VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
No bio...
User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
23m ago
Where do these kids come from?
If it's anything like my local school district, it's partly that people are choosing other education options (homeschool, private), and partly that people are having fewer kids and the youth demographics are different than the overall numbers. At least here, youth population is up (not even true everywhere), but district enrollment is down a lot.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
31m ago
It's really the fundamental tension of post-scarcity, isn't it? Some people enjoy what they do, some do it for the paycheck, and others are a mix of both. I'm not opposed to automation (AI these days) replacing drudge work nobody wants to do, but I really would rather I get the benefit of post-scarcity before my paycheck disappears. In practice, we've mostly been fine so far because things mostly change slower than you'd think from the headlines.
On the gripping hand, I'm not even sure society is ready for post-scarcity: it's not at all clear to me that everyone would be better off if we could all stop going to work tomorrow and still get paid. Some people would do well and find new friends and hobbies, I'm sure, but I suspect quite a few would end up worse than today in some metrics due to the usual vices (drugs, alcohol, World of Warcraft). As much as I like the idea of The Culture/The Federation, I'm not wholly convinced it isn't a bit dystopian in its own way. I hear a couple of Banks' books consider that, but I haven't gotten to those.
For pretty much every other sort of technology with safety concerns, we don't just say "don't let it get out of the box". We also don't throw up our hands and claim it needs a general-purpose "alignment" solution and nothing else matters, which is what Anthropic and OpenAI seems to be doing. Generally we start putting boxes in boxes of layered safety and only have tragic outcomes when all the holes in the "swiss cheese model" align.
Look at civil aviation: it's tremendously safe overall, but only because of rules and practices built up over a century of accidents. But it's not solved by a "one weird trick" alignment, but by many layers of safety and security. Accidents, when they do happen, typically could have been stopped by one of the layers catching it.
In that recent Amazon crash, the pilot touched down despite the other human voice (a qualified pilot!) in the cockpit calling it too fast, despite rules requiring stabilized approach configuration minutes before they tried to extend the flaps as they crossed the runway threshold, despite numerous automated call outs from the aircraft safety systems ("sink rate", "minimums", "too low terrain" twice --- I don't believe any of those are normal in a landing). If they had gone around on any of those indicators as generally required in their training, it'd have just been another day.
From what I know, the rules for nuclear and chemical plants are similar: we design them so many things have to go wrong before a single safety issue occurs. Any we (should) take all such things (near misses) seriously. But our AI corporate overlords seem to think they know better with "alignment".
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2hr ago
Would it be wrong to suggest that we should codify requirements to improve education for smart kids too?
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3hr ago
Is the carbonated grape juice in the US typically bought as something other than a non-alcoholic alternative to a wine-drinking event? The white variety I've seen before at weddings and parties and such for kids when the adults are drinking sparkling wine (champagne, or other types). Not that anyone would object to an adult choosing it too (pregnant, alcoholic, religious objections, just a non-drinker).
I'd bet you can charge more for something people are already buying with much more expensive sparkling wine.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5hr ago
Be thankful you don't have to deal with raw CoTs (unreadable now)
I look at them for GLM-5.3 Flash (previously GLM-5.2) occasionally, and they're still comprehensible English, usually even well-structured. It's in English even when I prompt it in another language.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
Due to the sorts of inequalities that people complain about regularly, banks have a lot more resources at their disposal than hackers typically do. Plausibly, they can afford Fable and Astra tokens to pentest and harden their own networks ahead of script kiddies having the means to buy them. I wouldn't expect that to last forever, but if they put effort into it they might not lose. Nation-state actors are different, but even then Western nations can afford better models generally.
Not a strong hypothesis, but pithily "the only thing that can stop a black hat with an LLM is a white hat with a better LLM."
Those sorts of targeting concerns are [ETA not] strictly new: there are plenty of WWII accounts of poorly-designed torpedos swimming in circles back toward their launchers. But they are valid concerns, and there are better IFF techniques (not AI) available for that sort of thing.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
Can the fruit fly grok, say, the axiom of choice? It's both a simple and a very abstract concept. I'm not sure, but it's an interesting question.
I'm sure at least someone has considered more difficult target discrimination problems, which seem to edge closer to the "poetry" use case. "Is this language Russian or Ukrainian", or discerning between common Eastern Bloc hardware used on both sides seems relevant and difficult, especially with active countermeasures on silhouettes and shapes going on. That meme with three fingers seems relevant.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
The usual arguments for the platform-ization of the Internet focus on social network effects and corporate centralization. Your argument has me wondering if there's another element of security that's been ignored. The big platforms can afford security professionals; my basic personal site is more likely to be running an unpatched (who has time for prompt patching) WordPress with an expired SSL cert. Let's Encrypt is finally a free option, but is going to start issuing 45-day certs by 2028.
