edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
No bio...
User ID: 842
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
3d ago
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
4d ago
I'm not sure how wise it is to be giving such recipes on this forum either.
ok but you'd actually probably kill yourself if you used my recipe to do anything
Also discussing hyper narrow techniques is fun at the end of the day nobody is going to actually do any of this, this is all elaborate textual role play to me. There's no way anyone is stupid enough to try to make cyanide gas in their parents garage, or get on a government watchlist for buying nitromethane.
I really worry about what will happen if someone is able to manufacture a bioweapon they otherwise wouldn't have been able to manufacture thanks to an LLM.
Using Pliny prompts I have been able to get it to teach me how to do fun very dangerous experiments then go to the local college chemistry lab and confirm they work. ~~PLEASE DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME
they mostly tend to be low in traits like intelligence that correlate with successfully perpetrating the most harmful kinds of mass violence.
yeah aside from the 9/11 highjackers and the Unabomber I can't remmber a single smart terrorist. Even the unabomber wasn't the smartest at actually carrying anything out.
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
4d ago
Ok so... i'm often seriously confused about what safety people actually care about.
I understand fear of handguns a handgun is an easy to procure object in a hurry that allows someone to commit a crime suddenly and violently.
But it seems any type of premediatated or planned operation is just super legal and easy to get? (except of course using it to commit a crime is obviously very illegal)
Nitromethane is freely available for purchase, which can be easily made into very dangerous chemicals using stuff you can buy in the hardware store. From there we have other things, while you have to either break the law or DIY it for a lot of parts you can make your own drone (or just use a kids RC helicopter toy, seriously it may not work for heavy payloads but you'd be shocked at how far you can go with mediocre toys these days.) and drop an explosive on anyone. You can also make actual war crimes in your basement by mixing iron powder, and sulfur then heating it, sealing it in a glass bottle with water as it builds up H2S. Alternatively if you want to make cyanide gas, buying sodium cyanide (i'd be willing to post links but I don't want this forum to actually get in trouble with the FBI, I already got searched once) and mixing it with sulfiric acid is doable (and ok like hyper dangerous beyond belief and you would have to basically get rid of it the moment you make it but....)
Again the delivery mechanisms for this stuff isn't complicated and the main limiting factor of these does not appear to be that obtaining the means of violence is hard it's that anyone smart enough to do this is also smart enough to realize that violence is a bad idea.
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
6d ago
Admit defeat and move on. May or may not have been a good idea to start the war but now that the war is too expensive to maintain (it would cost like 2 months of social security a year to maintain). War is costly and trying to win an unlimited objective war is a mistake, just end the war now that the ability to successfully coup the government is over and you don't have the milops needed.
If the US packs up goes home Iran will not forget but the cost benefit analysis does not favor continuing
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
24d ago
Ok so I could abuse my privileges as a moderator of /r/anime to reobtain the stuff from pushshift https://old.reddit.com/r/pushshift/comments/14ei799/pushshift_live_again_and_how_moderators_can/ but it will take a bit for me to regain pushshift access since they switched to a new system
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
1mo ago
Oh I have heard of mr.beast before but I kinda didn't realize he was that big, I just thought he was some random youtuber because the first time I heard of him was Stand up maths but I didn't really know anything beyond "oh he's some guy who makes youtube videos" I had no idea his videos were that... uhhh wasteful mindless entertainment. I just figured "oh this guy is doing something stupid and Matt parker is making fun of him, well ok whatever"
Like the fact that my algorithmic segmentation is so strong that I learned about mr beast through stand up maths is like insane. I guess Youtube really knows my taste and goes "yeah mr beast you won't like him, how about some Dwarkesh Podcast and some MichaelPennMath instead" and tbh youtube is right I do find international math olympiad problems more interesting than whatever the hell the mr beast video I watched was.
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
1mo ago
Short films as in fictional stories? No but short films like reality tv? Basically that's most of youtube.
