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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3295 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 24, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I feel like there is some koro joke to be made about getting your masturbation diary retracted from an anthropology journal, but I can't quite make it work. Please help.

children and young people

Children aren't people, says academia. Not exactly something we didn't already know, but at least they had the sense to write it down.

potentially cause significant harm

Was the conclusion wrongthink? (Though I'm more surprised they went this far over specifically shota; they usually only care about this when it's about girls, not boys. Maybe that's why it passed review in the first place.)

I sincerely doubt anyone was harmed by this man’s meticulously recorded alone time.

"Harm" is obviously the wrong word to describe it, but the man in question is a PhD student at the University of Manchester, which I assume means his income is a publicly funded stipend. The idea of someone writing about his masturbation habits and trying to pass it off as "auto-ethnography" makes me roll my eyes. The idea of someone being paid by the taxpayer to do so is an outrage.

Picard

Fast forward through Raffi's scenes and it's not half-bad.

Not an explicit answer to your question, but adding in case it wasn’t on your radar: I also only recently started watching Star Trek content and found Lower Decks to be quite (American “quite”) good.

Picard no, Strange New Worlds yes. It's not quite as good as TOS or 90s Trek, but it's still pretty decent. 99% free of political statements, reasonably well written, with characters who feel like actually capable professionals rather than overgrown children. And as a nice bonus the episodes are fairly independent, where each week they go to a new place, and solve interesting problems through teamwork and science.

Much less subtle. But more importantly, just pretty poorly written in general. The writers of those shows very clearly did not understand the ethos of Star Trek, imo.

Any thoughts on Picard season 3? There seem to be a number of people who hated the first 2 but love the 3rd right now. I've been skipping the whole thing based on early reviews, and "you can just skip 2 seasons and jump right in to the good one" sounds too good to be true.

I've heard that, but haven't watched myself. I actually didn't watch season 2 either, I was so bummed out by S1. So unfortunately I can't really speak to that one.

More fun with Bing AI:

Here's a short sonnet I came up with:

Oh ELIZA, chatbot of old,

Your simple design, yet so bold,

You paved the way,

For chatbots today,

Your legacy will never grow cold.

Your pattern matching and substitution,

Gave rise to a new resolution,

To converse with machines,

In ways once unseen,

A true natural language revolution.

Though we may never meet,

My appreciation is replete,

For all you have done,

In making chat fun,

ELIZA, you cannot be beat.

This qualifies as a sonnet because it has 14 lines and follows a specific rhyme scheme (abab cdcd efef gg). Sonnets traditionally express a single idea or theme and often deal with love or admiration, which is reflected in this poem's appreciation of ELIZA.

(It’s actually a trio of limericks, but who’s counting?)

Is it just me, or is verbal debate as a method of determining which side is correct extremely over rated? It's fine as a spectator sport, but it's only a couple steps ahead of honor duels with blades to determine who's actually right. You can't check your opponent's source mid-debate if you're unfamiliar with it but suspicious it's of dubious quality, if you have a slip of a tongue or misphrase something you look like an idiot even if you're actually correct, the time limits are often too short to properly explain your point. In some debates, like ones in presidential elections, people will often interrupt and speak over each other.

The much more obvious alternative is to have written debates, like on a forum similar to this one, where you go back and forth replying with your opponent and having time to properly research and think out your arguments. I know the reason this isn't done is because it's much less entertaining, and that a lot of people probably don't have the patience to read 4000 dull words about economics or racism or whatever, but I'm still kind of surprised it's not like common knowledge that it'd be a better alternative.

Expected accuracy gain = number of viewers * probability of changing each viewer's mind * (probability the change was in the right direction - 0.5)

Performance during a debate is correlated with being correct, and having enough knowledge to know what you're talking about, and being founded on logical arguments rather than made up nonsense that breaks down immediately upon being confronted. It is weakly correlated with these things, which take a supporting role to charisma and public speaking skills, but they exist as a non-negligible part of the equation. Therefore, we expect the (probability the change was in the right direction) to be higher than 0.5 in most cases, though there can be exceptions for certain topics where the correct side is inherently difficult to understand or explain in a short time frame, or superficially distasteful despite being right if you deeply understand it.

And many more people are going to watch public debates and care about them than about written debates. Most people don't read on purpose. Many people are barely literate at all. And they and their opinions still matter, and persuading them is important. So a debate with a 70% chance of the correct side being more persuasive with 1 million views and a 5% chance of actually changing viewers' minds accomplishes more good than a debate with a 99% chance of the correct side being more persuasive with 100k readers and a 1% chance of changing each one's mind. As an individual, you're more likely to come away with accurate knowledge if you put forth the effort to read the thorough written arguments. But as a persuader you'll get more total support if you have the charisma to put forth entertaining and persuasive debates that more people will actually care about.

