domain:ashallowalcove.substack.com
Im not sure if it's fair to say it "destroys" anything, but it certainly fails to capture certain sorts of things and in the end the result is the same.
A lot of the frustration I've experienced, stems from these sorts issues where some guy who spends more time writing for thier substack than they do writing code dismisses issues such as those described in the section on Lorem Epsom as trivialities that will soon be rendered moot by Moore's Law. No bro they wont, If you're serious about "AI Alignment" solving those sort of issues is going to be something like 90% of the actual work.
As for the "foom" scenario, i am extremely skeptical but i could also be wrong.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
15hr ago
If you can't get past the ridiculous "one unit per type per hex" limit, that's understandable
That change is the best change in the game! Warfare is so boring in Civ 4 because there's no gameplay to it, if you have a stack that counters their stack you win. I am sympathetic to the argument that doom stacks were better because the AI was more competent with them, but can't really understand preferring them as a game mechanic.
I have no reason to disbelieve that the sections you've quoted from the Red Terror entry on Wikipedia actually happened. In fact, I'm inclined to believe all of it.
However, I do have to say that some of it - (1) the Voronezh Cheka rolled naked people around in barrels studded internally with nails, (2) Chinese Cheka detachments placed rats in iron tubes sealed at one end with wire netting and the other placed against the body of a prisoner, with the tubes being heated until the rats gnawed through the victim's body in an effort to escape, (3) the Cheka in Kislovodsk, "for lack of a better idea", killed all the patients in the hospital - reads like the more fantastical and debunked stories of the Holocaust that deniers always trot out to muddy the waters.
I don't want to dwell too much on this topic, but could it be that these more horrific types of tortures were limited to just a handful of people and the rest were summarily executed?
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
I remember WWII history, but far less of it than Holocaust.
sammysoccer411
16hr ago
One can argue 'monetary value is not use-value'. Sure. But name a better predictor.
In practice, prices are literally--like quite literally and exclusively--the result of billions of people voting with their dollars, based on how much utility they believe item x has. What could be a better predictor average of use-value than every persons' opinions on use-value, averaged out?
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
It's totally normal for people to describe shit they think as evil as 'kgb', though. You're correct that people call their political opponents Hitler more than Stalin, but there's always been a token of axiomatic evil in figurative speech- it used to be the biblical pharoah(like from Exodus). Hitler's portrayal during WWII was actually rather buffoonish more than outright evil; the Japs on the other hand...
Now why Hitler gets the title rather than Tojo, that might just be the dominance of Jews in Hollywood. I can remember old folks using terms like 'banzai' to refer to crazy evil, but that was more specific to the crazy part. I can definitely remember, quite recently and by younger people, Stalin used as a metaphor for totalitarian evil. But Hitler definitely takes the generic spot.
roystgnr
16hr ago
Half the reason TheMotte is here is that Scott went viral a decade ago discussing Social Justice And Words, Words, Words.
hydroacetylene
16hr ago
It is not surprising why Wokism had an evolutionary advantage on post-URSS marxism. All of this autism is pretty ick, it works on Reddit but not on real life, because every normal person can smell with a bullshit detector that this lines are actively trying to scam you as a North African reseller on an Italian beach. Wokism is better as an ideology because it refuses, partially, to play words.
This is just a baffling description of wokism. Wokism is all about political correctness, language policing, definitional games, etc. Changing the definition of 'racism' 'woman' etc.
5434a
16hr ago
Fair play, I can see the appeal of honesty over artifice.
I'm almost ready to start activating the glue on the replacement headphone band I've been making out of built up layers of edge banding I had leftover from my shelves that I've boiled and clamped on a form. It's only taken me... ohhh, four months. Lol. Gardening takes priority in the growing season.
If that doesn't work out I'll have to buy some solid oak stripwood and try plan B. Getting pretty tired of these dinky earbuds.
Dean
Flairless
16hr ago
Maybe I'm tired and not understanding correctly, but your use of the collective 'you' is reading to me as linking to both the perpetrator and victim of firebombing alike- or possibly both, as in someone deserving firebombing.
