wraelk
21d ago
I'm not questioning the effectiveness of this at all, but there's something inherently funny about "clean your cutting board with a laxative", in the sense that I'd expect it to be a key prank in a movie about rowdy college students sabotaging the dean's party.
Dean Nofun, after watching his guests have to rush to the bathroom after every course, perplexed, begins sniffing the cutting boards with increasing concern... "FUNLOVING HOUSE!!!!!"
wraelk
23d ago
I don't think AI can get me arbitrarily good music in any genre, but it's quite good at producing music I like to listen to in bulk.
My programming/work standard now is Synth Mage, a synth metal AI channel that puts out music in hourlong blocks (the second hour on the video is just a repeat). I got ChatGPT to build me an ffmpeg script to split it into individual tracks based on the description timestamps (which unfortunately weren't accurate for videos where the author put an intro, but I'll get around to fixing that eventually), and now I've got a multi-day music library of stuff I could listen to all day.
The big thing for me is to avoid lyrics: AI lyrics still seem to be a little weak without a lot of human guidance, though a couple of Synth Mage tracks do just kind of treat voice as another instrument and that seems to work pretty well.
wraelk
23d ago
This is a great point I forgot about, probably because we don't really see much of those groups or get a feel for how big they are. Harnessing the oppression of groups that the current government doesn't favor is a lot more like a populist movement than how he was interacting with the other wizards.
I guess the monstrous groups figured any port in a storm: infighting in the wizard government would give them more freedom to do whatever they wanted, and even if Voldemort wasn't interested in keeping them around, he's got a much more ambitious project to work on in conquering both worlds, that might give them time to get out from under the wizarding boot and be ready for when he finally comes for them.
It's just a little confusing because whenever Voldemort got in power, he was mostly ruling through fear and seems to have done little to nothing to get the general wizarding populace on board. He got a few power-seekers and harnessed the existing bureaucracy, but wasn't pursuing the "common wizard" at any point I can see.
How small can your "true wizards" group be relative to the general population before you can't call it populist anymore?
wraelk
24d ago
fends off and defeats a populist revolt led by a strongman.
Does this work? The Death Eaters are mostly old aristocratic families, right?
It's more like Harry takes a side in a conflict between nobles, but one of Voldemort's most significant tenets is getting the Muggle "common people" out of the wizarding world and ruling over both, so I'm not sure he can claim the common man on his side.
wraelk
24d ago
I picked up on that too, and I'm looking forward to discussing it with a Harry Potter fan friend tomorrow.
But if all it takes is one wizard-wizard generation to wash the bloodline clean, it really seems confusing to consistently get mad about. Hermione's a Mudblood, but she marries pureblood Ron, so her kids aren't, and... that's good enough for the blood purists? Whatever harm the purists think Mudbloods are inflicting on the wizarding world, they "assimilate" by the standards of blood purity in a single generation, so it's purely temporary.
Now if you told me this was just incomplete JKR worldbuilding, I'd believe it, but if we're trying to make this all make sense, it seems like the number of Muggles in your bloodline over time is what they'd be worried about.
wraelk
24d ago
The premise of the Terminator movie (the original, at least) is that Skynet was about to lose to a ragtag band of human rebels and needed to resort to time travel to have a chance of survival, so it seems quite likely that it didn't have space-based data centers, and was indeed quite vulnerable to humans quickly hitting the data centers. Presumably the nuclear war was enough to disrupt the humans initially, but once they formed a resistance they could start making meaningful progress? I don't think they had resources for aircraft/space launches though.
I'm not sure this is a useful model for future malicious AI, but this specific movie AI seems not to have solved that problem.
wraelk
26d ago
moving to... Idaho? (forgive the Brit please)
That works for what you're trying to say, Idaho is a super empty and rural place. 44th in population density.
This was something I was really hoping would happen with all the remote work from COVID, businesses would realize they could have employees from all over the states and people could move wherever made the most sense for them independent of their job, reducing a lot of the housing pressure in major cities and letting smaller towns build up more. Unfortunately, while there are still more remote jobs than there used to be, a lot of that dried up.
wraelk
26d ago
I think the idea is that while some people value a brownstone in Park Slope for its own sake, some value it because it puts them near the job opportunities of NYC and otherwise wouldn't want one.
