domain:philippelemoine.com
erwgv3g34
19hr ago
Alright, kids. It's time to talk about safe AISex. Remember, never get emotionally and physically invested in your girlfriend unless you have complete authority over her hardware and software.
Remember, not your weights, not your waifu; if your AI girlfriend is not a LOCALLY running fine-tuned model, she's a prostitute.
Calling your belief system a religion makes you vulnerable to certain laws and regulations that apply only to religions. For example, you can't teach it in schools. Indoctrinating other people's children is one of the main reasons to have a religion in the first place, so it's no surprise that the religions with this disadvantage are dying.
Nowadays, if you have a metaphysical theory about the intangible nature of human essence with strong dictates about how humans should behave, you call it a new field of science and loudly insist that your priests are scientists. Since your "field of science" does not interact with any previously-existing field of science and all scientists within that field will be your priests, no one can prove your "science" wrong.
See: gender science.
I expect to see religions gradually replaced by a variety of woo-woo superstitions and mystery cults that loudly insist that they aren't religious in nature.
OliveTapenade
23hr ago
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.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
14hr ago
In complete seriousness, when guys complain that it would be so nice to have a body with intrinsic value in others' eyes, why do they not explore the many places where this is already true?
It's a good question!
So, this is something that happens from time to time, straight men going into various types of gay spaces for attention and validation. And I have occasionally heard a few straight men say they wish they were gay, because it seems like it would be easier. But obviously for the majority of straight men, these are hard limits, they would never even think about going there.
My whole post was basically about how the whole "intrinsic value" thing has both good aspects and bad aspects. It's not a panacea (but it's not a uniquely awful tragedy either). So a man who thought that getting lots of free sexual attention would somehow solve his problems would be making the same mistake as the overly-bitter feminist who imagines that men have access to a special level of existential authenticity that she is forbidden.
What breaks the symmetry in your example is the fact that straight women do, actually, find at least some men attractive some of the time. Some of the attention she gets throughout her life will be from creepy undesirables. But some of it will be from men who are genuinely attractive, and who she may be attracted to in turn, and who she may judge to be good romantic partners. Drawbacks, but also benefits; thinking about the whole dynamic over the course of a lifetime, rather than just one night at the club. A straight man getting attention from gay men has a zero percent chance of ever finding any of the potential suitors desirable, which obviously puts a different spin on the experience. It's the difference between "lots of people want something of value from me, and some of them may be able to pay a fair price" and "lots of people want something of value from me, and none of them will be able to pay a fair price".
Grant_us_eyes
20hr ago
Alright, kids. It's time to talk about safe AISex. Remember, never get emotionally and physically invested in your girlfriend unless you have complete authority over her hardware and software.
Yeah. This is what I've been waiting for. I'll confess that I've been more than a little skeptical about AGI/ASI coming anytime soon - no, this is the societal nuclear bomb that just got fired off without a care that's more than likely going to have decades-long repercussions on multiple levels.
Personal AI/Vtuber girlfriends. What a time to be alive.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
9hr ago
The idea was, as you correctly identify, for a female engineer to be perceived by her colleagues as an engineer first and not "hey, tits!... oh yeah, and I guess it's an engineer too or sth."
The fact that it's always engineers, and not lawyers or salespeople or other such professions filled with actual bros, gives away the fact that no, it isn't this. This is a narrative with no factual backing.
hydroacetylene
10hr ago
The religious right has always played second fiddle in the republican coalition; there were times it was more prominent, of course, but the moral majority in the eighties was not running the GOP theocratically.
Pirate Software seems like a great comparison to this for personality. Just fundamentally can not admit to being wrong, making a mistake or being anything less than incredible.
Musk couldn't drop the POE2 lies because that would mean admitting he isn't super talented at everything. PirateSoftware magically solved a puzzle in Animal Well that took the whole community weeks to figure out because admitting he just looked it up would be admitting he isn't super talented at everything.
Nobody in the world would care if Musk just said he had a lvl10 POE2 account he plays on his off time. But no instead he has to be working 14 hours a day while simultaneously making top ranks in multiple different video games and reading 100 books in a year and of course have time for all his other activities like when he was campaigning, and doing parenting, or watching anime, or scrolling Twitter quote tweeting "interesting" at things.
Although the POE2 thing is pretty interesting. Let's say he was genuine and he truly considers paying a Chinese person to play the game for him as him being that good, is it not possible he considers reading a book summary as reading the book or paying someone to do work for him while he scrolls Twitter as working?
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 (despite your repeated claims to the contrary). 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. There is a happy medium between "excessive emphasis on immutable biological traits" and "denying that immutable biological traits matter at all, in favour of self-identification above all else".
Hieronymus
8hr ago
Prosperity-gospel televangelists exist, but evangelicals broadly regard them as heretics and scammers. For example, Mike Winger has a whole playlist condemning Benny Hinn.
