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Yeah I was using a Claude script to translate a fic from Russian. I can't read Russian so I can't really tell what I'm missing out on (also the author is not the most amazing wordsmith) but it was quite decent in context even where they were using words like 'necro-energy' that don't even exist in either language.

What a sterling example of making the dream of perfection the sworn enemy of the merely better. As others have pointed out before, the most likely alternative, in the absence of ChatGPT, would have been this poor fellow resorting to Google Translate or other, far simpler ML solutions.

I don't speak Japanese, but I see nothing particularly objectionable in the translation. It might not capture all nuance, but it gets the gist of it across. Learning language takes time, probably years, and by the time this gentleman gets good enough that he needs or appreciates the nuance, LLMs will be even better at the job.

When you told me you're fluent in Japanese the other day, this was really not how I expected it to become relevant haha.

"Today's stream was perfect! When I commented "Please step on me!" my oshi Haachama reacted by saying "Gross!" and then she even said "You're way too much of a pervert!" - it was incredible!! I'm feeling like I'm in heaven right now. This is the most blissful moment of my life. And what I'm most excited about is that Haachama's birthday live stream is on August 10th (Sunday) at 9:00 PM!! I want to support her with everything I've got. Just imagining that day and the live stream makes me feel like I'm drinking her bathwater."

Claude knocks it out of the park as far as I'm concerned.

Even 4o:

Today's stream was absolutely perfect! When I commented, "Step on me, please!" my oshi, Haachama, actually reacted and said, "Gross!" Then she went on to say, "You're way too much of a pervert!" It was insane!! Right now, I feel like I'm in a sexy kind of heaven. This is the most peaceful moment of my life.

And on top of all that, the thing I'm most looking forward to is Haachama’s birthday live on Sunday, August 10th at 9:00 PM!! I'm planning to cheer her on with everything I've got. Just imagining that live makes me feel like I'm drinking her bathwater.

Like with your parallel post, I think this is reading too much into a detail. Japanese all but requires having a social directionality suffix when talking about actions done between or on behalf of other people in any remotely polite speech, so just writing ...と反応した, と言った would feel incongruously rude especially in the context of someone gushing about his vtuber idol. To translate it explicitly is to take an unremarkable piece of information that is conveyed by default expectation and elevate it as remarkable - it's as if a Japanese, or English, translator took a German text, where, after the German norm, all occupations must be marked for gender (der Fahrer (the male driver)/die Fahrerin (the female driver) etc.), and took care to translate the markers, turning the neutral "die Busfahrerin hatte einen Unfall" into the potentially sexist "the woman bus driver had an accident". (This would be even worse if you were translating to e.g. Chinese, where not even 3rd-person pronouns are gendered in speech - imagine every he/she turning into a they with an explicit mention of the person's gender!)

Sure, the disparities were not that wide (as far as I know). But do note the article is from before there was a vaccine at all, as they were discussing how it should be allocated when they had them, so reasonably early on.

Having said that if you actually read the paper and not the media phrasing even Dr Schmidts final recommendation was fairly anodyne. Prioritize healthcare workers and then essential workers who are likely to spread to multiple people (so a retail worker who has to come into contact with lots of people each day over say a farmer). In the end he didn't actually recommend that it be decided by race at all. Just worker type. He just talked about it being a factor to consider in his paper, which is the bit he was then asked to comment on for the article, or the article only published his quotes on that section perhaps.

The media version of X may not really represent X very well in actuality.

Fun stuff, but that's really not post-singularity. It's not even post-scarcity!

So, actually, at the risk of being egregiously obnoxious

You're getting there.

We're done here.

I don't think it codes as overwhelmingly feminine in the way, say, using あたし as a first-person pronoun would, but written out like that it gives the whole phrase a somewhat more pretend/role-playing vibe, so if I really wanted to dig into it I would check if it's an imitation of the speech patterns of the vtuber the author is simping for, or has some other pop-cultural weight behind it. Either way, I don't think this is particularly worth overthinking - people have working mirror neurons, and someone using "y'all" in English or simplifying pronouncing -ing as -in would also not warrant a deep investigation of the implications and whether they have Southern or African-American roots (as opposed to, as per my theory, imitating something they have heard elsewhere).

