domain:questioner.substack.com
Markass
8m ago
So then would you agree that Roblox has said or implied "vigilantes" are just as bad as predators?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
10m ago
I think they are thinking Project Manager or Customer Pleaser-type stuff. Which does tilt mostly female from what I have seen but isn't super automatable yet.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
13m ago
I edited it on him. He is. Correct
Markass
14m ago
Why else would they entertain weird nonsense from a stranger unless they're getting something out of it?
It's not just currency. They can want the approval of adults, the satisfaction of curiosity, or simply somebody to talk to. Many groomed kids have a tumultuous home life and are extremely lonely, for example. My point being that it shouldn't be thought of in pure economic terms, so predators doing this to children is (or should be) unacceptable and predator catchers finding predators this way is (or should be) acceptable.
If this was the immovable force you assert it is we wouldn't have this problem, since in that case children would always listen to authority figures that tell them not to do this.
Again, it's oversimplified to think this way. Being impressionable goes both ways. Sure, some will listen to authority figures and not do this. But some will not, for many reasons such as a preconceived distrust of authorities, being curious thinking "what could go wrong", or simply not knowing of the dangers.
And this is unique to online gaming... how, exactly?
It's not. But Roblox is uniquely refusing to ban predators when people report them.
The mitigations around it can't be solved for through technological means alone.
Yes, but you can just ban predators who are reported to do this. You can at the very least also not ban people who find predators and get them arrested in real life.
While it may be true that Roblox should ban people more frequently, that wouldn't actually fix their PR problem
It's not just "ban people more frequently", it's not banning people who find predators too. I feel like the latter is the biggest cause of their recent PR problem. Their tendency to not ban predators has been reported and documented before but it hasn't caused a huge media circus. Going after people who find predators is just a huge WTF moment.
I do agree that it's impossible to rid platforms of pedophiles before they strike but I'm willing to bet a lot of money that if Roblox suddenly reversed course, unbanned Schlep and started banning reported pedophiles, that their PR problem would virtually disappear overnight.
@OracleOutlook fixed it after my comment. It was originally a double-negative.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
22m ago
I’d be curious to know what type of businesses that 5% were used at. It might be good for things like writing boilerplate news and bad at ad copy. It might be good at picking up trends in engineering and business to business stuff and not so good at picking the new fashion trends.
Throwaway05
43m ago
I am studiously silent on whether you could replace me entirely with one
I can't find the paper but I was linked recently to a study illustrating that generative AI performance on medical content drops precipitously when "not one of these" is added to the answer list and used.
We aren't dead yet.
problem_redditor
45m ago
I've ping-ponged between two countries at one point, not for work but to fulfil other obligations. It got tiring and I got fed up at many points, yet I still somehow romanticise the idea.
The highly wistful bent of the third paragraph isn't meant to say "travelling is great" but to illustrate the strong compulsion I feel towards doing it anyway. Which comes back to the idea of adaptation promoting certain behaviours.
hydroacetylene
55m ago
The same way ‘woman/minority owned business’ fraud does.
birb_cromble
57m ago
Wait, what happens if you don't hit the minimum? Is there some kind of penalty that's worse than just burning tokens to hit the minimum?
Drinniol
1hr ago
Wouldn't is correct.
"Only enter information you wouldn't mind being leaked"
birb_cromble
1hr ago
how many companies can directly turn voice synth
I recently called a plumber that had an AI receptionist pretending to be human, so at least one.
Something about it was so off-putting, though, that I ended up calling somebody else.
Oh wow she just now dropped a new video laying out a lot of her theory in one place.
It seems like this is something of anti-Yakub theory, a modern well-informed reaction to it that proposes the actual proximate mechanism for creating white people: heavy metal poisoning causing DNA damage causing albinism. This was initially an accident, then may have been done deliberately (unclear by who or why), and is now starting to happen accidentally again to both Black Americans and to Africans (who are, I gather from other videos, unrelated to each-other). She's very mad at people who are still insisting on the old theory that white people came from (Yakubian?) genetic engineering mixing animals with human DNA, which she's disproven.
So it all started in Tanzanesia, where artisinal mining exposes everybody to heavy metals accidentally causing birth defects like albinism. There is still some further level of deliberateness here (there's a "they" doing it) which I don't understand. But pale-skinned people are actually a very recent development and come from this Tanzanesia heavy metal poisoning. Albinos are still to this day treated badly there, which is why white people hate black people: in revenge for their recent memory of being abused and mutilated as albinos by Africans. And it's starting to happen to Black Americans too because seafood boils are exposing them to heavy metals causing vitiligo.
