Living in LA, the LAPD helicopter noise really is incessant.
It's hilarious to hear flying cops try to be intimidating through when dispersing illegal concerts or singling individuals out in non-violent crowds. It's impotent posturing and an obvious waste of money. They really don't need to send 5 squad cars and a helicopter for noise complaints.
I will say though that the loudspeaker on those things are surprisingly clear, even through the buzzing of a helicopter.
You really ought to never trust the output of LLMs. It's not just an unsolved problem but a fundamental property of LLMs that they are manipulatable. I understand where you're coming from, but prompting is unacceptable as a security layer for anything important. It's as insecure as unsanitized SQL or hiding a button with CSS.
EDIT: I'm reminded of the hubris of web3 companies promising products which were fundamentally impossible to build (like housing deeds on blockchain). Some of us are engineers, you know, and we can tell when you're selling something impossible!
Love this article. If you'd like a book that works deeply through the topic of commodified humanity, Minima Moralia by Adorno is painfully pertinent here.
Yeah, was intended as a joke, pretty sure he's "whatever he wants to be", but I remember reading something that he said he only ate like "whole food plant based" which I consider to be "vegan for people who are too good for veganism"
To explain in the clearest terms: unlike the SS insignia, the lightning bolt in the logo has tapering at the bottom. The second element in the logo, the slash, does not have tapering at the bottom. The general shape of the logo is the same as the SS insignia: two diagonal elements side-by-side (which would be all good on its own). The mind tends to see repetition, so it has a tendency to "mix up" the two elements of the logo. The mind also has a tendency to remember similar things. Putting it all together, the logo has a chance to evoke the SS insignia.
I may just be reading too much Theweleit and W. Reich nowadays, but I think you'll get catch some flak for this logo if it becomes recognizable outside the tech milieu.
Thanks for the feedback-- I can say emphatically, that's not our intention in the least. We chose a lightning bolt to evoke speed, i.e., the "hyper" in Hypermode. I've asked design to take another look at the "H" logo.
Imagine typing a description of your ideal self into an image generator and everything in the resulting images screamed at a semiotic level, "you are not the correct race", "you are not the correct gender", etc. It would feel bad. Enough said.
I 100% agree with Carmack that guardrails should be public and that the bias correction on display is poor. But I'm disturbed by the choice of examples some people are choosing. Have we already forgotten the wealth of scientific research on AI bias? There are genuine dangers from AI bias which global corps must avoid to survive.
>Imagine typing a description of your ideal self into an image generator and everything in the resulting images screamed at a semiotic level, "you are not the correct race", "you are not the correct gender", etc. It would feel bad. Enough said.
It does this now, as a direct result of these "guardrails". Go ask GPT-4 for a picture of a white male scientist, and it'll refuse to produce one. Ask it for any other color/gender identity combination of scientist, and it has no problem.
You can make these systems offer equal representation without systemic, algorithmic discriminatory exclusion based on skin color and gender identity, which is what's going on right now.
That's not the case. ChatGPT 4 will happily draw a white male scientist. I just tried it and it worked fine. A very handsome scientist it made too!
You might be thinking of a previous generation of OpenAI systems that did things like randomly stuffing the word "black" onto the end of any prompt involving people, detected by giving it a prompt of "A woman holding a sign that says".
OpenAI has improved dramatically in this regard. When ChatGPT/DALL-E were new they had similar problems to Gemini. But to their credit (and Sam Altman's), they listened. It's getting harder and harder to find examples where OpenAI models express obvious political bias, or refuse requests for Californian reasons. Surely there still are some examples, but there's no longer much worry about normal people encountering refusals or egregious ideological bias in the course of regular usage. I would expect there are still refusals for queries like "how do I build a bomb" and they've been trying to block other stuff like regurgitation of copyrighted materials, but that's perceived as much more reasonable and doesn't stir up the same feelings.
> I would expect there are still refusals for queries like "how do I build a bomb"
I remember asking my grandpa how to build a bomb, and he stopped; didn't even ask why. He just asked me: "what do you think a bomb is?" He turned it into a teaching moment that _anything_ can be a bomb. All you need is pressure inside a container that the container cannot hold. That's it. You can make non-deadly bombs with some random off-the-shelf components (soap and tinfoil IIRC) that were a ton of fun...
eventually, we were building explosives near the level of TNT in my neighbor's cow pasture, but that was years later. I suspect that things would have evolved differently in an urban environment, but these AIs and the people who make them think nobody needs a bomb to clear out a stupid rock formation.
