JulianRota
2mo ago
I'm not really seeing the AI side. Human cops are perfectly capable of being competent and decisive and appropriately escalating to violence when needed too. If they aren't, it's mostly due to their orders, their training, and the other factors that play into their incentives. Those were all created by politicians and can be removed by them too.
If we ever have AI robot cops, why wouldn't they be programmed by the exact same people who gave the existing police those orders? Why wouldn't they behave the exact same way, only even harder? All the current companies involved in LLMs have already done this in all of their public models. AI robots (presuming they ever actually exist) would probably capable of behaving exactly as they are ordered to an even greater extent than human cops. They might well be programmed to machine-gun a white professional with no criminal record for looking at them funny while completely ignoring a severely mentally ill black career criminal actively stabbing people.
JulianRota
2mo ago
I don't think this has anything to do with AI. That robot is remote-controlled directly by a human who can see it. It's basically a fancy remote-control car. As was the one in the 2016 incident.
The sheet-covering technique would probably have been pretty effective against an actual AI robot. It wasn't because it's actually controlled by a human who can see it, so the robot's camera being unable to see anything is only a minor hindrance.
We can't currently build any AI that's nearly as smart as a human, even with datacenters full of computers. I don't think we're going to have an actual independent robot that's smarter than a potted plant anytime soon.
As sibling comment says, cheap drones are indeed concerning. Though AFAIK they're all also remotely-controlled with very minimal to no autonomy and nothing resembling intelligence. Drones are also pretty sharply limited in power budget and payload. The air is indeed somewhat more friendly to current or plausible future AI, but I'd think it would first come to high-dollar high-speed jet fighters. Air to air combat has remarkably fewer variables and more benefit from being able to pull high Gs, and those aircraft have much better payload and power budgets.
JulianRota
2mo ago
Thanks, I'll check that thread out after I finish reading.
I'll caveat, as before, that some of Shilts' history is... somewhere between rumor and hearsay.
I did notice that kind of thing, both in this book and the last new non-fiction book I read, The Devil's Chessboard, which I also posted about. They're both non-fiction books that manage to be decently engaging. I think part of the price of that is the authors filling in and making up or embellishing a lot of details about what people said, thought, and were like. On the one hand, it helps draw more casual readers in, but on the other, how could anybody possibly know that for sure? What might a different observer with different opinions think about these people and their situations? You don't get that in this type of book. Maybe it qualifies for being a distinct genre? I'd like to think I'm decent at picking up that theme and not taking the impressions too seriously at least.
JulianRota
2mo ago
Started reading And The Band Played On, about the handling of the very beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the early 80s. Seems interesting so far, and I have at least some expectation of it going against some of the things I believed.
To pre-register what I currently believe, I think it was probably handled within about a standard deviation of about as well as it could reasonably be expected to have been, considering both the highly novel nature of the disease and the behavior of the victims, including being highly reluctant both to seek medical care and to cease high-risk behaviors like sharing needles to inject drugs and highly promiscuous gay sex. I am skeptical that any reluctance of authority figures to take it seriously due to the nature of the victims was a bigger factor than either of those. Considering that even now, ~45 years later, we still don't have a great handle on medical treatment, it's hard to see doing more sooner helping much. The only thing they could have semi-realistically done differently was to crack down much harder on those high-risk behaviors, which probably would have been pretty ugly and would have further outraged the affected community. So yeah, AIDS sucks and hindsight is 20/20, but give us a realistic alternative that the people involved could actually have done if you want to really convince me that we screwed it up.
JulianRota
2mo ago
Finished The Devil's Chessboard. My opinion about the main theme of the book is basically unchanged since my last post on it.
The last section of the book is all about the JFK assassination. The basic theme, according to the book, is that a ton of people around Lee Harvey Oswald and the Book Depository building had "links" or associations with the CIA, anti-Kennedy Republican activists, and anti-Castro activists and a bunch of weird stuff happened around Oswald himself, including being allowed to live in the Soviet Union for a number of years, and move back with a Russian wife, at the height of the Cold War, with basically a rubber-stamp level of scrutiny. Also supposedly the whole Warren report was a whitewash.
