erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
1d ago
The grandparent now reads "Removed by @FCfromSSC". Was this on purpose? I often see deleted posts reading "Removed by [$MOD_NAME]", but I only just now realized the mods might not be aware of it, like they don't notice filtered comments.
That ad reminds me of the secret projects from Alpha Centauri. "The Artificial Intelligence" would fit right in with "The Self-Aware Colony" and "The Dream Twister".
See also "Cognitive Trope Therapy": "if your proposed program sounds like something the Rebel Alliance has to fly a daring fighter raid to blow up before it can be activated, consider you might be the bad guy."
erwgv3g34
2d ago
You fantasize about castrating chads because you will not allow yourself to fantasize about putting women in chains. That doesn't make you a rightist, it makes you an incel.
Not what I see.
Since this thread is about forum moderation rather than coding prowess, let's look at the text leaderboard on Chatbot Arena. The strongest open source model is glm-5.1 at 25th, followed by mimo-v2.5-pro at 32nd and glm-5.2 (max) at 33rd. The 24th strongest model is claude-opus-4-5-20251101-thinking, which as the name suggests came out in November 1st of 2025, 8.5 months ago.
Seems to me like "a year or two behind proprietary models" is accurate.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
Seconded. Normies ruin everything.
The problem is that Reddit became popular, and popular web sites cost money to operate, and advertisers are skittish about associating their brand with "that website with an entire section devoted to jailbait photos." So /r/jailbait had to go.
Rest in power.
From "Are Demons Real?" by the Dreaded Jim:
There is also an excellent practical reason for believing in demons. It makes the behavior of our ruling elite so much more intelligible, and thus enables you to put on the armor of God, protecting you from being driven crazy by their craziness.
As Charlie Kirk, martyr for Christ, told us, the proposition that Church and Easter are inessential activities, but bars, race rioting, and burning down Wendy’s are essential activities makes so much more sense if you assume our rulers are possessed by demons. Really, it is hard to explain Fauci weaponising a formerly harmless bat virus any other way, and even harder to explain why he has not yet been executed for crimes against humanity.
Charlie Kirk’s assassin was radicalised by hanging out on forums full of trannies, and a whole lot of trannies give an overwhelming impression of being dead bodies controlled by hostile alien entities. When one runs into a trannie, it is sometimes hard to disbelieve in demons.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
Incorrect. Israel is interesting opposite case. They have large urban population, educated women and everything. And even secular population has TFR above 2.
The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
The biggest blockers would be radioactively-hot CW-content that provokes a safety classifier or flinch reflex. That is nothing that can't be prompted away.
This is my biggest concern. I wouldn't trust any of the woke AIs to mod The Motte even if they had the technical capability to. Grok, maybe, but that's not a SOTA model.
My second biggest concern is technological dependence. If we built a forum based on active AI participation, what happens when the companies pull the models? We would have to use open source AIs to be safe, but those are a year or two behind proprietary models.
My daughter is an only, my spouse and I were from families w/two kids.
My daughter used to say she wanted a big family, like half a dozen kids. But she's changed her mind having dated. By the time she views her male peers as mature enough to marry, she'll likely be in your position and be limited by age/decreased fertility due to age. She's entering her mid-20s and isn't sure it's worth wasting her time on dating. I tell her there are guys out there who don't spend all their time gaming, but have no idea where to point my daughter to find them (church is out, she's an atheist; work is challenging, young men in stem are... spending all their time gaming).
I tell her there are guys out there who don't spend all their time gaming, but have no idea where to point my daughter to find them (church is out, she's an atheist
And you don't tell your son with money problems to get a job, because he just doesn't believe in working?
Uh nothing I can do as a father I guess. You tell the Man son!
I'm not sure if I understand your point but, yes, it is very common for American fathers to tell their sons they're sure there are jobs out there that will hire them, but not have any actually useful information about looking for them.
His point is that @fribble should tell his daughter to go to church; whether she believes in God or not is irrelevant.
Attacking Chinese datacenters wouldn't make sense because bombing GPU clusters only helps if there is already an international treaty to limit AI research, and such a deal would need to include both America and China at a minimum to be effective. The example given was that if the US, the UK, and China had signed a pact to stop AI development and later it was discovered that Russia was training frontier AI, then the anti-AI alliance had to be willing to airstrike Russian server farms (with conventional bombs) even if doing so inherently carried some risk of starting WWIII.
My grandmother had seven; my grandfather had eight (the seven he had with my grandma and one illegitimate daughter that was raised alongside her half-siblings). I'm a millennial. These sorts of numbers were common a few generations ago.
