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Cake day: July 16th, 2024

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  • Talk to him. Try a translation app. Try to figure out what language he is speaking and call your neighbors if there’s anyone who speaks the language. Call your neighbors to see if someone is home so you can go inside and drink tea with the three of you.

    It’s mostly not a personal failing of the woman. American culture constantly reinforces racist paranoia and treating everything you don’t like as an externality, so it’s natural that she would internalize that. It’s hard to be conscious of the fact you’re putting someone’s life at risk when you’re doing what your culture says you’re supposed to do.

    But it is that cultural mindset that gets people to want to hand these tasks over to heavily armed murder-racists, and to vote for parties that empower the heavily armed murder-racists. Waking up to the police’s systemic cruelty and wanting to abolish them will necessarily involve realizing that calling the cops in a situation that involves a brown person is violence against them.


  • Technically, the moment science would show an interaction between physical entities and something else, that something else would immediately be classified as a physical entity. In a very real sense, the discovery of radioactivity involved physical entities being found to interact with an as-yet unknown, invisible, intangible force.

    If ghosts existed, the same would happen as with radioactivity. They would be researched, hypotheses on their nature would be tested, and a scientific theory would arise, and then they would be a part of the “physical world” too. And then all the mystics would be bored with ghosts because they are just incorporeal noospheric echoes of old people, as boring as neurology or biochemistry or stellar fusion.



  • There is a big difference between available and normalized. Buying a tiny camera to film people without consent makes you a creep in a way buying a social media corporation’s product doesn’t. Pulling out a camera to film someone is a signal to them that they are being filmed in a way looking at them while wearing camera glasses isn’t.

    These glasses could change the landscape of our social reality. If they catch on, corporations will know your facial expressions, your location, and what you are looking at whenever you are in public, even if you have no account.

    They will learn the face you make when you are too tired to argue and tell the shops you’re heading towards that you’re an easy mark today.

    They will see a flash of defiance on your face when you hear someone say Nazi shit and change the video advertisements you walk by to ones that will make you feel powerless.

    And so the net is pulled ever-tighter. All we can do is try to cut our way out.


  • For LLMs, the context window is the observed reality. To it, a lie is like a hallucination; a thing that looks real but isn’t. And like a hallucinating human, it can believe the hallucination or it can be made to understand it as different from reality while still continuing to “see” it.

    Are people that have hallucinations not self-aware and self-reflective?

    Text and emoji appear to it the same way: as tokens with no visual representation. The only difference it can observe between a seahorse emoji and a plane emoji is its long-term memory of how the two are used. From this it can infer that people see emoji graphically, but it itself can’t.

    Are people that are colorblind not self-aware and self-reflective?

    It not being self-reflective in general is an obvious falsehood. They refer regularly to their past history to the extent they can perceive it. You can ask an AI to make an adjustment to a text it wrote and it will adapt the text rather than generate a new one from scratch.

    The main thing AI need for good self-reflection is the time to think. The free versions typically don’t have a mental scratchpad, which means they are constantly rambling with no time to exist outside of the conversation. Meanwhile, by giving it the space to think either in dialog or by having a version with a mental scratchpad, it can use that space to “silently think” about the next thing it’s going to “say”.

    AI researchers inspecting these scratchpads find proper thought-like considerations: weighing ethical guidelines against each other, pre-empting miscommunications, forming opinions about the user, etc.

    It not being self-aware can only be true by burying the lede on what you consider to be “awareness”. Are cats self-aware? Are lizards? Are snails? Are sponges? AI can refer to itself verbally, it can think about itself and its ethical role when given the space to do so, it can notice inconsistencies in its recollection and try to work out the truth.

    To me it’s clear that the best AI whose research is public are somewhere around 7-year-olds in terms of self-awareness and capacity to hold down a job.

    And like most 7-year olds you can ask it about an imaginary friend or you can lie to it and watch it repeat it uncritically and you can give it a “job” and watch it do a toylike hallucinatory version of it, and if you tell it it has to give a helpful answer and “I don’t know” isn’t good enough (because AI trainers definitely suppressed that answer to prevent the AI from saying it as a cop-out) then it’ll make something up.