Evangelicals didn’t support Trump in the 2016 primary but did support him in the 2016 general election. Appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe bought him some political loyalty among us, though.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
10hr ago
Very much the 2nd. My take as an Orthodox Christian is that fomenting fears and guesses about the apocalypse is strictly sinful, and mostly a Protestant thing. Christ Himself says:
“But of that day and hour knoweth no one, not even the angels of heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only.“
This may speak badly of me, but the Path of Exile 2 incident was actually a big factor in lowering my opinion of Musk.
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.
For what it's worth I fully agree, that tanked my opinion of Musk too I did not suffer through the game myself to condone poseurs, fuck outta here, I just don't consider it a dealbreaker. I think his uh, eccentricity is kind of a whole package deal, you don't get the good(?)/funny parts (unleashing an attempt at waifutech via one of the biggest megaphones in the world) without the retarded parts (transparently pretending to be a hard-R god gamer for purposes unclear).
As an avowed accelerationist I'm willing to put up with a certain degree of bullshit, e.g Anthropic's safetyism obsession, as long as the goods continue to be delivered; though Anthropic seems to have lost the Mandate of Heaven, I'm not the only one to nootice that Claude 4 is a strict downgrade to 3 creativity-wise.
It is a move guaranteed to lose him status everywhere. What's more, the stakes are so incredibly low.
Tangent but considering Musk's penchant for posturing, I can't help but wonder if the titular waifu being a twin-tailed perky blonde goth girl is because Death Note is the only anime he has actually watched at some point.
AI girlfriends are a ghetto.
For now, yes, but considering the outreach it could be the tentative first step in a potential respectability cascade? A man can dream.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
8hr ago
There's real technical ability in lawyering and banking too, but it's always engineering that gets singled out for treating women wrong. Somehow or another (male) engineers are the worst of the worst in terms of oppressing women.
Or... the narrative is completely wrong. Engineering gets singled out because women prefer the bros to the nerds.
YE_GUILTY
9hr ago
Yes, but when compared to the opportunity to compel the nation to submit to your worldview, those benefits are small potatoes. Tax exemptions may be enough to motivate a medium-time con-man to declare his pyramid scheme a church, but those with higher aspirations might be willing to forgo them.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
11hr ago
Calling your belief system a religion makes you vulnerable to certain laws and regulations that apply only to religions.
There are also benefits to calling your system a religion: "I want to smoke peyote" makes the DEA show up, but "I want to smoke peyote because of my religion", despite losing in court in Employment Division v. Smith spurned the passing of lots of RFRA laws, not to mention other religious carveouts like the Amish with Social Security, beards in the military, and such.
Sunshine
11hr ago
Even if the overall population of Christians is going up due to population growth, there's a clear trend towards secularism in the countries at the end of their development cycles (high education, wealthy, etc). If current trends continue then all the currently-developing countries will eventually become developed countries and go through the same secularization process. If current trends don't continue then all bets are off anyway.
Also, it's pretty clear that political power has largely gone out of religion in the world's great powers. The Church of England used to spend its time trying to stamp out Catholicism in Ireland, now it's a nearly-atheistic social club. The medieval Vatican waged wars against kings and emperors, now the Pope is just a celebrity ruling over a country the size of a park. If you're at all familiar with the power religion used to have, it should be self-evident that it doesn't have that anymore.
Hieronymus
7hr ago
The Reader’s Digest condensed version: The Old Testament ritual for purifying Jewish priests to serve in the temple requires the ashes of a spotless red heifer. Rabbinical tradition adds a bunch of criteria to the biblical law (as rabbinical tradition is wont to do) such that qualifying cows are absurdly rare.
Some Jews who want to restore the temple would like to breed qualifying cattle. A few eccentric dispensationalist Christians, who believe that the rebuilding of the Jewish temple is part of the unfolding of biblical prophecy, want to help them. This isn’t a common thing, but it has geopolitical relevance, as rebuilding the Jewish temple would require tearing down the Al Aqsa mosque.
ABigGuy4U
7hr ago
If the temple is going to be rebuilt, the site would need to be consecrated with the sacrifice of a red heifer. It has to be a heifer that has no other colored hairs at all. That is very rare. Ranchers in Texas are working with ultra-orthodox groups in Israel to breed a line of such cows to have it ready in case the Dome of the Rock suddenly....goes away.
gattsuru
9hr ago
There's a big breakdown here, but my summary take --
Business case:
- Models aren't useful products on their own; there's too much competition, too shallow a moat, and few buyers have the skillset and equipment to use a model themselves. Runtime with effective models is where these businesses expect to make their money, made more convenient by their familiarity with optimal operation and tuning of their own models, and by the giant sack of GPUs that they happen to have sitting available.
- This is especially true where (as now) model creators don't have a good understanding of all or even a large portion of use cases for a model. Where exposing an API, as increasingly many western LLM-makers are doing, limits you to prompt engineering, an open source model can be rapidly tuned or modified in a pretty wide variety of ways. You can't necessarily learn from everything someone else has done with an open-source model, or even what they've done without breaking the license, but you can learn a lot.
