roystgnr
4hr ago
Do you know what the precise charges were? I see news stories saying "assault", which, yeah, he was totally guilty by the dictionary meaning, but laws usually get much more fine-grained than that.
DC does allow juries to convict on a "lesser included offense" when the charge is for a greater offense that necessarily includes the lesser offense, so there's no way for a criminal-friendly or just-stupid DA there to let a criminal walk away free from a misdemeanor assault by mischarging them with felony assault instead.
But it might have mattered to the jury if prosecutors overcharged; jury nullification is so much easier to pull off if the DA pisses off the jury first.
Or ... does DC even define an appropriate level of assault charge? In Texas I think this would be a Class C Misdemeanor Assault, offensive contact without physical injury, but the weakest assault level I can find in DC is "Simple Assault" which requires there to be an attempt "to do injury to the person of another", and it wouldn't be crazy for a jury to decide that a short-range ballistic sandwich just wasn't possibly going to do any injury. Maybe there was no better charge possible than misdemeanor destruction of property, if the mustard stains just wouldn't come out?
(IANAL, IANYL, please don't throw food at anyone anywhere or encourage others to do so, etc.)
roystgnr
6hr ago
And to add hilarity, the chief complaint was that my essay could do with a trim
Ironically in this conversation, but seriously: trimming essays may be a great use case for AI. "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter." is one of those quotes that's so popular it's been re-phrased a dozen times and re-attributed to a half dozen later authors, but it's obsolete if we can solve the problem with mostly tokens instead of time. Getting an AI to add words to your prompt is always risky, but hallucinations and stylistic cliches and verbosity aren't issues when you're only getting the AI to subtract words.
roystgnr
7hr ago
Which case was this? The first thing that came to my mind was a vague recollection of the recent reported paper-bag-of-bribery-sting-cash video, but the suspect there (despite being first appointed to ICE by Obama) was considered "one of the president's top allies" and it was the Trump DoJ that dropped the case.
roystgnr
7hr ago
I think I understand you now. You didn't sell me on "tacked on", though - IMHO as long as stakes are raised steadily that's just a common way of writing in general, not a failing and not specific to TV shows. There are a lot of ways to do it wrong (writers who rely on expanding scope because that's the only way they can raise interest, writers who run out of interesting grand-scope ideas too and then end up with an anticlimax or with no sense of stakes, writers who can't or don't bother to come up with convincing Watsonian reasons for the higher stakes and for their particular protagonists to be critical to them...) but I don't think the writers here made any of the typical errors; I think we just have a difference of taste here. You might be right that following your tastes would have led to a better result overall, or even to a result that I'd think was better.
You definitely did sell me on "arrogant", but
I thought they were somewhat humble about parts of the expanded premise, given their milieu.
And I stand firm on the idea that, despite the arrogance, the fatal flaw here was that the writers weren't brave enough to be arrogant enough:
roystgnr
1d ago
The guy who calls everything retarded has less meaning when they say it vs the guy who barely ever calls anything retarded.
I once debated with a friend who never used "real" profanity/vulgarity. My position at the time was: if you just use "fudge" every time a vulgar person would have used "fuck", you're essentially cursing just as much as they are, you're just using a different but isomorphic language to curse in.
Years later, she was speaking about something upsetting enough to say "fuck", for the first and only time ever in my presence. Her language was not isomorphic to mine after all. Mine has an f-word corresponding to her "fudge", but it does not have any single word that can instantly both convey and provide evidence for "this is the worst thing I've ever spoken about in my life". That's actually kind of a powerful thing to have in your vocabulary.
It's weird that our "violate social norms" words are often so bad at that etymologically, though. I'm old enough that it sounds silly to me that "retarded", a word chosen out of kindness for its clinical sound and gentle literal meaning of "slowed down a little", is now on society's Top Ten No-No Words list. I wonder if "fuck you" sounded even more confusing to old fogies at some point centuries ago. "Yes, I will have sex soon; thank ye for the well-wishes?" I hope to live long enough to someday accidentally tell my grandkids that something "challenged" me and then get dragged into a 10 minute long Get Off My Lawn digression about how I'm not being insensitive toward the physically and mentally challenged ("Ohhh! You said it again, grandpa!") and how back in my day that wasn't even "the C word" yet.
