Bingbong
10d ago
AFAIK the London crime scene has had a colorful series of ethnic upheavals on major drug trafficking markets in which the 'Roadmen' class tend to only be involved in relatively petty and antisocial crime since the Albanians have come in whilst way more organized and capable of escalating force on anything that's actually durable and worth doing longterm as a criminal enterprise.
Bingbong
11d ago
I think the simplest answer is that they're not indexing on fanfic. There's no benchmark that they're using to train models that rates the level of Evangelion fanfic it produces, especially not fanfic where Shinji convincingly cums inside of Asuka. I mean, it'd take a lot of dedicated annotation work to see how many men can orgasm from reading AI-generated fanfic, it doesn't scale well. Contrast it to most things that are trained on that are very easy to scalably judge, like getting the right answer on multiple-choice questions; you can check that over with a simple string comparison. I'd say you're lucky to have found any LLMs that can produce fanfic and erotic fanfic that as good as the ones you have.
I mean they've got a gigantic locus of horny fanfic that has surely been ingested into the models through websites like Fanfiction.net and AO3 that is a huge output of the internet. Whilst you can argue how 'quality' most of it is I'd expect a pretty good model to be able to output AO3-level fanfiction easily for major characters.
Bingbong
11d ago
Same equally goes for Western democracy where the support network has absolutely blown up, and the elderly also have a massive outsized influence on the democratic process, a gigantic sense of entitlement, large amounts of cash and will dig in as hard as possible to stop anybody doing anything. China's got a better fighting chance than the typical Western country in that it isn't totally beholden to the Boomer cohort and can make tough decisions like relocating elderly or forcing through more automation in healthcare more easily.
Bingbong
11d ago
I wouldn't consider myself a deep Chinese historian but I've always figured that the back half of Mao gets a large amount blamed on his health/wife taking over for the Cultural Revolution. Plus general party continuity with the massive run of affluence afterwards means that there hasn't really been much of an opportunity for revisionist backlash. The powers that be aren't really interested in letting one of their foundational myths get trashed
Bingbong
11d ago
5 year plans are more about providing KPIs to work towards/sprints than 'the people who are currently administering have a 50% chance of being removed in 4 years and replaced with people actively working in the other direction'
Bingbong
12d ago
Yeah vast majority of their productive leverage comes from being able to close the strait. Nuclear arms increases the scrutiny and it's not like they're going to be able to produce enough/effective longrange delivery to be able to truly threaten MAD.
Bingbong
12d ago
The execution rate has also slowed down dramatically in the last decade or two, even according to most liberal observing bodies. They reduced the breadth of crimes that could be punished with death. It's at about 2000 a year now from 20,000 closer to the start of the millenia.
Also the US only executing 20-50 people a year is surprisingly low to me. I was estimating like 500 even if I know that it's always tied up in crazy lawfare and stays of execution.
Bingbong
12d ago
The way that Bureaucratic/political careers and incentives work in the Chinese system makes it easier to take a long-term view of things than when you're eternally having to defend yourself on 3-4 year electoral cycles. This doesn't necessarily mean that it always works out but it's been solid for the last few decades
Bingbong
12d ago
They've pivoted pretty hard since then and a lot of the Maoist stuff was integral (maybe unintentionally or as a side effect) of breaking the rural system and allowing for industrialization to really take off under liberalization.
Bingbong
12d ago
I suspect it's much more difficult, both because of regulation and because of market saturation, to found a worthwhile new university today than it was when Leland Stanford founded his.
Yeah. You've got to plug into the already-rotten university system of peer review in order to get any significant research done, any sort of a major metro will likely absolutely mug you when it comes time to try and build a campus. Meanwhile in most Western countries the vast majority of 'new universities' are blatant visa mills.
Bingbong
12d ago
Yeah but affirmative action and its beneficiaries indicate that the mindset of a lot of sinecure-receivers is more 'Why am I stuck at the lowly senior Vice President of Diversity role when I should be CEO. I'm great since the company rocket-boosted my ascent to where I have landed now' rather than 'Gee I wouldn't have been hired if I didn't have the diversity points, I should be grateful for getting a 500k/yr sinecure'.
