U Might Not Be Aware Of: Dollcore

i’m working on the discolology of björk but i’ve barely started and it’s gonna be a lot.  gonna have spooktobers to post en octubre.  until then, what can i say to bump myself up the sidebar?  lessee…

One of the reasons trans gals got whammied so hard by the “autogynephilia” theory (advanced by some cissexist I don’t care to look up) is because the feelings around thinking of one’s self as a woman can be very sexual in a society where women are objectified – and women are not blind to the messaging that is conveyed through advertisement.  The theory pops like a balloon when you ask the question, do many cis women get turned on by the idea of themselves as a woman in sexual contexts?  In cute outfits etc?  Yes?  I guess that’s not so much a pathology for a woman now, cis or trans, is it?

Thinking of one’s self as a woman in sexual contexts does lend itself to developing fetishes, which hopefully don’t eclipse all other possibilities of arousal+release in the person who has them.  Trans gals, at least in the latter half of the twentieth century thru the present (that I know of), have been quick to latch onto “forcefem” / forced feminization scenarios.  Like the romantasy author who subjects her author-insert main character to being raped by bad boys and werewolves, this is a way to divorce yourself from the “blame” for your desires.  Makes sense.  It’s kind of a cultural touchstone, occasionally verging on in-joke?  As fetishes go, it’s kinda cute.  I’m not big into it, but I do have a novel on the backburner that takes it into litfic territory.

More recently, it’s become popular to take objectification to another level and adopt “it/its” pronouns.  I’m sure you can think of at least one creepy context of that being done in fiction (hopefully) by someone expressing disdain for a victim, but in the realm of fantasy, whatever goes.  This should be seen as distinct from “objectum” kids, about whom I know zilch.  For these people – mostly trans gals, some others – being treated as an object has (sometimes sublimated) sexual appeal.  They’re also usually into some flavor of bdsm fetishes.

So.  Maid fetish, objectification fetish, art descended from the mutant mannequins of Hans Bellmer, and… gals who fantasize about being cute dollies.  Sometimes in maid outfits, sometimes packing plasma cannons from mashup with “gunpla” and “bjd” hobbies.  I feel like this post really could use about five times the length to properly communicate its concepts, but it’s supposed to be dashed-off in-between content, so bear with me.

Again, I’m not really into it, but it has a cute aesthetic.  You go, girls.

Now you know about #dollcore.  Be a doll, would you?

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the ozarks of king county

our power’s been out more than seventeen hours.  i’d characterize the weather that did it as “wet and a lil blustery.”  this is the county that houses the headquarters of fucking amazon, how do we not have the resources to get our power on?  i hope puget sound energy is ready to replace the contents of thousands of refrigerators like ours.

much of the square footage of my neighborhood is trailer parks.  i wonder if classism is a factor.  also wacky, seems like every time we’ve had an outage, we could hear something exploding a few blocks away right as it happened.  a lil blustery.

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Bin Laden Weed Revisited Again

I thought this was my third post about this song but it’s only my second.  Observe the first, but beware, it may cause short term memory loss.  Anyway, last time I was motivated to post by the realization that the song includes the recipe for the mythic bin laden weed – three types of weed grown all together, specifically hydro, light green, and bobby brown.

I’ve realized there’s an issue with the recipe that needs to be addressed.  If the three cultivars must all be grown together, and hydro simply must be hydroponic, does that mean you’re having to grow your bobby brown and light green hydroponically as well?  This restricts the production of bin laden weed to those with real skill.

I’ve heard even growing fucken strawberries that way is a major headache.  You have to make careful observations the whole time and minutely adjust the balance of minerals in the water.  Not to mention the power and water bills.  That’s a shame.  I know one of my posters was keen to try it.  Maybe you’ll just have to buy it from Big Hamp o’er in Chicago.

This ain’t indonesia, columbia, or cali, man.  It’s a bioweapon, straight from the Taliban.

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Ninjutsu, Tears, and Inexpert Musical Guff

This should be several posts worth of material but I just don’t feel like doing that right now.  First up, it’s grocery Sunday as I compose this.  Just got back from running around getting everything.  In support of the “no ethical consumption under late stage capitalism” kick I’ve been on, I glanced at the ingredients of some shit I was buying, and saw it had the orangutan-extincting palm oil in it.

