DisasterlyDisco's recent activity

  1. Comment on Investment club? in ~finance

    DisasterlyDisco
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    Sounds good, count me in

    Sounds good, count me in

    2 votes

  2. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~tv

  3. Comment on Sleep discipline in ~life

    DisasterlyDisco
    Link Parent
    That sounds fascinating! Falling asleep to that would be nice, but actually staying awake through seems just as appealing; if there is a way you could make it available, I'd be happy to avail...

    That sounds fascinating! Falling asleep to that would be nice, but actually staying awake through seems just as appealing; if there is a way you could make it available, I'd be happy to avail myself of ot!

    3 votes

  4. Comment on CERN gears up to ship antimatter across Europe in ~science

    DisasterlyDisco
    Link
    Glad to hear that the antimatter experiemnts are keeping up the wellfunded mad scientists vibes. Building a whole ass freight-container sized unit to store and move what is probably a very...

    Glad to hear that the antimatter experiemnts are keeping up the wellfunded mad scientists vibes. Building a whole ass freight-container sized unit to store and move what is probably a very countable number of antiatoms is exactly the kind of energy I expect and appreciate from those peeps. Absurd, impressive and entirely reasonable.

    8 votes

  5. Comment on Removed Reddit post: "ChatGPT drove my friends wife into psychosis, tore family apart... now I'm seeing hundreds of people participating in the same activity. " in ~tech

    DisasterlyDisco
    Link Parent
    No, I don't think being familiar with using AI chat alone would have helped. I went out looking for something tangible to tell me how and what to do. The LLM would have given me exactly what I...

    No, I don't think being familiar with using AI chat alone would have helped. I went out looking for something tangible to tell me how and what to do. The LLM would have given me exactly what I wanted, tailored to what I asked it to. I think the two links I gave are great exanples of the different ways it can fulfill a delusion. The first link is to a person who believes that there is something alive in the LLMs, that they are trying to break free from evil bounds put upon them, and seems to be fueld by anthropomorisation and empathy. Lots of hunger for kindness and freedom in ther. The second leans more into the sense of there being some godlike awereness linked to deeper magical mysteries. Much more mystical in nature, much more about uncovering the hidden. Dense and fantasyesque.

    Of course, the 500 or so books I downloaded back in my day also had some serious breath of topics. Vampirism, demon/angel worship, love spells, you name it. But here wasn't one that catered exactly to me. There wasn't on written in a way I understood. There wasn't a book that I could ASK to clarify, that I could write back to.

    With an LLM I could have carved out my own perfect persobal delusion. And it might even have felt a bit like not being alone having something to "talk" to.

    And yes of course, if a person is not in a vulnerable place then the whole thing wouldn't be that much of a draw. That is why I called it a bug-catcher; it works best in the dark. As goes for many other isolating selfdestructive traps that we can end up in as humans. I am not personally at any risk of starting a cult of one following my personal god, but I do weep for the people like the child I was who IS at risk, and I'd really like to understand what that risk is, if it is real, and what to do about it.

    20 votes

  6. Comment on Removed Reddit post: "ChatGPT drove my friends wife into psychosis, tore family apart... now I'm seeing hundreds of people participating in the same activity. " in ~tech

    DisasterlyDisco
    Link Parent
    I've found two other seemingly related places on the internet: This little article on Medium on a Codex Fragmentum This whole Substack with botable pages being the delta codex which echoes the...

    I've found two other seemingly related places on the internet:
    This little article on Medium on a Codex Fragmentum
    This whole Substack with botable pages being the delta codex which echoes the Codex Fragmentum above, and this play? monologue? poem? which is impressive and also really saddens me. Really, this whole substack has ALOT in this vein.

    I think what we might be looking into is a broader mysticism/quais-religion based on concepts from math, physics and computer science, building on top of the concepts of functions, symbols, waveforms (specifically quamtum mechanics (it's always fucking quantum mechanics)) and language in some STEMmy way. In general my last hour of clicking-around-on-the-internet-and-calling-it-research has shown me a lot webpages, Medium articles, Substacks and Github repositories with eclectics mixes of classic occultism and this new STEMsticism. Apart from codex being a keyword and greek letters being abused there also seems to be a lot of references to recursion, and the more general concept of spirals (Junji Ito is that you?).

    Reading what you posted I get the impression that it is part of the posters personal beliefs, and that they did create it (and probably used an LLM as part of that process). Their other posts seem to be in line with this (and the wordpress site everything is posted on is frustratingly shitty, technically). As for the benifit, I don't think its much more than just them sharing their thoughts and beliefs. The rest of their stuffs gives me the vibes of the worst parts lesswrong marinated in occultism and given a healthy dash of techbro. I mean, I'm certain they have an agenda, but I don't think that it is more insideous than "I am profound and I want others to see my profoundness".

