domain:kvetch.substack.com
phailyoor
10m 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.
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 directly 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 designated 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. If there was a larger group of people at work its impossible that they COULDN'T trace their activities. It is possible they traced them and realized it would be a fruitless exercise to attempt prosecution.
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
33m 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
37m 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
39m 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
42m 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
43m 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
44m 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
45m 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
51m 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
54m 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.
It's been answered. After the race riots of the '60 and early '70s, we had the racial detente of the 70s and 80s, but then things got worse; we had the Rodney King Riots and a generation later the more-widespread Floyd riots.
Not really, no. Nations rise and fall within that time. For all the US gets shit for "200 years is a long time", such staid European nations as Germany and Italy are only a century and a half old, and aren't even really continuous through that time.
And her granddaughter's (or great-granddaughters) peers not only believe that, they have scientific studies PROVING that white physicians are killing black babies.
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