RobotOverlord525's recent activity
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Comment on "Is democracy a fad?" Ben Garfinkel’s sobering forecast for democracy in the automation age. in ~tech
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Comment on "Is democracy a fad?" Ben Garfinkel’s sobering forecast for democracy in the automation age. in ~tech
RobotOverlord525 LinkIronically, I came across this in Dario Amodei's big utopian essay on what AI is doing to do for us. Democracy has only been common for the last 200 years—a blink in the 5,000-year history of...Ironically, I came across this in Dario Amodei's big utopian essay on what AI is doing to do for us.
Democracy has only been common for the last 200 years—a blink in the 5,000-year history of states. In this post, AI policy researcher Ben Garfinkel explores why that might not last, especially as automation reshapes the social contract.
When I imagine a potential doomsday scenario of automation, this is pretty close to what I'm thinking of. Less Skynet and more robotic-powered authoritarianism.
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"Is democracy a fad?" Ben Garfinkel’s sobering forecast for democracy in the automation age.
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Comment on Passing the torch - Discord is getting a new CEO in ~tech
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentAbsolutely. The annoying store banners they've added over the last few months have been the hint that they were starting to head down this road. While I'm sympathetic for the need for funding...My prediction is that this will lead to enshitification as Discord tries to maximise shareholder value.
Absolutely. The annoying store banners they've added over the last few months have been the hint that they were starting to head down this road. While I'm sympathetic for the need for funding (just hosting all of the stuff free users upload indefinitely can't be cheap), "notification" style ads are a huge annoyance for me.
These days, I rarely use any of the voice or video functionality. Instead, it's how my weekly D&D group communicates with one another outside of the game and has been the number one way I chat with my brother and, during work hours, my wife. (We used to use Google Hangouts, but then Google did the Google thing of killing it.) Discord has a lot of handy chat functionality that I appreciate.
Time to start shopping for a new chat platform, I guess. Ideally one my D&D group can upload images to.
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Comment on What's something that makes you feel like we're living in the future? in ~talk
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentI have a condition that makes typing painful. The fact that I can still work by speaking to my computer is a miracle. (It's also a constantly annoyance, but I recognize that the frustrations of...I have a condition that makes typing painful. The fact that I can still work by speaking to my computer is a miracle. (It's also a constantly annoyance, but I recognize that the frustrations of using Dragon NaturallySpeaking are peak first world problems.)
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Comment on What's something that makes you feel like we're living in the future? in ~talk
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentOn a related note, if you would like some "fun" reading, I came across this a while back. It's kind of what I was already thinking as far as all of this LLM AI economic apocalypse topic is...On a related note, if you would like some "fun" reading, I came across this a while back. It's kind of what I was already thinking as far as all of this LLM AI economic apocalypse topic is concerned.
(It was, ironically enough, in Dario Amodei's techno-utopian essay that was making the rounds months ago.)
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Comment on Long-term experiences with Google search alternatives? in ~tech
RobotOverlord525 (edited )Link ParentI'm curious exactly how this works. My concern would be that, if Kagi strictly searches for exactly what is typed rather than intelligently incorporating synonyms and alternate spellings, it could...it searches FOR WHAT I TYPE IN instead of what it thinks I want. If I search for how to solve a bug in DeDRM in Calibre on Linux, the first page of results aren't HowToGeek type articles on how to setup Calibre on Windows.
for real: your search operators work again!
I'm curious exactly how this works. My concern would be that, if Kagi strictly searches for exactly what is typed rather than intelligently incorporating synonyms and alternate spellings, it could lead to missing relevant results. For example, a search for "color" might not return results with "colour," or "DeDRM" might not match "De-DRM." This rigidity could make searches less effective, especially when users aren't aware of alternate terms commonly used for the same concept.
Though, having said that, I'm entirely too aware that Google has gone too far in the other direction with this. I feel like they had a happy medium on it at one point not too long ago but they've lost it.
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Comment on Texas officials report that an unvaccinated child has died of measles in ~health
RobotOverlord525 (edited )Link ParentIf you've ever wondered why people don’t change their minds in the face of overwhelming facts, there are two books that I read last year that I think answer the question better than anything else...- Exemplary
If you've ever wondered why people don’t change their minds in the face of overwhelming facts, there are two books that I read last year that I think answer the question better than anything else I've seen. I've mentioned them before. The first is How Minds Change by David McRaney and the second is Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein. In short, more often than not, belief change isn’t about logic—it’s about identity.
