Oceans Yet to Burn

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
collapsedsquid
collapsedsquid

I quite agree anon America doesn't lock up enough people, we need a Soros DA who will finally get us those damn FEMA camps we've been promised since the 80s to lock up those psychos.

mitigatedchaos

Based on the last few posts you’ve made, this is really your weak point, huh.

You’ve incorporated this “anti-conspiracy theory” opposition into your identity even when it doesn’t make sense.

From this and the other anon, I think we can infer here that the anon was criticizing DAs Soros funded, based on the things those guys publicly announce they will do, but that’s just a standard Republican talking point about Democratic support for urban disorder now. No conspiracy theory about it, nor is it WN.

politics

So I stopped by because someone privately linked someone (not prodigal) having a fit, which presented an opportunity to try making that last image.

[ @athingbynatureprodigal ] writes:

What’s sought is a criteria for “developed country” that wouldn’t include “Eritrea, but Putin and Elon Musk and the Waltons just bought vacation homes there.” Trains, healthcare, democracy, and lack of religious whackos killing people seems like at least as good a set as “well, it was on the US side during the cold war and has some rich people in it.” If you’re gonna call the former dumb, there needs to be more justification than “well I happen to use different criteria, which are equally arbitrary.” Both of those are vibes-based.

The question is, what is being “developed” in “development” of countries? In real estate, an “undeveloped” lot would be one that hasn’t been built on yet, whether that’s for a public park, which would be considered light development, or a house, or a factory. A “developing” lot would be a lot that’s in an intermediate state of construction or addition. Then of course there is “brown field development,” where previous construction has been built and is now getting in the way of new development.

So I would say that when we say a country is “developed,” we’re mostly talking about a country’s capital front. (Mostly productive capital, but also housing, etc.) Safety, adherence to law, education, etc are all inputs to that front.

In accordance with the O-Ring theory of economic development, the average correctness of each node in a production chain increases the ability to create a highly-complex, high-value product. This requires a predictable environment etc etc.

@official-kircheis If we’re looking at countries with tremendous capital fronts, the United States needs to be in the analysis, so if it’s not “developed,” well obviously it’s also not “developing,” so you need to describe the secret third thing that it is. (Obviously the United States is a diverse country, and it can be sliced in ways that make it more comparable to other “developed” countries in your sample.)

But this gets into why I’ve been on a social media hiatus. Or maybe “how.”

During the past 2 weeks, I built a new PC, and I’ve been putting in a lot of hours into learning to use Stable Diffusion and probing the capabilities of these new AI art systems.

Reading social media gets me annoyed and distracted. And Kircheis’ take was inflammatory and bad, but it’s not nearly as bad as Twitter. (For one thing, it’s obviously adjacent to nationalist shitposting. In fact, it most likely is nationalist shitposting.) However, there was a lot of information gain on social media before. Now that we’re not in a fast cycle (like national riots or the opening of the pandemic), I’ve brawled with enough partisans to get a sense of how they think, and I got my hands on more obscure information, there isn’t as much information gain there.

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While I use Tumblr to report my findings, and 300-500 words is a comfortable length for explaining concepts while not taxing the attention too much, there are issues with taking things on an issue-by-issue basis (including in a reply format).

Often, if I talk about stuff, I won’t do it. So I’ll just say it’s something to chew on for now.

the blue website politics
official-kircheis
official-kircheis

the US is such a developed country that one of its two (lol) political parties is trying to introduce the modern industrial policy of *checks notes* child labour

tanadrin

is a central example of a developed country

official-kircheis

official-kircheis:

the US is such a developed country that one of its two (lol) political parties is trying to introduce the modern industrial policy of *checks notes* child labour

“developed country” isn’t defined by the stupidest unpopular policies introduced by (local branches of) major parties; like I said, it’s not a term of approval! you have to be able to distinguish neutral category descriptors from terms which you use to denote approval or disapproval or your analysis of the world will end up incoherent.

it is not an endorsement of everything in american politics to say that the strongest military power in the world, with the highest GDP, and a higher per capita gdp than all but five european states is a central example of a developed country. it’s like people trying to say great britain is no longer a developed country since brexit or something (which i have also seen); it’s purely phatic, meant to signal political tribal allegiance, not real analysis.

but it literally isn't, because it's an outlier on religiosity, healthcare, violent crime, labour rights, incarceration, wealth inequality, and so on. and in every way it's an outlier, it's toward the less civilised direction. it's a country of barbarians that's bungled itself into enormous wealth through a uniquely advantageous geography.

mitigatedchaos

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experiments in mechanized shitposting political cartoon ai_tag this image will also be in the forthcoming ai art post
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Preview of a possible future AI Art 2023 post while I test the capabilities of Stable Diffusion (and Midjourney).