There's something different with their attitude to sex. And this is exactly the option that I want to explore further in this post.

the journey of a woman is about taking down these barriers: she has a lot of ideas with whom it is appropriate to have sex, when, where and what kind of. A girl in a woman's body has no such qualms.

Huh? The majority of teenagers come with much more programming of anti-slut defenses, parental controls installed, innocence which keeps them away from sexuality. I'm surprised that anyone thinks that human sexuality is primarily innate, rather than cultural, as regards the kinds of things that typically occur in pornographic media.

From personal experience: dating teenagers-to-twenty-year-olds (when I was that age) was mostly a process of breaking down barriers around sexuality, while dating older women they know what they want and they know what they are going to get. Things are much more direct and simple. I can't imagine anyone dating a teenager for the purpose of "simplicity." We can go all the way back to Big Ben Franklin and his advice on why it is better to have an affair with older women than with younger ones, among them:

Because thro' more Experience, they are more prudent and discreet in conducting an Intrigue to prevent Suspicion. The Commerce with them is therefore safer with regard to your Reputation. And with regard to theirs, if the Affair should happen to be known, considerate People might be rather inclin'd to excuse an old Woman who would kindly take care of a young Man, form his Manners by her good Counsels, and prevent his ruining his Health and Fortune among mercenary Prostitutes.

Because the Sin is less. The debauching a Virgin may be her Ruin, and make her for Life unhappy.

Because the Compunction is less. The having made a young Girl miserable may give you frequent bitter Reflections; none of which can attend making an old Woman happy.

All of which amount to a core logic that dating older women is simpler and more convenient than dating younger ones.

So beyond the obvious "They're hot" and "16 or 18 or 21 is just a number with no inherent relation to human development in particular cases" I propose another reasoning for teenagers being the protagonists of your pornographic novels:

#4 For Older Fantasists, when placing a teenager in the leading role of a sexual fantasy, are placing themselves within the fantasy at the appropriate age to fuck such a girl. The fantasy of the younger girl is one of nostalgia for one's own lost youth, the freedom and opportunity inherent therein.

Let's discuss a particular example of this: Billy Joel's Only the Good Die Young. Listen to it, it's a classic and I don't want to hear shit about anyone here loving America if they don't like Billy Joel, but here's some lyrics for close reading:

Come out, Virginia, don't let me wait
You Catholic girls start much too late
Aw, but sooner or later it comes down to fate
I might as well will be the one
Well, they showed you a statue, told you to pray
They built you a temple and locked you away
Aw, but they never told you the price that you pay
For things that you might have done
Well, only the good die young

You mighta heard I run with a dangerous crowd
We ain't too pretty, we ain't too proud
We might be laughing a bit too loud
Aw, but that never hurt no one

I'm pretty sure everyone, ever, who has listened to the song pictured Virginia as a Catholic schoolgirl, around seventeen or eighteen years old; sixteen at the youngest nineteen at the oldest. Now, Billy Joel was twenty seven years old when he wrote this. My parents, who loved this song, were in their twenties when it came out. Does anyone who listens to this song imagine the narrator as twenty-seven talking to his Catholic schoolgirl girlfriend? I mean, I guess somebody might, but if they did we can all agree the song would be deeply creepy and awful, closer to horror than to pop. Even the most determined TRPer can't possibly argue that it's normal or good for a twenty-seven year old to be trying to talk his way into his teenage girlfriend's panties.

No, the normal listener to Only the Good Die Young is picturing a teenage boy talking to his teenage girlfriend. Particularly given the later verse about running with a "dangerous crowd;" we're picturing a charming juvenile delinquent who will straighten himself out later. If we're instead picturing a twenty seven year old criminal, once again, creepy fucking lyrics.

