100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
No bio...
User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
as well as many hours into Factorio.
Serious take: This makes you a better developer.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
See: Austrlian men sheds.
The attempt was earnest, but the fact that it's now a charitable organization so that it can take government money means it's been backdoored into female-centric Statism. Oh well.
Building a shed with your buddies is still a great idea. Just don't get the government's permission to "do it correctly"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
like drug addicted alcoholic bums but not as sympathetic.
It's funny, but, some of the greatest authors of all time realized this way before computers, let alone AI. Bukowski was notorious for more or less believing that to be a true artist, you had to be a sort of social vagabond. Any attempt at real genteelness would pollute the pure art. Spengler wrote The Decline of the West in poverty and Eric Hoffer lived in a one room apartment near Chinatown, San Francisco, for decades.
If we hit vertical takeoff and the knee jerk response is a kind of poverty level AGI, we could maybe get a renaissance of true art and philosophy. That or sex robots
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
I do not believe that LLMs can adequately program, but ultimately it won't matter what I think.
I don't think this claim has much shelf life left <-- this is a link.
It (AI) built a C compiler.
I am more than happy to list the caveats;
- there was a lot of upfront context development
- There's a rigorous test library for what "success" looks like for this particular projet
- Anthropic and independent evaluators admit it is not as performant as gcc.
But, still, it wrote a freaking c compiler! This is a programming task that is out of the reach of 90% of engineers over their entire career. It did it for about $20k (and the cost of labor to write the context) in two weeks.
I wrote an article last week about how even I think that LLMs aren't ready to refactor big legacy code bases. The recent brouhaha over Clawdbot / Moltbook also show how dangerous these things can be in the hands of people who don't know / don't care about basic security management.
But the generalized claim that "ai can't write code" is just this side of "embarrassingly false." When you then consider the pace of progress, it really seems like cope. Two years ago, LLMs would make basic syntax errors in print statements. Today, they can write fully functional programs - albeit probably bloated and often security unacceptable - with ~30 minutes of prompting and system design blueprint work.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
That was my point.
The internet means whatever your career specialization is is not longer geographically bounded.
This means we can create communities of varied occupations / occupational classes where the focus and emphasis is on the strength of that community.
Instead, as @atelier's parent comment points out, we self-segregate into enclaves of rough career equivalence; suburbs full of striver type PMC jobs, wealthy neighborhoods full of lawyers / bankers / executive types.
To be fair, this is a complex system - housing costs and class based behavioral patterns also matter. The point is that the global flexibility that the internet should've allowed got inverted so that being in tech and not living in SF/NYC/Boston and a handful of other places means you work in tech but aren't in the right tech circles.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
I hadn't seen that. The large bodega facade, nonetheless, did contribute to the feeling that this was "a salute to poverty!"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
My deep regret is that the Internet didn't let us establish specialist networks over wide geographic areas that let us stay in villages for social lives while teaming up globally for productivity. Instead we tried to turn the globe into our village which is making everyone miserable.
Hemingway levels of economy of words. Blown away by how much weight this comment holds (seriously).
I'm a remote work maximalist for this reason. There are certain companies, including new startups, that have hardcore work in person requirements. Monday to Friday, no exceptions. Not only will these places fail to attract and keep high level talent, they're literally contributing to social malaise and atomization. This isn't their intent, per se, so I stop short of assigning moral culpability here. But their anti-social and anti-family negligence is profound.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
You're not wrong. There was some subtext here.
The Amish, and anyone who's actually grown up in an agrarian society, are acclimated to that life. I was suggesting that the idea that your average western worker, who is used to air conditioning and seating, would, if forced to revert to agricultural work, face a horrific transition period.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
An interesting comparison is the half time show from 2022. This was the one with Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre and a variety of other Hip Hop acts. It was, in fact, the first half time show to be centered on Hip Hop (you had had hip hop artists make appearances at previous show but all of them had retain rock or pop at their core.)
