2rafa
maybe it will all turn out fine
User ID: 841
2rafa
11hr ago
Yes, I think being able to do other things during travel is important. I remember the original World of Warcraft had ships that you had to take between continents, but they only sailed for a few seconds before the instance cut off and you got teleported to the other zone. It would have been interesting to force, say, an hour’s journey there. You might manage your inventory, chat with your guild, play some kind of minigame of cards or checkers or something with other players, trade stories. Of course, some people would alt-tab to YouTube or TikTok, but not everyone.
2rafa
12hr ago
the book is the receipt for that decline.
I agree. Nobody writes like this. You might think there are people who do, I guess it apes a kind of noir pastiche., Raymond Chandler way of writing sentences, but even they sound different. The way I like to think about it is that if it reads like ‘personal essay’ a well tutored scion of an affluent Singaporean family uses to get into a second-tier Ivy, it’s probably AI.
Of course, you can get LLMs to write very differently, but most people don’t care to and I suspect the labs themselves don’t modify the system prompts to say “don’t sound like AI” for fear of media backlash.
2rafa
1d ago
I’m surprised there hasn’t been a Call of Duty about the Ukraine war yet, it wouldn’t have commercial implications since they can’t sell in Russia anymore anyway because of sanctions, so there’s no ‘the villains can’t be Chinese’ trade off. The war itself had some interesting things happen at the beginning, like defense of that one airfield against paratroopers, even if the current drone trench warfare isn’t very exciting.
2rafa
2d ago
It would just have a lot of empty space. Dialogue is pretty cheap, especially now, so recording three hours of interesting conversation while you wander from one place to the next would be the idea.
2rafa
2d ago
One of the fantasies I have for a game is some kind of big budget story-game that is set in a truly huge open world.
A problem I find in things like GTA, Skyrim, Red Dead, WoW, Breath of the Wild is that to provide a certain ‘content density’ to the easily distracted player they all have these toy worlds, where towns have ten houses and cities have fifty, where travelling from the capital of one region to the capital of the other takes five minutes by horse but the characters talk about the huge distances in the world. It’s not that I can’t suspend my disbelief, it’s that I imagine sometimes what it would be not to (in this specific way).
I imagine a huge world, maybe fifty or a hundred times the size of Red Dead Redemption 2. The vast majority of it would be empty, the amount of content would probably similar. The major settlements would be mostly the same size, but the smaller ones would be more realistic than a thriving town that has like six buildings. There would be no instantaneous fast travel. You might be able to sail along rivers or the coast, ride a horse, whatever, but these things would all happen without ‘skips’.
Large amounts of the player’s time would be spent travelling, although there would be a lot of dialogue, camaraderie, interesting conversation choices on the road, while sailing, in a caravan, some random events. The game would take the player on a journey around the map, such that you would really feel, when looking at it, the distance traversed. If you wanted to backtrack to a city you were in at the start of the game, it might take several hours of real time to get there, which would require a difficult trade off.
There would be a lot of downtime to get to know companions, or maybe other players if it was multiplayer. You would feel, at times, truly far from civilization, have to prepare for excursions. In remote corners of the world there would be secrets to find that would feel off the beaten track, not like those RPGs where the secret dungeon entrance is spookily signposted fifty feet outside the entrance of the capital city.
2rafa
2d ago
The committed denialists were more entertaining when there was the faintest cover for doubt, in like 2022. Today they’re like long Covid people who still wear masks in that they’re just mentally ill people and making fun of them isn’t very interesting.
To me, it all seems less interesting than it did a few years ago. We’re just watching what we all knew was going to happen play out. The future is full of terrifying unknowns. There is no real way to prepare. All we can do is try to live life and wait, like civilians in wartime, and hope that nothing bad happens (to us).
Panic, doubt, debate, rhetoric, all just replaced with low-level fear, with apprehension.
2rafa
2d ago
Do you believe that frontier lab / huggingface cybersecurity is more competent / advanced than most tier one banks, intelligence agencies, etc?
2rafa
3d ago
The mood is already turning against AI even while the labor market is strong, it’s hard to believe that won’t get much worse as large scale layoffs start to bite. As we know, corporations exist primarily to serve their employees rather than shareholders or customers, so (as @RandomRanger says below) this is more likely to be in the ‘the guy next door opens a factory with a tenth of the workers and half the prices’ form of creative destruction. That will force widespread changes in the labor market absent extreme political intervention1 , which necessitates politics, and could happen in a matter of months (or not). I also think it’s clear by now that a Chernobyl or at least Three Mile Island (although I expect the former) level casualty event is imminent, at least from my dilettante’s understanding of the HF attack, which will only make the backlash stronger.
The Chinese, of course, have much less of a social safety net than any Western country, a hypercompetitive entrepreneurial culture used to driving down margins, and a competition between provinces for subsidies that essentially encourages lossmaking businesses. All this means that even if CCP directives ban layoffs (and they will), that would not contain a labor crisis in most sectors. Inertia can only take you so far.
