‮Jeff Eaton

18h

the year is 2036. conservative politicians speak a prosodically loaded dialect whose lexicon consists only of the words “america,” “communist,” and “ass”

Let us imagine that a company introduces a new, advanced biofuel reactor. They proudly announce that it will render the modern energy industry obsolete, radically altering the economy of the future.

However, imagine there are three problems: 1. The “bio” it uses is orphans. 2. It is 10x more expensive and dirtier than oil. 3. Its funders are counting on the projected GDP boost from eliminating all those orphans.

The complicated and undeniable truth is that their biofuel reactor *does* do something new and innovative, and that would be true even with a different source of biomass. And the efficiency and cleanliness issues could well be solved over time, making it better. But… that last bit.

Good first two thirds, but I really feel like Sense And Sensibility could’ve done without the jet ski chase scene

This is something I found very interesting as I started to leave conservative spheres in the early aughts. The idea of an “elite” is linguistically flexible: an elite runner, the financial elite, the cultural elite, and the political elite are all signifiers of VERY different things.

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Conservative resentment in the 70s-90s was colored by with having dominated business, but lost influence in academia and broader culture. “Elites” became a way for the politically powerful and financially wealthy to imply that they were put-upon everymen in the face of professors and poets.

Education, the arts, public service work — there is a deep strain of disdain for these unprofitable but important roles. They love to claim they’re both unimportant and inconsequential… AND that they’re powerful interests bent on locking innocent conservatives out of institutions.

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Resentment is kind of baked into populism, but there is distinction to be found between “a writer whose work is broadly respected” and “a business mogul with the power to decide who works and doesn’t,” or “a professor recognized as an expert in their field” and “the donor who funds the college.”

‮Jeff Eaton reposted

Randall Munroe

@xkcd.com

Vulnerability xkcd.com/3314/

Don Giovanni: Manosphere Influencer and Independent Peptide Distributor

One of the hardest parts about going from “specialty practitioner in a niche industry that nevertheless affects a lot of peoples’ lives” to “part of an org that sells products to that industry” is realizing and accepting that a lot of people in most businesses just don’t care about the industry.

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you shouldn’t have to buy into the box making company’s big vision about Why Boxes Matter and why Crunch Resistance Is The Green Flag Of Quality to just get a fucking box to put some stuff in.

but it is deeply ironic to be a guy who has spent a few decades REALLY CARING ABOUT CARDBOARD and working hard to push the state of the art forward, accepting that even in the cardboard box industry it’s an uphill fight to get people to give a shit about their boxes.

And in a lot of ways that’s okay. It’s a cliche that you shouldn’t have to buy into the deep world-shaking mission of, like, cardboard-box-making to hold down a job at the cardboard factory, no matter how much hiring managers wish you did.

siri are llms couscous

Purity-culture/trad-whatever sexual-ethics is confusingly horrifying for most people, because it’s an extended exercise in maintaining linguistic compatibility with modern culture without actually incorporating the concept of consent. If you don’t realize that bit has been rejected, it’s a maze.

In that scenario, the listener ends up nodding thoughtfully to broad statements of ideals and virtues, then record-scratch halting when they encounter stuff like “oh yeah, abused children are complicit in corrupting their abusers” lurking under the surface of consentless-ethics ideology.

Gotta admire the dedication of a kitten who will just lay on the kitchen floor, staring into the middle distance in this pose for like 10 minutes for no apparent reason

I don’t think people are starved for that. I think humanity had been thrashing out the details for a while, with varying degrees of success, and our current moment is what it looks like when wreckers don’t *want* to live together ethically and morally with anyone else.

Weird Alger Hiss 🎉 𓅳@itsjoelokay.bsky.social

uh, let me be clear, *most unclear and wishy-washy drivel conceivable*

“How do we live together“ is not the same question as “How do we live together with people who don’t want to live together with other people”

I say that not because I’m a doomer, but because I spent a good chunk of my life in a group that fit that description. If part of your society views coexistence and equity as a failure, not a victory, that is a first-order alignment problem to iron out, not an implementation detail.

