Seems like everybody got that email, my account is semi-abandoned and still got it. I love the reek of desperation in the morning

I’m looking on the bright side. Yes, they looted Puppet, but now they’re stuck with Puppet

OK so we’re getting into deep rat lore now? I’m so sorry for what I’m about to do to you. I hope one day you can forgive me.

LessWrong diaspora factions! :blobcat_ohno:

https://transmom.love/@elilla/113639471445651398

if I got something wrong, please don’t tell me. gods I hope I got something wrong. “it’s spreading disinformation” I hope I am

yes, but it can only sing Peter

I got some very intense, frequent bullying in 90s Latin America for being perceived as queer, before even understanding myself that I was actually queer.

I don’t think there was ever anything like the jocks from US movies. Bullies tended to be troubled kids from difficult backgrounds, the kind of kid who would be themself exposed to violence and abuse at home or in their neighbourhood. A handful were from religious fundamentalist families.

There was some hostility towards children who took school too seriously or were perceived as teacher’s pets, but I don’t think that in itself would have inspired “slapped every day” levels of bullying. I don’t remember bullying due to what today are called fandoms or geeky interests; they were just much less known.

What I never get about this stuff is how unfun all of it is. The characters in character.ai don’t sound anything like their model characters, at all. ChatGPT necromancy is terrible, the séance table in my hometown sucked but the medium on a lazy day was still significantly better at producing some sort of impersonation that felt at least a little bit like the dead person, a skill I’ve come to appreciate a bit when compared to ChatGPT’s attempt at it. Everything that ChatGPT writes, no matter who it’s trying to imitate, has the exact same flavour, and the flavour is slop.

Futurism articles really make me feel how these people are not living in the same reality as I.

Looking from now into 2149 and war is a nonfactor in Baby’s life. “Genocide” isn’t mentioned once, or “fascism”, or “borders”. No food or water scarcity. No mention of what happens to insects or wildlife or people in island countries or near the Equator. The only mention of “ecosystem” is in the expression “Center for Advanced Computer-Human Ecosystems”. The only mention of “climate change” is to say that it will lead us to a “reconfigurable architectural robotic space”. Somehow people have all the energy in the world to power AI girlfriends and moveable robotic walls and menstruation-sensing tech panties. The human body, the animal that is the human being, doesn’t really matter in this world where Microsoft VR smells your anxiety in your deathbed and comforts you with self-warming textiles. Where does the food that sustains the flesh comes from, what is our relationship to the plants and animals and insects and bacteria who we depend on for food and air and shelter, who builds all this stuff and under which conditions—considerations that do not even cross the mind of this person when they think of the question: “What does the future hold for those born today?”

translate technically fiddly instructions of the type where people have trouble spotting mistakes, with patterned noise generators. what could go wrong

The representative of the fascist party in Germany says she’s “lesbian but not queer”. I think it’s the same case.

I tend to like “Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff” more than “Behind the Bastards”. Need some nugget of hope in these dark days. A lot of the cool people have been downright inspiring.

My daily podcast is “It Could Happen Here”, but some other mainstays in the educational side include:

• Live Like the World is Dying
• Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness
• It’s Going Down
• Final Straw Radio
• Reaction (especially liked her dives on the Pinkertons and “The Business Plot”)
• Srsly Wrong [unrelated to the similarly named thing]
• The Iron Dice
• Bad Hasbara
• Frontline Herbalism if you like plants

I find the polygraph to be a fascinating artifact. most on account of how it doesn’t work. it’s not that it kinda works, that it more or less works, or that if we just iron out a few kinks the next model will do what polygraphs claims to do. the assumptions behind the technology are wrong. lying is not physiological; a polygraph cannot and will never work. you might as well hire me to read the tarot of the suspects, my rate of success would be as high or higher.

yet the establishment pretends that it works, that it means something. because the State desperately wants to believe that there is a path to absolute surveillance, a way to make even one’s deepest subjectivity legible to the State, amenable to central planning (cp. the inefficacy of torture). they want to believe it so much, they want this technology to exist so much, that they throw reality out of the window, ignore not just every researcher ever but the evidence of their own eyes and minds, and pretend very hard, pretend deliberately, willfully, desperately, that the technology does what it cannot do and will never do. just the other day some guy way condemned to use a polygraph in every statement for the rest of his life. again, this is no better than flipping a coin to decide if he’s saying the truth, but here’s the entire System, the courts the judge the State itself, solemnly condemning the man to the whims of imaginary oracles.

I think this is how “AI” works, but on a larger scale.