domain:badcyber.com
phailyoor
just now
I didn't mean to suggest any preferential treatment, just that as someone who participated in the process of creating them you would have a clearer idea of what line is and write well within it.
I also agree that the majority of the text in your essay did pass through human fingers, but there are some elements that are suspiciously suspicious.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2m ago
The states and nigh-rural cities where Boy Scouts (and their Evangelical Christian analogues) actually earn those camping and forestry badges. The states where lighters and pocketknives are still daily carry.
phailyoor
3m ago
oh no, I've gone to great lengths to make sure I always turn autocorrect off.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6m ago
Actual gorilla warfare
I do love autocorrect sometimes.
phailyoor
26m ago
All the high tech weaponry in the world doesn't matter for counterinsurgency purposes. Modern combined arms warfare is optimized for defeating peer and near peer adversaries in a stand up fight, not for blowing up a bunch of goat fuckers with rifles. If the enemy doesn't have anti-tank missiles or tanks, a multi-million dollar main battle tank is no more combat effective than a pickup with armor plates welded on and a cannon in the back. If the enemy doesn't have radar, your multi-billion dollar supersonic stealth strike fighter is no better than a crop duster with bombs strapped on it. Of course having armor and air support at all is super important, but the overmatch eventually doesn't provide any additional value.
During WW2, China lost nearly all its modern equipment and trained forces in the early days of the war, leaving them to fight the remainder of the war with only obsolete or crudely made small arms, against an enemy with machine guns, trucks, tanks, artillery, and air support. An enemy that was also willing to go gloves off and genocide the as many Chinese as necessary to win. Yet even with collapsing state capacity and morale against an overwhelming enemy, the Chinese still managed to stubbornly cling on to territory and inflict serious losses to the enemy, while only taking 3:1 casualties in direct confrontation. Actual gorilla warfare which does not even attempt to meet the enemy's attach head on would achieve a much more favorable kill ratio.
In the end a lake is more powerful than a water bottle, but a bucket will do the job just as well. Yet insurgencies have succeeded in the past even against determined and far more powerful opponents.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
31m ago
I checked, and yes, at some point in the half a dozen loops of iteration, my initial bullet points turned into a listicle. That bit is, in closer inspection, sloppy. At the very least, those additional (explanations) in brackets doesn't add to the essay. Mea culpa. I would normally remove them when I do edit passes, but I feel that it would dishonest for me to make changes, it would, even if not ended to be, come across as an attempted cover-up.
I seriously seriously doubt these words were typed by human fingers
A critique I have consistently received is using run-on sentences and too many commas. I make an intentional effort to replace it with dashes (and even I've got an allery to em-dashes), semicolons, colons or parentheses.
I tried to use our search function to find comments by me which include "-", because I expect that it would demonstrate a gradual and natural increase in my usage over the years. Sadly it doesn't seem to work, perhaps because the system doesn't index individual characters.
Aaaand even if somehow those words were typed by human fingers, you would never have written anything nearly close to this essay if it weren't for the corrupting influence of AI. Talking to robots has corrupted and twisted your mind, away from a natural human pattern of thought into producing this meandering and listless form that somehow traces the inhuman shape of AI generated text. It lacks the spark of humanity that even the most schizo posters have: the thread of original thought that traces through the essay and evolves along with the reader.
... I obviously disagree. One man's "twisting of a natural mind" is another man's polish and increase to readability.
On more neutral terms: prolonged exposure to a tool also moulds the user. I have been using LLMs since the GPT-3 days, and some aspects of their writing have been consciously or accidentally adopted. What of it? I hadn't really noticed em-dashes before ChatGPT made them notorious, and by then even I felt nauseated by them. Bullet points and lists have their advantages, and I will die on the hill that they deserve to exist.
At the end of the day, this is a debate I'm not particularly interested in. I'm on record advocating for looser restrictions on the usage of LLMs, and I enforce the rules (which are, at this point mostly a consensus on the part of the mods, and not on the sidebar). I am not, in fact, above reproach, and I am answerable to the other mods for personal wrongdoing. I deny that said wrongdoing happened.
you would never have written anything nearly close to this essay if it weren't for the corrupting influence of AI
I invite you to look closely at all the examples I linked above. None of this is new - at worst, I self-plagiarized by finally collecting years of scattered posting into one place.
odd_primes
48m ago
In terms of the slope slipperiness, Canada is expanding MAID to people suffering solely from a mental health condition. This is legally required due to a court case they lost challenging the MAID law's exclusion of the mentally ill. They have temporarily delayed this through new legislation, but eventually they will either implement it, or be taken back to court and forced to implement it. The people newly eligible will all fall under track 2.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
58m ago
There's a rationalist shibboleth that I am very fond of: "The optimal amount of X is not zero"
This isn't a call for nihilism or a license for carelessness. It's a recognition that we live in a universe of trade-offs, and that clinging to a perfect "zero" in one narrow domain can inadvertently cause immense harm in others.
