whearyou

I’ve got no problem with LLM copywriting but the LLMisms just drip off this thing, to the detriment of its clarity. Shame.

I recall reading the Arab world was a major refuge for escaping Nazis. Egypt had WW2 Nazi aces flying against Israel unless I'm mistaken?

I wonder if the Arabs got nearly as much milage out of Nazi scientists as the Americans or Soviets got.

I haven’t found I need to plan way too far ahead of time as long as I’ve defined the interface between the tasks

Straight out of Echopraxia.

Will be interesting to see how strong the controlling forces can be - enough to make you miss things in direct perception like in the book, or only softer effects further up the cognition layer stack

Feels like the run up to the "current world" in a Peter Watts novel

Like for the ACLU it seems driven by the personalities that entered the organization.

The type of people who in the most recent generation become professional activists are also those looking for an all encompassing ominicause/ideology that frames disagreement as a fundamental moral failing

Per Turchin model, the declining population in China has created conditions for more elite-adjacent positions for all those STEM PhDs, preventing overproduction

I think I have comments going back about 10 years no?

So interesting I've mostly noticed the fishy seeming anti-Israel accounts, I think mostly because what they say gets up so upvoted

Posted by a 48 day account that mostly talks about Israel.

This has felt like a super postmodern interaction

What are the chances that HN is getting astroturfed these days? Are mods strict about it?

I lots of relatively new accounts coming with what seems to me extreme, but altogether pop-culture acceptable opinions

Preach brother. Collective trauma traps us all

Between this and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026134 on the front page it feels, yet again, like we’re speed running to living in a Peter Watts novel

“It's creating a strange feedback loop: students use an LLM to write the essay, and teachers use an LLM to grade it. It ends up being just one LLM talking to another, with no human intelligence in the middle.”

This was the plot to a recent South Park episode: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt27035146/

Israel’s always been strong at “terraforming”. I wonder what unexpected consequences will be encountered though.

Eighty years they drained the coastal lowland swamps making central Israel broadly livable - prior it was a morass eg Roman generals writing about the difficulty of transporting soldiers through the region, not catching malaria, etc.

Then they figured out it was causing all kinds of environmental problems, so they had to reintroduce swamp like terrain in some cases.

Everything is trade offs I guess.

May we all have this man’s network

If/when this gets tossed - does the have grounds to sue (and who would he be suing) on wrongful arrest, or something else?

Agreed. Don’t know how we balance decentralization with the planetary civilization/economy’s complexity, which requires some kinds of centralization.

That’s doubly difficult because the complexity is what lets the system produce so much output, and if you produced less people would experience that as having less and would riot. The only way out would be if the whole society consumes less, including, visibly, the elites. Feeling taken advantage of is a far more powerful force on the non elites compared to, up to a point, their material ups and downs.

Trump’s ability to create a widely accepted narrative focused specifically on elites who are opposed to his power, but also who are doing extra well relative to the non elites, is what let him harness the raw force of wage stagnation et al for political power

And great write up on your part.

It corresponds with the qualitative observation that violent revolutions are usually led by the “middle class”. This itself corresponds with versions quantitative theories like Turchin’s Structural Demographic Theory.

It seems to me the assumption of consensus with disagreement coming from small fringe factions mirrored much of the American experience during the TNG era.

I agree. But it has a similar aspirational quality, to me, as well thought out proposals for eg Moon colonization.

I suppose the question left is overcoming the blocking path dependence - the method of mass action to get there.

Great example.

In the theory-land of Solarpunk, pretty much all the more fleshed out example I’ve seen imagined also have a similar issue with reality. In particular I’m thinking of KSR’s (otherwise great) novels.

It’s a shame because I think most people would agree some version of “Star Trek” is desirable and working toward a realistic imagining of it helps work toward a path to getting there.

If anyone here is a fan of strategy games and found this as totally awesome as I did, check out the game Terra Invicta on Steam.

I’m embarrassed to admit how many hours I dumped into it.

It was an interesting point to make 30 years ago when the orthodoxy did not include much of that perspective and general society didn’t think much about it.

At this point is it the orthodoxy, suffusing pretty much everything in intellectual public discourse, is no less oppressive than that which it replaced, and, subjectively, feels trite and reductive.

It’s a minor effort compared to the hundreds of millions Iran, China, and Russia have spent for a decade on influence operations.

Those get little air time in hard progressive or far right spaces since these anti liberal influence operations mostly promote hard progressive and far right perspectives.

From the evidence I’ve seen this is the explicit goal of anti-liberal forces in the world, particularly PRC, Russia, and Iran.

I understand those a-hole’s objectives and can emotionally write them off as a-holes, but the way people in the West play along as useful idiots does get under my skin

Agreed.

Other external actors (in particular the Soviets) and internal actors played mayor roles as well.

Castigating only the US paints an inaccurate picture of the realities, leading the public and future policy makers to learn partial lessons which when applied will perform less than optimally for preventing the next incident of large scale sufferings

For a case study, Israel vs eg Egypt.

Though, for Israel that is changing for the worse - less trust in the government and each other.

This seems effective - trying now and will report back

One of the last living artifacts of the internet that was, the internet that could have been.