2022's show had scantily clad women gyrating and being otherwise suggestive. Much of the coreography is the wildly over-the top "look at me" motions of modern Afro American "dance." I suppose I am still struggling to acquire the taste. This has been commonplace in half time shows for a long time now.
The "gangster" image of Snoop and Dre has been continually watered down over the years. Snoop, famously, co-hosted a cooking show with a post prison Martha Stewart. Your mom probably, now, thinks "Snoop is a hoot!" Perhaps the only somewhat controversial portion was when some new rapper who's name I don't know perform his set within a church-like setting. Even then, fairly light. Most of the show centered on a kind of weird "house" that allowed Snoop, Dr. Dre, Eminem, and 50 Cent to move between levels. The imagery was actually somewhat minimal - people dancing, some cars, whatever. It actually was "about the music." It just depended on if you liked the music.
2022's show didn't scare the hos. Many an eye was probably rolled and I can assume that the housewives of places like Omaha, Sioux Falls, Fort Collins, Topeka, Springfield (MO), Duluth, Spokane, and Provo may have used the half time show's duration to get a jumpstart on dishes or something. A gentle shrug. Those who likes 22's show loved it - it won the emmy for best live performance that year.
2026 is a different story.
Watching the damn thing provoked a totally unexpected lever of anger in me. If a dissident-right schizo blogger posted an imaginary Super Bowl half time show that was a faithful description of the Bad Bunny show, I would've thought to myself "Sure, right, sure ... they're actually going to do the whole thing in Spanish to a shitty raggaeton beat and pretend to fuck in the middle of a plantation while waving the Puerto Rican flag in conquering triumph"
Well, that's exactly what happened. They didn't just scare the hos, they made them (me) mad.
First, totally in spanish? The two quarterbacks in the game are some of the whitest white dudes ever. You're playing in San Francisco where, despite it's nomenclature, you're more likely to hear mandarin than Spanish anywhere outside of the Mission and possibly Oakland. It's February, black history month. Black Americans, generally, use English in their day-to-day. Finally, it's Football. Not Futbol, but Football, which is the game that best exemplifies American excess, hyper-competitiveness, ruthless capitalist competition, the last remnants of chauvinistic masculinity, and fetishized violence. Why the hell are you doing the whole thing in spanish? A bi-lingual "salute to unity" sure, whatever. But the monolinguistic exclusivity of the thing throughout was perhaps the intransigent signal of replacement over integration.
To drive the point home, towards the conclusion of the show, Bad Bunny pops up with the Puerto Rican flag over one shoulder. It's not that they're hoisting the flag of triumph over a deracinated, cucked, and conquered land, it's that they're celebrating their heritage on the land of a conquered, cucked, and deracinated people. There's a difference, don't you see.
But the part that actually got to me the most was the plantation imagery. Not because of any sort of recapitulation of slavery or classim, but because of the bizarre romance around manual agricultural work. Such work was the occupation of 95% of humanity for 95% of human history. And it sucked. It was indescribably awful. "Working the fields" is about as romantic as losing most of your teeth by 35 because of poor nutrition. You wouldn't finish a day in the sugar cane fields to come home and suggestively dance with your amor because you'd be too tired and, possibly, injured to do much more than eat and fall asleep. At some point you'd probably get kicked, gored, bitten, or trampled by livestock. Fingers, toes, and perhaps an eye would be cleaved from you via a sharp edged mishap. One bad season could mean permanent poverty and, perhaps, starvation deaths for the weaker in your family / community.
This is not shit we should be idealizing. None of this was fun.
Beyond the replacement theme - which was appalling apparent throughout - this was also a "show" about "degrowth" or, more accurately, a voluntary return to mass poverty and ill health. But, hey, at least I can rut in the sugar cane fields like the other animals around me.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
Want to fly farther?
Get that dick up, king <-- This is a link.
TLDR;
Ski jumpers, ahead of the winter Olympics (which begin, officially, today!) have, allegedly, been inflating their penises via various methods in order to expand the surface area of their ski jumping suits during official fitting.
