domain:academic.oup.com
phailyoor
1m ago
I'm always right. (except when I'm wrong) I'm in fact many times more accurate than even the best ai models, and I'm just an ordinary person.
faceh
1m ago
I did some self-interrogation on why I was dissappointed with this outcome, and I think a lot of the issue is that there wasn't a clear definition of what people wanted to see from this investigation.
There's at least two, maybe three 'generally accepted' definitions of the "Epstein Client List."
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The literal list of people who appear in Epstein's notes and logs and such. This we kind of know exists, and it has been released, at least in part. Not dispositive proof of any actual wrongdoing.
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The list of people that Epstein kept of those he had compromised via and trafficked women/girls to for purposes of blackmail, and who thus would be at risk of legal consequences if discovered. This would be pretty decent proof of wrongdoing.
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The list of people that the FBI has constructed via corroboration of details in the above notes and evidence and established some cause to believe were actually complicit in Epstein's activities either because they benefited from them or were trying to keep their own activities under wraps. THIS one would be the grounds for actual legal action.
And I find that I wanted them to release #3. I don't want a bunch of disparate notes and papers that people have to comb over and construct elaborate theories around, I wanted the official law enforcement officials to do their job and actually zero in on the people 'involved' in the conspiracy (look, we KNOW there was a conspiracy, its beyond 'theory' at this point) and thus would be truly culpable, even if there wasn't quite good enough evidence to convict. The FBI is very good at rolling up whole organized crime groups at the same time. There's a reason the Mafia is not really a major force in the U.S. anymore.
So people who wanted lists 1 or 2 released are disappointed because they're being told such a thing technically doesn't exist. Which may be true! Maybe the only true list of co-conspirators existed in Epstein's brain. Which, if so, definitely bumps up my personal odds of him being murdered.
But I think the real issue that is pissing people off is the lack of #3. As in, we know there were girls being trafficked, we KNOW there must have been people they were trafficked to, and there's significant reason to believe some of them were high powered politicians, celebs, and other elites. If the FBI has exonerated such people, fine. But what it feels like is that they just kinda shoved it all in a drawer and decided there was no reason to dig deeper. Or were told to do so by some other power.
Anyhow, I genuinely expect that the truly salacious, explosive details will be kept under wraps until most of the involved parties are old and all but immune to prosecution, or dead. We'll get a declassified Epstein report in about 10-20 years that reveals the full extent of the coverup, but by then it'll be hard to gin up the public ire enough to actually take any action, and obtaining justice against the involved parties will be impossible, so it'll just fade into status as a historical scandal.
That's just how it goes. Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown
07mk
24m ago
Computer scientists call their field computer science despite it being more about mathematics and logic than science, and despite the field having far less to do with computers than one might expect.
Sure, and when I say that I have a "theory" about who took the cookies from the cookie jar, it doesn't meet the same bar that the "theory of relativity" or "theory of evolution" meet in terms of scientific evidence and consensus. That doesn't make my theory not a theory, it just reflects the squishiness of word definitions. Likewise for "science" and "intelligence."
Normies have been calling computer opponents in video games "AI" since the 80's despite them knowing that they clearly aren't "intelligent"
I disagree. I think people consider, say, the ghosts in Pacman or the imps in 1993's Doom "intelligent." Not sentient, not logical, not conscious, but certainly intelligent. Hence the willingness to use the term "enemy artificial intelligence" to describe them. This willingness reflects - a possibly subconscious - understanding that "intelligence" doesn't indicate sentience, consciousness, logical thinking, etc.
gattsuru
28m ago
It's a very powerful and Apache-licensed set of models for (short) video generation. It has its limitations, especially keeping consistency across longer videos or handling multi-subject topics, but you can do some impressive stuff.
It's also... uh, very popular among certain crowds; FurryDiffusion has a channel of just animation-showcase, and while it's not the only competitor there, it and its derivatives represent themselves very well with a lot of videos I'm not going to link here. And while (focused-on-) human porny LoRAs aren't the only thing that shows up for WAN on civit.ai, especially sorted by likes or downloads you're going to get a lot of R, X, and XXX spoilers. As you might guess, both the porn and not-porn stuff can get weird.
