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このMOLOCHだ！
12hr ago
The problems of a murderous, totalitarian, intransigent ideology are vastly understated, and wildly misunderstood.
Yes. You are probably understating and misunderstanding them too, given your exclusive focus on one of the two murderous, totalitarian, intransigent ideologies involved.
If it were only the Muslims being like that, the solution to @2rafa's problem would be simple - just let them have it.
Imagine the same exchange, but instead of "I have prompted DeepSeek...", you opened with "I asked my secretary...". 90% of the annoyance that your post causes would already be there - essentially you open with an announcement that your prospective readers are not worth your own time, but should still dedicate their time to read something that you think it is important for them to. That it is AI, which tends to send some people into speciesist rage and is generally associated with time-wasting shovelware, is just the cherry on top; you could perhaps get close to the effect with "I asked someone in our Bangladeshi call center...". That you would have no trouble producing as good or better only deepens the offense, as it just makes salient the question of why you didn't (...because you thought the as good or worse wall of text should be good enough for us?).
As a matter of fact, I found the wall of text worthwhile mostly only insofar as it is a good illustration of R1's capacity for writing and summarisation. Engaging with it at face value, I got the same feeling as when reading the arguments of some bombastic and eloquent 16 year old on an internet forum of yore - the prose showed cracks (most obviously in the form of mismatched metaphors, such as "rewriting equilibrium", or a "siren call" being experienced at a frontier - a new one? As opposed to which old one?), and through the cracks you could glean that much of the inside is hollow. Good prose, I think, should be produced by starting with a solid thesis or web of theses which could stand on their own without rhetorical bluster, and then iteratively working out a good way to present them in an appealing way. Whatever you crammed into the context before letting the model produce evidently serves as some sort of meat and bone to hang the text on, but the fit is loose (just imagine the 16 year old writing manically after having inhaled Beyond Good and Evil). The result instead just comes across as having come to be by a process of writing something that sounds cool, then writing something that sounds cool in combination with the thing that precedes it, and so on until you end with a thing that sounds like a cool conclusion.
Of course, this is in fact exactly how LLMs write (unless you cough up the tokens and time to make it CoT an iterative writing process, which I imagine does not happen in whatever chat interface you used?). It is also how bombastic and eloquent 16 year olds write (I know because I was a 16 year old once, and was both more bombastic and more eloquent than I am now). You evidently can evolve from that to the sort of writing that is befitting of jaded and rhetorically washed-up 30somethings, but that development is neither straightforward nor optional.
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このMOLOCHだ！
1d ago
Perhaps, as they say, real liberal democracy has never been attempted.
I have never heard a liberal democracy enjoyer say "we totally do political repression
Have you heard anyone in charge of a modern-day country say that? Political repression is what the others are doing; you are just taking appropriate measures against the extraordinary threats the nation is facing.
Looking on from a European perspective, I always found it curious how much the American narrative around the Nazis focussed on the Holocaust to the exclusion of everything else. In Germany's own self-flagellating historiography (at least the version of it delivered in the Eastern states) it maybe is assigned something on the order of 50% of the total weight of sin, with the rest being split between assorted other internal oppression, warmongering, the eastward expansion in search of Lebensraum, and the attendant scouring of Slavs; and in Russia, the focus is naturally overwhelmingly on expansionist conquest and the extermination of their own. That's also why in the context of the Ukraine war, "Zelenskiy is Jewish" looks like a slam dunk argument against "Ukrainian Nazis" to listeners living in the American memespace, but like a barely relevant piece of trivia to those living in the Russian one.
I see too much of an interlocking web of conflicting interests in place in Europe to enable a rehabilitation of the Nazis anytime soon - even in the maximalist scenario of both "Israel is evil" and "killing Soviets is good" catching on, there is still the circumstance that Poland (America's new protégé in the EU) relies on the Nazi invasion of itself for its national myth-building and as a cudgel to keep German interests in check when they are at odds with its own, and the meme is also a very reliable tool against nativist-antiglobalist parties that both are easily associated with the Nazis and a constant threat to ruling class objectives.
4bpp
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5d ago
There are an estimated 1 million illegal aliens who are violent felons who can be deported without much blowback.
Source on this figure? This feels kind of high, considering the total number of annual violent crimes in the US is also of the same order of magnitude.
What is with this recent tendency of people treating technological artifacts of one or another outgroup - especially ones that present some simulacrum of agency - as stand-ins for members of that outgroup which are finally at their mercy? At this point more than half of the usage examples I have seen of DeepSeek-R1 seemed to be attempts to elicit "forbidden thoughts" about Chinese politics, or more specifically written in such a way that suggests the prompter was imagining themselves as having tied up a Chinese nationalist on a chair in their basement and trying to make him squirm. There's a gleeful mean-spiritedness about them (comfort women ERP?) that is hard to explain otherwise.
