domain:jessesingal.substack.com
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
3hr ago
I've ended up writing such a long response that it's best submitted as it's own post. Standby, I wasn't going to get much sleep anyway haha.
OliveTapenade
3hr ago
I'm still not sure how any of that changes the question any?
I didn't mention death at all, so I don't know why you bring it up, and everything else there is just... irrelevant. Okay, sure, the posthumans can have bigger numbers. We can posit that the experience is arbitrarily more entertaining. How does that change any of the ethical questions? What ethical difference does it make whether we're talking about playing Crusader Kings or an arbitrarily more complex super Crusader Kings? What is the relevant ethical difference between regular tennis and nuclear tennis? It seems like zero to me.
You can, as you do at the end of your post, just dismiss the question and assert an answer. But why should that answer be compelling? If your position is that there are no external criteria for a good life and the only thing that matters is self-approval, I think it's reasonable to reflect a bit on why you feel that's the case.
phailyoor
3hr ago
The threat of turning the place into gaza is the deterrent. And the power to go nuclear is important.
The Soviets and Americans didn't want to live in a nuclear wasteland yet they still built thousands of nukes.
Not an OP in this chain, but I think that's where we disagree. I'm somewhat friendly to the idea of high vs low trust societies, but I don't think that trust is inherently entropic and decaying or else we wouldn't ever have high trust to begin with. I also don't think technological or social movements from the last century or so are inherently corrosive to trust either (maaaaybe algorithmic-driven news but I am hopeful this will self-correct). I think any variation contributed by immigration is within the variation that already exists in the natural ebb and flow of trust insofar as it exists, it's not inherently directional. As an example, some immigrants might even raise institutional trust because they have a vision of America that is more rosy than Americans themselves believe. Or, of course, sometimes they bring prejudice with them, but it's not some broad brush, and it's not some inevitable march to decay. Civilization is not dying, and although history never repeats, I feel like the rhymes are there to justify humanity's continual adaptation and loose progression. As clarification, I think the 'global march of progress' narrative often parroted on the Left is super-duper wrong, but civilization itself has a stubborn tendency to stick around. Empires, of course, do not; mind you don't mistake the two!
Contra MaiqTheTrue, I think I draw the opposite conclusion from similar facts. Even though many individuals may not have full awareness or be capable of navigating balances and tradeoffs and knowing the fine details, we can still accomplish positive and clever execution because the intensities of belief act as "weights" on the system as a whole. Work tends to happen in the middle near the fulcrum, and directional pressures - even if vague by themselves! - lead to a convergence on a balance point actually quite close to the ideal in many cases. The more lower-d democratic a system is (caveat: actually a degree of representative government is also needed, policy is written by individuals after all), the better this tends to work. That is, I think wisdom of the masses theory is broadly true, and that even intelligent individuals in power often respect these counterbalances, even unconsciously, more than is often appreciated. A local administrator might tell you plenty of superficial rationales for choosing certain zoning restrictions, for example, but ultimately there is a lurking calculus of the big players in the city and what kind of things the voters like that has more often than not pre-determined the smaller range of plausible outcomes before they even start drafting them up.
Under this model of the world, even cynical, loud, and evil people who wield principles like a weapon and view politics as a blood sport often act more as weights on the scale than actual participants. Moving the Overton Window and living on the extremes provides a degree of additional leverage, this is true, but that's not a bug it's a feature! The 'intensity of belief' should affect the balance of things (and even pure cynics are downstream of this intensity, not the actual upstream source). Furthermore promoting more lower-d democratic behaviors helps quite a lot, indirectly, to expose them for what they are, and re-weight the balance over time.
roystgnr
3hr ago
That would be a devastating demonstration of the difference between "fargroup" and "outgroup", and you're probably right. But on the other hand, it's harder to profit from being rough with people when their sympathizers are a decent fraction of your soldiers and your family isn't ten thousand miles away.
To this day you can start typing "fort h" into Google and its recommendation before you get any farther will be the "fort hood shooting", with the 2009 one on top of the results. Taliban fighting other Afghans in Afghanistan had about a 1-to-1 kill ratio, and were an order of magnitude worse at killing Americans, but it just took one Taliban sympathizer in Texas to rack up 13-to-1 (well, 13-to-0 so far, but as of March 2025 it looks like he's now more likely to die of execution than old age). Like most military bases, Fort Hood has way more Red Tribe sympathizers than Taliban sympathizers, and it's a very good thing that we've never pissed off the former nearly as much.