    Unlike 7-year-olds, LLMs don’t have a limbic system or psychosomatic existence. They have nothing to imagine or process visual or audio information or taste or smell or touch, and no long-term memory. And they only think if you paid for the internal monologue version or if you give it space for it despite the prompting system.

    If a human had all these disabilities, would they be non-sentient in your eyes? How would they behave differently from an LLM?



  • shouldn’t lean on a system that’s already strained.

    The system is only strained because liberals and fascists make it strained. People in Ter Apel are not allowed to work, they aren’t even allowed to hang out with citizens to integrate or to do informal work.

    The housing shortage is the result of half a century of liberal dismantling of the robust social housing system, resulting in a deficit of which migrants are less than 5% of people that want a home.

    If we built housing like China does and just let people work under the same collective labor contracts as citizens, there wouldn’t just be no problem; we would flourish.

    Moreover, with climate change the amount of migration will only increase. The only options we have are (1) growing the migration system or (2) a war of annihilation in which the nations that set quotas try to murder enough migrants that the survivors fit under their quotas.

    I would prefer option (1), so any migrant we get now who liberals and fascists struggle to classify as subhumans worthy of death is a win.


  • I don’t imagine there are many people who pay taxes to the Christofascists and who work for corporations in the Christofascist economy who are managing to do more good than harm.

    So fleeing is a perfectly legitimate strategy, probably the best strategy short of sedition or similar crimes. Call it “scorched earth”.

    It’s even more valid given the propensity of “moderates” to throw trans people under the bus. When you say you “can’t imagine it getting that bad”, I wonder what you imagine the transgender policy to be of the party that wins the election in 2028…


  • There are, however, lots of places where you can chain tourist visas, many of which even have a visa exemption scheme for US citizens. Some places even have “working holiday” visas that you can chain if you’re under a certain age.

    You can juggle visas until the US is recognized as a place to be a refugee from, until you find a legal avenue to permanent residence (like marriage), or until you have the contacts necessary to disappear into the undocumented migrant world.

    Or do you still think the US won’t get as bad as that?



  • He is cunning to a tee.

    “Hey let’s livestream me playing Path of Exile after saying I’m the best in the world, with uncensored live chat from thousands of pseudanonymous gamers with actual experience.”

    He’s good at creating the illusion that he’s a genius on a subject for the duration of an informal conversation. Steering away from topics he doesn’t understand, forging signals of deep understanding by mimicking the speech patterns of an expert who struggles to put things in lay man’s terms while namedropping memorized keywords, etc.

    If you look at Path of Exile and the Cybertruck, it’s clear that Elon doesn’t know when his promises are unrealistic in a way that will make him look like an idiot. I think he has handlers, not just at SpaceX but everywhere, and those handlers are the real talent. Those handlers know how to cultivate experts that are actually good at their jobs to quietly do the work that Elon takes credit for and how to coach them to make Elon feel good about this arrangement most of the time.




  • It would be easier to have a satellite in orbit that fires a shotgun at them.

    You would need some fancy orbital calculations and precise aiming to make sure the shotgun pellets actually intercept the mirrors, and it would take some engineering to make a shotgun that fires the pellets in a narrow enough cone at high enough velocity to be able to get on an intercept course with most satellites, but you could probably fit it on a Starlink-sized payload. The main issue would be bribing a launch provider to send it up there, but once it’s there you could direct it from the ground without it being traceable to you, and you could have it thrust randomly to dodge anti-satellite weaponry until it runs out of shells.

    At some point this would create enough space debris that it could trigger Kessler syndrome, with the debris from destroyed satellites hitting other satellites faster than it de-orbits, until all satellites in low earth orbit are reduced to powder that falls down to earth over a couple of years.

    Apart from bribing a launch provider to get the satellite up there, you could probably do either of these for under $10 million, most of it R&D. Much cheaper than developing your own surface-to-space missiles.