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Cake day: July 16th, 2024

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  • Cached responses are healthy and natural, and they aren’t any more likely to be wrong than well-reasoned arguments.

    Like, suppose you were planning a dinner party with friends. One of them goes “person X? Ugh, can we not invite them?”, to which another friend goes into a long argument about why person X is totally better now. The first friend can’t really articulate what’s wrong, they just have a shitty feeling, and the arguments they use to explain that feeling are weak and full of holes. Which friend’s judgment would you be more inclined to trust?

    I for one would trust the friend with the feeling rather than the friend with the clearly reasoned argument 9 times out of 10.

    And so it is with LLMs/genAI. The reflexive repulsion towards them and towards people supporting them is well-earned. It’s healthy for people to set boundaries conservatively when so many genAI proponents are trying to weasel their way into acceptability with bad-faith comparisons, deliberate violation of “no genAI” boundaries as a form of gotcha, and a systematic lack of integration of critiques of genAI when trying to find new implementations. The Luddites were right, and so are anti-AI movements.

    All of which is to say, I think you got a false positive here, but you’ll get 'em next time.

    (You are correct that people do keep thinking about stuff and adding the impressions of those thoughts to the cached response. The analogy of a archive isn’t quite correct, it’s more like a giant pile of complaints that keeps getting added on to, that you need to shovel through to get back to that good point you heard 524 days ago, if it hasn’t disintegrated into abstract impression. I don’t think this changes the fundamental point, though, that usually the best reasons people have for believing something are not stored in their brain in a legible, rational format, and so the best actions - such as opposition to LLMs - are driven by emotional impression rather than thought).


  • Most LLM implementations to have come out in the past year have had introspection - a section of text where they’re prompted to think1 about the problem at a meta level which isn’t shown to the users. LLM engineers are actively working on expanding this into a more persistent, consistent, and functional world model - a bunch of text statements that other parts of the implementation are trained to treat1 as probably factually true, which it is regularly prompted to curate1 based on its interpretation1 of user input and other data.

    For example, an LLM might have a world model statement that says “As an LLM I may be running at different times. Before stating the current time with confidence, check the current time with an external source such as the UTC API.” so an introspection scratchpad it generates might be “To answer that question accurately I need to know the time. I will refer to the UTC API. Ah, it returned 12:17 on June 3rd 2026. Since Britain is currently at UTC+1 I can confidently say the sun is up in Britain”, and then the text the user sees is “Thank you for asking, the sun is currently up in Britain”.

    As for the lack of thought behind LLM backlash, that’s a factor of human psychology. In order to free up limited mental capacity, the human brain automatically simplifies rules it has learned consciously, imperfectly archiving the conscious method of learning it to long-term memory. People made up their minds about LLMs, and now the reasons are archived and no longer necessary for people’s response to LLMs. So now when people see LLMs, they don’t use the thought, they can just do the behavior they decided on and move on with their life.

    Re-litigating LLMs feels like going to an old archive and digging through dusty tomes. It can absolutely be worth it, but it’s an effort you’re not going to put in just because you see someone using it or praising it.

    Personally, my opposition to non-local LLMs is enshittification. Every habit you let become dependent on LLMs will be used to exploit you. Your habits before LLMs will be archived and too much effort to relearn, so you’ll pay out your ass for a worse service than what you used to be able to do yourself. My opposition to all LLMs is veganism, but that’s a story for a different comment.


    1: LLM instruction text anthropomorphises LLMs. LLMs don’t do these cognitive tasks the same way a human would.



  • The machismo is deconstructed, but the American chauvinism is real - they can’t even stick to the premise of the USSR/Soviets being a more credible antagonist to drive the space race forward. They give the US loads of tech upgrades from the space race, but the USSR does not get the same upgrades despite doing the same thing.

    The worldbuilding aspects are also kind of weak, with weird Final Destination-esque setpieces, and implausible political-economic just-so-stories to get main characters where the story wants them to be.

    All in all, I found it unbearably shallow.


  • This study does not include the 63 year old Michelle Yeoh in Wicked: For Good, which made $56 million in British box offices in 2025 according to the source the study claims to be using. Compare this to the $6 million made in the UK by Alleluyah, which the study does include.

