Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Stasi and the Nazis were two different groups in different time periods. I am only wondering about the Stasi.
The core is the same - totalitarianism.
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Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox (2025)
51–60 of 77 posts
Re: Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox (2025)
#52(2025) Doctorow has a book-length version of this, "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI", which I just read. It's not one of his better works. It's all conventional anti-AI wisdom. Too much of it is about the impact of AI on the punditry and writing industries. I expected better from Doctorow. I would have expected more focus on the relationship between AI and power. Doctorow has been down that road in his f…
Does anyone know what incentivised citizens to cooperate with the Stasi?
They were arguably the most repressive secret police regime in the world. They disappeared people and their families, and used torture, intimidation, and the biggest network of informants ever assembled (in some cities almost 20% of the population were informants!).
People collaborated because they had to, on top of the usual reasons for joining a military or intelligence service.
Re: Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox (2025)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
The core is the same - totalitarianism.
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I am friends with and know several migrants, illegals, ICE agents, police, feds, three letter friends (hi) and the decisions of loyalty boils down to "keep ego, feed family, avoid pain".
I am not certain about the order but that's not the point.
Honest Stasi employee can't get a job anywhere else (as 90% hate Stasi) so he needs his job to feed his family. Ego says he can't leave the family. Avoiding pain is not pushing against the higher ups for fear of ego, losing family.
I often ask people once they get a promotion or find themselves bored if they were asked by their CEO/Authority "is your position necessary?" Assume the honest answer is "no". They say yes: they lose their title, power, income, stability, while maintaining almost zero upside other than "the right thing was done".
Re: Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox (2025)
#54From the article
His job was to be the AI's "accountability sink" (in the memorable phrasing of Dan Davies): he was being paid to take the blame for the AI's mistakes.
Re: Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox (2025)
#55> what crypto will leave behind is bad Austrian economics and worse monkey JPEGs its what the crypto industry will leave behind, and you could say the main bubble already burst when ftx went bankrupt. the defining property of public blockchains is they are designed to never go down, and the biggest ones like ethereum probably never will until its replaced by something objectively better. if you take off the scams (ak…
I agree that the infrastructure is useful, though not as useful as it said on the tin, and having it around for other purposes is a good thing. I'm not sure it'll persist as "one more tool to get around big tech and oppressive governments."
There's still a lot of work to be done before big tech and governments don't have an outsized influence, even in blockchain-mediated spaces.
Re: Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox (2025)
#56CTF + F "bubble" - 15 results. This guy was manically predicting the bubble in 2025 > AI is a bubble. > AI is a bubble. Bubbles burst. We're in for a near-total collapse of the AI investment mania > AI is a bubble, and when bubbles burst, they sometimes leave behind a productive residue > When the AI bubble bursts, there will be stellar bargains on GPUs > The bad news is all the damage the bubble is doing now and all…
I don’t agree with Doctorow on this point, but there’s nothing inherently unreasonable about predicting an economic phenomenon is a bubble and having to wait several years to be proven correct. Michael Burry first purchased credit default swaps on mortgage backed securities in May of 2005.
A stopped clock is, after all, correct twice a day.
Re: Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox (2025)
#57(2025) Doctorow has a book-length version of this, "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI", which I just read. It's not one of his better works. It's all conventional anti-AI wisdom. Too much of it is about the impact of AI on the punditry and writing industries. I expected better from Doctorow. I would have expected more focus on the relationship between AI and power. Doctorow has been down that road in his f…
Does anyone know what incentivised citizens to cooperate with the Stasi?
Same list of things that compels people to become an asset for any intelligence agency, adjusted for the time in history.
Re: Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox (2025)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, here goes: You could look at your situation, think about it as objectively as you can (ignoring, as much as possible, any media driven mind worms), pick any particular problem you face that looks solvable, and try to solve it. If none of the problems seems particularly solvable, break them into pieces and look at the resulting sub-problems in the same way. Regardless of the outcome, iterate, since it's ultimately…
That’s a generic algorithm, not an example. I mean specific examples. Like, people sharing things they did.
No, it's a specific thing you can do.
You can literally just sit down, right now, and do this.
But if you insist on hearing about a specific example of something I did, here's one that's appropriate. I was frustrated that all the time I spent reading/hearing/watching about other people solving their problems left me oddly dissatisfied. I realized that that was because it wasn't actually solving any of mine (except perhaps assuaging boredom a little). Thinking about it, I realized that that was because I was wasting the impetus to improve my situation on voyeurism.
Re: Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox (2025)
#59I am a developmental autism researcher using multimodal neuroimaging, standardized and experimental behavioral/cognitive assessments, with a focus on longitudinal modeling to study condevelopment of brain and behavior. I also manage lab servers, databases, I program pipelines for neuroimaging, and I also write grant applications. I also tend towards slow and rigorous over fast and loose in publications. This is both…
I feel like AI is set to surpass us on most left brain tasks, yes. I know left/right is a myth, please forgive me the shorthand. I see it in my own work where the AI is incapable of brute forcing a solution because it can't do the fuzzy wet pattern matching we do. The kinds of problems I can't solve in front of the keyboard either, but that come to me when I step away and take a walk.
Re: Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox (2025)
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
So novel the person you link to says he's mimicking an existing CAD software
"I reimplemented a state-of-the-art closed-source thing in OSS" is extremely valuable and novel work.
It may be valuable.
It seems like a stretch to call a reimplementation novel.