To all of this I say, well maybe, but this is a lot of smoke but not much fire. Okay, it seems pretty unlikely that Oswald just up and decided to shoot the President one day. But exactly who did what here, and why? There's no more information on that in here than I had before. And if it was an organized conspiracy by... some groups... exactly what did they hope to accomplish by doing this? Why did they actually pull off an assassination of Kennedy, but not any other American president? Did they just kind of decide that that was too far and not to do it again? Is it like part of the plan or something to be so vague and confusing about exactly what happened that nobody has any idea what to do?
JulianRota
2mo ago
Lately I've tended to think that your vote for President not mattering due to being in a solid Red or Blue state shouldn't make you actually not vote for President because, even though it doesn't actually matter legally, people do pay attention to the National Popular Vote. It can and probably does affect the extent to which a candidate feels they have a mandate from the people to perform bold actions and the extent to which individuals complain that somebody "didn't really win" because they didn't win the NPV.
And so, I will vote for Trump despite being in a deep blue district (Manhattan) that has no chance of him winning.
JulianRota
2mo ago
Short version: CWR is dead, yo.
I was a regular there as well as TheMotte on Reddit. Like it says on the tin, their weekly thread is the "Off-Topic and Low-Effort CW Thread". Mostly for rationalist-aligned or adjacent people who were firmly Red Team to post kind of Motte-ish stuff, but with substantially more low-effort ridicule of Blue Team. Fun place to let the hair down a bit, as they say, and talk a little trash without worrying about needing to coddle the other side. I do miss it a bit, but I also enjoy The Motte for what it is.
A decent number of the regulars moved on to a Matrix chat room. It's invite-only, you'll have to show post history that can convince the regulars that you'd fit in. I haven't posted there in a while; I have limited tolerance for chat rooms with people I don't actually hang out with in-person and drink with regularly. I don't know of anywhere you can find that kind of discussion on a public-ish threaded web forum now.
JulianRota
2mo ago
I started driving at about 15, the normal age for it in the US. IMO it still is much more tiring than the amount of time and the actual physical activity would suggest. I'm not really sure about improvement - it probably has somewhat, but the extra mental strain is still there.
I do still like to stop every few hours when driving longer distances. Partly from mental strain, partly from the physical part of stretching and moving around. Also for bathroom, snacks, food, gas, etc.
JulianRota
2mo ago
That's not how anybody in the world has ever behaved with nuclear weapons.
How do you know Israel made "back-channel threats" about nuclear strikes? If they actually had, why wouldn't Iran immediately go running to Russia for protection? If they went public with evidence of such a thing, international support for Israel's war effort would likely evaporate, including from the US. Nuclear powers as a rule basically never do that because it could easily set off a chain of events exactly like that.
Historically, rival states which both have nuclear weapons become extremely cautious about provoking each other. See India and Pakistan. In every such case, both nations become terrified of doing anything that could conceivably escalate to a nuclear exchange. No set of nations has ever dared see mutual possession of nuclear weapons as an excuse to attack each other harder.
JulianRota
2mo ago
I've tended to be skeptical of the idea, primarily because it's only protection against a very specific type of economic collapse. The kind where something has gone sufficiently seriously wrong with conventional fiat currency that it's dramatically lower value, but there are still sufficient goods available on the market to purchase from people who actually are willing to sell them, and those people are willing to accept precious metals in exchange for them. And have infrastructure to do so, including to weigh and value those metals and store them in such a way that they can't be easily stolen.
If I was going to hoard anything, I'd store primarily actually useful goods, such as non-perishable food, water filters, soap, medical supplies, tools, ammunition, fuel, etc. Those are extremely useful in any type of collapse or catastrophe. If it's one where people actually are exchanging precious metals, you will soon have all you could ever want when all of those people come to buy actually useful things from you with chunks of precious metal. Assuming you think the future is bright enough to actually accept such trades.
