cryptica

> the best play tends to be "to be unjust while seeming just"

Yep this is a huge problem now. I think wealth inequality is also making this worse because people often turn a blind eye to the bad behaviors of people who have power over them. This is an extremely powerful effect; it's everywhere. For example, Christians turning a blind eye to certain negative character traits of God as he appears in the old testament. Employees turning a blind eye to the immoral actions of their boss and coming up with justifications to keep them on a pedestal...

The social structure is not determined by morality; it's the other way round; morality is determined by the social structure.

It reminds me of an old French fable in which a lamb tries to reason with a wolf why he should let him live... The wolf listens to the lamb's logic but then he eats it anyway and the story ends with a sentence like "The reason of the strongest is always the best one."

Yes, strongly believe this is the case. The corrupt leaders are rarely chosen by the people; they are installed by foreign powers. There are many cases you can dig into which are absolutely atrocious; like people getting paid big money by western leaders to assassinate their friends to take power and pass laws which facilitate the extraction of resources by foreign corporations.

Like the story of Thomas Sankara's assassination by his trusted childhood friend Blaise Compaoré is quite disturbing. It seems like Compaoré was leader for a very long time and is still in politics... I cannot think of a more morally deprived individual. If game theory was as claimed; nobody should want to work with such deeply disloyal and psychopathic individual. It's just like I say; people have a strong tolerance, even attraction to abusers. If you look at the real story, you notice this pattern over and over... but we are so badly gaslit about such things (aka 'PR') that we don't notice.

I think a major flaw of all these models is that they underestimate:

1. How easy it is to start fresh and shed your past reputation if you get caught doing something bad.

2. How forgiving people are and how tolerant they are to deception, abuse and immorality. I hate to say it but a lot of people are attracted to abusers. They keep going back to the same kinds of people who will abuse them over and over. These same people who tolerate abuse often seem to show disrespect and look down on good, honest people. I cannot overstate how powerful this effect is; and it seems to be getting worse over time! And these people keep coming up with narratives to gaslight themselves about their abusers "they're not so bad"... People will especially do this when their abuser has power over them (Stockholm Syndrome).

Once you factor these two things, cheating is the clear winning strategy. By a mile... It's objectively a superior strategy. If we just follow game theory; it will take us somewhere really dark. Game theory isn't what's keeping the world civilized. Society literally all rests on people's irrational emotions and moral principles.

The desire to do the right thing is completely irrational and is a net loss to the individual. If we continue with the current system and current assumptions, all moral individuals will be wiped out because they are at a HUGE disadvantage. To solve our social problems, we need to be more moral; we need to learn to judge ourselves and other people through the lens of morality and be very firm about it.

As an engineer who bills by the hour, I like how LLMs are affecting codebases.

I've been preaching the benefits of well designed code for a long time, explaining that 10x engineers exist but only if the codebase permits... Nobody got it. Now when people start with a poorly architected project and the AI starts generating slop code on top at a rapid rate, they finally learn the lesson I've been trying to get across. The effect was always there but AI makes it even stronger and allows people to understand the problem of compounding technical debt faster.

I've been kidnapped by my landlord, who is working in cahoots with my employer with the support of the government and the banks.

I've been trapped inside my landlord's house and my employer's office and they keep trafficking me between each other using a train.

They take turns raping me mentally and financially. S.O.S. Help!

It's moved to AI training sets. If you can't get your product into the training set of a popular model, it's game over.

The CEOs of the biggest corporations could absolutely be replaced... You don't even need an LLM, just a cron job that runs once a day and executes a script:

if (marketCrash) then sendEmailToGovernmentAskingForBailout();

There is probably a point when there is enough capital and enough investors that you don't need a CEO or executives. The investors already take care of all the politics and business networking side of the company for free.

The investors can organize the government bailouts themselves. You don't need a CEO.

If it can engage in criminal activity, then it can skip the golf training.

Every time the LLM CEO gets caught doing a crime and goes to 'jail', the LLMs on the exec board can vote to replace it with another instance of the same LLM model.

Forget 'limited liability', this is 'no liability'.

Yes, it is. I feel like this level of distrust is probably something that wealthy people often experience; but at least they can take a look at their bank account or portfolio app from the comfort of a house they own to help soothe the pain.

