domain:ymeskhout.substack.com
Yeah exactly, "your conspiracy theory conflicts with these official reports" as if the official reports are some objective source of truth is such a weak argument. Giving a bone to the truth while slipping in falsehoods and lies is a staple of getting away with a cover-up to begin with, we would expect the official documents to conflict.
This is something especially true when it comes to sensitive matters. Half the point of an intelligence agency is spreading lies and misinformation! I don't believe there's much evidence linking him to being an intelligence agent, but it's not so easily dismissed either.
And when we have plenty of bold faced lies happening even now around Epstein, my trust is greatly diminished.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4hr ago
Could it be Public Square? I don't know, I'm too square to be in the know.
I think it's referring to credit cards coming down against porn purchases on Steam. But needs more details.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4hr ago
It's been a few years since I read Player of Games - that's a good point out, good quote, more overtly leftist than I remember it being.
Just read my first Pratchett last month. Look forward to reading more of his stuff totally blind to his political or philosophical views - Small Gods was... interesting, but also a really entertaining read, somewhat reminiscent of Culture novels to me.
Anyway thanks for the responses!
SkoomaDentist
5hr ago
It should be illegal to ask ChatGPT to write something that would take you less than 2 minutes to write yourself.
Unless it’s a review mandated by the HR. Then ChatGPT is the right tool as its native output is close to ridiculous HR corporate speak.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5hr ago
LLMs can do pretty impressive things, but I haven't seen convincing evidence that any of them have stepped clearly outside the bounds of their training dataset.
What does it mean to step outside the bounds of their training set? If I have it write a fanfic about Saruman being sponsored by NordVPN for a secure Palantir browsing experience (first month is free with code ISTARI), is that beyond the training set? It knows about NordVPN and Lord of the Rings but surely there is no such combo in the training set.
Or would it be novel if I give it my python code and errors from the database logs and ask it for a fix? My code specifically has never been trained on, though it's seen a hell of a lot of python.
R1 has seen use in writing kernels which is real work for AI engineers, is that novel? Well it's seen a bunch of kernels in the past.
Or something fundamentally new like a paradigm-changer like the transformer architecture itself or a whole new genre of fiction? If it's that, then we'd only get it at the point of AGI.
I admire your willingness to deep dive. I mostly accept the government's account of the Epstein story because I'm a normalfag and also I'm not going to put in anywhere near the effort required (like you did) to form an opinion on this. There's just no alpha in trying to figure out what actually happened given the work involved, and absent that, going with the government's explanation is probably a good heuristic.
What can one learn about how to get away with serious crimes from this? Perhaps, obviously, hire extremely competent well-connected bulldog attorneys? Because actually the government kind of sucks, and leaves a lot of stones unturned, and exists in a political economy with finite resources and competing interests and you can make life extremely annoying for them?
A friend of mine, who did not have any money at all and had a public defender the whole time, eventually arranged for a work release from a county jail where he'd spend 12 hours a day at a strip club and smoked weed managing their web site for minimum wage. He was just really gregarious and met lots of people inside and outside of jail. So my assumption already is if you're not stupid and not utterly reprehensible you can make going to jail a lot more comfortable than you'd think from cop dramas.
I have observed that South Asians like this excuse a lot because their own notion of English fluency and "high-class" writing is very similar to ChatGPTese: too many words, spicy metaphors, abuse of idioms, witticisms, hyperbolic imagery, casual winking at the reader, lots of assorted verbal flourish, "it's not X – it's Y" and other… practices impress and fascinate them; ChatGPT provides a royal road to the top, to the Brahmin league, becoming like Chamath or Balaji. Maybe they played a role in RLHF.
In my view, all prose of this kind, whether organic or synthetic, is insufferable redditslop. But at least human South Asians are usually trying to express some opinion, and an LLM pass over it detracts from whatever object-level precision it had.
This is part of the general problem with taste, which is sadly even less equally distributed between branches of humanity than cognitive ability.
P.S. No, this is not a specific dig at self_made_human, I mainly mean people I see on X and Substack, it's incredibly obvious. I am also not claiming to be a better writer; pompous South Asian redditslop is apparently liked well enough by American native speakers, whereas I'm just an unknown Ruskie, regularly accused of obscurantism and overly long sentences. I do have faith in the superiority of my own taste, but it's a futile thing to debate.
OliveTapenade
5hr ago
He has mentioned declining subscriptions and revenue. I wonder if he's re-running a few of his 'greatest hits' to see what still strikes a chord?
He may have suffered the sad fate of many pundits, though - he's run out of things to say. He can either re-run older points he's made in increasingly angry or provocative ways, as he is here, or he can pivot to increasingly niche content, as I think you can see in some of his other recent essays.
KingOfTheBailey
5hr ago
I've previously speculated that normalizing polyamory (and sexual liberation more generally) would have this effect, and it sucks to see those predictions borne out in the gay dating world. I'm really sorry for your friends.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5hr ago
Makes one wonder about the definition of mental illness. The European generals pre WW1 who still kept lancer cavalry regiments might be considered 'retarded' by an observer, even without the benefit of hindsight. WTF are lancers gonna do to bolt action riflemen, let alone machineguns? Even if you just imagine the infantry out there on a field, unentrenched and in loose order, in the best conditions for a cavalry charge, the whole thing is still a slaughter.
But this kind of 'retarded', distinct from being an actual dribbler who probably has no concept of what lancers are, isn't an actual mental illness, it's just being really really bad at your job in one specific area. Kind of like an AI hallucination in scope, an isolated lapse in otherwise reasonable performance.
