Michael

Gorbachev’s choices made it increasingly inexorable, but at the time he came to power? Could easily have taken different courses (more like China, for instance)

If you’re too ignorant to recognize Korean OR a Palestinian flag AND too lazy/incurious/incompetent to look these things up, how did you even find yourself on bluesky? You should be learning how to tie your shoes, not posting

Or where WW2 is over almost as soon as it begins (with Germany easily defeated by France and allies). Or where the USSR doesn’t collapse. At bottom, most people, even well educated people, seem essentially to think that everything important that ever happened was literally inevitable. It’s weird!

Jeffrey Epstein butchering a Casablanca reference so badly that I barely recognized it

The people who made us put brakes in our cars now say we're not allowed to break the law? Very curious. Concerning!

Unironically would love to write about Quake as socialist paradise and/or about how gay the Quake scene is, @aftermath.site please give me money to do this?

It began that way, but the people seized the means of Quake production years ago and now Quake is anything we want it to be. Poetry generator? Transition allegory? All rocket launchers all the time? All this and more is possible! Quake is a land of plenty.

The two wolves inside me? Radical narco-communism and anarcho-tyranny. They are best friends.

Quake: the People's FPS (but seriously)

Also, Leeds is a proper city. This woman is probably from some Dallas exurb that doesn't even have sidewalks.

My "equivalent" is doing a lot of work there but…naah, I just think you're wrong. The kind of people who are going to be yapping about this stuff on Bluesky are a self-selecting bunch. You won't see many Americans here copping to not knowing what sumac is (AND being unwilling to try it).

It's not JUST personal ignorance, but it is a kind of received ignorance that's found everywhere. If you took some equivalent English yokel from Leicestershire or wherever to the equivalent New York grocery store (or the same London one, for that matter), you'd get the same response.

President Xi please send Dongfeng 61 ICBM equipped with hypersonic glide vehicle payload etc. etc.

Assassinating heads of state and other senior officials of countries we don’t like is a very cool precedent to set and will definitely have no negative repercussions

you think you've seen the whole movie, and then the alt text reveals you haven't even finished act two

My review of the Mothership module Orphans cites the one @valerialoves.bsky.social wrote at least six times and comes to basically the same conclusions, but I promise it also has original observations in it. And tips! And it's very long! We love a long-ass review, right? #mothership

In conclusion, it is past time both to launch the Butlerian Jihad and to reconvene the Committee of Public Safety.

To them (the bourgeoisie, the Epstein class, whatever we call them), we are machines that can be persuaded (or manipulated, or coerced) to serve their interests. LLMs presage better machines that will do more, better, faster, cheaper. You don't have to feed them for 20 years, as Sam Altman observes.

The fact that LLMs do not exist beyond the instructions they're given (that they do not dream, want, imagine, have inner lives at all) is no contradiction for these people, because they don't recognize that other humans have dreams, wants, imaginations, inner lives, or any kind of humanity at all.

No wonder it's overwhelmingly (rich) men driving this; it's the exact same mindset as "If I say the right things / model the right behaviors / give the right gifts / spend enough money, she'll HAVE to fuck me," only now they can go under the hood and rewire things until they're guaranteed success.

You have a desired output, and you try a bunch of inputs to get what you want. Humans can be difficult or expensive or frustrating or entirely intractable; sometimes no inputs get you to your desired results. Machines can't do it all yet, but they can do a lot, they're fast, the inputs are simpler.

But what I now (belatedly) realize is that the most relevant AI boosters (the people creating, instrumentalizing, and propagandizing the stuff) aren't that stupid. It goes the other way: They think that flesh and blood people are less human than they actually are. They see humans as machines.

For years now, I've assumed that AI boosters delusionally thought their agents were more human than they were, that they imputed consciousness to LLMs because they passed the Turing test, that they were falling for parlor tricks. And of course there are a LOT of people like that excited about AI.

Instead, he implies that humans, in the same way, do not have will, volition, etc.: "our familiarity with the origins, nature, and consequences of our own desires seems limited." And yes, I know about determinism and p-zombies and whatnot; these are not new ideas. But something clicked for me here.

Two-thirds of the way through the recent NYer article about Anthropic, it seems like Gideon Lewis-Kraus is finally going to acknowledge that LLMs do not have anything like personhood (no will, volition, personality). Skeptics note, he says, that agents lack "true agency" or "intrinsic motivation."

Trump calling his own Supreme Court justices “lap dogs” rules. It’s not even projection at this point, he’s just scolding his disobedient creatures. I brought you into my house, and you’re peeing all over my floor? You’ve chewed up my slippers? This is unacceptable!

It’s February 14, which of course means that I am thinking even more than usual about the Austrian Civil War (which ended 92 years ago today-ish, with the fascists victorious) and Stephen Vincent Benet’s beautiful “Ode to the Austrian Socialists”: allpoetry.com/Ode-To-The-A... #poetry

they ran out of holy things to profane and now they're just profaning everything. I am tired of this.

so can man at last be compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind? or are we too busy with our phones or what