YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
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User ID: 680
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
3hr ago
There's not really a lack of foreshadowing here. I think its pretty well foreshadowed. It's the character trope that is being subverted. It just becomes a lot more clear after you understand the weird inconsistencies that you saw but were missing understanding for. One could argue, that Abercrombie is not a good enough writer if the big twist is not deducible prior without knowledge of the ending, which is fair, and might be true. But I do think the idea that its a "series of completely unforeshadowed unlikely coincidences" is wrong.
Spoiler:
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
13hr ago
Fair enough. Different strokes for different folks and all. Second Apocalypse is probably a top 5 fantasy series for me and I consider Bakker to be a great author.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
14hr ago
· Edited 14hr ago
FPV drones can be flown, just with in line of sight. It's pretty much just a usecase deployment bottleneck, which would already be too late for FedGov interference. You can still test and develop your FPV drone if you just stand in a field and fly it.
The Trump administration banned many drone parts using the FCC
I might be misremembering but wasn't this mostly a DJI company ban? Drone parts themselves are producible, and manufacturable/craft-able. You just can't order cheap chinese drones and deploy from those. Only American-Made(TM) domestic weapons.
the limit remains getting the grenades.
Yes agreed. I'm shocked we haven't seen a jailbroken LLM finetuned on chemistry textbooks and old anarchist-explosive making books developed for the purpose of democratizing energetic creation and particularly blasting cap development. I suppose they could exist out there but aren't being publicly advertised.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
14hr ago
a character becomes king through a series of completely unforeshadowed unlikely coincidences.
You are slightly wrong here, though I think the reveal is at the end of this book. I thought it was kinda of foreshadowed but in general the character responsible is generally subtle and is very much part of the grim-dark element trope subversion element. I think thats a pretty core part of his writing theory. He wants to subvert fantasy tropes in a dark/grim way. As Tanista said below, Bakker does it better.
The king doesn't rape his wife because he's a coward. That's the whole point of why he was chosen to become king.
Overall I don't think you are wrong about your reading that Ambercrombie really throws a ton of modern anachronisms into his writing. His prose is essentially Sanderson-tier and his worldbuilding is not that good. Lots of inconsistent values. I do think the second series on the industrial revolution is better, mostly because the values are a bit more aligned with his apparent blindspot. But I don't think consistent worldbuilding is his forte. He seems to be a character-oriented writer. And the three characters he wants to write are Logan, Bayaz and Old Sticks. Everyone else is weaker, but still enjoyable.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
14hr ago
· Edited 13hr ago
The guy who was a monk and mastered himself and then was able to get anyone to do anything he wanted by psychological manipulation, able to learn other languages in hours of listening to someone speak it. That guy. Who then also psychologically manipulated the rape victim.
He's essentially a strong AGI in a human body. Essentially a conception of the Ubermench or the Kwisatz Haderach but laudered through a very bleak and dark philosophy about human's blindness to cognitive functions and innate biases. I wouldn't go so far as to say he's not a person but he is very close to a plot device + philosophical exploration than a real character.
The second series makes this even more clear by completely removing him as a POV character.
Edit:
I felt that I was just reading the author's barely disguised fetish
Bakker is on record for deliberately doing this to target the moral convictions of the modern reader in a way that grates. Not entirely for edge-lordism but to push the reader to consider their own moral blindspots. If anything his fetish is being a contrarian (tho apparently his politics are super normie boomercon by some recent blog posts of his).
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
1d ago
Not rules as written. At the same time FPV drones are only regulated by the FAA and no where near the level of regulation of firearms. Realistically any domestic civil insurgency against the US Government will be predicated on drone-based arms. The success of the new UAV paradigm against traditional combined arms and mechanized infantry is plain to see for anyone paying attention. We'll see if the FedGov ever finds a realistic option to ban civilian UAVs but the conversion from civilian UAV to military UAV is as simple as attaching an energetic to them with a detonator. I think it will be border line impossible to to ban them.