From "Dégénération" by Mes Aïeux:
Your great-great-grandmother,
she had fourteen children;
your great-grandmother,
had about just as many;
and then your grandmother,
she has three, it was enough;
and your mother didn't want any,
you were an accident.
Or, as the English version puts it:
well now Your great great grandmum She had fourteen kids to raise
and then Your great grandmum nearly followed in her ways
Then your grandmother had three and decided to prevent
And your mom had just the one and she was an accident
I wasn't an accident, but my sister was.
The immediate precursor to Overcoming Bias was the Shock Level 4 mailing list, and the precursor to that was the Extropians mailing list. Eliezer met Robin on Extropians; he is cited in Hanson's 1999 "Comments on Vinge's Singularity" page.
For those of you that don't know what a mailing list is, it's basically the ancient equivalent of a subreddit; e-mails sent to the group's address would be forwarded to all subscribers. I'm not old enough to have ever used one; I cut my teeth on internet forums similar to Data Secrets Lox.
erwgv3g34
8d ago
It's infeasible at the population level, not the individual level. Individual people can obviously learn more than one language; I myself already speak both English and Spanish.
But most people do not have that capability, nor the motivation to learn, nor the use case to make it worthwhile. Me? I have been a weeb since I was watching Saint Seiya and Dragon Ball as a five year old, I have been interested in learning Japanese since I was in middle school, and I will never want for practice, since I am constantly consuming Japanese media, from anime to video games to hentai manga.
This is unlike, say, French, which I took two years of in high school, and which I barely remember; what the hell am I supposed to read in French, Jules Verne? I took French for the Bright Future scholarship, not out of any love for the language, or need to use it. So as soon as I graduated, I let my studies collapse.
Similarly, I am against trying to teach everyone algebra, despite the fact that I know algebra, and indeed calculus. Most people do not have the capability to learn algebra, hate the subject, and get no use out of it; I myself can count on one hand the number of times I have used algebra outside a classroom. But that does not mean engineers should not learn calculus.
erwgv3g34
8d ago
I got Learn Japanese To Survive! Trilogy and Cursed Treasure 2 Evil Evolution Bundle. The first because I am going to learn that fucking language if it's the last thing I do, the second because I like tower defense games. They are also very cheap; $5.18 combined.
The visitor is implied to be from dath ilan, Eliezer's setting where the median person is Eliezer Yudkowsky and home to characters like Thellim and Keltham. It is said that in dath ilan, everyone is an economist, the same way everyone on Earth is a scribe or a calculator from the perspective of medieval times; hence why they can avoid falling into this sort of trap.
erwgv3g34
9d ago
What indeed.
My life ended 19 years ago; I simply lacked the courage to do the honorable thing.
erwgv3g34
9d ago
From Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Visitor: I suppose I can imagine a hypothetical world in which one country screws things up as badly as you describe. But your planet has multiple governments, I thought. Or did I misunderstand that? Why wouldn’t patients emigrate to—or just visit—countries that made better hospitals legal?
Cecie: The forces acting on governments with high technology levels are mostly the same between countries, so all the governments of those countries tend to have their medical system screwed up in mostly the same way (not least because they’re imitating each other). Some aspects of dysfunctional insurance and payment policies are special to the US, but even the relatively functional National Health System in Britain still has failure of professional specialization. (Though they at least don’t require doctors to have philosophy degrees.)
Visitor: Is there not one government that would allow a reasonably designed hospital staffed by specialists instead of generalists?
Cecie: It wouldn’t be enough to just have one government’s okay. You’d need some way to initially train your workers, despite none of our world’s medical schools being set up to train them. A majority of legislators won’t benefit personally from deciding to let you try your new hospital in their country. Furthermore, you couldn’t just go around raising money from rich countries for a venture in a poor country, because rich countries have elaborate regulations on who’s allowed to raise money for business ventures through equity sales. The fundamental story is that everything, everywhere, is covered with varying degrees of molasses, and to do any novel thing you have to get around all of the molasses streams simultaneously.
Visitor: So it’s impossible to test a functional hospital design anywhere on the planet?
Cecie: But of course.
Visitor: I must still be missing something. I just don’t understand why all of the people with economics training on your planet can’t go off by themselves and establish their own hospitals. Do you literally have people occupying every square mile of land?
