100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
So, in an unexpected instance of "the system works" would this imply that the frequent flyer hypochondriac who asks the doctor dozens of follow up questions, thereby turning a 15 min consultation into a 45 minute one, will actually end up paying (either directly, or via their insurer) more?
Hospitals have entire departments whose job it is to comb through notes.
Fuck. That. Noise. So, an army of functionaries use their best judgement to try to translate a doctor's notes into one or more of a series of codes to reconstruct the exact service provided? I thought lawyers billing me in 15 minute increments was bullshit. After the fact reconstruction of what happened layered with overly hierarchical categorization is a new level of theft.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
Given that presurgery mental health is surely part of the institution’s concern
Tangent here.
Not only no, but fuck no. To this.
The quick little slip of "mental health" here is an exemplar of how insidious current perspectives are on the topic.
When (normie) people hear the term "mental health" they automatically connect it to images of depression, bipolar, maybe even schizorphrenia, along with PTSD etc. A "mental health crisis" might even conjure desperate scenes of attempted suicide or some full blown panic attack that necessitates the men in white coats arriving.
Whatever the specific circumstance, we're dealing with a disorder of some kind. Perhaps mood related, perhaps cognitively related, perhaps something more broadly endocrine (note: there are some cases of neurological issues, but I always roll my eyes when people use the term "brain chemistry" as it is both horribly imprecise and, more to the point, they're usually talking about the endocrine system as opposed to a brain (as in the grey matter, not the concept of mind) specific neurological problem")
These things are called disorders because they represent an unexpected and maladaptive response to normal life circumstances. Depression; "I have a good job, an active social life, stay in shape, and don't abuse any substances. I'm horribly sad all of the time. What do?", Bipolar disorder: "I have a good job, an active social life, stay in shape, and don't abuse any substances. But these mood swings are causing me to drink, miss work, not go to the gym, and alienate myself from people. What do?", Schizophrenia: "The Jew Aliens keep reading my brainwaves without my permission. What do?" (Okay, I had fun with that last one).
What the NYT author describes is categorically not a "mental health" issue. Getting an unexpected and alarming piece of mail should cause some level of distress. If you're totally incapable of dealing with that distress, my first response would be to question general maturity and life capability. A second would be to look at your specific life circumstances at the time to see if there's a charitable reason why you might be in a bad position to deal with such an occurrence. Only much, much later would I start to think, "Well, maybe this guy has an awful mental health disorder which makes it hard for him to deal with ... things happening and mail."
"Mental health" is not a species wide mission to prevent bad feelings from happening. Especially when the given circumstances would naturally provoke negative feelings. But this is yet another wonderful biproduct of the culture war; bad feelings have become pathologized as a) horribly disturbing and never to be expected b) worthy of full and unquestioning accommodation by ALL others and c) probably both someone else's fault and responsibility to deal with.
The author slips all of this in, easy as you please, by asserting that of course his health care provider obviously considers "mental health" to be as high a priority as sterile operating room conditions and well trained staff.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
I appreciate your framing, sincerely.
What's your take on the other abrahamic "hard" religious groups; Rad Trad catholics / Orthodox "ortho-Bros", and actual zionist and/or messianic Jews?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
5d ago
I mean, reliability level of "some dude on the internet" but, I can tell you I saw a mountain lion about 20 feet from me hiking in Central VA last year. It was slinking up a not-human-navigable trail on a hillside, stopped, looked at me. I looked at it. It walked away.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
7d ago
hose collaborations have laid the groundwork for both theoretical breakthroughs and practical technologies. My own research at IPAM, for instance, helped lead to the algorithms that now cut MRI scan times by a factor of up to 10.
This is indirectly related to the main culture war topics.
I despise when theoretical or "pure research" academics try to launder their work as being "practical." Even before I get into the (quick) research I did, let's parse out that last sentence.
My research ... helped ... lead to ...
How much did it help? Was it the breakthrough needed to make the tech work? Was it just a novel approach to something that already had a solution? Did the person / organization who made the MRI tech just read one of your papers?
