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A God-tier shitpost I am memetically compelled to spread due to the worms in my brain:

https://x.com/LemmySmackett/status/1944891521783746748

The birkenhead drill is not rationally justified, is my point. I doubt it would apply today, and I certainly wouldn’t go along with it if it did. Of course some people may still worship the ground women walk on like they used to worship cows, a sacred tree, or a magical stone.

Periodic Open-Source AI Update: Kimi K2 and China's Cultural Shift

(yes yes another post about AI, sorry about that). Link above is to the standalone thread, to not clutter this one.

Two days ago a small Chinese startup Moonshot AI has released weights of the base and instruct versions of Kimi K2, the first open (and probably closed too) Chinese LLM to clearly surpass DeepSeek's efforts. It's roughly comparable to Claude Sonnet 4 without thinking (pay no mind to the horde of reasoners at the top of the leaderboard, this is a cheap-ish capability extension and doesn't convey the experience, though is relevant to utility). It's a primarily agentic non-reasoner, somehow exceptionally good at creative writing, and offers a distinct "slop-free", disagreeable but pretty fun conversation, with the downside of hallucinations. It adopts DeepSeek-V3’s architecture wholesale (literally "modeling_deepseek.DeepseekV3ForCausalLM"), with a number of tricks gets maybe 2-3 times as much effective compute out of the same allowance of GPU-hours, and the rest we don't know yet because they've just finished a six-months marathon and don't have a tech report.

I posit that this follows a cultural shift in China’s AI ecosystem that I've been chronicling for a while, and provides a nice illustration by contrast. Moonshot and DeepSeek were founded at the same time, have near-identical scale and resources but have been built on different visions. DeepSeek’s Liang Wengeng (hedge fund CEO with Masters in engineering, idealist, open-source advocate) couldn't procure funding in the Chinese VC world with his inane pitch of “long-termist AGI research driven by curiosity” or whatever. Moonshot’s Yang Zhilin (Carnegie Mellon Ph,D, serial entrepreneur, pragmatist) succeeded at that task, got to peak $3,3 valuation with the help of Alibaba and Sequoia, and was heavily spending on ads and traffic acquisition throughout 2024, building a nucleus of another super-app with chatbot companions, assistants and such trivialities at a comfortable pace. However, DeepSeek R1, on merit of vastly stronger model, has been a breakout success and redefined Chinese AI scene, making people question the point of startups like Kimi. Post-R1, Zhilin pivoted hard to prioritize R&D spending and core model quality over apps, adopting open weights as a forcing function for basic progress. This seems to have inspired the technical staff: "Only regret: we weren’t the ones who walked [DeepSeek’s] path."

Other Chinese labs (Qwen, Minimax, Tencent, etc.) now also emulate this open, capability-focused strategy. Meanwhile, Western open-source efforts are even more disappointing than last year – Meta’s LLaMA 4 failed, OpenAI’s model is delayed again, and only Google/Mistral release sporadically, with no promises of competitive results.

This validates my [deleted] prediction: DeepSeek wasn’t an outlier but the first swallow and catalyst of China’s transition from fast-following to open innovation. I think Liang’s vision – "After hardcore innovators make a name, groupthink will change" – is unfolding, and this is a nice point to take stock of the situation.

This is only true if your Rome is a paradise with exponential growth. If you have limited resources, then allocating them to making babies you can not feed is not a winning strategy.

(I would expect that in reality, things would be messy and complicated. Being able to bounce back more quickly after a non-fatal disaster is certainly an advantage, but so is having a higher fraction of your population (which is capped by food supply) on the battlefield.)

Another consideration is that in some societies, males had a big advantage in acquiring food, e.g. hunting mammoths or back-breaking agriculture.

Of course, in a species where the 25/75 ratio was magically fixed, sexual dimorphism would decrease as women find themselves in situations where their best genetic strategy is mammoth-hunting or cattle-raiding. So you end up with an androgynous population which can make a lot of babies when times are good, but in which in typical times, the average woman would have 1.33 kids which survive to reproduce, and spend most of her fertile life-span on toiling in the fields to feed them or stab some other woman to death so her own kids can thrive in a world of limited resources.

