walkabout

It seems unfair to call out LLMs for "spam, scams, propaganda, and astroturfing." These problems are largely the result of platform optimization for engagement and SEO competition for attention.

They didn't create those markets, but they're the markets for which LLMs enhance productivity and capability the best right now, because they're the ones that need the least supervision of input to and output from the LLMs, and they happen to be otherwise well-suited to the kind of work it is, besides.

This isn't unique to models; even we, humans, when operating without feedback, generate mostly slop.

I don't understand the relevance of this.

Curation is performed by the environment and the passage of time, which reveals consequences.

It'd say it's revealed by human judgement and eroded by chance, but either way, I still don't get the relevance.

LLMs taken in isolation from their environment are just as sloppy as brains in a similar situation.

Sure? And clouds are often fluffy. Water is often wet. Relevance?

The rest of this is a description of how we can make LLMs work better, which amounts to more work than required to make LLMs pay off enormously for the purposes I called out, so... are we even in disagreement? I don't disagree that perhaps this will change, and explicitly bound my original claim ("so far") for that reason.

... are you actually demonstrating my point, on purpose, by responding with LLM slop?

In aggregate, however, I believe in the US presidential elections end up voting for their own best interests, as they see it

This is extremely close to one of the early "OK, but maybe there's a reason what we're observing at the individual level isn't so scary" hypotheses explored by political science in the latter half of the 20th century—that individually poor choices would nonetheless produce good outcomes by being in some way chaotic and the good outcomes often manifesting as attractors in that chaotic space, or something like that, or by some "wisdom of the crowds" effect that emerges in aggregate. These approaches have been found untenable despite much trying, though I think there are some limited efforts at it still under way.

HOWEVER! I think after this post I do see what you're actually getting at, which is that if people believe they voted in their own best interests ("as they see it" being key) then they may believe they did in-fact do that indefinitely, even if entirely incorrect, so long as they... well, continue to believe so.

The prisoner voting to remain a prisoner not because they don't want to be free—not because if you describe completely and in detail, leaving nothing out, the conditions they're in-fact in they tell you they would love to live that way (they claim they would hate it!), and then if you also describe free life they claim that is the outcome they would rather have, and if you carefully probe you find that it's not even for some greater-interest purpose they are voting to remain imprisoned (it's not that they believe they'd be a danger to others if free, for example), but because they believe they aren't in prison despite [gestures at their prison cell]—is voting in their own interest.

By that standard, yes, a lot more voters are voting in their own interest than may be reckoned by other standards.

Spam, scams, propaganda, and astroturfing are easily the largest beneficiaries of LLM automation, so far. LLMs are exactly the 100x rocket-boots their boosters are promising for other areas (without such results outside a few tiny, but sometimes important, niches, so far) when what you're doing is producing throw-away content at enormous scale and have a high tolerance for mistakes, as long as the volume is high.

Yeah, I think you nailed it. A ban on playing against "the house" would do it. Taking a fixed amount from each pot (as at poker tables) for play among patrons would still be allowed, but slot machines wouldn't. Your solution's much better than a full ban because it wouldn't drive as much illegal betting (a problem no only because it circumvents the law, but because for gambling in particular but for any black market, really, it tends to become connected with other criminal activity)

Although, if you believe in that theory, you should reject democracy and aim for some form of aristocracy or monarchy.

Not necessarily! It means that the model of the typical voter's behavior (and of the reasons why elections go the ways they do) isn't what many conceive it to be (or hope it may be), and that democracy's weaknesses, vulnerabilities, strengths, and capabilities may in-fact be at least somewhat different from what one operating from that idealized (and apparently very wrong) model of voter behavior would expect. It could still be the best of a bad lot.

They did not get "fooled" and bait-and-switched even if they later feel the performance was not great.