She doesn't actually get in to the Native American stuff in this one, but my head-canon is that it's something like: everybody everywhere was black, but then everyone other than Africans and (completely seperately with no relation) the real Native Americans (Black Americans) got this heavy metal poisoning and turned pale. Then at some point later the fake Native Americans (Siberian/Asian, she mentioned this in another video I skimmed but I'm not going to find it again) invade or are imported or something, and invent/are forced to believe the lie that they were there first.
From some screenshots she included, it seems at least some of this is LLM-potentiated.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
1hr ago
Twitter is advertising Scottish HIV testing, shortly after I visited a gay bar. Does it know something I don't?
Secretaries have barely existed for like 25 years at least and call centers aren't pink collar work. Pink collar work is overwhelmingly face to face service work, like nursing, teaching, childcare and social work.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1hr ago
Sorry, you got the gist at least.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
1hr ago
The existence of LLMs makes me a better doctor (and I am studiously silent on whether you could replace me entirely with one). Perhaps this is an artifact of me being relatively junior in my career, but I had an uncle, who is a consultant psychiatrist with more degrees than a heat wave ask GPT-4o questions. He begrudgingly admitted that it gave a more satisfactory answer to one of his thorny questions than the overwhelming majority of other consultant shrinks.
(Said question was on the finer details of distinguishing schizoaffective disorder from bipolar disorder with psychosis. Why 4o? I used the Advanced Voice Mode for the sake of future shock, o3 could have given an even better answer)
Let's just say that my willingness to pay for SOTA LLMs is far higher than their sticker price. Thank god for market competition, and the fact that I don't need nearly as many tokens as vibe coders. The price I pay is comparable to the delicious pork belly I'm eating at a nice Chinese place, and I know what I'd take in a pinch.
thejdizzler
1hr ago
Still slogging through Way of Kings. It is getting better as it goes on, but at the same time, it's so god-damn slow. I know Sanderson is relatively popular in the rationalist community and I can sort of see why (the world-building is very unique and interesting, even if not particularly realistic), but man the guy need an editor, especially for his dialogue.
Reading Capital for philosophy book club. Marx is quite frustrating to read some times because he is smarmily dogmatic (I guess this where the infighting in the Soviet Union has its roots). It has its insights, but I think some of the ways he presents his arguments leave a lot to be desired. For instance, he seems deliberating obtuse about the fact that trade actually can generate real value, and this fact isn't even incompatible with the labor theory of value: the merchant does a fair bit of labor in identifying the market, transporting the goods, etc.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
A fun thought experiment article, but it has some flaws.
This line especially sent me to WTF-istan:
In its most extreme form, capitalism behaves like a collectivist hive.
That's a category error (social vs economic system) wrapped in a demonstrably false statement about capitalism. It's assertions like these that make me "smh" about crypto bros' economic literacy.
I also think there's a misunderstand of macro level data in the article. Many things can be true at once:
- Returns are following more of a power law, especially in tech
- Real wealth per capita has risen substantially post WW2
But but but "wealth inequality" one might counter. The US has this horrible Gini coefficient. Well, let's look at the Top 10 most equitable income countries on earth based on the Gini:
- Kyrgyzstan 26.4 2022 est.
- United Arab Emirates 26.4 2018 est.
- Moldova 25.9 2022 est.
- Czechia 25.9 2022 est.
- Netherlands 25.7 2021 est.
- Ukraine 25.6 2020 est.
- India 25.5 2022 est.
- Belarus 24.4 2020 est.
- Slovenia 24.3 2022 est.
- Slovakia 24.1 2022 est.
Are we really going to pretend that any of those countries - The Netherlands included! - have social, economic, and political conditions that represent a better life or life possibilities than the United States?
Because I am a fan of steelmanning, I'll point out this post - today! - from Marginal Revolution which has a lot to say about status games in wealth societies.
The conclusions are pretty interesting and heterodox. But there's an easy lesson to draw at the meta level; don't play status games. Make money in order to support yourself and your family, save for the future, and then to pursue things you generally enjoy. If you're making money to buy status, you're playing a negative geometric mean game (i.e. from the article linked in the post I am replying to) and you're almost certainly going to "lose" over the long term - or hit the jackpot and be someone rather famous (which is a loss in its own right if you ask me).
The more I think about it, the more I think the "the economy isn't working" arguments that are in vogue on both sides of the political spectrum today are category errors that conflate a lot of modern anti-social habits with a mysterious yet central "flaw" in capitalism. Capitalism is a means of efficiently trading resources to order to generate economic growth. Imperfect as it may be, it's the best thing we've come up with a species. But capitalism will not - and has no role in - making you feel good about yourself in society. That's a far trickier situation that involved politics, community, and personal values systems.