Algorithms
Dude.
cut MRI scan times by a factor of up to 10
What was the baseline time? I believe most MRIs are between 30 - 60 minutes. I don't think they were ever 300 - 600 minutes. "Up to" means it could also be lower. Is this shaving off 15 minutes?
The quick googling I did produced these two items:
A quick patent search - Terry Tao has four, which are all versions of each other
"peOplE aRe LITeraLly DyiNG!" is what we're supposed to feel when we read Terry Tao's sob story. But they aren't.
I can more than appreciate when gigabrained pure mathematicians and physicists honestly tell us "Yeah, we're working on this bleeding edge theoretical stuff. It might unlock the secrets of the universe, but, it's not actually going to be useful day-to-day for ... a while ... or maybe ever."
But I can't appreciate when the same people (let alone the humanities professors) try to wrap themself in the flag (diploma?) and cry out that they are the only reason we aren't all living in pit toilets and dying of diphtheria.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8d ago
A couple things;
The natural assumption should be that they're making good margins on inference and all the losses are due to research/training, fixed costs, wages, capital investment.
This is a fun way to say "If you don't count up all my costs, my company is totally making money." Secondarily, I don't know why you would call this a "natural" assumption. Why would I naturally assume that they are making money on inference? More to the point, however, it's not that they need a decent or even good margin on inference, it's that they need wildly good margins on inference if they believe they'll never be able to cut the other fixed and variable costs. You say "they aren't selling $200 worth of inference for $20" I say "Are they selling $2 of inference for $20"?
Why would a venture capitalist, who's whole livelihood and fortune depends on prudent investment, hand money to Anthropic or OpenAI so they can just hand that money to NVIDIA and me, the customer?
Because this is literally post 2000s venture capital strategy. You find product-market fit, and then rush to semi-monopolize (totally legal, of course) a nice market using VC dollars to speed that growth. Not only do VCs not care if you burn cash, they want you to because it means there's still more market out there. This only stops once you hit real scale and the market is more or less saturated. Then, real unit economics and things like total customer value and cost of acquisition come into play. This is often when the MBAs come in and you start to see cost reductions - no more team happy hours at that trendy rooftop bar.
This dynamic has been dialed up to 1,000 in the AI wars; everyone thinks this could be a winner-take-all game or, at the very least, a power low distribution. If the forecast total market is well over $1 trillion, then VCs who give you literally 10s of billions of dollars are still making a positive EV bet. This is how these people think. Burning money in the present is, again, not only okay - but the preferred strategy.
Anthropic is providing its services for free to the US govt.
No, they are not. They are getting paid to do it because it is illegal to provide professional services to the government without compensation. Their federal margins are probably worse than commercial - this is always the case because of federal procurement law - but their costs are also almost certainly being fully covered. Look into "cost plus" contracting for more insight.
What evidence points in this direction of ultra-benign, pro-consumer capitalism with 10x subsidies? It seems like a pure myth to me. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
See my second point above. This is the VC playbook. Uber didn't turn a profit for ever. Amazon's retail business didn't for over 20 years and now still operates with thin margins.
I don't fully buy into the "VCs are lizard people who eat babies" reddit style rhetoric. Mostly, I think they're essentially trust fund kinds who like to gamble but want to dress it up as "inNovATIon!" But one thing is for sure - VCs aren't interested in building long term sustainable businesses. It's a game of passing the bag and praying for exits (that's literally the handle of a twitter parody account). Your goal is to make sure the startup you invested in has a higher valuation in the next round. If that happens, you can mark your book up. The actual returns come when they get acquired, you sell secondaries, or they go public ... but it all follows the train of "price go up" from funding round to funding round.
What makes a price? A buyer. That's it. All you need is for another investment firm (really, a group of them) to buy into a story that your Uber For Cats play is actually worth more now then when you invested. You don't care beyond that. Margins fucked? Whatever. Even if you literally invested in a cult, or turned your blind eye to a magic box fake product, as long as there is a buyer, it's all fine.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8d ago
look at the apocalypse that was Microsoft's Skype.
