roystgnr
2hr ago
FWIW, these days you can usually ask about the seemingly-retarded choices and get either an explanation or a correction-plus-apology for each. I use AI to self-study math, and I still catch it making errors these days, but no more often than it catches my errors, and pinning down which case is which usually only takes a little extra back-and-forth. The reasoning models these days are much better than when some of them would just double down and try to gaslight you about their errors ... Whoa, according to my logs that was only a year ago. Hell of a roller coaster we're on...
roystgnr
2hr ago
Why were those guys even carrying around an extra kidney they didn't need, anyway?
roystgnr
2hr ago
"Density" definitely becomes a quality to look for in a game rather than one to avoid. I remember reviews criticizing some RPG for only having 20 hours of content after 30 became the de facto standard, and I agreed, but these days? You tell me I'm not going to get closure for 20 or 30 hours? If it's not one of the best games of all time, count me out; if it is, I swear I'll try to get around to it in 5 or 10 years. I'd love a list of modern games that instead follow in the footsteps of Portal 1 (3-4 hours) or at worst Portal 2 (8-9?) and likewise manage to pack a full satisfying game into that length of time.
roystgnr
2hr ago
edifying in the same way a good nonfiction book is.
Well, the good nonfiction book is typically denser.
I've been a fan of space flight my whole life, nearly studied ASE before starting off as a MechE instead, but I never understood why "porkchop plots" had their weird double-lobed shape until the first time I found myself having to cope with interplanetary plane change maneuvers in Kerbal Space Program. So, yeah, on the one hand, actual advanced practical (well, to JPL engineers anyway) knowledge ... but on the other hand, Steam tells me I've put 320 hours into KSP over the last 10 or 15 years, and I'll bet I could have gotten more knowledge out of a good orbital mechanics textbook in a quarter of the time.
roystgnr
6hr ago
The only cost to an autocracy getting nuclear warheads is that, if you don't stay personally in charge of them, your successors can be as tyrannical as they want and nobody will come save you from them. This is more than counterbalanced by the benefit that, if you do stay in charge of them, nobody will come try to "save" anyone from you. North Korea won't be getting the Venezuela or Iran treatments any time soon.
Getting highly-enriched uranium without continuing on to turn them into warheads, on the other hand, just pisses everybody off without giving you any leverage, and the next thing you know your successors are in charge anyway. Even if you have a weaker bomb program and give it up before the airstrikes escalate, moving far enough in that direction may already have crossed the "sodomized to death by a bayonet eight years later while the world chuckles" point of no return. This is just not a place where you stop your nuke program because your political calculations are going well; it's a place where you stop because your engineering calculations aren't going well enough. A successful test explosion is a "Get Out Of Jail Free" card; a test fizzle is a "Kill Me Now Before It's Too Late" request.
roystgnr
1d ago
in a replacing doctors scenario you'd need to be getting it right 100% of the time with no second check
Which doctor manages that?
Yeah, I know, that sounds like an insult/joke, but estimates of iatrogenic death rates in US hospitals are at minimum 20k/year out of 700k, which means that in even in high-stakes scenarios doctors and nurses are only at 97% for "getting it right enough not to kill someone"; fully "getting it right" would be a much higher bar and lower success rate. All the AI has to do to replace skilled workers is get more reliable than they are.
You're surely right that AI in medicine isn't as good a replacement for human workers as AI in fields where checking results is easier than producing them ... but it's perhaps similar to AI for self-driving cars: stringent requirements and potentially-lethal consequences, but the AI still doesn't have to be perfect to be an improvement, it just has to be better than the typical human competition.
roystgnr
1d ago
I think the median 0day the NSA exploits is one they found or bought and not one which they made some US company insert on purpose.
You're probably correct, but don't forget about the (probably small, but not null) class of exploits that they simply trick US companies into inserting. The NSA has a wide range of strategies. They paid RSA to use their exploitable Dual_EC_DRBG, for instance, but apparently that was mostly to buy enough credibility to get it called "the standard" and adopted freely by other crypto companies too.