In the spirit of open source art tools, I’ve used GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) as my adjunct to Stable Diffusion (via Automatic 1111), and no tablet. (I’m quite out of practice anyway.)

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Inpainting, selectively reprocessing a designated part of the image, is a big deal. It allows a human operator to achieve compositions that the machine cannot achieve through prompts. Stable Diffusion has it. Midjourney doesn’t. This allows it to function like a combination of Photoshop and Google Images, with both the benefits and drawbacks of that approach.

ai_tag the mitigated exhibition
discoursedrome
discoursedrome

A good example of this is the story about how Dwarf Fortress used to incentivize industrialized mermaid slaughter and fixed it by changing the economics so that industrialized mermaid slaughter was no longer highly profitable. This wasn't necessary in terms of the play experience -- the industrial mermaid slaughter was never so valuable that anyone felt compelled to do it, particularly in a single-player environment. But you can justify doing this from a branding perspective, in that you don't want to be known as the "industrial mermaid slaughter" game, where that's like a basic meme people talk about all the time and use to pitch the game to others. In that sense it was a sensible change.

But did it improve the moral alignment of the game? I think it's arguable that it made it worse. The implicit message here is that the logic of pitiless autocratic industrial resource exctraction is naturally aligned with moral conscience in the sense that you don't need to go out of your way to resolve conflicts between them, which is...not really a good lesson? It's a deus ex machina solution to a problem, which means that if you're interpreting the industrial mermaid slaughter as a warped social statement, this just warps it further! In that sense I think that while this was obviously the correct change to make, it's least defensible on the moral axis.

mitigatedchaos

Since computer power is becoming cheaper, maybe we should increase the scope of the simulation to introduce more higher-order consequences (at least for some games), both in terms of negative social opinions, and in terms of ecology, and thus turn industrial mermaid slaughter into a short-termist position.

First, many of these games aren’t really thermodynamic - not just in terms of compressed range (e.g. acreage to support one character is very small in these types of games), but also some weird behaviors are caused by e.g. animals just spawning in regardless of resources, generating ‘free’ resources.

Second, in real life a lot of industrial exploitation behaviors are short-termist either with respect to the environment, or in terms of the ability to maintain a political coalition to support them, either by failing to hold intergenerationally, opposed interests among personnel, or just other people freaking the fuck out because they think they’ll eventually be next.

It could make for interesting gameplay, in the same way, ironically, that Subnautica’s “no guns” rule makes for interesting gameplay.

video games
collapsedsquid
ghostpalmtechnique

Tucker Carlsen is going to be replaced by some other awful person, just as he replaced Bill O'Reilly, so I don't expect his firing to have a major positive effect on US domestic politics. On the other hand, his exit actually is a huge boon to Ukraine/blow to Russia, because his Russia-apologism was genuinely unusual (aside from Trump) and not widely shared.

Russia's propagandists know it, too, and have been hilariously butthurt about it in the past couple days.

collapsedsquid

Seen this take elsewhere but I'm not sure who else has both the ability and discount Daily Stormer talking points, they're either gonna be stuck with someone too slimy or some Hannity-equivalent who lacks some of his nastier parts.

mitigatedchaos

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I know you like to present yourself as serious, and supposedly this criticism of yours of Tucker is serious, but “discount daily stormer talking points” is a fair criticism of people platformed by essentially every major news organization in the United States.

racepol politics
oligetcetera

Anonymous asked:

I mean, at least you have more self-awareness than most of them do. It's been stunning me to see how many people are enthusiastically setting themselves up to be bigoted towards sapient AIs before they even exist. It's like the lefty idpol "racism being bad isn't a general principle" fuckup of the 2010s managed to erase literally all cultural programming about bigotry being bad including in scenarios unlike our current environment

northshorewave answered:

I’ve also seen people pre-commit to treat sapient AI exactly like humans. Shit like “There’s no reason to privilege organic lives over non-organic ones” which I have seen pretty much word for word here, just gives me the willies tbh. Like that’s what someone says before they start the Torment Nexus up. If the price I pay to prevent that is being a 55-year-old redneck who yells “NO BOLTIES IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD!’ then I guess I’m willing to pay it. (Bolties is a slur for robots in this scenario btw)

Dunno about the ‘lefty idpol’ though. Sure I don’t like em but words mean things, and those don’t. Honestly the anti-AI coalition seems to outnumber the pro- by quite a bit atm, across all sorts of political lines. I see both lefty and righty followees reblogging all sorts of shit about how much they hate AI.

oligetcetera

it's actually pretty striking how ai stuff hasn't polarized along the same axes everything else in the conversation has!

anyway fwiw i think both sides of the robot personhood question are totally right - we will get manipulated by our own empathy for things that feel nothing AND we are likely to mistreat any actually sentient entities we create coming up with convenient justifications for why it doesn't matter - and while i'm more worried about the latter they both point in the direction of "please, please don't create AI" especially because with current models we can't really peer in the box and see what's going on

mitigatedchaos

Ethics limits might be a good reason to put a hardware cap on AI.

