domain:acoup.blog
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4m ago
Our society continues to function because Reds haven't joined the game yet, and Trump winning the last election is a strong disincentive for them to do so for the time being. But the back-and-forth wrench is obvious and undeniable. The changes to norms are undeniable. Reds will get on the scoreboard eventually; it's a statistical inevitability. When that happens, a large percentage of Reds are going to be running a copy of the current Blue script, and I see no reason to believe Blues in general will accept that or even recognize the irony.
sun_the_second
5m ago
That's interesting, any examples of what literature elements you don't like?
FtttG
6m ago
The trans women you've met must pass a hell of a lot better than the ones I've met, or seen photos of.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
9m ago
For reasons I can only speculate, all I've ever heard about tariffs are that they are stupid when the US does it, and brilliant when other countries (especially China) do them to us to protect their industrial base. While there may be something to the specific circumstances that could support this narrative, it is rarely evident in the reporting. If you've ever been inoculated against Gell-Mann Amnesia, you'd detect a psyop going on here.
I think there's at least two reasons combining here. One is the usual anti-Trump stuff (anything Trump does is bad), and the other is China boosterism (China is the greatest, they will crush the US industrially and their hypersonic missiles will destroy all our carriers and Taiwan will be theirs). Some of which is mere anti-Americanism/anti-Westernism and some of which is straight up enemy action from Chinese agents.
cjet79
11m ago
I think I'm a little bit broken in my set of preferences for certain art forms. For a long time I've lacked the ability to understand and explain why. Video games have helped, but music might have the best metaphor, even if it doesn't apply to me.
First, imagine that there is an objective ranking for how good a piece of music can be. The ranking stands regardless of individual preferences. More sophisticated listeners who can appreciate music better will have their preferences more in line with this objective ranking.
Second, imagine you have some unique ears, and the sound of string instruments just really bothers you. So you prefer any music without string instruments.
Most of the best music includes some string instruments, so you end up not liking most of the "best" music. The best rating doesn't require string instruments, its just that it makes some things easier in the course of crafting the music. A theoretical best song could be crafted that has no string instruments, it would just be much more difficult. Your tastes end up looking very unsophisticated. You gravitate towards an amateur community of song writers that share your hatred of string instruments, and some of them are just bad at writing any songs with string instruments. They write songs that are relatively bad on the objective ranking, but it removes string instruments at least, so it becomes more tolerable than mainstream stuff for you.
Something like this has happened to me in regards to reading and literature. There are common story elements like certain foreshadowing techniques and certain character development tricks that really grate on me. And there are story settings that I dislike, mostly modern and non-magical settings are boring to me.
I've ended up in a weird spot, like the stringed instrument hater. I can only really enjoy the other authors that also hate stringed instruments, or the amateurs that can't even write stringed instruments into their music. I am probably reading stories and literature that is "objectively" worse on some cosmic literature scale, and I'm well aware that it makes my tastes look unsophisticated and "bad" to the elites of the literature world. But I can't stop and won't stop, because I have some subjective preferences that entirely override the importance of the objective scale.
PokerPirate
11m ago
I like meta behind the "unions are evil" example: It is the only example luxury belief that is right coded, and it's also the only belief that has a number of posters explaining why it's not actually a luxury belief but a "true fact about the world".
If the idea of luxury beliefs really has explanatory value as a model of the world, I would expect all political ideologies to have them in some capacity. So I would like to see more examples of these right-coded luxury beliefs.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
12m ago
I meant it in the figurative sense (a man turned transwoman does not present as traditionally masculine anymore), not in the sense of actual amputation.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
14m ago
If anyone has an example of "this is how I use it for work/at home and it really saves me time and mental energy", I'd be glad to hear.
I don't, but I have a related observation. Because there are differently capable LLMs available, we have not a "one screen two movies" a situation but reverse, "nominally same movie in two screens". One screen is 4k ultraHD and other is camcorded VHS tape. In this thread and other forums, savvy people truly test this shit, constantly trying out which is the current state of the art, and enthusiastically adopt it, and report amazing results. I almost believe it is that good. Meanwhile, at work, my coworkers are not savvy at all yet enthusiastically adopt the default-tier ChatGPT. Which is shit. I call it ShitGPT.