Even their work with DES was a mix of white-hat (they knew about a vulnerability and pushed for changes that they secretly knew would eliminate it) and black-hat (they pushed to drop the standard key size from 64 to 48 bit, then settled for 56, because they knew they had the compute to brute-force those) security, and the only "made some US company insert on purpose" there was legislative, for a brief period in the late 90s when companies were only allowed to export encryption software with 56-bit or shorter keys.
roystgnr
3d ago
Computerized car engines give you more efficiency, more power, less pollution, and more reliability than mechanical ignition and injection systems did.
Computerized driver controls I'm much less sanguine about. Nothing I might want to fiddle with while watching the road should be controlled by a modal UI, much less by a touch screen, rather than by a knob or button whose function is determined by a shape and position I can actually discern by touch.
get data from their cars and change the cars' behavior without having to modify hardware?
Well, this is perhaps the source of the design problems, not just the design decision, isn't it? Some of the common examples of risk compensation are claims that car drivers take more risks when they know they have anti-lock brakes or seat belts partially protecting them from the consequences, but software producers, including car software producers, also have incentive to take more risks when they know they have automatic patch application partially protecting them from the consequences. Do you really need to fix all the bugs before launch now, or can you just fix the worst of them and then try to get to more of the rest before buyers get too pissed?
If my theory here is right, then computerized car engines could actually get worse as cabin computer connectivity gets more popular. If your buyer can't do an ECU firmware update without going into the shop, they're going to be pissed if they ever need an update, and you'd better make sure that engine computer is solid from day one, whether or not there's a bug in the radio UI. But if you have an internet connection that lets you slip an ECU firmware update in without the buyer even noticing? Getting software solid is expensive, and you could probably save a lot of time and money by just getting it mostly solid and then waiting for the diagnostic data and the bug reports...
roystgnr
3d ago
I'm typing this from inside my solar-panel-bedecked house in Texas, so don't take it too critically, but Texas is among the best spots for solar, not the typical spots. I get 300 days a year of good sunlight, and most of my residential energy demand is coming from A/C requirements that spike only a few hours after the solar supply does, so people here can get away with few batteries ... or if you rely on the grid for evening power like I do, no on-site batteries.
If your city doesn't get as much insolation (most of China, for some reason?) the economics look a little different. If much of your home energy demand is coming from a heat pump that needs to be pumping in the opposite direction (what, half the US?), the economics look a lot different. If both are true (half of Europe?) then it's long past time (except for you, France, we're cool) to just go nuclear.
roystgnr
3d ago
That average temperatures across the globe taken over the course of year X, are higher than x-1, and x+1 will be higher than x.
Well, this one's just not true; e.g. 2021 was cooler than 2020. Even x to x+10 failed for 1998 vs 2008. I'm not sure if we'll ever see a decadal drop again without some major change, but the trend is still only something like 0.025C/year, and year-to-year variation of ~0.1C still regularly swamps that.
Less snarkily, that the models popularised over the last 50 years or so have been mostly correct, and all show a warming trend.
Remove "popularised" and this one's true. But the way we (well, the news media and the most salacious academics) popularize a model is to take whatever the most extreme possibility is at one p<0.01 end of the predictions, turn that into a "it will never snow in Britain again!!" headline, and so convert tomorrow's credibility into today's paycheck. Current measured warming since 1990 is pretty much right on the "Business-as-Usual"+"Best Estimate" line from the 1990 IPCC report, which puts it way above the "weather just changes, it'll probably revert to the mean again" null hypothesis, but "we're up nearly 1C and it's still accelerating" feels anticlimactic to people who vaguely think they remember that coastal cities were supposed to be flooding or something by now.
roystgnr
7d ago
It's not that her decision is more dumb or more awful, or that she's expected to have more agency, it's that it's dumb and awful in a more self-destructive way, so we'd hope to be able to skip the step where we figure out what incentive is supposed to prompt the use of that agency. The man here is obviously in vastly greater need of improvement, but "Wouldn't you like to not get to abuse anybody, not get to control anybody, and not get to be a drunk?" seems like a harder sell, at least for the type of person for whom it's applicable, than "Wouldn't you like to not get abused, not get controlled, and not get stuck with a drunk?"
roystgnr
7d ago
Damn it, I'm one Prime Minister off. I meant Boris Johnson.