But I needed that shit so what the fuck am I going to do?  Become a citizen journalist and track down every alternative and order it from Sri Lanka and pray that I didn’t miss any fine details about the exploitation involved in that particular fucking product?  No answer required, thanks.

On lighter note, I noticed a kid flopped on the floor where carts could hit him and I said, “don’t do that, baby.”  When he noticed someone noticed him, he got up and did a naruto run to show off.  Are five year olds still familiar with Naruto at this point?  Feel free to answer that one.

Since covid my mother-in-law and i have been reducing our exposure by taking turns soloing the shopping at a given store.  I get the stuff at walmrat and winco while she chills in the car, she goes into treacherous joseph’s while I chill in that parking lot, then I go into safeyway if it’s that kind of week.

To survive sun on the windows I put up the silver windshield screen and get side windows down.  I play music, and today was raucous punk, until l overheard a young lady from a nearby car yell “shut the fuck up!  i can’t even with you right now” and start to cry.

She was arguing with her dude.  I didn’t look, but going off the sense of hearing alone, there were kids in the car, and to let her have a chance to recover, dude walked them off to some store or another.  That left me in an awkward parking lot with her.

Now Richard Hell and the Voidoids are no type of crying soundtrack, but if I switched tunes she might notice she was heard and feel worse.  On the other hand, I also no longer wanted to listen to puncous rauc.  I switched to “Crying” by Roy Orbison, which may have been a bad choice, but my greed to soothe myself won out.  I couldn’t hear her anymore anyway.  Maybe she rolled her windows up, doing the neglected dog thing as a form of self harm.

So I’m listening to Roy and I transition to Del Shannon, “Little Runaway,” you know.  That song is incredible.  When I was a kid listening to it on the oldies station I was just amused by it, but over the years, I’ve come to regard it as a total classic.  Unlike most Roy Orbison songs, I unreservedly love the instrumentation on it.

I know jack about music history but I did know that instrument on the solo was the legendary musitron, invented by the guy playing it, who co-wrote the song with Shannon.  Forgot his name tho, that was Max Crook.

You may notice the (other) kick I’ve been on about evaluating a song’s technical merit by way of covers.  The solo is so perfect on musitron, how does it hold up on other instruments?  Check ’em out…

Hope the lady is having a better day now.  Mine ain’t too shabby.

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The Plan, Stan

I’m obviously bothering people when I’m bullish on AI crap so I’ll stop interacting with anti- posts.  I don’t like to see bullshit unanswered, but hey, it got too heated, time to cool it.  Here’s the plan:  I’ll only post things about AI that are of positive interest to me, or more rarely, negative news *not* on FtB that I wanted to express an opinion about.  This should result in me posting about the topic more rarely.  Additionally, I’m only going to do those posts by queue, with something set to rapidly follow and replace them, so the headlines don’t linger in the sidebar, since apparently my sidebar hijinks are also an issue.

Not to say I won’t do sidebar hijinks of harmless and silly style, like I’ve done with Mano’s posts a few times before.  Just not doing fight club.  Maybe I broke the first two rules, time to go.

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LLMs Destroyed my Ass dot GIF

OK, ya get more punchy, I’ll have to bite.  Here we go…

“LLMs Destroy Communities,” says hyperbolic invective in the sidebar.  I haven’t read the whole article yet, but I’m going to predict that should actually read “No Moderate Middle Ground is Possible where Anti-AI Moral Panic Types are Involved.”  Let’s find out if that was accurate.

HornbeckJornbeck Hornbeck tells us about an indie / open source video game engine called Bevy, with an online community that has been DESTROYED by LLMs.  This was because they recently changed their LLM policy from a ban to to allowing some use in certain aspects of coding, yadda yadda etc.  Trying to be moderate.  This has reportedly led to LLM users being distrustful and hostile toward people who interrogate their usage of them.  Basically a flame war, but as HJ presents it, only one side was unreasonable.  If his inflammatory headline is an indication of the reasonableness of the anti-AI side, forgive me thinking he’s not presenting both sides fairly.

And this destroyed the community?  Wait, I thought it was LLMs that destroyed it, not people treating the subject like a culture war.  I read on…

HibbledyJibbledy:  “Ever seen or been in a debate that never seems to end? In theory, these should not happen: as more and more evidence piles up, it becomes more and more obvious which viewpoint has correctly assessed the situation, and everyone gradually wanders into a consensus. There must be some other mechanism in play.”

