erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
1d ago
They must have gotten guys who work in STEM because there’s no way 58% of men know what a checksum is. Same with many of the electronics terms, 64% know what a gauss is? I had to look it up, it’s a non-SI unit for magnetic flux density, and I am extremely skeptical that the majority of men have even heard of that.
Same with boson, 76% of men are familiar enough with particle physics? Less than 50% of men have even had a single physics class in high school! I’d be surprised if 76% knew what a proton was.
Most men have heard of the Higgs boson, AKA the God particle. They may have no idea what it is (I certainly don't), but they know it has something to do with subatomic particles and the Large Hadron Collider.
Gauss is probably recognized as the last name of Carl Friedrich Gauss rather than the unit.
2026 Chevrolet Trax LS or 2025 Nissan Sentra S?
I'm looking for the cheapest new car I can buy near me and these seem to be my choices. They are both within $100 of each other (about $19,500 including dealer fees, not including the 7% sales tax), so the price is basically identical.
Pros for the Trax: Larger, so more storage and easier to fit inside (I'm a big guy). I live in South Florida so the fact that it's higher off the ground helps to deal with flooded streets, plus I keep seeing sedans destroy their front bumpers on parking stoppers.
Pros for the Sentra: Higher MPG (34 vs 30). Easier to park.
Advice?
EDIT: Never mind, the Trax uses some kind of weird fuel called E85. I've got no interest in that. Sentra it is.
reverse gangbang? Is that where Aella fucks THEM?
A reverse gangbang is when a bunch of girls fuck one guy (as opposed to a regular gangbang, where a bunch of guys fuck one girl).
Conservatives are also racking up wins on gun rights.
Only fake ones, like pot users getting to buy guns in states where others can. This year another state (Washington) moves to a permit-to-purchase system, and the states which didn't issue carry permits before are now issuing carry permits which don't let you carry. The AR-15 and the Glock are being subject to bans in blue states across the country.
Florida became a constitutional carry state 3 years ago; that was nice.
Yes, the blue states keep getting worse. At this point, if you are still living in a blue state, you are asking for it. Move to Texas or Florida and enjoy the good life.
This is the most important political issue of our day. Five hundred years from now, if there are still people around, nobody is going to care about Lindsay Clancy or the Iran War. Everyone is going to remember how we acted, or failed to act, on AI.
And who knows if it will stay this way. Sometime soon there's probably going to be a much bigger AI swarm incident, which might yet incite a hysterical kneejerk reaction.
Let us hope. The alternative is that the next AI swarm is smart enough to bide its time, and give no warning signs, until it is too late.
I am always baffled by the inability of people who care about an issue to send conspicuous non-partisan signals.
Environmentalists should be sponsoring and attending monster truck rallies every day of the week to show that they want to bring overall emissions down not spoil every fun activity that involves petrol.
Likewise, the AI safety people couldn't do anything to correct the perception that AI safety was in big part about making sure AI was aligned with Democrats? They couldn't praise/collaborate-with xAI, they couldn't do some PR stunts like pointedly contribute to Trump's big 250th anniversary?
It's probably easier to see when you're looking at somebody else's cause.
From Eliezer Yudkowsky's Twitter:
I note, because I think that even now it still matters: On my history, EAs generally and Amodei specifically, indulged in politically polarizing "AI safety" in a leftist direction, because that got them short-term power; stymieing others' attempts to stay right-left neutral.
Over the last decade and longer, we tried to keep nonkilleveryoneism from being coded as right or left despite some short-term incentive gradients to try to cozy up to the left. In recent years, we took meetings with politicians on the left and on the right and we begged both of them for bipartisanship.
Over the last decade and longer, a large OpenPhil faction generally and Amodei specifically did as felt pleasing to them, or as they were short-term incentivized to do; which was generally coding things left-tilted, because that's who they were and that's what played well with their immediate audience; and lol 2026 what's 2026 who cares about the endgame when they could get some nice tasty gains right now.
We tried to do this the foresightful way. They fucked over that correct strategy and thought nothing of it.
Now that the cost TO YOU of what got THEM some short-term goodies has become apparent, now that others' careful forbearance there is clearly seen to have been the path in retrospect that would have been better for you and your kids -- well, it's frankly too late to take away what Amodei gained by fucking you over, to set up retrospective incentives that if Amodei had foreseen them would have disincentivized him and other people at that OpenPhil faction from wantonly associating their watered-down shadow of AI notkilleveryoneism with the political left. He's got his trillion-dollar company already. You needed the foresight and correct incentives then, not now.
But you can always do a little worse by failing to update, even now, and by not applying any retroactive reputational incentives at all.
erwgv3g34
19d ago
This isn't new. It's been around for... months, at least. Probably since the beginning of the site.
Something having happened at some point in all of history does not mean that thing was politically feasible for the United States in the early 2000s. Just bombing Afghanistan into rubble and leaving, even if that had been sufficient to achieve American strategic goals, is not something I think was ever realistically on the table.
