Deep Dive Devin

You're missing my point. Kerdios said that the US right has become "impossible to discuss with". This isn't literally true, yes, but nobody who says it means it that way. Obviously people can talk to each other, but you shouldn't be surprised that people rarely agree to the caveat of "just agree to their framing of politics and treat their opinions as more legitimate than they are". What I am saying is that there hasn't been a significant change in position that made this divide larger, just a more toxic attitude that's harder for moderates to ignore. My example of how they obfuscated this before was to bring up which political euphemisms they've historically covered their asses with. The things they actually want have not changed that much. Yes, the Muslim registry thing was a real promise Trump made, though it was early in his presidency and obviously didn't come to pass. I admit "destroy the middle class" is exaggerated. Both of this country's parties are corporate-controlled, neither of them have working class interests in mind (it was Clinton who dealt the biggest blow to welfare, after all), but it does not take a genius to look at "lower taxes" being implemented as "rich people paying less taxes for social programs that benefit non-rich people" and see that that was always the point. It's not unfounded to say these things, though. I honestly don't know what to think if you're just going to tell me the concept of political euphemism has completely passed you by. Like, when Republicans say "gay marriage should be decided on by individual states", they say it because they know many states would never legalize it on their own, but there's not a lot of political viability in trying to ban it nationwide (currently). This is how they approach abortion, how they previously approached segregation, et cetera. If you're honestly telling me that they'd still believe in "states' rights" to decide these things when the conservative position was federally-mandated, that's extremely naive. If you want to cite good reasons to believe not every euphemism is sound or wholly accurate to what people say it means, I guess we can have that discussion, but I'm not interested in being told I don't know what I'm talking about because I don't simply take people who constantly lie about things at their own word.

I don't think there's a ton of use distinguishing between "the GOP" and so-called "Trump MAGA". Certainly a lot of former-republicans have become disillusioned, but it's not like that caused them to move left, or indeed vote any differently at all, as far as I can tell. There's nothing in particular that MAGA says or believes that is a break with tradition for conservatism, it's just more than before (an escalation which I fear is going to hurt us when the democrats have absolutely not matched it in any way). You're right that discussion is impossible with them, but I mean. The strat before was to shift the conversation to something so abstract that it was impossible to reach an agreement anyway. That's "protect American jobs", "war on terror", "lower taxes". It's not like most of the voters changed their minds when that became "keep the Mexicans out", "Muslim registry" and "obliterate the middle class". It's harder to stay friends with people who are always saying the quiet part loud, but the quiet part hasn't changed much. Pundits and politicians are riding the reactionary wave because it gets them money and power, and that's what they've always done. It's certainly become scarier, but that's as much as anything because the Democrats are not fit to match them. At-best they're pretending all the old euphemisms are still what's being fought, and at worst they're moving further right themselves.

I loved what Nightdive did with Quake 1, I should probably play 2 sometime. Though I've always gotten the impression that 2 is more conventional and kinda...less interesting, across the board? I don't remember where I specifically first heard that. On a related note, I recently played through Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, the Team Reptile successor to Jet Set Radio. It works great! And that's about it. Something about the slower speed, the broadness of the stages and general gameplay formula feels less-exciting than Jet Set Radio Future did. I love the OST, I love the controls, I love the visuals emulating that low-poly, blurry-texture-with-harsh-cel-shading style, but the magic just isn't there. It's not a bad game, and it's probably better for everyone who isn't already a superfan like me, but Future is still the height of this style of game.

I like to think I'm a spooky scarecrow in spirit. I'm really good at making people (birds) leave me alone

I like Death Note. A lot of people say it goes downhill in the second part, which is true, but it's still pretty good. EDIT: oh, what's going on with this dude? half his posts look like bot posts but the others seem more legit. is he scraping others' posts or something?

I really wanna know exactly what mentality makes a person post exactly once, wait two and a half years, and only post again when roleplaying as a dude from a terrible old adventure game from 30 years ago

My Harry Potter knowledge is basically worthless these days, but as someone who read the books, they basically introduced the soul-splitting thing entirely as a scavenger hunt to center the end of the series around, and kind of wrote off the side effects as "ooh but he got even MORE heartless" which was completely hollow as the dude was already a serial killer as a child. I think a better example would be something like Fullmetal Alchemist, where Homunculus/Father progressively loses aspects of his identity as he splits his worldly desires off into separate beings, and it ends up biting him in the ass at the end. Dude starts off as a funny little smoke ball in a jar, but ends as angry face man with no personality other than wanting power.

Don't do curiouscat, I hate the way it's organized and formatted, it always feels like I can't either find what I'm looking for or just find the FULL PAGE for a user. Clicking their icon does nothing.

my favorite!

