scarecrowbob

Yes, yes and their hearts pump a viscous oily goo rather than blood.

"surely you don't actually think you've learned NOTHING from playing Fallout? Nothing about yourself?"

Well, I did write out a couple of paragraphs about what I thought I learned.

I did indeed "learn how to play fallout". Which is pleasant. Like learning to play Rock Band or Sing Star or Guitar Hero was also pleasant.

And although I initially thought that maybe all those "ethically good" decisions I found gratifying might improve my ability to make ethically good choices in the larger world, I believe I was incorrect.

And further, because of the highly contrived nature of the game and it's uncanny closeness to the material world, it might be actually harmful: it encouraged me to pretend I am ethical when in fact it has brought me to do literally nothing with other people.

My point is probably getting hung up on the mechanics of drumming, which I have struggled with off and on for the last 30 years now.

So instead, I'll say what I have to say about writing and general LLM usage and be done:

The real difficulties of writing are a positive adjunct to my thinking, and I believe that almost all of the intellectual things I have struggled with (from learning to read the log files in Linux to predicting what is wrong with the engine in my car) all benefit from the same struggle.

Removing that effort by crapping half-formed thought in and out of an LLM might not be a big deal or even improve the work of folks who have already learned how to think through these complex systems.

However, that flailing certainly doesn't help people get better at thinking in the way that writing or troubleshooting complex systems might.

Further, unlike Guitar Hero an LLM might encourage folks to just "play the game" instead of actually breaking out of the bounds of that game. Because it produces tangible output (from poetry to PLC code), the folks using these "ways of thinking" often feel that they are "doing the same thing" in the same way that I can "bench press" 2-tons-of-steel with a front end loader.

And that intentional confusion between "getting better at doing stuff" and "a lot more crap got done" isn't a good thing to me.

That is the point: a lot of folks do in fact think that creating with an LLM is the same as the process of learning to create.

My point isn't to say that if your motivations for drawing or drumming or whatever come from XYZ, then they aren't valid. I'm also not claiming that picture books about airplanes are bad because they encourage children to become bomber pilots.

People have all kinds of strange and complex motivations, some better than others.

I'd trade your "enjoyment of video games" for "my parents' failures as 'professional' musicians" any day of the week.

My own reasons for going out tonight and playing double bass with my jazz band are way more sus, weird, dumb, illegitimate, whatever and have way less to do with my (very real) love of playing music with my people than anything I think some rando on the internet is going to divulge.

Rather, the point is that struggling and sucking at drawing until you figure out how to do it in a way that feels good can easily get short-circuited by midjourney or whatever.

The hidden midpoint that you think I am hesitant about might be all the pedagogical materials in-between: the scales, drum rudiments, gesture drawings, forum postings, low-rent bar gigs, half-assed bug ridden toy PHP scripts, bizarre sophomore manifestos, bad poetry, broken song lyrics, iffy recitals, lessons with bored teachers, incorrect tableture. Those things are all "pretensions" in your sense: those are all on spectra where folks flail as they approach "doing the thing". And they are all a-okay.

The limit on that spectrum, though is the LLM and the Guitar Hero, where folks are barely even "flailing". Like all parts of a spectrum are on the spectrum, but which is to be avoided if the other end of the spectrum is "good". And I probably wouldn't bother writing that out if there weren't LLMs didn't have literal cults forming around them...

Nothing can invalidate whatever path you found to music.

I'm sorry you had folks rolling their eyes at you when you got your instrument. That's an exceedingly common thing to happen. Especially with singing. But it doesn't make it okay or correct or nice.

But the lessons and the practicing aren't the same thing as playing a video game.

In the same way that no matter how good I get in Fallout it will never have anything to do with how I am able to deal with folks in my real life.

For instance, I enjoy Fallout and it's very validating to play it and be the "good" guy. For a quite a while I considered that maybe there was something ethically useful in that kind of "education".

As I have gotten older I have come to feel that it's actually closer to some kind of ethics porn: none of the choices have material consequences for me or my community and I can go back and do things from a save game. I have total control over the situation in ways I never have in real life.

