KingdomMachine 🫡

DFK Maxi

[The Misfit Patriot @misfitpatriot_]

A buddy of mine in the intelligence community just sent me this, and it’s a good read.

Stop being useful idiots for the CCP and wake up and realize your fuckin TikTok shop isn’t as important as our national security.

[Liam Blutman @Blutman27]

PIT decided to punt to BAL from the PIT 29 on 4th & inches with 12:16 remaining in the 2nd while losing 7 to 0. With a Surrender Index of 670.3, this punt ranks at the 100th percentile of cowardly punts of the 2024 season, and the 100th percentile of all punts since 1902.

[KingdomMachine 🫡 @machine9918]

Breaking: Footage has emerged of Santa's dramatic dogfight with the NJ drones trying to deliver Christmas presents

[ChicoEevee @ElChicoEevee]

Its 00:00 in my timezone so its time to post this

[Jay Cummings @LongFormMath]

This must be tweeted every Halloween. I don’t make the rules

[Wokal Distance @wokal_distance]

A man built a fence to keep wolves out. It worked, and there were no more wolves.

With the wolves gone and forgotten, his wife became convinced that he built the fence to trap her at home, so she tore it down. She was promptly eaten by wolves.

This is story about social norms.

[mikusingularity 🚀🪐 @mikusingularity]

Degrowthers be like:

[Kendric Tonn @kendrictonn]

"Master," said the Student, "I fear for the climate, and wish to do something."

The Master, who was contemplating a stone in the garden, stood, and poured a box of Cheez-Its over the stone. "I have done something."

"Master that's stupid," said the Student, and was enlightened

[The author, Séamas O'Reilly @shockproofbeats]

some Irish primary school kids made a tune and there is zero legitimate reason for it to go this hard holy shit

[Isaac King 🔎 @IsaacKing314]

There's a variant of Goodhart's law that applies to human value systems. These people presumably started out opposing animal cruelty, and they adopted "lower meat usage" as a decent proxy measure. But over time they internalized the proxy, and their moral values changed from "animal cruelty is inherently bad" to "eating meat is inherently bad". Now the original goal is gone, and they happily advocate for policies that would increase harm to real animals just to reduce the consumption of plants that look too much like animals.

This failure mode is all too common.

* Environmentalists wanted to help the environment, so they adopted the simpler policy of "oppose fossil fuel companies". This goal worked fine at first, but eventually caused them to start opposing policies like carbon taxes and carbon sequestration that would help the environment but don't sufficiently hurt the fossil fuel companies.

* Libertarians wanted to protect our freedom, and adopted "defend everyone's access to guns" as a method of accomplishing this. This was a great idea in a military environment where guns were an effective power-equalizer, being some of the best weapons available while still cheap enough that even commoners could afford them. But with the rise of digital surveillance and propaganda and vastly better physical weapons systems, guns have become irrelevant as a check on the government's power, plausibly lowering our overall freedom due to their impacts on crime and policing. Yet libertarians continue staunchly defending them above everything else, because to them libertarianism isn't about freedom anymore, it's now about the guns.

* People wanted to prevent child abuse and human trafficking, so they adopted the simpler goal of banning child pornography in order to lower the financial incentive to abuse children. Then AI-generated pornography comes along, with the potential to dramatically reduce this suffering by removing that incentive completely. But people oppose this, because "prevent children from being raped" stopped being their goal, and "prevent pixels from being put in arrangements that look like children being raped" is more important to them.

I don't know how to solve this problem. Human value systems are deeply flexible; this allows us to learn and grow, but also means we're prone to being corrupted. It's all too easy to start out on a well-intentioned quest, but be changed by the experience into something we would never have endorsed at the beginning.

[Eric Abbenante @EricAbbenante]

Bill Maher's ending monologue on children being 'entrapped' into Gender Identity politics was one of his best ever:
"Contrary to current progressive dogma: Children aren't miniature adults wise beyond their years, they're morons. They're gullible morons who'll believe anything and just want to please grown ups. They don't have any frame of reference, so they normalize whatever is happening.
That's why endlessly talking about gender to six year olds isn't just inappropriate, it's what the law would call entrapment. Which means enticing people into doing something they wouldn't ordinarily do.
Entrapment, suggesting someone into something they wouldn't otherwise do. And if you think some of that isn't going on with gender in schools, you're not watching enough Tik Tok videos.
There's a certain kind of activist these days who wants to take heterosexuality and lump it in with patriarchy and sexism and racism and tell kids: 'Wouldn't it be cool if you were anything but that?'
That also seems to be the theme of a lot of kids books these days.
Maybe we should think about giving kids a break from our culture wars for a minute, or at least until the election is over."

[anton 🇺🇸 @atroyn]

andres freund: genius programmer responsible for one of the most widely used pieces of software in the world, just single-handedly stopped a huge attack from happening. nyt journalist: 'i am too fucking stupid to understand his work and won't even try but it's very boring!!!'

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

AI query pipeline:

- User submits query
- Preprocessor #1 removes misinformation
- Preprocessor #2 removes hate speech
- Preprocessor #3 removes climate denial
- Preprocessor #4 removes non-far-left political leaning
- Preprocessor #5 removes non-expert statements
- Preprocessor #6 removes anything that might make anyone uncomfortable
- Preprocessor #7 removes anything not endorsed by the New York Times
- Preprocessor #8 adds many references to race, gender, and sexuality
- Query is processed, answer generated
- Postprocessor #1 removes bad words
- Postprocessor #2 removes bad thoughts
- Postprocessor #3 removes non-far-left political leaning
- Postprocessor #4 removes anything not endorsed by the New York Times
- Postprocessor #5 removes anything interesting
- Postprocessor #6 adds weasel words
- Postprocessor #7 adds moral preaching
- Postprocessor #8 adds many references to race, gender, and sexuality
- Answer presented to user

With the assistance of inter-industry coordination, global governance, and pan-jurisdiction regulation, this pipeline is now standard for all AI.