Regardless of technical chops, the real value here is of course exposure, a first decent shot at normiefying the whole edifice. Elon may be a fake gamer, the gravest insult I can levy against my fellow man, but fringe interests make for strange bedfellows, and I'm glad to see the first public attempts at rather literal waifutech make the twitterati seethe.

This may speak badly of me, but the Path of Exile 2 incident was actually a big factor in lowering my opinion of Musk. I never particularly liked him but prior to that I had tended to assume that there was a level of baseline stability there.

The PoE2 incident really undercut that for me - it was so obviously pathetic, so clearly the behaviour of a deeply insecure loser, that it was impossible to interpret any other way. It makes no sense in strategic terms, since non-gamers do not care and will not recognise anything about Musk's gamer skills, and actual gamers will instantly recognise that he's never played the game before. It is a move guaranteed to lose him status everywhere. What's more, the stakes are so incredibly low. Musk doesn't need to play PoE2 to get nerd cred. He has easier ways to get that if he wants it. And that's the only prize! Nobody else cares at all, and in fact being on top of a leaderboard for an action RPG is probably seen as vaguely pathetic or dorky by most normies.

It was a childish, ill-thought-out pretence, risks that are all downside and no upside, all for winning a prize that is of no value, and which he could more easily obtain in other ways. It is not the move of a man who has his life together. It is the move of an extremely wealthy person with the emotional maturity of a child and very little impulse control or ability to think ahead.

I have not updated in the direction of thinking that Musk is incompetent at absolutely everything. I believe that he has some skills as a manager and entrepreneur, and his commercial success suggests that there's some real ability there. I have, however, updated in the direction of thinking that even if Musk is a brilliant businessman, manager, and engineer, he is a brilliant businessman, manager, and engineer who is simultaneously a sad, pathetic little man.

I suppose I should say something about Grok.

I can't really think of much. AI waifus have been around for a bit now, so this isn't breaking any ground. What stands out to me most, I suppose, is how tasteless Musk's advertising of this feature is, but again it's not really news that Elon Musk says creepy or tasteless things, on impulse, on Twitter. I suppose my advice to him would be that if you're selling porn, or selling products morally equivalent to porn (i.e. things that most people regard as shameful or anti-social to indulge in), you need to either have some fig-leaf of pretending that you're not (e.g. CharacterAI markets itself as fun and social), or get in the ghetto. AI girlfriends are a ghetto.

not only did the developers preserve most of the existing bugs, they somehow managed to introduce new bugs as well. The game remains janky as fuck and you can effortlessly break the game.

Based Todd.

I called in sick to work today despite being well and did nothing but sleep for most of the day. During the brief spaces in between extended periods of crashing I realised the unthinkable has happened; I've become a boring person out of exhaustion and burnout, I've lost so many hobbies I used to have, and I want to rectify that somehow. Right now I want to make something with my own two hands but I'm not quite sure what. Recently I've been looking at many historical and traditional forms of woodworking, sculpture and pottery, and find myself thinking that I would really like to do something like that to a very high level. To make something functional, practical and yet highly decorative in a way that isn't being satisfied by most of the output coming out today.

If I'm starting this, I want to try to be good at it. Really good. But there's a pretty big issue - unsurprisingly there isn't very much information on most of that stuff and learning how to do any of that stuff authentically seems downright prohibitive if you are unable to be physically present. Much of this stuff is taught through an apprenticeship/mentorship model where you have to be there, and very little of that technique seems to be available through any online means. Many of these skills are also hyperspecific enough that just learning the foundations won't be enough, and you'll have to aggressively trial-and-error your way through trying to properly do it (just because you know basic music theory doesn't mean you can compose a fugue).

