domain:youtube.com
hydroacetylene
6m ago
Well yes, and as someone not employed by the district I take this as evidence that district bureaucrats should be shot and district functions sold to vendors, pour encourager les-autres.
Quantumfreakonomics
11m ago
There job is to make sure the district is eligible for funding and doesn’t get sued. These are much more important functions to the district than educating the children.
HereAndGone
13m ago
He wasn't a school dropout, he wasn't (previously) in trouble, and he wasn't ugly. Guy who's doing an apprenticeship, is reasonably smart and averagely good-looking can find a girlfriend (I would say "particularly in bumfuck nowhere Utah") if he wanted a girlfriend. No, he's not going to get hot liberal college chick, but "conventional Mormon girl from lower middle-class background" is not out of his range.
If he was living with a boyfriend-turned-transitioning male to female, then he's gay or bi and not looking for a (cis) het girl.
HereAndGone
18m ago
having his deer rifle on his seat still loaded
Sounds like the kind of Stupid Human Trick that ends up with "and the guy was shot by his own rifle" that may engender amusement in those who think hunting is immoral.
Even more surprising for him to be hired; the district claims to have done a background check on him; you would think this would result in them finding out he was not authorized to work and not being hired.
Depending on how well the vetting was done, I guess. There was a story about someone working in a crèche here who had all the relevant clearance for working with kids and still got caught on CCTV being physically abusive. And I remember years ago when I was in third level education where the college hired someone who later turned out to be on the run from charges of assault in Sweden.
So even good checks can have someone slip through the cracks, and maybe this guy used the fact that he was an immigrant to cover up any gaps in the background check? (e.g. "Yeah, I am waiting for the government office back home to get that paperwork, you know the kind of delays that happen").
The story sounds odd, though. Wikipedia has a scanty article up, and it says that he was working as school principal back in 2012. So he was in the US presumably on some kind of sports scholarship, graduated, got (it would seem) a fairly high level of education - and then started work? But he was supposed to be finally deported in 2024? I don't understand what was going on there.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
23m ago
You don't have that crypto in the car with you any more than I have the cash in my bank account in my phone, that crypto is actually in some coinbase server somewhere and unless it's Monero, it's very much traceable. It's not the same. If you had a Ledger with you, that would be analogous.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
36m ago
This music is much the same, there is no purpose and it doesn't go anywhere.
What do you mean? Why does music need a purpose? It just needs to sound good. A purpose and meaning are optional.
Now the lyrics, when they're AI, can have a samey, obvious vibe. But that's just the lyrics.
HereAndGone
37m ago
Also, maybe I am dumb but I still don't understand why it helped the AI that there was a manual override.
Yeah, this seems to be the pertinent part:
It can select an hour when an operator will press a key because their relative sits on a boat that will move through a strait the next morning.
But, uh, Dan didn't? Or at least that didn't seem to factor in to his actions about going for manual override? What the system seems to be doing is "how far can I push? what are the triggers that will move this up to real human control? and then will the humans stop me or just accept the bullshit I give them as an explanation?"
And that seems to be what Elaine is doing, out of selfishness, self-preservation, and not wanting to admit to "I fucked up, I gave the system too much leeway way back when we were training it".
But definitely Dan did not press any keys because 'muh sister' but he went to manual override because "hold on, whoa, never saw this response before, this is above my pay grade". So either make the ferry more important and have Dan explicitly do something because "I want the ferry to get through because muh sister" or drop that bit altogether. This way, he could just ring the sister back and say "Sorry sis, ferry won't be running tomorrow because there's a technical screw-up" because there's no sense of bad outcomes if she's on the ferry.
hydroacetylene
41m ago
Catholic school, same time period-
Lot of emphasis on colonial history, very in depth on the runup to the revolutionary war. Lewis and Clark and the Louisiana purchase were triumphal statecraft. We kind of glossed over the civil war era. We learned about religious discrimination in 19th century America- the know nothings, the mormon pioneers, the need for the knights of columbus, the KKK.
Lot of emphasis on the industrial revolution. US intervention prevented the European colonizers from doing far worse things to China and Latin America than they wound up doing. Monroe doctrine, Teddy Roosevelt, USA good. The AFL, Teddy Roosevelt, Cornelius Vanderbilt were all portrayed as good guys at the same time. Intervention in WWI was sadly necessary.
The depression was emphasized, but not as much as WWII. Oh gosh WWII ate the rest of the curriculum. Patton was a good guy, Macarthur was more conflicted, the new deal was a good thing but might not have worked as well as it's thought. Straightforwards USA and Britain good, Germany and Japan bad. The soviets were portrayed as bad, but maybe a lighter shade of black than the Germans and Japanese- but still very evil.
We learned about the cold war. Not a lot about anything in specific, but USA good-commie bad. JPII's role in ending the great evil of communism was very important. That's about where it ended.