Some absurd fraction of the youtubers I watch are pretty clearly "I watched mythbusters as a child and want to make mythbusters 2.0". Ranging from The action lab or Styropyro are these youtubers making "short film?" no. But youtube is basically reality TV but even lower quality for the most part. Heck watch Mr.Beast for a bit and you get "wow this guy is making reality tv 2.0". (wow I had to literally google who this guy was after googling "most popular youtubers" man algorithmic segmentation is strong)
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
1mo ago
something to realize is that modern people have dramatically much less willingness to accept civilian casualties than our great grandparents did. This constraint causes dramatic shifts in how war is fought in strange ways.
I admit that this is mostly secondhand from reading ROEs but like if we fought wars like we did back in the 40s and 50s the outcry's would be insane
The falklands war had the UK basically do everything in a respectable way, and the most controversial incident from my grandfather's perspecictive (RIP) was like "wow this even caused any controversy at all?" When he saw and read about it. To the old people wars are dramatically crazier than modern day wars. Vietnam Veterans I talk to describing the vietnam war show things that I personally consider abhorrent as just "lol that's war".
We (the average american young person) are soft and that's a good thing! (it makes us less willing to accept wars)
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
4mo ago
Yeah well phones are godawful for long form discussion which forums like this/reddit are for. The typing speed of the average phone user is somehow typing at 30 WPM? that seems really high to me, but desktop users easily reach well over 60 WPM on a regular basis. It is far faster to type with 10 fingers than with 2, which is a big reason for the shift away from text in general in phones. (also text is very much a medium of slow moving conversations while video is a much faster for the viewer form. There's also the new meta of talking directly to your phone and having your phone input the text which is probably significantly faster than typing to your phone)
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
4mo ago
discord is a bunch of tiny microcommunties rather than 1 public square
I'm in the largest discord for the 3rd largest Yugioh yugioh format and we have approximately 20 regulars.
Maybe that makes sense though everyone is siloed and you "gotta be there' for everything in discord, there's no long public record for people who come in to really find easily (though you can search everything good luck finding the info) and discords are extremely hard to discover so you gotta find the place that links to the discord, but once you're in there's little value in leaving.
There's no way to have long form discussion on discord really.
also memes are banned on /r/anime consider posting on /r/goodanimemes instead
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
4mo ago
IDK about you but I feel like the internet is completely dead.
I moderate one of the 100 largest subreddits on the internet (/r/anime) we get 150-200k comments/month. That sounds like a lot, but we're a top 100 subreddit and we barely get 3 comments a minute. Even worse once we filter out the spambots we lose about 5% of that total.
This supposedly large forum has probably at most 300 actual regulars. (who make >30 posts per month remember most comments are really short and shallow.) 1 user (holofan4life) makes up >1.5% of all comments on the forum. (that's just 1 guy). The forum is dying (and it will be getting worse as LLM spam continues to get better I have to constantly find new ways to detect LLMs and LLM's are going to win sooner rather than later)
Even twitter feels weak, I can't get a conversation with anyone I reply to who isn't also a rationalist maybe I just don't have the ability to chat but it's like I have a higher chance of having a conversation with Matt yglesias or noah smith than I do with small accounts when I reply to them. it feels like the internet is a bunch of drive by posts with little to them.
Maybe it's the forums I use and the modes of conversation but like this is a tiny politics fourm in the middle of nowhere and it's pulling about 5% of the posts per day as the largest anime forum on the internet
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
7mo ago
ok, so that means you probably were hit the hardest by price changes!
The biggest changes price wise in the positive direction are medical care, housing and restaurant food.
So basically if you live in an apartment and eat out a lot you were hit the hardest by the recent changes in relative prices.
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
7mo ago
yeah well I should have mentioned this, the reason I chose states as a comparison is because states are an example of "what happens when you shrink the size of countries" (Standard deviation increases)
So "country with financial hub and less than 5 million residents" = economic superpower because variance
(The state of california though is less cheating than the country of ireland because it's got a much bigger population.)
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
7mo ago
I know this is going to sound strange but are you by any chance moderately rich?
A lot of the growth in the past few years in the USA has been driven by rising wages for the poorest people, so stuff like fast food has gotten way more expensive.
