JarJarJedi
1d ago
With high intelligence being one of the key ingredients to make for better leadership of groups and societies
I would like to challenge this. While obviously we don't want the leaders to be idiots, I am not sure I would prefer a 150 IQ psychopath to 120 IQ kind and moral person as a leader. To me, the main role of the leader is to set goals, make choices and keep the group from descending into chaos, and I am not sure sky-high personal IQ is the best way for that. Maybe some other qualities - which I am not ready to define, but could tentatively call as "not being an evil asshole"? - are at least as important? I do not doubt we need to require the leader be smarter than average - but I think there's a point of diminishing returns where pure IQ power stops being the thing that matters. I don't know where this point is, but I think the premise "the more IQ, the better leader, no exceptions" needs at least to be seriously questioned.
This of course is complicated by the fact that a lot of our current leaders are, to be blunt, psychopaths or borderline psychopaths. Some of them aren't that high IQ either, to be honest. So we're not doing great in this area, and we only have ourselves, as a society, to blame for that. I'm not going to name names here because everybody would have their own examples depending on their political and personal proclivities, but there are enough examples for everybody. But if we want to do better, sometime in the future, I am not sure "higher IQ score" is the metric we need to concentrate all our efforts on. I have seen enough high-IQ assholes to make this questionable for me.
They're not evaluating GPT-4. They're using 4o.
4o vs gpt4 is my mistake, but gpt4 is generally considered obsolete and nobody uses it. It's true that 4o is a mixed bag and underperforms gpt-4 in some aspects, but we have no reason to believe that it's significantly worse than gpt-4 at translation.
4o is also what powers chatgpt.com so it's the model that most casual users will get the output from.
4o, even at the time of publication, was not the best model available.
4o was released well before gemini 2.0 or claude 3.5, so it likely was the best model at the time, along with the original gpt-4. I agree that right now 4o is not good.
My core contention was that even basic bitch LLMs are good enough
My core contention is that deepl is good enough, as it's within spitting distance of chatgpt. But on the other hand ChatGPT has given people ways to do much much worse when they use it wrong.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
The word you're looking for is "war".
If you're stuck in a permanent war against an enemy you profoundly outclass militarily, economically, culturally, and politically, at a certain point you are responsible for the ongoing outcomes.
Israel has done other things, up to and including
I should be clear, I am no defender of the Palestinians, they are absolutely awful insane irrational neighbors. I am deeply thankful I live nowhere near a Muslim theocracy. While I rate the Israeli reconciliation attempts as "mediocre at best", they have tried, both sides are profoundly irrational at this point.
the best the Israelis can do
I think the answer to this is some flavor of Marshall plan + perhaps a rather invasive CCP-style police state to give young Palestinians a taste/goal of a better life while ensuring that the smallest possible % of GDP is turned into ballistic rockets. Also things like "not constantly encroaching on the West Bank with settler communities" would probably help as that rather calls into question the good faith nature of one of the sides.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Thanks, I hate it.
I finally took the plunge and joined an art discord a couple months back, and VR chat is a big part of their social activity. I actually have an old VR rig I've never bothered setting up, and briefly considered joining in, but increasingly think it's better to leave it on the shelf.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
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Depends on what you mean by "tech companies", technically unless you do fulltime VPN at least your ISP has the full list of all websites you visit. Given that we have confirmed report of dragnet surveillance installed at least at some major ISPs, you can assume NSA (and whatever TLAs they share with) has the full log of these (storage paid for with our tax money, thank you very much!) though they probably don't check it unless you become a focus of their attention somehow.
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Google/Apple most definitely has these data, and likely they sell some of it, and give some of it on a search warrant. The government can request it, the legality of it is kinda debated but it's legal at least in some cases, so you can assume if the government wants it, it will have it. I don't think we have any info about Feds keeping independent logs, but they wouldn't need to.
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Not likely, as it would be a direct violation of wiretapping laws AFAIK. Unless, of course, you got into trouble enough for The Law to be able to get a wiretapping warrant on you. Though really with all the rest of NSA shenanigans I wouldn't be totally surprised if they start doing it, but I haven't heard any indications of that happening yet.
