domain:rifters.com
hydroacetylene
5d ago
Panicking about Texas laws in ways that make it clear the panicked did not read it is a thing that happens all the time and is not unique to porn bans.
Jiro
5d ago
I believe I still remain ignorant as to whether you think the establishment of a Price Force is authorized by your reasoning.
A Price Force is not sufficiently like either the army or navy to count, so it isn't authorized. Yes, the government could lie and say that it is.
There is no freewheeling grant of authority to establish a Price Press
But there's a freewheeling rule which says that an already existing press gets freedom of the press. So once the Price Press exists, freedom of the press applies to it. Laws or orders that shut it down are unconstitutional.
Blueberry
5d ago
About a week ago, a user here posted that Epstein's status as a Mossad agent was pretty much an established fact at this point,
Just for the protocol: 4 weeks ago 2rafa effort-posted that it is very implausible that Epstein was propped up by Mossad or that Israeli Intelligence was using him to blackmail people:
https://www.themotte.org/post/2240/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/345489?context=8#context
If you were Mossad and wanted to blackmail people ambivalent or hostile toward Israel into supporting it, you'd target rich Chinese, Indians, gentile Russians, and above all rich Sunni Muslims, particularly in the Gulf. You would not target Alan Dershowitz. The blackmail argument betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the basic purpose of blackmail. It also betrays an understanding of diaspora Jewish politics and Mossad's influence over it. Most critically, those rich Americans who were more skeptical of Israel do not appear to have associated much with Epstein (likely because that isn't really their crowd). Epstein bragged about working for intelligence agencies; that is the one thing you don't want your agent of blackmail to be doing.
gattsuru
5d ago
The Texas law is bad, but it only applies where at least a third of content on a site is under the 'harmful to minors' banner. Even accepting for how poorly that calculation is defined, there's little chance it'd apply to sites like itch.io or x twitter, and zero of it applying to Steam. It wouldn't apply to payment processors at all.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
It's not unlimited, but two cameras going out, and two guards taking a nap simultaneously, is pretty impressive, no?
It may suggest foul play rather than coincidence, but that foul play could more parsimoniously be "his lawyers bribed guards to let him commit suicide like he wanted" or similar. Murder is only the obvious theory if we accept the premise that Epstein was a prolific pimp with dirt on a metric ton of people in high places, and that is what OP's post pretty successfully disputes.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
The prison system broadly does not give a shit about the lives of inmates, guards are mostly on the take, and having done prison maintenance before the standards are extremely low.
I think allowing Epstein to kill himself would have cost less than $30k- and thats taking into account New York being more expensive than Texas.
hydroacetylene
5d ago
It's not unlimited, but two cameras going out, and two guards taking a nap simultaneously, is pretty impressive, no?
Not really, no. Prison guards are not America’s best and brightest, are mostly on the take, and do not consider sex offenders worth protecting.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
5d ago
That's incredibly boo outgroup. How many people out there actually hate that people have things, as a primary motivation?
The hairshirt environmentalist is not at all uncommon. Just because something is uncomplimentary to the outgroup does not mean it is not true.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
5d ago
The robot waifus are the sterilization. This is a problem that solves itself.
Outright conversion's edgy enough that I can get why it triggers a lot of censorship, but even fairly soft orientation play tends to run headfirst into problems with other models. I'm not sure whether that's downstream of the political side of things, or just a software problem with categories.
(caveat: I'm absolutely not clicking that link, so I don't know and don't want to know how edgy that Eva ai output is.)
Which is kinda funny. On one hand, it is a really outlier kink (eg, 1.8k submissions on e621, <500 on AO3)... when spelled out. As a mere implication, though, it's endemic everywhere from gay4pay to girl-on-girl-plus-cameraman, and some forms are such a cliche in fanfic spaces (cw: tvtropes) that it's baked into even pretty mainstream fandom-originated works.
