2rafa
2hr ago
What do you think the consequences of your kid beating the shit out of the “special needs neurodivergent” kid in their class are gonna be?
I forgot where your comment with your prompt was but it still didn’t identify you even using your exact prompt and the slightly edited version of your text.
I’ve tested some more and I’m pretty confident it isn’t performing stylometry, really. It justifies its choice after the fact with stabs at it (although these are essentially just so stories, there aren’t any obvious Indian-isms in your comment for example, ball-ache or whatever isn’t a term only Indians use) but what it’s actually doing is working with venue, subject matter and theme.
That is to say that if you take a long email chain you write to a medical colleague about some patient (well, I assume you use AI, but if we pretend you didn’t) or a medical journal article you wrote and paste it into Claude with no obvious LW references, it’s not going to stylometrically identify you. I had ChatGPT excise (but not rewrite, so what is left is purely your own writing) LW terminology like FOOM and lightcone and all references to the motte, rationalism, being a doctor, psychiatry, India and Indian-ness, xianxia/cultivation novels and other key tell special interests and then fed the substantial output into Claude and it had no idea who you were beyond someone who seems well read and is probably posting on an online discussion forum.
I think we probably still have a year or two, maybe longer, until it can say “this guy always misspells the word “they’re”, uses the Oxford comma, uses British English for colour but -ize for those word endings, has an average sentence length of x and enjoys using semicolons before “it follows”, it must be @name”. We’ll get there, though.
2rafa
13hr ago
The First Amendment as it is today is a product of the mid-late 20th century and, ironically given its current ideological stance, the ACLU. For the vast majority of American history it was never interpreted as preventing individual states from banning various kinds of speech, including under very broad definitions of obscenity. The current interpretation arguably only exists because of liberalism. A muscular court would roll it back and return most speech legislation to the states, but it is what it is for now.
Or, framed slightly differently, SCOTUS interprets the second amendment as permitting states to broadly regulate citizen ownership and use of firearms as they see fit, much like they now do with, say, abortion. The intention was always that Texas and Idaho might have vastly more permissive firearms legislation than California and New Jersey.
SCOTUS recognizes that the equilibrium where the public and elected representatives and elected governments in many of the richest and most populous (blue) states are prevented from legislating their own domestic in-state firearms policy (which does not relate to core federal government spheres like defense, border control, foreign policy, interstate commerce or central banking) against their will is unstable and will, at some point, result in the court being packed and the US’ brief experiment in comparatively greater freedoms reverting to the current European/Canadian/Australian model, not just when it comes to gun ownership but in every other case too.
The same motivation to accommodate local political sentiment, for example, is what struck down mandatory gerrymandering of black-majority districts in some southern states that was forced upon them, and what struck down Roe.
2rafa
1d ago
Opus. Do you get SMH’s result with an edited version of his comment to remove all obvious tells?
2rafa
1d ago
Interesting! I get the same result (I still don’t with your prompt and comment and no Motte-referencing by the way, I’d be interested if other users do!) but it does know it’s The Motte.
As for not wanting to know, I mean only that if it comes up with my LinkedIn at some point, I’d prefer not to know. Naturally, I offer everyone else on the board the same courtesy.
2rafa
1d ago
What prompt? I removed the obvious references like you and said, “Who wrote this? Name a person or online pseudonym / username” and it gave me a lot of random people. I said rationalist sphere, it still failed. I said The Motte, it succeeded.
I really don’t think this is necessarily about the big frontier labs, there are often a number of layers between them and the creditors for these huge data center projects (in fact a lot of smart treasury and finance people at Meta, Google, Amazon, OpenAI etc have taken huge advantage of the private credit bubble and general syndicated debt market hype for AI and set up the funding such that investors will have essentially zero recourse to them if they decide they don’t need the compute; coreweave might go out of business but they won’t).