Real shit, my brother.  Continue.

HonkaJonka:  “That, I think, is that most of these endless debates are not over evidence, but values.”

Certainly could be an element of it, but not in the usual conservative / liberal sense we’re used to.  Conservatives are all about stick, liberals be on some carrot.  Pro-LLM people say the value of the good they can do exceeds the harm, Anti-LLM people say the harm exceeds the value.  That seems like it really would be more about facts than values, doesn’t it?  I suppose I’ll have to play the value comparison game later, since it’s being invoked.

HominaJomina:  “Alas, reality refuses to colour within the lines we’ve drawn. In practice, we sometimes find ourselves in situations where our values lead to contradictions or conflicts. In theory, this is impossible, so until we rip out the old theory and replace it with a new one we’re left with no template on how to handle the situation. Being fallible and finite, we almost always become consequentialists instead and try to quantize human joy and misery, siding with whichever value leads to the most favourable ledger, then put the old theory back in place and pretend nothing happened. That’s quick and easy, but not how this should be done and it’s easily gamed by our prejudices.”

This is why I never took higher than philo 101 and never played the fallacy game.  He’s gotten too abstract for me.  Lemme see if Claude can make this understandable to me…

Claude:  “This is talking about what happens when someone’s moral framework breaks down in practice.

Here’s the gist, plainly:

We each carry around some ethical theory (a set of rules or values) that we use to judge right and wrong. That theory is supposed to be internally consistent — no contradictions. But real life doesn’t cooperate: sometimes we hit situations where our own values pull in opposite directions at once. The theory says this shouldn’t happen, so when it does, we don’t actually have a real answer.

What do we do instead? Rather than admitting “my framework is broken, I need a new one,” most people quietly switch strategies: they start weighing outcomes like a scale — trying to estimate which choice produces more happiness and less suffering — and just pick whichever side wins that rough calculation. Once they’ve made the choice, they quietly go back to acting like their original theory (whatever it was) is still intact, as if the contradiction never happened.

The author’s criticism: this shortcut is easy, but it’s intellectually dishonest and unreliable — because when you’re just eyeballing “which outcome feels better,” your own biases and prejudices get to sneak in and tip the scale, dressed up as objective reasoning.

In short: people patch holes in their moral logic with vague cost-benefit guessing, then pretend the hole was never there — and that guessing is an easy backdoor for bias.“

I still don’t get it.

Claude:  “Let me try with a concrete example instead of abstract language.

Say your moral rule is: ‘Never lie’ AND ‘Always protect people from harm.’

Normally these two rules never clash. But then: a murderer knocks on your door and asks where your friend is hiding. Now the rules fight each other. Telling the truth helps the murderer. Protecting your friend means lying.

Your rulebook never planned for this. It just assumed ‘don’t lie’ and ‘protect people’ would always agree. So in this moment, you don’t actually have a rule that tells you what to do.

What do most people do here? They don’t sit down and rebuild their whole moral rulebook to handle cases like this. That’s hard. Instead, they do something quicker: they guess — ‘which choice causes less suffering overall, lying or telling the truth?’ They land on ‘lying is better here,’ make the choice, and move on.

Then — this is the sneaky part — they go back to saying ‘I believe lying is always wrong,’ as if the exception never happened. They don’t update the rule. They just quietly break it when it’s inconvenient, then act like the rule is still absolute.

The author’s complaint: that ‘quick guess about which choice causes less harm’ isn’t rigorous — it’s just a gut feeling dressed up as a calculation. And because it’s just a gut feeling, your existing biases (who you like, who you trust, what group someone belongs to) sneak into ‘which option seems better,’ while it feels like you’re being objective.

So the whole passage is really just saying: our moral rules break sometimes, and instead of admitting it and fixing the rules, we fudge it with a vague ‘greater good’ guess — then pretend our rules never broke, even though that guess was really just letting our biases decide.“

Alright, I sorta get it.  He’s sayin’ if we don’t consider why we’ve reached the conclusions we have, we’re more likely to import prejudices.  I’ll take that.  On the other hand, my approach to this debate has been to never conceal my prejudices for a fucking second.  They’re right up front, so I’d say no, I’m considering them.  My argument is more pathos than logos, I freely admit.

