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DaseindustriesLtd

late version of a small language model

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joined 2022 September 05 23:03:02 UTC

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User ID: 745

DaseindustriesLtd

late version of a small language model

65 followers   follows 27 users   joined 2022 September 05 23:03:02 UTC

					

Tell me about it.


					

User ID: 745

This is particularly jarring after Biden has made more overt moves indicating he'd like to see deescalation, most recently the (failed) UN ceasefire resolution. … I can't imagine that whatever Israel has gained in the last year is worth the long-term cost of burning its support with the next two generations of Americans.

My year-old comment:

I think Americans will have a sort of a crisis of faith when they understand that this isn't about them – that they are no longer important enough to pander to; and their changing sentiment is largely explained by this fact and their subconscious sense of being disrespected. … Democrat or Republican, if you identify with the Hegemonic Superpower Maintaining Rules-Based International Liberal Order, the paternalistic big brother watching over a seed of a fraternal culture in the hostile environment – this must sting.

In conclusion, I believe that contemporary psychopathology is a case of finding a hammer and suddenly realizing we are surrounded by nails. If something can be treated as an illness it will be treated as an illness, because that is l’esprit de l’époque.

Does social dysfunction not matter at all in your paradigm? To a sufficiently disinterested observer, everything is culturally contingent, but the criterion of maintaining will to survival while not harming others without due cause seems trivially justified so long as we recognize the legitimacy of people, well, living in a society.

Insane to think that we've been discussing this 4 years ago.

God I was funnier back then.

Oh come on, this is more American whining. Muh deaths of overdoses, muh Russian election meddling, little old us assaulted on all fronts, won't somebody please spare a thought for the poor hegemon.

The CHIPS act has been about pork and the usual fighting over the spoils from the beginning, its success or failure is of no consequence. China was summarily cut off from modern semiconductor manufacturing and falls behind, new fabs in safe allied countries are being completed, Taiwan is getting reinforced, and AGI seems to be on schedule within 5 years. Yes, could have been done better. But it has gone well enough that advancing petty political agendas took precedence. If there ever is any plausible risk of the US losing control over the global high-end manufacturing chain, I am sure you'll see it going differently.

I disagree with his method even more than with his take. On one level, his communication is wack: it is not clear whether he makes a claim about Navalny's own beliefs and/or policies and platform, or Navalny's ultimate consequences that he speculates were anticipated by some American minders from the deep state. (Thus, "What?")

On another, it is like that because he's not invested in making a worthwhile contribution and just verbalizes some vague "based Putin cringe national traitor opposition" sensibility, where the opposition leader must have something to do with the breaking down of our holy sovereign empire into ethnic republics. This is worse than nothing.

Yeah, I'd say this precludes the whole scenario, but granting that UN's ire was somehow avoided, I'd expect sanctions.

If White South Africans took power back, they'd have received enough sanctions to make Russia whistle in awe. Kind of hard to grow the economy in these conditions.

Navalny was in line with American goals for Russia, breaking it down into ethnic components

What?

I'm getting tired of your low-information default twitter righoid takes, could you increase the quality of your commentary?

Ukrainians despise Navalny and his loyalists. They justify this with his Crimean position ("not a sandwich", a poorly developed milquetoast – from the Russian perspective – proposal to establish mutually agreeable conditions for a transparent do-over referendum on leaving Ukraine for Russia; which would of course have yielded an overwhelming "yes" from Crimeans, and would be illegitimate as per the Ukrainian law). But from what I can tell, this isn't the crux. They're only interested in allying with Russian "opposition" that supports AFU and advocates for the dissolution of the Russian Federation, to wit – regionalist activists (predominantly ethnic minorities); they consider any unified state dominated by ethnic Russians in anything like current borders an existential threat that would soon enough regress to the mean of infringing on their sovereignty under any rule. I believe this is the tacit consensus in the most concerned neighboring states, represented by Anna Fotyga in the European Parliament and other Western patrons of the Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum.

