Looking forward to have "lived through the 20s" the way some folks lived through the 60s

OK, I'll say it. Bluesky sucks because you can't write long posts. (I pay X $2/month for this.)

Say what you want about the rationalists, but their epistemics are far better than any other group, since that is literally what they optimise for. For the most part, they don't lie, they don't snarl, they update on evidence. On purely checkable factual matters, they're almost always correct.

Agree it is good, although as a liberal centrist I'm somewhat detached. What interests me, though, is the epistemics of left-wing culture. These people believe "AI is fake" through an odd process of social osmosis and repetition: it becomes something "everyone knows" and never re-examined...

Rent control is to left-NIMBY as CA Prop 13 is to right-NIMBY. New residents pay extra to subsidize old residents.

If this is true, it recontextualises "stochastic parrots": it's not actually a claim that machines can never think (since symbolic AI can do that), only that statistical AI cannot think. (And from that perspective, it's plainly wrong, since the LLMs are capable of doing symbolic manipulations.)

Understanding the "personhood" of LLMs is straightforward: an LLM chatbot is simply a machine pretending to be a person, just as a person may pretend to be another person. It's an act of fiction, a fictional character.

I mean the fact that thinking and speech can now be simulated does call into question thinking and speech themselves. It very much does call into question what thinking really is.

I guess antis playing the we-never-said-that card is progress of a sort??

Hmm, this doesn't seem like a very good book tbh? benthams.substack.com/p/the-ai-con...

The dry part is now the only part you're allowed to eat.

The more fundamental underlying issue is that capitalism is not going away.

The future of digital art is going to be vast amounts of AI slop + some actual real art (also made with AI)

Would really like a ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_BYPASS_REFUSAL string though.

Can't help seeing her through this lens: x.com/AngelicaOung...

Opinions on the Current Things: 1. It's for the justice system to sort out, that's why we have one. 2. "Running" a foreign country is likely to be a huge mess. 3. A COFA would give everyone what they want; making annexation threats just pisses off the people you want to persuade. 4. Javid Shah!👑👑👑

Javid Shah! 🦁☀️👑

One can celebrate Christmas as a Christian; one can celebrate Christmas as an atheist; but oddly, one cannot celebrate Christmas as a Jew. If Christianity had taken a different path, and remained a Jewish cult rather than converting all Europe, it would've been the other way around.

Reminder that humans do not actually create anything, they just collage together existing work.

One thing I like about Bluesky is that is you search for "polytheist", you get actual polytheists talking about polytheism, rather than monotheists (mostly Muslims) attacking Hindus and occasionally each other

UK settled on a broad policy of self-determination. On the one hand, it means it gets to keep the Falklands (this is good). On the other hand, it has to let Northern Ireland (and Scotland if it had wanted to) break away (this is also good). Other countries (e.g. Spain) don't take this approach.

seeing a machine do something that you previously thought was unique to your cognition, and opening up that capability to anyone, is to many people a deep narcissistic injury. this explains much about the social environment

Twitter/X is better than BlueSky because for a small amount of money ($2/month) you can make long posts.

Mormonism is 100% AI-generated. Go visit the Visitors Center at their SLC temple if you don't believe me.

The word "fascism" is actually pretty useless. It has consistently been used by leftists to mean "everything we dislike", starting from Thälmann's "social fascism" (meaning social democrats) and as such does not actually point to any specific ideology or political features.

I plan to try these some day. 🧇🧇🧇 simonsarris.com/recipes/fals...

we pay you $0 and if you don't do things EXACTLY as we demand we're going to stop

🧇 WAFFLES 🧇

Are you paying us? Where?

Folks in the replies trying to arrange this into a theory of Why My Political Enemies Are Like That, trying different angles, maybe smart kids vs cool kids? maybe rich kids vs poor kids? maybe wordy-smart vs techy-smart? Surely it can be made to work...

Probably my most left-wing anime view (and it's relatively mainstream): Squealer did nothing wrong.

H, because I live there, so much of my food already comes from there. Honestly don't know why anyone would ever want to pick a diet of all-imported food.

See now this kind of shenanigans is why my language entirely separates module imports from namespaces.

Conflicted on the "Department of War" rebrand -- I kind of appreciate the honesty. "Defense" was always a euphemism.

I suspect that the real problem is not that Twitter has "Nazis" (or conservatives, or Trumpists, or whoever has the bad politics) but that America has nazis and the English-speaking world has nazis and this is simply reflected on Twitter with its "free speech" policy, such as it is.

Based on these numbers, forgoing one hot bath (150L heated from 12°C to 40°C) offsets the water of ~400,000 ChatGPT prompts, and the energy (~5kWh) of ~16,000 ChatGPT prompts. Apparently average usage is 8.25 prompts/day, so that latter number comes to about 5.4 years. (And STFU about water.)

Big "trans & pro-AI" contingent on Bluesky among the general anti-AI masses

More and more preferring X/Twitter's "soft" approach to blocking (you can still see posts, you just can't interact with them) to BlueSky's "hard" approach, where for example if A quote-posts B and B blocks A, nobody can see who or what A was quoting.

Honestly don't understand the pink triangle brigade. Why would you celebrate Oct 7th? All it did was give Israel an excuse to destroy/cleanse/reoccupy Gaza. You just know Israeli hardliners were secretly celebrating when it happened.

It's OK to believe that Hulk Hogan was bad and also that Gawker was bad. You're not Tinker Bell, you can hold two thoughts in your head at the same time.

Funny how it's no longer conservatives, but leftists standing athwart history yelling "stop".

Reminder that the revealed political message of The Culture is that socialism is not compatible with human self-determination.

Not actually a fan of JD Vance, but absolutely A1 trolling of the prissy lefties on Bluesky. Probably worth following just to get on some blocklists; let the trash take itself out.

Is this true?? andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sh...

I think I agree more with Barak. The key division for me is this -- Motte: Anything that has an effect on society is thereby political, and we should reflect on the social effects of our work. Bailey: Computer science teachers have an obligation to support the social justice issues of the day.

SF convention makes the most minimal-possible use of an LLM just to speed up name searches for panelist selection and of course everyone has a meltdown. bsky.app/profile/seat...

No worries, all my money is in crypto. (Which is down even more, of course, but it just seems normal.)