domain:forecasting.substack.com
Yes, this is one of the arguments I have seen. You can posit yourself outside of any moral structure and define good something akin to "how to achieve one's goal most effectively". So for instance if a school shooter wants to kill as many students as possible, it is "good" for him to use guns as opposed to knives. You are not going to question the morality of the action, you just talk in terms of which actions are more effective in reaching any given goal that you are morally impartial to. I think this level of thinking is useless outside of highly specific and individual action, you even need to distance yourself from any other potential impact these actions have for that person and take their stated goals at their face value, otherwise you enter into moral argument territory rather quickly.
Plus I think it is also misleading to even use the words like good or bad for this concept, I wish there was a different vocabulary there. As soon as you are talking about concepts like what is "good" for country or people, you are losing the argument as country or people are not moral agents to whom you can give any advice.
HereAndGone
13hr ago
Daily Record
This is a Scottish newspaper, so it's local rather than national, unlike The Sun or The Daily Mirror (and you get regional versions of those, e.g. The Irish Sun). A lot of the daily papers got hoovered up by the Murdoch behemoth and brought downmarket as tabloids to become profitable. Your question is a bit like asking "Why do you need the Minnesota Star-Tribune, isn't USA Today enough?"
RenOS
something is wrong
13hr ago
Somehow you replied to yourself on a completely different topic, as far as I can see?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
13hr ago
I don't have much to say about this, even though little girls and bladed weapons form a major part of my life. It's cute, I guess. The incident in the video I mean. As far as propaganda goes, we've seen so much that this is just background noise. And as for the AI image...okay? Doesn't really do much for me. I found the real video more interesting, though neither is worth much. Even the real one could be staged or manipulated. And even if real, what did we see? A girl screaming at the camera and briefly pulling out two things that might have been weapons (in someone elses hands). Girls do dumb shit all the time. Maybe this one wasn't dumb but actually heroic. But we don't know. How the hell would we be able to tell?
We live in an epistemic desert, where all information is mirages.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
13hr ago
the object level issue is too muddy to comment on until more information surfaces. Perhaps the teenager had sympathetic reasons for brandishing knives, perhaps she did not.
However, the general point in this case feels like a nothingburger. I don't think AI images are doing anything new. Before the advent of mass photography and telex, all pictures in newspapers, magazines and other contexts were illustrations, designed to evoke emotions yet supposed to illustrate real life events. Even with photography, many news photos have been intentionally staged to be evocative. During the past decade, meme texts, pictures and shopped photos have been cheaply available from 4chan. Only difference is that quality of freely available illustrations have been slightly upgraded, but it can be assumed the audience is soon desensitized.
HereAndGone
13hr ago
Since you don't give this option, I'll have to record "neither" as my answer here. The anime image is stupid annoying, the video is "why are these brats running around with knives and hatchets in public? they need discipline, have they no parents rearing them?" In a slightly different context, this would be "little thugs attack ordinary person going about their business in broad daylight".
HereAndGone
13hr ago
And yet, this fake image (and the countless others in the replies below) elicits much stronger emotions and sympathy from me than the real video.
Friend, if crappy bog-standard AI beige cartoons that are blinkin' well everywhere elicit strong reactions of sympathy from you, congratulations, you are Pavlov's dog.
Which probably is the entire problem in a nutshell, now I come to think of it.
Does anyone else hate that cartoony style because of over-exposure to it, even for 'serious' discussions of topics? I was about ready to throw a glass at the screen when Freddie deBoer used the crappy cartoony bastardised-Ghibli chibi of Joe Rogan, for pete's sake!
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
13hr ago
Autism runs rampant on the Motte, and remember that anime is often preferred to 3D reality because it is easier to parse and safer to consume.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
13hr ago
My buddies get extremely frustrated by teamkills, so I maintain the best trigger, stratagem and comms discipline I can manage. I try to lead by example and take my friendly fire deaths with good grace and cheer, but so far it isn't rubbing off. Hell, they even get prickly when they smell a whiff of gas or have to take five slow steps through an EMS field, never mind the fact that it just saved their lives! They'd rather get eaten by bugs than accept that sometimes danger close is the correct response, and good luck getting them to take cover. No, they'll stand out completely in the open, on the wrong side of a chokepoint, with me calling out to them to just take ten steps back and not get mulched, but they'd rather magdump and then complain about running out of stims and ammo.
I like my friends, I like playing with them, but they really don't want to think about what they're doing. To them (nominally very intelligent people), play-time is brain-off time. And they will absolutely, every time, die trying to get back their support weapon rather than just call in a new one.
DiscourseMagnus
13hr ago
And yet, this fake image (and the countless others in the replies below) elicits much stronger emotions and sympathy from me than the real video.
