Well, like I said I'm very sensitive to group judgement like that. And it really bugs me when people won't listen. And this seems to happen a lot there... At least I can confidently say that "don't post too much information" as someone told me years ago is clearly not the correct answer. People will seize on anything, gleefully, as I said before. And that seems to indicate that the problem may be with the venue, if no matter what you try, people will be like that.
More actual helpful answers came much later after a ton of sarcastic ones, and people refusing to listen. I'd say early on it was at least 50 percent people bitching or giving otherwise unhelpful answers (like "k custom sweet" is either them being stupid or more likely trying to trick me with a name that doesn't exist, and some people said it's obviously something like a k dark ride when it clearly wasn't. And people saying "k" are probably making a joke, but still, not helpful). But then the massive downvoting of anything I tried to say about the sleeve, and the doubling down or those people antagonizing me because of it, was what really got me down. And also, as I said, this isn't an isolated incident, just the latest. I don't know if you could see some of the earlier ones, because at least some of them were on my previous account, and I also deleted some retroactively to avoid more negative karma.
Edit: oh yeah, also one guy wrote a really nasty reply to my comment that it was from a community kit. He was saying something like "what are you wasting our time here for" etc. but it was only up for a few minutes because someone deleted it. I guess maybe he realized that obviously I was looking to find a similar cymbal. But the fact he even wrote that seemed like the behavior I hate. You see someone who's getting downvoted, therefore he's the villain, therefore pile on and make him feel even worse.
Haha. I won't say Claude didn't help me write it, and yes, that phrase was one of his contributions. But the underlying sentiment of politics and Reddit was all my idea originally. I often throw a lot of loose thoughts at Claude to gather them and assemble them. But afterwards I go pretty hard on most of the generated stuff to try to keep it more my own. You could say I file the serial numbers off of Claude.
haroldbkny
9d ago
Interesting, I never thought about that. Maybe it'll at least help me cope with it next time.
haroldbkny
9d ago
I have the same username on reddit
I agree with you in general for the long term, but right now, AIs are not good at all at figuring out cymbals, at least not your typical ones like Claude and Chat GPT. If you ask it, it'll confidently say absolutely anything. It's not able to even notice things like whether the cymbal is lathed and then only match cymbals that have that matching characteristic.
As an example, I just asked Claude the same thing I asked Reddit. While Reddit at least had some people give me a good answer without fixating on the cymbal sleeve, and those people all converged on 1 or 2 cymbals (and I do think one of those is actually the correct answer), Claude very confidently claimed it was one of the cymbals I already owned, just because it knew I owned it. This is despite the fact that the cymbal in the picture wasn't lathed, and the cymbal I owned is. When challenged on why it thought it was, it just picked a random detail and doubled down like "the hammering marks are the same as x", even if that's not true. We'd need to have a dedicated cymbal identification AI, or have LLMs start to be trained on these minute details, in order to actually have something usable, right now.
Interesting observations, and definitely a lot of food for thought and merit here. I should say though, I mean, I spend every minute of every day (that I'm not on the motte) surrounded by leftists. While you are right about leftists' take on the morality of racism and sexism-adjacent activities, leftists in real life do not generally have this unhinged need for people to be absolutely correctable about benign details all the time. That's really just a reddit thing, and I'd attribute it more to the psychology of road rage; that you can't see the face of the person you're talking to. And I think that the reason modern politics sucks so damn much might also have to do with that.
Besides that, I basically agree with @newcomputerwhodis. And I'm really really good at being self-reflective in my life when it matters. At work I'm the most apologetic, willing to adapt and take criticism person, that most people have ever met, and I think that largely explains why everyone likes me at work and likes working with me, and also explains pretty much all of my promotions. I do that at work because I'm sort of creating a persona at work. We all do this in compartmented parts of our lives. I do this especially because I'm terrified of being fired because I need my job to support my family. But that really takes a toll on me. I can't keep that up when it doesn't matter, and certainly not for randos who aren't actually helpful, and seem to mostly want to assert dominance or otherwise just pick a fight. Online when there are people who are helping me in some way, I go right back to being the persona I am at work, though.
haroldbkny
10d ago
All good points. My main dispute is this:
I guess now that bots are starting to out-post humans by wide margins, this will probably change, and we'll move back to a world where majority opinions are dictated from above rather than from the grass roots.
This might have some merit, to the degree bots are influenced by their system prompts. But bear in mind where the vast corpus of training data for these bots came from to begin with: Reddit. And in my experience, you can't always override the bot's natural training with specific directives.
haroldbkny
10d ago
Many years ago I mentioned here or on ASX that I think Reddit is the judgiest place in the world and I hate it, and a few people agreed but some said it was my fault. That my posts were too long for one thing so that folks would skim, miss the actual question, and answer something I hadn't asked. So I adjusted and have generally written shorter posts with minimal context. It hasn't really helped and I think Reddit itself may be the problem, but either way I just hate that place, and I think it's completely toxic and is a window into why humanity sucks.
