TheDag
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User ID: 616
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
21d ago
Just started, City of Brass of the Daevabad trilogy. I'm curious!
In non fiction I'm reading Meditations on the Tarot and looking to start The Interior Castle soon.
TheDag
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21d ago
Woah, do you know how this society got rich enough to afford all of this? Sounds actually quite amazing. Even better in some respects than the modern world.
TheDag
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23d ago
I would recommend the Coldfire Trilogy by C.S. Friedman.
TheDag
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28d ago
Yeah I agree in this instance it's pretty egregiously dumb.
TheDag
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28d ago
Yeah that's fair. I'm also suspicious because there are strong incentives for US AI firms to make China seem like they're ahead.
TheDag
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28d ago
Increased drug use is one suspected reason, but I think it might just be brain rot from being on right wing twitter too much. It should be noted that left wing social media contagion has similarly destroyed rationale thinking in the last ten years.
I think another, more charitable argument would be that the media environment is saturated with so many lies and false reporting, slanted journalism, etc etc that it's easy to discount things you don't like and focus on things that seem correct.
The journalistic / expert class brought this upon themselves, as far as I'm aware. Elon doesn't have time to do the enormous amount of checking that is required in this environment to verify every claim. Perhaps he could hire someone, which would probably be a good idea, but doesn't seem like how he operates.
TheDag
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28d ago
China has a new AI system out taking the world by storm, Manus. It's an autonomous AI agent that, according to Forbes changes everything.
I've seen a LOT of hype so far about AI agents, but the claims from this one actually seem pretty impressive, if they are true. Forbes says:
For instance, given a zip file of resumes, Manus doesn’t just rank candidates; it reads through each one, extracts relevant skills, cross-references them with job market trends, and presents a fully optimized hiring decision—complete with an Excel sheet it generated on its own. When given a vague command like “find me an apartment in San Francisco,” it goes beyond listing search results—it considers crime statistics, rental trends, even weather patterns, and delivers a shortlist of properties tailored to the user’s unstated preferences.
Manus uses the by now common "stack" of AI models, where there's a master-slave relationship between a head model that looks at the problem, and then sub models which are more specialized to go and do specific tasks. I can't quite tell from a quick search what the key breakthrough Manus made is, as my understanding is other agent AIs already have a similar set up. There is talk about asynch cloud work, but again, I didn't think that was an entirely new thing.
Either way, similar to the DeepSeek R1 reveal, there are a lot of breathless articles coming out about China "taking the lead" i the AI race. I agree that this is a concerning development for the U.S., given that we now have two Chinese labs that have seemingly joined the leading edge out of nowhere. Of course, it remains to be seen if this press blitz actually reflects seriously impressive new ground, or is just a good hype campaign.
Anyone who has used this or looked more into the details - what are your thoughts about Manus so far?
TheDag
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1mo ago
I can understand people on the left being worried about Trump based on how speech has changed. Personally I don't think it's because Trump is censoring speech, in fact I think it's the opposite.
The progressive left heavily censored speech in the U.S. for the better part of a decade, ramping up especially in the last few years. We have the receipts, it's common knowledge at this point that the FBI and other government organizations colluded with social media sites, news outlets, et cetera to push a pro-progressive message, and sideline or outright ban even relatively centrist people with dissenting views.
If there is a lot of genuine concern, I think it comes from people on the left getting a distorted view of what the information landscape looked like, via their censorship. As things bounce back towards a more representative information environment, of course people will feel shocked.
TheDag
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1mo ago
Just got Meditations on the Tarot which is a book on tarot from a Christian hermeticism point of view. Apparently Pope John Paul II kept one on his desk.
TheDag
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1mo ago
Ahaha thank you for this comment, has me dying laughing. lol.
TheDag
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1mo ago
Oh dang I got suckered in by fake apologetics. Man it's so hard to trust anything today. Sigh.
TheDag
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1mo ago
Counterpoint: could Trump not keep Putin's dick out of his mouth for a few hours?
This type of rhetoric is adding far more heat than light.
TheDag
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1mo ago
with “what kind of diplomacy, JD, are you speaking about? What, what do you mean?” I find it hard to interpret this as anything but extremely insulting. Wars in history have been fought against nations for less insulting behavior
Thank you for actually marking the time... Zelenskyy is BEYOND insulting here! After Vance chides him mildly, Zelenskyy says "Have you ever been to Ukraine, huh? Count once?" with his arms folded and backing up with an extremely condescending air. I can't believe it! How could a leader who desperately needs this stronger ally act with such immense disrespect?
I have been kind of ambivalent so far but wow... I am disappointed with Zelenskyy here. I know Trump and Vance aren't exactly polite but come on. The course of world history could've been far different if he was willing to play nice.
TheDag
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1mo ago
Right so scientists and scientific progress at at best acceptable collateral damage
Scientists and scientific progress shouldn't have played politics so hard. At this point it is nigh-impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff given the insane ideological bent of the universities, and the fact that they are leveraging their large amount of cultural and fiscal capital against one side of the political aisle.
"But scientists vote XX% democrat! They have to be the evil woke!"---well it shouldn't be that surprising that scientists overwhelmingly vote against the party of creationism and appointing anti-vaxxers as HHS secretary even if they might have had serious concerns with woke overreach. If you don't believe me, you can listen to Richard Hanania.
This is a straw man of the right that currently exists. Fundamentalist Christianity has been gutted in the U.S. and definitely does not hold much power in the current right wing administration. Do you think Musk is a Creationist?
TheDag
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1mo ago
The response is predictably shock, outrage and literal weeping.
The weeping was from the man talking about retiring, not about Vance's speech, FYI.
TheDag
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1mo ago
If I was China or an adversary, this would be child's play. Do they just not want to reveal themselves? I just don't get it. Every company I have gone to would be so easy to get admin creds. This makes me think there are two options. Either there aren't enough hackers to take advantage, or they are holding back. Which one is it? Because like I said, it would be trivially easy to hack these companies.
I wonder if most of the people with the skills and means to become hackers are just far more motivated by political ends than pure profit. I'd imagine if you could become a hacker, getting money would be relatively easy (although still entail a lot of hard work) by just getting a job in red teaming.
Or perhaps it's just a blind spot to the hacker mindset? Hardcore programmers do tend to kind of forget the blue collar world exists, after all.
TheDag
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1mo ago
Feels like the government is just dismantling the world I’ve spent my life working to become a part of, and I can’t say that I quite understand why.
The academy allowed itself to be hollowed out and started playing politics instead of searching for truth. Yes, hard sciences included.
No, just wanting to keep your head down and “do the science” is not an excuse. I’m sorry for you personally, but academia made its bed and now it will have to lie in it.
TheDag
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1mo ago
Trump can stop being putin's little bitch for more then a minute?
This is... a little intense. Trump is trying to end the war and protect American interests, at least allegedly.
TheDag
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1mo ago
My first response to Russia escalating into a full fledged invasion in 2022 is that the US shouldn’t nuked Moscow - an option that is now too late.
Do you mean we should have nuked them? In 2022 or beforehand?
I liked the first a lot! The sequel was definitely a lot more meh but the first one was riveting.
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