Corvos
1d ago
Funny how these TIL posts always seem to update in favor of Russia, isn’t it? No one ever comments “I revisited my strategic assumptions, and it turns out Putin is a huge bitch. Like, tinpot-dictator paranoia. Now I’m more sympathetic to the Ukrainians.” There’s no alpha in agreeing with the mainstream narrative.
This is natural, isn't it? The 'Putin is a huge bitch' narrative was pushed so heavily right from the start that any new information is likely to update in favour of Russia simply by virtue of regression to the mean.
Corvos
1d ago
Jeremy Corbyn remains the only (potential) Prime Minister ever to say publicly that he would instruct commanders never to fire nuclear weapons under any circumstances. It was hugely politically damaging for him.
Corvos
1d ago
Are there any models that you would consider generally good? I have a Claude-based personal assistant that I'm working on but medical queries don't work out well. The positivity bias is too strong - it tends to agree and amplify, which isn't good in medical care!
Corvos
2d ago
People who become spies are generally really weird. Being willing to lie and sneak for your masters tends to come with a cluster of pretty grim characteristics.
Oddly enough that’s why so many spies are flamboyant exhibitionists like Arthur Ransome (who was either a Russian agent, a British double-agent, or a Russian triple-agent) or Burgess of the Cambridge Five. The narcissism and fantastical thinking gives them the ability to persuade themselves of whatever narrative they need in order to be convincing.
Corvos
4d ago
It’s different, though. Being anti-abortion in Europe is like being royalty in the UK. In practice the royal family has very little remaining power in the UK, and what it does have is basically a historical relic that persists because lots of people have vaguely positive associations with royalty and royal rule is perceived as harmless.
The King recognises that actually attempting to exert royal authority in the UK on anything other than a rare, informal basis where most of the public agrees with him (as when he requested Saudi investors to reconsider some particularly ugly building designs in mid London) will swiftly lead to overthrow of the monarchy. They accept having given up 95% of their power to preserve the remaining 5%.
As with royalty, so with abortion.
Corvos
5d ago
Three (rather hypocritical) cheers for actually going and looking at the evidence.
Corvos
5d ago
Right, exactly. Which in turn breeds disrespect for load-bearing parts of society.
Not that it matters, but I did not sin against gay or black people in thought or deed before I found myself in the Left’s sights.
The collective Left chose to wage wide-ranging racist, sexist campaigns of persecution in flagrant contradiction of all their loudly stated principles and as far as I’m concerned they have utterly forfeited the right to tell sob stories about the 1950s.
We had a society that was, for all intents and purposes, colour and sex and sexuality blind. It was the left who chose to push that pendulum back up on the other side. In retrospect, I think they probably had to, because pertinent facts about these different groups did not make it possible for them to become interchangeable in reality, with all the consequences of that.
But the pendulum is still going to swing back, and it should.
Corvos
6d ago
What I mean isn’t really that “what the first amendment allows” becomes the definition of free speech.
It’s that turning politics into law distorts politics and degrades law. On the one hand nominal proponents of free speech (as an example) forget why they care about it and how to argue for it because they get used to just saying “First Amendment rights, bitch”. On the other hand, it means that actual meaningful discussion of what these rights ought to be get distorted into legal wrangling about how to interpret legal documents; these being matters of high impact, this means increasing politicisation of legal appointments and blatant distortion of the law on both sides (abortion rights, gun control etc. on the left and now birthright citizenship etc. on the right). As an outsider, it doesn’t look healthy.
Britain has historically operated on a ‘whatever parliament says, goes’ basis, softened but not constrainted by historical convention. We moved to a more rights-based system in the last few decades due to importing European human rights law, and it’s having exactly the kind of distortion art effect I describe above.
Corvos
6d ago
Sure, he’s autistic and probably was quite self-righteous about being ‘one of the good ones’.
I think though that a lot of people here are Red-Tribe-ish enough that they’re used to having largeish families.
If you don’t have children until mid-late 30s that means…
- Your children are unlikely to have more than one sibling, if that (so 50% chance no sisters).
- Their aunts and grandparents will be quite old and weak by the time they’re physically mature.
- Their parents are unlikely to have many siblings either, so few aunts/cousins. Both sides are likely to move regularly for work, so you don’t see them often.
It’s sad but having relatively little familial contact is quite normal for a big section of society at this point, especially upper-middle class.
Corvos
6d ago
Eh. This is just the "but how does it affect you PERSONALLY" meme seen from the other side. Trans advocates argue about it because letting people say 'there is a physical difference between trans women and women-women and we're justified in treating trans people differently' goes against the heart of the project; they care about it because of trans, not because of sports.
Corvos
6d ago
Yes, lots of smart, shy men who spend time on the internet are virgins. I don't think anyone should find this surprising.
I haven't been poking at it with a stick like you have, but in general Claude is mostly content to stick to the scenario absent provocation. It's not like Deepseek R1 where reigning in the constant flow of random creativity gets exhausting and irritating after a while.
Give Claude explicit instructions about maintaining consistency and I wouldn't expect to have serious issues.
Corvos
6d ago
Agree with you re: hysteresis.