    Trying to find more information about their methodology on their website:

    The dataset comprises the top 100 films released in the UK in 2023, 2024, and 2025, based on British Box Office gross figures sourced from Box Office Mojo. Rankings were determined using in-year release totals, with re-released films excluded. Actor age was standardised as age at the time of each film’s release.

    Lead cast members were identified using information scraped from the IMDb Full Cast & Crew page for each film. This was achieved using the AI tool Gemini and manually checked and updated by an internal team at Ageing Better. IMDb typically lists cast in an order that reflects the most complete on-screen credits, usually corresponding to end credits. However, this ordering may differ from poster billing, opening titles, or promotional materials, as some films present cast alphabetically, by order of appearance, or according to negotiated billing arrangements.

    lol

    I think the study simply fucked up. I found Yeoh in under five minutes of just checking the UK top 10, who knows how many other actresses Gemini overlooked that the “manual check” didn’t catch either.



  • “If you go for a walk, you’re still running laps around everybody who stayed home on the couch”

    Kids have got to learn how to not make stupid mistakes through practice. In the moment there are way too many things to re-examine and it’s natural default habits come back.

    At my first action I parked my bike 50m away and had to pass as an innocent bystander and no-sell the cops to get my bike back. That was stupid of me, but there were dozens of other things I did for the first time that I did a passable job at.

    It’s toxic to let mistakes outweigh everything.


  • Congratulations, you support eugenics. Historically governments have forcefully sterilized all sorts of people because their children would suffer unacceptably by the government’s standards.

    Now please look into the history of eugenics and see what the policy you support has meant in practice.

    Much like historical eugenics supporters, you are ignoring the outside factors that are causing someone’s suffering in your judgment, blaming a factory farmed chicken’s suffering on them being a “genetic freak” rather than on the people that lock them in cages shoulder to shoulder.

    The descendents of chickens will produce so many eggs that they will start rotting near the nest and become a health threat, so they need assistance with getting enough protein and with removing the eggs before they rot. This is not a life of suffering, they only need a tiny bit of assistance to live as full life as any bird.

    Chickens choose to make their nests in coops if they are built for them. Fences around a chicken yard are usually there to stop predators from murdering them and most chickens will not fly over them even if they can, as long as the fenced off area is large enough.

    The same goes for dairy cows, who need assistance getting the milk out because they produce more milk than their calfs can drink. A farmer with a bucket may be approached by cows that want to relieve the pressure.

    Some vegans consider honey to be provided with consent if the beekeeper is gentle enough. By the same standard, chicken eggs gotten when helping them clean their nest and milk gotten from cows whose udders would otherwise break would be vegan.

    Of course without killing the males, a farmer probably can’t saunter up to a cow and help them get the milk out quite as easily, but that’s a skill issue.




  • if 2 humans wanted to bring a child into existance that would suffer its whole life and then die of a heart attack into the world I would also say that’s immoral.

    So what would you want to do if they kept making such children? Imprison them? Forcefully sterilize them? Would you like the political system of your society to have the authority to decide what “suffering your entire life” is?


  • From what I can see, OP refused to answer the question because it’s a hardly relevant edge case. Could you link the comments where OP took the purist stance your original comment is a response to, and where OP responded in a purist way?


    Though to answer the question you pose for myself, I would say it’s up to Inuit to find a way to evolve their culture to become vegan while preserving the things they care about that don’t involve brutalizing animals. Cultures evolve all the time; the horse wasn’t native to the Americas but was happily adopted by nations across the North American and Argentinian steppe. This isn’t loss, it’s improvement. You aren’t entitled to hurt others just because it’s traditional to do so.

    And if some people refuse to let their culture evolve, and in some distant future activists have nothing better to do, and the ecosystem is at least as balanced if the animals aren’t killed1, and all less violent ways to apply pressure have been exhausted, then at some point it would be right for people to defend animals from hunters with deadly force, whether those hunters are Inuit or anything else. What those hunters want to do other die trying to kill others is up to them.

    Consider how rhinos are currently being protected with deadly force from poachers. There are lots of traditional cultures that want to hunt and kill rhinos for their bodies, but local governments have decided that the continued existence of rhinos as a species is more important than those rituals and the lives of those who want to enable those rituals.

    Do you think the people that are willing to kill traditional hunters to protect those rhinos are wrong?

