domain:badcyber.com
celluloid_dream
3m ago
Is there so much of a difference between a pet tiger that could maul you if you accidentally trigger its prey drive, and a volatile drugged-up gangster who thinks you were chatting up his girl?
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
9m ago
Because I read DeepSeek's 2024 paper.
Shrike
13m ago
Man, don't shoot the messenger here.
Ha! No, like I said, that's definitely not my ethos. But I hear ya.
Either way, the thing is that the rule against killing is, again to a first approximation, fairly absolute; and to someone who actually believes in an absolute rule, asserting that you actually want to break it in a fairly broad special case is not persuasive.
Sure, this makes sense. And of course Americans often don't believe in this at all (even when it comes to executions and the like).
Can you muster the theory of mind to understand that some people actually believe that there are no "bad guys" who it is a good thing to kill?
Yes. And I think you're right, there's an incommensurability problem that plausibly is only worked out on civilizational timescales.
I'm not so convinced that they are strongly correlated at all - East Asia has ubiquitous AC but no guns and an atrocious free-speech situation compared to Europe as well, Russia flip-flops but at least intermittently had quite liberal gun laws with no relation to its AC or speech situation.
I am also not convinced on the correlation, but I will note that I think civilizations are very different and a causal chain that exists in some cultures may not exist in other cultures at all. Sometimes just the idea that something is true makes it so.
I also suspect Europe's free-speech situation is, at least in some respects and specifically in some places, about as bad or perhaps even worse than Russia's – it looks like England might be in some ways worse than Russia, arresting 12,000 people in 2023 while Russia detained about 20,000 people since 2022 as per this 2024 article as part of crackdowns on anti-war speech (note that these don't measure convictions, and of course note also that Russia has nearly three times the population, but also that the article I pulled was focused on the Russian anti-war crackdown and might not measure people taken in for other views.)
Either way, the heat death figures you refer to always seemed fairly cooked to me - Eurocrats have an incentive to inflate them to support the climate change narrative, while the US figure seems pretty inappropriately small for its burgeoning homeless population.
I think it's pretty rare for ~healthy adults to die from heat stroke (some of these numbers might be due to aging European demographics) and a lot of the American homeless are in pretty temperate places like California. I believe US cities generally have lots of places for homeless people to get out of the cold, or ways for them to travel to more temperate regions. If I had to guess, most exposure deaths among the homeless involve drugs of some kind. But that's a guess.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
14m ago
Concealed carry isn’t about freaking people out.
It got popular in the 70s and 80s as part of the broader political struggle. Liberal, urban states adopted stricter policies and rural ones looked for ways to signal their opposition. Revoking old concealed-carry bans was one option.
Arguments about “not marking yourself as a target” or “strategic ambiguity” are secondary.
roystgnr
29m ago
Try to not typical-mind as much.
I do, but I also try to be charitable, and the idea that you want to win a knife fight with an unarmed tackle wouldn't have passed that test even if it had occurred to me.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
31m ago
One of the biggest sources of illegal guns is parked cars.
I'd be curious what fraction of guns left in parked cars are left their because their owners can't legally keep them on their person where they've parked --- bars (depending on state), private property that disallows carrying, etc. I'm not going to blindly use that to push for legalizing carry everywhere (honestly, probably not my preference), but the numbers would at least be interesting.
Corvos
32m ago
He’s saying that someone with a gun could kill you at any moment without even trying. The same is not true of, say, a rubber duck. It’s natural to be a lot more nervous around one than the other, even if the owner has not yet demonstrated ill intent or stupidity.
this is distinct from intelligence
I disagree, it is not distinct, it is integeral. What is the value that a human equipment operator (or any other "intelligence" for that matter) adds over a machine carrying out a set of scripted movements if not the ability to react and adapt on the fly?
Tell me do you want your "self driving car" to plow into the back of a stopped vehicle because it was programmed to drive south on [route x] at [speed] for [distance], or would you prefer that it percieve and react to the obstacle by applying the brakes and/or going around? Which of those options do you think is the more "intelligent" of the two?
