His character is the admiral of the titular battleship, under huge stress, and releases this stress by very slowly and carefully building a model ship in his rare time. Said model ship is a beautiful and very intricate historical galleon; it appears in pretty much every scene where the admiral is being introspective in his quarters.
Avoiding spoilers, a Bad Thing Happens to the admiral and he loses someone he cares about. Olmos is a rather improvisational actor and completely aces his character's reaction: he roars, takes the ship in his hands, lifts it up, and smashes it to smithereens on his table, the admiral wrecking years of his own work in grief.
The cameras cut, everyone high-fives... and then the director points out that the real-life prop for the model ship was on loan from a national museum. It's very old, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars... and Edward James Olmos has just smashed it to match-sized bits.
Thought you might find it amusing as a case of life imitating art.
Corvos
1hr ago
is it not at least sympathetic
No. People have endured far, far worse with more dignity. By the sounds of it this is entirely gratuitous and achieves nothing.
There is also the fact that, when you get right down to it, there are billions and billions of people and very few precious works of art. Yes, most of them are special to someone but if we acted like every person was as precious as their mother/father/brother etc. thinks they are then society would be unable to survive.
(This is an assertion, of course. I can't make an argument for my moral intuitions, I can only describe them.)
On a lighter note, are you aware of the story about Edward James Olmos and the model ship from Battlestar Galactica?
Corvos
3hr ago
That doesn’t seem fair. For the world’s biggest rising country and the greatest threat to the American-led world consensus to break with its own economic model and institute effectively a freeport on its own territory seems like big news.
Corvos
10hr ago
Globally over the last fifty years it’s obviously female education and careerism, which is why the UN and Western governments used to promote feminist interventions explicitly as fertility reducers.
You seemed to be shifting the conversation to the West since a mild uptick (which I haven’t heard of) since 2005, so I gave a more Western modern factor. Perfectly happy to concede that phones made a big difference too (using one right now) but the negative push factors are a big, big part of the story and did a lot to drive people to phones in the first place.
Did you ever read Scott's essays Radicalizing the Romanceless and Untitled which describe the broad atmosphere of online feminism in the late 2000s/2010s?
Or for that matter Ezra Klein's article on "Yes Means Yes"? The moneymaking quote is:
everyday sexual practices on college campuses need to be upended, and men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter
Many young men including myself blame the modern-day lack of coupling on the fact that that we grew up in the fifteen years where feminists were telling us with absolute sincerity that any interactions with women were potentially sexual assault, and that we needed to be afraid when dealing with women. Men are on the dating apps, hellscape that those are, because men were made to feel unsafe approaching women in any environment except one where women had explicitly opted into being approached. And even that doesn't work, because an awful lot of women in both dating apps and other dating meetups make it very clear that they are not actually there to be approached in any non-theoretical manner. (This is likely the reason for the sudden turndown you were discussing in another post, incidentally).
Yes, a decent number of men had enough female friends and social nous to realise the gap between the rhetoric and the reality, and now have happy dating lives. Good on them. Seriously.
But feminists wanted young men to feel afraid and uncertain when socialising with women in person, and they worked hard and they achieved their aim. And fixing that requires more than an insincere apology (which we haven't had) and even more blame for not being supermen and fighting through the blizzards that they ginned up. The reason that I focus on women is that fixing this requires women to actually be positive and welcoming towards advances by men, which all experiences show only occurs when they need us for something.
Corvos
14hr ago
Various third-world countries having China-like development spurts driven by the natives.
I'm very curious about the reactions when it comes to "oh, you expect me to put my money where my mouth is when it comes to having kids
What reaction are you expecting? At least a third of our posters already have kids and regularly comment on how fulfilling they find it, and another third (myself included) are very vocally unhappy that they haven't been able to start a family. We have a few out-and-proud horndogs around but definitely below a third.
At the risk of being provocative, you seem to be very invested in this idea that 'boys only want one thing'. What would it take in terms of evidence to genuinely change your mind?
Corvos
2d ago
Between you, @Pasha and @ChickenOverlord that's a pretty positive response. I guess I have some new tools to learn :)
Corvos
2d ago
Plus those numeric processing packages will almost certainly be using C or C++ under the hood for speed, because base Python is just far too slow when processing primitives.