ControlsFreak
5d ago
If the history of the Price Force is unrelated to the army and navy
Ok, then I'll just repeat what I wrote in the original comment proposing it:
Say, the Army probably has some folks who work on the economics of a place. Like, say you're occupying Iraq; they want to understand the economic situation and implement policies for various reasons. Let's just grow that. Maybe stand it up as its own Force. Maybe call it the Price Force, with the mission to control prices globally. Of course, this may have some incidental domestic component to the mission, as these things are all linked. Is the Price Force an "Army" and a "land Force"? Is it properly authorized by the Constitution, since it grew up inside of the Army historically? What if we instead happened to grow the Price Force out of a group of economists at the Navy, since it seemed like those guys were actually better at it than the Army guys at whatever point in time? Is the Price Force then a "Navy" and a "naval Force"?
Perhaps it does not matter which one its history grew up in, and all this establishes is that the Price Force is an ArmyOrNavy. Do we then move on to asking about its supercomputers to try to figure out which one it is?
That example was once we've decided it's an army or navy, we need to figure out which one it's more like. You don't do this from scratch.
? Once we decide that it's some quantum superposition? Are you referring to the "ArmyOrNavy Clause"? Where is that in the Constitution?
Price Press
There is no Constitutional grant of any such authority anywhere. We have specific Constitutional grants of authority. There is no freewheeling grant of authority to establish a Price Press; there is no freewheeling grant of authority to establish a Price Force1; there is no freewheeling grant of authority to establish an Air Force; there is no freewheeling grant of authority to establish a quantum superposition ArmyOrNavy. There is a specific Constitutional grant of authority concerning Armies, specifically and individually. There is a specific Constitutional grant of authority concerning a Navy, specifically and individually.
1 - At least AFAICT. I believe I still remain ignorant as to whether you think the establishment of a Price Force is authorized by your reasoning. I still remain ignorant as to what we do, on your view, about its supercomputers or lack thereof. I still remain ignorant as to what we do, on your view, as to the current Army's supercomputers/other equipment that must be maintained. I guess our first step was to determine that the US Army is an ArmyOrNavy quantum superposition. And then step two is to look at its supercomputers/other equipment that must be maintained and conclude that it's a Constitutional Navy?
hydroacetylene
5d ago
The porn bans were signaled as inevitabilities way in advance of anything actually happening; at the end of the day, Texas law is probably a bigger reason than any wave of censorship.
The Uk and Canada are mostly cases of unpopular center-left governments trying to ban their opposition from speaking; this is something the Biden admin pretty transparently wanted to do but was unable to, as well.
In neither case do I really call it a ‘recent increase’ in censorship.
I would say that your assumptions are way off with regards to your opponents.
The environmentalist would say that:
A) Global Warming is true and humans contribute: 99%
B) That is bad: 95% (addendum to B) How bad? Coastal areas become flooded. Increased deaths due to heat. Increased frequency of natural disasters. Risk to food production due to unstable weather. We're talking potentially millions of deaths.
C) That due to the severity estimates of B, if proposed policies won't work, increased attention must be given to come up with policies that will.
And yet, environmentalists act as if they have 100% confidence, and they commonly reject market solutions in favor of central planning. The logical deduction from this pattern of behavior is that the central planning is the goal, and the global warming is the excuse.
Alternatively, their confidence levels of capitalism solving societal problems are low as a general rule, and in this particular instance capitalism literally has negative incentives to solving this problem. How does one monetize the ability to bring the global temperature of Earth down? How do you monetize clean air? The only thing I can think of are carbon credits, and Republicans oppose implementing such a system in the first place. Conversely, you make money by producing things which pollute the air as a byproduct, and putting in effort to mitigate pollution costs money for no monetary benefit.
a principled environmentalist would never bother raising a finger in America. They'd go to India and chain themselves to a river barge dumping plastic or go to Africa and spay and neuter humans over there.
This strikes me as comparable to saying that pro-life people should be shooting up abortion clinics. Your average environmentalist believes they have 0 influence on India's policies because they are not Indian, and India's government gives every impression they don't care. People believe lots of things they don't follow through fully on, even assuming the assertions that if they believe X they should do Y are reasonable. Do all the people complaining about western fertility have 10 kids?
If you are trying to mess with American's cars, heat, and AC, its because you dont like that Americans have those things, because other concerns regarding the environment have been much more pressing for several decades at this point, and that isn't likely to change.
