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Cake day: July 15th, 2024

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  • I can’t believe you worked a B5 ref into a discussion, much less operational differences between Vorlon and Shadow.

    I’m technically not interested in any other kinds of discussions, but even explaining what this particular kind is takes work even from the closest people to me, so - compromises are to be made, weird posts are to be typed and sent.

    Major difference even in the analogy is that Shadows actively and destructively sought control and withheld info whereas Vorlons manipulated by parceling out cryptic messages.

    That’s the “planted gods for the lesser races”, “taught Minbari hyperspace travel”, “sent that Inquisitor guy with nice former hobbies” kind of Vorlons, right? Very cryptic.

    Removing filters from LLMs and training them on shitholes will have the expected result.

    I’m glad we don’t disagree.







  • Not necessarily, they train models on real world data, often of what people believe to be true, not what works, and those models are not yet able to perform experiments, register results and learn from them (what even a child does, even a dumb one), and real world is cruel, bigotry is not even the worst part of it, neither are anti-scientific beliefs. But unlike these models, the real world has more entropy.

    If you’ve seen Babylon V, the philosophy difference between Vorlons and Shadows was somewhere near this.

    One can say in philosophy blockchain is a Vorlon technology and LLMs are a Shadow technology (it’s funny, because technically it would be the other way around, one is kinda grassroots and the other is done by few groups with humongous amounts of data and computing resources), but ultimately they are both attempts to compensate what they see as wrong in the real world. Introducing new wrongs in their blind zones.

    (In some sense the reversal of alignment of Vorlons and Shadows, between philosophy and implementation, is right - you hide in technical traits of your tooling that which you can’t keep in your philosophy ; so “you’ll think what we tell you to think” works for Vorlons (or Democrats), but Republicans have to hide that inside tooling and mechanisms they prefer, while “power makes power” is something Democrats can’t just say, but can hide inside tooling they prefer or at least don’t fight too much. That’s why cryptocurrencies’ popularity came in one side’s ideological dominance time, and “AIs” in the others’. Maybe this is a word salad.)

    So, what I meant, - the degeneracy of such tools is the bias in his favor, there’s no need for anything else.





  • Russia fights for domestic political reasons.

    Wha-ha-ha? I live in Russia, I promise you nobody will demand continuation if they say on TV that Putin got assfucked by Ukrainians and we lost. I also don’t notice anybody speaking about that war much. If by domestic political reasons you mean that independent and well-existing Ukraine is a threat to the regime - then surely. Except not anymore, after what’s already happened it will take a lot of time to rebuild.

    Ukrainians fight to avoid annihilation.

    No, annihilation is what’s happening in Latakia, done by a former branch of ISIS which is suddenly good and accepted for the West, done in their “Syrian army” uniforms, and their commanders record videos with speeches like “do whatever you want, just don’t record it”, but there already are plenty of videos with empty streets with corpses of civilians lying around, people executed in all manners possible, families murdered together, and all such shit which I avoid since 2 days ago.

    Ukrainians fight to avoid something that almost every people on the globe has experienced, they would of course have former servicemen and especially officers jailed and possibly killed, politicians, activists, whoever not, but that’s not the same as genocide.

    Next for your tangent, that’s a gold medal performance in metal gymnastics to get where you got.

    This sentence looks like an attempt at irony, except it’s just stupid.

    First, we’re talking geopolitics here. There is no single “good” side and no single “evil” side. All sides will do things judged by others as evil. Second, to suggest russia is virtuous even by itself, is insultingly silly.

    You have to pick one. Also there are good and evil deeds, of course you’ll get the impression there’s no such if you listen to what people say.

    And compared to the rest of course Russia is virtuous, at some point (being a kid) my opinion of all those sides was that some are evil, but competent and thus make consistent things which eventually combine into something good, while Russia is both evil and incompetent, thus just shitting around. I no longer think so. I prefer incompetent Russia. Except nobody should rely upon it for security.

    Because right now it’s still spending enormous resources at trying to defeat its strongest former ally, while the rest of its former allies are somewhere between battered and dead.

    My whole theory is that maybe Russian leadership has learned something, had some internal changes, so that now they may be looking for an opening to stop the war and start rebuilding the rest of what they failed to keep operational.


  • I’ve read recently that Poland’s GDP per capita will soon surpass that of Japan.

    Stereotypes from 70s and 80s and even 90s, when you think about it, were repeated and prolonged and perpetuated by the Internet, and the mass media, and the whole climate of 90s+. They weren’t so solid when they existed. It was the reality, but the reality changes.

    I mean, even in my childhood (born in 1996, so not too old) it didn’t seem so weird that such things will happen in future, but the further the less likely it seemed.

    Now somehow everyone treats it as strange that Sony slowly sinks too.

    If they weren’t, they’d probably already made a PSP Slim form factor portable PC with a Unix-like OS, general-purpose, ignoring what everyone does with Android and iOS and such tomfoolery, it would be popular even if said OS would be a walled garden worse than Apple’s. Or maybe some other form factor, point being - Sony is that company that always had perfect ergonomics, they’d think of something, and very virtuous hardware engineering, so again they’d think of something.

    What they are doing instead - sigh.


  • Tech that will allow to murder all Sunni combatants in the world, tech that will allow to murder all monarchs in the world, tech that will allow to murder all politicians in the biggest countries …

    OK, ancap is not the left, it’s just that I feel that without ancap “balance of violence” idea there’s not much to say of the left, and with anarchist left it should kinda align.

    Because I’m just not interested with the colored-hair polyamorous UBI left, if these 3 things are more important for it than what is being done for their taxes in their name.


  • Because Russia needs a ceasefire “saving face” for its “elite”, in fact it’s, of course, not about saving face, their face is covered with piss, but about persuading themselves. I don’t think there are many war goals to be reached with further fighting. Russian and Ukrainian militaries now have something resembling parity in terms of professionalism and processes. Basically a huge polygon to train two armies. It just doesn’t make sense for them to fight each other IMHO.

    Anyway, with what Western-supported jihadist government is now doing in Syria (literally massacring Alawites and Christians on the coast, the EU has literally condemned Alawites for “rebelling”, accused them of massacring themselves and called them Assad supporters, Russia has released something meaningless, France and Greece some good words, but without actions, there’s been a UNSC meeting which ended with nothing ; there are a few thousands of people hiding on the Russian base, but Russia doesn’t have a good history at delivering on at least such expectations ; the last numbers of the dead I’ve seen were 7k-10k, 2 days ago, but nothing has stopped, apparently, and since Syria’s “new authorities” are already trying to persuade those refugees to leave the base, it appears they’ve killed much more), it’s the first time since 2022 that I started doubting that Russia is the bad boy here. Maybe those in Kremlin knew something I didn’t, having intelligence services and all that.

    Maybe the West is evil and Russia is virtuous for the sole reason it’s not part of the West.





  • You generally won’t understand another person (and adversary especially) if you don’t see how their actions perfectly make sense for them, and without conspiracies.

    So - there is one matching variant, that Musk sincerely hates bureaucratic kinds of power, but not proprietary kinds of power. Replacing a bureaucrat with (some imagined good) AI in another assumption would be replacing a mediocre human with inherent lust for power with an unreliable automaton, but without lust for power. The good part here is that humans are unreliable too and working bureaucracies compensate for that.

    The bad part is that for every failure a person should be responsible proportionally to their input. I’m not sure they’ll do that, or I’m sure they won’t.