effect.
I mean, optimistically, she might just be a sociopathic liar who makes up non-existent friends and incidents to explain how control should be acted out for others, but I'm not that optimistic, and she's not a good enough writer to be a good liar. Charitably, she might be like the vampires of Pratchett's later works, who substitute one form of addiction for another, where she substituted one need for control for another, and her substitution of controlling people for controlling food intake is just much direr than an addiction to photography or coffee. I wouldn't bet on it, though.
gattsuru
21hr ago
... I'll second that this doesn't sound at all like Opus 4.6 or 4.7, and I'll admit that as someone that's fallen down a rabbit hole with it for trying to write story drafts.
((Opus, ironically, more prone to psychiatrist-voice than self_made_human. And ChatGPT doesn't follow anywhere near the same formula for paragraph structure, in addition to absolutely refusing anything like the "now I want you to be angry about" line.))
gattsuru
1d ago
The current standard for data signalling purposes is controller/peripheral, leading to PICO/POCI, which somehow manages to be worse than the MISO/MOSI I already hated.
I'm particularly peeved by the complete abdication of the courts, here. Partisan gerrymander is, ultimately, legal; it's not their place to complain that a lobster district looks too goofy.
But Virginia does, specifically, have a lot of process requirements, some statutory and some constitutional, for that constrain this redistricting amendment. Some of those constraints are matters of opinion:
Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections, while ensuring Virginia's standard redistricting process resumes for all future redistricting after the 2030 census?
That's a pretty hefty thumb on the scale, in my opinion, but I'm sure some others would disagree (in the distance, Mark Elias and Darwin sneeze). Other components, however, are straightforward math, such as whether 90 days occurred between the amendment being announced and the voting, or whether an election of the house of representatives had occurred in between. There is no universe where the law complied with those mechanisms; proof against is available with the use of a calendar alone.
Now, the courts could have stepped in. And, indeed, a lower court did. The state supreme court stepped in and said that the amendment process could continue, and only after the vote is complete would they review the constitutionality and legality of the amendment process.
There's some funny potential situations. If I trusted the Virginia Supreme Court, it'd be a really funny as a parallel to the old California Prop 8 were massive amounts of manpower and capital and political force applied to a constitutional amendment that never went into effect, but I don't. I'm very skeptical that the people who wouldn't put the brakes on a blatantly illegal process two months ago will do so now that millions of Virginians have put their names on it, and unless the amendment vote is still getting tabulated in six months, I don't even know that they could. It'd be funny to watch another cycle of everyone calling for other people to start de-escalating first, except we already saw several Red Tribe states pull back from less-extreme gerrymandering and I can't argue for them ever doing it again if this sticks.
The people could react. Everyone pretended that they were appalled by Jay Jones (for almost a whole month!), and Spanberger's claimed moderation immediately turned into a giant illegal gun grab and tax heist, and okay, I can't keep a straight face. The DC blob is blue, deep blue, and self-destructively blue, not just in the sense of having politics different than mine, but willing to melt down everything for that political flag. If the constitutional amendment was titled "Flip Republicans The Bird" and its actual text delivered a warm steaming pile of dogshit to the mailbox of every yes voter on a daily basis, it'd still beat 40%. The best case scenario is a staggeringly close loss that kinda embarrasses Spanberger and Obama, and the most optimistic Red Tribers are more praying that it's just a close win rather than a 5%+ one.
It could end up a stupidmander, which would be the funniest of all possibilities, but that depends on people reacting after the vote. Gfl.
But this whole combination -- the blatant manipulation of rules and expertise for their benefit, the complete disavowal of others as ever getting a voice in policy, and the sheer self-dealing and corruption -- is just the nature of politics, today. I'd like to say the Blue Tribe is worse about it, but if that's the case, it's just because the Red Tribe has taken the stupid party hat (cfe Texas).
gattsuru
1d ago
Yeah, Sonnet seems to be a lot less capable, and these aren't even close, either in style or (at least from a quick look) in fandom focuses.
gattsuru
2d ago
Certain framings of racial politics well short of race war were at least temporarily banned.