I don't think therapy would help me to be honest. My problem is not psychological; it's that I need more money to buy my time and freedom. One time I was earning a modest passive income for about 3 years while working on open source projects; I was quite happy then and the fact that I didn't trust anyone was not a problem as I wasn't forced to interact with anyone.

I guess one positive aspect about this feeling of 'not caring' and putting on a mask is that it comes across as confidence and it gives me more control. I can say unexpected things and control other people's emotions to some extent.

When you're always willing to throw away the entire relationship in every interaction, people tend to respect you more for some reason. It's like; if you don't value the relationship, it signals high status or something. I suppose this is the trick that psychopaths use?

This is part of the reason why I never worked for big tech. I always have a side project going. I cannot function without a side project.

I don't believe that any corporation would ever reward me for any reason; so without a side project, I wouldn't have hope... How would I get out of bed in the morning to go to work, without hope?

For me; day job is survival, that's it. I do it well because I'm well practiced and I need good output to provide me narrative cover but I don't trust any of it. I'm not invested in my day job at all. I assume it's all a PsyOp and I could lose the job any day for any weird reason. I act and pretend constantly and I care about nothing and no one and I trust no one...

I literally believe that if I worked for some big tech company which was actually rewarding employees for real, that they would stop rewarding employees as soon as I became one. I've encountered a situation like this in the past. Horrible situation. The secret to happiness is just don't expect anything and do unto others what they do to you.

I think a good strategy is to change companies often and ensure that your side project isn't related to any of them. This creates a lot of complications and adds a layer of protection because if your current employer tried to claim the software as theirs, your previous 3 employers would all have claims (weak claims, that is).

If the software is different from what all 4 companies would produce and it is all built outside of business hours, it gives you full leverage.

If any specific company tries to imply that their claim is valid, they cannot do this without validating the claims of 3 other companies... Thus preventing themselves from obtaining the full ownership rights over the product.

The company which actually wants your software would be better off just paying you and accepting your simple version of reality than trying to create complications for themselves by inventing some elaborate legal fiction.

You can see it everywhere. In this case, the fact that it took 2 years. And of course now that FFmpeg is getting more exposure in the media due to their association with AI hype, now they finally get 'fair' legal treatment... I don't call that winning. I see this over and over. Same thing all over the west.

I remember Rowan Atkinson (the UK actor) made a speech about this effect a couple of years ago and never heard about it since but definitely feeling it more and more... No exposure, no money, no legal representation. And at the same time we are being gaslit about our privilege.

The law doesn't seem to work anymore. There are so many cases where someone can do illegal stuff in plain sight and nothing can be done about it. Not everyone has tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to spare to get a lawyer. By the time you manage to save up the money, you realize that this system is absolutely crooked and that you don't trust it to obtain justice anyway even with the lawyers and even if you are legally in the right.

The law exists mostly to oppress. It's exactly the argument that gun proponents make "Only the good guys obey gun laws, so only the bad guys have guns."

All the good guys are losing following the law, all the bad guys are winning by violating the law. Frankly, at this stage, they write the laws.

As I get older, I'm realizing that there's no such thing as 'human nature.' It's a broad spectrum. My view is that poor and average people are alright but as you get closer to power, people become increasingly corrupt and evil. Relationships become more calculated and transactional to the point that they become unpleasant; though apparently some people either don't feel this effect or maybe their hunger for power is so strong that it overrides those feelings... Or maybe it's a bit of both. In any case, by the time you get really close to power, all moderately normal people have been filtered out; both voluntarily and also because non-psychopaths generally struggle to fit in.

The psychopaths in power want to remove the moral element because it makes things unpredictable for them. They prefer everything to be kept stable and under control through blackmail and other forms of coercive leverage.

Something else I've found is that, as you get closer to power, people become much 'nicer' (superficially) but they are definitely more evil in reality if you look at their actions. It's like they make up for their evil deeds by being extra nice to people in person. Nowadays, when I meet people who are too friendly with their words, I immediately feel skeptical; I don't trust them.

I suspect hallucinations in LLMs are the result of contradictions in their training sets which were trained into it.

I suspect it's just like with humans. People who learn quickly and don't carefully curate their knowledge to resolve contradictions as they learn, they tend to make similar mistakes when it comes to subjects which they did not invest much time fully studying.

