domain:link.springer.com
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7m ago
AI girlfriends (and boyfriends) have already one-shotted some of the more mentally vulnerable of the population.
Talking to an AI feels like trying to tickle yourself. I don’t get it at all.
When I was a kid I used to be somewhat surprised that there were older people who had never played a video game, had no interest in ever trying a video game, they were perfectly fine with never playing one, etc. And I was like, how can that be? How can you not even be curious? I suppose video games just got popular at a point in their lives when their brains were no longer plastic enough or something. And I suppose I’ve hit that point with new technology now as well.
I can’t enjoy talking to an AI when I know that I’m in control and it’s trying to “please” me. Even if I told it, “oh by the way, try and add some variance, maybe get moody sometimes and don’t do what I ask”, the knowledge that at the end of the day I’m still the one in control ruins it. I suppose if we imagine a scenario where the AI is so realistic that I never get suspicious, and you’re able to trick me into thinking I’m talking to a real human, then sure, ex hypothesi there’s nothing to distinguish it from a human at that point and I would enjoy it. But short of that? Not for me.
There was a Sirling-era episode of the Twilight Zone where a bank robber died and went to Heaven. Angel tells him that he’s made it, he can have anything he wants for all eternity. So the dude lives out all sorts of wish fulfillment scenarios, winning big at gambling, beautiful women, some bank heists, etc. But he gets bored fast, says something is missing. There’s no danger to any of it, no bite, he wins every time. Angel says “well you can set whatever parameters you want. We can make it so there’s a 50% chance of your next robbery failing”. Guy says “no no, it’s still not the same. Look, I don’t think I’m cut out for Heaven. I’m a scumbag. I want to go to the other place”. Angel says, “I think you’ve been confused. This IS the other place.”
That’s what AI “relationships” feel like to me.
quiet_NaN
9m ago
Seems like LLMs can induce all kinds of failure modes in humans. Turns out that telling people what they want to hear will trap some of them.
Personally, I would prefer it very much if the shoggoth stayed on its fucking side of the uncanny valley, thankyouverymuch. Duct-taping a cute anime girl on the giant inscrutable matrix does exactly the opposite.
Even if THIS is where AI stops improving, we just created a massive filter, an evolutionary bottleneck that basically only the Amish are likely to pass through.
I think that we will be fine, eventually, PRNS. Life finds a way. The bubonic plague killed 70-80% in some places, and yet we survived.
People have long predicted doom for every tech and medium of expression which rears its head. Role playing games? Satanism. First person shooters? Will turn kids into violent psychopaths. Industrialization? Will turn wars into horrors beyond our ancestors wildest nightmares. TV? Will turn people into idiots. Social media? Will make us more isolated in real life.
(Okay, one or two of these warnings might have been correct, in retrospect.)
In a way, it is leveling the playing field. (Whole bag of not-too-carefully examined assumptions incoming in 3, 2, 1.) Women seem to be more into smut (i.e. narratives, situations, characters), while men are more into visual porn (i.e. tits). So far, LLMs have thus probably generally had more success with romancing women (also because from my understanding, "I want my partner to offer unconditional emotional support whenever I need it" is more of a feminine thing, and something which LLMs can obviously do great). If Musk now gives tits to the LLMs, more men will fall for them. He would not even need to spend a fortune on video generation, because most male fantasies are likely to involve the same elements. Few men will want to watch the anime girl painting a fence white while wearing a orchid blouse and then complain that the blouse shown was clearly heliotrope instead.
I am not entirely unsympathetic to the idea of regulating AI partners a bit, though, just like we regulate other addictive stuff, inconsistent as we often are.
Also, this reinforces my impression that rather than being on the forefront of the AI race, xAI is basically picking up the applications which are too icky for the big AI firms.
If you allow me a metaphor, xAI might not be the first company to develop surgical steel, but they clearly try to be the first company to use surgical steel to craft oversized butt-plugs.
Such concerns over women leaning left despite trans-issues (that is, transwomen issues, because almost no one cares about transmen choosing to live life on a higher difficulty setting) has the vibe of "Democrats Are the Real Racists."