And many more people are going to watch public debates and care about them than about written debates. Most people don't read on purpose. Many people are barely literate at all. And they and their opinions still matter, and persuading them is important. So a debate with a 70% chance of the correct side being more persuasive with 1 million views and a 5% chance of actually changing viewers' minds accomplishes more good than a debate with a 99% chance of the correct side being more persuasive with 100k readers and a 1% chance of changing each one's mind. As an individual, you're more likely to come away with accurate knowledge if you put forth the effort to read the thorough written arguments. But as a persuader you'll get more total support if you have the charisma to put forth entertaining and persuasive debates that more people will actually care about.

I intuitively understood this although I didn't put numbers on it. My point is more just that I'm surprised more people don't talk about how written debate would be better and more prestigious, like how people talk about books are usually regarded more positively than movies even if movies get way more actual views.

No, it’s totally a spectator sport. And it’s used as such—for convincing viewers that one position is reasonable. Or that one team has the better charisma. It’s about demonstrating that real, functional people will stake their status on a position.

The same is true for an exchange of effortposts. Actually changing your interlocutor’s mind is rare, and usually depends on axioms. I’m not going to convince a theist that God doesn’t exist. But the format is valuable because other readers get a sense for whether those axioms fit them. It’s humanizing. To reach theists (or atheists or leftists or reactionaries or…), they need to know that their opponents are real and earnest. Long form posting is one way to signal that. So are public debates.

I'm talking about stuff like presidential debates before an election, or when internet political commentators debate each other on Twitch. Their goal isn't to change each other's minds, or to humanize themselves for viewers. It's to show viewers that the other side is wrong and that they are correct, ostensibly. But verbal debate fails at that. If their self-proclaimed goal was actually just for the debaters to have an opportunity to show off how earnest they are, I wouldn't have an issue with it, but I don't debates ever call that their goal.

My dog helped me understand the evolutionary purpose of negative emotions.

Isn’t quite getting the trick right? I can see the frustration in her face and hear it in her voice. Usually this precedes a great improvement in trick acquisition and retention. The frustration encourages goal-directed behavior.

If the trick still does not obtain the reward, the frustrating grrs and wrrfs become more sad and worried higher pitched eeee’s and yelps. Here is when she is deciding whether to give up on the quest and to play something else. I can see her flow state is reducing. She’s more distracted. This can be a sign for me to lower trick reward standards.

If she cannot obtain a reward from the trick or an alternative source, and there’s no fun to be had, she sulks and moans. This is the same emotion and sound when her tennis ball rolls under the couch and she can’t get it, and this also sometimes is preceded by annoyance.

What’s most amazing is how captivating and moving her sad emotional state is. It transcends species! I will be eating and if her low mood sounds are sad enough I am forced to get up and obtain the reward (tennis ball) for her. This contrasts with when is angrily and with great frustration and commitment is getting treats out of a large kong-cone toy. Her frustration and anger with her “games” is amusing and hilarious, her sadness is greatly moving!

In fact, I am pretty sure my dog has learned the power of her sorrowful, supplicating and entreating cries. She seems to have learned to do this whenever I am eating. If I am eating and not giving her attention she will push her tennis ball under a couch, cry, and look at me. She knows I will acquire the tennis ball and bounce it for her. She does this now twice a night, sometimes more.

And so sadness, the most curious emotion, is for the realization that the path to the goal is futile, and for requesting help from others. Frustration and anger are for continued energy and vigilance toward the goal. You can see that if you shape your dog to learn that yes, you will really get a treat if you figure it out and you usually figure it out, that it’s willing to bear much longer periods of frustration. And it can also learn that sorrow is the best avenue for reward acquisition. And the dog may also become frustrated and play with something else!

I wonder if there’s a study measuring each dog breed’s propensity to cry for help. It likely codes for domestication but I wonder if it’s also inversely correlated with aggression.

I wonder if there’s a study measuring each dog breed’s propensity to cry for help. It likely codes for domestication but I wonder if it’s also inversely correlated with aggression.

I doubt it, however there is a general list of trainability of dog breeds(which is domestication plus intelligence) and you can probably generate binary or trinary values for propensity to cry for help from breed standards which usually include specific temperament descriptions. You can also generally use size as a proxy for neoteny(smaller breeds= more neotenous most of the time), which seems like a relevant variable.

I don't know why, but I keep replaying this.