I don't know any of the details on what went down with management. Can you share? I, of course, did see how a once "category leading" product turned into an unusable hunk of garbage.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
Yes.
Which is why the Big AI companies are looking to tightly couple with existing enterprise SaaS and/or consumer hardware as fast as possible. And I'm reasonably sure that the large hardware companies may want to aid them. NVIDIA keeps making noise about "AI first" hardware at, I think, a consumer level.
They really do want a version of Sky Net.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
Nothing you've said is wrong, it just reflects a different value prioritization and worldview.
When people use the phrase "work to make someone else richer", I very much enjoy YesChad.jpeg'ing that hard. I believe in a life of service. I want to do things in life that make other people better off. In a more economic yet abstract sense, I want to create more value and wealth than I consume.
I can hear @Sloot laughing as he pictures me as a doe-eyed whippersnapper who actually feels good about making the Boss more money. Well, maybe? What if the boss is smarter than me and can better allocate the resources of the company? What if I know the boss pretty well and also think he or she has a good set of moral principles as well?
One of the pitfalls of modern individualism is the idea that if you're "serving" or "working for" anyone else in a hierarchical arrangement, you're automatically being exploited. I can tell you for a fact that there are still thousands of Marines who loved the hell out of serving under General Mattis. Elon Musk's reality distortion field is so strong that he has ex employees on record stating he was pretty much abusive - and they were proud to take it! These are probably bad examples to bring up to defend my case, but my point remains.
Chad H1B Billable Hour-Generation, with his excellent ability to game the system will enjoy skating ahead while everyone else around him - fuck 'em - is being a naieve little wagecuck. But Chad H1B is also importing the, ahem, cultural peculiarities that don't look so good for the West when extrapolated across all of society (the UK and Canada would like to have a word in the alley -- which is where they spend most of their nights now).
Free riding is a problem and the answer isn't to applaud it.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
I understand your experience. There is something strange about certain versions H1B culture - zero pride in work, zero interest in getting something done in a final in production sense. It's like the only goal is just to generate more work - good, bad, repetitive, doesn't matter - so that the billable hours stay strong.
I just can't imagine the mentality of this. Zero personal pride, zero interest in personal development, hyper autist levels of emotional disinterest in other people.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
There are two companion articles of late that I'd add to comment on this.
This one is pretty short and to the point. LLMs, without any companion data management component, are prediction machines. They predict the next n-number of tokens based on the preceding (input) tokens. The context window functions like a very rough analog to a "memory" but it's really better to compare it to priors or biases in the bayesian sense. (This is why you can gradually prompt an LLM into and out of rabbit holes). Crucially, LLMs don't have nor hold an idea of state. They don't have a mental model of anything because they don't have a mental anything (re-read that twice, slowly).
In terms of corporate adoption, companies are seeing that once you get into complex, multi-stage tasks, especially those that might involve multiple teams working together, LLMs break down in hilarious ways. Software devs have been seeing this for months (years?). An LLM can make nice little toy python class or method pretty easily, but when you're getting into complex full stack development, all sorts of failure modes pop up (the best is when it nukes its own tests to make everything pass.)
"Complexity is the enemy" may be a cliche but it remains true. For any company above a certain size, any investment has to answer the question "will this reduce or increase complexity?" The answer may not need to be "reduce." There could be a tradeoff there that actually results in more revenue / reduced cost. But still, the question will come up. With LLMs, the answer, right now, is 100% "increase." Again, that's not a show stopper, but it makes the bar for actually going through with the investment higher. And the returns just aren't there at scale. From friends at large corporations in the middle of this, their anec-data is all the same "we realized pretty early that we'd have to build a whole new team of 'LLM watchers' for at least the first version of the rollout. We didn't want to hire and manage all of that."
TLDR for this one: for LLM providers to actually break even, it might cost $2k/month per user.
