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TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
ojovivo
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macklin celebrini has autism
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occasionally subtle
if i look back, i am lost
Keni
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
wallacepolsom
bliss lane
KIROKAZE
Stranger Things
🪼
Product Placement
RMH
Misplaced Lens Cap
seen from Switzerland
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@intimate-mirror
Men sometimes get breast cancer, but it is about 100x more common in women.
On the other hand, in the US, counting prisons, the data suggests men are approximately as likely to be raped as women. If you don't believe the data, I don't blame you, but it can't plausibly be more than a 10 to 1 ratio.
Breast cancer is so quantitatively different in this respect that I can't respect it as an analogy.
4. One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a "public good" which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of "digital public infrastructure." This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I've never met an open-weight models advocate who doesn't ultimately concede this is where things end. You'd be surprised how many 'accelerationists' lobbied me, while I was in government, to support an eleven or twelve-figure federally funded data center so that startups could train models at a subsidy and then give them away for free. There was no other way for AI to progress, they said. Perhaps this is the logical end state of things. Nonetheless, I find myself surprised to see supposed accelerationists excited about such an outcome. I think many of them just don't know what they're doing. Many accelerationists do not view the creation and serving of frontier models as a legitimate business.
5. I would guess that the Trump Administration will at some point realize that their best strategy here would be to create large amounts of regulatory risk around the use of open-weight Chinese models. You don't need to "ban open source" (one of the dumber motifs of AI policy discussion). You just need to direct every agency to issue soft law that creates FUD. "A Federal Reserve Advisory Bulletin found that there may be backdoors in Chinese AI models." It needn't be that well justified. You just create enough regulatory risk that every regulated enterprise backs off. You probably don't want to create so much regulatory risk that you scare off the hyperscalers from serving Chinese models; this will just drive startups to sketchier providers. There's a happy middle ground here. I'd assume they will do some version of this.
some interesting thoughts (!) from "head of strategic futures" openai
Sam Altman envisions AI as a metered utility like electricity, with pay-per-token billing. Critics see dystopian gatekeeping, supporters see
nothing Altman says can be trusted of course because he's a pathological liar (according to everyone who has ever interacted with him?) but this whole thing is incoherent: massive investment is required to create a utility that is too cheap to meter and doesn't earn any return; meanwhile open weight models will lead to a dystopian communist hellscape and must be stopped because they may deter the investment needed to create this unprofitable behemoth.
I do really love it when women write graphic and fucked up things. I feel like so often people react to fucked up fiction with “of course a disgusting man would write this 🙄” and it often carries an unspoken (honestly sometimes spoken) message of “a woman’s PURE and DELICATE and FEMININE mind could NEVER think of something this VILE”. Thank you women in fucked up fiction 🫡
Today’s prediction digest:
057431226444113751050325226702524054343626114254027710
Yesterday’s prediction:
The randomness beacon, at noon on Thursday, the 16th of July, 2026, will show its longest streak of ones as strictly less than ten .
(verify)
the thing is that for all its supposed faults, i would take this brand of 90s utopian globalism over whatever the fuck we’ve been doing for the last 10 years in a heartbeat
Jokes about people who adopt a stilted, "hyper precise" manner of speaking when getting into arguments just serve to reinforce the point that no matter how right or wrong you might be, in the eyes of many people, talking funny means you have automatically "lost" the argument. The people who do this are wrong about what the normative register is, but they are 100% correct that failing to present their arguments in the correct way will get them dismissed out of hand with zero consideration for the actual substance of what they have to say.
average gay guy problems: i have been hooking up with my hockey rival, but now i am developing feelings for him and nobody can know! >_< also nobody serves ginger ale
average lesbian problems: my wife died when an alien virus turned all of humanity into a hivemind and then said hivemind sent a woman who looks like a female version of my romantasy hero to charm me into complacency, which i resisted at first but then i got lonely and now i think i am falling for her >_< also john cena said the hivemind is eating people
I just saw a video title on YouTube that said something like “Why is glass transparent?” And that’s an interesting question and I’m sure it’s great that the video exists but my first thought was like “Because glass is terrible, obviously.” Because it’s unwieldy and let’s out warmth and needs to be heated to hundreds of degrees to be shaped and turns into hundreds of tiny daggers if you drop it. Why the hell would we bother with that if it didn’t have some magical quality like being totally transparent despite being solid? Glass is transparent because if it weren’t, we’d use something else.
looking through my “me” tag and this is apparently what I was thinking 3 years ago
If you’re still curious we did not start working glass for its transparency. It was most likely started as a sanitary concern. Glass is easy to clean with soap and water, once it’s cleaned out you can use it again for anything and no germs or flavor from the previous meal or drink will remain.
