Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
No bio...
User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
Anything Grok can generate for you, you can generate yourself manually on your own computer (given a sufficiently beefy GPU) with zero guardrails since you can give it any text you want.
How beefy? I thought I was looking into trying to run alphafold or some of the other structural bio models a year or two ago and we were talking like 20k. Is it easier to run inference on the image generation models or was I just stupid?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
We used to have our more clinically-focused research meeting Monday mornings. Everyone would rotate through every few months, and people seemed to think the best way to show off the importance of their research was to present graphic images of their patients suffering. One doctor studied some immunodeficient patients, and insisted on showing this one woman's vagina exploding with genital herpes Every. Goddamn. Time.
The EDS guy always showed his patients bending their thumb down to touch their forearm, which was disquieting in it's own way.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
8mo ago
Obama 2008 was a blowout year, 2012, 2016 and 2024 had a lot less enthusiasm, and between 2008 and 2020 the population grew by 10%. That gets you halfway there, more if that growth was skewed democratic.
Not to mention the vast majority of fraud claims would be in the thousands to tens of thousands of ballots in swing states, not literally 15 million votes across the country. How can you possibly envision fraud on that scale? Literally every dem leaning county dumping tens of thousands of fake ballots and none of the election officials turned up concrete evidence?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
Tell me more about my interests, though. Maybe I’ll learn something.
If you stick around TheMotte long enough, you live to become the progressive. You filthy life-long democrat, you.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
The question now is whether migrants are like benzos or, say, antihistamines.
But antihistamines don't work...oh! I see what you did there.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo 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.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
If what you're doing deserves to be treated with dignity and without antagonism, you should not be shamed! In fact, it will probably be very difficult to shame you if you actually know that you're conducting yourself in a dignified fashion and feel strongly that the people who suggest otherwise are in the wrong.
I doubt this very much. Someone immigrating from a country where women are expected to bare their breasts in public would be readily shamed walking around downtown NYC. Conversely, I've met women in the Peace Corps who ended up in countries where they were shamed for wearing shirts and went with the flow, despite their discomfort. A hedge fund manager would be shamed mercilessly were he transplanted to a trailer park in a suit with a briefcase full of whatever they put in their briefcases, and a trailer park bro would be shamed for driving his ATV around Martha's vineyard. Self-righteousness won't get you very far if you're literally being ostracized by every person you meet.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo ago
You're breaking so many damn rules in one comment I'm mildly impressed.
'Perhaps there's a simple reason for this anti-America deal. Two of the key players you mentioned, Alice and Bob are both radical leftists. You even mentioned that Bob harbors anti-America sentiment. Subversive radical leftists are trying to undermine America's power when the nation is weak and vulnerable. Biden, though not a radical leftist (I know, I know), fits the role of senile idiot here.
Since you're looking for possible explanations for this seemingly irrational behavior, I thought I would supply an explanation.'
Surely the above would just be Tuesday at the Motte rather than a banworthy post, no? I'm fairly confident I can find a number of comments like the above with minimal effort. Posts without any evidence to suggest a conspiracy, things that are inflammatory and boo-outgroup, etc.
The Jew-haters' brigade is right, tbh. Their comments mostly aren't treated the same. I just happen to think that's a good thing and think you should just ban anything that crosses the line to clear anti-semitism, while they don't.
Tongue-in-cheek suggestion: Replace janitorial duty with an AI that flips the political valency of a given comment before someone is asked to judge it. Bonus points if you can train the AI to learn a given user's ideology. If we manage to abstract reality enough, it's the first step towards black mirror!
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
I see, thanks for explaining.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo ago
No, it's for you. I'm confused what you see as sniping at Trump supporters. Make America great again, again?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6mo ago
There's modest consensus around here that Vivek & Elon firing half of the government would be a good thing, and that most of those workers are largely vestigial parasites/culture warriors who don't productively contribute to society.
What would the practical effects be of Trump pulling a Xi and dropping the hammer of god on wall street and hedge funds, HFT outfits, etc.? Say you can keep venture capital and bank loans to businesses and all the other stuff, but the 'quants' who make a living with options, trading commodities and the like? I'll leave it to someone better versed in that world to carve out precisely what should or shouldn't be banned, or try to convince me that this is a mistake.