Anyway, Navalny was, although ethnically at least half Ukrainian or something more complex, completely at peace with the continued existence of a Russian state (or more cynically – not interested in diminishing his potential domain), and thus an example of the "Russian democrat ends where the Ukrainian question begins" problem, as they put it. He was hated, and Budanov may be affirming Putin's narrative purely to encourage his compatriots, reaffirming that there's no common cause with the Russian opposition (to wit: "the war with Regular Orcs is not going badly enough to seek compromise with the Cuckold-Orcs, whom we loathe as much if not more").

Or whatever, he likely doesn't have any special insight into this case and Ukrainians make up intel a lot.

On the object level, I think it's plausible Navalny died "naturally" after months and months in the punitive isolation cell; it is a known torture/slow execution method. But also, he could have been offed as a gift to Bastrykin, who wanted him to die a great deal (there are such rumors that he asked for permission to commemorate his 70th anniversary) or as an early event in the upcoming elections.

People treat Putin as a highly rational, intelligent and well-calibrated person, but he's basically a psychopathic, out-of-touch grandpa who's got too high on his own supply. He's weird and he treats murders as a funny occasion, arranges them to happen on Special Dates, probably giggles when he gets the news. "But what about sanctions for Russia? What is the benefit?" Get real. Because he's playing a game.

I lost interest assuming someone else will post it. Anyway, fixed

Or was there some tweaking going on there, such as "Show me 17th century British kings, but make them all black" and the AI does what it's asked, then the prompter goes on X to say "look at what happened when I asked for 17th century British kings"? The Second World War German soldiers had me rolling on the floor, but is this the pure quill, as they say?

There's a number of layers to this AI thing.

The most trivial answer is that current-gen image-generators-as-a-service use prompt preprocessing, expanding a prompt via an LLM to narrow down its possible interpretations by the diffusion model downstream. For example, if you write a cartoon cat holding a balloon, what the image generator gets as input is The image shows a cheerful cartoon cat standing on its hind legs and holding a large, round balloon. The cat has exaggerated features, including large, expressive eyes and a small, upturned nose, which give it a friendly and playful appearance. Its fur is soft and fluffy, with a natural-looking color and texture. The balloon is brightly colored and has a pattern or design on it, adding visual interest to the image. The balloon is filled with a light, airy substance and has a string or ribbon attached to it that the cat is holding onto. The cat is wearing simple clothing that is appropriate for a playful, carefree character. The background is a solid color, making the cat and balloon the main focus of the image. The overall tone of the image is cheerful and carefree. The image is well-lit and has a high level of detail, with clean lines and smooth shading.

This expansion happens according to simple natural language guidelines some girl (or at least I believe it was a girl) at Google has manually written. It so happens (guess why; here's a surprisingly charitable explanation about mode collapse) that the guidelines included aggressively injecting diversity into images with humans. Due to hallucinations we don't know the actual text, but prompt extractions yield something in this vein:

To expand the range of images, I internally adjust the prompt in a few ways: • Keywords: I might add words like "diverse," "inclusive," or specify ethnicities ("South Asian," "Black," etc.), and genders ("female," "non-binary") alongside the word "leprechaun."

Another layer is that, yeah, Google has rigged up the reinforcement learning preference dataset and/or the pretraining dataset such that Gemini-chat version is genuinely very progressively minded even without any images involved, and this might have nontrivial effect on its behind-the-scenes prompt expansions.

There's more to say of Google's deepening crisis of managerial competence, woke true believers among higher-ups (aggressive recruiting and promotion to counteract the disparity Damore had so plainly explained has yielded the desired effect, I guess), and…

All in all it doesn't matter. Gemini 1.5 is a superior product to OpenAI's, the next version will be competitive with GPT-5, Google's shipping engine has finished revving up, and we'll be getting fed more of this bullshit from now on.

The former; I believe he wasn't literally non-existent back then, after all. I think this was the private start of this Great Reconciliation with the Big Brother discourse, which eventually made its way from the apex (Scottsphere) to the less plugged-in pundits.

Tfw Karlin has no idea who Scott Alexander is.

