domain:lesswrong.com
TIRM
20hr ago
notorious transphobe, fascist and serial instigator of harassment campaigns Jesse Singal
Beautiful way to describe a progressive Jewish New Yorker journalist who questions youth gender transition. He's 99% on their side, so he's basically the reincarnation of Hitler to him. The moral purity and rigid adherence to a narrow set of approved beliefs is amazing with this crowd.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
20hr ago
So if ATF started releasing videos like that you'd think it's fine and not a worrying sign about how they see themselves?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
20hr ago
Or evidence that their optics are exactly what they want them to be and they're reasonably competent at cultivating the appearance they want to have. So far I see no evidence that ICE wants to cultivate an image of professionals who dot every i and cross every t, and quite a bit of evidence that they want to cultivate an image as badass thugs who are getting shit done in terms of kicking anyone illegal out of America, no matter who they are and no matter why they think they're safe.
hydroacetylene
20hr ago
We aren’t that, though.
Pongalh
20hr ago
Indeed there was an infograph recently of most popular social media worldwide and Finland stuck out as being the only one where Threads reigns supreme
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
20hr ago
Being an atheist doesn't make you infertile
I agree it doesn't cause it, but the correlation is present.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
20hr ago
but there isn’t really a replacement for illegal labor on farms
Actual visas for the particular types of workers you want to bring in would be the way a functional country would handle this.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
20hr ago
I've been reading and posting on Threads recently. There seems to be an interesting division between Finnish Threads (essentially a hornier version of normie white-collar millennial Twitter, somewhat leftlib but mostly apolitical) and American Threads (dumber Bluesky). Threads is probably somewhat more popular in Finland than many other countries for reasons I haven't really understood, so that probably contributes.
TK-421
20hr ago
This is the political angle that Trump can show to his base. It's not actually going to him - well, some might slosh off - it's a demonstration of his reinvigorating of the American economy. Bringing in the bacon. The same triumphal vibe as DOGE or the tariffs. It's a win, a smart deal, and it's going to lead to years of bigger negotiations as the distribution networks reconfigure.
(Also years of lawsuits. That's the same thing as a negotiation.)
Rov_Scam
20hr ago
It's mostly left-wingers who left Twitter after Musk enshittified it my ramming his preferred content down everyone's throats. They don't want a monoculture so much as they don't want to be forced to look at posts by Ted Cruz. The fact that they were getting a reputation as you described is probably a big part of the reason they are so flippant currently. If the woke scolds who are the face of the company but a small percentage of total users want to leave, let them leave. I went on Bluesky today without an account and I didn't see anything relating to politics, mostly sports and scenic photos. I can't say the same about my Twitter account, which shows me a bunch of right-wing political posts even though I'm almost exclusively following sports journalists.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
20hr ago
Yeah so my problem with the idea of Christ as the “perfect example which all of us must try to emulate” is that Christ was basically exempt from a lot of our terrestrial concerns, on behalf of being a divine being with magic powers. I obviously cannot emulate Christ’s supernatural healing powers, nor can I emulate his ability to rise from the dead. If I attempt to emulate those, I will actually just make my life worse, and look very stupid in the process. Furthermore, there are aspects of Christ’s life which I actively wish not to emulate: the whole “being tortured and then martyred” thing, obviously, but also the part where he died unmarried, childless, and penniless. Things like material resources and a familial posterity were unimportant to Christ because they were distractions from his mission (which he knew to be fairly short-lived in a temporal sense), but they are (and should be) extremely important to humans. Taken to its logical extreme, a world in which every human tries to live the most “Christ-like” life possible is an anarcho-primitivist proto-Communist world, devoid of the concentrations of wealth and power that allow for anything resembling higher civilization to take shape. This is a world to which we can aspire only if we truly believe that Christ’s return is literally imminent within our lifetimes, rendering any need to build for the future irrelevant.
So, which elements of Christ’s life and personality should I, or can I, seek to emulate? I can emulate his kind-heartedness, his boundless self-control and resistance to temptation, and his leadership qualities. I can strive to extend grace and the benefit of the doubt to those around me, and I can strive to eliminate within myself passions and temptations which lead me to harm myself and others. I can imbue my actions with a greater import because I know that I am being watched and that there is a higher plan toward which I should focus my efforts. This, to me, is the most a religion can really demand of its adherents. That’s also what, to me, separated something like Mormonism from a “cult” in the way modern people use the term. A literal reading of the Biblical Christ’s imprecations would lead an adherent to give up all material possessions, to abandon his or her family and loved ones, and to eagerly await the rapidly-approaching end times. Since the end times did not actually occur during the lifetimes of the church’s early converts, I think it’s safe to say that not everything Jesus said was meant to be interpreted totally literally.