After they've de-cocked, so to speak, the extra suit material acts as a small "sail" and they stay aloft just a bit longer.
Anything for an edge, I guess. This leaves me to mourn mostly for whichever ski jumper is legitimately packing a howitzer downstairs. That poor fellow will probably have a room full of scrutinizing IOC eyeballs on his Johnson.
Any other good sports cheating stories like this?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
Regarding deprogramming, I think it happens across generations as opposed to one group of people actually getting deprogrammed.
My Dad, mostly due to dating my Mom, dabbled in Hippy-ism in the early 70s. Long hair, Grateful dead concerts. That sort of thing.
By the time they had their first child, Dad had a typical corporate haircut, wore suits to work everyday, and smashed that like button for Reagan in the next election. He didn't deprogram so much as reverted to what he was. The dabbling was just that, dabbling.
But they still send christmas cards to at least two hardcore hippies. One still does the "ride your bike naked" around either Portland or Seattle (I forget which one) each spring. I don't know if his "employment" history is either of a) existant or b) not mostly illegal. That dude is never going to deprogram. Trump isn't on his radar because he still hasn't gotten over Nixon.
And his son is an aerospace engineer. With a crew cut. I've never met him, but Dad says that he and his father are estranged (my Dad and the hippy still catch up over zoom a few times per year).
It doesn't take much of a logical leap to think that the son grew up in a kind of fucked household because his Dad was so down with the cause. His, the son's, reaction was to, I'd bet, follow that straight and narrow path, work hard, and find a way to make some money. I'd wager he's probably half MAGA and half techno-futurist.
You see this more broadly with Gen-Z. While some of them are indeed "dinergoths" (See other top level post from this week's thread), you also have Gen-Z gym bro's who openly say "retard" and "faggot" to one another and don't care if they get tut-tutted by their post-woke classmates.
That's how deprogramming happens. I think the hard problem across generations, however, still has to do with male-female social and political relationships. That's a true capital-C Culture War which is upstream of politics and political LARPing.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
So, to save one's soul, the option would be to become a literal monk. If you have a family ... move to outside the monastery and live as survivalists? Not trying to be hyperbolic or sarcastic here. It just seems like the stakes are high in your model.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
Fair and good reasoning. I commend your internal consistency.
So, again, genuine question, what do you see as the end state of capitalism?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
Or would you prefer a method far more biased and value driven?
Yes, absolutely.
I'm getting the sense that what you're advocating for a kind of State management system that relies heavily on empiricism for governing. I think this is incredibly foolish advocacy for technocracy and a kind of political Scientific Management.
On the hard problem side of things, this fails because of complexity. Society, a large economy, the legal system etc. simply interact too dynamically and in too complex of a network for any central authority to effectively model the current state of things. Let alone the idea of being able to create policy and accurately predict it's outcomes. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Social Security began as a well intentioned program to help out the poor elderly. It has metastasized to be an intergenerational grift. There are simply too many variables changing too often and interacting in non-obvious ways to able to come close to accurate modeling. When the State tries to do this, not only does it fail at its own stated goals, it often actively harms its own citizens, albeit in subtle ways.
This is why I want a state that is 100% value driven based on deontological principles. The original American Constitution is a great start, but was gradually altered by amendments and fundamentally corrupted by the 14th. It isn't a very long or complicated document and has little to nothing prescriptive to say.
but it is the least arbitrary and most self-correcting method available for grounding state action in basic reality
I don't disagree with the logic of this statement, I just think it's impossible to implement. History is full of governments of various kinds saying, "no, this time it's different. We're going to be able to run the country based on hard facts and data." Number one, they can't in a very functional sense. Number 2, all decisions are at some level value based decisions. Humans can override their own hardwired instincts for self-preservation in extreme circumstances (family protection, self-sacrifice in combat, heroic deeds even beyond those two).
