self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1hr ago
There's a Chinese Escape From Tarkov clone that showcased pretty solid AI for NPC teammates.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=gNZ7fGl5CHc
That was over a year ago, and AFAIK it wasn't implemented in the live game, though I don't play AB. Still, it's a real-time FPS, and we're long overdue for bots that are meaningfully smarter than those in Half Life 2 or FEAR.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
20hr ago
I don't know if I count as an AI "maximalist", though I'm definitely of the opinion that AGI is likely and more imminent than 95% of the population. I still don't think it's guaranteed and have sufficient uncertainty that it's worth making some investment in mundane infrastructure and mitigation. You know, global warming (which is not existential anyway), space exploration yada yada.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
21hr ago
My impression is that the mainstream left is anti-Israel in the States, but I'm hardly an expert here.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
Well, I'm a teenage dog. My joints ache, but the tail just keeps wagging.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
4d ago
Uh, it worked for me? Gemini initially made a new poem, then I told it I wanted an image, and I got it.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
5d ago
Nano Banana Pro is practically flawless about generating realistic firearms. If it's an obscure design, all it needs is a reference. I can't be bothered using the old fashioned kind of image generator/Diffusion models, it's just too smart and convenient, and not even that strongly censored.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
5d ago
I remember enjoying the novel, and yes, it does have bits about old technology. Probably halfway through is when it becomes a major facet of the novel. I'd suggest you stick with it.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
5d ago
Turkmenistan
What did they do? You can go decades without hearing about Turkmenistan or the men from there.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
5d ago
I think you're conflating "harm" with "violence" and ignoring the role of consent and information asymmetry.
If I sell you a car that I know has a 100% chance of breaking down in ten years, I'm a crappy salesman selling a mediocre product. If I sell you a car that has a 1% chance of exploding the moment you turn the key, I am a murderer. The total number of people inconvenienced or harmed by the first scenario might be higher in aggregate, but we treat the second scenario differently because of the variance and the violation of expectation.
Tobacco is the first car. It is a slow-motion suicide pact. The transaction costs are transparent. The package literally says it will kill you! Nobody smoking cigarettes in the West in 2025 AD is under the illusion that it's good for your health.
The user makes a trade of "feeling good now" against "dying of lung cancer in 2050" and society generally allows people to make bad intertemporal trades. We might tax it to recoup the externalities, but we acknowledge the agency of the user.
Fentanyl is the exploding car.
First, there is the lemon market problem. A huge percentage of fentanyl deaths are people who thought they were buying Xanax, Percocet, or cocaine. In those cases, the dealer is effectively poisoning the customer through fraud. If McDonald's started slipping cyanide into 1 in every 10,000 Big Macs to save on meat costs, we would not fine them. We would arrest the board of directors and likely see the company dismantled by the state. That is not "selling an unhealthy product" but rather "killing people" or at least criminal negligence.
Second, even for the willing user, the margin of error is nonexistent. A cigarette smoker cannot accidentally smoke a single cigarette that kills them instantly. A heroin user in the pre-fentanyl era had a reasonable grasp of their dosage. Fentanyl requires pharmacy-grade blending equipment to be safe. Mixing it in a bathtub in Sinaloa guarantees hot spots where a specific dose is instantly fatal. Selling this product is akin to selling a game of Russian Roulette disguised as a sedative.
Finally, there's the state capacity argument regarding your drone strike comment. We don't drone strike Philip Morris because Philip Morris submits to the jurisdiction of US courts. If they break the law, we sue them. If they hide evidence, we fine them. They exist within the Leviathan. The cartels exist outside of it. They enforce their business model with beheadings and bribery, effectively declaring themselves a rival sovereign. You can't sue a cartel in small claims court for wrongful death. When an entity places itself outside the law and uses violence to enforce its will, the state responds with military force rather than police action.
The tobacco executive is selling a legal vice, and everyone knows it's a vice. The fentanyl smuggler is selling a variance-heavy poison often disguised as something else, while actively warring against the state.
In raw numbers, that's about 6.5x as deadly as fentanyl! And some of those are secondhand smoking, people who didn't choose to be harmed by cigarettes unlike an addict ODing.
About 10% of the deaths are attributable to second-hand smoking. I think that's terrible, but that's an equilibrium reached by society on the basis of decades of litigation and regulation. We've cracked down heavily on most cases of second hand smoking. You can't harm everyone else in the restaurant without being asked to stop or getting into legal trouble. I wouldn't be averse to even stronger resistrictions.