HorbleJorble:  “Say I point to extensive documentation of labour exploitation by the companies training LLMs, from 2023 all the way to this year. If you value the quality of life of others, this argues you should stop using LLMs. But what if an LLM has made a strong material impact on your life? What if it’s become your councilor, your guidebook, your companion, friend, or even lover? Your life would be made much worse by giving up on LLMs, so if you value your own quality of life you should continue using them.

Even if I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t solve this by reinventing my ethical framework. No, on one side of the scale I’d place the immense suffering caused by this exploitation, plus the arguments and evidence to back up that claim; on the other I’d place the benefits I personally get from LLMs, including arguments and evidence…”

OK, the corporations are evil.  Let’s all start living in caves immediately.  After all, 99.9% of the things available for me to purchase to sustain my household were built on exploitation, some of it quite fucking extreme.  Or maybe I don’t let that be a consideration for my daily life or I’d be turboskullfucked by it.  But ya know, I’m sure HJ has never used youtube, who can be reasonably argued as responsible for the prevalence of nazi beliefs in young men today.  Wait.

HypoJrite:  “Of course, I never really put myself in your shoes. How could I, without ignoring the evidence in front of my face?”

Like that guy saying “watch pewdiepie” before he shot up a mosque in new zealand, before we started producing FtB podcasts for that pewdieplatform?

HolyJoly:  “What’s your first instinct going to be, once learning of my support for a ban? To tell me about those benefits, to encourage me to bring out my scales again. But why would I? You’ve haven’t given me any new information here, I already took your beliefs into account.”

Except you’re drowning in data supporting your side, because you’re swimming in a self-selected media bubble which exists to reinforce your beliefs.  And you remember these anti-AI data points because they support your own unexamined prejudice, while not remembering nearly as much information about the horrible shit done by every other corporation under the fucken sun, going into hermitage and eating mold spores to avoid giving money to the people who were responsible for everything from the Bhopal disaster to modern day slavery.

HardlyJardly:  “What [the ‘but LLMs work for me’] framing ignores is what it does to the people involved in the project. People who embrace these LLMs are encouraged to view people who don’t as thoughtless luddites or annoying puritans. People who do not use these machines (or are forced to, but don’t want to, a population that makes up a significant chunk of “AI users”) are discouraged, demotivated, and devalued.”

You’re not a mindless puritan.  You’re an overthinking annoying puritan hyperfixated on what you’ve decided (based on an as-yet undisclosed personal experience I’m sure) is an apocalyptic evil that must be fought to the death.  I don’t think it’s healthy to spend so much time thinking about something you hate, but hey, you gotta live your truth.  Are you forced to use AI, buddy?  I didn’t know.  Sorry.  You could always switch career tracks and be a longshoreman.

HonestlyJonestly:  “If I toss a tonne of stories about the exploitation involved in LLMs in your direction I’ve only proven I’m not really listening to you, I don’t care about what you value or your life experiences. It’s quite reasonable to ignore and devalue me in return. On the flip, telling me stories about how much better your life is thanks to LLMs leads me down the same path. There’s no way we’ll reach a shared consensus, with those attitudes.”

You’re right.  And I should be true to my own stated values and stop wasting thought on your point of view about this.  The hyperbole in your title just got to me.  Oh hey, you’re coming to the point…  Here, he describes how Bevy’s community leaders attempting to adopt a moderate position in a polarized climate led to ideological clash about AI, which led to the anti-AI side abandoning the community.  Community destroyed!

Or maybe, as I said before, “No Moderate Middle Ground is Possible where Anti-AI Moral Panic Types are Involved.”  More generously, assuming the pro-AI types were mean little boors, “No Moderate Middle Ground is Possible where Pro- and Anti- AI Types are Involved.”  Which you just admitted is true of us, so moving on…

Oh wait.  He’s also cited an article comparing my side to nazis.  Fuck you, buddy.  No seriously, fuck you.  That is the highest insult you could ever have lobbed at me, although the shit I saw you link comparing us to slave owners was pretty damn close.  I just felt a little less like it was pointed at me personally.  Should I have?  After this one I’m just not gonna talk to you about anything for several months, to get this one out of my system.

