iprayiam3
4d ago
it's ok to generalize when giving general advice. generalization isn't a synonym for absolutes.
iprayiam3
8d ago
As soon as you feel comfortable going out of the house with the baby, take full advantage of it. While the baby is young enough to be content sitting/napping in their stroller, you can savor the last bit of dinkiness allowable. By 8 months, your baby will be restless and the pleasure of going out to eat or do other adult oriented activities with them will take a deep dive for the next several years.
Spend months 2-7 going out and socializing with a baby in tow.
iprayiam3
18d ago
A lot of me thinks this is just reverse 'population bomb'-ism. I'd like to compare the certainty of those worried about underpopulation today with the opposite in the 70s. AI and robots are going to overturn so much, I don't think these negative bombs are particularly predictable for much.
iprayiam3
21d ago
Basically my thinking exactly. While I'm not myself MAGA, I was very disappointed that what was good about it was going to sell itself out to slightly less woke technocratic liberalism, and that this was going to work on the masses.
I still don't think we're out of the woods, but am happy about the direction here.
iprayiam3
23d ago
From what I hear, a lot of teachers who require written essays in their classes are pretty near to giving up because they can't ever be sure (or prove their suspicions) either.
Giving a takehome essay should be given up on for sure at this point. Graded essay writing should be something that happens entirely under supervision at this point, if the goal is to measure learning in the area of creating coherent, written point of view.
Were I a teacher, I'd do this:
- Give a generalized form of the prompt or subject. Students can then use AI to help them create notes, do primary research etc.
- Students can bring some limited selection of reference material to class to turn in. On the day they turn it in they have to write an ad-hoc explainer of what they've coallated and why.
- The coalation is reviewed before the day of the essay. On the day of the essay, each student is given back their packet (less unjustified material), and the true prompt is given (Therefore preventing what's turned in to be a straight draft).
- The student writes their essay during the test period, ala blue books.
- Bonus: Another assignment could be letting the student use AI to refine and turn in a final, more comprehensive draft of the essay at a later date
iprayiam3
1mo ago
You are being nonsensical in your handwaving of complexity. Chess has 32 total pieces each with an extremely contrained potential action across only 64 positions. You can't just handwave knowability there into the real world. There's no reason to believe enough computational power exists to be able to have 'omniscient level' understanding of the world. You are just speaking pure, unfounded fiction.
iprayiam3
2mo ago
But here, the argument that these means, based on voluntary exchanges, are morally wrong, has not been sufficiently defended.
But if this is your issue, then the ‘simple question’ you posed is irrelevant or insufficient. Of the moral argument comes down to whether there is a valued life at the other side, then we have to include consideration of those other scenarios. If it’s more complex than that, then your premise that it’s a simple question is one you don’t even agree with. So which is it?
iprayiam3
2mo ago
The question is simple: do you want people to exist, or not to exist?
That’s not the simple question; starting there sneaks in the contentious axiom that the ends justify the means. You’re arguing past the actual objection.
By reduction to that simplistic question, you can justify any that produced a loved child including rape, infidelity, incest, and more.
Maybe that’s a conclusion you come to, but it’s built on a mountain of disagreed assumptions that you can’t simply assume past
iprayiam3
2mo ago
I think the 'Star Wars future' is a best possible outcome here. The internet is ruined, in person interactions is the norm and AI is a lot of ideosyncratic robots who have to talk to eachother and the internet for us because it's all so incomprehensible for an average human.
Thanks to a competency crisis in IT that's been outsourced to robots, nobody really programs anymore, but we can rely on AI/robots to do that for us. Simultaneously that also forces more things back into a more mechanical world and skillset as people spend more time interacting with their high tech environment materially rather than digitally / through pixels.
iprayiam3
2mo ago
Another is google ads. There’s an apocalypse brewing here for companies that rely on adspend for inbound driven pipeline. It’s falling off a cliff
iprayiam3
2mo ago
Someone said in a lower thread the internet will be the first casualty of AI and I tend to agree
iprayiam3
2mo ago
AI is already imploding the white collar world in other ways than just job replacement. Let me give an example.