They are extremely often operating from incorrect information, either regarding facts about the state of the world, or about probable outcomes of various policies. This can include things that directly affect them (or don't) in ways that one would expect them to notice—one fun form of study that's been run a few times is to ask a population whether a tax increase or decrease that in-fact affected only a tiny sliver of the population but was the subject of substantial propagandizing and/or publicity affected them personally (this is about as direct as it gets!) and the typical result is pretty much exactly what your most-pessimistic guess would be.

Supposing that people very-often hold a bunch of incorrect beliefs about how policies affect them but are also good at voting for their own interests when it comes time to mark the ballot is probably somewhere in the category of wishful thinking—and that's assuming motivations and intentions focused on policies and their outcomes in the first place. There's less-strong but still-quite-strong evidence that, as the kids say, "vibes" are a huge factor in the outcomes of elections, even when those "vibes" come from things that even the extremely politically-ignorant ought to know have nothing much to do with, say, who the President is, like a rash of shark attacks for example. This, of course, doesn't mean that this "vibes-from-irrelevant-stuff" voting makes the difference for anywhere near as many people as incorrect information does (it almost certainly doesn't) but that it has an outsize effect on the true-swing (not self-reported swing, that's mostly bullshit) vote, which tends to consist almost entirely of so-called "low-information voters", with the result that it may not have any effect at all on most voters but elections still turn on it (one of a billion reasons FPTP voting sucks is that it amplifies the power of this effect).

I do think, separately, there are cases of rational trade-offs, of picking (say) an anti-abortion candidate who holds many other positions one dislikes because one's stake in one's position on abortion is that important. That's not the kind of thing I mean, and I don't think it's the kind of thing most people mean when they say people are making mistakes by "voting against their own interests", though the effect of such a choice may well be that one is also in these cases (consciously!) voting against one's own interests on various issues.

One may smile while sharpening a knife.

We're on track to be a much-richer Russia. Which is a lot better than being like Russia, and also as poor as Russia. But it's a lot worse than being rich and also not like Russia.

I expect most of the pain will be from lost potential growth rather than an actual decline in real terms, and that it'll take a while for most people to realize how stagnant we've become—because line will continue to Go Up thanks to an inflation-based debt reduction strategy, plus the US is such a giant player in the global economy that our slowing way down will also slow the global economy for quite a while, until it adjusts, so we'll still seem to be doing relatively OK for potentially another decade or more.

Of course we could also derail into something even worse than Russia. Or capital flight might hit us harder and faster than I think it will (anyone who can't see a way to, or can't stomach, getting on the good side of our rulers, will want to get out so they don't lose all their shit, including possibly their lives in extreme cases)

Voter behavior and motivation (and knowledge of the issues, and of basic facts about their own government...) is well-studied and has been for decades. Political scientists studied it really heavily for quite a while because early results were fucking alarming (and proved to be accurate, and also not just a temporary aberration) if you're starting from a firm belief in liberal democracy and a broad franchise.

Voters, to a great extent, aren't motivated by what one might either expect or hope, nor 1/10th as well informed about the operation of their own government or the issues at stake as one might hope. It's a shit-show, so much so that it's practically miraculous that voting produces functioning governments ever, at all, and the whole thing's terribly fragile (after convincing themselves the data weren't wrong, the next step was a few decades of trying to figure out some mechanism by which this whole thing wasn't as worrisome as it seemed, which effort turned out to be based mostly on "copium", to use a modern term, and was eventually regarded as having more-or-less failed)

I have seen and enjoyed the first two movies but had somehow never even heard of the third one. It’s now high up my to-watch list, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Yeah I used to be for it on grounds of liberty but having seen a little of the actual industry it’s just purely corrosive, evil shit. It should be fought.

I’d maybe be OK with some kind of well-thought-through thing that still allowed friendly poker matches or sports brackets between people who actually know each other, but got the big money out of it. Maybe just ban corporations from having anything to do with it so limited-liability and serious investment is taken off the table? Something along those lines? But it’s also bad enough that I’d definitely vote for an outright ban if it came up. Complete switch-around for me on this topic, from where I was on it for years.