Shwarzenegger's affair partner was 6 years younger than his wife, though I wouldn't say hotter. After Gavin Newsom's divorce he dated a woman literally half his age, but the woman he married was only 7 years younger. I'm afraid I also misremembered a bit about Newsom: the "affair" he was part of might not have started until after he was divorced, in which case the only infidelity was that the woman was married to ... well, Wiki calls Alex Tourk "Newsom's close friend", but I feel like the rest of the sentence disproves that description.
Prominent examples of male infidelity + divorce + serial monogamy with younger partners currently include the President of the United States, around half of the six richest men in the world, the last male UK Prime Minister before this one, two of the last three governors of California ...
Though, looking into details, I'm not sure any of them became serial monogamists by choice, they're men who tried to pull off parallel polygyny in secret but got caught. I'd guess those men found serial monogamy more alluring than actual monogamy but tried to also pull off polygyny as long as they could first, but perhaps they just found polygyny so much more alluring that they were willing to risk it backfiring into serial monogamy if their spouse caught and didn't forgive them.
roystgnr
9d ago
It seems I've miscommunicated what I meant by "moral status." Maybe most people call it "moral value."
Trying to steelman you here: try "importance" or "relevance", maybe? Perhaps literally nobody thinks that a person necessarily has higher status or higher value just because they have higher intelligence, and they definitely don't think that a person has higher moral status or value for that reason. But high intelligence (at least if combined with high agency, not exclusionary of social intelligence, etc etc) is a force multiplier for morality - a moral person is more likely to provide others with more beneficial externalities if they have the capabilities to do so, and an immoral person is likely to be more of a threat to others if they have the capabilities to do so. The "mad scientist" is mostly a fictional trope, but when e.g. the Nazis or later the Soviets were ahead of us in rocketry, we didn't conclude that shucks, they must have been more moral people than us after all, we were horrified by the implied danger.
There are a couple of strange personal attacks toward me, accusing me of being racist
In the phrase "Talking about intelligence points toward your racism" here, "your" was probably intended as the generic you, not the second-person pronoun. This is simply an explanation for why talking too much about intelligence is taboo: it has a history of being used to excuse bigotry in a way that doesn't apply to factors like height, so even when someone talks about it in a non-bigoted way there's still naturally some suspicion that that's just a "cover story".
or that I live in a bubble.
This isn't a personal attack.
roystgnr
9d ago
serial monogamy, which is something that has zero allure to promiscuous men
There are a lot of ex-wives out there who would be surprised to hear that. I'd agree that male promiscuity leans toward trying to attract multiple mates in parallel rather than in serial, but cads who "trade in their wives for newer models" are a stereotype (and occasionally a hilarious stereotype) for a reason.
roystgnr
9d ago
The anti-manosphere folks generally also claim to oppose judging people for being any/all of "poor, fat, and socially inept".
This is just the scaled-up social version of the stereotypical "I wish I could find someone like you!" and "Just be yourself!" from a woman to a friend-zoned guy, isn't it? She thinks she's judging him positively! They're good friends! She wants to see him find a girlfriend, and thinks it should be easy for him! She just "doesn't think of you in that way", for what she assumes are inexplicable random reasons uncorrelated to what other girls will think, certainly not for any reasons that might sound superficial if identified and examined.
It's tempting to be critical of people who can lie to themselves in such a fashion, but just about everybody seems to do it (about some topic, if not this one), so by induction I'm probably doing it too, so self-interest alone says I probably want to vote for mercy over justice here.
roystgnr
11d ago
Damn you! I was about to come back and brag about getting the top score, but you tied me. If @Lewis2 is correct about the grading in his (nicely spoiler-protected!) point 1, though, I missed a point that way, and I was robbed!
