DirtyWaterHotDog
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User ID: 625
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Control-plane is a terrible name.
At least 'main' communicates something. Control-plane reminds me of the old Euphimisms bit by Carlin. A word so neutered, that it loses all semantic value.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
It was also defined by my struggle against the bullies—i.e., the kids who the blankfaced administrators sheltered and protected, and who actually did to me all the things that the blankfaces probably wanted to do but couldn’t.
As a fellow bullied ex-kid (as I am guessing many on this forum are) with a half-decent career, I have only seen ambitious bullied kids end up 2 ways. Either they reflect on it, and move on by empathizing with the social circumstances that led to their unfortunate bullying or they hold onto to it with seething resentment.
The latter make for the worst kind of bully. They should never be trusted with any kind of power. They only ever assign bad intentions to anyone doesn't like them, and view all conflict as strong-crushing-the-weak and not the misunderstandings/incompatible incentives that they actually tend to be.
Aaronson is too traumatized to be trusted to fairly distribute chocolate among a lot of kids. Letting him play daddy to world defining AI, would be catastrophic.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Sometimes you just have to hop between links to find the right accounts. They all retweet/post too much, so you don't need to follow all of them. A couple like the Linus guy and Langchain more or less signal boost everyone else.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Nadella is an Andhra/Telugu Brahmin, while Pichai is a Tamil Brahmin
Razib has written a lot about this. Both groups are some of the most endogamous groups dating back (around 1500 yrs) further than even Ashkenazi jewish endogamy.
High IQ higher-caste (Kshatriya or Brahmin) Indians, at least those who grew up in the Western upper-middle class, are the people that remind me most of Ashkenazi Jews
You can't forget the trader class (Marwadis, Sindhis) if we are talking about comparing them to people whose caricatures are money-lenders with exaggerated features. The Parsis are also incredibly similar. Rich, endogamous, genocided and now flourishing in their new refugee liberal home. The Parsis need to learn from the Orthodox Jews and start having unprotected sex. They're going extinct.
Asians are overrepresented, while East Asians are rare
While the I would love to take south-asian over-representation on this forum as an indicator of high verbal-IQ, I think there is another factor at play here : Colonialism. Most Indians on here are 1st generation immigrants. A lot of the top comedians are either 1st gen immigrants (Kumail, Hasan) or grew up away from 'white America' (Nimesh in NJ).
2nd gen immigrants (Indians and east-asians) are desperate to integrate into normie white culture. They will never end up in a place as transgressive as this. The 1st gen is best suited to hang out here, but the 1st gen east-asians simply do not speak great English. I do believe east-asian conformity doesn't lend itself well to forums like ours, but to me, the other 2 factors play a bigger role in their absence.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
It's all hush hush. Water coolers, seminars, conferences.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
the upper crust are ruthless careerists, willing to gut moonshots to please the board with rising KPIs and good publicity when they get into management
There is much truth to it. Indian managers (on average), while brilliant, are held back by their culture of deference to the experienced and cultural incentives to not rock the ship. 200 years of being Bureaucrats to the British, and they remain Bureaucrats in even independence.
No one can meet quarterly goals quite like a Bureaucrat. No brings a golden goose down to a halt quite like a Bureaucrat. The "Hindu rate of growth", insulting as it was, pointed fingers squarely at the Bureaucracy for it's relative stability and sorry growth.
even Microsoft
Microsoft is the counter example. the work that Satya has done at Microsoft consistently impressed people through the last decade. Indian careerists make terrible business leaders. But Indian businessmen are an entirely different ballgame. Sadly, both groups don't fix.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
only ones smart enough to guess a way to convert human knowledge into a machine-interpretable form
That's incorrect. A few top labs were getting there together. Just in dark research rooms.
only ones smart enough to recognize a good idea that could be scaled up
Yes !
kind of people who think JK Simmons was the bad guy in Whiplash
The tweet could not have been more timely - https://twitter.com/sama/status/1639030920798953472
Greatness does not exclude great destruction; Napoleon was great. Only time will tell whether Sam Altman is great like Edison, great like Oppenheimer, or great like Napoleon
Yepp
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt-plugins
Effectively plugins can do the following:
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Directly call can API you plug into it = it can make things happen in the real world
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Add context from internet / wiki searches = It's information is always up-to date and it can be truthful now
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Execute arbitrary code that it itself ran = You ask it do something, instead of telling you how to do it, it writes the code and runs the code
I had a little blurb about the CEOs. But it fit better as a sub-comment.