There's room to disagree with that figure, but even the pro version of the big models that cost $200+ per month are probably being heavily subsidized through burning VC cash. A hackernews comment framed it well - "$24k / yr is 20% of a $120k / yr salary. Do we think that every engineer using LLMs for coding is seeing a 20% overall productivity boost?"
Survey says no (Note: there are more than a few "AI makes devs worse" research papers floating around right now. I haven't fully developed my own evaluation of them - I think a few conflate things - but the early data, such as it is, paints a grim picture)
I'm a believer in LLMs to be a transformational technology, but I think our first attempt with them - as a society - is going to be kind of a wet fart. Neither "spacing faring giga-civilizaiton" nor "paperclips ate my robot girlfriend." Two topical predictions are 1) One of the Big AI companies is going to go to zero. 2) A Fortune 100 company is going to go nearly bankrupt because of negligent use of AI, but not in a spectacular "it sent all of our money to china" way ... it'll be about 1 - 2 years slow creep of fucked up internal reporting and management before, all of a sudden, "we've entered a death spiral of declining revenue and rising costs."
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
9d ago
A fun thought experiment article, but it has some flaws.
This line especially sent me to WTF-istan:
In its most extreme form, capitalism behaves like a collectivist hive.
That's a category error (social vs economic system) wrapped in a demonstrably false statement about capitalism. It's assertions like these that make me "smh" about crypto bros' economic literacy.
I also think there's a misunderstand of macro level data in the article. Many things can be true at once:
- Returns are following more of a power law, especially in tech
- Real wealth per capita has risen substantially post WW2
But but but "wealth inequality" one might counter. The US has this horrible Gini coefficient. Well, let's look at the Top 10 most equitable income countries on earth based on the Gini:
- Kyrgyzstan 26.4 2022 est.
- United Arab Emirates 26.4 2018 est.
- Moldova 25.9 2022 est.
- Czechia 25.9 2022 est.
- Netherlands 25.7 2021 est.
- Ukraine 25.6 2020 est.
- India 25.5 2022 est.
- Belarus 24.4 2020 est.
- Slovenia 24.3 2022 est.
- Slovakia 24.1 2022 est.
Are we really going to pretend that any of those countries - The Netherlands included! - have social, economic, and political conditions that represent a better life or life possibilities than the United States?
Because I am a fan of steelmanning, I'll point out this post - today! - from Marginal Revolution which has a lot to say about status games in wealth societies.
The conclusions are pretty interesting and heterodox. But there's an easy lesson to draw at the meta level; don't play status games. Make money in order to support yourself and your family, save for the future, and then to pursue things you generally enjoy. If you're making money to buy status, you're playing a negative geometric mean game (i.e. from the article linked in the post I am replying to) and you're almost certainly going to "lose" over the long term - or hit the jackpot and be someone rather famous (which is a loss in its own right if you ask me).
The more I think about it, the more I think the "the economy isn't working" arguments that are in vogue on both sides of the political spectrum today are category errors that conflate a lot of modern anti-social habits with a mysterious yet central "flaw" in capitalism. Capitalism is a means of efficiently trading resources to order to generate economic growth. Imperfect as it may be, it's the best thing we've come up with a species. But capitalism will not - and has no role in - making you feel good about yourself in society. That's a far trickier situation that involved politics, community, and personal values systems.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
In the same way, as a true liberal, I feel it is, all else being equal, axiomatically, fairly wrong to prevent people from doing whatever the hell they want
I want to sincerely thank you for creating such a succinct illustration of why liberalism always fails within its own framework.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
Based comment of the week. I can only yeschad.jpeg so hard to this.
I remember having a conversation once at a party where I voiced my interest in what it would be like to date someone and intentionally remain celibate until marriage. The other party, a Thoroughly Modern Woman, immediately voiced the objection "But what if they're bad at sex?!"
I respond by telling her to think it through. In my hypothetical, the dating is the same as it is now, just no sex. We find each other attractive, we share important experiences, we trust one another, we integrate into each other's family life etc. If we assume all of that exists (which we have to, because, in this hypothetical, we're getting married) ... then how in the hell could the sex be bad?