The friends I have in that space freely admit that they don't believe that they contribute meaningfully to society. They have advanced degrees in physics, math and CS; wouldn't society be better off pushing them towards engineering, manufacturing, company creation? And redistributing capital from the non-STEM people at these places who contribute nothing of value to society?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9mo ago
Literally translated, they just mean mister know-it-all or Little Joe...savant? Knower-of-things? Not sure there's a good translation in English.
French in France is typically viewed as more precise, uptight and grammatically correct, whereas Quebecois is (unfairly) seen almost like a pidgin or 'lower-class' French. Like how someone with a 'cut-glass' British accent might look down on Americans from Alabama or speaking AAVE.
'Monsieur je-sais-tout' sounds very proper, whereas Ti-Joe is a contraction of petit-Joe, maybe the equivalent of saying 'mister know-it-all' versus 'lil Bob smartass.'
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
But we have two people who think in sound bites trying to convince an audience of uneducated dolts to clap along.
Why would you try to infer anything about how either Harris or Trump think based on how they present in public? They're actively trying to say the things that will win them the election rather than what they actually think. And if sound bites play well with their constituencies, well...obviously that's what they're incentivized to optimize? Being responsive to what your voters want is a feature, not a bug. If you want politicians that behave better in public, convince a large enough fraction of the population to punish their candidate for vapid sound bites or idiotic name calling.
At least neo-reactionaries have ideas. I’m not fully on board, but they can generally tell you what kinds of things they want to do, why, and why this would work.
So do rationalists. So why do neither group win elections, particularly given that the latter is supposed to be 'systematized winning?'
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
Any amount of past casual sex is too much for wife material, unless you are a cuckold, which I personally am not. Of course you might say, "This is the most fucked up time period for male-female relations perhaps in human history, and I will accept a bit of cuckoldry in exchange for not being alone forever.", and I won't judge you too harshly for that, but that's still the bargain if your wife has any sort of a casual sex history. You're trading cuckoldry for companionship.
In all your writing, this is the closest you give for a rationalization as to why marrying a woman with (if you'll forgive my paraphrasing, feel free to replace with terms of your choice) a 'high body count' is bad. And yet, your meaning of the word cuckold doesn't comport with any definition I've seen used before - you're suggesting that in a monogamous marriage where neither partner has slept with anyone else since the wedding, the man is nevertheless a cuckold if his wife had casual sex in college? You're just trying to use the shock/meme value of the word cuckold to smear a perfectly healthy marriage.
Seriously - what is your concern with the situation outlined above? STIs? The woman may have a child prior to the marriage? Okay, set those aside for the moment and let's explore cases where neither of those apply. Explain to me what is so wrong with a woman who has casual sex in college, settles down in her late 20s and has a family in her 30s without resorting to broader arguments about society and fertility.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Does that count as impeding progress?
No, because you can just go down to the store and buy fish oil for 30$? Not to mention eating fish oil isn't progress, we've been doing it for I don't know how many years. Lovaza is different in that it is manufactured in a GMP facility, with GMP protocols and supported (I presume, I don't follow the fish oil literature) by expensive clinical trials. Maybe you don't care when it comes to fish oil, but you probably care that your hideously complex chemo drug is both 1) effective and 2) safe.
Would the libertarians paradise where drug manufacturing and prescription was completely unregulated, and savvy consumers learned which manufacturers were reputable and which drugs were efficacious by word of mouth be better than what we have now? No idea, although it's worth noting that we effectively had that paradise in the era of snake oil salesmen and sulfanilamide killing over 100 people. We had thalidomide, we had SV40 contaminated polio vaccines, and other incidents I can't remember off the top of my head. I think it's reasonable to question whether the FDA in it's current state is net positive and how it can be reformed, but I'd wager that the vast majority of the 'FDA delenda est' crowd have no idea why this fence was built in the first place.
As some other anecdata, if you like, until recently many Chinese people prized medicine (and other goods!) manufactured in the USA. Largely due to the regulation and processes you dislike.
It only took them nine years!
Difficult for me to comment as I'm about up to date on epipens as I am on fish oils, but the rejection seems pretty opaque. Are you confident that the entirety of the issue here is the FDA just sitting on their application/dragging their feet, or were there actual major problems with the design?
I think that the FDA impedes progress relative to a theoretical-within-punishing-the-elites pharmaceutical regulator
What does 'theoretical-within-punishing-the-elites pharmaceutical regulator' mean?
Regardless, at the end of the day you face tradeoffs between safety and cost. The ideal number of pharmaceutical recalls/killed patients isn't zero, but it's hard to say what the optimal number is.