For the world in general, we learned a lot about Rome, the renaissance, and the age of exploration. There wasn't a true global focus but we probably got a lot more latin american history, especially early latin american history, than a typical public school would have.
quiet_NaN
45m ago
Indoctrination works. Reinvigorate civic indoctrination in schools.
I am not sure it does work very well. Any message which comes down officially from the school, no matter if it is about drugs, rape, abstinence, civic pride, the glory of communism or whatever is inherently uncool and cringe. Good luck competing with TikTok.
Semi-mandatory service.
This seems like a terrible idea. At its core, pressuring young people into service is fundamentally gerontocratic, democratic only in the "two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner" kind of way. I abhorred the draft when I was 16, and I am happy to say that I still abhor the idea decades later.
Besides, if you are worried about political violence, then the last thing you would want is to give a lot of people technical and psychological training in shooting other humans.
a group of capital P-atriots
This is a vacuous claim. I am sure the PBs see themselves as ultra-patriotic. Of course, different people had very different ideas about what being an American was all about, from lofty ideas about the relationship between the state and the individual over an entity who protects their god-given right to own other humans to run of the mill nationalism you find in any nation. Some would see the J6 efforts to prevent the peaceful transfer of power as quintessentially anti-American instead.
I'm busy and not going to answer this unless I do it really quickly, so here we go.
I'd rather just hear what you know, but fine.
A lot of people are clearly downvoting the idea rather than the argument; I've been perhaps too quick to assign you to this general category. Your questions scanned to me as a fairly impressively-polite phrasing of 'are you full of shit' (sincere appreciation there; it's an art) and to be blunt I just didn't experience any desire to satisfy you about that.
But I think you are appropriately calling my attention to something that I'd stopped noticing by force of habit. To wit, I'm using the term 'mutation (or 'mutational') load' in a way that is new to you and must appear very screwy. It occurs to me that I am indeed being loose with the term; I simply don't think we have better language for what I'm talking about. Most readers won't have that problem, never having heard of the concept, but you do and I apologize for not offering you more consideration.
What I'm talking about is kind of a broader sense of mutation load. Like, abstract it up a level or three; I'm not sure how many. It's a general concept, and principle, and with yesterday's post I bet you can see where I'm suggesting the pieces might be tied together. If you do have any suggestions as to what else to call this, I'm all ears. And of course the real holy grail would be a reference to a paper describing and naming it. But in the meantime I am, as it were, going to war with the army I have.
Bad times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, etc. Isn't this your overarching thesis?
I'm really glad that you called this out specifically because the answer is no. I've always chafed beneath that aphorism and part of the project of the book is to explain how it's incorrect. Unfortunately, I do not yet have a replacement which is anywhere near as pithy. Bear with me as I scratch in the dirt here, but,
- Highly-selective environments make finely-tuned creatures
- Finely-tuned creatures find new slack in their personal ecologies
- This poisoned gift may be passed down to their offspring, who are now in a less-highly-selective environment
- ...Resulting in less-finely-tuned creatures but with some cool new tricks.
- Who then take the female part in the mating game with the next finely-tuned males to arrive.
An isomorphism is indeed present between the two, but they're not quite the same thing. And "good" is of course as troublesome a concept as always, but we can't seem to help ourselves, can we?
A larger sort of synthesis is going on in human history. Finely-tuned people conquer an area populated by indigenes. Admixture occurs. The product generations are generally less-finely-tuned but contain some new beneficial adaptations as it were. The superstructure crumbles beneath the pressure of another finely-tuned people, even given all the defensive advantages of agricultural society. The system climbs higher and higher across iterations.
So looking at it that way, I think the divergence comes in line three: "Good times make weak men." Yes, but also no! Good times make new men who are better in some ways and worse in others. Then comes the winnowing. See?
You have a large number of relatively common variants in your population floating around, and as soon as you relax purifying selection on the weak alleles, your model organism/people are suddenly 50-65% less 'whatever' even in the F1 generation. I'm not a population geneticist, but I don't see how that can be possible? You're telling me that if you relax all selection and let everyone breed (and you're also telling me that all your captured animals have this trait!) a single generation is enough to wreck what you're looking at?
Less a trait than a sort of index, and... yes.
Calhoun's mouse utopia bred like gangbusters from 8 mice to 2200 without any kind of purifying selection. Shouldn't they have crashed in a generation or two?
No, I don't think so either. This was a correct objection on your part and I hope I've answered it satisfactorily in general in the comments of this chapter. Mea culpa for playing too fast and loose with my English. I don't actually expect F5 to be mostly-infertile; I was just gesturing at it as an example of the sort of odd, nebulous, systemic issue that I do expect to have popped up somewhere by that point.
Whatever behavior you're looking at (you're an animal psychologist, right?) has a significant environmental component, and living in captivity is deleterious. Plenty of animals fail to breed or exhibit other behaviors in captivity and this has nothing to do with 'catastrophic mutational load.'