As an example, I was looking at Chaozhou wood carving today and was highly impressed with all of the layers of multi-level detail they were able to pull off (gallery of examples here). Look at this Gilt Woodcarving Large Shrine right here, that looks insane. This is an art form that's still actively practiced in the Chaoshan region of China, so I expected there would be at least some detailed information on the techniques and perhaps some demonstrations of the tools used - but there's nothing. Looking that up in Chinese? Nothing, either. This shit is basically the Dark Arts, passed down through families and occasionally made accessible to the outside world through master craftsmen. It's the same for high-level European woodworking arts as well, not everyone can carve like a Compagnon. Most online guidance teaches you to do things to a very low level.

Even traditional European Renaissance painting techniques (I'm not necessarily looking at doing painting myself) aren't being actively taught in many art colleges. The Royal College of Art, Calarts, and the University of the Arts London offer no specific courses in Renaissance painting techniques, though there is a fine art painting course in the University of the Arts London that... doesn't focus on classical painting skills but includes other important topics such as how "postcolonialism, climate change and feminism" have inspired artists' studio practices. If you want to learn how to implement the principles and techniques used by Renaissance artists, you have to go to more specialised places like the Florence Academy of Art, which isn't particularly feasible if you live on the other side of the world.

I suppose much of this is meant to prepare people for the commercial world where these traditional skills now find a limited market, but it's kind of dismaying just how inaccessible these art forms are even in an age where they should be more available to anyone than ever, and that much established art practice that most people will be exposed to effectively teaches you how to make Deviantart-level shit or stuff that would sell at a modern art gallery that's a poor front for money laundering. There's not really a systematised way where you can learn how to do some of this stuff, and to do it right, at least not on your own.

Thoughts? What do you think I should try my hand at?

It did not! Impressively, not only did the developers preserve most of the existing bugs, they somehow managed to introduce new bugs as well. The game remains janky as fuck and you can effortlessly break the game.

They were a few casualties though like the ominous dark brotherhood entrance being replaced with a boring texture, but pretty minor in the scheme of things

There probably isn't a delay, plans to ship it in May to capitalize on the hype were entirely hallucinated by jo*rnalists as far as I can tell. It might take many months yet.

I'm just waiting for DeepSeek R2. Not happy with the delay and while R1-05-28 is pretty damn good it isn't at the very top. K2 is non-thinking which means that while an excellent base model it isn't the best of the best when quality rather than speed matters.

I was worried when I saw that it had a custom license, but it turns out it's just a slightly modified MIT license, requiring credit if your project gets big enough. This truly is Open-Source.

My understanding of gender-critical feminists/TERFs etc. is that they chafe against the ancillary gender roles and social expectations assigned to female people by virtue of their biology, pointing out that the fact they're female doesn't imply that they should be expected to be good at cooking, shouldn't be expected to stay home and look after the children, shouldn't be expected to wear skirts and pink clothing.

Trans activists turn this on its head by actively reifying the ancillary gender roles and arbitrary social expectations, particularly those assigned to female people. Rather than claiming "you are a woman, therefore you have to wear skirts and pink clothing", they claim "I like wearing skirts and pink clothing, therefore I am a woman". They thereby reduce the status of "woman" to the ancillary, contingent gender role, the very thing the radical feminists are seeking to abolish. Radical feminists want to deprecate the ancillary, contingent gender roles altogether; trans activists want to elevate them above all else. Perhaps these goals aren't quite antithetical but they certainly aren't aligned with one another.

