domain:science.org
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
10hr ago
Yet another advance of the digital panopticon justified by anarcho-tyranny.
You'll get digital ID for the same reasons, you'll see.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
10hr ago
I'm well aware Americans have a longstanding hypocrisy about pornography not being art along criteria that even their Supreme Court refuses to explain, but if documenting historical machineguns or how to build 3D printed guns doesn't count as speech, then this conversation is indeed over, because all that's happening is that you don't like when the tools of censorship apply to things you like.
It's a popular position, but don't come and pretend to have any attachement to free speech as a concept if speech is narrowly restrained to the content you approve of.
FtttG
11hr ago
Does the existence and behaviour of Israel/Mossad etc. push more people further towards such behaviour? Also yes.
How exactly does one Irish Jew minding his own business on a Dublin bus bear any responsibility for the actions of Netanyahu and Mossad? The implication that all Jews are collectively responsible for the actions of any individual Jew is about as close to a textbook definition of "racism" as I can envision.
TowardsPanna
11hr ago
I'm playing Elden Ring for the first time. It's fun and gripping.
I picked the noob friendly Vagabond class. I've upgraded the hp flask quantity twice and got my steed and killed three dungeon bosses. I've put some points into dex, str, end.
Can I get some spoiler free advice? :)
Should you focus on only one type of combat, or can you create a mixed build with success? It would be nice to have a good ranged damage option but I also want to kick butts with badass melee weapons.
Corvos
11hr ago
I am quite confident that the assailant made no effort to ascertain his victim's political affiliation (i.e. whether or not he was one of the "good Jews") before harassing and assaulting him.
Sadly, no one ever does. Woke activists in the 2010s had absolutely no interest in finding out your exact views on race and sex before calling for your firing as a white man. As with Chinese Cardiologists, humans free-associate and they do it with a broad brush.
Broadly it seems that there is a cycle of persecution:
- Jews feel under threat.
- They take unusually stringent overt and covert actions to defend themselves.
- This makes them increasingly unpopular.
- Rinse and repeat.
Does the existence of Jew-punchers on the bus suggest that they need their own state and should do whatever it takes to keep it? Yes.
Does the existence and behaviour of Israel/Mossad etc. push more people further towards such behaviour? Also yes.
quiet_NaN
11hr ago
If the management is ok with cashiers wearing cameras, they are very likely also willing to use visible video cameras for the same purpose.
If I was a manager, I would not want employees to record continuous footage on private devices. Their interests are not aligned with the store's interests. E.g. it is in the "creator's" interest if a video of fat people buying tons of unhealthy food goes viral. It is not in the interests of the store.
About a year ago, in a discussion of Ireland's rabid support for the Palestinian cause, I argued that it's primarily caused by misguided post-colonial solidarity and that "I've never gotten the feeling that Ireland is an antisemitic country".
That's a position I'm now revisiting:
A Jewish man was hit by a stranger shouting antisemitic insults on a Dublin city bus on Friday [the 18th of July], according to a video circulating on social media. The assailant shouted “genocidal Jews” and other slurs at the man.
He also said he recognized that the man was a Jew “because of his face.” The Jewish man – who recorded the incident – can be heard saying, “I get used to it; they are all like this.”...
The assailant then slapped the Jewish man in the face and tried to take his phone.
Comments on social media said the driver called the police and that the man was arrested.
An officer told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday that it does not comment on material circulated online by third parties but confirmed that “shortly after 11 p.m. on Friday, 18 July 2025, [police officers] from Rathmines responded to reports of a disturbance on a bus in Rathgar, Dublin.”
For reference, Rathgar is a very posh suburb, with houses going for €1 million at the minimum.
A few weeks ago, my dad quoted some Israeli politician (whose name escapes me) at me who supposedly claimed that his proudest achievement was drawing an equivocation between anti-Zionism and antisemitism in the public consciousness. I accept that the two are not strictly equivalent, but I don't think anyone can dispute anymore (in Ireland or anywhere else) that the former can often serve as a cover for the latter. I am quite confident that the assailant made no effort to ascertain his victim's political affiliation (i.e. whether or not he was one of the "good Jews") before harassing and assaulting him.