I have watched how "senior" engineer who used to bit perhaps above his skill level but quite okay starting do quite stupid stuff, like in live code review call call copypasting ChatGPT outputs without looking at it, including the time when ShitGPT decided it wants to write the answer in C# instead of C++. Another engineer caused a week of mayhem because he uncritically trusted ChatGPT "summarization" of library documentation, except halfway the ShitGPT had stopped summarizing documentation and switched to hallucinating, causing the most curious bugs.
WhiningCoil
14m ago
Does anybody have any ideas on what I missed?
The tariff's hurt China too. For reasons I can only speculate, all I've ever heard about tariffs are that they are stupid when the US does it, and brilliant when other countries (especially China) do them to us to protect their industrial base. While there may be something to the specific circumstances that could support this narrative, it is rarely evident in the reporting. If you've ever been inoculated against Gell-Mann Amnesia, you'd detect a psyop going on here.
China has basically stopped even reporting financial figures, not even the fraudulent ones you need to read between the lines of. There is effectively no reliable information about how the tariff's are impacting China's economy. But rumors are coming out that it's manufacturing sector in panicking, with factories sitting idle and orders drying up. Even if reshoring is years away, companies literally cannot afford to order from China while the tariff's are in place. I was watching some of Gamer's Nexus's coverage of the tariffs, and companies were saying that with the tariff's they would lose $100+ selling a $100 PC case for example. So all they can do is shut down production and hope a solution presents itself. They haven't sold through their US stock (yet), but they sure as shit have cancelled their orders no matter what the penalty they have to pay.
newcomputerwhodis
15m ago
Yes, it is already happening, and it was even before AI. Entertainment media can be provided bespoke - that's exactly what artists working on commission do. For a whole lot of people and purposes, the quality/price curve is or very soon will be in AI's favor. I have a couple hours of music about wizards drift racing and I am eager for the moment I can poke at an AI for a bit and receive custom made retro game bubblegum tailored to my exact whims.
Voyager
16m ago
I'm a man, I would consider myself having high libido, and still I have noticed more than once that a female acquaintance becomes more sexually attractive as I get to know her better as a person. And from what I've heard, men in general are attracted to women they love.
Perhaps "romantic/personal attraction enhances sexual attraction" is somewhat universal for humans, and a lower baseline libido just makes the effect more pronounced.
To be fair, this is basically how it went between Jews and early Christians.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
27m ago
Funny, Junger is next up on my list!
phailyoor
28m ago
How much are you willing to wager on this claim? What are examples of a baseline of mid-budget Hollywood?
Stellula
30m ago
It’s a motte and Bailey (the namesake of this website).
Motte: were Christians just like the ones you’ve heard of or maybe grew up as.
Bailey: we believe Christianity is actually incomplete until a man named Joseph Smith completed it in the 1830s.
So you’re right, “secretive” or “hiding” aren’t perfect words to describe Mormonism, a better word would be deceptive or dishonest (I don’t think that Mormonism would have many converts if they were more honest about their beliefs, and apparently neither do they, which is why teach their missionaries “milk before meat”, or more in the parlance of this website: motte before Bailey.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
30m ago
There was the thing where a democratic campaign volunteer attempted to murder as many of the republican congressmen as he could, the FBI covered up the clear political motive, and it was common for years afterward to hear Progressives mock the victims and wish the would-be assassin had done a better job.
James Hodgkinson?
There was the time the Antifa guy murdered a trump supporter in cold blood, on video, his antifa buddies publicly celebrated the murder on video, prestige media responded by glazing him, and local progressives shrugged and said it was the trump supporter's fault for engaging in political speech in a blue enclave.
Michael Reinoehl?
Then there's the family members, friends, and acquaintances who've opined to me that it'd probably be for the best if Trump or Elon or Vance were just murdered.
Yeah, I've gotten that too and I don't even live in the 'States.