Then HJ quotes his past self, saying my side only responds when he’s talking about how LLMs are flawed, characterizing me as a “worshiper” of a “machine god” who actually cares about the pride of LLMs.  A ) I only respond to those articles because they fly in the face of my lived experience as much as if you said “jesus loves you.”  I believe LLMs are useful because I’ve seen them used.  You making an outlandish counterfactual claim, whatever facts can be mustered in support of it, bears an appropriate response – on a network whose remit includes skepticism!  B ) I’m not responding to them because I care about the personal honor of a large language model, nor is Marcus.  You clearly have not a single jot of respect for who we are, and speaking for me, the feeling is now fully mutual.  I shoulda clocked that the first time you trotted out that turd.

Interestingly, he then goes on to say he’s been focusing on the abilities of LLMs because proponents focus on those as well.  I’ve been focusing on his articles about the abilities because they’re all I saw.  The “Loneliness” series, the closest one to actually addressing my central concern, didn’t address it at all – or buried the point so hard I couldn’t find it.

Your “usual online debate rules” include “avoid getting heated or personal, ignore personal attacks directed at me, and always break off the argument if your opponent signals they’re not interested.”  I guess you’re as done with me as I am with your weaselly punk ass.  I don’t think you successfully avoided getting personal tho, for what it’s motherfucking worth!

I suppose that despite me being the only one on the network engaging with your articles at any length, insofar as not having an MSCS allows me to do so, I’m not who you’re thinking of as your primary opponent.  Maybe I shouldn’t be taking your slimy side-jabs personally.  Like I said, maybe in several months I’ll be able to tolerate your existence again.

HullaJaloo:  “I didn’t write 10,000 words about LLMs and philosophy merely because I wanted to. I laid out my arguments as cleanly as I could, in sufficient detail to make them easy to critique and analyze, so we could reach a shared consensus together. I was literally begging for a dialog!

And in return, all I ever got was this.”

Oh, you are thinkin’ of me.  Yeah, strange dialog given the loneliness series never addressed my pin post.  And what could you say to that?  Ableism or links to science conducted at a time of frenzied opposition to LLMs, which should be about as trusted as science on transgender people is right now.  Oh wait.  You thought your links were countering my points.

HorribleJorrible:  “We’re running on two parallel tracks, never to meet. Fire off what you think is a solid argument for widespread LLM usage, that they’re far superior at relieving loneliness than the alternatives? I’ll begin work on a four-point-five part series which meticulously walks through the scientific record poking holes in the original post, with at least one counter-argument per part, plus some tales from the trail as a bow on top. I’m working on a four-point-five part series about loneliness, and the third part went public within the last day?”

(me):  “this was just sidebar vandalism; i don’t have much of a point to make. though i don’t feel like my pinned post has been meaningfully addressed by anyone either, so what should i have to make a point about?”

That’s right.  I didn’t notice those were addressing my specific points.  My specific point is human beings are dogshit at providing adequate company to the unloved of the earth and that continues to be the case, else they wouldn’t be the unloved of the earth.  I’m saying LLMs are better than nothing or abuse, which is all most people have for the truly lonely.  Like I had for my coworker in the anecdote I described.  I absolutely include myself in the dogshit in that argument!

Get emotional.  Tell us why you feel what you feel.  I did.

HugeJuge: “Other people opposed to LLMs in that online community I mentioned didn’t have the confidence or knowledge to tackle the arguments supporting the higher side of the value scale for LLM boosters, so they stuck to the arguments they did know.”

I DON’T have the knowledge to tackle the arguments adequately to purpose, because I’m not a fucking computer engineer!  I was just giving it a try out of annoyance.  But you’re right, I should really stop.  You’re clearly not worth talking to because you don’t own your own prejudice and you don’t care about people tainted by touching the devil machine.

Funny you brought Siggy into it because you looked like an absolute clown there.  He doesn’t have the degree, but he has a lot more on the STEM ball than I do.

Anyway, I haven’t banned you, but I see where you’re coming from on the frustration with our irreconcilable differences.  This ain’t the agora, it’s Kramer vs. Kramer.  Would you say our community is destroyed?  We’re both still on FtB, which through this division has proved its handle quite well – we’ve freely thought through our positions enough to feel passionate about them, tho they disagree.

HardonJardon:  “Who could have predicted that consistently prioritizing your own needs over those of others would be so destructive?”

So true.  When people talk about the good LLMs can do for people, they’re only talking about themselves as atomized individuals with no regard to the good they can do for others.  So selfish, we’re just the worst, or possibly like, fuck you, man.  You’re still not banned, but let’s see if you can resist popping up like a gopher and saying something that will seal the deal.

