YourNetworkIsHaunted @ YourNetworkIsHaunted @awful.systems

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1 yr. ago

Somehow that's even dumber than I thought. Especially given the amount of actual political discourse taking the form of "can you believe the woke left wants to allow doctors to trans your children at the age of 3 months!"

Could some of these people write a compelling pro-trans argument? Probably, given that their exaggerations are absurd, nonsensical , and/or contradictory on their face and that the pro-trans arguments are generally rooted in basic respect for people's autonomy over their own bodies. But that doesn't stop them from lying about what trans people actually want in order to gain political power by stoking the right's identitarian outrage.

To be fair, it's hard to really internalize that all these rich and powerful techbros are actually morons after all these years of journalists like Ezra Klein breathlessly reporting their weird ideas and baseless claims about what they were going to be able to do in the next couple of years.

True enough, but it feeds too beautifully into the terminator reference that closes it out.

And evidently:

🇳🇬 English (Magnified and Embellished)

I blame New York lack of bears, the natural enemy of libertarians.

Which I think in turn means we can blame RFK Jr apparently!

I think it's worth emphasizing that the biggest change between that idealized Internet and today's adware hell wasn't any technological change but a massive shift in who was using the internet, how, and why. The technological changes that led off of that were largely attempts to meet the needs of this new audience, and they largely did not have the technical skills to do their own administrative work and didn't have any interest in doing so anyways. That user base effectively requires some level of centralization, and since those centralized entities are explicitly about offloading the technical work of being online they are (in our current economic system) going to end up being primarily profit-driven as a way of ensuring the people who do that work are compensated. From there the advertising model of monetization has the distinct advantage of not making those users pay you anything because even though they're the product rather than the buyer it's really easy to sell something that's free. Social media completes the loop by giving those users tools not just to consume information without having to think about how it's done to letting them create their own online spaces and share their own work with each other, meaning that you no longer need to know even HTML or what a "server" is in order to fully take advantage of the internet.

Google and Facebook aren't the product of a sinister conspiracy trying to control the internet in order to push a woke ideology down the throats of an unwilling populace. Instead, they created services that streamline and moderate user's access to online information and nobody appears to have realized how much actual power that gave them over people's access to information (and by information I increasingly mean "the whole world") until they had already become economically dependent on selling that influence machine to the highest bidder in the form of advertising. All the technologies that enable the modern intermet and the associated problems and centralization on problematic platforms and companies were created in an attempt to meet the needs of users without any consideration for the kinds of social and economic structures that were embedded in those technological structures.

Zuckerberg and friends aren't evil geniuses who need to be stopped by a plucky band of good guys, they're a bunch of amoral idiots who have gained incredible personal wealth by stepping into a powerful role that was made systemically necessary without any consideration for who was going to fill it, and now we need to solve the problems of both how that power should be used by who and of how that power can be wrested from the hands of the people who have proven themselves categorically incapable or unwilling to use it responsibly but are making too much money to let go voluntarily.

"Digital Human" as a product class is straight-up dystopian, or at least would be if it made any kind of sense from a technical or economic perspective.

The discussion of creating a simulation as an escape room just makes me imagine that we're massively overcomplicating all this. Maybe we're wasting all this time trying to create a super intelligence to bash down the walls when really Gary just left one of the soup cans in the chest in the corner and we missed a clue somewhere.

I do remember part of the appeal for SETI@home back in the day was the ability to analyze the data that heuristics had ruled out but not conclusively, so it's not like there's no precedent. Of course the other benefit of BOINC was using the "spare" cycles in consumer hardware rather than purpose-building more massive power and water-hungry datacenters, so the cost was arguably negligible even if the benefits were similarly small.

I think you're right but I've also learned to never underestimate the level of cringe some people are capable of.

Of course one of the first things they try is torture, because "maybe the simulationists aren't as big of bastards as we are" is a reasonable hypothesis to test and not a reason to be locked up.

Also since we're messing with absurd thought experiments, I'd like to propose that when they declined consent the simulationists could actually just disable the part of that agent with a subjective personal experience, making them a P-zombie in the David Chalmers tradition. As such, they were no longer part of the simulation without adversely affecting any other aspect of it.

Is this stupid? Obviously, but let's be honest: it's probably less stupid than at least half of the actual paper.

You know, I feel like it's only a matter of time before someone in the overlapping griftoverse tries their hand at immanentizing the eschaton by creating their own second coming - the MessAIah.

The proud tradition of "no really, Trump isn't that bad if you pretend he's a normal libertarian who happens to be an asshole instead of listening to the words that come out of his mouth"

I've read enough of the Yudster's work to recognize that he is particularly vulnerable to being replaced by a small shell script that outputs a massive volume of text that says very little of substance, and what little there is is weirdly racist.

I think his aggressive contempt for the reader also makes TLP a much easier writer to bounce off of into a healthier direction. Like, I remember reading his stuff and thinking "wow, this guy is an asshole" and being more concerned than excited when something made sense. Eventually those parts that kind of made sense connected to a framework with less hate and rage.

And then the company behind it made the AI girlfriends less horny unless you paid for the premium plan.

My favorite part is that as with all LLM solutions it either spits out the correct answer or absolute nonsense. This calculator will never have a floating point error or screw up the order of operations, but it will sometimes decide that 2+2 equals "either 5 or 4.0000354, depending on how you measure it" even on the minimally-spicy settings.

Don't get me wrong, I think ending the de facto segregation we've ended up with needs to be a primary policy goal and that dealing with people not like themselves is going to do good for any kid all on its own. And the numbers parents use to figure out which schools are "better" are cooked to all hell, making trying to accurately judge school quality incredibly difficult. But that doesn't change the fact that some schools do have better outcomes or more problems than others, and while the broader systemic factors that create those problems need to be solved, expecting parents not to try and take care of their own kids first isn't a viable way to make that happen.

As sympathetic as I am to the parents and children for whom public school is a necessity rather than a choice, I don't think she's actually wrong here? Putting her kids in public school won't magically immediately increase funding, reduce student/teacher ratios, improve facilities, get reactionary Texas nonsense away from history curriculums, or otherwise fix whatever problems those schools have. Rather it will mean that more people in that school have the resources to Karen their way into getting the people who can fix those immediate problems to make them a priority, and there's a time lag in how quickly that can be done (assuming parents still care enough to agitate as their kids get older and graduate). And while there are a lot of very good reasons to assume that growing up in a family with those resources has a more immediate impact than which school your kids go to (i.e. her kids are still going to have access and interest in private tutoring, PTA involvement, and a home environment free from the stress of economic precarity and that will benefit them regardless of what school they go to), we still talk as though giving your kid a good education at a good school is the most important single thing you can do to help them be successful. If we're going to talk like going to a bad school is like playing Russian Roulette with your kids, I'm not comfortable with the logic that everyone has a moral duty to play because it reduces each individual's odds of losing, y'know?

Of course, given her proximity to the Ratsphere I'm probably being incredibly charitable and she's actually worried about having her kids spend time too close to genetically inferior races with mathematically-described low IQs or something.

Keeps me in a job, at least.