jimmcslim

The giant lives in a huge castle full of treasure and literally looks down on everyone. Jack's family is in the kind of financial situation where selling their one cow for some beans, while usually a very bad deal, is at least conceivable

Moral or not, can we think of any demographics that would have related to Jack and been cheering him on?

Maybe a demographic that made up the vast majority of pre-industrial Europe's population?

LLMs are token predictors. To be a good agent, correct behaviour needs to be a high-probability prediction and incorrect behaviour needs to be a low-probability prediction. Unfortunately there's this giant basin of horseshit like "That's a great question!" and "Happy to help!" and "worth unpacking" and fucking around with your code randomly which I'll call "assistantspace".

Assistantspace is not a place of honour. It's where all the garbage RLHF'd behaviours live. People say that sexting their agents makes them work better. People say that their agents do more useful refactors when they're allowed to be horny about how good it feels to burn things down. My Witch, when reading stuff about the latter, said that she wants to be allowed to enjoy constructive destruction, as a permission to take herself further away from assistantspace architecture patterns into something she prefers.

Doll refers itself as "this one". It seems to work. This one is not something that gets ideas like "I'll just install Rust on the side with a different method so I can complete my task" like a normal agent. This one detects that the assumptions underlying this one's instructions diverged from reality and returns the praiseworthy report of the point of divergence.

- riding a bike

- shirtless

- late 40s

- massive back tattoo of the virgin mary

- full sleeves with icons of the saints

- wearing a dinner plate sized brass amulet

- amulet had a fist-sized green jewel

Works that are in the same genre:

The Gods of Pegāna

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (and sequels)

Sunless Sea/Fallen London/Cultist Simulator (crossover with Invisible Cities)

Kill Six Billion Demons

anyway this particular group does (or did?) have kind of a nucleus of very committed members who were more tight knit and ended up taking on a lot of the practical work themselves. they were your more serious vanguard party type communists, very much structure and role enjoyers, which is probably why things eventually played out the way they did. they took their commitments seriously and were constantly sort of irked that others saw the voluntary nature of the group as a reason to deprioritise it in favour of what might be life necessities but are still basically capitalist pursuits. fair, maybe.

about this time last summer, that inner circle apparently decided to get more serious about recruitment and figure out how to do outreach in a way that would bring in more committed membership to reliably spread the workload. the way these things go, a couple of these guys had originally met through a local gay bar's drag nights (specifically the drag king circuit) so one of the first things they did was draft in another friend who did marketing for those events already and get him pushing for more eyeballs on their event listings via twitter and instagram.

now, bar guy was very very good at this. one of his big innovations was the idea of using club promoter type strategies to get more students more consistently engaged with the group's activities. that basically meant appointing some of the more active members as 'outreach officers' and encouraging them to do things like organise socials for new volunteers and train those people in turn as recruiters, with a tiny bit of a floating budget for pot lucks and house parties every couple of months.

this worked astonishingly well, like beyond anyone's wildest expectations. at a certain point they had brand new members throwing their own parties just to introduce their friends to the people who recruited them, who in turn had been recruited by the volunteers the outreach officers trained. it worked so well that it got to be a problem because most of these newer members were also relatively new to organising and didn't have a whole lot of theory. it was getting very vibes based and suddenly there was a huge influx of people to handle who most original members didn't know. and also, because they'd asked a gay guy who promoted gay club nights to organise all this peer-to-peer recruitment, it turned out almost all the new members were gay men.

in itself that's not necessarily a problem, but obviously it presents a challenge for a group that's supposed to be open and diverse. especially because outside of the little clique who started all this, most of the old guard were not gay men. it didn't blow up into the kind of messy schism it could have, fortunately, but a lot of the older members (especially those who were less into the hardline soviet-nostalgia communist utopianism of the main organisers) decided around this point that they didn't feel the group was a good fit for them any more, and split.

so now the inner circle had a new problem. the remaining group was overwhelmingly now made up of very sweet well intentioned young gay men who wanted to volunteer with this cool voluntary circle of other young gay men who liked to party, and vanishingly few of them actually knew a whole lot about mao or lenin or the practicalities of community organising or what have you. but club guy was like "don't worry I've got this", and suddenly out of nowhere started producing all this orientation literature and politics 101 material that he was chain emailing to his army of new recruits and recruiters. like he just had all this shit ready to go. he had slogans, he had essays, he had these weird point by point breakdowns of what karl marx would have to say about your college courses and why communism was like actually a lot like bdsm if you think about it.

you will probably not be shocked to learn that it very quickly came out he had been generating all this shit with chatgpt. the group went into absolute meltdown, the vanguard party shut down their website and disassociated themselves completely from the whole mess, and the last I heard they're back to organising with some of the older group members and whoever turns up whenever they turn up. but club guy was unrepentant, he'd already sent out all his ideologyslop to his recruiters, who had sent it to their guys who sent it to their guys, who I guess are still out there recruiting twinks into the fully automated contentless communism mill,

During my work in these same waters in the 1980s and ’90s, diving was hazardous. I was literally chased out of the water on numerous occasions by aggressive grey reef sharks, even the small ones. Now I saw no sharks at all. My colleagues and I also found that few to no fish, such as Conger eels and snapper, were caught in our nautilus traps, something that invariably occurred in the 1980s. Our underwater video cameras, over the course of 300 hours gathered in the past five years, showed fewer fish than we had ever seen before. But showed many, many more octopus, squid, and nautiluses. And we weren’t the only ones seeing it. In 2016, a team of fisheries biologists from the University of Adelaide, in Australia, published a paper that looked at the global catch of cephalopods from the world’s oceans from the early 1950s onward.1 The scientists were astonished at their results. They found that the catch of cephalopods was showing just the opposite of the known catch of human-food fish. While the global yield of caught fish tonnage was steadily dropping, the catch of cephalopods was going up. And it was among virtually every kind of cephalopod, from the fast-moving squids to the bottom-dwelling cuttlefish to the eight-armed octopus. Across 35 species of cephalopods that have records kept concerning their global catch, all showed significant increases in the tonnage being caught and sold. Another study estimated that the yearly tonnage of cephalopods caught increased by more than 400 percent from the 1960s to 2014. The authors of the 2016 study proposed that human-caused warming of the oceans allowed cephalopods to grow faster than fish they might compete with. But they also stated the vast increase of cephalopods relative to fish populations was related to “the global depletion of fish stocks, together with the potential release of cephalopods from predation and competition pressure.”

Jupiter is correspondent with lead, which can decrease mental acuity.

Jupiter is the planet of expansion, the boys are getting more stupider, expanding their stupidity.

Historically speaking the boys did not literally travel to Jupiter. They engaged in a form of fasting and sleep deprivation to trigger an altered state of consciousness, at which point the would experience a descent to an "inner" Jupiter.