Biological brains are probably special, but if they aren’t, the level of mindcrimes that can be done with instantly-blankable mental hardware are uh, pretty much unthinkable as of right now.

We really need a better understanding of what’s going on before we scale these things up to cow compute size, let alone human compute size.

northshorewave

Anonymous asked:

I mean, at least you have more self-awareness than most of them do. It's been stunning me to see how many people are enthusiastically setting themselves up to be bigoted towards sapient AIs before they even exist. It's like the lefty idpol "racism being bad isn't a general principle" fuckup of the 2010s managed to erase literally all cultural programming about bigotry being bad including in scenarios unlike our current environment

northshorewave answered:

I’ve also seen people pre-commit to treat sapient AI exactly like humans. Shit like “There’s no reason to privilege organic lives over non-organic ones” which I have seen pretty much word for word here, just gives me the willies tbh. Like that’s what someone says before they start the Torment Nexus up. If the price I pay to prevent that is being a 55-year-old redneck who yells “NO BOLTIES IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD!’ then I guess I’m willing to pay it. (Bolties is a slur for robots in this scenario btw)

Dunno about the ‘lefty idpol’ though. Sure I don’t like em but words mean things, and those don’t. Honestly the anti-AI coalition seems to outnumber the pro- by quite a bit atm, across all sorts of political lines. I see both lefty and righty followees reblogging all sorts of shit about how much they hate AI.

mitigatedchaos

Human rights are an abstraction based on human capabilities and a human distribution of behavior. Outside of this range, they will not function properly.

We already don’t extend human rights to wolves, bears, tigers, sharks, whales, chimpanzees, or gorillas.

They’re not subject to the same evolutionary pressures as humans, so they don’t have the same mind design - and neither does AI.

(AI will most likely appear sapient before it is sapient, if it ever is. People will seek to exploit this for political and commercial purposes.)

mitigated future ai tag

Biomechanoid Discourse Anon Round-Up

(~1,500 words)

I received 54 anons in response to my short post about biomechanoids that went viral last week, so I’ve decided to gather some of the ones I actually intend to answer here, in this round-up post.

[ Anon#1 ]

wait are you against fat-body cyborgs?

You may have encountered “fungrams” vs “thetagrams” as synthoid enthusiast slang. This stands for “functional grams” (weight that contributes to the functionality of a body), and “aesthetic grams” (weight that’s mostly just aesthetics), respectively. (Just like with a natural human body, there’s a bit of a blur between the two.)

Fat Cyborg Activists may, for example, carry an extra 200 kg of glorified silicone padding, causing them to get bumped up a bracket in the combined-force-and-mass classification used in most jurisdictions, since being dive-tackled by a 300 kg Yokozuna-style body even with just a natural human level of strength can be enough to cause serious injury. They then complain about the brackets.

I don’t think it should be illegal to carry 200 kthetagrams of articial fat. Fat Cyborg Activists are just deliberately misinterpreting the League of States Charter when they claim that the bracket system should be abolished because it’s “a fundamental human right” to weigh up to 500 kg.

Obviously, as I’ve written before, these rights are an abstraction based on a human range of behavior and capabilities. This is how the courts have always interpreted it in the League, and if a baseliner hit 500 kg the weight would crush his organs to death.

We also need to talk about Neo-Penitents.

A lot of baseliners are Neo-Penitents and refuse tissue engineering. We as cyborgs should not be encouraging them to get that fat. Yes, they will die earlier than they otherwise would die due to refusing treatment. No, we should not be encouraging that to happen more quickly. I don’t use tobacco cigarettes, either.

Most children are born to religious natals (including Neo-Penitents). We should mediate the environment so that they don’t experience cyborgs as something to fear. (If you’re feeling hostile to them and want a cynical reasoning - we depend on recruitment and they outnumber us.)

[ Anon#2 ]

Why are you against age liberation?

Rejeuvenation therapies, biomechanoidization, and kaitosomes prolong personal lifespan, but personal development still happens at different rates for different people.

I disagree with the contemporary reactionary view that life extension techs fundamentally stall out or delay self-discovery and consideration, though I think it can have that effect on some people who forget that they will die. It’s a matter of a certain kind of emotional and intellectual sophistication that allows people to learn from observing their own lives (and the lives of others). If you read through early-21st century archives (Twitter is a good example, here), there are a lot of people that made it to their 40s, 50s, and 60s that became older without really advancing all that much intellectually.

So for this reason, a lot of people would really like to reset the clock when they start getting serious (often around 50). (Our society still treats young people as having more potential than old people, among other reasons.)