You can tell the song is primarily nostalgic for Billy, and his audience's, younger days in that Only the Good Die Young is the start of Joel's nostalgia-retro-oldies period. You have a series of songs that mime the doo-wop of Billy's youth: Uptown Girl, Tell Her About it, The Longest Time. Then you have a series of songs that explicitly reference and call out Billy's boomer memories: It's Still Rock and Roll to Me, Keepin' the Faith, We Didn't Start the Fire.

Joel is picturing himself at sixteen, talking to his sixteen year old girlfriend, and remembering the joys of being a teenager. The freedom of dating at that age, one's own strength and virility, with no stakes for either of you beyond mom's disapproval.

And I think a lot of ephebophilic fantasy is of this nature: the fat out-of-shape 38 year old porn consumer doesn't picture himself as a creepy 38 year old porn consumer when he watches "barely legal" porn, or reads it, rather he pictures himself at his prime at 22, when he at least had potential. Even moreso in a novel.

Moreso yet in real life. So often the balding but rich middle aged man who marries a young floozy second wife is trying to recapture his own rapidly-fleeing youth, when he had hair and freedom.

I'll also add in as a freebie throw-in:

#5 Male attraction is recursive and social in nature, and younger women provide higher status because they provide higher status

Men want to pretend that our attractions are purely simple and biological, but they aren't, they're deeply social and status seeking in nature. One can see this in the way "trends" in attractive women in pornography occur over time. What men want is what other men want, because when other men see that you have it, they will think that you must be pretty fuckin' bitchin' to attract such a girl. Marty's loser dad gets the hot girl in Back to the Future, and instantly everyone wants to make him class president and hang out with him. This applies to age as well: only rich and high status men can get the twenty year old girlfriend, so men seek out the twenty year old girlfriend as a status symbol. So much more the status symbol to have an illegal girlfriend, and be so powerful that no one can stop you!

As for me, hot women are hot, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The rest is just a question of what price you are willing to pay.

I work a lot with non-native English speakers and I think ChatGPT has definitely improved things, especially when they want to try to explain more complex aspects of the business, their funding needs, answer certain questions. I used to get a lot of emails so poorly written and barely comprehensible that it would take much longer to parse the meaning than if they had just sent the email in whatever native language and let me Google translate it. Mostly these are intelligent people, they’re just too proud to hire a translator (but not to use an LLM).

To me this is kind of a mass production of furniture or fast fashion thing. At the high end, the amount of genuinely enjoyable and well-produced writing will decline, not even because LLMs aren’t capable of it but because they will default to simple, emotive English in the new style, and because even good writers won’t be bothered in most cases to write themselves or to tweak prompts for better output.

But for the 99% of people who either don’t speak the language they’re ’writing in’ natively or don’t have good verbal ability, communication can be much easier, the gap between what is in their head and something someone else can read has, in my opinion, shrunk.

Oh and just obvious thing, the Dem states could also just be like "nah we don't care about helping out the conservative areas either then" if they felt like being cruel in response and focusing their state level recovery resources on the blue areas

These areas are usually not blatantly violating federal law.

Scenario 3: Congenital felons again. There is a strong correlation between high IQ and low criminality, but it's not perfect. Imagine we uplift their IQ, but not their criminal dispositions? If you thought "We Wuz Kangs" is bad, wait till you've seen "We Wuz KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN"

Khan is definitely the civilisation-killer one, the one that (potentially) can't be fixed. But you're over-focusing on pre-existing criminal dispositions; it's entirely possible people will accidentally or deliberately introduce psychopathy via the "high-IQ psychopaths have higher income than high-IQ non-psychopaths due to doing white-collar crime and other exploitation" correlation.

The people who actually wrote these policies are not Jewish. The people who made the decision to actually go through with it are not jewish. Jewish organizations have been asking for this for a long long time and not getting their way. This is about a cudgel for hitting democrats with.

It's lame you had to do this but I get it

I did really enjoy his ability to kick off an argument, although I get why the way he does it is against the spirit of this place

McMansions are better housing than NYC apartments. Literally- they're bigger, they have more amenities, it's harder for neighbors to affect you, they're less likely to be infested by rats, etc.