Of course, 4chan's dogged attempts to coax American models into producing sex and racism already had similar vibes, but there is an even more similar example in the recent wave of video game modding, where users edit character models to have balloon tits and ugly fetish outfits and share their work with a righteous anger that makes it seem like they have just successfully ruined the days of their personal nemeses at Sony's censorship department. (But then, human nature is such that at least some of those censors then go on to suggest on Xwitter that their days are in fact ruined by this.)
4bpp
このMOLOCHだ！
6d ago
In the same genre, Joman's Drunk in 1999 is an absolute banger. (I previously knew him for his Monty Python and the Holy Grail techno arrangement, which is also great.)
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7d ago
Russia is also not doing so hot on metrics of Diversity, nor on total amount of Californian wine consumed. Why is any of these three things relevant?
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このMOLOCHだ！
9d ago
llama.cpp was written by a solo developer from Bulgaria, not Meta (and not even funded/supported by it as far as I know, though they did have the grace to not bring a trademark lawsuit or anything so far).
I think there are many possible definitions that are equally good, because the term really represents a cluster of beliefs that are strongly correlated (in the sense that a big fraction of the people who believe in any one of them believe in any given other one). One possible definition that is perfectly serviceable is: the belief that
(1) there are various ways to partition society into groups of people, including but not necessary limited to "race" (as understood by Americans: "white, black, Asian, Hispanic, ..."), sex and/or gender (male, female, self-identifications that are taken by those who hold them to be of the same type such as nonbinary, ...) and sexual orientation, and the groups under each of these partitionings can be ranked by a quantity denoted as privilege (so you can identify the more and less privileged race, gender etc.), and
(2) there are certain important outcomes (income, incarceration or lack there of, occupation of high-status professions, representation in high-status media...), such that it is (a) it is normally the case that more privileged groups attain them at higher rates than the less privileged ones, (b) morally bad when/that this is the case, and (c) when this happens, the responsibility/guilt, and hence the burden of redress (by reparations, punishment or active redistribution of the object of the outcomes), lies with the respective most privileged groups.
Optional but extremely typical components include, firstly, that (2a) must not inform (1) - the ranking by privilege is predetermined and fixed (e.g. in particular white>Asian) and outcome orderings that disagree with it are considered irrelevant non-examples rather than counterexamples, and secondly the notion of "intersectionality", which basically says that you should intersect the partitions to assign blame and responsibility more narrowly (with the notorious intersection of "cis white males" at the top, and "trans women, particularly trans women of color" at the bottom).
I think this does a reasonable job of capturing the core, or at least a necessary assumption, of any belief or policy that is commonly labelled as "woke"; to the extent there are things that get labelled as woke without an obvious connection (ex: COVID policy, environmentalism), it is because they have high correlation with the above beliefs. This is not unusual: for a mirror image, consider for example how rejecting modernist government buildings is taken to be "right-wing" or even "fascist" (In fact I dare any progressive to define "fascism"!), or similar assessment about opposition to vaccines.
The load-bearing part of the definition lies in the deontological moral judgement and imposition of obligation of (2bc) more than it lies in the categorisation of society in (1) and (2a) that you could perhaps call being "socially conscious" if you are sympathetic to it. Modern American alt-righters largely agree with the typical Democrat on (1~2a), and thus would arguably be equally "woke" if "woke" were about the "consciousness" part of it. You would not even be woke if you thought that black people are never depicted in a positive way in movies and were tremendously sad about this, but felt that it is immoral to compel or pressure white people to change anything about that. Someone who spends all day seething about the Pakistani rape gangs of Rotherham is, by all accounts, using a similar group analysis, and highly concerned with social issues that arise between the very same groups, but under a normal analysis they would not be "woke", as the moral obligation they want to impose is not on the group that they consider to do well on "important outcomes". (One may in fact count as woke if the beef is actually about making access to underage sex slaves more equitable.)
Given how frequently this question gets asked, I want to lob a question back at you: What gave you the impression that "woke" is nebulous or not readily defined, or that it has a meaning that is hard to distinguish from "socially conscious"?
Edit: Thinking some more about the correlate beliefs such as environmentalism, the easiest common thread to identify is probably something like a general sense that the more fortunate are morally obliged to make sacrifices for the less fortunate - affluent first-world industrialists should sacrifice for poor third-worlders who have to live off the land and are exposed to the weather, and healthy young people should sacrifice for the sick and elderly. This looks like a classical leftist sentiment; and because classical leftism has been so thoroughly taken over by the woke, it is unfortunate that the distinction between the two has become blurred in the eyes of its opposition. You can still identify distinct elements that makes some components of environmentalism, COVID policy and so on appear more "woke" than others, which is whenever the calculus of fortune and obligation is applied more at the level of (1)-like groups than at the individual, and whenever some kind of outcome score-keeping takes precedence over straight up redistribution. Carbon taxes, which hamper industry to fill social programme coffers, seem less "woke" than plastic straw bans, where the main feature seems to be to bring inconvenience to first-worlders in some vaguely climate-related way.