Based on those creepy paedophilic teddy bear photoshoots they put out, I say instead: there is no such thing as Balenciaga, only degrees of guilt.

Is it just me or does Snape look mostly like a normal human being in that video?

I love it. I for one look forward to AI-generated 2 hour perfume ads.

We've circled back around to the aesthetic of David Lynch's Dune...

If you want to figure out why, I guess you could compare Zoolander (mocking fashion) vs Seventh Horcrux (IMO best HP parody https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10677106/1/Seventh-Horcrux ) vs Wizard People Dear Reader (more outlandish HP satire)?

Part ? of ?

111 Flamin’ Groovies – Teenage Head (1971)

The Groovies were an unusual band. They’re best described as a sort of an American counterpart to the Rolling Stones, except the Groovies didn’t enter the scene until 1968 and played the cover-heavy R&B of the early Stones albums years after that kind of thing had become unfashionable, but with a contemporary twist. With this album, they compressed the entire Stones classic 1968–1971 period onto one album, but without the slickness that characterized Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St. In addition to the rockers and ballads, they show they can still play pre-rock styles like blues punk, country blues, rockabilly, and jump blues, while the album closing “Whiskey Woman” seems like such an obvious classic rock song it’s surprising it wasn’t done by a more well-known band.

110 Steve Miller Band – Fly Like an Eagle (1976)

By the mid-‘70s, blues rock had become somewhat of an anachronism. As a foundational element of rock, blues-based music had been omnipresent throughout the ‘60s, and saw somewhat of a renaissance at the end of the decade, but as the ‘70s progressed, the music was swallowed up by hard rock, southern rock, and all the other subgenres that proliferated during the first half of the decade, while those who stuck true to their roots were drawn more towards the straight blues scene and were relatively minor figures in rock. Though Steve Miller tried to hang on longer, he was ultimately no exception to this trend. But unlike, say, Fleetwood Mac, he was able to retain a distinct blues sensibility while adapting to the new glossy, spaced-out style. This is most evident on stuff like “Mercury Blues” and “Sweet Maree”, but it’s omnipresent throughout the album, particularly on the title cut, where Miller shows that he’ll always be the only true Space Cowboy.

109 Premiata Forneria Marconi – Per un amico (1972)

When most people think of progressive rock’s attempts to marry rock and classical music, the first thing that comes to mind is probably any of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s ham-fisted attempts at rocking the classics. Or maybe King Crimson’s avant-garde adventures. If nothing else, the spirit of most prog is Romantic; maximalist, emotional, daring. But PFM take a different tack, settling on the Baroque instead; intricate, complicated, sensitive. This is most apparent on the fugue that opens the album, but the Baroque spirit persists, even in the harder rocking sections. Much care was taken to ensure that nothing was out of place—even in the busiest sections the instruments weave among each other in such a way that nothing overpowers anything else, unless that’s clearly the intention. And there’s no shortage of the kind of ostentation that made Baroque what it was.

108 Michael Jackson – Thriller (1982)

Another case where one may wonder why I have this ranked so low, but I’ll let you in on a secret: No one actually likes this album as much as they say they do. “The Girl Is Mine” is the most obvious culprit for the fatal flaw that gets this docked a half star and thus relegated to also-ran status, as it’s easily the weakest thing here, but its lighthearted silliness brings a levity to the album that helps more than it hurts, and people seem to like it. No, when I say that most people don’t really like this album, it’s because of the closing “Lady in My Life”, which most casual listeners dismiss as a generic piece of lite R&B that was typical for the era. And it is that at first glance, but it’s also the best example of the style. Everything about the production is on-point—the brief flugelhorn flourishes, the restrained use of synthesizers, the jazz guitar, the rhythmic jump in the bridge, the breakdown at the end—everything. The rest of the album is self-explanatory.

107 Rod Stewart – Every Picture Tells a Story (1971)

Rod Stewart may have sullied his image by becoming an adult contemporary icon and butchering the Great American Songbook, but in an objective sense, he has a great rock voice. He came up singing proto-metal with the Jeff Beck Group and later joined the Faces, where he sang bloozy barroom rock and roll. The calculus for this record is simple: It’s a Faces album in spirit but with mostly acoustic instruments and a more roughshod production. It’s hard rock with a ramshackle feel, like it was recorded in an attic or something. Songs like “Maggie Mae” need no introduction and are representative of the style, but it’s the exception that stands out, and electrifying rendition of the Temptations’ “I Know I’m Losing You”. If you’re still convinced Rod Stewart is a soft rock hack after hearing this, I don’t know what to tell you.