TK-421
20hr ago
I strongly encourage you take a dive with the AI of your choice on the subject. Every layer has deep complexity and I now understand why networks, stations, affiliates, even the bigger entertainment conglomerates are structured the way they are. The technical implementation details are interesting for their own sake but you can really start to see how they dictate a big sector of the economy.
07mk
20hr ago
with a few extra advertiser-friendly bits thrown in (you need to click on "sensitive" videos instead of autplaying, porn is mostly banned except for the softcore "sub to my OF" type stuff)
FYI there's no restriction on porn on Twitter (except required by law). There's tons of hardcore stuff easily available, though I believe the algorithms tend to limit their reach.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
20hr ago
Why should the $25-50B go to Trump? I would think it would go towards the federal budget.
TK-421
20hr ago
You're ignoring the fact that, according to Neilsen, about 20% of people in the US rely on OTA TV to receive local stations, myself included, and that number is in excess of 30% in some markets.
My apologies, I wasn't trying to ignore you. I considered calling out that many people who rely on OTA for TV and analyzing their alternatives but the original post was already getting long.
The short answer is that I don't care about you and I think others shouldn't either. It's a cost benefit analysis. I acknowledge that many people will lose access to OTA TV. My expectation is that most, 90%+, will be able to substitute the entertainment they get from local TV from any of the others in our modern grab-bag of entertainment distribution. Many are elderly people who will barely notice if the TV at the nursing home is repurposed for streaming. But even if more people are affected than I think I still don't think it's enough to overcome the benefits. I am sorry grandma, your stories are using a common resource that we need for growth.
There are emergency and public notification functions that OTA TV also serves. I think in many cases that information can be disseminated through other means but if there's a very low cost way to keep that or if the buyer of the spectrum can easily provide the service then sure, but it's these kinds of little carve outs and extra requirements for tiny populations that leads to the administrative and contracting bloat we are fighting. Sometimes maintaining backwards compatibility really is too expensive and we should make the change and let market forces solve for the edge cases.
theincompetencetheorist
20hr ago
Is there something in this 5000 word essay you find interesting? I sped through it, but tech->fascism->tech->fascism doesn't provide much insight. The 30 additional mentions of fascism don't make up for it either.
I just use it as a reference to the controversy that is in the beginning of it and from someone who is really angry about waffles. It is actually the lack of insight that is the main point of using it.
Oh, I just mean that twitter will be completely intolerable for them now, as the witches are very much out of the closet, loud and proud, and will happily engage with the witch-hunter brigades, so I doubt any of the bluesky refugees will last very long if they come back into the fray. There's enough screenshots of what they said on BS (lol unfortunate acronym) to come back to haunt them.
It'd be like getting released from Juvenile Detention straight into the the rec yard of a Maximum Security Federal Penitentiary.
TeknOShEeP
20hr ago
only that AFAIK the speech norms are often pretty different
Yes, 4chan is for my literal shitposting (on my employer's time of course), the motte is for when I am waiting on civilized company. One can have different voices tailored to different environments.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
20hr ago
As I’ll continue to say, if Joe exotic can turn men gay, it stands to reason someone, somewhere, can turn them straight. This amounts to viewpoint discrimination in therapy, which is mostly garbage anyways.
...Are we suggesting therapeutic meth addiction as a youth therapy?
Its witches all the way down.
Although in my mind the distinction is that most Right Wing Witches aren't trying to drive lefties out, they need 'em as a foil and might even enjoy the conflict. Its the lefties who are insistent they must burn the witches.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
20hr ago
Were I in one of these roles that benefit so highly, I personally wouldn't be bragging about how much of my workload is able to be automated.
This is starting to happen in consulting.
All the big consulting firms are crowing about how "AI forward" they are, as they think that is good marketing and brand positioning to clients to show how technologically advanced they are, etc.
It probably is good marketing.
But in a few client meetings now, questions like "so if you're so much more efficient with AI, why are we paying a 7% technology fee?" Or "if your using AI to automate and make your people's time more efficient, can we pay for less time?"
Some of these questions are humourous, some not. But the vibe is building and it's funny to watch. I have a feeling consulting margins are about to start experiencing some pricing pressure as the increase in productivity is turned into margin wars.
