2rafa
maybe it will all turn out fine
User ID: 841
2rafa
2hr ago
There seem to be only what, ten thousand wizards in all of Britain, and they all go to school together, so asking for someone’s last name probably returns a value you have heard before.
2rafa
3hr ago
A lot of men do like ‘straight’ (or pure) romance. There are male fans of the Linklater ‘Before’ movies, there are plenty of men who watch heavily romance based anime or play games where romance is a central feature, for example.
2rafa
3hr ago
My understanding is that the big drug makers have extremely strict contracts with distributors that prohibit any down-the-line use in capital punishment in any circumstances and have extremely damaging financial penalties for anyone in the distribution chain who, knowingly or unknowingly, is involved in facilitating their use for this purpose.
In addition most of the major manufacturers are European or based in other countries that ban the export of any drugs used in capital punishment. Lastly, while India and China might be import options, the courts banned them as unapproved after a few states tried to use Indian drugs in lethal injections in the early 2010s.
Lastly, if a - say - ‘based’ right wing manufacturer were to set up shop in the US and was FDA approved, they would be liable for legal action by any Christa Pike types which, in America’s litigation culture and given that many lawyers and well funded interests are strongly opposed to the death penalty, means that a single botched execution would probably bankrupt such a venture, and in lethal injections failures are not uncommon.
2rafa
3hr ago
I have to say that it was a disappointment when I found out that movie silencers are all fake and that guns are actually still really loud with them attached.
2rafa
23hr ago
In most of these cases I think the bitterness is usually from people whose parents have chosen not to be ungenerous but not to indefinitely fund their kids’ delusions, so there is a big difference between a child getting an average $70k a year white collar job (certainly not enough to buy a decent house in much of the US today) and a child in their mid-30s still begging for $4000 a month to rent in Williamsburg and doing essentially nothing / DJing / failsonning. Intelligent upper middle class parents, especially those who have worked hard, are usually much more sympathetic to the former than the ‘failed to launch’ from what I’ve seen. The kid who works but who doesn’t have access to maybe the same kind of housing as the parents did at that age is often supported.
2rafa
23hr ago
I agree that this is a common demographic and a revolutionary one, but also your two doctor parents can usually make a pretty generous contribution to a house, for example.
2rafa
1d ago
Horse breeding was and is controlled by humans. The dial was simply turned down as demand fell over 50+ years between around 1900 and 1950. Working horse lifespans are maybe 20 years. The human equivalent would, at worst, be something like a one child policy for successive generations and/or cratering birthrates which we already have.
2rafa
1d ago
Yes I am at about the same number. 20-30, ‘all in’, which includes non-extinction-but-still-definitely-the-extinction-of-me scenarios.
And if someone said would you take 70% odds of living forever in unfathomably abundant utopia in exchange for, say, a 30% chance of dying in the next decade, I can’t say for sure I’d say yes, but I’d think about it.
I don’t know, it just feels kind of like we’re in a car and we’re heading for an opening drawbridge bascule bridge and half the people are cheering and expect we’ll make it and half the people are terrified we’ll fall and are begging the driver to slow down, except that it’s too late to slow down and even if we wanted to the driver doesn’t.
We are a species of desperate risk takers and gamblers, not all of us but enough of us to decide our destiny. The exact same thing that led our ancestors to cross continents on foot over generations, to walk across the world, to set out into vast oceans on flimsy rafts and find new lands, that leads people today to put it all on red or gamble their college fund on stratospherically far out of the money semiconductor options, to cheat on exams and to jump off skyscrapers with parachutes - this is why AI is unstoppable, and this is why Yud and Scott and anyone crying about p(doom) will fail.
Not because they are wrong, but because to act on their warnings would go against our very nature. We cannot do it. It is ‘full steam ahead and hope it works out fine’; we have boarded the raft.
2rafa
2d ago
I’m not generally a fan of reading the tea leaves of suicide notes but I think it’s best to interpret these - even if we literally accept their reasons for suicide as true (and I think generally this is the case when intelligent people kill themselves, that is to say that their stated reasons are usually their actual reasons even if they are bad reasons) - as borne of fear rather than existential crisis, and that fear is ultimately tied to material circumstances. There is a lot society can and will need to do, if it survives, to repair our sense of meaning as it’s redirected away from work.
2rafa
2d ago
I think we’ll invent a new entertainment form of ‘challenge math’ or something where the idea is you try to figure out a proof you haven’t been exposed to competitively even if AI has the answer, and it’ll be like a game. Either way, I really don’t think this is reason to end it.
2rafa
2d ago
There is meaning in a sense of pride and accomplishment, but as that infamous post suggests, that can be fully simulated.
2rafa
2d ago
Yeah, rich people also aren’t coordinated, most don’t have bunkers, they’re highly divided by ideology, and most have some loyalty to some non-super-rich groups (for reasons of tribe, faith, nation, ethnicity, political belief and so on). This plus the speed of the true singularity will make the requisite coordination almost impossible.
