8,339 karma · joined October 19, 2016
And that's why it's important to go after morally corrupt, uncivil monsters.
The problem today is that the press and the DAs/courts are complicit--they're less interested than ever in pursuing public morality and civility as ends in themselves. They're mostly only interested in partisan politics.
Don't underestimate the power of the desire to keep one's job to cause a large organization to behave towards its own self-perpetuation despite the moral lines that must be crossed by individuals to do so.
I think it deliberately avoids censorship of any kind, which makes it both more open to truth (if anyone posts it there) and more susceptible to manipulation.
If you disagree, I'm curious what government types you think collectivization and central planning can be accomplished with besides those that directly take charge of those things.
No. Everyone is going to die sooner or later.
I'm talking about wrongful deaths. It is wrong for a government to kill people for any reason other than conviction of murder. The Bolsheviks, Red Giard, and Stasi straight up murdered people because they owned means of production, disagreed with communism, or tried to escape to a different country. That us evil.
I know that most of the early deaths under communism were due to starvation, what GP calls "misallocation of resources". Thats a fancy term for stealing. Violation of private property - literally taking people's land and things - is evil and it's also directly responsible for the massive famines that happened under communism.
The longer I live, the more I'm convinced that the idea of communism arises because of envy, and not understanding that wealth doesn't just "exist" statically such that it can be fairly (re)distributed.
The real value is what people sell - either food, clothes, houses, and goods/services. By solving the wrong problem, Communism messes up the motivation to work, produce, and sell. And so everyone becomes far more equal - but poor and starving (except political leaders, they usually do far better than the populace... they're "more equal" than others).
It's an evil idea.
... and I am having trouble understanding why all this needs to be said again. Where the heck is the idea that communism is good coming from? The harrowing biographies and memoirs of those who lived under it are out there - all the content dying, famine, fear, the KGB banging on front doors at 3am to "disappear" people (who return 10 years later and talk about torture, prisons, guards authorized to do "anything" to prisoners, and gulags), the learned willing ignorance ("the less you know, the better you sleep").
I had a Russian co-worker over for dinner once who lived through the tail end of the Soviet Union. "The less you know, the better you sleep" is a quote from him.
You mean, those who were forcibly starved by their government, those who were forcibly murdered and displaced by their government, and those who were put into forced labor "re-education" work camps by their government.
I'm not talking about the baseline of human problems and suffering that is everywhere -- that's not communism's fault. Communism is responsible for the large increase in death rate following a country's fall to it, and especially for the murders it commits (literally shooting, hanging, decapitating, working to death in gulags, etc., as well as imprisoning and persecuting dissidents and mass theft of peoples' property leading to mass poverty).
The vast power communist leaders hold always corrupts them and turns them into monsters.
> go over to the west and count up all the people who died of preventable means
> Death by capitalism.
You might as well say that everyone in a family who had a preventable death experienced "death by family". Or that everyone with an employer who had a preventable death experienced "death by employer".
It's not other people's job to prevent a given person's misfortune.
> Every person who's ever died of complications of malnutrition while their country exports food
That's due to government corruption more than anything else. Government officials should be held accountable and prosecuted.
Watch out, good hackers find those words incredibly motivating.
Bad arguments should be quickly responded to and shown false. Calling them "dogwhistles" doesn't change anyone's opinion.
Once an LLM-based system can be hard-locked to its own ontology, think and evaluate options and make decisions based on it, and update it based on what it learns from encounters with the real world, then I think we'll have made the final great breakthrough AI needs to become generally intelligent and useful.
In terms of Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, LLMs currently use only System 1 thinking (equivalent to fast, pattern-matched decisions humans make). You can scale that up to trillions of parameters, but fundamentally it's still fancy scaled-up probabilistic pattern matching. Like humans, fast decisions made by AI here only can be justified/audited in retrospect.
Integrated ontologies would move AI toward what Kahneman calls "System 2 thinking": slow, logical, systematic evaluation that is more auditable.
If you have an LLM or human just start coding up something without nailing down those decisions first, then he/she/it will implicitly make those decisions arbitrarily in the moment (usually based more on pattern-matching than real weighing of alternatives) and the result will be a massive mess.
Ideally for an LLM, you'd hand-write a highly detailed DESIGN.md file to encode those decisions and a suite of test fixtures to enforce them.
"Diversity is our strength" -- what kind of diversity? Within a company, diversity of purpose is not a strength, because you can't have people working at cross-purposes with one another. It's the same for countries, local communities, and families. "Diversity" can easily be used to describe what ultimately is "division", making it contradict the old saying in the USA "United we stand, divided we fall".
Diversity of strengths/weaknesses, personalities, backgrounds (including ethnic), etc. all do make us stronger provided we maintain and prioritize a practical unity in a shared purpose.
Real beauty comes from expressing something coherent within constraints such that the constraints become the means of expression.
So for numbers we normally work with, no. Maybe with cryptographic operations though.
I've always wanted to fly my wife & kids in a plane, but I just can't afford a high-maintenance luxury asset that costs as much as a house, and fuel costs are prohibitive as well.
so yeah, if someone could mass-manufacture an FAA MOSAIC-certified light-sport aircraft with >2 seats, that could bring the cost of fractional ownership and once-every-two-months weekend use down to my level. And if small local air strips could stop closing too, that'd be great.
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All to say, aviation used to be semi-reachable as a middle class hobby for family people. Now, the only way to get a family in the air for people like me is to spend years building a kit plane from scratch or fixing up a cheap broken plane.
I recently reacted angrily in a PR review comment after encountering one for the umpteenth time... that caught me off guard. I didn't know I was capable of that.
If you don't speak English, write it in Hindi and use google translate. That will be much preferable to something written by an LLM.
The LLM-voice revulsion isn't just about particular idiosyncrasies. Another commenter put it well - the "uncanny valley of text".
I'm getting to the point that I almost have a physical feeling of revulsion/nausea when I read something outside an open Claude Code session that is written in an AI voice.
I'm so sick of that voice -- word choice, phrasing, style... it's hard to define and frustrating because it's both pervasive, influential on human writers including myself (I found myself using the phrase "doing a lot of work" in a Slack message about a word someone chose to use :grimace:), and presumably compounding on future LLMs.
I used to win spelling bees in school, but I played the entire archive on this game and my highest score was 6/18.
Maybe it has to do with the balance between audio and visual learning. Spelling bees are spoken words in, letters out -- not letters in, words out. When trying to solve these, I kept trying to sound out different orderings of letters, maybe that's not how good players do it?