andrewflnr

You already know about it, just in different terms. You have one father and mother, but two grandfathers, four great grandfathers, four great grandmothers, etc. Which of these is your "bloodline"? Either all of them or none. Each of them is likely (in the general case anyway) also a grandparent to many other children with other intermedaries. Which of these is their descendant bloodline? If you get rid of weird socially contingent criteria like "first son", the answer is obviously none of them. It's just a big web, going back thousands of years at minimum. Billions of years back to the first sexually reproducing eukaryote, if you want to think of it that way.

If they're useful, they aren't reports no one will read, and in that case it's important that they be readable after all. The police report is going to be read in court for instance.

If the solution is changing the format of the reports so they're less heinous to write and read, I'm fine with that. Let's just make it actual communication, not letters to the void.

> or preparing a report I suspect no-one will ever read

We should actually restructure our organizations/society in such a way that this stops being necessary. If no one reads a report, it was almost certainly a waste of effort. The only possible benefit was for the report-writer (which of course is also flushed if the "writer" uses an LLM). These things were already a plague before LLMs.

Pollen is quite diverse. So yeah, some pollen, apparently.

I mean, it's also a bit of disdain for the law, because in the US we've somehow made laws whose actual enforcement is economically untenable. Large chunks of our economy depend on illegal labor. But yes, it's mostly the nakedly evil "enforcement" methods under Trump.

> These things aren't even normally the president's direct fault, but in this case it 1000% is.

This has been one of the most striking things for me. I've beaten the drum of "the president usually can't do much about the economy" before, but it turns out that even if the president can't fix the economy, he can damn well smash it.

Both the groups I have regular video calls with noticed, to the point that one of them switched back to zoom. It seems to have gotten better the last few months, though I don't think it's quite back to the near-flawless peak it was on in, say, 2024.

FWIW there are settings (maybe in the accessibility section) to avoid playing animations until you've actually clicked on something.

It's actually not just as functional as ever. Quality of voice and video chat took a noticeable dive this year, maybe coincidentally right as vibe coding really took off in the industry. And all that extra crap might not make discord unusable but it does suck. Like I said, not great.

Because it's actually a good experience in some ways. I mean, it's not great, but as a chat room it's fine.

I know it's falling out of fashion, but some people still care about things other than making money.

They are still minds, though. And there's no reason to believe they're actually unknowable. You're trying to inject more mystery than is actually warranted. Ancient people have a lot in common with us just by virtue of being similar physical beings in similar environments with similar problems.

We can debate fine meanings of ancient texts. But at minimum the bare facts of, say, the story of Gilgamesh passed through ancient humans' minds in a similar way as it passes through ours. That's still more than we can say for AI-written text.

> One can just as easily contemplate the method through which human writing got distilled into a matrix of numbers

Humans aren't matrixes, though. Humans want to communicate with other humans, beings who face the same problems we do. That's why we care about human thoughts. No one cares what a matrix thinks, no one healthy anyway.

Good point about emphasis. Correctness in emphasis, and I do mean correctness, was already underrated. It's a critical measure of whether you actually understand a topic, and an indicator of values in general.

...I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me? The identity of the author is not germane to my point, only whether there actually is an author, aka an actual mind. You could argue those old texts are worth engaging with exactly because they're our only links to those minds.

I don't think "judge writing by its quality instead of its source" is coherent. Certainly, the value of reading is in the thoughts it produces in the reader's mind. So if you want me to ignore the source, you're asking me to value the thoughts I get from the writing without regard for the thoughts that produced it. This seems dubious, if not actually oxymoronic. As a reader, it feels much like you telling me to eat something you made, which you enthusiastically assure me is high quality, but which you can't be bothered to eat yourself, and in fact you've never eaten anything like it before. Plus it smells like spray-cheese.

The real explanation seems a bit more prosaic:

> There, within WildChat’s data, Hamilton and Mimno found a small sample of conversations that included Elias and familiar tales of lighthouses.

> “Based on the timeline, we’re fairly certain WildChat is an original source of this phenomenon,” Hamilton said, adding that future work will explore why LLMs prefer these lighthouse stories.

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/10/who-elias-lighthous...

So, probably at least as much a quirk of the training data as a deep distillation of LLM psyche. Still fascinating though, especially IMO the broader pattern of tropes.

You've almost exactly identified what "convenience" means for a belief, then rejected it out of hand based on... what? Implicit, unquestioned nihilism? The other option is generally personal sacrifice based on principle, usually moral/ethical. This isn't common, but it does happen enough to be worth noting.

Anyway, I think I've pretty clearly described a positive feedback cycle in a way that distinguishes it from a tautology. I don't know what else to tell you on that point.

If you're able to achieve that, great. But I don't think any "system" can survive arbitrary component failures. Eventually it just stops being the system you designed.

Sometimes the "system" consists of identifying and removing or bypassing unreliable components.

> At the time of posting, I didn't know about any embargo. My contact had told me there was no embargo, and her contact had told her the same thing.

I'm not saying it needs to be a public burning, but I sure hope someone figures out who dropped the critical metadata bit so they can avoid telling that party critical things in the future.

This paper describes "eruptible magma" to be at least 50% melted. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2021JB02... (with silicic magma in granite, so at least vaguely the same situation as Yellowstone). Recent observations show that the Yellowstone magma chamber is like 10% melted, maybe almost 30% in some places. https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/yvo/news/new-views-how-ma... That's not enough.

From the first link, again:

> These recent studies demonstrated for example, that silicic supereruptions with volume exceeding 1,000 km3 of eruptible magma can be generated in less than 5,000–10,000 years (which we call “Yellowstone” type), to longer than 500,000 years

And geology is not a context where "less than 5,000" realistically includes, like 5, or even 100.

For what it's worth, convenience and belonging are very closely aligned, more than you seem to be giving them credit for. People tend to believe convenient things regardless of belonging, so most people will find themselves in a social context full of convenient beliefs. Meanwhile belonging is already convenient before considering the content of the belief. They reinforce each other. Not a full match, but I'd give it more than half.

> Sounds like Sci-fi Horrors

Correct, the novel is called Starfish by Peter Watts. Though it's mostly not the volcano that kills people.

Obligatory reminder that Yellowstone is at literally zero risk of exploding in the next couple thousand years.

I plainly did not say they're equivalent, no. But the difference in mindset among the proponents is often one of degree, not kind. Bear in mind that I only brought it up to explain to someone why their honest questions might have been accidentally conflated with that mindset.

Personally I'm still holding out the possibility of something like MOND being true, even if it looks more and more like it will have to coexist with DM at best. That doesn't stop me from noticing that most of the people who believe in it look exactly like cranks, and many of them actually are. And I'm going to keep pointing this out where it's relevant.

Curiosity is one thing, but in practice "just asking questions about dark matter" is uncomfortably close to pseudoscience and a lot of us are sick of it. It's similar to if you had accidentally said something similar to a young-earth creationist.

Do you have a link with details?

...hmm, yeah, now that you mention it. Those generally have pretty big targets though, with IR signatures. I'm not sure how much of that translates directly to subsonic drone-on-drone violence. (In general it's just a matter of time, of course.)

If you weren't improvising with a bomber, you could also just build a slightly larger drone.

I already acknowledged they were good at enriching themselves. But it really beggars belief to think that Iran, ICE murdering random civilians, the economy, etc are going exactly as Trump et al wished they would. That's borderline flat-earth conspiracy logic. They're just idiots making idiot mistakes and having idiot spats.