For anyone who is sincerely interested in the topic, I strongly recommend Tom Murphy VII's video essays, particularly Badness = 0 as a primer on the techical challenges and not just for the excellent "alignment" meta joke.
The portion about Lorem Epsom and Donald Knuth is particularly relevant when discussing publicly available LLMs like GPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek.
ChickenOverlord
30m ago
This seems fundamentally incompatible with believing that these things aren't "intelligent."
Computer scientists call their field computer science despite it being more about mathematics and logic than science, and despite the field having far less to do with computers than one might expect.
Normies have been calling computer opponents in video games "AI" since the 80's despite them knowing that they clearly aren't "intelligent"
hydroacetylene
33m ago
I mean, LoTT might not be the most reliable source, but it has enough documented instances to say this is at least a thing that is happening and relatively widespread.
thejdizzler
34m ago
I think I'm putting dating on pause at least for a few months but probably until I finish my PhD. I'm finding I'd much rather train or spend time with friends (or making new friends) than go on a date with a stranger that probably won't go anywhere. Of course at some point I do need to focus on dating: I think finding someone to spend the rest of my life with is important. But I think things will go easier when I earn more money, have clearer work/life boundaries, and in an era of my life where I don't want to train as much.
hydroacetylene
35m ago
I mean, the percentage of modern day Geocentrists is above the lizardman’s constant(upper teens percent in most western democracies IIRC- weirdly this is the one time thé US isn’t an outlier). It seems fair to round off anything under ~20-25% as a fringe in most contexts and that’s not a massive underestimate of SJ popularity, at least.
07mk
36m ago
I don't buy your appeal to normal people here. I think that most normal people do not think that chatbots are intelligent.
It's hard to say what "normal people" think about this (or even what "normal people" are), but in my experience, people I would consider in that category use the label "AI chatbots" to describe things like ChatGPT or Copilot or Deepseek, while also being aware that "AI" is short for "artificial intelligence." This seems fundamentally incompatible with believing that these things aren't "intelligent."
Now, almost every one of these "normal people" I've encountered also believe that these "AI chatbots" lack free will, sentience, consciousness, internal monologue, and often even logical reasoning abilities. "Stochastic parrots" or "autocomplete on steroids" are phrases I've seen used by the more knowledgeable among such people. But given that they're still willing to call these chatbots "AI," I think this indicates that they consider "intelligence" to mean something that doesn't require such things.
Again, its not "naive" it is generating an average if the bulk of the tokenized training data related to your prompt is press releases, the response is going to reflect the press releases. Whether those press releases are true or false doesn't enter into the equation. This is expected.
SSCReader
42m ago
But the resentments of blacks alone, along with the sympathy for those resentments among one party of whites, will keep those convulsions going indefinitely.
Well that's the question isn't it? From Founding to the Civil Rights movement was near 200 years. It's been about 80 since then. Timescales for nations are measured in centuries. In 120 years will those convulsions still be ongoing or not? Or will American blacks and whites have banded together to fight our AI overlords or an alien invader, or Chinese communism or just all be rich, fat and happy on automated cruise liners in space?
It seems clear to me, having significant contact with black Americans that the level of fear and anger in younger generations is significantly less than in older ones. Even my wife's grandmother on her deathbed recanted her ban on "dating out". And she had lived through Jim Crow in the South before migrating North and believed a white doctor had tried to kill one of her children in the womb.
faceh
45m ago
To an extent, I'm using the availability heuristic based on my initial impressions of white identitarians as I remember them.
The Northwest Front was my first exposure to this particular approach to White Nationalism, and while I wouldn't call the members associated with it dysgenic, well, you can see how effective they are at website design. There's a sheen of incompetence over the whole affair.
SSCReader
55m ago
Tiers of justice, ceding the commons to the lowest common denominator, deciding that racism (or sexism) is good so long as you target it at the right people, restricting the right of association based on certain protected classes but not other categories of those classes, so on and so forth are also bad. Less so. Does that make them reasonable prices to pay for moral improvement? Does that make a functional multicultural society? All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others?
Maybe, that's the point. It might be once it committed to slavery that America had no good outcomes. Either genocide or hundreds of years of racial animosity and war or affirmative action and critical theory. As you say the best option would likely to have been not enslaved a bunch of people. Once you do that as Jefferson noted, you have no good options.