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Not likely, since the traffic to record it all would be large enough for people to notice and start talking about it. It is plausible that there could be "keyword triggers" that record specific conversations and clandestinely ship them back to the phone/OS company (where the previous items apply), but for full transcripts of every word it'd be hard to do without people noticing, and since we don't have AFAIK any good evidence of this right now, I'll tend to say no, at least in the form presented. They definitely could listen and update e.g. your advertisement profile - that'd be very hard to catch without having enough access, though the longer we go without somebody Snowden-ing it out, the lesser is the probability that it is actually happens. If NSA couldn't keep their secrets secret, why Google or Apple would be able to?
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In general, it all depends on a) what is your threat model and b) how interested the government is in you. For most normal people, the government is not interested in them unless they become a target of the investigation - which means they did something to trigger it, or somebody else pointed at them as somebody to watch. If that happened, pretty much any contact with modern society means you're screwed. Bank account? Forget about it. Driving? You better wear a mask and steal a car from somebody that doesn't mind they car being stolen. Communication? Burner phones probably would get you somewhere but don't stay in the same place too long or use the same burner for too long. It's possible to live under the radar, but it's not convenient and usually people that do that have their own infrastructure (like drug traffickers) and if you're going into it alone, it will be tough for you. OTOH, if you're just a normie feeling icky about your data being stored at the vast data silos, you can use some tools - like VPNs, privacy OS phones, etc. - with relatively minor inconvenience, and avoid being data-harvested. But it wouldn't protect you if The Law becomes seriously interested in you.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
The word you're looking for is"war".
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.
Israel has done other things, up to and including withdrawing both military and civilian populations from the area. Result: Gaza Palestinians elect Hamas to represent them and step up the attacks. The Palestinians are going to hate them and attack them no matter what; the best the Israelis can do (short of actual genocide) is degrade their ability to do so.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
If the "ping" in "ping-ponging" is ethnic cleansing, would the "pong" be "ethnic dirtying"?
I just meant ping-ponging as having them shuffle back and forth across the strip, not a metaphor.
getting someone out temporarily because it's an active war zone and then bringing them back when it's safe is just good manners, not ethnic cleansing.
I agree, except with 2 caveats:
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I think shuffling a bunch of humans around an area as you bomb it into gravel in an effort to wipe out an organization who's primary recruiting tool is the anger generated in humans who are being shuffled around an area as its bombed into gravel is equal parts evil and stupid. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.
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given this area will never stop being an active war zone (only more or less intense of one), and frankly given neither side has any interest in making it not that, I feel like "being wildly unwilling to create a lasting peace" somewhat offsets the good manners part of moving people around to keep them safe in the micro level (i.e. day to day or month to month), when on the macro level you have absolutely 0 interest in them ever actually being safe.
Were the latter just suckers, to take such risks only to have critics ignore their existence?
Yes
Amusingly, the Chen Sheng story strikes me as the perfect summary of how the Gazans feel. It's not quite as extreme, but this is literally how Hamas has a never ending string of young men signing up to get blown up
"The moral of the story is that if you are maximally mean to innocent people, then eventually bad things will happen to you. First, because you have no room to punish people any more for actually hurting you. Second, because people will figure if they’re doomed anyway, they can at least get the consolation of feeling like they’re doing you some damage on their way down."
I'd say it's entirely applicable. "without getting in too much trouble" is one of the two main throttling mechanisms on the tribal hatred engine, and is tightly linked to the other one, the fact that the search is "distributed". The search being distributed reduces how much trouble individuals get in, and reduces the efficiency of the search because it's conducted in a less-conscious fashion. It's the part people miss when they niavely predict the outbreak of civil war over the atrocity du jour.
Here's a gradient:
"X are bad" > "X shouldn't be tolerated" > "It's pretty cool when an X gets set on fire" > "you should set an X on fire" > "I'm going to set an X on fire" > actually going out and setting an X on fire.
