VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
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User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
21hr ago
Those sorts of targeting concerns are 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
22hr 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
1d 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
2d 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
2d 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
3d 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.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
Imagine a chimpanzee trying to align a human being. What could it really do other than try to be cute, to play on the human's affectionate and childraising instincts?
I occasionally see people muse something along the lines "We domesticated dogs. Cats domesticated us." I do see some truth to that model: being cute, fluffy, and mercurially aloof and affectionate demonstrably works. I put up with feeding mine and cleaning the litter box for it.
But also in the last hundred years intelligent humans have started appreciating the environment and biodiversity. Not always successfully, but we at least try not to exterminate biodiversity just because we can. I'd even suggest that "support for preserving whale species" is correlated with intelligence. I can at least imagine a situation where medium AI might accidentally stomp us underfoot, but a super intelligence would care about preserving us, if only like pampered zoo animals.
Not saying it'd definitely work, but it's not a completely zany gambit.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
That might be a concern at some point, but current hardware that can (effectively) run bleeding edge models is really rare. A machine that can effectively run GLM 5.3 Flash (not a frontier model even, but close-ish) at nontrivial rates is, last I checked, six figures. Can it even run on a single 12A (120v US) breaker? A rogue frontier AI isn't going to spin up instances on smart TVs or even most desktops.
That might change in the next decade assuming demand and technology make these things commonplace, and that is worth preparing for, but seem oversold as risks today.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
You would not expect a "pandemic safety organization" to create novel viruses.
There have been plenty of comments here about how much the CDC and NIH were funding gain of function research, despite a Congressional ban, some of which was done in Wuhan, and some of that proposed included specific mutations later seen in a pandemic coronavirus that first appeared in Wuhan. Whether or not this was the source of said pandemic remains unproven.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
Isn't all of it hobbled without login now? There are some mirror services, but I don't expect those to last forever.
I'm sure Aaron would have been proud. /s
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
Surely Providence should have thought of, uh, safety before allowing this cellular life stuff to engage in evolution by natural selection. You can't just let that happen, or FOOM.
But that same Creator also didn't consider the gray green goo hypothesis, and now that stuff is everywhere, even deep underground and ocean vents.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
The argument in favor of the "top ten six five percent" rule was that high schools were heavily segregated in practice --- barely now within living memory, by fiat, but now mostly by school zoning area demographics. Ideally the winners are supposed to be poor schools in the Rio Grande Valley and historically-Black communities getting to send graduates from poorly-ranked high schools to top-tier UT Austin, but I've definitely read anecdotes of parents of means, uh, venue shopping come senior year of high school. I can't speak to how common that is, though.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
4d ago
The most rabidly xenophobic nations are generally the ones people are least interested in migrating to
This partly depends on your definition of xenophobia. I've known no shortage of weebs dismayed that Japanese immigration laws are basically "no". I'm sure there are KPop stans that have similar situations.
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."
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