It’s hard to express how frustrating it is to try to allow kids access to tech and the Web (it’s kind of important that they have at least some access! And isn’t a bunch of this allegedly for super-charging learning and exploration of the world?) while basically every platform and vendor (of most any kind) except Apple’s and Nintendo’s stuff is somewhere between mediocre and annoying, and utter shit on this front (even, and in some ways especially, open source operating systems) and none of these goddamn things coordinate or communicate with one another (and of course SSO, basically a necessity for even starting to tackle that kind of problem, is an “enterprise” feature for almost every vendor)

Then we’re told this is all our fault. Meanwhile schools send home devices that don’t lock or at least disable Web access at night, and I can’t admin those to fix that dumbfuck oversight. To point out just one of many ways we get undermined. This is a whole bunch of stress and work that simply did not used to exist for parents and I absolutely get why a lot just stop trying.

It’s far easier to just pirate (nearly all?) GOG games. Like there are torrents with big chunks of their entire store on them, and I’ve seen allusions to an unofficial “store” that just has all(?) their games on it for free. I doubt many people are abusing the refund system because going through those steps is more work than piracy.

Plus the whole professional CS tournament scene is sponsored by these predatory casinos

I once had a glimpse behind the scenes of the online sports gambling industry (only for a few months—turns out that was my limit of how utterly disgusting an industry I could participate in and still, literally, sleep at night!) and it answered a question for me.

The question was: “How did professional gaming get so incredibly big so very fast?” Its quick rise seemed to me to have started well before the broad normalization and rise of gaming in mainstream pop culture, so had always seemed to me like the cart coming before the horse, and I’d never been able to figure out how or why it’d happened that way.

The answer was gambling. Professional video gaming is all but completely a gambling industry. That’s where the money and promotion came from. Sponsorships, sure, but that’s secondary and would drop off to a large degree without the boost from gambling. And I mean gambling on the matches, not just sponsorship by gambling sites. It’s a betting industry.

(Online gambling’s also all wrapped up in right wing political money and funding right wing media[!] in, at least, the US, was another thing I learned that I hadn’t expected)

“Democracy” in the sense of “a government with large amounts of citizen participation via voting, strong rule of law, and peaceful transition of power” (this is an entirely fine usage; it’s the main way most political scientists use the term day-to-day, ditto ordinary people, that’s why there are so many openings for incorrecting people online with “ackshually only direct democracy is democracy, the rest is sparkling representative republics”, which, again, isn’t how people who study government generally use the term) is failing, because rule of law is failing. This is a (partial, in this hypothetical, but far more complete in the real thing I’m alluding to) clear failure of government.

“Democracy” as in people are voting and the people they elected are wielding power (nb it is not necessarily the case that voters like that crime isn’t being prosecuted in my hypothetical, even in cases that their system of presumably-also-democratic government legally requires it—it could be that this prosecutor is popular despite that) is working.

Maybe you just mean that votes are resulting in things happening, period, regardless of whether those things are legal according to laws established and upheld by prior elected governments, and even if the system isn’t operating anywhere near its foundational legal basis, and that’s the disconnect?

(Outside the hypothetical, rule of law has always kinda struggled at times but is simply collapsing this term in ways and to a degree that’s not been seen in living memory, certainly; voting has been under attack for decades and especially lately between the ‘00s-today baseless but effective attacks on confidence in elections, the “find me votes” and illegal electors pushes having no consequences and the guy behind them currently holding effectively all federal levers of power and quite a few state ones, increasing gerrymandering activity, and the VRA being on life support and likely soon to be dead; and we’ve not seen peaceful transition of power in as shaky a place as it is post-Jan-6th [and the reactions thereto]… maybe ever, aside from the actual civil war? Certainly not since the 19th century; taken together, yeah, American democracy in the former sense is doing extremely poorly and large parts of it are entirely broken at the moment, and it’s very much not clear how much, if any, of it will recover, and it’s a safe bet a lot of that’s going to get worse at least in the short term)

Oh of course they were dystopias. But at least they were cool and there was a fair amount of competence floating around.