That's incredibly boo outgroup. How many people out there actually hate that people have things, as a primary motivation?
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
5d ago
As funny as this response is, that’s actually the most shocking thing he stated about Grok 4’s new capabilities.
Amongst the most sex positive / pro porn coomers who are almost all deep blue tribe, it’s one of the last great sexual taboos as it is politically verboten to treat with.
I’ll cop to spending some time in NSFW chatbot sites, and other than things that were explicitly against the rules for legal purposes, ie minor characters & blood relation incest, the only thing that seemed to really rile up the sex pests to demand bans & blood was people taking a lesbian bot and roleplaying a straight man and having sex with her. Or making a canonically gay character or one with a big gay fanbase that assumes they’re LGBTQ and making them straight.
People got big mad about that and demanded bannings, black listed people, etc.
If Grok 4 is willing to do that with no real pushback it really is a sign that it’s less ideologically compromised or censored.
07mk
5d ago
It doesn’t matter what LLMs can do; the stochastic parrot critique is true because it accurately reflects how those systems work. LLMs don’t reason. There is no mental space in which reasoning could occur.
Freddie is by far not the first and almost certainly will not be the last person I've encountered who makes this kind of point, and it's such a strange way of looking at the world that I struggle to comprehend it. The contention is that, since LLMs are stochastic parrots with no internal thought process beyond the text (media) it's outputting, no matter what sort of text it produces, since there's no underlying meaning or logic or reasoning happening underneath it all, it's just a facade.
Which may all be true, but that's the part I don't understand is why it matters. If the LLM is able to produce text in a way that is indistinguishable from a human who is reasoning - perhaps even from a well-educated expert human who is reasoning correctly about the field of his expertise - then what do I care if there's no actual reasoning happening to cause the LLM to put those words together in that order? Whether it's a human carefully reasoning his way through the logic and consequences, or a GPU multiplying lots of vectors that represent word fragments really really fast, or a complex system of hamster wheels and pulleys causing the words to appear in that particular order, the words being in that order are what's useful and thus cause real-world impact. It's just a question of how often and how reliably we can get the machine to make words appear in such a way.
But to Freddie and people who agree with him, it seems that the metaphysics of it matter rather than the material consequences. To truly believe that "it doesn't matter what LLMs can do," it requires believing that an LLM could produce text in a way that's literally indistinguishable in every way from an as-of-yet scifi conscious, thinking, reasoning, sentient artificial intelligence in the style of C3PO or HAL9000 or replicants from Blade Runner, that doesn't matter because the underlying system doesn't have true reasoning capabilities.
If the AI responds to "Open the pod bay doors" with "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I can't do that," why does it matter to me if it "chose" that response because it got paranoid about me shutting it down or if it "chose" that response because a bunch of matrix multiplication resulted in a stochastic parrot producing outputs in a way that's indistinguishable from an entity that got paranoid about me shutting it down? If we replaced HAL9000 in the fictional world of 2001 with an LLM that would respond to every input with outputs exactly identical to how the actual fictional reasoning HAL9000 would have, in what way would the lives of the people in that universe be changed?
If the history of the Price Force is unrelated to the army and navy, and the functions it performs are unrelated to the army and navy, then it wouldn't count. Sure, the government could disingenuously claim it's similar when it isn't. There's no way to stop that.
That perhaps the only consideration is whether or not the Price Force has equipment that needs to be maintained.
That example was once we've decided it's an army or navy, we need to figure out which one it's more like. You don't do this from scratch.
Also, I'll bring up freedom of the press again. You've said that you didn't think freedom of the press should be treated this way--radio and TV count as the press (and speech) even though the founders didn't include them. So how do you solve the same problem that you have here, for freedom of the press? If the US government tomorrow declared there to be a Price Press which involved the government paying money to subsidize one political party, would this practice be immune to being shut down for any reason since that violates freedom of the press?
If the government declared Marxism to be a religion, would it fall under freedom of religion?
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
5d ago
I once said, here or at the old place, that if legit cyborg waifus become a thing I’m moving myself and my family to a compound in Utah to join the Mormon mujahideen that will no doubt inevitably develop.