roystgnr
1d ago
Imo The Good Place dragged out far too much,
Nah. In particular, they went in to Season 2 with a perfect excuse to write an arbitrarily long, very episodic stretch of filler material, and they basically ignored that, time skipped as necessary, and kept the show pacing tight anyway.
but I also greatly disliked the direction it went into later for other reasons that are arguably subjective
And yet this time I won't argue, for a sufficiently narrow definition of "later". I thought the ending (by which I mean roughly the last episode and a half) was decent, but I was still disappointed. The rest of the show was great, not just decent. It also felt like there were multiple different ways they could have made the ending great instead, yet they didn't. They weren't smart enough to handle a better-in-nerdy-ways ending (in the second big block of spoilered text here), and they either weren't brave enough or truly broad-minded enough to handle a better-in-obvious-ways ending (in the final block there).
roystgnr
2d ago
So, is there a series that has the final season that doesn't feel either rushed or drawn out
(sobs in Firefly)
that finishes exactly how and when it should?
Okay, never mind.
It's a kids' show, but: Gravity Falls.
Andor's second season started slow (like its first) but more than made up for that by the end.
Bojack Horseman.
Wow, you'd think it would be easy to come up with more examples, wouldn't you? But even if I consider very episodic shows, where there's no arc-plot to be rushed or drawn out, it feels like most of the great long-running shows were only ended a year or more after they'd started running low on ideas, and most of the great short-running shows were killed too soon, and there are even some shows that somehow managed to do both, being first killed in their prime and then resurrected in inferior form. There are still a lot in each of those categories that are great overall despite pacing flaws, but they're not what you asked for.
roystgnr
2d ago
To my mind, this was rather astonishing and shocking.
How so? Written descriptions basically are the closest thing that an LLM has to short-term memory. If the written description is just a move list, then for each new Nth move it makes it has to reconstruct the state of the board through all ~2N previous moves from scratch to determine what subsequent options are valid. If the written description includes previous states of the board then it just has to reconstruct the state of the board by adding 2 moves to the previous state. Try playing chess yourself without looking at the board, only at a list of moves, and see if you can "learn pretty quickly how to play perfect chess" under such conditions. There are people who do even better, who play "blindfold chess" well, but it's not nearly as easy as playing when you can just look at the board at any time.
In the last thread, my opinion was that LLMs are missing something essential. And I still think that, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if LLMs required very little theoretical augmentation to reach AGI.
You're updating your beliefs remarkably fast. (for a human - ironically, the LLMs I've used started to get good at "thoughtfully" reconsidering disagreement about a year ago, though they were torn between stubborn gaslighting vs worthless sycophancy before then) Or maybe I'm flattering myself here, because "Not effectively AGI yet, but will probably be a component of it after a little more augmentation" is about where I am right now, and I'm a tiny bit worried that a big chunk of the "augmentation" may turn out to be as simple as working out the kinks in multimodal models. We don't need much visual short-term memory as humans to consider ourself generally intelligent (though even people with total aphantasia will use scratch paper), but it does seem to be important, and I would be very surprised if the state-of-the-art in LLM visual memory remains "a mix of written descriptions and/or ASCII art" for very long.
Actually, that's not totally true, since some tasks have exponential or even combinatorial time complexity.
It's also worth distinguishing between NP tasks where we don't actually care about getting the exact right answer (e.g. imperfect solutions to the Traveling Salesman problem still save shipping companies billions of dollars) and those where we do (... maybe just cryptography?). AGI could become superhuman at coming up with heuristics for approximations even in cases where it might need practical quantum computing first (or worse cases where it might need to discover that actually P=NP in a practical way) to get exact answers.
roystgnr
3d ago
This is getting a bit comical, don't you think?
Seen on X:
"As the Earth is being disassembled:
"Guys, stop over-reacting! The concept of a Dyson Sphere was already in the training data!"
roystgnr
8d ago
Citation needed.
"Are sexual relations between two adults of the same sex not wrong at all?" is not exactly the same question as "should same-sex marriage be legal" in logical terms, but the societal changes track pretty well, and we have a longer history of finer-grained data on the former via the General Social Survey. Figure 1(a) here gives some estimates of the magnitudes of intra-cohort changes. Before around 1990 there was no trend at all; afterwards every cohort who were adults in 1990 but still young enough to have a complete sample by 2005 shows some upswing; the ones still adults with a large sample size past 2020 show roughly 40% swings. That's a clear supermajority of the roughly 50% swing for the country as a whole. Each cohort usually starts out with more "not wrong at all" responses than their next-nearest-age peers, but by a few percent, not a few tens of percent.