As an aside, I can't help but marvel at how self-defeating this behaviour is. Whenever you assault someone because they look like they might be Jewish, you are precisely demonstrating Israel's entire raison d'être, the moral necessity of its existence.
I probably should have defined "meaningless" better and generally articulated my argument more systematically, that's my bad; I was writing down my first reaction to the passage and had not yet properly distilled how to explain my point. What I mean by "not meaningful" is that there might be no way to prove or disprove the statement, and as such it can be considered an example of a statement that's not even wrong. In terms of its utility in shining light on the world around it, it's not particularly helpful; this is the case due to the fact that it has not been and perhaps cannot ever be evaluated through reference to formal logic, mathematics, or any natural sciences. Marcuse has presented a statement of fact without proof or rigorous logical argumentation as to its validity. He's not even built his conclusion based on reasoning from other assumed priors (not perfect, but better). As such it is a bare statement.
I think it may be helpful here to draw a comparison between Marcuse's claims about value and your own previous comments about anime. You said "I felt like the whole corruption arc was dealt with far better in Breaking Bad". Now, is this something that you could absolutely rigorously logically prove 100%? No, of course not. But does that mean the sentence is meaningless? No, that's not true either.
Right, I think that this elaborates the difference between our epistemologies and our opinions on the standard that academic scholarship should ideally strive towards. I generally adhere to logical positivism (very INTP of me, I know /s), and while I don't act like this all the time in practice, I do believe that principles of falsifiability and offering up proofs/disproofs are the kinds of standards that scholarship should exemplify. As Scott describes it: "The truths of science are verifiable empirical claims and ... the truths of logic and mathematics are tautologies. These two constitute the entire universe of meaningful judgements; anything else is nonsense."
Something like "Death Note was not that good" is an evaluative judgement of quality, not a statement of fact. Every argument surrounding aesthetics will be vibes based as a result, and the point of it is not to get closer to any truth; rather, it's to impress upon someone your subjective experience and make them viscerally feel it on a deep level. The point is to impose your personal feelings on someone. The reason why people structure it like a rational argument is specifically because we assume that other people believe certain things are good too, we assume other people share our own cognitive characteristics. We create premises and then we can possibly use logical (more often, pseudo-logical) argumentation to show how these premises result in an inevitable conclusion.
Of course, there is a point beyond which you can't get much closer to agreement through this method of argumentation. Say a film critic enjoys films that are talky and philosophical and idea-based and the ordinary viewer enjoys stuff that's more action-packed. There isn't really a way for these two parties to come to any consensus on the quality of films. While it's possible to try to argue it if there's some other related point of commonality you can reason from, a big part of convincing people in this regard is trying to force them into your mental framework; to get them to understand you on a qualia-level. Discussions surrounding aesthetics proceed with the inherent assumption that truth is not what is being discussed, and as such they do not need to meet the criteria for evaluating a truth-claim. (There is a way to discuss aesthetics which is amenable to proof or disproof by appeal to the majority or analysis of human neural structure, but when most people discuss aesthetics they're not trying to make a claim about whether most people like something or not but instead getting someone else to adopt their own subjective evaluations of a piece of media.)
On the other hand, assertions such as "Art that emphasises subjective experience helps people reject capitalism" aren't of the same nature that "this show was bad" is, in that they are not value judgements. It is a factual claim about the effects of a certain course of action. This automatically raises the bar for the kinds of arguments that should be accepted when evaluating these statements. Because when you agree with that statement, you're not agreeing to adopt a certain personal evaluation of things. You're agreeing to a statement about how the world operates. Discussion of such things needs to proceed among logical or empirical lines, and if it cannot, all you are doing is relying on your own emotion or personal bias to try and divine a fact. When discussing this one cannot subject themselves to the same criteria that one would subject a movie review to.