"Here's this person who I find physically attractive, deeply care fore, have spent x months or years with, and have thought about as a long term partner for much of that time .... oh, fuck, she doesn't immediately know how to swivel her hips. Cancel it, cancel the whole damn thing."
It's such a laughable thought to genuinely worry that, on a wedding night, one or both partners is confronted with the horror - the absolute horror - that the other party isn't particularly gifted and one of life's most insanely pleasurable activities.
But that's what modernism has brought us. "He/she has gotta fuck good" is on the same checklist as "trustworthy" and "reliable"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
Why not frame it like cigarette smoking?
I don't think people look down on people on a deeply moral level for smoking nowadays, but it's definitely at the level of "Yo, how can you be so stupid? Those cause cancer. And we've know that for years"
I won't judge a woman for going through a ho phase, but I'll shake my head and think "Any smart and respectable man is going to find a subtle way to filter you out. And we've know that for years."
I would also apply this exact same logic in reverse to a man. You spent your 20s and 30s dogging chicks and being a cad / skeezer? Well, in your 40s, any worthwhile woman is going to find a way to filter you out as well.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
Boats boosts it by approximately four billion.
Owning a boat is financial masochism. I've never done it because literally every blog on the planet - including super bro boat blogs - categorically informs you that it's a horrible idea. Yes, yes, "if it's a true passion" -- but, if it is, then you'll deal with the logistics of renting or chartering.
But got-damn to the bitches love a boat. My first experience with this was doing a half day rental of a pontoon boat on a B-Tier lake in greater Appalachia. This was not Miami, Catalina Island, Mykonos, what have you. This was a hot-ass august day on a "lake" that was made when Uncle Sam dammed a river 80 years ago.
The bikinis were on only until they were off. Sound track of Sports Illustrated Photo Shoot giggles. As I was the guy who decided to rent the boat and then drive it, my girlfriend was the ring leader and, although I didn't pursue it, I kind of felt like she was listing threesome on the menu.
Although I now see it for the moral sugar-high-and-crash that it was, and would never orchestrate a similar scenario, I cannot lie and say the memory isn't a warm one.
I have zero inclination to buy a boat, but when I drive past a marina in the summer in some of these mountain lakes, I smile, turn up the Kenny Chesney, and go back.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
You fantasize about castrating James because you are not allowed to fantasize about locking up the girl you dated.
Style and phrasing is straight out of The Last Psychiatrist and Sadly, Porn.
Well done.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
Here's my prognostication:
A disproportionate number of western women enter their 40s and 50s single, never married, and childless. It doesn't matter if they "realize" they want a family or not. Instead, the tyranny of aging means they will simply get less male attention as time goes on. Gracefully accepting defeat isn't something many humans do, so they will rebel in their own way. Not against men in some sort of wide scale "Go Girlboss!" moment. Instead, they will attack the easiest to spot targets with the lowest possibility of retaliation; young women.
The great reckoning will thus be these spinsters attempting to shame or otherwise emotionally blackmail these younger women not into avoiding the older generations mistakes (see: failure to accept defeat) but into agreeing with the spinsters ahead of schedule. Recommended Slogan: "The only way to be a feminist in 2035 is to admit that all men are evil. Defund the patriarchy!"
But young women themselves will largely see this for the spite fueled grift that it is and veer away from anything that even resembles this. They'll continue to be pretty and young and go on dates, but perhaps not put out as much, and perhaps seek the counsel of trusted male friends on their potential mates. Play this tape forward enough and all of a sudden the "cool girl" thing to do is to take things slow, pair bond hard, and get married early and have babies.
My primary support for this prediction is that it's already happening. Gen Z women, from the survey's I have seen, are super divided between "all men are evil" levels of feminism and "lol, I just want to be a mom" levels of trad. There isn't much of a middle ground. I've also seen some millenial women, after having become moms, hit the hard defect button out of the sisterhood. My anec-data of note was seeing a FAANG director-of-something-made-up leave that $500k / yr job to be a SAHM after taking an extended maternity leave and changing her mind to "whoooaaa babies are way better than spreadsheets."