I sympathize, but there are three problems. First, someone who has been clubbing without much consideration for 30 years has still has a power advantage over someone who is 17 (much less 12, which is favored by more extreme activists). Second, as part of healthy cultural development, each generation should be able to have some of their own culture to help form a stable self-image. Third, the brain is still aging even with rejeuventation therapy, and at increased risk of costly age-related disease and degeneration. That usually isn’t covered by state insurance, except for Class IV rejeuvenation, which inherently causes some level of permanent memory loss.

We already had the battle for “age liberation.” The compromise was laws that prohibit new bodies from looking under 18 (unless intended for, and used by, literal children), and cryptographically-signed augmented reality chronological age display. (Only a few carveouts have been made, such as the Shanghai Ethnopolity’s “R+[years since rejeuvenation]” for Class-IV rejeuvenation.)

What activists are demanding is age unlocking.

They want to be able to claim they are 104. They want to be able to claim they are 14. Because these have certain cultural associations, and they want those cultural associations. You can already refuse to provide a number (which is a trend these days). The whole thing is self-negating.

[ Anon#3 ]

die fascist scum

I get these all the time. Just noting for the record that I delete pretty much all of them. Either make a real argument or move to the World Union.

[ Anon#4 ]

In your post you said you’re against allowing biomechanoidization before age 21. Weren’t you raised biomech?

It’s possible, if expensive, to hold a natal body for an adult. It’s even more difficult to do for children, since you have to match growth for growth. (Even if you do a return procedure, you still pretty much have to fit the body for a cyberharness anyway, so it will never be quite the same.)

The current push to “allow children and teens” to “explore their options” through biomechanoidization is because biomech bodies have gotten “too good,” and we’re in a downturn so people are holding out longer rather than switching or upgrading (or simply refreshing).

For a child’s growth trajectory, a company can sell 5-6 bodies, or 3 if they start during the teen years. Biomech bodies don’t grow (skeletally, not in terms of muscle/fat). If for any reason manufacturing gets disrupted for a few years, the child could have a really serious problem.

I’m worried it could also disrupt the formation of the child’s self-identity, but as you know that’s much more politically disputed.

I was raised as an officer for the military of a country that no longer exists. It’s not really the same.

[ Anon#5 ]

We read your blog out here printed on paper in Outer Mongolia due to attention regulation laws in our ethnopolity (actually it’s just our way of life), where it’s distributed as part of a newsletter. I had my friend Dave send this. [Hi! -Dave] What is the difference between “biomechanoids” and “synthoids”?

It’s really more of a gradient than a binary.

We can basically divide things into whole-grown bodies (natal bodies, cloned replacement bodies), constructed bodies (biomechanoids, synthoids), dolls (bodies without onboard life support), and static life support systems.

For constructed bodies, every body except for a few high-end specialized bodies uses at least some engineered biological tissue for long-term life support, because it’s cheaper, usually more resilient (against some classes of problems), and easier to use to balance the biochemistry of the brain. But the human brain only uses about a fifth to half of the body’s resources, so for the rest of the body, the designer has the option to use either synthetic systems or cultured biological tissue.

In general, the more organic tissue is used, the more “biomechanoid” a body is, and the more synthetic systems are used, the more “synthoid.” (There’s a practical limit to how much of a constructed body can be biological. Constructed body designers have to use a synthetic framework that allows the parts to be grown, printed, or assembled individually, then integrated.)

Biomechanoids usually have lower maintenance costs during the rated lifetime of the body, since biological tissue is self-repairing against minor stress. Synthoids can be more robust against certain kinds of problems, and there’s more freedom in the overall design, but their systems have a limited number of uses at time of manufacture because they’re generally not self-repairing.

[ Anon#6 ]

what are your thoughts on the new sex variants

They turned out to be a lot easier to create than anyone in the year 2010 would have thought. Those genotypes are out in the wild now, social conservatives are just going to have to learn to deal with it.

As for myself, World Union regulations classify all paramilitary cyborgs as “male,” regardless of appearance, and thus subject to “anti-oppression rules.” After San Diego changed hands and became part of the League of States, I just never updated my registration.

[ Anon#7 ]

You work for the caveman ethnopolities? The fuck do they pay you with, rice?

Cosmopolitans pay handsomely for artisanal foods, especially animal products. League citizens from higher-tech polities will purchase vacation packages ranging from a few days to spending six months milking cows and working a farm by hand. Low-tech ethnopolity governments also lease out about 10-20% of the land. Cosmopolity governments tend to pay for things that might spill beyond the borders, like environmental remediation.

They can be surprisingly tolerant (as long as they view you as ‘just visiting’), but they can be slow to trust, and tend to pull from a small pool of contractors.

Technically there’s only one neolithic ethnopolity (though that’s really more of a park) and most low-tech ethnopolities are early modern (think 1700s).

But yes, sometimes they do pay in rice.

augmented reality break