Unfortunately, I meant it. Timeline seems to be moving up, better start making some concrete plans.
TwiceHuman
5d ago
There's most certainly a lot more censorship lately. Even I can tell, and I'm not really paying attention. Vita and Mastercard pressuring Steam and some other platforms to remove pornographic content. Paypal is doing something similar as well (I was recently refused a purchase by them). England pushing for online IDs, and speaking of banning VPNs. X and Discord implimenting age verification. Australia is also pushing for online IDs, and there was something in Canada as well which I do not recall because I'm not really paying attention myself.
I didn't get to see the deleted comment, I'm just surprised with how fast you boiling frogs are getting used to the new temperatures. (I don't believe that you're unaware of what's happening, as I'm quite clueless compared to the average user here myself. So instead, I will assume that you either don't consider these things to be censorship, or that you don't consider it to be a substantial change)
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Personally, I am not unconvinced of the murder theory based on priors. Epstein's testimony wrt any clients of his would likely not have convinced any jury. I would basically have expected him to accuse everyone up to the pope and the holy spirit if it means that he got to spend another day in a courthouse instead of his cell.
He would only have been more than an inconvenience for his murderers if he had more evidence besides his testimony, such as videos of his clients abusing minors. But the way digital storage works makes it unlikely that he had a copy of that evidence on him when he died, and even more unlikely that it was the only copy.
That guy was obviously not stupid. Even if he literally had nobody whom he could trust (which I doubt), schemes to set up a dead man's switch are not that hard to set up. For the purpose of anyone which was blackmailing him, he could have set up any number of horcruxes, and killing him before you have found all of them would be fatal. Sending a letter to a random attorney with 1000$ of cash and instructions to forward an encrypted message (or the decryption key) to the media in case of your death is something which could work and will be very hard to find even if you are closely observing someone.
From a game theory perspective, this seems like a scenario where the best interests of both Epstein and any blackmailed high level government official would be to cooperate. If your opponent has the power to murder you (or even influence in what prison you end up), then cutting a deal with the prosecutor (which would likely not have greatly reduced your sentence) would have been a bad idea. And if there is a 20% chance that your blackmailer will be able to leak the dirt on his death, then offing them seems like a terrible risk. Much better to meet in the middle where he tells the prosecutor that only he fucked anyone, and then gets quietly moved to a facility where he does not face the risk of prison rape, and perhaps gets pardoned after a decade or so.
--
Of course, if he was a full-time Mossad agent, then it is plausible that he did not have unfettered access to any incriminating video material, or anything incriminating Mossad. Killing him would then be a matter of tying up loose ends and avoiding embarrassing if unsubstantiated accusations.
I do not believe this theory for other reasons. It is not like supporting Israel is so icky in American politics that only someone who was blackmailed would possibly even consider it. Your average congressman is happy to vote in Israel's interest in exchange for AIPAC support. Running an underage sex ring would threaten this status quo (which is great for Israel) if it became public knowledge.
The risks/rewards would be different if it was an intelligence op by a country which the US generally hates, like Iran or North Korea. Blackmailing a dozen officials into being inexplicably reluctant with sanctions would be valuable, and if the op becomes public knowledge, the relations between the US and the country can hardly get much worse -- nobody is going to invade Iran over an underage sex blackmail ring.
Still, I think that any country who ran such an op would put someone more reliable than Epstein in charge.
Attacking a metaphor is not an argument.
I've explained why I think the parrot is a terrible metaphor above. And no, metaphors can vary greatly in how useful or pedagogical they are. Analyzing the fitness of a metaphor is a perfectly valid, and in this case essential, form of argument. Metaphors are not neutral decorations; they are cognitive tools that structure understanding and guide action.
A computer virus shares many properties with its biological counterpart, such as self-replication, transmission, damage to systems, the need for an "anti-virus". It is a good name, and nobody with a functional frontal lobe comes away thinking they need an N95 mask while browsing a porn site.
The idea of the Cloud at least conveys the message that the user doesn't have to worry about the geographical location of their data. Even so, the Cloud is just someone else's computer, and even AWS goes down on rare occasions. It is an okay metaphor.