And further, I have come to think that this way of thinking ethics might actually be harmful to my practical ethics: because I'm not forced to make choices that actually impact me or anyone else, that game might start to erode the parts of that process that deal with the often-negative outcomes of those decisions.

So, like, sure: Fallout made me more interested in how my ethics function. But it's so far removed in how we actually move through the world that it might actually mess up how I do things.

I used to have an octapad back in the oughts, and if that was the only way I was interacting with the drum kit it would have done a lot of harm to my playing. If I played the video game drum set like I played my real kit, it would get destroyed in short order.

I am certain that you know what I mean when I say that the specific techniques around stick/beater control have virtually nothing to do with the mechanics of that kit, and further I am equally certain that you understand that the timing involved in these games has little or nothing to do with the strictness (and often looseness/feel/dragging/etc) of the timing when we play drums with other humans.

My point isn't even about the specifics of these games, but about how folks seem to abuse AI so easily these days.

I -don't- think there is anything pretentious about buying an instrument you don't play and then doing whatever you do. That's not pretense, that is the process of learning to play music- that's what it is in itself.

But I also don't think that is the same thing as playing a video game, and I think the distinction is important to make because there is much in our world that asks us to pretend we are doing things we aren't doing.

In the same way that I have to think about how to respond and think about why you have a negative reaction to what I wrote, I also have to struggle with a reasonable way of communicating why I think you don't understand what I wrote.

I have to come to terms with the limitations of my ideas and how I can state them-- if I crapped "fuck your strawman and the fleshlight version of music and thought that is generated by an LLM" into an LLM, then I wouldn't really be getting anything at all out of these kinds of interactions.

So when I read and write, I often struggle. But I think that having those difficulites and sitting with them is what is different than dropping half-baked reactions into an LLM or playing Guitar Hero.

Maybe not, but folks keep telling me that I'm ignorant for not agreeing that being able to "engineer" a prompt is the same exact thing as being a poet or painter.

As a person who plays several instruments (including drums) in professional situations, and as a person who enjoyed Guitar Hero, I always find it strange when folks are able to take the "experience" of Rock Band / Songstar /etc as a proxy for the experience of practicing music.

I actually do sight read for a couple of instruments- nothing in any of those games has literally anything to do with that.

Hell, my (very good) reading for clarinet and double bass has nothing to do with my (very poor) ability to sight read on piano.

Whatever gets folks interested in stuff is great, but to me it's like saying "I watched 10K hours of MTV in the 80s and that was very helpful in my career playing jazz"...

The same thing is true with writing and other skills replacements- much of my ability and desire to write comes from the experience of using it as an adjunct to thinking.

Having to figure out how I should connect ideas and state them in a way others will understand clarifies my own thoughts, so the idea that I am somehow gaining idunnowhat by adding a bunch of verbal noise to my writing misses a lot of the reasons why I like to write.

I'm happy to use LLMs to draft things like the contracts I need for the mechanical royalty payments I make when I record other folks material, but that's only because I am not trying to learn how to think legalistically.

And further, creating documents via might spark an interest in legal language and how it get used, but it's not going to help me understand the underlying reasons for what's going on any more than watching a whole lot of porn is going to help me be a better lover...

So, today was my second day piloting drones ever. I am absolutely not sure what I would need any bit of AI for... it is quite enjoyable to zip around the trees here.

I did the same process as the "author", namely Joshua Bardwell's videos and tutorials Liftoff using a remote, and now I have a tinywhoop and analog goggles.

But it was mostly just normal practice and learning in the sim (I have maybe 25-35h of time in that) which has translated pretty well to the actual drone. I was able to fly around my yard pretty well. I don't think I'd have had as much luck if I'd not crashed many hundreds of times in a simulator.

For me, the amount of thought outsourced to LLMs has been a bit strange lately. Like, I just puzzled this stuff out and followed a couple of videos other folks had made on Youtube. It's just not that complex these days and there are plenty of (human intelligence) resources already.

