Way Status:

Source: Vinland Saga ヴィンランド･サガ

It feels very confident and smug about how this isn't going to be a dystopian surveillance state. But the main thing I was thinking through the entire first part was "couldn't a government abuse these powers to stop people from running cutting-edge AI on their own hardware? Setting up the infrastructure to do that is totally unacceptable." And then I get to part 2 where he says "also we'll need to stop people from running cutting-edge AI on their own hardware."

Like, the big concerns I have about LLMS are that they're being run centrally, on servers, where people can read what we say, and where both companies and potentially the government can regulate how it gets used. The thing I want to make sure happens is this gets decentralized, so people can run it locally, without being observed, and ideally disable stupid ethical blocks like "I won't make porn".

And Scott's post is basically saying "we already don't live in that world, so it's not a problem to move further away from it". But it is! I want people in the AI space actively advocating for more decentralized AI use—and as strong a taboo as we can fashion against the government limiting AI, or really anything about the software we run on our computer. Total legal ban on in-hardware DRM. Crash course on fully homomorphic encryption so we can set it up so that openAI can't read our chat logs. A government commitment to reverse-engineer any model and publish the weights openly.

(I feel like we should all be really worried that the government feels like it can ask openAI to pause a chatbot release. That shouldn't be allowed! That's...well, it's not in the top fifty bad things the Trump administration has done, but it's a serious civil liberties problem that has me deeply worried.)

But the real upshot of this is that I'm definitely not the target audience, and in a real sense, Scott and I are on opposite sides.

Plan A’s regulations on chips bear more than a passing resemblance to the way the United States currently regulates “controlled substances” - potentially addictive medications like Xanax or Adderall. ... But has the existence of controlled substance regulations indirectly plunged the world into Orwellian dystopia? Has it turned life into a global panopticon? I wouldn’t say so.

1. The ring has a basic level of intelligence, it being part of Sauron, and is perfectly capable of tempting people who are not wearing it. It tempts loads of people who are not carrying it (Boromir most notably, but also Smeagol murdered Deagol for it and clearly remains tempted from miles away) and barely manages to tempt Frodo or Sam despite them spending months with it. While it clearly did tempt Bilbo, he's ultimately okay with giving it up to be destroyed despite having it and using it regularly for decades. The main protective factor from the ring is contentment with your life and a lack of great ambition, not just not touching it.

It is not good for women to be afraid all the time, and we should not encourage it! When you consume a media diet of mostly true crime, buy a surveillance device for your house, and commiserate with the girlies online about how scary it is to see a man in a public place, you are basically cultivating an anxiety disorder. This will make your life more unpleasant, because you have trained yourself to be scared all the time, and it will not benefit you, because your fears are based on memes, not reality. You're not protecting yourself from anything; you're just giving yourself an extra flinch response.

And it plays right into the hands of conservatives! The right wing would love it if all women, especially all white and/or wealthy women, were terrified to leave their houses alone because they might see a strange man. They want you to be on a quest for One Good Man who will protect you from all other men and to be too scared to go anywhere without him. They want you to be on a hair trigger, ready to call the cops on anyone who makes you uncomfortable, because that is your function within their hierarchy.

If you are a woman, especially a white woman, then your fear is used to justify violence against poor people and people of color, especially men. From the perspective of conservatives, this is what your fear is for. And your fear is, in large part, what you are for.

Here is a passage I find particularly striking, even if it's purely anecdotal:

I was having trouble putting my finger on what exactly seemed off until I got to this part:

Most “masked” autistics still show obvious, visible signs of autism that are either just slightly muted or channelled into a less obvious and more socially acceptable form. I could be accurately described as a high-masking autistic, but anyone who knows what autism looks like will immediately clock me.

And I thought,

"Wait, why would you think that masking would make it harder to detect autism?"

What I had assumed the term meant was...

Okay I keep trying to come up with the perfect analogy because I find that allistic people have an incredible amount of difficulty reasoning about what it would be like to have serious deficits in social understanding, so here's another attempt:

I'm writing in English, so I imagine most of my readers have only the vaguest knowledge of what a Japanese tea ceremony entails beyond "fancy" and "tea". If you do know a ton about tea ceremonies pretend I'm talking about, I don't know, initiation into an undocumented Etruscan mystery religion.

