domain:putanumonit.com
aqouta
11hr ago
I think that is evidence but not proof. "I'm the opposite sex actually" is not so conceptually foreign to normal experience that I wouldn't expect it to come about as a normal error spontaneously occasionally. "the position of the stars mean something to or ordinary lives" is a false conclusion arrived at by multiple civilizations.
Now, maybe having that error and it getting ingrained deeply enough just is gender dysphoria and star believer would also spontaneously appear at some base rate and further the best thing to do about this is let them buy crystals and get gaudy piercing to their heart's content. But if that's the case then it does sound like something we ought to be able to talk a rational person out of, and should probably try pretty hard to given the severity of the costs associated with transitioning. Finally granting all of that falls on the side of letting them transition anyways being the best for them, this being a disorder caused by an idea it would be exactly the kind of thing we'd worry about social contagion on. It becoming a fixation may be a much lower bar than it being spontaneously arrived at and then affirming it as a normal thing widely seems like a pretty big mistake.
Then there is the other possible conclusion. If It's caused by some kind of physical thing and would show up not only separated from the concept of transgenderism but in some kind of Truman show style total separation from the opposite sex. This would be very strong evidence indeed and some kind of model where we can do a brain scan and very accurately predict transgendered identification would be strong evidence. But then I'd want the transition gate kept on those grounds.
Lizzardspawn
11hr ago
In the last couple of year you can see in the gaming industry that small teams deliver great games and rake massive profit s - not that it hadn't happen before, but they are encroaching on AAA territory. If you can deliver the same as a massive bloated company at fraction of the costs - eventually someone will displace it.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
11hr ago
What the hell did you think being a Secret Service agent entailed? Vibes? Papers? Essays?
It's the "how do you like being a firefighter" joke all over again.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
11hr ago
"What do you mean? I'm not wise, I just like dismembering babies!"
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
11hr ago
If you can take half of my job away, you can just give me double the workload of tasks that only a human can do and therefore you need half the staff.
But now you have half the staff, and your competitors have half the staff, so presumably the market price of the stuff you are selling will face downwards pressure. It could be that your existing clients will want to buy more your stuff as its now cheaper and you get now clients who previously were not able to afford your product, perhaps you find out you need to hire more people...? But if half the workforce got fired at step 0, that is much less people able to buy any products despite their cheaper price...?
It will be nightmarishly complicated to adapt to when its happening, let alone predict.
People make comparisons to horses and combustion engine. True, many horses got "unemployed", yet traffic increased a lot. There are probably more people involved in logistics and industries enabled by it than ever were in "horse service industry". And horses were never the presence on the demand side of the equation, they never bought anything.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11hr ago
And that isn’t true for a population that will need lots of surgery, hormones for life, and lots of follow up care? I mean, if anything, those same incentives are more present in trans populations who spend thousands on medical treatments overa decade.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
11hr ago
My gut feeling is that this AI wave will be a short panic and then basically blow over. To predict massive job loss you have to assume that jobs are already distributed rationally, and that companies are good at adapting to and using new technology efficiently. Neither of these are even remotely true!
If you've ever seen how the sausage gets made at a major company, jobs are very much withheld and created on more of an internal, political basis than any actual needs the companies have. On top of that, most major organizations are still barely adapted to using spreadsheets and the most simple algorithmic techniques that were created decades ago. Literally just using excel to automate tasks could save these companies tens of millions of dollars a year. And yet... they don't?
So the idea that just because there's a new technology coming out that can do a bunch of fancy new stuff, does not convince me that we'll have massive job loss at all. What will likely happen, and what has already been happening for a while, is that the people in white collar roles who can use these tools will just shift off more and more work to them privately, and pretend they are still just as busy. The roles might get a tad more competitive.
But we're not going to be in a doomsday scenario where everyone loses jobs, even IF AGI comes out tomorrow.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
11hr ago
AI is the boot, it's going to be doing all the stomping. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter are some of the most powerful companies in the world, they have a gravity well that pulls everyone else behind them. Shut down AI, what does that do to your stock portfolio? Your pension? What does that do for your reelection campaign, is the other guy going to get the algorithm on his side, millions in his warchest? How do you coordinate against AI when all major internet forums are looking to AI as a revenue source?
Or the 20 million people spending hours a day on character.ai, they're not going to let their wAIfus and husbandos go without a fight.
Not to mention that everyone else in business has some kind of interest in AI. The manufacturers want to automate their factories and improve their logistics, services companies want to boost productivity.
And the arms race, as you mention, DARPA, the Pentagon and leading lights in the Chinese Communist Party. That alone is an insoluble problem for decels, what do you say to the paranoia of American strategists? Without a technological advantage, the US doesn't stand a chance against China. They're certainly not going to let China get ahead. And China is not going to stop, it's clearly identified as a key technology to advance in. The public in China love AI, they're very optimistic about it.