Supah_Schmendrick
36m ago
Come on, be charitable. It's not a perfect analogy. The point I'm trying to make is that it's a dangerous thing to be carrying around in public. It does require volition, but volition may be influenced by rage, or alcohol, or psychosis, or mental illness, or one bad day.
But that's a significant difference! You've moved the goalposts from "that's something that can kill if you don't concentrate on it sufficiently" (untrue, but would strongly favor your position a la "ultrahazardous activities") to the true argument of "but people are sometimes idiots, impaired, or negligent" which is a major shift with significant consequences!
Im sure with perfect adherence to a special diet plan you are correct, but as someone in the medical field I’m sure you’re aware there’s a wide gap between recommended use and typical use of anything. Typical vegan diets are not healthy for kids, and typical vegan diets are what the modal vegan kid is eating. Studies show the typical vegan kid is stunted, and that’s a bad thing.
It’s not good for the elderly either, where veganism is associated with risk for bone fractures, sarcopenia, anemia, and depression.
Maybe all of this could be eliminated with the perfect vegan diet. Maybe Real Veganism Has Never been Tried. I don’t really care, I only care about what empirical works for most people.
It's a curiosity because without principles, what makes someone choose any particular side to begin with?
And I’m answering: familial loyalties, suspicions of whether their tribe will benefit, aesthetic preferences, etc.
Who is having their goods delivered? Whose fault is it that what is happening is happening? Macroeconomics and the like are so nebulous, unreadable and unproven that you will find people’s opinions on the effect of price controls is strongly determined by their loyalties, and not the reverse.
I am come from an upper-class family, I went to the appropriate schools in the UK, I read the Soectator, etc. You could pretty easily predict my views on the merits of taxation and on the usefulness of the Laffer curve, my voting affiliation, my views on fox-hunting, on globalisation, all from those pieces of information.
Then Brexit happened and there was a big alignment but it’s amazing how you can predict people’s carefully worked out opinions on the results of certain policies once you know their class, gender, age and job.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
56m ago
I would naively expect it to help, if only by making charging and sentencing easier.
Oregon tried that decriminalization experiment with drug possession. But it was hideously confounded by fentanyl, and I didn’t find any studies from the recriminalization last year.
Maybe there’s something in gang violence stats? Police have a longstanding interest in disarming gangs. It should be possible to tell whether changes in general gun policy, or even in enforcement, actually reduce gang shootings.
wayfarer
57m ago
define an axis along which we can work to evaluate both animals and algorithms
trying to evaluate intelligence on one axis is going to take you nowhere, as made clear by your claimed results
perceptivity + reactivity spectrum
this is distinct from intelligence
and if asked "which is smarter, Grok, Claude, Gemini, or an orangutan?" I am going to pick the orangutan every time.
that just proves your intelligence definition is bad and not worth using
wayfarer
1hr ago
It's almost as if there must be some intermediate layer in between.
Can you explain what claimed layer is there?
After all, if all the LLM is doing is predict the next most likely word
that is with so called temperature parameter set to 0, in practice typically is set to LLM predict next likely token
how do you get a chess engine or python script out of that?
by training it on large pile of text first
anti_dan
1hr ago
Imagine if Nazis kept co-opting gun clubs and local chambers of commerce. Perhaps that would help you see the trouble with this kind of excuse making.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1hr ago
About a quarter of Europeans live in a country where assisted suicide is now legal.
Assisted suicide is not morally analysed or perceived as the assistant killing the recipient by those who support it.
How can you avoid exceptions? Should the enforcers of a gun ban have guns?
I think the answer many would give is "in an ideal world, no". Unarmed British police are admired all over the continent.
This seems like an important one, right?
Really, no. Germany and Austria have seen a lot of lethal bladed-weapon attacks by our dear immigrants in recent years, but sentiment to the effect of "if only a victim/bystander could have killed the assailant first" was almost never voiced as far as I could see. (Fantasies took the shape of overwhelming/tacking/disarming the attacker.) The value system is really that different. Try to not typical-mind as much.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1hr ago
They can just be mistaken about whether they should use a gun in self-defense and end up killing someone anyway.