This is purely your opinion and given the price people are willing to pay per sqft, one that millions of people do not share with you.

NYC apartments have something McMansions can never have: location, location, location. This is the ultimate amenity.

You may not value it, which is fine, but that doesn't mean it isn't valuable.

Bulverism is a waste of everyone's time

A response to Freddie deBoer on AI

Freddie deBoer has a new edition of the article he writes about AI. Not, you’ll note, a new article about AI: my use of the definite article was quite intentional. For years, Freddie has been writing exactly one article about AI, repeating the same points he always makes more or less verbatim, repeatedly assuring his readers that nothing ever happens and there’s nothing to see here. Freddie’s AI article always consists of two discordant components inelegantly and incongruously kludged together:

  • sober-minded appeals to AI maximalists to temper their most breathless claims about the capabilities of this technology by carefully pointing out shortcomings therein

  • childish, juvenile insults directed at anyone who is even marginally more excited about the potential of this technology than he is, coupled with armchair psychoanalysis of the neuroses undergirding said excitement

What I find most frustrating about each repetition of Freddie’s AI article is that I agree with him on many of the particulars. While Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence is, without exception, the most frightening book I’ve ever read in my life, and I do believe that our species will eventually invent artificial general intelligence — I nevertheless think the timeline for that event is quite a bit further out than the AI utopians and doomers would have us believe, and I think a lot of the hype around large language models (LLMs) in particular is unwarranted. And to lay my credentials on the table: I’m saying this as someone doesn’t work in the tech industry, who doesn’t have a backgrond in computer science, who hasn’t been following the developments in the AI space as closely as many have (presumably including Freddie), and who (contrary to the occasional accusation my commenters have fielded at me) has never used generative AI to compose text for this newsletter and never intends to.

I’m not here to take Freddie to task on his needlessly confrontational demeanour (something he rather hypocritically decries in his interlocutors), or attempt to put manners on him. If he can’t resist the temptation to pepper his well-articulated criticisms of reckless AI hypemongering with spiteful schoolyard zingers, that’s his business. But his article (just like every instance in the series preceding it) contains many examples of a particular species of fallacious reasoning I find incredibly irksome, regardless of the context in which it is used. I believe his arguments would have a vastly better reception among the AI maximalists he claims to want to persuade if he could only exercise a modicum of discipline and refrain from engaging in this specific category of argument.


Quick question: what’s the balance in your checking account?

If you’re a remotely sensible individual, it should be immediately obvious that there are a very limited number of ways in which you can find the information to answer this question accurately:

  1. Dropping into the nearest branch of your bank and asking them to confirm your balance (or phoning them).

  2. Logging into your bank account on your browser and checking the balance (or doing so via your banking app).

  3. Perhaps you did either #1 or #2 a few minutes before I asked the question, and can recite the balance from memory.

Now, supposing that you answered the question to the best of your knowledge, claiming that the balance of your checking account is, say, €2,000. Imagine that, in response, I rolled my eyes and scoffed that there’s no way your bank balance could possibly be €2,000, and the only reason that you’re claiming that that’s the real figure is because you’re embarrassed about your reckless spending habits. You would presumably retort that it’s very rude for me to accuse you of lying, that you were accurately reciting your bank balance to the best of your knowledge, and furthermore how dare I suggest that you’re bad with money when in fact you’re one of the most fiscally responsible people in your entire social circle—

Wait. Stop. Can you see what a tremendous waste of time this line of discussion is for both of us?

Either your bank balance is €2,000, or it isn’t. The only ways to find out what it is are the three methods outlined above. If I have good reason to believe that the claimed figure is inaccurate (say, because I was looking over your shoulder when you were checking your banking app; or because you recently claimed to be short of money and asked me for financial assistance), then I should come out and argue that. But as amusing as it might be for me to practise armchair psychoanalysis about how the only reason you’re claiming that the balance is €2,000 is because of this or that complex or neurosis, it won’t bring me one iota closer to finding out what the real figure is. It accomplishes nothing.