As Klein writes,
Human beings evolved to exist in groups. To be part of a group, and to see that group thrive, meant survival. To be exiled from a group, or to see your group crushed by its enemies, could mean death. Is it really so strange that we evolved to feel the life-and-death stakes of group belonging and status?
Klein explains that political and social beliefs are tied to group identity, meaning changing your mind often feels like betraying your community and, more to the point, risking exile from it. This is why people resist facts that challenge their group's views. McRaney digs even deeper into the psychology, showing that traditional debate fails because of motivated reasoning, the backfire effect, and identity-protective cognition. Instead, real change happens from self-reflection that only happens when we don't feel threatened (psychologically on an individual level as well as in the sense of our status in our social groups). Rather than bombarding people with facts, McRaney uses the example of "deep canvassing" (and similar techniques like "street epistemology") to show techniques that are shockingly effective at changing people's minds by connecting an issue to their own experiences, provoking reductions in cognitive dissonance. Further, a great example referenced repeatedly in the book is how public opinion on gay marriage shifted rapidly—not because of better arguments, but because the broader culture changed and it didn't feel like a betrayal of group identity to change stance on the issue.
So how do we make it so that vaccination isn't politicized and therefore linked to group identity? I wish I knew. It's going to require powerful forces within conservatism itself to do that. (To say nothing of the generally left-leaning "wellness" community.)
McRaney, towards the end, says,
We’ve seen many ways to get people through the natural mind-change process—and we’ve seen the persuasion techniques that deliver the best results. We’ve learned to counter the effects of tribal psychology; create better online worlds to tap into what gave us the ability to change our minds in the first place; use the genetic gifts of assimilation and accommodation, reasoning, elaboration, perspective-taking, and social learning that give argumentation the power to change the minds of people bound within SURFPADified and tribal ideologies. Scaled up, these paths to change disturb the status quo when the network effects we’ve discussed create the conditions that make cascades of change unpredictable. But no status quo is eternal. Every system occasionally grows fragile. The key to changing a nation, or a planet, is persistence.
At any one time, for any given system, thousands of us are banging away at it hoping to make the difference that changes the world, but no one knows where the vulnerable cluster is at. No one can will the system to cascade for them.
The system must become vulnerable. When it is, with so many people banging away, it is inevitable that someone will start the cascade that changes everything, but that someone isn’t preordained. You need no special privilege to start striking at the status quo, because no one is in control. What you are in control of is whether or not you stop striking. And if the change you want to make is big, you may need to strike all your life.
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Comment on Google may be close to launching YouTube Premium Lite in ~tech
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentInteresting. I wonder if that's related to that heatmap that displays "popular" parts of videos. (Naturally, the end of sponsored segments are very popular.) I don't think I've ever been able to...Interesting. I wonder if that's related to that heatmap that displays "popular" parts of videos. (Naturally, the end of sponsored segments are very popular.) I don't think I've ever been able to skip right to that most popular point exactly, but maybe that's just reflective of how much my YouTube watching is on my TV. I'll have to keep an eye out for it.
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Comment on Looking for low-precision, mouse-only Steam game recommendations in ~games
RobotOverlord525 (edited )LinkMy wife is absolutely addicted to Brotato and I feel it'd probably work in this situation. She plays it WASD (no mouse) and I play it with just the left stick on a controller. Seems like it could...My wife is absolutely addicted to Brotato and I feel it'd probably work in this situation. She plays it WASD (no mouse) and I play it with just the left stick on a controller. Seems like it could be played fine on a touchscreen since it's possible to play with just a mouse.
It's surprisingly entertaining for a game whose gameplay consists only of moving your character and buying randomized (roguelite) upgrades. I've got 97 hours on it, my wife has 195. (My brother got it for us and has around 25.)
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Comment on Google may be close to launching YouTube Premium Lite in ~tech
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentI've seen tipping as an option on YouTube sometimes now. Not often, and certainly not on my TV, but it's occasionally there. I've never used it, though.I've seen tipping as an option on YouTube sometimes now. Not often, and certainly not on my TV, but it's occasionally there. I've never used it, though.
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Comment on Google may be close to launching YouTube Premium Lite in ~tech
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentHow so?YouTube is scummy,
How so?
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Comment on Google may be close to launching YouTube Premium Lite in ~tech
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentI have Premium and don't use ReVanced or Sponsorblock. There's definitely nothing to let me manually skip, much less automatically skip, sponsored segments.I have Premium and don't use ReVanced or Sponsorblock. There's definitely nothing to let me manually skip, much less automatically skip, sponsored segments.