Might I ask you to reword this for clarity?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
16hr ago
I think they were both pretty equal in evil. The reason that Stalin gets a pass is that it makes an absolute mess of the moral certainty that the postwar order created. We were allies with Russia, and im not sure that the Allies would have won without Stalin and his war machine. If the war had remained a one front war, it’s possible that some form of Nazi German Empire would have survived. It was only because Russia was involved that we won, and thus talking about Holodomor and Gulag systems (which were absolutely as evil as any of the German labor camps) becomes a bit of a hagiographic problem. Stalin being known to be equally as ruthless would turn the story sideways. Which is a problem because the postwar mythological narrative of Liberal Western Globalist order is “we defeated the worst thing that had ever existed. Thus we have the moral right to rule over everything.” And furthermore it gives the new order a moral certainty— evil looks like Hitler, evil looks like straight armed salutes, arm bands, and speeches in big stadiums and big red flags.
Now they were obviously both evil and killed millions and committed genocide of people into the millions of people. But I don’t think the way the mythology works in th3 modern world works for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it turned things that used to be considered okay into evil simply because they’d been used to evil ends. Nationalism and patriotism are usually good things, they hold people together to build a country. It works in China. They think being Chinese is good and favor things that benefit China.
You could always just self-host a wiki with the same software that Wikipedia uses. (Other options include Tiddlywiki, Dokuwiki, and Wiki.js.)
ChickenOverlord
16hr ago
Yes lend-lease helped, but Soviet home industry did most of the heavy lifting.
That's dramatically underselling lend-lease. The US provided approximately 2/3 of the USSR's trucks, 60% of their aviation fuel, 10% of their planes, etc. And the US was also able to give all this to the Soviets while they also built the most powerful navy in human history and waged a war across North Africa, Europe, the Pacific, and Southeast Asia.
JarJarJedi
16hr ago
Stanislaw Lem had as a teaching example the tale of the robot being asked to clean the old storage closet full of disused globes with the prompt "remove all spherical objects from this room". It did it perfectly, and also removed the operator's head too - it looked spherical enough to match. I think that was in The Magellanic Cloud.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
16hr ago
No it’s not a pejorative! The thoroughness of your empirical research is rarely observed among the brainrotted younger generation.
JarJarJedi
16hr ago
And they didn't have their production code and databases backed up?
As hilarious as it sounds, with this "vibe coding" thing I totally expect it. I mean, this is a magic machine, why would I need "backups"? If there were the need for backups, the magic machine would make some, by magic. Since it didn't, it must be just some stupid superstition boomer coders invented to justify their inflated salaries.
Quantumfreakonomics
16hr ago
Oh man. Vatican II makes a lot more sense now. Every Catholic Church in America would get Waco'd if they openly churned out integralists like this regularly.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
16hr ago
The hilarious thing about this for me is that I have literally used "You ask the LLM to "minimize resource utilization" and it deletes your Repo" as an example in training for new hires.
...and this children is why you need to be mindful of your prompts, and pushes to "master" require multi-factor authentication.
comfortable
16hr ago
I've had Obsidian bookmarked for a while, but it seems to be a bit low-level for what I'm looking for. I'm sure it's very powerful, but so is LaTex and I don't generally type up my documents in that over something like Word.
comfortable
16hr ago
I'll give this a try. I'm not entirely sure about Microsoft nowadays, but ease of use has its appeal.
I am adding 'Fox News boomer' to my list of pejoratives.
Lizzardspawn
16hr ago
Oook!
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
17hr ago
Man I had you pegged as a 50 year old Fox News boomer.
Dean not only knows what gap moe means, he's embodied it.
(Also I don't know what it means and this joke is based on a 2-minute google search.)
OliveTapenade
17hr ago
To clarify, as far as I can tell the issue is that he refused to delete or censor Facebook posts by other people that were perceived to be transphobic. Hutton himself frames it as a straightforward free speech issue. He has since gone on to denounce the party as authoritarian and enforcing a cult-like orthodoxy.
I can't say I'm terribly surprised by this. That the Greens, the most progressive of Australia's significant political parties, enforce lockstep orthodoxy on trans issues is not a surprise to me. I daresay it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody who's been paying much attention to progressive political spaces in Australia or in the wider world. Is it possible that trans issues are a wedge for parts of the left?
There's too much overthinking in this thread.
Nazism is reviled because of the inherent implications for multiracial, multicultural societies. The main thrust of Nazism and Hitler - the enactment of an ethnonationalist society through violence on a country-wide scale - is incompatible in a nation where "less than half of US children under 15 are white".
Communism has an offramp because it's in principal an economic ideology.
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