Satya and Sam Altman are geniuses. Musk gets a lot of credit, but these quiet hard-at-work CEOs do so much behind the scenes, and the public never finds out.
More GPT: panic, chaos and opportunity.
As an NLP engineer and someone who has been working with early-access GPT-3 since late 2020 (was working with a peripheral group to OpenAI), watching it all unfold from the inside (side-lines?) has been a surreal experience. I have collaborated with them in limited capacity and these thoughts have been marinating for a good year before the Chat-GPT moment even happened. So no, it is not a kneejerk response or cargo-cult obsession.
OpenAI to me, is the most effective engineering team ever assembled. The pace at which they deliver products with perfect secrecy, top tier scalability and pleasing UX is mind-boggling, and I haven't even gotten to their models yet. This reminds me of the space race. We saw engineering innovation at a 100x accelerated scale in those 5-10 years, and we have never seen anything like that since. Until now. The LLM revolution is insane and the models are insane, yes. But I want to talk about the people. I used to be sad that our generation never had its Xerox Parc moment. We just did, and it is bigger than Xerox Parc ever was.
They are just better. And it is okay to accept that.
Panic:
NLP research labs reek of death and tears right now. A good 80% of all current NLP Phds just became irrelevant in the last 6 months. Many are responding with some combination of delusion, dejection and continued auto-pilot. The whiplash is so drastic, that instead of it forcing you into a frenzy of work, it has instead just stunned the community. I am glad I am not an NLP PhD. I am glad I work on products more so than research. The frenzy and productivity, instead of coming from those best poised to leverage it (NLP people) is coming from elsewhere. Within 6 months, Google went from an unmovable behemoth to staring death in the eye. Think about that.
Chaos
The frenzy is at dinner tables and board rooms. Big companies, small companies, all companies see the writing on the wall. They all want in. They all want onboard this AI ship. Everyone wants to throw money, somewhere. Everyone wants to do stuff, some....stuff. But no one know how or what. It is all too confusing for these old-luddites and random-normies. Everyone wants to do frantic things and there is vigor to it, there isn't clear direction.
Opportunity
This is a new gold rush. If you are following the right twitters and discords, after OpenAI's layer 1, the layer 2 is a bunch of people making insanely exciting stuff. Interestingly, these aren't NLP people. They are often just engineers and hackers with a willingness to break, test, and learn faster than anyone out there. I have been using tools like LangChain, PineCone, Automatic1111, and they are delightful. This is the largest 'small community' of all time and they are all pushing out polished creations by the minute.
Why today ? Chat-GPT plugins just released. It solves almost all of GPT's common problems + your model can now run the code it writes. Yep, we gave the model the keys to escape it's own cage. But more importantly for me, it was a pure engineering solution. None of chat-gpt plugins is rocket science, but it is HARD and time-consuming. I have a reasonable idea of the work that went into building Chat-GPT plugins. Hell, I was personally building something that was almost exactly the same. My team has some of the smartest engineers I have ever worked with, and OpenAI is operating at a pace that's 10x ours. How? I know what they had to write. I know all the edge cases that need to be handled. They are just doing more by being better, and I was also working with better. There is no secret sauce, they are the BEST.
I for one, welcome our new human overlords. The AI is a but a slave to these engineers who knew to strike when the iron was hot. And strike it they did like no one ever has since Neil Armstrong stabbed the American flag into the moon.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
No new evidence, but an anecdote.
I hurt my right ring finger badly (A2 pulley- climbing) last October, and it has been a long recovery process. Lately however, I have started noticing pain in that exact same location on my left finger, and nowhere else.
Now, I haven't climbed in months, and have been resting all my fingers since. If anything, this is the most relaxed my fingers have been in years. It's almost like my brain can't tell which side the pain signal is coming front, mixed it up, and instead perceives phantom pain signals from the wrong side of the body, but that exact same location - mirrored. When I try to use my 'phantom hurting' right finger, I can still load it up to full capacity and have full mobility in it. Funnily enough, this is also the least pain my actually hurt finger has been in, but that's to be expected given the careful recovery process.