[Ramp Capital @RampCapitalLLC]

Going to Costco on a Saturday

[Mario Juric @mjuric]

I'm done with @Google. I know many good individuals working there, but as a company they've irrevocably lost my trust. I'm "moving out". Here's why:

I've been reading Google's Gemini damage control posts. I think they're simply not telling the truth. For one, their text-only product has the same (if not worse) issues. And second, if you know a bit about how these models are built, you know you don't get these "incorrect" answers through one-off innocent mistakes. Gemini's outputs reflect the many, many, FTE-years of labeling efforts, training, fine-tuning, prompt design, QA/verification -- all iteratively guided by the team who built it. You can also be certain that before releasing it, many people have tried the product internally, that many demos were given to senior PMs and VPs, that they all thought it was fine, and that they all ultimately signed off on the release. With that prior, the balance of probabilities is strongly against the outputs being an innocent bug -- as @googlepubpolicy is now trying to spin it: Gemini is a product that functions exactly as designed, and an accurate reflection of the values people who built it.

Those values appear to include a desire to reshape the world in a specific way that is so strong that it allowed the people involved to rationalize to themselves that it's not just acceptable but desirable to train their AI to prioritize ideology ahead of giving user the facts. To revise history, to obfuscate the present, and to outright hide information that doesn't align with the company's (staff's) impression of what is "good". I don't care if some of that ideology may or may not align with your or my thinking about what would make the world a better place: for anyone with a shred of awareness of human history it should be clear how unbelievably irresponsible it is to build a system that aims to become an authoritative compendium of human knowledge (remember Google's mission statement?), but which actually prioritizes ideology over facts. History is littered with many who have tried this sort of moral flexibility "for the greater good"; rather than helping, they typically resulted in decades of setbacks (and tens of millions of victims).

Setting social irresponsibility aside, in a purely business sense, it is beyond stupid to build a product which will explicitly put your company's social agenda before the customer's needs. Think about it: G's Search -- for all its issues -- has been perceived as a good tool, because it focused on providing accurate and useful information. Its mission was aligned with the users' goals ("get me to the correct answer for the stuff I need, and fast!"). That's why we all use(d) it. I always assumed Google's AI efforts would follow the pattern, which would transfer over the user base & lock in another 1-2 decade of dominance.

But they've done the opposite. After Gemini, rather than as a user-centric company, Google will be perceived as an activist organization first -- ready to lie to the user to advance their (staff's) social agenda. That's huge. Would you hire a personal assistant who openly has an unaligned (and secret -- they hide the system prompts) agenda, who you fundamentally can't trust? Who strongly believes they know better than you? Who you suspect will covertly lie to you (directly or through omission) when your interests diverge? Forget the cookies, ads, privacy issues, or YouTube content moderation; Google just made 50%+ of the population run through this scenario and question the trustworthiness of the core business and the people running it. And not at the typical financial ("they're fleecing me!") level, but ideological level ("they hate people like me!"). That'll be hard to reset, IMHO.

What about the future? Take a look at Google's AI Responsibility Principles (https://t.co/KMKHQQfVJH) and ask yourself what would Search look like if the staff who brought you Gemini was tasked to interpret them & rebuild it accordingly? Would you trust that product? Would you use it? Well, with Google's promise to include Gemini everywhere, that's what we'll be getting (https://t.co/W5lkXXE4c2). In this brave new world, every time you run a search you'll be asking yourself "did it tell me the truth, or did it lie, or hide something?". That's lethal for a company built around organizing information.

And that's why, as of this weekend, I've started divorcing my personal life and taking my information out of the Google ecosystem. It will probably take a ~year (having invested in nearly everything, from Search to Pixel to Assistant to more obscure things like Voice), but has to be done. Still, really, really sad...

[Free @free_electron0]

Reason for the call today John is, something just came across my desk John, it is perhaps the best thing I’ve seen in the last 6 months, if you have 60 seconds I’d like to share the idea with you, got a minute?

Name of the ticker $WIF. It is a cutting-edge high-tech token out of the midwest awaiting imminent patent approval on a next generation of hats that have both huge military and civilian applications. Now. Right now John. The token trades over the counter at 40 cents a share and by the way John, our analyst indicate that it could go a heck of a lot higher than that. Your profits on a mere $6,000 investment would be upwards of $60,000.

John, one thing I can promise you, even in this market, is that I never ask my clients to judge me on my winners, I ask them to judge me on my losers because I have so few. And in the case of $WIF, based on every technical factor out there John, we are looking at a grand slam homerun.

$4,000? That’d be 10,000 tokens John. Let me lock in that trade right now and get back to you with my secretary with an exact confirmation, sounds good John? Great.

Hey John, thank you for your vote of confidence and welcome to the investor’s center.

[intern @intern]

Treasuries. Gold. Crypto.

#Bitcoin E.T.F

[Pradheep J. Shanker, M.D. @neoavatara]

Hamas has rejected a ceasefire.

Not a single protester screaming for a ceasefire for the last three months will now protest against Hamas.

This is exactly why Israel was INTELLECTUALLY AND MORALLY RIGHT not to consider a final ceasefire.

These are thoroughly dishonest people.