Hanania says:

I don’t think that the HBD crowd has enough respect for the power of this taboo. Many would give up on the whole idea of objective scientific inquiry before accepting race differences in IQ as immutable.

But that's exactly what has happened, no?

Anyway. I believe that there are very few people writing cogently and effectively on any given topic, and they all know each other, so the bulk of discourse is advanced essentially by conspiracies. I think there's some Discord group where Hanania, Karlin, Yglesias and other such edgy dorks hang out. I suspect that some time ago – maybe around Scott's disappearance – they've concluded that the right is doomed politically (for reasons Trace describes with regard to the GOP) and just decided to cut their losses, concocting some compromise vision and rhetorical tradition. What we observe now is a product of that covenant – bloodless, by-the-letter, superficially reasonable essays that may feel very fresh to a tired culture warrior, but also make flimsy arguments that prove them having engaged in a bit of lobotomy as a gesture of goodwill to the liberal-progressive hegemony they wish to be forgiven by.

Rather than this schlock, I'd rather read Hanania's Discord messages.

I still clicked upvote because I can't wrap my mind around Hlynka's Ilyad and this explanation is satisfactory.

Civilian casualty figures for the invasion of Gaza are on par with other urban assaults by western militaries. You can contrast this with the battles in the Ukraine war, which are a lot a lot worse

Can you?

By 18 December 2022, OHCHR had recorded 17,595 civilian casualties in Ukraine since February 24, 2022: 6,826 killed and 10,769 injured. This included 9,620 (4,036 killed and 5,584 injured) in Donetsk and Luhansk.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) verified a total of 9,614 civilian deaths during Russia's invasion of Ukraine as of September, 2023. Furthermore, 17,535 people were reported to have been injured. However, OHCHR specified that the real numbers could be higher.Oct 27, 2023

Russian actions and intentions are considered genocidal.

How many civilians dead in Gaza (and West Bank, and Syria, and…)? 10k, 20k? I don't want to cite Hamas-affiliated sources. But no, it doesn't sound a lot a lot worse.

Russians are currently in mourning about the (admittedly cute) cat Twix who got tossed out of the train near Kirov (really tragic), they don't give much of a fuck about hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians killed by the Russian army. Had we higher verbal IQ, everyone else would also have cared more about Twix. Jews care about Jews, and they're smarter and more influential than we are, though not remotely as smart as they seem to imagine.

It is what it is.

Scott has committed to not doing boo-outgroup against his ingroup no matter their epistemic evils and to writing subpar propagandistic slop, and eventually was rewarded with an incredible mainstream reputation and traditional marriage and children. With his children growing up, he will drop cringey Fristonian analogies and «rediscover» traditional religion too. Truly, the dream life of any trad. Makes his paranoid freakout about the NYT that much more embarrassing.

It is not very interesting that people outside his ingroup experience life differently.

Before checking the comments I've transcripted it with whisper and added paragraphs with an LLM:


Good afternoon, welcome to the Natal Conference. I'm Kevin Dolan. We're here to solve a problem that will define the next century. In our lifetime, in our children's lifetime, every government, every culture, every belief system, and every family on earth will pass through a bottleneck, bottleneck tighter than the Black Death, predicated on one question, will your children have children of their own?

It doesn't matter if you already have kids, if you don't have kids, if you hate kids. If you have a 401k or a mortgage or a social security card or a checking account, this question is going to impact your life in a very direct way. The entire global financial system, the value of your money and almost every asset you might buy with money, is defined by leverage, which means its value is dependent on growth.

Every country in the developed world and most countries in the developing world face long-term population decline at a scale that makes that growth impossible to maintain, which means we are sitting on the bubble of all bubbles. Not just a temporary overheating of home construction, but a permanent oversupply, like the kind you find in cities like Detroit. Not just tech stocks, but the entire equities market. Not just a handful of cities gutted of their tax base and going bankrupt, but thousands of them, and then sovereign bankruptcies. It's an everything bubble.