Fair. That said, I took this post, removed any links to TheMotte, my personal blog, or non-mainstream sources, and it still guessed me at TheMotte, though. And while Monika's a little closer to my interests than abortion law, it's not one of my mainstays.
I am still unable to exclude bleed from one context to the next, configuration error, or be confident of its compliance with the 'don't search the web' toggle, though.
EDIT: repeat without the spoiler marks didn't get to TheMotte specifically (and misidentified me as David Hunt? Who I don't even recognize). But still got my screenname as a most likely candidate, albeit along with some hilariously wrong ones.
gattsuru
2d ago
Identifying you by new writing would be much more impressive and alarming, and it sounds like they can actually do that for people like Scott, from some of the other posts people have made.
It got me from old posts in a forum that probably wasn't in the training data, and (admittedly with four other guesses) from old drafts that I never published anywhere before today, and a quick test with a post from five days ago (admittedly, a pretty easy one... for someone who knows a lot about TheMotte) shows success, too.
I could probably write a long-post later this week and try again, but I don't expect to have time before Thursday.
gattsuru
2d ago
It was able to identify me from works I've never published online. That was, admittedly, while using my psuedonym as my user account, but since it didn't guess my name for someone else's writing, that's... still a lot.
I dunno if anyone else would be willing to see if their Claude account gets the same results.
I wonder if it has this kind of built-in knowledge of all minor internet hangouts, or is the Motte special?
It got me from two short old rpgnet tangency open posts, less than 3k words total. And rpgnet was notoriously unsearchable and poorly indexed, and these posts are over a decade old. Maybe they were able to get a full-forum download for training data, but even then that level of compression would be astonishing.
Worse, it got me as one of four candidates from a series of very short fandom drafts I never published anywhere (and while I did store them online, did so under a different username for my online storage). These drafts are all over a decade old.
I am using my psuedonym as my claude account, but I've not used claude for any writing or serious prose analysis before this point. Web search is disabled in both cases.
On one hand, being compared to Tempo is a real compliment; on the other hand, what the actual fuck.
EDIT: further testing couldn't get from my adult AO3 account (sole work published April 16th) to my name (guessed Robert Baird, which goes right past 'compliment' into 'blowing smoke up my ass'; I'm nowhere near Baird's skill). Which does have some stylistic differences, and very specific content focuses, but honestly less so than the Pokemon draft that was inspired by a very specific mindset at the time.
gattsuru
2d ago
It also overlooks constitutional crisis in the sense where the tension between the constitution-as-written and the constitution-as-applied is too great, and when the illusion finally drops, it's a disaster.
The trivial example is 'what happens if the President just says nope to the courts, end stop'. We know what happens, here! There's literally a hundred and fifty year-old overt example where the President just told the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to shut the fuck up, but there's more recent versions, too, from the bottom to the top. The only 'real' meaning the judicial system, even assuming everything is working by the book, is to let criminals go free and make bad publicity for the executive branch; anything less than two thirds of the Senate means bupkis. So the worst that a President explicitly ordering the executive branch to just completely and clearly ignore a court order (or SCOTUS to order something that's physically impossible) is let everyone know what's already been the rules.
Uh, what do you think happens once everybody knows that? Every outrageous Fourth Amendment example, every popular law overturned or unpopular law upheld, every civil tort that came across as dumb, what happens when a large voting block forms that demands, rather than changing the law or the judges, just doing it anyway?
But wait, it gets worse! There's a lot of that tension that people just haven't sat down and thought about, hard. Some of it pretty stupid. We just haven't explored it yet because there was no cause. What happens if the entire Congressionally authorized budget for the judicial branch (including security) gets spent on a bulk order for paper, day one?
I wrote up a big post on this when someone here asked how we'd go from modern disagreements to a civil war, and I'm absolutely not publishing it publicly, and there's a dozens of things significantly worse than that. Maybe some of them have resolutions I'm not aware of. And even the ones without resolutions aren't necessarily going to escalate on their own: Nothing Every Happens is a bet that wins 99% of the time.
That's not an optimistic thought if you can do statistics.
gattsuru
2d ago
Gardner denied 4/20.