If I was an AI researcher, what I would try to do is find the highest quality information possible concerning very few axiomatic topics, with as few contradictions as possible, then train it into the LLM until it can generate text and basic reasoning which is fully accurate... Then once we have this basic but fully rational AI, start feeding it new data but, before giving it any piece of data to learn from, you first ask the AI to indicate if this new data contradicts any of its current knowledge. You only let it update its weights with the new data as-is if it does not contradict its existing knowledge. If it does contradict its existing knowledge, either discard it or maybe feed it the data but with some synthetic preamble like "Some people believe that..." so that it's aware of the existence of this belief system but knows that it's not to be internalized as its own beliefs.

Or maybe there is a way to do this to detect contradictions by looking at the weights themselves. You can rollback a round of training if the weights update in a way which suggests that a conflicting piece of information was learned in a specific round of training. Maybe there can be a different ANN which looks at the weights of the LLM during training and it was trained to detect contradictions and decides when to rollback a round of training.

This is an excellent subject to teach in schools. I'm a software developer and I felt like I benefited from woodwork and metalwork lessons at school. I think if the future generation is to automate systems, they will need to understand the manual processes.

Another thing that's needed through is to make it easier for young people to buy land in remote areas and/or to access funding to start companies. It's insane how difficult it is to obtain funding for any venture dealing in the word of atoms. I hear stories of young people moving to China to access opportunities; in the west, it feels like entrepreneurship in the space has been regulated out of existence.

It's bad enough that you have to compete with China on price and quality, but regulations make it essentially impossible.

I oppose the bill on principle. That said, I can see some positive that can come of it (for Australians) which has nothing to do with safety. Still, I'm not convinced that Australian politicians are actually working for Australian interests there. Also the timing seems bad. They should have done it before Elon bought Twitter. Now it looks totalitarian. Could be one of those bills pushed by foreign entities... Could be pushed to tarnish Australia to reduce the current insane levels of inbound capital flight to Australia. Many people really want to see a housing price crash, for example. Also, we shouldn't discount the desire that foreign entities have in controlling global narratives to shape global economics.

It's just like it was with pen and paper... Everyone trusts what is written on the financial statement but when they come to withdraw the cash, all at once, suddenly everyone finds out that the gold isn't there.

It's the same with computer systems. The charts show something, but until enough people decide to all withdraw their money or sell their stock at the same time, nobody has any idea that the money or asset simply isn't there or nobody knows just how frothy the valuation is.

Social media and search algorithms are highly optimized to ensure that people don't sell or withdraw stuff at the same time. Modern media directs massive attention towards certain topics as a way to draw attention away from other topics which could collapse the economy.

Also, imagine a bank has a serious bug which causes millions or billions of dollars to disappear every year or creates extra illegitimate dollars. Imagine they only discover this bug after a few years of operation... How likely is it that they will report it to an authority? They didn't notice it for years, why not pretend they didn't notice it for a few MORE years... The incentive to delay the reckoning is an extremely powerful one.

Well, you can't overthrow a government with a piece of cloth. So I still don't see how it could be called an insurrection.

That's too bad but I guess if people want to silo themselves in, they should be allowed. I just hope that big corporations don't eventually coerce everyone into this through economic force.

I can see a future where corporations control the entire economy. Startups or parallel economy would be impossible due to regulatory moats and monetary asymmetries and everyone would be forced to lock themselves into a filter bubble in order to get a job... To survive.

Imagine knowing what's happening and not having the power refuse... And by that point, the power would be granted fully artificially out of a money printer, distributed straight into the coffers of select big corporations on the basis of secret mutual agreements between each other. All under the banner of MMT? This is beyond immoral.

More specific to your point, it makes sense why the entities behind the censorship push might still want a single platform, but simply with better 'siloing' capability. It's likely that the same people who want censorship, also want mass surveillance. Mind-bending to think that there exist a conflict between these two dystopian aspects! They really want to have the cake and eat it too.

From my perspective, X experience has improved a lot since Elon's acquisition.