I care not just about the raw numbers, but harm per capita, preservation of individual liberty, and also whether the industry is doing harm after submitting to regulation, or despite it.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
5d ago
There are people who make the argument that gun sellers should be held responsible for anything done with their product, but it's generally laughed out of American society. Especially by the right wing, given the long history of focusing on personal responsibilities.
But how about the other examples then? Are sugar companies terrorists? Are the tobacco and alcohol companies terrorists? They're all dangerous unhealthy products that get misused and abused, causing health damage and even death.
Well, there's a reason why I went with the example of arms dealers circumventing international law to smuggle drugs into a war zone with an ongoing genocide. I think Colt or H&K are entirely above board. Cars kill people too, and I don't blame Honda as long as they met government safety standards.
With alcohol and cigarettes, everyone knows what they're getting into. Society beats into your head the fact that you're almost certainly strictly better off not touching them, but hey, you're a free man, and if you're an adult that's your choice. I like that. I also believe that most currently illegal drugs should be held to the same standard.
The arguments you bring up are emotive and sway the innumerate. I am okay with greater than zero people dying because of their choices, and that point it becomes a question of quantity, not quality. Swimming pools kill kids too.
By those standards, a fent dealer is closer to someone aiding and abetting a genocide. Someone selling weed and coke at Burning Man is not. That's my two cents.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
Ah. In that case, I think a missile is overkill. They should have been given an expedited visa instead.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
But ok, let's say that they are drug boats. Is the response to that calling them terrorists and murdering them anyway? People who sell drugs are not killing people, because drugs can not kill people in the same way guns can not just kill people. Drug deaths are suicides by the irresponsible drug users, whether on purpose or on accident. People may feel shameful if their father or brother or daughter or whoever ends up as a druggie and ODs, but blaming the person who sold them the drugs is like when leftists blame gun stores for shootings.
I don't find this convincing, for the same reason that a gun dealer smuggling weapons into Somalia is, as far as I'm concerned, killing people. Sure, they didn't shoot anyone. "Guns don't kill people, people do, unless it's a Sig" etc etc.
More importantly, drugs aren't made alike. A group of college kids or business people doing lines of coke in a bathroom stall aren't trying to kill themselves, any more than someone ordering a shot of vodka is. Unfortunately, due to the sheer ridiculous potency of fentanyl, even microscopic contamination, say the dealer being less than scrupulous about washing hands, can leave those poor bastards ODing on the floor.
Drugs are not made alike. Someone smoking weed, doing coke or dropping molly before a concert is in a very different reference class to people shooting up heroin/fent or smoking crack pipes.
Accidental ODing from taking an entirely different drug is closer to dying of a peanut allergy after ordering gummy bears. It's not suicide.
I particularly dislike fent because it's like the Worst Drug Imaginable, and because it screws over even people who want to stay away from it. Thankfully it's not common in the UK, and the Albanians keep the coke clean.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
and anyone who thinks we should give drug smugglers free reign is not.
I'm generally sympathetic about drugs. Drugs are sick. I prescribe them sometimes. But when the drugs in question are almost certainly large amounts of fent, I'm not too fussed if the dealer is blown up by a missile.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6d ago
I will blame jetlag from a long flight for the missed opportunity. I'm smacking myself, it was right there haha.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
That's very kind of you to say, but I still think that "izzat" is a poor descriptor for the average Indian.
Almost all of the things described in the original essay are not normal! India is poorly described as an honor culture. It is not like Afghanistan, even if we have regions that are closer to those norms. It would be like coming up with some kind of term for the honor culture in the Appalachians, and using that to draw sweeping conclusions about the rest of the States. Or using SF fent zombies as examples of the average American.
"When two Indians get into an argument, the stakes are always deadly due to izzat"
????
The post takes a small Motte and uses it to defend a ridiculously huge Bailey. Haggling with a merchant on the street or an Uber driver doesn't result in knives or guns coming out.
India is poor and corrupt, but it's not because of izzat. It's for the same reasons as any other poor third world country. Izzat is applicable in Afghanistan, less so in Pakistan, and nigh useless in India itself.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
This reads like someone who's had some really bad experiences and is painting with an incredibly broad brush
Like yeah honor/face culture exists in lots of places but acting like 1.4 billion people all operate exactly the same way because of one cultural concept is wild. I've worked with plenty of Indians who were just normal colleagues, not scheming honor warriors plotting my downfall lmao
The greentext story especially sounds made up as hell. Most of these examples feel cherry-picked to support a pretty harsh generalization
Someone in the thread, and I agree with him. When I first ran into this copy pasta, I was like, what the fuck is an izzat? I've lived in India for well over 20 years without running into it outside of cheesy Bollywood music played over a radio. I know it's originally an Urdu/Persian word, and it's not commonly used here.