This means that while certain things got cheaper (TVS phones ect) and certain things got more expensive, the things that are more expensive tend to be the "upper middle class" purchases (ex restaurant food)
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
7mo ago
European growth these past few years has been remarkably bad? (source is world bank data if anyone has a better data source I'll accept that
From 2009 to 2024 we went from European countries being frequently ahead of the USA gdp wise (ex Netherlands, norway, ireland denmark) to functionally even (Finland, belgium, sweden) to only moderately behind (Germany, france UK), to by 2024 only Ireland being ahead, Norway being basically even, Denmark and the Netherlands moderately behind and everyone else significantly behind.
I never realized how big the eurozone crisis of 2014 was to Europe, it basically wiped a bit less than a decade of growth from the countries. Sure us Growth from 2019 until 2024 has been much greater than that of say germany (31% vs 17%) but in the 2009 - 2018 time frame the 4 countries that were ahead of the US grew 1.5% (netherlands) NOR 3.84% Ireland 54.87% (I know everyone goes Ireland cheats, but Irish GDP per capita isn't really any greater than New york, and it's only slightly higher than the state of california) DEN:4% while US growth was 33.29%
Yes Us growth is still dramatically higher than europe even excluding 2014, but 2014 provides a major thorn in the side. US grew at a 5.64% annualized growth rate from 2019 to 2024 while Germany only had a 3.22% annualized growth rate.
(also why are these growth numbers so high??? is the world bank doing nominal gdp and not RGDP?)
Still with these trajectories California will have a GDP higher than the country of germany by 2030.https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/04/23/california-is-now-the-4th-largest-economy-in-the-world/ (6% growth compounded vs 3% growth)
There's probably something I fundamentally misunderstand (though NVIDIA has a higher market cap than the entire german stock market) so maybe it's more "wtf uS growth is that big compared to northwestern europe why didn't I notice this before"
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
9mo ago
My story about getting banned by reddit was really strange.
I was on /r/anime participating in a subreddit watch of Re:Zero. The only important thing about that show is the main character has the ability to go back in time by dying, he returns to a set "save point" defined by the plot.
At one point I said " Try to get your sword repaired it's really useful for the small amount of fighting you can do, but more importantly you can use it to Kill yourself" which got me a temp ban on reddit.
Meanwhile this phrase didn't even get a peep
"Get a knife and be ready to stab myself to death if things are going south"
So it must have been a bot.
What was incredible of course is that the /r/anime mods apparently messaged the admins defending me and my post. This is mind you a 13 million user forum yet the mods feel really that strongly about defending users from admins.
IDK why the mods in /r/anime are like this but it's convinced me that it's the best modded subreddit by a large margin and it remains one of the only subreddits I actually use. (that and /r/slatestarcodex)
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
9mo ago
yeah it's gotten game of telephoned indeed. I heard it get called Double tapping in justin Taylor's youtube channel figuring that's probably a more "modern term" than what legal scholars from the 70s were saying...
The other place I read it is https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/wvlr/vol108/iss3/10/ which is an article from 2006
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
9mo ago
Shooting at somebody after you've already hit them.
Shoot>Hit>Shoot again to make sure they're actually dead.
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
9mo ago
White Phosphorous munitions is the most common one you'll see online.
But there's also "firing at fleeing soldiers" "Double tapping" (very controversial but probably not a war crime though it can be a war crime in certain circumstances)
Also what counts as a child soldier depends on the treaty, for example the Geneva convention sets the age at 15, but OPAC defines it as below 18. (most nations have signed OPAC)
One funny thing about watching an anime with people was going "yeah meteor bombing the city was not a war crime but Inaho(the main character) using the school as a command post was because there was a hospital next door to his command post"
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
9mo ago
Well I just finished The Geneva convention(s). So I started with a new book "In another world with my smartphone"
The Geneva suggestion convention is a way more interesting read when you have all the cultural context of people calling things war crimes. It's a lot of fun to read and go "wow that isn't a war crime and the amount of effort it puts into this is really fun. (admittedly I was also watching an anime with a bunch of people in /r/anime and just recording the war crimes comitted by the good/bad guys (mostly the good guys) really made it a lot more fun of a read.
