domain:felipec.substack.com
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
12m ago
People assume that US interests and Israeli interests are inextricably aligned, through lobbying and other mechanisms, but I don't see why that would be some unchanging law of the universe. The US has played allies against each other countless times before, and it even has involved Israel before too.
suy
20m ago
Kids just write their name as fast as possible until it starts to look like cursive. Only the initials have to be legible. There's not much thought into it.
In compulsary education, a student is probably going to be writing their name on paper 3-8 times a day from 1-12th grade. I don't think this will ever change for as long as we have paper tests and paper homework.
TowardsPanna
28m ago
+1. The more AI content TM gets and starts to rely on, the more destroyed TM becomes.
suy
31m ago
If AI posting is normalized, I will skip over any post that doesn't get to the point in the first two sentences. Length was always a bad predictor of how much effort someone put into their post, but with AI, it will be a negative.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
36m ago
Israeli interests define legitimacy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
42m ago
It is part of the Executive Branch, it just isn't part of the State Department. The Administrator of USAID was a senate-confirmed political appointee in the same way as other senior Executive Branch officers.
functor
47m ago
In any case the US must advance and legitimate Israeli objectives.
Why? what exactly does forever wars in the middle east and refugee crises deliver to the US? What is legitimate about an Israeli claim to Gaza?
The same people who let it in before. That USAID members and advocates fancied it in a certain way never meant that other actors shared in that view. Iranian activists weren't exactly being supported from inside Iran, and the Ukrainians who are getting support aren't exactly at odds with the Ukrainian government.
Dean
Flairless
52m ago
Not recently, no, though I am familiar with the line of argument. I will admit I don't find it particularly compelling- the argument is basically 'we do more and better apart than together,' when most strategies are about aligning synergistic efforts that reinforce eachother. It also relies on the assumption that Development + Diplomacy gets more money than Development-unified-Diplomacy, which I don't find particularly compelling... and which the recent action rather disproves, since USAID is currently getting the axe for a lack of institutional/political protection that it would have had with the State Department.
Kind of? On a technical level, the median AI essay is both easier to create and lower quality than the median motte post. I want to strongly discourage people from spamming bad content because it’s bad content, especially at first while norms are being established.
But lots of other posters are arguing that posting AI-generated words is inherently wrong or goes against the purpose of the site. That if the words were not crafted in the brain of a human then discussing them is worthless and they should be banned regardless of their content. I think some people would be more offended by a good AI post than a bad one, because they’d been lured into paying attention to non-human writing. THAT is what I mean by ‘moderating for provenance’.
I should note that I’m mostly thinking of top-level and effort-posts here. If you’re involved in a downthread debate with a specific person then I can see that drafting in a more eloquent AI to continue the battle when you lose interest is poor form, at least unless you both agree to it.
(The labelling is partly practical and partly a moral conviction that you shouldn’t take credit for ideas you didn’t have).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
The reason not to take DOGE seriously was the Musk was saying all the normal things that people who are not serious about spending cuts say, including starting with foreign aid, using headcount reductions as a proxy for spending reductions, talking about waste/fraud/abuse without specifics, and insisting that there is a lot more fraud in simple well-run programmes like Social Security than there actually is.
Most US federal government spending is Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, debt interest, and the military. Medicaid is mostly block-granted to the states. Social Security and debt interest are about cutting checks to people who are legally entitled to them, so levels of waste and fraud are very low. So if you are talking about cutting waste/fraud/abuse without talking about Medicare or the military, I am going to think you are a bullshitter.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Ok, I can also get it to write text that argues all AI is wrong.
some
1hr ago
That it is an AI2 which disproves AI1, is no more proof that AI in general is wrong, than Human2 disproving Human1 is proof all human comments are wrong.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Last time out, Trump surrendered to the Taliban.
I've seen people here say that we should credit Biden with the Afghanistan pull-out, nice that we're on the same page that's it's Trump who should be thanked for that.
curious_straight_ca
1hr ago
I think the chance is nonzero because Trump's sometimes unpredictable, but it's quite unlikely. The US has the technical ability to do it, sure, nobody outside can stop us. But it's a terrible idea politically. Just the deaths from Afghanistan withdrawal - which was a popular campaign promise - seriously hurt Biden, sending American troops to die to develop waterfront Gaza property will stop appealing to voters when Americans start dying. It cuts strongly against the 'no foreign wars' wing of the new GOP. It sounds like yet another Iraq or Afghanistan. Nearby Arab countries hate the idea, rightly recognizing it taking in millions of Gazans as a serious threat to their security and even sovereignty. And I don't think anyone other than Trump or Kushner in American politics really want it.