    Though sad as it is, Inuit likely won’t have a choice. The ecosystem that relies on seasonal ice coverage and the necessity of cold adaptation is being undone. Climate change will drive most species Inuit traditionally hunt to extinction, or at the very least drive them north much further than the places Inuit have traditionally lived and reduce their populations below the point people (or other predators) can sustainably hunt them. Inuit culture will have to evolve or die without any person getting between them and animals they might hunt. So why not evolve into veganism while they’re at it?


    1: I personally don’t see a moral difference between predators of different species hunting animals to kill them and eat their flesh. Deer likely don’t care whether they are killed by buckshot, spear, or a wolf’s bite. For thousands of years Inuit were part of a balanced ecosystem as an apex predator, competing with polar bears, orcas, and birds of prey, and they were no worse than them. But in an ideal world, there world be no predators and no overpopulation of the animals they prey on.

    One day, when this is the most pressing issue, and we know there is a predator species that can’t be kept alive with a vegan diet and whose ecosystem can be balanced without them, I would be okay with letting that species go extinct rather than let prey animals suffer and die to feed them. Hopefully we can find better options, though.

    Without climate change, it would be quite possible that Inuit hunters turning vegan would destabilize the ecosystem by creating a surplus of herbivores that cause a collapse of populations lower down the food chain, or that it would end up with just as many animal deaths as other predators fill the ecological niche and there is just as much suffering. But now, polar bears are at risk of extinction in the wild, and the ecosystem is getting unbalanced in ways Inuit tradition never had to encounter.



  • It’s completely accurate. There are so many right wing arguments responding to this post it’s not even funny. So many white liberals setting the timetable to another’s liberation, so many LGB people who think the T is just going too far, so many workers threatening to vote for the party that dismantles workers’ rights if the pro-worker party supports migrants.

    And the same happens every time. Non-vegan self-identified leftists’ arguments against animal liberation are almost always right wing logic and right wing talking points.


  • Oh hey, you’re the same person that I responded to in a different comment on this post. I’ve given a more detailed explanation there, but you’re arguing against a straw man interpretation of the OP. It doesn’t say meat eaters can’t be leftist, it says self-identified leftists tend to argue against animal liberation with right wing arguments.

    So the OP is not exclusionary to meat eaters, it is only exclusionary to people that oppose animal liberation. Which is good because animal liberation is good. Trying to sell oneself to centrists by compromising one’s ideals, thus proving one has none and one will sell people out for political expedience in a heartbeat, has been catastrophic for left-wing parties throughout the western world for the past 40 years.


  • That’s not what it says. Go back and look: it says “leftism leaving people’s bodies as soon as you ask them about animal liberation”.

    This does not mean you can’t be leftist and eat meat. It merely observes that, often enough to be memeable, self-identified leftists pull out all the dogshit centrist/right wing arguments they would otherwise not just oppose but recognize as dogshit.

    You can see this in this thread; the majority of replies are “lgb without the t” tier arguments about the left going too far, about that level of moral purity simply not being feasible, about it not being politically expedient, threatening to join the right if that’s the way it is, judging a political position by its weirdest supporters, conjuring up the most niche edge cases as if those invalidate the structural change being proposed, and yes, railing against straw man versions of what they are seeing.

    Sadly, you do not make the cut here.

    Maybe you can process the fact you’ve been attacking a straw man and re-examine whether you still feel like OP threatens cultural erasure?


    Also, unrelated,

    Blanket statements should be opposed if they are wrong, even if they are in the spirit of good.

    It’s interesting. The statement discredits itself, and yet you made it in earnest. How?


  • Would you respond the same to a post saying “leftism leaving people’s bodies the moment someone mentions trans people”?

    How would you try to convince someone that their circle of caring is too small? That they don’t need to be perfect in how they handle that group as long as they acknowledge their shortcomings and work on getting better? That solidarity with victims is more important than solidarity with perpetrators that are more like you?




  • Oh, I had responded to it from my inbox and I thought it was a reply to my other comment on this post.

    It’s consistent, though. People whose response to being informed they are doing something bad is hostility are dangerous to put in any position of power, or even any social group, frankly. It’s only a matter of time until they do something bad that negatively affects the group and then try to use their power to try to remain in the group to cause more harm in the future.

    This is not a matter of moral purity, but of a healthy movement where problems are addressed before they become catastrophic.