mozz

I somehow just realized now that the little blowfish character is OpenBSD

This is a good comic

I want to hear what AI experts I already think of as qualified (Yann LeCun or Rob Miles) think of this bill

@computerphile@mas.to

Or can anyone who’s still on Twitter just ask them?

It’s honestly most akin to an AI model over optimizing for the trained outcome even when it turns out it was misaligned from the good outcome we wanted.

They certainly don’t want their grandchildren to inhabit a barely-livable hellscape instead of the paradise world they were born into, but they’ve been optimizing for money for so long that it’s baked in now, and it’s so so easy to just say, well it’s probably not a big deal, or I don’t think the science is really all that dire in its predictions, or oh well someone else will probably figure it out. And so, every year, we keep setting records for “production”.

The mafia is not famous for being able to provide a stable environment which is safe for the people within it who follow the rules and can scale up to hundreds of millions of people while keeping everything relatively safe and reasonable

“We'll just kill everyone who threatens us” is a tempting solution for a government that is under threat, but the historical examples of that strategy playing out well for anyone even over the short term are few and far between, even when it seemed pretty justified at the time

Learning from people even if they don’t agree with all of your existing conclusions, or want to present well researched facts and conclusions that are outside the scope of your favorite model and your favorite facts to present, is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Case in point: I am genuinely curious, what would you say is the way to structure a society so that it won’t have within it the natural ingredients for collapsing into fascism over time? If you’re going to say (I assume) that capitalism will inevitably turn into fascism as time goes by?

(The book is obviously more complete and well researched than my one sentence summary alone, since it draws from 10-20 countries and the exact details of how fascism arose or didn’t in each one, and what might be the factors that were instrumental in why it happened the way it did in each. That factual analysis and examination of history to see how reality tends to play out I think is pretty invaluable to being able to understand. That said, your broader point, that maybe we shouldn’t get too deep into the nuts and bolts of how things play out once they reach the crisis point without looking firmly at the factors that brought the countries to the crisis point in the first place, I actually think is a really good point.)

Greta Thunberg talks about it in her book - if the bathtub is overflowing in your house and water is spilling across the floor everywhere, step 1 for most people is to turn off the water. Yes sure it is fine to look for towels and buckets to try to contain the damage (and I don’t even disagree with you that it’ll be needed), but that also assumes that they’ll work and there will be political support to deploy them at scale, instead of mustering up the political support to turn the fucking taps down since at this point that’s clearly needed and is relatively speaking much much easier.

Yeah. Little bit 1932 and a little bit 1861, maybe.

I know nothing about the guy, but I just skimmed over about 30 minutes of this and I can't tell what the hell he's talking about. As far as I can tell he's just talking in a funny cadence and listing people he really likes and from time to time touching real lightly on the idea that America does bad things sometimes.

Contrast that with (I just picked a random video from Youtube) Fred Hampton talking for 5 minutes and making simple, coherent, powerful points (among them hilariously enough being "we gonna have to do more than talk.")

I'm not trying to sit in judgement of West just because I watched one talk and didn't get anything from it. But I watched one talk and I didn't get anything from it. Does anyone have like a little TL;DR on what Cornel West believes and wants to make happen in the country?

You shouldn't be trying to kill your players, no. But it's also not your job to keep them alive. That's their business.

* 1932 politics

And then he grabbed the reporter by the front of his shirt with both hands, pulled him close, reeling in the fabric by twisting his fists, and sneered at him, inches from his face.

"And what are you going to do?" he asked, steadily, his voice quiet but with a hard edge of menace. His eyes were blazing. When there wasn't a reply, he suddenly dropped his arm back, and hit the other man's guts, hard, with one dark massive fist. As the reporter collapsed over coughing and flailing, backing up, Thomas boomed loudly, "I asked you a question, boy! I said what the fuck are you going to DO about it?"

The hapless man was occupied with gasping for breath, until Thomas started approaching him again, and he suddenly cried, "Nothing! I'm not... the one in charge of it, what would.. would I even do? What do you even mean?" He was still doubled over.

And then Thomas stopped, and broke into a broad, malicious grin, looking down at him. "That's right. You're not gonna do a God. Damned. Thing."

"Now get out."

Oooh ooh I know, we refuse to vote for his opponent because this is so tiresome that we have to do this every election / because his opponent isn't everything we wanted to have in terms of forward progress / because that'll show the system as a whole that we want better candidates and things will finally move forward as a result / etc

No? Because I have been assured that that is the answer