This particular species of fallacious argument is called Bulverism, and refers to any instance in which, rather than debating the truth or falsity of a specific claim, an interlocutor assumes that the claim is false and expounds on the underlying motivations of the person who advanced it. The checking accout balance example above is not original to me, but from C.S. Lewis, who coined the term:

You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly.

As Lewis notes, if I have definitively demonstrated that the claim is wrong — that there’s no possible way your bank balance really is €2,000 — it may be of interest to consider the psychological factors that resulted in you claiming otherwise. Maybe you really were lying to me because you’re embarrassed about your fiscal irresponsibility; maybe you were mistakenly looking at the balance of your savings account rather than your checking account; maybe you have undiagnosed myopia and you misread a 3 as a 2. But until I’ve established that you are wrong, it’s a colossal waste of my time and yours to expound at length on the state of mind that led you to erroneously conclude that the balance is €2,000 when it’s really something else.

In the eight decades since Lewis coined the term, the popularity of this fallacious argumentative strategy shows no signs of abating, and is routinely employed by people at every point on the political spectrum against everyone else. You’ll have evolutionists claiming that the only reason people endorse young-Earth creationism is because the idea of humans evolving from animals makes them uncomfortable; creationists claiming that the only reason evolutionists endorse evolution is because they’ve fallen for the epistemic trap of Scientism™ and can’t accept that not everything can be deduced from observation alone; climate-change deniers claiming that the only reason environmentalists claim that climate change is happening is because they want to instate global communism; environmentalists claiming that the only reason people deny that climate change is happening is because they’re shills for petrochemical companies. And of course, identity politics of all stripes (in particular standpoint epistemology and other ways of knowing) is Bulverism with a V8 engine: is there any debate strategy less productive than “you’re only saying that because you’re a privileged cishet white male”? It’s all wonderfully amusing — what could be more fun than confecting psychological just-so stories about your ideological opponents in order to insult them with a thin veneer of cod-academic therapyspeak?

But it’s also, ultimately, a waste of time. The only way to find out the balance of your checking account is to check the balance on your checking account — idle speculation on the psychological factors that caused you to claim that the balance was X when it was really Y are futile until it has been established that it really is Y rather than X. And so it goes with all claims of truth or falsity. Hypothetically, it could be literally true that 100% of the people who endorse evolution have fallen for the epistemic trap of Scientism™ and so on and so forth. Even if that was the case, that wouldn’t tell us a thing about whether evolution is literally true.


To give Freddie credit where it’s due, the various iterations of his AI article do not consist solely of him assuming that AI maximalists are wrong and speculating on the psychological factors that caused them to be so. He does attempt, with no small amount of rigour, to demonstrate that they are wrong on the facts: pointing out major shortcomings in the current state of the LLM art; citing specific examples of AI predictions which conspicuously failed to come to pass; comparing the recent impact of LLMs on human society with other hugely influential technologies (electricity, indoor plumbing, antibiotics etc.) in order to make the case that LLMs have been nowhere near as influential on our society as the maximalists would like to believe. This is what a sensible debate about the merits of LLMs and projections about their future capabilities should look like.

But poor Freddie just can’t help himself, so in addition to all of this sensible sober-minded analysis, he insists on wasting his readers’ time with endless interminable paragraphs of armchair psychoanalysis about how the AI maximalists came to arrive at their deluded worldviews:

What [Scott] Alexander and [Yascha] Mounk are saying, what the endlessly enraged throngs on LessWrong and Reddit are saying, ultimately what Thompson and Klein and Roose and Newton and so many others are saying in more sober tones, is not really about AI at all. Their line on all of this isn’t about technology, if you can follow it to the root. They’re saying, instead, take this weight from off of me. Let me live in a different world than this one. Set me free, free from this mundane life of pointless meetings, student loan payments, commuting home through the traffic, remembering to cancel that one streaming service after you finish watching a show, email unsubscribe buttons that don’t work, your cousin sending you hustle culture memes, gritty coffee, forced updates to your phone’s software that make it slower for no discernible benefit, trying and failing to get concert tickets, trying to come up with zingers to impress your coworkers on Slack…. And, you know, disease, aging, infirmity, death.