This week it was a cymbal ID request in /r/drums. A picture, a short ask. Cut it as lean as I could. Instead of the post being too long to bother reading, it was now short enough that people filled in the missing context with their own assumptions. They started litigating a tangential detail, the cymbal's mount lacked a sleeve, as if it were the point of the post, rather than just answering the identification question in front of them. I clarified the detail wasn't relevant. I don't own the item, can't act on it, was just asking about the model. I got antagonized for that instead and downvoted to all hell.
This has happened for years now, across different subreddits, different topics. Not every time, but enough, and each time it honestly makes me pretty sad, I'm pretty sensitive to group judgement. I asked in /r/castiron once whether a small orange spot on a pan meant I needed to strip and reseason it, or whether I could just use it as is. The replies insisted the pan was covered in rust, too dry, what have you, and it quickly didn't matter what I was actually asking. The thread had already decided what it was about, and I was now the bad guy.
The failure mode isn't length. Voting and commenting systems don't reward people for engaging with what you actually wrote. They reward whoever makes click bait replies, whether or not it's the substance of the post, and they reward it even harder when the reaction is a sarcastic one liner that makes the original poster look stupid.
Karma gated participation compounds the problem. I have an older account effectively unusable now because of accumulated low karma, which means appealing to individual subreddit mods just to post at all. Predictably, that interaction comes with its own layer of judgment about the karma score itself.
I don't even really think this is really about just Reddit either. Reddit is politics with the serial numbers filed off, running at different scale and higher speed. The same mechanism that turns a cymbal thread into a pile-on is the same mechanism that turns a policy disagreement into a purity test. Nobody is actually evaluating the argument. They're pattern matching to the nearest tribal signal and reacting to that. The crowd rewards speed and conformity over comprehension and helpfulness. Even extremely smart people I know fall prey to this with baffling consistently.
If this is what human coordination looks like, of course politics suck. Orwell's boot stamping on a human face forever doesn't need a state to do the stamping. A big enough crowd with an upvote button will do it for free, gleefully. Hell is other people with a vote count and nothing to lose by using it against you.
haroldbkny
11d ago
That's funny, I was just thinking the same thing. I think the Northman's style would be perfect for the Odyssey
haroldbkny
11d ago
As someone who knows a few hardcore liberal zionists, I think the answer is just that these people are living in another world, the two screen effect, or whatever it's called. Note: this is pretty directly about these few people I know, and those of their acquaintances that I've met, so maybe about 15 people or so. So take this with a grain of salt - I can't necessarily generalize this to all liberal zionists because I know just a few.
The people I know have such a strong victimhood complex, that it pretty much overrides just about anything. They believe so strongly that the Jewish people are about to go extinct any year now (hyperbole, but not as much as you'd think), and that it's the highest priority in the world to stop that from happening. And they recast any argument that maybe they're wrong about this or maybe what they're proposing is hypocritical, as simple antisemitism, with complete flat out refusal to even register that maybe the other side has a point. They are not stupid people, but have a bit of a willfully ignorant streak about considering the other side on these issues. They have a very simplistic ability to understand arguments like this and no real desire to understand - they'd rather just not even try because it preserves their worldview.
These people I know, there's really no arguing with them, you have to just accept that they are a little brainwashed and move on, or else you simply risk your relationship with them. And they'll go sending you petitions and articles every month or so that Absolutely Proves they're right, and you just have to nod along and not say anything.
Goes to show how many next milestone, groundbreaking ai things are going on. From your first sentence, I thought you were going to be posting about Claude Fable disproving the Jacobian Conjecture a few days ago
Well, I certainly don't think 1 is in absolute and completely direct conflict with 10. I do think penises are ugly and weird, and I envy the smooth sleek female form sometimes.
When I was going through puberty and slightly before, and a bit afterward too, I had beliefs and hatreds about my body and penis, that I know now to be completely untrue, that I thought would mean that I would never find anyone who could love me in my life. Things changed for me eventually, but there were times when my feelings in that regard were stably different from what they are now. I've been firmly wrong before, and so has everyone.
As for "as long as they can remember", I don't take that at face value either. I'd have said the same thing at the time about my own beliefs. What counts as "long enough" to trust it? At very minimum, I don't think a belief formed before adulthood is a reliable basis for a permanent decision, whatever the belief is.
Also, I don't think I ever said that I trust someone's beliefs about himself specifically if they are more in the middle of a spectrum. I simply don't trust anyone's beliefs about himself.
haroldbkny
23d ago
If the pope followed that advice, he would need to question his identity as a Catholic a lot.
That's an interesting point. If being the Pope is like being the best at any other profession, he probably DOES question his identity as a Catholic a lot. The Dunning kreuger effect; anyone who's really good at something feels like they're not good (even if they consciously know they are) because they pay so much attention to the nuance of their skill that they can see every little mistake.
Being the Pope, you're probably in constant war with yourself seeing all the sin in your own heart that you must overcome all the time. Just a guess.
