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There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

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Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#171

Post by coldtea »

graemep wrote: post #160
dns_snek wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unless you presume government is beneficial That's the constitutional bedrock of our societies. That doesn't mean it's always true but if you denounce that as a legitimate and achievable goal then you don't have a society anymore.

The alternative is worse. No government at all implies anarchy which is worse that all but the very worst governments, and from which IMO some form of government will emerge anyway.

>No government at all implies anarchy*

No government at all can just imply anarchism, ie. a kind of self-governing that doesn't ascribe to our conventional ideas about government, presidents, pms, members of parliament, senators, etc.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#172

Post by graemep »

PowerElectronix wrote: post #90
schrototo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in democracy you do get to say which government you want.

You can pick which of the two possibilities, neither of which is even close to your political views, will oppress you for the next 4 years.

That is true in the US, but that is not typical. I cannot think of another democracy that is as firmly two party as the US. Even the UK which I felt was too two party has always had some smaller parties (for many decades the Liberals, and then the Lib Dems, and Northern Irish parties), many smaller ones more recently (add the Scottish and Welsh Nationalists) and with two smaller parties gaining a lot of ground in the last few years the next general election looks like a four way fight.

In many countries multiple parties and coalition governments are the norm.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#173

Post by flanked-evergl »

simonask wrote: post #113
flanked-evergl wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That index confuses voting or even liberal democracy with democracy. A multitude of different peoples voting to rule over the others is not democratic and will never be democratic. Just because the voting process is secure does not make it democratic. What makes it democratic is that a people rules themselves, nothing else. Zulus ruling over Xhosas is not democratic just because the Zulus give the Xhosas votes becaus…

This betrays a simplistic understanding of democracy. In short, its meaning cannot be derived from decomposing its etymology, and your take here is ... certainly unique. Democracy is not just voting. Actual full democracy is predicated on a fairly large number of fundamental rights, as well as duties. Democracy is antithetical to majority rule, in which the rights of minorities can be ignored or trampled by the major…

> Actual full democracy is predicated on a fairly large number of fundamental rights, as well as duties.

This is an entirely modern idea and really has nothing to do with the concept. It's the typical leftist tendency to appropriate a word that people see as good and then redefine it to be something which the leftist themselves want, and then hope that people still associate it with good.

It's the same thing with the word nation, love, marriage and a multitude of other concepts.

> Zulus ruling over Xhosas can never be democratic, because nobody is "ruling over" anybody else in a democracy, no matter their ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, and so on.

Zulus making laws for Xhosas is most definitely Zulus ruling over Xhosas. Just because the Zulus also give the Xhosas rights to vote does not make them one people or mean that all of a sudden, Xhosas are ruling themselves.

Demos is a synonym for ethnos, and for all of history except maybe the last 80 years people would have understood democracy as self-determination of ethnic groups. The reason why everyone wanted democracy has always been that peoples, i.e. ethnic groups, want to rule themselves, and don't want to be ruled by others.

If Palestinians are 10% of the electorate in a Jewish nation state then they can never write laws for themselves, they can never rule themselves. There can be no democracy for Palestinians in a situation like that.

If Zulus and Xhosas each make up 50% of the electorate then voting is not democratic, it's a battle for one ethnic group to try and rule the other, and the weapon is just voting.

Xhosas don't want to be ruled by Zulus, Zulus and Xhosas don't want to be ruled by Afrikaners, Afrikaners don't want to be ruled by the English, Poles don't want to be ruled by Germans or Russians, Russians don't want to be ruled over by Lithuanians, Jews don't want to be ruled over by Arabs, and Palestinians don't want to be ruled by Jews.

Everyone knows this, even you. Redefining words won't change this. Nominalism won't change this.

Almost invariably, even under the most favourable conditions of rule by another ethnic group, an ethnic group will still want to rule themselves.

«What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.»

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#174

Post by latexr »

usef- wrote: post #115
andrewparker wrote: post #34

OP point out that OpenAI used the "too dangerous to release" marketing ploy with GPT-2... Positioning this as "both sides" have played this card. But at this time Dario was at OpenAI and was a co-author on the GPT-2 research paper announcing the model. The "too dangerous to release" approach has been him the whole time, at both companies.