Suppose that suddenly you are informed that you have to attend a tea ceremony tonight.

And suppose that, for whatever reason, attending this ceremony and doing well at it was incredibly important for your career, your social circle, and your romantic prospects. Your success in all those realms depends heavily on how well you do at the tea ceremony tonight.

So you ask the friend who brought you the invitation what you do at a tea ceremony, and he says,

"Uh, it's not like there's some script that you follow, it's just etiquette and politeness."

But he does tell you that asking direct questions of your host about what you should do is offputting and inappropriate.

What would you do in a situation like that?

Well, if there are a lot of people you might stay towards the back out of sight of the host.

You might watch what other people did and copy them as closely as you could.

You might try to make sure that any specific tasks for guests were assigned to somebody else rather than you.

And I don't think you would adopt those strategies because they would make you look like an expert in tea ceremonies;

I think you would adopt strategies along those lines because what the fuck else could you possibly do in that situation?

Until now I have assumed that this is what people meant by "masking"; strategies such as avoidance, ceding decision making to other people, and rote copying are things that I adopted quite early on in life, not out of some attempt to stop people from noticing I had autism, but from a desire to minimize negative attention.

I had thought that the analogy was like, If I draw a crude smiley-face in crayon on a paper plate and wear it as a mask, maybe I'm not trying to fool you into thinking that it's my real face, maybe I'm just trying to keep you from seeing what my real face looks like.

To go back to the tea ceremony analogy, maybe another person there was raised by a master of the tea ceremony, knows all the subtle ins and outs, but just thinks it's morally stupid that so much success depends on this arbitrary ceremony. If it was important to success he might go along with the tea ceremony anyway, and you could also, I suppose, call this "masking" as well, but it seems to me that it is only similar to the coping strategies I outlined above in a very broad way.

1. Rote copying is definitely masking, in fact it's arguably the archetypal masking behavior. I don't think avoidance is a masking behavior so much as a behavior to avoid having to mask, but wouldn't be that surprised if someone disagreed.

2. Obviously you are trying to cover up the fact that you are autistic/don't know how to perform a tea ceremony. Compare to the unmasked behavior: someone who starts in the same place but who doesn't particularly care about seeming like they already know what they're doing would just ask "I have never done this before, what are you doing and why?" Or maybe they would do something so obviously un-tea-ceremony-like that nobody would think they are trying to perform a tea ceremony.

But it's not really untrue, is it? In this hypothetical, the police have no direct interest in harming the hostage. It's definitely the robber's fault, first and foremost, that the hostage is at risk at all.

And of course, the purpose of saying that she is, and here I'm leaving the metaphor and I'm just talking about the governments that say these kinds of things every time they blow a school up, in the real world the purpose of telling the widow that she's irrational is to assert that you have no control over this trade-off and, in fact, you have no responsibility to make this trade-off less likely through your own actions.

Guys, I just... I just don't get modern day mental illness discourse from either direction these days.

I'm really tempted to say "I think it makes total sense that Rogue wants a cure for her mutant condition and Storm doesn't and I have absolutely no idea why this idea is apparently so deeply confusing and upsettingf for so many people."

But like, also:

Even if they didn’t know that autism was the name for the condition, in my field, an autistic cyber security analyst was such a common thing to encounter that people didn’t think of us as a disabled minority but just as a type of guy that you will inevitably have to encounter.

Hey, so... I mean like the obvious suspicion that a lot of autistic people have is that autistic traits are not purely maladaptive; that the reason you see so many people with autism with the incredibly adaptive trait of "good at cyber security analysis" is that in some way the pattern recognition oddities that make it difficult to understand social cues are wrapped up with the ability to understand , say, programming.

I mean, savants (Are those still a thing? I never hear about them anymore) are one piece of data for this hypothesis, and, like, why didn't the army have a lot of autism accomodations?