Very likely, there's a cohort effect kernel driving the change, with smaller period effects following as a result of mimesis dragging everyone closer to the new cohort mean.
You mean the new total mean? "50 year olds' opinions are changing to better match the opinions of 50 year olds" wouldn't have any effect.
But the total mean can't be affecting everyone - 35-49 year olds have been tracking right around the mean, and 18-34 year olds have been steadily moving away from it.
How do you come up with "very likely"? The data seems to match "peoples opinions are all being affected by their environment, but the older you are the farther back your environment goes" just as well.
I can't rule out that 50-year-olds are trying to mimic 25-year-olds' views specifically, except by anecdote (does the phrase "kids these days" sound like it's going somewhere positive, or somewhere negative?), but I'll note that even if this were true, it isn't what people generally mean by "cohort effects"; it would be something much more strange and interesting.
roystgnr
8d ago
For gay marriage?
In legal terms, in the USA, kinda. A dozen-ish states had already made gay marriage legal by legislation or referendum before Obergefell, and dozens more had already legalized it based on state court or lower federal court rulings, but Obergefell did cover a third of the country in one swoop.
In terms of core moral principles, no. Support for gay marriage in America went from 27% in the 1996 up to 60% right before Obergefell, and it kept going up along basically the same linear trend with no significant disruption one way or the other for 6 or 7 years afterward, before leveling off or declining a bit in the last few years.
roystgnr
8d ago
Mostly cohort effects, meaning new people and not existing people changing.
The rate of "should be valid" answers to the question "Do you think marriages between same-sex couples should or should not be recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages?" went steadily from 27% in 1996 to 70% in 2021, faster than the old "one funeral at a time" method of changing people's minds would allow. Although the results vary with age in the direction you'd expect, the 50-64 and 65+ groups are still at around 60%. The difference between retirees and young adults today is lower than the difference between Republicans and Democrats.
Iraqi, Pashtun, and Vietnamese moral intuitions are contra Anglo people's democracy.
Views toward America in Vietnam were 84% favorable vs 11% unfavorable in the latest large-scale survey I could find; 84% was higher than in any of the other 36 countries being polled. Part of this is probably that they weren't as disappointed by Trump as most, but the favorable/unfavorable margin for America there was still nearly double their margin on confidence in Trump. 69% specifically said they like "American ideas about democracy", higher than any other country polled except South Korea.
roystgnr
8d ago
Not quite post-apoc, but there's Snow Crash, where the Protagonist spends most of his Metaverse time connected from the 20x30 storage unit where he and his roommate live.
I wonder how well most storage units would hold up, post-apocalypse. The climate controlled ones would lose that control when the grid goes down, and anybody paying a premium for climate control probably has something they expect to decay at ambient temperatures+humidity, but nobody's going to get a second unit for more robust possessions so even the climate controlled units would still be worth cracking open to see what survived.
roystgnr
8d ago
There will be questions people will definitely be wanting answers to, and they will get them in due time.
Wow, that sounds ominous.
Though, whatever it is, don't underestimate the ability of future generations to just move on.
My knowledge of my grandfather grew from "He died when my dad was a kid" to "murdered in his bed during military service in a tumultuous far-off land" to "in an unsolved crime story full of sex and coverups and intrigue", ending up with an email conversation with a historian who "thought some things about the official reports didn't add up" ... and that was 20 years ago, with no closure, but it's pretty much water under the bridge to me and all my cousins. You'd think that, after I later inherited a priceless artifact (not super valuable, I just don't have the documentation that I think would be necessary if I ever wanted to legally resell it) that was once my grandfather's, the story should have picked up from there, but nope, no visits from master cat burglars or Russian agents or anything. I didn't even think to check it for secret compartments.
Damn, I've never actually typed that all out before. Now I kind of wish I had some recorded phone calls to listen through.
roystgnr
8d ago
the failure of the kibbutzim.
"Only once in history did democratic socialists manage to create socialism. That was the kibbutz. And after they had experienced it, they chose democratically to abolish it." - Joshua Muravchik, "The Mystery of the Kibbutz", as quoted in this fascinating GrokInFullness blog post
It feels like "failure" is too strong a word to use for that, though. Even if it didn't work well enough economically, it was at least a counterexample to the old "you can vote your way into socialism but you have to shoot your way out" joke.
roystgnr
8d ago
not my professors as they are completely unwilling to talk about not academia
All of them??