AI BDR (business development representative) is one of the roles that most AI agent companies are rushing out because it’s (seemingly) low hanging fruit.
What is a BDR? It’s the lowest sales role that fields inbound requests and does outbound prospecting (cold calls, emails etc).
Cold calling used to be the best way to do outbound until 3 things happened: 1. Email, 2. decline of the office phone, and robo calling + smartphone with contacts making answering unknown calls a scourge.
Now phones are just broken as a concept. I never pick up unknown numbers and now miss all sorts of important calls like drs appointments etc.
So emails.. that worked for a while, but it’s been an arms race of attention against spam. In the last 6 months it’s broken completely Why? Because there was a really short period of time where AI BDR was a super power, human like messaging, custom not templates, even personalized to company / contact research at scale.
But the pipe has already been clogged and it’s ruined for everyone. A world of perfect AI, every company who can maybe sell me something can send a handcrafted message to me every single day. That’s millions of messages. No one AI can get through the other. Email and marketing on both sides of the equation is over.
There’s no quick fix. AI being good didn’t improve outbound sales for the seller or recipient (except for a short period inside 2024).
It just broke it. AI didn’t replace jobs, it didn’t increase efficiency. It clogged a channel with so much junk it collapsed.
This will happen in other places.
iprayiam3
2mo ago
Sounds like you should move the base forward and go back to underhand pitching
iprayiam3
2mo ago
I get your point. On the other hand, rehiring this guys is probably the strongest at to say, no we don’t do cancel culture anymore.
Somewhat ironically, the more transparently fair and judicious about this stuff the less power you actually have. We’ve seen this play out over the last half decade enough to known for sure. It’s why apologies don’t work. Unfortunately you can’t push against the tide with small reasonable discernments. You end up just breathing more power into the controlling frame.
The best thing to do would have been to not hire this person to this position in the first place.
The second best thing to do is to use the oppprtunity to tell activist journos to shove it.
This way the next time we can ignore them, and the time after that we can fire people justly in an understood isolation from the noise.
The among the worst things to do (in terms of efficacy) would be to tell the journos they’re right this time with their cancellations but not next time we promise!!
iprayiam3
2mo ago
In the meantime it would be nice if people would avoid poking this obvious sore spot. I'd be fine letting you get away with doing it once. But you are doing it twice as a top level post.
Twice? This implies that the below top post (which I stressed was unrelated) is poking a sore spot, rather than earnestly calling for the BLR return. You can look at my Reddit history to see I’ve been calling for its return since immediately after its retirement. There’s nothing wrong with using the recent AI developments to recontextualize such a call. thus you’ve over counted my ‘poking’ by 50% and by your own justification should have let it slide.
I’d like my ban stricken from the record
Unrelated to any other post of mine, I would like to submit a suggestion that this forum consider a Bear/Lynx repository, where folk could post various links, thoughts, and essays about these two mighty predators. These could be concrete or metaphorical.
While some may worry that this would not be ‘culture warry’ enough, I am quite confident it would prove otherwise.
To demonstrate, I have posted a CharGPT prompt below, unedited with 3 ideas.
-
Environmentalism vs. Development – A repository focused on bears and lynxes could serve as a symbol of conservation efforts clashing with economic interests.
-
Symbolism in Political Ideology – Both bears and lynxes could be used as political metaphors.
-
Climate Change and Animal Habitats – Discussions about shifting bear and lynx populations due to climate change could produce some debates over environmental policy and whether concerns about species loss are exaggerated or valid
iprayiam3
2mo ago
Last week there were a few ‘performance piece’ top posts that utilized AIslop to demonstrate a Goodharts law adjacent concept about the problem with effort posts as too simplistic a concept.