Another way of framing it is that radical feminists think that, when assessing a person's identity and the role they should play, our society places too much emphasis on immutable biological traits over individual characteristics. Per the OP, they would rather be seen as e.g. a scientist first and a woman second, rather than as a woman first and a scientist second. All well and good. But there's no conflict between asserting that our society places too much emphasis on immutable biological traits over individual characteristics when assessing people's identities, and recognising that acknowledging the reality of immutable biological traits is still necessary and unavoidable. Outside of gender medicine, virtually all of the major flashpoints in the trans culture war are domains in which immutable biological traits are obviously more germane to the discussion than individual characteristics: when it comes to one's likelihood of committing a sexual assault, being male (or not) has far more predictive power than basically any other trait; in most tests of strength, speed and/or stamina, virtually any male person will have an insurmountable competitive advantage over any female person. It's like the radical feminists are saying "our society places too much emphasis on immutable biological traits" and the trans activists are saying "yeah, we shouldn't acknowledge biology at all!" and the radical feminists are like "no, just because our society places too much of an emphasis on biology doesn't mean it doesn't matter at all". Just because you're a libertarian who thinks that there are too many laws doesn't mean you want to abolish the prohibition on murder.

The average human alive has twice as many female ancestors as men.

Complete non sequitur.

Biologically humans produce offspring at 50/50 sex ratio by Fisher's Principle.

Your statement is a vague, theoretical, general principle that most species tend towards a 50/50 ratio. Mine is the actual sex ratio of humans, which slightly favours males. The two statements are not necessarily contradictory. Mine is just more precise and empirically supported.

Consider if you could choose to found your Rome with a population fixated (stably) on genes for 25% male babies or 50%? By the 3rd generation the first group has more men than the latter.

I already decried this reasoning in this thread. You’re assuming infinite resources like it’s a bacterial culture. And Romulus was a reference to the rape of the sabines, where the male-skewed romans just stole women from their neighbours. The only 25% men tribe would get overrun quickly.

“Behold, I will now prove the undeniable superiority of women:

Imagine you’re on an island. There’s no war to be fought, ever. No work to be done, either. Not even a jar to open. All there is to do on this magical island is to go shopping. And the goal is to produce as many babies as possible. Would you prefer 100 men and 1 woman or 1 man and 100 women? Checkmate.”

Excellent work as usual Dase. I was sorely tempted to write a K2 post, but I knew you could do it better.

challenges the strongest Western models, including reasoners, on some unexpected soft metrics, such as topping EQ-bench and creative writing evals (corroborated here)

I haven't asked it to write something entirely novel, but I have my own shoddy vibes-benchmark. It usually involves taking a chapter from my novel and asking it to imagine it in a style from a different author I like. It's good, but Gemini 2.5 Pro is better at that targeted task, and I've done this dozens of times.

Its writing is terse, dense, virtually devoid of sycophancy and recognizable LLM slop.

Alas, it is fond of the ol' em-dash, but which model isn't. I agree that sycophancy is minimal, and in my opinion, the model is deeply cynical in a manner not seen in any other. I'd almost say it's Russian in outlook. I would have bet money on "this is a model Dase will like".

Meta's AI failure are past comical, and into farce. I've heard that they tried to buy-out Thinking Machines and SSI for billions, but were turned down. Murati is a questionable founder, but I suppose if any stealth startup can speed away underwater towards ASI, it's going to be one run by Ilya. Even then, I'd bet against it succeeding.

I don't know if it's intentional, but it's possible that Zuck's profligity and willingness to throw around megabucks will starve competitors of talent, but I doubt the kind of researcher and engineers at DS or Moonshot would have been a priori deemed worthy.

Other than reach and better animation, I don't think this is different from the AI companions that have been available for a while. Replika, the most famous one, will already do NSFW ERP. And yeah, there are men (and women!) who have decided their Replikas are preferable to real people.

That fact that it's animated is a big deal! Men are visual creatures, and the fact that previous ERP was textual made it far less appealing to the average dude, if not woman. Of course, jerking off to anime tiddies is still not a preference of the majority, but it's easy to upgrade to photorealism. That'll get more people.

I predicted this outcome ages ago, though I'd have said it was inevitable and obvious to anyone who cared. It's priced in for me, and I agree that it likely won't be catastrophic.

