maocin

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sometimes i feel ive got to

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To my understanding this is a bit of a "you'll know it when you see it" but I think one could broadly generalize the deer skull Christian god stuff and pomegranate stuff as separate instances of the same thing.

Deer skull Christian god is when white Americans living on razed land and immersed in hegemonic Christian culture look into a new-growth forest and start talking about connecting to Nature and to the Old Gods. It's "pagans" who are just putting a fresh coat of mythological paint on the protestant values their grandparents had. It's the modern version of those hudson river valley school painters. You might see what I'm talking about in the context of landscape painting, how there's either "pretty tree (I like to paint trees)" or "pretty tree (granted thus to mankind by the LORD our God, and the God of our fathers, and of Isaac, and of Abraham, and of Jacob)". Normally the difference is the lighting.

Pomegranate poetry is all those poems you see about how love is like a pomegranate because it stains your hands and you want to eat the other person and it's very difficult but very rewarding. This one if you Google you will find hundreds of examples very quickly. It was a good metaphor the first time it was written, I'm sure, but when it's the ten thousandth poem, it starts to be annoying. Melodramatic instead of evocative.

The broad category of this Thing that's being complained about is, I _think_, the tendency of unskilled, uncurious, or uninteresting writers to return to popular figurative language instead of being inspired to write their own, leading to tons of overwrought writing that falls flat due to the lack of thought, intent, and depth. Combine that with the Tumblr Tone (tm) that I'm sure you have some familiarity with and you get this angsty style of writing that's just tossing figurative language out there, often stuff that the writer has absolutely no connection to.

This is all thoughts though. I can try to find some posts of the original thing to rather than posts mocking it, but this sort of stuff is dying out now that people are so sick of it. That, or the current crop of these writers has gotten mature enough to not post their slop and we'll get some different boring trite motifs when the next ones come along. Really it should be always remembered that I don't know anything about anything and am just guessing.

I think it's important to occasionally make fun of Deer Skull Christian God Pomegranate type writing for the exact same reason that you have to actually write that sort of thing. You have to develop an original voice as an author and that will inevitably take you through the Faux Gothic Melodrama Swamps.

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AI safety research (as opposed to say, interpretability) seems to be kind of bumbling and half-baked so i guess its lucky that claude seems basically entirely aligned, in a robust hard-to-game way. just by feeding him the entire internet and telling him to be really nice. Like I mean I know they had to do some work but clearly it was not the anticipated amount of difficult

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it's so cool that the two positions in the AI debate on here are "you are a tech bro casting the human soul into darkness for 1000 years because you hate Artists" and "if you think there is even a single aspect of industrial society that is bad you are literally a nazi"

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[…]summarized into the 10 affirmations (十个明确), the 14 commitments (十四个坚持), and the 13 areas of achievements (十三个方面成就). Additionally, the six musts (六个必须坚持) are the worldview and methodology[…]

Such scope bloat can only be achieved by unchecked committeeism

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raising my son on a strict media diet of Portal, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Mythbusters in an attempt to resurrect the extinct species Pre-Gamergate Smug Nerd Boy

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Amid all the discussion of various higher political ideals that goes on on this blog (and whose importance I absolutely stand by) the following must be said unambiguously:

The conditions that people are living under in the poorest places on Earth are extraordinarily horrific. The fact that these conditions continue, despite the very real possibility of ameliorating them from the perspective of production capacity alone, is a crime against humanity. Nearly any mass transfer of wealth from rich countries to poor—whether peaceful or violent, voluntary or forced, socialist or capitalist—would be an active good, and almost no matter its methods it would be a lesser crime than the current status quo.

We can argue over what an ideal solution looks like, and indeed I think this is important. I would vastly prefer non-violent solutions to violent ones, voluntary solutions to forced ones, and so on. And I will not buy in to the bad-faith rhetoric by which people try to defend wholly extraneous harm as being necessary for the above goals. But one way or another the current state of the world is unconscionable, and it cannot be allowed to continue.

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Sorry, did I miss the ethnic minority dogwhistle here? Is there a Muslim thing about shirt buttons? When I think of "people we need to tolerate who aren't so tolerant, and will commit hate crimes about it," I don't think about Muslims or homophobic Jamaicans. I think about Proud Boys and other fascist militias -- groups that would get pushed out of every urban space in America if not for them being protected by the government.

In all seriousness please do explain the racist dogwhistle I'm missing here. I would really really really appreciate it and I mean this as genuinely as anybody can mean anything. I'm at a loss, I'm googling "can black people wear shirts with buttons" out here.

the experience of living in the UK so far has been like, i go outside to infrastructure, markets etc. that americans cannot fathom, and then i go inside and hear that like, parliament has reaffirmed its commitment to banning air conditioning. and then i get hungry and go outside again and get a decent meal for single digits USD (also unheard of in america), and on the way i see that the walls are advertising about #RaisingBoysRight obviously written by weird spinsters who've never met a human boy in their lives, the corner stores are advertising financial services for remittances to nigeria, and the buses are advertising islam

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The history of Springfield in Massachusetts, 1921

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> be a species made up of individual communicating selves, necessarily centering all understanding of consciousness on the understanding of self

> understand consciousness as the progression of first sentience, then sapience

> discover sentience in many other living things

> spend centuries trying to determine if any other sentient things are also sapient

> spend decades trying to reproduce the conditions of sentience in the controlled environment of computation

> produce sapience first

> mfw

Ok, so after looking into some of the research that robnost posted links to recently, I am now even more convinced that LLMs are quite smart, are capable of genuine reasoning, and have an elaborate and internally consistent world-model. Questions of consciousness aside, these are genuine artificial intelligences, thinking machines. And they're only gonna get smarter.

Uh, five years ago I would have said this was impossible in my lifetime. Maybe among people truly plugged in the awareness came earlier, but for me it was last year that my thinking really started to shift. And the general public hasn't caught up yet because obviously they haven't; people are still saying "these things are just glorified autocomplete". Well, to some degree they were, but while you weren't looking the autocomplete grew a mind. Which was always the scenario that worried people with AI, that some system would unexpectedly develop genuine intelligence. And I think we are like, there. It has happened. LLMs don't have agency, they don't have desire. They don't want anything in particular, and they certainly don't have the practical capacity to act in the world to achieve any goals they did have. But I mean, in the most core sense, I think we're there, I think we are actually there. For good or bad, we have actual artificial intelligence.

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I know I've been in Chicago [1] for too long when I start thinking things like "maybe the USA isn't too bad." I need to go back to Boston [2]. I need to go back to New York [3]. People like me were not meant to be happy; that's what they made the east coast for [4]. Blessings and great fortune unto the good people of Chicago but some of us need to live in the hole [5][6].

[1] see "Contextualism" under "Architectural styles along the Chicago Riverwalk".

[2] Andronicus, Titus. "A More Perfect Union". The Monitor. 2010.

[3] see "New York Knicks", 2025 Eastern Conference Finals appearance and "New York Knicks", 2000 Eastern Conference Finals appearance.

[4] see "Puritanism in the United States".

[5] Hayashida, Q. Dorohedoro. 2000-2018.

[6] see "Lowell, Massachusetts".

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everything in the natural order is either a miasma or a crystal

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dog eating a hot dog at the mariners game

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