If anyone want to see some high quality examples of the form, check out:
- O Mission Repo, by Travis McDonald, an erasure of the 9/11 Comission Report
- A Humument, by Tom Phillips, an erasure of A Human Document, a victorian novel of manners; A Humument is unusual in that each page is beautifully and thematically hand painted over by Philips, not just blacked out or erased as is more typical of the form.
- Radi Os, by Ronald Johnson, an erasure of Paradise Lost
As someone who's fairly ignorant of how AI actually works at a low level, I feel incapable of assessing how realistic any of these projections are. But the "bad ending" was certainly chilling.
That said, this snippet from the bad ending nearly made me spit my coffee out laughing:
> There are even bioengineered human-like creatures (to humans what corgis are to wolves) sitting in office-like environments all day viewing readouts of what’s going on and excitedly approving of everything, since that satisfies some of Agent-4’s drives.
While I don't disagree that I've seen a lot of eugenics talk from rationalist(-adjacent)s, I don't think this is an example of it: this is describing how misaligned AI could technically keep humans alive while still killing "humanity."
Smart. Could definitely find a more efficient private operator to handle this. I've heard good things about one Charles Montgomery Burns out of Springfield, he'd be just the man to do this important work.
I think the ripping out of woke stuff is mostly marketing for the political base. Sure, Trump and Musk have some personal stake in it too, but it's not the point.
I wouldn't say they're "burning things down for the sake of burning things down", though. The truth is somewhere between what you and gp are contending. There's no moral framework, but there is a framework. They're burning things down so that "the free market" can replace the things they burn down and capture the money that used to go towards doing those things for the public good, and instead do those things for a private profit.
They're getting rid of things that stand in Elon's way. CFPB was actively investigating complaints about Tesla and financing, for instance. It was also reportedly seen as a roadblock to turning Twitter into a payments platform.
Yeah, it is like the so called "Shock therapy" imposed on failing countries (like Russia in 1991 and some South american countries in the 2000s). The goal is to break down institutions so that more can be privatized.
Yeah and these guys are actually friends with Jeffery Sachs, who was the economist pushing for shock therapy in Russia in the 90s.
I strongly feel like these guys see what happened in Russia and see it as a success: the "weak" soviet union was replaced by a "strong" Putin-controlled Russia. The collapse in living standards, lawlessness, etc, was acceptable collateral damage.
I think the silicon valley bros are playing checkers, not chess. They are succeeding because they're being allowed to succeed and if they get what they want their ultimate fate will be dying of polonium, falling out of a window, or disappearing into the American equivalent of a Siberian jail.
Not an expert but my understanding is that it's only feasible on a small enough scale to eke out tiny profits over the long run, too much success will get you rapidly 86'd.
If anyone reading this is intrigued by games of chance with an available skill edge and is considering learning advantage Blackjack, I'd highly recommend learning Poker instead. You're not playing against the house, you're playing against other players, and the house is not incentivized to clamp down on the edges available (though of course they take a cut of everyone's winnings). And it's an endlessly deep strategic game instead of a mechanistic counting game that advantage Blackjack is, which is to say, it's actually fun.
It's an internal project based on Rust, not a product. So I don't think it matters too much what they name it. It's opens source which is great, but still not a product that they need to market.
I take your point but corrosion-resistant metals such as Aluminum, Titanium, Weathering Steel and Stainless Steel don’t avoid corrosion entirely but form a thin and extremely stable corrosion layer (under the right conditions).
> Democrats, despite winning the popular vote in all but 2 elections since 1988, are pretty much completely out of power
This shit pisses me off so much. Why can't they play by the same rules? The supreme irony is, if Dems were willing to occasionally fight dirty/play to win as well, at least when they still had some power, it would have likely forced Republicans to try to govern well occasionally rather than simply always playing to win.
NY for example had a map that was gerrymandered to benefit dems. Their SC struck it down and instead we ended up with a map that slightly benefits Republicans.
This is an example of something that happens across the country. Most deep red states are heavily gerrymandered. In contrast, almost every single state that uses an independent redistricting commission is blue. This means Dems are unable to play by the same gerrymandering tactics as Republicans
I think u/mrkeen might have been referring to phony criminal charges against a political opponent, for example. Or I dunno, hundreds of thousands of ballots dropping at 4AM in some central counting location they control with 100% being for their candidate.
If anyone want to see some high quality examples of the form, check out:
- O Mission Repo, by Travis McDonald, an erasure of the 9/11 Comission Report
- A Humument, by Tom Phillips, an erasure of A Human Document, a victorian novel of manners; A Humument is unusual in that each page is beautifully and thematically hand painted over by Philips, not just blacked out or erased as is more typical of the form.
- Radi Os, by Ronald Johnson, an erasure of Paradise Lost