Messing around with all the little extras in Sonic Origins Plus. They've cumulatively added a lot to the classic quadrilogy at this point, with widescreen, no lives, spindash and four characters in every game, expanded levels, mirror mode, missions, and best of all, the ability to retry special stages, and savestates for the 8-bit games. I just wish they'd put rings in Death Egg Zone in 2, that is an insane difficulty spike even 30 years later.

Smartest AI lesswrong will ever produce.

Gremlin Graphics hit with false advertising suit over 40 year old game

I'm pretty sure his point was that the levels had more presence than usual for a shooter in August of 95. Duke 3D is known for being a pioneer in designing levels to actually resemble locations, and that came later.

I'm happy to see Ross alongside other people, I just don't love his recent choice of company -- granted, there's plenty of much worse fearmongering and apocalyptic conspiracy theories he could be platforming than AI stuff, I just hope it stays away.

I clicked on the dude's website and it immediately got stuck on a loading screen that looked like this: is this what AF is gonna be now? Just platforming lesswrong and effective altruism cranks?

Neural nets have been around for years (we've been using it to upscale old game textures for a while), the current splash is due to the improvement in text bots and image generation, and the current controversy is over the reference material being unethically-sourced. We're also seeing text generators being used to run bots, image generation and voice generators spreading disinformation and impersonating people. Nobody doubts the capability as tools, but we do need conversations about how those tools are used, because they're easily misused. I bring it up because Yud and his cult of personality mostly just speculate about the robot apocalypse, but since both these things use the word "AI", it's very convenient for the weirdos who want your money. Okay, "assume he's a bad person and move on" is definitely not a good idea, but I mostly included it because it's well-sourced and I didn't want the things I was saying to sound baseless. Obviously any wiki has a degree of bias, and maybe it is a little weird to fixate on a person in this manner, but I don't think their assessment is incorrect. Well, I mean, this is a discussion about how much disruption something new is causing. If you don't care, I'm not sure what I or anyone else is supposed to do to convince you. It is essentially pascal's wager but CYBERRRR and not sarcastic, yes. Rich people with outweighed influence on the world have lasting effects and consequences. This is something that people pay attention to and document, both because it can cause a lot of problems, and because understanding those things is an important step in actually solving problems. I feel like you're not really seeing the forest for the trees here. Objectively, these kind of technological leaps should be a great thing that makes a ton of work easier for everyone. But like all other forms of automation, the system they exist under is rife for abuse. It's good to talk about that

I mean I don't think he's gonna pose a danger to Ross or anything, but Yudkowsky and his lesswrong friends are just cranks. He's not really a programmer, not really an expert beyond having written a lot of things, and the "research" his foundation does with all the giant piles of money donated to them amounts to wild speculation about sci-fi shit becoming real. The current wave of neural network popularity and discourse is probably a convenient advertising strat, but it's mostly unrelated the robot apocalypse they keep predicting. If we wanna talk about the threats of AI, we're going to be talking about automation, impersonation, data and statistical bias, things that accentuate the problems we already face in the real world due to centuries of compounded socioeconomic tension and systemic injustice. The current problems are not a break with tradition, they are the tradition, only more. By contrast, the thing that Yudkowski (and Elon Musk, in case you wanted more evidence it's a fake problem) is most afraid of amounts to a time-traveling bonzibuddy that tortures you for not thinking about it hard enough. I highly recommend rationalwiki's dutifully-maintained and sourced page for more info on all this garbage. A lot of it is really funny.

This dude claims he sat in a room for a while and logically solved all of human morality by thinking really hard. I hope Ross is prepared for an hour of bad-faith arguments followed by a bunch of crypto chodes claiming the other guy won

Eliezer Yudkowsky is, in fact, just some chump.

I thought this was just a joke about the title, but no. That really is what the game is

That's awful optimistic. Given the past...okay, forever, but especially during Donny's run, I can't be anything but cynical at the idea of anyone with power in this country facing real justice. Also, we haven't exactly made significant progress against the voter suppression that has won republicans so many prior elections, and it's clear that Democrats just...hate being in power? I'm not sure any political party is more self-destructive right now, other than maybe the current UK labour party. Republicans have been just fucking disgusting, but there's nothing about their current strand of reactionary absurdity that breaks with their regular, traditional reactionary absurdity.

Sorry! I was definitely being a bit aggressive before. It IS cool work, the language of "solved" just put me off a bit, because this is a thing I think is both important and interesting, and sometimes seeing a work-in-progress sold as a solution gets under my skin, makes me worry that it's not gonna continue improving. You see it in reverse, too! People talk about Y2K like it was a fake problem people were wrong to ever worry about, instead of an issue that a lot of people worked very hard to prevent from being too destructive. We're probably gonna see the same mentality brought out whenever we get around to climate mitigation.

"This is solved now" bruh, no it's not the advances in neural net tech have been impressive (and make a lot of the ideas in Ross's video seem achievable), but they clearly aren't at "solution" level

I should probably watch FLCL again after like six years but I still vividly remember all the pillows songs