Cash is probably also more useful. In any of the much more plausible types of short-term disasters that have happened semi-recently, having at least a few thousand in cash lying around would likely prove very useful, because virtually everyone you might find selling things will be willing to accept it. Most of them probably wouldn't have much idea what to do with precious metals.
JulianRota
2mo ago
This is a very interesting and ominous development. I strongly doubt Durov will actually serve serious jail time. The interesting questions then are:
Exactly what concessions will France / the EU / whoever wring out of Durov and Telegram in exchange for his release?
What should we take from the fact that this level of lawfare has not yet been used (at least not visibly) against any of the other social networks or messaging platforms? Are they all cooperating sufficiently, despite claimed E2EE protections on some things? Do they have some other sort of leverage or protection? Or maybe the powers that be are just afraid of possible backlash, so they're going after Telegram first to see what they can get away with, and if it goes well, further action on other platforms may follow.
JulianRota
2mo ago
I've bought and sold several properties in multiple states and am friends with a few realtors. I've never heard of either happening.
JulianRota
3mo ago
How would having nuclear weapons allow them to fight Israel?
They could potentially nuke Israel, and then be nuked back in return by Israel, and very likely other nations, including anyone who considers themselves allied with Israel, or simply against the unprovoked offensive use of nuclear weapons by anyone.
That aside, they can already fire conventional missiles at Israel. They don't have the ability to carry out an offensive land invasion of Israel, and having a few nukes isn't going to change that.
JulianRota
3mo ago
Apparently I am in the minority in liking them.
To me, they symbolize rebelliousness and counterculture, which I do like. Unfortunately, it turns out that many who were "counterculture" in the pre-2000s were actually just Blue Team warriors who were upset that they weren't on top right then. Not very many have adapted to conservatism as the new counterculture in the post-2010s. Many continue to have the delusion that they aren't "really" on top yet. That's life in this era I guess.
JulianRota
3mo ago
I get the feeling it's not great right now. My job still seems to be fine, but I have several friends in different companies recently laid off and having trouble finding new jobs, which seems unusual IME.
I don't have any sources or proof or anything, but my feeling is that the field has been bloated for a while for various reasons, including startups powered by loose VC money and tech majors hiring heavily and paying big salaries in hopes of someone building something great. I think this may be an overdue contraction that isn't going away. I think the longer-term outcome is something like the bottom 20% or so finding other lines of work, much less demand for things like bootcamps, and the rest continuing to have steady employment, albeit at somewhat lower salaries closer to being inline with other types of engineers.
My current employer did do some layoffs a few months ago. Pretty small numbers for the most part. Everyone they let go that I personally knew of was pretty low on the list of overall productivity. Doesn't feel like anything to worry about.
JulianRota
3mo ago
Still reading The Devil's Chessboard. It's mostly a tour through all of the dirty deeds that the CIA did and/or was accused of doing during the Dulles regime during the Cold War.
It's interesting, but it's sufficiently preachy that I feel a little dubious about it's takes on many of these events. I wonder what other takes are out there on these events, if they were really as bad or as unjustified as portrayed.
I perceive a good amount of what I see as two-facedness about the Cold War. During it, it was claimed that the Soviet Union was impossible to beat, we had to learn to live with them, many were quite justifiably worried about the influence they wielded around the world and took broad measures to counter them. Then suddenly they just collapsed one day. After that, magically, everybody always knew they were a house of cards, all the stuff we did to counter them was totally unnecessary and unjustified, and we're a bunch of big stupid jerks for doing it.
I think the truth is more like, yes they absolutely were a grave threat to liberty around the world. We were correct to counter them at every turn. Maybe not every single thing we did in service of that goal contributed to their downfall, but a lot of it did, and there was no way to know for sure at the time what would and what wouldn't. In the grand scheme of things, it was all justified and it did in fact work, and the world is a better place without their regime, even if the process of getting there wasn't the prettiest thing around.
