Corvos
27m ago
This is why I chose my example carefully. You have a building with 200 people. They used to almost all be English. Now none of them are. We can discuss the mechanisms and consequences but that is straightforwardly "replacement" by any reasonable definition of the word. They were there. Now they are gone.
Secondly, if the reason they are gone is because they are diminishing, then what they/we need is time and space to recover from whatever factor has been depressing populations. Pandas are very difficult to breed, but we keep trying because we like pandas and we think that places which used to have pandas should have pandas again. You don't just shrug and import 10 million (much more aggressive!) grizzlies because one bear is basically like another; that would guarantee extinction.
Corvos
1hr ago
I get that. I have moments of thinking, "is the AI a useful tool implementing my ideas, or am I increasingly a useful tool allowing the AI to work around the bullshit that human-designed systems put in its way?".
It's why I ask the kind of questions I asked you: to see if I'm slowing things down by insisting on participation to justify my existence, rather than just solving the problem. I think still largely no, but it's good to be aware.
Corvos
1hr ago
Thanks, that's interesting.
For my more usual interests, it's more involved; oftentimes the model will go off on a tangent or latch onto something I don't care about, and I need to tell it to stop going in a certain direction.
This is more what I'm used to. I wondered if I was crippling it by stifling it, and would get better results from direct elicitation.
I guess worth trying both depending on the problem :)
Corvos
2hr ago
So? Do you object to the phrase "65 million years ago, mammals replaced reptiles as the dominant land dwellers"? Or "when the last Lord Salisbury died in 1966, the line ended. A banking magnate soon replaced the Salisburys as tenants of Longleat Hall".
Do you argue that this wouldn't have been considered an entirely anodyne phrase right up until it started to be used describing a politically live issue?
I have made an observation. What is the point of debating the cause unless it is to equivocate between "it isn't happening" and "it's good that it is happening"?
Corvos
3hr ago
Germany would have been in this category until recently. It seems relevant to me that all of those societies are growing economically and are 80 years old max.
We have not even begun to see the long term consequences.
My family has lived here for fifty years. I see the names of other people in my apartment building when I go to pick up my parcels. There hasn't been any English names for years, at least half a decade. In the local park, English is rarely spoken and most women wear hijabs.
If one thing vanishes from a place as another appears there instead, what word would you like me to use if not 'replacement'?
Corvos
5hr ago
(The back and forth, here, was entirely me saying "you can do it!", "keep at it, I believe in you", and "you've got this, finish it!")
Can you expand a bit on how this conversation went for you? You put the paper in, turned Pro mode on, and then gave the verbal equivalent of a 'continue' when the model turn came to an end? As a researcher, I'm curious to know how others are working.
Corvos
20hr ago
You would like the open internet to «come back», but not enough to drop some links to open internet websites.
Most of them are literally dead - the php links to resources that no longer exist, if the forum site is still up at all, and wayback machine can't crawl them.
Plus, the nice thing about them was as @ArjinFerman said, you didn't have to share your toaster-fucking forum on your plumbing support and so on. But for a representative example, have some toaster-fucking with Across the Salt: a long-dead Battlestar Galactica fanfic forum specifically for shipping some combination of Helo/Boomer/Athena and literally nothing else. There used to be billions of these for every subject you can imagine.
Corvos
1d ago
Why? They're still pretty good shoes, I have some. Market downturn? Sentiment shift?
Corvos
1d ago
The kind of company that can meaningfully challenge the frontier is like oracle sized or a new startup with industry insiders and several billion dollars in funding.
I'm pretty sure that Deepseek was way smaller than that and they absolutely made the frontier companies dance, as well as hugely opening up the field as a whole. Advances come from unexpected directions. One problem with regulation is that the amount of compliance you have to pay for (long before you have product sales) makes it far harder to start this kind of competitor.
Corvos
1d ago
diving right monarchies in Europe
Cthulu always swims left, monarchies dive right to avoid him.
Corvos
2d ago
2 seems dodgy to me. It's metaphorically true but not definitionally or literally true. Somebody talking about your brass testes is not going to suggest selling them to a metallurgist.
Corvos
2d ago
They do now. Traditionally it meant you were a member of the gentry i.e. upper class. I believe it meant specifically that you were armigerous (but less sure on that).
The word was a description of rank first and became expanded to behaviour only later.
Corvos
2d ago
Oh, wow. This is just writing "I think all Christians are heretic morons" on a big banner and waving it about, isn't it? Credit for the balls but I see why the coalition assembly isn't going so well.
