argumate

some things are difficult to say, and the reason why they’re difficult to say is also difficult to say and so on, but at least the fact that they’re difficult to say is easy to say

kid at the Chinese consulate wearing a full Captain America costume, congratulations on yet another cultural soft power victory guys

first day as a second century warlord i have my men tie branches to their horses’ tails to stir up dust and make it look like there’s a lot of us but i forget it just rained so there isn’t any dust and the enemy can clearly see there’s like twenty of us all spread out in a line

second day as a second century warlord i bribe a bunch of kids to start singing a nursery rhyme i carefully crafted to spread misinformation and further my strategic ends but they change the lyrics to be about poop and the enemy isn’t misdirected at all

third day as a second century warlord i lure my enemy into a narrow valley and send a team of archers to shoot them from the high ground but there was a feral hog napping on the trail up to the overlook and they couldn’t decide whether to try and shoot it or just go around and by the time the hog woke up and left on its own the enemy had already passed safely below

fourth day as a second century warlord we attempt to join a battle on the side of the guy we want to ally with but he and the guy he’s fighting have really similar names and it’s finally dusty and i misread the standards and attack the wrong guy. so now we’re stuck with this total loser of a liege lord, because how the fuck do you explain that after a battle?

fifth day as a second century warlord and some sort of wizard wanders into camp, my loser liege lord wants to execute him for being a wizard but i convince him to let the wizard stay, because i want to do more weather-based strategies and i’m pretty sure having a camp wizard can help with that. after the welcome to the team banquet the wizard steals half the treasury and my liege lord’s wife and leaves

sixth day as a second century warlord my loser liege lord sends me to reinforce a city he’s taken, but in the confusion of leaving i forgot to take the token that would have gotten us into the city, so my men have to wait outside the city walls for like eight hours while i ride back to get it

seventh day as a second century warlord and my loser liege lord finally joins me in the city, it turns out he’s actually a pretty cool guy, and he isn’t even that mad at me for letting the wizard steal his wife. i decide to shoot my shot but i’m really nervous and keep on stalling because what if i mess up our relationship and by extension jeopardize the security of my men, and eventually he just says goodnight and goes back to his room, where an assassin is in the process of setting up to kill him

eighth day as a second century warlord and my loser liege lord tells me to fake defect to his rival warlord, the one i originally wanted to ally with, to find out if he was the one who sent the assassin and why. but my whole way over to the rival warlord i’m worried that this has something to do with the wizard thing or how awkward i made it last night

ninth day as a second century warlord i try to tactfully ask my fake liege lord if he sent the assassin to kill my loser liege lord and it turns out the idea of using assassins never occurred to him, but now that i’ve suggested it he’s really into it. in order to save my loser liege lord i volunteer to be the one to kill him

tenth day as a second century warlord on my way back to my loser liege lord’s city i realize i won’t be able to collect my men from my fake liege lord until i bring back my loser liege lord’s head. this would have been a great thing to think of before i got myself in this situation. i go back to my loser liege lord and ask him to rescue my men, and he tells me that if he could sack my fake liege lord’s camp he already would have. that doesn’t change the fact that my men are still trapped. they’re prisoners, even. i go back to my room to sulk

eleventh day as a second century warlord i find a little caged pigeon in the rafters of my loser liege lord’s room and deduce it belonged to the assassin. without asking permission or telling my loser liege lord goodbye i let the pigeon loose and follow it north. don’t ask what i was doing in my loser liege lord’s room. it’s not important

twelfth day as a second century warlord i disguise myself as a wizard and enter the camp of the coalition leader the pigeon led me to. in the middle of my little sleight of hand performance i make eye contact with the coalition leader’s second-in-command. IT’S THE WIZARD THAT STOLE MY LOSER LIEGE LORD’S WIFE. after the banquet i corner the fake wizard and ask him what the fuck is going on and he just says “wouldn’t you like to know” and leaves. i don’t know what to say to that so i just let him go

thirteenth day as a second century warlord i’m honestly so sick of not knowing what’s going on, so i adjust my wizard costume to passably disguise myself as a woman and break into the women’s area of the camp, where sure enough my loser liege lord’s wife is. i ask her what she’s doing here and she tells me the fake wizard overheard her singing a poem she overheard on the street, not knowing it contains the coalition leader’s formation’s weaknesses. the fake wizard kidnapped her and assigned an assassin to kill her husband before they figured out the poem’s significance. she shares the first couplet with me but i’m discovered and thrown out before she can share any more. she doesn’t need to. through a bizarre coincidence of homophones, it’s the poop version of my misinformation nursery rhyme