Corvos
2d ago
It also really depends how you use them - a lot of people open a chat and then ten messages and a bunch of code lookups later they ask for something, then they don't like it so they ask for a correction, the correction is bad and they complain and ask for another correction, etc. So you have 30,000 tokens or more, containing a bunch of broken code that you don't want. Some people use the same chats for days or weeks.
Important points:
- The competency of even the top LLMs drops off rapidly as the number of tokens in the prompt increases. This include the code it looks up, your messages, the code it's writing for you, etc. Always use a new chat for each problem, and if you are getting problems open a new chat to do the corrections where possible.
- LLMs are better at understanding that X != NOT X but still, anything in the chat will influence the output. If the chat is full of stuff the LLM got wrong, even if you are telling the LLM to fix it, it will encourage the LLM to produce more broken code. This is especially true as the context window gets longer.
- Asking for a plan up-front, preferably with options, reviewing it yourself and then requesting implementation works a lot better to avoid self-owns where the model gets carried away and forgets it's trying to solve a specific problem.
But yeah, sometimes the LLM just derps.
Corvos
2d ago
Demand is mostly consumers, supply is mostly corporations.
People (consumers) really don't like the government telling them they can't do stuff. Corporations are much more used to it, and it's professional so their employees don't care so much.
Corvos
2d ago
I think some of the disagreement around the discernment and snobbery in coffee and other food/drink comes from seeking enjoyment vs getting [active ingredient delivery system].
But also it comes from not wanting to get on a runaway hedonic treadmill. If you refine your tastes to the extent that 70% of the market no longer pleases you, and on average you need to spend 2x to get the same hedons, have you truly benefited?
This is not a straightforward question because there are second order effects here too. For example, raising standards throughout your society may result in better quality stuff at the same or lower prices. But worth considering IMO.
If you allow parsimony to reduce you to a single magisterium, there can be no other way. If you refuse to allow that, well then there's not much I can do to move you.
Yes, this is my point. You have proclaimed that you are right, and therefore that you must be right. Philosophy has been 'solved' for a long time in that if you start off at certain places, you tend to arrive at certain conclusions along reasonably well-trodden paths. It has failed in that in almost every case it is impossible to prove those conclusions to those who don't share them.
Ultimately people tend to cluster philosophically according to their society, their base intuitions and their experience. 'Parsimony' to me means accepting my understanding of the world and myself at broadly face value. I experience agency -> I have agency. I have subjective experience, and we really have no idea of the nature of that 'subject' or how that experience is produced. I find 'free will is an illusion' and 'consciousness is an phenomenon of neuronal voltage shifts' to be motivated reasoning, considerably less parsimonious than accepting the reality of my experience, and proposed broadly because the prospect of two magesteria makes modern people uncomfortable.
That said, I applaud your writing your thoughts down, and I don't want to come across as too salty, but I do think it's wise to consider your conclusions as contingent on certain philosophical choices rather than plain for all to see.
I'll go one further. Every avenue that purports to explore the "hard problem" of consciousness must necessarily smuggle in dualism in just the same way. [...] I simply can't see how any rigorous thinker can go this way.
"Free will" is a popular card [...] a useful fiction
For matter to "choose" to behave differently than physics requires it to would be going right back to dualism again, once again importing that very same separate magisterium - and this time not only in the creative capacity, but in a 'has observable physical consequences' way.
To those who cry out that virtue ethics or deontology or any other framework are needed, hogwash! [...] It's all just fancy window dressing over consequentialist reasoning.
If any deity even could exist, it would be solely one that set the initial condition of the universe and hit go - an entity elsewhere running a simulation that is our universe.
Yes, it is quite possible to airily deny the existence of anything that your theory disagrees with, and therefore prove that your theory is right. It's very popular, and the basis of Scientism. But nevertheless, I am aware that I have a rich inner life, I am aware that I choose to do things and to not do things, and your theory's only response is 'ar har har, of course you don't, it's all an illusion.' Well, I do, and cold realism offers no explanation. Parsimony is a guide, not a master. If I were to psychoanalyse I would say that people are attracted to the feeling of being strong and brave enough to throw away the supposed comforts of lesser men, but it won't work. We're no closer to having a genuine understanding of the human mind than we've ever been, and any claim by neuroscientists otherwise is based on either an incredibly optimistic scaling up of electrode experiments or the naive application of whichever engineering theory is in vogue at the moment. A hundred years ago Karl Lorenz thought that we were switchboards; later we became computer programs and electromagnetic fields, last decade it was Bayes and Temporal Difference Reinforcement Learning and now it's LLMs.
