mrwiseandshine

[mrwiseandshine]

Has your opinion on assassinations by normal citizens being ineffective political actions changed at all?

Well, in the US context, the assassination of a major healthcare CEO had exactly zero impact on our healthcare system and the attempted assassinations of our semi-fascist President only boosted his popularity. If the events of the last year are any suggestion, they indicate that political assassination attempts range from ineffective to actively harmful. With that said, I’ll admit that Shinzo Abe’s assassin basically got exactly what he was hoping for (the marginalization of the Moonies in Japan), so there’s always a fluke

[mrwiseandshine]

Welcome

[mrwiseandshine]

We can refer to anything that doesn’t require horses to work as being horseless. The horseless carriage. The horseless pencil. The horseless laptop. The Horseless Large Hadron Collider.

[mrwiseandshine]

okay who can tell me why Germany (and Russia?) use comma as a decimal separator and who do I have to kill to make them stop, why didn't America fix this in 1945, this is far worse than the failure to complete denazification given that those guys were all gonna die eventually anyway but this bloody numeric format is still with us

[mrwiseandshine]

vulcan horror movies would be an exercise in emotional regulation against fear, targeted directly at vulcans' deepest insecurities. movies titled "IT IS ILLOGICAL TO QUIVER AT THIS SEQUENCE OF EVENTS" which, if one of its hundred-and-six jumpscares gets you, you'll never live it down. humans find them annoyingly scary, like a friend who won't stop trying to "get" you.

you'd think that klingon horror movies are gorefests, but it's actually quite the opposite: gore is honorable, and nothing is scarier than dishonor. they often show a person whose life falls apart despite their own valiance and virtues: like an earth tragedy but with someone who clearly doesn't deserve it. at the end, there's often an operatic number where the protagonist exclaims that there's nothing they could have done to prevent their abysmal fate.

ferengi horror movies are documentaries about stock market crashes

[mrwiseandshine]

making a vrisrezi comic to american football is my peak sadstuck for an audience of one (myself) (2019)

[mrwiseandshine]

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.

[mrwiseandshine]

embroidery from peacockandpinecones my friends and I have been losing our minds over all morning.

[mrwiseandshine]

"like a boss" by lonely island was released ten thousand years ago when mammoths still roamed the big wide world. feel old yet?

[mrwiseandshine]

"Might makes right" may not be "correct" like, morally. But it is "correct" as a basic description of geopolitics

[mrwiseandshine]

Karla Knight

[mrwiseandshine]

Man, crossposted my latest blog post to LessWrong and oof, eesh, it's tough! Last time I was like "AI can't write good fiction" and now I'm like "3 months later, AI can write pretty good fiction", so I am getting it from both ends. I've been the guy being like "shut up nerd, this still sucks", and now I'm also the guy being like "I really did do my homework and pay attention and duly disregard hype and notice that previous efforts suck, and I still feel like the new stuff is halfway decent" and wow, this stuff is just so difficult to constructively opine about! Yet seems so nice to really, actually understand.

Anyway here's the new post:

[mrwiseandshine]

Arugula is some crap they found on the ground for real

[mrwiseandshine]

random anecdote for father's day: one time during a long car ride my dad asked me, "you're familiar with Murphy's Law, right?" and i was like "isn't that the one about how anything that can go wrong will go wrong?" and he said "yeah, exactly" and i said "why do you ask?" and he went "well, have you heard of Cole's Law?" and i said "no, actually, what's that?" and he said "it's mostly lettuce and carrots with a little dressing mixed in"

[mrwiseandshine]

the comparison between the soviet propiska and chinese hukou systems is interesting because they’re seemingly comparable in form but ultimately had something like the opposite impact

in the USSR, housing registration was tied to where you were actually allowed to live - it was incredibly difficult to move somewhere without first acquiring the proper propiska. as a result, it was used for just what you might imagine: to prevent rural-dwellers from moving to large cities. this (1) slowed the pace of urbanisation in existing urban centers like leningrad and moscow, but (2) increased the pace of urbanisation in newly built, often geographically remote, monogorods, and (3) was compensated for by a campaign of rural industrialisation where light industry was brought to towns and villages instead of being concentrated in big cities. the overall impact was a relatively even distribution of industrial capacity across the territory of the USSR

in china, however, the opposite happened. there, hukou status is tied primarily to what level of state benefits you receive and only secondarily to actual place of residence. as a result, it was actually used to welcome a massive influx of rural-dwellers into existing urban centers - workers who would receive a far lower level of state benefits than people with urban hukou, and who could be freely exploited since they’re constantly under the threat of internal deportation by police. in combination with the chinese policy of keeping rural areas 100% devoted to agricultural production, this has propelled (1) some of the most rapid urbanisation in human history as well as the creation of the largest cities in human history, and (2) an astronomically unequal distribution of industrial capacity across the territory of china

anyway they’re both terrible but it’s an interesting contrast

[mrwiseandshine]

Let's imagine that you're trying to fix American politics by making a George Washington gambit, or perhaps a Dwight Eisenhower gambit.

Your goal here is to transcend our dysfunctionally-polarized moment by taking the two big political parties and smashing their heads together until they stop moving. You are trying to unite a supermajority of Americans behind a sane, stable, viable-consensus Middle Way - maybe through third-party shenanigans, maybe by hijacking and parasitizing the Republicans or the Democrats, whatever can be made to work.

Let's further assume - arguendo - that you have some good reason to think that you might be able to achieve this, given the right setup and the right resources. We don't need to have the argument over whether it's just a stupid idea from the get-go, that's not the point. (We also don't need to argue over what the sane stable viable-consensus Middle Way would actually be, in terms of policy prescriptions, branding, etc. Fill in your own favorite answer.)

You'll need a figurehead. A presidential candidate. Someone who can, in his person, stand in for the idea of "we're better than all this and we're actually going to set things to rights." Someone who won't immediately be treated as just another shill for the existing left/right.

A real American hero, ideally. Someone who seems like a good, trustworthy leader to as many voters as possible?

...any nominees?

Seriously. I mean it. Anyone at all? I'm coming up pretty short, and that fact scares me.

We tell jokes about God-Empress Taylor Swift (RIP @kontextmaschine), but of course that would actually be a bad idea for our project. She's popular, she might conceivably have the charisma and the intellect and the cultural-manipulation chops, but it doesn't matter; there's no escaping the fact that she's a pop star rather than anything else, and too many people would see her as inescapably frivolous. If she won, it wouldn't do the thing. Same goes for anyone else in the "celebrity performer" category.

War heroes are often good for this kind of role. Do we have any generally-accepted war heroes these days?

A scientist or high-culture artist might do. Are there any who are famous enough, and also not closely tied to an existing political faction?

I'd suggest "civil rights hero / activist leader" except that there are obviously none of those who aren't closely tied to existing political factions.

The best I can come up with on short notice is, like, Chelsey Sullenberger. Which is not super great.

(Admittedly I don't know enough about sports to say whether there's a sufficiently beloved-and-respectable athlete floating around. That would also be sort of an inherently weak choice, not much better than a celebrity performer and maybe even worse, but I can imagine really good spin doctors making it viable.)

[mrwiseandshine]