Dubious on the supermajority requirement for political reasons. Bear in mind that I'm not writing from an American perspective here, but I'm dubious about the concept of a constitution and amendments. Partly because I'm not sure it's healthy for political life to move from "I believe that free speech of this form is good because..." to legalistic arguments about "The first amendment says...". Partly because the supermajority requirements seem both too strict and too loose: anything about 50% seems so strict that it's very rare to reach and yet precisely because it's so rare you basically only have to get supermajority agreement once and then everyone has to live with whatever wacky idea you had for generations.
Yeah, I'm really impressed, especially since I was pretty nasty about 3.7 in another thread. There are some caveats:
- It's EXPENSIVE. I burned through enough money for multiple AAA games in the last week.
- I have to limit the context to 20,000 tokens because of the expense, which is less than it sounds. If a character drops out for more than three or four scenes, they may come back with a noticeably different voice. You can limit this with summarisation / manually copy-pasting character introductions into the author notes when they reappear, so a character who was shy will stay shy, but the way they're shy may change.
- For similar reasons, the tone can drift. I especially notice a slow trend towards analytical/clinical/technical style writing appears about 30,000 words in unless you force correct it.
- I use Guided Generations for guiding new generations. Not the clothes etc. stuff, just 'write the next scene in this way' style prompts to keep the AI on track.
- The plot is still being made up as you go along, and won't be consistent in the way that a novel is consistent unless you work to make it so.
- Claude 3.7 is surprisingly permissive but the limits may cause trouble for certain types of stories. I don't know if you could do misery memoirs (explicit abuse), or Game of Thrones (explicit torture, harm). As far as I can figure out, it will refuse to depict on-screen sex or other explicit actions, or serious on-screen violence/damage to a human character.
Long-term consistency in video game NPCs is probably a lot easier - each NPC gets 4000 token summary and produces max 1000 token replies. Global consistency is taken care of by the game state.
Scenarios, mostly. I have a scenario that's basically the borrowers / Grounded (you are a tiny person in the walls, stay alive and don't be seen), a scenario that's the setting from Rosario + Vampire (you have been enrolled in a prestigious boarding school, but all the other students are monsters in disguise), etc. I also have a romance that I was working on. I also have a Japanese-teaching bot that takes place in your standard anime setting for colour and to provide conversation topics.
Corvos
6d ago
I appreciate that I’m being a pedant here but it seems relevant that a pacemaker doesn’t and AFAIK can’t improve a naturally functioning heart. We use it to turn a malfunctioning (unnatural?) heart into a functional ‘naturally’ healthy heart. A trans human alternative would be actually improving the function through hyperoxygenation or something. (But all the methods we know of to do this have long term issues, fitting your original point).
Same with glasses - they correct my deformed eyeballs to give me natural human vision. Transhumanism would be something like a telescope and again lens physics doesn’t really allow for massively expanding the kinds of things you’re able to see. Being able to infrared or something would be neat though.
Corvos
6d ago
Do you know if it beats Claude 3.7 for writing? I have wasted shameful amounts of money in the last week: it gets character consistency and plot progression perfectly, even carefully adding in hooks for potential future plots. It’s the only model I’ve ever tried that gets long-form writing right.
Corvos
7d ago
And the pacemaker is designed to make sure that a natural part of the body does its job in the natural way.
Corvos
7d ago
Briefly, I agree that you that arguments from nature can be fraught but I think that we can show more discernment here.
I think it’s fair to say that your body is naturally designed to mature during puberty, your heart is designed to pump blood at an appropriate pressure and rate, and that women are naturally designed to be able to produce healthy children without dying in the process.
These processes sometimes fail in the ancestral environment for various reasons, thus eg. 50% child mortality or angina. These processes are pretty clearly failures of function rather than successes.
Therefore I think we can say quite confidently that puberty is a natural process of human maturity whilst excluding heart failure.
Corvos
7d ago
It is kind of sad that the only group of people with as many long-term health problems as the terminally sedentary are the sports nuts.
Corvos
7d ago
In both cases, I would express sympathy and deflect, unless there were strong cofounding factors. I wouldn't feel like it was my place to say more.
If I were asked, specifically, for my opinion then I would give it but I don't think this can be applied to the nation except perhaps for elections.
Corvos
7d ago
Why? If you have supermajority agreement on something, you don’t need a special mechanism to protect it - no government has attempted to legalise murder or indentured servitude for small children.
If you don’t, if it falls beneath 50%, why should the fact that 60% of people thought policy X was a good idea 10 years ago prevent it from being dropped when those people change their minds?
Corvos
7d ago
If you want naturalized citizens to take part in the political process, training them to keep their head down before they have their citizenship seems obviously counter-productive.
Do we? One of the reasons immigration has been so controversial is by being openly a way for the Left to rig politics by importing paid-up foot soldiers. They were entirely open about this, see “The Emerging Democratic Majority” or Tony Blair’s staffer remarking that the purpose of their immigration policy was to render British conservatism “irrelevant and out of date”.
I think that first-generation immigrants are essentially guests and should refrain from any public criticism of their host - a policy that I follow myself.
Well, quite.
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