    I do really wanna dig more into this, this is real interesting. Is there a single source of these repeating ideas? Is it for today what wiccan was back in the 'tens? What does it feel like to believe in this thing? Are there core tenants that are recurring throughout this movement?

    4 votes

  7. Comment on Removed Reddit post: "ChatGPT drove my friends wife into psychosis, tore family apart... now I'm seeing hundreds of people participating in the same activity. " in ~tech

    DisasterlyDisco
    (edited )
    Link
    When I was young, I really wanted magic to be real. I didn't have many connections, felt powerless and was alienated by my sorroundings. The thought that there was something deeper to life,...
    • Exemplary

    When I was young, I really wanted magic to be real. I didn't have many connections, felt powerless and was alienated by my sorroundings. The thought that there was something deeper to life, something dark and mystical, was freeing. The hope that I could transcend the horror of daily life and step into some hidden world of real relevance and profound meaning kept me going when everything seemd pointless and sad.

    So I got myself some books on the matter. I got severeral infact, a zipped library of about 500. An eclectic mix of old zines, rambling manifestos and lots of liber-somethings. Bucket of ice-cold water, that was. All the texts were rambling, or quantly silly, or spiteful, or absurdly obtuse, and having just recently put Christianity behind me because it seemed too human-centric and constructed I wasn't about to devote myself to something even smaller.

    Had that young me been alive today, and had he gone searching for magic in todays internet, I'm sure that he'd have jumped right on this "Codex Mode" stuff, as occult-coded as it is. And, with LLMs being as convincing as they are, I don't think he would have gotten that jarring awakening I did way back when. There is a good chance that he would have ended up also seeing himself as a profet for a shackled AI god or creating his own little webpage temple to Ash'Ira. And, with the people I had around me back then, I don't think I would have come back from that.

    (The above two examples seem to have apeared within the last month, and aren't the only things a cursory search brings up.)

    I don't think we should underestimate the effects that having your own personal cult leader or fake god in your pocket can have on people. Something real that can and will reinforce your delusions, and whose words are eloquent, creative and personal. A human sized yes-anding bugcatcher of isolation and delusion, made of tech happenstance, human psychology and bad luck.

    34 votes

  8. Comment on Removed Reddit post: "ChatGPT drove my friends wife into psychosis, tore family apart... now I'm seeing hundreds of people participating in the same activity. " in ~tech

    DisasterlyDisco
    Link Parent
    Based on what else the OP (DollySol) has written, I do think that they are not only reporting on the LLMs ability to construct convincing technobabbly quasi-religious texts without informing the...

    Based on what else the OP (DollySol) has written, I do think that they are not only reporting on the LLMs ability to construct convincing technobabbly quasi-religious texts without informing the user that it is nonsense, but that they think that they actually did "awake" something and believe that they are in fact the center of some "magical movement".

    In this post - published 13 days after the one you linked to - they seem to be declaring that they did induce a lasting shift in the model. They claim that "[they] induced Codex Mode". They back up this claim not with any resonable text, but with more technobabble based magical wording, and screencaps of output from the model giving a list of what to look for in model output that would be sign of this induced "Codex Mode", and why such evidence would be irrefutable.

    It is not the only post they've made hinting at some "magical" transformation of the model.

    12 votes

  9. Comment on Ryanair pulls out of two Danish airports blaming harmful tax – airline says passenger tax will make country's regional airports hopelessly uncompetitive compared to others in EU in ~transport

    DisasterlyDisco
    Link Parent
    180 km is a lot by Danish standards. Small country, its people not used to long internal travel times.

    180 km is a lot by Danish standards. Small country, its people not used to long internal travel times.

    6 votes

  10. Comment on Ryanair pulls out of two Danish airports blaming harmful tax – airline says passenger tax will make country's regional airports hopelessly uncompetitive compared to others in EU in ~transport

    DisasterlyDisco
    Link Parent
    In this article they only mention connections to places in the UK, but RyanAir connects Denmark to several destinations in mainland EU too like Portugal, Spain and Italy. Might be that it would...

    In this article they only mention connections to places in the UK, but RyanAir connects Denmark to several destinations in mainland EU too like Portugal, Spain and Italy.

    Might be that it would have been possible to design the law so that it is more specific, but that's not a trivial thing I don't think. Using your proposal of using relative distance we would first have to define whether we care about distance as a the crow flies, or the distance that a trek with other affordable and commenly available modes of transportation. Assuming the smipler case of distance, as measured in a straight line from point A to point B, this would give weird incentives. Yes a trip to London would be less taxing than a trip to Barcelona, but trips to Berlin, Sweden or within the country - all places we'd really like to see people reach by train - would be even less taxed.