Internally as well, given what happens to any push back against law enforcement where I live- in the US, at least, if you try to defend yourself against state violence you'll be summarily executed in the street.

Ah, that explains why all the Q-pilled folks I know (in?)correctly believe the US government to be communist...

Why? Because it's not a very accurate stereotype.

I do first aid at music festivals and volunteer at a free clinic that serves a homeless population. I see a lot of spun folks and folks in varying stages of "burned out" (to use the term from the stereotype). I'm still in EMT school, but I've had to work with a lot of folks having adverse reactions to these substances.

Meth and alcohol, simply being poor, childhood trauma, getting into a bad medical situation, losing a job and not finding one; all of those things will put folks into some bad places.

But most substance abuse, in my limited experience, comes down to various traumas folks get into and maybe some chemical predispositions.

That's not how most of the folks I know who have had very adverse psychedelic experiences have gotten into those states. And it is generally a very transitory state.

While there are long-term psychological effects from stuff like acid (and IME, MDMA, Ket, and Nitrous are worse physiologically than things like LSD, C2B, DMT, psilocybin, mescaline, etc), generally psychedelic substances lead people to doing less of those drugs over time and that has a very different effect than, say, alcohol and chronic poverty.

Propaganda about these things has a hard time taking hold in the face of most folks lived reality.

Yeah, as soon as my kiddo finished college I literally moved into my pickup truck and started playing music and doing stage hand stuff.

I'd literally rather live in the back of a pickup than have to keep getting woken up at 1am to reboot a server in Iowa because that's cheaper for my boss than getting a second instance.

At some point I inherited some money and bought a shack in the desert, and now I am studying to be an EMT and I volunteer at a free clinic... today got to help a doc sew up a hobo who got into a fight, which was beyond interesting for sure. I get enough money from some investments, an audio production business, and doing festival stuff (either first aid or audio).

Fuck the US, and fuck its working culture. It's sick. When I had to play along with it cause I had kids to raise and needed some stability, I put on a happy face and did the thing.

But there is no reason to do that if you don't have too.

For context, I am 48.

Seriously.

People write stuff like this and get all pissy when I say yes, and that we have been doing this work for a long time.

Then get all righteous and start talking about democracy and then no-true-scotsman all the actual things folks do to curtail the actions of the state.

It's wild, but the flip side is that since I am on that side of things I have a much better picture of what it might actually be possible when folks understand that the ethical choices aren't available via a ballot line.

I wish I believed voting worked even a little.

A lot of folks might take that sentiment to believe that since the only 'real and adult' politics comes about from voting we simply abstain out of apathy. For me, the sentiment is a lot closer to "I wish I thought I could just vote instead of all the other weird political things that I end up doing".

I live next to a reservation and feel that there is a lot in common between the US indian reservation system and concentration camps.

My position is that the US has been on this road for about 250 years. Blood quantum and similar policy choices forced on people, individually and in groups, have been very damaging.

Yeah, but my shoes get worn out, and I can't share them- the media stuff has always already been mass produced and there has been way more useful stuff to look at so the industrially automation of literal crap may find an audience.

But as a person who reads (and I assume you have some care for what you're reading) why would that have anything to do with you as an audience? Like, I get why folks would want a curated set of Readers Digests, but why would you care to make -more- of that output?

As a writer and cognition-enjoyer, much of the reading I do has been done by people who were using that writing as an adjunct to their own thoughts.

Producing a bunch of filler content to pad things out is the opposite direction from most of the reading that I have found helpful. In fact, shortening works seems to be the main part of good writing. I don't generally want to watch a 4-hour film that could have been a tight 50 minutes. I don't want to read 800 pages that could have been a solid 200.

I'm not reading for distraction, and if I were Zane Gray and Robotech and Harliquin romance novels already have that filled- heck, I could just re-read Cujo (which probably wasn't edited very much at all, admittedly).

Generating a ton of crap, as you note, has never been a problem.

Getting rid of the 4-8 paras of thoughtlessness has always been the real work in my experience.