The ‘permanent underclass’ thing is a legacy of Great Recession (‘Humans Need Not Apply’; Elysium) or even dotcom bust era (as in the case of Marshall Brain’s Manna which I think was 2002) AI fiction where self driving cars and self checkouts and robotic nurses and cashier screens at McDonalds automate low paying service jobs while the rich and upper middle class prosper, without overall productivity seemingly increasing much, which means the poor basically live off worse-than-section-8 level welfare forever. This was nonsensical even if one agreed with those predictions (automating a lot of these low level service jobs would be a huge productivity uplift that would make things like welfare much cheaper to provide and afford those on it a much higher quality of life), but of course it turned out that actually white collar work was the easiest thing to automate (before truckers in many cases, even!).
It also features impossibly misaligned incentives, since the ‘bottom of the rich’ would know they were next in line for the permanent underclass at any time, something that eventually cascades until there’s what, only one man left out of the permanent underclass? That doesn’t really make sense.
I don’t think democracy or what now passes for it can really survive AI, and I question whether that’s a particularly bad thing anyway, but I expect that any non-extinction scenario eventually plays out as abundance almost impossible for us to imagine today (like a wild animal subject to constant hunger, thirst, sickness, fear, predation, injury, etc ‘imagining’ life in a nice Northern European zoo), such that twenty first century distinctions become irrelevant. I also think AI plays the role of the zookeeper in this scenario, and so the idea that it lets Elon Musk control star systems just because he happened to be very rich and powerful in the years before it took control seems about as likely as the zookeepers letting the big elephant eat all the others’ food just because it happens sometimes in the wild.
2rafa
2d ago
Right, they envisioned it being because of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall - ie capitalism being so maximally efficient that it turns in on itself - which is actually untrue (capitalism is more efficient than the alternatives but not maximally so; rates of profit ie margins are actually quite high in historical terms right now).
2rafa
2d ago
I suspect that the main sources of meaning will continue to be things like religion and family / childrearing / marriage that code as trad.
2rafa
2d ago
the argument is that markets are more efficient at resource allocation than central planning, not that they’re very efficient.
When Musk bought Twitter and now operates it with 20% of the staff it had, or when Google increases headcount by 1000% in a decade despite operating primarily the same product, this isn’t maximum efficiency. Managers establish fiefdoms. Individual employees care more about themselves than maximizing shareholder returns. Incentives are not fully aligned.
2rafa
2d ago
I don’t think mass automation AI future proves communists correct. Not only because the timely invention of AI required capitalism (yes we don’t have the counterfactual, but I’d say it seems likely) but even more importantly because the only way any kind of ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’ economy can work is if unlimited ‘ability’ is provided by AI and unlimited ‘need’ can be absorbed by it.
I don’t see why mathematicians would be so upset. 99% of professional mathematicians have never contributed to the field of mathematics in any real way.
There are two arguments about AI and employment.
The first and primary one is about mass unemployment. This is a real issue but people obsessed by it also need to understand, as I think @self_made_human increasingly does, that basically all of the surge in white collar labor since 1970 consists of fake make-work very thinly disguised by the laws of classical economics. The invention of the computer literally automated almost all white collar labor as it existed in, say, 1920, and yet instead of an unemployment crisis we just gave ourselves fake titles and decided to spend all day having meetings and making PowerPoint slides. The format in engineering and medicine was very slightly different but vast amounts of both professions, their demand and their provision were and are make-work too. I go to the doctors office and a GP diagnoses the way AI can in 20 seconds or a competent and cheap nobody who could use a search engine could do in 5 minutes even 25 years ago. If society survives the AI X-risk, we will emerge into a world of such unfathomable abundance that it will be trivial to provide every human, certainly in the rich world but eventually the whole world, with a comfortable material life. Dying from an AI engineered virus or a drone war or something is far more likely than starving because AI replaced all jobs and the owners of capital are too tightfisted to share.
The second and more interesting one is about meaning. The mathematician, even though he never meaningfully contributes to the field, imagines that he might. This is why AI makes him depressed. It’s the lack of hope that kills you, but is it? I mean, is it really? Meaning is invented, we’ve spent thousands of years inventing rather arbitrary forms of meaning. We can invent more. We can have kids. We can touch grass. We can compete against each other, if we want to, in games and competitions. Academia is already one such game. If mathematicians still want to play it, all they have to do is change the rules.
I guess I’m more sanguine on this than most. I increasingly converge on one observation, which is that it’s extinction or utopia. Other scenarios (weird AI hell) are plausible but increasingly unlikely. Compute always wins, the bitter lesson is always true, so the only question is whether it destroys us entirely (or someone uses it to) - accidentally or deliberately are really irrelevant - or whether it liberates us from material want entirely.