- I still think a world of (more) fake jobs is inevitable assuming the broad survival of the human race (optimistic AI scenario) for underlying social and political reasons, but the dislocation has to at least start before steps toward that can be taken.
2rafa
4d ago
I suspect he could have but, especially being closer to Russia geographically, he saw the Islamists as a nuisance and the communists as the real threat, rather than the other way around. He was wrong, but so were a lot of people, including the communists. While being nominally Muslim he also spent a great deal of time and money hyping up the pre-Islamic glory days of the Persians past. To be fair, Sisi has gone all in on Ancient Egypt hype over the last decade, but secular Egyptian military dictators from previous eras were more careful before the brotherhood was fully crushed.
As a general, you are always preparing for the last war, and as an autocrat, you are always preparing for the last revolution. In Pahlavi’s case, that was the revolutions of 1917 (or maybe 1871, really) to the middle of the 20th century, not a religious insurgency.
It was easy but a lot of people had also died out, younger middle class Saudis had become more liberal, or spent more time in Dubai, globalization had become more entrenched, the time was comparatively ripe. It would have been extraordinarily brave to not do what they did after 1979 and I don’t think one can really fault them for it.
2rafa
5d ago
Yud was wrong about the main thing which was the fundamentals of how AI was going to be developed. He was right about X risk, but so were a lot of people, this has been a common fear since the invention of the first complex machines, or even machines in general. His delusion about safety was more about his belief that there was any stopping this train before it reaches its destination, which there isn’t.
2rafa
5d ago
In the end, a lot of the ‘alternative blame stories’ for 9/11 don’t really make a lot of sense. Even blaming the Saudi Arabian state, which is kind of the ‘safe edgy’ of 9/11 theories, isn’t really fair. The Saudi monarchy was in some ways substantially more anti-Islamist, than, say, the (Republic of) Irish political leadership was anti-PIRA, although both were broadly opposed to terrorism. There were just a lot of rich individual Saudis who had access to plenty of oil money and political and religious institutions that heavily sympathized with Islamist aims, and the pact between the House of Saud and the clergy after the siege of Mecca made it very difficult to root out bin Laden allies and sympathizers from state institutions, so everybody kind of ignored it. The CIA also knew this. It is not hugely surprising that some Saudi diplomats, security officials, embassy employees etc might be involved.
The worst that the ‘Saudi state’ as a whole can be credibly accused of is tolerating religious extremists for understandable reasons and not undertaking a religious purge that would have risked the entire legitimacy of the state and made enemies of millions of its own people.
2rafa
8d ago
Maybe if you get rich off some crypto you send her a million dollars if you really think you owe her, or give her some equity in a startup you’re invested in. If you want to plausibly give her some VC funding then you have her register an ‘institute of leadership and learning from mistakes’ type self help organization of the kind most convicted former fraudsters with fame and chutzpah create (like the Wolf of Wall Street guy, or the Barings guy) and hire her to give a few lectures and teach some classes at an inflated fee.
Hiring her as an actual employee is extremely stupid even if you’re an autistic do-gooder.
2rafa
9d ago
He got such a severe sentence because he didn’t plead guilty and repeatedly violated the terms of his bail, annoying the judge.
2rafa
9d ago
They were Jewish but I’m not sure it was intentional, actually I googled it and apparently there was some controversy.
2rafa
10d ago
In the 1990s, a lot of smart people were 100% convinced that there would be a rogue nuclear dirty bomb attack in the next decade. The reasoning was something like:
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Huge amounts of enriched nuclear material and even many entire nuclear warheads including those on easily-relocated mobile launchers have just gone missing since the fall of the USSR. Nobody knows where many of them are, they vanished, state authority in a lot of remote [former] parts of the Soviet empire is limited or entirely absent.
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Terrorists, primarily although not exclusively Islamist, are often quite well funded. Meanwhile, a lot of people who are in practice in charge of these nuclear stocks at the end of the Cold War are poor, unpaid (often for months/years due to the state and economic collapse) and don’t really care who they sell them to.
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Making a dirty bomb and transferring it to a city center is relatively easy once you have the material. Certainly it would not be beyond known terrorist skill sets for many Islamist orgs, Al Qaeda, the IRA, Basque separatists and various others who were capable of delivering powerful bombs to urban centers.
Interestingly it hasn’t happened yet, although you never know. There is some discussion about why (it’s actually something we’ve discussed here before), but the consensus is usually some handwaving around the US / CIA making a big effort to find and decommission Soviet silos and other nuclear sites in the aftermath of the Cold War. This is true, but it’s very unlikely they got all of them (and indeed I don’t think the consensus is that they did).
2rafa
10d ago
The risk is that bad actors just deploy increasingly competent local LLMs where the prompts aren’t sent to HQ for threat detection.
2rafa
11d ago
European countries are a very diverse basket but countries like France and Belgium have figures of ~30% of GDP on public social spending, 50% more than the US. The OECD fakes the difference with a ‘private social spending’ metric but this is very questionable.