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
10mo ago
How do you best verify Large language model output?
I hear lots of people say they use LLM's to search through documents or to get ideas for how something works, but my question is how do people verify the output? Is it as simple as copy-pasting keywords onto google to get the actual science textbooks? Or is there some better set of steps to take that I miss. I also wonder how you do that for looking through a document, is there some sort of method for getting the LLM to output page citations so you check those (maybe it's in settings or something)
Just finished reading the first Volume of The chemical Formulary, a book which is best described as "What if the Necronomicon were real"
It's got all sorts of recipes from adhesives to cosmetics to explosives to (insanely sketchy) medicine. It also presents everything in a mater of fact way without telling you of all the demons you are possibly creating.
Here's the recipie for cleaning coins for example
Sodium Cyanide 8 ounces
Water 1 Gallon
Apply the above solution with a tampico brush and when tarnish is removed wash with cold clean water then hot water and dry.
Note: this material is Poisonous and care must be taken in handling.
When this book says something is dangerous what they mean is this has a level 4 safety risk in the data sheet cleaning coins just requires enough cyanide to kill 2000 people
In volume 6 they have a Defense against war gasses section on page 535.
The describe Titanium Tetracloride smoke as "harmless", and Zinc Chloride smoke gets the same treatment
Yeah that's right this book is that unhinged.
It's also got great recipes for making Hydrogen Sulfide gas, a chemical that if it reaches 1000 parts per million and you take 1 breathful you die instantly.
This book is both a gold mine and a walking disaster. The funny thing is most of the chemicals used in the recipes are super easy to purchase at your local hardware store or wal-mart. Then you can light your house on fire, give your neighborhood cancer, die of Cyanide poisoning (ok that one is harder), die of hydrogen sulfide poisoning. Some of the stuff is harder to make thankfully but the danger levels of this book rival removing a microwave transformer.
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
10mo ago
Yeah, and it was pretty obvious given that you couldn't buy pizza near the pentagon
edmund-nelson
Filthy Anime Memester
11mo ago
They produce propaganda through omission
the other major option to produce propaganda is not omission but by putting 2 things close together
Ex
"Bryan said he likes the idea of effective altrusim, effective altruism is a philosophy published by william macaskill who likes ice cream"
Guilt by fake association, Bryan doesn't necessarily like ice cream but the reporter is making you think he is.
(I choose a contrived example because real examples while plentiful are often more.... frustrating to read)
Trash
A Conneticut Yankee in king arthur's court: This trashy isekai light novel was written by mark twain in the 1880s but it follows most modern Trashy Isekai light novel tropes to a T.
MC is sent to a magical world via Isekaitis? Hammer kun is truck kun
MC is sent to a world where his modern knowledge makes him into a god? Check
World is effectively built around MC's ability? Check
MC gets a harem? Check (kinda)
and the big one you already knew it. The Title is also the premise.
Re:Zero: I have no clue why but I read 20 volumes of a time loop mystery. The thing that this story does is make our main character go through many different time loops in succession each "arc" is basically one time loop where our main character must both figure out the mystery and defeat the opponent. But our main character suffers a lot. Even though we have plot armor as an integral part of the story he suffers much more in interesting ways than most fantasy characters. This story is very well done with deep lore.
Stuff I read that is a waste of time but I can pretend to justify it better
The Chemical Formulary: A book of chemical recipies made in the 1930s has a lot of interesting ideas and also some of the worst ideas humanity has ever had.
One line you're reading an idea on how to prevent fog on your car then a little later you're reading about putting thallium in the ground to kill ants
The Geneva convention : I swear reading the Geneva convention has changed my opinion of fictional wars. Mainly I start to think the "good guys" are actually just fucking war criminals a lot.
The federalist papers: Some very interesting old papers where you get a great insight into the opinions of the founding fathers both how much foresight they had and how much they lacked. Really a great series of documents showing that these guys were absolutely insane. (in both a good and bad way)
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