Hell, the Wikipedia page is barely worth the TP it's printed on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izzat_(honour)
Maintaining this societal reputation by all necessary means is considered obligatory upon every man and woman, as is revenge or punishment upon those who have or are perceived as having directly or indirectly violated it.
The fuck? Obligatory? Where?
The idea of reciprocity, in both friendship and enmity, is deeply embedded in izzat. It is required, for example, that a person goes to any lengths to come to the assistance of those who had previously helped them in their time of need,[5] and to fail to do so is to dishonour one's debt and thereby lose izzat.[5]
If anyone here belongs to a culture that doesn't have the concept of friendship or the concept of reciprocation, I pity them. Let me know so I can hear about it.
Seriously, this is about as useful as that meme of someone going, "oh yeah, in my culture, we loooove our family and food is very important to us."
In other words, the original description of izzat is not a good description of the majority of the country. Honor culture exists in many parts of India, particularly rural and conservative backwaters, but it's fuck all like that in general. I'm not sure if anyone should except better from a KiwiFarms thread called "India is a menace".
Edit:
There was a greentext from 4chan (I don't have it so bear with me). Anon knew an Indian. This Indian would make outlandish claims (he could benchpress 500kg, he was a billionaire, he did arms deals with the US government). Anon said he didn't believe the Indian. The Indian reacted with righteous indignation. The situation escalated to the point where the Indian was emailing Anon death threats. Anon responded by forwarding the emails to the police. The Indian killed himself. Anon was left baffled at the whole situation and had no idea what the fuck just happened.
The fuck? I think the antics of one compulsive confabulist or mentally ill isn't grounds for sweeping statements. Does anyone know >1 Indian?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
Very good post. I hope you've shared it on the subreddit.
While I'm more of a Xianxia than Wuxia guy, I get the appeal. It's honestly impressive how much effort went into the game, and even the great deal of jank is the charming kind. I am not sure if I'm going to ever play it, but I'm glad it exists.
Speechcraft as a form of medical treatment? Well...
Dr. Yuan is absolutely spitting facts. If he has an AI bot, we need to put that thing in charge of the NHS.
And why not have a fucking comment section with quests? Good, devs with balls. I know that Amazing Cultivation Sim has a full on in-game forum. Fuck Western devs and their pussy ass takes on it, when they deign to allow it. They can try finger but hole. The Chinese will eventually eat their lunch.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
Yup, I've got the same issue on Chrome for Android.
Some Arma Reforger, and Rimworld.
I've also been dipping my toes into RW modding. I can't play without the Combat Extended mod, which makes the two blind guys in an alley shootouts in vanilla into something respectable.
I wanted to start small and make a mod that adds a single gun, namely a railgun that's effectively an MG and shoots 6mm tungsten sabots. I wanted to be maximally lazy and use AI to write all the code, but had very little success. Rimworld modding is a relatively niche topic, and CE submods even more so. Especially since there was a version update and DLC since the knowledge cutoff. I was tearing out hair before giving up on that approach as a wholesale solution and ended up taking an existing mod as the starting point and stripping it down and building back up by myself.
So far? I've got a 6mm railgun! It shoots!
Unfortunately, it only fires single rounds and doesn't seem to need ammo. The former is a consequence of starting off with a mod that added a sniper rifle, but the latter perplexes me. I'll figure it out eventually, especially with help from the CE dev discord. It's cool that it's working at all, even if it's a tiny project on well-trod ground.
Edit:
I've got it working! It's out on Steam, with 3 railguns that fit your needs regardless of the enemy you need railed. I'm officially a modder, and I've returned something to the community and game that I've enjoyed for an ungodly number of hours.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
10d ago
Little known fact, the Scouts were a thing in India, a leftover from British colonial rule. I was a member, and I got fuck-all out of it. I think I joined because someone vaguely promised me that I'd get to shoot a gun at some point, but that never came about.
I found it immensely boring, but the Indian version had very little of the "scouting" that Americans enjoy (or did). Going for a week long hike in the woods? What woods? It was urban living and farms for several hundred miles till you ended up in a national park or a mangrove swamp. I think it was wise not to make a bunch of kids into (big) cat food.
We didn't do girly arts and crafts as far as I remember, they taught us a few knots (which I was never good at and have entirely forgotten), lit fires in the middle of a field, marching and so on. The only highlight was the one time an excursion had a lunch, and I got extra servings for helping prep food.