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Comment on Grammar errors that actually matter, or: the thread where we all become prescriptivists in ~humanities.languages
RobotOverlord525 (edited )Link ParentHear, hear. Spoken language is a human universal (as is language evolution) but written language is no more than a tool that we have developed in order to represent that. To some extent, a written...Hear, hear. Spoken language is a human universal (as is language evolution) but written language is no more than a tool that we have developed in order to represent that. To some extent, a written language fails when it fails to properly represent the spoken language as it evolves.
I remember being incredibly amazed in high school that Spanish is as phonetic as it is. But this isn't any accident. It's due to reforms by the Real Academia Española, which standardized spelling based on pronunciation. (They also invented the very cool inverted question mark and inverted exclamation point that I've long been jealous English doesn't have.) English isn't as phonetic as Spanish because we don't have an equivalent body to perform spelling reform. American English got a slight spelling reform in the 19th century, but that was basically it. As a result, written English is failing to evolve to keep up with the evolution of spoken English. (To be clear, I'm entirely too aware of why we will never have meaningful spelling reform in English. The written language is, for better or worse, frozen for as long as we keep using the Roman alphabet.)
Given that, I don't think it's entirely inappropriate pedantry in order to correct written English when it's "breaking the rules" in a sense of failing to properly represent spoken English. (Though to be completely honest, I am guilty of engaging in indefensible levels of pedantry on a regular basis, as my wife and my brother can both attest.)
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Comment on What were some artists, groups or albums that had an influence on you before you were old enough to choose for yourself? in ~music
RobotOverlord525 LinkWhen I was young, my parents listened to a lot of '80s pop music. They had some cassettes we listened to in the car a lot, too. Michael Jackson's Off the Wall and Thriller (but not the title track...When I was young, my parents listened to a lot of '80s pop music. They had some cassettes we listened to in the car a lot, too. Michael Jackson's Off the Wall and Thriller (but not the title track because it scared me) and some Billy Ocean album come to mind. But we listened to the radio a lot, too, so I got exposed to all the Top 40 stuff from the '80s.
I spent many years not listening to pop music (I started to hate it in the '90s when I discovered metal in high school), but I looked some of it up on Spotify some years back and it was a huge nostalgia hit. Amusingly, my daughter really likes it. (And doesn't like my '90s/early-'00s metal art all.) I like to tell myself that '80s pop music is just fundamentally better than '90s pop music.
Curiously, I never could tolerate the '50s and '60s pop music ("oldies") that my mom also used to listen to. Everytime she put Elvis on it drove me crazy. I have a theory that she didn't listen to as much of it when I was really young as she did when I was in, like, middle school. But I could be wrong. Whatever the case, the '80s pop stuck but the older stuff didn't.
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Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of February 17 in ~society
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentI'm surprised they've remained on good terms as long as they have so far, too, but I will be absolutely shocked if they don't end up hating each other at some point. You can't put two narcissists...I'm surprised they've remained on good terms as long as they have so far, too, but I will be absolutely shocked if they don't end up hating each other at some point. You can't put two narcissists that extreme together forever and not expect them to come to blows.
On the other hand, I also thought this country would never in a million years elect such a stupid con man as Trump, so what do I know?
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Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of February 17 in ~society
RobotOverlord525 LinkI took a peek out of my news/politics hole to see what Ezra Klein was talking about and found this interesting interview he did about Elon Musk with Kara Swisher. (Transcript available here.) I...I took a peek out of my news/politics hole to see what Ezra Klein was talking about and found this interesting interview he did about Elon Musk with Kara Swisher. (Transcript available here.)
I think her read on Trump and Musk's narcissistic need to be loved is probably more accurate than Ezra Klein's "they don't care anymore" perspective. (Not that I can't see where Klein is coming from.)
Kara Swisher:
He’s going in there like he does with his companies and doing the exact same thing. He’s got a series of moves that he makes every single time. And he’s doing them writ large on the federal government.
Ezra Klein:
Walk me through the moves. What is his playbook?
Kara Swisher:
It has morphed over the years. But there’s always a massive amount of drama centered on him. That tends to be the thing he does. He can be very dramatic in a very poignant way.
There was a period where he was very worried about the fate of Tesla, and he was sleeping on the floor there. And he gave an interview to The New York Times where he seemed to cry. He seemed very emotional. And at one point when we were talking — this was, I think, off-camera — he said: If Tesla doesn’t survive, the human race is doomed.
