somenameforme

4 ms·

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by somenameforme 5d ago
It doesn't imply literally none. I'm sure flavored vapes helps improve their addictiveness for their target demographics - children, but they'd also be extremely addictive even without the flavorings. The reason I brought up
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by somenameforme 5d ago
The original comic didn't really resonate with me for a couple of reasons. The first is that the obvious metaphors it seems to have (which I assume you're alluding to here) are in quite poor taste. The second is because I think pu
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by somenameforme 5d ago
Having lived through it, participated in it, and being able to personally contrast people then and now. It's not particularly different, outside of the fact that in the past you had 0.1% of people (if that) using these services, wherea
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by somenameforme 5d ago
I'm not entirely sure I'd agree with that definition of sealioning, but I'll respond to your definition. In general I see nothing wrong with pushing an agenda, so long as one is not simply ignoring other possibilities. For in
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by somenameforme 5d ago
But in this case we're rather going in quite the opposite direction! For instance broad opposition to free speech has no place in any sort of formulation of liberalism, and so you find yourself in a scenario where a certain brand of li
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by somenameforme 5d ago
Are you capable of having a debate without relying on straw men and ad hominem? You probably lack the ability to understand how you seem to people who don't already agree with you. This sort of behavior and attitude is why 2028 will be
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by somenameforme 5d ago
Or, perhaps people can see the same evidence and come to different perspectives and conclusions. All without it being some malicious conspiracy, insanity, stupidity, or however you would like to frame it. If you look at society on a holisti
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by somenameforme 5d ago
I don't think this necessarily follows. The point of the Library of Babel is more one of permutations/combinatorics than of knowledge accumulation itself. In 'our' Library of Babel, each book would be informative, if not
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by somenameforme 5d ago
I think actually discussing and debating things is precisely how you get an informed society. We only need be concerned when people 'begin by denouncing all argument, or forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it
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by somenameforme 5d ago
RFK was also a lifelong Democrat. Not that long ago anti-war, pro free speech, anti 'big brother', anti illegal-immigration, anti political violence, anti mega-corp (especially big pharma), and other such stuff was all part of a v
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by somenameforme 5d ago
This is one of those topics that LLMs are quite good at for digging up information and consensus on, because they've been trained on stuff that you may have either forgotten or not been a part of the culture of. BBS were universally de
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by somenameforme 6d ago
Age restrictions don't say it's 'okay' for somebody above a certain age to use something. Cigarettes will screw up your body at 18 just as much as they will at 17. But at 18 you're, legally at least, an adult, the p
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by somenameforme 6d ago
I'd take this one step further and say this would be a major issue even without 'the algorithm' and other such 'engagement' maximization efforts. Way back before social media existed, things like BBS' and later
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by somenameforme 6d ago
This reminds me of when I coach a kid in chess and the first thing I ask them is what they want to achieve. A fairly common response is to not lose. At first that doesn't sound unreasonable, yet the goal there doesn't require any
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by somenameforme 7d ago
It also doesn't factor in the dramatically reduced costs. It's likely that X is already significantly more profitable than Twitter was. And with less dependency on advertisers, which is a huge win in and of itself.
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by somenameforme 7d ago
Crows are one example I alluded to above. One of the 'most telling' signs of their intelligence is their ability to stab grubs with twigs. If a human demonstrated that as the peak of his cognitive ability, it would only be due to
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by somenameforme 7d ago
These are hardly human-ish things. The reason they're found novel is because their behaviors that demonstrate some basic degree of interaction with the world or each other, outside of pure instinct. And by the standards of most animals
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by somenameforme 8d ago
It refers to a simple issue. If you write a program to add 2+2, do you imagine some entity whiffs into existence, perceives itself deciding to add 2+2, and then whiffs out of existence at the conclusion? It seems fairly absurd. So the impli
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by somenameforme 8d ago
I think it's more that humans have put a man on the Moon, whereas we're highly impressed with other animals when they are capable of doing something productive with a twig or make gestures or noises that can be reasonably interpre
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by somenameforme 8d ago
This was based by comparing people on Prolific (earn a few quarters for a task, akin to Amazon Mechanical Turk) to LLMs. Suffice to say the human group isn't going to be the most motivated, capable, or interested group. The social sci
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by somenameforme 8d ago
Perhaps some. But I'd wager orders of magnitude more are using LLMs to brainstorm if not outright generate content for them, which they are then reframing as their own creation.
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by somenameforme 8d ago
By this standard, nothing is well documented. The Western propaganda machine was building up an extensive case against Russia. I suspect the reason it was dialed back was only because they overestimated the gullibility of the public - nobod
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by somenameforme 8d ago
State pensions everywhere tend to assume home ownership. I haven't been to Japan since they started doing wild funny money stuff, so I don't know what that's doing to local prices/economies, but not that long ago $450 +
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by somenameforme 8d ago
On Mars a critical part of civilization will be the Sabatier Reaction. [1] It's a chemical reaction between CO2, which is widely abundant on Mars, and hydrogen. It yields methane and water. Things like this are so unbelievably convenie
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by somenameforme 9d ago
I'm trying to keep this engaging/holistic and avoiding writing a rambling wall of text, but I also don't want to just cherry pick stuff. So if you think I'm ignoring something or whatever, please do feel free to point to
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by somenameforme 10d ago
Russia blowing up its own pipeline was also 'extremely well documented.' One of the many reasons that propaganda is self defeating is because when done effectively, as it has been with Ukraine, the people doing it eventually begin
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by somenameforme 10d ago
Operation Mockingbird. [1] Now let's bring that into modern times with the internet, digital communications, the complete degradation of values from government and business alike, and LLMs on top of it all now. It's why nothing ma
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by somenameforme 10d ago
Unless humanity goes extinct in the near future this is certainly inaccurate. People don't realize how rapidly fertility affects populations. Take a place with a fertility rate of 1. That means each successive generation (which tends t
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by somenameforme 10d ago
Yip, I think we're all saying the same thing, but with varying degrees of unspoken assumptions on a topic where we all, generally wisely, think other people have no idea what they're talking about.
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by somenameforme 10d ago
I have indeed read the book you referenced, at least as much as I could stomach. They're quite ill informed, and we can get into that but first on a couple of points you mentioned: To start with Mars has practically endless water. Tha

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