Even so, you may say, well, it's a bubble. So be it. If it pops, then there's a correction and we move on. But in the aftermath of a collapse like this, the shrinking number of productive workers have to support a growing number of older, sicker people, which in turn accelerates the economic pressures that make it difficult to start families. This problem isn't self-correcting, at least not within your lifetime. It gets worse as it gets worse.

So what does that look like? Well, societies like Japan or South Korea show us what may be the best case scenario, what it might look like if you could let the air out of the balloon slowly. What that looks like is young people chained to the desk, working ever longer hours for ever lower wages, not only unable to start a family, but increasingly unable to start a family. The countryside and smaller cities abandoned as the tax base evaporates. Basically an orderly managed retreat from the planet. And hopefully at the end, there's a robot nurse to turn off the lights.

To be clear, that will take luck and meticulous planning on their part. Maybe they pull it off. But I think Japan and Korea are beautiful places with beautiful people who should go on existing. That would be an orderly tragedy. And again, that's best case.

Places like China, Brazil, Russia, Thailand, and Mexico got old before they got rich. In coming decades, these countries will be totally unable to sustain their elderly populations, even if they could stop the flight of their most productive young people, even if they work them and tax them to death. Unless something truly dramatic happens, these countries will face humanitarian and political crises on par with the worst of the 20th century.

The United States will probably be somewhere in the middle. So far, immigration makes US fertility rates look better on paper, but not enough to prevent a degrowth economic collapse and not enough to take care of an aging population. It's not obvious in any case why young immigrant families from poor countries would sign up to support a population of elderly dependents to whom they have no attachment while their own grandmothers back home are starving. America's wealth and productive capacity give us a few more attractive options in the short run, a few ways to avoid catastrophe if we act now, but our political system and our culture is just so damaged that making that happen would be a heroic undertaking.

So those are the global stakes of this issue. And we've brought experts in demography, genetics, endocrinology, economics, and public policy to tell you about all that. I'm not an expert. The reason I'm here is that I have two girls and four boys. And like a lot of millennials raising kids, when I look around at how few of us managed to start families and how much worse it is for Gen Z, I feel like I caught the last train out.

A consistent 95% of Americans say they want kids, but it looks like only about 60% of millennials will get there, and it's much worse for the Zoomers. Fertility decline often gets characterized as inevitable. You give people the freedom to choose, and it turns out parenting just isn't a desirable choice. But that's not the story that you hear from childless people. In surveys, only about 10% of childless people say it was a conscious decision. Another 10% deal with some form of medical infertility. But in 80% of cases, it's what demographer Stephen Shaw calls unplanned childlessness. You'll hear more about exactly what that means, but bottom line, the infrastructure that gets ordinary people educated, employed, paired off, and raising kids is just broken down.

So I view this as fundamentally a conservation project. If the Bengal tiger suddenly and dramatically stopped breeding, we wouldn't say, wow, I'm so glad the tigers are prioritizing their mental health, or they're spoiled, they're just not made of the same stuff as their tiger ancestors. And we certainly wouldn't say, good, there's too many Bengal tigers, Bengal tigers are ruining everything. Instead, we'd look at their environment and try to figure out what changed, what's disrupting their ability to fulfill this most basic imperative. And it is a basic imperative. If you're built to do anything at all, you're built to fall in love and have children and raise them. And there's no more punishing verdict, there's no situation in which a person is more psychologically vulnerable than when they take a chance on that.

You can tell a kid who's afraid of rejection that it's not life and death, but it is life and death. When you ask someone to love you, to marry you, to have a child with you, you're asking them, do you want my eyes, my nose, my hairline, the way I think, the way I walk and talk, do you want that to go on into the future, or should it go away forever? And for hundreds of millions of men and women, it feels like the whole world is telling them, nope, not you.

For men, it's usually near the top of the funnel, just getting swiped left 10,000 times at a glance. For women, it often comes later in the form of situationships that can last for months or years and never quite come around to, yes, I want you in particular. I want my kids to be like you. I think your thing should go on.

I don't think there's anything to gain from asking who has it worse or who's to blame. And in fact, one of my goals for the conference is to create a space totally free from that brand of Twitter blood sport. But I get why so many people are angry. We're just not built to be hurt like that over and over again with no end in sight. And a system where that's the fate of an ordinary person is a broken system.