Which I felt was a little dramatic. And I thought: Wow, this is a man in his 40s who thinks that he’s the center of the universe. So it always has that element of drama.
I think he’s greatly informed by video games. Someone described him to me as Ready Player One, and everybody else is an N.P.C. — a nonplayer character. He always has to be the hero or the person who matters the most. Sometimes he does, and sometimes he has engineered it — getting the founder role when he’s not actually the founder or rewriting history or using public relations to make himself the founder.
He understands the hero’s journey kind of thing rather well. Also the stakes have to be very high, and if it doesn’t work, we’re doomed. He tends to overstate problems. Most companies have problems, but: Everything is a disaster here, and I’m here to fix it. Or: Everything sucks, and everybody previously is criminal or evil or “pedophiles.” A word he likes to use a lot.
In one tweet, he called Yoel Roth, who was head of trust and safety at Twitter, “evil.” And said that I was “filled with seething hate” — which is really dramatic and ridiculous. I’m not seething with hate.
Ezra Klein:
Very Trumpian.
Kara Swisher:
Yes, that kind of thing. I think he means it, though. Trump sometimes is just doing it for show — a reality show kind of thing.
I find her read on Musk's psychology quite believable. Not just the grandiose narcissism, but the dramatic immaturity.
I keep saying this to people — and I said it at the time when Biden did not invite him to that E.V. summit and invited Mary Barra instead and treated him shabbily. He was very upset. Like, very.
I talked to him a lot about it — or he texted me. And other people noticed it, too. This was a summit that Biden had, and he couldn’t invite him because of the union issues. Musk was very virulently anti-union, so they didn’t invite him. And he was very upset — personally upset. Wounded, almost.
I even went as far as to call Steve Ricchetti, who worked for Biden. And I said: Boy, have you made a mistake. You should bear-hug this guy. He’s really mad.
And Steve Ricchetti was like: Oh, you know, it’s the unions. He should understand. He’s a big boy.
And I was like: No, he’s not a big boy.
[...]
The way Musk takes slights is really strange. I had seen it in action — sort of petty anger and slight slights. And that one really stuck hard. And the Biden people kept tweaking him.
I also found this potential outcome below quite believable. Fingers crossed we see it.
Ezra Klein:
In a way. Musk — I wonder a bit about that in terms of the pain of the administrative war that Trump and the people around him wanted to do.
When I think about when this starts to go bad, assuming this starts to go bad, Musk taking so much credit for it all makes him so usefully sacrificial. When the people around Musk who are more careful and quiet — the Susie Wileses, the Russ Voughts, the rest of them who are not against this agenda —
Kara Swisher:
Have you noticed they’re all leaking: We don’t have control of him.
Ezra Klein:
Yes, there’s a lot of leaking already that we can’t control Musk.
So at the moment he becomes more liability than asset, you can get rid of him. Trump can be like: Elon Musk got out of control. That wasn’t us.
I don’t know that it happens. And he has leverage he can bring to a fight like that. But it doesn’t seem impossible that it happens. And you can see people setting up that escape route as we speak.
Kara Swisher:
Utterly. Trump’s life is full of those people. And now he’s got the greatest one ever. Michael Cohen was that. There’s always a fixer in Trump’s life who’s willing to go to the mat for the boss — which he likes to be called, apparently.
So Musk is that writ large. He’s much more protected because he’s so wealthy.
A huge, public fight between Trump and Musk would be delightful. Particularly given how much both of them like to bully people with the legal system.
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Comment on Single most useful program you daily use? in ~tech
RobotOverlord525 LinkDragon NaturallySpeaking. I can't type without it anymore (unless I want to spend hours or days in pain afterward). It's a miraculous, amazing piece of technology that frustrates and annoys me...Dragon NaturallySpeaking. I can't type without it anymore (unless I want to spend hours or days in pain afterward). It's a miraculous, amazing piece of technology that frustrates and annoys me constantly.
I was naïvely hopeful that after Microsoft bought Nuance, it might finally get some performance enhancements and better compatibility with Microsoft programs like Teams. Nope! I'm pretty sure Microsoft just bought it for the intellectual property so they could integrate some of its features into the (even slower and less accurate) Windows 11 voice recognition system. It's a real shame.