I've commented before there is many a horseshoe and overlap between progressives and mainstream conservatives with regard to women's Wonderfulness when it comes to restricting male freedoms and protections to maintain and/or expand female freedoms and protections.
To the extent conservative maps to Republican in countries like the US—and progressive to Democrats—progressives have, relatively-speaking, concrete things to offer women that conservatives don't. Examples that include, but are not limited to, income/wealth transfers and affirmative action ("DEI") come to mind. I say "relatively" because mainstream conservatives are largely but progressives driving the speed limit RE: Women and non-Asian minority Lives Mattering More. They just sometimes haggle over the degree.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
12m ago
My brother in Christ, you shouldn't be arguing against gooner superstimuli while also watching YouTube Shorts!
The gooner stuff is probably less bad because you can't easily get away with watching it while out and about.
Save yourself, before it's too late.
hydroacetylene
14m ago
You think this is bad, wait until AI can make realistic toddler robots.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
15m ago
Poison, believe it or not, also projected authenticity - they really were into that glam rock party lifestyle - which is why Bret Michaels remained a celebrity despite gradually turning into Janice from the Muppets. But when you get sucked up into the music machine you look soulless in comparison to 'authentic' acts like Nirvana and The Strokes (which in a way is just the same machine in the bust part of the cycle.)
All of them are artists. Blackpink are artists. The Monkees were artists. They will look soulless anyway when coopted by the machine. And while I'll admit I don't know a lot about Creed, I'm pretty sure they were thoroughly coopted by the machine, just based on the radio play they got back then and how much everyone complained about it.
Tree
19m ago
Another hopelessly confused feminist who cannot express a coherent thought. Women like her have been indulged, coddled and lied to their whole lives. As you note, almost subconsciously, she senses that something is not adding up (“the lingering shadow “, “performative reverence”, “dimmed”, “faint echo”).
Echoes of the white lies she has been fed, of her incomparable value, of her oppression, and that she can have it all, and do anything men can, and better. The problem is not that she’s elon musk and people value her too much and don’t value ‘her for her’. It’s that people lie to her about how valuable she really is, like an AA hiring panel, or a loving parent.
Because the male body has little to no intrinsic value
This argument has to die. Nature itself thinks men are as valuable as women. Slightly prefers them even, at 1.05 to 1. Most rawlsian babies would prefer the male body, it’s the practical choice. Most parents do too. And if you’re founding a city, every romulus in his right mind would choose a hundred men over a hundred women. Women can always be procured. A weapon is as valuable as an incubator. Even more so in the modern world, where the incubators are faulty, and we’re all tools.
MotteInTheEye
19m ago
If there is some non-trivial amount of work to re-review each regulation, then a balanced budget would also impose limits on at least the number of regulations. It would be harder to account for the impact of a regulation's scope though. Maybe if it was coupled with constitutionally-backed standing to sue if you are affected by a regulation which doesn't meet strict scrutiny for not being over-broad.
Coincidentally I recently stumbled upon an extremely creepy series of shorts (created using AI, for maximum irony) about humanity repeatedly extinguishing itself by overuse and over-reliance on technology.
Eh. I don't think this is necessarily catastrophic
Up until now I'd say there were probably options to help turn the tide around. This is basically a black hole from which no unprepared mind can likely escape.
Look at my Total Fertility Rate dawg, we're never having children
Eh. I don't think this is necessarily catastrophic, but we better get those artificially wombs up and running. If AGI can give us sexbots and concubines, then it can also give us nannies.
Edit: If I was Will Stancil and this version of Grok came for my bussy, I wouldn't be struggling very hard.
FtSoA
32m ago
I assure you that you have no idea what you're talking about. They get plenty of applicants for the FSOT.
Also, a member of the Foreign Service gets their life heavily subsidized when overseas. It's one of the most competitive entry level jobs out there. https://old.reddit.com/r/foreignservice/comments/1dtl17q/pipeline_funnel_numbers/
Plenty of brilliant people make career decisions based on considerations other than monetary compensation as the primary concern, especially if an early career choice is also considered a good stepping stone for a pivot. (Do you know how much academics make?)
