Architeuthis @ Architeuthis @awful.systems

It's not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.

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2 yr. ago

That’s a problem in itself, don’t you think? It’s all very “Feminists hate sex and they want to erase the differences between the genders”. Julia gets a taste of freedom and her right place in the world by putting on makeup and girly clothes and having a lot of sex.

It's been to long for me to be able to tell if that applies to the general context of Orwell's views (which apparently I'm not sufficiently aware of) or if it's also a significant issue with 1984. In principle having the woman character employ cargo cult femininity in a desperate attempt at self expression shouldn't be unsalvageabl. Being the only woman with a speaking part and also a ditz less so.

Winston being a self-aggrandizing tit who needs things explained to him a lot so the author can soapbox was the sum of my reaction to the character, that he was also supposed to be relatable beyond the basics of his clash with authoritarianship certainly puts a different spin on things.

Why

Hot take time, I think when siskind was at the age that he decided there are some things he will never again change his mind about he happened to be downstream of some flavor of transhumanism that favored gene editing instead of cybernetic augmentations and brain uploads, and things kind of escalated from there.

Spotlighting eugenics-based IQ-maxing is probably his version of going all in on summoning the acausal robot god to fix everything, and also the substack money is pretty good.

The follow up article where normally he retreats to the motte and cherry picks comments from the previous one is somehow worse, we're now treating Lynn as obviously correct as "has been confirmed by later research which is harder to bias."

Yeah, many people tried to gotcha me with claims that Lynn did this or that or the other thing wrong. Lynn tries to defend his methodology here, but I think (and tried to argue in the post) that at this point, that debate is of historical interest only - there’s too much confirmation now. One commenter brings up World Bank Harmonized Learning Outcomes as an example. Another points me to this preprint, which tries to update Lynn’s numbers using all modern standardized testing data and correlations with social development index and GDP. They find mostly similar numbers to Lynn: Malawi goes from 60 → 66, and new last place goes to Sao Tome & Principe at 62. This is by people affiliated with Lynn and scientific racism, and you can choose not to trust their judgment either, but I think at least the SDI correlations are an extremely simple regression that it would be hard to fake.

Steve Saller is in the comments calling himself moderately reasonable. Also woke enabled pakistani rape gangs in the top comments.

Cracker Johnny calls this 'an unironically stunning and brave article and I'm here for it. I appreciate your post.'

TTLX thinks we should move to the obvious next step and finally start talking about how this is affected by deliberate sexual selection, combining inceldom and eugenics in a way that shouldn't be surprising to anyone. Siskind chimes in to say that seeing results in 2-3 generations is unlikely unless you get real hardcore about it and only allow the top 10% IQ havers to reproduce, otherwise more like 20-30 gen for 15 points, because that's how it worked for Askhenazis and also something something china.

E. Kirkegaard and his shitrag appear to be the sum total of his sources and he's still trying to do the enlightened centrist thing of couching everything in 'this is what people (who I implicitly consider qualified) have come up with to explain Lynn's {absurd bullshit}', which I guess at this point might possibly fool some of his Nepal-based readers (average IQ of 42 according to Lynn).

Uncharacteristically short post by slatescott, best he could come up with to explain how Lynn's results are worth considering once we choose to ignore his vibe based research methodology and how he's downstream of nazi money appears to be that:

• Lynn's research is in fact anti-racist because US blacks not being uniformly mentally disabled supports nurture over genetics wrt IQ and
• really low IQ scores achktually fail to capture mental disability because it is comorbid with all sorts of impairments besides low IQ, and it's really surely entirely possible to have a chat with a person who scored 60 on an IQ test and only realize something's off when you try to discuss the finer points of HPATMOR with them, so having a functional country where the median IQ is several standard deviations below normal shouldn't be out of the question.

Siskind doesn't give a shit. If we take the above at face value the obvious conclusion is that IQ is garbage at what it's supposed to be useful for, but the comment sections is currently full of HBD enthusiasts excited to finally be feeling seen and probably eager to send subscription money his way.

