That’s adorable, love to see it.

I don’t doubt it can be harmful, but I can’t help wondering if the problem in education is the LLMs themselves or the educational system being broken in general. I never had LLMs when I was in college/university to begin with, but also, the only time I can remember even being tempted in the general direction of cheating was an online statistics class (one of the few times I did fully online class) that I had trouble focusing on or understanding much at all (at the time, I didn’t understand that I probably struggled more with some classes than others because of ADHD/executive functioning focus problems). And I still didn’t ideate about actual cheating itself, I just had some test where I tried to guess answers with intuition as an experiment; unsurprisingly, that went badly and I had to study harder going forward in that class to make it up.

Maybe I was just too goody two shoes to ever consider it seriously, I don’t know. But it wasn’t really something I even considered as an option. Notably, I also genuinely enjoyed learning if it was a subject that interested me and I usually more liked classes that had projects I could do, rather than rote memorization or long research papers.

I don’t have data on it off-hand, so maybe I’m talking out of my backside, but it seems to me that if people are focused on assignments as meeting metrics and expectations rather than the learning itself, they’re more likely to look for ways to game the system, whether for an edge, to get approval, to avoid rejection, etc. So although I can easily believe AI is making it worse in the short-term, I have to wonder why people would go for it in the first place and what can be done at the root at cheating motivations.

That’s a fair point. One of the problems of them mushing all of the class stories together. Classes like Smuggler get scaled up in power and classes like Consular get scaled down.

Yeah, it was great.

Great example of combo of greed and unrealistic “visions”. If they’d just aimed for something solid and sustainable of its own kind, they probably could have done it and gradually built a strong audience on IP fame alone. Instead, they aimed for the next solar system and made it to the corner store. Millions sunk into enormous amounts of voice acting, vain attempt to compete with the most popular MMO, and they couldn’t even field a solid multiplayer infrastructure for mass player events. And then they did so bad at launch and the people in charge had so little faith (or money probably) in them to turn it around, they booted tons of people and had nowhere near the resources needed to continue the class story arcs, so they shrunk it down enormously and eventually had to go F2P/MTX to make it work.

I’m convinced if it wasn’t “the only star wars MMO” with the easy money-making that brings, it would have shut down long ago.

I genuinely enjoyed some of the class stories, but even at their best, they felt held back by the MMO shell for me. I don’t begrudge anyone liking it though, preferences are preferences. I’ve had times I sunk quite a bit of time into because it was close enough to KOTOR vibes, but I also got burned multiple times by bugs and bad management and unwanted changes all around. And yeah, KOTFE was… well, jeez, I could get into a whole thing about that alone lol. I don’t think the story of it was bad exactly, but it threw out so much of what was already there, took forever to get it back, and the gameplay was padded to hell with never-ending fights to stretch a little bit of story into something longer.

Oh right, thanks, that’s probably what I was thinking of. Some gall Canada has to act like China will do scary detaining after that. If Canada was honest, they’d be putting up an advisory recommending people not to come to their own country.

Isn’t Canada the one that detained some Chinese company executive for a long time over fuck all? Or am I remembering some other thing?

Also bugs me about Revan that (spoiler warning for anyone who hasn’t played them):

Reminds me, I always prefer to write made up settings because I don’t want to do months of research trying to get historical accuracy to write about a real time period. And then on top of that, do it only to have somebody be like “actually, in this period, they hadn’t invented the doohickey yet, they only would have been able to use a doodad.”

Fantasy in general (RPG, Games, Shows), it is so satured with over the top stuff, that it just stopped being fantastical. You don’t find a normal King diminishing the amount of silver in silver coins to fund his war, only a beautiful and rich warrior-King. You don’t find a normal small medieval castle, just a 18th century chatteu. Every has magic, so it just loses the charm. Etc etc etc. And the worst thing for me, is how Eurocentric this genre is, and it’s not even the enterity of Europe, it is just Anglo-French centric. You never get arabic medieval stuff, chinese medieval stuff, or african medieval stories.

And then they love to portray the king and/or queen as magnanimous individuals who are doing their best with a tough situation against barbarian hordes and demons or some such enemy that is so horrific, it makes them look better by comparison. Need fantasy where the royals are trash and the people collectively organize a revolt against them, but that would probably be uncomfy for the capitalists and more uncomfy for places like Britain, where the monarchy still exists.

KOTOR 3 was never made and instead we got a single player game in MMO form (SWTOR) that was really badly managed for like 10+ years now and that made mockery of the main characters from KOTOR in how hamfisted its inclusion of them was. Part of what makes it grating is the storytelling in SWTOR is not bad exactly, but it’s clearly made worse by being part of an MTX and lootbox infested MMO that was cobbled together with bad management in its development and is riddled with bugs and poor infrastructure design. It’s clear that it was made by people who understand single player games best, but they made an MMO instead because reasons. Oh and on top of that they tried to emulate WoW in aesthetics and came out with something more cartoon looking than realistic, which just bothers me personally on visual preference.

A small thing, really, but it’s a good example of how capitalistic “all-the-profit”-chasing took something popular and turned it into a shallow cash cow. Similar arc with the Assassin’s Creed series, but much more gradual in that case. What started out as more of an adventure game with story as the primary focus eventually became “open world” repetitive gameplay with “let’s see if we can get you to spend in the store” as the focus and story in the back seat.