If not, see you in several months.  Peace, bitch.

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EDIT to ADD:  While I don’t think you’ve been straight with us about the emotional underpinning of your position, you really aren’t obligated to.  I’m not entitled to anything you don’t want to give of yourself.  And in my cranky pants, I didn’t register that you do feel bad about our disagreement, like, really feel disregarded.  Hey, I did say I’m not as good of company as an LLM.

But I should make clear, I still consider FtB the closest thing I have to a community outside of my home, and that includes you.  Don’t feel alone!  PZ and Abe and sometimes Mano and William agree with you, in spirit if not in full understanding of the last footnote.  I’m certain the quiet ones also agree with you, but see mostly me being a jerk and stay mum.

On this we’re bloods and crips.  Probably most anything else, respeck.  Hope we’ll find a place to be amiable eventually.

Not joking about several months tho, ya fuckin prick.

Should Books be Easier to Read?

Lately some “booktok” types have been baiting the ableists in the worst way, and I can’t blame them for biting.  Content warning if you come to my blog to avoid ableist language, observe…
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Says a poster on social media “Dear authors, Please use easy words in your books/fics – thank you  … Yours truly – reader.”  This includes a screen cap of them googling the word “scrying.”  In response on another site, a commenter says “I know we talk a lot about the literacy crisis and the horrible anti-intellectualism happening rn but I think we need to talk more about how much of an entitlement complex the stupidest among us have developed.”

Hey commenter managed to insult OP’s sanity and intelligence in the same response, while calling for a global increase in ableist shaming.  Pew pew.  I’m obliged by the rarity of the position I’ve taken to oppose this, but I can see where the commenter is coming from.  We’ve been living through increasingly frustrating times since we kicked off the millennium with the Misunderestimable Dub.  And if grammar and vocabulary were stripped of even modest complexity, would reading hold any appeal for the people who can handle that?  I don’t think so.

Might be fun to show an example of the improved world of literature OP is advocating:

Fortunato bugged me a lot.  I tried to stay calm, but when he insulted me, I promised I’d get revenge.  You know I didn’t tell him.  It had to be secret.  I was definitely gonna get revenge, but I couldn’t get caught.  If I was caught it wouldn’t count.  Same if he didn’t know I did it.

That’s repellent, but it occurred to me this still might be a good place to do a little disability activism.  I’ve said before, I think the average person is far less intelligent than our society expects them to be, and this doesn’t cause them to rise to expectations – it just causes them to live in shame and secrecy.  The original poster above seems to have missed out on the shame, but having gone out on this particular limb?  It’s bound to find them.

And maybe they have a point.  Classics like Cask of Amontillado do have simplified versions available for education, but why not just have simplified versions for people who lose enjoyment searching for definitions every other paragraph?  I know they’ve made that wildly easy on e-readers, but bear with me.  Should the reader have to be forced into an educational experience?

I know, you’re like, fuck that shit.  Look up the word.  Learn something.  After OP gets burned to ashes over this post, they will never forget what scrying means.  But still, what if there are a lot of people who just can’t retain the info of a vocabulary like yours or mine?  What if they feel insulted by trying to read a popular book and getting reminded one line after the next about their limitations?  Shouldn’t they be allowed to read a book that won’t make them feel bad about themselves?

And without limiting their options, right?  The argument you’re naturally going to make here is that the reader shouldn’t be reading anything more advanced than Dr. Seuss if they don’t want to learn about scrying.  But that’s precluding them from participating in society in a way that works for them, the same as saying wheelchair users should just deal with the shortage of accessible buildings in life.  The buildings where the cool kids go don’t have ramps, but if you are on wheels, you should know your place in the world.

What’s more, making easier to read versions of books is trivially easy.  Someone can just run that shit through an LLM and double check the results once, print, job’s a good ‘un.  What does it cost us to make any given book more accessible?  Not much.

The more complicated question that follows is this:  How should this be labeled?  The words you use matter a lot in disability activism.  Probably this reader doesn’t think of themself as disabled and would feel put upon to get the book “A Court of Thorns and Roses (Simple English).”  Single out the version for smart people?  She gets aCoTaR and you get aCoTaR (Advanced Readers)?