Beyond that, the desire for a public web presence seems to have wanted over time. I don't want to be internet-famous. IMO the "I don't post anymore" problem is evidence that whatever effort the platforms put into "trust and safety" doesn't seem to have delivered either. But I do miss those naive times some days.
Also one of the things the Yuddites seem incapable of doing is figuring out that superintelligence does not mean omnipotence.
I find myself frustrated at a lack of what I expect would be cool theoretical results on bounds for intelligence. It seems clear that tiny microcontrollers are never running meaningful models, but I'd have expected some "this much hardware/weight count for this much intelligence" bound. But I suppose we still don't have a raw measurement (maybe even definition) of intelligence.
My intuition is that my (not-web-enabled) toaster is never going to achieve much useful thinking, and that actual intelligence has diminishing returns with scale in ways that make "super intelligence" useful, but not unboundedly powerful. But I don't have a strong argument for that.
Pithily: Modern AI has a Claude, but lacks a Claude Shannon.
The mood is already turning against AI even while the labor market is strong, it’s hard to believe that won’t get much worse as large scale layoffs start to bite.
I don't think "large scale layoffs" is necessarily the only future here. I'll certainly admit it's possible, but historically automation hasn't always gone that way. A century ago, we had lots of accountants, and most of their time was spent manually balancing arithmetic, maybe with a mechanical adding machine. Along came the personal computer (earlier for large businesses with mainframes), and most of that work can be automated pretty trivially. Yet there are more accountants today than there were a century ago. What changed is that they're not doing arithmetic, and the complexity of what they do has grown substantially. For all the complaints about the growth of the tax code (and frequent related stunts by politicians), we are able to handle that complexity because we can offload the line-by-line balancing to software. Some of that complexity is probably wasteful, but some of it is also better auditing and accountability, or targeted governmental incentives — some, again, is probably wasteful, but some seems reasonable.
I don't have quite as coherent an argument (still a work in progress), but it's also the case that "recession caused by mass AI-driven unemployment" is actually a self-own by corporate AI overlords in limiting their upside. If you replaced half of human workers tomorrow at a cost savings, any not-truly-essential business is going to lose customers who can't afford their wares: tech companies fit pretty high on Maslow's pyramid, and most of the base ones are long-commodified — at one point, most of us were farmers, then along came the tractor. Nobody in the West is starving because they can't get a farmhand job. The cratering of farm employment is, in fact, why I get to work an office job, rather than out in the fields somewhere, and I'm not sure I'm worse-off for it.
But that latter part is, again, a half-formed argument.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
I think we're ultimately going to have to agree to disagree here: I think the moral valence of the two parties here is less clear. If pressed, I'd probably weakly lean towards Israel (that Golda Meir quote on loving children doesn't seem completely wrong), but they're hardly blameless victims.
I appreciate the forthright discussion, though.
If it's at all unclear, I don't think it's happening. If it were, it'd be worth prosecuting (like sexual abuse going on in the basement of a basement-less pizza parlor), but the idea that it is without substantial additional evidence is laughable.
The rest of the comment was possibly-irresponsible musing on the legality of imbibing such things and specific charges therefore, but not meant to be taken seriously.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
As very much an outsider, would you be willing to elaborate? Do you mean the ways, as the musical put it, "That the current President of the church, Thomas Monson [not the current President anymore], speaks directly to God", or something else?
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
While I'm glad "Free Cuba" is a statement that both Macklemore and Marco Rubio can agree upon, I suspect they mean it in very different ways, and probably don't actually agree on anything there.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
I'm not sure I really want to know the answer, but is "blood drinking" by itself a crime? I'd assume it depends on how you source the blood in question ("ethically sourced from local abortion clinics", ugh, still no).
Last I checked, the Catholics would testify that they drink literal blood regularly, but we've mostly settled the Protestant-Catholic animus over such things in the US.
With the crucial difference that Rafah was demolished, whereas the antizionists are still a decade or so away from possessing the power to demolish Tel Aviv.
Sure, but they demonstrably did a quite a bit to Be'eri.
And Dresden was largely carried out by American forces: no American cities were even modestly impacted by enemy violence during WWII. The total number of civilian casualties in the 48 states during the war is countable on a single hand. Even London with the Blitz wasn't hit anywhere near as hard as Dresden or other German cities. Does "the Germans were a decade away from possessing the power to demolish Washington" (roughly true) mean that FDR was the baddie there? I personally don't think so, but YMMV.