TeknOShEeP
20hr ago
These people are laboring under the misapprehension that their voice is so desired other people will follow them to wherever. In reality, no one cares, and it makes no sense.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
20hr ago
One of the things I learned in the Jimmy Kimmel fiasco was that I actually didn't understand how the network TV system worked.
Rov_Scam
20hr ago
Imagine you're planning a vacation. Your dream vacation is Hawaii; your second choice is Myrtle Beach, but that would only be about half as fun. So you call a travel agent, and find out that you unfortunately don't have enough money for a flight to Hawaii. On the other hand, you could drive to Myrtle Beach, which wouldn't be nearly as expensive. Now suppose the travel agent calls you back and offers you the following proposition: "You can't afford to fly to Hawaii, but I've found a reduced rate ticket that will get you 95% of the way there for only 20% of the full price. Granted, it doesn't quite get you to Hawaii, but isn't getting 95% of your dream vacation better than settling for Myrtle Beach, which is only worth half?"
This is obviously nuts, because getting 95% of the way to Hawaii puts you somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It's pretty obvious that if you can't get all the way to Hawaii then you're better off going somewhere else entirely. 80%, or 90%, or whatever of a marketable product is no product at all. 80% autonomous cars are regular cars with fancy cruise control (which is itself only used a small percentage of the time), and 80% of whatever AI is aiming for is fancy, expensive, inefficient Google. And saying you're 80% of the way there is more or less meaningless when it comes to technology investment. It's a vague term that has no bearing on actual numbers; it certainly doesn't mean that you're 80% of the way there time-wise or that you've spent 80% of what's necessary to get to 100%, just as the last 5% of the way to Hawaii costs four times as much as the first 95%.
In 2020, The Information estimated that the AV industry had spent $16 billion on research through 2019. Their conclusion was that the whole enterprise was a money pit and that they'd never be able to climb out of. Car and Driver put this in perspective by noting that they could have given every licensed driver in America two brand new Ford-F150s and still have cash to spare. OpenAI's recent projections for 2025 predict $7.8 billion in operating losses and a $13.5 billion net loss. One company in one year manages to spend half the money that the entire AV industry spent in a decade. And incidentally, the amount of money spent on AV research has actually gone up since then, yet you admit yourself that the improvements haven't exactly been dramatic.
AI companies want to spend another trillion or so in the next five years. Will it get them to that magic 100% mark where they can actually sell something for a profit? Nobody knows, but if it can't, I'm willing to guess that the industry's proposed solution will be to spend more money. The point I'm trying to make is that the amount of money they want to spend simply does not exist, and even if it did spending it is not justifiable to someone who eventually expects to turn a profit. If the amount being spent were on par with AVs I'd be more optimistic, but it's exponentially larger. There's going to be a point where the funding isn't going to be there, VC firms are going to have to eat their losses, and there will be a bear market in tech investment where AI is practically a dirty word. This isn't like AVs where the amount of money involved is small enough that companies can quietly make small gains that take years rather than months; it's significantly worse.
How much research did you do on the downsides before you ate that meal? Did you spend a considerable time to be sure you know all of them, assign proper probabilities and weights to every single one, and properly value each and every single one of them according to the best of current scientific knowledge, and then also assign a proper probability and weight to the fact that the current scientific knowledge may be imperfect or plain out false, and add that risk to the calculation too? Or did you just think "yolo, one burger won't kill me, here I properly evaluated the risk and step into this with my eyes fully open now!"? If you did the latter, you are like about 100% of other people and you are fooling yourself. If you did the former, you are like about, within any reasonable rounding, 0% of other people and all other people would call you "weird" if they knew. And that's just a puny burger which, yes, most likely won't kill you (unless the luck selected you to be the random victim of the Burger Serial Killer, which is also a possibility - did you account for it in your evaluation of risks?)
Of course it isn't obvious to you. That's the whole point.
Do you think that you are actually aware of The Truth? I mean, that all statements you believe in are objectively true, and for every statement you can determine (if it's logically possible, let's not get into paradoxes here) whether it is true or not, and that determination would be the objective Truth? If you think so, you are either an avatar of God, or have a giant ego and are fooling yourself. If not, then there must be statements that aren't true and yet you think they are true. But you probably don't spend each available moment of time to find out which those are and correct them. You are fine with it being, more or less, as it is. For some people, one of such statements may be "What is written in the book of Mormon is a literal description of events that actually happened". For you, it may be a completely different statement.
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