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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 25th, 2023

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  • The marketing documents provided with the photo say there is ā€œno regulatory oversight — U.S.D.A. confirmed in writing.ā€ It’s not clear what the company means by that. A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Seth W. Christensen, said he was not able to confirm whether the agency had corresponded with Haemanthus. ā€œU.S.D.A. does regulate vet diagnostics,ā€ including blood testing, Mr. Christensen said.

    Ah, yes, medicine. A field without regulations. Hope they have some non-scammers in the family that can take care of the kids.



  • I work with IT at a STEM company, but the typical education is chemistry. People are grounded in measurements and real world practicality, but sci fi is also rather popular.

    Some people got hype last year, but most people was more in ā€œnew stuff, will this mess with my work flow?ā€ mode. After getting and evaluating tools, some small uses were identified, mostly first draft of meeting minutes. Trying for themselves seems to have quelled the hype. Now there is mostly concern for how AI processes in surrounding companies will affect our products and sales.

    So from that small measurement it feels like the hype is breaking. We have a sane and reality based management though, and that helps.





  • Really good.

    You are quite right in describing the zero interest rate as central banks taking the foot of the brake. Similar to how a brake can decrease speed but not increase it, the interest rate can destroy demand but not create economic activity.

    The reason for not using tried and effective method of Keynesian spending is of course ideological. In the euro zone it was ruthlessly enforced by the ECB and the Commission were the deficits created by automatic stabilisers were taken as breaking the Maastricht treaty and those countries had to be put through austerity.






  • I followed the 2008 crash in some detail and as far as I remember it the pension funds and little towns in Norway that got swept away in the financial avalanche were not known before the crash. Then the surviving banks were allowed to rebuild their balance sheets by both government largess and fleecing their customers. And in the euro zone there was the whole euro crisis as spill over effects hit the banks and French and German banks were saved by fleecing Mediterranean EU countries, payed for by destruction of their economies. Which had some nasty political effects like the direct inheritors of Mussolini’s party now running Italy.

    I don’t think we can know even the direct knock-on effects of the crash without knowing what financial institutes and pension funds has gambled on the line going up.

    Anyway I expect the oligopolies to receive government support and fleece the rest of the economy. They can probably jack up prices at least 10-15% every year without CEOs going to their IT department and saying ā€œfuck it, teach me Linux, we are switching, this is just to expensiveā€.


  • However, even the accelerationist don’t want Chinese AGI, because insert standard sinophobic rhetoric about how they hate freedom and democracy or have world conquering ambitions or they simply lack the creativity, technical ability, or background knowledge (i.e. lesswrong screeds on alignment) to create an aligned AGI.

    I thought in modern US phrenology East Asians were smart? So they just haven’t been reached by the holy scripture/ Harry Potter fanfic?

    Now I got curious, has there been any attempts of spreading EA to China, and if so how did it go?




  • It really looks like it’s on an awful trajectory.

    In my teens I read about how Leo Szilard took a train out of Germany the day after the Nazis took power. Passed the border before border checks had time to come into force. Seemed obvious then, now I am all to aware of the problems of such a ā€œsimpleā€ plan and the ties that binds you, not least family. And of course not knowing in advance how bad it will be, until after. And not knowing if you jump from the ashes and land in the fire, lots of countries are on the same trajectory but further back. Fascism is yet again the choice, the owners choice in the face of climate change.

    I’m rambling and it’s late. Sympathies and solidarity.



  • If I recall Asimov correctly The Caves of Steel was human killed because mistaken for robot.

    Robots of Dawn was robot killed because weird sex hangups (don’t fuck the robot).

    The Naked Sun I think is the one you are thinking about were robot killed human. Because reprogrammed to think human is robot or something like that.

    In all cases the cop can eliminate all other options, and what remains blah blah. (Also does an inordinate amount of interstellar politics for a cop.)

    In ā€œDie, rich asshole, dieā€ the plot will instead be that as the show goes on it turns out that everyone who has interacted with the victim has a motive, including the people on the other side of the planet he yells slurs at. Since they (for a pittance) operate the heavy machinery in his home that killed him, from a completely separate jurisdiction, the story takes a turn towards international relations. However, our protagonist gets a leak from a robot operator that anyone who knows the password can operate the robot if they know the password. All the robots are shipped with the password ā€œpasswordā€.

    Armed with this knowledge our protagonist goes to the hacker of bright hair colours and indeterminate gender. The hacker first laughs at the protagonist for not knowing the password in the first place - it was in a post that went viral on Tumblr - and then accesses the robot. It turns out that not only did everyone have a motive, everyone was trying to kill him using the robot. One was poisoning the coffee, another one the cocaine. One was trying to electrocute him in the pool, on getting the chandelier to fall on him and so on.

    Finally, the hacker helps our protagonist to trace the IP of the person that operated the robot when it strangled the rich asshole. Turns out it was someone accessing robots for fun to pretend they had come to life. The rich, high, somewhat poisoned, victim fell for it and got horny. He begged to be strangled a bit and unfortunately the person controlling the robot complied, not understanding the strength of the robot. It was an accident after all.

    Our protagonist pours a whiskey, looks into the camera and says that you got to know that both you and your partner know what you are doing if you engage in strangulation. Also, don’t be an asshole.