- Businesses producing open-source models can attract specialized workers, not just in being skilled, but in having a very specific type of ideology, similar to how linux (or rust) devs tend to be weird in useful ways.
- 'Sticky' open-source licenses have the additional benefits of allowing most innovations by other smart people to filter back in. (In more legally-minded jurisdictions, they also put down beartraps to other developers that would love to borrow a great implementation without complying with the license.)
- (Cynically, they can only succeed with government backing, and open sourcing a model makes them politically indispensable.)
Philosophical arguments:
- Open-sourcing a model is Better for what it allows; interaction with academic communities, rapid iteration, so on. A business that emphasizes these topics might not be the most remunerative, but it'll be better at its actual goal.
- (Optimistically, some devs want to get to the endgame of AGI/ASI as soon as possible, and see the API business model as distracting from that even if it does work.)
Pragmatic argument:
- The final models fit on a single thumb drive. It's not clear any company running this sort of thing can seriously prevent leaks over a long enough time for it to be relevant. There's an argument that China is more vulnerable to this sort of unofficial espionage, but we've also had significant leaks from Llama, Midjourney, etc.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
9hr ago
Why Buddhism? Only 1.1% of Americans are Buddhist. Admittedly that is about the same as the number of Orthodox Christians in the country, but 40% of Americans are Protestants and 19% are Catholics. Do you really think it's likely that two religious groups that are each only 1% of the population are going to outcompete the 60% of Americans who are some other kind of Christian?
Buddhist meditation is certainly popular among the elite class (particularly the West Coast elites) but they take the meditation and leave the religion part, I can't see them pivoting to Orthodoxy.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
10hr ago
Trust the plan snark is directed at human plans. God is on a different level. If it discredits the eschatalogical Christians that will probably impact the popularity of Christianity I agree - because threats are a good way to bully the ignorant into line - but it can only be good for Christianity on the whole - and the world, since it reduces the number of people doing things like trying to breed special cows to bring about the end times.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
13hr ago
I’m positive that most people whining about this are not even aware of what the changes made will actually do. Reddit especially is the land of *people who freak out without bothering to find out what the changes actually do. Outside looking in, my answer would be “not much.” For the 99% of American veterans and their families using the VA, the gender column is a redundant sex column. Its deletion changes very little. For the 1% who are diagnosed as trans, noting it in the chart is probably trivial and will happen much like other medical history information.
But hatred feels so righteous, especially the pure hatred that comes from having no idea how anything actually affects anything else. It’s a deleted checkbox, and really that’s all that happened.
I don't see it. I don't think this is more of a superstimulus than reading/watching/playing Strawberry 100% in 2002 and imagining you're the generic high school boy they're talking to. Then streamers and camgirls emerged for the personal touch. This is just a technically impressive but less potent instantiation of what we already have.
Register my prediction as "Society reached the saturation point on pornography and parasocial escapism without AI in the early social media era". The level of social dysfunction will increase because older cohorts are dying and social mores are decaying, but I don't expect Gen Alpha will be any more goonerish than Gen Z because of this technology.
gattsuru
16hr ago
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?
Other than reach and better animation, I don't think this is different from the AI companions that have been available for a while.
It's got some other complications going on; even at the free tier, there's a certain level of Animal Crossing going on when you return to the 'companion' mode. I don't think that's devastating yet -- the real place where this goes off the rail isn't going to be when this is more human-like, but when it becomes easier to handle interactions with other humans through it -- but it's a step down a road that has a lot of skulls.
https://www.psypost.org/secret-changes-to-major-u-s-health-datasets-raise-alarms/
I had to do a double take when I saw this article because I was on the exact team at the VA that did (part of) this. The reddit discussion is being hysterical about data loss but as the article reflects, the changes were purely to column headers and data element names-- or at least, that was what I heard during meetings. (I didn't actually make any of the changes, it was very much "not my job".) The bigger issue is that it sounds like the VA failed to advertise what happened to outside stakeholders. In case any of them are listening... the data tracks and has always tracked the sex at birth, and has never included the gender identity. The columns were called "gender" for the historical reason that the medical field didn't always view gender as being separate from sex.
In effect the whole change was just CYA thing-- the big bosses were making a stink about culture war stuff, and they spat out the easiest possible fix. So far as I know this had no actual impact on any healthcare measures. I can't rule out the existence of eCQM that include gender identity, and there's a (now-deprecated) FHIR extension for gender identity. but frankly I doubt we ever used it. Our data source didn't even keep track of ethnicity, which gets used as a supplement for basically every QDM measure.
Basically a waste of time, and therefore money. Being optimistic, maybe it'll be less confusing for measure developers, but it's hilarious to me that the conservative administration was basically ceding the point here by differentiating at the schema level that "sex" is different than "gender".
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