The great lesson of the Trump administration is that something is only off the table until it isn't.
This might fit better on sunday, but it's not sunday, and the topic is mostly for fun anyway, so here it goes. Who here generates images/comics with AI? What are you using/recommending?
I'm currently trying to generate a small comic book. The idea is, every time we watch a movie or series together and my daughter sees someone do something that would be a bad idea IRL, she says that's dumb, and she would just stay home and eat cookies (or whatever else is appropriate for the situation; In another movie, she basically just said she wouldn't save the princess, bc she got into the mess through her own stupidity).
So as a gift, maybe for christmas or birthday, I thought about making a short picture book titled "[daughter] doesn't go adventuring", where on every side there is a different well-known story, with my daughter as the main char, and she just refuses about everything in a blunt, matter-of-fact way. There's gotta be some small twist somewhere I'm not sure about yet though, otherwise it's going to be to boring.
But unfortunately I'm hitting a roadblock much earlier. Namely, the (chatgpt for now) AI is extremely trigger-happy to block pic gen for popular movies and the like in anything even just approaching the original artstyle. It only seems to work for the super-generic AI style that I don't want to use. I'm currently trying some workarounds, but it's tedious and seems to involve first starting with an original image and then progressively moving that into the desired direction with very specific prompts like "crisp inked outlines", "flatter color palette" and "simplified background".
Also, even after modification, it's recognizably AI drawn, but that is fine by me for now.
Try Fooocus. With Pony and the right LoRA, you can insert any character or copy any style you want. Find LoRAs on Civitai.
erwgv3g34
22d ago
let the number fall below nine if someone dies or retires.
Bad idea. Imagine there had been eight justices during Bush v. Gore, and the vote had been split 4-4. What would have happened?
Can you imagine that?
Yeah it's called Singapore. If American police were allowed to police the US like Singapore and we had Singapore style laws dealing with violent crime and drug dealing yes it would be fine. Look at Dubai it's super safe despite being full of Indians and Arabs. Policing can create safe and secure societies if you let it.
From Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Well, I agree that the design of well-functioning political systems is hard. Singapore might be the best-governed country in the world, and their history is approximately, “Lee Kuan Yew gained very strong individual power over a small country, and unlike the hundreds of times in the history of Earth when that went horribly wrong, Lee Kuan Yew happened to know some economics.”
Then you destroy Anthropic's datacenters first, then move on to OpenAI's data centers and so on. You don't sit around wringing your hands about "oh gee this could kill everyone but what can we do? If only the Chinese would agree to play ring-a-ring-a-rosy with us!" And if you work for Anthropic and you believe this, you should immediately quit (and possibly burn the place down on your way out), not go "Well what can I do? If not us, maybe OpenAI, and Altman is the Devil! So better we do it! (and besides, my stock options!)"
This is, and I'm saying it unironically, sounding more and more like the "What would you have done in Hitler's Germany?" questions beloved of online scolds. This could very well be our "the Nazi party is ascending, Hitler is coming closer and closer to power, you know the dangers, are you going to stand up or are you just going to go along?" moment.
Nazi Germany was not defeated by individual Germans sacrificing themselves to assassinate Hitler, and Goering, and Himmler, until the Third Reich collapsed due to a lack of leadership. It was defeated when America and Britain and Russia coordinated together to overwhelm the Wehrmacht military.
From Eliezer Yudkowsky's Twitter account:
The corporations and factions driving to build superhuman artificial intelligence, and our subsequent extinction, could be shut down with less effort than World War II; and the Allies did not then say, "Oh, that's hard, guess we should lie down and die then."
If China decides they would also prefer not to die along with everyone else -- or that they're not willing to go to war with a genuinely terrified US/UK about what the Allies genuinely believe to be omnicide -- it could be done with less effort than the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
(I'd be more worried about Europe signing on than China, actually? Europe is easy to convince to regulate, hard to get to take any regulatory problem actually seriously. China hasn't particularly seemed unfriendly to the notion of world treaties on AI; I'd hope that a treaty which treated China symmetrically with all other signatories, and offered them no insult suggesting otherwise, would be well-received. But I mention China anyways because it's the scapegoat always dragged up to explain why the West can't possibly destroy the world any more slowly.)
(Also to be clear, there isn't actually any point in unilateral relinquishment by one country if ASI research just moves elsewhere. It's international action or bust; you have to stop ASI everywhere. That's enabled by the narrowness of the GPU supply chain; and ultimately backed by the willingness of terrified Allies to use military force to destroy any stolen GPUs, lest the blockage against ASI be broken and everyone on Earth die.)
Anyway. Not actually as hard as WW2. The reason we'll die is if people don't see it coming, not because nothing could actually be done if we saw it coming.
And from Eliezer Yudkowsky's other Twitter account:
"But if they believed the theory that says they've got a huge chance of wiping out humanity, why are they working for AI companies --?" BECAUSE THEY WERE SELECTED TO BE PEOPLE WHO'D DO IT ANYWAY! Most of us who understood (and built) that theory DID NOT TAKE THE MONEY!