I'll note that all of these except Butler are progressive murder culture, not reactionary murder culture which is the point most relevant to your argument. Certainly, it's hard to keep that kind of thing fully one-sided indefinitely, though.
phailyoor
31m ago
This feels like MOSTLY a solved problem with ChatGPT's o3 image generation capability.
My understanding is that o3 image gen is identical to the regular chatgpt image gen (famed for the ghiblification wave). Both cases call out to gpt-image-1 which to be fair is much better than dalle and stable diffusion and the like at following prompts.
https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/gpt-image-1 https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/o3
Unless we ARE very, very close to the plateau of what can be achieved with the current paradigm.
This is actually a very defensible position
cjet79
32m ago
My full original comment:
I am willing and happy to read AI generated stories.
I haven't tried too hard to generate my own. But if one of the stories I was following on Royal road turned out to be an AI story I wouldn't be unhappy except that most of them have a release schedule that is clearly within human abilities, and I'd want more. Once they got revealed I'd expect them to stop sandbagging it.
My limited attempts to get AI to generate interesting stories have kinda sucked. In one instance it took my writing and declared it too adult and I legitimately wasn't sure what the hell it was talking about. Those were early chatgpt days though.
I still have this unverified sense that AI can produce pop, but not jazz. Meaning average mass appealing stuff, but weird individuality is harder for it to generate.
Re-reading my first sentence as standalone I guess it could be interpreted one of two ways:
- I am willing and happy to read AI generated stories, as they are now.
- I am willing and happy to read AI generated stories, if I could not tell the difference between them and human written stories I already enjoy.
I meant it in the second sense. I definitely think the AI stories right now are a lot of hot garbage, for all the reasons you've mentioned.
birb_cromble
37m ago
US and China slash tariffs as trade war cools
It looks like we will experience a de-escalation of the tariff battle between the US and China.
The U.S. will cut Trump’s recent tariffs on Chinese imports from 145 percent to 30 percent, while the Chinese side will drop measures from 125 percent to 10 percent. The suspension is temporary for now, lasting 90 days, allowing time for further negotiations.
How does this line up with your personal predictions for how this was going to proceed?
My belief was that both sides would maintain 100+% tariffs but exempt essentially everything that matters. This development shows that I was wrong and I don't understand something about the events that have occurred. Does anybody have any ideas on what I missed?
TheBailey
soapy mop
43m ago
If you aren't knowledgable about guns, buy one from a reputable retailer carrying a reputable manufacturer.
See bulletpoint #1 in the post you're replying to. That would entail putting myself on the gun owner registry (that doesn't technically identify as a registry.)
no one actually cares if you own a gun. ... Grow up and realize you are not the center of the universe.
Maybe they don't care yet; I just can't stand to be in the registry when the upcoming generation of boiled frogs who has their anchoring bias reset starts coping about bubbles actually forming on the bottom of the pot.
TheBailey
soapy mop
47m ago
When Biggus Dickus, the uninsured hooligan who happens to have recently changed his name, destroys my vehicle in a collision he caused,
-
What specific good is that court order going to do me?
-
How much of that good would not be got just as well from an Alabama DS-60 clone?
You keep vaguely rambling about how the DMV has some "reason" for treating a common law name change as a boogeyman, a reason that's (I infer from your silence on my actual question on the legality) so good as to be worth breaking the law to stop, yet have refused to give me any model of why it's any more of a boogeyman than a court-ordered name change.
quiet_NaN
48m ago
And yes, I know that "AI" is still a misnomer, I understand that LLMs are just token predictors, and I think people who believe that any neural net is close to actually "thinking" or becoming self-aware, or that really, what are we but pattern-matching echolaliac organisms? are drinking kool-aid
I am kind of in the middle ground between "they are just stupid stochastic parrots, they don't think!" and "obviously they will develop super-intelligent subagents if we just throw more neurons at the problem!", while I suspect that you are a bit more likely to agree with the former.
