corbin

For what it's worth, a grand unified theory of Meta must include Bittorrent. The reason we have Llama is because its weights were leaked by Meta employees on 4chan and distributed via Bittorrent; going open-source was the most market-efficient way to save face. (See also previously, on Awful.) It is well-known inside lore that Facebook datacenters use Bittorrent to initialize and update machines. In the 2000s, folks used to say that Googlers look at Bayesian conditioning like classical programmers look at if-statements; similarly, you must understand that Meta/Facebook culture looks at Bittorrent the same way that we look at scp and rsync.

Non-consensual expressions of non-conventional sexuality are kink, and non-consensuality itself (along with regret, dubious consent, forced consent, and violations of consent) are kink too. Moreover, "kink" is not a word that needs reclaiming and wasn't used here as a slur.

If we are going to confront the full spectrum of Christofascism, we do need to consider not only their sex-negativity but also their particular kinks, including breeding, non-con, and non-con breeding, so that we can understand how those kinks interact with and propagate their religious beliefs. Also, sexology semantics for "kink" and "breeding kink" might not be as word-at-a-time as you suggest, akin to how the couple we're discussing probably wouldn't mind the words "press tour" or "mating" used to describe them but might balk at "mating press tour."

Alex O'Connor platformed Sabine on his philosophy podcast. I'm irritated that he is turning into Lex Friedman simply by being completely uncritical. Well, no, wait, he was critical of Bell's theorem, and even Sabine had to tell him that Bell's work is mathematically proven. This is what a philosophy degree does to your epistemology, I guess.

My main sneer here is just some links. See, Mary's Room is answered by neuroscience; Mary does experience something new when color vision is restored. In particular, check out the testimonials from this 2021 Oregon experiment that restored color vision to some folks born without it. Focusing on physics, I'd like to introduce you all to Richard Behiel, particularly his explanations of electromagnetism and the Anderson-Higgs mechanism; there are deeper explanations for electricity and magnets, my dude. Also, if you haven't yet, go read Alex's Wikipedia article, linked at the top of the sneer.

It's hard to get into the article's mood when I know that Lexis not only still exists but is now part of the Elsevier family; this is far from the worst thing that attorneys choose to do to themselves and others. Lawyers have been caught using OpenAI products in court filings and court appearances, and they have been punished accordingly; the legal profession does not seem prepared to let a "few hallucinated citations go overlooked," to quote the article's talking head.

Yeah, that's the most surprising part of the situation: not only are the SCP-8xxx series finding an appropriate meta by discussing the need to clean up SCP articles under ever-increasing pressure, but all of the precautions revolving around SCP-055 and SCP-914 turned out to be fully justified given what the techbros are trying to summon. It is no coincidence that the linked thread is by the guy who wrote SCP-3125, whose moral is roughly to not use blueprints from five-dimensional machine elves to create memetic hate machines.

Thanks for linking that. His point about teenagers and fiction is interesting to me because I started writing horror on the Internet in the pre-SCP era when I was maybe 13 or 14 but I didn't recognize the distinction between fiction and non-fiction until I was about 28. I think that it's easier for teenagers to latch onto the patterns of jargon than it is for them to imagine the jargon as describing a fictional world that has non-fictional amounts of descriptive detail.

The orange site has a thread. Best sneer so far is this post:

So you know when you're playing rocket ship in the living room but then your mom calls out "dinner time" and the rocket ship becomes an Amazon cardboard box again? Well this guy is an adult, and he's playing rocket ship with chatGPT. The only difference is he doesn't know it and there's no mommy calling him for dinner time to help him snap out of it.

I've done some of the numbers here, but don't stand by them enough to share. I do estimate that products like Cursor or Claude are being sold at roughly an 80-90% discount compared to what's sustainable, which is roughly in line with what Zitron has been saying, but it's not precise enough for serious predictions.

Your last paragraph makes me think. We often idealize blockchains with VMs, e.g. Ethereum, as a global distributed computer, if the computer were an old Raspberry Pi. But it is Byzantine distributed; the (IMO excessive) cost goes towards establishing a useful property. If I pick another old computer with a useful property, like a radiation-hardened chipset comparable to a Gamecube or G3 Mac, then we have a spectrum of computers to think about. One end of the spectrum is fast, one end is cheap, one end is Byzantine, one end is rad-hardened, etc. Even GPUs are part of this; they're not that fast, but can act in parallel over very wide data. In remarkably stark contrast, the cost of Transformers on GPUs doesn't actually go towards any useful property! Anything Transformers can do, a cheaper more specialized algorithm could have also done.

That's first-order ethics. Some of us have second-order ethics. The philosophical introduction to this is Smilansky's designer ethics. The wording is fairly odious, but the concept is simple: e.g. Heidegger was a Nazi, and that means that his opinions are suspect even if competently phrased and argued. A common example of this is discounting scientific claims put forth by creationists, intelligent-design proponents, and other apologists; they are arguing with a bias and it is fair to examine that bias.

You now have to argue that oxidative stress isn't suffering. Biology does not allow for humans to divide the world into the regions where suffering can be experienced and regions where it is absent. (The other branch contradicts the lived experience of anybody who has actually raised a sourdough starter; it is a living thing which requires food, water, and other care to remain homeostatic, and which changes in flavor due to environmental stress.)

Worse, your framing fails to meet one of the oldest objections to Singer's position, one which I still consider a knockout: you aren't going to convince the cats to stop eating intelligent mammals, and evidence suggests that cats suffer when force-fed a vegan diet.

When you come to Debate Club, make sure that your arguments are actually well-lubed and won't squeak when you swing them. You've tried to clumsily replay Singer's arguments without understanding their issues and how rhetoric has evolved since then. I would suggest watching some old George Carlin reruns; the man was a powerhouse of rhetoric.

Rick Rubin hasn't literally been caught with a dead woman like Phil Spector, but he's well-understood to be a talentless creep who radicalizes men with right-wing beliefs and harasses women. Nobody should be surprised that he's thrown in with grifters yet again, given his career.

Let's do veganism now. I'm allowed to do this because I still remember what lentil burgers taste like from when I dated a vegan at university. So, as with most vegans, Singer is blocked by the classical counting paradoxes from declaring that a certain number of eukaryotic cells makes something morally inedible, and the standard list of counterexamples works just fine for him. Also, I hear he eats shellfish, and geoducks are bigger than e.g. chicks or kittens (or whatever else we might not want to eat.) I don't know how he'd convince me that a SCOBY is fundamentally not deserving of the same moral insight either; I think we just do it by convention to avoid the cosmic horror of thinking how many yeast cells must die to make a loaf of bread, and most practicing vegans aren't even willing to pray for all the bugs that they accidentally squish.

I agree with everything else he puts forward, but it boils down to buying organic-farmed food and discouraging factory farming. Singer is heavy on sentiment but painfully light on biology.