Look, when I seize power as the Supreme Warlord of the Southeastern United States, elevated to victory on a strong anti-corruption, pro-free enterprise, pro-free association, pro-free speech platform (and tons of organized violence)...
And I start executing Bureaucrats by firing them out of a battleship cannon into the sea (Re-commissioning the USS Alabama for the task)... I want there to be an established history people can point to so as to explain exactly when I snapped and my motivating impetus for the campaign.
That said, I think that Bukele and Milei have shown that it is possible to reverse certain declines without going on all-out cleansing campaigns, dragging people out of bed and gunning down dissidents in the street.
But I am, yes, increasingly convinced that unless the Government is willing to apply the death penalty, and ideally make the executions public, for aggressive criminal activity that directly betrays U.S. interests in favor of foreigners, that they simply can't be serious about solving things.
faceh
12hr ago
Guess I misunderstood the thrust of your point.
Me, I have accepted that you don't get to choose how certain issues make it to mainstream prominence.
(I've been aware of the Epstein situation for like twenty years, and I'm just happy that people at least notice it now)
faceh
12hr ago
Presumably quite a bit of both.
Al Capone was famously very charitable and generous in his community.
There's a pretty simple argument to suggest that fraud, if it can be proven to exist at all, is probably pretty rampant in Somali communities.
Premises:
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The Somali community in Minnesota is probably tight-knit and interconnected, moreso than most other groups in the state. Lots of communication channels amongst them and between different circles of them.
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The Somali community would thus likely be aware that there's a bunch of sketchy daycare business operated in their area, and these receive federal/state funds.
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Nobody notable in the Somali community has raised an alarm as to this practice, and I've not heard a single word of condemnation from any of them. Quite the opposite.
What might we conclude about the Somali community?
Do we conclude that they are harsh and intolerant of fraudulent behavior in their midst? That they are quite honest and rule-following on average?
Or is the obvious implication the precise opposite, that the majority of them are probably cool with fraud going on (maybe they don't even see it as immoral) even if they're not participating, and good many of them are participating?
Or which premise do you take issue with?
Are Somalis NOT tight knit in this area? Do they somehow NOT know that their family and neighbors run these sketchy daycares? Or are they actually coming forward and reporting on fraud all the time, but they're ignored?
Which premise fails?
Your analogy falls apart the second you notice that Christians are constantly calling each other out and even condemning each other for preaching falsehoods (as they see it) and are not prone to covering for each other merely because of shared theological beliefs.
Famously, individual denominations take massive issue of tiny disagreements in interpretation and are quite happy to make their disagreements known, and distance themselves from 'heretical' street preachers and the like.
If its as bad as it looks, I have to imagine it started off at relatively small scale. Register a few extra kids who aren't actually there, have enough kids around to look legitimate. And if that passes muster, or you notice that the inspectors are lax or nonexistent, scale it up. After a year you have a hundred kids registered and you don't even bother to have them show up.
THEN, you tell your friends about it, and they also try the scam, and it presumably works for them, so they scale it up. And now there's a repeatable business model that can be transmitted easily.
Now its basically organized crime.
Which, I've pointed out before, is a feature of pretty much every group that immigrates here en masse. The Irish, the Italians (obviously), Russian, on and on. Thankfully this isn't a particularly violent mafia, but its the same flavor of "insular community develops a criminal element that springs up from their communities" type development.
I'm not so much tapping the sign as open palm slapping it like a goddamn Conga Drum.
faceh
13hr ago
There's enough CONFIRMED fraud going on in the Somali community that your priors that this sort of business is fraudulent, at least to some large degree, should be high enough to make an educated guess rather than outright dismissal.
Plus, the Boomer guy straight up says he's been paying attention to this for years.
So in a sense, yes, yes it is a culmination of years of investigation.
faceh
17hr ago
LOL.
Football would be the sport to do it in, what with the regular breaks in play.
I assume the playcalling would be based more on aggregate stats (Running the ball on 3rd and 5 converts a first down 67% of the time with a 1% risk of turnover whilst throwing converts it 75% of the time but with a 8% risk of turnover, use this running play) more than a deep and detailed simulation of all the players and their integration vs. the other team.
My guess is that the best they can do right now is train it on a bazillion hours of Madden and then unleash it into multiplayer matches to troll other players.
faceh
17hr ago
Yep. Unless you can hook the thing straight up to the animator's brain (hi there, Neuralink!) the fidgety little details will be hard to keep perfect and consistent, let alone going back and making minute changes without 'redoing' the whole shebang.
Pure written language is a horrible inefficient way to do such things
It still might beat having to go in and do all the detailed work manually, bur I know way to little about digital animation to give a real guess.
I note that this isn't all that different from standard live-action filmmaking, where you would have actors give multiple 'takes' on a scene and edit in the best ones. You're still 'prompting' actors, and refining your instructions based on the 'output' they produce, then choosing which ones you like and discarding the rest.