I said this in the other thread, but they were proven right about their gpt2 worries, weren't they? From the original 2019 release: > We can also imagine the application of these models for malicious purposes , including the following (or other applications we can’t yet anticipate): Generate misleading news articles Impersonate others online Automate the production of abusive or faked content to post on social media…

> The public at large will need to

Ah, yes. You see, it’s not them who are wrong for knowingly releasing something they knew to be harmful, it’s everyone else who needs to change. That seems reasonable. Humanity is famous for being able to rapidly adapt to fast changes as one voice. Oh, wait…

They are no different to the tobacco and oil companies. They know the harm they’re causing but care about personal profit about everything else.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#175

Post by graemep »

flanked-evergl wrote: post #92
simonask wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's helpful to be flippant in this analysis. The US falls in the category of flawed democracies, together with Botswana, Indonesia, India, Mongolia, Philippines, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and many other countries with, shall we say, significant potential for development. I don't think anybody who has actually lived under a pre-democratic regime would call the US "no way democratic". There are many de…

That index confuses voting or even liberal democracy with democracy. A multitude of different peoples voting to rule over the others is not democratic and will never be democratic. Just because the voting process is secure does not make it democratic. What makes it democratic is that a people rules themselves, nothing else. Zulus ruling over Xhosas is not democratic just because the Zulus give the Xhosas votes becaus…

That is only an issue if you have sufficiently deep ethnic divisions within a country that people automatically vote on ethnic lines.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#176

Post by rustcleaner »

dudefeliciano wrote: post #169
rustcleaner wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Neither of those are "taking away your guns" and you forgot to answer my second question. Is concealed carry essential to overthrow a tyrannical government?

It raises the risks for the enforcers taking a paycheck to oppress the [subset of the] population. Bullies think twice when they can be punched square in the face.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#177

Post by temporaryacc2 »

qsera wrote: post #163
echelon wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the people on HN thinking this stuff is garbage won't be working in tech in five years. There simply won't be jobs for them. The risk is that all of these very incredibly smart and disgruntled people decide to do something about it. Elite overproduction, but instead as a result of enormous shift in supply side economics.

Actually I am one of them, and I am thankful for the people who are true believers of AI marketing. Your payments and subscription keeps the LLMS free for people like me who use it as a better search and use it to learn a lot of new things that had no good documentation. I don't worry about losing my job. I worry about becoming useless. If you know what I am saying..

If you do not pay for access to the latest models, your experience with AI is a 6-12 month lagging indicator as to current capabilities.

Therefore, it is impossible to have a conversation with you about AI capabilities, because you are anchored on a ceiling that we've long since exceeded.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#178

Post by Marazan »

dxuh wrote: post #64
modeless wrote: post #22

> But this government [...] I'm hearing a lot of this kind of thing. "Oh if only it was a different government". I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. This is the whole problem with government involvement! I don't think that message is getting through, but it's the real lesson that should be learned here.

I think it should be noted that the current government, which did this silly thing, belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.

"Small government" is a euphemism for letting racist people be racist without censure.

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#179

Post by levmiseri »

uludag wrote: post #21

> I actually have another draft post in the barrel about how I think we should see a resurgence of the ‘flash game’ renaissance because it has become so much easier to make fun little games with AI tooling. I have been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit to see exactly what sort of games people are coming up with and I can say I have been incredibly disappointing. I've been faithfully trying the games people post and…

Speaking of game explorations/ideas enabled by LLMs, here is a 'craft anything' sandbox I'm trying to turn into a game: https://asciidia.com

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing

#180

Post by [deleted] »

coldtea wrote: post #107
modeless wrote: post #22

> But this government [...] I'm hearing a lot of this kind of thing. "Oh if only it was a different government". I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. This is the whole problem with government involvement! I don't think that message is getting through, but it's the real lesson that should be learned here.

Each government just adds shit on the previous, with small optics differences, anyway. Like, in the US, Trump might do the ICE show for his voters, but Obama's deportated 3 million just fine in his time.

[deleted]
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