EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
I know what you're here for. What's his bias? Politically I at least like to think of myself as a true moderate, maybe (in US context) slightly naturally right-leaning but currently politically left-leaning if I had to be more specific.
User ID: 1043
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
4d ago
That’s a great point and I was just trying to be brief with my allusion. I actually think that you could get bipartisan support for limiting the type of immigration that leads to large amount of remittances vs those who genuinely want to raise families and establish themselves. Thus my point about how the current split is partially a result of the stalled bipartisan efforts (like really we were only a vote or two shy several times)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
4d ago
Maybe you would know, but are there good “AI” piano music transcription models nowadays?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
4d ago
Only certain strategies, but there can sometimes be some fun dimensions especially when outnumbered to the Total War Troy or Pharoah games.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
4d ago
In my perception it’s not so much that the Democrats have gone crazy it’s more that Republicans won the messaging war and also, tactically, tricked many Democrats into knee jerk reactions. Dems have always been praising the virtues of model minority immigrants and at times Reps too, that’s important background. Dems had a long history of wanting more “charitable” treatment for the poor or oppressed (whether you think this is a weakness or a strength is partly a values disagreement). We can’t act like this isn’t a recurrent historical position - see for example the Statue of Liberty poem about bringing America the poor and hungry and persecuted. (Immigration sentiment also historically has come in waves for and against)
So when Trump says some overtly racist things or does a Muslim bad etc., plus the college educated lens of viewing Trump pronouncements as facially and literally accurate rather than the directional pronouncements most voters actually hear, I think there was an overreaction. Dems operate partly on guilt and border security plays on that guilt. But again, although some politicians got tricked into saying and supporting poorly considered things in Trump backlash (hate to admit he could be right about anything) extending even to the Biden years still in the shadow of Trump, I’d view this as mostly organic rather than some actual pro-immigrant plot.
To be sure, there IS a subset of Democrats who legitimately feel greater allegiance to the globe and humanity as a whole than they do to the US, they are loud but this is often a minority and they don’t always get into authority positions.
I should also add that at least 3 times in the last 15 years we got extremely close to compromise with immigration bills, but they all failed to pass so in a very real way the problem got worse than normal. In that way, of course the rhetoric gets most extreme, because the problem is more extreme
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
11d ago
Few things terrify me more than a possible (and increasingly likely-sounding) future where superbugs of all kinds have free reign and with little recourse - aggressive Asian hornets (although allegedly wiped out), ticks, bed bugs, cockroaches, fire ants, termites (two major species just hybridized), etc. To say nothing of how violated I would feel if a tick literally gave me a meat allergy. Thankfully growing up in the PNW as well, seems like we were (still mostly are) one of the places with the fewest awful insects in the country.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
15d ago
Again this whole thing would be easier, ironically even for Trump, had Trump not personally torpedoed a major compromise immigration bill before coming in to office. Which among other things would have increased the number of available judges.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
15d ago
This is just anti-credentialism at its most stupid. If anything the legal industry is one of the best places to be credentialist, because so many cases turn on very specific case law and precedent that the non-credentialed have almost no hope of fully understanding. Let alone the whole demand for isolated rigor lens. Respectfully, your intuition is twisted.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
15d ago
What the above poster is claiming and what I think is more accurate is that rather than foreign students “taking spots” from domestic students, instead there is a synergistic effect where more-profitable foreign students essentially underwrite less-profitable domestic students. Like how health care takes profits from healthy people (and lucky people) to pay for poor people (and unlucky people). If you take away foreign money, you actually hurt domestic students! Universities will shrink their advanced degree programs due to funding shortfalls rather than expand access to domestic applicants. Making this an own-goal (at least in absolute numbers)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
15d ago
The funny thing I read recently was about how shipping is a mess because of Trump - first, a ton of big ships made trips to the EU, and now that there’s a pause in the China tariffs and US companies are stocking up, the ships are in the wrong spot. Basically a lot of reactionary decisions all around and because Trump’s mind is hard to read the logistic decisions at also unstable and sometimes “wrong”
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
15d ago
It’s tough, but I don’t think RCTs are possible. Despite obviously how helpful they would be. They require you to randomize treatment, and not only is blinding difficult or impossible, at its core for an RCT to even occur you need parents and teen subjects BOTH who are willing to give up the choice entirely to chance! That is, if you’re assigned to a transition group or not, neither the parent nor child can have a veto, or it ruins makes random assignment useless. I don’t know anyone who would be comfortable doing that, do you?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
20d ago
Just because I was reminded by the comment in the main thread, do pierced septums, tongues, and gauges give anyone the major ick? Nose studs? Fine. Belly button piercings? A little wierd but fine. Any non-face tattoo? Fine. But hoooooly crap does anything more than a tiny septum piercing make me uncomfortable. Not just like, “oh that’s weird” but almost I find it physically repulsive that larger ones I find it hard to even look. Ear gauges also, anything bigger than a button. Tongue piercings in any size. Is this just a human “looks like that would hurt” reaction, or is there some other component maybe? Curious if others feel the same but are more/less vocal about it, or if it’s just a personal issue.