If the job opportunities of NYC don't matter anymore, that second group no longer wants to be in Park Slope, so while there probably still won't be enough brownstones to go around, there may be less of a gap than there currently is.
We're also seeing some significant declines in fertility rates, and I think more so in the demographics that want to be in Park Slope. So if that trend continues in utopia (which seems reasonable, material abundance if anything seems to get people less interested in children if we look at the modern era), over time there will be fewer people looking for them and the gap might shrink further.
If we get infinite life extension that might be a different matter, but I expect eternal youth will also lead to "eh, I'll get around to making kids later" for some very long definitions of later, and the city-seeking crowd also seems to have a problem with depression that might lead to disinterest in infinite lifespans.
wraelk
27d ago
Isn't the Logan Act for the other way around, when an American citizen is negotiating on behalf of the United States?
At least in original intent, since it's named for an American man that negotiated with France to end a pseudo-war.
wraelk
28d ago
Wait, are you saying you're confident not only that JD Vance was on Less Wrong, but that he actually commented?
I've heard people speculate that he moved in those circles, but never anything more concrete than that.
wraelk
1mo ago
Entertainingly, I'm apparently one of the few. I played Blizzard's League ripoff, Heroes of the Storm, for years, every single match against bots.
It's not like the personalities of League players are improving the experience.
wraelk
1mo ago
I'll second phailyoor here: the standard I'd want is "the mod hat should be on or off, per post".
If you're going to make a post that's part of your position as moderator, it shouldn't be combined with actual engagement in the discussion: people have to pay attention to moderator posts as it might be "stop it or you're getting banned", so adding Amadan-the-user commentary with it unfairly privileges Amadan-the-user's viewpoint ahead of other users. People are free to read or not read wraelk-the-user posts, and it should be the same for Amadan-the-user.
I thought there was some kind of mod-hat formatting this site had, and I'd expect the original post (as well as the one I'm responding to) to be in that formatting, with the actual engagement in the discussion moved to its own non-mod-hat post. That way users can pay attention to mod-hat formatting as conveying important mod information, and regular formatting as just being the on-equal-footing user having a regular discussion.
wraelk
1mo ago
I appreciate the followup.
It seems like the concern is that the AI PR is over-technical and doesn't explain in simple language what happened: I don't see a lot of functional difference between the two. I can see the case that going back in and looking at the AI one will be harder to pick back up on "what exactly did this do", but I think I could figure it out from what they have: the AI writes overly technically, but I could easily see a human doing the same thing.
This change also adds a safety net fix for situations ???? <- the ai slop makes zero sense, no idea what this does.
It looks like there was a situation where if the directory for a worktree was gone, 'git worktree remove' isn't actually going to remove the worktree registration (presumably because it's intended to remove the directory and the registration at the same time, and possibly the original race condition detailed in the PR created a situation where that didn't happen properly for some worktrees), so it introduced a secondary method that checks "is this worktree safe to remove" then removes that worktree registration with a different command, to clean up that situation. There's another mechanism that could remove all stale worktree registrations, but the AI goes out of its way not to run that because it would create another race condition risk.
I checked the code to confirm that, but I do think that PR note actually does make sense, and someone more familiar with the codebase and effects than me (I honestly don't know what a git worktree is) would understand it more easily than me.
wraelk
1mo ago
Can you take that PR and write a better description that you think would be more helpful than the AI one?
It seems like that would be the major step forward: instead of saying "it sucks", break down the problems with it and provide a superior human-generated one for the same content that we can compare it with.
wraelk
1mo ago
You could publish an encryption of the text and just not reveal the key until you need to.
wraelk
1mo ago
These are awesome and I'm going to steal them for my Pathfinder campaign. I've already mostly got the god-king, Moldbug's Fnarigal.
wraelk
1mo ago
I hear Lalafells are pretty popular lately among the sexual roleplayers of Final Fantasy 14…
Tangential and not your point, but this is a pretty controversial topic in the game.
At least on the America servers, there is a strong standard against sexualizing Lalafells, and the sexy clothes and nude mods you'd find for every other species are completely forbidden among mod hosting sites and in-game communities. Since mods are all clientside and require a modded centralization service to show up on someone else's client, that's pretty effectively enforced in the community.
There was some brief drama when one of the main centralization services got taken offline after legal action from Square Enix and there was a scramble to choose its replacement from a number of forks, and if I recall correctly one of the more popular options was eventually blackballed by the community due to their position on sexualization of Lalafells.
