fallingfrog

My favorite excerpt so far:

Case ID #: 50D-NY-302757

Witness Information

First Name: Donald

Middle Name:

Last Name: Trump

Age: 70

DOB:

Additional Info: Again, just trying to find out the NYPD detective on the FBI sex trafficking task force that called me a couple of weeks ago and spoke to me about some of these issues.

How is Contact Known: He participated regularly in paying money to force me to ‐----- with him and he was present when my uncle murdered my newborn child and disposed of the body in Lake Michigan.

Type: Business

Address:

City: Washington DC

State: District of Columbia

Zip: 20500

Country: United States

As expected, the stupidest imaginable policy. Take all the guardrails completely off, even though the ones that are in place are already toothless. Don't worry, the free market will ensure that everything is turned into paperclips at the maximum possible speed.

One would imagine such a practice to be illegal. But yeah this was my question as well.

"Blacklist" in what sense? Is there a master list somewhere of people not to hire?

I've had the experience of having migraines with aphasia- this is essentially a migraine aura that affects the part of the brain that processes language. I can confirm that while this was happening, i was aware of my surroundings and able to have thoughts, but I was unable to speak and unable to understand spoken or written language. It all just looked and sounded like gibberish. I thought about whether I should go to a hospital, what was going on, wondered whether my loved ones were concerned, and so on, but was unable to communicate any of those thoughts to other people. It was a bizarre experience.

I dont want it to say something shocking

I can't really hold my attention on a conversation with an AI for very long because all it does is reflect your own thoughts back to you. Its really a rather boring conversation partner. I'm already pretty good at winning arguments with myself in the shower, thank you very much.

140k is significantly more money than I've ever made in my life.

Where I live, really the line where life becomes a real struggle is about 80k I would say. Below that, you're putting off maintenance, not saving money, the car is accumulating wear that you can't fix, and a medical bill is fatal.

People living way below 80k can only be doing so with significant government assistance.

The drummer in my band was the type of person who become anybody's friend in a few minutes. I watched him and gleaned this advice:

When you meet someone, your goal should be to get a little look into their inner world. Find out what they care about. And second, be genuinely interested but don't judge. It shouldn't be fake, you should really care. Pay attention to what they say.

This works pretty well for getting to know a person.

Ah I remember running a serial cable from my bedroom to the hallway so we could play 1v1 quake via direct connect. Good times! I think we used to play age of empires that way too.

Oh honey. I wasn't born with this attitude you know- it was beaten into me.

Nothing is punished so swiftly and severely as outshining your boss or making him look stupid.

Reject subtlety

Embrace cringe

Nah im just the kind of autistic that is good at solving specific kinds of problems that can be worked out through visualizing data structures

No reason to risk making the humanity killing doomsday machine appear even a minute sooner, and besides, you wouldn't listen.

I said something because im a fool who cant keep her mouth shut. It was reasons of emotional catharsis having no rational basis.

Tell you what, here's a story from my last job.

I was hired on to help run these experiments with a machine they were trying to perfect. They wanted to do all this stuff with running two machines in parallel, dumping the refuse from one into another machine, all kinds of silly stuff.

I looked at it and in a few minutes I sketched in my notebook a solution to their problem that would achieve the maximum theoretical yield without all these wacky experiments.

But then what would be my job? I was hired to run these experiments not solve their whole problem in 5 minutes. So I didn't tell them. I was getting paid so i didn't care if they were wasting time. I'm a smiley little trans woman anyway, they wouldn't have listened. I did work out the math though on my own.

A few months later, a team of phds at a university we were working with hit on a rudimentary form of the same idea, so at that point I revealed to the boss, oh, look I've worked out the math for that already. And I wrote up the code, and we hit the maximum theoretical yield and it ran 100x faster computationally, and i got a pat on the back. But the reason they listened was because a man with a degree said it.

Why would I bother giving them ideas if they won't listen anyway? If i had given them the answer months earlier, I would not have gotten any kind of bonus even in the unlikely event that I had been taken seriously.

So now of course youre all telling me im insane, and thats fine because honestly I have no incentive to give you answers ahead of time. Go suck eggs. Figure shit out on your own.

Ugh why do you care so much? Leave me alone. The big insane statement i made was "i have some idea of what the next bit of advancement will look like". Transformers are a special case of a much more beautiful general principle ok? Go away

If someone else comes along and makes the exact claim I just made, I won't believe it either

Well it kind of sucks honestly because im never going to get any sort of recognition, but that's partly by choice and partly because I don't have the right personal connections. I 100% understand why all of you think I'm a significant fool. Thats ok. Like i said, im burying the idea. But its obvious enough that someone else will discover it soon enough.

999999 times out of a million you'd be right.

