When I was young the whole part where they misrecall history just felt like a 1984 bit to me. And I reread it after Helldivers 2 came out, and I noticed a lot of odd things, like how their ideology doesn’t make sense, how for some reason all the smart people seem to die (by being put in dangerous spots), people who disagree with them being setup as strawmen (old ladies, and crazy people basically), and how odd it is that Rico while not being smart (he only qualifies for the infantry after all) is judged as perfect officer material. Which felt to me like they were selecting for stupid people. (the guy not being able to do math properly while their ideology is based on some unspoken math science thing is also funny).

And then there is the whole uplifted scout dogs thing. Who all commit suicide the first time they encounter a bug (which means nobody ever tested that, and they still deployed their whole scout dog force on the planet). And due to some psychic link this also makes their handler useless.

It is just a weird book tbh. The military scenes make little sense (just randomly blow things up) and are just warcrimes. The ideology is dumb and is based on a handwave, and if you read between the lines (which was not intended obv) and make Rico into an unreliable narrator because he isn’t that smart (see also how he never doubts that people who get executed are guilty, the law system fucking up isn’t a thing he thinks about, but he knows the system isn’t fallible, as they complain about how big of a mess the war logistics are) and misses things, there seems to be a whole different thing going on.

Also democracy fell because kids were not spanked enough.

Hope this made it a bit clear why I think you can also read it as a dystopian unreliable narrator being manipulated novel even if it wasn’t intended.

But yeah the space suits are cool.

Funny to type all that up and also go ‘Le Guin Disagrees’

(not that having a different read than the author intended is strange, I mean I have a dystopian reading of Starship troopers which I think makes much more sense than what was intended).

Lol at that soj site just being the same anti vax misinformation pushed by one account every 3 minutes.

Indeed, and I think defense spending is not stopped when the gov shuts down right?

And all this because she simply could not shut up. Which seems to be one of the oldest, modding a large community rules.

the defense contractor Anduril

Interesting to note that apparently Anduril is very bad at their job. Their shit doesn’t even work properly. Source: https://bsky.app/profile/hypervisible.blacksky.app/post/3m2bzp4r4es2n

Brave

You are downplaying the shittyness of that one here as well. (Not blaming you or anything, I get the need for not dumping everything in one post. Just adding to the pile). And source, www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1j1pq7b/list_of_brave_browser_controversies/ esp note the wikipedia clone, it was the one by Vox Day

It wouldn’t be so bad if they just didn’t care and stopped maintaining, but their site is one of the first ones you get. Which is a regular problem with these things.

Nope. And tbh, did some dd2 recently, and for a very short while I was tempted to push the edit button, but then I remembered that fextralife just tries to profit off my wiki editing labor. (I still like the idea of wikis, but do not have the fortitude and social calm to edit a mainstream one like wikipedia). (I did a quick check, and yeah I also really hate the license fextralife/valnet uses “All contributions to any Fextralife.com Wiki fall under the below Contribution Agreement and become the exclusive copyrighted property of Valnet.”, and their editor sucks ass (show me the actual code not this wysiwyg shit)).

Like Clinton starting a go fund me for a coworker with cancer, the rich and their money are not voluntarily parted.

See also how youtube tutorials have mostly killed (*) text based tutorials/wikis and are just inferior to good wikis/text based ones. Both because listening to a person talk is a linear experience, and a text one allows for easy scrolling, but also because most people are just bad at yt tutorials. (shoutout to the one which had annoyingly long random pauses in/between sentences even at 2x speed).

This is not helped because now youtube is a source of revenue, and updating a wiki/tutorial often is not. So the incentives are all wrong. A good example of this is the gaming wiki fextralife: See this page on dragons dogma 2 npcs. https://dragonsdogma2.wiki.fextralife.com/NPCs (the game has been out for over a year, if the weirdness doesn’t jump out at you). But the big thing for fextralife is their youtube tutorials and it used to have an autoplaying link to their streams. This isn’t a wiki, it is an advertisement for their youtube and livestreams. And while this is a big example the problem persists with smaller youtubers, who suffer from extreme publish, do not deviate from your niche or perish. They can’t put in the time to update things, because they need to publish a new video (on their niche, branching out is punished) soon or not pay rent. (for people who play videogames and or watch youtube out there, this is also why somebody like the spiffing brit is has long ago went from ‘I exploit games’ to ‘I grind and if you grind enough in this single player game you become op’, the content must flow, but eventually you will run out of good new ideas (also why he tried to push his followers into doing risky cryptocurrency related ‘cheats’ (follow Elon, if he posts a word that can be cryptocoined, pump and dump it for a half hour))).

