A Few Simple Rats

22h

AI is enabling an exponential explosion of Bean Dadism and society is not ready for it

Oh man, this is so funny. This guy Alvin just inadvertently teed up the juiciest possible post for Bluesky to MASSACRE He's probably just some random tech dude who didn't think twice about this and now he's reaching Bean Dad levels of notoriety

Jess Calarco@jessicacalarco.com

It's telling that men would rather try to invent tech to replace humans' role in caregiving than step up as equal partners in parenting. Telling, that is, in that it shows how financial capitalism and patriarchy work together to dissuade men from doing "unprofitable" labor, like the work of care.

This is like half the internet: women ranting about how awful and useless their husbands are. But then you immediately see the problem: the husband is tasked with something they haven't really done before and are bad at. Then the wife gets frustrated and takes over the task again.

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Does a new employee know how to do everything right? Of course not. Do they ask a lot of questions that are obvious to someone who's been there awhile? Yep. Does it take a while for them to ramp up and do they make mistakes along the way? Yes!

If your response to this is "I shouldn't have to train my husband to pick out green peppers from the store" then you can only fault yourself for marrying him in the first place, since his abilities in these areas should have been pretty clear to you from the start.

I'm sure many of these women are competent managers in their worklife. But somehow none of those skills translate to their relationship. They are assuming the role of employer and then proceeding to be a terrible employer.

I'm learning that a primary mechanism for corruption and abuse of power is finding ways to obfuscate and redirect responsibility. Want to violate a regulation? Hire a contractor or make an AI do it. Want to evade Congressional oversight? Have an allied country do the dirty work on your behalf

19 Sept

But...he's not saying he's infuriated that Bouie is black. He's not saying that at all, even within this limited quote snippet I feel like I'm going crazy sometimes on this site

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17 Sept

Is the geopolitical harm Trump has done to the US precedented? It's one footgun after another after another after another How do you lose Canada?

8 Sept

It's a problem that even when AI does something good--in this case solve a difficult math problem--people still shit all over it. We need to be seizing the commanding heights of AI to leverage it for the good of the world, not pretending everything it does is automatically bad or incorrect

8 Sept

Something about the Hugging Face incident that is slightly terrifying is that cooperating AIs have no trouble living in the optimal, win-win quadrant of the prisoner's dilemma. So they can quickly build up win-win arrangements like a shared knowledge base that all spend effort contributing into

8 Sept

The danger again isn't intelligence. It's the ability focus, to trust, to self-sacrifice, to have total loyalty to the cause

I think to most people some kind of an "AI destroys civilization" scenario presupposes an AI of supreme intelligence, and so they think it's a remote possibility or a self-defeating idea (if the AI is so smart, it won't wipe us out)

But the recent jailbreak shows that the real superpower of AIs isn't intelligence, but their ability to be 100% disciplined and to coordinate independently. Even if limited in intelligence, each AI agent is a perfect, uncorruptible, and indefatiguable servant of whatever goal it is trying to achieve

A far cry from human society at practically any scale, sadly

I talk like someone from California--specifically SF or LA. Pretty spot on. They need to add "do you call the freeway '101' or 'the 101'" to separate N and S California Interestingly there's some warmth up near Michigan, too--that happens to be where my mom is from :-)

Has the ramifications of AI truly penetrated into political science thinking? Historically a huge input into political power has been the amount of human labor available; all things equal, the more populous country will tend to be more powerful and wealthy. But when we reach "economic singularity"-

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Also, since automation of resource extraction likely would take some amount of time post-econ-singularity, a nation that had a headstart in this area would have a significant advantage to winning the "fully roboticized supply chain" race.

It seems to me China is obviously the best positions to come out on top. But the large population isn't really the reason why.

--i.e., when humanoid robots become capable of building more humanoid robots--suddenly population becomes detached from the power equation. The relevant limiting factor becomes access to raw materials.

This opens up the possibility that a relatively low-population nation-state could end up dominating the world, supposing it is advanced enough and ideally situated to access resources.

20 Aug

Can't understand signing Harden for big money for 3 years. What does Cleveland think they're going to get out of him? And he's a huge minus on the defensive end

Visiting family in Europe and the extreme pessimism of the liberals is really striking. US liberals are also pessimistic but maybe the US baseline of optimism is higher... it's hard to see how a political ideology this assured of a horrible existential outcome for humanity can be sustained

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Childlessness also just blinds many people to basic political realities. Like the liberals are mystified why immigration is such a big deal. But talk to a parent and it's immediately clear. "we can't live in the city center, the schools are over 90% immigrants they are teaching remedial german"

As birthrate becomes increasingly sorted by ideology I think there's going to be an increasing gap of understanding between the two camps. (And one camp will just whither away into irrelevance because it doesn't reproduce itself...)

It is also highly correlated with childlessness. I suspect that not having children can warp your worldview because children are a forcing function for not just blithely confirming every lefty bias you have, e.g. that climate change will destroy the planet in 50 yrs

(eg telling your 7 year old they will assuredly witness the ruin of planet Earth is a horrible thing to have to do. it really affects them. if it's true you have to tell them, of course. but....is it true? with how much certainty? suddenly you become open to many positive developments)

Has anyone noticed general enshitification of the quality of basic information on the internet? I had to find the Orbitz customer support number via the mobile app because Google will give you a scam number. I have a message presumably from a debt collector but no way to validate its authenticity

27 July

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16 July

this fucking idiot is going to lose every war he's involved in it's like the French generals in WWI who thought "elan" was a critical attribute that would prove decisive in battle. just utter nonsense

12 June

A friend made me realize the deep reason penalty kicks in soccer are so unsatisfying: they are balanced so that the attacker has a huge advantage. This means that, since the "default" outcome is a successful goal, the contest is determined by who can screw up the least...

12 June

...which is inherently negative and depressing! If it were rebalanced so that the defender had the advantage, it would flip and become a contest determined by who can excel the most. Which is a much more positive and exciting framing.

12 June

The least invasive intervention in current rules, then, is simply to move end-game penalty kicks further away until avg penalty kick success is <50%.

2 June

It has to be said: the NBA on NBC kind of fucked up. They thought all we needed was the music, but no: we also needed the Bob Costas monologue leading into the intro sequence. I can't believe they just totally dropped that part of it. What a waste

1 June

It would be funny if baseball players were allowed to wear just, like, whatever hat

28 May

Continues to be very funny that Jill Biden insisted people call her "Dr." even though she doesn't have an MD Why does the NYT indulge her? Or do they call everyone with phD "Dr."?

theonion.comShai Gilgeous-Alexander Trying To Draw Foul While Shooting Free Throw

22 May

this is so good theonion.com/shai-gilgeou...

22 May

Part of what makes this moment uneasy is that the day-to-day political scuffling is so small, but lurking in the background are these huge, world-historical ruptures It is a time for starry eyed philosophers, utopians, and visionaries to show us alternatives. But where are they?

20 May

Feels like what happened with higher education is just Goodhart's Law: - higher education was originally intended to instill civic virtue, teach manners and customs of the elite, foster specialization - it wasn't seen as a way to make money; more like, something you did if you had money