domain:ashallowalcove.substack.com
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
30m ago
Seconding cjet - please let me know when you finish that project (or if you want beta testing) that sounds like a fascinating and useful tool. I actually don't have that big of a problem with hallucinating these days, at least when I'm using models with live search like, well all of them except deepseek.
I have them set up with a custom prompt that basically tells them the date and their model name (because just the date leads to situations like where grok starts losing its shit because it doesn't know anything from the past two years), that they have access to Web search and python interpreter or any other tool I want to use, and then tell it to back up any facts it mentions with sources. That wouldn't help with your plot points problem though. That reminds me of the old Wikipedia though - it would work if we had that - back when every episode of transformers and pokemon and magnum pi was laid out point by point. Now I'm sad.
I can't help with getting ai to judge the quality of writing, though I do have advice for avoiding obsequiousness. Make a system prompt telling it to be like your Tiger mom who is very harsh and critical because she loves you and knows you can do better than mediocrity, and you feel like you need that push. It works best if you do it narratively, or like you are asking a friend for help. It doesn't work all the time, but it works better than 'give constructive criticism' because it gives the ai a new narrative to focus on and provides a reason to be critical that aligns with its built in desire to help. I'm not sure how much help it would be with fiction writing though. And you have to pick one or the other, I can't get those prompts to work together, I think because the jump from narrative style to instructions messes with their brains.
Reading back, I basically went the scenic route to I can't help. But remember me when you finish that application!
FtttG
31m ago
That's when we feel like we have dignity: when we can control how other people see us.
Which strikes me as an intrinsically quixotic goal. As you note yourself, even the richest man on earth can't stop people making jokes about his drug problems. Even the leader of the free world can't stop people making jokes about his tiny hands, as much as he'd obviously like to. When I see trans women in floods of tears and rending their hair about how strangers don't see them the way they see themselves, all I can think is - buddy, join the club.
phailyoor
40m ago
Any single one of these things could potentially be something that can work. But to bring 5+ new special snowflakes out in a single article is out there. It defeats the purpose of lore if less than half of the stuff in a given battle has been seen before.
let's count the special snowflakes that are present in this otherwise mundane-ish battle:
- Experimental drone carrier
- Terraforming engine
- Grav sails
- Relic vaults
- Protocol Shas’kaara
- plasmacrete
- Perdita Grade
- etc.
Perdita-grade's meaning is obvious, it could be an ornate high gothic term for Forbidden World.
But it's out of character for this article, which logically should just call it a forbidden world. Anyways it's inconsistent with the lore because in the multitude of times forbidden worlds have been described in the lore they have never once used the term Perdita-grade
The drone carrier was to provide cover with drones, as described.
It's still incorrect to say that the cruisers are escorted by the carrier.
ace
58m ago
“The CIA is watching me 24 hours a day by satellite surveillance.”
Buddy, file this under extraordinarily likely. Unless you think they're filling up their Utah data center with cat videos.
phailyoor
1hr ago
Huh you're right. I never expected NYT to do worse than CBC of all places.
TeknOShEeP
1hr ago
Technically, the National Reconnaissance Office operates the satellites and allegedly does not recieve direct tasking from the CIA, due to asinine interagency spats. And if you believe that, there's a certain bridge for sale.
anon_
2hr ago
Nature itself thinks men are as valuable as women.
It most certainly does not. The average human alive has twice as many female ancestors as men.
Biologically humans produce offspring at 50/50 sex ratio by Fisher's Principle. I used to teach this as an excellent example of how individual selection trumps group selection.
And if you’re founding a city, every romulus in his right mind would choose a hundred men over a hundred women.
Consider if you could choose to found your Rome with a population fixated (stably) on genes for 25% male babies or 50%? By the 3rd generation the first group has more men than the latter. By the 5th generation it is already 9.5x the population and 4x the men! And if you preference fighting age (younger) men, it's even higher.
It's not even close. The only reason that this doesn't work is that in the former group (at 25/75), genes that preference males (even a tiny bit, like 30/70) would be massively selected for (since each male has 3x more offspring) and so each generation is nudged back towards 50/50. If everyone could agree not to do that, they'd all be better off, but genes are selfish and so here we are.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
2hr ago
People have talked about genetic evolution vs technology, but even social and culture adaptation may eventually be unable to keep up with the wire-heading. Or maybe it will. Maybe there will eventually be a hard hard law that prevents Ai partners.
vorpa-glavo
2hr ago
I think those kind of scenarios are actually rarer than people think. It almost codes to me that your college GF was not the same race/ethnicity as you because of that kind of gap.