What actually got worse materially? I hear a lot of gesturing 'Orange man bad', 'Elon help orange man, so Elon bad' but I cannot reach any of these conclusions from first principles looking at Trump's policies while he was President... Aside from the Jan 6 incident... But I don't see consensus there between either side so I do have some doubts and questions about the true nature of that incident. The fact is, nobody on Jan 6 had guns besides police officers. How can that possibly be an insurrection? Please correct me if I'm wrong there.

I refuse to use Bluesky because it is clearly being pushed on the masses, in collusion with mainstream media, as an alternative to X. Clearly another attempt by certain people to control information. It's shocking how people fall for this stuff over and over again.

I hope if backfires, mostly draws in users from existing speech-unfriendly platforms and then the number of social media platforms will multiply from here onward and a large number of platforms will compete based on who is most permissive with regards to speech.

Most of the highly suggestible masses already moved off X to Threads... So now that Bluesky is being pushed hard, I hope the suggestible people from Threads will switch over and split up their censorship ecosystems.

It makes sense from that perspective. The censored ecosystems should be separated into lots of small platforms because you need a lot of different filter bubbles to maintain the deceptions and impermeable information silos. A large centralized ecosystem will create too many opportunities for exposure to alternative information so it cannot be controlled as well.

In the future, there will be a different platform for every kind of delusion and each one will focus on its own delusion and will make up stories to discredit rival platforms so people always doubt information received outside.

It's a matter of time before large corporations start preventing their employees from using non-approved platforms. They'll probably use cybersecurity safety as an excuse. They might carry out hacking false flags on their own employees to convince them to not use other platforms they won't feel forced.

Also cats are smarter than humans because they found a way to enslave humanity without even having to pretend to care about us. Dogs rank one level below, in that respect.

I don't understand why the media is pushing this a Jake Paul vs Mike Tyson stuff so hard and why people care about it. Boxing is crude entertainment for low intelligence people.

I'm tired of all this junk entertainment which only serves to give people second-hand emotions that they can't feel for themselves in real life. It's like, some people can't get sex so they watch porn. People can't fight so they watch boxing. People can't win in real life so they play video games or watch superhero movies.

Many people these days have to live vicariously through random people/entities; watch others live the life they wished they had and then they idolize these people who get to have everything... As if these people were an intimate projection of themselves... When, in fact, they couldn't be more different. It's like rooting for your opponent and thinking you're on the same team; when, in fact, they don't even know that you exist and they couldn't be more different from you.

You're no Marvel superhero no matter how many comic books you own. The heroes you follow have nothing to do with you. Choose different heroes who are more like you. Or better; do something about your life and give yourself a reason to idolize yourself.

It's interesting the way things turned out so far with LLMs, especially from the perspective of a software engineer. We are trained to keep a certain skepticism when we see software which appears to be working because, ultimately, the only question we care about is "Does it meet user requirements?" and this is usually framed in terms of users achieving certain goals.

So it's interesting that when AI came along, we threw caution to the wind and started treating it like a silver bullet... Without asking the question of whether it was applicable to this goal or that goal...

I don't think anyone could have anticipated that we could have an AI which could produce perfect sentences, faster than a human, better than a human but which could not reason. It appears to reason very well, better than most people, yet it doesn't actually reason. You only notice this once you ask it to accomplish a task. After a while, you can feel how it lacks willpower. It puts into perspective the importance of willpower when it comes to getting things done.

In any case, LLMs bring us closer to understanding some big philosophical questions surrounding intelligence and consciousness.

The part where Elon's mum said she was shocked by the contents of the Twitter files and that's why she stopped being a democrat. That's all the info I needed.

Haha. How leftist/neoliberal of me to outsource my opinion! Well, in my defence, Elon's mum is more trustworthy than CNN. She hasn't lied yet.

Unlike your typical leftist, I actually keep score of such things.

The first amendment of the US constitutions says that it's illegal for the government to make a law which abridges people's freedom of speech. There are many cases of government entities working with social media companies to suppress speech as the Twitter Files have proved. As the government created and upholds those federal entities on the basis of laws, the government is responsible.

We haven't come so far from the time of the Romans who drank from lead pipes. We're just wrestling with different chemicals and different physical, environmental and social effects.

When I see stuff like this, I don't understand how the economics work out for YouTube. So many pointless videos uploaded for free. How can they possibly make a profit?