sarker
competency crisis actor
Suddenly I cannot remember the color of your eyes
Or the things we said as we stood together for the last time
User ID: 636
sarker
competency crisis actor
12hr ago
Why are you making a moral argument instead of addressing my mechanical one?
I am wondering if we are even having the same conversation. Are my messages getting through? Is there some corruption in the database?
I do not believe that you can learn to expand what you like by reading more of what you already like.
I absolutely loved Eragon as a kindergartener. Was it the absolute peak of literary achievement? Absolutely not. But it hadn't been for books like Eragon, I never would have been interested in reading books like the Dragonriders of Pern, or from there Foundation and I, Robot, or from there Anathem and Void*Star.
You enjoyed Eragon not because you were a kindergarten-level reader but because you were a child. If you are already not a child, or not a kindergartner, there is no point in starting with children's literature to cultivate an enjoyment of reading: you should just read actually good books.
sarker
competency crisis actor
12hr ago
As written, your response implies that you disagree with the position that "old books aren't necessarily unreadable"-- meaning, you think old books are unreadable.
No, my response implies that the essence of my second comment was not that old books merely readable.
Well not actually, but c'mon-- are you totally incapable of seeing how a person might enjoy recency and currency in the media they consume, and thereby prefer to look for classes of media where they can find it?
Sure, in the same way that I am capable of seeing why a person enjoys reading books written in the first person rather than the third, or why a black woman enjoys reading books about black women. I simply consider this a blinkered perspective and if I never read, for example, Hemingway because I think bullfights are barbarous and reprehensible, it would be ridiculous.
I do not believe that you can learn to expand what you like by reading more of what you already like.
sarker
competency crisis actor
17hr ago
The first issue is that you're competing with TikTok, video games, and twitch streams. I can promise you that there is a gulf between Treasure Island and your average RoyalRoad story in terms of ease of reading.
Sure, RLS might require the average moid to look up a few words. But basically anything in the past 100 years is easily digestible for a literate adult.
Even if you read slop, you will get better at consuming slop more quickly.
Uh, cool, I guess, but I don't know what the point of this is. It isn't necessary to read faster than average to read something that isn't slop.
sarker
competency crisis actor
17hr ago
I understood the essence of your second reply as being to claim that old books aren't necessarily unreadable
It clearly wasn't, which should have been obvious given the examples I gave of interesting books. It's quite simply wrong that there are no interesting books published before current year plus ten.
sarker
competency crisis actor
17hr ago
GAs that notice/monitor the manufacturing and shipping of precursors to nerve agents seeing some
This isn't public information and it doesn't do anything about prevention.
Or GAs monitoring military supplies notice a report that some chemicals have gone missing.
This doesn't do anything about prevention.
GAs monitoring social media notice that a particular guy with a background in chemistry started posting schizo content and then went dark a month ago.
So they send someone around to go check on the guy.
That guy doesn't have to post schizo content on Reddit dot com because he's chatting with his GA. You don't hear about him until it's too late.
Imagine, if you can, how a neighborhood watch group might figure out that one of the houses in their 'hood is being used to cook meth.
There's plenty of houses in which people cook meth without detection. The societal downside risk of cooking a batch of meth is significantly smaller than that of cooking a batch of WMDs.
Then scale that up to constantly vigilant electronic entities that can track most electronic activity, monitor cameras, and (possibly) hack into personal communications.
Nah, hacking is not going to happen when every public facing system has been hardened by Mythos+ tier intelligences, and you're certainly not going to be able to outcompete those with your GA running on your clapped out netbook.
No, I'm just making a tongue in cheek point
Perhaps you should instead consider what the politics of this would actually look like and have a serious discussion.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
literary fiction is often written in direct subversion of what it takes for a story to be "fun." Reading about depressed writers getting cuckolded by their mistresses
You have an incredible talent for talking to someone without responding to them.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
The point I'm trying to make is that there's plenty of good books that aren't difficult (surely that should be clear from the examples I gave). It's not clear to me that reading slop helps read good books any more than watching tiktoks helps you enjoy movies.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
I admit I mostly skimmed, however:
No, seriously. If you feel like you're a guy, and you don't read enough, stop forcing yourself to read highbrow literature or books like you feel you should read, and track down some lowbrow junkfood.
