Chrisprattalpharaptr's profile

To which I respond... yes. That's exactly right. Suppose ICE actually deports enough illegals to cause significant shortages in farming, roofing, factory work, construction, etc. Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for? Isn't that, quite literally, how you make America great again?

The dream held by parents around the world is not 'I have done backbreaking labor roofing the houses, tilling the fields and manning the production lines - I hope that my child will live the same life,' it is 'I have done backbreaking labor roofing the houses, tilling the fields and manning the production lines so that my child doesn't have to.' Rather than grubbing around in the dirt with a hoe, we built massive tractors and combines to the work of dozens? Hundreds? of men. And more cynically, we outsourced the production lines to Bangladesh and roofing houses to illegals. But boomers and their children got to put on their white collars and push papers around in an office all day! Or, you know, become neets and shitpost on 4chan.

Tell me, do Chinese people tell their children to dream of a job on the production line or do they force them to study 20 hours a day for the gaokao in hopes of escaping a life of manual labor to do the white collar jobs that you sneer at? The future is not retvrning to backbreaking labor, but forging a new path that avoids both the perils of neetdom and the grievances of the dispossessed. The future lies in recognizing our love of zero-sum status games and squaring that with a world where there's fewer and fewer high-status jobs to go around.

A nation, a culture, a race that does not provide for itself, should go without. This, I imagine, is one of the core ethical commitments that separates MAGA from its opponents.

Really...? When is the last time you heard MAGA supporters agitating for cuts to welfare and entitlements because those who do not provide for themselves, should go without? When has Trump ever supported anything resembling what you just said? The core ethical commitment that separates MAGA from the rest of the country is a revanchist bent to make the libs/globalists/elites suffer as they have. The reaction to the supreme court striking down Roe v. Wade wasn't jubilation about saving the unborn (although I did hear of some Catholic circles where this was the case), it was gloating about how arrogant Hillary and RBJ were in assuming that the arc of history was inevitably bending their way as they girlbossed their way to grinding the deplorables beneath their high heels. The reaction to DOGE isn't that cutting government spending would improve the union (see: all the arguments regarding the magnitude of the spending cut versus the actual federal budget), it was joy at the suffering of entitled, lazy government bureaucrats and globalists who care more about HIV in Africa than fentanyl abuse in the rust belt.

Whether the anger is justified is a whole other conversation, but consider this: If MAGA were forced to choose between 1) a debatably prosperous country where libs in New York and San Francisco flourished via tech/healthcare/finance and MAGA strongholds stagnated or 2) crushing the 'globalist agenda' and doing to those industries what was done to manufacturing, with questionable benefit to MAGA strongholds, which do you think they would choose?

If you take away the animus for the libs, the MAGA coalition collapses. You see it here where there is largely consensus against any kind of woke topic, but bitter arguments around the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the tariffs.

34

Context

Chrisprattalpharaptr Ave Imperaptor 23d ago

I see, thanks for explaining.

7

Context

Chrisprattalpharaptr Ave Imperaptor 23d ago

attacking the big tariffs on major trading partners.

Trump announced tariffs on Canada and Mexico in his first week or two. Everyone complained about tariffs on our major trading partners, Trump supporters just don't give a fuck. People here were unironically saying alienating our allies and destroying the post-WW2 coalition was a good thing.

At this point, what's left to do but either wait for congressional republicans to start panicking about their political futures or wait for the midterms? It doesn't matter what the media or twitter accounts focus on, Trump supporters know what they want and they're going to get it.

1

Context

Chrisprattalpharaptr Ave Imperaptor 23d ago

Europe is seriously considering its local defense industry and in talks to trade favorably with China against the US

I get the first half, but why do you think the second half is a good thing?

6

Context

Chrisprattalpharaptr Ave Imperaptor 24d ago

however, there are a ton of topics of interest to the Motte user base about which I know little to nothing, and thus have no valuable opinion. (What do I know about the future of LLMs? Why are you asking me?! I work a dead-end normie job! I’m just a guy!)