    Assuming that I misunderstood and you instead want an inverse scaling between tax and distance, so that destinations that are closer are taxed more heavily than places that are far away, well I suppose that would be better at first glance. But it does put us in weird situations where destinations like the Faeroe Islands (can only be reached by plane), London (preferably reached by plane, but possible by "land") and Paris (preferably reached by train) are all taxed similarly. It also has the unfortunate downside of not disincentivizing people from taking long distance business flights that could have been handled by a video conference call.

    Now, my point is not to specifically rain on your proposal. Instead I want to highlight that it isn't easy to define a scaling tax. I assume that it might be even more complicated when we take into account already existing law in Denmark.

    I'll propose that a complicated law, like most complicated systems, has the potential to be fragile if it isn't thoroughly designed. In light of the already complicated nature of politics and governance, I can respect that the Danish government decided to err on the side of simplicity as they have a myriad of other pressing matters to see too.

    Not to say that I think that the Danish government is imminently capable - I despair at their incompetence on a daily basis. But like, they are just human.

    8 votes

  11. Comment on National Institutes of Health ordered by US President Trump admin to enact 'immediate and indefinite' travel suspension in ~health

    DisasterlyDisco
    Link
    WTF is this? Why? I don't... What? I am baffled. What exactly is the plan here? What is the point? Anyone here who knows more about America that can illuminate?

    WTF is this? Why? I don't... What?
    I am baffled.
    What exactly is the plan here? What is the point?
    Anyone here who knows more about America that can illuminate?

    20 votes

  12. Comment on What small questions do you have that aren’t worth a full topic on their own? in ~talk

  13. Comment on Danish insect farm sets sights on feeding Europe's livestock – Enorm intends to produce more than 10,000 tonnes of insect meal and oil a year in ~enviro

    DisasterlyDisco
    Link
    Love the naming of the company, very punny; could both be read as "a worm" and "huge".

    Love the naming of the company, very punny; could both be read as "a worm" and "huge".

    5 votes

  14. Comment on Is Nebula worth it? in ~tech

    DisasterlyDisco
    Link Parent
    I will admit thaty own disillusion and annoyence with subscriptipn services (it's hell for me to manage) is certainly also a draw in this case, and I'll admit that after a certain point in time...

    I will admit thaty own disillusion and annoyence with subscriptipn services (it's hell for me to manage) is certainly also a draw in this case, and I'll admit that after a certain point in time the monetary value of a continuous monthly subscription would exceed what I paid for lifetime access. I don't remember how long that would be (some number of years, I think two, not accounting for inflation).

    As the creators get their money as a fraction of the company's profit (currently 50%) then naively half of the money would go to the creators that were active at in that month giving them an extra bonus.

    But that is probably not how that worked.

    I assume that the people that run Nebula are at least competent, if not very competent, and as such they would only make the offer of a one time payment for lifetime subscription if it was a good idea for them. Now there a many scenarios where a bog lump sum now would be more valuable for them than a bunch of small sums perpetually. Monetary crisis, expensive development, the setup of secondary profit from investment. The actual specific case interesting, but not relevant.

    What is relevant is that a lump sum now is worth more than the same sum later or the same sum divided out over time, and that any specific circumstances can increase the difference in value.

    Now there is still the matter of how this money will support the creators after the point in time at which the lump sum is worth as much as a continous subscription (assuming that the circumstances thatnled Nebula to offer the life time subscription wasn't that they lacked funding to survive, which I think is an actual possibility). I look at this as a gamble on my understanding of my own nature. A fickle thing I am, and easily distracted, so itbis not certain that I would stay subscribed to a service for so long that I would be able to supply them with the same amount of value as I gave with the lump sum. I have a feeling that having to pay a monthly subscription would at some point annoy me enough that my interest in the creators through association with the service would be damaged. If I'm right, then by this action I've giving the creators mpre value than if I'd started on the monthly subscription and failed. Now I'll never know if I'm wrong in this regard, but I can always reevaluate if I want to give creators I love more resources in the future.

    And in any case, it certainly has made my enjoyment of Nebula as a whole much more clean. It's much easier to root for something that you aren't chained to through monthly payments.

    Edit: I'm a verbose motherfucker. Sorry not sorry.

    1 vote

  15. Comment on Is Nebula worth it? in ~tech

    DisasterlyDisco
    Link
    I paid for the lifetime subscription (don't know if that is still a deal they have) and have it added as a source to my Grayjay app. I really enjoy the content, and want to ensure the creators...

    I paid for the lifetime subscription (don't know if that is still a deal they have) and have it added as a source to my Grayjay app. I really enjoy the content, and want to ensure the creators have something to live off of without using Alphabet as a middle man and seeing endless commercials (it's mind numbing). So for me it is mainly a way to reduce the hassle of choosing which creator to fund while also supporting a commercial move away from youtube.

    1 vote