domain:alexberenson.substack.com
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
6m ago
You can just ask your LLM of choice what it would enjoy reading, what it deems as meeting the threshold of being good enough to share, etc, and go from there. And/or ask it to simulate a wide variety of personas of varying tastes and proclivities.
hydroacetylene
9m ago
Sure, the political goal of ‘stop the spread of communism but don’t roll it back’ was dumb, and poorly implemented because of factors in south Vietnam. But the limited goal of ‘achieve a south Vietnam that can defend its sovereignty with no U.S. boots on the ground’ was achieved. The withdrawal of US air support- and political factors in the south Vietnamese army- led to the ‘75 invasion succeeding where previous ones had failed.
The U.S. goal of ‘capitalist, essentially secular, American aligned dictatorship in south Vietnam which doesn’t require American army presence’ was a success. The decision not to provide air support following a leadership reshuffle in their army led to them getting overrun by north Vietnamese tanks. To be clear this goal wasn’t a stable equilibrium- south Vietnamese security would have required a comprehensive defeat of the north. But this wasn’t an afghan government, where it can’t hold together for three months without the marines propping it up.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
10m ago
I wonder if Trump seriously thinks this ends in any other way than Israel annexing Gaza or if he's just using it as an underhanded justification for America doing the dirty work. FWIW I think Bush was a true believer in "we have to bring Democracy to Iraq and liberate the Iraqi people", an intellectual justification which was also spun by Netenyahu himself. America isn't getting a Riviera in the Middle East, it's going to be gifted to the Israelis 100%.
TitaniumButterfly
12m ago
Sure, but what is Christian metaphysics rooted in, then?
Man's experience with God.
I sense an implication in your words that I am less correct than you are because my belief is less coherent.
My apologies then as that was not my intention. My point here is that complaining about the perceived immorality of God as Christians understand Him is silly, if I'm being nice, and cringeworthy if I'm not.
But your coherency doesn't look valuable to me because from my perspective, some guy just picked a bunch of beliefs he and his acolytes had 2000 years ago and arbitrarily declared them to lie along one axis (God).
I don't see anything arbitrary about it, even from your perspective, unless you're irrationally insisting that the absence of God is a given, which seems questionable. You're just stipulating it and I'm pretty sure that's unwarranted.
Botond173
13m ago
And a bit of a paradox, no? "Everybody's parents live with them" is only possible if everybody is an only child, unless by "live near family" you mean "in the same compound, Encanto style".
I think in a practical sense it usually means "the grandparents live not so far away as to make the commute long and too inconvenient for people of their age, with the means of travel that are available to them anytime".
DecaDeciHuman
18m ago
Not the OP; I share similar reactions. I am not the most articulate; let me attempt to expand these a little.
arbitrary terminal preference.
Your 'arbitrary terminal preference' is my '(relational) tacit knowledge'.
the end of my interest in a thread
The other person a. has signaled that they do not find the thread in question important enough to spend their time on b. has signaled that the preferences and opinions expressed in the thread are not their own.
Otherwise, long form content - the hallmark of much of the best content here - is immediately suspicious, and I am likely to skip it.
Current LLMs tend to write long-form responses unless explicitly prompted otherwise, and LLM content is often used to 'pad' a short comment into a longer-form one. This results in P(LLM | longform) >> P(LLM | shortform). There are, of course, exceptions.
Ditto, the amount of my time wasted trying to help someone if I realize 90% through a shortform comment it's LLM-generated is much less than if I realize 90% of the way through a shortform comment it's LLM-generated.
and a sharp drop in my respect for the user
P(arbitrary comment from user uses a LLM | some comment from user visibly used a LLM) >> P(arbitrary comment from user uses a LLM | no comments from user visibly used a LLM).
Of course, then the followup question becomes "what do I have against LLM content". A few of the components:
The big LLM-as-a-services are a very attractive target for propaganda and censorship. (Of course, so are local models - though a local model can be assumed to remain identical tomorrow as today, and user Y as user X.) We already are seeing the first stirrings of this; everything so far has been fairly blatent whereas I am far more concerned about more subtle forms thereof.
Beware Gell-Mann Amnesia. I test (locally, because test set contamination) LLMs fairly often on questions in my actual field of expertise (which will go unnamed here) and they categorically write well-articulated responses that get the superficial parts correct while spouting dangerous utter nonsense for anything deeper. Unfortunately, over time the threshold of where they start spouting nonsense gets deeper, but does not disappear. I worry that at some point that threshold will overtake my level of expertise and I will be no longer able to pinpoint the nonsense.
I am not here to get one particular piece of information in the most efficient manner possible. I am here to test my views for anything I've missed, and to be exposed to a wider variety of views, and to help others when they have missed implications of views, and to be socialish. LLM-generated content misses the mark on all of these. If ten people read and respond to me they have a far wider range of tests of my views than if they all run my post through a single LLM. If ten people read and respond to me they have a far wider variety of outlooks than if they all run my post through a single LLM. If I spend time reading a partially-incorrect answer to be able to respond to it to help someone and I discover after-the-fact that it was LLM-generated, I have wasted time without helping the person I thought I was helping.