Bingbong
12d ago
Yeah but that's just a symptom of the modern economy. Your Rockefeller or Vanderbilt likely had a lot more direct ability to make physical change on the world than a Musk or a Page, but that's due to a surfeit of reasons. Their wealth is more arbitrary, the swamp has gotten a lot better at deleting cash that enters its orbit and property/construction/compliance is a lot more expensive.
Bingbong
12d ago
? I'd say Elon Musk has flipped from like universal adoration (He had a Simpsons episode) amongst the Center-left Redditor sphere to strong condemnation over the course of the last decade or two. You can argue about how much he's actually accomplished for conservative beliefs despite clearly harboring them, though keeping Twitter reasonably uncensored has been solid. He's just largely too big to cancel.
Bingbong
12d ago
Is that a byproduct of being trans, or is that sort of mind just more likely to become trans?
Bingbong
12d ago
China also is far less likely to get held hostage via pensions and other entitlements to the Elderly than any Western country. Sure their absolute population is dropping but if one has the political will to either strongly encourage the elderly are served with the maximum efficiency instead of hodgepodging everywhere, or the ability to say 'no' then you can sidestep a lot of the demographic bomb issues
Bingbong
13d ago
I particularly don't like it since I feel like the current metagame both curtails the ability of native sons to actually get ahead, and it produces strange incentives for foreign imports where a very small population might manage to ascend through the ranks but there's also a plethora of foreigners who are solely pursuing lottery-ticket type careers exacerbating the amount that they cost to support. Having a popular understanding of life amidst one's recent immigrants that one needs to either be a rapper or an athlete to get anywhere is actively contributing to issues with assimilation.
Bingbong
13d ago
Yeah same feel like it was a reasonable return to form and it'll be nice if he can keep to an annual cadence from here.
Bingbong
13d ago
Yeah but if somebody put a million dollar prizepool on Trail Racing I'd imagine the winners (after a couple years to convert and gear up) would come from a functionally identical population to the current Marathon winners.
Bingbong
13d ago
My background is sports analytics and I can recognize how onfield play is translating into Xg in Soccer. I just feel the conversion relationship in Soccer is a lot wobblier than it is in the vast majority of sports and there's large parts of the game where nothing's realistically going to happen.
I don't particularly enjoy Baseball but I feel that something happening is usually looming closer than it is in Soccer since any at-bat can instantly convert.
Bingbong
13d ago
Would this require like a commute and minimal hours per week?
Like I'm sure one of the obvious answers would be some sort of government/bureaucratic remote sinecure where you don't actually have to do more than an hour or two a week
Bingbong
13d ago
Just something I feel tiresome since it's World Cup season and inevitably every major Western democracy is getting some variant of 'Don't like foreigners, what about RANDOM AFRICAN who kicked a goal for NATIONAL TEAM' spammed across social and news channels.
Am I the only one who finds it somewhat absurd that the native underclasses of most Western countries are essentially getting kicked out of a rare but real pathway to winning the athleticism lottery and becoming a professional Soccer or whatever-else player? I feel similarly about trying to outsource this kind of job as I do about outsourcing the bullshit bureaucracy non-revenue admin jobs at a Fortune 500 company in which, sure they could technically be done better but they're more about distribution of societal spoils than actually value driven.
Bingbong
13d ago
Having fallen just short of the professional level in a major ball sport I feel like a certain amount of the rise of alternate sports is how success/progression-orientated a ton of youth sport participation is now. A lot of people age out of playing their ball sport of choice as a function of being rejected to continue progressing up the ranks after actually trying quite hard, so continuing to play at a social level can feel like ruminating over one's own failures and/or leave you in a weird uncanny valley of 'I remember when I was 50% better at this since I trained 8 times a week so why am I playing beer league and kinda-sucking'.
I like BJJ since being reasonably active and staying moderately in the gym makes me a top echelon athletic specimen in that sport versus if I were still trying to play Rugby or Gridiron those are relatively table stakes.
Bingbong
13d ago
As somebody who never played the game and doesn't particularly watch it I feel Rugby League is probably the best ball sport in terms of entertainment product. The rules can be explained to a caveman in 2 minutes, the physicality is self-evident and it has a good momentum->scoring transfer ratio, lack of which is a large part of why I've never really vibed with Soccer.
Is non-COVID Vaccine refusal now Right Wing coded? Just out of curiosity since I feel like most of the non-COVID antivaxxers I know are still more Hippy leaning.
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