So it might be that (hopefully not!) the price that must be paid for moral improvement is what you see today forever. Or it might (and hopefully will) decline over time. How long the racial wound of slavery and discrimination takes to heal is an open question. The question is given we can't change the past, is this the best option we have of those available to us? From Founding to the Civil Rights movement was what 200 years give or take? So maybe roughly 200 years is what it will take to heal. Would 200 years of the things you don't like now worth 200 years of what black people had to go through in their 200 years? Or is that too great a moral price to pay?
There is no objective answer to that, really. I'd sway to the idea that yes that would be a reasonable price to pay. But that is also predicated on the fact, I think being a white man in the US is pretty good even with whatever headwinds being faced. So I don't really view it as much of a cost at all. I'd choose to be white over than black in a heartbeat from a flourishing point of view in the US right now and I don't see that changing particularly.
But how much of a cost (if any at all) anyone person is willing to bear for the mistakes of Americans past, is going to be invariably a very personal thing.
OliveTapenade
58m ago
I don't buy your appeal to normal people here. I think that most normal people do not think that chatbots are intelligent.
Realistically, I don't think most people can explain why they're not intelligent, because most people don't have definitions of intelligence on-hand. I think for most people it's an I-know-it-when-I-see-it situation. That's why we need to philosophise a bit about it in order to produce more reasonable definitions and criteria for intelligence.
Anyway, I think that intuitions of most normal people would say that bots aren't intelligent, and if we explored that with them, and had a patient, philosophically nuanced conversation about why, we probably would find that most people intuitively think that intelligence involves things like, to quote myself, 'awareness or intentionality'.
AvocadoPanic
1hr ago
They have a strategic stockpile of rice! (What a thing for a government to choose to do, have the expertise to manage, etc.)
I'm having difficulty parsing the sentiment behind this.
A number of nations maintain a variety of strategic reserves or stockpiles. The US has a petroleum reserve, Japan too. Italy a natural gas reserve, China and India have food stockpiles. Canada has maple syrup and butter.
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
When you find something via Google, do you immediately and unconditionally trust it?
Certainly not. When I research something I look at multiple different sources, make judgements about which ones I find the most trustworthy and credible, and synthesise a judgement.
If I ask an LLM about anything, I need to do the research that I would have done even if I had not asked the LLM. The LLM adds no value. It does not shorten the research process, nor improve what I find by showing me any hints about where to look.
Astranagant
1hr ago
The only thing beards correlate with nowadays is being ugly. Sorry, there is almost nobody who looks better with facial hair than without.
But yes, time was they were the domain of hipsters, and I'd wager that most of the people who are really into beardcare and styling are still pretty far left. Just having one isn't party coded but having it as a hobby probably still is.
Dean
Flairless
1hr ago
I'm pretty optimistic that much of that is going to resolve itself in the short/mid-term. They're just a little behind on the battery front, but those are getting so absurdly cheap, they just have to pull their heads out of their asses and connect them.
Well, they also have to pull the mountains of lithium and other rare earths out of their asses as well, if not the ground. Which is already hard enough without casually asking China for a few more mountains as well.
There's a reason the article you listed tried to frame impressive growth in terms of ratios of batteries produced (battery storage increased by a factor of 100 in a decade, 16 nuclear power plants) and not in terms of absolute volume of storage needed (storage capacity produced versus storage capacity needed) or grid scale (16 nuclear power plants versus the 54 US nuclear power plants in service, when nuclear power is only about 1/5th of US energy production anyway). The former works from starting from a very small number, and the later would put the battery capacity projections in contrast to much, much bigger numbers.
Which is the usual statistical smuggling, as is the ignored opportunity costs obligated by solving the green energy solution that requires the battery storage at scale.