I'm sorry to be so blunt, but what the fuck are you talking about? It isn't even a good AI-generated image. You were hyping it up and I was wondering if when I clicked on your link I was going to see some kind of incredible cognitohazardous superstimulus version of the real incident (which I had already stumbled upon, found evocative in a vacuum, and now find even more evocative given the context). But what you've actually given me is like a low-rent obviously-AI-generated Ben Garrison knockoff. Get a grip, man.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
13hr ago
I usually don't make it very far into puzzle games (me dumb), so I'm reluctant to part with an entire month's fun budget (me poor) if I'm not very confident that I won't regret the purchase.
That said, I should probably just try the demo.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
13hr ago
I still feel bad about Cjet gifting me a copy of Factorio: Space Age and me never making it to the multipalyer sessions. Based mottizen, too generous for his own good.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
13hr ago
It seems funny to me that the idea of Believing Women (w.r.t. them actually being harassed when the women react as though they were) is widely mocked on the right internet... unless the accused are migrant and especially unless the accuser is below the age of majority.
The media landscape I've been brought up on suggests to me that a certain demographic of women learn/are taught to scream rape to ward off any sort of attention, warranted or not, from very young age.
Bots don't leave comments
They leave shit loads of comments. There seems to be some kind of system for limiting these though since they never seen to go beyond a certain percentage of the overall comments.
Ioper
14hr ago
And yet, this fake image (and the countless others in the replies below) elicits much stronger emotions and sympathy from me than the real video
So, I don't agree here and I'm curious as to which of our perspectives is the more common one.
Please answer the poll on which of the options elicits stronger emotions:
https://strawpoll.com/NoZrzw9oBZ3
Then there is the question of which of the two garners more engagement and there I don't really think it's a question of which is more engaging but rather which is easier to consume while still being reasonably engaging. An image is much easier to consume than a video and it fits much better in a text feed than a video does. You can glance at an image and then scroll right by, while a video breaks your engagement flow with the feed.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
14hr ago
I do think that AI-generated propaganda helps the right more than the left in the current environment
Well there's also the fact that the left has huge budgets to propagate their ideas, they don't need AI. They can pay 50, 100 people to make propaganda for a single show. They have entire broadcasting companies all around the world. They already have endless NGOs and cadres and academics pushing out meaningless words, they don't need to automate it. Automating it might even hurt them in absolute terms rather than just relative terms, rendering their patrons unemployed.
See my post here: https://www.themotte.org/post/2254/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/348142?context=8#context
FistfullOfCrows
14hr ago
Ah yes, can't pick a better human representation of inhuman evil than fking Balmer. When I see Balmer I remmember all the shenanigans he got up to back in the day and his roid rage fueled hatred for Linux and open source software.
The video depicted a man, who is not white, confronting the woman for calling a Black child a racial slur. Though the original video was taken down, Michael McWhorter, known online as TizzyEnt, reposted the video on Wednesday, April 30, to his more than 9.5 million followers across TikTok , Instagram , X and YouTube.
In her campaign, Hendrix claims the child stole from her 18-month-old son’s diaper bag at the Soldiers Field Park playground.
“I called the kid out for what he was,” Hendrix wrote.
For context, this happened right after Karmelo Anthony, a black teenager, stabbed a white high-school student to death at a track meet and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars via fundraising sites. Hendrix also started a fundraiser to cover relocation expenses, and it went viral in the aftermath of the Anthony incident. From the sentiment I saw on social media, it seemed like mostly spite donations and people supporting her refusal to cave to the cancellation mob. There was a concerted effort to get her fundraiser above the Karmelo Anthony total, and it ended up raising something like $800k.
And just as it seemed like her 15 minutes of fame were up, she was just charged with three counts of disorderly conduct, apparently for simply using the n-word.
FistfullOfCrows
15hr ago
behavioral issues
This little girl has absolutely had it with the rapacious diversification. That she has had to arm herself to protect her sister is a kind of condemnation on UK society we can't even come close to making ourselves.