You can graph the gradient in terms of actual harm inflicted on the outgroup, by the danger of getting in trouble, or by the amount of trouble you'll get in. There's a sweet spot on the graph where you find the greatest harm inflicted for the least cost incurred. The Culture War consists of people, with various degrees of consciousness, searching both for that sweet spot and for changes to social conditions that make the sweet spot larger and sweeter. Increasing consciousness of the nature of the search increases search efficiency greatly. Being unaware of the mechanics of getting in trouble likewise increases the efficiency of the search, since even if you get in trouble, you still provide valuable data to the rest of the search nodes. Various coordinated actions, changes in social norms or in formal policies likewise increase the efficiency of the search by asymmetrically reducing the threat of trouble being gotten into. Affirmative consent policies, DOGE, "who will kill Elon" and "are those level-4 plates?" are all variations on a theme.
Blue hostility toward the Church and Red hostility toward Academia are the same thing: coordinated meanness against an enemy tribal stronghold, moderated by the need to not individually get in too much trouble. The tribes successfully purge each other from their institutions, and then are shocked when the other side no longer values the institutions they've been purged from and begins reducing them with metaphorical bombardment.
...And for those who've read this far, this is your reminder that this process is not your friend. Our capacity to maintain flowing electricity and running water rely on the sweet spot staying quite small and the search being quite limited and stable over time.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
Does he? Wouldn't surprise me, but I think we need weebs subject matter experts to disambiguate on our behalf.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
I'm reading the paper, but initial issues that caught my eye:
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They're not evaluating GPT-4. They're using 4o. The exact implementation details of 4o are still opaque, it might be a distill of 4, but they're not the same model. As far as I can tell, that's a point of confusion on your part, not the authors.
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4o, even at the time of publication, was not the best model available. Very far from it. It is a decent generalist model, but not SOTA. It isn't the best model, the second best model, or even the third... best model, on almost any metric one opts for.
I have, as far as I'm aware, never claimed that LLMs match or outperform professional human translators. My core contention was that even basic bitch LLMs are good enough, and an improvement over previous SOTA, including DeepL, which this paper supports.
This would hold true even if the authors had chosen to use something like o3, Opus 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro etc. It is unclear to me if they were aware that better options were unavailable, there's little reason to use 4o if one wants to know what the best possible output is.
And even if it is true, it doesn't matter. The models are consistently getting better. We have a new SOTA every few months these days.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
Amusingly, we got sucked into bickering about definitions, which I had actually hoped to avoid by using "ethnic cleansing" over the much more volatile "genocide". Admittedly, I opened up pretty flippantly, so maybe that was the wrong word, although it felt amusing and volatile in the moment.
My core thesis is that I think shuffling a bunch of humans around an area as you bomb it into gravel in an effort to wipe out an organization who's primary recruiting tool is the anger generated in humans who are being shuffled around an area as its bombed into gravel is equal parts evil and stupid. I don't really care what we call it at the end of the day, there is a metric shitload of human suffering happening, much of which is being deliberately and callously applied.
Gaza is one of the most efficient generators of human suffering I've ever been made aware of. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
CBT and DBT have excellent evidence bases for instance and are meant to be highly structured with clear end points. We also have a pretty good understanding of what patients and situations should use each of those therapy modalities.
What is a good way to learn more about our understanding of best practices of when to apply which flavor of therapy?
VRChat (and most other social virtual reality worlds) allow people to choose an avatar. At the novice user level, these avatars just track the camera position and orientation, provide a walking animation, and have a limited number of preset emotes, but there's a small but growing industry for extending that connection. Multiple IMUs and/or camera tricks can track limbs, and there are tools used by more dedicated users for face and eye and hand tracking. These can allow avatar's general pose (and sometimes down to finger motions) to match that of the real-world person driving it, sometimes with complex modeling going on where an avatar might need to represent body parts that the person driving it doesn't have.
While you can go into third-person mode to evaluate how well these pose estimates are working in some circumstances, that's impractical for a lot of in-game use, both for motion sickness reasons and because it's often disruptive. So most VRChat social worlds will have at least one virtual mirror, usually equivalent to at least a eight-foot-tall-by-sixteen-foot-wide space, very prominently placed to check things like imu drift.
Some people like these mirrors. Really like them. Like spend hours in front of them and then go to sleep while in VR-level like them. This can sometimes be a social thing where groups will sit in front of a mirror and even do some social discussions together, or sometimes they'll be the one constantly watching the mirror while everyone is else doing their own goofy stuff. But they're the mirror dwellers.