My point is exactly that we got the dystopia but also it's not even a little cool, and it's very stupid. We could have at least gotten the cool dystopia where bad things happen but at least they're part of some kind of sensible longer-term plan. What we got practically breaks suspension of disbelief, it's so damn goofy.

The primary "technology" of star trek was socialism lol.

Yep. Socialism, and automatic brainwashing chairs. And sending all the oddball non-conformists off to probably die on alien planets, I guess. (The "Original Series" is pretty weird)

It's kind of incredible the news is so crowded with insanity that "minimum two justices are simply taking huge bribes more-or-less openly, and as many as all nine are doing some things that are at least ethically iffy" didn't have much staying power, as a story.

Dark, yes, but also cool and with a fair amount of competence in play, including among powerful actors, and often lots of competence.

We got dark, but also lame and stupid.

The whole idea even accepting the core premise is OK to begin with needs to have a similar analysis applied to it that medical tests do: will there be enough false positives, with enough harm caused by them, that this is actually worse than doing nothing? Compared with likelihood of improving an outcome and how bad a failure to intervene is on average, of course.

Given that there's no relevant screening step here and it's just being applied to everyone who happens to be at a place it's truly incredible that such an analysis would shake out in favor of this tech. The false positive rate would have to be vanishingly tiny, and it's simply not plausible that's true. And that would have to be coupled with a pretty low false negative rate, or you'd need an even lower false positive rate to make up for how little good it's doing even when it's not false-positiving.

So I'm sure that analysis was either deliberately never performed, or was and then was ignored and not publicized. So, yes, it's a fraud.

(There's also the fact that as soon as these are known to be present, they'll have little or no effect on the very worst events involving firearms at schools—shooters would just avoid any scheme that involved loitering around with a firearm where the cameras can see them, and count on starting things very soon after arriving—like, once you factor in second order effects, too, there's just no hope for these standing up to real scrutiny)

I already adjust my clothing choices when flying to account for TSA's security theater make-work bullshit. Wonder how long before I'm doing that when preparing to go to other public places.

(I suppose if I attended pro sports games or large concerts, I'd be doing it for those, too)

We got our cyberpunk future, except none of it's cool and everything's extremely stupid.

An enormous proportion of Republican voters were already Trumpers as early as the ‘90s, but didn’t have a candidate yet, so had to settle for “vote Republican to keep the democrats from doing all the bad things Rush says they will”.

Republican partisan-propaganda media after anti-trust de-fanging (mid ‘70s) and media deregulation (‘80s-‘00s) became huge, and cultivated an electorate that wanted Trump but had to settle for tepidly-socially-conservative neoliberal Republicans. Such voters would tell you all day long about how we should just build a border wall (or mine it…), cut trade and foreign military engagements (though those have some cross-aisle appeal), question why we extend civil rights and due process to [pick a group], tell you we should use the military against protesters in cities, wonder why anyone opposes cops beating suspects unless they love crime, and so on, and they’d tell you that stuff many years before Trump’s 2016 run.

They fucked up the design if they didn’t want factions (yes, a common term at the time for what we call parties) and did so in a way that makes it nearly impossible to fix in practice.

The electoral college also never functioned the way it was supposed to, as in, broke almost immediately.

They also knew the Supreme Court was horrifyingly dangerous but their best answer was “uh, ignore them sometimes I guess?” Another couple sentences outlining a panel system instead of permanent Supreme Court members (which aren’t required by the constitution—the court is, fixed permanent members of it are not) could have done a lot to fix that flaw, though may have been impractical at the time due to travel and communication times before the train and telegraph.

It was an OK try for an early democratic constitutional state, but we really could have benefitted from a third attempt.

One nice thing about pointless witch hunts that go nowhere despite enormous efforts is that you can be sure a much-quicker process ending with something like actual consequences would ensue if there were real criminality to investigate.