I've definitely known many professors who reserve their highest respect for tenure-track professor jobs, but they'd all placed PhD students at government labs and in industry and been proud to do so. The long-term rate of academic PhDs creating new academic PhDs has to average to the population growth rate; this implies that either you're sending most of your grad students outside of academia deliberately or you're simply at the top of a pyramid scheme.
Even the ones who had zero intention of leaving academia themselves were proud of their networks outside academia. The obvious motive is that having former students and colleagues in industry gives you a constant source of blurbs to make research grant proposals sound more impressive; perhaps less obvious is that that increases their own BATNA when negotiating with their university or moving to another. One of my favorite Asimov quotes, about his conflicts as a chemistry prof and non-fiction writer versus his administration at BU:
In the course of my fight with the school, I couldn't help but notice that I became a pariah. [...] Once, however, a fellow faculty member, making sure we were unobserved, said to me, "Isaac, the faculty is proud of you for your courage in fighting the administration for academic freedom."
I said, "There's no courage involved in it. Don't you know my definition of academic freedom?"
"No. What's your definition of academic freedom?"
I said, "Independent income."
roystgnr
9d ago
There's typically an August and a September test date that can get your scores released in time for even early applications.
It's not uncommon to take an earlier SAT, though, late junior year, to make sure you can retake it if you blow it the first time.
roystgnr
9d ago
American cities were insanely dangerous and crime ridden in a way that even the worst parts of now can't hope to emulate
While it's true that violent crime danger in most places in the US dropped again in the 90s, the "worst parts of now" are still pretty awful. NYC's homicide rate in 1980 was 12.7/100k/year, nearly triple what it is today, but that's still barely more than half of the newly "low" rate I was just congratulating Baltimore on, and it's a quarter of the rate in a couple remaining hot spots like (the city of, not the metro of) St. Louis.
No real objections to the rest of your paragraph, though. IMHO the extinction risk of AI is worse than the near-extinction risk of nuclear WW3 was, but it's also a much more subtle and speculative risk. I learned as a (GenX) child that there were thousands of nuclear weapons ready to vaporize everyone I loved, 30 or 40 minutes after someone pressed the wrong button, and I'd say that was still sufficiently rough.
roystgnr
9d ago
give in to populist demands and start reforming parts of the economy that are currently set up for rent extraction at the behest of shareholders
So ... which is it? Populist demands are easily converted (by both sides of the aisle!) into protectionist policies that set up parts of the economy for rent extraction. "You can only build more housing here if it's economically 'inclusionary' enough" gets predictably turned by reality into "you can't build more housing here" and drives up the price of the grandfathered (often literally!) housing stock. People want to "drive housing prices up for people who own their homes" while also making housing prices affordable for people who don't, but that just doesn't compute.
principal-agent conflicts of interests in healthcare
are another example. The ACA caps insurance company profit as a percent of premiums, a policy at least populist enough for Obama to brag about it ... and a policy that inadvertently sets up a huge conflict of interest when insurers are trying to figure out what they should pay out.
Ironically, this sort of "cost-plus contract" malincentive was also fixed in part by Obama, in the context of NASA procurement, when he supported and extended the Commercial Resupply Services contracts and then went beyond them with the Commercial Crew program, in both cases paying for purchases where the seller actually could make more profit by producing results more cheaply. For now we still have to burn $4B a pop for SLS when we want to send humans outside Low Earth Orbit, but we can replace it with a $180M Falcon Heavy launch for things like Europa Clipper.
roystgnr
9d ago
I just want to make sure it has qualia and isn't a Chinese room.
"In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland without children." - Nick Bostrom
I'd also add some preferences regarding population and personality and such, but "do our successors have any intrinsic value or not" does seem to be the first and most important criterion to have!