The victim was named McGlockton and was killed by a ... you know the answer. Incredibly unfortunate nominative determinism.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
There is an argument that gun advocates make that gun rights are necessary to keep the government in check. I generally like this argument, and think it is demonstrated by the level of free speech rights in places like Great Britain where guns have been successfully banned for most private "citizens".
I do not think that UK libel laws have much if anything to do with their restrictions on gun ownership.
More broadly, I think that the idea to use guns to keep the government in check was fine in 1800 but today is just laughable. Since world war one, the wartime capabilities of states and what US citizens are allowed to own have greatly diverged. How is your semi AR15 with a ten rounds mag going to fare against a predator drone or a tank? In the very best case, you would be fighting a protracted war against the federal government. If you win, it looks like Mao winning his civil war, if you lose, it looks like Hamas in Gaza.
Of course, on the basis of "things should not be illegal if they are fun, even if they are not necessary", we can legalize further things.
For example, I imagine that hand grenades are much fun. Or landmines. Watch the stupid coyotes explode when they trespass on your property. Contact poisons are fun. Radioactive substances are fun. So is building your own nuclear reactor. And if we really want to counterbalance the federal military advantage, why not allow citizens to start their own nuclear weapons program? Provided they are not minors, mentally retarded or have demonstrated poor impulse control, of course.
In a country where most people hunt their dinner, guns are a necessity. But this is not sustainable in any but the most sparsely settled areas.
Different people naturally have different ideas about the tradeoffs between usefulness (which includes being fun) and danger. Some want to ban any knives with blades longer than 3cm. Some would be fine if you could just buy hand grenades at the hardware store.
For the most part, people agree with the level of regulation around cars, which are immensely practical in most areas but also account for a huge fraction of accidental manslaughters. So you need a driver's license, your vehicle has to be designed according to certain standards and get regular safety inspections, and you need to obey all lot of different rules while on a public road. This is all very bothersome and expensive, but it also keeps these manslaughter cases on a manageable level, compared to a counterfactual level where everyone could build their own vehicle and try to learn to drive it unsupervised.
My estimate is that in most of Europe (e.g. Germany), getting a hunting license (including the rights to own rifles and a pistol, but not the right to bear them outside your home except when on hunting trips), plus the costs of a gun safe is still somewhat cheaper than the costs of a driver's license. The costs to get licensed to own a gun for sports shooting are lower (no need to demonstrate knowledge of tracking down an injured paper target), but also might require a few years of membership in a shooting club. Few people get the license to carry loaded weapons in public, typically this is restricted to on-duty employees of security companies.
wayfarer
1hr ago
Fact is that adapability and agentic behavior are key things to consider when discussing whether a robot can replace a human worker
are you sure?
you do not either to replace human workers - combine harvesters replaced vast amount of human workers, without really having either of that
LLM that would hallucinate far less and be better at following orders (with no agentic behavior whatsoever, though I guess adaptability would be be needed) would allow to do the same to programmers
Claude or Grok has suddenly gone "FOOM" and turned into Skynet
if we assume bizarre increase in intelligence of LLM then agentic behavior is absolutely not needed - you would only need human to prompt them once (and surely there are jokers doing "turn into Skynet and murder all humans") several times a day
An LLM on its own is little more than a tool that turns words into math, but you can combine it with a second algorithm to do things like take in a block of text and do some distribution analysis to compute the most probable next word...
that seems quite unusual definition of LLM - who else is using it?
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
1hr ago
Muppet side-eye.png
celluloid_dream
1hr ago
Come on, be charitable. It's not a perfect analogy. The point I'm trying to make is that it's a dangerous thing to be carrying around in public. It does require volition, but volition may be influenced by rage, or alcohol, or psychosis, or mental illness, or one bad day.
Humans are fallible. They can just be mistaken about whether they should use a gun in self-defense and end up killing someone anyway. The difference between justified and unjustified can be seconds.
and humans are stupid. They do incredibly dumb shit (warning, death) like shoot each other over literal garbage.
Thoroughlygruntled
1hr ago
sig owners shift uncomfortably in their seats
The problem that commentary was not even interesting, but dealing with fiction invented there. Propped only by fake or worthless credentials.
More options
Context Copy link