Corvos
2d ago
Because you can't 'explain' away an opinion. You can only disagree with it, which you do. The case rests on factors that you consider non-salient, deductions which you consider to be false, and intuitions you don't share.
Corvos
4d ago
FWIW as a right-populist I'm sincerely impressed by what Labour and Mahmood have done, whilst also thinking much more needs to be done. Sadly I don't think Labour would do it, but if they did even half of it then I would vote for them.
Yes, but the US is the only country where they believe that "free speech" == "a negative right not to have the government specifically compel or forbid your speech". And that works, kind of, except when it doesn't. But from where I'm standing it seems super, super limited. My employers and my social groups have far more influence over my daily life.
If I define "liberty" as "a negative right to never have the government interfere with your person" then it's totally internally consistent to say that a man has his liberty while he's locked up in Josef Fritzl's basement. But most would consider that a pretty anaemic version of liberty.
If you had said that the US has "protection from speech-related legislation" and the UK has "protection from being fired for your speech" then I'd be with you. But to blithely say 'the US believes in free speech and Europe doesn't' is to my mind frankly ridiculous.
Ultimately my conception of free speech comes down to this: can somebody speak their sincere mind without fear?
Note:
In practical terms, it seems to me that both countries regularly fall short of their concept of free speech.
The US' conception of free speech does not permit the government to harass social networks to censor political opponents, but it does. It does not permit the government to make laws that require employees don't hear things that make them feel uncomfortable (a hostile environment) but it does. And so on.
The UK likewise falls short: arresting journalists for non-violent tweets does not in any way fit in the tradition of UK free speech, and I'm old enough to know. Personally, my experience of the UK's free speech problems is that they came in the wake of Twitter rows and race taboos imported from the US in the latter half of the 2010s, but I won't insist on the point.
Corvos
4d ago
I don't believe the university had the right to fire him, unless he was on some weird short-term contract. As I say, usually the defendants in these cases win and get significant damages. @MadMonzer's thread went into more detail.
Corvos
4d ago
Yes, but not for being arrested. IIRC the only people who were actually put in prison were arrested for directly calling for violence in the middle of riots. I don't approve of that, I think it reflects vast hypocrisy on the part of the government who would never treat non-English rioters this way, but I'm fine with that principle if it's applied evenly.
Corvos
4d ago
No, that's not what I meant to say. I think you are treating the subject in a mature way, albeit one I disagree with.
What I'm asking for is more recognition from others that free speech must ultimately involve trade-offs which different countries are handling in different ways, and less chimping out from certain people (not you @KMC) about how America is glorious land of Free Speech and England/Europe is a contemptible tyranny.
In America you (plural) have broadly decided that it's terrible if the government can punish you for speech, but ok if your employer does. In Europe it's the other way round - it's the governmnt's job to step in and tell your employer that they don't have the right to fire you if they dislike your politics.
Corvos
4d ago
That's a perfectly valid perspective. But we're now talking about the real tradeoffs and decisions that America makes: we can't protect your speech from retaliation by your employers because that infringes their rights.
America has a particular, limited right to free speech which says that no government can legally punish you for your speech. And that's fine, that's a perfectly valid conception of free speech. I personally happen to disagree with it: I think many people would rather spend a night in a police cell than be blacklisted from their career. That's just my opinion.
What irks me is silly "in America unlike Europe we have Free Speech" comments which ignore the complexity in both countries.
Corvos
5d ago
It's not a meme, it's just straightforward blasphemy. You are not supposed to suggest that you or your friends are basically like the Son of God for the purposes of self-aggrandisement, especially when you and your friends are neither holy nor christlike in their behaviour.
Comparing people to Jesus in order to learn from his example is obviously different.
Corvos
5d ago
If free speech is protected in America, why do people get fired and blacklisted for the things they say?
Come on, be serious. There are compromises made in every country on Earth
In practice, the UK has more legal protections against being fired or discriminated against for your views, even when those views are right-wing. That is why people who go to employment tribunals tend to win their cases. It doesn't usually give them their jobs back.
The UK has less protections for tweeting in a way that makes the government worried. This is not good.
Broadly, in the US you are more likely to be ruined, in the UK you are more likely to get arrested. Neither of these are good.
One reason that matters, though, is because opportunity clusters. If you can't afford a brownstone in Park Slope (wherever that is), that's a problem because you then can't access the high-paying job/networking/cultural opportunities in Park Slope. There is a plausible downward spiral of
couldn't quite afford Park Slope -> moved to the boonies -> could only find low-paying local jobs -> could never even think of moving to Park Slope -> can't even afford the boonies any more
which doesn't quite hold in a utopian society.
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