Other materials at the time, namely clay, would absorb flavors and germs meaning that if you ate beef off a clay plate your next meal with that plate could have beef flavor and microbes common on cow meat on it. That would leak out seemingly at random no less. Heck imagine a sick person coughing into their soup bowl and then months later their germs hiding in the clay would pop out to infect whole new people.
Also the earliest human use of glass we know of is for its sharpness. Pre-historic people would use volcanic glass as sharp knives for food preparation. Also beads. Pretty much any new substance humans get their hands on for most of our history we immediately try to make into beads.
The fact that it could become see through was a side benefit.
this is amazing and I’m really glad I reblogged that old bullshit post because I got to learn this
what the fuck are my mutuals doing
Settlers of catan
Saw these pieces of Supergirl by Peach Momoko for the first time today and they're like, the MOST accidentally Victoria Dallon I have ever seen in the wild. That's HER, you can't tell me otherwise.
Victoria's characterization is actually pretty in line with Kara's characterization in the comics in the mid to late-2000s (i.e. the period when Wildbow was still reading Big 2 comics): the world is terrible and she's pissed off about it.
On the one hand, "steps already have been taken towards a total compute surveillance state" is not a very good counterargument to concerns about a total compute surveillance state.
On the other hand, this is importantly not true in one respect: if you talk to an open-weight model you are running on your own machines (or, realistically, on the cloud), your conversations do not get reported to the government if you say anything scary enough.
It is specifically the kind of compute centralization which Plan A is pushing for where this can get a couple extra 9s of reliability compared to the current situation.
Many people back in the day were worried that "ai safety" concerns about it killing everyone would get merged into the same concept as people worrying about like algorithmic fairness.
Thankfully, this has been avoided.
But it does seem like people treat ai notkilleveryoneism as basically the same sort of worry as tough-on-crime/war-on-terror kinds of safety concerns, to which I am not very sympathetic.
It would be nice if the different goals people have (and associated definitions of alignment) were better separated so it can be easier to discuss them case by case.
The goal of open weights is NOT "no single point of failure for government censorship".
All this stuff about multiple governments getting access to compute may be good at preventing a couple countries from dominating everybody else, but it does not help the individual in the conflict between individuals and their governments. Open weights does, because it would be prohibitively expensive to enforce laws against existing open weights models.
one day, i hope to be moved from your downloads folder into somewhere more deliberate
I saw Backrooms yesterday, and I felt like there was some conceptual / aesthetic / thematic overlap with the Long Stairs from Worth The Candle and also the dungeons from Dungeons. If you've seen the movie: do you have any thoughts about that?
Oh, definitely, I think repetition on a theme and the infinite are both central authorial preoccupations (not repeating myself, but the idea of patterns and what happens when you get at the fringes of them, when they decompose). Degenerate cycles and repeating patterns was one of the more central aspects of WtC.
And for myself, getting caught in bad patterns, wearing a rut in the mind, endless rumination, is one of the main things that causes bad mental health.
The main distinction that I would draw with the Backrooms is that the Backrooms themselves seem to be a copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy, an imperfect recreation drawn from the subconscious or something. There's something about our culture in there, the detritus of corporate design output, the way you see a million pale imitators. My read on the movie is that it's at least partly a Zoomer feeling of living in the shadow of the recent past, but one that's stripped of any corporate iconography. Liminality is part of the zeitgeist, a feeling of being between places, not quite one thing or another.
And the thing that draws me in is a bit different, I think. It's more the idea that there are endless, oppressive possibilities, too much media, too many symbols, and the underlying patterns give rise to dizzying variation that's nevertheless constrained by the generation method. The Long Stairs part of WtC does share some DNA with the Backrooms, and holds some of the same horror, but the directionality of it is different from what the movie is doing, mostly because the things we fear are different.