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
There are counterexamples, right? To be sure, they're small scale and niche - mostly traditional religious communities. I'll be specific here in that I do not mean the loudest groups (i.e. evangelicals) but those with the strongest and deepest tradition - Amish, Traditional Catholic, Orthodox, Haredi Jews.
I guess the counter to the counter here is that these groups are often not exactly capitalist and are also often somewhat techno-skeptic.
Curious your thoughts on that
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
Find me the engineer with hair long enough to bun in this photo.
I rue the day that a short sleeved button down shirt + dark tie became code for "McDonald's manager" instead of "NASA meat eater that shoots his load at the moon"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
you'd get handmade zines
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
I disagree with you, but I don't want to argue because it won't get anywhere new and interesting.
Instead I genuinely want to ask you to what extent you think culture and local community degeneration are responsible? Or, in your model, is that downstream of capitalism?
I'm a capitalist and always will be. I am also - very roughly - what might be called a technological accelerationist. More succinctly, I think capitalism+technology = overall massive material improvements for society. That being said, I do admit that as technology progresses and as the capitalist machine turns, there are some folks who will end up on the short end of the stick. My solution, or, the idea for it, has always been that local first communities work to support the stragglers and that things like family formation and, especially, extended family mutual reinforcement would do a good job of evening out the rough edges of capitalism for all who aren't repetitively highly anti-social (i.e. criminals and drug abusers).
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
Or you get drunk salarymen snacking on sushi while also binge drinking and smoking
You mean @George_E_Hale?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
I always thought this was also due, in part, to shows like Cops wherein arrested male suspects ended up handcuffed wearing the tank top? Because many of these were related to domestics, the fashion-guilt-by-association emerged.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
They want something simple and affordable which they can enjoy, heavily based online since that's where they spend their time.
In my own small-ish town, I've encountered old teens / young 20s somethings having conversations that are, without exaggeration, just the trading back and forth of what I assume are memes or Very Online references and meta-references. There's no "Hey, did you go to the movie with Jeff?" levels of basic fact exchange.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
or at least, the least amount of unhappy - about the outcome.
This sentence scares the shit out of me.
If you can not find a way to do it, then probably the partnership is not going to work out.
But then what happens? It's a very nice and good and smart modernist idea to think that when a married couple realizes they aren't good for one another that an amicable and professional divorce takes place.
In reality, however, divorces are some of the most (figuratively) violent experiences people have. Many, many divorced people never truly recover. Most, I'd wager, have, at least, a year or two of personal and financial setback. And, of course, outcomes for children of divorce and uniformly inferior to their stable household peers.
My whole point is that I want discourse around relationships to actually be helpful to them instead of milquetoast generalities that do nothing but sound and or feel good. Dating is one thing and breakups are fine. But when the marriage contract is signed, it's such a massive commitment that you need all the tools and good information you can get.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
What's the actual claim here?
That "AI", more specifically, LLMs, shouldn't be thought of as minds or cognitively aware "beings" or any other such "conceptions" because we know exactly, precisely, specifically what they are.
I don't understand why this is so hard to understand.
Again, let's use a toy analogy. You see a house and say "That house is really a landscape for a family to build dreams. It's a compassion and bonding machine" Well, that's fine if it works for you, but what the house really is is a house. It's made of lumber, sheetrock, shingles, and various bits of metal and plastic. I have no problem with you dressing it up with whatever emotive map you like. But it's just a house. These other responses seem to be arguing that the basic definition of "house" should be discarded in favor of these highly subjective mappings.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8mo ago
Yeah I'm not going to base my evaluation of a product on the marketing materials.
Also, again, they're not minds. There are hundreds of high quality write ups of how transformer architectures work.
I'm also now realizing that if you transported, say, James H. Hammond to 2026, he'd view the halftime show and remark, "A-ha, just as I suspected! These mulattoes are full of whimsy and joy at their condition! Look how they dance about the cane fields, indulging their naturally libidinous inclinations. Why, in any other method of employ, they would find the routine stifling and quickly succumb to melancholy!"
More options
Context Copy link