Bottom line for me is I don't want any of that for my kids. I have to think of something better. Yes, there are political and economic dimensions to this issue, and I'm excited to think through them with you, but I'm not trying to have grandkids so they can fund Medicare. I want my kids to have kids so they can learn that Christmas morning is actually better as a parent than it was as a kid. I want my daughters to have sons and my sons to have daughters and to care intensely about what happens to them and watch as that transforms their whole perspective on the opposite sex.

I want them to see all the little imperfections and embarrassing things that they were insecure about as kids in this other person who's just the best and realize that all that was completely okay and not a big deal and it didn't make them unlovable. You're supposed to observe your life again in third person. You're supposed to see yourself as a little child through your father's eyes, your mother's eyes, maybe through God's eyes. You're supposed to see yourself saying and doing things your parents said and did, and you're either supposed to understand that and forgive it or you're supposed to recognize that it was wrong and make it right, maybe both. And these are psychological loops that don't close in any other way.

Of course, life isn't fair. Things don't always work out, but it should be normal. It should be typical to have these experiences. Parenting is as fundamental to the human life cycle as puberty and just as transformative. I want that for my kids and I want it for your kids because I like your thing and I think it should go on.

To the extent that I care about the median home price or the social security trust fund, that's why I care about those things. My personal line of attack on this issue is economic. I believe that the mainstream institutions that used to get people educated, employed, married, and supporting a family are in terminal decline and have become hostile to life. So I found that exit as a network and a fraternity to build something new on the outside, a place for like-minded talent and capital to build businesses, schools, marketplaces, and communities that can make raising a normal family normal again.

That's not for everyone. It's not a total solution. There are so many more things that could be done and that's why we launched this conference. We want to see what you're seeing to know what you know and to build things we haven't thought of yet. We've done a little homework on you, not a lot, but some, and I can tell you for certain that we don't share a common culture or political program. We even disagree in pretty stark terms about this issue, what it means and what ought to be done about it. But we're here because we agree that people are beautiful, that life is beautiful, and that it should go on. I'd like to thank everyone who's participated in making this conference happen, especially my co-founders, Drew Gorham and David Moore, our producer Barbara Williams, our sponsors, our volunteers, and all of our speakers who made the effort to get out here, prepared remarks, connected us with their friends. And of course, thanks to all of you for spending the time and travel and money to make this possible. Thank you.

Back in the 50s and 60s Americans were young and thin and quite a bit less rich.

but there aren't any Feynmans in the 21st century

This is cope, of course. Our Feynmans are called names like «Ilya Sutskever» and «Noam Shazeer», or if you want a Gentile, «Alec Radford». The focus of frontier research has shifted from bits to bytes and from public institutions to for-profit companies, while professional celebs have picked up the slack of mental representation for heroic figures. But sci-fi valorization of flashy fundamental physics results, partially driven by military agendas of the XX century and purely aesthetic raygun gothic midwittery, persists; and so people try to explain the non-real phenomenon of our era lacking Feynmans.

So, which of those defects are present in his thread?

Because you can't program virtue ethics into an AI. You need a utility function.

I am not even sure Yudkowsky would argue this. In any case this is not defensible unless you think that virtue ethics is in principle not computable.

Misspellings are allegedly a mechanism to invoke algorithmic suppression and not have your content revealed to the general audience. I do ignore them.

He reads like an arrogant 15-year-old to me

People generally do not become any smarter with age so that is okay. If one can make an argument at all, it can be made at 15 and with a teenager's mentality. Except when an argument depends on accumulated experience, like his time in academia.