fourteenth day as a second century warlord i go back to my loser liege lord and tell him everything, urging him to join with my fake liege lord to attack the coalition leader according to the weaknesses in the nursery rhyme. he tells me frankly that he doesn’t trust me anymore. i ask him to execute me if that’s really true, because i can’t bear to live if i can’t protect him and i can’t protect my men. he agrees to attack the coalition leader

fifteenth day as a second century warlord. due to the information in the nursery rhyme, and thanks to my loser liege lord reminding me of the weather conditions multiple times while planning our battle strategy, our alliance carries the day. my loser liege lord gets his wife back. my men tell me that our fake liege lord actually treated them really well and they’d like to stay with him if i don’t mind. i do mind, now that neither the men i love nor the man i love have any use for me, but i don’t tell them that

sixteenth day as a second century warlord i’m preparing to leave to i don’t know where, maybe to try to become a wizard for real, when my loser liege lord stops me and asks me where i’m going. he says he had hoped i would continue to work as his advisor. i was unaware i was his advisor in the first place. i agree, and he tells me he’s truly honored to have me in his service at last. he has known i am a rare and talented man with a strategic intelligence far above his ever since the day he witnessed me tying branches to my horses’ tails in six inches of mud, and could not for the life of him figure out why

Literally impossible to read this in anyone's voice but Eminem's.

should have reblogged my old posts complaining about how much Unity sucks huh

you're right, there's always time to complain

mental health awareness has come a long way but I wish there were a tactful way to communicate, and distinguish between, a "feeling a little burnt out" mental health day and an "I'm really glad I don't own a gun" mental health day.

how does one phrase an apology for missing class and generally dropping off the face of the earth because you were having the latter? "not feeling well?" "brain was broken?" "had the mother of all off days?"

A small (maybe not that small) part of me has never stopped raging against a social system built explicitly on lies. You are supposed to pretend you are physically ill, the person you are telling the lie to knows that and plays along, the gears keep turning. This is the stable societal equilibrium.

Ill elaborate on this because I'm on Tumblr at 2 AM and so not making bad choices ain't really a ball in play right now. Why is this the societal equilibrium? The problem with everyone just going off on "sorry I missed class my brain is broken" is that mental health issues are both ubiquitous, impossible to contradict, and permanent. If I *accept* that excuse as say a boss, I am essentially giving free reign for a perpetually-valid excuse to be a free pass for shirking. So outside of the rare instance you want to avoid this excuse.

Instead you are "ill". This is fine because unlike mental health issues, illness are normally temporary, easier to check, and fairly rare. What this does is it places a "cap" on your ability to use that excuse. If you are "ill" every 5 days, I can very explicitly go "hey you seem very physically ill, do you need to file for disability" or something and beak the status quo. Which, if you are using 'ill' as an excuse for mental health stuff, you *also* know. So you know not to push it. The need for the excuse limits your capacity for abuse and keeps you accountable, and in return most people look the other about the occasional white lie. Being honest instead hangs a shroud of uncertainty around your reliability.

Of course as always some people are honest, this is averages, etc. But I think I see this dynamic play out more often than I don't see it.

damn, Trump wants what Joan Rivers had

energy? good putdowns? an appreciative audience? fabulous outfits?

"we must smash this machine that threatens established power relations" is a reactionary impulse, "we must ensure the benefits of this development are shared amongst us all" is progressive

is it, though? why not ban email so we need to hire back all the professional typists and messenger boys and manufacturers of those vacuum tube things for delivering capsules?

AI will only put people out of work if it's useful, if it's delivering value, and that frees up labour for more productive purposes, it makes us all richer, and if we can't share that wealth due to political gridlock then what makes you think we're going to ban it?

this is the most naiive thing youve ever said

*stoutly* I've said much more naive things!

but really, I think claims that AI is putting people out of work and that AI can't do anything useful are in conflict.

now, technological improvement is often a step down from what came before, especially at first: typewritten text was faster but much uglier than the best handwriting (but much easier to read than the worst), mass production was much cheaper but less elegant than the best artisanal craftsmanship, the first cars were worse than horse drawn carriages to the point that we still have fictional caricatures of the eccentric freaks who were obsessed by them, etc.

but in the long run you can't keep investing money in something that doesn't give you anything back, because you run out of money, and if the business that hires people achieves more than the business that doesn't then it's going to stick around.

blah blah blah equilibrium.

I'm not tryna claim anything as dramatic as "AI can't do anything useful" I just think that this model idea of an economy where everyone gets what's coming to them has huge meaningful flaws right now

For instance, consumer share of wealth is extremely low rn so making things worse for your customers in a way that saves money and pleases investors is incentivised, but one might meaningfully argue that making everything worse in a way that slightly increases the wealth of a few people is not "useful" or "delivering value" in a way that we care about.