ETA: On looking, there were six civilians killed in the 48 states during the war, who died from a Japanese balloon fire bomb. Not quite one hand.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
I think any other direction has darker implications: to reverse your claim (which, to be fair, is factually accurate to my knowledge), those that would commit mass ethnic cleansing of Jews in the 1940s were stopped by making their cities look like Dresden. Why wouldn't "Never Again" mean turning cities (Rafah) to such in 2026 for the same reason? "Which river? Which sea?". I don't agree with it, but I can at least understand the position.
Ultimately, the cycle of violence is only broken when one side loses or admits defeat — the West Germans were to some extent lucky the Western Allies were more magnanimous than many other historical examples — or when "hippy-dippy peace-and-love attitudes" prevail. In most cases I can imagine, I'd prefer the latter.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
I feel like I'd also apply this criticism to Mormons: the origin story is, to put it kindly, a bit hokey. That said, the organization as a whole seems to produce members that are, at least when I've crossed paths with them, consistently reasonable people. Clearly it's at least possible for an organized group to transcend the "quality" of its founding documents, even though I think they still believe them earnestly.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
I'll concede it's a bit of an overzealous, maybe even facile model. But I'm not sure I have a much better model for most extremist ideologies (except maybe the Quakers, if they count as such) that doesn't devolve into totalizing revanchism regardless of initial direction: it's a common thread among literal Nazis, through Pol Pot, all the way to the Hutus, Lost Cause stans, and both side in Israel/Palestine. It's really easy as humans to blame all sorts of things on our outgroups; I won't claim to be immune to that one.
But I have trouble finding any sort of consistent principles in modern progressivism that don't boil down to "who, whom". Genocide is bad, but maybe we can poll watchers of The Young Turks how they feel about Armenians. Blasphemy laws are bad, but don't you dare draw The Prophet. Black lives matter, except the ones in Africa killed by (often-Muslim) militants. The most reliable metric for "Omni cause" support seems to be more along the lines of voting blocs than moral principles, and I have real misgivings that the political standards that are IMHO not-even-unreasonably applied to Christianity are largely brushed off for everyone else that will vote for them at present. That part gives me pause.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5d ago
The dichotomy in TNG between Data, who is often played in a role of AI wanting to be "truly human" (also Spock in TOS, with Facts and Logic) and the ship's computer, which seems quite capable of similar levels of intelligence, but lacks something (agency?). I don't think it was IMO fully explored, but was brought up a few times directly. It's a pity very little modern TV is able to consider such deep questions: too much grim-dark, flawed-protagonist, melancholy slop.
the left wing is totally on board with the alternate theories and has applied the "blaming culture==racist" paradigm
Sometimes it seems to me that the social currency of DSA types is just, well, unabashed shamelessness. It certainly explains the number of self-identified "working class" fail sons that had daddy buy their first house or live rent-free, or hyper-progressive businesses that haven't paid their taxes.
If that's really true, it seems like all you'd need to subvert it is a critical mass willing to play along by its own rules. Get a bunch of Eastern Europeans to show up to a meeting and center that "in living memory, Slavs have been the primary victims of capitalism", and raise etymological concerns every time someone else uses the word "slave". Those facts are, arguably, not even wrong. If they kick you out, raise discrimination claims under the Civil Rights Act. There is certainly an element of the crab bucket to it, too. On the other hand, I'd recommend against it because of what could happen if you were successful: what is literal Naziism if not turbo-woke except centering blond-haired, blue-eyed Germans as the primary victims of history at the hands of Jews and other European powers?
To tie it back to Islamism, I haven't listened to OP's podcast, but my broader concerns there are that many on the left (not even always Muslim believers themselves!) lack the self-awareness expected of "the rest of us". I'm expected to appreciate the historical nuance and implications, but to them, history always begins at a very convenient choice of time. Byzantium Constantinople Istanbul has always been Muslim land (see also Jerusalem). The only slave trade worth mentioning is the Western Atlantic one. It's only "genocide" when it's done by perceived-as-white people; pay no attention to the last century in, to name a few, Armenia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, Kashmir, South Sudan (in some cases, literal skin-color-based murderism), or religious minorities within the Middle East like Druze or Lebanese Christians. I'll pretty reasonably acknowledge that bad things have been done by Christians and in the name of Christendom, but it feels very much like a one-way street.
To be clear, this isn't an "all Muslims" thing. There are plenty of quite reasonable minds here. Whom amongst us doesn't have weird teachings in corners of our religious texts that we are at least a bit uncomfortable with? It's more a question of what you choose to do with it and where we go from here. The Reformation was, to put it bluntly, not the best time to live in Europe, but the Westphalian peace and the Enlightenment seem important results from that which aren't as universally-assumed as they ought to be.
I am aware of people rejecting it at small scales, but I'd guess they are a small minority of at least my social network. I haven't heard a big company come out against it, for example, but lots of examples of them embracing it. I'm open to other data, but my guess is something like 5% (loud) rejection or less.
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