The kinds of statements I consider meaningful are exemplified in this quote from Scott in his post about logical positivism. "[W]hat is there such that, using reason rather than emotion or made-up pseudologic, we can actually change our minds about and correctly judge as having one probability of truth rather than another?" It really doesn't matter much to me that the majority of philosophers seem to think the Vienna Circle has been invalidated; if I'm to judge the effectiveness of these principles I distinctly note that these institutions that operate under things that look and sound a lot like positivism do far better.
Perhaps that makes me a pragmatist instead.
But "dumb" and "wrong" are importantly different from meaningless. I get the impression that you already think that Marcuse's claims here are at least level 3.
Correct, I think Marcuse's claim is level 3 as presented in your list. It contains a clear statement of fact that can be pretty straightforwardly understood. I do believe this is true for much continental philosophy, though they fail other epistemological criteria and sets of standards.
No, I really have to disagree on this. Many people self-consciously base their own value system on the pursuit of perfectionism and efficiency. No one thinks that there's anything mystical or unarticulable about this. Therefore, its denial should not be mystical or unarticulable either.
I think we've talked past each other on this point, I don't mean to say it's mystical. What I mean is that people would accept Marcuse's claim not on the basis of formalised reason or empirical proof but on the basis of the fact that it resonates with them and they deeply feel it is true; they think it sounds right and seems reasonable in spite of the lack of concrete reasons they should believe it.
Also, the distinction I've made between a value/moral judgement and a statement of fact, as well as the different burdens of proof which should be placed on them, rears its head here. Statements such as "I base my values on the pursuit of perfectionism and efficiency" and "You should not base your own value system on the pursuit of perfectionism and efficiency" are value judgements. "Emphasising subjective experience helps people reject capitalism" is a statement about how the world works.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
12hr ago
Moose
Meese
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
12hr ago
There is massive latent demand for sex in the economy.
Yeah, imagine all the sex people are having with each other for free. It's definitely an inefficient system, a massive untapped market that is worth billions or even trillions if you can achieve perfect price discrimination.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
12hr ago
I think they're the only 2 women in the top 50
There's also #25 AriGameplays, #29 Rivers_gg
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
12hr ago
Well, okay, yes I will grant you that statistical awareness of anything more complicated than a surface level understanding of Pearson's r is more rare than it should be, so I can see that.
Helpful video link of Hinton, definitely illuminates a bit of where you're coming from (and I was pleasantly surprised to see him talk, essentially, about my exact point regarding memory when he talks about "time scale" as something he thinks is an area that could be fruitful; a memory approach the cartridge cache idea, while neat, isn't really, though we'd need to get into an extensive tangent about neuroscience, and likely a little more linear algebra than I'm up to, to tease out why). I will say that genius scientists having major realizations after they are old and their careers are over don't have the greatest track record, but he's still got a point. I think upthread I alluded to a group of scientists who think that what is happening behind the scenes in LLMs is true understanding, and Hinton as I understand it falls into that group (and thus has an above-average P(doom) to use the cliche'd term). But, as I noted then, that group is still the minority view in the field. So I think epistemically it's solidly in the realm of 'reasonable people can disagree'. I lean against, but I'm still a bit agnostic about it. From a statistics perspective, we're in a little bit of uncharted territory, where we have a bit of the scaffolding but the setups have some novel traits, so the lack of total clarity for "higher order" relationships doesn't really surprise me.
I do think you're a little too unkind to self-directed learning. The AR-Zero paper is exclusively looking at if LLMs can, essentially, teach themselves to code if they have access to a Python environment and its output... and already went through pre-training. That's just replacing the RLVR, amplifying a pre-existing skill in a closed, human-built, rules-ruled system, which is impressive as a practical matter but not really what I was getting at. And not very similar what most of the forms of learning we'd want would look like in practice, either.
He also touches on and as you elaborate (I enjoyed reading your thoughts about the numbers), yes there is definitely a difference in parallelism and throughput and metrics like that for brains vs LLMs, and this is part architecture but part the simple decisions of what the 'market' is investing in and exploring. I too wonder what might emerge, or might end up being impossible.
