Oh. Corporate culture is something I absolutely hate. I have ASD and get sick from the thought itself.

I’ve just realized that automated cons is something these things are absolutely best for.

Aggregator websites full of absolute junk - too bad, falling back to asking friends or, well, finding new ones via links in you feed in some social network. Search engines full of absolute junk - still kinda work for me, but ultimately the same.

Political fakes and political bots - well, mass propaganda was always there, it even found ways to appear grassroots, by having different layers of propaganda for different layers of society, designed smart enough so that people would make derivative ideas which would seem natural for their own layer and sincerely think other layers are independent from it.

The whole of USSR’s society - both the dumbest types, the average workers, the lower layer of educated people (schoolteachers, techs, officers etc), the intelligentsia, the “masters of life” in all their gradations from party nomenclature of various levels to diplomats and journalists, all of them, - was in fact product of such propaganda. Soviet dissidents being no exception. The gray silent cowardly dishonest types from party nomenclature turned out to have far better understanding. Still the system into which they’ve rebuilt USSR and its society can’t last for long. Right now it’s in process of killing Russia’s and Ukraine’s best people in a war. Those grey types may think they are killing two birds with one stone, but it won’t be too long until they realize what Assad did recently.

Interestingly enough, I think it was really intended to be so somewhere in 1920s when it was started. If you read Soviet “conformist” sci-fi, it would appear that in Soviet marxism “redoing” the continuous and chaotic fabric of society into a set of uniform classes, or layers, was considered as something good. Can’t say anything about logic of that, but the emotional component was something about self-organizing systems and humanity building itself towards some ascension via science, order, centralized administration and planning of everything. I definitely know that they (people in charge of that ideology) were huge fans of Plato’s Republic. If we suggest that Soviet propaganda was literally aimed at implementing that, then the “philosopher class” would be whom I called “masters of life”, the military and engineers, including that intelligentsia which mostly had technical education, would be the “soldier class” by Plato, and everyone else the workers.

OK, that’s off topic. What I meant is that such propaganda will become even stronger, but it was already strong enough without burning a lot of electricity. LLMs won’t make a revolution there, because in deceiving its own humanity has progressed past the need in LLMs long before LLMs.

But automated cons are something else. Scammers had to waste a lot of time to get a successful scam. Now they can use “AI” voice bots with sufficiently individual approach.

ASD doesn’t explain anything disturbing. That would be ASPD.

If someone still has secret guilt of this looking like a conspiracy thing - it isn’t, there’s buying and there’s buying out on markets, these are different.

Also a pretty normal thing for authoritarian governments to make honey pots for intelligent people, so that they’d work in some kinda useful, but more importantly well-paid positions different from where they could make a difference.

I still think there are 3 other components, all of which can be considered good to some degree - 1) feeling of belonging and, ahem, of hierarchy, people all seeing each other and their employer, 2) less disruption in case of connectivity problems, 3) better understanding of processes and dynamics when in one location. To be clear, 1 is bs, 2 is factual, but can be negotiated for some skeleton group, 3 is bs. But some people make think this way without malice.

Makes me wonder, though, when they say Musk has ASD, how in hell would he be against remote work. Other than commute being hard, actually being present among all those people, boss or not (even worse when boss), should be exhausting. There is that pop culture idea that ASD is connected to being very intelligent (actually no, just caring about interests above social needs), so perhaps it’s a PR thing and he really doesn’t have it.

He’s right, but religion is pretty natural for humans. Any kind of divorce between religion and core ideals of the society lasts only as long as the cultural movement behind that divorce doesn’t create its own religion. Because the majority of humans are not independent thinking and not rational, even if they are part of a crowd united by stated belief in independent thinking and rationalism.

That’s why ideologies can be divided into “creating a resilient structure of society, because apes will be apes” and “fixing the apes to be better humans”, and the latter kind always fails. Interestingly enough, this division is orthogonal both to right\left and to libertarian\authoritarian categories.

My point was - a person may identify as whatever they want, but they were, in the vast majority of cases, born clearly a man or clearly a woman.

I don’t think he’s against that identity. But to reject reality of nature because of self-identification and to try to impose that upon popular scientific discourses is a religion indeed, just sort of a protest against religious mainstream, not much different from East Roman iconoclasm or Jewish hassidic movements.

Or Christianity itself the way it conquered the old religions in the east Mediterranean, especially Egypt. Egyptian ancient religion from that age was very complex and well-canonized, and with apparently most people just as full of it as today of Christianity. While early Christianity in Egypt was a compact, simple and beautiful set of abstract beliefs ; in some sense Christianity of that time was less magical and allegorical than old religions, but at the same time claimed that its smaller miracles were true.

I’ve just realized that I can’t remember what those things are named despite buying them a few times.

But, long story short, I suppose some things are limited only by IP.

