Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
No bio...
User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
It was after this paragraph that I decided to just stop reading.
Sad. You'll never get to experience my devastating counterargument. Best of luck to you - I'm eager to see how all the predictions shake out, although you haven't shared many here.
But my argument here was not that China Good: solely that allowing Chinese development in the first place, instead of pursuing a more negative-sum strategy, was not a blunder or a betrayal of American self-interest. America actually can benefit from global growth (eg by getting bailed out in a crisis, after having become a pillar of global economy). Chinese growth prior to this phase of conflict is, therefore, not evidence of American Deep State being incompetent.
I think you should expand this take into it's own post for discussion of the group. It's...an interesting one.
For the contrary example, look no further than the EU and Canada. They have comparable population quality, are at the same stage of development, and share many of your natural advantages. How have the last 20 years been for them? Are they famed for their Deep State? I rest my case.
This one too. Can't speak for the EU, but the argument that Canada would be as powerful as the US (or I imagine you'd retreat to a motte of achieve comparable GDP growth rates to the US given that you haven't actually specified any metric by which to compare them over the last 20 years) if they only had a more competent deep state is a hilarious take.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo 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
4mo ago
Particularly given that many of those same people have likely ridiculed the purity spirals on the left.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
Your complaints about GWOT are motivated reasoning, GWOT was quite successful for Israel at least.
Why is it motivated reasoning? My impression is that the GWOT is fairly widely regarded as...not the most successful foreign policy, no? Or are you trying to make the argument that the US state department is competent, but got played by even bigger-brained Israelis?
The US has been able to grow its economy extremely rapidly through Chinese industrialization, without that your, as marxists say, Internal Contradictions would have likely brought about a protracted recession already.
The confidence you have in stating these counterfactual alternate histories is just astounding to me, but I guess there's no stakes when nothing is falsifiable. I won't pretend to know what the world would look like had China failed to industrialize, but I'm also not buying your interpretation offered with the barest of rationales and no evidence. I could just as easily argue that a world where China failed to industrialize is one in which glorious America land still stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world with no real peers, and the only way to settle the argument would be the floridity of our prose and our imaginations.
Don't forget that in 2008, it was China that bailed you out.
Ah, that was very generous of them. I'm sure self-interest played no part in it, and it's not even clear what you mean by that - buying treasuries? If so, they bought treasuries throughout the early 2000s at a rate not that different from 2008 - was that also for altruistic reasons?
1970s-2023, I'd say. Your safe and prosperous world is a product of an overall competent policy. Just continuing and improving on Biden's program could have been enough. See the success of CHIPS act, for example.
Vietnam war and Afghanistan/Iraq were competent policy? What about the inflation of the 70s and early 80s? All the NIMBYist policies that birthed our housing crisis and inability to build anything, falling birth rate, crumbling infrastructure? Contrary to some of the blackpillers, I won't pretend that the last 50 years have unilaterally been failures, but all the available evidence points towards relatively normal people muddling along rather than a cabal of puppetmasters making the rest of the world dance. All the problems that put us on the path to being peers of and/or eclipsed by China were born during the golden age you're gesturing towards.
Like owning the biggest consumer market in the world
How do you propose to leverage this? Tariffs?
most of the world's most prized IP
Indeed - Thankfully, China also has a robust track record of respecting those IP rights.
having military presence in all corners of the world.
Maybe.
I'd say you left out immense natural resources (even more so if you include the 51st state), vast oceans on both flanks and (I laugh while writing this) the ability to appeal to talented immigrants from around the world, and integrate them into the social fabric.
I recall I did predict a long grinding war after like a week of it.
I'll take your word for it. Would you agree that the vast majority of people have gotten it wrong, over and over again? Including (I'd guess we can infer) the US and Russian state departments?
What did you say at the time?
I kept my mouth shut because I at least have the self-awareness to know that I know fuck all about Ukraine and Russia.
Sorry, this sounds very much like Russian “we haven't even started yet” narrative to me.
Hardly. It's an argument that we were undeniably the most powerful country in the world and, while we caused plenty of misery, our reign was fairly benign.
I'm under no illusions that America in 2025 is the superpower it was in 2000, or that China is a nation of rapacious peasants riding the coattails of the Master Race to success. There's a fair chance that China destroys my industry the same way they destroyed western manufacturing, with your prized Tsinghua graduates grinding 996 for poverty wages to fuck me in the ass.