For some very high stakes activities, it really ought to be extremely zero over human timescales. For example, if there is an automated system that is responsible for initiating a response to a nuclear strike, I sincerely hope that the failure rate is 0.0... per annum, for several zeroes. Stanislav Petrov was responsible for preventing an accidental nuclear war because he correctly diagnosed that the Soviet early-warning system was malfunctioning.
The lower the stakes, the more the leeway for failure or unpleasant outcomes. If you truly wanted a government that never "systematically" murders someone (and we're assuming that murder is definitionally objectionable), then your best bet is to get rid of government altogether. I suspect that doing so will just lead to an increase in the number of murders overall.
Consider medicine, my home turf? What is the acceptable rate of iatrogenic death, i.e patients killed by the treatment meant to save them? We know for a fact that surgery has a non-zero mortality rate. Anesthesia can kill. Drugs have unexpected, fatal side effects. We could reduce iatrogenic deaths to absolute zero tomorrow by simply banning all surgery, all anesthesia, and all prescription medication. The number of people who would then die from otherwise treatable conditions would be rather large. We accept a small, managed risk of systemic medical error because the alternative is a certainty of systemic medical neglect. That is the only sensible way of going about such things without, as I've said before, literally infinite money/resources.
(This is why deontology is insane. The Pope might not want any orphans to starve in Africa, but he doesn't pawn off the Pope Mobile to pay for it. At least adopt something more sensible like Rule Utilitarianism/Consequentialism. It is easy to say that the optimal number of starving orphans is zero, far harder to make it happen without sacrificing more important concerns)
Even the legal system, in your own example, abides by Blackstone's ratio. A certain number of the innocent will accompany the guilty, be it to the gallows, a short stint in prison, or in paying fines. To reduce the rate of wrongful conviction to literal zero would be to dispense with a legal system. Guess what that does to crime statistics?
If I had to put a number on the "acceptable" rate of systematic murder, the most obvious way to peg it is by calculating the number of non-systematic murders that would occur. I think I can slightly bias the conversion ratio, but in both directions. I am quite unlike to be either systematically or unsystematically murdered myself, but I guess I'd prefer the latter for the sake of fairness, should Rawls drape a veil over me.
phailyoor
59m ago
All that matters is spreading the idea that they can get away with it. Soccer mom by day, assassin by night.
Antifa is a bunch of sheltered rich kids, yet they've committed dozens of felonies each because they keep getting away with it.
phailyoor
1hr ago
The army can't afford to guard every single Combination KFC Taco Bell in the country. The daily fast food raids are going to be hard fought but I think the insurgents can pull it off.
Gaashk
1hr ago
(and just because you filtered out the em-dashes doesn't mean I don't see what you did there)
I looked at the new, improved GPT5 free content I got today, and, lol, there are 18 in a single response. But then it generated a .docx of basically the same content, and lo and behold, the em dashes are gone, and now there are a lot of colons instead. Also, it's formatted nicely with headings. Huh.
ChickenOverlord
1hr ago
The median American doesn't need to fight though, only a small percentage does. The same was true in Afghanistan, Syria, and in any other guerilla conflict you can think of. In fact the "3%ers" (who I assume are mostly glowies) are named after the supposedly only 3% of colonial Americans that fought in the Revolution.
It's certainly pushing the boundary in terms of what is and isn't AI slop, and I'm sure it doesn't violate the rules (for obvious reasons).
But even though it doesn't trigger obvious alarm bells, my eyes did glaze over when you started the AI slop listicle format and started delving into details that nobody really gives a darn about.
At the very least I'm pretty sure your listicle headers are straight from the mouth of a computer, not a human.
Red Team Testing
Implement systematic "penetration testing" for the oversight system. Create fictional cases of people who clearly should not qualify for assisted dying —em—dash—maybe—filtered— someone with treatable depression, a person under subtle family pressure, an elderly individual who just needs better social support ...
I seriously seriously doubt these words were typed by human fingers.
Aaaand even if somehow those words were typed by human fingers, you would never have written anything nearly close to this essay if it weren't for the corrupting influence of AI. Talking to robots has corrupted and twisted your mind, away from a natural human pattern of thought into producing this meandering and listless form that somehow traces the inhuman shape of AI generated text. It lacks the spark of humanity that even the most schizo posters have: the thread of original thought that traces through the essay and evolves along with the reader.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
1hr ago
What's the acceptable rate of systemic murder?
For me it's 0 so I don't think any case can be dismissed as anecdote.
If we're allowed to use the "any system can fail and that's okay" I ask then what your position is on capital punishment and collateral damage in the pursuit of legitimate military targets.
Supah_Schmendrick
1hr ago
To me the regulated-militia bit implies a strong skepticism of loose cannons and even an outright endorsement of some loose degree of government (perhaps suitably local) control.
There has been linguistic drift; at the time of the founding, the word "regulated" meant "functioning," and in the concept of a militia - which the founders generally intended to be the primary American military force to the exclusion of standing armies - meant well-equipped, trained, and disciplined.
