• 17 Posts
  • 2.67K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 29th, 2023

help-circle
  • Documents can be replaced. They get lost, stolen, or destroyed all the time. You can explain to a clerk that your documents were stolen - technically the truth since they’re withheld from you without your consent - and if they press the issue you can explain that your abusive parents won’t give you access to them and you cannot ask them for access.

    Think about how you frame the information - don’t say “my parents have them and won’t let me access them” because that sounds potentially benign to a bored clerk just trying to get through the day and not really paying attention. Say, “they were stolen by my abusive parents who I no longer live with,” since that front-loads the problem and frames you as the victim, rather than as someone’s child. If you can have a friend with you when you go to get your documents that can help. You haven’t said how old you are that I saw, so I’m assuming you’re still a teen, but even if you’re a young adult this can still matter. Okay, I see you said you’re an adult.

    In an ideal world it shouldn’t make a difference, but the way you present what is technically the same information really does matter in getting bureaucrats to help you properly. They are people, and they don’t just follow rigid rules, they will be swayed by their emotions and learning to navigate that is a big part of getting the system to work for you.

    Also documents like that usually have serial numbers. That’s so if they are stolen, they can be registered as invalid, so the thief can’t use them to steal your identity. So whatever is in the safe can be made worthless if you get that done. Getting replacements should automatically invalidate the old ones but not every system works the same, so double-check that the old copies will be invalidated.

    It depends a little bit on where you are but in general I wouldn’t trust the cops to be helpful, unless you somehow know for a fact that they will help and not just return you to your family. I hate to say that but they fundamentally exist to protect property and a lot of them accept society’s logic that children are the property of their parents, and if you’re striking out on your own it’s important for you to learn that cops aren’t your frends. People like your dad & brother become cops specifically because it gives them power over others.

    It’s also likely your parents will simply lie and try to convince the cops that you should be back with them. Not to say they will be successful, but once you’re away from the home I would absolutely try to eliminate any contact you make after that. I don’t want to scare you too much, but also these people have a pattern. They usually know how to talk to cops, since they tend to talk the same language. Your parents likely keep the documents away from you in order to keep you controlled, so they will know that this is an opportunity for them to reel you back in. I wouldn’t give them the chance.

    I would look up teen shelters, and if you can find a group of people who you believe have your interests at heart then you can ask them for help. All of this will be a lot easier if you can find allies. If you can find any mutual aid organisations near you - “food not bombs” is a common name to look for - they may know other orgs willing & able to help, or they may just have people who are willing themselves.













  • You didn’t ask me to explain anything, you said I had the chance. You’re right, I could’ve kept trying, but you didn’t ask, and I don’t owe it to you.

    I have spent far too much energy in the past trying to explain to people who aren’t listening to bother with people who are functionally no different to a brick wall. It’s exhausting and pointless.

    And on a more simple, practical level, if you don’t tell me what you found confusing about what I said, then I don’t know what you need explained. As I said, the information is there if you want to investigate any of the terms you didn’t understand. If you want my help, you are going to need to express it.

    Which is why, when I detect this behaviour, like you showed when you baldly repeated:

    “Clickbate” is not a word.

    I always stop and ask the person to express literally any curiosity to understand. In my experience people who aren’t listening won’t do this. Like I said, it would cost you nothing to ask if you actually do want to know.

    You can express that you are curious to understand what I’m saying, or you can not. That is up to you, but it’s literally free to do, and it’s all I ask.

    Do what you want.









  • Yes, they try to prevent unwanted outputs with filters that prevent the LLM from seeing your input, not by teaching the LLM, because they can’t actually do that, it doesn’t truly learn.

    Hypotheticals and such work because the LLM has no capacity to understand context. The idea that “A is inside B”, on a conceptual level, is lost on them. So the idea that a recipe for napalm is the same whether it’s framed within a hypothetical or not is impossible for them to decode. To an LLM, just wrapping the same idea in a new context makes it seem like a different thing.

    They don’t have any capacity to self-censor, so telling them not to say something is like telling a human not to think of an elephant. It doesn’t work. You can tell a human not to speak about the elephant, because that’s guarded by our internal filter, but the LLM is more like our internal processes that operate before our filters go to work. There is no separation between “thought” and output (quotes around “thought” because they don’t actually think).

    Solving this problem I think means making a conscious agent, which means the people who make these things are incentivised to work towards something that might become conscious. People are already working on something called agentic AI which has an internal self-censor, and to my thinking that’s one of the steps towards a conscious model.