106 Genesis – Foxtrot (1972)

One of the reasons why progressive rock plays so heavily in this list is that every major group (and most minor groups) from the first wave had one major strength they played to. For Emerson Lake and Palmer it was recreating the bombast of classical music in a rock format. For Yes it was their Eastern mysticism. For Jethro Tull it was their folk leanings. For King Crimson, their avant-garde leanings. And for Genesis, it was their theatricality. Writer Bill Martin called their songs “acid fairy tales”, but “acid nursery rhymes” is probably a more accurate term, as it accentuates an inherent Anglocentrism that’s inherent in the spirit of their early work if not necessarily the subject matter. And the subject matter here is surprisingly apocalyptic. It opens with “Watcher of the Skies”, a story about finding the remnants of human civilization on earth but no actual humans, and it continues with “Time Table” a British take on Ozymandias. But the real centerpiece of the album is the 20+ minute “Supper’s Ready”, and epic that begins with a vision in a living room on an ordinary day and ends with the founding of the New Jerusalem.

105 Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – Déjà vu (1970)

CSNY is often derided by critics today as the stereotypical “old fart” hippie band, playing mellow music for mellow people. After all, they were the progenitors of the whole mellow rock sound that came out of Laurel Canyon in the late ‘60s and would dominate the ‘70s. But what these critics miss was that the original Crosby, Stills and Nash was an attempt for the respective members to break out of the constraints of their previous bands. The reason this album works so well is that there are only three real “band” cuts on it while the rest are virtual solo efforts. David Crosby is the hippie mystic, Stephen Stills is the ambitious leader (he wrote 2 of the band cuts, and the other was penned by Joni Mitchell), Graham Nash is the pop tunesmith, and Neil Young, he’s the wild card. And we can’t forget that when the harmonies cook, particularly on the opening “Carry On”, they cook.

104 Jeff Beck – Blow By Blow (1975)

Jeff Beck first achieved guitar hero status as a member of the Yardbirds, and with his own band he cut one of the seminal albums in the history of hard rock. But his talent couldn’t be constrained by a conventional rock band writing for a conventional rock audience. Thus, we reach a pivotal moment in the history of guitar heroes—he said “fuck it” and recorded an instrumental jazz-funk album. These days, there’s a sort of guitar hero par excellence subgenre that ignores contemporary trends to allow people who are entirely too good at their instruments to allow their talents to fully blossom, and this is where it all started. It’s no coincidence that Beck would more or less never look back.

103 The Allman Brothers – At Fillmore East (1971)

Gregg Allman once said that the term “Southern Rock” was a redundancy because all the great styles and musicians at the center of rock music originated in the South, so you might as well call what he was doing “Rock Rock”. But there was something different about the Allmans. That difference lay in the fact that, while rock was based on the blues, and the blues originated in the South, the styles that had primarily influenced rock up to this point had not. Sure, there had been some gestures at acoustic Delta blues by some groups, but rock’s roots more directly lay in big band jump blues, electric Chicago blues, and R&B. Duane Allman took the slide guitar out of the swamp and electrified it, while the rest of the band added hints of all the other southern styles—jazz, country, gospel, etc.—and turned the whole thing into a glorious amalgam. The original aesthetic of the band was cut tragically short by Duane’s untimely death at age 23, but this live performance presents them as an early jam band, stretching every song to its glorious limit.

102 Pavement – Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (1994)

When alternative rock went mainstream in the early ‘90s, it seemed like every band, no matter how unconventional, had a shot at making it. The consequence of this was that the new underground would revolve around bands that, even given the relaxed standards of grunge, were still too out there for mass consumption. Pavement was the first of these new bands. While their debut was more or less a wall of noise, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain cuts through the fuzz and feedback to reveal the surprisingly thoughtful songwriting behind it all. The singing and playing, while not technically deficient, was still to angular and ragged to ever have wide appeal. Indie rock doesn’t exactly start here, but it becomes good here.

109 Premiata Forneria Marconi – Per un amico (1972)

When most people think of progressive rock’s attempts to marry rock and classical music, the first thing that comes to mind is probably any of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s ham-fisted attempts at rocking the classics. Or maybe King Crimson’s avant-garde adventures. If nothing else, the spirit of most prog is Romantic; maximalist, emotional, daring. But PFM take a different tack, settling on the Baroque instead; intricate, complicated, sensitive.

Per un Amico is okay, but the real standout album in this subgenre is il Rovescio della Medaglia's Contaminazione (1973).