Governments couldn't care less about implementing unpopular policies, mass migration for one. Or ending the death penalty. Or invading foreign countries for dubious reasons. If they see it as a core priority, they'll make it happen regardless of what people think. AI is almost certainly far more seductive than any of these things, with far stronger institutions backing it. I'm very bearish on decels having any success whatsoever. Remember PauseAI? Basically nothing happened. It was a squib, hundreds of billions in capital was redeployed to rapidly advance AI in 2023, the exact opposite of what they wanted.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11hr ago
I mean there’s good risk and stupid risk. It’s not good to release a drug with very serious side effects or that don’t work. I don’t think anyone is calling for that anyway. On the other hand, there are drugs that are clearly working (and in some cases approved for use in other countries) that are still required to go through decades of testing to prove that they work just as well here as they do in other places. That doesn’t help anyone. If the drug works in Russia and has been used for decades, it’s probably fine.
HereAndGone
11hr ago
"We will simply order our students to join a credible anti-CCP movement so that they will be able to do industrial espionage, and then when they return we will keep wondering which of them were actually flipped by being exposed to hostile ideologies on our orders" does not sound like a winning strategy.
Neither is "we will just ask any potential students to give up their Chinese citizenship and then ten years later when they go back to the Old Country and stay there for good after drip-feeding the information they gathered while here, we'll be completely surprised they did not, in fact, mean it".
I think the CCP is more confident it can deal with "If Li Yu comes back contaminated with running-dog ideology, we can re-educate him to be a model citizen". They had no problem getting Jack Ma to fall in line.
HereAndGone
12hr ago
It's swings and roundabouts. Bodies such as the FDA were set up because before that, in the unfettered and unregulated world of the free market, businesses were happily poisoning their customers. Then people got accustomed to "medicine is safe and indeed is a wonder drug" so any adverse effects were clearly somebody's fault and had to be paid for in punitive damages, which led to concerns by government bodies that "if we pass a medicine that later turns 1% of the population blue, we are gonna get slaughtered" and so caution became the watchword.
And now we're stuck between drug companies trying to get a return on their very long, very expensive, product development process where the bad examples are things like Aduhelm, and the calls by people who are (to be blunt) dying and desperate for Hail Mary cures so they want the FDA to rush through and license "this might extend your life by three weeks and it'll cost $5 million" drugs, where of course the cri-de-coeur is "every week of delay means another 1,000 people die!" (not considering that those people might die anyway because the cure is only speculative even if they go on the drugs or the treatment protocol).
HereAndGone
12hr ago
It's hard to know, since clearly suffering from precocious puberty means a problem with the entire system so the effects of that on the brain are going to be hard to tease out from "and then we put them on blockers".
How well sheep studies relate to humans is also hard to know, who was the last sheep to attend Harvard?
but still displays gender dysphoria (which you can confirm by asking if it is actually gender dysphoria or the kid is mistakenly wanting to be the other gender for some other reason)
Huh? How do you ask "is this actually gender dysphoria" to someone who hasn't heard of the concept?
HereAndGone
12hr ago
You are very entertaining to interact with, but I'm afraid that the more you reply to people, the less I credit you with serious intent. You reply to everyone with the equivalent of "no, you're smelly and ugly" and that makes it hard to think you are thinking about this subject.
Women all shallow bitches care only for hot looks, yeah, heard it before.
Owlify
12hr ago
I think if a kid has been secluded from all transgender related concepts, but still displays gender dysphoria (which you can confirm by asking if it is actually gender dysphoria or the kid is mistakenly wanting to be the other gender for some other reason), then that's decent evidence that the kid is transgender. What should be done about this (allowing social transition, or puberty blockers, or even more extreme measures) is still unclear though.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
12hr ago
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In year 2012, Michael dies. His two sons, Dennis and Roman, don't bother to probate his will, so Michael's house remains titled in Michael's name. Dennis is left in charge of maintaining the house.
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In year 2017, the property taxes on the house are not paid. In year 2018, a company spends 7 k$ to buy from the municipal government the right to foreclose on the house.
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In year 2021, the company starts a foreclosure proceeding against Michael, and serves Dennis with the complaint. Nobody responds to the complaint in court, so in year 2022 the judge declares Michael to have defaulted, and the company successfully forecloses on the house by paying off the delinquent taxes of 55 k$. In year 2023, the company sells the house to a third party for 325 k$, yielding profit of 270 k$.