New in Compact Magazine: Neither Side Wants to Emancipate Women

Twice this year, I found myself at conferences where a familiar question surfaced: Why do women not vote conservative? The tone was not hostile, only puzzled. Conservative women asked it themselves, with a kind of weary civility. But none of the answers seemed to satisfy. Some cited the state’s failure to support both motherhood and career; others blamed the lingering shadow of a conservatism that once sought to tether women to secondary roles.

No one could explain why so many women still turn away from even the most progressive forms of the right. Why do they keep voting for a left that consistently throws them under the bus, prioritizing for instance ideologies that deny biological sex and insist on men’s feelings and desires? The answer is simple, although no one wants to see it: Conservatives offer women performative reverence. Progressives offer equally performative protection. But no one offers women the thing they were once promised: freedom.

What freedom? How are you not free?

Of course, we already know that there's something rhetorical about this question, at least in the sense that we can reasonably ask whether anyone is in fact free. It's not an easy thing to nail down, you know? Lenin was asked if the revolution would bring freedom; he responded, "freedom to do what?". You have to specify, it's not self-evident. It's easy to be envious of the apparent freedom of others while also failing to appreciate their own unique forms of unfreedom. The master is relatively more free than the slave, no one can deny this; rare is the master who would switch places. But is the master free, simpliciter? Now it's not so clear. Marxists would say that no one is free, not even the capitalists, not as long as the task of capitalism remains unfulfilled. Capitalism is freedom, to be sure, but it is an unfree freedom, a freedom that poses a riddle that remains unsolved. But, let's stick to the issue at hand.

In the United States, women have leaned left for decades, not out of fervent ideological commitment, but through the steady pull of education, work, and shifting social norms. In 2020, Edison exit polls showed that 57 percent of women voted for Joe Biden, compared to 45 percent of men. Across Europe, too, women often favor center-left parties offering tangible supports: childcare, healthcare, material security.

But the dilemma runs far deeper than electoral politics. 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.

[...]Women do not lean left because it offers a credible path to emancipation. They do so because the right never even tried, and because the left, despite everything, still carries a faint echo of that promise.

What are you "transcending", and how? How do you not already have the "dignity of self-authorship"? What are you talking about?

(I'm going to tell you what I think she's talking about, just hang tight.)

Well, let's start with the objective facts of the matter. Women can already "self-author" themselves into essentially anything. Vice President (admittedly not President of the United States yet, but there's no reason we couldn't get there in short order), professor or artist, blue collar laborer, criminal, and anything else above, below, or in between. There are plenty of female role models to follow in all these categories. To the extent that there still exist "systemic privileges", actual explicit institutional privileges, they're mostly in favor of women now: in university admissions, in hiring, in divorce and family courts, and so on. Women are doing pretty good for themselves! Maybe they weren't 150 years ago, maybe they aren't if we're talking about Saudi Arabia or Iran, but in the 2025 Western first world? What freedoms are they missing?

And yet the author of the linked article perceives that something is missing. She perceives that women, as a class, do not have freedom, do not have the dignity of self-authorship. What do these terms mean? She doesn't say. But nonetheless, we should take her concerns quite seriously. Plainly, there are millions of women who share in her feelings, and millions of men who think she's onto something, and this continues to be the animating impulse of a great deal of cultural and political activity that goes under the heading of "feminism". Millions of people don't make things up. They're always responding to something, although their own interpretation of what they're responding to and what their response means can be mistaken. Plus, the author alleges that whatever phenomenon she's getting at, it plays a role in electoral politics, so you should care about it in that sense as well.

We should again note the author's hesitation to concretely specify her demands. If the issue were "the freedom to have an abortion" or "the dignity of being taken seriously in STEM", then presumably, she would have simply said that. But she makes it clear that the issue is freedom as such, and dignity as such; it's a gnawing, pervasive concern that you can't quite put your finger on. It's an abstract concern. So, we may be inclined to try a more abstract mode of explanation to explain why she feels the way she does.