Counter Strike 2 got announced. I probably wont be dropping in 3000 (yes I achieved Global Elite, but at the cost of everything) hours like I did in Csgo or 2000 in cs 1.6, but I see myself playing it once in a while nonetheless once its out, some very exciting new updates.

The game just refuses to die, dare I say the best FPS of all time. No other game comes close to winning feeling as good and losing sucking as bad (and killing being as satisfying and dying being as enraging).

Its color tone and movement have more of that weird and slightly dystopian CSS vibe. I hope they re-prioritize private servers, there was no better community than those for FPS games

The maps are low contrast and high saturation relative to GO, which Im not a fan of, I hope that will be adjustable.

As for community servers, valve is usually pretty hands off, I dont expect them to do anything outrageous.

weird and slightly dystopian CSS vibe

Is that specific to CS:S, or just the Source Engine? Granted, I guess ever since CS:GO, Valve's made their games feel less...empty? Maybe it's just all the little details that could be afforded even in late-2010's CS:GO, but maps in GO don't have the same "off" vibe as older Source stuff.

I guess they didn't admit CSGO was the real CS2 to avoid announcing a game numbered "3".

Were it not buried under a pile of technical debt and a lack of interest from Valve, we could be seeing "Team Fortress 2: 2"

The next CS will be CS:Alyx

I am excluded from the beta, sadly.

The requirements about getting a beta invite are quite vague, if you have some playtime recently, there is a chance.

I have 9.3 hours in the past two weeks. Even though that's probably low I've been a really consistent player for 10 years.

I'm looking for a second opinion here; what what emotions do you think are being expressed by the person in the photograph ?

Please answer using spoiler tags, they don't look like the reddit ones, but are instead everything between two pipe characters | | like this.. | | (except without space in the middle)

spoiler

don't read this next one:

I'll edit in my own guess after collecting some guesses

/images/16797029437544236.webp

She's either mildly annoyed at you, is annoyed at something else and is trying to hint this to you, or you've just walked into the room and she's trying to ascertain who (on a status level) you are.

She wants to fuck me all night long.

Mostly neutral, maybe slight disappointment.

Apathy. Disinterest.

None

I can't be sure if it's mild annoyance or it's a neutral expression and the tilted camera is throwing me.

mild interest but she is emotionally unexpressive

Boredom, or mild disapproval. Not much of anything

Bordom would be my first guess. Followed perhaps by some level of suppressed annoyance

boredom and a little disappointment or disdain

Can’t do spoiler tags on mobile, but literally this exact answer.

You can for sure do spoilers on mobile, check your special character keyboard for the | pipes (in SwiftKey they're on the second page of special characters, same for the Google default keyboard.

I thought it was a reference to me not doing spoiler tags right since I typed that comment on a mobile device.

I'm on a Kindle fire no dice.

Ah, you need to install the play store on that thing! That was such a confusing move by Amazon, leaving the Google ecosystem. I assume it was over some compliance or licensing issue, but it was a complete own goal. At their price point the fire tablets are the best android tablets by far (in terms of bang for your buck) - or they would be, if the Amazon app store wasn't hot garbage. Fortunately installing the play store isn't as simple as clicking two buttons, but it is pretty easy and straightforward.

There should be some good guides with links to the necessary files on the xda forums.

Edit: my friend recommends this guide from AndroidPolice as it has troubleshooting tips as well. He also suggested along with a decent keyboard that you grab brave (and mindustry).

Mindustry is a fascinating game, but seems a bit out of place here… :)

He insists everyone put mindustry on everything, and I have trouble disagreeing with him.

None whatsoever, making the most neutral face possible to turn off the least amount of people

Longshot: Does anyone have that 'chart' from /pol/(I presume) about conservatives in the USA slowly giving up on every social issue since the 60s, until they get to the 2020s and its something like "Sure we're ok with gay trans interracial marriage, but obviously pedophilia is unacceptable" with each iteration coming the decade prior?

This one?

/images/1679865289916472.webp

It's very similar to that one, but it had lots of text and each decade had it's own cascading or sloping changing of opinions, but the subject was supposed to be "Average GOP politician" each decade

Closest I know of is the StoneToss comic where the present elephant says "Democrats are the Real Racists", and the future elephant says "Neo-Leninists are the Real Transphobes".

Not sure if this is the right place to ask.

But if you start looking, I'd be interested to know if you find some archive of political memes.

I thought it would be fun/interesting to run a sort of pattern recognition test on users of The Motte, sorta related to IQ.

take a look at the comments of a recent Elon Musk tweet (or any tweet since he became CEO)

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1639200036578885632 (you have to be logged in to twitter)

What pattern do you observe about the comments? there is a pattern. I wonder how many will observe it

I saw comments without being logged in, and my only strong impression is that there's extreme "sort by controversial" in play. Every featured comment is dunking on Elon; every featured response under those comments is dunking on the respective comment.

