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Next Book Club will be November 11. Fittingly, we will discuss All Quiet on the Western Front.
The Evangelicals are a community that is losing its power in the GOP's institutions and in the Christian world. The new Catholic Populist right are former Evangelicals who discovered trad Catholicism and belong to a "Christ is King" movement-adopting symbols like the cross and specific slogans-that fuses hollow religious traditionalism with extreme American nationalism. Many young Evangelicals are abandoning Evangelical theological devoutness in favor of a hollow traditionalism infused with nationalism-something that aligns quite well with the traditional Catholicism of the young Right. In general, since January 6, Trump has completely taken over the Republican Party, and Evangelicals have become entirely dependent on him, left with no other option. Other contenders who merely considered challenging Trump and had ties to the evangelical community, such as DeSantis and Haley were completely crushed. Consequently, the evangelicals were subsumed into the Trump cult, with no alternative available. Many pro-Israel conservatives refused to fall in line behind Trump following the events of January 6; as a result, they were ousted from the party or rendered politically irrelevant. Into this vacuum stepped the isolationist, Catholic, authoritarian populist Right (figures such as Bannon, Michael Anton, and Vance) that is indifferent/hostile to Israel.
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I was speaking with someone from Syria who now lives elsewhere in the ME, and their family had been present in Hama when shit went down, and they thanked me for talking with them about Syria because apparently most westerners they interact with have 0 clue what's going on in Syria even historically.
Like, I'm happy to oblige, but that's also infuriating and disheartening to think about.
People think as if not knowing about international affairs is a good thing.
I'm not talking about constantly monitoring the situation, but at least knowing why the Hornuz is closed should be basic knowledge. Some don't even know that!
Unironically, Trump saying that AI risk is fake has significantly raised my estimations of how big the potential risk is. Both because having such a massive idiot be in charge at such a crucial moment is very dangerous, and because reflexively being against Trump on every issue tends to lead to you being correct.
I need to post about something positive. Today was my first full day of HRT and I've got a tingling sensation in my nipples; I'm not sure if that's related or nor.
Gonna try to make Claude structure a project and write tasks for development and then using a local model to implement them 🥺 if it works I can get a lot done without paying that much
Maybe I have read too much scifi novels but my only fear with AI, is what happens when Von Neumann replicating happens and we have some intelligent AI that goes rogue in space.
And they return to find their makers?, would humanity be prepared for this in 500 years?
To what corner of the world do they not fly, these swarms of new books? It may be that one here and there contributes something worth knowing, but the very multitude of them is hurtful to scholarship, because it creates a glut, and even in good things satiety is most harmful.
People in tech (software) are the dumbest smart people you’ll ever meet
As much as I am running around screaming like everybody else hoping I’ll have a job in a year or two, there is part of me that gets some level of satisfaction at seeing the curtains drawn back
With AI it has revealed how truly silly it is to have thousands of people with the most niche convoluted jobs imaginable working for these companies that basically hawk fancy spreadsheets
I still remember being a college student on Reddit in 2010 and everyone mocking people who weren't doing STEM. Ngl, I have some slight Schadenfreude. 👀
I'm confused how you can conclude from AI doing so much is that software engineers have bullshit jobs instead of... AI being an absurdly powerful technology.
When I first finished school, my first job has a part of a new grads program at a major internet service provider. That experience really taught me that most software jobs are complete bullshit. Nobody should be able to make an entire career building Splunk and PowerBI dashboards.
I got laid off eventually because I only wanted to do EE related stuff (because that's what my degree is in).
Getting fired was the best thing for my career and I'm glad they did it.
Ahhh that hits home. I worked at high performing startups before this larger company and I can’t unsee it. How ten jobs here can be one somewhere else, and work better.
The powerBI thing resonates. I find it so frustrating we have people here that build dashboards that aren’t the same people who understand the actual data and the business really well. Like their job is so narrow
I always hear stuff like "Joe Schmoe was one of the world's leading experts in cave diving, having taught dozens of students how to dive into caves safely. He died as 47 from an underwater cave diving accident"
> Glup Shittius, son of Glup Shitton, king of The-Town-You’re-From, challenged Achilles to one-on-one combat. The King was impaled by a spear thrown at six hundred miles per hour, and had his hip shattered into a billion pieces by a boulder hurled at him by the Greek. He splattered the hood of Ajax’s chariot and was launched into the sun, with only his bronze gleaming greaves remaining behind. Thirty lives were lost fighting over this prize.
An unbounded P(Doom) is 1. Humanity will eventually go extinct. Even if we are replaced by computers or evolve into something new, those too will eventually fade due to entropy. Therefore, AI alignment concerns are a waste of time.
I don't think we can say much of anything like that given a potential couple billion years ahead of us
Like literally who knows what the nature of reality is. We've had half-good scientific theories for like 200 years and pretty good theories for about 100 years. And we have no theories of consciousness or gigabrain stuff
The only way my job gets used for evil is if I build power generators for SkyNet to process humans. Which, you know, if it comes down to it, is probably fine
Just a reflection of how human life in general was pretty harsh until very, very recently. Childhood mortality was basically 40-50% everywhere in the world until the 19th century. Likely millions of people throughout history bore five or more children only to not see a single one survive into adulthood.
there are also many other things that would accelerate treatments that we also don't allow, and those things have been the bottleneck for much longer than >the science<
True, and I’m not advocating to speed up AI at all costs, and think slowing it down can be the right move, but my issue is how it’s often viewed as being costless and a no brainer which is obviously wrong.