One form is that all the batteries being used for power system load storage are, by mutual exclusion, not being used for any other battery purpose. Given that the fundamental advantage of the technology of a battery in the first place is that it is for things that cannot / should not / you don't want to be connected to a power grid in the first place, massive battery investments to sit connected to the grid and useless for things that only batteries can do is a major cut against the cost-efficiency off all alternative battery uses of the batteries that could have been made for off-grid use. This is just a matter of supply and demand meeting with the absolute rather than relative scale referenced above. When your article is arguing that batteries have lower marginal costs then fuel power plants, they certainly are not factoring in the higher marginal costs for all other batteries, and battery applications, the load-storage batteries are increasing the costs of by demanding the battery materials.
The second form of opportunity cost is that a battery-premised grid balance plan has to plan for significant overproduction of energy generation to work 'well.' By necessity, the batteries are only storing / being charged with the energy generated that is excess to current demand in the windows where the renewables are sufficient. A renewable-battery strategy requires enough excess renewable generation in the good periods to cover the renewable deficits in the bad times... but this is literally planning to increase your fallow generation potential (100 vs 50 units of idle panels / turbines) in order to to charge the batteries for the time that 50 units of generation are offline. When your article is arguing that batteries have lower marginal costs than fuel power plants, they are also not factoring in that they have to build considerably more generation capacity to feed the batteries. (And compensate for the energy storage loss to, during, or from the storage process.)
Add to this that both the green generation systems and the battery storage are competing with each other for the same chokepoint- processed rare earth minerals. They don't use the exact same amount for the exact same thing, but they are competing for many of the same inputs. If you order X units of rare earths for storage capacity, that makes the X units of rare earths for generation capacity that much more expensive because you are increasing complimentary demand for the same non-substitutable good. A renewable-battery solution at scale is increasing the cost-pressure of a limited resource, not just for other uses of the rare earths but with eachother.
And all of that runs into the geopolitical reality that the country that has cornered the rare earths extraction/processing market as the input to these renewable-battery strategies is... China. Which absolutely has used cut-offs as a geopolitical dispute tool with countries with policies it finds disagreeable. While I am sure they would happily sell a few more mountains of processed rare earths for mountains more of money, it would be a, ahem, risk-exposed investment.
Risks, costs, and limitations that could largely be avoided if you did not invent a problem by over-investing in renewables in the first place. Batteries are a solution for the costs of renewables, but renewable generation weren't the solution to an energy challenge either. They were a political patronage preference to the already-engineered solution of nuclear power, which would free up massive amounts of rare earths for more useful (and less ecologically harmful applications) than renewable energy schemes.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
America you will note, managed to not have the union destroyed
It was destroyed, and then put back together by force, going from the original voluntary union to a nation of victors and vanquished. And the mainstream complaint nowadays is the vanquished weren't treated harshly enough, so therefore we should treat their descendants (literal, political, philosophical, or imagined) even worse.
not have a full scale race war
That would not have turned out like Haiti, when whites were willing to take their own side.
You quoted Jefferson. Jefferson also feared "Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites" and "ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made ; and many other circumstances"
He was mostly wrong on the first. It turns out those deep-rooted prejudices of whites could be mostly (if bloodily) extirpated. But dead right on the second. And that may well be sufficient for the consequences he feared: "will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race" I expect not on the extermination part. But the resentments of blacks alone, along with the sympathy for those resentments among one party of whites, will keep those convulsions going indefinitely.
yofuckreddit
1hr ago
I am giggling like a schoolgirl. I'm sure the X team is feeling some heat, but to paraphrase Elon: If we're judging likelihood based on entertainment value, this was always going to happen.
ulyssessword
1hr ago
When you find something via Google, do you immediately and unconditionally trust it? I don't, because Google's results are full of nonsense. In response, I've developed google-fu to both refine my queries and judge the results. The same goes for every other source there is, from physical libraries to subject-specific Discord servers.
Do I compare LLM output to Google results? Sure, but that's nothing special. Comparing what you find in different sources is a pretty basic tactic.
LLMs are part of a complete breakfast research strategy, and a pretty good one at that.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
I believe a lot of the lack of institutional pushback was down to the election of Trump, which made plenty of liberals go insane and abandon their principles. There was both this radicalising force and a desire to close ranks.
Ante hoc ergo non propter hoc. That is, all this stuff, without institutional pushback (and often with full-throated institutional support) pre-dates Trump's election. Yes, Trump's election made them go insane, but they weren't pushing back before either.
I don't. (Not as much as AI at least)
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