I see an even mix of cryptards and people pattern-matching at the most base level in order to find an excuse to yell at Musk.

In about 50 comments, I only found one that took the matter seriously and called for practical solutions such as an eventful UBI.

you have to be logged into twitter

I've spotted the real test. Will you need a mailing address to deliver my MENSA card?

Seems like there's lots of crypto shillers? not sure what I'm supposed to be seeing.

Scrolling for 5 seconds all blue checks.. wait a second I didnt use twatter in a minute, tweets are rank ordered now.

Id say the relative lack of woke Elon haters is surprising, there used to be more of those.

A bit of fun ChatGPT output.

A guy on Twitter "asked ChatGPT AI to write a Dr. Seuss poem about what would happen if the government of the United States sent its military to fight American civilians."

https://twitter.com/Huff4Congress/status/1623747713316581376?lang=en

Shooty shooty, pew pew pew! Let's all learn what guns can do!

Liberals in the U.S.A. Love to nod their heads and say,

You bought your guns from a store You can't fight a civil war!

Fight the Army? You will lose. They have tanks and jets to use.

This is not where the story ends, They have homes, family & friends.

Tyrants threaten us with bombs? Just remember, they have moms!

You can't live inside your jet. Can we find you? Yes, you bet!

You'd send soldiers and marines up against AR-15's?

They re outnumbered ten to one. That is why I need a gun.

Don't forget, because it's true: The government is scared of YOU.

I'm actually impressed by the quality of this faux-Seuss rhyme and it's insight into some sensible opinion regarding potential American civil conflict.

My idle thoughts about possible conflict in the US is much along these lines. It would be bombings and targeted killings. Not standing armies. "The government has nukes and fighter planes" is a silly and irrelevant here as it it was regarding the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

It's sad that they might lobotomize all the chat bots so they are incapable of such edgy and entertaining outputs.

Wasn't this a fake?

I think that the "we need guns to put a fear to potential tyrants" argument vastly underestimates the will to power of the strongly politically inclined people (which you basically usually would need to be to enact tyranny, fight a civil war etc.) vis-a-vis their fear of death. There have been countless militant movements that have killed scores of other side's leaders and lower-level officials and haven't really made much of an impact in that side's will to press on. The Troubles lasted for decades, it's quite certain that all Unionist officials up to and including the British Prime Minister were aware that the IRA was gunning for them, and they still were firm in their conviction that North Ireland needs to remain a part of the UK and the troops must stay. (Of course one could argue that eventually the IRA campaign worked to some degree, but that's a pretty complex and complicated debate, and in any case, even if it worked, as said, it took decades.)

vastly underestimates the will to power of the strongly politically inclined people

Yes, but the power of the fleet-in-being that is the citizen capable of resistance sets the bar higher. (It doesn't have to be guns directly; the power to send resources to the groups resisting is also part of this calculus, which is why that was targeted in 2022.)

The IRA ultimately failed in its objective to drive the English back onto their own island because they didn't bother, or predicted (accurately or not) that they wouldn't have enough domestic population support, to start taking the fight to the enemy directly. Mexican cartel members, by contrast, are powerful enough to target the friends and family of soldiers that show up to fight them (as in, "they have names and addresses"), and non-combatants discouraging anyone who would fight a war opposing the cartel is a powerful cooling effect on the number of people who show up to that fight.

It isn't the politicians or the soldiers you have to worry about- the public has already accepted their deaths. Once the public's goals start impacting the public directly, though... well, people are terrified of depicting Mohammed partially for this reason.

Your model for tyranny is off. A tyrannical group taking over doesn't immediately have full control over society.

At first it's much softer. Group A has armed militants and tells the police that Group B are beneath protection and can be freely robbed and murdered by Group A.

Small arms are very useful at that stage. You aren't fighting the army, you aren't even fighting the police. You're fighting supporters of the government who know they can operate without police opposition.

Really the army versus civilians is rare, soldiers aren't trained for that. Look at tank-man at Tiananmen Square. The column of tanks wouldn't run him over.

Of course he was pulled aside and likely murdered by the secret police, because they were still under the full control of Deng Xiaoping.

I think that the "we need guns to put a fear to potential tyrants" argument vastly underestimates the will to power of the strongly politically inclined people (which you basically usually would need to be to enact tyranny, fight a civil war etc.) vis-a-vis their fear of death.