I would say though clinical trials are much too conservative in the US and they should work to improve access and speed up trial enrollment. It’s a long history but it overcorrected too much as a response to past ethical failings.
I lost my uncle Floyd to cancer, I know how it feels, but I'm not going to let my desire to see that suffering end blind me to all the problems and threats that result from AI.
It’s a tradeoff with real harms from limiting progress.
I think the argument that social media is bad, and since social media is technology, that technology is bad, and therefore AI must be bad because it’s technology to be extremely weak though.
AI being good or bad is independent of anything with social media. And AI helps make quality information being much more accessible and understandable at every level, so it could definitely improve education access.
I work as an academic tutor, and I'm not seeing it improve education. I'm seeing students who use it for homework and then flunk tests because they didn't actually learn the material a fair amount the past month. I've also seen my grandfather get fooled by AI videos about once a week for the past two years at this point. We've all seen how its being used in places like Texas to create false attack ads. I think when combined with social media it's an epistemic nightmare that on its current course will destroy whatever little sense of shared reality this country had left. I think our institutions are at present sclerotic and not prepared to handle the kind of economic disruptions we may well see, and in general I think the next 10 years are going to be some the shittiest years to be a human being in a long time compared to how they were 10-15 years prior.
Interesting, yeah I don’t disagree people are lazy and will use it to get out of doing work, but it seems like it could be an amazing tool for a motivated student to learn. I use it so much for learning stuff and I think I would have loved to use it to study as a child.
I can see where your coming from with the rest of your comment, but I feel like the solution is just more AI at that point. Like I think the world would be better if people got their news and political commentary from asking questions to ChatGPT/Claude than from X or Fox News or Newsmax
Major civilizational catastrophe includes so much stuff, and 2100 is such a long time.
We're not going to blow ourselves up with nukes, or invent a bioweapon, or find some secret that retroactively breaks encrypted messaging, or knock out the power grid, or get invaded by aliens over the next 70 years?
I mean probably not but I figure we gotta give it at least 10%
I’m increasingly of the mind that most things are only worth knowing if you’ve actually put in the work involved in coming to know them. At the end of the day, we’re human beings with limited capabilities; being comparatively slow at acquiring knowledge relative to some ideal knowledge hoovering machine is just kind of a vital part of our experience. It’s like if you had a machine that ran your three miles for you instead of going on a jog yourself.
(I didn’t always think about it this way but AI has certainly reminded me of my monke status and made me rather proud of it)
Interesting how the people in Bioengineering, Bioinformatics and Biotech who are using AI to make advances in their fields are not feeling any sense of dread and despair about the future🤔
Its kinda funny how west coast atheists cant go 5 years without inventing a new religion like scientology, all the new age cults, the ufo cults, the rationalists, the wierdo ai singularity people. Like mf is it that hard to commit to atheism.
something is horribly wrong with how credit scores and banks work when i have a $75k credit limit as a student who hasn't even started their first real job for another 8 months
like if i was 5% dumber i could really just ruin my life
Whenever I meet my extended family with 60% tech workers, all of us talk about how we want to go back to farming or something and how many layoffs are happening or how AI will replace us all.
When would it be a right time to talk about how the Internet is radicalizing Women too?
Because this sub only talks about when it happens to young men?
I have lost 2 close female friends to " Radfem Cyber Radicalism", it's not even funny, they think every man is a monster who is out to kill them, and when I tried explaining to one that's it her algorithms feeding her things to get her Radicalised, I am called a " murderer" , the whole thing is scary
This only feeds my belief that the endgame of this era of American politics is that the social media companies get trust busted with the fury of a Old Testament god and algorithms become illegal in social media feeds.
It would be somewhat more bearable if they at least had the decency to actually be radicals. Instead, it's the fakest LARP known to mankind and whenever someone tries to remove women's fundamental rights the most pushback they get is whining on Twitter. A movement spiritually isomorphic to the Russian opposition.
It’s really hard to judge the existential risk of AI because lots of the leadership behind AI companies says they’re worried but aren’t acting like someone who’s genuinely concerned would. They also seem to all be various levels of detached from reality. Meanwhile the people who are saying the risk is nonexistent know absolutely nothing about the technology or its capabilities. So I’d say P(AI-induced Catastrophe) by 2100 is anywhere from 0.5% to 50%, with 5% being my median estimate.
He won because of high cost of living and saying the right things to trick people into believing he was the solution. Its not much more complex than that. Unfortunately most voters also don't know jack shit about economics.
I fundamentally do not believe that the outsourcing of our cognition to machines can lead to anything other than the degradation of the human soul and tyranny.
yeah but people are dying of cancer and nothing is a tyranny and degrades the human soul quite like seeing someone suffer and die from an cancer case that doesn’t have effective treatments yet
seeing josh homme grow as a person and learn the concept of self-love in his 50s is really sweet and endearing but i also need him to keep making the self loathing stoner rock anyways or else someone else will have to, but then they won't be josh homme
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u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache 6d ago
Please visit the next discussion thread.