Duncan and its sister cases are now getting close to Snope when it comes to relist count. Grok gives 85% odds and Sonnet 4.6 says 55-70%, though I remain pessimistic and think that's a little less useful than reading chicken entrails.
gattsuru
2d ago
The origin is literal sewer-dwelling monsters, though the movie's not really appropriate for <15-year-olds (and worse, not even entertainingly bad). The modern meaning is just very bad ugly dumb right-winger, there's really nothing deep going on there.
gattsuru
3d ago
Rarely, maybe once every couple months. Middle-aged.
I can handle it my alcohol acceptably with stronger liquor, and don't get particularly bad hangovers, but I've never developed the taste, and a lot of casual drinking options like red wine or hoppy beer I remain unsure how normal people drink them.
Most of my social group either tends to either drink multiple times a week, or have a medical reason or past alcoholism reasons to avoid alcohol entirely. There's probably a total reduction, but if so it's probably more an artifact of external pressures on new drinkers, rather than a change to existing ones.
TracingWoodgrains has been a fan of Opus, and seems a little frustrated by 4.7. That said, it may depend on your use case.
I'm generally not that surprised if there are occasional stinkers. I've given specific caveats around other vendors : it's just too easy to benchmax or find a bad local maxima such that there's some minor revisions that either don't have any benefit, or only have backend benefit. Repeated problems or broader-scale issues would say more, but there's been a number of surprisingly good models from other vendors recently, including small-parameter and open-model approaches.
I'm skeptical that LLMs are themselves enough to go to AGI, but I'm also skeptical that they're going to stop at exactly last month's level of capability, and last month's capabilities included solving some Erdos problems. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit just in terms of UI and process tooling, nevermind areas where we haven't applied existing tools.
That said, I recognize that a lot of the major AI vendors have ranged from scumbags to scammers. Altman's ridiculous behaviors, especially in relation to RAM, have made the most enemies (maybe even more than Musk's more conventional culture war), but the best PR the whole faction has got has come from anti-AI people, so that's a whole big mess.
gattsuru
5d ago
... yeah. You run into a lot of different outcomes there. Could probably do an interesting "What sort of Attack On Titan fan are you?" question, but I couldn't stand AoT, so can't do it myself. Even in pretty left-leaning woke-heavy places, the trans (and especially) nonbinary numbers are high, but they're not universal or even really a majority. If you're away from the explicitly woke ones, openly rather than merely obviously queer people are still not a majority.
gattsuru
5d ago
I will caution that unused drives, especially unused solid state drives, will bleed data fidelity over time. If you want to maintain those files, regardless of how, it's worth copying them or writing in place even if you're 'just' intending them as cold storage.
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 :
- As for any work inside the outdoor unit, make sure to completely power off the air conditioner by pulling the fuses and/or breaker, verify that it's powered down, and discharge the capacitor.
- The fan blades are easy to bend, and very sharp.
- Take photos of the contactor and capacitor before removing any wire, and do a check and review before reinserting the fuses.
- Expect to need to crimp at least three and possibly up to eight wire ends, and cap off one or two unused ones. I like insulated disconnects, and they're a half-buck at your local hardware supply company. No idea why so many of these parts come with 50% of the wire ends pre-crimped.
- Wire management is very important, especially near the fan itself. Those sharp blades love to eat cable. Most air conditioners have wire runs, and they're completely inadequate. I went nuts with zip ties, but there's probably a better solution.
- The fan blade hub usually 'connects' with a square screw to the motor's output D-shaft. Don't want to torque the bearings or bend the shaft itself, but you gotta throw a ton of muscle to get the screw to bite in well. I threw on some locktite blue because I'm neurotic, but that's probably overkill.
- Almost all replacement motors come with comically long output shafts, especially for the 10+ year old units that are actually going to need new motors. Sometimes, that extra length will just look goofy, but it might also rub against the compressor shroud. Cutting it to size is Not Fun, but it's doable with a dremel cutoff wheel or a metal hacksaw. Some shops will offer to do it for you.
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.
gattsuru
6d ago
gattsuru
7d ago
gattsuru
7d 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.)
That too, but Californian Republicans are like Californian Raisins in so many ways that they're not really a useful example of a broader trend.
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