My reading was an uncoordinated but aligned demonstration that AI can produce the facsimile of a top post while entirely missing the point of a discussion board by and for people.
Unstated as it were, I am quite confident that the implied intention of both was to make transparent through the remaining dichotomy, the need for a return of the Bare Links Repository (not to be confused with unrelated calls for an unprecedented Bear/Lynx Repository).
(aside - The original BLR was likely only retired because of jealousy at its success by a sore mod team and sock puppetrous smear campaigns by one Julius Branson.)
Of course nobody wants uneffortful top posts but a BLR, is something entirely different.
Without hashing through its obvious differences from AIslop, tldr they are fundamentally mirror cases of ‘low effort’, where the former is earnest in its low effort and point outward, the latter is disguised and points inward.
The fact is, the BLR in its return would bring necessary life to this forum and counteract the slow momentum erosion the site has suffered since losing Reddits network effect; all while not compromising the rules.
iprayiam3
2mo ago
The average LLM is more trustworthy than the average Twitter or Reddit commentator, though for now I would hope the Motte does better.
Again, my primary objection is not with the 'quality' of the AI output
Hey, I asked ChatGPT to do a vibes check on your comment. It pointed out these objections, which look sensible to me. Why ought I disregard them?
In other words, hey, can you talk to ChatGPT for me?
iprayiam3
2mo ago
I do agree that it’s not how it’s conventionally used, but I think it’s better. Slop as a quality of writing commentary is slop of the gaps as LLMs improve. But the fundamental issue with nobody cares about your prompt engineering will remain
iprayiam3
2mo ago
AI as a writing and editing tool is one thing (I still think it’s a double edged sword that leans negative, but that genie can’t be returned to the bottle so no use debating it). What is AIslop imo, is not the quality of the AI output, but the motion of:
“I asked AI x and here’s what it said…”
Where the human has contributed nothing more than the prompt, and the substance of the piece is what some LLM had to say about the prompt.
It’s slopped because it’s just been ladled out into your bowl without much more effort.
It’s not about the content, in fact that’s a red herring. It’s the ‘prompt’ What is being criticized is the implication that there’s something interesting or even contributory about having typed in a particular prompt and seen what comes out. Everyone can do that for themselves.
This kind of shit is all over Twitter. “I asked grok…” is the most tediously vacuous and self indulgent post possible.
iprayiam3
2mo ago
Suppose I'm risking being late and waterlogged for a very demanding interview, and nearly guarantee I won't get the job, a job at which will save many lives if done well, and I am especially best qualified to do it right.
You've added in the factor of saving multiple lives instead of one life (at the cost of a nice suit), which is saying something different from the original. The original means to point out the moral obviousness of saving the child at very little real cost.
Yes I know, my point was in agreement with yours. That's why I said the original is an 'un'trolley problem. My point in describing some additional opportunity cost was exectly to illustrate that opportunity cost ruins the thought experiment.
And that's why it has very little to say about foreign aid or most other real world charitable activities that are abstracted from time and place. Because outside of immediate and present opportunities (like saving a drowning child right in front of you), opportunity cost does have to be considered.
And as you've agreed, it becomes different than the thought experiment, thus the thought experiment is no longer relevant.
iprayiam3
2mo ago
And at the end of the day, this is the problem -- I haven't spent enough time reading literature responding to it, so hopefully this critique is already well documented -- this is an un-trolley problem. It's designed so that there's absolutely no opportunity cost. But then used to imply therefore, the opportunity cost of other scenarios are handwavable.
If I'm walking by a pond where there's a drowing child; in all likelihood, rescuing that child is the most valuable thing I can do in that moment, and the ruin of a 1k suit, that I'm already wearing is a sunk cost.
But this doesn't extend to prove that some future fungible time and money, there's a best thing to do and thus it is a moral imperative to have it done.