JarJarJedi
1hr ago
If for some reason, people decide the economic data has partisan spin
Under Biden, it was routine for BLS to publish jobs data, gather all the press and then "update" it to lower numbers a couple of months later which the mainstream press largely ignored (rare counter-example: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/revised-data-exposes-overstated-job-creation-claims-by-harris-biden-admin-revealing-818000-nonexistent-jobs/ar-AA1pc1Ez). Shenanigans like this is what makes people to decide economic data is being used for partisan spin purposes. Of course, since it wasn't Trump doing it, nobody in the chattering class gave a hoot about it. It is possible that "announce high numbers, than revise it to much lower numbers" is how the process works and in fact there's no way to make it work otherwise - I seriously doubt that, but let's assume it were the case. In that case, an objective non-partisan official should have spent a lot of effort to inform the public that's what is going on, and to make sure the corrections get at least as much attention as the original - incorrect - data has gotten, and that the initial estimates are reported as rough estimates, to be substantially corrected later, and not as objective truth. This is not what has been happening.
In general, I think the chances that Biden administration appointed an absolutely neutral, non-partisan purely technical person to a politically sensitive position which generates a lot of press attention, are close to zero. Thus, for Trump it's completely legitimate to dismiss that person, and appoint his own choice. Of course, it should have likely been done on day 1, but given as anything he does will be presented in worst possible light anyway, it doesn't matter too much. Will Trump's new appointee be better? Hard to say, the history gives equal chance both for a competent worked and a complete disaster. We'll see.
I guess really my question is, if US economic and public health guidance is no longer seen as trustworthy
Never had been. Only now, because Trump, it's being highlighted, and once the other side takes the power again, it will be deemphasized again. The quality of data will not improve from that.
how do you get the right decision makers to use the right data to make sound decisions?
Welcome to the basic problem of socialism. Yes, capitalist countries aren't free from it too, no more that airplanes are free from gravity. The data is dirty, and will probably get dirtier as the partisan politicization of everything continues. Would I like for it not to happen? Sure. Do I have any hope it is not going to happen? Nope. One of the reasons why I have no hope is that almost nobody speaks about it in terms "destroying the integrity of research is a problem". It's always "Trump destroying the integrity of research is a problem" - and once it's not about Trump, then there's no problem, right? And the other side, predictably, adopts the mirror stance, so now both sides are hard at work destroying it and everybody pretends it's somebody else's fault.
Will doctors no longer be allowed to administer medications even though they know they would work
That has long been the case. There are a number of medications which are approved in Europe but not in the US, for example.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
Reading Stranger I had two main thoughts:
-
I didn't realize how influential it was. Dune is largely the same thing with heavier/harder scifi, Star Wars is largely Dune, and a million things since Star Wars are ripoffs of Star Wars. But they all come back to Heinlein.
-
It is definitely very 60s in its view of sexuality.
Look forward to hearing more of your thoughts on it!
Rov_Scam
2hr ago
Like Ioper says below, you're romanticizing the idea of merchants traveling and what that was actually like. How does this sound to you: You'll spend 22 hours in a plane (including 4 1/2 hours laid over in Los Angeles) flying from Sydney to Indianapolis, at which point you'll rent a car and drive an hour to a small town that's home to the CVS Pharmacy Midwest Distribution Center. You'll check into a Holiday Inn, eat dinner at an Applebees, and spend the next two days touring a warehouse so you can prepare an estimate on light bulb costs as part of a redesign of the lighting system. On the second day you'll take a late flight back after work that has two layovers but avoids the need to stay an extra day.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
Fair, I probably misinterpreted your post.
But still, I don't even know if that data said it isn't useful! If I published an article telling you that I ran the numbers, and the 40-1 bets on UFC fights hit 5% of the time, that would be a huge gambling tip telling you to bet on the longshots.
The true benchmark is GDP. If LLMs truely can boost productivity in most tasks except for pure manual labour we would see GDP roaring. If we saw a 10-40% increase in productivity among the majority of the labour force it would be like an industrial revolution on steroids. We are seeing lackluster economic growth, clearly production isn't booming.
Some how tech has the ability to radically change how people work and provide people with amazing tools without boosting productivity much. We went from type writers to Word to cloud services that allow us to share documents instantly across continents. We really haven't seen a matching boom in productivity. The amount of office workers wasn't slashed with the propagation of Email, excel, google search or CRM-systems.
More options
Context Copy link