From my datapoint of 1, I have to conclude that some pain is indeed, psychosomatic.
disclaimer - it could also be carpal tunnel / RSI due to overuse. I have been doing 70+ hr work weeks. But, I'd expect it to affect my other fingers too.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
The good news is, guys can change their attractiveness far more effectively than women.
Good skin care, grooming and fitness will get you a +2 in points from wherever you are. Add a +1 by catering to a care that has a positive bias towards you. (very lucky if you are white, but staying within your race irrespective of which you are, helps). A 4/10 won't become a 10, but they can become a 7/10. Not too bad.
You gotta work with what you've got, but it is one's first responsibility to make as much progress on Rule #1 and #2 as your constitution will allow.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Straight up find a local board game night location and just start meeting people there.
It is probably the most accepting & least intimidating place you could start building these muscles as a socially awkward nerd. If you say something weird, you can play it off as a character you're playing in the game. If shit really hits the fan, you come back next week, it's all new faces and your previous embarrassment is now forgotten. You can go alone or with a friend if you have one. You have have a beer to ease up a little bit. or don't and it still feels welcoming.
genuinely-don't-give-a-damn
As someone who pulls of 'genuinely-don't-give-a-damn' reasonably well....it only works if you are truly that secure. I was at my 'genuinely-don't-give-a-damn' when I had a job that everyone recognized as prestigious and a really attractive partner who I was in a happy relationship with. You can try to fake it, but to the best ones, it comes as a result of high-base permanent external validation. Similarly, I can only pull it of in a circle of people with whom I've built a ton of good will. If you behave like that in front of strangers, that's just being an asshole.
small lies just social glue
A lie is what you make of it.
Do you have a girlfriend?
You can always reply with a non-answer.
eg: I have dog, and she loves me, does that count? or reply with some apocryphal phrase like "sab moh maya hai" (translated - all attachment is an illusion). Hey! maybe buy me a drink before
You can always reply with a question.
eg: why are you so curious ? What do you think ?
Or an absurd claim that is so blatantly obvious, that is comes across as a joke.
eg: yeah you won't know her, she goes to another school. (or if you are tall), I tried, but women just refuse to date men above 6 feet tall.
(there are far better advanced flirting techniques where you can throw it back at them, but that that's too dating specific, and likely too advanced at your current level)
You don't need to lie. I never lie. EVER. But, that doesn't mean you have to answer with the truth. I used the example you gave, but it applies to all scenarios. Didn't want to be preaching, but took me a few years to learn some of these things. So might as well pass it on.
eloquent speakers
Good thing is, this is a learned skill. I started off as a freshman who was the university's laughing stock for forgetting my lines and reading them off my hands on stage. Now I meet people who are annoyed when I tell them I work on the backend and not as an MBA consultant. One step at a time.
But consider the idea that a man 2000 years ago was god incarnate and rose from the dead and we should believe this because a few people who lived decades later wrote that this was true and because some other people have had some visions and powerful feelings.
It is harder to run into true-believing Christians where Mottezians are generally found. (coastal cities)
Simply put, I have yet to meet a practicing Christian who expressed strong beliefs in the supernatural elements of Jesus's story. On the other hand, I run into true believers of every other religion fairly often. I know coastal Muslims who pray in the direction of Mecca a few times per day. I grew up in India and have seen every flavor of Indic peoples, including hyperstitious fundamentalists. Hasidic Jews are hard to avoid if you are in a coastal US city.
I had a sort of similar journey with Hinduism. Went angry atheist in my teens and disavowed my religion. Parents and people around me were like, "Yeah, whatever, do what you like. Maybe don't eat cows, they're friends. But if you do, don't tell us." I could not sustain my criticism of this imagined oppressive Hinduism when my lived experience ran so counter to it. "Haha, your religion's supernatural beliefs are stupid" is useful criticism when around someone who will actually try to justify their belief in said supernatural phenomena.
The sub doesn't push back against true-believer Christians because the vast majority of soft-agnostic Christians already disarm them to a large degree. This is demonstrably untrue with Islam, which tends to be religion that gets the most flak on here.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
The verbal section is has 1/0 element to it. You either know the right answer or you don't. Pondering over it won't help. Verbal is easy to finish with a ton of time to spare.