As soon as we add any actual opportunity cost to saving that child or ruining the suit, the parsimony of the aesop falls apart. Suppose I'm risking being late and waterlogged for a very demanding interview, and nearly guarantee I won't get the job, a job at which will save many lives if done well, and I am especially best qualified to do it right.
At that moment, it just becomes a regular trolley problem, with a little bit of forecasting mixed in, and there's nothing really to gleam from it.
If alternatively we take the most superficial lesson from the problem: We should help others when we are able, at a cost to ourselves, even when we aren't physically near them. Then sure! It's a great reminder. And it has just about nothing to say about government spending on foreign aid.
Yes but that’s why we had a bare links repository.
The volume of effort posts has been diminishing anyway.
Bare links and aislop are routes toward similar ends you described, but it’s not the outcome that solely makes them bad. It’s that AI slop is an inferior low effort entry point into a topic, for the reasons I described.
Now ideally we would have nothing but effortful and timely top posts, sure. But my point is that in the event that someone wants to juice the conversation without the effort post, the bare link is a far superior and more earnest, and less empty way to do so.
That said of course bare links as top posts are bad roughly on par (well…) with AIsloptopposting. But nobody is advocating for that. The people are asking for the repository back.
If we want an experiment, let’s have the BLR and an AISlopTopShop that is exactly the same, but for AI posts. Let’s see which produces more fruit, while keeping the rest of the CWR thread clean
iprayiam3
2mo ago
In that (perhaps quite likely) eventuality then forums and social media as a concept are dead. AIs talking to AIs while people nod and curate them basically destroys the platonic purpose of social media.
This is like if you brought photographs to a painting club and claimed that it expressed what you which you could paint better than you can paint it yourself. Can you see how that might satisfy an itch you personally have but is thoroughly uninteresting to the painters there to paint?
Yes the existence of photographs and digital tools have fundamentally transformed art and even tradition methods can’t really exist outside of conversation with them to some extent. Yes AI has changed the nature of written discourse.
But no it’s not a good reason to dump AI slop and say ‘discuss…’
I am sure that, now having been convinced you will join me and the rest of the rising chorus to return the Bare Links Repository to the Motte
This is dumb bait. But I think the Bill Maher discussion of his dinner with Trump soundly puts to bed any arguments here. Bill Maher, is about a raving of a TDS as almost anyone, coming away and praising his sharpness and conversability is not something that can be shrugged off with gestures toward nothing like this.
Trump's quoted point at the end is completely coherent, just ideosyncratic and favoring his point over debating the minutia. I'm not defending either the content or point of view, but it's entirely coherent, and the demential complaint is dumb as hell. Here's a summary of the not even subtext of that clip:
Interviewer starts to try a tu quoue about some Biden tactic analogy to Trump. Trump doesn't want to take the bait, so pre-empts with an reverse objection about a double-standard of critique. He uses that to launch that into an attack on Biden's competence. This single sentence has tons of intent:
All this could be disagreed with, but rather than being incoherent, its a very tight conveying of meaning.
The interviewer then tries to dodge the question of Biden's competence by arguing whether Biden actually did an interview with them or not in some given timeframe.
Trump first starts to engage, but then decides he's not going to lead the interviewer to any Socratic point, so just throws out the idea that he didn't do an interview into being a well informed that he 'barely' did an interview and it was terrible.
Is Trump lying that he's familiar with that particular interview? Yeah probably. (or else he was lying that Biden didn't do an interview and lying or mixed up about the length). But that's not really evidence of mental acuity. The lie makes complete sense in context of the picture he's trying to paint.
The interviewer then gives a sarcastic praise. Trump takes it straight-faced, and uses it to restate his thesis: Biden was incompetent, and any appearance of power-grabbing from him is just hostile coverage from the media
Again, without any bias here (tbh I deeply dislike Trump), Trump's entire bit in that last exchange is tightly governed by a specific frame and defense against a percieved hostile frame. He just favors rhetorical point over detail consistency.
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