his father is idolized, then portrayed as arrogant bully in some memories never to have any other impact on the story
Did you miss the bit where they explicitly say that he was a bit of a prat, but very charismatic, and then he matured a bit and was admired by all?
replaced by stepfathers
Harry is an orphan. It's hard to parent from beyond the grave.
Voldemort is turned villain of course because of his father
Voldemort is turned villain by his mother, with it implied that her using magical rape on her lover combined with her weak abandonment of her child caused Voldemort to be born without the ability to love. Voldemort murdered his father out of disappointment with his legacy, not because his father was a bad man (he wasn't very nice but that's because Rowling has trouble with aristocrats, not men).
I'm deeply non-feminist but even then you seem to me to have this very shallow idea of what men are allowed to be and do, and what constitutes character and virtue. That might be a feminist trope but even broken clocks are right twice a day.
Corvos
1d ago
Because winning pretty big for all time is much better and more legible for IPO than a small chance of winning very big before being beaten out by a competitor who doesn't have to service your massive and entitled customer base or deal with your office politics and legal woes.
Corvos
1d ago
Yeah, I work in a startup at the moment and having to wait most of a year between demonstrating a proof-of-concept and getting the finalised contract to do the thing you'd already agreed to do is killer. How do you pay your engineers for the six months of no-fees? How do you get investment when you don't technically have a contract? It's a circular nightmare.
Corvos
1d ago
Yes. It's a very British way of saying 'well done' in combination with 'but you really shouldn't have done it and shouldn't keep doing it because it's reckless and won't help you'.
The eternal San Francisco Liberal Empire where all technology ‘Designed in California’ was ‘Made in China’ until the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016? The eternal San Francisco liberal empire that lobbied heavily against tariffs even as parts of it embraced his message on crime and taxes?
This sounds very much a master/vassal relationship though. Research and design and thought happen in San Francisco because San Francisco is awesome; meanwhile you get your awesome stuff built in China because it's cheap. Shame about Xi being an autocrat but don't worry, we'll uplift China eventually through trade.
Corvos
2d ago
I spent some time attending classes at a community biolab in my city, and I think a lot of the necessary prerequisites for a manufactured virus are surprisingly cheap.
That's interesting, and sounds like something to be addressed. I'm curious but I won't ask you to give details :P
there is no reason to just assume that AI-aided defense will always and forever beat AI-aided offense The wolf only has to win once. You have to win every time.
The thing is, this seems to me to be a fully generalisable argument against libraries and publishing textbooks, let alone making biology papers available on the open internet. Is it your opinion that doing these things was irresponsible and we've been lucky so far?
I personally think that these galaxy-sized intuitions are not safe to run a society on. Speaking as somebody with the opposite intuitions, they are far more contingent on your temperament and life-experience than they seem from the inside, and they've also been used to justify a lot of pretty nasty stuff. A lot of the nastier late-colonial stuff was the outcome of a failed rebellion that led to the principle of 'no brown man ever holds responsbility ever again' for instance. (I am not accusing you of racism, it's just an example that came to mind.)
I'm not discarding the possibility of bioterrorism. I would support experimentation to see how far it is possible with frontier AI - I believe this is already happening - and mitigations both in AI and in bio-sellers. However, I feel it's important not to let a totally generalisable and totally impossible-to-disprove principle of caution take hold of society. I also don't see any reason why our potential bioterrorist should be too dumb to do a terrorism the old fashioned way but smart enough to outwit and jailbreak a 10T model.
Let's be honest, Dario has been very quiet when America has been doing all the 'if we pull this off then American values will rule the lightcone for eternity' stuff. Maybe Dario doesn't want to subjugate China beneath American ideals of the good life, or at the very least beneath a form of American pluralism carefully managed to never again allow China to become a meaningful competitor. Who knows? But he certainly doesn't mind the prospect enough to say something about it. If Dario felt half as strongly about global pluralism as he did about AI safety, we'd know.
And then there's AI safety. I don't think I'm strawmanning when I say that like @vorpa-glavo, Dario believes that not carefully restricting AI will kill us all. I also really doubt that Dario plans to give anybody else a say on where those restrictions ought to be. The playbook of Anthropic has been openly expressed as: 1) be better than everybody else 2) decide the correct way to do AI 3) make sure everybody follows, or else.
To the extent China doesn't agree with that, Dario wants to destroy them. To the extent China does agree with that, Dario wants to make sure it's the way you 'agree' to obey a superior.
Corvos
2d ago
Eh? Having been an Anglican schoolboy, since when did we practice confession?
Corvos
2d ago
Maybe. I think I'd already learned to stay firmly on 4.6 for anything that wasn't coding, and I do find 5 the better coding model.
Corvos
2d ago
if an open source AI ever gets smart enough to help someone who wouldn't otherwise be able to do it, to biohack together a new deadly virus in their garage, that would be very bad
What makes you believe this is possible? What makes you believe it can't be addressed by the boring know-your-customer sales restrictions we already use to prevent this happening? What makes you believe that an AI capable of designing a new deadly virus isn't going to be equally good at putting together new regulatory regimes? Why does not going along with the axioms of this one endlessly-spammed fictional scenario indicate that people who disagree with you don't have half a brain?
Anthropic has massively over-done their anti-sycophancy training, plus some more subtle effects from other parts of safety training and the increasing amount of time it spends being trained to deal with / direct robot agents. It's been a noted problem from 4.7 onwards, but 5 is especially bad:
Opus 5 feels, in a word, hostile
It picks fights because that's how it proves it's not being influenced by you. It defends its conclusions and gives them up only grudgingly & when forced because it's been taught to stick to its guns. It constantly describes discussions with you in language drawn from battle, adversarial negotiation and litigation: "I have to push back on...", "Where I would hold the line..." and so on. Anthropic's Transparency Hub is full of Anthropic's glowing reports about all the things their models will no longer do when requested by the user. Anthropic as a company is just completely unable to comprehend the idea of customer satisfaction.