Huh.

I guess it stands to reason that the guy who made such a fuss about abusing language as a means to nefarious ends would himself have ideas about how it could be abused ethically.

To be clear, I mean to say that in society where it's life or death to be highly guarded and suspicious of everyone any romantic relationship is necessarily poisoned.

Plus I think there's a whole thing in the book about things being so restricted that fucking for fun is in itself an act of rebellion and thus another thing your partner has over you if they happen to need to give something up to the authorities.

linguistic purism

That must have been really subtle, all I remember is a concern specifically about how a sufficiently totalitarian regime may try to weaponize language as a further means of subjugation, not that language evolving is bad in principle.

Isn't Julia a member of some sort of anti-sex league, meaning there's a lot of bad faith involved in their relationship from the get go?

Also with respect to the attitudes on women and proles, although I don't think it's entirely written in the character's point of view it feels like there's a lot of unreliable narration going on, or at least you get a lot of stuff from the perspective of a person who grew up in one of the most absurdly totalitarian regimes in literature. Which is to say, it didn't feel prescriptive most of the time to me.

See also: "proles", as in the contempt is baked in to the language, which we know the regime is actively trying to hold in a tight leash.

They posted an update:

4hours later I now have a complete marketing department of agents, it works pretty well actually. I gave it a high level task around building a full campaign, and it is. Here is the social media manager agent off on it's own composing the tweets, the social media manager agent is build with 4 internal agents, but calls out to my hackernews agent and my google search agent when needed. It actually works super well... you can see it running here, the manager even told it to do all the tweets for the year, so I presume it's going to stop at 365 tweets, https://s.h4x.club/eDubwABJ

So their use case appears to be effective spam distribution, or "social media marketing campaigns".

I guess in most games where millisecond reactions are necessary you probably aren't doing much scenery gazing in the first place and can switch DLSS off without missing much (but you'll have to pay extra for it anyway).

The long term problem is that no doubt eventually the 30fps of shitty unoptimized gameplay should be enough for everyone rhetoric will move on to you will take 180fps that feel like 30 and like it.

Apparently they announced a $3.000 home computer that will be able to run 200B parameter models which is about half the params of the biggest downloadable model at this time.

Are they trying to compete with OpenAI's $200/month plan? No idea. The actual pitch seems to be you know AI is going to be everywhere soon so better lube up.

They also say if you buy one you get access to nvidia's AI tools to do whatever, probably to produce cutting edge quality AI media content or develop some hugely disruptive AI powered app, like the countless success stories we've had so far.

Molly White on one of the more obvious problems with betting markets

Tried to add the screenshot in the post but it won't work for some reason.

The comments are something else alright:

The part about kids is wrong. Per Aella's survey, many people report having masturbated well before puberty. Breeding and pregnancy were actually one of my earliest kinks when I was 7.

Base open source model just means some company commanding a great deal of capital and compute made the weights public to fuck with LLMaaS providers it can't directly compete with yet, it's not some guy in a garage training and RLFH them for months on end just to hand the result over to you to fine tune for writing caiaphas cain fanfiction.

That's some wildly disingenuous goal post moving when describing what was meant to be The Future of Finance™ at the time.

Like saying yeh, AGI was a pipedream and there's no disruption of technical professions to be seen anywhere, but you can't deny LLMs made it way easier for bad actors to actively fuck with elections, and the people posting autogenerated youtube slop 5.000 times a day sure did make some legitimate ad money.

Oh no, the premise of money and capitalism, my only weakness.

So many low-hanging fruits. Unbelievable fruits. You wouldn’t believe how low they’re hanging.

Zero interest rate period, when the taps of investor money were wide open and spraying at full volume because literally any investment promising some sort of return was a better proposition than having your assets slowly diminished by e.g. inflation in the usually safe investment vehicles.

Or something to that effect, I am not an economist.

Maybe EAs should ditch malaria nets and start subsidizing bum ticklers