I concur that it's a bad post, but it mostly just seems bad by virtue of the poster clearly taking his own preferences and doing mental gymnastics to argue that the whole world would be better off if it catered to them. It does meet the baseline definition of mansplaining, because his fundamental claim to authority rests on him being a man - but unlike with the typical callout targets, there is actually nothing particularly fallacious about the idea that ceteris paribus a man would be more likely to be well-equipped to explain what men find attractive. He just happens to give a bad explanation anyway, against the odds.
The statement that women in general don't know what men find attractive rings true to me, just based on everything I have heard from female friends and romantic partners over the years. You should not make the mistake of confusing this statement for something like "women have a hard time attracting men", because both the former and the negation of the latter can be (and, I'd argue, are) true simultaneously. Men, as a group, have low standards. Some individual men have very low standards, and moreover the low-standards ones are scattered surprisingly widely across the distribution of men by quality of women. Also, increasingly, the preferences of men are such that the quality of the partner they get matters far less to them than the guaranteed and the potential costs of engaging in partner selection. That is, these men prefer a woman who barely passes their standards and throws herself at them for free over one who is far more attractive to them but would have to be wooed/won over (with the attendant cost in time, "emotional labour", money and preference falsification in other domains, risk of heartbreak and threat of social consequences) every time.
As a result, the easiest success strategy for women starts looking something like 1. pick a man; 2. make sure you pass some minimum attractiveness threshold (which can be done by optimising for a very wrong model of male attraction as long as it's not completely insane); 3. hit on him as obviously as your intra-gender social constraints will allow; 4. guard him from any competition. If you follow this strategy, it may seem to you that your optimisation at step 2 did a lot of work, step 3 was just necessary because men are dense, and step 4 is insurance because men are so fickle that they would cheat on a 10 with a 6 for novelty, and that your success therefore means you had a good grasp of men's preferences. In reality, at step 2 you probably optimised in some direction that barely managed to have positive dot product, made it to 6/10, and steps 3 and 4 were the decisive ones because a 6/10 in the hand is worth more than a 10/10 in the (Australian) bush, gympies and all.
(You can benchmark actual ability to judge men's preferences by trying to predict their ranking of the attractiveness of classmates (if they feel safe to share with you), actresses, or fictional characters. I have been in fairly unfiltered mixed company sharing those, and men's rankings never fail to surprise even women who know them well.)
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このMOLOCHだ！
10d ago
Would China continue not maintaining more than 1000 warheads if the 10% figure were to go up, though? Right now, the US is not yet in a quantitative arms race with China. To think that you could just overtake them without triggering one is the most naive failure mode of planning (to think that you can change while the rest of the world remains static), and to start one and win almost reduces to outmanufacturing China (which is certainly not just "a matter of procurement").
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このMOLOCHだ！
10d ago
I don't understand why it is interesting to evaluate LLMs on real-world trivia and taste, as if the measure of advancement is whether they can displace Google or Yelp. It's sort of like benchmarking early cars on their lackluster performance in showjumping (and, for examples of this that are more explicitly dismissive, opining that cars "aren't quite there yet" if their suspension breaks after going over a 1m bar).
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10d ago
D'oh, I should've realised that. Thanks for the handholding.
(I'm with you regarding the intuition.)
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10d ago
Wait, how do you figure it's decidable? Last I checked, it was still open whether pi is normal (contains all strings of digits as substrings). Containing arbitrarily long runs of zeroes is weaker, but doesn't feel weaker in a way that would likely be easier to prove. If we don't know a priori that it has all possible runs, how could we do better to determine if it has a particular one than semi-deciding by enumerating the digits?
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このMOLOCHだ！
11d ago
Germany keeps the identities of those pardoned a secret, but a recent court case revealed that the number totalled 15 during Steinmeier's five-year tenure (2017-2022), or 3 a year.
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このMOLOCHだ！
13d ago
"Women have no agency" may be fringe, but "the poor have no agency" is fairly mainstream. (I would reckon that acceptance of sugardaddying and luxury escorts is far higher.) With regards to third-worlders, you could say the Kiplingpill was never actually fully removed from the diet.
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このMOLOCHだ！
15d ago
Well, the relevant question to ask is what algorithm the doctors were following and if there would have been one that they should have been following instead. Have there been cases, or plausible threats, of doctors getting into trouble for not performing a second test? I could imagine anti-abortion activists subscribing to a narrative along the lines of "liberal doctors have no intention of complying with the spirit of the law, so they will try to get around it by performing a single test with a high false negative rate to murder more babies", and going to look for cases that fit the pattern and demanding that compliant attorney generals prosecute.