Am I disagreeing with any of the above? Not at all: whenever anyone is making breathless claims about the potential near-future impacts of some new technology, I have to assume there’s some amount of wishful thinking or motivated reasoning at play.

No: what I’m saying to Freddie is that his analysis, even if true, doesn’t fucking matter. It’s irrelevant. It could well be the case that 100% of the AI maximalists are only breathlessly touting the immediate future of AI on human society because they’re too scared to confront the reality of a world characterised by boredom, drudgery, infirmity and mortality. But even if that was the case, that wouldn’t tell us one single solitary thing about whether this or that AI prediction is likely to come to pass or not. The only way to answer that question to our satisfaction is to soberly and dispassionately look at the state of the evidence, the facts on the ground, resisting the temptation to get caught up in hype or reflexive dismissal. If it ultimately turns out that LLMs are a blind alley, there will be plenty of time to gloat about the psychological factors that caused the AI maximalists to believe otherwise. Doing so before it has been conclusively shown that LLMs are a blind alley is a waste of words.

Freddie, I plead with you: stay on topic. I’m sure it feels good to call everyone who’s more excited than you about AI an emotionally stunted manchild afraid to confront the real world, but it’s not a productive contribution to the debate. Resist the temptation to psychoanalyse people you disagree with, something you’ve complained about people doing to you (in the form of suggesting that your latest article is so off the wall that it could only be the product of a manic episode) on many occasions. The only way to check the balance of someone’s checking account is to check the balance on their checking account. Anything else is a waste of everyone’s time.

Technically sure. But not really. He is a supervisor of an oil rig. You would still have managers and capital owners in this world. It still fits with the described knowledge worker atrophy.

Consider also that he got that position by gambling. Not as a career path or through credentialism. Again lending credence to the theory that knoweldge work is dead and everything is a blue collar larp.

But the opposite, right? She is aware of her sexual value. So she doesn't squander it on a 19 year old. He has no money.

In reality, perhaps this is what’s happening. But I don’t think it’s what’s happening in the ephepophile’s fantasy, that causes him to be attracted to the 19 year old, no. Golddigging is an unattractive trait in a partner even if you are the beneficiary. One would prefer to think that the free-spirited young thing with few sexual hangups is exactly that, rather than secretly calculative.

Or maybe he is just predisposed to noticing a particular type of bad thing in his life.

In other words, he's a racist.

Lando is white collar.

The original english translation you posted below is incomprehensible.

Eh, it was comprehensible enough, the most mistranslated part was "reacted really disgusting me" vs what I assume was meant to be "reacted really disgusted with me" - and the true meaning can be error-corrected from context. The AIsloppy editing destroyed more meaning, originality, dare I say soul than the lack of English skills of the author.

Interestingly @RandomRanger cited a video in another thread that's an unintentional example of this. It's an Avatar compilation video titled "Hardest RDA Edit" where 'hard' is used to mean based/awesome/woah. My browser mistranslated that to "[Most Difficult] RDA Edit' i.e. 最も難しい RDA 編集.

If GPT is given both the title and the summary (which Youtube could do internally with their API) it gives the much better translations "Max strength RDA edit" 史上最強RDA編集 or "Most villainous RDA edit" 最凶RDA編集. In general I find GPT much better on language problems than they are on almost any other task, and miles better than standard machine translation.

今、天国に色気分だわ

@4bpp sorry for double-dipping, but since I've got you here do you know why わ is used? Obviously it's usually feminine, and I understand that the male usage is from the archaic patterns where it's broadly an emphasiser like ぞ and therefore used by archaic / cool characters to express emphasis. Is that what's going on here? It doesn't quite seem to fit.

I do feel like it's insane how much content is now AI driven.

Even random innocuous social media blurbs have em-dashes when it's like 'You could have written that your restaurant is open for longer hours'. I understand using AI to marshall your thoughts or if you're wanting to do longer form writing but there's plenty of messages where I feel like it'd just be quicker and easier to not open ChatGPT and provide a prompt.