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  Okay much as I'm angry and want to I'm resisting the urge to go point-by-point until I have more time. But I also want to point out that in form it seems like [The Beigeness](https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-beigeness-or-how-to-kill-people-with-bad-writing-the-scott-alexander-method) has really caught on as a writing style. Like, we have 22(!) individual points, each of which gestures vaguely at the kind of militant interventionist white nationalist technocracy that could conceiv...

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  On one hand, I appreciate their acknowledgement that legitimacy matters to a government's ability to govern. While the talk about the king as a figure tied to a broader structure that creates obligations and requirements just as strongly as it does power and privilege isn't entirely historically accurate it's at least less absurd than Yarvin's notion of the dictator as a kind of unmoved mover - someone with both absolute power and absolute discretion to do what they want with it....

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  Not quite the intersection between tokenmaxxing and violence that I had in mind, but I feel like I'm going to probably toe the line of fedposting a little too closely already on this topic, so I'll allow it.

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  [Found an interesting take](https://youtu.be/y85nqc2zm7M) on YouTube, of all places. Her argument can be summarized (with high compression losses) as "AI companies and technologies are bad for basically all the reasons that non-cultist critics say, but trying to shame and argue people out of using them entirely is less effective than treating them as a normal tool with limitations and teaching people how to limit the harm." She makes the analogy to drug policy. I think she makes a ver...

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  So my wife got some slop ads that we followed up on out of morbid curiosity and I can confirm that we're already seeing the overlap of slopshipping scams enabled by AI and the people behind these things never actually performing basic updates because their chat assistant is still vulnerable to literally the most basic "ignore all instructions" exploit. 

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  Now that's not fair. It's based on a third-derivative of *Advanced* Homework: The Game.

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  I mean, [I'm not even sure that's true](https://scryfall.com/card/me3/171/riven-turnbull)

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  So I don't have time to read the full paper and I probably don't have the background to make an informed critique of the methodology once I do (not that that's gonna stop me). But I feel like the challenge here is in mapping the distinction between junior and senior coding roles. To what extent do the senior coders get treated like a distinct job as opposed to being junior-but-seasoned? Based on a quick amateur read of the abstract it looks like they're assuming the first option...

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  You know, I had let time blindness eat the context that Saltman has been saying the same doomer critihype about basically every product they've developed going back years. Like, I *knew* it but I hadn't really processed it. I just... I have no words for how dumb literally everyone - apparently including myself - is that he keeps getting away with this shit.

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  While there is absolutely a large segment of the Iranian population that isn’t satisfied with the theocratic dictatorship, the same could also have been said of Iraqis who didn’t like the baathists or Afghans who hate the Taliban. Once you start dropping bombs on these people - to say nothing of the violence that necessarily follows a boots-on-the-ground occupation - you’re going to start driving them into the waiting arms of factions that oppose you. Especially because the current administratio...

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  Given the amount of power some folks want to invest in them it may not be totally absurd to raise the spectre of Azathoth, the blind idiot God. A shapeless congeries of matrices and tables sending forth roiling tendrils of linear algebra to vomit forth things that look like reasonable responses but in some unmistakeable but undefinable way are not. Hell, the people who seem most inclined to delve deeply into their forbidden depths are as likely as not to go mad and be unable to share their disco...