Why would you assume that to be the exception, rather than the rule? Even the local 'polymaths' have their lanes that they mostly stick to, and occasionally deviate from with a relatively bad take.

2

Context

Chrisprattalpharaptr Ave Imperaptor 25d ago

The progress at humanoid robotics startups in the last 18 months is insane, and manufacturing costs collapse at scale (especially with robots on the assembly line).

Who do you think is furthest ahead, or who are several of the frontrunners if there's no clear leader?

4

Context

Chrisprattalpharaptr Ave Imperaptor 27d ago

Yeah, at this point I've spent as much on tools for taking out a square taper and fixing all the other shit wrong with my bike as I would have buying a new beater off craigslist. I'm down to the cups and they're so rusty they may as well be welded to the frame. My wife is not amused.

In my defense, we got a (relatively, for our area) lot of snow this year and half an inch of snow induces such panic in the populace that a fleet of plows immediately dump a metric ton of salt on every road. Now that spring is here, I've replaced the chain, cassette and derailleur. FML.

3

Context

Chrisprattalpharaptr Ave Imperaptor 27d ago

Definitely not instructions or memory. I hate emojis. There doesn't seem to be any commonality to when it throws in dozens of emojis; that specific conversation had random work-related questions, random discussions about biology and then a lot of questions about bike bottom brackets. Every answer was full of emojis.

2

Context

Chrisprattalpharaptr Ave Imperaptor 27d ago

But like, why would I do that when I can just ask computer?

More seriously, it's hard to measure my old bottom bracket without being able to take it out, right? Or is there something I'm missing? My understanding was that if I bought a bottom bracket that was slightly wider it may change my pedal width and I'd just have to adjust my derailleur.

1

Context

Chrisprattalpharaptr Ave Imperaptor 29d ago

Yes and no. I'll see if I can paste the conversation:

I ask it if the amazon kit I want to buy has everything I need to replace the bracket:

Final Verdict: This kit looks 90% complete for threaded bottom brackets (square taper, Octalink, Hollowtech II, etc.). If you’re running a press-fit BB (BB30, PF30, BB92, etc.), you’ll need a press and possibly an extractor tool too — but those are specialized and not usually in multi-tool kits like this one.

Want me to help identify your BB type before you order the kit? A quick check of your bike model or a photo of the BB area can tell us a lot! 🚲✨

It piqued my curiosity by asking for a photo.

If I upload a photo you can tell what kind of bottom bracket it is?

Reply:

Yes — if you upload a clear photo of the bottom bracket area (where the crank arms meet the frame), I can usually identify the type of bottom bracket you have.

Here’s what to focus on in the picture:

A side view of the crankset and bottom bracket area.

A close-up of the crank arm connection to the BB (is it square, splined, or hollow?).

Any visible markings or labels on the bottom bracket shell.

Once I see the setup, I’ll figure out whether you have a square taper, Octalink, Hollowtech, Press-fit, or something else — and confirm if that tool kit covers it all. 🚲✨

At this point I'm cracking up as I'm now a slave to the machine, running errands for my AI overlord. I trundle outdoors and take a photo of my chainrings.

Looks like you’ve got a square taper bottom bracket — I can tell from the square-shaped spindle poking out where the crank arm attaches. This type is super common on older bikes and some modern budget models.

Here’s what you’ll need from that tool kit:

✅ Crank puller — To remove the crank arms (make sure it supports square taper). ✅ Cartridge BB tool — For unscrewing the bottom bracket (a splined tool like the Park Tool BBT-22 or similar works for most square taper BBs). ✅ 8mm hex key — For the crank bolts. ✅ Grease/anti-seize (not in your kit) — Good for keeping things quiet and preventing seizing when installing the new BB.

Once you’ve got the tools, the steps are:

Remove crank arms using the crank puller.

Unscrew the bottom bracket (left side is usually reverse-threaded on English-thread bikes).

Clean the shell, grease the threads.

Install the new BB, making sure it’s the right spindle length and shell width (e.g., 68mm x 113mm).

Reinstall the cranks.