It’s doing fine.

McDonald’s is a franchise, as you know. So Russia simply has a “pirate McDonald’s” with different branding. With “pirate Coke” among the drinks.

I think stats show that Russians are less drunk generally than Scandinavians (not a very surprising statement admittedly) and Baltic people and even Armenians and Georgians. And than Irish (again no surprise I suppose).

What Russians are, according to stats, is people who have tea too often. And I don’t think that had a negative effect on the British Empire, but then UK might be more drunk generally than Russia.

So perhaps being drunk is, in some unknown way, a civilization-level advantage.

Bad idea.

The closest to a good idea IMHO is NOSTR. By the way, there is a standard for moderated communities for it, I don’t know whether anything implements it yet.

In general, not in fact.

in my religious historiography class we discussed how increased literacy in general in the 19th century led to a lot of these “literalist” movements.

Literacy increase in 1920s-1930s USSR (European parts) led to a certain kind of people for whom things officially printed are obviously true.

They unironically consider it the ultimate argument that some general summary, that is printed in an official history book for schools, says what they say. They don’t get the idea of cross-checking sources, they don’t get the idea of hermeneutics, they don’t get the idea of dispute. Actually it’s worse - they think they get all these ideas, and all these ideas are barbarism, while reading something officially printed and not doubting it is enlightenment. It’s that bad.

Likely that, yes.

I’ve met a lot of (ex-Soviet, that should be kept in mind) Muslims, most wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between this madhhab and that.

And Christian theology, when you don’t reduce it to average American Christians, has a lot of tradition.

What I mean … you typical Salafi is just like that:

when most of these folks have sub fifth grade reading levels means that whatever feels good at the time is what God wants.

Can we just agree that most people with religious identities don’t care about actual philosophy?

Yes.

Say, Islam as a religion has the “cut in stone” part, the only way to change that is a new prophet. Literally. And it has the rest, which is up to very wide interpretation. And it doesn’t have a central authority (no Caliph today, though a certain ISIS type claimed that role).

So, that didn’t make Islam a more tolerant religion. Not even remotely.

https://bq.ru/

LOL. Wrong BQ. The one you’ve read about is dead, yes. The one I have a phone from is a Russian noname.

That’s why I think computers should be like in year 2000. Not because I’m some luddite, but because you can’t increase complexity indefinitely without laws of the market changing. Today’s general-purpose computer systems are so complex that they encourage behavior that wouldn’t be competitive then, because then there were more choice and the industry was much easier to get into.

There are things one can live without.

Especially funny, because new cultural phenomena involving computing are as applicable today as they were in year 2000. What was added since then seems to be about, well, that amount of gaslighting, propaganda and primate instinct abuse made real by centralized social media, and about everyone carrying surveillance devices.

Not everything is progress, some things are just experience. I think wisdom may be in losing that.

This also won’t be unprecedented, supersonic passenger airliners are not operated today, and creation of an actual space colony seems much further than it was even 20 years ago, and unification of the Earth into one huge federated state has not happened after Cold War ending, and we don’t carry around devices with nuclear batteries.

Such airliners were in operation. Such a colony was being seriously devised. Such a political project … I guess, was more of a propaganda device both on the Western and on the Soviet sides, but many things done and attempted hint that it wasn’t all dreams. Nuclear batteries exist.

So. Computers produced in a few enormous God level foundries, with technology far harder to achieve than nuclear shield, centralized to a few companies, with processes approaching theoretical physical limitations, being the necessary element of our daily lives. I don’t think that’s a good idea by any measure, if you forget what you know about our world and just read this sentence and imagine some alternative one.

Why would you need an LLM for that?

We have a standard, it’s called RSS.

We have scripting. We also have visual scripting. That there’s no customer tool for that … is not customer’s fault, but not a sign of some fundamental limitation either.

Customer support would, in fact, be more pleased with an e-mail from a template, and not a robot call (and it’ll likely have robot detection and drop such calls anyway).

Informing your contacts is better done with a template too.

However, now when I think about it, if such a tool existed, it could use an LLM as a fallback in each case, where we don’t have a better source of data about your flights, a fitting e-mail template, some point of that template lacking, or confusion in parsing the company page for support e-mail.

But that still would much rather be some “guesser” element in a visual script, one used when there’s nothing more precise.

I think such a product could be more popular than just an LLM to which you say to do something and are never certain whether it’s going to do a wildcard weirdness or it’s going to be fine.

Funny I didn’t hear about it. I think they tried releasing something with Ubuntu Phone a few years before, so not a completely worthless company.

Kinda sad even, pretty normal vanilla Android.

Sigh. OK. About breaking stuff - my mom managed to break an RPi charger of all things.

2020, my bad. Checked. In any case it’s BQ-5046L, sort of what you buy when you don’t like the whole idea of Android, but need some stuff for work.