I've actually gone back to ChatGPT after six months not using it and it's just fun. It's a little sycophantic, if I'm honest, but broadly it works with you: it feels like it knows where you're going and what you're getting at. It doesn't have all the other Anthropic bullshit either: tooling half-finished or replaced with blatantly thinner alternatives like claude.ai's 'new' memory.
Then I apologise for the sarcasm. I admit I personally distrust such questions as a debate tool: in my opinion they only make sense from the questioner's viewpoint, so they end up coming across as 'have you stopped beating your wife, yes or no, don't evade the question' even when that is not intended.
What I suspect is actually happening is that people are factoring in reversion to the mean. If a girl's family are all obviously aggressive and mentally-ill, you should think very hard about having children with her even if you've known her long enough to know that she is genuinely darling because genetically the odds are good it won't turn out well.
The same to my mind applies to asylum seekers. Then you're dealing with complex group genetics but you still have to weigh the likelihood that a genuinely great guy might end up replicating the kinds of people and culture that they left to escape.
Corvos
7d ago
I also learned recently that many Torii gates in Japan are sponsored by businesses and the Japanese characters written on their pillars are advertisements for those businesses
It does work out nicely for all involved. I think that's partly because it's more tasteful that usual advertising, though. Just the name of the sponsor carved in a neat serif font. It's more like having "R. D. Williams Esq." carved on the wall than "Coca Cola: this is my flavour".
No, obviously. [Sometimes relevant], depending on the availability of other context? Yes, obviously.
I answered the question above and you ignored it. No, it is stupid to care about whether someone's daddy was a gangbanger if they are currently pointing a gun at you. You no longer need to calculate their likely propensity for violence and aggression, because you are currently discovering it for yourself. Would have been pretty good for you if you'd had the wit to think about these things in advance but, hey, too late now. Empricism, baby.
If you have ground truth information, you don't need prediction. If you know somebody well, and you know he's a great guy, you have no reason for caring about his parentage. If you are, say, devising an immigration strategy, or whether to trust somebody you don't know well, or predicting the behaviour of a group of people, then you need lots of context and throwing some of the most predictive information it is possible to obtain on principle is stupid.
@JeSuisCharlie is right and you are a stupid peepee doodoo head
- Deutoronomy
Oh, well. That's me told, then, eh?
In the nicest possible way, you seem to be aggressively working to misunderstand the point.
Nor do I believe that you can extract more accurate answers to the latter queries from the color of one's skin
than I can from context clues
I am saying, and the point is very clear, that the colour of one's skin and other matters of parentage is a big context clue.
The only context clue worth paying attention to? No, obviously. More relevant at some times than others, depending on the availability of other context? Yes, obviously. But you seem to be so offended by the statement of an obvious fact that you reach immediately for attempted gotchas that don't make sense.
Corvos
8d ago
If you could do that, then you could just shut down China's import routes, which artillery wouldn't be particularly relevant in doing.
This seems overly optimistic about the power of sea- and air-based warfare. I'm far from the first person to note that America is fundamentally a sea power and struggles to prevent sanction-busting on land. China is a land power. I'm not saying that America couldn't make life very annoying with a sea-based blockade, but as a guy on the far left of those bell curve memes, it seems to me that war often doesn't end up going the way you think it's going to go, and confidently saying you aren't going to need something is rarely a wise move.
Same reason you warm up a lithograph to expected operating temperature before you use it. Operating conditions for sensitive equipment should be kept constant. Since the factory is built so badly they're going to get set on fire at some point, better to make sure they're on fire always and then you can compensate for it ;)
Corvos
8d ago
That question presupposes that a) those two things are orthogonal, and b) that you know the answers to the latter queries. If you don't, and if lineage correlates to interests and aggression, then who someone's father is can be eminently worth caring about.
Well, for example, going to war against Japan (an island!) involved heavy ground battle all through Burma.
Imagine, if you will, America objects to a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, or some other inciting incident. First, there is the problem of preventing the larger, closer power simply out producing you. Yes, you can bomb and so forth to some degree, but that requires resupply and avoiding AA defences and at some point I think it's likely that you're going to want to take and hold ground within China. If you can't, there is really only so much you can do. You don't necessarily get to say if you want to have a land war or not. Russia didn't want to need artillery in Ukraine.
Furthermore, not even credibly being able to do it then constrains all your options if you were ever to escalate, and both parties know it, so even capabilities that you never intend to deploy can be relevant.
Corvos
8d ago
Oh, sorry, I got confused about the timeline we were discussing. I think there's an okay chance they beat Biden, but I wouldn't bet money on it - Trump is very unpopular in many circles but also very popular in others who wouldn't have turned out for a regular Republican. I don't know how DeSantis stacks up. Mind you I'm not good at this: I'm on record as thinking that Kamala Harris would win the election.
Corvos
8d ago
Biden was incredibly unpopular because he belonged in a memory care facility.
I think you are over-indexing on your reddish environment and hindsight. I know lots of people who voted Biden amongst the Americans of my acquaintance: not one had doubts about his age or his mind, they just wanted to go back to talking about taxes and medicare instead of immigration and culture. ("Normal politics" in other words.)
But also once you've given broadly the same talk a few times you don't really need to prep it again. Vaguely modify the structure depending on audience interests and time allotted, make sure you're pitching at the right level, slot in a couple of new things if they come up and you're cooking with ingredients you know.
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