Corvos
3d ago
1 in 20 deaths in Canada is assisted suicide.
Around 96% of recipients identified as white people, who account for about 70% of Canada's population. It is unclear what caused this disparity.
To be fair, it's probably age.
Corvos
4d ago
Pydantic is regularly used, but what about Astra? Are you using astral yourself? Is it in any major open-source projects?
I’ve never seen anyone do package management that wasn’t pip (or conda/apt depending on environment).
Open to it, I’ve just never seen it in the wild.
Corvos
4d ago
I was writing some code to optimise within constraints - basically just a massive pile of nested loops and if statements. It did well so we ported it to production, rewriting everything in C++.
The result was literally hundreds, maybe thousands of times faster. It went from being something that ran with a visible delay to something I could run in real-time.
Corvos
4d ago
I cheated by reading your comment first, but it seemed this way to me as well.
But it's not all levels. I don't think that for the vast majority of people these troubles do exist.
I don't get how you can think that unless you ignore every single official pronouncement about how hard they're working to employ 'diverse' candidates, the massively changing demographics of your society as foreigners are bussed in to drive down wages, being told by practically every single person here that they've seen this stuff...
Some blackpills are very definitely up for interpretation: for example the people worried about the covid vaccine have to interpret certain things about the evidence, how pharma works, how vaccines work, etc. to come to the conclusions they have. Anti-white discrimination is different. They boast about it on every channel possible! People can't wait to tell you how hard they're discriminating against white men! I can't help thinking you are so keen not to be blackpilled that you're putting your fingers in your ears.
Beyond that, let's say you're right. Maybe the pizza dudes are fine. (I doubt it, I've seen the demographics.) It still means that white people are being given an incredibly hard time in better paying areas. Personally, I worked very hard to get into a good school, and then very hard to get into a good university, and then very hard to get into a good PhD and then very hard to get a good job. And at every stage, they clearly and loudly said that it was a shame they had so many white men, and they discussed what could be done to make sure that people like me weren't doing the kind of stuff I'm doing. You couldn’t see the noticeboards under signs about women’s mentorship groups and women’s leadership groups and female-only funding opportunities.
All indications are that it’s starting to work. My friends and colleagues are really struggling to get new jobs. The cohort under me, including my own relations, are having huge trouble and some of them are failing to launch completely. Good for you if you’ve found another way to live your life, but ‘just deliver pizza, bro, it’s not hard,’ frankly isn’t good enough.
These are fully generalisable arguments against ever caring about anything ever, though.
Holocaust? Well, the Jews in Israel are fine.
Rwanda? Some of them make it, no Tutsi can be all Tutsis.
Fired without cause? Well, my brother still has a job.
The whole point of the article is that actually a lot of people are having serious difficulties. You can decide how much you personally care, and to be glad for your own good fortune, but you are not rescuing people by persuading them that their troubles don't exist. There is a spectrum between 'full blackpill' and 'this is fine', and the clear proof for massive discrimination at all levels really ought to be nudging you a bit further along IMO. I have personally seen people I care about fail to launch because of exactly this kind of stuff.
Corvos
5d ago
Noted, and I'm not sure if I agree or not. Please see my reply to @Gillitrut.
I have had some respect for my managers too, don't get me wrong. It's just that I also note that management has massively increased and I wonder how much of
prioritizing the work for me and other team members. Coordinating work across teams. Translating high level strategy shifts from higher level executives into concrete terms for people like me
really, really actually is valuable compared to the 1930s where this work was not done to the same degree. It feels valuable, but is it? Are those strategy shifts really necessary? Are lower-level workers essentially allowing their own abilities to plan and coordinate to be taken over by their manager? Is this all optimisation that gets 99% of the juice out of the orange instead of 95% at the expense of vast amounts of extra work? Is this all a Red Queen problem?
Those aren't rhetorical questions, they're questions I really don't have the answer to. Modern society has broadly done away with the originals (which one could take as evidence of efficacy, or of public goods issues) and for caste reasons I don't really trust the institutes like Harvard Business Review whose job is theoretically to answer these questions.
Oh @crushedoranges san, you're so clever and handsome! And I agree with everything you just said!
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