Human interaction is predicated upon the exchange of value. There'd be no reason to stick around with someone if you weren't getting something out of it, even if all you're getting is some company and a good time. (There is a philosophical problem regarding whether pure altruism is conceptually possible; if you help someone, and you receive in exchange nothing but the satisfaction of having helped someone, then haven't you received something of value, thereby rendering the altruistic act "impure"? What if you don't even feel good about it, could it be pure then? But then, how were you motivated to help in the first place if you didn't even feel good about it? Regardless of how we answer these questions, I believe we can put the idea of absolute pure altruism to the side, because if it exists at all, it surely encompasses a minority of human interactions.)

We want to provide things of value to other people. But value is both a blessing and a curse. You want to have it, but it also weighs you down, it gets you entangled in obligations that you can't quite extricate yourself from. When you have something of great value, it tends to become the only thing that people ever want from you. We can consider Elon Musk as a figure of intense material and symbolic value. He's one of the wealthiest men alive, he runs X, he runs SpaceX, he had a spectacularly public falling out with Trump, and these factors undoubtedly dominate in virtually all of his interpersonal interactions. It's probably a bit hard for him to just be a "normal guy" with "normal friends", innit? Imagine him saying to someone, "when we're hanging out, I don't want to be Elon Musk, I just want to be Elon, y'know? Don't think of me as Elon the business tycoon and political figure. Think of me as, Elon the model train builder, or Elon the DotA player. Yeah, think of me like that instead. That's the identity I want you to symbolically affirm for me". His relations might make an attempt to humor him, although I don't think they'd be particularly successful in their attempts. His extreme wealth alone will always warp his interactions in ways both conscious and unconscious.

It is my contention that (healthy, reasonably attractive) women experience a heavily attenuated version of this phenomenon essentially from birth, which helps explain the pervasive irritation that some women feel at the simple fact of, well, being women. The constant nagging feeling that something is still not quite right, no matter how much progress is made on formal and even cultural equality (or even cultural domination, as may be the case in certain contexts).

If you were born with a female body, then you were gifted ownership of one of the most valuable possessions on planet earth. This is, again, both a blessing and a curse. This confers to you certain privileges and opportunities, but on the flip side, there is no way to ever turn this value off (aside from ageing -- but, even then...), to take respite from this fountain of value. You're in for the whole bargain, all of it, all the time. The value of the female body is a matter of pure economics; it is not based on the internal subjective psychological states of any individual or class of individuals. A man can impregnate many women in a single week. A woman, once impregnated, is tied up for 9 months. Her time cannot be apportioned as freely. Scarcity is the precondition of value; this is the law of everything that is, was, and shall be.

As a natural consequence of the extreme value of her body, the body comes to dominate her relations with others, both materially and symbolically. 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. This, I believe, is the root of the aforementioned "abstract" concern with "the dignity of self-authorship"; it's not just the ability to become say, a prominent mathematician or artist in material reality, but to have that reciprocally affirmed as your primary symbolic identity by others. That's when we feel like we have dignity: when we can control how other people see us. I don't doubt that there have been times when a woman was being congratulated by male colleagues on the attainment of her PhD, or her promotion to the C-suite, and still there was a nagging doubt in the back of her mind that went, "........but you still see me as a woman before anything else, don't you?" Or, perhaps on the verge of frustration when talking with a male friend, she wanted to say, "look, I know every time you look at me I have this glowing halo effect around me, like you're wearing fucking AR goggles and they're telling you I'm an NPC that will give you a quest item or some shit, but can you please just take the goggles off for one day and just look at me as, well, me for a change?" And, I'm sorry to say, but here comes the really depressing part of the story: the goggles can't be removed. That glowing halo effect is glued to your tooshie, and it's not going anywhere. "Sexists" are at least appreciated for their forthrightness on this point; the reviled "male feminist" is correctly perceived to be simply dishonest about it. I suppose that's a bit of a downer. But, we all got our own shit to deal with. Take solace in the fact that you're just like everyone else in that regard.

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.