If all they can come up with is bullshit, things must be going ok, and if they’re committed to pursuing bullshit, odds are good they’d be thrilled to find something real to attack, if they could. Similar deal with Republican election complaints: if they don’t bother to investigate when they can, or find nothing substantial when they do, those concerns can be safely dismissed, which is nice.

Say a prosecutor is elected and literally never prosecutes crimes. Any crime. Ever. Despite laws on the books stating they are, in some cases that have in-fact come up, required to. But this prosecutor keeps getting re-elected, and nobody enforces the laws about their having to bring certain cases.

Both of the following may be true:

1) The prosecutor is doing what a plurality of voters want.

2) The office of prosecutor is not functioning correctly, as defined by law (“has failed” or “is broken” would be other ways of saying this)

Can you point to any parts of the constitution that, if ignored, would represent the US state based on that same constitution no longer functioning correctly, or not as a continuation of the same state as before? If so, why those parts but not, apparently, broad swaths of the rest of it?

If not… I think you’re operating under a uselessly-broad notion of what constitutes US democracy “working”.

[edit] what this really gets at is legitimacy, which is the ultimate arbiter of who’s in charge and how effectively they may wield power. I find the idea that a state founded on a constitutional document as its fundamental claim to legitimacy ignoring major parts of that document isn’t at least overtly flirting with either a loss of legitimacy or a transition to a different state with a different basis for legitimacy (either of which seem to me to clearly count as a failure of that original state)… puzzling.

Not a lot comes to mind that really falls between “basically trivial” and “you’re gonna need to hire a team of PhDs” or “you have accidentally asked me to write a custom distributed file system, and you probably don’t want to pay for that”

Which is to say that usually the hard stuff is an accidental request that nobody actually wants to pay for, so the only thing “hard” about it is recognizing that the client/stakeholder has wandered into territory they really ought not.

It’s also the case that market-ideals tend to become miserable to experience in practice if you approach them too closely.

Usually the discussion of that kind of thing revolves around the near-elimination of profit via (hypothetical) too-perfect competition among producers and too-perfect information for consumers, but with the rise of automated mass-scale spying and automated finer-grained price discrimination (plus enormous consolidation of markets due to near-abandonment of anti-trust enforcement in the ‘70s), we’re kinda seeing the real deal play out the other direction: approaching-maximum extraction of profit from every transaction.

Which sucks, to put it mildly. You do not want markets that function “too well” in any direction.

It’s not exactly working when the executive seizes two core powers of Congress (taxation and spending) and gets away with it for, so far, most of a year, with no end in sight.

There’s a difference between disagreement over reasonable interpretations and some of a handful of key passages in the country’s highest law simply being ignored, for months on end (this aside from entirely unambiguous ordinary laws being ignored left and right, like e.g. firing all the inspectors general without the required notice period). That’s not “democracy working”, it’s rule of law, and democracy, breaking. Democracies are routinely ended by people who were elected, the fact that people won elections doesn’t mean that the results are functioning democracy.

What’s crazy is how many people routinely drink the equivalent of two or more bags of skittles with their meals, between enormous to-go drink sizes and frequent, free refills when dining in.

Like… ew, friggin’ gross.

Depends on your cooking. Lots of baking, or lots of certain dishes (pastas, stir fries, that call for or benefit from eggs)? You’ll tear through eggs even if nobody eats them scrambled or over-easy for breakfast.

One angel food cake or batch of soufflé and you’ll use a bunch right there. Just a glaze on some meat pasties might burn two or three, and they’re barely even an ingredient in that case. Hell, family of five, one scrambled egg breakfast a week can knock out an entire dozen if you use zero other eggs that week for anything.

The things are little chemical miracles somewhere between useful and indispensable for all kinds of stuff in the kitchen, or good as a (usually…) dirt-cheap source of protein, vitamins, and flavor that can be added to lots of dishes or eaten on their own, making them remarkably versatile and easy to use.