But instead of a random hallucination it's more like a motivated argument where one might despise the grifters on twitter or dislike the cut of Yudkowsky's jib and then form your opinions based on that. Likewise, I imagine the cavalry officers held themselves high, cavalry is noble and aristocratic, a testament to the connection between man and horse. Infantry was ugly muddy and plebeian, so they looked for reasons why the cavalry should win when the idea is idiotic.
roystgnr
5hr ago
Yeah, I can't disagree with any of that. In the colloquial sense "no evidence" fits.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
5hr ago
I tried using o3, but it correctly noted that the file you mentioned isn't available, and its web browsing tool failed when trying to use the website.
I can't do anything about the missing document, but I did manually copy and paste most of the website. This is its answer:
aldomilyar
5hr ago
I find it especially confusing when the prompts to do some of these write-ups would be more writing and harder to craft than the actual statement itself.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5hr ago
For Epstein to have been murdered, the assailant would have had to know how to do the job in such a way that it would cause certain things to happen but wouldn't cause other things to happen
If the medical report is real and evidence-based. You can just write a fake medical report. You can just release fake documents, or misleading documents, or documents that lack the key facts. Official sources release fake documents all the time, there's no need to believe government data on potentially embarrassing topics like unemployment, military intelligence, espionage or whether politicians actually did commit a scandal. They can produce masses of evidence for why a policy has been a success, that doesn't make it a success.
I want to see camera footage of Epstein killing himself. If no such footage is provided, then it didn't happen. Footage of corridors is not a substitute. There's no excuse for 'oh we lost the camera footage, my bad'.
Having a camera or a guard or a cellmate or anything watching a high-profile prisoner (a prisoner so high-profile we are still talking about it today) is not an optional extra. The US is a rich enough country to have at least one prison cell with a camera that works.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5hr ago
"I'm in this photo and I don't like it."
gattsuru
6hr ago
That's a fair point, and does seem to work with Grok, as does just giving it only one web page and requesting it to not use others. Still struggles, though.
That said, a lot of the logic 'thinking' steps are things like "The summary suggests list operations exist, but they're not fully listed due to cutoff.", getting confused by how Consideration/Introspection works (as start/end escape characters) or trying to recommend Concat Distillation, which doesn't exist but is a reasonable (indeed, the code) name for Speaker's Distillation. So it's possible I'm more running into issues with the way I'm asking the question, such that Grok's research tooling is preventing it from seeing the necessary parts of the puzzle to find the answer.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6hr ago
Didn't the Puritans marry pretty young?
I can believe that you can keep a boy virginal to 16 reliably with good parenting, 18 or 20 less reliably but still often enough to make it worthwhile, but probably never to 25 unless the boy is sort of a fuck up. Like if a boy loses his virginity before 16 it says something bad about the parents, of a boy still has his v card at 26 it says something concerning about him. He might lack the libido to have a quality marriage later, or the power of will to get what he wants.
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
There are ‘go kill people’ nut jobs- in the past they were serial killers, now they’re mass shooters and terrorists.
The original is at least readable. It suggests personality and context, the nature of which makes it funny. I can’t say that the ChatGPT examples in this thread have anything at all to make them worth reading. Like the best of what the bot produces, there’s sometimes this sense of airbrushed elegance, but never any sort of underlying texture.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
6hr ago
Shouldn't that be あんど
but I am sensing a whooshing sound going past my ears here.
gattsuru
6hr ago
Most of Azad's slums wouldn't be out of place in an Ayn Rand novel, but the treatment of medical care is one of the big tells, especially for when and where Player of Games was written, as is the drone informing Gurgeh that "it all boils down to ownership, possession; about taking and having." That's not fundamentally leftist, but it's still also not how the red tribe equivalent would put things, or even universal among the left side of the branch (contrast, for example, Pratchett's "Evil starts when you begin to treat people as things").
Agreed that it's still pretty subtle and a fairly reasonable extrapolation of the technical assumptions Banks is making for the world he wants to build.
And oh, boy, do I have a take on Moore.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
6hr ago
As a Kansai resident I will say it does not code feminine here, though I can't speak for all of Japan obviously. Men routinely use わ in Kansai dialect, which is in general considered a rougher way of speaking than Kanto ben.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6hr ago
Have you tried simply asking it not to search the web? The models usually comply when asked. If they don't, it should be evident from the UI.
"Your conspiracy theory conflicts with these official reports" as if the official reports are some objective source of truth is such a weak argument. Giving a bone to the truth while slipping in falsehoods and lies is a staple of getting away with a cover-up to begin with, we would expect the official documents to conflict.
This is something especially true when it comes to sensitive matters. Half the point of an intelligence agency is spreading lies and misinformation! I don't believe there's much evidence linking him to being an intelligence agent, but it's not so easily dismissed either.
And when we have plenty of bold faced lies happening even now around Epstein, my trust is greatly diminished. Why are they lying about the "raw footage" that was clearly edited? Why did the Trump admin officials continually claim there was a list that they were gonna be releasing beforehand? Trump is claiming his letter to Epstein is fake, but there's tons of evidence that the birthday book is real and hes even had other birthday books done for him! It's a tradition!
He says he never wrote a picture in his life, meanwhile he would send off an autographed doodle every year for charity.
Why say he was never on Epstein's plane when we know he was on Epstein's plane?
They're lying and lying and lying. It seems like they're either innocent people trying to make themselves suspicious for ??? reasons, liars addicted to lying for the hell of it or there's something deeper going on.
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