Here are a few riffs on the video that have crossed my feed (all should be viewable without logging in): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GzUEppFW0AA_Ucc?format=png&name=900x900 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GzSGAjkakAAp7VP?format=jpg&name=4096x4096 https://x.com/bitcloud/status/1960179071511585038/photo/1 https://x.com/RealDixonUranus/status/1960232042341244985/photo/1
I do think these new capabilities benefit the right more than the left in the current environment. You correctly point out that these are asymmetric weapons, but that needs to be interpreted in the context of an information "battlefield" that is heavily tilted against the right. There are comparatively very few right-wing institutions that staff full-time paid journalists, political cartoonists, and commentators to pump out high production value propaganda in response to the news cycle. Technology that allows anons on Twitter to turn their idea into reality with a few prompts and a bit of tweaking in photoshop is a democratizing force that helps level the playing field. Twitter is an incredible incubator for these ideas and messages as well, now that they have dialed back the censorship. The most effective messages rise to the top, while the low-effort slop (mostly) languishes at the bottom of the replies section.
anon_
15hr ago
I do expect that if they can get the noise level down, Mach 1.7 over land will be achievable. Granted this is more of a political than engineering question. On range, yeah, that is a sore spot. Hopefully a LR version gets to 5500nm which unlocks most of the transpacific.
The economics will be interesting. I'm not sure daily service is a must as you can freely mix-and-match supersonic and subsonic travel. Heck, you could run the thing purely westbound (LHR->JFK->LAX/SFO->ICN/HND->DXB->LHR) with the understanding that your biz travelers are taking a lie-flat on their eastbound legs. All-premium has been a losing proposition (RIP midwest) but that seems like a capacity thing right?
That said, you've convinced me to adjust my optimism a bit downwards, at least in the medium (say, 2035/2040) timeframe.
AnonymousActuary
15hr ago
wait, explain Shiloh Hendrix to me?
gattsuru
15hr ago
This is the first I've heard of a significant military interest in Arc. Could you unpack that?
Uh... technically it's Intel's Flex for the server side, and this is extrapolation rather than anything I know first-hand so it's probably wrong, but :
At the higher confidence level, these boards can run inference comparable to mid-tier nVidia cards, and could potentially be made in Arizona, rather than in TMSC. That's not going to get you massive AGI from LLMs, if such a thing is possible, but there's a lot of video and image data, signals analysis, and more esoteric stuff (HMDs!) that needs realtime or near realtime processing. Yes, most applications would prefer a Jetson over either a normal nVidia card or an Intel one, but since even the Thor-sized Jetsons can't keep up with realtime efforts, they get to compromise. The nVidia boards aren't currently irreplaceable, but military procurement does consider whether there are alternative sources, and Intel is the only even potential alternative.
The... more speculative bit is that Intel's got a number of design opportunities that they were starting to build around. Optimizing data transfer from network card to CPU to GPU is a boring and unsexy thing, but it's actually a big deal for extremely realtime behaviors like streaming video operations, and something where nVidia's offerings (an ARM 'superchip' call Grace) were far behind the competitors... before Intel killed their better solution. There's also some weird messiness with nVidia's solutions for licensing and for chip-to-chip interconnects that are navigable for datacenters for a nightmare for US military procurement.
This isn't readily available to consumers (or even prosumers) yet, because the vast majority of extent AI/ML workloads don't work in Intel ARC environments to start with; those that do seldom even get the full benefit from the GPU's hardware, and even fewer get any serious benefit from GPU/CPU integration. But it's at least a space that would be interesting if Intel could get its core crap together.
This is tantamount to giving up its foundries, and I'm surprised not to have seen more analysis. I wonder if he thinks that that portion of the business is totally unsustainable in the long run, or if he's just playing chicken with the U.S. government hoping for more money.
Officially, they're just doubling down on the 1.4nm stuff. But I don't think I'm the only person reading it that way. For motive, it's hard to tell. He could even be playing chicken with buyers, trying to pressure them to step up early rather than wait until after engineering samples have already gotten off the floor. But I'm not optimistic given the amount and variety of other cuts.
Tiber727
16hr ago
That is the sane-washed story they tell themselves. In practice, Democrats only hold to norms to the extent that they are winning. Consider the Supreme Court. When the SC was delivering progressive wins, it was an unimpeachable source of restraint and goodness and laws and norms. And then when Trump gave us a conservative majority, they immediately switched to "This SC is illegitimate and it's rulings are illegitimate. We should pack the court when we get back in power."
Everyone follows this behavior where they say to do X then do Y, they will always have a reason why the situation demands doing Y vs X. It's just a question of if that exception was reasonable or an excuse. One can respond to a perceived violation by either taking the high road or going tit-for-tat. Honestly what frustrates me the most is when someone says they're going tit-for-tat but tries to act like they still have the moral high ground, or when they act outraged says they are going tit-for-tat towards you (since the other side likely didn't see their original action as a violation).
With the Supreme Court specifically, the norm violation the left was responding to was McConnell arguing to Obama that Supreme Courts should be filled after elections to ensure that it aligns with the will of the people, then very pointedly rushing to fill the seat before elections when Trump was almost out of office.
It sounds like you had a stronger emotional reaction to the video than to the AI-generated image.
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