It's interesting to me that you think these differences on the whole aren't very relevant to an (abstract) understanding of intelligence, however. Do you think human perceptions of intelligence are essentially one big conflation because we happen to be "solitary mobile embodied agents" that are also, as a group, quite clearly different in scale and perhaps nature from the rest of the animal kingdom (thus we ascribe too much of this difference to intelligence)? I tend to think that these things cannot be easily divorced; intelligence only ever makes sense to think about in a human philosophical context, rather than a more abstract criterion. As you say, the human form of learning and intelligence is very intrinsic to us, why fight against the natural desire to evaluate it this way?
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
12hr ago
You can override WD, though. You're making the choice not to, because you think it might be malware.
Windows has gotten significantly worse about anti-user features since 10, but you can still run code MS doesn't like AFAIK (can't speak to Win11, as MS is on my hatelist since they started bankrolling OpenAI).
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
12hr ago
Meritocracy is, in some very real sense, "discrimination against dumb people"
And in that same sense, countries that grant their citizens broad liberties and freedoms discriminate against the stupid and virtueless.
"Ruining it for everyone" is the excuse to socialize your private virtue for those people.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
12hr ago
The correct question is 'What rate of pay would Jeff Bezos and his wife have agreed to in return for her assistance?'
No thanks, Software As A Servuce is bad enough, I'm not entertaining Marriage As A Service.
but that's not actually relevant so long as the court would have forced him to pay her for her labor regardless of the success it engendered -- her compensation was guaranteed, so there should be no risk premium.
It's not about compensation and premiums, it's about ownership.
Free by Lea Ypi, a memoir of the author's childhood in Albania as it transitioned out of the USSR out of socialism and into a liberal democracy. Unsurprisingly, it presents living in a socialist country in a very negative light. Comparisons with My Brilliant Friend are apt (Albania in the late 80s/early 90s seems about as economically deprived as Naples in the 60s), even though this one is marketed as non-fiction. Very readable, and I'm glad the focus is mainly on the politics and the disruptions the author's parents had to cope with, rather than endless trite anecdotes about the author's interactions with her primary school classmates or whatever.
wayfarer
13hr ago
then he has a specific threat given that Pinochet was suppressing them
then it could be "I am being persecuted under pretext of being communist", this does not require someone to be a communist
(rather than "I live in a terrible country and it can happen to me")
wayfarer
13hr ago
because basically no one walks in the area
oh, I keep forgetting about that USAsian weirdness.
FtttG
13hr ago
Otherwise, we kind of move towards a world where everyone dons a disguise out in public just to maintain some semblance of anonymity.
Perhaps the political valence of wearing a facemask in public spaces will do a complete 180. Or better get, burqas for everyone, not just women.
P-Necromancer
13hr ago
The labor theory of value is wrong, yes. I think you're missing a step or two between that and the Washington State Divorce Court being the proper way to assess that value. The correct question is 'What rate of pay would Jeff Bezos and his wife have agreed to in return for her assistance?' Which is unfortunately impossible to answer given that no such negotiation took place.
I suppose you could argue that he married her with the understanding that, should they divorce, their assets would be divvied up according to that process? That's technically valid, but it'd be just as valid if that process were anything else, provided those terms wouldn't have prevented their marriage; also impossible to say, I suppose. Still, I think this is the best supported position.
On the other side, one can consider what he'd have had to have paid someone else to fulfill those same responsibilities -- certainly far, far less than he ended up paying her, even if he'd had to take out a loan to do so. It's certainly possible she did something for Amazon no one else could have done, but neither accounts nor packing orders meets that bar. He likely wouldn't have taken out a loan to pay someone else to do those things (at least not very early on), but that's not actually relevant so long as the court would have forced him to pay her for her labor regardless of the success it engendered -- her compensation was guaranteed, so there should be no risk premium. But that's not what the court would do, and they both knew that at the time, so maybe a risk premium is fair.
Eagles are probably Switzerland.
I would say Australia is a very good contender for this. The wedge-tailed eagle has a massive wingspan and length and it is endemic to the Australian continent. They are often seen here and are in fact the most common of the world's large eagles. IIRC Australia also has higher median wealth per adult than Switzerland, though also lower average wealth (I suppose Switzerland's average is pulled up by a small percentage of really high net worth individuals) so I think it fits well here.