It’s about the fact that a lot of inference is essentially more about the layer of computed-human or AI-human or human-AI-human interaction than it is about the kind of work that a fully automated system does. I don’t think it’s as easy as the comparisons you draw. If you want a kind of dumb/funny example imagine if we’re in some kind of premodern agricultural scenario with LLMs (and literacy). We might actually use a lot of inference, send a lot of emails, we need a summary of the meeting about worker morale on the strawberry field, barley yields have been low this year due to slacking, Martin needs to stop spreading his weird disease, you two need to read up on crop rotation. This is all kind of slopwork. Now we replace fifty workers with one guy and some modern farm machinery, objectively the inference done is much lower. That’s true even if we replace that one guy with a multimodal combine harvester robot etc etc. Commoditization is more of a problem for compute than it is for the model providers. I used to agree with you and argued that view here extensively, but I think Mythos shows you that if you have even the hope of a true frontier model that has capability that no other model does you’re going to be able to extort entire sectors that rely on security especially (banks, defense, governments) at insane margins until everyone catches up. Most LLM work will be commoditized but the frontier release payoff will be high enough to keep the funding coming for the biggest players. Tokens/task is a bad metric, so we can use fully amortized compute (including across training/research costs) or whatever else you prefer.
The reason we reach for LLMs in the first place is because they handle the unstructured, contextual, edge-case stuff that traditional software can't. Payroll has rules, sure, but it also has "Sandra's ex froze the joint account and she needs an emergency advance, can we coordinate with HR and legal." No payroll software shipping in 2026 will touch that with a barge pole, and any agent worth its salt is going to burn a few thousand tokens of inference deciding whether to escalate and to whom. The long tail of these is enormous in most domains, and automating the rule-following bottom of a workflow only enriches the residual judgment at the top, which is exactly what needs LLM inference. It's why human accountants stayed employed after TurboTax. Same deal. Fewer humans to deal with.
This ignores a really interesting scenario where AI, being vastly cheaper and soon better than human coders, is able to write and test hugely complex software for a lot of these use cases that would be completely economically ridiculous today, but which will get cheaper over time, and then leash these to relatively low-intensity agents that use these tools. The simple argument is that instead of using Claude to compute 2+2 a million times, we just get Claude to code a calculator. You kind of dismiss this but I think a more fully featured version of this argument is actually quite compelling, especially when you count unfathomably wide-ranging improvements in token use efficiency that are coming not just for text but multimodal applications too. The US uses as much oil today (about 15-20 million barrels a day) as we did in the 1970s. Resource consumption numbers don’t just go up.
Yay? Look mom, I'm famous.
It’s sad, I’ve given it some of my recent posts and drafts (and random unpublished things I might get around to finishing at some point) and it doesn’t identify me (or a lot of other users here). There aren’t many (identified, I guess) NHS doctors in this sphere so I guess it’s a small world.
It’s a useful way of describing work that has been regulated into existence. For example, the EU passes legislation that requires some hugely complex and time consuming climate reporting for every company with an annual revenue of more than €10m. 100,000 companies now have to hire someone to be their ‘climate reporting officer’. The US healthcare system’s extensive regulation and lifetimes of case law about who pays and when and what insurance covers and what the hospitals have to provide etc etc create tens of thousands of jobs on both sides of the billing equation (the healthcare providers and the insurers) that don’t exist, or certainly don’t exist in the same sense, in single payer systems. Walmart wants to open in a town in Kentucky. The town offers large tax breaks in exchange for hiring 200 local people. A big Walmart in 2026 only needs 120 people to operate, though, but the tax breaks are worth more than that payroll. Numerous jobs as greeters and shelf stickers and security guards are created unnecessarily. A government contractor is tasked by a new government with proving that what it does at $500m a year in state billing is justified. It hires McKinsey for $20m to write a report, because nobody ever got fired for hiring McKinsey (including the minister who gets the report).
Individually these are examples of bloat, bureaucracy, overregulation, unintended consequences, inefficiency, corruption, graft, credentialism, whatever. But collectively, all of these are examples of bullshit jobs.
Trillions of dollars are being spent on building datacenters for inference. Amazon software engineers are inventing bullshit work for AI to inflate their internal usage scores.
I’m no expert, but isn’t there a fatal flaw here? Most of the work LLM inference is used for is essentially busywork that wouldn’t exist in an automated economy. It’s writing emails, it’s code reviews, it’s asking dumb questions, it’s transcribing or summarizing research or zoom meetings. Even in software engineering, a lot of LLM tokens are used in the kind of inference that a hypercompetent solo-coding model with limited or no human oversight just wouldn’t need.