*: They still exist but tend to be very bad quality, even worse now people are using genAI to seed/update them.

Sealions is a bit more specific, as they do not stop, and demand way more evidence than is normal, Scott had a term for this, forgot it already (one of those more useful Rationalist ideas, which they only employ themselves asymmetrically). Noticed it recently on reddit, some person was mad I didn’t properly counter Yuds arguments, while misrepresenting my position (which wasn’t that strong tbh, I just quickly typed them up before I had other things to do). But it is very important to take Yuds arguments seriously for some reason, reminds me of creationists.

Think just calling them AI concern trolls works.

So bit of a counter to our usual stuff thing. But a worker migrant here won a case against his employer who had linked his living space to his employment contract (forbidden) using chatgpt as an aid (how much is not told). So there actually was a case where it helped.

Interesting note on it, these sorts of cases have no jurisprudence yet, so that might have been a factor. No good links for it sadly as it was all in Dutch. (Cant even find a proper writeup in a bigger news site as a foreigner defending their rights against abuse is less interesting than some other country having a new bisshop). Skeets congratulating the guy here https://bsky.app/profile/isgoedhoor.bsky.social/post/3m27aqkyjjk2c (in Dutch). Nothing much about the genAI usage.

But this does fit a pattern, how, like with blind/bad eyesight people, these tools are veing used by people who have no other recourse because we refuse to help them (this is bad tbh, Im happy they are getting more help don’t fet me wrong, but it shouldn’t be this substandard).

Yes that is what people want, more generic shit.

Tyler Cowen saying some really weird shit about an AI ‘actress’.

(For people who might wonder why he is relevant. See his ‘see also’ section on wikipedia)

E: And you might wonder, rightfully imho, that this cannot be real, that this must be an edit. https://archive.is/vPr1B I have bad news.

Friend: “I have a problem”

Me, with a stack of google printouts: “My time to shine!”.

E: ow god, I thought the examples were multiple and the friend one was just a random one. No, it was the first example. ‘I gave my friend a printout, which saved me time’. Also, as I assume the friend still is unhoused, and they didn’t actually use the printout yet, he doesn’t know if this actually helped. Atwood isn’t a ‘helping the unhoused’ expert. He just assumed it was a good source. The story ends when he hands over the paper.

Also very funny that he is also going ‘you just need to know how to ask questions the right way, which I learned by building stackoverflow’. Yeah euh, that is not a path a lot of people can follow up in.

There have been a lot of cases in history of smart people being bested by the dumbest people around who just had more guns/a gun/copious amounts of meth/a stupid idea but they got lucky once, etc.

I mean, if they are so smart, why are they stuck in a locker?

Secretly been eyeing your prompt. Are you ready to get spontaneous? Just say so.

(Somebody linked 2 chatgpts (or groks, I don’t recall which anus like logo it was) speaking to each other and they kept repeating variants of the lasts bits).

E: bingo this one: https://www.tiktok.com/@aarongoldyboy/video/7555260691947588895

One the one hand that ani thing has the most cringe tone for a chatbot. “Secretly been eyeing your [blank]…” (Damn grok sounds formulaic) but otoh they are debating a bot. You can only do that the first few months you are online, after that you should know better.

You cannot simultaneously claim to care about the “declining birth rate” while also supporting AI “companions”

Actually eugenicists can, quite easy actually. (Repeating the word ‘degenerate’ and not getting this is quite something).

This is transhumanist

No.

E: eurgh, had forgotten the whole bsky waffle thing. Wasn’t making a reference to that, sorry if it came off as insensitive. Got rid of the comment anyway.

(I had totally forgotten this post, and also didn’t expect the CEO to double/triple down, and now make mentioning waffles into a anti-trans dogwhistle).

The dictionary doesnt tell me how wise and smart my misinterpretation of a basic idea is and then tells me im right, weird AI bro.