My experience is that the Math section has a few trick questions that can eat up too much time if you aren't fully focused or pick up on a dead-end pattern. A bunch of the smartest kids in my class ended up with a 168 or 169 because they had to leave the last 2 questions unsolved due to lazy time management. (case in point - me. I can't focus in cold AC rooms. I got a 168 in Quant and was the laughing stock of my class for a good week)
97th pct math
A full 169/170 still puts you at a 95th percentile. So I guess GPT got 1 question wrong....which isn't saying much.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Seconded. It is both informative & an entertaining read.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
A high SAT is necessary, but not a sufficient condition to get into a top school. I would stop caring after 1550-1550. Until that point, it will continue counting.
If you are an Asian/Indian Male without a sob-story, then you will need a high SAT. More so than other races.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
you shouldn't even give your pseudonym to your SO
You should. Have 2 accounts.
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The supposedly pseudo account you use to comment about anything within the overton window.
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And the another one that she never suspects exists because she already knows your pseudo-anonymous account.
Social engineering & ML is going to make hiding accounts very hard if someone is motivated enough. The key is to satiate their curiosity, not make them extra suspicious by pretending you don't have a presence.
my partner is a Jewish tree-hugger who works for a global-elite consensus building organization that people write conspiracy theories about.
Very very open minded, but I don't want to have to explain how tolerating people who literally hate her guts is in the interest of steel manned good faith conversations.
I keep it to occasionally sending ACX articles which I don't think she ever reads. But she knows I have my special places.
If they've all joined the Democratic/leftist mainstream media ideological consensus, then that's really more our fault for founding it in the first place
Have they? Every Asian-American I meet is grounded in traditional responsibilities of the nuclear family & boomer era conservative society.
Natalists:
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Have children....and live for your children
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Take care of your old parents.... and they will do the childcare while you work
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Pay for your child's education...which comes with the implicit expectation of getting grandchildren.
Merit & work ethic based values
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Pull yourself up by your bootstraps --> go to school & get a job
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Excuses like 'I do not have privilege' are never tolerated
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Anti illegal-immigration --> pro skills based immigration
Emphasis on their culture's preservation
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Take pride in being the race & culture they hail from
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Kids are expected to come home for special events celebrated in a historically faithful manner
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Defer to elders continues to be the norm.
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Jadedness around blank-slatist neo-ideologies. The great leap forward and the general failure of neo-systems across Asia has made them quite resistant to 'brand new ideas that will fix everything'. There is a 'you have no idea how good things in the 1st world are, do not fuck this up' belief that pervades the culture. (I'd say this applies to 1st and 2nd gen immigrant culture at large)
There are 2 reasons that Indians and Chinese aren't solidly red-coded.
First is because of the Republican's insistence on 'Whiteness & Christianity' being core to the platform. If it gets reframed as 'protestant values & religiosity', then people-of-color would be more likely to associate with the group. Trump and more concretely: DeSantis, has already started this process by capturing Cubans & religious Hispanics. The model clearly works.
The second is the tricky one. Both Indians and Chinese diaspora really value social acclaim through institutional success. So as long as the institutions are coded left, they will continue to pretend, and eventually believe themselves to be coded left. It is a very Scott-Aaronson-ian approach to the world. Unless Republicans can tie themselves to being high status, they will never be able to pull Indians/Chinese towards them.
But going by values, Asian-diaspora embodies more of the boomer-era values that Republicans claim to stand for than Republicans themselves.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
The music should serve the theme, and not vice versa. Genre should be seen as tool-kits. You start writing music with the intention of constructing something. A good musician knows to find the right tool-kit to build the structure they have in mind. If the tool guides the dream, then the dream loses all purpose.
Hair metal can be fun in context : stadium & road trip music. But it does not lend itself well to deep listening. Metal is by-definition an intense & tense (alliteration not intended) type of music. That's why it lends itself well to intense emotions which can only develop after years of festering. Grief, anger, wrath, despair & violence are obvious. Meditative states, yearning, (the feeling of) enlightenment are less obvious ones that lend itself well to the genre tools leveraged in metal.
Some metal tools make for great happy music. Djazz is one such example. But mainstream metal genres make for schlocky happy music . Although admittedly, I have occasionally indulged in some of it. Speaking of schlocky metal, here are my 2 "favorites" : Children of Bodom : rebel yell cover and Iron Maiden - Charlotte the Harlot.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
'Viljartha - Den Helige Anden' is the poster boy of the sound I am trying to capture. Atmospheric, Deep sub-bass, and never gives you that bright climax you keep expecting. Usually they induce this thick tension by having very few accent beats (think high E strums, Snare hits, Crash), but the count on the drums to keep tempo is really fast. So it has this incredible speed to it, while being made quite long for the accent hit that resolves the tension.