But did he check? What, in those sources, proves BAP wrong? Why did you believe him that he did check? The first paper is some inconclusive exploratory study. But it has interesting sections:

Challenges for incorporating Asian American donors

Engaging Asian American alumni as part of university communities is a major challenge for development officers. Several interviews revealed Asian Americans’ disconnections with their university. In the words of one development officer:

Alumni of color generally tended not to be as engaged and connected to the university. I think there tends to be a little more skepticism about the university’s commitment to issues of diversity ... so I think there are some hurdles that you have to get over with regard to trust and making sure that they understand the importance of being involved. (Personal communication, 23 February 2009)

In fact, many Asian American alumni form reunions solely within their own ethnic communities. Revisiting a previous conversation with Asian American donors, one development officer said,

‘a prospective Asian American donor, who is also an alumnus and his family have never attended [university’s reunion] ... it’s not that they weren’t invited – they get mailings just like everyone else – but they didn’t think the annual event contained anything meaningful for them’. However, a number of this alum’s Asian American colleagues, who graduated with him – whether they came from Mainland, or Taiwan, continue to get together and have their own annual celebration; they have no negative feelings about the university; but, their attachment is to each other and not to the university as an institution’ (personal communication, 3 March 2009).

Another challenge is soliciting monetary support from Asian American donors. This is in addition to traditional donations of time and personal efforts to support voluntary causes. As documented in previous research, Asian American donors possessed a strong desire to dedicate their personal time, volunteering for the Asian American organizations or serving as the Board members (Deeney, 2002). In contrast, financial supports have primarily benefited their family and ethnic groups (Ho, 2004).

One respondent explained:

Asian Americans are accustomed to giving in terms of their time – they are very involved in the community and/or serve on various committees, etc; but, they feel that that should be the limit of their giving. They don’t see giving in terms of dollars. It just isn’t part of their tradition. Giving money has always been about giving to a family and giving to a mainstream university is a relatively a new concept ... it is not a practice in which they’ve been involved throughout the generations. It’s not that they are withholding, or that they are parsimonious, it’s just that financial contributions to an organization are not part of their psyche. (Personal communication, 3 March 2009)

Working with donors in international settings, unavoidable obstacles are distance and communication. One development officer mentioned, ‘You [development officer] are not in front of them on a regular basis, and you might lose the momentum’ (personal communication, 26 March 2009).

In order to overcome these difficulties, development officers employ meaningful e-mail and telephone communications, and frequently travel to Asian countries to meet with the prospective donors.»

There's some hope about 2nd+ generations:

Previous research has revealed that first generation Asian Americans are more likely to give back to their home countries or give specifically to Asian American-related causes, while giving by second and beyond generations tend to be directed more toward mainstream organizations (Chao, 1999; Ho, 2004). One development officer responded, younger Asian American alum tend to ‘give more closely to their non-alumni of color counterparts, so they tend to give more generally to the university because they feel more connected to the class than the past generations have’ (personal communication, 23 February 2009).

I'll also note that the paper was authored by one Kozue Tsunoda, who, being obviously Japanese, is very much not a modal example of an Asian alumni in the current year, and who with characteristic Japanese tact avoids sharp angles of facts, such as «how much less do Han Chinese alumni donate». Ime this is typical for Japanese sociology (mealy-mouthed garbage even by Western standards).

I allow that with the rising proportion of 2nd gen Asian Americans and some other changes like greater motivation of the Chinese HNWI to show loyalty to the US, the situation must be changing to the better (for schools). However, in no way can this disprove BAP's argument about the schools' already baked-in, historical reason to engage in anti-meritocratic discrimination against Asians and also Whites.

Actually, were TheMotte in a better shape to try and impose new standards, I'd have petitioned to make «disingenuous citations that don't prove your point» a bannable offense. It's such a disgusting redditbrain intimidation tactic. And this user is generally acting with an agenda.

That's a few words to express a fairly unjustified level of disrespect.

No, Asians really are meritorious as far as potential for educational and professional attainment goes. They get high scores, and those scores translate into life outcomes. A 99.9th percentile SAT taker comes in, a 99.9th percentile employee comes out and waves a diploma proving his or her value to the employer. This is a perfectly reasonable meritocratic system, as meritocracy has been defined for a very long time.

BAP is a romantic who believes that merely excellent outcomes are not what elite education is about; that the objective of such institutions is finding and riding the coattails of geniuses and heroes. Glory isn't just a better-ascertained «merit».