domain:pedestrianobservations.com
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
8m ago
You'll just have to take my word for it, I'm afraid.
As far as I'm concerned, the most compelling reason to not worry too much about anything but the most-blatant usage of LLMs is that it is almost impossible to tell. There are obviously hints, but they are noisy ones. Anyone who opts to be careful can get away with it easily. About 70% of our effort-posts, if posted on Reddit, would immediately face accusations of being AI. Even things written in, say, 2020.
I am deeply annoyed by implicit accusations of cheating by generating even a substantial portion of my work with AI, or worse, trying to disguise and launder LLM-usage. I consider even the weaker claims that I use LLMs to help me write to be as farcical as accusing SS of being an anti-semite. For once in my life, like him, I'd go "yeah? And?".
(This is not a personal attack on you, I know we have probably irreconcilable differences of opinion, but you're one of the "LLM-skeptics" here who is open to alternative arguments and willing to engage in proper debate. My blood pressure doesn't rise when talking to you, and I'm grateful for that)
I've already shared screenshots. I would even share the very first draft, which I was writing in the text box as a response here. This post is from 4 hours back, and about an hour before I submitted the final essay. I think that's a sufficient amount of time to write said essay from scratch. I can't fake the time stamps without a time machine, and even GPT-5 can't build those yet. I think it's the version in one of the Gemini 2.5 screenshots, but god only knows at this point. I'm not kidding about staying up still almost 7 am.
If after that much time and hard work, I face such concerns, then what can I even say? I bother now both because I'm definitely not getting any sleep, and so I have something to link to if this happens again.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17m ago
In that case I have no choice but to concede. Actual gorilla warfare would have the Japs on the run.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
19m ago
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.
That's still deontology. How did you decide who gets to do the "managing"? You think that's based on raw numbers of successes and failures, or assetions of authority deciding to crush your supposedly beloved principle of autonomy under it's boot? If the system worked the way you describe, we'd be living in ancap insurance-ocracy, not what we have today.
If you were offered the opportunity to remove 40 IQ points and half your lifespan, would that help in any way? Is there a particular reason the status-quo is privileged?
I didn't say that we shouldn't seek that kind of power. I'm not arguing that it's bad. I'm arguing that it's irrelevant to the moral question I posed.
The question of whether a morally good human life can be found in merely entertaining one's self does not seem like one that's particularly changed by the intelligence of the human being in question. Whether you live to 40 or 80 or 200 does not seem to have any bearing on it.
I understood you to be suggesting that something about posthuman entertainments would change the nature of the answer - that perhaps it would be bad for you or me to spend our lives self-amusing with video games, but that it might be good for us to spend our lives self-amusing with video games, if we were much more intelligent or powerful.
I'm willing to entertain the possibility, but I think you need to spell out the difference for me. Why would that make any difference?
My moral intuitions, at least, are that it wouldn't make much difference. To take a fictional example: in the setting Exalted, the gods occupy themselves by playing the Games of Divinity, which appear to be extremely entertaining and may be contributing to the gods' quality of life. Nonetheless my intuition is that the Games are contemptible, or that by choosing to amuse themselves in this way (especially when they might otherwise be engaged in other tasks, such as repairing or improving Creation, or caring for their mortal followers) the gods are in some way moral failures. The vastly superior power, knowledge, and immortality of the gods does not seem to redeem the Games, at least to me. So if I consider a scenario in which we were the gods with the super-games, it seems similar to me.
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.
A few problems with this statement:
- It wasn't seen as a failure, if there was no punishment
- The governments don't run on Open Source. If euthanasia was legalized with the intention of lowering healthcare costs, even if based completely on the own initiative of the patient, it's still meets the criteria for a systemic failure. However, without access to all communications and private conversations of all public officials involved in the decision, proving it will be impossible, and so your request is unreasonable.
- You should at least provide a plausible explanation of how these doctors came up with the idea to offer euthanasia in these cases, that doesn't condemn the system. My most mundane one is that they got a pamphlet telling them to shill it, so they shilled it. That's still a systemic failure.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
26m ago
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.
phailyoor
26m ago
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.
Also I hope I'm not coming off wrong here in my comments, I don't mean anything to be negative towards you, I think you are cool, I'm just a huge huge AI hater.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
28m 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
29m ago
oh no, I've gone to great lengths to make sure I always turn autocorrect off.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
32m ago
Actual gorilla warfare
I do love autocorrect sometimes.
phailyoor
52m 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
58m 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
1hr 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
1hr 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
1hr 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.
I didn't decide to do anything at all. I'm talking about an existing system, which was created over decades by people with far more degrees and alphabets after their name. Give me ten years, maybe 20,before I get there.
It is obvious to me that even attempting to frame the system-as-it-exists as exclusively deontological or utilitarian/consequentialist is at least partially a category error. There are a lot of sticky fingers in that pie.
What I am advocating for is a better system overall. I think the existing system is okay. Not great, not terrible. Hence the critique.
Would it surprise you to find out that I would actually prefer to live there? One of the many reasons I dream of moving State-side is because it's the closest any country has ever come to embodying those aspirations.
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