As far as I'm concerned the 2nd Amendment, properly understood, requires every citizen to own, maintain, and drill with M4s and other military weapons, a la Switzerland. However, practically the champions of militia vs. a permanent, professional military establishment lost for good after WWII.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1hr ago
Oh, I agree with you 100% that Americans don't have the temperament required to fight back against a tyrannical government. But that is a very different argument from "we can't fight tyranny because they will have tanks and fighter jets". I don't get the sense that @ChickenOverlord was trying to claim Americans are going to put up a fierce resistance, just responding to that specific argument.
ChickenOverlord
1hr ago
America has a ton of motivated political irregulars of many political stripes, and loads of impractical terrain not far from farmland.
Also the I-70, I-80, and I-90 freeways run through some very mountainous territory full of some of the most conservative groups of Americans. Rebels in the mountain west could literally cut the northern part of America in half. All interstate transit would have to be on the I-10 and I-40 through Arizona.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
1hr ago
An extremely high one- do you know anything about pigs?
Your anecdote is not typical - most pigs are raised in factory farms where they, as far as I know, eat mostly corn and soy.
A friend of mine raises them at home and feeds the heads to his other pigs when he slaughters them. Feral hogs happily eat dead piglets.
Touché, but if the pigs are cannibals because people are feeding them pigs, I don't know if this reflects well on human honor either.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
If you have any evidence of systematic failures of the Canadian system, as opposed to anecdotes, then I would be happy to see them. Any large system would have failures, and eye-catching, condemnation worthy failures to boot.
(and just because you filtered out the em-dashes doesn't mean I don't see what you did there)
Is this a claim that this essay was mostly, or even substantially AI generated? If so, that would be false.
I have no qualms about stating that I use AI, but for the purposes of proof-reading, stylistic suggestions/polish, critique, or research. In fact, I've been an open advocate for doing so. What do you think this post suggests?
I'm happy to provide affirmative evidence. I've uploaded an album of screenshots. You can see the embryo of my original draft, further refinements and conversations with o3 where I did my due diligence. As a matter of fact, I spent at least an hour tracking down sources, and groaning as I realized that the model was hallucinating. If this essay is LLM-slop, then please, explain.
In fact, I can go further:
https://www.themotte.org/post/1701/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/302888?context=8#context
https://www.themotte.org/post/1701/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/302842?context=8#context
https://www.themotte.org/post/1701/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/302567?context=8#context
Or one can simply look up everything I've ever said about euthanasia on this forum:
https://www.themotte.org/search/comments/?sort=new&q=author%3Aself_made_human%20euthanasia&t=all
You will find what I hope is extremely strong evidence of me formulating and discussing similar views months/years back, often with identical wording. Short of video-taping myself while writing each and every comment, there can be no stronger proof.
Total blockades and a lack of local ressources does tend to hamper economic growth.
I'm not about to defend Hamas, but if you were a Gazan businessman in the 90s, there really isn't a lot you could do when trade is functionally impossible.
Can't buy machines for industry, couldn't even export the production, tourism is a no go, can't even have 3G cell towers or any sort of proper internet so no weird internet business.
It's a prison. The inmates are making shanks and trading cigarettes. As you would expect.
The only meaningful difference in a protracted civil conflict is mountains.
America has a ton of motivated political irregulars of many political stripes, and loads of impractical terrain not far from farmland.
You could run a guerilla for a very long time if you wanted to and had enough civilian support. And that has actually happened many times in American history. With extremely bloody outcomes.
You are a fool to think Americans can't be driven crazy enough to be the men in black pyjamas when that shit happened many times in a small scale up and including within living memory.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
· Edited 1hr ago
So... what, you're saying that people have a responsibility to prove to you that they're not secretly cackling demons?
Do you realise that universalising this attitude results in civil war?
Is anyone looking at making a Chat GPT5 analysis? I don't want to preempt anything, but the results seem underwhelming.
Some people seem to put a premium on its usability though ('it does what you tell it to do').
Edit: All sorts of memes and squabbling going on over at /r/singularity
P-Necromancer
2hr ago
The common European value system says that basically to a first approximation there should not be a legal way to kill people (and to more detailed approximations we can begrudgingly haggle over exceptions like self-defence against someone who tries to kill you first)
And defensive war, right? The vast majority of Europe maintains a military and they don't arm them with tasers. Indeed, if you listen to their rhetoric regarding, say, a Russian invasion, it doesn't seem like that willingness to kill is 'begrudging' in the slightest. If it's truly a matter of value systems rather than practicality (war, you might argue, is more dangerous than random attacks perpetrated by individuals, but that's not an argument from values), what set of values afford nations the right to preemptively arm themselves to facilitate lethal self defense, but deny that right to individuals?
I have custom instructions that specifically tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in conversation with me. As the screenshots attest, it doesn't give a single fuck regardless of the model. In a way, it's actually gotten worse, because when I first put that there it usually listened.
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