But you have a susceptibility to grand, romantic narratives where small numbers of people can leverage their brilliance into enormous influence on the course of history rather than human matters largely being emergent phenomena. If you think I'm wrong, make some concrete predictions about how China will bring about America's ruin in the next three years - should be plenty of time for a couple of Tsinghua galaxy-brains forged in the fires of the gaokao to run circles around some retarded Orange Man sycophants, no?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
overestimated the US mainly because I did not account for the immense capacity for self-sabotage.
I'll wager that if we're still here in 3-5 years, you'll be saying the same thing about underestimating the Chinese capacity for self-sabotage. The United States isn't going to collapse in the next 5-10 year timeframe, and if we lose to China, it will be a long and drawn-out process. Not some knockout punch engineered by whatever the CCP department of foreign affairs is called.
I think they have enough talented people to do this, it's just those people have lost in internal politics.
Did those talented people lose in the 2000s during the GWOT era? Or in the 90s when we let American companies migrate to China en masse? When have these Mycroftian prodigies ever won in internal politics, what decisions did they make with said influence and where's the golden era in American foreign and domestic policy mediated by these people?
Manipulating the world is made much easier when you own major causal factors of that world. It doesn't take 200 IQ, though intelligence helps not to manipulate yourself into the ditch. All of great power politics is such manipulation. Suppressing competitors, strengthening allies, capturing international institutions
Like what, the financial system that proved utterly incapable of regime change in Iran or hindering Russia's ability to wage war? Toothless institutions like the UN, WHO or WTO?
networks of high-agency people, not by vague sentiment of the electorate. Sorry, that's just what we can observe happening.
Sure, the electorate isn't writing policy, nor should they.
That being said, the ability of anyone to influence systems this complex is limited, and related to how well we actually understand them. We designed computers from the ground up, and you can drill all the way down to machine code and circuit diagrams if you like. Mastery over the system makes you a 10x software engineer, or whatever the 10x hardware engineer is called. Diagnosing and fixing problems in a car or aircraft is eminently doable because we designed and understand all the parts ourselves.
On the other hand, reading all the economics textbooks in the world won't give you mastery over the stock market any more than learning fluid dynamics will help you understand the weather well enough to predict it perfectly. Biology PhDs can't even make basic predictions about how the system they've studied their entire career will behave in response to a given perturbation. And this is only partially due to the fact that they aren't very bright or talented in general, but more due to how complex and inscrutable biology is - at least to humans as we are now.
You bring up Russia and Ukraine - in March 2022, was there anyone (including what we can guess the US state department thought at the time!) who confidently predicted the outcome would be >= 3 year grinding war with little movement on the front, dominated by drone warfare? I saw plenty of takes that Russia was about to curbstomp Ukraine, then after the initial offensive failed, plenty of takes that Russia was about to collapse due to American sanctions, all of which turned out to be bullshit. If you can't predict that, I don't believe you when you say that Russia was capable of winning the war if they had just done it rationally, or that you or anyone could have figured out what to do differently in the leadup to reach a significantly different outcome. The outcome hinged on decisions made by thousands, if not millions of people - their morale, equipment, education, talent, weather, luck. If some South African entrepreneur had listened to all the people telling him not to build a rocket company, and the Ukrainian military never had access to starlink, would we be looking at a vastly different map? If Obama had pushed NATO to seriously stockpile arms and could provide Ukraine the materiel (shells, tanks, drones, whatever) to prosecute the war properly, ditto?
Yes. It's a stupid trade war and it's highly likely that no Tsinghua graduate will be so stupid. That aside, China has an official policy of not pursuing global hegemony. This certainly has no teeth, but Americans don't even have an equivalent toothless commitment.
I hope we don't see the future that proves you wrong. If Americans were truly hegemonic and held that as their goal, the world would look very different.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo 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
4mo ago
I expect you'll dismiss what I say as just another smug American chauvinist...but watching you express with great confidence that the geniuses at the US state department were about to crush the Chinese upstarts a few years ago, to joining the ranks of the resident Chinamaxxers should be enough to give anyone whiplash. If anything, it should make readers update their priors about trusting anyone with grand geopolitical narratives.