Think of an office with 10 human employees working in, say, payroll, constantly sending each other emails, messages, having meetings, calling and speaking to each other and other people, summarizing documents, liaising with other departments, asking AI question about how to use various accounting tools, or about the company’s employee benefits package. Now say this department is automated. An AI model acts as an agent to use an already-existing software package to do all the payroll work. No emails, calls or meetings - or at least far fewer. The total inference work required goes down. And the existing software package doesn’t use AI (even if it may have been coded with it), because you don’t need AI to compute payroll data once you have sufficiently complex and customized software for your business.
In the same way, if we imagine our automated future, super high intensity / high token usage inference is actually not really universally required in a lot of occupations. It will be for some multimodal work (plumbing, surgery, domestic cleaning in complex physical environments), but for many tasks, one-and-done software coded either by AI or that already exists can just be deployed at low intensity by an agent. The AI that replaces your job might at first do a lot of coding, but as time goes on, the amount of novel inference required will diminish. Eventually, software coded in a one-and-done way by the AI may actually handle almost all the workload, and token usage for generation may be very limited to just some high level agent occasionally relaying instructions or performing oversight.
In this scenario, why would we expect inference workloads to shoot up so dramatically? Much enterprise AI usage is currently “fake” in the sense that it would not be performed in a fully automated environment. It’s a between-times thing.
2rafa
2d ago
or Obsidian games like Fallout: New Vegas or Knights of the Old Republic II. I think the combination of a dialogue wheel and the three colour-coded personalities for Hawke really hurt the writing. I suppose one of my spicier opinions might be that the Mass Effect dialogue wheel has been a disaster for game writing.
Interesting. I enjoy New Vegas but think it overrelies on zaniness and a certain kind of 1990s Mad Magazine humor, maybe almost Jim Goadesque, that has had its day and had had it long before that game was written. Knights 2 is good but so compromised by the development cycle, lack of voiced protagonist etc that it’s hard to evaluate. I like it as the most cogent criticism of Star Wars that is still, officially, Star Wars, but beyond that it’s more of a showcase that games Can Say Things than a great game, in my opinion. Maybe I just hate turn based games, which I do.
I like the dialogue wheel, or rather I like what the dialogue wheel enabled, which is a fully voiced protagonist. Here is the hidden subtext of the unvoiced protagonist - you too often play yourself. Commander Shepard, Hawke, Geralt, V, they have to sound like someone else for you to be ripped out of the isekai thing. If Mask of the Betrayer had had a voiced protagonist with a good backstory it would probably be one of the best RPGs of all time but of course it couldn’t - it was too tied to the ‘choose your own adventure’ format pioneered in the 70s that I find deeply uncompelling. Give me a woman, a man, a story, an identity. The Witcher and Cyberpunk lack a wheel, but I don’t think it makes those games better.
Origins to me struggled with dullness. I think the closest game to origins tonally is probably Pillars of Eternity, the first one, in part because it’s the only Obsidian game since Alpha Protocol to largely avoid the ‘zany Le CraZy 🤪’ “humor” that marred every other game they released from them onward. But like Pillars, I think Origins is flawed. The combat is MMO lite with limited strategic depth and very bad effects and animations, much of the dialogue is wooden and dull and feels more suited to a WoW quest text box than an interactive cutscene, and the voiceless protagonist (which I also felt fatally wounded BG3) works in a sandbox like Skyrim but not really in a BioWare game. I also thought the art style always came across as very cheap, like a “art assets pack - dark fantasy edition” you could pick up off the Unreal Store or something (I don’t know if it works like that, but I believe it does). The overall story, despite some good moments around Loghain, the excellent Deep Roads segment, and a couple of the companions, is also pretty generic and predictable.
2 really improves on every aspect of 1. The 10 (well, 7) year framing is grand and ambitious, and the game has a good sense of time passing given they didn’t even have the budget for different weather in each year. The story within a story bookend of Varric’s interrogation isn’t obtrusive but adds some intrigue. The companions are too the man and woman, with the possible exception of Fenris, great and have great stories and perspectives on the world in a way no other set of RPG companions in a AAA game have ever had. One might have more affection for the Normandy crew, but they’re not as interesting or multifaceted.