I'm not absolutely sure whatever's going on with them is bad, but it's definitely a break in behavior that was not really available ten years ago.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
It should be illegal to ask ChatGPT to write something that would take you less than 2 minutes to write yourself.
I would love to know what other minuscule things you'd outlaw as dictator of earth.
phailyoor
1d ago
This paper: https://arxiv.org/html/2504.18221v1 grades gpt-4 versus other translators with actual human grading (not bs like ROUGE which is useless) and finds that gpt-4 doesn't seriously outperform deepl, and google translate, while worse, isn't even that far off.
This test is actually also unfair in favor of ChatGPT, as since the test text is a story by a famous author, ChatGPT has likely already taken a peek at human translations of the work during training.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
The translation of "edit" as 編集 also feels iffy to me - I haven't seen that word used in the nominal sense for a product of editing, but only in the verbal sense for the act of editing. The term that JP net culture uses for these sorts of videos is MAD, or if you are okay with dropping any connotation that the clips were modified as opposed to just stuck together, you could stick with just 編 or even 編成動画 (compilation video).
"Hardest" feels borderline untranslatable, with its simultaneous connotation that the edit itself "goes hard" and that it makes the RDA look hard. It's actually serendipitous that 最強 works as well as it does - I couldn't think of anything that would work as well in German.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
Sadly Turok's discussion of class was less than worthless, and seemed to mostly be about his own unexamined class insecurities. As I said elsewhere, "It's a funny barber-pole-of-status-signaling thing. I have never encountered someone on the internet who is actually upper-class for whom "lower-classness" is an object of vitriol rather than of disinterested study." But bringing that directly into discussion would also violate the norms of this space, such that any discussion from his posts was already drawing from a poisoned well.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
That's an interesting and fair point, obviously a big mac in NYC is not substantially better than a big mac in Boise, but at the same time there is probably some amount of value for what you said about "big mac in NYC is worth more because you can eat it while being in NYC" because that is convenient.
I'll have to think on this more, would you mind expanding on the "But PPP would disagree with you there." part?
Also in general, PPP aside, I just think it's ridiculous to make sweeping judgements about the subjective value of things to people, it's not just clearly wrong, it adds very little value to a conversation to be like "I like X more than Y, thus X is better in all cases".
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1d ago
Slowly, snailfashion, glacially, at a pace I dread to think about (because at this rate, I will not get anything done in my life), I have chewed away at my Actor positioning/scaling/parenting issues in Unreal. I'm getting a progressively better handle at it, but it's still infuriatingly very similar to Unity/Godot but off by just enough to confound me at every turn.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
Sure, I agree with this for the most part, although "as they should" is really funny given the proven lack of efficacy in the real world.
I find the distinction somewhat unneeded because I'm only concerned with the actual effectiveness and not semantically splitting it into component parts.
My thesis is that telling your kids not to have sex is demonstrably a bad way of preventing teenage pregnancy, and to think otherwise is to be willfully ignorant, generally due to ideology.
I guess in general, what I'm also trying to say is that just because something is theoretically effective, if it actually isn't effective in practice then who cares. What matters is what real humans do in real life, not what hypothetical outcomes could happen if hypothetical humans did or did not do things (especially when we know the real humans won't act like the hypothetical humans).
jkf
1d ago
I don't know basically any Japanese, and I'm pretty far from streaming culture -- but based on my knowledge of how these things work I'm pretty sure both are failing badly in their interpretation of 'support on live stream'; I'm pretty sure he means that he plans to, like, give her money? Probably not all of his money ("support her with everything I've got"), but certainly "cheering my lungs out" would be atypical behaviour on a livestream, no?
Thanks!
Hm. It may not be as applicable to my topic as I thought. "Without getting in too much trouble" doesn't seem very accurate at the current stage.
Edit: No, I'm wrong. It remains accurate. It's not like POTUS Trump is getting into any trouble he wouldn't have been in anyways.
Same, all the moreso because if and when they do manage to find someone who ostensibly wants a strait-laced monogamous relationship, the dominant gay culture is constantly shoving extra-relationship sex into their faces, leading to rampant cheating and drama and relationship blow-ups/divorce.
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