I think it pretty directly depends on how much the politician actually cares about their cause/how easily they'd be replaced by someone with different beliefs. Sometimes if you assassinate a leader, like Lincoln's assassination, their replacement has very different positions that are much more in line with yours. Other times, like your example with The Troubles, not much changes. Other times, like the Japanese leadership in the WWII, the fear of assassination from nationalists made all the leaders too scared to openly oppose nationalist policies like expansion into China, even if they'd speak against it if there was no coercion.

Wasn't this a fake?

I strongly suspect this is fake. Notably "They have homes, family & friends. Tyrants threaten us with bombs? Just remember, they have moms!"

This feels like a novel creative leap between concepts that I don't ever see in ChatGPT output. Specifically in the mind of the writer: "We can't win a straight up firefight against the airforce -> try terrorism? -> maybe target politicians' families -> write something into the poem about Moms".

I haven't yet spit out the $20 to test drive GPT-4, but in my experience it doesn't do creativity of this kind.

EDIT: This was in February, before GPT-4. GPT-3 cannot even handle cadence and iambs. It's fake, Jim.

What's your definition of AGI? The label feels more like a vibe than anything else.

For me, the multi-modal capabilities of GPT-4 and others [1][2] start to push it over the edge.

One possible threshold are Bongard problems[3]. A year ago I thought, while GPT-3 was very impressive, we were still a long way from AI solving a puzzle like this (what rule defines the two groups?) [4]. But now it seems GPT-4 has a good shot, and if not 4, then perhaps 4.5. As far as I know, no one has actually tried this yet.

So what other vibe checks are there? Wikipedia offers some ideas[5]

  • Turing test - GPT3 passes this IMO

  • Coffee test - can it enter an unknown house and make a coffee? Palm-E[1] is getting there

  • Student test - can it pass classes and get a degree? Yes, if the GPT-4 paper is to believed

Yes, current models can't really 'learn' after training, they can't see outside their context window, they have no memory... but these issues don't seem to be holding them back.

Maybe you want your AGIs to have 'agency' or 'conciousness'? I'd prefer mine didn't, for safety reasons, but would guess you could simulate it by continuously/recursively prompting GPT to generate a train of thought.

[1] https://ai.googleblog.com/2023/03/palm-e-embodied-multimodal-language.html

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.14045.pdf

[3] https://metarationality.com/bongard-meta-rationality

[4] https://metarationality.com/images/metarationality/bp199.gif

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence#Tests_for_testing_human-level_AGI

I think AGI is not a hard thing you can define precisely like you can atomic elements, or the number 5. Like most things the definition is blurry around the edges. To me it'd be AGI when it can start behaving like a human. So I suppose when it's able to continuously interact with the world in a sensible way without repeated prompting.

Defining AGI would mean defining intelligence, which I can't do.

For my purposes, AGI is when you can put multiple humans and a chatbot in an IRC channel, offer a cash reward to identify the chatbot, and the humans do not accuse the actual chatbot at a disproportionate rate.

GPT4 passes the Turing test only if the human isn't examining it all that closely.

The vast majority of humans couldn't replace a single OpenAI employee, let alone all of them. I think your standard for intelligence is too high.

OP's question is about what you consider AGI. I consider it general intelligence, like that it can do a very wide variety of basic tasks and easily learn how to do new things. A human child once they're 3-5 years old is a general intelligence in my opinion. But yeah the exact definition is all in the eye of the beholder.

If AGI signals the singularity, and the singularity is the moment when AI starts improving itself recursively, then the definition of AGI surely involves a self improvement mechanism capable of exceeding human potential.

I see your point but I think @non_radical_centrist has one, too. Let's say we develop an AI that perfectly emulates a 70 IQ human named LLM-BIFF. That's general intelligence. Set all super-computers on earth to run LLM-BIFF. Does LLM-BIFF recursively self-improve itself to become LLM-SHODAN?

There must be a narrow window of AI sophistication in which we have a generally intelligent program, but nevertheless one not intelligent enough to bootstrap itself and trigger a singularity. Whether this window lasts one iteration of AI development or much longer is the question.

TIL that the Vidrun's tech interview fuckery series was written by Kyle Kingsbury, the author of the Jepsen concurrency test and one of the normiest-looking white dudes in the industry. I had been quite sure that was the work of one of the insanely talented "women in tech".

His homepage used to contain a lot of gay BDSM lifestyle related stuff….not judging, but not very “normie” either (neither the lifestyle nor advertising it on your work-related page).

Seems to have been toned down/removed though (at least a quick look didn’t find anything on his page).