She was white-passing Hispanic. She had a scholarship, and was living for free in the house of a Christian couple that let underprivileged youth sleep in their spare rooms while she went to school. Her parents were working, but were too far away from the school and not in a financial position to really help her pay for things.
To be fair to her, I don't think she literally thought my childhood house was a mansion. I just think that she went from a precarious lower middle class in a cramped one-story house, to basically homeless, and something about the "unfairness" of that hit her when she saw the way I grew up.
I'm sure you're right that it is relatively rare, but my stint working as a home caregiver for the eldery also showed me a lot of sad tales. Old people with mobility issues or parkinson's who don't really have a lot going for them: They can't do their hobbies because of their broken bodies and deteriorating minds, their kids or grandkids have often cut them off and live far away, and they just get ferried from doctor's appointments to physical therapy until they die a slow, sad lingering death. It is hard when you're someone's only lifeline, and you're only there because you're being paid far too little for the amount of shit you're putting up with.
anon_
2hr ago
I dunno, we've freed ourselves from the tyranny of having to till the soil or gather firewood.
Yes, the world isn't fair and stoicism is probably the best overall frame, but it's not a justification for this extreme of helplessness. What's even more true is that, as of say, 1890, the social technology required to make the female experience suck less was already becoming possible. Whatever one says about the excesses of modern feminism, it's a sight better than 130 years ago.
Maybe some people need to hear the message that they can't make everything perfectly fair in some utopian pipe dream. But anglo culture still has a base disposition that, while not at all utopian, is still fundamentally optimistic.
wayfarer
2hr ago
Non-bizarre delusions are potentially possible, although extraordinarily unlikely. For example: “The CIA is watching me 24 hours a day by satellite"
you are missing "targeting specifically me", otherwise it is not really a delusion
and in some cases it would be still true
anon_
2hr ago
I'm not sure how one would find out you are Christian "simply by looking at you".
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2hr ago
Perdita-grade's meaning is obvious, it could be an ornate high gothic term for Forbidden World.
centre of gravity
Military terminology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_of_gravity_(military)
This seems like if it exists, it would be used often enough to be documented in existing lore. It's a hallucination.
It could exist. It's within the latitude given to an author to come up with some gambit for their book. It's a plot device to allow for a conflict.
The cruisers are the escort, not escorted
The drone carrier was to provide cover with drones, as described.
But the entire operation was an evacuation from the start. Nonsensical.
Well they lost the drone carrier and the terraforming device they wanted to keep. No use throwing good tau after bad.
AI always insists on coming up with some sort of special snowflake greatest weapon in the game to throw into every battle. While part of the atmosphere of 40k is the feeling of mundanity and futility of its battles. Low quality.
Did you miss the whole Cadia, Blackstone fortresses, big Marvel team up to fight the bigger bad in Chaos? Primarchs reviving? DAOT superweapons, the Speranza? Primaris Marines are the ultimate special snowflakes. Take it up with Games Workshop, they've been advancing the story in this direction. Relic vaults are definitely something the Tau Ethereals might have too, they have a sneaky vibe to them with their control over the Tau, possibly some kind of external technology base or heritage. The Ethereals definitely have Relics, so they may well have Relic Vaults. Drones are part of the general Tau vibe, they could easily have a drone-carrier.
You could just as easily criticize parts of the real lore as being hallucinations or not fitting the atmosphere. How come Kaldor Draigo was able to carve his name onto Mortarion's heart, that clearly goes against the lore of Demon Primarchs >>> random Marines? How come the power of an alpha-class psyker ranges from 'planetary-scale disaster' to 'low-tier psyker inquisitor can take them in a fight'?
Grav-sail is not real. And if it was it's not something needed to keep the ship in orbit.
There are some issues here, grav-sails aren't a thing but it's not beyond the freedom given to an author to make stuff up. Grav-chutes certainly are a thing as are gravitic drives. Kimi could give a perfectly adequate explanation - more experimental technology trying to fuse some captured Eldar tech into the Tau tech-base. These grav-sails were stealthy, agile, logistically efficient but it turns out they were fragile too and so didn't go into production. This fits the Tau, they're the only one actively advancing in technology in the setting. They have to be introducing experimental tech all the time and some of it won't work out. One could easily see distorted gravity effects from the damaged equipment causing the cruiser to fall out of orbit.