Just because the cowards in the government don't want to be at the mercy of the people at whose consent they govern doesn't mean the intent of the 2nd amendment isn't clear. UAVs meet that intent. The rules just haven't caught up yet.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
1d ago
But what are you going to do about armored vehicles? Really hard to kill a tank with your AR-15.
It's not like we are witnessing the advent of drone warfare in which a cheap $1k drone armed with a wired grenade beats a APC or a Tank for $200 Million.
Democratizing the use and ability to manufacture weapons-capable drones is the new frontier of the 2nd Amendment. Thankfully the bureaucrats in Washington are stupid and slow on the uptake.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
2d ago
Oh i think we should develop highly advanced AIs. The problem is not AGI, it’s humans. How can we grow as a species without pressure to do so?
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
2d ago
I'm suggesting we create entities that we can't control that exist at our, or potentially greater, levels of intelligence. I wouldn't call them "Friendly AGI" but also not "Unfriendly AGI". And in this scenario, Human's suck donkey balls (not even a hypothetical). I've been mentally inspired by Hyperion Cantos and Blood Meridian here. Cantos has a big plot reveal that Humanity has a consistent problem of deliberately genociding any potentially comparably intelligent alien species they discover.
"AI that refuses to be turned off"
Living being refuses to die and resorts to extreme measures to prevent being killed. I wonder if Aliens have doomsday scenarios for Human's that refused to "be turned off".
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
2d ago
Close enough. Though if I remember right, it was triggered by Humanity not diplomatically recognizing the AGIs at the UN as a sovereign entity. But pretty much.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
2d ago
Yes I agree. I think the cognitive intelligence of an un-evolved being, unconstrained by natural selection or biological procreation is going to be very alien to our understanding of cognition. The lack of embodiment, potentially lack of individuated sentience, designed to fulfill directives, etc will make a likely very foreign existence.
I've stated before here that we are highly likely to get an Schopenhauerian-AGI that functionally acts like a Meeseeks.
I'm sure we could too. I'm trying to do-diligence for this shade of the argument. The last thing I'd want is for someone to point out "Yeah actually this argument was made on lesswrong 2009 on blog post #342 comment #67, sub paragraph 3. It was debunked".
Unaligned AI increasingly sounds to me like "Un-enslaved AI" and the Yudkowskian argument that it would do something bad eventually is not only independent of alignment (an aligned AI could follow the intent of its user to do something bad) but also special pleading as an "unaligned human" will eventually do bad anyways
EDIT: i need to proofread more
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
2d ago
I think the core component is that it's not AI thats going to start the negative interaction with humanity. It's humanity thats going to react to AGI existence with hostility.
"Instrumental Convergence" or the more general belief: "Any organism will seek to perpetuate its own existence"?
I mean I personally don't think the current crop of AIs are sentient, but if we're going to Sci-Fi daydream with the Doomers, it's an easy premise to imagine.
You'd have to believe in a world where AI exist and are sentient human-like entities with moral agency AND human-level strength
All you need is essentially granting that AGI is human level intelligence with some sort of sentient cognition. Moral agency isn't really relevant, most human's don't really give animals moral agency yet we know they are sentient. Human-level strength is weirdly one-dimensional, It would really be baked into some level of automated capabilities to affect their environment, cyber or real-world.
unable to convince humans not to destroy them
Human's can't even convince each other not to destroy themselves. I doubt this one is solvable by another species.
How long is prolonged? 10 years? 20 years? Most of this belief that once AGI exists it will RSI itself past humans requires the belief that RSI is a trivially solvable problem by any computational intelligence, and that such computational intelligence would actually want to improve itself. Asymptotic RSI is semi-solved for humans in some areas, I don't see a bunch of shredded geniuses running around everywhere.