A number of prestigious government careers have a model where effectively it's deferred career compensation, and/or a unique job you can't do elsewhere.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
37m ago
Likewise, in studies of the speech patterns in British English, Peter Trudgill observed that more working-class women spoke the standard dialect than men.[47] Farida Abu-Haidar performed a similar study in Baghdad of prestige in the Arabic language, after which she concluded that in Baghdadi Arabic, women are more conscious of prestige than are men.[48] Other areas in which this has been observed include New Zealand and Guangdong in China.[49][50] As explanation, Trudgill suggests that for men, there is covert prestige associated with speaking the working-class dialect.[6] In fact, he observed men claiming to speak a less prestigious dialect than that which they actually spoke. According to this interpretation then, "women's use of prestige features simply conforms to the ordinary sociolinguistic order, while men deviate from what is expected."[51] Elizabeth Gordon, in her study of New Zealand, suggested instead that women used higher prestige forms because of the association of sexual immorality with lower-class women.[52] Whatever the cause, women across many cultures seem more likely than men to modify their speech towards the prestige dialect.
The same factors that apply to language may apply to politics.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
37m ago
It certainly looks promising, but looking at the reviews suggest it's not as polished as SwiftKey, especially in swipe typing and autocorrect. SwiftKey has a very useful clipboard manager I can't do with too, and I'm not particularly fussed about the privacy concerns.
AvocadoPanic
38m ago
would Spain be better if the Spaniards believed, to this day, that God and St James chose them to militarily reconquer thé land for Christendom?
Yes, it would be much better.
England be better if the English believed, to this day, that God chose them to build a global empire to spread Christian civilization and Protestant values to the world.
FtSoA
40m ago
Man, my APUSH class included a lot of leftwing stuff, like reading a good chunk of A People's History of the United States. (And it was not because the teacher was a real lefty or anything--he was very focused on doing what we needed to pass.)
But in general I'd say everything you described was "classic center-left polite society civic religion of the professional class" and not "classical liberalism," even if one can still see the archeological roots. And then I have no idea exactly how bad it's gotten since, but all signs point to "not great" on matters of both economics and the Culture War.
I do think it's oversold how much the Founders got wrong and undersold how much they got right--particularly regarding a limited government as a strong guiding principle. Post-FDR, that's been out the window with only a bit of neoliberalism to at least focus on economic efficiency.
That's a pretty good collection you have going. I'd love to have the ~full U.S. inventory for WWI and WWII at some point (if a replica in some cases).
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
41m ago
I originally thought "emancipation" was just acting as a floating signifier, an applause light. But she actually does define it and her form of "freedom" in a few places, if not in terms that are very concrete themselves.
It touches upon the very essence of what it means to be free. I remain loyal to the feminist promise, however battered or dimmed, of genuine emancipation for women. This vision is not content to merely manage or glorify womanhood, but to transcend its limitations altogether, to be more than a body assigned a function, to move beyond the scripts of sex and tradition, and to claim the dignity of self-authorship. I never wanted merely to be accepted as a woman; I wanted to be free.
Freedom is not safety. It is the fragile space in which one may choose what binds.
To be free is not to become a better woman; it is to cease being one, politically.
But the first and last of these are impossible, and for a feminist, self contradictory. One might reasonably imagine a world where skin color failed to matter aside from one's household sunscreen budget, but a world in which one's sex doesn't matter is not one populated with humans. And to be a feminist is to be concerned with the interests of women, politically.
The second is also impossible for most. At the trivial level, one must eat and drink, one must obtain protection from the elements, and one has no choice about that. Further, one's role is limited by both social and biological realities. Oddly she scorns the people who deny this the hardest -- the trans activists.
So, she seems to be asking for something impossible and which men also don't have. It is no surprise she is disappointed.
vorpa-glavo
44m ago
I wonder if some of the rise in transmen isn't mediated by trying to find a secular alternative to this phenomenon.
Maybe autistic girls who really have trouble succeeding as women, find it far easier to be a short guy than to continue living with the weight of expectations of womanhood. The fact that surgeries and hormones "destroy their body" ends up being a benefit, not a drawback.
vorpa-glavo
50m ago
The people who think those on benefits have it easy have never had to live in poverty.