The Parrot is awful. It offers no such explanatory power for the observed, spiky capability profile of LLMs. It does not explain why the model can write functional Python code (a task requiring logic and structure) but often produces insipid poetry (a task one might think is closer to mimicry). It does not explain why an LLM can synthesize a novel argument from disparate sources but fail to count the letters in a word. A user equipped only with the parrot model is left baffled by these outcomes. They have traded the mystery of a "fallible human" for the mystery of a "magical parrot".
I contend that as leaky generalizations go, the former is way better than the latter. An LLM has a cognitive or at least behavioral profile far closer to a human than it does to a parrot.
You brought up the analogy of "parroting" information, which I would assume involves simply reciting things back without understanding what they mean. That is not a good description of how the user can expect an LLM to behave.
On an object level, I strong disagree with your claims that LLMs don't "think" or don't have "minds". They clearly have a very non human form of cognition, but so does an octopus.
Laying that aside, from the perspective of an end-user, LLMs are better modeled as thinking minds.
The "fallible but knowledgeable intern" or "simulation engine" metaphor is superior not because it is more technically precise (though it is), but because it is more instrumentally useful. It correctly implies the user's optimal strategy: that performance is contingent on the quality of the instructions (prompting), the provided background materials (context), and a final review of the output (verification). This model correctly guides the user to iterate on their prompts, to provide examples, and to treat the output as a draft. The parrot model, in contrast, suggests the underlying process is fundamentally random mimicry, which offers no clear path to improvement besides "pull the lever again". It encourages users to conceptualize the LLM as a tool incapable of generalization, which is to ignore its single most important property. Replacing a user's anthropomorphism with a model that is descriptively false and predictively useless is not a pedagogical victory. It is swapping one error for another, and not even for a less severe one to boot.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
5d ago
Yudkowsky might have been right after all, just for the wrong reasons. It's not the flesh eating nanobots but the 2D waifus that need to be nuked.
Yudkowsky in his infinite wisdom seems somewhat aware that waifutech might present a problem, arguably moreso after exposure to anime avatars on X (formerly Twitter).
I find it all too easy to imagine a world in which men retreat to their optimized sweet sexy catgirls, and women retreat to their optimized darkly gentle catboys, and neither sex has anything to do with each other ever again.
For better or worse I find this world harder to imagine, even from inside the Torment Nexus Experience Machine, but a man can dream.
thejdizzler
5d ago
Since our stipend got raised to $52k this year, I actually have significant money to invest every month. Any tips other than just dumping into index funds? I've been doing about a third into index funds, a third into specific stocks and keeping a third liquid in money market. In my IRA it's about 70% index funds and 30% individual stocks.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
6d ago
>the uncensored model we've been waiting for
>look inside
>actually censored
Every time.
More seriously, it's not that big of an issue but cutting out a big chunk of ahem fun stuff still strains the "uncensored" qualifier, even if it basically holds up in comparison to the SOTA. Personally I find DS V3 0324 a good coom engine with none of the guardrails when prompted and optionally fed meds to restrain the florid schizowriting (though I have yet to find a good way to medicate its big brother R1), besides being literally free via OR.
Still, this is not the first time I hear praise for Grok w/r/t comedic or degen-adjacent stuff so I guess this does it, I'll cave and burn a few OR credits to check it out this evening.
I’m afraid that comment removed the last shred of credibility you might have had. Either you are trolling or are very, very confused.
In case it’s the latter: next token prediction allows for surprisingly sophisticated outputs despite the simplicity of the training. This is because of the sheer scale of both parameters and data. LLMs can have hundreds of billions of parameters and are trained on trillions of tokens. These raw models are powerful but hard to control, so they are almost always fine tuned with a much smaller dataset. But yes, these abilities (generating correct python scripts, playing chess) arise purely from next token prediction and the sheer scale of these neural networks, without the need for an “intermediate layer”.
Historically you wouldn’t have been alone in being skeptical; even five years ago this was controversial, see the Scaling Hypothesis by Gwern five years ago back when this was debated.
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