Cecie: … How do I phrase this…
All useful land is already claimed by some national government, in a way that the international order recognizes, whether or not that land is inhabited. No relevant decisionmaker has a personal incentive to allow there to be unclaimed land. Those countries will defend even a very small patch of that claimed land using all of the military force their country has available, and the international order will see you as the aggressor in that case.
Visitor: Can you buy land?
Cecie: You can’t buy the sovereignty on the land. Even if you had a lot of money, any country poor enough and desperate enough to consider your offer might just steal your stuff after you moved in.
Negotiating the right to bring in weapons to defend yourself in this kind of scenario would be even more unthinkable, and would spark international outrage that could prevent you from trading with other countries.
To be clear, it’s not that there’s a global dictator who prevents new countries from popping up; but every potentially useful part of every land is under some system’s control, and all of those systems would refuse you the chance to set up your own alternative system, for very similar reasons.
Visitor: So there’s no way for your planet to try different ways of doing things, anywhere. You literally cannot run experiments about things like this.
Cecie: Why would there be? Who would decide that, and how would they personally benefit?
Visitor: That sounds extremely alarming. I mean, difficulties of adoption are one thing, but not even being able to try new things and see what happens… Shouldn’t everyone on your planet be able to detect at a glance how horrible things have become? Can this type of disaster really stand up to universal agreement that something is wrong?
Cecie: I’m afraid that our civilization doesn’t have a sufficiently stirring and narratively satisfying conception of the valor of “testing things” that our people would be massively alarmed by its impossibility. And now, Visitor, I hope we’ve bottomed out the general concept of why people can’t do things differently—the local system’s equilibrium is broken, and the larger system’s equilibrium makes it impossible to flee the game.
The point of going to Mars is to flee the game. To Escape From Terra to a place where the looters and moochers cannot reach us. "Men will endure bitter poverty, cold isolation, drink piss and eat lichen just for a chance to be free from the tyranny of the United Nations." Or, as Heinlein put it:
When a place gets crowded enough to require ID’s, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.
erwgv3g34
10d ago
I literally had a guest ask me if I was pro or anti AI datacenters at my hotel, apropos of nothing.
erwgv3g34
10d ago
Just upload it to The Motte.
erwgv3g34
11d ago
Most of the Sequences were originally posted on the old Overcoming Bias blog (the one that was Typepad powered), then later exported to LessWrong (back when it was a reddit clone), and now live on LessWrong 2.0.
For example, here's "When None Dare Urge Restraint" on Overcoming Bias, LessWrong, and LessWrong 2.0.
Yes, the wizarding world doesn't seem to have anything like the institution of college; you are considered a full adult when you graduate at 17.
Add to that that education at Hogwarts is surprisingly hands-on; there is some theory ("twelve inches of parchment on the properties of moonstone and its uses in potion-making, to be handed in on Thursday"), but students are casting spells and brewing potions from year one, and it is treated as an outrageous anomaly when Umbridge wants to remove the practical portion of her DADA class. Compare to modern real-world schools, where courses like shop class and home ec are pushed aside to make room for moar uni prep.
And, of course, Lily and James came of age during wartime, which is the best possible circumstance for young people to make a name for themselves and have a real impact. Napoleon was a lieutenant-colonel at 23; Audie Murphy become the most decorated soldier in American history at 20.
Claude Fable is back! I spent as much time on Chatbot Arena as I could to take advantage of the honeymoon phase, but that's over now (for those of you who don't know, when a new model is first added to LMArena there is a brief period of time when it shows up unusually frequently in battles, presumably to help the algorithm quickly rank it). The end result was two pages of prompts and replies.
Now that I have had more time to play around with it, I feel like maybe my original comment on the Culture War Roundup thread was a little too negative. No, Claude Fable is not superpersuasive, but it's still the strongest creative writing model in history. Some of the stories ("The Measure of Hayase", "The Grass Grows Over Everything", and "The Flying Library") actually made me tear up a little, which is a first for any model.
Interestingly, none of the comedies impressed me nearly as much; an equivalent performance would have had me crying in laughter. From which I conclude that Fable is better at writing drama than humor. I guess the old adage is true: "dying is easy, comedy is hard".
I haven't had any luck getting NSFW responses yet. When I sneak past the Arena's censors to send an obfuscated prompt, Anthropic's own censors prevent a response. When I get past Anthropic's censors by toning down the prompt, the model itself refuses to answer. And when I somehow manage to get a response out of the model to a risque prompt, it always completely avoids anything explicit. This model is locked down tighter than a nun's asshole!
From "Unspeakable Bargains" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Or, as Alpha Centauri put it:
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