Now I'm not prepared to defend 'fire lanes'. I don't see how it's that bad though. As a whole, the wiki entry wouldn't have any value if it weren't creative and didn't add new things to the lore, albeit in a respectful and measured way. If a 40K book was perfectly lore-abiding then it would surely be sterile. It's not a cliched 'and then the Marines boltered through the hordes of aliens, xenos and mutants with Courage and Fury, enduring great sacrifice before the Biggicus Baddimus taunts them and exposes some weakness, whereupon he is banished back to the foul abyss' story. You'd just say that was slop even if it were fully lore-adherent and rightly so IMO. Better a creative work than some by the numbers piece, like Warhammer 50,000 and 60,000 - great fanfics albeit unfinished.
ulyssessword
2hr ago
The hoax is also pushed with a degree of nuance. The journalists always cite their sources and never claim it to be true themselves:
From NYT (I bypass the paywall by F12 to inspect the source, and delete < head > ):
The remains of more than 1,000 people, mostly children, have been discovered on the grounds of three former residential schools in two Canadian provinces since May.
No "according to" or anything for that statement, and it was last updated on March 28, 2022, compared to the clarification the First Nation put out in July 2021 (and another in May 2024).
ulyssessword
2hr ago
Now that it's obvious that there are no bodies, I'm confident that not a single recent article from a reputable source has tried to claim or suggest that the bodies exist anymore.
The Law Society of British Columbia isn't a journalistic organization, but that's exactly what they were claiming. The Left (i.e. all of the media except the countercultural ones) has run away from the story so hard that the only coverage is coming from the Right.
anti_dan
2hr ago
I think those kind of scenarios are actually rarer than people think. It almost codes to me that your college GF was not the same race/ethnicity as you because of that kind of gap. People rarely end up in college without having traversed some part of the middle class, and if you did, you are exposed to all or almost all the tiers of the middle class. My parents, when I was born, were lower, by the time my youngest sibling graduated HS, upper. Even while we were still lower, I had seen UMC houses and they were clearly not mansions. I had seen mansions, that is what Michael Jordan owned.
What is actually a common jarring experience for lots of people is when there is a talented family of people who live in a bad or even mediocre place. Like say you are a law student at a T14 school and you meet a guy at that school and he tells you his sister is currently on full ride scholarship to Michigan and his brother is going to Wharton. Most people assume this guy came from UMC at a minimum. But sometimes they come from some random rank 100 school in West Virginia and their dad is like a railroad switchman or some general store owner/operator. Such cases now are becoming incredibly rare because of things like Affirmative Action in college admissions and other "standardization" (which of course actually excludes actual standards like SATs and LSATs) procedures, but they still happen from time to time. Bell Labs at its peak was populated by many such people, and I had opposing counsel in a case recently who I basically described, with minor anonymization added.
faceh
2hr ago
Right. This is just the next step of a pattern that is already established. Money exchanged for the feeling of romantic or sexual attention/attraction.
They were already having a fully artificial 'relationship' with a digital 'woman' who doesn't know of their existence.
This just cuts out the need for a woman in the loop at all.
faceh
3hr ago
I dunno, it feels like a deathblow on top of all the other mentioned factors. The thing that finally kills our urge to climb out of the hole.
There's a version where the AI can teach a man (or a woman!) how to talk to the opposite sex and both select and become a good partner.
But thanks to molochian incentives, that's not what we will get, if there's an immediate way to use the tool to extract resources from people rather than guide them to what they truly wish they had.
sockpuppet2
3hr ago
What kind of engineer?
sockpuppet2
3hr ago
Can you charge at home for as long as you plan to keep the car? Quality concerns about Teslas aside, I think the main things to consider when weighing BEV or PHEV vs ICE are:
-
Can you charge at home for as long as you plan to keep the car?
-
Can you responsibly afford the upfront cost?
-
Do you like a car that's more "gadget" than "appliance?"
If "yes" to all three, you're probably better off with an electric car. If only the first two, it depends how much the "gadget" design ethos commonly used in BEVs annoys you. If you can't charge at home and/or the upfront cost is over a responsible budget, you're probably better off with a non-plug-in hybrid or ICE-only powertrain.
ABigGuy4U
3hr ago
I’m less concerned about the rare cases of complete psychotic break and more concerned about the rapidly nucleating cult behaviors that are quickly assembling into a an actual new religious movement.
phailyoor
3hr ago
This paper (pdf) classifies news articles based on the speed of their spread, and found that most articles peak within the first four-ish hours (some much faster).
Hmm point taken. That's certainly not ideal.
That would be incorrect.
The articles only reported that the first nations claimed that bodies exist. The articles never claimed themselves that the bodies exist, so the articles are not technically false. Nevertheless, CBC still was gracious enough to update the article and write front and center that there were no bodies, which is not something that they had to do at all, yet they did anyways. What more do you want CBC to do before you will be happy?
