There has always been cultural and material exchange across enormous distances. Everyone knew about each other! The reason so many people (including plenty on the left) don’t consider that is because our intuitive response is “if everyone knew about each other why weren’t they racist”

nothin better than standing regular-style in my favorite restaurant. i love to cross that threshold and plant my feet in a loose but vigilant straddle, like anyone would

if you reference media online people assume that you have a negative opinion or god forbid a 'take.' you post a video 'this reminds me of the sopranos' and then get comments like "yeah the sopranos fucking sucks." negative reviews are rewarded so much that people everything is a negative review.

"We took idiosyncratic passages out of context from longer, often challenging works, and asked a supercomputer to render them more palatable in isolation. Which version do you find more palatable in isolation?"

the “Real writer or AI?” quiz becomes a snap once you realize what separates a human from an LLM is not the fluency or prose or coherence of the argument: it’s the ability to surprise.

Let me be clear: I don't give a fuck about Amazon or its shareholders I'd also like to emphasize that stealing for fun or simply because you can is deeply pathetic and these folks deserve what comes to them when they get caught. Do we live in a society or not, jfc

It's hard to internalize the fact that the administration really does believe the Iraq war was "woke" and that they would be able to easily defeat a substantially more powerful nation simply by being based chads

btw about that pixar thing, the reason why these people think having a conversation about gay people with kids is difficult is because they don't know a way to say to their kid "gay people are normal but you are not allowed to be one" without sounding like a bigot (there is a reason for that)

That human thinking is an emergent property of the massively parallel interactions of many "dumb" subprocesses is not deflationary or dehumanizing any more than the fact that a painting is made of molecules.

That’s not the problem here though, the problem is that if we don’t know very much about what consciousness is, then *AI industrialists don’t get to apply the word to their product.* It’s rhetorical sleight of hand that displaces burden of proof disguised as philosophical inquiry.

I think this deserves at least as much sustained attention from US media as Claudine Gay's dissertation

Mutilization

It’s amazing to see how sincere MAGA was in their delusion that the previous international order really did involve regime change out of weak woke lib human rights concerns and not resource theft. This is literally the same exact shit we’ve always done, said the same exact way, just stupider.

one reset I'd personally appreciate: behind the insistence that we must offer the electorate a little bigotry is the idea that commoners are more bigoted than the richer and more educated, who can be appealed to with high minded policy. but then you Ctrl+F "phrenology" in the Epstein files

"Just after starting on Cars 2, I was told by a superior that I would be uninvited from all weekly art department meetings because Lasseter 'has a hard time controlling himself' around young women... It was clear that the institution was working hard to protect him, at the expense of women like me."

My argument that we’re entering a new Romanticist period continues to be affirmed wahoo finally we can all stop pretending cynicism is cool

I see lots of people on here either saying “this is why we should intentionally impoverish rural areas” or “I would simply claim credit for the good stuff and then everyone would like me” and goddamn, would that it were so simple.

Does it utterly piss me off that I (and many people like me) left my specific “how can we know how brains very unlike ours perceive the world?” field because no one wanted to pay us to investigate that? Yep. Am I even angrier about it watching people debate whether LLMs are sentient? OH FUCK YES.

I think about this all the time. And for faculty in good jobs it still has some of that — I do enjoy knowledge making. But those are so so few and everywhere else the academe is indentured labor to a loan shark.

Regarding the U.S. sinking that Iranian warship: when you're trying to describe an act that (probably) isn't an actual war crime, but DOES feel slimy, I think the word you're looking for is "honor."

How do we not understand the fundamentals of burden of proof anymore, how did adult working professionals get so unbelievably stupid (This is rhetorical, it’s very clear how this happened)

It was about protecting Division III high school girls volleyball.

I remember learning about the Hays Code in film school and how it made it so that any amoral protagonist had to meet karmic justice by the end of the film and going “wow, that’s really silly” and then once a week I log online and see people argue that we need stuff like that now or it’s problematic

We're at a point where there are no cheap options to retreat to and no price points that guarantee quality. Every run-down studio is $1400, every fast food meal is $17, every luxury condo has peel-n-stick tiles, every $300 pair of boots falls apart. Endless expensive mediocrity.

This reminds me of something Toni Morrison wrote.

They're going to write books about all the big brain moves of this gang of imbeciles and among them will be "Spending a year trying to kill renewable energy and then launching a war that sends oil prices soaring"

What pisses me off more than I'd like to admit is that Hegseth is too stupid/drunk/both to realize just how pathetic and weak he sounds when he thinks he's being cool and badass. It's not fair. There should be like a drug we could give him to make him self-aware and cringe until he shits himself.

It’s so bizarre because he’s acting as if the inverse thing has occurred - as if Doocy is asking about college athletics while they’re holding an event about war and death.

It’s why they get along with Silicon Valley so well

I maintain that simply arresting Elon musk and making a real example of him is the quickest way to global stability

Assuming we think they’re sincere, the rash of tech industrialists announcing their chatbots are conscious is such a blistering indictment of their personality/character. They literally cannot conceive of a person being made up of more than words. They are incapable of understanding humanness.

No, Claude is not anxious. Anxiety requires two components: 1. Awareness of the possibility of annihilation of self. 2. An autonomic nervous system. Mimicry of the words of an anxious person is not being anxious. A dog can be anxious. Your plagiarism machine cannot.

"We can be as shitty as we want but you have to treat us fairly, because you said you care about fairness." They are all 12yo boys.

> @benstiller.redhour.com

Coffee, straight out of my nose.

Great to know their CEO doesn't even understand how AI works. It's not anxious because it's conscious, dumbass. It's anxious because you've been scraping the social media of users living and posting through fucking unstable times.

Woke 2 is here lfg

It’s not a war you fucking idiots. It’s an exchange of violence between two polities to impose a political outcome through conflict.

Iran: look, it's simple. We literally just paint the silhouette of a plane on the ground. We literally just nail together some boxes in the shape of a tank. We literally just pull looney tunes shit. Their AI will make them spend $100 million to destroy $5 of arts and crafts. the US: grok is this

politics really needs to be something other than a theory of other's people defective cognition.

I think there's a deep, subterranean ideological assumption that civilian causalities are the result of insufficient care, insufficient attention, or insufficient technology. They're really just a basic consequence of choosing to go to war.

it's a real achievement to develop a policy that so many macroeconomists could agree on

the only consistent funny thing about trump is how little he respects anyone in his orbit

My friends yall are about to learn exactly how badly an Oklahoman can fuck things up. Go get em markwayne, show this country what real Okie incompetence is all about