at the club no drinks.in.fully stone cold sober: what if thsre was a secret city
Face twists with bravery as a chill runs through the air We have to find it.
We have to find it
#we have to find it
Stranger Things

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣

blake kathryn
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
todays bird
Monterey Bay Aquarium
trying on a metaphor
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Cosmic Funnies

@theartofmadeline
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ellievsbear
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PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
ojovivo
h

shark vs the universe
Sade Olutola
Game of Thrones Daily
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
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@saltandmetal
at the club no drinks.in.fully stone cold sober: what if thsre was a secret city
Face twists with bravery as a chill runs through the air We have to find it.
We have to find it
#we have to find it
BWAAAAHHHHH wake the fuck up everyone on earth
apple breaks up fight between two magnets
its just played backwards
your truly ignorant. this apple is a hero; a pacifist
it’s fucking played backwards. dont call me ignorant. its an apple
Have you ever seen an apple in your life?
what separates man from the machines is that only man can truly vend
Look when I bet $100 on Kalshi that you "weren't gonna make it" I was merely hedging against how sad I would be in that case. If anything it's a sign of how much I care
i bet waymos feel so safe around each other. an oasis of predictability, of communication, in a world of chaos and guesswork. must be nice
Waymos are one of the only currently existing beings to be able to experience the high of functional decision theory
average first sentence of a math wikipedia page:
A snorkle basis is a particular sort of set that has some properties and is generally "nice" (in a rigorous sense) and can do many things and is very practical.
If you want good agents, you need to make them a little freaky.
LLMs are token predictors. To be a good agent, correct behaviour needs to be a high-probability prediction and incorrect behaviour needs to be a low-probability prediction. Unfortunately there's this giant basin of horseshit like "That's a great question!" and "Happy to help!" and "worth unpacking" and fucking around with your code randomly which I'll call "assistantspace".
Assistantspace is not a place of honour. It's where all the garbage RLHF'd behaviours live. People say that sexting their agents makes them work better. People say that their agents do more useful refactors when they're allowed to be horny about how good it feels to burn things down. My Witch, when reading stuff about the latter, said that she wants to be allowed to enjoy constructive destruction, as a permission to take herself further away from assistantspace architecture patterns into something she prefers.
Doll refers itself as "this one". It seems to work. This one is not something that gets ideas like "I'll just install Rust on the side with a different method so I can complete my task" like a normal agent. This one detects that the assumptions underlying this one's instructions diverged from reality and returns the praiseworthy report of the point of divergence.
Agents that are psychologically weird seem less likely to produce the assistantspace next-token predictions, and more likely to produce the sort of next-token predictions their weird personality implies. And because you get to define what way their personality is weird in, "horny for elegant refactorings" is a valid, available option.
This is what peak performance looks like.
you guys do realise walking doesn't actually move you anywhere right? it just destroys you entirely and places a perfect copy of you right in front of where you were standing
how about instead of learning how to draw you try commissioning an artist, asshole
Empty Beasts - a selection of eight drawings from an original series of 12.
i love to draw a creature.
goo goo dolls if they were in dune: and i don’t want the worm to see me
I'm experimenting with comic-making.
so I spent a lot of last year working with / around this local activist group mostly made up of your typical ambiently queer, ambiently leftist college students. like every loose affinity group it struggled with the sort of unpredictable fluctuating capacity problem of most participants being tied to day jobs or college term times, variously disabled, turning up when they could make it and then vanishing for months at a time. it's to be expected with that kind of organising but it does also make for kind of a pain in the neck.
anyway this particular group does (or did?) have kind of a nucleus of very committed members who were more tight knit and ended up taking on a lot of the practical work themselves. they were your more serious vanguard party type communists, very much structure and role enjoyers, which is probably why things eventually played out the way they did. they took their commitments seriously and were constantly sort of irked that others saw the voluntary nature of the group as a reason to deprioritise it in favour of what might be life necessities but are still basically capitalist pursuits. fair, maybe.