But, I shouldn't have said anything.

I know how it looks. I shouldn't have said anything- it was pointless.

At any rate someone else will figure out what i know soon or already has.

I have some idea of what the way forward is going to look like but I don't want to accelerate the development of such a dangerous technology so I haven't told anyone about it. The people working on AI are very smart and they will solve the associated challenges soon enough. The problem of how to slow down the development of these technologies- a political problem- is much more pressing right now.

Sure- when I talk about trying to avoid choices when it comes to fashion, I am describing myself. I thought when I was young that people who i saw presenting themselves in a way that seemed deliberate were being artificial, and in order to be authentic i should avoid trying to present any specific image to the world.

What I was actually doing was wearing whatever my relatives gave me for Christmas. So, in my attempt to avoid making any choice I just ended up dressing like a nerd- which of course, I was, but I guess the point is that trying to avoid a choice is also a choice. We are all guilty, as you say!

"Given that The Paris Review portrayed itself as studiously apolitical—recall William Styron’s famous anti-manifesto in the first issue, fashioning it as a home for “the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders”—Matthiessen’s CIA involvement has raised questions and eyebrows since its revelation in the seventies."

This is actually a bit of a tell, because the best way to make ideology palatable is to make it seem like common sense (which is easy if that ideology is already in power). As zizek said, it is when you believe you have stepped outside ideology that you are most fully ensnared by it.

A lot of people think, "I am not ideological, I just use common sense, I am apolitical." Sorry but this is a game you must play whether you want to or not- trying to avoid making a choice is still making a choice.

Its like with fashion, for example- you may think that by wearing khaki shorts and sandals with socks that you are avoiding making fashion choices, but what is actually happening is that you are simply making very bad fashion choices.

I rather think that one of the psychological principles beneath authoritarianism is that making choices requires effort, and so people try to avoid it, and the easiest way to do that is by copying whatever everyone else is doing. When a person in this mode sees other people doing things that are different or unusual or out of place, they are reminded that in fact they have free will, and that other choices were always possible, and that is a disturbing and uncomfortable thought.

The life path of "going to school, then going to unviersity, partner, kids, work, work, living daily live, getting old, dying" is, other than the kids part, utterly horrifying to me and feels like not living at all. Why even bother with life if driving to work and driving home is all youre going to do with it? I am fully of how pretentious this sounds but, the way most people live is an insult to the precious gift of the human spirit.

Of course for many there is no choice. But that only makes it more horrifying not less.

2 weeks ago I took shrooms with my friend, we went to the basement of an arcade and crashed a bdsm costume party, then i spent the night at her place. This weekend, I played music with 4 talented people for 15 hours, and we finally collapsed giggling and covered in sweat at 2:30am. Thats living life! These are the kinds of things you can do if you are willing to take risks. You think I want to retire to a life of watching wheel of fortune? Why???

Marijuana makes me feel like im living inside of a badly written play where the script was written by a new hire at the last minute, none of the actors know their lines and the plot makes no sense. I dont like it. Alcohol gives me migraines and degrades your body.

But shrooms have low potential for addiction, no hangover and its a pleasant experience. So that's my vice of choice. I take them in moderation in social settings. I generally feel like my mood is lifted and my mind is sharp following a dose.

Yes, I experienced the same, it was like what they call in cinema a "jump cut". I remember the doors to the OR opening, then bang i was in a bed in the recovery room. Like the universe glitched.

Welll. On guitar you cant really use the "matching the beats" or the thing where you play the 4th on the string below and make them sound in unison, because if you do that all the way up the neck your guitar will be tuned to Just intonation instead of equal interval intonation and certain chords will sound very bad. A series of perfect 4ths and a perfect 3rd does not add up to an octave. Its better to reference everything to the low e string and just kind of know where the pitches are supposed to land.

That's a side note, the rest of what you wrote was very informative!

I haven't noticed that effect, to be honest. Actually I think its the really low bass frequencies that are harder to tune- especially if you remove the harmonics and just leave the fundamental.

Are you perhaps experiencing some high frequency hearing loss?

My number one principle of UI design is this:

The things the user does most frequently need to be the easiest things to do.

You expose the stuff the user needs to do quickly without a lot of fuss, and you can bury the edge cases in menus.

Sadly a lot of software has this inverted.

No, we all hate it, but the number of senators and members of congress who would vote to replace it could be counted with one hand. The reason is simple: the insurance companies give those senators millions and millions of dollars and nobody has the cash to beat them. And we've given up at this point.

As the song goes:

"Everybody knows that the dice are loaded

Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

Everybody knows the war is over

Everybody knows the good guys lost

Everybody knows the fight was fixed

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich

That's how it goes

Everybody knows"