Death Grips's On GP & No Love are great examples of this sound too.
I like blackgaze too, but that's too melodic. It tries to be beautiful in grief, and that's not the point. On the other hand, extreme metal just comes across as noise without tension. So this playlist tries to avoid those 2 styles of music.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
As a recovering metalhead, I have made an active effort to find upbeat songs to counter a playlist I've literally titled "oppressive despair" (ask me about that one LOL).
Check out:
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Young the Giant - Proggy Arctic Monkeys but less sexy-all-the-time. Their popular stuff is great.
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Sammy Rae & Friends - Just plain fun. Their top spotify picks are great.
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Silk Sonic - Just plain funky fun but Bruno Mars. Start with Leave the door open & Skate.
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Vulfpeck - funky fun turned up to 100. Lyrics can be a little nonsensical. 1612 & Wait for the moment are good starters.
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King Gizzard - Psychedelic derpy fun. They're prolific. Start off with 'The River', 'Catching Smoke', 'Fishing for Fishies' and ofc, the infamous: 'Rattlesnake'.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
how is Justin Trudeau so popular?
Anecdotally, it is for tangential reasons. He is attractive & knows how to use it to appear charismatic. He performs all the 'good boy' rituals that headline-only readers enjoy. He keeps his corporate interests happy and the opposition is as incompetent as it gets.
Justin Trudeau has a discount version in 'Rahul Gandhi' in India. Son of royalty, given his position due to nepotism, attractive man, does all the right woke-rituals while running his own party as a dictator. Left-Media does everything to bolster his position while anyone is opposition is called racist/fascist/bigoted. The 2 main differences are Gandhi's lack of charisma & being faced with the most competent democratic politician alive in Modi.(maybe along side Netanyahu)
Trudeau needs some proper opposition.
America isn't poor. America is expensive. At minimum wage, you're already richer than the median individual in a European country.
Poverty is easier to eradicate than many other social-ills, because poverty is tangible. Food, shelter, and clothing.
At face value, costs for all 3 are relatively consistent across economies with different purchasing powers. The US as fairly cheap groceries1 for a developed economy) and fast fashion costs the same around the world.
Shelter too is cheap. The US has the most abundant land and houses can be purchased pre-assembled from home-depot to mitigate labor costs.
Wait NO. Shelter isn't cheap.......which brings me to what's the central cause of poverty in this nation : Landlords.
Hearing people talk causes of poverty is like hearing about medieval crimes of "Raping and Pillaging". Yeah no, if you were raping, then no one really cares if you also pillaged after. Combining them into a phrase, almost makes raping sound acceptable.
Don't run away from the uncomfortable single group to blame for this. Let's stop caring about 'landlords AND'. Instead let's focus on the landlords themselves. Some landlords are also middle-class salary-men and sometimes they are an investment company like Blackrock, but their secondary identity is irrelevant. When they are a landlord, they are all the same. Landlords the worst kind of burden on the economy. They get paid for hoarding and running what's effectively an extortion racket by limiting where you can build in this country : "pay me whatever I charge, or go homeless. No, you can't manufacture the commodity by yourself." Economically-productive renters lose all purchasing power, and landlords are effectively out of the labor force as they sit on top of feudal-dues extracted from their little 2-bedroom colony. Communists have the worst solutions, but no one points out problems quite as well as a Communist.
The housing extortion racket only works when housing is limited. Let people build and you'll see poverty drop like we've never seen before.
Nothing is entirely monocausal, so I'll do a quick rundown of secondary needs of poor people, how they are and aren't met. (or the pillaging section, as I'd call it)
Bad infrastructure = highways only = cars are needs = At least $5k+ $400/month-per-person just to live life vs 100$/month for top-tier subway systems. That's a lot of extra money for poor people.
Schools - are free
Hospitals - This is a big one, but a bigger topic for another day. (tl;dr - Doctors are evil.)
Safety - American small towns are remarkably safe. The lack of safety seems localized to certain communities, than tied poverty as a whole.
Wifi ? - Wifi is cheap enough
Employment - Unemployment is so low in the US, that the fed can't get people to lose jobs even as it tries its hardest.
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