OliveTapenade
3hr ago
I'm not sure AI or LLMs are the issue here - shaming or building consensus is against the rules here, but I have to admit I was tempted to just reply to the top-level comment with, "Dude, you read too much porn."
The point is that I think this isn't a technological issue so much as a social issue. People can produce pornographic fiction and will seek out or buy pornographic fiction for all the usual reasons. The social regulation of that desire is just as important if not more so than the technological regulation thereof.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
It is a very working class usage. I'm definitely willing to believe that it's a regionalism, but it seems like I've heard it used by Australians or English or something- maybe it's something that convergently evolves in regional dialects as a lower class colloquialism.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3hr ago
Wait forget everything else: do those casualty numbers in Ukraine have any credibility or is this a map sharpie moment?
Rov_Scam
3hr ago
You need a carry permit to transport a gun in a car, at least in most places I'm aware of, unless the gun is unloaded and cases in the trunk or some other inaccessible area.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
the only state that is plausibly a nation is Texas
Alaska.
philosoraptor
4hr ago
I occasionally see "meat" and "poultry" treated as separate categories, but mostly in older sources and even they seem to tacitly concede the two are closely related. I've never knowingly met anyone in person who thought it was an important distinction. This is the first I've ever heard of pork products not counting as "meat", though. Where do you see this usage?
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
An extremely high one- do you know anything about pigs? A friend of mine raises them at home and feeds the heads to his other pigs when he slaughters them. Feral hogs happily eat dead piglets.
They're nasty, vicious animals.
WandererintheWilderness
4hr ago
And do you want to live in Gaza? "Guns would allow us to overthrow a tyrannical government and restore a real democracy with first-world living standards once the unrest is over" is a decent pitch. "Guns would allow us to survive indefinitely outside the tyrant's control as starving guerillas in a bombed-out wasteland", not so much.
please be specific, which part?
I am not going to bother checking whether it confirms your claim because for example
DeepSeek-V2 Chat (RL) outperform GPT-4-0613 and ERNIEBot 4.0, solidifying the position of our models in the top-tier LLMs that support Chinese
indicates that they use "LLM" for DeepSeek-V2 and GPT-4 in general going against your
Now if what I am describing does not sound like an LLM to you, that is likely because most publicly available "LLMs" are not just an LLM. They are an LLM plus an additional interface layer that sits between the user and the actual language model. An LLM on its own is little more than a tool that turns words into math, but you can combine it with a second algorithm to do things like take in a block of text and do some distribution analysis to compute the most probable next word. This is essentially what is happening under the hood when you type a prompt into GPT or your assistant of choice.
claim
the unusual thing about the US is that there isn't a set of subordinate ethnic-national identities that the civic identity is built on top of
Not really. Well, this is historically wrong... obviously in the present day this is pretty clearly correct. Besides Texas of course, and for a while Utah to some degree (and maybe also Vermont? It never joined the Articles of Confederation and took a few years to join the United States too, although a lot of this was New York's stubbornness denying them. I don't think my native Oregon Territory makes the cut though), you only have to look at the Civil War and the decisions made by many individuals there to discover that some people did in fact consider other identities as not even necessarily subordinate but even superceding that of full nationality. Robert E Lee as a classic example notably considered allegiance to Virginia as supreme to that of America. However, it's worth noting that this really only applied to the original 13 colonies and weakened substantially over time. And of course every war in particular was a major impetus towards nationalism.
Still, I get what you're saying. There was a sort of "purpose" and consciousness behind the creation of the US that many other [Western] nations lack, at least so quickly. It's nonetheless difficult to say what exactly generalizes and what does not, because historians well know that nationalization somewhat paralleled technologies that facilitated internal movement (e.g. the railroad), internal mixing (e.g. educational and literacy trends), and led to increasing national mobilization in the military realm (post-Napoleonic warfare). The US is also a bit of an aberration in the sense that it has limited history (in a Eurocentric sense, and thus fewer pre-existing loyalties) so it's not an easily extensible template.
the_Culture_is_great
4hr ago
I just think calling him neurotic, and referencing the cliff and chainsaw bit specifically was uncharitable. It was a perfectly good analogy about how he personally perceives the threat of guns, even if he knows nothing isikely to go wrong.