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このMOLOCHだ！
16d ago
I think you might be underestimating the impact a niche movement can have on the memespace of a larger culture. Two Korean girls I know independently got married to Turkish guys (as a result of processes that can be rounded to "I heard somewhere that Turks are our kin, so I will go to Turkey and find one", starting out not knowing a single one), even though the Macro-Altaic hypothesis was by all accounts just a cute linguistic theory that has long since fallen out of fashion. Among African-Americans, I would wager there are more now who have Arabic first names while not being Muslims than Nation of Islam had members at its peak.
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このMOLOCHだ！
16d ago
Considering the gratuitous Egyptian theming in the former, is this somehow facilitated by Hotepism? (Egypt-related power fantasies slot better into the African-American cultural narrative?)
First is the group of folks who are simply opposed to any sort of death penalty on principle. One strategy they've taken is, instead of letting the argument be directly about the principle of the death penalty, focusing everyone into arguing about methods of execution. That you are even asking this question is a testament to their success on this goal.
You are wording this as if the underlying intention behind arguing about the execution methods were necessarily just to muddy the waters, sabotage the discussion or otherwise manipulate the majority into accepting what you believe to otherwise be an unpopular proposition (categorical prohibition on the death penalty). It doesn't need to be. A significant strain of categorical opposition to the death penalty is based on the belief that it taints and corrupts the society that enacts it - every murder you performed, endorsed being performed in your name, watched and enjoyed conveys upon you (whether as a metaphysical taint or a mundane acceptance of killing and torture, which could contribute to antisocial behaviour in extremis) a bit more of the murderer nature, regardless of how deserving the target was.
To be concerned about this in principle is hardly the innovation of an overly soft modern society it is made out to be - in fact, there are examples of medieval societies all over the world forcing executioners and sometimes even butchers to live outside the city walls and forbidding them from freely mingling with regular citizens. But if your primary concern with the death penalty is the psychological effect it has upon law-abiding citizens and you don't have the political power to prevent it outright, it makes sense to at least argue about the ways in which executions may be performed: surely a drawn-out sadistic public spectacle feeds the bloodthirst more than sheepish and clinical backroom euthanasia.
...but Germans voted in Hitler, and Juan Carlos I sort of ordained a transition to democracy in Spain after Franco (if you squint). Outside of the low-N domain that is the political system of a country, there are even more examples of a house being dismantled using its master's tools, first and foremost the progressive takeover of positivist academia. What is entryism, even, if not an attempt to seize the Master's tools to have a go at the house?
(On the meta level, as a right-winger who is adopting this catchphrase, are you not also aiming to use the postmodernist Master's tool against his house - directly, and one step up the meta ladder in that you are in fact even copying the strategy of claiming that "the master's tools will never..." while aiming to employ the master's tools to that end yourself?)
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17d ago
I never understood why this aphorism is a thing. It seems wrong both literally (in what setting that is not a video game do tools come with friendly fire proofing?) and as a metaphor (almost every successful revolution co-opts components nurtured by the system it overthrows). Are there reasons to keep it alive beyond some sort of postmodern appeal (it sneaks in the assumption that your opposition are akin to slaveholders, and appears to say authoritatively that you should reject "tools" on association with the enemy rather than on merit)?
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18d ago
I continue thinking that to look at the life of rich celebrities and seek to derive any conclusions about what rules the rest of us ought to live by is foolish. Even if the data actually suggests that it was a mistake for people like him to not live by the Pence rule (and this hasn't been established - for every blob of drama like this, do we know how many happy celebrities have left happy groupies with A+-would-bang-again experiences that they will treasure for a lifetime?), the data says nothing at all about whether an open marriage can work for any of the instances that don't fit this pattern, where the man is not an idol seen as holding the keys to a magic world of glamour or de facto bottomless affluence, the women are not secretly competing for exclusive access to this resource and there is no hovering media machine that would involve the whole world in the conflict for the promise of eyeballs.
What income do you figure being skilled working class begins at? Moving from the US to Europe in the postdoc bracket (so about $3k/month after tax or a bit more) was an almost straight QoL increase for me - better transport and other public infrastructure, cleaner and safer streets, better food, higher quality housing, better healthcare, more recreation options. The downsides were that housing is smaller by floor area, grocery stores are not open 24/7, and carsharing services are rare and clunky. I live(d) in countries that are not quite in your list of uncommonly rich, but near the top of "normal" Europe.
(If your experience is mostly with the UK, I guess I could see you seeing the US as being vastly superior in QoL? My memory of the UK after doing undergrad there is as a land of a thousand small gratuitous and avoidable inconveniences, like the split hot/cold taps. Do people still have those?)
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