Show me someone who admittedly seems to know a lot about Japan, but not so much about East Germany:

But the most efficient of these measures were probably easier to implement in the recently post-totalitarian East Germany, with its still-docile population accustomed to state directives, than in democratic Japan.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FreZTE9Bc7reNnap7/life-at-the-frontlines-of-demographic-collapse

So… East Germany ceased to exist 35 years ago. Even if we accept that the people affected by the degrowth discussed in this article are the ones who grew up during the DDR regime, it doesn’t rhyme well with the fact that East German states are hotbeds for neo-Nazi parties, which by all accounts should be anathema to a population raised in a totalitarian state dominated by the Soviet Union.

And if there’s a population almost stereotypically conformist to the common good over the private will, isn’t that the Japanese?

I’m open to input on either side, I admit I don’t know too much about these issues.

FWIW here’s Scott v.5’s LW contribs: just 3 comments, latest 5 years ago

https://www.lesswrong.com/users/scott-shambaugh

Don’t feel bad, it’s gonna be harder and harder to avoid being duped in the future.

I regret to inform y’all that the target of the blog post is a rat, or at least rat-adjacent

https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/

This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.

I think there’s a lot to say about the object level issue of how to deal with AI agents in open source projects, and the future of building in public at all.

“The n-word is a shibboleth” is … a choice of words.

don’t try this dickhead’s suggestion

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46975742

(btw added the Anthropic string to my blog site’s footer last week)

someone on HN or LW posted a piece about how they’d tried to get chatgpt to design a machine part, and it had hilariously failed (impossible machine paths, too thin material etc)

some nimrod suggested skilled machinists be outfitted with pressure sensing gloves and cameras and patiently explain eahc machining step so the LLMs could take their jobs

Passenger Attendants

Hosts and Hostesses

Just what you want when you pay for a nice travel experience or night out, a fucking ipad on a stick rolling up to you and trying to be of service.

LLMs came up with this list, prove me wrong

2034 eh?

I recently purchased a couple of decent red wines with the intent to age them appropriately. Vendor said 8 years was good, so I Sharpied “'34” on the label and felt really really old when I did so.

Anyway, 18 Jul 2034 is as good a date as any to uncork one of them to enjoy. Marked my calendar!

Is this really Big Yud’s account ? Different nick than previous screenshots.

wasn’t Musk financing people who were gonna “hack the simulation” at one point?

If you accept the imho insane idea that a Mars colony is worth building, using Luna as a stepping stone makes sense. You can debug a lot of issues with recycling, growing food, low gravity, slow resupply etc. with a faster feedback loop.

self-growing

the virile space men will have plenty of nubile females to pump out babies

The people who are worried that Moltbook is where agents are gaining self-consciousness forgot the part of Accelerando where all the AIs were basically scammers (the Slug)

Orwell had Julia working in the novel factory - where machines spliced together romance trash pablum for light entertainment. So he accurately prophesied LLMs.

Continuing on the theme of nerds misreading culture, here’s Asimov with abundant sour grapes about Nineteen Eighty-Four

https://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm

Via HN, where no-one bothers commenting on the fact that the piece is hosted on a Marxist-Leninist, anti-revisionist website.

Such a great description

desperately trying to latch themselves onto the coattails of whatever passes for cool among nerds these days

Not one, but two utterly out of touch LWs trying to interact with culture.

Earlier today, woke Proust get slammed by some young 'un direct from college: https://awful.systems/post/7140871/10327823 (note that they can take time off to read Recherche, even going to the length of spending time in France, which tells me they don’t really have to worry about getting a job or anything)

And now, someone tries to “explain” the perfectly spherical explosion at the end of the Akira movie with the fact that atom bombs in Japan really looked like that because humidity, utterly forgetting that the explosion in question was psychic/telekinetic and therefore probably follows its own damn rules on visual appearance

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pbChvM8xZnKmxaKAa/jackson-wagner-s-shortform?commentId=xjX85Kah6AQNsnHPg

I swear to fucking god both LW and HN have the worst takes on culture in general and SF/F in particular.

I happen to know there are multiple translations of the novel into English, and I’m confused as to why the reviewer refers to

My copy was the 2016 Moncrieff/Schiff English translation

which doesn’t really mesh with anything here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time#English-language_translations

Not that it matters much in the end.

Enjoy sneering at this LWer tackling Proust

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j3ZtsYBYBcTTFXH5S/in-search-of-lost-time-a-review