If you're curious, the Chinese have significantly deregulated. They also use a lot more 'phase zero' clinical trials that allow smaller biotechs to get clinical data much more easily and, as a result, are on a trajectory to wreck the US biotech ecosystem in the next 5-10 years. That said, I'd bet they've had some nonzero number of patients in clinical trials develop serious adverse events that were kept hush-hush in a way that's impossible to do in the USA.
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I'm very curious how the Trump admin has been doing tackling regulation. There's a lot of things going on, and regulation seems to have lost the spotlight, but I'm very much hoping that we walk away from the next few years with dramatically reduced regulatory agencies.
Well, he appointed an HHS secretary (who oversees the FDA) who fucking hates the pharmaceutical industry. As far as I can tell, the twin north stars of RFK Jr. are 1) pharmaceutical companies are evil and 2) COVID was manufactured in a lab and facilitated by NIH money. I don't think he's a man who wants to maximize the number of drugs large pharma companies can get approved. They've also (as far as I can tell) entirely cut off government grant money to at least Harvard, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Northwestern and others which probably isn't optimal for progress. He's threatening to block government scientists from publishing in top medical journals and is instead promoting his personal weird one. Biotech in the US is probably dead in the water, and the future is Chinese.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
I miss Julius Branson. If only we could coax him back instead of the boring trolls.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo 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?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo 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.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo 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.”
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo ago
I think you're wrong here. I predict DOGE will put a significant dent in the deficit.
Are you interested in attaching some numbers to your prediction? How much lower do you think the 2025 deficit will be relative to 2024?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6mo ago
Trudeau's nearly 10 year reign witnessed the largest transformation in Canadian history since European settlement: the replacement of a largely European population with a multicultural blend of cultures from around the world.
Prior to Trudeau, Stephen Harper was Prime minister for 9 years. There's pretty much an unbroken trendline that started in the 90s between Chretien/Martin/Harper's time in office and Trudeau's in terms of the proportion of the population that are immigrants. Ditto for the fraction of 'visible minorities'. The graphs like this one, which I imagine gets spread in your circles, conflate temporary workers with immigrants. After COVID, the government panicked due to inflation and a labor shortage a brought in a bunch of temporary workers before clamping down on it late last year and announcing reductions in immigration over the next few years.
Am I missing something? Do you have any data showing that Trudeau was significantly different from Harper, Martin or any of his other predecessors in recent history?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7mo ago
What is the evidence of this? People here and elsewhere argued that Floyd was a boon for democrats in 2020, and they won fairly convincingly four months later.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
8mo ago
To be fair, I did a gentler version of this with my now-ex and she said he was going to repeal Roe and the ACA. I told her there was no way they'd get Roe past the supreme court, and, well, we had insurance through work so the ACA wouldn't hit us. She ended up being fairly accurate...
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
8mo ago
Can you name a woman worth running? Hell, can you name a man worth running? Most people here would argue every president since Jefferson has been a low iq moron, which usually makes me think they either don't understand the incentives involved or drastically underestimate our politicians.
A number of diseases have been functionally eliminated in the USA; polio, measles, diphtheria, rubella. One person foregoing the vaccine gives them some small value with negligible cost, although who knows, maybe the value proposition is still there if you plan on traveling to the third world. Some of these things are really nasty if you get them as an adult.
The entire population foregoing vaccines would lead (eventually) to these diseases becoming endemic again. Polio alone was paralyzing 15,000 kids a year prior to the vaccine and killing a fraction of those. I suppose we could decrease the amount of vaccination to allow a little bit of endemic disease back just to improve the value proposition for individuals and please the economists. Thankfully, our forefathers knew that was Fucking Stupid as they watched kids dying of preventable diseases and made vaccines as mandatory as they could.
So, if you want to translate the above into econ-speak - where is the positive externality? And if you agree that eliminating diseases via vaccination is preferable to the alternative, how would you like to give pharma companies enough of a profit motive to make the things?
While we're on the subject, COVID notwithstanding, vaccines are horrifically underfunded for this exact reason. The USA vaccine market was 29 billion in 2024, and pre-COVID was only 17 billion. As an aside, the entire biotech ecosystem in the USA is only ~800 billion; just over half the market cap of Meta, a single tech company. The MMR vaccine costs 100$ and you get two doses over your entire life. This isn't exactly some massively profitable scheme whereby Big Pharma is fleecing hapless poors, it's just a convenient punching bag that plays well with the base.
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