PorterBHall

Kids today can’t do this either

Baseball used to be America’s premier sport, but it’s been declining in cultural relevance for decades. As a lifelong baseball fan, this saddens me. Not there’s a strike looming that threatens next season.

Let’s call it a collaboration

To Hell with paperclips. This is now our plan.

Should you care that your heart surgeon is a necrophiliac? Probably. Should you care that some AI researchers are in a sex cult? No.

Nearly half of all US high school students are below average in reading.

“News is what someone doesn’t want you to know. The rest is just advertising.” Variously attributed to George Orwell and William Randolph Hearst.

I tip for service I’ve already received and I’ll tip in advance if I’m using the space. E.g. if I go to a coffee shop to work, I’ll buy something and leave a tip. I’ll tip if you make something for me, like a cappuccino.

I don’t tip at point of sale simply because it isn’t fair. I don’t tip at grocery checkout. Why would I tip for a drip coffee?

If you put more effort into this comment—-like explaining how “this tip thingy” is rooted in racism—-I might have left you a tip.

This is the kind of level-headed advice I wish I got from my older brothers.

I use a podcast manager to listen to all of my podcasts. Do you have a feature that would allow me to syndicate a feed to my podcast app?

Nailed it.

> Though the window of opinions you can express publicly has narrowed in the last decade, it's still much wider than it was a few hundred years ago. The problem is the derivative. Up till about 1985 the window had been growing ever wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would have expected freedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it has decreased.

Let’s apply his heresy test. Is his statement true?

It might be, but I don’t know how one could confirm it. What is apparently true is that the amount of expression has greatly increased since then because internet. So that’s the denominator. The numerator of “fired for speech” would have to expand beyond the proportion of the growth of communication for this to be true.

Do you know anyone fired for their outré opinion in the last few years? Do you know _many_? I’ve read stories of it happening in business, universities, government but I don’t know anyone who has gotten the sack for expressing an opinion. Maybe that means I’m a conventional mind safely surrounded by the same.

When I hear about “cancel culture,” I picture a speaker who wants to say something and not face the social disapproval which said things triggers. But that disapproval almost always comes back at them as speech (I think infrequently as a pink slip). So those claims ring as “Free speech for me, not for thee.”

What saddens me about this topic is the large amount of hatred coming at cyclists from drivers in the opinion page of the local newspaper (Seattle Times). Why not have some gratitude they are not contributing to traffic, not taking up parking, not polluting, etc. It comes across as pure madness.

I’m in the middle of this right now. They detail a scenario that starts off pretty convincing but takes a turn into a sci-fi feel when this fictional model starts strategizing on how to escape its containment.

The core argument is that these models aren’t crafted as much as they’re grown. They show examples where models display not desires but preferences (e.g. lying and cheating to testers) and that the AI companies aren’t able to control it even interpret those preferences.

If LLMs get to a super intelligence phase (big if there), the gap between its capabilities and our understanding of it grows even larger.

Is it the end of the world or just Davos?

I love this because it explains so much about the human mind. Rationally, it was the medication. Emotionally, it was Jesus.

> When we ponder upon this, it boggles down to the fact that it's notoriously hard to distinguish "value creation" vs "value extraction".

This is an excellent frame to think about this. When we look at the increasing financialization of consumer spending (subscriptions, buy now pay later, rebates, club discounts, etc.), we can think of it as disguising value extraction as value creation.

I have to wonder, too, if this partially describes why "Make America Great Again" has been such an effective slogan. The greatness that most Americans long to return to is a time where a larger middle class was able to more easily pay for health care, housing, and other needs.

“Plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend.”

Terrorism is the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.

It was a different world when you were a kid. People weren’t as incendiary in their speech.

In the United States, stochastic terrorism is neither a statutory offense nor a term of art in criminal codes; it is an analytic label used in scholarship and practitioner writing to describe probabilistic risks of violence linked to rhetoric. Recent legal and critical surveys stress that usage is heterogeneous and contested, and that the concept's value lies in describing a structure of communication and harm rather than in supplying a justiciable element test.[7] By contrast, U.S. incitement law is anchored in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), which protects advocacy short of speech that is intended to produce imminent lawless action and likely to do so. Stochastic accounts often concern non-directive, cumulative rhetoric whose effects materialize unpredictably, making the Brandenburg imminence and likelihood prongs difficult to satisfy absent clear exhortation.[2]

It’s unsettling to think that humanity has lost knowledge it once had, but it happens all the time. Anyone here know how to harness a horse to a buggy?

Gen Z discovers nostalgia.

True that a majority of the electorate voted for and should have expected this, but Presidential approval rating is in the cellar.

I think your take makes sense. Thanks for laying it out. I worry about the containment aspects of this. Sure, the capex for this is coming off corporate balance sheets, but a bad event could wipe away a lot of stock market value, which would trigger a deep recession given that AI spending is really the only thing keeping our economy afloat at the moment. It feels like we’re in a doomed if we do, doomed if we don’t moment. I see breadlines in our future whether or not we achieve AGI. The only question is whether or not we’ll have to deal with some added existential risk.

I came here with a similar thought. Given that we don't have a really precise definition of that transition from living to dead, I wonder if this could be it.

Only the prices paid by my side are unfair or absurd. The prices paid by their side are justified.

Meanwhile the lines dividing us become deeper and wider.

Wedge issues, deployed by both political parties, do exactly this.

Wealthy donors express their political desires by funding politicians who become dependent on their continued financial support.

The voter gets just enough small wins on these wedge issues to keep them somewhat happy. The wealthy preserves the status quo since that’s how they became wealthy in the first place. Our democracy ossifies in the face of new challenges.

If voters across the spectrum viewed campaign finance reform as a key issue, we might have some hope in changing things.

I live in a somewhat small community (~25k) and I commuted into the city on public transportation for about 15 years. 10 years ago, I started working from home full-time.

I often see the people I used to commute with around town. I recognize them and remember them, but I’ve never had any interactions with them.

When I see them, I’m surprised by how much older they look. Then I realize I must look older to them.