Do you want me to help figure out the exact size BB you need too? You can either measure the old one after removal or I can guide you based on the crankset type. 🚲✨

A few messages back and forth (omitted for length considerations) before it asks me for a picture of the crankset.

Got it — from this new photo, I can see the crankset more clearly. It looks like a Suntour XCM or similar vintage-style triple crankset, which often pairs with a square taper JIS bottom bracket.

Given that it’s a triple crankset (3 chainrings):

Bottom bracket shell width: Likely 68mm (common on road/touring bikes from this era).

Spindle length: Typically 113mm or 118mm for triple cranksets like this.

For a Suntour setup like this, 113mm is usually a good starting point — it keeps the chainline more centered. If you want a bit more crank arm clearance from the frame, 118mm works too.

👉 Recommended bottom bracket:

68mm shell width x 113mm spindle length (square taper, JIS)

Brands like Shimano (UN300 or UN55), Tange, or Token are reliable options.

Would you like me to find a compatible bottom bracket online or walk you through the installation next? 🚲✨

We'll find out this weekend whether we're one step closer to AGI or I wasted 50 bucks on Amazon.

5

Context

Chrisprattalpharaptr Ave Imperaptor 29d ago

Are any of you using LLMs for fun projects? I've heard Claude makes a decent life-coach substitute but I haven't tried that out yet.

I don't actually know what you do, but perplexity is excellent for sourcing papers from the scientific literature if you're starting in on a new (sub)domain.

This week I had to replace the bottom bracket on my bike. Chatgpt told me which kit to buy, and then I was blown away when it instructed me to go take a picture of both sides of my crank/cassette so it could be certain what we were ordering would fit. Somehow I missed them adding that functionality, but it's mind boggling to me that it can 'see' in addition to just parsing language. I guess I doxxed myself given that my openAI account uses my real name and my ignorance of bike repair/photos of my shitty commuter bike are in their database. Maybe the next SolidGoldMagikarp exploit will start regurgitating all my personal data for the world to see.

While I was at a startup, I was responsible for all kinds of biology subfields that I had no expertise in. I wonder if they'll ever realize how I did all the modeling, although at least a lot of our data has been validated externally. I advertise myself as a full stack biologist now :)

It's still not really useful for professional things. When I ask it to come up with new ideas or commercial opportunities in [area], it just regurgitates reviews I could read myself or tells me every garbage idea I have is phenomenal. But I haven't had the patience to systematically test all the available models recently, or put serious effort into prompting.

9

Context

Chrisprattalpharaptr Ave Imperaptor 29d ago

Just hang around for over half a decade.

Or, there's this page.

1

Context

Chrisprattalpharaptr Ave Imperaptor 30d ago

Watch your tone or I'll ban you too.

The joke is that I'm not a mod. He is.

13

Context

Chrisprattalpharaptr Ave Imperaptor 30d ago

I've attached a reply from Gemini 2.5

Consider this a warning; keep posting AI slop and I'll have to put on my mod hat and punish you.

It uses patsies or useful idiots to assemble a novel pathogen with high virulence, high lethality, and minimal predromal symptoms with a lengthy incubation time. Maybe it find an existing pathogen in a Wuhan Immunology Lab closet, who knows. It arranges for this to be spread simultaneously from multiple sites...This doesn't require superhuman intelligence that's godlike. It just has to be very smart, very determined, patient, and willing to take risks. At no point does any technology that doesn't exist or plausibly can exist in the near future come into play.

Do you really think you can do that with existing technology? I'm not confident we've seriously tried to make a pathogen that can eradicate a species (mosquito gene drives? COVID expressing human prions, engineered so that they can't just drop the useless genes?) so it's difficult to estimate your odds of success. I can tell you the technology to make something 'with a lengthy incubation time and minimal predromal symptoms' does not exist today. You can't just take the 'lengthy incubation time gene' out of HIV and Frankenstein it together with the 'high virulence gene' from ebola and the 'high infectivity' gene from COVID. Ebola fatality rate is only 50%, and it's not like you can make it airborne, so...