The US State department isn't staffed by geniuses who can shape the world to their liking. Nor is the CCP. And even if you took US IMO team and forced them to study geopolitics rather than theoretical physicists finance, their ability to influence the world would be minimal. The NWO-deep state-Masonic brotherhood conspiracy theorists believe manipulate world events to their benefit doesn't exist, simply because the world is too hideously complex a system for someone of any intellect or means to meaningfully manipulate. I don't seriously believe that anyone can predict what will happen or who the paper tiger is.
Is China an unstoppable manufacturing behemoth about to steamroll the US navy on their way to Taiwan, or an aging and shrinking nation who imploded their property sector with loads of debt? Is America the global hegemon with the best military, largest concentration of talent and strongest economy in the world, or a sclerotic, internally-divided shitshow? Probably...all of the above? Who can say whether China's population bomb represents a hard cap to their ascension, or whether they can dominate every STEM and manufacturing field to a degree that dwarfs the rest of the world before they lose their dynamism? Or whether China does a Pearl Harbor next October and Americans of all stripes rally around the flag, erasing the problem of partisanship?
The uncertainty is part of the fun, I suppose. But I'm fairly confident that nobody can make meaningful predictions about what will happen consistently. And I'm certain that whatever happens, some asshole on TheMotte will write a novella about how fucking stupid Trump/Xi Jinping were for doing X when any retard could see that Y was the obvious course of action. Hindsight bias is a helluva drug.
It seems Americans simply cannot conceive of having a serious or superior enemy...They feel like Main Characters of history, who are destined to win for narrative reasons and therefore can afford arbitrary foolishness in the midgame – at it will amount to is a few extra lines in the moral takeaway in the epilogue. Karl Rove's famous quote is quite apt.
All of these criticisms can be leveled at the Chinese as well - you've never heard them rant about 5,000 years of civilization? The century of humiliation making them temporarily embarrassed hegemons, from which they will inevitably recover? And you think that a world where China is hegemon won't see shit like Trump's exploitative trade war on the regular? Look at how they act in the SCS, or fish the hell out of South American countries EEZ. Look at where the Thomas and Sabina shoals are on a map and tell me what business they have ramming Filipino ships. Look at the wolf warrior diplomacy bullshit they pulled before realizing how ugly pulling back the veil made them look. Now scale that up to hegemon-level.
Not to mention I'm fairly confident I've seen you mock Americans hyping the 'Chinese threat' and making them out to be more competent than they actually are as a motivation for more defense spending.
Were you living in reality, you'd feel more incensed at nonsensical, low-IQ-racist boomer copes that keep undermining your side's negotiating position.
I've burned plenty of incense. It hasn't gotten me anywhere, and I've seen how miserable the people are who walk far enough down that path. Boomers gonna boom boom boom my friend.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
Once upon a time, this is what I got out of Wheel of Time. It didn’t matter if the prose was florid or the plotting glacial. The sprawl was the point. I wasn’t reading it to find out what happened in each finale, but to watch the setting evolve, further selling the illusion of another world.
That's curious; I'd find myself skipping Perrin, Egwene, Elayne, Nynaeve POV chapters out of boredom to get to the climax with Rand. Almost all the moments from the series that stick with me a decade or so later are with Rand: Picking up Callandor (and trying to revive the dead child), Rhuidean, cleansing saidin, using the True power against Semirhage for the first time, his epiphany on dragonmount.
I suppose as a teen I was even more of an uncultured swine than I am now.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo ago
Proposal: Everyone else writes their own versions of your viewpoint, complete with what they think you do for a living, asl, etc.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo ago
I thought he was the same guy as Julius Branson?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo ago
Because 0.00001% of their endowment amounts to 5,000$.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo ago
I miss Julius Branson. If only we could coax him back instead of the boring trolls.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo ago
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.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo ago
I see, thanks for explaining.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo 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.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo 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
6mo 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.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6mo 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?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6mo 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.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6mo 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.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6mo 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.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6mo 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.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6mo 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
6mo ago
It'll probably prompt Rightists to make thinly veiled comments, if it keeps going. About minecraft.
You often talk about worldview, predictions, updating, etc. Do you have an update to your worldview based on this thread?
More options
Context Copy link