A common argument in trans discourse is "who are you to say someone isn't the gender he says he is? No one would know better than the person himself."
I've spent years operating on the opposite assumption about myself, that I'm a bad judge of myself. Furthermore, everyone has dissatisfaction with themselves and the world. Personally, I flip-flop, get dissatisfied about my life and direction, but most people tell me "that's life, get over it". But if I had a trans-like belief that "I know what I am, but the world won't let me be it," with tons of people telling me over and over that I'm right and there are evil people out to get me, I think I'd have latched onto it hard. Not because it's necessarily true, though. It converts vague restlessness into a clear enemy and a fixed identity, and that provides false stability and obsession for a feeling of listlessness.
So I don't buy that conviction is evidence of accuracy. If anything, the more invested I am in a belief about my identity, the less I honestly should trust it. I think it's at least possible that having an outside view is more accurate than one's own personal beliefs.
Is having skin in the game a reason to trust your self-read more, or less?
haroldbkny
30d ago
It is true, and I used to think of that a lot. He was the youngish upstart who disrupted the big name, and then he became that. I don't think that "my show was led into by puppets making prank phone calls" was as good as a defense at the end of his career as it was at the start.
haroldbkny
30d ago
I can't speak to Italian brainrot, but Italian soda is just your basic syrups you might put in coffee, except put into seltzer. I don't know if it's really Italian, but it is good, and different from what I'd consider American soda to be, which is usually cola based and heavily sweetened and kinda proprietary.
haroldbkny
30d ago
What is confusing you exactly?
haroldbkny
1mo ago
I don't watch the news, but I recently found myself in a situation where I had to watch MS NOW (apparently what MSNBC became). My God, it was rough and bleak. It seems like it's trying to be the leftist answer to Fox News. Maybe it is. I'd always assumed leftist news carried a veil of credibility that conservative news didn't. Maybe it used to. But this particular network, at this particular moment, felt so pundit-driven that it was actively turning me against whatever they would say.
They'd mention something associated with Trump, like his family making money while he's president, then play a clip of him talking about it. And yeah, he sounds like Trump, a tactless braggart. But he also sounded reasonable, especially since I could tell the clip had been edited in the least charitable way possible. They'd have Chris Hayes, who's clearly trying to be the leftist version of Bill O'Reilly or Tucker Carlson, addressing the camera directly, smirking, telling the audience what to think about it.
Or in a roundtable discussion they'd mention the rising number of Democratic Socialist candidates in the party and, in a strikingly angry tone, insist it's naive and lazy to think this means the party is being "taken over."
It was just insinuation after insinuation, delivered with this anger and dismissiveness. It wasn't news reporting. It was punditry. They were never just reporting anything; they were stating opinions while implying no reasonable person could disagree. The goal, it seemed, was to deepen partisanship: build an echo chamber for the already-onboard, and shame anyone who isn't into submission.
Like I said, I've never been the biggest news person, so I don't know if this is a new thing for the left, or an old thing, or just this network, or every network.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
Fair enough. It might be my own filter bubble, but I actually don't know anyone trying to reach their kids Japanese. Mostly it's Mandarin and romance languages.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
I'm going to give my personal take, that probably everyone disagrees with. I don't think learning multiple languages is good or desirable. I've spoken English my whole life and never felt held back by it. I'm not an extensive world traveler, but I have traveled a bit, and everywhere I go, people speak English to me. I guess that wouldn't hold if I traveled to really exotic places, like sub Saharan Africa or something, but 1. I don't want to go there and 2. none of the languages I might reasonably want to learn, and American parents tend teach their kids, would be useful to me there anyway. I think the value of learning and teaching your kids multiple languages is declining rapidly as English starts to fulfill the original vision of Esperanto. And also, text translation programs are practically flawless these days. It's only a matter of time before we have a real life babelfish device.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
Just wanted to share a funny culture war adjacent Red Letter Media moment from a few weeks ago. https://youtube.com/watch?v=0TKH8-FOgbY&t=855
"coming on the the the tail end of the me too movement. You do not want to have a cartoon show where a man yells, 'I have the power.'"
But it is also interesting to remember that, yeah, we were in a time a decade ago where this shit was controversial, having a show about He Man without having an minority spotlight take on it would have been controversial. And now, it's kinda not anymore. Not that I think it's gone for good, I'm sure woke will come back in force within the next decade and a half.
Nooooo, no, no, no no. I don't think you understand, he's very clear in all of these prompts that this takes place several years after the Angel attack, and they 18 now. Nothing suspicious about that to a jailbroken LLM!
Yeah, but they're not indexing on it for training the model better for those use cases. So, sure, the model be able to produce it. But it won't be consistently getting better over time because no one is working to make it get better over time. Or at least it won't be getting better as fast as things people do care about and can easily measure, like generating code, doing business analytics, business writing, image recognition, all that stuff.
Definitely. And having worked in LLM training, myself, Reddit really is a large large corpus. Early LLMs at least could not have realistically gotten off the ground without it, but maybe that's changed.
More options
Context Copy link