Aesthetic knowledge killed me. 44/50, 79th percentile, and I think I guessed once or twice there so even the 44 might include some dumb luck.
roystgnr
11d ago
That's a solid trick option, though. If someone used the phrase "HDD cable", today I'd mentally translate that to "SATA" without thinking it was weird; decades ago "IDE" likewise (unless they were talking about a third party's high-end computer and I might need to check that they knew about SCSI).
roystgnr
11d ago
There's much much more "power of science" stuff in the book, which they (tragically but wisely IMHO) cut from the film (or at best alluded to in the film, in five second bits showing the solutions to problems that took minutes to hours of thinking or days to weeks of trial-and-error), to make room in an otherwise-too-long-for-a-movie story for the more emotionally central themes related to your spoilered point.
The book is still not as good in that respect as The Martian, but it's way closer than the movies were.
roystgnr
15d ago
Ha! I was wondering if I was the only one who noticed that. That's what slipped the "might" into my last sentence. I know there are other posters here who've gotten good mileage out of phrasing something in a way that's supportable but inflammatory and initially-unsupported, so that they can lure out and then argue down objections.
I'd even say it's not superficial engagement, once you get to the "argue down objections" part. At the start it's literally trolling if you do it on purpose, and in the end I'm not sure whether it's productive (it does get people to stake out a position that can be countered) or counterproductive (if the counter isn't perfect people tend to just entrench), but it does attract a real conversation, it's not pure outrage bait.
roystgnr
15d ago
I think "dangerously dehumanizing" is probably more accurate, for the reasons you elaborated on: Nazis are just one subcategory of that. I don't like that the euphemism treadmill has left us with no more-extreme synonyms for "dangerously" (though post-Charlie-Kirk I'd say "atrociously dehumanizing" is fair), but in the end reaching for the word "Nazi" doesn't permanently take us off the treadmill, it just pulls "Nazi" further onto it. Godwin's Law is decades old now, and if you run the risk of someone mistaking your serious point for hyperbole regardless then you might as well make the serious point as precisely as possible.
(this is all analysis in leisure and in hindsight; obviously you're not going to spend this much time analyzing every single word you use and I'm not upset that you might have chosen one slightly-suboptimally)
roystgnr
15d ago
Disallowing generative editing of user-uploaded images seems like a no-brainer.
Is it? Even if you only disallowed it for uploaded images of people, that would cripple one of the most popular use categories for generative editing. My kids mostly aren't very interested in AI, but they were thrilled when Gemini stopped disallowing and started allowing us to turn pictures of them (and their cats) into anime-cartoon-style and bobblehead-doll-style and kaiju-battle style and so on and so on. If you also disallowed it for all uploaded images then you'd be ruining one of the easiest good ways to control output of image generations in general.
roystgnr
15d ago
Right. If you'd said "quarantines were enacted to isolate only those who traveled from city to city" then that wouldn't have needed correcting.
roystgnr
16d ago
Quarantine is from "quarantena", literally "40 days", the time period of isolation for new ships arriving in Venice. The whole point was that bubonic plague can be asymptomatic for a week after infection; if you were to immediately let people in just because they weren't confirmed to be infected, you would eventually let in people who were infected.
This is a good point. The trouble is that world leaders act like they're big Causal Decision Theory fans, and once a state has nukes it's hard to go back in time to make that not have happened, so whatcha gonna do? We try to keep ICBM tech from leaking to Pakistan, but we hardly turned them or India into pariah states for having the warheads. Maybe Iran would get worse treatment because they signed on to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and would be violating it whereas non-signatories weren't?
Ignorant question: how confident are we of that? It looks like Iran fired two missiles at Diego Garcia, at more than double the range of anything we publicly knew they had (and if we knew privately that they were violating ICBM restrictions, that would have been a great cassus belli to bring up to Europeans uninterested in joining this war, so I'm betting we didn't), in which case they've at least been managing to keep some aspects of their weapons development programs secret.
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