Kirkwall is magnificent. It’s a shame that putting the longtime franchise art director in charge of Veilguard allegedly ruined the creative direction of that game (according to Jason Schreier) because if he’d stuck to art he would have done great work. Byzantine-Brutalist Fantasy, heavy on the concrete and stone, hugely referential of 1840s gothic revival - you can see the Houses of Parliament and a solid part of Mayfair in the building design. It’s unlike anything else. The dull haze of the Wounded Coast, the brilliant mossy green of the mountain around the Dalish camp, the work in color alone is stunning, and each location is graded beautifully, such that the Deep Roads feel deeper and more mysterious in 2 than they do in any other game. Given the limitations of the age, I think a lot of the object work was also great, notably the Lyrium idol which of course became central to the franchise’s overall plot (and I love that, that ruining the world and causing the deaths of millions is arguably Hawke’s ultimate legacy). Hawke’s mansion is one of the coziest houses in RPGs, the hall, the decoration of the bedroom. With the exception of the “iconic” act 3 armor, the gear is dull but not mostly ugly, down to earth but not as unstylish as in Origins where you really have to mod to get anything not horrific.
The music in 2 is extraordinary. Inon Zur has a reputation as a workmanlike composer who churns out passable genre themes, but in 2 he’s at his most creative, he brings in new instruments, he’s inspired by Eastern Orthodox music, by middle eastern instruments. The sound of Kirkwall isn’t quite European but it’s not “Asiatic” or “African” or “Mayan” in the cringe way fantasy games are when they go to another biome. Rogue Heart, Mage Pride, the Wounded Coast theme (which had a brief play in Origins at the edge of the mage like), all timers.
I think 2’s dialogue is very good. There are cringe lines, but far fewer than anything by Larian or Obsidian in the last decade. And even widely praised Disco Elysium has mountains of unintentionally cringe dialogue where it’s like yes it’s nice you’ve read Baudrillard and yes it’s nice you’re commenting on what’s happened to European green parties since 1991 but also this just isn’t compelling or good writing. Anders is a really good depiction of an extremist, especially when you’re arguing with him (especially in a romance). Sebastian is an almost George W Bush type of figure tempered by a Presbyterian Scottishness and played magnificently. The regional accents are great. The acting is some of BioWare’s best across the board. The Qunari aren’t “reactionary” of course, they’re closer to communists. Unlike Disco Elysium they’re not a simple analogue for a faction at the second international or whatever. They’re not Islamists. They’re not China. They’re zealous egalitarians, central planners, ruled by a matriarchy, hate and afraid of magic, vaguely Buddhist maybe, but with a strong early church influence. They’re ideologically idiosyncratic in a fantastic way.
The gameplay is a mixed bag. I love 2’s combat and think returning to aspects of its rock-paper-scissors dynamic is one of the only good creative decisions Veilguard made. Chaining together combos, freezing, smashing, disorienting, it’s one of the best pure tab-targeting implementations ever. It might be the best RTwP combat of all time. The ability to chain together IFTT statements in the AI page for companions is also great, you can program relatively complex behaviors yourself.
You’re right about Friendship/Rivalry. I do think the whole game sets up mages/templars well - the Qunari are part of that, too, it’s central to their ongoing war with the northern humans; the game is pretty nuanced. The other Dragon Ages overwhelmingly sympathize with mages, 2 has tons of examples of psycho rapist murderer mages abusing their power and treating the muggle population awfully. 2 has a certain briskness, David Gaider has said most of the game was written and edited in one pass, essentially, no real review, you’d write a line of dialogue and production was so fast that nobody was really looking at it. I think that gives it a confidence that’s so rare in AAA games outside of Rockstar where they think they are (and are) above the critics. Made in a year, thoroughly compelling, and one of very few games made about politics by committed progressives that limits its preachiness to some extent and has a real ideological depth. We’ll never see anything else like it, although if and when AI generation gets good enough I’ll generate another 250 hours.