In fact, that might be the way to think of it, a return from the sheer tedious craftmanship of computer animation to the more 'organic' style of a Director/Prompter eliciting their ideal performance and massaging it into the final product.
faceh
1d ago
I think that is a correct analogy.
My guess is that there might be an opening where very low-fidelity renderings are used to map out the action on screen, but AI is doing the work of dozens of other animators in texturing, lighting, simulating and 'rendering' the actual image on screen, with a human just nudging it along and rejecting outputs as they go.
The missing step seems to be fine-grained control over the details, but creators like Gossip Goblin have been able to keep an extremely consistent style, so either that's a solved problem or they've got their prompts refined to a point that they aren't having to toss out much.
The quality available at what has to be a fraction of the cost of traditional FX is going to lead to rapid uptake.
faceh
1d ago
From a purely 'scientific' perspective, I wonder what the odds have to rise to before a guy no longer feels interested in confirming or dis-confirming his paternity. 1/1000? 1/10,000? I feel like if there was a 1/1,000,000 chance of it being my kid, without some additional Bayesian observations, I'd not consider it worthwhile to check into it.
From the child's perspective, however, I'd guess that learning that there are 10,000 possible fathers out there only steepens their drive to identify the one. From their view its not a 10,000 to 1 shot of being related... its a 100% chance of being related to one of the 10,000.
Honestly that right there is the factor that makes this entire thing a boondoggle.
It doesn't matter HOW emotionally distant or HOW legally protected you are, no matter how they raise the child it is entirely possible and probably more likely than not that they'll decide to bring this issue up and confront you about it and thus force an emotional reckoning, no matter how you or the other couple wishes it to be handled.
You're placing bets on how this future human will behave, what they'll believe, and how they'll handle this piece of knowledge, and whether it will thus impact your own life many, many years after the decision is made.
You don't have a say about how socially acceptable this particular arrangement will end up being in the future, either. Granted, you can't be certain that heterosexual monogamous marriages will be looked well upon by then either but I think the precautionary principle still favors not getting so experimental with another person's wellbeing.
This argument can probably be extended to cover all surrogacy/sperm donor situations and a good portion of adoptions, I guess.
faceh
1d ago
The Will Stancil Show suggest that yes, this is likely.
Legally you're probably in the clear, dependent on which state it is.
Pragmatically... if they're friends... you're going to see this kid regularly. Your kids will presumably also know of/find out of this kid's existence.
Your wife will eventually see, as the kid grows, a child that looks like you... but not like her.
From my perspective there's too many ways this spirals emotionally out of control over the next couple decades. This isn't a 'fire and forget' scenario where you don't have to know there's a kid out there.
And the fact that they were suggesting it be done via direct injection is bold to say the least.
And it may depend on how you philosophically/theologically conceive of your 'duties' to your children. Are they innate from nature? Prescribed by God? Or merely socially constructed and can be accepted, transferred, or cut off at will.
For example, what if the alternative was they paid you and your wife to bear another child and then allow them to adopt it at birth? Would you feel weird handing over a biological child of yours to a different couple?
Isn't this at least half as weird as that? If you learn that the kid has a genetic disease would you feel at all responsible? Or, if the kid gets seriously injured at some point, how emotionally distant do you think you'd be?
And here's a vanishingly unlikely 'worst case scenario': what if all of YOUR kids end up dead before you... would you feel compelled to make this kid your heir of all your assets (after your spouse, of course) on account of the genes?
Just trying to feel out the emotional boundaries and your overall openness.
From the 1000 foot view, its good that this will help with TFR, but that doesn't mean it has to be YOU.
I also had the absolutely horrible idea that the situation could be somewhat defused by playing 'semen roulette' where there's six prospective fathers she chooses and the genetic material that gets used is then picked at random. Obviously one can figure out the truth later. Would that make it MORE or LESS awkward?
faceh
1d ago
Hahah fair enough. I'm similarly locked down and I usually only see actual ads when I'm at a restaurant these days.
But I know I've been momentarily fooled by some videos I come across online... which leads me to worry about whether I've been completely fooled already.
faceh
1d ago
I've noticed that a surprising amount of the advertising is using AI animation. I'm not exactly an anti-AI, "it's killing art" type, but there's something about it that's absolutely revolting when I see it in action. It's like everything is a worm-ridden mass of semi-biological matter that writhes and wriggles across every single frame. It's an aesthetic that would be more fitting in a particularly unpleasant horror short than a commercial trying to sell me Coca-Cola.
I want you to ask yourself the difficult question:
Are you only picking those ones out because they were noticeable and thus you peg them as AI.
And is it possible you've been watching other ads with AI that simply didn't trigger that response, and thus you haven't registered them.
faceh
1d ago
Indeed. And I really, really hope that by and large the most intelligent apes who are capable of trying to implement 'paradise' are wise enough to either recognize the futility of the endeavor under current constraints, or at least to recognize that its never so easy as just killing the few apes you view as obstacles to it.
