HalloweenSnarry
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User ID: 795
HalloweenSnarry
4d ago
Yeah, we have them here in Phoenix, and as a native resident of Phoenix, I can say that we have some truly questionable human drivers on the road as it is.
HalloweenSnarry
4d ago
True, there's already enough that's made by humans that one can find easily, and yet, we are getting generative AI pushed in our faces anyways. Every tech corporation is on a crusade to put an AI button within easy reach on UIs and even physical devices.
HalloweenSnarry
4d ago
Now, hold on, this probably needs the caveat of "terrorism works in the short term." I doubt this automatically means that the Greens are going to get the pick instead.
HalloweenSnarry
4d ago
I am going to pre-register my position of "no major Happening occurs." It may well just be for the purposes of carrying out another flashy, expensive bombing run on the Houthis. Why strike Iran now and not before?
HalloweenSnarry
4d ago
I dunno, some of the ways I can think of to bring down a transformer station or a concrete-hulled building involve violent forces that would, in fact, be similarly capable of reducing a lone infantryman to a bloody pulp.
HalloweenSnarry
4d ago
I think you replied to the wrong comment (at least, I see you replying to yourself).
HalloweenSnarry
4d ago
To put on the Hlynka hat, both extremes are guilty of both of these things.
HalloweenSnarry
4d ago
To add onto the other disagreeing replies here:
Consider the technology we use to make a cup of coffee. Once, you had to just boil ground coffee beans (presuming you already knew that you had to roast and grind them) in water. This made okay coffee, but you had to deal with the grounds. Then, we invented the percolator, which sprayed hot water over coffee and made for a crappy end result, but was probably more convenient overall.
Then came the Chemex, which took a bit more manual effort, but made good coffee. Then the almighty drip coffee machine was invented, which carefully dripped just-hot-enough water over the coffee grounds, and the end product was pretty good--maybe not as good as the Chemex, but still good enough, and very convenient. But then, then came along the Keurig K-Cup and all its derivatives, serving us coffee from plastic/aluminum pods. Is the end product as good as the older drip coffee, let alone as good as the Chemex coffee? Again, probably not, at least as far as aficionados would tell you, and yet, the K-cup has proven to be just so damn convenient that I would not be surprised to learn that the drip coffee machine was a declining product type.
This story of convenience beating out quality has happened in many fields of technology, and I feel that AI could play out the same way.
HalloweenSnarry
4d ago
I would like to agree, though I think poetry is one field of art where slop is characteristically more palatable to the masses than the real thing. It's one thing to have too-perfect generated images vs. illustrations made with actual care, but your average Joe is probably going to prefer a low-brow limerick over Eliot, Ginsburg, or Cummings.
HalloweenSnarry
7d ago
Yeah, I think conventional explosions could still cause blindness, assuming sufficient yield, no neutrons necessary.
HalloweenSnarry
8d ago
Holy shit, wow.
HalloweenSnarry
8d ago
the UN judge getting convicted of slavery in the UK
The what
HalloweenSnarry
8d ago
What makes these explanations not necessarily correct, would you say?
I do agree with this take, though, I think there's examples of legacy-corpo family heirs who are both stupid-rich and very progressive.
I get to use my taxes to (indirectly) pay for the gun the Camden gangbanger uses, a gun I'm not permitted to have.
What, exactly, is the mechanism by which this happens? I'm genuinely curious as to how this "also my tax dollars somehow" thing works, as you allege.
HalloweenSnarry
10d ago
Huh.
HalloweenSnarry
10d ago
Jeez. Good thing the cyclone wasn't that bad in the end. Any clue as to why people are so miscalibrated? Is it purely culture war-y reasons, or is it purely being calibrated on genuinely bad storms?
HalloweenSnarry
11d ago
Do the Azeris have any significant grudges against Iran? I'm not too familiar with the history there.
HalloweenSnarry
11d ago
For comparison, see, for example from 19th century, war of 1870. War ended with great victory for Germans, great humiliation for French. France lost two provinces, lots of cash and honor.
What happened afterwards? Peace. Bad feelings remained, but diplomatic relations were restored, French could travel to Germany and vice versa, no walls and barbed wire on the borders. Not thinkable today.
It was precisely this war, however, that deepened Franco-German resentment, which contributed to both World Wars, as both empires sought to see the other ground under their heel in the name of their blood feud.
HalloweenSnarry
11d ago
As far as I can see it, the efforts required by the frustrated and resourceful people of places like Venezuela are "demonstrate and coordinate sufficient violence to force the Maduro regime to either step down or be thrown down." This is a tall ask, but it is the bar that the Maduro regime has set, given the multiple rigged elections, suppression of political opposition, and militaristic displays of tyranny. Peacefully forcing change looks very unlikely over there nowadays, unless Maduro dies in office and his successor forgets to rig the election that's supposed to let them take over in his place.
HalloweenSnarry
11d ago
Although the reactions up here to the recent cyclone are heartening - competency crisis has started being a bit of a normie meme.
I'm a bit curious to know more.
HalloweenSnarry
11d ago
Some people here claim that the old, pre-edited version of Meditations is better. I haven't actually sat down to compare any changes, and to be frank, the archived version was one of the first results that came up on DDG...and not Scott's actual old blog, for some reason.
HalloweenSnarry
11d ago
There is a thorny tension in that, yes, there are challenges that seem difficult to solve without massive coordination--and suborning lots of polities to a higher power is a decent way to sidestep the usual difficulties of coordination problems (Sidenote: also available here!). However, some of these same challenges are the ones that are so high-stakes and consequential that getting it wrong can be really bad, and worse, "getting it wrong" can also scale too well. I think the "experiment" mindset is the right way to go about tackling these issues, when it comes down to it.
HalloweenSnarry
11d ago
I think the disagreement here is that YFR and others see the spending-versus-results conundrum as a matter of cost disease/"the dose makes the poison," where the cost-benefit ratio is so miserable that no increase in spending can be stomached, whereas you seem to see the problem as a "more dakka" one, where we could actually do better if we just invested more.
HalloweenSnarry
11d ago
Is this supposing that the inflows of immigrants are high enough that, if one were to indoctrinate, train, arm, and organize them, that they could be a force large and powerful enough to overthrow Maduro and suppress Chavismo into oblivion? This might be true, but I would like a reminder on the numbers involved.
The sales decline in Europe is at least potentially explainable by the backlash to Musk, what explains China? Preference for domestically-made EVs?
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