The latter case is easy to make. If you train a sufficiently large LLM on chess games written in some notation, the most efficient way to predict the next token will be for it to develop pathways which learn how to play chess -- and at least for chess, this seems to mostly have happened. Sure, a specialized NN whose design takes the game into account will likely crush an LLM with a similar amount of neurons, but nevertheless this shows that if your data contains a lot of chess games, the humble task of next-token-prediction will lead to you learning to play chess (if you can spare the neurons).
By analogy, if you are trained on a lot of written material which took intelligence to produce, it could be that the humble next-token-predictor will also acquire intelligence to better fulfill its task.
I will be the first to admit that LLMs are horribly inefficient compared to humans. I mean, a LLM trained on humanity's text output can kinda imitate Shakespeare, and that is impressive in itself. But if we compare that to good old Bill, the latter seems much more impressive. The amount of verbal input he was trained on is the tiniest fraction of what an LLM was trained on, and Shakespeare was very much not in the training set at all! Sure, he also got to experience human emotions first-hand, but having thousand of human life-years worth of description of human emotions should be adequate compensation for the LLM. (Also, Bill's output was much more original than what a LLM will deliver if prompted to imitate him.)
Of course, just because we have seen an LLM train itself to grok chess, that does not mean that the same mechanism will also work in principle and in practice to make it solve arbitrary tasks which require intelligence, just like we can not conclude from the fact that a helium balloon can lift a post card that it is either in principle or in practice possible with enough balloons to lift a ship of the line and land it on the Moon. (As we have the theory, we can firmly state that lifting is possible, but going to the Moon is not. Alas, for neural networks, we lack a similar theory.)
More on topic, I think that before we will see LLMs writing novels on their own, LLMs might become co-authors. Present-day LLMs can already do some copy-editing work. Bouncing world building ideas off an LLM, asking 'what could be possible consequences for some technology $X for a society' might actually work. Or someone who is skilled with their world-building and plotlines but not particularly great at finding the right words might ask an LLM to come up with five alternatives for an adjective (with connotations and implications) and then pick one. This will still not create great prose, but not everyone reads books for their mastery of words.
striker
49m ago
I always find Fitzgerald’s books an unending wonder. Often it feels like not much is happening but afterwards, often years afterwards, you still find yourself bathed in the glow of whatever feeling he manages to convey. Gatsby is amazing but possibly the least “bathesome” - Beautiful and the Damned and Tender is the Night both left me with something inexplicable and permanent in my veins.
cjet79
52m ago
What you don't understand is that those 2-3 million did not die in concentration camps, if that many died at all which is highly doubtful. The death toll in the concentration camps is a small fraction of that number. And most who died in the concentration camps did so in final months of the war due to Germany being destroyed on all sides and infrastructure totally collapsing. Many died under the custody of Stalin during and after the war, and never came under German occupation in the first place. The death toll in the concentration camps was a small fraction of that number.
Eh this is why the conversation with you reminds me of other generic conspiracy theorists. It all feels very wishy washy. Like you are doing a cold reading of me, and will push as far as you can in the direction of "nothing bad happened to the jews". Just so we are clear, I still think about 6 million jews died, and that there was a mass extermination effort of some kind. They weren't just killed off as a side effect of being rounded up and put in camps where there was no food and diseases ran rampant.
I just remember seeing that "middle ground" estimate from another conversation someone had with you.
I still think Churchill was uniquely unlikely to mention "gas chambers" because he had a history of controversy around chemical warfare. He was publicly willing to use it against the Germans if they used it first in warfare. And before WWII he was caught in a private conversation advocating that gas attacks be used on 'uncivilized' people. He did publicly talk about the holocaust after the war.
Grok AI does seem to think that there are passages referencing holocaust things:
Growing awareness of a Nazi policy to exterminate Jewish communities and calls it a crime against humanity. That is in volume 4
In volume 5 churchill mentions the unprecedented scale of Nazi massacres. He mentions the liquidation of ghettos, and the use of special camps for mass killings.
Maybe the AI is halucinating. I still believe it more than you. Get me a digital copy of the book that I can ctrl-f and we can settle it for sure.
A lot of foreshadowing. It takes me out of the story when I see it, because I'm strongly reminded that it is a story with an end destination in mind by the author.
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