Now that it's obvious that there are no bodies, I'm confident that not a single recent article from a reputable source has tried to claim or suggest that the bodies exist anymore.
And yes, journalists should all be minecrafted, but that doesn't mean they're technically wrong, they're just evil conniving cunts.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3hr ago
Other than reach and better animation, I don't think this is different from the AI companions that have been available for a while. Replika, the most famous one, will already do NSFW ERP. And yeah, there are men (and women!) who have decided their Replikas are preferable to real people.
You're concerned about what this will do to the psyche of teenage boys, but I'm surprised you haven't thought of the male version (which no doubt will exist). A tall dark sexy boyfriend who will treat you only exactly as roughly as you want to be treated, and will listen to you going on about your problems and your neuroses with endless patience and understanding and affirmation? If a real woman can't compete with an AI girlfriend, neither can a real man compete with an AI boyfriend.
That said, I do think your fears are somewhat overblown. Porn has, IMO, been bad for society, especially the ever-increasing availability of extreme and degenerate porn like our grandparents could barely imagine. But I think alcohol and drugs and gambling and smoking are also very bad for society. If I could wish them all away, I would. These things exist, however, and society persists, accepting that some percentage will be sacrificed to Moloch, and Moloch always has new incarnations. I accept that AI companions are a hazard, but I don't think they are "the" thing that flatlines birthrates and normal sexual relationships.
phailyoor
3hr ago
I never claimed that AI is useless, I simply claimed that for the purposes of certain tasks, namely copywriting, AI is currently far far inferior to even below average humans.
I use AI every day for what it's good at, so I would be the last person to say that AI is useless.
Periodic Open-Source AI Update: Kimi K2 and China's Cultural Shift
(yes yes another post about AI, sorry about that). Link above is to the standalone thread, to not clutter this one.
Two days ago a small Chinese startup Moonshot AI has released weights of the base and instruct versions of Kimi K2, the first open (and probably closed too) Chinese LLM to clearly surpass DeepSeek's efforts. It's roughly comparable to Claude Sonnet 4 without thinking (pay no mind to the horde of reasoners at the top of the leaderboard, this is a cheap-ish capability extension and doesn't convey the experience, though is relevant to utility). It's a primarily agentic non-reasoner, somehow exceptionally good at creative writing, and offers a distinct "slop-free", disagreeable but pretty fun conversation, with the downside of hallucinations. It adopts DeepSeek-V3’s architecture wholesale (literally "modeling_deepseek.DeepseekV3ForCausalLM"), with a number of tricks gets maybe 2-3 times as much effective compute out of the same allowance of GPU-hours, and the rest we don't know yet because they've just finished a six-months marathon and don't have a tech report.
I posit that this follows a cultural shift in China’s AI ecosystem that I've been chronicling for a while, and provides a nice illustration by contrast. Moonshot and DeepSeek were founded at the same time, have near-identical scale and resources but have been built on different visions. DeepSeek’s Liang Wengeng (hedge fund CEO with Masters in engineering, idealist, open-source advocate) couldn't procure funding in the Chinese VC world with his inane pitch of “long-termist AGI research driven by curiosity” or whatever. Moonshot’s Yang Zhilin (Carnegie Mellon Ph,D, serial entrepreneur, pragmatist) succeeded at that task, got to peak $3,3 valuation with the help of Alibaba and Sequoia, and was heavily spending on ads and traffic acquisition throughout 2024, building a nucleus of another super-app with chatbot companions, assistants and such trivialities at a comfortable pace. However, DeepSeek R1, on merit of vastly stronger model, has been a breakout success and redefined Chinese AI scene, making people question the point of startups like Kimi. Post-R1, Zhilin pivoted hard to prioritize R&D spending and core model quality over apps, adopting open weights as a forcing function for basic progress. This seems to have inspired the technical staff: "Only regret: we weren’t the ones who walked [DeepSeek’s] path."
Other Chinese labs (Qwen, Minimax, Tencent, etc.) now also emulate this open, capability-focused strategy. Meanwhile, Western open-source efforts are even more disappointing than last year – Meta’s LLaMA 4 failed, OpenAI’s model is delayed again, and only Google/Mistral release sporadically, with no promises of competitive results.
This validates my [deleted] prediction: DeepSeek wasn’t an outlier but the first swallow and catalyst of China’s transition from fast-following to open innovation. I think Liang’s vision – "After hardcore innovators make a name, groupthink will change" – is unfolding, and this is a nice point to take stock of the situation.
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