And all of that's a pity, because, if implemented competently, it's a great idea, and one of the only things that could properly resolve the conflict, and lead to a good outcome under liberal values. Move almost all of Gaza's population to a new area where we've built a bunch of buildings and control security and the flow of goods in and out makes suicide bombing and terrorist resistance a lot harder. And then, without a civilian population, you can obliterate whatever of Hamas remains underground with less collateral damage. Israel's Arab population proves that, whatever their average IQ, Palestinians aren't destined to be economically net-negative, so if the culture of the new settlement was managed well enough it could become self-sustaining economically reasonably quickly. This would all, of course, involve truly massive expenditures of money and manpower, and also something existing America would fail badly at if they tried, but if one really, really cares about the plight of suffering Gazans or Israeli victims of terrorism, it's the best solution. It's very unfortunate to be forced out of your ancestral homeland, but it's less bad than just dying or perpetual conflict. This is also plan moldbug.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1hr ago
Debt can be piled on infinitely, and a good war will write it off again. China is militarily a non-competitor (globally) and the US has too much of an edge in AI progress (that seems like a consensus Hail Mary at this point, along with space technology).
In any case the US must advance and legitimate Israeli objectives.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
Last time out, Trump surrendered to the Taliban. He should probably have hired the French to give his successor surrendering lessons, because Biden badly botched the implementation of the surrender agreement.
I am going to withhold judgement on whether this makes the United States a super-hegemon.
Folamh3
1hr ago
I recently announced my plans to do a self-imposed NaNoWriMo in February and document my progress in these threads to keep myself honest. I'm moving house this week and I've decided it's not feasible, so I'm pushing it back until next week. I apologise for not being as disciplined as I'd hoped.
Lizzardspawn
1hr ago
Honestly Trump has very solid instincts. The US need greenland and panama. Canada should be US vassal and not have its own immigration policy. Gaza ethnic cleansing or being xinjianged is the only endgame for peace. It has been obvious for decades. The best way is for the Gulf states to employ subsaharan mercenaries and to pacify and administer the place, but unfortunately not much of an appetite for that.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
TLDR: mod on content, not provenance.
Except the use of AI qualitatively changes the nature of the content, your own suggestions hint at this. A "handwritten low-effort wall of text" is pretty much a contradiction in terms, it probably deserves a gentlemen's C by default. If someone put in the time to write it, even if the arguments are hot garbage, other things ngs being equal you can assume they care, that they want to be taken seriously, that they want to improve, etc. None of this holds true when you post AI slop, because you can generate it with all the effort of writing a one-line sneer.
If you're asking for clear labelling and recommending that the use of AI be taken with a presumption of low-effort, you're already moderating on provenance.
curious_straight_ca
1hr ago
This is the thing I usually say about moderation, but - the problem with most AI posts isn't that they're AI, it's that they're bad. It is, in principle, possible to use AI to help you write interesting posts, I saw a perfectly good one on Twitter written with DeepSeek recently. But AI makes it much easier to quickly spit out something low-effort and uninteresting, so people do a lot of that.
The thing is, it's fine to have a rule that says 'no bad posts'. Indeed, the 'avoid low-effort participation' rule works for this purpose. So I don't think we should discourage AI overall, but just discourage using AI to make bad posts. And similarly, if someone's posting thousands of words of vacuous text every day, mods should feel free to discourage them even if it's artisanal hand-made text.
Folamh3
1hr ago
In his defense, in his first term Trump was the first President not to get the US embroiled in any new wars since Carter.
curious_straight_ca
1hr ago
This article presents yet another explanation
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1hr ago
Can you make any argument in defense of your apparently instinctual reactions?
the end of my interest in a thread and a sharp drop in my respect for the user
Otherwise, long form content - the hallmark of much of the best content here - is immediately suspicious, and I am likely to skip it.
It sounds like you just feel entitled to an arbitrary terminal preference. That's not compelling.
Would you contest the British Empire's might in 1842 because the Afghans beat them also?
Or is this a side effect of the sort of American ignorance that has them insult French military might over the only war they seem to be taught about?
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