Entirely correct, and I understand why you think that's at issue, but it's not. We can control for this as it were via experiments such as the one I described with pigeon eggs elsewhere.
Consanguinity/founder effects - I assume you're trapping these in a smallish area, and your starting population might be significantly related? It seems unlikely to be able to account for the early effects, maybe some of the future generations.
No comment but I applaud your sharp eyes. This doesn't bother me either.
The rest seems to circle back around.
Thank you for the rigour. Please keep it up if you don't mind, even considering that I've been a less-than-stellar host to you thus far.
Edit: Oh and @faul_sname
KingOfTheBailey
53m ago
'toaster fuckers' originated from an old meme (I want to say a 4chan greentext, but I'm actually not certain)
It was indeed a greentext:
Before internet
>i want to fuck toasters
>dont be a fucking retard
>grow upAfter internet
>I want to fuck a toaster
>find a community with 1000+ members about people wanting to fuck toasters
>fuck up your life
Earliest I found was this 2017 pic, and a 2024 repost with slightly different wording.
hydroacetylene
55m ago
Iowa isn't a swing state, democrats haven't won a statewide election there in over a decade- and that was mostly Obama's personal magic.
As an aside, it's actually crazy how much school district admins get paid, especially considering that what they mostly do is make things worse.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1hr ago
Oh, I see.
I would guess Suno's use case is the long tail of people who want bangin' music for their YouTube channel/podcast/home videos but have no idea how to license music or find someone to compose it for them.
As someone that occasionally DJs I have wanted music that hits a certain vibe but finding it on Beatport can take hours upon hours of listening. "Deep house, breathy female humming, no lyrics, sexy" is a really hard search but Suno will make you a couple in less time than it takes to listen. I may or may not use them because of quality issues but it does seem to be improving pretty quickly.
faceh
1hr ago
That last generation was the sort of thing that it used to produce more often circa V3.
Some weird distortion that spins off into eldritch horror territory as it compounds.
Which emphasizes my point that it has advanced a lot over just the last 6 months.
I really would like to try a double blind experiment on this forum to see who can still spot the AI songs.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1hr ago
Interestingly, I just noticed that the current Friday fun thread was downvoted for me. I was confused because I didn't deliberately do it, and I undid that. I can only guess that while scrolling I accidentally pressed the down arrow (I browse the motte on my phone). Maybe that's what others are doing and they don't happen to notice after the fact?
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
Bisexual men are far more common than fully-gay men, so there is a substitution effect.
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
1hr ago
I prefer Western Hestia over Japanese Hestia, at least the western version refers to her myth (the embers on her head referring to the hearth) and isn't just "generic large chested girl of ambiguous age".
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
I'm not sure "prime steer" and "heterosexual dating market" belong in the same sentence, considering a steer is definitionally castrated.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2hr ago
having a loaded deer rifle on the seat of his parked car.
Not aware of the law here: what's the legal status of illegal immigrants possessing firearms? IIRC In theory it was at least an ITAR issue for dumb reasons ("export") until the first Trump term when regular ol' guns left that list.
It's decent, not amazing and none of those would pass muster for me as a Chopin fan unfortunately, not least the second to last one which somehow has English vocals (Chopin did actually write a small amount of songs with words but they were all in Polish and not published during his lifetime)...
Still I guess if you showed these to somebody back in 2015 they'd still be rightfully amazed. Still significant work to be done, at least in replicating Chopin properly.
I'm starting to get Gell-Mann Amnesia with Suno, it does really badly according to my ears for the genres where I sort of know what "good music" is supposed to sound like and it does really well according to my ears for the genres where I don't know much about them beyond vaguely knowing what they should sound like.
Also WTF is that last generation?
striker
2hr ago
Of course it’s a possibility, and I’m sure it happens. I don’t believe it to be pervasive (here, anyway) because that would require a degree of coordination that honestly I don’t give them the credit for. It’s a small country and “everyone knows everyone” is a cliche, but there is some truth to it. There are very few leaps from me to editorial team in state broadcaster newsroom. Comes to mind: “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2hr ago
Yes, anti-draft pamphlets handed out by the Socialist Party of America (motto: "Workers of the World, Unite!").
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
2hr ago
The little ads and bits from that film are amazing! I love Conan the Librarian and Spatula City and when the little boy wins a drink from the fire hose after finding the marble in the oatmeal! I know Is have watched that every day if it had been a Saturday morning show.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2hr ago
Can't say I have.
Oh man, this reminds me of way back in the day, an infamous court case about a bunch of (I want to say gay but I'm not entirely sure) guys who got put up on charges for nailing their dicks to planks of wood, and the judge thought this was evidence of craziness, and there was some condemnation afterwards of him for being so judgemental towards adults doing consensual stuff in the privacy of their bedrooms. Because thinking that nailing your dick to a plank is not normal behaviour is so small-minded and homophobic, yes?
Yep, here's the case. Operation Spanner is even funnier when you know what spanner means in British/Irish slang:
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