Reminds me of this sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

I could probably be a good parent, but I could also probably put that to the test by doing teaching or something, without the need to try to have kids first. Of course, this is assuming I found someone to have kids with in the first place. Anyway, I tend to have mixed feelings about it. It appeals to me on some level, but it would also be a huge commitment to take on and one I’m not currently well-equipped to handle materially. When I’m on dating apps, I tend to put like “open to kids” cause I don’t feel closed off to it like some do who don’t want children, period. But I could not say I’m actively pursuing the idea either. It also just feels a bit weird to think about as a decision I make at any point, since I’m not the one who would be bearing the child. I know it matters though insofar as I’m looking for someone who wants the same thing. But since I’m not sure what I want and some of it for me depends on things like financial stability, that makes it harder. If I lived in a socialist state where financial stability came relatively easily, as did community support systems, I’d probably be much more into the idea. But in the US? Sometimes I wonder how much can hold together before weeks become decades. So it’s hard to even think about a lifetime commitment like that.

Communism didn’t help the romanovs

“Won’t someone think of the royals” is not something I expected to read today. 🤣

Hopefully we will see improvements in architecture and alignment research long before LLMs reach a point of normality that is taken for granted. Right now, there seems to be a push to use LLMs as they are to cash in on investments, but they are far from a point for research to chill at.

Yeah LLMs are great at being confidently wrong. It’s a little terrifying sometimes how good they are at it, when considering people who don’t know they’re effectively BSing machines. Not to say the intentional design is for them to BS, but it’s sort of a side effect of the fact that they’re supposed to continue the conversation believably and they can’t possibly get everything right, even if everything had a universal right answer that was agreed on (which is often not the case with humans to begin with).

Similar to a con artist, it becomes more apparent how poor they tend to be on facts when they get into subjects the user knows really well. I’ve occasionally used an LLM to help jog my memory on something and then I cross-reference it with other sources, but trusting them alone as a sole source on something is always a bad idea.

As an aside I look with some amount of skepticism at those who propose that in the west we could at some enormous scale what China did at a very small scale to a small number of high ranking war criminals and a former emperor. Quite frankly the indoctrination runs far deeper here in the west than in China. Liberalism, capitalism have been here for hundreds of years. It’s interwoven with religious dogma, with cultural dogma that is entirely part of the liberal super-structure unlike in China whose culture still had strong communal non-individualist (if feudal/peasant) elements to it. You try and shame a Chinese person from that era with their ancestors and community responsibility and most feel it pretty deeply, you try and shame a westerner and they scoff at you because they, their parents, their parents’ parents were all raised in individualism, in a contempt for the community, in a fuck the world and treat others as stepping stones mentality, in an economic mode that directly rewarded and venerated this behavior.

As far as I can tell, I’m the only one who brought up that China example in this thread. I did not bring it up to say it will translate directly to every circumstance. The point was about effectiveness and how we think about the question. Whether we are thinking about what should happen to people sourced from a sense of anger at what they’ve done and hypotheticals deriving from that, or whether we are thinking about what is most effective for liberation. Until power is actually in communist hands in a place such as the US, we can only speculate at what will or won’t be effective for the indoctrination problem. Small scale stuff preceding that might provide some insight, but it isn’t going to be quite the same as communist hands on sources of information at a large scale; as opposed to the current reality of swimming against the current of status quo propaganda constantly and communists effectively being locked out from most mainstream means of reaching people, whether through more direct censoring or indirect through funding difficulties.

💯 The best LLM is still worse than wikipedia when it comes to getting factual information and that’s saying something, considering the “pretense of neutrality yet heavily biased” problems wikipedia has. At least with wikipedia, you can see what sources a page is using. With an LLM, as a user, you have no idea where it’s getting the ideas from.

Might be the wrong question. I recall sharing a bluesky thread on here some time ago, where a person talked about the history of the last emperor of China and how the communists reformed him (not while he was an emperor, after they had power). This isn’t to say reform will always work or is always the right choice, but in China’s case, it showed what the program was capable of in bringing people around.

In an actual war scenario where you don’t hold the power, it’s probably just going to be “peaceful protest” silliness to think you can reform those in power (though you can still impact footsoldiers in the war, maybe more so if they are conscripts). But once you do have the power, the landscape can change drastically in that way. Now you’re in charge of the propaganda engines and the normality of how the society functions.

Note that I’ve not said what’s moral because I’m not sure that’s really the important part here. The important part is the strategic success of liberation, decolonization, etc. Some moralizing will happen within that and some moralizing drives the motive to be in favor of those things. But ultimately, you have a need to succeed or else people suffer greatly. Whether everyone in the way of that truly deserves some kind of punishment in a moralistic sense is more about what is going to define the forces of liberation as a new society, and what is going to keep the power in their hands, than it is about what those individuals deserve.

There’s a trope in liberal storytelling that goes something like: Oppressed group takes power or tries to take power, but they also agonize over how they go about it because if they do it the “wrong way”, they will be “just as bad as their oppressor.” Sometimes they make a pivotal decision that is merciful and this is supposed to make them stand out as moral compared to who they’re fighting against. The problem with this is it ignores the conditions of oppression and simplifies it to discerning who is in the right based on individualistic morality, which gets into all the stuff about the “perfect victim” vs. not. It’s a worldview that believes abuse of power is fundamental to possessing power, like a morality meter in a video game, rather than a product of other, more complicated factors. And that the only way to guard against this is to dilute power as much as possible (which can then lead people to a kind of anarchism worldview). I forget why I brought up this point and I’m spacing out on finishing it out, so I’ll leave it here rather than try to hamfist a connection to the rest of what I said.

Edit: I think maybe the reason I thought of it was that how the new society acts on a moral level does matter, but it’s not all-defining and somehow flips the dynamic into them as oppressor if they cross an invisible threshold of “bad version of liberation” like how liberal storytelling does it. A colonized people liberating from colonizers doesn’t become colonizers if they are mean in how they liberate. It’s just not how these things are defined as systems.