You know, some cities (at least one because I live here) delay their local pride celebration until July to avoid competing with larger cities in the local metro area. Don’t get too comfortable if you want to avoid being seen and celebrated, is what I’m saying.

Did anyone else read the old Star wars Novel Darksaber by Kevin J Anderson? The Hutts kidnap/hire the designer of the original death star to build them one of their own, and while the new Republic is gathering up the requisite heroes to do what they do to death stars we get to see the Hutts cutting corners and embezzling. The fleet arrives just as they’re ready to turn it on and instead of blowing our heroes up the subpar construction fails and it just fucking explodes.

No idea why that came to mind all of a sudden after reading this piece.

I mean at some point someone is going to try and make this argument so they can actually extract profit from their slop-inator. And it’s gonna be real funny to see what they had to say about copyright law during the training data gold rush.

This gets dangerously close to acknowledging that the rationalist method isn’t actually very useful for any area where it isn’t trivial.

Yeah. The Haitian revolution was absolutely a high point of postcolonial Caribbean history, but the resulting state wasn’t exactly able to project power and export their revolution through material support. It gave slavers a reason to double down on repression, but outside of Haiti itself it’s a propaganda win more than a change in the scales.

It’s also fascinating because I thought the OP was pretty clear that there’s a difference between decision theory and “desirable dispositions” which I interpret as covering the kind of counterfactual preferences indicated here. Actually there’s an even more fundamental issue with this as a decision theory problem which is that it misidentifies who is actually making a decision. Changing the applicant’s decision theory (while leaving their preference for thievery intact) doesn’t matter to the person actually deciding here.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s also a wildly racist example to put forward, it’s just also a bad example and where there is an argument it’s addressed in the OP.

Yeah. For being a little strange I find the shrimp welfare stuff pretty unobjectionable. Like, he vastly overstates the magnitude of good done by those stunners because he does appear to be a shut-up-and-multiply bro, but I’m comfortable with the general notion that we should be nicer to shrimp and other animals we eat, even the ones that don’t make good PETA glamour shots.

Ed: oh sweet merciful Jesus the Epstein take. Nope. I’m actually investigating whether we should torture shrimp even harder just to make sure since their most ardent defender is like this.

Also, I showed this to my wife since we’re all going through it, and she points out that that burger looks like it knows what an Atari is.

This may be true in the general case, but if you consider that my depression and anxiety make me vaguely megalomaniacal you would understand that I am different and uniquely terrible for having literally any problems ever.

My wife keeps lamenting that we haven’t found ways to help pet rats live as long as cats but I don’t think this is what she had in mind.

So did anyone else read the terrible Star wars novel “Darksaber” about the Hutts hiring one of the architects of the death star to build their own in order to hold planets hostage or something, and while the new Republic is trying to rally the gang to go do what they do to death stars the Hutts are so busy cutting corners and embezzling that when they go to turn the thing on for the first time it just fucking explodes?

I don’t know why that’s coming to mind right now.

He certainly seems to enjoy the same kind of privilege of an infinite rebuy that Elon gets. It really does feel like there’s a limit of nine digits on the money counter and once you get more than a billion dollars it just overflows to infinity. There seems to be no amount of bad investments they can make or money they can lose that would actually matter or make them come back to the same economy the rest of us live in.

The fact that the 2014 presentation opens with “SoftBank=goose” just makes the 2026 metaphor even harder to parse. Is SoftBank itself the goose? Is the goose the hypothetical ASI that OpenAI is definitely going to build and monetize any day now? Am I the goose? I certainly feel undervalued sometimes, maybe I’m the goose.

At this point I’m expecting the next big startup to literally call itself Golden Calf

I vote we preserve this term for future and past bubbles as well.

Maybe my experiences are unusual, but I’ve seen more harassment and general shittiness from other commuters than I ever have from homeless people camping nearby. Not saying it doesn’t happen, but I feel like we’re back to the problem of harassment and violence already being illegal. Going back to the immediate question here, removing the benches doesn’t make harassment or assholery any more difficult or more consequential.

Is there any chance this is just an awkward translation?

I imagine there’s a certain level of generic fringe attraction at work here too. Some people are just particularly drawn to hidden knowledge or forbidden arcane arts or secrets of the universe or whatever you want to call it. Places like SFZC appear to be at the outer edges of the broader cultic milieu.

I mean it seems like a lot of that could be avoided by, for example, keeping the goddamn bathrooms open (or making there be public bathrooms). Drugs are already illegal. The station is still a roof over your head, making it preferable to the street whether or not there are benches.

Ironically it seems like the most direct harm done by homeless people sleeping on the benches is that those benches aren’t usable by commuters who may need to rest. And this certainly makes that problem go away, I guess. Wouldn’t exactly call it solved.

It’s also funny to note that at least 2/5 of the points are actively bad advice. Naively extrapolating from a trend line is one of the most common errors people make when trying to make a prediction, especially when you’re already prone to letting the aesthetic of data lead you astray. Trusting in a kind of “normalcy bias” or whatever you want to call the assumption that the world will continue to be pretty normal is one of the better ways to hedge against that.

Also I’ve said it before but the name “technological singularity” literally comes from the idea that at the hypothetical rate of change they’re posting all our existing models of what is possible or probable break down like the laws of physics at the center of a black hole. If you’re reasoning from a pre-singularity model then definitionally there is no expectation that it should continue to hold true. I don’t think I need to get too deep into why the whole singularitarian concept is pretty sketchy in its own right, but since it still lies at the heart of the science fiction driving these people’s predictions I think its worth acknowledging that it does suggest its own nonsense.