I was raised as conservative Christian (how conservative? Useless question, too relative) but in liberal Oregon, if relevant, so at least it’s not purely a lack of exposure thing.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
21d ago
Thanks!
A somewhat interesting Orson Scott Card (cowritten) book on a hypothetical civil war had some ideas (but is mostly just a thriller, notable for (major plot spoiler)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
22d ago
Reddit accounts are 1) worth money, technically but 2) are occasionally useful for when you need to post in a community that requires a higher reputation. So I'd keep it. For example, I've used /r/hardwareswap before, which seemed easier to me than doing eBay. If that's like what you're describing, where your name shows up in DM's, I don't see any reason to panic unless you're a major political figure or something.
I think it's more the case that psychology has strayed from some of the more helpful and direct aspects into softer and less effective techniques, that sound more short-term palatable and reasonable. I think CBT is a central case. Have you ever read the book that kick-started basically the whole movement? It's Feeling Good by David Burns. Actually, such an interesting book. The main thesis is that you should get in the ingrained habit of mentally "talking back" to yourself. Not necessarily belligerently, often compassionately, but still firmly. And without drugs. You can see where some of the modern therapy-talk comes from, but at the same time, it's almost unrecognizable! I should write a main post about it sometime.
He does things like having you write out a cost-benefit analysis for being angry. He writes out some extensive role-plays where one person aggressively challenges the other. He has you literally write down on paper thoughts and then deliberately re-phrase them, like a kind of self-brainwashing. Or, in other cases, to write down your predictions The emphasis is that theoretically, you get enough tools that you can go without therapy indefinitely. You should "get better" and not just "feel better" (I should note that the book's focus is most focused on depression and related symptoms, not trauma or anything like that). There's a nice little table at one point of 10 (really 11) specific "cognitive distortions" that are seen as the source of "many if not all of your depressed states" (page 42 on my copy, which I dug out of storage). They are: all or nothing thinking, overgeneralization, mental filters, disqualifying the positive, jumping to conclusions (mind reading and the fortune teller error), magnification/catastrophizing or minimization, emotional reasoning, should statements, labeling and mislabeling, and personalization. The underlying thesis is that if you are unhappy, it is because you have some maladaptive or frankly incorrect ideas in your head that are too extreme and don't match reality. By becoming a more rational observer of yourself, you can have realistic standards and cope better with extenuating circumstances. In this way, it's almost explicitly anti-narcissist. It also straight up rejects the notion that your emotions are a reliable guide. That is to say, emotions alone have a feedback loop with thoughts and do not exist purely independently. And one of your "demons" is the self-critic, to which you respond with talk-back, along with some evidence (putting pen to paper and even "testing" some of your assertions).
I'm leafing through this book again and it's so interesting that he actually has criticism of what were then practices of the time, that you still see now, despite CBT allegedly becoming the go-to method. There's this passage about how "emotional ventilation for its own sake is usually not enough", where he talks about a writer who "learned" from her prior therapist that she's perfectionist, that she picked up from her mother, and could never please her mother, and the therapist said to stop it, but she doesn't know how, mechanically, despite this knowledge. He goes on to criticize the industry for overfocusing on "ventilation of emotions and insight" and under-emphasizing actual tools and techniques. Anecdotally, I will also say that it was pretty rare across several therapists I myself went to for them to ever assign meaningful homework, much less follow up. Ironically, including the one who recommended the book, which therapist didn't even bother to take notes (and clearly didn't take them afterwards because he would rarely remember what we previously discussed). I thus wonder if it's not as much the exploration of feelings that's the problem so much as stopping halfway and stopping there, instead of viewing feeling-exploration as a means to an end.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
22d ago
I mean although this kind of violence is infamously contagious and prone to copy-cats, the optics here are pretty uniquely terrible. Not that it usually matters for terrorists that their actions frequently are counter-productive. The museum is already left-aligned in several ways (the website has a Native American land acknowledgement and an Equity and Justice statement about BIPOC people, hosts "LGBTJews" events, etc.), the man wasn't even Jewish he was a Christian although both were still Israeli embassy staff, and the couple was young and photogenic, famously about to get engaged within a week or two.