However, I'm confused by the use of the phrase "make sure" here. Unless you're expecting to be uploaded, and you're confident that the idea of a "p-zombie" is incoherent (which I'm guessing you aren't, given the Chinese room reference), what observations could give you any sense of surety here? Today's LLMs can pass Turing tests, which used to be our "fine, they're sentient now" criterion, but their lack of "medium-term" memory and they fact that they still can "slip" in ways that make them seem non-sentient makes us think in hindsight that our criterion was just inadequate, and yet we haven't really found anything to replace it. If tomorrow's LLMs never slip, does that mean they've become sentient, or does that just mean they've become better at faking it?
roystgnr
9d ago
Even "overestimated" probably overstates things, in that it suggests that he got the magnitude wrong but still got the direction of the effect correct. I suspect it's more likely that stop-AI bombings will have roughly the same effect on AI risk that anarchist groups' bombings and murders a century ago had on government overreach.
roystgnr
9d ago
Taking inflation into account, that's only a little more than I was getting paid by my university just to work on my PhD. From an independent company who'd have you working on problems with more immediate benefit to them than "it makes the University stats look better" and/or "we could conscript him to teach if a prof gets sick or quits suddenly", it doesn't sound competitive at all until you consider the equity ... and equity in a startup is like a lottery ticket: even if the game isn't crooked, your ticket might make you fabulously wealthy but it's more likely to be worthless.
On the other hand, the job market does seem to be kind of awful right now. It might not be crazy to take something here to avoid resume gaps and build more experience while job hunting elsewhere, and if you're finishing up your PhD at the same time then maybe that's enough to prevent the typical "what was your last salary" question from making subsequent employers lowball you too.
On a side note that probably belongs in Culture War - the Baltimore homicide rate is now the lowest its been in nearly 50 years, after dropping more than 60% in 3 years! Wow! That still leaves a crazy high rate (my advice after my daughter's Johns Hopkins application and some crime map study: "you're not likely to get shot unless you go a mile south, or east, or southwest ... north looks nice ... I can see why they're medical specialists ...") but there's now like 500 fewer dead people than the 2015-2022 rate would have predicted, and that's pretty great.
roystgnr
9d ago
there has basically never been a mathematician producing valuable maths older than that.
Yitang Zhang didn't prove that the lim inf of the prime gap was 2 (which would have verified a 150 year old conjecture), but he was the first to prove it was finite, at age 58. Listing and Moëbius were in their 50s when they formalized the idea of non-orientable surfaces (which I would consider to be literally "producing" math rather than just "solving" it). The first version of the Weierstrass Approximation Theorem (which led to whole fields of the most economically valuable results in mathematics, in my biased applied-math+engineering opinion) was proven when Weierstrass was 70.
But, damn, are they the exceptions who prove the rule, so long as we leave that "basically" qualifier intact? Kolmogorov was in his 50s when he solved Hilbert's thirteenth problem, but that was in joint work with a 19 year old student. Euler, Gauss, and Cauchy were doing great work in their old age, but arguably only after doing greater work as younger men. Searching for mathematical discoveries by importance and then looking up age (rather than searching specifically for discoveries made at older ages), the bulk do seem to be between 25 and 45.
I wonder if the trend is moving older (because things that were groundbreaking discoveries 300 years ago are basic undergrad background today and you need to learn much more to get to the cutting edge) or younger (because subsidized institutional math research gets more output but at the cost of making older mathematicians spend all their time teaching and mentoring and writing proposals and hiring and so on, while their grad students and postdocs are the ones who can actually focus on the work).
roystgnr
10d ago
Well I never said that
That was supposed to be the generic you in context; sorry for the misleading ambiguity.
I'm confused. "led the National Socialist Party of America" is a direct quote from the indictment, but Wiki claims that literally describes only two guys, neither of whom seems to fit the rest of the description. Did some other organization take the same name after (or before) the first one disbanded? Is this a People's Front of Anti-Judea vs Anti-Judean People's Front thing?
For any present "director of a faction" of some hate group or other, I'd have said opsec might be a mitigating factor here. If the SPLC lists in its "Extremist Files" the leaders of factions A, B, C, and E, then they pretty much have to list their mole in faction D too, or they risk having to list his successor after an untimely murder later. But these indictment entries are saying things like "led", "the Imperial Wizard", and "National President", and they distinguish those from cases like "the former chairman" and "the former director of a faction", which suggests that these were singular-leader roles during the period of the SPLC payments. Even if they've found themselves stuck metaphorically riding a tiger they can't safely dismount, it seems pretty damning to pay someone who's in that position as a mere "field source". "What is your hate group doing tomorrow?" "Same old: whatever I tell them to." At that point at least feed the poor bastard some de-escalatory suggestions.
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