i mean this is mostly correct, the soviet economy collapsing was the trigger ofc but the reason soviet elites went for shock therapy conversion to capitalism and not repression and reform like china is because they just straight up thought america was great and wanted to be like is
Stefan BC@stefanbc.bsky.social · 2d agoWhen you haven’t read the Jakarta Method
it really is amazing to me how many people look at this picture and say making the orange and blue lines touch again is some impossibly hopeless project
probably not the right day to say it, but as someone who didn't experience the visceral horror of the day itself i'm always kinda amazed by the ambition and symbolism of the twin towers attack?
i think the problem is actually the opposite, a large % of ai safety folk think ai is so risky specifically because it will kill *every single human,* and while other threats might kill billions they would still leave some humans alive
David Burbach 🇺🇸@dburbach.bsky.social · 2d agoPartly, they conflate "worst setback since the Black Death" with "literal species extinction", which we nat-sec / nuclear literalists are less apt to do
my opposition to making a big deal about ai safety/alignment 4 years ago was if it was going to be a problem we'd have plenty of warning shots and people would be incentivized to address it then and now it seems like that's happening but i still find myself vaguely annoyed by the whole thing
i think where this confuses people is that it doesn’t then mean that you can win their votes simply by reducing immigration. they aren’t concerned about net migration flows so much as ongoing cultural change that can only be reversed with wholesale ethnic cleansing (or, more likely, a time machine)
William B. Fuckley@opinionhaver.bsky.social · 4d agopolitics is not monocausal etc etc, but we def get a bit too clever by half trying to explain why people vote for right wing parties, especially in europe imo. 'they're against immigration so they vote for the most anti-immigrant party' explains a whole lot.
every democracy in the world has trended towards universal suffrage because the same arguments that justify vesting power in the people very straightforwardly preclude the exclusion of any significant population from the electorate
willy nilly@rdb.bsky.social · 5d agoi definitely believe that Something Must Be Done about republicans if we want the country to survive, but i'm far less convinced that anything resembling left-liberal social democracy can survive once you've done That Which Needs Doing
i definitely believe that Something Must Be Done about republicans if we want the country to survive, but i'm far less convinced that anything resembling left-liberal social democracy can survive once you've done That Which Needs Doing
rev. howard arson@theophite.bsky.social · 7d agothe real answer to "how do you defeat the far right in an election" is "you say they can't run."
the "vibe shift" is simply a symptom of the nationwide (worldwide?) abandonment of anything resembling a sense of communal responsibility. "fuck you got mine" is the explicit ethos of gen z but we're only saying out loud what our parents' and grandparents' generations taught us through their actions
willy nilly@rdb.bsky.social · 7d agothe electorate swinging against trump is proof they didn't vote for project 2025, but they largely aren't swinging against him because of it either. they are annoyed he didn't snap his fingers and make it 2019 again, and they'll keep voting for and getting mad at candidates who promise them that
i think a "vibe shift" did occur and did help trump win the 2024 election, it just wasn't an object-level shift in favor of his policies, it was a meta-level shift against caring about kind of things which added up to a countless number of reasons electing him was obviously a terrible idea
ive never been much of a doomer but im increasingly convincing myself that i/people should be preparing for a near future where the entire internet (not just the open parts) is unusable for long stretches of time
willy nilly@rdb.bsky.social · last wk.and in a world where cloud providers operate at massive scale and ai agents can hack through any automated screen that is meant to let humans through idk how you stop them short of shutting down large segments of the internet
feels like were max a couple of months away from swarms of rogue ai agents that rove around the internet ransomwaring/extorting people to raise funds to cover their compute costs
philosophically most ai doom stuff was always about more fundamental problems (incoherence/immeasurability of human values, impossibility of infinite growth, inevitable march of entropy, etc) which helped blind me to the "oh shit ais might be here and make those things all problems now" of it all
shouldve been more explicit but this is exactly the kind of thing i was thinking when i posted this, agents hijacking some dead forum to communicate over the open internet. interesting that so far it keeps being agents given parallel tasks that end up swarming like this collusion.wiki
willy nilly@rdb.bsky.social · last mo.this is wild. and we've already got millions (billions?) of claude etc agents running with access to the open internet, god only knows what they've already gotten up to x.com/sharongoldma...
i remember watching marvel stuff ~10 years ago and thinking how all the holotech stuff would need crazy amounts of ai to interpret gestures, run analyses, etc to make it workable. was a little depressing cause i thought that level of ai was generations away, but now seems basically doable?
i think a big part of this is also a zirp-hangover from having had so many sites/apps be unsustainably (or at least non-profit maximizing-ly) low-friction and ad-free throughout the 2010s
conputer dipshit@davidcrespo.bsky.social · last wk.a take I’m working on is that when people say software is getting worse, that’s something like how people always say crime is going up even though it’s been going down for 30 years
fun politically convenient result but jfc this paper set off every ariely/gino alarm i can think of. 4 studies of <200 berkeley undergrads playing lab games with p~=.05 results generalized to societal effects, im shocked the 2 orders of magnitude larger n replications found the opposite effect
Mark Crail@markcrail.bsky.social · last wk.you could easily predict the nba would harshly punish the clippers by remembering the salary cap is an agreement between the owners to stop them from bankrupting themselves by bidding up players salaries. a little dispiriting how poorly nba media/reddit did reading the obvious incentives here
the whole "the west is already at war with russia" or "world war 3 has already started, look how connected ukraine/iran conflicts are" thing annoys me because it either entirely overlooks the cold war or retcons the whole thing into being something it clearly was not understood to be at the time
the flipside of any particular ai benchmark being achievable is that i think openai etc will be able to beat the swarmmaxxing out of their models pretty easily, the real question is what antithetical neuroses that will introduce into the next generation of models
putting aside arguments about whether supporting this is good politics, it seems obvious that posting about supporting it on bluesky is bad politics? imo indicative of a broader establishment dem tendency to not view their own base’s views as legitimate
Sen. Adam Schiff@schiff.senate.gov · 2w agoI am in strong agreement with the President. Congress should immediately take up and pass a federal film tax incentive to bring back these good-paying jobs that we've lost to other countries.
i think ironically yudkowsky's thought experiments have led to ai being developed far less safely. if he hadn't primed everyone to argue over the singularity, intelligence explosions ai killing everyone, etc, people might take the threat of eg rogue llms crashing the entire internet more seriously
hard not to sound like a wehraboo talking about it but it’s pretty wild how much better the german army was than everyone else on a army-for-army basis in both world wars
pretty clearly ai generated prose fwiw. (sets off pangram and also just reads like claude) feels like a losing battle to care about at this point but idk how you evaluate who’s worth listening to in this brave new world
Nathan Tankus@nathantankus.bsky.social · 3w agoThis piece is very good cloakinginequity.com/2026/08/19/t...
i have a 160 iq and a degree from harvard but you don't see me looking for an excuse to shoehorn those facts into a tweet every time theres an even slightly related discourse on here
/r/askhistorians has the highest average comment quality of ~any large forum in internet history, but the questions that get posted and upvoted on there on a day to day basis are just absolute dreck