In business, there's always a lot of discussion about the unit economics of company. Simply put, does selling one unit of your product to a customer cost more than you're selling it for? In startup land, the answer to this question can be "yes" for some amount of time. In a high growth setting, paying to buy up market share can be a viable strategy. But, eventually, the answer has to be "no." If it isn't, you're running a structurally negative return and it's just a matter of time and debt before the company dies.
I see failing ideologies like third wave feminism in this regard. You can have whatever worldview you want, but if having and professing that worldview leads to a lifestyle that cannot support itself in the long term, eventually that worldview dies out. Freezing eggs, looking for sperm donors, and then being a single mother is a far far higher risk, lower return, more expensive, and more complicated strategy than "get married. have kids" You can try to find some sort of grey middle ground, which has been the entire experiment since, roughly, the late 1990s / early 2000s, but I think the experiment has shown that middle ground is, at best, a thin isthmus rather than a lush and wide peninsula (geography metaphors for the win).
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
Eh, the case for sexual traditionalism is pretty strong.
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No one has every died from being too horny. If this were the case, men would have an expected and maximum lifespan of 16 years.
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Men commit the overwhelming majority of murders and violence crime. The are, generally, three broad reasons for this; money/currency (including drugs), respect or prestige, and access or exclusive access to women.
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The near human universal antipathy towards prostitution is largely based in concerns for a) health and b) preventing the breakup of families due to infidelity. I know it may come as a shock, but our hundreds of millions of illiterate agricultural ancestors weren't actually involved in a highly ideological effort to "own women's bodies and sexual agency" -- they didn't want creepy-crawlies in their pants, and also knew that Uncle Nimrod was one seriously horny dude.
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Won't pay it much attention here but; pregnancy and abortion.
Simply put, sexual hyper-liberalization is obviously high risk for society. Risk, even when high, isn't inherently bad, but one then has to weigh it against the other side of the equation; reward.
And what is the real reward for sexual liberalization? I mean this genuinely as a question, not a rhetorical device. The most common responses I have heard or seen fall into a bucket of fuzzy, highly emotional self-justifications; "People should be able to express themselves however they want" , "sexual agency is a necessary requirement for personal liberty" (I don't know what that means) , "people have a right to love whoever they want to love." None of this is very concrete and side steps the entire risk-reward framework.
I also haven't seen much in the way of good faith or realistic discussions of the downsides of a return to sexual traditionalism. The Handmaids Tale LARPing is, hilariously, just a publicly accessible BDSM fantasy. Sexual traditionalism wouldn't mean women couldn't vote or drive or have "real jobs" (read: high status wordcel jobs). I can see slut shaming becoming a little more prevalent but my thought there is that it still absolutely exists, but is just done in layers-upon-layers of backhanded compliments and covert communication styles instead of out in the open.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
It's another trope / basic lore in RedPill forums that your "blue haired, heavily tatted, super pierced" feminist is probably into pretty rough sex / degradation / submissive kink.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
24d ago
This reminded me of something that is not quite on topic, but close enough.
Towards the end of summer 2018, I broke up with my girlfriend. Given my age and maturity at the time, I, of course, took care of the most important things first; I hid all of our photos that we had posted together on Facebook.
Well, not actually all of them. All of the one's that popped up on my "wall" at the time (I actually deleted Facebook for good about a year later, so my appreciation for both the terminology and function of the site is now out of date. Apologies if what I detail here isn't how it works anymore). These were typical couples photos; lots of couple-selfies of us eating things or being in places or even eating things in places.
As with any millennial breakup, however, I didn't actually unblock or unfriend my ex. No, no. You see, there is etiquette to the Facebook break-up. Although there can be a a period of mutual blocking, you never hard delete one another. But you also never interact with one another. You simply cyber-stalk one another to see who rebounds first.