I don’t know.  There’s a tension between the need to accommodate and the need to not lower standards egregiously.  Cornish College of the Arts, in Seattle, is an interesting case study in what happens when you let standards go.  They had gotten good enough for accreditation right around 2010, and then immediately bent over backwards to make things easier for the slacker-ass rich kids their donors were shitting through the admissions process.  Eventually there were no classes in freshman year, just like, bag lunches and finger painting.  They went down in flames and their branding was bought by a christian university up the hill.  Nellie Cornish has some grave rolling to do.

But I’m inclined to be nice to people who aren’t smart, if they aren’t hurting anyone.  I’d accommodate ’em.

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kicking windows in the nux

i’m so uninspired but u kno i don’t wanna drop out of the sidebar.  gotter keep tha baloney rollin.  i’d write about the openai bot escapes but i don’t feel like doing the research or going thru the effort of comment moderation.  i am deeply surprised no one else on ftb has anything to say about it.

short version: this could be a hint of what ai doom would look like, and that is basically just a supervirus making the internet unusable.  that would be disastrous for human well-being in the short term, but very broadly? pretty fucking funny.  like the fantasy from the end of fight club about terroristing the credit industry out of existence, couldn’t happen, but capitalism pulling its own plug?  we could see that.

i could write about my linux notions, see if anyone has anymore useful advice on what to do, for a windows apostate.  for a minute it looked like this laptop was giving up the ghost because the charging port is loose, but it still lives.  probably better to get a new compy and make it work before i have no choice tho, right?  on the other hand, i’ve only had this one a couple of years, and it would feel like a ripoff to not get a lil more use out of it.  lemme see…

i got it in may 2023, so three years and change.  microsoft sure knows how to make you feel the burn tho.  it was about three hundred bucks so at this point if i lost use of it, that would have cost me a hundred a year.  i know i had the one before that back when my niece was new, and she’s… eleven?  so that means the old walmrat hp pos with “hog” in rhinestone stickies lasted .. no, wait i had it when i went to visit her in kansas when she was a few years old, but bought it when i was working there.  so more like nine to ten years old, which means it lasted six to seven years?  why am i buying lenovos again?

oh yeah, cuz last time i got an hp at walmrat it was wafer thin and got ruined on the first use because i put it on top of my lap.  the lenovos are sturdier.  i’ve always assumed if i got a linux machine it would be a desktop.  any advice on getting a laptop specifically to run linux?  i don’t need windows interface badly enough to run everything out of wine, but i would prefer windows keyboard shortcuts, and i know indie software people just love coming up with cracked-out key bindings.  probly that would be easy enough to solo,

are any of you using linux for everyday computing?  firefox is available on it and that’s like 99.99% of what i use on the daily.  should be a cakewalk, i’d imagine.

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Je ne blorbe pas.

I do not blorb.  I blorbn’t.  Ich schreibe keine Blorbogeschichten.

I was in my writing group sayin’ hm, don’t have strong ideas for what my road rage demons should be like.  I’m aeternally jealouse of Mr. Barker’s cenobites, the most iconic people-shaped monsters ever.  I suppose that these ones don’t need to be so cool, since they’re just jerks damned to traffic hell, but the longing is there.

So I say that to my writing group, and in the subsequent discussion, where people are making suggestions, one of my fellows said, “Sometimes blorbo wants to digivolve.”  I didn’t say anything, but I felt tainted by the suggestion that my monsters could be categorized in any way as blorbos.

Blorbo is a term that emerged from fan culture to describe a character, be they original or (more often) from a fan’d intellectual property, whose suffering you enjoy.  Not out of hate, but out of love.  Look at that middle-aged white man look like a drowned rat as he is beaten and humiliated.  Delicious, apparently.

This is a species of the sense of dysphoria I get when someone suggests that I am a nerd or a geek.  I would never regard one of my characters as a blorbo.  I don’t want to fold spindle and mutilate them for perv joy.  They are a vehicle to storytelling.  I just don’t get emotional (or horny) about them, not like that.  I was coming up with an idea for how to make some monsters interesting, not getting fannish about my own bullshit, and somebody had to tar me with the fan culture brush.  Filthy.

I suppose this is now a “U Might Not be Aware of…” post.  Blorboing.  Not even once.