Without spreading speculation about the best way to destroy humanity, I would guess that your odds of success with such an approach are fairly low. Your best bet is probably just releasing existing pathogens, maybe with some minimal modifications. I'm skeptical of your ability to make more than a blip in the world population. And now we're talking about something on par with what a really motivated and misanthropic terrorist could conceivably do if they were well-resourced.

I'm still voting against bombing the GPU clusters, and I'm still having children. We'll see in 20 years whether my paltry gentile IQ was a match for the big Yud, or whether he'll get to say I told you so for all eternity as the AI tortures us. I hope I at least get to be the well-endowed chimpanzee-man.

14

Context

Chrisprattalpharaptr Ave Imperaptor 30d ago

When will the AI penny drop?

Amara's law seems to apply here: everyone overestimates the short-term effects and underestimates the long-term effects of a new technology. On the one hand, many clearly intelligent people with enormously more domain specific knowledge than me. On the other hand, I have a naturally skeptical nature (particularly when VCs and startups have an obvious conflict of interest in feeding said hype) and find arguments from Freddie deBoer and Tyler Cowen convincing:

That, I am convinced, lies at the heart of the AI debate – the tacit but intense desire to escape now. What both those predicting utopia and those predicting apocalypse are absolutely certain of is that the arrival of these systems, what they take to be the dawn of the AI era, means now is over. They are, above and beyond all things, millenarians. In common with all millenarians they yearn for a future in which some vast force sweeps away the ordinary and frees them from the dreadful accumulation of minutes that constitutes human life. The particular valence of whether AI will bring paradise or extermination is ultimately irrelevant; each is a species of escapism, a grasping around for a parachute. Thus the most interesting questions in the study of AI in the 21st century are not matters of technology or cognitive science or economics, but of eschatology.

The null hypothesis when someone claims the imminence of the eschaton carries a lot of weight. I dream of a utopian transhumanist future (or fear paperclipping) as much as you do, I'm just skeptical of your claims that you can build God in any meaningful way. In my domain, AI is so far away from meaningfully impacting any of the questions I care about that I despair you'll be able to do what you claim even assuming we solve alignment and manage some kind of semi-hard takeoff scenario. And, no offense, but the Gell-Mann amnesia hits pretty hard when I read shit like this:

It emails out some instructions to one of those labs that'll synthesize DNA and synthesize proteins from the DNA and get some proteins mailed to a hapless human somewhere who gets paid a bunch of money to mix together some stuff they got in the mail in a file. Like, smart people will not do this for any sum of money. Many people are not smart. Builds the ribosome, but the ribosome that builds things out of covalently bonded diamondoid instead of proteins folding up and held together by Van der Waals forces, builds tiny diamondoid bacteria. The diamondoid bacteria replicate using atmospheric carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sunlight. And a couple of days later, everybody on earth falls over dead in the same second.

I've lost the exact podcast link, but Tyler Cowen has a schtick where he digs into what exactly 10% YOY GDP growth would mean given the breakdown by sector of US GDP. Will it boost manufacturing? Frankly, I'm not interested in consooming more stuff. I don't want more healthcare or services, and I enjoy working. Most of what I do want is effectively zero-sum; real estate (large, more land, closer to the city, good school district) and a membership at the local country club might be nice, but how can AI growing GDP move the needle on goods that are valuable because of their exclusivity?

Are there measures of progress beyond GDP that are qualitative rather than quantifying dollars flowing around? I can imagine meaningful advances in healthcare (but see above) and self-driving cars (already on the way, seems unrelated to the eschaton) would be great. Don't see how you can replicate competitive school districts - I guess the AI hype man will say AI tutors will make school obsolete? Or choice property - I'd guess the AI hype man would say that self-driving officecars will enable people to live tens of miles outside the city center and/or make commuting obsolete?

I can believe that AI will wreak changes on the order of the industrial revolution in the medium-long term. I'm skeptical that you're building God, and that either paperclipping or immortality are in the cards in our lifetimes. I'd be willing to bet you that 5 and even 10 years from now I'll still be running and/or managing people who run experiments, with the largest threat to that future coming from 996 Chinese working for slave wages at government-subsidized companies wrecking the American biotech sector rather than oracular AI.