A possible runner-up is Japan (probably features third behind Australia and Switzerland because it's not super wealthy, and it represents the edge of the habitat range for the species in question). The Steller's sea eagle is one of the heaviest eagles and can be commonly found overwintering in Hokkaido (they are also found in South Korea and China but in smaller numbers, so depending on your definition of marginal you could count them or not). The actual core of their habitat is in Russia, but that country definitely isn't wealthy.
Big snakes are, I’m guessing, either Malaysia or Singapore.
Singapore definitely wins this, they have the reticulated python. This alone doesn't make them unique - many other countries have large snakes, but what really wins them the title is that they are also very rich.
But I would include Australia before Malaysia in that list. Northern Australia in particular has its fair share of large pythons like the Australian scrub python (which is one of the world's largest pythons, capable of preying on wallabies) and carpet pythons, which can get large: example 1, 2, and 3. Also here is an olive python swallowing a crocodile in Queensland. You're welcome.
I realise this reply is very Australia-heavy but I think people underestimate just how much actually gigantic wildlife there is in the country. They definitely win the "large marsupial" category with red kangaroos, too.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
14hr ago
- <1 km
- 3km
- 1km, apples
- 5km (not Amtrak)
- 4 km (local equivalent)
- 220km
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
14hr ago
I find the discussion about intelligence worth having and exploring, to discover the edges and weird applications of current terminology. We're not doing warfare and abusing language on purpose or anything, trying to pick apart both meaning and connotation is partially the point, no? But Google is a poor example, even given some wiggle room about word meaning, and I will continue insisting on that. Assembling Google, as a glorified directory, is not knowledge work, even if you consider the slightly more complex algorithms that go into its modern iterations. Full stop. And I think you'll find you're in the minority if you think humans are "merely information processing algorithms", do you really think this?
There's a bit of overlap, but sometimes in education you might see the word "synthesis" thrown around. It seems to me that "processing" implies analyzing, sorting, and reacting to information, and "synthesis" implies combining, connecting, and distilling different ideas. LLMs are neat because they don't just categorize or recognize, but are able to do recombination and produce novel outputs from a broad context base. Thus my example about how LLMs summarizing a document effectively is a higher-order work task. Maybe that's a slightly more helpful example of what I meant when I said "judgement" is applied to context.
Now, personally and in practice, i.e. outside of philosophical discussions, of course I think it's better just to say "LLMs display jagged intelligence" or "spiky intelligence" or something of that nature. I think it minimizes confusion. Clearly, the implication is that the intelligence is not generally applicable, and has major failure states, and that matches their real-world performance thus far pretty well, and it doesn't raise any excessive linguistic red flags. But I'm still comfortable calling in a qualified type of intelligence, qualification mandatory. Also, partly why I default to calling them LLMs instead of Artificial Intelligence (or at least I try to) despite them being somewhat interchangeable in practice, though I'm not perfectly consistent there. I'm too aware that until ChatGPT, AI meant something different, usually another confusing reference to "deep learning" which in turn was a poor alias for neural networks. Buzzwords, sigh. Anyways, no real test needed, and I view the need for qualification to be at least partially self-evident.
DiscourseMagnus
14hr ago
"I'm sorry sir. I just have to scan the ID of anyone who looks under 30" (guy looks 17)
Despite the presence of a posted sign that says that we only have to check the ID of anyone who looks under 40, management requires that we check the ID of everyone period. I'm honestly not sure how much of this is that management thinks we're too retarded to estimate people's ages and how much of it is management figuring that it'll offend people (mostly women) for us to estimate that they look over 40 regardless of accuracy.
I'm getting a 403 from the website, can we get a check on Coulter's law? The quoted parts seem a bit cagey about the identity of "the assailant".
Another way to look at is: if you can't be anti-zionist without being antisemitic, because someone decided to draw an equivocation in the public consciousness that they're extremely proud of, there might come a point when they say "well, I guess that means I'm anti-semitic now".
That said, yeah, I feel the vibes have shifted on this, and it does feel kind of spooky.
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