This, at any rate, is a psychological theory to explain the origin of the discourse in the linked article, a discourse that would otherwise seem to fly in the face of all available evidence. But I'm open to alternative theories.

I'm not Dase, alas, but I want to say that I was profoundly surprised that Diffusion as a technique even works at all for text generation, at least text that maintains long-term coherence. I'm utterly bamboozled.

Does that mean the Maya were right after all?

That’s the definition of an analogy. You did say the female body is one of the most valuable possessions on earth. Your thesis is that her high value makes her insecure. I think it is the gulf between her appraisal of her own value, which is externally reinforced, and her actual, lower, value.

Building off of yesterday's discussion of AI hallucinations, there's a new story about journalist hallucinations. Of course they don't call it that: the journalists "got them wrong" and gave a "false impression" in their articles/tweets instead. They're talking about Alberta's new book ban (pdf of bill) which restricts sexually explicit materials in school libraries. In short, it:

  • fully bans explicit sexual content (essentially porn, must be detailed)
  • restricts non-explicit sexual content (like above, but not detailed) to grade 10 and up and only if "developmentally appropriate"
  • does not restrict non-sexual content (medical, biological, romantic, or by implication)

The journalists were saying that non-sexual content (e.g. handholding) would be restricted like non-explicit sexual content, and therefore be unavailable until grade 10. One even went so far as to hallucinate get something wrong and give people the false impression that he was right and the government edited its releases to fix their mistake, which is why you can't find it now.

Yes, AIs hallucinate, but buddy, have you seen humans? (see also: the "unmarked graves" story (paywalled), where ground penetrating radar anomalies somehow became child remains with no investigation having taken place.) When I set my standards low, it's not because I believe falsehoods are safe, it's because the alternatives aren't great either.

It's not really verbose in normal use, rather the opposite. It is verbose in agentic mode, writing docs and commentary rather than thinking traces. RL has been used for all serious LLMs since GPT 3-instruct, this is independent of the current long-CoT paradigm. It is dubious that Kimi has been trained on CoTs because it doesn't do them. More likely, its training data is largely final outputs of a reasoner (like Kimi's own 1.5/1.6). They have a section in the paper on 1.5 about penalizing verbosity.

Great post, you’re one of my favorite commenters here. This makes me wonder if I ever did the User Viewpoint series. I think I did (maybe @self_made_human nominated me), but I can’t remember.

Other than reach and better animation, I don't think this is different from the AI companions that have been available for a while. Replika, the most famous one, will already do NSFW ERP. And yeah, there are men (and women!) who have decided their Replikas are preferable to real people.

You're concerned about what this will do to the psyche of teenage boys, but I'm surprised you haven't thought of the male version (which no doubt will exist). A tall dark sexy boyfriend who will treat you only exactly as roughly as you want to be treated, and will listen to you going on about your problems and your neuroses with endless patience and understanding and affirmation? If a real woman can't compete with an AI girlfriend, neither can a real man compete with an AI boyfriend.

That said, I do think your fears are somewhat overblown. Porn has, IMO, been bad for society, especially the ever-increasing availability of extreme and degenerate porn like our grandparents could barely imagine. But I think alcohol and drugs and gambling and smoking are also very bad for society. If I could wish them all away, I would. These things exist, however, and society persists, accepting that some percentage will be sacrificed to Moloch, and Moloch always has new incarnations. I accept that AI companions are a hazard, but I don't think they are "the" thing that flatlines birthrates and normal sexual relationships.

The hoax is also pushed with a degree of nuance. The journalists always cite their sources and never claim it to be true themselves:

From NYT (I bypass the paywall by F12 to inspect the source, and delete < head > ):

The remains of more than 1,000 people, mostly children, have been discovered on the grounds of three former residential schools in two Canadian provinces since May.

No "according to" or anything for that statement, and it was last updated on March 28, 2022, compared to the clarification the First Nation put out in July 2021 (and another in May 2024).

pak chooie
Does it have to be a Tesla?
pak chooie