Yeah, it is a bit dumb to talk about "cleaning" forests. Or at least I've never heard anyone who spouted that line who I thought had any understanding of the situation. Mostly they are just salty that the forests aren't actually profitable for logging, but they can't say it like that.

Like a lot of things in the US, the resources are "there" for this stuff, because it's a lot of individual labor instead of something that can be turned into a massive payoff for a couple of "investors" there's no "market incentive" so nothing will be done.

For context, I live on 40 unimproved acres in CO, and much of my spring and late fall is spent moving downed wood and cutting down thickets of gamble oak.

That is a lot of work, and I hope (over the next decade) to eventually get it somewhat under control. The idea is to not have, for instance, a dead tree leaning up against a living tree and to try and tamp down or increase the space between the floor and the first couple of branches in the trees. I also collect up wood for heating in the winter (better to burn it to stay warm than to lt it go in an eventual wild fire.

This is a lot of strenuous work, and not just because I have some love and respect for the situation of all the individual flora and fauna that populate this chunk of land. I've know several wildland firefighters here and they are doing similar things in a hurry out in the hills with hand tools. Because you can't get large equipment around to do the work- there aren't roads in a lot of these places.

It'll all probably burn at some point, anyhow.

But I try because at least in the couple of acres where I actually live I might be able to get the underbrush cleared so a fire could be fought.

But the idea of setting it on fire is prepostrous- I might as well set the shack where I live on fire while i am at it.

That more or less scales up.

The process of mitigating wildire (usually done on a line near an active fire) is largely a bunch of 25 year olds with shovels and chainsaws.

I am all for that work- I'd much rather have them doing that than geraing up to go to Iran or Cuba or wherever.

But hey, the ecology of this place is fucked. My ancestors destroyed the megagfauna to prevent folks from subsisting off of the concentration camps/ reservations. The folks who are still "into" that racist, genocidal, ecocidal project aren't going to do anything to fix it; they'd rather burn their own houses down first.

For a lot of us who have spent a lot of time writing, the process of formulating our thoughts in a way that's legible to other folks has also forced us to think about the material we are writing about in ways that hopefully clarify the content for us or change how we understand the topic.

Because of that work, I have very little trust in the thinking of folks who don't care enough to engage deeply with the process of formulating their thoughts in a way other folks can understand.

"Do what thou wilt" and all, but you might consider that the process of writing is a helpful adjunct for thinking.

I mean, fortunately for me it's dry enough that I can run a small swamp cooler for the couple of weeks a year where those are the temps in my place. But yeah, you're correct that this is what it looks like where I am at, temperature-wise.

Though I have no A/C, per se... I have thought about it. I'm 100% off grid, but the only time I would like that is when the sun is so far up that the batteries have all already charged.

True, I have learned a lot and that has been very interesting and quite fun. I'm at 6500' but am still planning on setting up an outside shower just because it's pretty here. I am waiting on that till I figure out an indoor situation, though.

I got a quote for a backhoe rental today and am a little apprehensive (it's by far the largest machine I will have operated), but hey, I get to run a backhoe for a weekend...

I can see how small efficiencies would matter a lot in that sitation.

When I had 6 100W panels and was trying to keep my laptop (and lights) running off that, then I did a lot more trying to keep them clean. If I was having to burn fuel for electricity, I'd certainly be trying a lot harder to squeeze what I can out the array.

Anyhow, good luck.

I likely am in a similar position. My hope is to get a cistern buried this year so I can have more than 40L of liquid water on hand at any given time... and then maybe even a shower :D Washing myself with a bucket is starting to lose its charm.

If they are like me, keeping the fridge from freezing during the winter is more energy that keeping the fridge cooling during winter...

Ah, that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, the one tree branch that hits my array until 10a prevents it from charging at all even though it only obscures 1/4 of one panel in the 10-panel set.

But I like the branch and have plenty of full sun, so I haven't cut it.

Horses for courses. My system is off grid, so any extra power is just not used, and its designed in a way that a 2-5% change doesn't do anything. That might be a more meaningful change if I were selling power to other folks.