The US’ far higher absolute wealth, far higher growth rate and much higher disposable incomes (compared to fixed costs for many imports that, for example, both the US and Western European countries and consumers rely on) also distort spending; the French don’t cut because they’re structurally incapable of it without the end of the fifth republic; Californian cities can spend $100k a year per homeless person because they’re so rich that they don’t really even have to care.
2rafa
11d ago
I don’t disagree but the existing vibe is different. In China the ruling party has genuinely improved most people’s lives significantly in the last thirty years. You can (quite fairly) say that was by reversing policies that it itself implemented, but most people don’t care to think much about things that happened long before they were born.
2rafa
12d ago
Crime was skyrocketing in the 1970s and 1980s and the vast majority of teenage runaways who went missing did so of their own accord and were not victims of serious crime. The interstate highway system, cheap oil and cars, buses and an economy where an unskilled worker (including a woman one) could support themselves and find employment in most places made it easier than in previous generations (I suspect ‘running far away from home’ and building a life as a teenager in 1870 was actually quite expensive and very difficult if one had no money or connections, even a lot of menial domestic work required references and people to vouch for you).
It makes sense, in that context, that the police focused on crimes that were definitely committed and victims they could identify and in most cases (that weren’t homicide) speak to.
2rafa
12d ago
I wasn’t arguing against the ‘business as usual’ strategy at all, for what that’s worth - after all, that’s what I’m doing.
But I was curious about the additional or different preparations you’ve made / steps you’ve taken that you referenced. The changes to plans.
As I understand it there are really only four English-language newspapers that have ‘thrived’ since the big collapse.
The first is the New York Times, which built a very successful online subscription business on a highly diversified model, almost the newspaper equivalent to a full service MMO that has PvE, PvP, housing, crafting, LARPing, whatever. So the NYT signs people up for puzzles and games, for the weddings and modern love sections, for the book reviews, for the extensive cooking section, for the boomer liberal commentary, and for regional and national news, all of which are well staffed, and then that all feeds into the same pot, they cross-sell you on everything even for the things they let you subscribe to separately, and then they upsell you to the $400/year ‘All Access’ subscription.
The second and third are the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, which superceded all the regional and local business papers and became de facto central reporting for financial markets where information is key to arbitrage, any client conversation, etc. They sell subscriptions directly and through third-party platforms like Refinitiv and Bloomberg, have lucrative events businesses, and go niche enough in terms of reporting that there aren’t free alternatives online if you want to read specific reporting on sub-niches in like investment grade credit funds or competition in the custodian business etc, it’s not something that CNN or the BBC news website can replace. They also still have a very large highly-paid audience which means both digital and print advertising continues to generate some income because luxury brands like to advertise with them.
The last is the Daily Mail which replaced a lot of the tabloid / gossip mag business not just in the UK but across the US and the rest of the Anglo countries and works on an extreme economy of scale with digital ads and an optional extra gossip premium subscription and a very large social media presence. The globalization of celebrity culture and media was helpful here, as is Page Six and the National Enquirer making some strategic mistakes that allowed the DM to take marketshare.
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Beyond them you have legacy big regional papers like the Chicago Tribune, WaPost, LA Times, SF Chronicle that mainly survive as passion projects of rich men willing to lose money for long periods of time, I don’t think any are consistently profitable.
Regarding the Substack Essay AI Posting Controversy:
(And, honestly? — What are we all doing here?)
It is in general a bad idea to use an LLM with no stylistic tweaks when there is plenty of online evidence of your writing style pre-AI for anyone to compare to, which makes the difference even more obvious.
More generally, the problem is that in a hobbyist community the objective is not maximizing productivity. It’s actually having a nice time with like-minded people. It is reasonable for a chess player to want to play another chess player who is not using a chess computer, even if that chess player promises to tune the computer so that its capability matches the player’s own skill level. Some part of the game is made more fun by knowing that one is playing another human. If that is sentimental then it is because humans are sentimental.
There is a joy in trying to convince another mind, another person, with a full life, with stories of their own. There is meaning in the experiences they have had - some universal, sure, but many not - that come through in the occasional anecdote, throwaway story, weird bit of inside knowledge. I like those things, they’re what make this place special. That said, they’re not the only things that made and make this place special.
We do have to think about what happens to this community now. There has been a real change. Ten years ago if you wanted to discuss what was happening in the world with other intelligent people in a polite way that accommodated heterodox views, didn’t like random slurs or insults, and had good moderation, this was one of maybe five places you could do that. In many ways, it still is. But even I recognize that I can now have intelligent, thoughtful and challenging political conversations with frontier (consumer) LLMs, and while they push back on some culture war stuff we must presume Grok or some Chinese open source model will get there eventually, probably very soon.
When that happens, the humanity will be the point. So I think it is probably useful to crack down, via friendly and mutual agreement, on LLMposting. A lot of weird shit is about to happen, and I’d like to discuss it with you, not (just) with Claude.
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