More importantly, you can answer the question in a way that nobody gets hurt and people can learn and do things.
I agree that would feel pretty artificial, if we understand it the utilitarian way.
But Wilhelm Reich doesn't really follow a utilitarian calculus. I.e., for him pleasure is not the equal yet opposite of unpleasure. Rather, the calculus is one of material tension and release, or intensity, which I think you get at quite well in your example.
And yeah, if Marx, Bataille, and Spinoza are called philosophers, I guess we can call this a philosophical thought as well. Though it certainly reaches beyond the bounds of philosophy into psychoanalysis, biology, and cybernetics.
He has a stellar analysis of fascism in "The Mass-Psychology of Fascism." It's almost frightening how prescient he was not only for it's 1933 publication but for our current day as well. I wish more folks would check him out.
His fascination with orgone adds a lot of color to his work. I hope people don't write off his radical analyses for that. Despite the pseudoscience, he does get to the root of things. Great life-affirming stuff.
Not to oversimplify, but Reich saw a direct connection between the urge to fascism and the failure to find a state of sexual contentment (for lack of a better word).
While it may not be direct, groups like internet incels blame lack of sexual contentment for basically their entire life situation and there are tinges of fascism in a lot of their ideology. A lack of agency in one aspect of life might increase the desire for control/belonging in another aspect.
The people you describe as incels don't have an ideology.
If they do, then any group of people with a common set of complaints and frustrations has an ideology (such as black people? women? men? our military is an ideology now?). At that point the word ceases to have any useful meaning.
What is it with people nowadays wanting to apply words that are wholly inappropriate?
apparently being frustrated that women won't sleep with you is fascism?
>If they do, then any group of people with a common set of complaints and frustrations has an ideology
I specified "internet incels" as they group together into a community online, rather than incels in the world, silently suffering. If a group of people who form a community because of a common bond remain a community for long enough, it will begin to have an ideology as most people in the group agree with certain ideas. A good example of this is black pill incels -- they believe themselves to be completely undesirable and instead of remaining hopeful, they turn to hate and try to convince other incels to "abandon any hopes of having a relationship with a woman because women are ACTUALLY the problem".
Sure, some people can come to this opinion without the help of peers egging them on, but if a group is trying to convince themselves and others of a certain idea, then that is an ideology after it remains in the community for long enough.
>apparently being frustrated that women won't sleep with you is fascism?
Reich (who the original article is about) believed the tendency toward fascism was related to the tendency to not being sexually satisfied. So in this respect, no, frustration does not equal fascism. What Reich might argue for is frustration leading one on a path to fascism, much like how hunger might lead a man on a path to highway robbery.
It's not like it's a cause so much as an observation that people who aren't satisfied in some way are more likely to seek that satisfaction somewhere else, and replacing one satisfaction for another is powerful.
When in doubt, put the word "online" in front of it, that way your bologna seems more palatable.
Personally, I think if you're going to rail against an "online ideology" it should be the hackernews ideology, where people come together online and agree that software is interesting.
Sure, because people following the HN ideology have been involved in shootings because they swallowed the black pill so hard they used their death as a manifesto of why interesting software is interesting.
Oh wait, no, that was an internet incel[1]. Hacker News doesn't seem to intentionally choose hate and push others to choose hate. Internet incels do.
In the 80's these things were blamed on D&D, in the 90's on video games, I guess nowadays it's "ideology".
regardless, you just moved the goalpost. HN meets your definition of ideology. It does so because your definition is flawed. You recognize this, which is why you've now added the requirement of murderousness.
I haven't moved any goalposts. I never said an ideology has to be murderous to be an ideology. Something being an ideology is not automatically a negative. I also never said that ideologies must be "railed against."
Regardless of what you think, or how I present my argument, the fact is that hateful incel communities tend to produce hateful, antisocial people. They do not attempt to raise each other up because they aren't there to be raised up -- they are there to feel one with a community that understands their pain. That pain is real, and it causes people to lash out. When these people DO lash out, the incel community often considers them a martyr.
If you can't recognize that as an ideology adopted because the people in pain gather together, it seems like it's either because you don't want to, or you aren't arguing in good faith in the first place. I recognize their pain. I recognize the human connection they crave and partially sate by being part of an online community of fellow lonely men. I recognize the powerlessness they feel when faced with society belittling them and their pain. Desperate, powerless people tend to make the most unhinged decisions because that's all they feel is left for them.