JulianRota
3mo ago
I think the moderation is fine actually. Everyone in that thread who was excessively hostile to Trace got modded for it.
I think the problem is more that Trace seems rather conflicted about exactly who he wants to be. He says he wants to be the calm and reasonable debate hall guy. We may disagree, but we'll all wear suits, follow the rules, speak calmly and reasonably, and shake hands afterwards. That's certainly a thing you can be, but you actually have to behave like that at all times or it breaks down. Trace, metaphorically speaking, went and picked up a battle-axe. He seems to expect everyone to see it as a cute joke, a harmless prank, etc. Then he got super mad that some people don't care to see it that way. You certainly can pick up a battle-axe if that's what you really want to do - you'll have no shortage of company and support in this day and age. But you need to know that, once you touch that axe, it's not so easy to just put it down. The people you metaphorically axe-murdered will have friends and family, they will delight at pointing out the bloodstains on your suit when you try to come back to the debate hall like nothing happened. They will not all oooh and ahhh at how cool your axe technique is. You're definitely not helping the situation when you get all mad at only those people and aggressively reject any suggestion that you've done something inconsistent with who you say you want to be.
JulianRota
3mo ago
It's got to be put into perspective though. LoTT's primary presence is on Twitter/X as far as I can tell. There, they have 3.3 million followers and their posts seem to commonly get hundreds of replies and thousands of likes and reposts, and regularly get reposted by elected Republican politicians. I can't read all of the replies to their posts, but I've skimmed some and I don't see any mention of that incident. They've also got a Substack, and as far as I can tell, nobody is commenting on their substack about the incident either. Therefore, I think that in the real world, the number of people who actually care about that is a rounding error compared to their total audience.
I'm sure LoTT has plenty of haters too. I'm not sure where to find them specifically, but I'd bet there are 10,000x more LGBTQ+ activists who hate their guts with a fiery passion for going against their agenda than reasonable-seeming people on the Motte who falsely think they don't verify their content well enough.
I don't think I've seen anyone actually comment on LoTT organically here, i.e. not in a thread that started based on Trace and the things he's said and done. We're kind of in different worlds - they're in the outrage-bait and memes world, we're in the long-winded calm and reasonable discussion of things world, and we don't really interact that much. If someone was to tell them that some person on the Motte was mildly smearing them, they'd probably be like "Huh? Where's that? I never heard of that place. Why are you bothering me with this? Go away, I'm busy finding new memes to post."
JulianRota
3mo ago
I'm trying to come here to discuss the culture war, not to wage it. I consider myself to be on LoTT's side, but don't really care to exaggerate how bad something that happened to them was to prove what side I'm on. It was a little bit bad, but that's all, and I don't think they deserved it.
Is there any actual person out there who really thought LoTT was super serious professional journalists who exhaustively verified everything they touched and is now shocked and not trusting of them because Trace managed to trick them? Probably not literally zero people, but I suspect it's below Lizardman's constant. I feel like we're all just being performatively mad because it looks bad. It's almost like a thing where the less bad it actually is, the more people get mad about it. When something is actually really bad, everyone knows it, so there's no reason to or value from getting really mad.
Metz's article about Scott probably did cause a measurable number of people who were unaware of Scott or had a mildly positive opinion of him to now have a negative opinion. It also caused a huge flurry of reactions from Scott himself and countless other people. So no argument needs to be made.
The whole incident was probably a lot more damaging to Trace than to LoTT. The fact that he did it, posted about it in that tone, and had a poor reaction to people being upset about it. I think a substantial number of people in our community who thought well of him and respected him before now think rather less of him, and I include myself in that category.
JulianRota
3mo ago
I saw Trace's post at the time, but I didn't have the time or energy to go through the whole thing at the time. I did today though. The poo-flinging here was a bit unexpected though. I don't really keep up with the interpersonal drama in that much detail. For anyone else curious:
A Motte discussion of it at the time.
