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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • In retrospect, I think the rise of smartphone-based, algorithm-driven social media circa 2012 will be seen as the information-age equivalent of lead poisoning that quietly brainrotted society. It greatly increased the power and reach of disinformation and radicalizing propaganda while destroying the ability of mainstream news sources to moderate or even alert people to the damage being done. There’s a staggering gap in attitudes between people who get their news from social media apps vs. newspapers or even cable TV. And so much of the maliciousness is below the surface, distributed across millions of unique newsfeeds and “for you” pages that the public writ large has very little insight into. If some shell company were airing neonazi recruitment ads on national television, people would be shocked and outraged, but slip it into the feeds of vulnerable people and you can poison an entire generation with hardly anyone noticing until it’s too late.






  • I feel like a good test of any supposed AGI would be to hook it up to a feed of a classic 3D platformer like Mario 64, give it input control, and see how long it takes to progress through the game. We’re seeing sparks of this with Claude Plays Pokemon, but any self-respecting superintelligence (or even human-equivalent) should be more than capable of learning the control scheme, navigating the 3D environment, solving puzzles, and generally playing through as competently as any 10-year-old seeing the game for the first time.


  • I voted for Sanders in the 2016 primary. In hindsight, he would have been obliterated, McGovern-style. Clinton and Biden treated him with kid gloves, but in a general election all of his questionable past – his unemployment, his wife’s involvement with that college financing thing, his honeymoon in the USSR, the rape essay – would have come out and been hammered relentlessly by Republicans (and a good chunk of Democrats).