Masculinity? We had the fruitiest troop master known to man, who was our kindergarten teacher at some point. He became a she at some point, which I suppose is something.
Ah... Good times, it beat being in class, but not enjoying my summer vacation in front of a TV.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
11d ago
My condolences. At least it's the whole company going down the drain instead of you being fired after 20 years of work. I hope you land on your feet and your buddies get you a good word elsewhere. Good luck!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
12d ago
I'm an atheist, and an antitheist, but I don't bother with being militant about it.
I feel like we reached the heat death of the theism debate sometime around 2011. Every argument has been deployed, countered, steelmanned, mothballed, and then resurrected as a zombie argument so many times that the marginal utility of another forum post is effectively zero. I am happy to report that life as a Western atheist is actually quite pleasant. I leave them alone; they generally leave me alone. It is a functional equilibrium.
I am so confused by this conversational mindset. What could someone perceive as the value to themselves of jumping into a discussion among Christians, with Christian premises, to declare that actually Christians are morons who believe in a "sky fairy" or whatever? If you truly believe that Christians are benighted superstitious freaks, then surely you're wasting your time yelling at them on the internet. Or if you think they're ordinary people with mistaken beliefs, then it seems like the attitude should be one of polite curiosity and question-asking?
But I want to push back on the quoted dichotomy. It suggests that if I believe religious people hold fundamentally absurd beliefs, I must either view them as raving lunatics worthy of scorn or simply be politely curious about their worldview.
This assumes a unitary model of the human mind which psychology tells us is almost certainly false. The correct model is that humans are world-class champions at compartmentalization.
The average religious believer is not a caricature. They are behaviourally indistinct from the general population. They take out thirty-year mortgages. They trust the FDIC to insure their deposits. They accept the efficacy of amoxicillin. They engage in normal signaling regarding movies and electoral politics. They are hosting a parasitic memeplex, yes, but it appears to be a commensal organism rather than a fatal one. It is not metabolizing their ability to function in a modern economy.
I have an uncle who is a highly credentialed microbiologist. He spends his days applying the scientific method to bacteria, running PCRs, and adhering to rigorous evidentiary standards. He also believes, with total sincerity, in homeopathy. If you tried to model this as a consistent worldview, you would fail. But he doesn't have a consistent worldview. He has a work-mode partition where dilution removes active ingredients, and a home-mode partition where dilution increases potency. I have tried to bridge this gap in debate. It does not work. It only generates heat, not light.
The peace treaty works both ways. The religious generally grant that despite my lack of a divine command theory of ethics, I am probably not going to eat their babies or harvest their organs for the black market. I am a Cooperator in the Prisoner's Dilemma of civilization.
In return, I acknowledge that their "God module" is just an unfortunate quirk of their hardware. It is a glitch, perhaps a spandrel of our evolutionary history that makes them susceptible to hyper-active agency detection. Maybe they genuinely do have a God-shaped Hole, which I fortunately lack. But outside of that specific theological blast radius, we share a surprising amount of epistemological territory. We can agree on the price of tea in China. We can agree on the laws of thermodynamics. We can agree that the new Star Wars movies were disappointing.
I feel a certain distant pity for the condition, the same way I might pity someone with a benign but annoying tinnitus. But since they are otherwise high-functioning members of the tribe, I see no utility in screaming at them until they admit the ringing sound isn't real. We can (usually) just ignore the noise and watch the movie.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
12d ago
I don't know of any meds that can help, he's not psychotic, he's just a dick. Can't cure ASPD.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
12d ago
I hope you can appreciate that an atheist watching a thread devolve into bible study would be miffed.
I'm an atheist/antitheist. My stance on the Bible study threads is bemused tolerance, sure, it's not for me, but I'm sure that my passion for AI alignment research isn't what others are looking for. In both cases, the sensible thing to do is collapse the thread and look for something else to read. Perhaps appreciate that this sub has a diversity of opinion and discussions!
I certainly don't see an assumption of Christianity in general, most of the discussion is usually found away from the CWR threads, and where it does come in, well, topics like abortion or immigration and one's attitudes towards the same do hinge on religious beliefs or lack thereof.
Would Scott count? I'm sure he needs no introduction in these parts, and if he does, then lurk moar.
He's got a pretty squeaky clean image, and is definitely charismatic (over text), and I think he's made a meaningful impact on the world. This site, at the very least, owes its existence to him. The closest thing to controversial in his life was the drama over his ex's new husband leaking emails where he gave HBD more credence than he had done publicly, and to his credit, he's expressed support. So yeah, I don't know anyone who really has anything bad to say about him, and I think he deserves his success.
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