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Comment on DeepSeek R1 reproduced for $30: University of California Berkeley researchers replicate DeepSeek R1 for $30—casting doubt on H100 claims and controversy in ~tech
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentI'm not sure if this conclusion is supported by these events. Particularly if DeepSeek developed their model based on closed-source model weights obtained by some shady means. Now, if they based...China is now a heavyweight in generative AI... in spite of Biden's bans... and because they embraced open source.
I'm not sure if this conclusion is supported by these events. Particularly if DeepSeek developed their model based on closed-source model weights obtained by some shady means. Now, if they based their work off of another open source model, like Meta's Llama, then I could get behind the idea that they advanced the state-of-the-art "because they embraced open source."
Personally, I'm very sympathetic to the AI safety concerns about proliferating powerful LLMs. Because China is not a heavy weight in generative AI after this — anyone is. The Kremlin has as much access to DeepSeek's source code as anyone in China does.
The New York Times' Hard Fork podcast discussed this topic last week and they had this to say on the safety implications.
Kevin Roose
So the third group of people that I would say are freaking out about DeepSeek are AI safety experts, people who worry about the growing capabilities of AI systems and the potential that they could very soon achieve something like general intelligence or possibly superintelligence, and that that could end badly for all of humanity.
And the reason that they’re spooked about DeepSeek is this technology is open source. DeepSeek released R1 to the public. It’s an open weights model, meaning that anyone can download it and run their own versions of it or tweak it to suit their own purposes.
And that goes to one of the main fears that AI safety experts have been sounding the alarms on for years, which is that just that this technology, once it is invented, is very hard to control. It is not as easy as stopping something like nuclear weapons from proliferating. And if future versions of this are quite dangerous, it suggests that it’s going to be very hard to keep that contained to one country or one set of companies.
Casey Newton
Yeah, I mean, say what you will about the American AI labs, but they do have safety researchers. They do at least have an ethos around how they’re going to try to make these models safe. It’s not clear to me that DeepSeek has a safety researcher. Certainly, they have not said anything about their approach to safety, right? As far as we can tell, their approach is, yeah, let’s just build AGI, give it to as many people as possible, maybe for free, and see what happens. And that is not a very safety-forward way of thinking.
Maybe I'm just paranoid, but that does resonate with me. I don't like the idea of authoritarian regimes having access to powerful LLM AIs.
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Comment on Speculative fiction that speaks to our current moment(s) in ~books
RobotOverlord525 Link ParentFor what it's worth, I tried to read this one back in 2020. At the time, here's what I thought of it: I seem to recall also finding that it had a very smug sort of tone that was also annoying....Walkaway provides a view on a world dealing with the social, economic, and climate problems we face and proposes a future in which groups take advantage of ever-improving home-manufacturing hardware and open source software to literally build their own communities and live post-money.
For what it's worth, I tried to read this one back in 2020. At the time, here's what I thought of it:
DNF at 12%.
I was getting a little suspicious when Doctorow deployed the worst recap of the Tragedy of the Commons I've ever read. Then I read about how his "walkaways" magically have access to an effectively unlimited amount of land, labor, and scavenged raw materials to live in an anarchic la-la land.
I'm pretty left leaning, but I draw the line at anarchy. It's just not believable. The real world is not Github and you could never run it that way.
With my suspension of disbelief shattered, I decided to check some reviews to see if I could expect things to improve. The consensus seems to be, "nope."
So I gave up.
I seem to recall also finding that it had a very smug sort of tone that was also annoying.
Having said all of that, I know the book is well liked by a lot of other people.
Even if we accept the idea that the Roman Republic was a democracy (don't let the "Senate" fool you, it wasn't—the property-holding qualifications for even the lowest magistracies in the Roman Republic were steep), the Roman style of government still wasn't "common" in the ancient world. Democracy as we know it really is a very late-18th and a 19th century phenomenon. As the article observes...
Point is, democracies are historically unusual. Hopefully not an aberration, but I think the author makes a persuasive case for why it might be.
I think we're seeing right now how weak those systems can be. The raison d'etre of the Electoral College was to prevent men unsuitable for the Presidency from attaining that office. That's not a very democratic institution, but it's supposed to be one that's anti-authoritarian. And clearly it doesn't work. Likewise, Congress's impeachment powers are supposed to be a check on the executive branch, but they fail if the legislature doesn't have any interest in upsetting the executive's supporters. All of the societal trends driving these are part of the author's overall argument of a trend towards authoritarianism. We humans don't naturally share power. And even when power is shared with us, some of us don't really want it. Apparently.