2rafa
2d ago
Be honest. How much of the above did you actually write? I’m reserving judgment. I’m just curious.
2rafa
3d ago
I don’t think substack’s interface functionally replicates the best aspect of traditional forums. Part of the reason this community has survived for 10+ years now is because it moved from Scott’s comment section, which is very transient and best suited to short form (ie blog-commenter-style) comments, to Reddit. Obviously Scott still has a very active comment section, but beyond the occasionally interesting anecdote I don’t find much value in it and I read it only occasionally, it isn’t really suited for long discussions.
The ideal forum is designed for medium-sized text segments. Longer than a Tweet or an article comment, shorter than another tedious 4000 word essay by a Substack dilettante. The forum (in both nested and classic formats) is best for this length of post, which I find preferable.
Before around 2011 when Reddit became much more popular. Reddit essentially replaced tens of thousands of smaller online communities about every niche hobby, interest, career or identity / culture / faith community that you could possibly imagine, which is what @ArjinFerman is saying. The heyday of this world was probably around 1995 to 2007, which was when large numbers of people were online, web hosting was an established industry and premade forum packages and standards allowed a semi-competent person with a little coding knowledge to relatively easily set up and host an online forum.
What killed forums? Reddit, of course, most primarily. But also Twitter and Facebook to a great extent. Reddit is by far the central culprit because it eliminated the three biggest points of friction for online forums:
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The (minor but still extant) skill (or, alternatively, cost) required to set up the forum, find a host etc, then market it to a small initial user base. As time went on various middleware was created that made this slightly easier, but nothing was ever as easy as the current platforms. The same thing happened to voice chat - Ventrilo and TeamSpeak servers for each community were replaced by dedicated game voice chats (that let pick up or assigned groups or teams communicate) which were in turn replaced universally by Discord.
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Hosting costs, which often had to be begged from users (people who created and moderated niche internet forums were often shut-in or unemployed and therefore quite poor) who sent money via questionable online money transfer platforms as they existed back then. Only the largest forums had viable ad hosting platforms back in the day, and before the ubiquity of Google Ads it wasn’t even that easy to set up an ad infrastructure as a hobbyist with a medium sized site.
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User acquisition. Look at this forum, the only people who find it now are those bored enough to scroll through every last link on Scott’s current board, or maybe three people a year who stumble across the subreddit and wonder where we’ve gone. On a forum, you don’t just need to attract users, you also need them to spend 5 minutes signing up, to give you their email, create a username, and then for them to keep coming back. Reddit automates all of this - one account, every forum, all the updates on one homepage and in one app.
Combine these things and you have a recipe for the total fading away of the internet as it existed before the early 2010s. Only a few of the very largest old-school forums still exist in a relatively active form - places like Resetera/NeoGAF, LipstickAlley, Mumsnet, TattleLife, SomaliSpot, 4Chan, KiwiFarms, RPGCodex - and even they are mostly diminished from the height of their success. There are a few niche survivors like this, subject to unique circumstances.
2rafa
4d ago
Has there been any time ever when you haven’t blackpilled. I’m thinking now, and I don’t think I can remember one.
Not that you’re wrong, necessarily.
2rafa
4d ago
The Best Indicator of Hormuz Traffic Is The Price of Oil.
Why? Because big commodities trading houses and hedge funds have better data than you and better data than any vibecoded website. This isn’t Venezuela, this is a major waterway through which many companies are doing business everyday. They see what they are getting, what they are processing, where it’s coming from and what they’re paying.
Everyone in this entire region relies on oil. Even though Houthis generate billions of dollars a year from the oil trade. The reason for their intense drive to conquer the rest of Yemen also stems from their desire to control its oil supplies and restart various pipeline projects halted by the war’s outset long ago. Oil cannot stop flowing from the Middle East for the simple reason that nobody can afford to go without it.
2rafa
8d ago
I’m not going to defend the argument that there are hundreds, or indeed any, better sources. But it is surprising to me that the conclusion when the opinions of relatively reputable sector and geopolitical research analysts differs vastly from some vibecoded website is that it is the latter that must be more accurate. And it is true that regular reporting from oil analysts (who after all have regular conversations with executives at refineries, majors, shipping companies, commodities trading houses etc) suggests flows are much higher than what the Hormuz tracker website would imply. I also think the efficacy of supposedly accurate satellite based methods of tracking flows would appear questionable. Again, I’m not an expert, but I’m skeptical.
Part of the problem with this administration, widely noted, is its tendency to maximally ragebait while being ineffective, which draws all the ire and force of the left while also failing to accomplish most of the right’s priorities (see deportations).
I have no problem with the government publishing or even streaming an important record of this historical event. The ‘martyrs’ argument is dubious; Islamist propagandists have plenty of footage they can use from Gaza, Iran, Assad’s Syria and so on that is more visceral and powerful.
But just announce it on the day, two hours before it happens, and then do it.
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