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Just a few days before the sale, Roman learns that the house has been foreclosed on. Months after the sale, a year after the foreclosure, and 11 years after Michael's death, Roman finally probates Michael's will, is appointed the administrator of Michael's estate, and in that capacity moves to (1) vacate the foreclosure because he had no notice of it and (2) recoup the 270 k$ of profit under the recent federal Supreme Court decision forbidding the "theft" through foreclosure of home equity in excess of the delinquent taxes.
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The trial judge denies the motion, and in year 2025 the appeals panel affirms. Service of the complaint on Dennis, who resided at the house, was proper. And the Supreme Court decision prohibiting "home-equity theft" is not retroactive.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
12hr ago
I'm so curious for the second one but the images won't load, alas.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
12hr ago
YES YES GIVE ME THE GOSS!!!
iprayiam3
12hr ago
No I know. Of course that’s the biggest part of it. My overall point is I’m seeing uncertainty expressed in AI uncertainty, whether that’s just a rebundling of tariff etc uncertainty or not, my fear is that it is contributing to increased general uncertainty, which will be additive economic results trending from that uncertainty
kky
12hr ago
The major theme of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, outside of his obvious love and nostalgia for the mighty river of his boyhood, is the unending march of progress. He speaks of the raft-men (who he also immortalized in Huck Finn), who would lazily guide rafts loaded with upstream cargo down to the Gulf and spend their free time preaching their strength and tussling with one another with an Appalachian verve that reminds me of nothing more than WWE fights. They were beaten out by the steamboats. He talks of his experience as a pilot of one of these steamboats, a highly lucrative profession due to its technical complexity and fine art, carefully dodging the sandbars and "reefs" (usually - sunken trees) and adverse currents and following side-channels to cut out major parts of the voyage, not only at day but even at night, through nothing more than one's memory, with the constant risk of the bomb of a boiler sitting below-decks and threatening to detonate and kill most of those aboard, as happened in fact to Twain's brother - liveliness, risk, and the gaudy beauty of those old, painted boats, which Twain recalls pulling into his hometown's dock as a child, with the tempting offer of a life on the river and wealth beyond his imagination. The trains came down the river postbellum, and the passengers and freight moved over, for the most part, and little tugboats in the hire of the newly muscular federal government came along to pull all the stumps and dredge all the sandbars and haul long trains of barges for far cheaper than the steamboats ever could, leaving the pilot's job simpler and his steamboat derelict and unwanted.
Twain, of course, was a fervent Progressive - of the movement of the time, which meant recognition of what was changing, and what was changing so much for the better. And indeed, he describes these incredible shifts in the world of his time. The mosquito-ridden bogs of New Orleans were drained by a modern system of sewage and water control that left nowhere for them to breed. The agonizing, slow stage-coach journey he took out West was replaced by a train that made the trip in a fraction of the time and in total luxury. All of these things were changing over the 19th century. I remember feeling almost dizzied when reading Twain's Innocents Abroad, when he stops in his pleasure-trip in France in 1868 - the last time I had read about France, it was 1815 and Napoleon's troops were marching north for their doomed encounter with Blucher and Wellington, and their movement was compassed by Napoleon's compass, firmly set to the number of miles a pack-laden man could march in a day. But now the country was covered by a beautiful and perfect train network - why march to the Netherlands when you could go by train? Incredible, incredible. Or I remember how Chekhov (yes, that one), who was a doctor as well as a playwright, had expressed shock at some of the war-deaths in War and Peace, as he himself was (now, later), perfectly capable of curing the gangrene that was irreversibly fatal in 1812. (But I can't find that quote again at present, so treat the source as apocryphal - but not the medical fact.) The end of the 19th century was a different world from the start, completely and totally.
Hopefully you've enjoyed at least some of this meandering, but let me make my point clear. What gave the Progressive movement of the 19th century such muscle was the obvious, incontrovertible, and massive improvements to life of applying its methods generally. Everyone became richer, healthier, and in better control of their environment - especially in America, where the fruits of the movement rapidly percolated down to the common man. There were disruptions, and pretty major ones too. The steamboat industry was one of those sacrifices. But the great wealth of the time defanged the worst of the Luddism that could have arisen in response. Luddism is always on the back foot compared to the powerful evolutionary quality of progress, but it can make some temporary gains if there's enough general sympathy - and there just wasn't, and the reason why there wasn't is clear.