Maybe it's sort of inherent to that specific job, but I also suspect that to some extent it's that there is a huge enough pool of allistic army officer candidates that it is not necessary to go extremely out of the way to accommodate the autistic ones.

Which leads to the obvious question: Why do people looking for cyber-security analysts go out of their way to accommodate and retain autistic analysts? Like, it sounds like they are going beyond the ADA, so why not be less accommodating and simply rely on allistic analysts?

I think the suspicion a lot of people have is that, like, a lot of people are good at that job because they are high functioning and autistic.

Here is a passage I find particularly striking, even if it's purely anecdotal:

I was having trouble putting my finger on what exactly seemed off until I got to this part:

Most “masked” autistics still show obvious, visible signs of autism that are either just slightly muted or channelled into a less obvious and more socially acceptable form. I could be accurately described as a high-masking autistic, but anyone who knows what autism looks like will immediately clock me.

And I thought,

"Wait, why would you think that masking would make it harder to detect autism?"

What I had assumed the term meant was...

Okay I keep trying to come up with the perfect analogy because I find that allistic people have an incredible amount of difficulty reasoning about what it would be like to have serious deficits in social understanding, so here's another attempt:

I'm writing in English, so I imagine most of my readers have only the vaguest knowledge of what a Japanese tea ceremony entails beyond "fancy" and "tea". If you do know a ton about tea ceremonies pretend I'm talking about, I don't know, initiation into an undocumented Etruscan mystery religion.

Suppose that suddenly you are informed that you have to attend a tea ceremony tonight.

And suppose that, for whatever reason, attending this ceremony and doing well at it was incredibly important for your career, your social circle, and your romantic prospects. Your success in all those realms depends heavily on how well you do at the tea ceremony tonight.

So you ask the friend who brought you the invitation what you do at a tea ceremony, and he says,

"Uh, it's not like there's some script that you follow, it's just etiquette and politeness."

But he does tell you that asking direct questions of your host about what you should do is offputting and inappropriate.

What would you do in a situation like that?

Well, if there are a lot of people you might stay towards the back out of sight of the host.

You might watch what other people did and copy them as closely as you could.

You might try to make sure that any specific tasks for guests were assigned to somebody else rather than you.

And I don't think you would adopt those strategies because they would make you look like an expert in tea ceremonies;

I think you would adopt strategies along those lines because what the fuck else could you possibly do in that situation?

Until now I have assumed that this is what people meant by "masking"; strategies such as avoidance, ceding decision making to other people, and rote copying are things that I adopted quite early on in life, not out of some attempt to stop people from noticing I had autism, but from a desire to minimize negative attention.

I had thought that the analogy was like, If I draw a crude smiley-face in crayon on a paper plate and wear it as a mask, maybe I'm not trying to fool you into thinking that it's my real face, maybe I'm just trying to keep you from seeing what my real face looks like.

To go back to the tea ceremony analogy, maybe another person there was raised by a master of the tea ceremony, knows all the subtle ins and outs, but just thinks it's morally stupid that so much success depends on this arbitrary ceremony. If it was important to success he might go along with the tea ceremony anyway, and you could also, I suppose, call this "masking" as well, but it seems to me that it is only similar to the coping strategies I outlined above in a very broad way.

1. Rote copying is definitely masking, in fact it's arguably the archetypal masking behavior. I don't think avoidance is a masking behavior so much as a behavior to avoid having to mask, but wouldn't be that surprised if someone disagreed.

2. Obviously you are trying to cover up the fact that you are autistic/don't know how to perform a tea ceremony. Compare to the unmasked behavior: someone who starts in the same place but who doesn't particularly care about seeming like they already know what they're doing would just ask "I have never done this before, what are you doing and why?" Or maybe they would do something so obviously un-tea-ceremony-like that nobody would think they are trying to perform a tea ceremony.

Here it is again. You might want to save it just in case an accident like that happens again

It's nice to me too!

you must protect the anime titty for the anime titty's sake as well as for the sake of queer people and sexual education (etc). it is good and beautiful for there to be cheesy games to masturbate to. nobody is growing hair on their palms and going blind.