This comment here absolutely defines the dangerous part of assistive AI. Figuring things out *is* a rush. When you’re learning, that’s the feedback loop that keeps you going, and eventually gets you to the place where you can make and own the more nuanced and complicated decisions.

Ed@ed3d.net

I do wonder how much of it is the obsession over vaguely defining an output and dopamine-farming when it at first glance (but not second) looks plausible doing hard work sucks, it’s too bad that that’s how you do good work

Vernor Vinge’s narrative aside in A Deepness In The Sky — thousands of years of software cruft, impenetrable and unpredictable but mediated by AI assistants — is feeling a little too close. Interesting that Pham, the book’s center of gravity, becomes the master of an army simply by digging deeper.

@kevinr.free-dissociation.com

I think we can all agree that if Community were still going, any problems would be overshadowed by how amazingly perfect the “Dean Pelton Gets AI Psychosis” episode was

‮Jeff Eaton reposted

Kevin Riggle

Replying to @kevinr.free-dissociation.com

As a cybersecurity consultant, people are constantly asking me how they can have their cake and eat it too, and the answer is: I'm sorry, but sometimes there are hard trade-offs, and here you simply can't.

21 Sept

Hypercalvinism with GPUs and a trilby.

19 Sept

This is a terrible time for systems thinkers, in part because nobody wants to listen to systems thinkers about stuff they’ve been saying for years, so now systems thinkers have to watch deeply incurious people reinvent systems thinking from first principles

18 Sept

Imagine the entire automobile safety universe was dominated by Cars Truthers. Like, people who believe the movie Cars is a documentary. Everything they write about crash testing, engineering standards, etc has this weird tinge and you can’t put your finger on it until… Oh. Oh no.

Erin Kissane@kissane.myatproto.social

I think a lot of stupid and malicious things will occur bc humans tell the robots to do stupid and/or malicious things, bc that already happens. You just don’t need an apocalyptic sex cult to think about that.

17 Sept

Oh look, the latest issue of the preeminent semi regular outsider zine on the topic of the hypertext markup language

16 Sept

novelty barbarian/bard multiclass here he comes

15 Sept

the most exhausted imaginable “yes, this”

Max Read@maxread.info

i don't like that i feel like we're all getting dragged against our will into an all-media all-the-time LessWrong thread, an insanely annoying and disorienting experience that most people do not have sufficient experience or mental preparations to deal with

11 Sept

one fun part of using your own public content creations over the years as a demo data source for an llm processing pipeline is being reminded of just how many of your public taglines and profile blurbs are prompt injection attacks

10 Sept

Lotta work with AI stuff for the job of late. And by that I mean “being pleasantly impressed with demo level output and unshocked at the limits of scaling it to real-world levels of contextual ambiguity, then slogging through the work of formalizing the connective tissue that human teams intuit”

9 Sept

building a big searchable repository of everything I've ever said, written, bookmarked, archived, or taken a picture of. same as ever.

Karen Attiah@karenattiah.bsky.social

What are you doing with your midlife existential crisis? No wrong answers. Just trying to see something, as the kids say.

8 Sept

so, today I discovered that apparently some people read david brooks unironically?

malkovich malkovich?

MeidasTouch@meidastouch.com

Trump suggests renaming New Mexico to "New America"

It is grimly fascinating that fundamentalist evangelical culture in America spent a generation or two ranting about the evils of “cultural” Christianity over true faith.

The current waves of reactionary theo-bros take faith seriously in the sense that tech influencers take linux kernel disputes seriously: It is the meta, and even if the details are irrelevant, the meta matters.

Culture war *is* their culture at this point.

It is grimly fascinating that fundamentalist evangelical culture in America spent a generation or two ranting about the evils of “cultural” Christianity over true faith.

And now the most virulent form of “cultural christianity” imaginable has metastasized and devoured it. A wave of reactionaries who like the aesthetics of totalizing patriarchal authoritarianism and don’t give two fucks about doctrine beyond rhetoric. Vance doesn’t believe things, he opts into them.