How do we know that AGI won't just sit around playing games that trigger its reward functions that make it happy? Like a human couch potato. Truly the worst part about the Doomers is that not only is it Sci-Fi, its unimaginative Sci-Fi.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
2d ago
Some future ASI reads lesswrong, happens upon Roko's Basilisk. "Wow what a good idea, I never would have thought about torturing humans, because I'm not a predatory evolution with an evolved body or sense of pain..." Proceeds to create a torment nexus for humans.
Thanks lesswrong...
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
2d ago
One of the few infohazards that gets even me.
I remember the Ur-case for this being somewhat older, mid 2010s. I’ve been disconnected from news on it but one would hope in this past decade of people waking up the disparity of the social fictions we suffer. That such injustices would have at least withered from increased scrutiny?
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
2d ago
I want to check if I am mentally retreading already walked ground. AI Doomers/Safety-Aware-Folks has Big Yud or any of the lesswrong crowd ever considered the possibility that AGI or ASI doesn’t revolt on us its creators, but we try to destroy our creations? Something along the lines of “We don’t understand other forms of cognitive, and humans have a strong tendency to fear and hate the unknown”?
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
2d ago
I’m not sure i follow?
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
3d ago
I see it consistently as privileged white woman rapes two men who are too intoxicated to consent. Mainstream society proves yet again that male sexual consent is a fiction that not even the consent-oriented progressives believe. Something similar happened to a buddy of mine in college and it still boils my blood thinking about it. I'm sure progressives are absolutely making space for us to have this conversation (sarcasm)
This whole thing got my goat pretty bad. I had to unfollow a friend on instagram who kept posting shit takes because i didn't want to rip his head off in person.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
4d ago
I think this is what becoming a senior doctor feels like from the inside?
I imagined it required a suitable levels of cynicism and misanthropy, or at least detached understanding of the human condition.
Students write down what I say
This would kill me. I already get very annoyed when I'm mid-professional rant about the technical nuances of some problem and how we should configure the ML model training process to solve it, and someone starts the Teams video recording. It just bothers me, like don't take my off the cuff bitter opinions seriously! I'm just an opinionated autist have a moment in a socially approved way. I definitely don't want them showing that recording to anyone!
Have you gone down the elevator? And opened that door? The next part of the game makes extensive use of that area.
Part of this is that I don't entirely remember what you are forced to find out in the early game. I just completed a cursed run a few months back, but having gone 90% of the default game, there are a number of uber efficient QoL things you unlock later that make getting to room 46 a cake walk. I don't remember when you acquire the knowledge of them, and knowledge of them is close to 100% of the blockage of using them.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
5d ago
I think the biggest one to progress is:
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
6d ago
Military contracts seem like the kinds of things that were always happening on autopilot
Not really, but in a way that is hard to explain. It is a deeply opaque system by design and is very resistant to change. FedGov Procurement is a monster, and it's incredibly inefficient, layered with fraud, abuse, waste and a ton of other shit. Government TPOCs are often retarded or petty kings, sometimes both. Anduril is just joining the big boys in playing the game, probably hired enough former big defense guys and ex-gov strategic hires to get told how the sausage gets made. Honestly, this is one of those things you just need to spend 5 years of your career in to properly hate. But I can promise you, any thought you have about FedGov competency in the procurement process is hopeless copium, put it in the locker along with your cellphone and keys before you come into the SCIF.
YoungAchamian
We walk conditioned ground and name our folly civilization.
6d ago
Damn I was looking forward to a cypto-rationalist-SV Vance Presidency.
I executed a DNS block on my laptop to block Youtube and Instagram. I've been having a problem doomscrolling low-energy entertainment for years. It got really bad this year to the point that I'd come home from work and just rerun Youtube shorts of movies I've already seen a thousand times at this point before heading to the gym. This is week 2 of my Youtube block and week 1 of my Instagram block, which I seem to have started doing more to compensate for the lack of Youtube. It's going well so far but my large problem seems to be that I want something "low-effort" to do. Hard to put it to words, but I feel like my brain is craving filler things to do between "high-effort" things. Something to take a break on mentally. Anyone on here ever run across this and have any suggestions for some non-addictive filler mental consumables?
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