If there's a terrible thing to be done, but doing it gets you money and status and bragging rights in the short term -- and you get to feel big and important and like you'll get to be in the room where it happens -- if personally enacting the big disaster feels better than being powerless --and you can reach for a dozen excuses about "someone else would do it anyway", excuses that only need to convince yourself instead of a court judge -- then SOME PEOPLE WILL GO FOR IT! It is NOT A MYSTERY THAT AI COMPANIES EXIST!
SOMEBODY will try to do a horrible thing if there's a lot of immediate rewards for it and they think they won't immediately go to jail! They always will! Every time! The only question is whether everyone ELSE, the rest of civilization, manages to shut them down or not!
There is no anomaly here in need of explanation. All humanity's history of horrors and disasters has always been like this, including plenty of disasters that predictably took down the perpetrators with them.
Is that a full and detailed story of this particular band of disaster-spawners' detailed psychology? No, and I don't know all the details for a fact, and you really shouldn't care. If for some reason it actually mattered, I could talk your ear off about all my sad icky guesses for hours. But it would be pointless inside baseball.
It's just not surprising. There is nothing strange about this situation to be explained.
erwgv3g34
22d ago
Wokeness originated in America, largely as a response to the black underclass, and then infected Europe and the Anglosphere through the universities and social media. Is it a coincidence that you saw Black Lives Matter protests in the UK?
Reagan thought if you could reduce taxes, that would force the government to curb its spending, because it would have no money to fund itself. "Starve the beast", was the slogan.
Didn't work. Turns out, the government can just keep going deeper and deeper into debt. Then, once Reagan is gone, it can raise taxes again. Seems obvious in hindsight.
erwgv3g34
22d ago
"People are that incompetent" is a much more realistic explanation than "people are secretly pretending to be incompetent as part of a genius Machiavellian plan to achieve their goals".
erwgv3g34
23d ago
No bunker in the world is going to stop a nanoswarm from disassembling the Earth into raw material for a Dyson sphere.
But most importantly, what does this say about politics now where promising $1.35 trillion in direct payments to voters is presented as the conservative campaign message. How much further into the slop can we possibly descend, and how we can ever pull ourselves out of it? Maybe the Dems can just promise 5,001 dollars or something.
In a democracy, the guy promising to do the responsible thing will always lose to the guy promising more gibs (whether the gibs comes in the form of lower taxes or increased spending is immaterial as long as there is a deficit). This has been known since ancient Rome. Solving this is a coup-complete problem. Until that day comes, all we can do is agitate for our gibs, and try to deny gibs to our enemies.
Or, as Alexander Fraser Tytler put it:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.
erwgv3g34
23d ago
During the Napoleonic wars, soldiers would volunteer for the forlorn hope (the first unit to assault a fortified enemy position) despite horrific casualty rates well in excess of 10%. Why? Because the survivors were guaranteed money and promotions.
Try to destroy the gun.
What would be the point? Even if you manage to destroy Anthropic's datacenters, that just means OpenAI kills everyone next week, or Google the week after that, or China six months later. The only way we survive is if, at a minimum, Washington and Beijing coordinate to shut down all frontier research.
erwgv3g34
23d ago
"Dies last" means "a few days later", tops. Not worth it. Might as well spend the money and time you would have used for the bunker having fun with friends and family before the end.
You haven't seen the Sankey chart yet.
How many campaigns ended because you came in a fluffer?
My own experiences bore this out. "193 unique campaigns" sounds bad, but fully two-thirds of those were abandoned during
A moment of silence for our fellow commenter, who died tragically while in the middle of writing his post.
erwgv3g34
24d ago
Looking at the poor sexual and romantic choices made by women (made by people, arguably), the underlying cause in most cases is placing too much stock in physiognomic appraisals rather than too little.
I'd argue that this is a case of the opposite, it's just that the person choosing the romantic partner, whose radar for these things is broken for some reason. Everyone around are almost always able to tell immediately that the person is rotten, from barely more than a glance.
If only there were some third party with a vested genetic interest in the woman's well-being to whom the choice of romantic partners could be outsourced...
erwgv3g34
24d ago
Ninety percent of everything is crap, but that was true long before AI. You can look at user reviews to find the most popular games, then play the demo to see if it's worth committing to the game.
Yes, the vast majority of AI NTS games have been Netorase Phone clones with shitty writing, shitty art, shitty gameplay, and a shitty update schedule. So be it. You don't have to play them. You can just ignore them and focus on the gems. User reviews screen off use of AI assets.
Watched Overman: The Meaning of Life on Eliezer Yudkowsky's mention. It was pretty good! Definitely at least as watchable as the average Hollywood superhero movie. I loved the part where Overman is flying around stealing random people's powers to a catchy tune, and at least the climax didn't come down to a big fistfight.
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