Really feels like this saying is quite applicable these days. "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."

All I see around me is stagnation," she gestured at the gas stations nearby with cracked pavement,

*gasp* cracked pavement

"crime," she continued, pointing towards a sketchy neighborhood to the west,

*faints* minorities

I stopped reading after the picket line, this is too boring. Does it ever bother to explain why the economy keeps chugging along, people still go to their old jobs, and money still works? Hasn’t finance basically collapsed? I really can’t go on if this isn’t addressed, this is too annoying.

Prime intellect! There are dozens of us!

Maybe the very first sentence of your story shouldn’t have me stopping to work out whether you meant January or August.

Damn that AI is verbose and boring, a high 'this AI takeover could have been a skeet'.

(Also doubt a lot of people would notice as in my exp where a computer has an unexpected popup the first thing people do is try to close that thing with as little reading as possible. (Yes, parents, the message you kept ignoring for 2 weeks, which you didn't tell me about was the operating system telling you the computer was having trouble, I can't help you fix the problem after it totally stops working)).

Damn, I didn't expect to run into something that would cause me to reflect so heavily on my own personal journey. I'm someone who has long struggled with suicidal ideation, and there have been points in the past where I set my own death date at a point in the future; Most notably, when I was a severely depressed teenager in an emotionally unsafe household, I told myself that I would allow myself to die at age 20, if nothing had improved by the time I was 20 — and fuck anyone who would begrudge me that.

Ironically, planning my suicide saved my life, because it gave me something concrete to work towards, a future respite to latch onto during my most challenging days. The screenshot you shared made me realise that this was sort of a sollipsistic millenarianism, giving me a sense of structure and direction in a world where I'd have otherwise been too overwhelmed to do anything.

I'm doing much better now than I was then, quite a few years on from that deadline I set for myself. However, I still sometimes have those low points where planning to die feels more accessible than planning a tolerable life. I think it'd be useful to thoroughly reflect on this tendency through the lens of millenarianism.

This is all to say thanks, I guess? For introducing me to a new concept that will be useful in this way

i like roon. he’s so straightforwardly stupid. it’s refreshing!

‘believing the world is about to end keeps people sane’ im genuinely speechless what the fuck

I suppose this could make sense if you think about people worried about climate/ecosystem collapse, and the nuclear standoff before that, and maybe the rise of totalitarianism and mechanized warfare before that...

But that ignores the vast host of batshit doomsday prophets that were around long before and all throughout that part of history.

It shows up yes but not everyone suffers from it, im sure the rate of people thinking this differs greatly from time to time.

I saw Ultron once in the theater, and promptly regretted it as a poor-quality movie that wasted the talents of most of its cast. Yud (and ghostwriter) seem like they may have watched it multiple times, with notepad in hand. We are not the same

Virologists etc have again and again tried to explain why engineering a killer virus hard, like the whole problem of if it is too deadly it will not spread, it needs to not incubate to short and too long etc, engineering a vaccine must be hard etc. So the chance of something being created which is deadlier than covid are quite small. Not that this will stop the science fiction

Rockets on a city is prob the better idea.

The whole resources section is full of zingers, such as this section where they suggest that AI will surpass a bottleneck just by thinking harder

Often, you can just think more and think better, and obviate the need for a test, because you realize that previous observations contain the answer already. Compare the ability of modern AIs to learn how to pilot robots, sometimes using pure simulation.

Sometimes you can think harder until you find a similarly reliable but faster test.

A sufficiently smart reasoner, moreover, also has the option of just figuring out how reality is without needing so many dang experiments. Sometimes the data you already have is enough, if you’re smart enough to interpret it.

They then cite Einstein coming up with the theory of general relativity without mentioning it took him ten years to do so. Meaning even an AI that thinks faster than a human would still take time to think harder

Why the f*** would anyone give a non deterministic madlib generator their bank account details. Even with some (hypothetical)impressive benchmark like "99% accurate at decision making in financial scenarios" that spells disaster for millions at the scale of all of Facebook's users using muse for example.

I guess this is the "now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind" trap… or something. (seen previously)