Yeah, as a child of upper middle class parents, it was a bit of a system shock years ago when I truly grokked that people had radically different backgrounds.
My college girlfriend broke down crying when she first saw my childhood home, because I "lived in a mansion" (I didn't) while her parents had been forced to sell her childhood home because they couldn't afford it, and one of the members of my Esperanto club was the first disabled man I ever interacted with at length and it was kind of heartbreaking seeing the squalor a person my age could live in even with supportive friends and family and disability payments.
FtSoA
51m ago
The problem is almost never that an agency outlives the original purpose, like horses becoming largely irrelevant.
The problem is that the original purpose is inflated, particularly in a regulatory way. But that's usually not literally the agency's fault. It's usually a combo the Congress and the courts, and/or a presidential initiative. So the Department of Transportation is forever, horses or not. "Do they have good policies?" is the real question and a harder one to answer.
We have the system we have because "we" "wanted" it. Manual reapproval would be very hard to even design--look at how there's gridlock for the budget. Scaling that up won't help us get an effective limited government.
John_Doe_Fletcher
anarcho-heretic, Quokkit guy
53m ago
FUTO Keyboard has this as well, plus swipe typing, minus Microsoft selling your input data. Worth checking out. I can just long-press H and the em-dash is the first symbol option.
hydroacetylene
54m ago
Elon could at least conceivably give up all his wealth, his titles, his positions of symbolic authority, and start from zero. Because the male body has little to no intrinsic value, it's easier for men to become a "blank slate". But when your body itself is the source of this overbearing value? That's a bit harder to rid yourself of.
The lindy way for high status men to do this is to enter a monastery(and honestly, while I'm not expecting Elon to do this, it'd be the least surprising tech billionaire). This option is also open to women; both Christian and Buddhist monasteries have convents to go with them.
god_from_celegans
56m ago
One idea is to detect slop, by looking at how surprising and compressible an essay is. Einsteins theory of relativity would have been surprising for an LLM
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I’d agree very strongly with balanced budget amendments as good. But I don’t see any way to slow the growth of regulatory agencies other than having the government — be it executive or legislative — have to manually re-approve the agency (with the default being no) at regular intervals will at least allow for review and revision and avoid mission creep. If we have a department of horse welfare in 2025, it doesn’t need to exist anymore because few people need horses for transportation.
vorpa-glavo
1hr ago
She correctly perceives that when people (well, men, at least) think about men, the properties they notice in order of salience are "web developer, white, middle class, male, father...", something like that. But when people think about her, the ordering is "woman, web developer, white, middle class...". Her body is what people want, it's what they're seeking; or at least, this is always necessarily a lurking suspicion.
I agree with some of your points, but I'm not sure if I fully agree here.
While the idea that "men do, women are" is accepted as a truism in some online circles, and I even think there are probably evopsych forces pushing in that direction, I think there are plenty of women who find fulfilling communities, hobbies, etc. where the fact that they are the "scare resource" in reproduction isn't really that relevant one way or another.
Consider Youtube channels like this one for scrapbooking, or this one for miniatures. Both women are just disembodied hands, and yet I know people like my mom (who does scrapbooking and homemade cards) and an older family friend of ours (who made elaborate miniature dollhouses when her health was better) love these kinds of channels, watching them obsessively for ideas to try out.
I also have several lesbian friends, and they tend to have crafty hobbies that they love. One (whose day job is as a web developer) is an amazing seamstress, and has won cosplay contest awards for historical accuracy (due to her obsessively deep diving into Chinese clothing history for a costume she did.) One loves crochet and once made dozens of crochet stuffed animals (including several quite large ones) to give away for a party. Both of them seem to be pretty satisfied with their lot in life, most of the time, and neither their professions nor their hobbies seem to be affected very much by the fact that they're the scarce resource biologically.
Now, I grant that all of these are female-dominated hobbies that probably appeal to a "people-oriented" personality more, but it really isn't that hard in the modern day to have a friend group consisting of almost no straight guys, which has the practical effect of reducing the salience of being the scarce resource biologically to practically zero.
This suggests that the problem will self-extinguish as pillarization results in parallel status hierarchies in red and blue America.
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