Porn, Dreams, Reading, and Ex-Lovers
Sunday Shorts (25W10): 20250309
Hahahahaha, you can learn about this blog from this AI-generated podcast.1 I fed NotebookLM all of my Sunday Shorts since mid-December 2024. I take zero responsibility for its outputs.
Things I’ve consumed
I wouldn’t want to be a school principal, but I generally commend the ironic irreverence of teenagers. I just hope they don’t end up in jail like Sam Bankman-Fried. On the topic of crimes, I’ve been reading about the Zizians on mainstream media, so I asked for primary sources from my most Rationalist (Rat) friend, who’s a true Effective Altruist dinosaur, and he pointed me to this profile about Ziz and this forum of the Rats being Rats. By the way, I always find animal communication so fascinating. Speaking of foreign communication, I surprisingly enjoyed Ezra Klein’s coverage of Trump’s foreign policy. But don’t ask me about it, because I am generally confused about the politics in the White House at the moment. Anyway, I’ll end this section on a better note of happy International Women’s Day…?
Things I did
Drugs.
Lucy Goosey (Guo-sey?)
So, what does it mean if you engaged in something illegal on a platform, like disseminating child pornography of yourself if you were a 17-year old girl, then you sued the platform for the crimes you committed?
Legally, I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer.
What I do know is that on your eighteenth birthday, your brain undergoes a stage of maturation that gives you a new ability to say, “No, I’m not posting nudes on the Internet,” that you couldn’t say the day before. Obviously not.2
Well, this exact situation is apparently the nightmare of Lucy Guo, the co-founder of Scale AI and the current CEO of a social media platform called Passes, who is named in a class-action lawsuit for allowing child porn on Passes. There’s lots to unpack here and sides wanting company. I am on the side of the truth, which I do not know. While I suspect pictures of “underboob+thong” for $69 are nowhere near as profitable as the “recovered damages and other forms of relief”3 under Florida Statutes Section §847.01357, many Class members probably unfortunately did “suffer serious harm, including physical, psychological, financial and reputational harm.” Lawyers and informed personnel can litigate the particulars of this case.
I am mainly concerned about the legal protections of any content creator. Well, of any person. What are the consequences of the Defendant if the Plaintiff had, in fact, been coerced or manipulated to create lewd content – except she was over eighteen? On the other hand, what are the protections for the Defendant if the Plaintiff were legally and “willingly” posted nudes, as in on OnlyFans, but falsely accused the platform of wrongdoing? And how should we distinguish between “legal” and “moral” boundaries, especially in the name of free will? Consider the thought experiment of The Pig that Wants to be Eaten, or perhaps the real case of the man who wanted to be eaten. What is the right thing to do?
Again, I don’t know.
What I do know is that if you are purely motivated by money, your best bet is to enter the porn industry. OnlyFans reports a revenue per employee of $30 million, which is almost fifteen times that of Apple. Money exists in porn and addictions. (And crypto. Tether supposedly reports a profit per employee of $124 million.) But greed makes for ugly4 stories. Enron, the Madoff investment scandal, FTX, or Martin Shkreli, to name a few. Famous cases aside, I’ve heard some nasty divorce litigations, some from my friends, and some from Bryan Johnson5. I find it all very sad, especially how love can turn into manipulation.
And it goes beyond money. External motivations such as status, including power and fame, can be equally as detrimental. While these motivations are normal6, in my ideal world, success is driven primarily by intrinsic values. We don’t live in an ideal world, but I think strong intrinsic motivations can guide you away from dubious situations. Like, if you’re able to bribe someone to do something, maybe you should expect that they’re able to be bribed to do the opposite for even more money?
I don’t know.
What I do know is that the best I can do is to lead with good intentions and make smart choices given my limited information at the time.
Best use cases of ChatGPT
I drafted this before I saw Andrej Karpathy’s video on how he uses LLMs, which you should watch if you’re not familiar with LLMs because he does a great job with explaining them. I think he’s a clear and methodical communicator, and his voice is also quite soothing.
Anyway, here’s a meta comment on the Lucy Guo story above.
I want to verify that the information I wish to convey is communicated as accurately and precisely to the widest audience possible. To do so, I’ve been interrogating various LLMs to summarize my writing and state my viewpoints, cross-examine my arguments, and so on. I view language models as an aggregation of human thought after all.
While I was writing, I asked several friends and ChatGPT to read the beginning of the piece and summarize my main points. I am generally centrist, so I was going for a neutral yet inquisitive stance. Interestingly, ChatGPT gave me the answer I intended, but every friend had a different interpretation of what I’d written. Perhaps I unintentionally use dog whistles7, but it reminded me that human reading comprehension consists of context projections that LLMs currently lack. For better and for worse.
Speaking of using LLMs, I played with AI coding agents Lovable8 and Cursor9 this weekend, courtesy of the OxAI Hackathon. The retrospective: the current state of LLMs is amazing, but even the simplest tasks require excessive prompting, and I wouldn’t trust AI outputs without verifying its code.
You can now sign up for the waitlist at elevensocial.club 😊
On writing about ex-lovers
I’m not quite Taylor Swift, but my writing is definitely inspired by my ex-lovers. Many of you have asked me what I think the people I’ve dated might feel about my Substack. I don’t know. I try to be judicious about any information I say – online and offline. I’m generally friends (or at least friendly) with my exes of sorts, so I’ll voluntarily share my blog, and they seem fine with it. For others, I imagine my writing could be unnecessarily painful, because I sometimes speak in inside jokes. And because I’m a bad writer. Just kidding. I actually don’t think they read my blog, although I still do my best to ensure that my writing is comfortable for anyone mentioned.
Dreams
I’ve always had vivid dreams, each of which feels weeks or months long, and I’ve tallied over “fifty years” of recollected dream life. Dreams push me to feel – and subsequently do – things I wouldn’t otherwise, like make YouTube videos. They come in various forms, from the type of narrative (first or third) to the protagonist (I’m not always the protagonist, and I don’t always exist in my dreams) to the amount of realism (they’re almost always surreal). I view them not as an interpretation of my emotions but rather an exploration of my thoughts. They often surprise me. But as interesting as my dreams are, they become quite intrusive when I repeatedly dream about people and things I shouldn’t think about. C’est la vie?
Editor’s outro: I do take responsibility for the clickbait title10. My apologies!
Remember, “AI can make mistakes. Check important info.”
By the way, I think this is a serious issue. I need to find the actual source, but supposedly lots of unnecessary deaths in medicine are caused by a hard classification threshold.
~$15 million
But Netflix worthy!
To be clear, I’m not siding with anyone here. (I don’t know his fiancée’s perspective. ) Also, I frankly don’t care. My point is that the litigation is at least in part motivated by money, and it sounds unnecessarily messy.
I mean, I’d like to see myself on the cover of Forbes Magazine.
It’s defined by Merriam-Webster as “a coded message communicated through words or phrases commonly understood by a particular group of people, but not by others.”
It’s decent for frontend web development. I’d use it as a first-round pass to get something deployed on Vercel before moving to Cursor or manual editing.
I see why people love it. It has a well-designed UI/UX, works for frontend and backend, and is a 10x time saver for API documentation. It works quite beautifully.
And thank you to the person who commented, mostly for letting me mess up your sleep schedule. Hopefully my unmatched perspicacity coupled with sheer indefatigability makes up for it.