Moreover not doing whatever the trendy thing is that investors like is disincentivised right now, whereas even if making things better for the customer delivered higher profits in the end, it won't necessarily do so on the sort of timescale that matters to decision-makers (who tend to change jobs pretty frequently). Add up the two and there's little reason for someone to take the risk of trying to distinguish themselves by doing it differently, and that's how you get shit like the bar/restaurant scene in my city right now, where basically nowhere lasts for very long because they're all directly competing with each other because they're all exactly the same - they all conform to the same Received Wisdom about what Is Profitable because you have to in order to get funded. The hypothetical place that doesn't do that could potentially do really well by being consistently chosen over all the identical places by whatever subset of people prefer what it is doing, but it can't exist in the first place because it all starts with pleasing investors not customers.

All of this to say that (for example) every major supermarket chain replacing actual human customer support workers with chatbots delivers no value to customers but it might frustrate them out of managing to lodge a complaint, which looks in your stats as if there wasn't a complaint, and what are they going to do - go to your competitors who are all doing the exact same thing?

And it likely doesn't even do the Efficient Market Hypothesis thing of making groceries cost less, because it's a wealth transfer from people who would have actually spent that money in the local economy to people who may or may not do anything productive with it.

Also, for profit corporations aren't the only organisations that exist. I'm very worried about academic publishing in medicine - the value being destroyed there wouldn't be (immediately or directly) financial, it would be in terms of our ability to reason about what is likely to be true and, as a consequence, make good medical decisions. (Ultimately, the financial consequences would be very great - but not in a way that usefully punishes the relevant actors.)

This isn't to argue the broader point the thread was about at the start; it's just like. Cmon dude. People are excited and stupid about this thing and most big decisionmakers don't understand it very well, but do understand that employing humans is expensive. There are absolutely real-world examples of people going ahead with staff cuts that reduce productivity because they didn't understand things like "humans get sick sometimes, and departments that grind to a halt whenever that happens are less efficient than departments that could technically run on slightly fewer staff than they have when everyone is in work", or because the cost saving of firing those people would be credited to them while the efficiency loss could be blamed on someone else. AI will definitely put people out of work that it's not a useful replacement for; some amount of that is absolutely going to happen.

sure, I mean I thought covid was going to decimate the Australian university sector as they lost all of their fee paying students, but they just fired everyone and cut contract rates and bounced back stronger than ever, at least financially, word on the street is that teaching quality and morale are both decimated, but that's what I've been hearing since the '90s so I don't think anyone goes into academia expecting much better.

anyway, I'm sure AI is going to make some things worse, just like phones made a ton of things worse, and computers made many things worse, and cars made things worse, and we're going to have to navigate that and try and push back against some of the stupider excesses and ultimately come to terms with the world as it continues to evolve.

@MichaelDPlant:

@jessi_cata:

@zackmdavis:

ecclesiastical politics. i am informed all the rationalists exiled themselves to Berkeley and have been busy setting up “death cult infrastructure”. i am also informed by sillycon valley people that the mysterious wizards with a hand on the spigot are tightening up the money tap. the world is emerging from a two year terror campaign into an incipient European and possible World war.

obviously this is all due to the liturgy

since you can go to the moon with 1960s tech and break the sound barrier and construct nuclear weapons with 1940s tech maybe everything is easy

turns out if you’re willing to burn a thousand times as much compute as a human you’re able to get a computer processing language less well than a human.

what the fuck are you talking about

I’m just getting distracted by that “games are easy” line, because yeah, they kind of are! but we got confused by the fact that chess is very easy into thinking that go was hard, when the board fits in what, 71 bytes? and it turns out that with a few million iterations over those 71 bytes you can develop good heuristics for winning positions, even if you still can’t solve the game.

images and “language” are surely hard in the general sense, but turn out to be easy in the superficial sense, if you’re willing to train on millions of examples to generate sloppy output.

who knows what we might discover is easy tomorrow!

The Residence is an entertaining White House murder mystery (featuring Australians and Kylie Minogue) that's mostly amusing due to its wholehearted endorsement of that classic "famous detective" trope so beloved of every detective story ever, gotta love it.

Randall Park makes a decent Watsonian himbo; I don't know what deal he signed with satan to get so many roles but you get used to having him around.

okay it really was a lot of fun right up until the very end when the murderer is unmasked which as usual was mildly unsatisfying after all the shenanigans that preceded it, but definitely worth a watch if you're into genre savvy detective stories, which I suppose is all of them at this point.

and how much of Trump's tariff focus is simply because that's an economic lever available to him personally, unlike measures that require a broad based coalition to pass?

I think it’s that PLUS he’s got this “tariffs will punish the other countries” idea lodged in his brain and he won’t let it go. Like. As a person, he’s deeply invested in punishing his enemies (real, perceived, and imagined).

taxing their financial assets would also punish them, but it might be a less sexy solution than putting a price on tangible goods, even if it works better.