I don't see how this changes anything about partisan violence levels.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
22d ago
Isn’t this a solved problem in a more local sense? You just put a housing development off the main road with deliberately curved and winding streets which has the natural effect of slowing down car speeds and limiting through traffic as long as the entry points were sensibly chosen. No need to be a mid sized town, this can be dropped into bigger city outskirts.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
22d ago
If my (extremely amateur) experiences with images is any guide, then it’s extremely bad at permanecense (google tells me this is not a word but I feel like it is).
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
22d ago
There would be a deep irony if the money making professors all bailed for China, thus having the opposite effect Trump intended
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
22d ago
Not all the endowments can be taken at face value. It’s kind of like a university’s 401K, while it’s counted in net worth it’s not immediately accessible. Also the stock market being unusually good the last 20 years has caused some of them to grow more than expected, but that’s not something you can bank on indefinitely. Thus, the 15 billion being unable to entirely sustain current spending. Even Harvard it’s something similar.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
22d ago
I think another sign that something was seriously wrong at Columbia is that they run the Columbia Teacher’s College, the premier destination for teacher training — that is best known in recent years for being the exact ones who were flagrantly wrong on the Science of Reading stuff, ironically mistraining teachers. Great write up.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
23d ago
This article is a good top level summary. This post was unverified but the reasons seem to match other reporting that the most recent model is a massive sunk cost. The head and VP not only both resigned last month but also asked their names not to be put on the eventual release. “Most of the team” probably overstated sorry. I accidentally took out of context the still notable fact that 11 of 14 of the authors of a major paper on the fundamental AI research team at Meta have left since publication and formation in 2023. Either way, Meta is behind absolutely but everyone is slowing. IMO we need another theoretical leap, probably about implementing “memory”, to keep progress rolling.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
23d ago
The point about simple measurement is a good one. Standardization is not so standard in history! Famously even changing the definition of a bushel of grain led to revolts on France because it distorted the tax collection, weights and measures might even vary from town to town.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
23d ago
It’s true that robotics is getting renewed attention, but this seems to be more the result of increased investment rather than any foundational sea change in knowledge or theory. The fixation on a bipedal and human-ish one is also just that, a fixation, and still leads to some difficulty even moving around consistently - see for example the robot marathon and of course claims that the Tesla robots have been somewhat relying on human controllers last I heard. No new paradigms yet there.
There continues to be progress on the LLM front but this is actually, maybe contrary to the impression you are getting, slowing. I wouldn’t call it a plateau at all but there’s a real sense of struggle out there. Most of the focus in the last six months has been tool use of various kinds, rather than fundamental improvements, though there are some theoretical ideas kicking around that might prove fruitful. On the contrary the major research labs have started to see some diminishing returns. Meta notably can’t even catch fully up to the front players and most of the team quit in frustration. Anthropic has been stuck in a bit of a rut with 3.7 only a mixed improvement over 3.5 and in some ways a regression. OpenAI has had trouble getting the so-called “version 5” off the ground that’s an impressive enough improvement to deserve the name. Google is catching up and adding some neat things. Context windows are going up. “Agent” systems are being experimented with more. Video generation is showing some sparks of brilliance but the compute required is pretty steep. Deepfake video and voice, even real time stuff, is the biggest issue right now, more than any AGI crap.
Yes to turn signals otherwise they don’t become habitual,
No to stop signs because a rolling stop doesn’t necessarily increase safety (I find full-stop people often actually delay braking more),
No to strict speed because not even civil engineers intend them to be literal law, and anyways you sometimes need to speed to pass,
No, many roads aren’t wide enough for half the lane to be purely a passing lane and close trailing is dangerous,
Yes, but mostly because I lived in Miami for a while where all drivers are aggressive,
No; all these norms should be universal,
Until I die I will insist that full (non LED-obscene level) brightness lights should be required on all cars, all times of day, all lighting conditions.
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