I've heard from a friend of a friend about some individual ERPers that go for that sort of thing, and even accusations of being associated with such people can be enough to split apart a community. Though admittedly that's as much because FFXIV is an incredibly drama-heavy playerbase as anything.
wraelk
1mo ago
Weird that political affiliation seems to be the most significant predictor.
Going from male to female is 51g-15ng to 41g-26 ng, -10g +11ng
Going from Republican to Democrat is 61g-13ng to 34g-31ng, -27g +18ng
I didn't think this was really a two-party-politics thing, but I guess what isn't these days.
wraelk
1mo ago
Yeah, probably a few things here:
- Gaming journalists are often journalists first and gamers second, meaning they don't really have the same view of the space as their audience does, and might not actually be any good at playing games.
- Even if they are, they often don't have the same amount of time to invest into an individual game, because they have deadlines and their publication is unlikely to be sympathetic to "I need to invest 200 hours into Factorio to really get it enough to write a review"
- The classic audience/critic divide where critics are often more interested in niche artistic things that don't correspond to whether the work is actually good (or political considerations because they see themselves as tastemakers).
- Financial/access/networking considerations putting a thumb on the scale: even if the new CoD is absolutely awful, how many bridges are you going to burn to make that point?
The streamers that replace them have none of these problems: audience-driven financials can do weird things to political streamers but seem to work fine for gaming ones, they can spend as much or as little time as they want on a game, and they're under constant competitive pressure to provide a competent experience and align with their audience. They can be bought, but when they've got a steady stream of content and there's suddenly a sharp divergence in what they're doing, it's pretty easy to tell when they're being bought, and they can't really stop their audience from switching to another creator, either just skipping the bought content or permanently dropping them.
wraelk
1mo ago
And more than just user reviews, you have the ability to look at Twitch or Youtube and watch someone play the game and get a feel for whether it's good and matches your interests.
For all the back and forth about games journalism, I think this was the real devastation to the industry: if you're interested in a game it's far better to actually look at gameplay than to see a X/10 score or a writeup of someone else's experience, and the barrier to entry is so low that you can pick and choose people who are actually good at the game and are choosing to play interesting games rather than terrible ones.
Sponsored streams can get a game exposure but the gameplay has to pass the gate of looking enjoyable, and a streamer who spends too much of their time on sponsored bad games will likely lose chunks of their audience (or the audience will just skip the sponsored videos/timeslots)
wraelk
1mo ago
Researching how long it takes to drive to a particular location, then sending your husband to that location to get him out of the house
I'll note that the "research" in this case seems to have been a Google Maps route that shows drive time.
This is the kind of thing I would regularly do for a restaurant before ordering food from it or sending someone to go there. "Oh, that's 45 minutes away? Dang, I don't want Indian that much".
So I'm not sure this is only compatible with "she planned to have her husband out of the house for a fixed time" versus "she checked that it wasn't super far away before committing to that place for food".
What I'd want to know is how normal this behavior was from her: did she regularly Google restaurants before sending her husband there? Is that restaurant unusually far away compared to other restaurants she's sent him to before? She apparently wasn't driving at the time, so sending her husband out versus going herself would have been typical.
wraelk
2mo ago
The movie clearly distinguishes between the entity created by the wish, who obsessively loves Bear, and Nikki, who is also in there and hates Bear. When she screams and pulls back from the kiss on the first night, or when she begs Bear to kill her, that's not the entity, that's Nikki.
It's almost not even a monkey's paw, because it didn't do the thing he wished for: Nikki doesn't love him, the willow just inserted another entity that loved him into Nikki's body. I suppose if that entity is also named Nikki it technically monkey's-pawed him, but it's not a particularly clever monkey's paw in that case: it could have just set events up so that he became the owner of a devoted dog named Nikki, because he didn't specify which Nikki.
It's possible she's trying to make that case, but I think it's more that she's presenting magic as such a huge force multiplier that you can just have a very small number of people ruling over the masses. While teamwork certainly helped against Voldemort, in the end it was mostly just about out-magicking him, not "the people rising up and overthrowing tyranny".
Voldemort's plan seemed to be "I can kill anything you can organize against me" and while that might not have worked against an army, the wizarding world doesn't seem capable of fielding one.
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