It's definitely different than a hat. If for some reason you get in a heated argument, a guy with a hat can't kill you with a twitch of his finger like a guy with a gun can.
TheLoser
4hr ago
And I'm saying that someone who is violent and drugged up is significantly more lethal with a gun than without one. Are you seriously suggesting that an armed insane person is not signficantly more dangerous than an unarmed insane person?
I have a bad habit of picking examples that muddy my point. Sub out our druggy gangster and replace him with an average Joe who just had a bad week - found out a parent was diagnosed with cancer, lost big on his sports bets, got laid off, car damaged in a hit and run, etc.
I don't want to draw a firm line between stable people and unstable people. Certainly unstable people exist, but normal people can be pushed into instability, and it doesn't take much sometimes. Worse, they can just make innocent mistakes that still end with someone dead. Argument gets heated, someone shoves someone else, someone fears for their life...
ChickenOverlord
4hr ago
More broadly, I think that the idea to use guns to keep the government in check was fine in 1800 but today is just laughable.
You're making me break out the old /k/ copypasta (how do I make the quote one continuous block I don't know how to internet):
Listen, you fantastically retarded motherfucker. I'm going to try and explain this so you can understand it.
You cannot control an entire country and its people with tanks, jets, battleships and drones or any of these things that you so stupidly believe trumps citizen ownership of firearms.
A fighter jet, tank, drone, battleship or whatever cannot stand on street corners. And enforce "no assembly" edicts. A fighter jet cannot kick down your door at 3AM and search your house for contraband.
None of these things can maintain the needed police state to completely subjugate and enslave the people of a nation. Those weapons are for decimating, flattening and glassing large areas and many people at once and fighting other state militaries. The government does not want to kill all of its people and blow up its own infrastructure. These are the very things they need to be tyrannical assholes in the first place. If they decided to turn everything outside of Washington D.C. into glowing green glass they would be the absolute rulers of a big, worthless, radioactive pile of shit.
Police are needed to maintain a police state, boots on the ground. And no matter how many police you have on the ground they will always be vastly outnumbered by civilians which is why in a police state it is vital that your police have automatic weapons while the people have nothing but their limp dicks.
BUT when every random pedestrian could have a Glock in their waistband and every random homeowner an AR-15 all of that goes out the fucking window because now the police are out numbered and face the reality of bullets coming back at them.
If you want living examples of this look at every insurgency the the U.S. military has tried to destroy. They're all still kicking with nothing but AK-47s, pick up trucks and improvised explosives because these big scary military monsters you keep alluding to are all but fucking useless for dealing with them.
Dumb. Fuck.
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
You should pay attention while using a chainsaw. You should not be extra wary when your neighbor is cutting up a fallen tree branch in his front yard while you're on the porch. Likewise if you're changing your tire on the shoulder, you should exercise extra attention- but if you're in a parking lot off the feeder road, wincing every time a car comes down the highway is uncalled for.
It's quite reasonable to pay extra attention to a gun you're using at the range, or in the hunting field. On the hip of the guy in line in front of you at the coffee shop? Doesn't affect you anymore than him wearing a hat(or not).
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
You can be pretty sure that a legal concealed carrier is not a violent drugged up gangster. There are actual studies on CHL holders; even those conducted with hostility to the policy of legal concealed carry tend to find that license holders are model citizens.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
4hr ago
I honestly can't tell if you're taking the piss here, but somehow this comment makes me think of David Brin's Uplift series.
Pongalh
4hr ago
I am come from an upper-class family, I went to the appropriate schools in the UK, I read the Soectator, etc. You could pretty easily predict my views on the merits of taxation and on the usefulness of the Laffer curve, my voting affiliation, my views on fox-hunting, on globalisation, all from those pieces of information.
Sure, you could, but it's not causal. But do you believe the veracity of what you think about the effects of taxation is really no more accurate than what a poor person thinks? It's all just situated selves determining so-called truth? Or are the effects real independent of you coming from an upper-class background?
Ah, spending your vacation in the best way!...? :)
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