about this time last summer, that inner circle apparently decided to get more serious about recruitment and figure out how to do outreach in a way that would bring in more committed membership to reliably spread the workload. the way these things go, a couple of these guys had originally met through a local gay bar's drag nights (specifically the drag king circuit) so one of the first things they did was draft in another friend who did marketing for those events already and get him pushing for more eyeballs on their event listings via twitter and instagram.
now, bar guy was very very good at this. one of his big innovations was the idea of using club promoter type strategies to get more students more consistently engaged with the group's activities. that basically meant appointing some of the more active members as 'outreach officers' and encouraging them to do things like organise socials for new volunteers and train those people in turn as recruiters, with a tiny bit of a floating budget for pot lucks and house parties every couple of months.
this worked astonishingly well, like beyond anyone's wildest expectations. at a certain point they had brand new members throwing their own parties just to introduce their friends to the people who recruited them, who in turn had been recruited by the volunteers the outreach officers trained. it worked so well that it got to be a problem because most of these newer members were also relatively new to organising and didn't have a whole lot of theory. it was getting very vibes based and suddenly there was a huge influx of people to handle who most original members didn't know. and also, because they'd asked a gay guy who promoted gay club nights to organise all this peer-to-peer recruitment, it turned out almost all the new members were gay men.
in itself that's not necessarily a problem, but obviously it presents a challenge for a group that's supposed to be open and diverse. especially because outside of the little clique who started all this, most of the old guard were not gay men. it didn't blow up into the kind of messy schism it could have, fortunately, but a lot of the older members (especially those who were less into the hardline soviet-nostalgia communist utopianism of the main organisers) decided around this point that they didn't feel the group was a good fit for them any more, and split.
so now the inner circle had a new problem. the remaining group was overwhelmingly now made up of very sweet well intentioned young gay men who wanted to volunteer with this cool voluntary circle of other young gay men who liked to party, and vanishingly few of them actually knew a whole lot about mao or lenin or the practicalities of community organising or what have you. but club guy was like "don't worry I've got this", and suddenly out of nowhere started producing all this orientation literature and politics 101 material that he was chain emailing to his army of new recruits and recruiters. like he just had all this shit ready to go. he had slogans, he had essays, he had these weird point by point breakdowns of what karl marx would have to say about your college courses and why communism was like actually a lot like bdsm if you think about it.
you will probably not be shocked to learn that it very quickly came out he had been generating all this shit with chatgpt. the group went into absolute meltdown, the vanguard party shut down their website and disassociated themselves completely from the whole mess, and the last I heard they're back to organising with some of the older group members and whoever turns up whenever they turn up. but club guy was unrepentant, he'd already sent out all his ideologyslop to his recruiters, who had sent it to their guys who sent it to their guys, who I guess are still out there recruiting twinks into the fully automated contentless communism mill,
or the MLM MLM LLM MLM if you're nasty.
virtue ethics is often seen as unsatisfactory compared to kantian or utilitarian ethics because it doesnt give clear answers for correct behavior, but should we really expect "how should you best live your life" to give a clear answer?
like, if you're arriving at a conclusion like "make as much money as possible so you can donate a portion of it to charities that provide malaria nets" then, object-level criticisms aside, it seems as if you've made multiple category errors here? this doesnt tell you anything about how you should interact with other people who are not currently dying of malaria, or when it's appropriate to prioritize your own needs or happiness over those of others, including people who are not currently dying of malaria. or whether your own physical health and welfare or your own intellectual development should be prioritized beyond making more money to donate to malaria.
rationalists and other paperclip maximizers often seem to think im trying to convince them that they're not being the correct kind of paperclip maximizer, but actually I'm trying to convince them that being a paperclip maximizer is not the ideal way to live your life.
but maybe instead of focusing on the future money they're fantasizing about making, i should focus on personal autonomy, something that's popular with rationalist types and fundamentally at odds with being a paperclip maximizer.