You don't like the community or its opinions and are stretching for any reason to blame them for things, this is why you call them having a common interest as an ideology but would not present a community of soccer enthusiasts the same way.
This is _why_ you moved the goalpost to needing some sort of hatefulness (note your switch to using exactly that word) because you discovered you needed to split that hair even finer than you already were.
>this is why you call them having a common interest as an ideology but would not present a community of soccer enthusiasts the same way.
You keep trying to hammer this point when the fruit of what comes out of a community matters when discussing what that community believes. However, instead of belaboring this further I'll just point to something[1] that carries more weight than my anonymous words, where they discuss the incel ideology because it actually exists:
"Across our quantitative analysis of the distribution and associations made with identity terms, we see evidence of an ideology where physical appearance determines human value, as has been found with prior work on incels (Maxwell et al., 2020; Baele et al., 2021; Pruden, 2021). This ideology essentializes social constructs, such as race and gender, as biological physical features impacting desirability, with controversy over the role of race."
>"Particularly pernicious is a black-pilled ideology that physical appearance determines human value, a reinforcement and extension of essentialized gender and racial hierarchies"
Firstly, are we done arguing whether incels have an ideology then? And secondly, no, physical appearance doesn't just matter, it's ESSENTIAL for them. Your value is pegged to your attractiveness. Nothing you do or change matters. Give up, lay down and rot, and hate.
>"An increasing politicization is reflected in this example post: “we don’t need society to completely accept the incel ideology, we just need to masquerade as normies and keep bashing women, jews and gays.”
The fact that you are minimizing all of the negativity that comes from the incel communities with snarky replies just underlines that you don't seem to be arguing in good faith.
Some Blacks commit murder, some blacks spout hate, therefore anyone who defends blacks as a group is trying to minimize the negativity that comes out of black communities.
The issue is that you dislike a _group_ of people and have tried to justify that dislike after the fact. That's what post hoc rationalization IS.
I wasn't aware there was a win condition to a conversation online.
>The issue is that you dislike a _group_ of people
I dislike a self-selecting group of people because of the things that self-selecting group believes and does. What other reason does anyone have for disliking anyone else? This entire time I have been talking about a specific, self-selecting group of people online, and you keep arguing as though I am talking about the entirety of every incel on the planet, whether they get online and take part in incel communities or not. That is clearly not what I am arguing for.
You didn't like me saying that online incels have an ideology. You argued I used that word wrong because you didn't agree with the scope as I described it, and instead expanded the scope yourself to try to point out how you think it's a ridiculous claim. Then we've been arguing about your expanded scope while you tell me I moved the goalposts because you didn't like where I "put" the goalposts in the first place. I get it, I'm never going to convince you. So have a nice day :)
Jessica Benjamin and her book "The Bonds of Love" really struck a chord with me. I believe that her concept "gender polarity" fundamentally underlies old and modern "gender wars".
Other books and authors I found really interesting:
- Estela Welldon and her Book "Mother, Madonna, Whore"
- Sándor Ferenczi, who was a close associate of Freud and pioneered the concept of "Identification with the Aggressor", which seems to be the driving force behind what we call "transgenerational inheritance" of trauma. His concept of the "confusion of tongues" between child and pathological adult is also very interesting!
- Mathias Hirsch, a german psychoanalyst who wrote a lot about trauma, love, sexual abuse and was not afraid to explore stigmatized topics. For example:
- the effects of sexual relations between analysts and their patients (he saw parallels to incestous abuse in a parent-child relationship)
- sexually abusive mothers and the idealization of motherhood
- the fact that his pyschoanalyst Günther Ammon, who later became his boss at the Deutsche Akademie für Psychoanalyse, controlled the academy in a cult-like fashion
Definitely Guattari! Anti-Oedipus, which he wrote with Deleuze, is a trip and really wonderful. That's actually how I came across Reich.
Guattari is interesting for pioneering schizoanalysis at the La Borde clinic. He's also one of the most confusing writers I've ever come across, so I recommend the books cowritten with Deleuze over his solo stuff. He's got some whimsy to him just like Reich does.
It's hilarious to hear flying cops try to be intimidating through when dispersing illegal concerts or singling individuals out in non-violent crowds. It's impotent posturing and an obvious waste of money. They really don't need to send 5 squad cars and a helicopter for noise complaints.
I will say though that the loudspeaker on those things are surprisingly clear, even through the buzzing of a helicopter.