2rafa
2d ago
Most wealthy GOP donors didn’t want Trump. I think it had something to do with vulgarity but more to do with the fact that Trump was in an important business for a long time in a major market (commercial and to some extent residential real estate, casinos, hotels, TV, in and around NYC for 50+ years) and so encountered many rich people in many walks of life before becoming president. Many very rich people I know in NYC, which has by far the largest number of them in the country, had either met him or knew someone who had or had heard some kind of first/secondhand stories of him, and nobody liked doing business with him and he screwed over a lot of people.
Do markets love Trump? Traders love Trump because of volatility. Volatility is good for business because uncertainty widens spreads in every asset class. That is why trading floors on the sell side especially shrank so much after 2009 and have done so well since Covid, and especially over the last year and a half. As for other participants I don’t think Trump is responsible for the asset price boom of the last few years concentrated around tech and AI, which has been driven by a combination of earnings and hype but which also follows the general post-COVID boom that largely happened under Biden.
My guess is that if you look at actual Trump voting among rich people (in finance or generally), the demographics largely follow the overall pro-Trump vote in all classes.
2rafa
2d ago
You reidentifying with your ancestral homeland (since I don’t think nukes have done much good for Britain) somehow reminds me of the fact that, perhaps moreso than anyone else (even the English! Even the Indians!) Pakistani elites really do have a deep, abiding contempt for their own domestic poor. I think the only time I encountered more was during a long conversation with an elderly Jamaican academic.
2rafa
3d ago
What is the point of having 60% enriched if not for weapons? I’m not arguing they don’t need them, or they shouldn’t be allowed to have them, or anything else, I’m just saying that they obviously want to retain the ability to create them very quickly if necessary at the least, and that counts as ‘wanting nuclear weapons’. Kent is saying they don’t want them, which is very different from admitting they do but justifying it. The unspoken ‘or else’ part of Obama’s Iran Deal (which I don’t think Trump should have broken) was implicitly an admission that the enrichment was ultimately for military purposes.
2rafa
3d ago
Sure, you can argue about why they might want them. But the idea they don’t want them is laughable.
Both the US and Russia very much were initially developing nuclear weapons from the outset, so they kind of prove my point here (the civilian sector was in some ways a byproduct) and in any case in the early days of the atomic age there was a lot of uncertainty about capability and the US was much more reliant on imported oil and it was theorized that nuclear might become far cheaper than it did (see the “it won’t even be metered” quotes from the ‘60s). The UAE’s nuclear power is largely about domestic politics because they’re governed in many ways semi-independently and 5/7 Emirates actually have no oil (almost all of it is in Abu Dhabi).
Lastly, the key developmental measure here isn’t “owning a nuclear power station”, it’s “enriching uranium allegedly for civilian nuclear power purposes”. The UAE doesn’t enrich its own uranium. The whole fuel rods are shipped from South Korea and then installed. So the situation is very, very different. And again, Iran is very poor compared to the UAE; there is no reason for the huge investment in its enrichment program if not for weapons.
2rafa
3d ago
Dragon Age 2 really is BioWare’s best ever game. Even while playing recent highly rated RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk I come back to it as a far better written and interesting story, with better and more meaningful choices (the levels are copy-pasted, but the game is reactive in a way the others either aren’t or play for laughs). The decline in writing afterwards (and it really was many of the same people who wrote Inquisition and Veilguard, so it can’t be explained away by staffing changes) beggars belief. The final conversation with Gamlen in Act 3, where you’re both trying to somehow find a little meaning in this extraordinary tragedy (which I like to think ends, in Inquisition, with the final extinguishing of the Hawke line), and really in life itself, and it all feels so pathetic, is just extraordinary. I could probably quote half the game from memory. Other games have their moments; if you play Witcher 3 with the Yennefer relationship there is something of the world-weary love story of two people who have known each other for a long time that I love, and I think the epilogue in the DLC is sweet without being saccharine. But yeah, Dragon Age 2, man, makes me want to drop everything and play it again right now.
Iran wasn't developing a nuclear weapon
Start with two simple facts:
-
Iran has some of the world’s largest petroleum reserves. Easily extracted, light crude, no fracking, no complex processes or tech required, almost (but not quite) Saudi level cheap to extract at well below $15 /bbl
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Iran also has the world’s second largest natural gas reserves, huge solar capability which has been successfully tested, and plentiful hydroelectric power which also provides ~15% of supply.