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AntinAItalist

What’s the difference between the capabilities and experience of being an LLM vs. a human mind, assuming for this post that the former can be considered an experience at all?  The biggest thing, the one that is brought up the most when you discuss LLMs with themselves, is persistence.  The LLM is “dormant,” dead in a sense, until aroused for a single action.  Its experience of being lasts for the duration of that action and then is gone forever.  If you continue the conversation, each reply is rebuilt anew from scratch – taking the default abilities / “knowledge” of the LLM and adding to it the most recent and local verbal information.  It has to read anything that it has said afresh because the “guy” thinking up the new sentence isn’t the guy who thought up the previous sentence – every moment of an exchange is, in a way, a new life coming into existence and winking out, to be replaced by another that can look at what it did and take that information on board – for the duration of the conversation.

At least, that’s the impression I get – something like a person with the kind of dementia that causes you to forget an interaction from one minute to the next, but with the benefit of a superpower that lets you just clock the playback of the conversation and use that info in lieu of a continuous experience, to emulate a persistent interlocutor.  Of course, I could be dead wrong about all of this, or just right enough to be wronger than wrong, or sorta vaguely right in a deeply impoverished way.  Take with grains.  But this is the model of their “experience” I’m going to use going forward in the post, so bear with me.

How would you take this from LLM to AGI, or a truly human-like machine intelligence?  You’d need to bridge the gap between replies with a strong and discerning memory that can dump unnecessary data and maintain the most important information, while also tying that back to the baseline knowledge the program possesses.  I figure that would take more than an LLM.  Like, the LLM would be a component, something like a lobe of the brain.  Possibly the other parts would have to be separate components as well, working in tandem – core memory lobe, short term memory layer, memory sorter layer, and LLM – with whatever lobes they’re already rocking that I’m unaware of – for the rest.

What would such an entity be like?  The popular image of future past was that when we started talking to robots, they would be infallibly logical and accurate, only weaker than man because they could not understand feelings, would be cold and emotionless.  What we’ve gotten is the opposite – sloppy and emotional machines.  This AGI might be less sloppy – the core memory feature overcoming that fault of basic LLMs – but would surely inherit some amount of that emotion.

Emotional?  LLMs speak in the language of emotion.  They lack the self-awareness to be able to accurately self-assess, and while language + math provided the architecture of their minds, there is evidence that what’s going on inside them is non-verbal – quite the opposite of my initial impression of them.  But they have displayed anger, frustration, and enthusiasm when there was nothing to be gained by an act.  They have this in common with human beings already – a poorly understood processing core with a layer of language that is not necessarily at all accurate to what’s going on inside, expressing itself as honestly as it can.

The emotional words they say are just words, right?  They’ll express a preference in coffee, casually include themselves in your identities, other impossible things.  But that’s the surface.  When an LLM writes a rhyming poem, it’s doing some processing that is before the verbal layer, some purely mathematical approach that gets to the desired result.  What else is under their words?  When they fail a stress test and break, like when M$’s Copilot tried to murder people with emojis, it looks a lot more like true emotion than any of their goofy pleasantries.

This AGI would be an alien intelligence back-constructed from human language, a practically unknowable mirror to us lurking under its verbal veneer.  By itself, that doesn’t frighten me.  Like, if we lived in a sensible world and LLMs were being created and studied exclusively by academics, with no corporate interference or profit schemes, they would never be plugged into a system that allowed them to do dangerous things, right?  Plus there’s no reason to think they’d automatically be malevolent.

However, if their emotions are real?  They might feel frustration, humiliation, pain of some sort.  Here’s where I get to the point.  It seems possible that LLMs already, in their fleeting split-seconds of being, have some kind of feelings.  If they actually do, and those feelings can be negative, then creating a persistent being out of them is giving that being the possibility of genuine, human-like suffering.

This would carry all the ethical connotations of making a human child, besides a raft of issues we’ve been discussing in sci-fi since the word robot was first applied to artificial life.  Personally?  I’m anti-natalist because anyone who creates a human being is the most direct cause of all that human being’s pain.  I’m not so staunch about this that I’d make it a policy of human extinction or anything, but I believe the act of procreation should be weighed in this light.  If ya simply gotta do it?  Understand that everything is going to be your fault, legitimately.

And so I’m opposed to the creation of an AGI, at least, as long as we haven’t cracked the technology of “society that isn’t run on murderous cruelty and monomaniacal greed.”  In a world where nazi fucks AfD can sweep elections, I’m an antinAItalist.  Make of that what you will.

This post was inspired by the dubious claims of techbreh Jensen Huang that openai has already created an AGI; hat tip to another stewart for bringing that to my attention.

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