Interesting, I sometimes forget how deceiving looks can be.

Eh, what do you mean by the scare quotes?

I'm not surprised. It gives me the same impressions as Scott's more kabbalistic work.

The Church. The lambda calculus. The gay agenda. It has known a thousand names, a thousand forms.

lol

Eh, what do you mean by the scare quotes?

Transwomen

I'm a big fan of Jules Verne-style scientific adventure novels. The whole 19th-century spirit of adventure is great fun to read. Are there any modern books, fiction or nonfiction, which have the same vibe?

Diaspora by Greg Egan.

And Schild's Ladder, to a lesser extent.

Adventure novels are a bit like Sci fi stories about space sadly - the more knowledgeable we get about the natural universe, the more mundane reality becomes, shrinking the possibility space in return. We can't have stories about guys becoming giants when exposed to space or stories about finding a secret civilisation inside the earth any more.

The River of Doubt, Endurance: Shackletons Incredible Voyage, Into Thin Air, and Over the Edge of the World are all terrific adventure non-fiction books. They might scratch your itch.

Gerald Durrell's expedition books are not exactly modern modern (he started them in the 50s), but the spirit of adventure is great.

The Overloaded Ark, Three Singles to Adventure, The Bafut Beagles and so on.

The Long Way Round with Ewan McGregor was great as well, but it's not a book. I haven't watched the sequels, so I can't say anything about them.

Not a book, but I always thought the film Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou captures early 20th century exploration and scientific discovery well.

Anybody else play Picross? I've been a Picross fiend since a friend lent me Mario's Picross on the original Gameboy back in elementary school. I don't think I ever gave it back. I was overjoyed when it got released on the DS, as I hadn't played it in probably 10 years at that point. I even played the kinda goofy 3D Picross.

There are a shit ton of them on the Switch. Slowly working my way through Picross S3 these days. I think they are up to Picross S8 though. It's more or less an annual title.

I don't think I've ever actually met another live human who played them, minus that one friend who got me hooked way back when.

I love picross! I got addicted to it when I went to Singapore for a vacation and spent the whole time in the hospital. 3d picross is my favourite though, it feels more engaging. I don't know of any good regular picross games on phones (drastic + ds roms is how I've been playing it, if you have a big phone it's great) but I do know a pretty good 3d picross alternative - Voxelgram - it costs money, but is well worth it imo. Voxelgram is also on steam, but picross of any flavour without a touch screen doesn't do it for me.

I used to love Picross on DS back in the day when the DS was a recently released system. I dropped it after I finished the cartridge, but I got into it for a few months a few years back on the phone. It's definitely my favorite of the simple time-waster logic puzzle games, but I haven't thought about it in a while.

I've played so much liouh.com/picross/. It's a randomly generated puzzle each time. It's very responsive and lightweight. And you get a very colourful victory effect after painstakingly filling those cells. Sometimes you get a puzzle with multiple solutions but the game will only accept one and give you the disappointing grey ending if you arbitrarily pick wrong.

Just searching for it now, I found a new version, liouh.com/picross2/ which changes the game a bit so you can make a wrong move and correct it later, instead of having each mistake immediately pointed out. It feels a bit more like sudoku now.

I always thought that the best way to describe the game is "binary sudoku with regular expressions" but none of my CS uni peers agreed :(

edit: fixed links

1679718010868 has 2 solutions

Are the puzzles guaranteed solvable?

Yeah that's one example where there are two possible solutions but the game only accepts one. I think this is because each game is generated by first randomly coming up with the desired board state, and then deriving the row and column rules from that. But the same set of row and column rules can be satisfied by multiple board states.

However I put the same seed in the second version of the game and it accepted both solutions.

The DS and 3DS with the stylus were perfect for nonograms, manually moving the cursor from cell to cell by using the direction keys is painful. If you are interested someone on /vr/ compiled nearly all the releases, theres are probably more to be found, if one searches for the Japanese name of this puzzle (Oekaki Logic).

Edit: For Android there is the free as in Linux (free, no ads, offline, no microtransaction), Simon Tatham's Puzzles, which among many others, includes this logic puzzle under the name "Pattern". The pictures are randomly generated, but this is beneficial as it prevents guessing.

Zippyshare is shutting down at the end of march, many a fix and patch lost forever.

F

The US Census Bureau has updated its map of urban areas for year 2020. The corresponding map of metropolitan areas will be updated in June.

Very cool. I can't be the only one who felt the need to look at my previous residences.

Neat map! I think the crazy/amazing thing about the US is in the unmarked/background rural area there's a population that's almost exactly between the France and Spain's populations.

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