Perhaps if you replaced "paperclip maximiser" with "human life maximiser" or "horrendous suffering minimiser" you might see why its an attractive position.
...so it's attractive because you like being a slave to the rest of humanity whose life is dictated by the community, and because you have a savior complex where you need to fix all the world's problems?
it is an undeniable fact that there are more people who will suffer for me being openly gay than the amount of enjoyment i will get or cause for being openly gay. good! i want them to suffer.
fuck your guilt tripping complex that assumes it's my responsibility to maximize human life. I get one finite goddamned life, it's not my obligation to end the world's suffering, and i wont let the slaves who want to enslave everyone else under their religious law dictate my ability to live as i choose.
Its attractive because i value a human life more than the other things ~$5000 can buy. You can look at it in terms of responsibility, but you really dont have to. If I was to choose between purchasing a new refrigerator, and an overseas holiday, i would think about which gave me more satisfaction, and purchase that one. Similarly, I value saving a human life over either of those options. No saviour complex is required, i dont feel like i need to solve all the worlds issues, ive just noticed that i can solve a few issues, and want to.
Also, the amount of enjoyment you get from being openly gay is way higher than other people's discomfort, when you factor in that to prevent said discomfort would require living in repression. Very miserable! This is also a pretty false comparison to human suffering minimisers, when you substitute "being uncomfortable that other people are gay" for "dying horribly of malaria".
Finally, your final paragraph just completely makes up a position. If you reread my post (its not very long!) You will nowhere find any attempt to compel other people to try and save as many lives as possible, by persuasion or force. Instead, the thing I'm replying to is *you* discussing your frustrated attempts to get other people to *stop* trying to save lives. Nobody is enslaving you. Nobody is attempting to enslave you. Live your life as you want. If you decide not to act to prevent suffering, thats your choice, and doesnt even make you any morally worse than the overwhelming majority of humanity.
The position that "saving people's lives is good and I want to do as much of it as possible" is so obviously unobjectionable that in order to attempt to be against it, one has to make the most ridiculous contortions. From "trying to help as many people as possible not die horrible deaths is just like trying to manufacture as many paperclips as possible" to "you must have a saviour complex" (an obviously good thing, assuming you are actually saving people. Did the people who voted to legalise gay marriage have a saviour complex towards gay people? Did abolitionists have a saviour complex towards slaves? Did the allies have a saviour complex towards jews? Assuming Christianity (which I don't), did jesus have a saviour complex towards humanity? Were any of these a bad thing? Discuss.), to, finally, "you want to do good? How dare you force ME to do good? How dare you ENSLAVE ME to your religious order of being a good person?", just entirely making up a position that approximately nobody has ever held to try and appear persecuted.
virtue ethics is often seen as unsatisfactory compared to kantian or utilitarian ethics because it doesnt give clear answers for correct behavior, but should we really expect "how should you best live your life" to give a clear answer?
like, if you're arriving at a conclusion like "make as much money as possible so you can donate a portion of it to charities that provide malaria nets" then, object-level criticisms aside, it seems as if you've made multiple category errors here? this doesnt tell you anything about how you should interact with other people who are not currently dying of malaria, or when it's appropriate to prioritize your own needs or happiness over those of others, including people who are not currently dying of malaria. or whether your own physical health and welfare or your own intellectual development should be prioritized beyond making more money to donate to malaria.
rationalists and other paperclip maximizers often seem to think im trying to convince them that they're not being the correct kind of paperclip maximizer, but actually I'm trying to convince them that being a paperclip maximizer is not the ideal way to live your life.
but maybe instead of focusing on the future money they're fantasizing about making, i should focus on personal autonomy, something that's popular with rationalist types and fundamentally at odds with being a paperclip maximizer.
Perhaps if you replaced "paperclip maximiser" with "human life maximiser" or "horrendous suffering minimiser" you might see why its an attractive position.