Uh, why? There's twenty thousand years of human literature out there. Believe it or not, the ancestors even had literature that wasn't highbrow (Portnoy's Complaint? Robert Louis Stevenson?).
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
It seems quite clear that the number of people who are merely diligent is greater than the number of people who are both diligent and have expertise in means of killing lots of people.
When you reduce the price, the quantity demanded increases.
there are 100,000 people whose GAs would be devoting their efforts to not letting their user get killed in a Sarin gas attack.
What does that look like?
50% chance of nerve agent release on the subway today, better pack your gas mask!
Send that agent back to training. You can avoid sarin gas poisoning with proper PPE, but you need more than a gas mask - you'll need to wear a level A hazmat suit with a SCUBA setup (the gas can get you through the skin). Perhaps you believe that this is a future that people are going to be OK with? A conversation with the median voter may correct this impression.
sarker
competency crisis actor
1d ago
I think it would be bad if psychos got help from AIs to plan and carry out terror attacks. What does the world look like when anyone has the expertise necessary to carry out a sarin attack on the subway? To paraphrase, the optimal number of sarin attacks is not zero, but I doubt that people will accept it being very high without demanding that something is done.
sarker
competency crisis actor
3d ago
It could simply be the case that a large number of people refuse to admit that Iran has lost, which is actually very common in the history of war.
Can you name another example of this common occurrence?
"you can't press the beans into bricks, okay?? You just can't!"
sarker
competency crisis actor
5d ago
The downfall of 99% of veg burritos is that they replace the meat with lettuce instead of a veg protein and Las Pencas is in the same boat.
sarker
competency crisis actor
5d ago
I've been a vegetarian for a number of years now so I can't speak to the meat options, but the veg burritos at Senor Sisig are quite good.
sarker
competency crisis actor
5d ago
Chipotle charges $15.60 plus tax for a steak burrito (with guac) in my part of coastal California. A place I like in SF charges $16.25. You can hit $20 with various additions but it's on the high side of things.
sarker
competency crisis actor
5d ago
Any sort of heating is going to nuke the vitamin C at the least. Boiling also leaches stuff into the water.
sarker
competency crisis actor
6d ago
I can't think of any other technology in history that has achieved 50 percent market penetration in 3-4 years.
What did you think takeoff meant? Vibes? Papers?
and they both start to take off in early 2023, which was about how I remembered when I first started hearing about them.
That's when GPT-4 hit the public imagination.
HALF of Americans are doing this weekly?
Yes!
My circle must just be in the stone age, then, because I still know multiple people who don't own computers.
About 9% of American adults don't have a smartphone, so sure, it's not out of the question that you know several of them.
sarker
competency crisis actor
6d ago
I suppose it would include things like Alexa/Google Home/Siri?
Well, no, those are not chatbots.
I wasn't even hearing the term "A.I." as anything other than the movie (or Allen Iverson) in any remotely mainstream sense, unless post-Covid.
Huh? The prominence of the AI boom is largely a post Covid phenomenon.
sarker
competency crisis actor
6d ago
Almost half of Americans use chatbots specifically, with about a quarter doing so daily.
sarker
competency crisis actor
6d ago
I'll bet less than 5% of people have ever used AI in any form,
Almost a supermajority of Americans use AI at least multiple times a week. Let me know how you want to pay up.
sarker
competency crisis actor
7d ago
Ironically, the pizza in the third world is much cheaper.
It's not really this that I'm convinced of. It's more like, I don't really think that reading is valuable in itself unless you are reading something worth reading. I also don't think that reading the classics has been tried and found wanting; mostly I think it hasn't been tried at all by "nonreaders". I also don't think that the tactic of reading garbage is likely to lead to appreciation of actually good literature - I expect it will merely increase appreciation of garbage.
Sure. I'm responding to the Eragon example you brought up. My argument works against reading slop just as well.
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