17

Context

Chrisprattalpharaptr Ave Imperaptor 1mo ago

Obviously a bit late for your current trip, but the HelloChinese app works pretty well for picking up some basic conversational Chinese. Learning characters is a whole different story, but you can ignore them and just focus on the pinyin. Duolingo for Mandarin is terrible, imo.

I probably understand about 30% of what my in laws say, although in my defense, their pronunciation isn't great and they keep mixing in Hokkien and other dialects.

6

Context

Chrisprattalpharaptr Ave Imperaptor 1mo ago

But if you hear what she's actually saying, brashly, it's that there should be no hyphenated Americans. You need to abandon your native land, your culture and your history at the door. Sam Seder needs to leave only in so far as he's incapable of dropping his distinctly Jewish identity.

It's not clear to me whether this is your view as well, or if you're just trying to correct the record. But if true, would you (or your interpretation of her views) welcome my immigration to the United States if I wholly identified as an American? Say I surrendered my previous citizenship, listened to the Hamilton soundtrack a couple times and passed the citizenship test? What if I weren't Christian? Or what if I weren't white? What if I supported trans children in choosing what to do with their body (which you see as sterilization and self-mutilation, I know, let's not get hung up on semantics)? Increased redistribution and welfare relative to what I expect you would want?

The above is more or less directionally true, even if I changed many details/positions. I am an immigrant, I do largely identify as American, I do love the history and origin story and culture of this country. But I also, broadly speaking at least, align with a set of values that clearly melt your brain. Yet those values are undeniably a valid set of cultural values in this country - have I assimilated, or not? Is 'abandon your native land, your culture, and your history' code for 'you need to adopt political positions that I like?'

0

Context

Chrisprattalpharaptr Ave Imperaptor 1mo ago

After Mandela, things would get much worse. Thabo Mbeki, the next President, denied the link between HIV and AIDS, and the number of South Africans suffering from the disease skyrocketed to a quarter of the population.

Hey, all these people were saying the US was following in the footsteps of Brazil and South Africa, but I never believed it until now:

In the fifth chapter of the book, titled "HIV Heresies," Kennedy writes several times that he is neutral on the whether HIV causes AIDS. "From the outset I want to make clear that I take no position on the relationship between HIV and AIDS," he says at the beginning of the chapter. Later on, though, Kennedy says in a parenthetical passage that he believes that HIV is "a cause of AIDS" and there are numerous mentions throughout the chapter of HIV infection not being the sole cause of AIDS.

Despite assertions that he is not taking sides, Kennedy spends much of the chapter on HIV presenting arguments made by Peter Duesberg, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and perhaps the most influential HIV "denier." Duesberg has argued that HIV does not cause AIDS but is a "free rider" common to high-risk populations who suffer immune suppression due to environmental exposures.

In "The Real Anthony Fauci,” Kennedy sums up Duesberg’s theory as follows:

“Duesberg and many who have followed him offered evidence that heavy recreational drug use in gay men and drug addicts was the real cause of immune deficiency among the first generation of AIDS sufferers. They argued that the initial signs of AIDS, Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), were both strongly linked to amyl nitrate—poppers—a popular drug among promiscuous gays.”

6

Context

Chrisprattalpharaptr Ave Imperaptor 1mo ago

I am but a humble biologist, and know little of warfare, politics and economics. But I'm surprised to see nobody has mentioned that the majority of US aid to Ukraine was spent with US arms manufacturers. Many Trump supporters (or at least democrat-haters) bemoaned the atrophied state of US/European arms production when Russia was producing more shells than NATO per month. China can kick our ass in drone production. Setting aside all questions of morality (which I obviously find more compelling than your median Trump supporter), why not use the conflict in Ukraine as an opportunity to re-arm? So to answer your question...pretty much anything and everything that we can make that wouldn't enable Ukraine to steamroll the Russian army and march on Moscow. No NATO troops, no air support (just intel), no nuclear umbrella (for now).