We've recently been sold a story that computing is the next Industrial Revolution. Certainly computing is now everywhere, absolutely everywhere. What was once an analog control mechanism became a custom-programmed digital interface; the custom-programmed digital interfaces have become small installations of Linux. Everything is "smart," which (to be honest) often doesn't live up to its own name, but the processing power is there. The ubiquitous internet has changed how we interact with just about any question of fact and knowledge. AI is, in a sense, just a continuation of that, another horizon of computing. Where before we would have people sitting and doing manual entry, now we have a prompt sent to an LLM to produce similar output. Everything that required a little human fuzziness and finesse to corral uncertain inputs into uncertain outputs now falls under the domain of the digital. So now we don't have to bother getting our fuzzy mindsets to cleanly interface with discrete digital systems, but instead can interface with those fuzzy AIs and get what we want without worrying about the specifics. That, I think, is what's roughly on the table here. Obviously jobs are at risk, just like the old manual computers were replaced by calculators, and how the required number of secretaries went down as computing technology went up, and how email replaces the need for a great many form-shufflers, but there are meaningful changes in how people can interface with the world - as a simple example, no more balancing a checkbook, just log onto your online banking portal and you can see exactly how money entered and exited your account (and a short hop to your credit card's website will give you the rest of the breakdown).
But people are, this time, generally unhappy in a way that goes beyond the disruptions of the past. The main division I've noticed in optimism here - beyond the AI fanatics, who I think are an unrepresentative subset of hobbyists invested in the technology for reasons other than pure practicality - is between ownership and everyone else. There was a post on here some few weeks back, where a small businessman was using AI and was pretty happy with what it was giving him. That's the small end of AI. On the large end, CEOs in big businesses are creaming their pants about AI to the shareholders under the impression that shareholders are very interested in AI, and less cynically, they might even believe that AI is an important improvement to their business model. (I have connections in the industry on both sides of the buying-AI and selling-AI divide, and at the moment neither one has a good idea of what LLMs will be useful for but definitely don't want to be left out - my paraphrase, but not my words on that one. So I'm a little more dubious than the CEOs are, here.) So if you stand to control the use and output of AI, you're all in favor. If not, then you're a lot more skeptical of whether it will benefit society. That's it. There are other questions about efficacy, which we don't need to get into, but assuming it will do something, the answer of whether or not it is good depends on whether you will get control over it.
And this is not a new question for computing. I'm sure the median reader here is aware of the "right to repair" movement arguing that non-licensed mechanics should be able to repair proprietary hardware, like cars and farm equipment. But the reason this movement had to start, the shift from the old mechanic status quo, was the introduction of computing to vehicles. EULA terms for the software on these vehicles, most famously from John Deere, would invalidate the license if anyone other than the manufacturer was involved in the repair. Computing, because of the tight copyright and licensing scheme for the distribution and reuse of software, has become a powerful tool for ownership in America and abroad. If you get a purely mechanical tool, it is possible - maybe not easy, but possible - to modify it to meet your needs, and certainly legal. With software, this is often illegal. Old software, because its source code is both under copyright and not published, disappears into the ether instead of being used as a meaningful basis for new software - the public domain of software is only those things which people have, for their own reasons, decided to publish generally. And more recently, in the age of cloud computing and the internet, the tools we use most commonly aren't under our own ownership and on our own servers, but on some large company's server - a company who can make unilateral decisions about our software, nominally responsive to the market but certainly not responsive to you. (I'm still personally salty over a Firefox UI change from fifteen-odd years ago.)
This is why the response to AI is so muted among your coworkers, in my opinion. It's obvious to the little guy that you don't control what's happening with software. The ownership is simply removed from you. There's no real alternative than to get what's coming to you. If someone retrains an LLM and makes it worse for you, then you'll just have to suck it up, won't you? If they replace your job, you're not getting any of the profits, are you? It's just more leverage for power and less for everyone else. And I don't think this is going to change, not as long as we regulate software under our current rules, with copyright and the EULA. Those rules are not a necessity of the technology, but they sure do create "natural" monopolies, as much as if we'd let Carnegie copyright molten steel and hold onto that copyright for 90 years. Until this changes, there is never going to be good news out of computing, because the only news will be that the bastards who rule your life get to twist your nuts a little tighter. AI is no exception.
Install Linux, btw.
iprayiam3
12hr ago
but that might as well be a result of cutbacks due to economic uncertainty.
But this uncertainty is what I’m interested in. How much is effect but how much could snowball into cause? Buyers get skidding, forecasts go down, and so forth. I’m not saying it’s the leading cause of uncertainty to anywhere near it. But I am noticing it becoming a contributing factor
Corvos
12hr ago
Depends heavily on your field. I made a minor move in my job a while ago: the old field fell under Computer Science and it was traditional for all research to be put on Arxiv, and the new field is almost the same but falls under Engineering and so everything good is gated behind IEEE. SciHub finds most papers before 2020 or so but not many after that and it's causing me serious trouble.
It can be described but I'm not sure everyone is talking about the same thing when they use the term.
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