Whole thing seems kind of meh to me, to be honest. Yeah it's not a good look for Trace or the BaR Podcast to carry out hoaxes like that. But LOTT didn't really suffer any harm from it. Trace has done some great work otherwise, but I'm not under any illusions that he's a partisan for my side of the culture war, so I'm not like morally offended that that time, he did something mildly bad to my side. It's kind of a bad look for him to do that and, as far as I can tell, refuse to apologize or anything, but I don't feel the need to follow him around and bash him about it in every other thread. And I get that it's annoying to have that happen, but he didn't need to get so mad about it. I haven't seen him acknowledging anywhere that it was kind of a jerk move. If he wants to take his ball and go home because of that and other such things, well sorry to see a mostly good poster go, but okay I guess.
JulianRota
4mo ago
First off, I don't think there is any viable way to fake or half-ass this. But it's part of growing up IMO to develop the ability to fit in in multiple different types of social groups. You can learn to fit in with this new crowd, but you'll want to make sure you maintain a group of friends, preferably IRL, that you can talk about the things you actually like and find interesting with.
IME, most people are quite happy to share their sources of cultural references with a less-knowledgeable newbie. So whenever you hear a reference to something you don't know, ask. Not necessarily at the time you hear it, if not appropriate, but later. Then follow up and read, watch, or listen to whatever they suggest. Keep an eye on the things people around you read, watch, listen to, and copy them. If you already have an impression that you ought to know some piece of media, then do it - go ahead and watch Titanic, and get a recording of the top 20 or so Beatles songs and listen to them a dozen or so times. Don't make a big deal about any particular thing, just keep consuming and let it all soak in. This should hopefully provide enough sources of things to consume to occupy all the time you're willing to spend. You'll have to accept that you're not going to be the coolest guy around in this crowd for a while, but that's okay. You're going to have to keep your mouth shut and listen a lot, and often let references you don't get yet just float on by.
If it all feels weird or discouraging, know that you probably aren't the only one doing this, very possibly including in your current work social group. If you're faking it to some extent, you're not the only one.
JulianRota
4mo ago
I'd note that that incident wasn't exactly randos - it was the work of Red Army Faction, which was backed by the KGB and likely receiving training and materials from them. I don't think any randos are going to be constructing a precisely timed shaped charge IED to take out a target in an armored car.
JulianRota
4mo ago
FWIW, I regard the whole idea of assassination by medium-long range gunshot at a well-known public event to indicate a crazy rando. Someone seriously experienced or some sort of elite intelligence operative would work on acquiring and leveraging specialized intelligence for a much simpler and more certain kill, and good chance of the assassin surviving and escaping.
Especially for someone with a little less protection like a former president and candidate, it's likely that at least a dozen times a week he's just walking around in some random public place with a bunch of random people nearby who haven't been checked for weapons or inclination, with a few USSS bodyguards around. This is mostly reasonably safe since it's highly secret and hard to predict exactly when those encounters will be. If you were super-elite, you'd try to learn about some of these ahead of time, choose one where you're reasonably likely to be able to get away clean after you shoot, and take the shot. Get away clean, and it's a super-mysterious event. It'd be hard to prove afterwards whether it was a crazy rando that just got lucky or really was some kind of elite operative acting on masterfully-obtained evidence.
JulianRota
4mo ago
So far it appears he was only grazed, and nobody else around was hit, which is a really bizarre outcome. A clean miss or a solid hit is far more likely. I'm not quite sure what to make of it. I guess more information will come out in the next few hours, but it feels pretty scissor-y already.
It's not really aimed at the general public, but at the Republican Presidential candidates and the people who might make up their cabinet if they get elected. Nobody cares much about selling the general public on how it's totally super awesome. Only conservatives who are hardcore policy wonks would actually read it. There's probably not much to be gained from any Republican candidate for office talking about how it's great and they promise to do it all either.
The Liberal institutions picked up on it as something they can scare their base with. It's easy and in their interest to go wall-to-wall selling everyone on how it's totally super terrible and horrifying and every Republican definitely seriously wants to do it, regardless of how much truth there is to that. And so, the overall public perception is super bad.
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