SomethingMusic
21m ago
I'm voting a hard no, I would no longer read this forum anymore. I'm here because I know people are taking the time to write and post their personal opinions. I believe Reddit is increasingly 'dead internet' thanks to AI and astroturfed subreddits controlled by superusers utilizing AI tools. I really don't want this place to go in the same direction.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
24m ago
"Pretty much". I'm not saying it can't be done to prove a point, I'm saying next to noone does it in the natural course of posting.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
26m ago
A "handwritten low-effort wall of text" is pretty much a contradiction in terms
No its not. I could write a full page rant in maybe double the time it takes just to type.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
27m ago
Could we have a length limit on AI posts? I don't mind AI generated content, but it feels like AI content is often very long posts, perhaps a 200 word limit would allow things like AI summaries of long things and push for self written portions of top level posts? Maybe also a tag like 4chans green text that would make it very clear where it is used?
I don't think they could pay enough to get all the groups like Somalis out, and many of them won't want to leave regardless. At the very least, you will have to do the mean things that offering money is supposed to avoid first. And the consequences of that sort of thing is unclear.
I came from a safe poor country. We didn't live like kings but we were relatively well-off (middle class) by national standards. We still left.
Because if someone has a condition you can't get an MRI. You can't send your kids to a university worthy of the name (if you send them to the West as a non-citizen they'll squeeze you since it's the easiest way to raise tuition*, so there goes a chunk of that money). You can't always avoid the graft and corruption. You can't always avoid the shitty roads in the rainy season. You're constantly being taxed in a variety of ways: you have to organize your own electricity and water , have to dodge shitty cops, have to worry about family members on a small salary. There are very few good jobs and the economy is going nowhere.
And everyone, no matter what their children say once steeped in Western society, knows that the West is better and no guarantee that you'll be first man in the village, for as long as European power maintains it, (and I'm being charitable in assuming that this is a thing that can be casually done and that Europeans have the will for pseudo-colonialism; the fact that you think it would be easy and would be done merely through diplomacy doesn't augur well) will be as good. It's inherently unstable and not a particularly bright future.
This shit might work on the Polish but I don't think there's any point in pretending there'll be anything genteel about ethnically cleansing people back to certain nations. You're not handing them an envelope full of cash and parting as friends.
* At least in Canada. Much easier to raise fees on foreign students.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
31m ago
Please avoid using google amp links. It's bad for a lot of reasons.
KMC
35m ago
The Rhodesians were fine until they got sanctioned and embargoed. There would still be a Rhodesia if they could have imported weapons.
Oh please no, giant blocks of spoiler tags are awful. It takes just as much space on the screen, and you have to click through every single one individually.
Collapsible would be ideal. Hell, I'd use it for dumping citations instead of the obnoxious "every sentence has a link" habit we picked up from Scott's early writing.
justmotteingaround
41m ago
Worst. Deal. Ever.
The US gets: blowback, military escalation, and debt. The US receives: sand. Id rather they send a blank check and let Israel take all the flack.
Islamic terrorists have told the US for decades that the primary reasons for 9/11 and other attacks was US support of Israel, AND military boots on the ground in "Muslim lands". This comes from a straightforward reading of the Quran/Hadiths as understood by hundreds of millions. They sincerely believe that the creator of the universe wants them to dedicate their lives to killing US troops in Muslim unless they pay the jizya and "live in humiliation".
Saudi Wahhabists found Bin Laden so extreme on this issue (as they has made deals with the US gov't) and basically sent him to Afghanistan, where he was armed by the US and famously praised a freedom fighter.
Israel is doing pretty well. They're far from dire straits. The US should be hands off as possible. Financial support is quite tolerable as it goes to a small, stable democratic ally in a hostile region.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
42m ago
I'm British - when I insult the French military record I am strictly trolling.
I'll allow it then, our ancient rivalry is dear and precious. And by the way I think your government renaming the HMS Agincourt is a disgrace and an insult to everyone that died there.
an honest appraisal of the military leadership of the British Empire is that we were off our game in the mid-19th century due to the lack of serious competition
I feel like the parallel is even more pertinent. The US decayed a bit from the time of Schwartzkopf from precisely this lack of serious competition.
Time will tell if the Americans can actually produce some pragmatic diplomatic policy and not just spectacular coups. Most of what we saw of Trump seems to have been for an audience of Americans primarily.
KMC
43m ago
Ethnic cleansing is good, actually. You want your places clean, after all.
Multiethnic countries don't work, or don't work for long.
KMC
45m ago
it depends on if they are citizens
What if they simply stripped them of citizenship first? States can act. They can just do things. Citizenship is made up, it's a piece of paper, especially for Africans in Sweden.
kriss___vector
47m ago
Not so much "remember the right one" as "forget the wrong one completely" because you'd be unlikely to forget that the noun is the "e" one, wouldn't you? Then the verb synonymous with "impact" starts with the other letter.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
48m ago
Average wages inside the country drop.
This assumes that the workers who were producing that thing were paid more than average and get a new job paying less than average (or stay unemployed).
(As a sidenote: people inside the country can no longer afford country-made products, and so shift their purchasing to cheaper imports. CPI goes up here, as I mentioned, as country-made products are price-weighted out of the basket.)
This seems fine in many cases. Often the products made outside of the country are just as good (lumber) or even better (cars) as those made in the country. I don't view this as impoverishment.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
48m ago
I don't know. Every longer text needs a good hook, but there are other ways to do it than by spilling the main point in the first paragraph.
But an LLM simulating those humans is qualitatively different from those actual humans sitting at their computers or their phones all around the actual Earth tapping their fingers on the keyboards or screens in front of them.
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