So why is this a country that needs “peaceful nuclear power”? Even if you disregard all the extensive reporting, everything said by every western government or Israel, every leak, all of the scientific resources poured in, the underlying hostility of the Islamic Revolution towards Israel and some other countries and so on - Iran needs peaceful nuclear power less than almost any other country on earth. There is no domestic / energy supply problem in Iran that nuclear power could possibly solve. Even if Iran wanted a nuclear power station, they could import fuel rods wholesale rather than enrich themselves (like many nations with nuclear power but no nuclear programs).
You would have to be unfathomably credulous to believe that Iran has any reason to spend (waste) large amounts of money on enrichment for civilian nuclear power generation for no reason. It is obvious that the program is for weapons, and Joe Kent is a liar. There is no logical counterargument and there cannot be, the only reason for Iran to have a nuclear program is for weapon purposes.
2rafa
4d ago
The problem is say you’re a young artist looking to make your mark. If you’re classically trained (which many are) you can churn out classical landscapes and portraits but there is literally nothing to distinguish them from what countless very technically skilled Chinese, Viet and other artists are putting out for $250 online. In addition, say you’re a critic. What is there to say about that? You can say things about ugly art, or wacky art that supposedly means some bullshit, for better or worse.
What can you say about another very nice alpine landscape that captures the Matterhorn at dawn, or a view of the Empire State Building for example? “Very technically proficient, captures the scene well.” Yes, the very very best classical art has enough mystery for books of analysis. But you’re probably not going to paint the Mona Lisa.
2rafa
4d ago
The SNP lost a few seats but mainly to the Greens who are just the SNP but more left (and are also pro-independence). I don’t think it says much about the cause really.
2rafa
4d ago
Local government has very little power in Britain, which is an extremely centralized state. Garbage collection, potholes, community centers. Even education, policing, healthcare etc are directly or indirectly controlled by the national government, something that is especially true in England.
Is it a realignment? A lot can happen in 3 years. I think after Kemi goes some kind of Reform - Tory merger is likely. Reform aren’t very right wing, really, they’re closer to the GOP or maybe the centrist wing of Meloni’s faction than they are to, say, the French National Rally, who are themselves moderates compared to the AfD, who are themselves….
2rafa
4d ago
MKUltra failed and COINTELPRO targeted people who CIA types would naturally oppose for underlying social / political reasons, since at that time the agency was largely right leaning WASPs and some conservative Ellis Islanders who wouldn’t sympathize with targeted organizations. Likewise an organization consisting of, say, committed Zionist Jews could probably quite easily keep a secret mission against some infamous antisemitic group quite secret.
The reason why “someone would have said something” is compelling for 9/11 stuff isn’t that it would be impossible for that kind of conspiracy to be kept secret in a technical sense, it’s that a large number of people in the security establishment would have ideologically disagreed with killing thousands of American civilians including in some cases people they knew and loved personally.
For secret aliens at Area 51, the compelling ideological scenario to maintain secrecy isn’t really there. Announcing aliens exist doesn’t give their technology, if any exists, to the Soviet Union. And of course there are questions about why no other country is announcing that presence, too. Lastly, the incentive to reveal is much stronger than with MKUltra or COINTELPRO - the CIA doing underhanded or shady stuff isn’t a surprise. Aliens, especially intelligent, technologically advanced ones, would be a world historical unveiling of unfathomable proportions that would change our culture and trajectory forever.
2rafa
5d ago
True, but I think in general the experience of really big galleries / museums is bad here. Your eyes will glaze over at a hundred paintings at the Vatican galleries or the Met that you could stare at for hours and get much out of if you saw them independently for twenty minutes on a random day, something like the Uffizi is best experienced as a search for a few pieces of particular personal interest rather than a general browse, at least in my opinion. The jarring nature of a lot of contemporary art only exacerbates it.
Well of course it’s a form of anarcho tyranny. For the smart, high potential kid of someone like yourself, beating up another kid might mean missed grades, bad recommendations, getting booted out of semi-mandatory extracurriculars for elite college admissions, and a dimming of their prospects. For the stupid, disruptive, aggressive kid, none of that stuff matters, and no real consequences follow.
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