Being a career technology dude, however, I noticed something interesting. Within just one or two days of my totally-not-crying deletion of the various wall photos, I became aware that my ex and her friends were no longer getting prioritized in my newsfeed. This was a stark contrast to just a month before where every damn day my newsfeed was filled with whatever new photos she had posted that day along, often, with the goings on of her friends (whom I had friended on facebook when we began dating). Quite the abrupt shift! I double checked to see if anyone hand blocked anyone else. Nope. Should I navigate to any of these profiles directly, I could still click on stuff without any new limitations (pro tip: don't get caught liking a photo from six years ago).
The realization didn't take long to formulate in my head. It seems to me that Facebook detected the pattern of "relationship status change followed by rapid hiding / deletion of photos only featuring two people ... those previously in a relationship" and then quickly, and easily, followed the random forest down to "breakup protocol." To help spare my feelings, it began to algorithmic shadow-censor the new things my ex and her friend's were doing (why the friends? Probably just in case my ex popped up in their photos. A likely outcome).
But then I realized something else that really gave me an "oh shit" moment (and, happily enough, made me forget about my ex). Facebook must have hundreds of these kind of behavioral decision trees. Breakups, divorces, graduations, new births, deaths in the family ..... deaths in the family .... wait, what kind of deaths? old age, cancer, car accident .... suicide.
It then became apparent to be that Facebook likely has a fairly reliable (though probabilistic) means of identifying social media posts that evidence suicidal ideation. Then, thinking back on my own situation, I wondered if there was some sort of correlation between breakups and suicidal ideation (it's my understanding that, yes, there generally is. I think job loss is the other big one.)
So, in 2018, instead of doing normal break up related stuff, I'm trying to piece together how accurately fascebook can predict suicide, or drug overdose, or alcoholism, or intent to harm others (I stumbled across a bunch of articles about how cops would try to find ways to infiltrate private instagram feeds because, apparently, gangs would literally announce their intended targets that way).
And this is the bigger conundrum to me than just the collection of data. If the data available to a company could be used to make these reliable behavioral profiles and, in fact, probably is. Then, to what extent do we want them to take preventative measures for all of these potentially horrible outcomes? But think about what that is -- it's corporate sponsored Minority Report. Hell-the-fuck-no! The level of dystopia that comes with "Hi, we're the cops, facebook told us to visit you" is off the charts.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
28d ago
That's a pretty good piece of evidence for the hypothesis that Glock saw/sees HK as their primary in-market rival, whereas SIG may have been viewed as a "discount supplier", or just a non-direct competitor. Firms want to win battles they view as being "on their turf." Ford doesn't care if their small car sells less than Toyota or Honda. They absolutely care if the F-150 is losing to Chevy.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
28d ago
There's something biblical about the idea that the men who build homes (and other buildings) are the same men society has determined aren't quite worthy of being a full part of society.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
28d ago
After years of examination and multiple lawsuits (that are worth examination on their own),
Legally protesting a contract is an incredibly common corporate strategy for the mega contracts. Oracle and Microsoft did this several years ago when Amazon won what was then called the "JEDI" contract for cloud computing at the Department of Defense.
I'm not an expert in the legaleese, but I've seen enough of them happen. From what I understand, the bar to pass an initial review for a protest is pretty low. Once that's passed, the process drags on for at least months and often years. Nobody really cares about who wins or loses. What this forces is for the department or agency who initially offered the contract to suspend or cancel it, and then re-issue another competitive RFP for the exact same services, but under a different contract name.
This lets the losers of the original contract re-try their bid. Maybe the drop prices, maybe the try a different technical approach, whatever. The whole point is that some contracts are so existentially important that various firms will go to whatever lengths it takes just to 'stay in the fight' - even after they've, technically lost.
This is one reason, although nearly most important one, why Federal acquisition and procurement is such a shit show. The process has completely overtaken the product / outcome and so firms that live on Federal contracts have become masters of the process, selling horrible products.
That's my point, and that's why I caveated my post with "Tangent"
Nothing. It is, in fact, a reasonable ask. It's not a mental health question. "Patient comfort" sure, "procedural professionalism" whatever.
I don't think it was your intention, but please try to avoid conflating the points I'm making.
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