As an aside, isn't domestic spending to onshore manufacturing a key goal of the Trump administration? Why the monomaniacal focus on tariffs and not industrial policy more broadly? And particularly tariffs on our allies...but I suppose that's a different discussion.

14

Context

Chrisprattalpharaptr Ave Imperaptor 2mo ago

It's interesting that the cuts are occurring to the "next generation" of incoming talent, although it somewhat makes sense - Penn PhDs are funded, with very nice stipends.

Penn PhDs make about 30k a year, or 24k after taxes. Entry level at costco, maybe 1.5-2x minimum wage. Entry-level for someone with a bachelor's of science in a biotech company in Boston or SF is like 55-70k. 'Generous' is not a word I would use considering that they aren't sitting in class all day, they're spending 8-12 hours a day grinding out experiments so Penn professors (and grad students, to be fair) can publish papers. It's closer to an apprenticeship than what you typically think of as a college degree.

The whole point of the Ivy, I mean, Ivory Tower is to strengthen their own prestige and little robots, so rescinding feels weird. There's also the ability to dip into the endowment, but I know that gets complicated fast.

May be true at Penn, but isn't true at all of the state schools and smaller liberal arts college where the majority of people go. There's also complications around turf wars - the faculty of medicine can't just dip into the endowment when they feel like it. It's also easier to just turn on the taps in a few years if the administration changes than try to keep a constant enrollment.

Are any international future students getting the boot?

Contrary to popular belief, international students at the PhD level are either self-funded or intensely meritocratic. Most of the NIH training grants and PhD student grants that fund a lot of students are unavailable to international students, so most schools cap it at 0-1 international students per year as their costs are harder to cover. Excepting cases like students from Singapore (and China in the past) coming over with a full ride from their government.

Or will academia, particularly STEM, turn to embrace private funding more thoroughly? Private influence in STEM academic research could increase innovation and development, and solve the "funding crisis" presented from the withdrawal of government funds.

If you think private funding is going to increase innovation and development in STEM research, I've got a cancer drug that's going to increase your median lifespan by four months to sell you for 10,000$ a month. This drug was viewed as such a success (see figure 2) that it kicked off an enormous gold rush for radiopharm sweeping the entire biotech industry. None of those drugs are likely to be anything more than incremental improvements.

Philanthropic funding is different, but also harder to solicit. People with funding from HHMI, CZI, Gates foundation, Broad institute, etc. all do great work. Biotech research is just inherently too risky and capital-intensive to be worth it to VCs unless you're coming to them with something that's been pretty well worked out in academic labs already or the modality is already established to work on the market and you're just churning out a new drug for a different target.

There's plenty of reform in the life sciences that could be worthwhile. I agree that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to let Harvard skim a bunch of money for overhead costs, but as I mentioned, many of the scientists out there are working at places with much smaller/no endowments who need the overhead. Or if they had said we're capping overhead costs at X% and compensating by increasing the size of the grants by the same amount, then great. There's a real possibility that Tsinghua and Peking university are the global STEM centers for the next generation. Ten years ago Chinese universities were paper mills shilling unoriginal research in garbage journals, today I'd guess about 1/3rd-1/2 of Cell/Nature/Science papers are from entirely Chinese labs situated on the mainland. A popular new business model in the USA is just licensing drugs that were developed in China; it's hard to see this as anything other than outsourcing domestic talent and expertise the same way we did in so many other industries.

Cutting NIH funding isn't going to bring back manufacturing or balance the budget. It's just going to cripple the next generation of scientists and hand China a win.

13

Context

Chrisprattalpharaptr Ave Imperaptor 2mo ago

Arranged marriage white edition: the ugliest white dude gets headhunted by a controlling Asian woman who keeps him on a leash. He is overjoyed to find his fetish match. Happy ending.

I've been laughing at this for the last 10 minutes. WMAF couples are by far the dominant demographic in my immediate social circle.

27

Context

What is this place?

Why are you called The Motte?

New post guidelines

Rules

Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats

Chrisprattalpharaptr

Chrisprattalpharaptr