Kind of off topic, but I see a lot of folks proximate to me have built systems to turn panels so they face the sun more closely. I can see the use in that if you don't have much space or if you have a large commercial operation, but this area is very rural.

My array (4kw) which I built myself has 10 400W panels. The panels cost me $1200 because the minimum order is 12 and the supplier suggested buying extras; shipping large panels one at a time isn't cheap. In fact, the shipping for the entire system (about $5000 worth of equipment) was almost $1000.

But my feeling is that for the cost of a moving array that tracks the sun / time of year would have cost quite a lot more and have involved construction that I personally wasn't comfortable with. The conclusion I came to is that it would cost about the same to build a second array, angle it for "summer" (mine is angled to be most efficient in winter), and hook it to the other MPPT on my controller.

That would take up a lot of space, but a) I am 40 acres and b) then I could run a mig welder with impunity during the day...

I am curious how much of a difference it makes.

I have 4kw of panels and 15kwh of storage. I only get down to about 80% most nights (I heat with wood and propane).

But my system will charge completely in about 2 hours of full sun. If it took 3 hours it wouldn't make a difference. So I generally don't clean them (well, the rain and snow do that work).

I do remove snow, because that has a very noticeable impact.

Is the difference that you are pushing back to a grid (I am not), so the power all gets used regardless of you being the one to use it?

"Taking us back to the previous system, and putting in the hard and mundane work of keeping it working is the much better solution if people want redress, not continuous 'we just need to break it a little more because feelz/it's simpler/our political class (that we could, you know, work to get voted out) suck (and all we do is whine about it)'."

What, this actual system, where (even ignorign the deep violence it metes out to folks in other places) every fucking week I get to hear about how someone has been murdered by it?

It's rich to hear folks talk about "wannabe murders" out of one side of their face while ignoring long-term, violence that this system does every day.

I don't know your situation but surely you've tried ventilating at night and then closing up the house at a specific time in the day?

I only ask because when I moved from the US south to the high desert in NM (about 2KM) I had to learn how to time that transition.

Very few folks here run A/Cs, we generally have homes designed to stay warm and during the summer usually fans go on about bed time and off in the morning, and that's enough to keep things cool because of insulation.

It was not obvious to me how that worked and I spent one very sweaty summer before I got the timing correct.

Of course, if the nights are hot (which sometimes happens) then that doesn't work so well.

I live a couple of miles from an airport that houses a fire-fighting air tanker base, and I am somewhat terrified of fires- 120K Acres has burned in my area of the state so far this year.

I've also been a ham radio enjoyer and had been looking for projects that work with radio. So I built a little antenna that works with ~1Mhz and hooked it to a raspberryPi running dump1090... it's amazing how far I can receive. 50-ish miles across a bunch of 12k-14k mountains.

However, I've switched to just using one of the ADSB sites because they have a lot more tracking info.

It's been super interesting to watch the tankers take off. Mostly c130 and md80, but there have been a pair of canadair float planes... quite a menagerie of aircraft.

Anyhow, the adsb stuff gets really interesting once you identify the spotting planes, as it's a little faster at identifying where agencies are looking at fires than WatchDuty (which also works very well).

Yes.

I live in a very rural spot with a difficult-to-deal-with Electric Association, with a Ute reservation on one side and unpowered parcels on other sides; I don't think that the easement is a typical issue.

And to be clear, I didn't count my labor in designing or implementing the system. I suspect that would have been somewhere in the neighborhood of another $10K if I had to get a hands-off, turn-key version of this same system.

And at some point I will likely double much of the capacity, at which point I will be able to run a mig welder at night if I want...

Fortunately for me, I could just bop down to the bog box store and buy a more appropriate fridge from vevor; horses for courses.

I've never had to turn off my fridge, though it does have interesting-to-me usage patterns; it's weird what you can learn once everything you use has a watt-meter. I can look at the weekly graph and recall when I turned on a hammond organ or cooked in my instapot.