In a sense, they'd have to be, or else the species would probably not have survived this long (in many alternative timelines, it probably did not).
Posting less as a question and mostly for self-accountability.
I made a prediction that we might see a feature length film produced by a small team using AI by the end of this year.
Well, the year has ended and I can't find any such releases that have been made publicly available. So comfortable saying my specific call is a bust.
But.
In the 11th hour, one of the creators (Gossip Goblin) I've been tracking since like July published something that at least validates my logic.
If it were 80 minutes instead of 10, I'd argue it adequately fulfills prediction. Instead, I'll just argue that it proves my point that in principle a small team could have built out a feature film, insofar as its just a matter of repeating the efforts that produced the original 10 minutes to add to the length.
It avoids the standard AI 'tells.' The character's appearances are consistent throughout. There's no weird physics or physical deformities (that aren't intentional), the SFX quality is arguably a step above modern CGI in many cases (Avatar movies notwithstanding). There are some truly impressive cinematic shots in there.
Now the main hints are the short length of the individual shots, the lack of 'action' scenes to speak of, the general surreality of the environment, and the fact that they relied on narration rather than characters actually speaking dialogue. Don't think that dialogue isn't mostly solved, though.
The previous top contender was Kira (still extremely impressive on its own).
So I'm still betting on us seeing that first feature-lengther in fairly short order. And not TOO far after that, the ability to produce feature-length films from a single, fairly-detailed prompt.
Anyone else have a guess as to when such a film drops? (again, I don't say it has to be released on streaming or broadly viewed, just that it has to exist and be released in a publicly-reachable way)
Bonus Question:
When will we see an existing movie completely reworked via AI? Or perhaps just a couple of characters recast.
P.S. My other longer term prediction about AI replacing newly minted lawyers is still in play, and I did get some validation on that one.
I used to regularly do 8 hour drives back in the day (driving home from law school, and vice-versa). I still often do 2.5 hours, sometimes twice a day.
Audiobooks, especially a semi-educational one (but not an overly dry one) are great for this, doubly so if you have a passenger to enjoy with.
Listening to Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann on an 8 hour trip honestly made the whole thing fly by.
If its a 2-3 hour drive, full comedy specials are a great option. There are some classics out there.
The whole tedium is that there's nothing you can do other than stare out the windshield hoping your fellow travelers aren't about to do something stupid.
faceh
2d ago
I think wise apes will consider the future implications of murdering 20 million other apes and how that might impact this paradise they hope to create, or cause other apes to resist their efforts.
The real problem is that even a smart ape might think they can achieve their future paradise without excessive Ape-murder, and embark on a quest that, incidentally, spirals out of of control and results in large scale ape genocides.
I just doubt that most apes would intentionally, as a required part of their plan, decide to murder 20 million apes. They may decide 20 million ape-deaths is acceptable, of course.
The 'wise' ape will try to completely obviate the downside risk if they go to make such impactful actions.
faceh
2d ago
Would you continue beating your wife if the alternative was that a priceless piece of human culture was destroyed or lost forever.
Even if you can't quantify the value of the alternatives involved, surely there's a rank order you can produce.
faceh
2d ago
I've definitely soured on the first part.
I don't think most people want 'freedom' in any complex sense.
They do not want to be prevented from pursuing the things they want to pursue, most will throw a tantrum when told "no, you can't have that now."
But they don't really care if they live in a prison if they are supplied with the things they want. "Who cares about what's outside? All the food and beer is here, and there's TV!"
I mostly chalk this up to people truly desiring status. And status requires the existence of some hierarchy or rank system. Which almost directly implies there's someone in charge, making rules, and restricting freedom. And one can still pursue status even if they're in a prison.
And I note that its perfectly fine to rank freedom below other priorities... but on a meta level, freedom is an important value to support if you want to pursue other values that most other people don't also prioritize.
faceh
6d ago
Well in-context that's not an issue, its an actual communion wafer, but V poisoned it.
I guess then the argument is that sure, the wafer turned into Christ's body but the poison was still poison.
I do notice some crossover in Rian and Moore's apparent approach to depicting right-wingers, although Moore does allow them to be sympathetic and maybe even be correct in some way before they get their just desserts. Rian, as mentioned, is obsessively devoted to ensuring his RW characters aren't allowed to claim even a single win.
Amazing news.
I just checked and the largest guns on the USS Alabama are its 16-inchers on the rear turret, and the width of the average male at the shoulders is... 16 inches. Most Bureaucrats should thus fit snugly in the cannons with minimal modification, and there are three cannons in the battery, so we can really get efficient with it.
And for severely overweight bureaucrats I am happy to supply GLP-1s while they're in custody.
For the Judge currently hearing this read into the record at my trial, this post is a joke.
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