NewCharlesInCharge
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User ID: 89
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
Decent odds, maybe 50% chance Vance is here. Doubtful on Putin. Would be unsurprised if Russian intelligence used this forum as a source of intelligence on exploitable culture war topics.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
You could argue that they don't truly believe it because if they did they'd also treat those seeking abortions as they would someone attempting a murder, but that's just arguing that they're insincere or inconsistent, not hyperbolic.
I think most women seeking abortion lack the mens rea to properly call it murder, they've been told all their lives that abortion is "healthcare," "just a clump of cells," and many other slogans that distract from the reality that abortion is ending a human life.
The doctors can be presumed to know better.
Were I writing the laws I would make a distinction between someone in this mental state and someone who knows full well that they're taking actions with the express purpose of killing another human. You'd have to default to treating all offenders as ignorant, letting quite a few off with punishments less than what they deserve, but the "shout your abortion" types could be justly punished as willing murderers.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
At least at my job, which is a large company but not government large, people generally know who the CEO's lieutenants are. If one of them asks for something directly, beyond verifying it's not a phishing attack, and unless I needed to push back because I knew it was going to break something, I'd just do it and send a note to my manager.
Email is almost never used here, nearly all comms are internal chats on our own platform, so phishing is pretty unlikey.
And if the CEO or his lietuenants wanted to look at all my emails, they'd just ask the department responsible for that, without any need to justify themselves. They can also look at everything on my phone, they can even view a live stream of my desktop.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
Near where I used to live we had an intersection where three corners were gas stations and the other corner was a 7-11, no gas.
It's a four lane divided road. The gas stations on the far side of the intersection, where one could take a right after passing through the intersection, and then take another right to continue on the same route, have always had the same branding and ownership.
The one gas station that was on the near side, where you'd have to exit and be immediately at the stop light, would change ownership every couple of years, and eventually failed completely.
Traffic gets very backed up in this area, and I'm guessing people didn't want to deal with re-entering with a line of cars that wouldn't be kind enough to let them in. Just a few seconds further would take you to a station where eventually traffic would get blocked by a red and you could re-enter without depending on the kindness of strangers.
That property sat unused for about a decade, reportedly because of the great expense involved in neutralizing the underground gas tanks to meet environmental standards.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
That expectation doesn't exist in the private sector. The boss is expected to have access to everything you do on company devices.
If Alphabet wants to import all of Waymo's email comms for training Gemini, they have that right.
Or if they suspect employee X is barely or not-at-all working, they can dig around without needing to check with the employee first.
Maybe it would make sense to place limits around criminal investigations, but not giving the employer carte blanche to view the data generated by their employees on company devices is just hamstringing the employer's ability to manage its employees.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
Requiring a response violates the Privacy Act (congress makes all sorts of rules that limit the executive in various ways)
This seems too absurd to be true but it's apparently not even the most absurd bit of this law. The federal government is restricted from collecting PII on its own employees, which includes mere names and email addresses, without it being necessary to accomplish a purpose authorized by law or executive order.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
It was their union that negotiated the contracts to set up these incentives.
If you’re looking to cut budgets and have one class of employees that will be difficult to terminate and another class that are essentially at-will, of course you will focus on the latter group.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
I think you misread Hsu's motives. He's almost always giving his honest read of a situation and saying where US policy is working against itself. For example, export restrictions on high-end microchips. He said this is just going to bootstrap Chinese chip manufacturing that otherwise would have had to compete with imports. Manufacturers in China have the same incentives as anyone else and until the ban consumed a whole lot of imported chips.
Now we have DeepSeek R1 that was partly trained on Huawei chips.
On a recent podcast he talked about learning of Trump's win while hiking a mountain in China. And he fist-pumped and celebrated as an American happy that his country was getting back on the right track. And then shortly after was soliciting for technical experts to fill roles in the adminstration.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
Occupying government buildings to coerce a political outcome was merely planned by the Proud Boys and they got decades in jail for it.
They're only out now due to pardon, the laws are still on the books and available to the Trump DoJ.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
It appears that for all the blood and treasure spent since the early war peace deal was derailed, they're probably getting the terms of the early war peace deal.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
We may still be the most powerful country, but we're not capable of enforcing our will on all things. For about ten years after the fall of the Soviet Union this was perhaps the perception, but the new adventures in the Middle East revealed this was no longer the case, and perhaps it never was.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
What exactly does this mean? The "Euromaiden was fake/astroturf" position runs aground on the absolutely massive, cross-spectrum popular participation.
That something was a color revolution doesn't imply that the participants were altogether fake.
Every country has its dissidents. An intelligence agency can help them to fund their activities, grow their networks, spread their message, etc. I would say that for something to be a color revolution it wouldn't have happened but for the covert participation of another state.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
I have pretty rudimentary knowledge of the training itself outside of storage needs, but my understanding is that each node in the neural net is linked to all the other nodes in the next stage of processing. So when you’re training you need to adjust the weights on all the nodes in the net, run the data through the adjusted weights, see if it’s a better result, rinse and repeat.
There isn’t a local model, the model is distributed across the cluster.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
It's coordinating them that is the issue. You don't give them a big queue of work and let them churn through it independently for a month. Each step of training has to happen at the same time, with all GPUs in the cluster dependent on the work of others. It's much more like one giant computer than it is like a bunch of computers working together.
In those conditions you have lots of things that get more and more painful as you scale up. I specialize in storage. Where for most applications we might optimize for tail latencies, like ensuring the 99.9th percentile of requests complete within a certain target, for AI we optimize for max(). If one request out of a million is slow it slows down literally everything else in the cluster. It's not just the one GPU waiting on data that ends up idling, the other 99,999 will too.
You also have the problem that if one computer breaks during the training run you need to go recompute all the work that it did on the step that it broke on. Folks are coming up with tricks to get around this, but it introduces a weird tradeoff of reliability and model quality.
And of course constructing and maintaining the network that lets them all share the same storage layer at ultra high bandwidth and ultra low latencies is nontrivial.
Also at least in my corner of AI folks are skeptical that xAI actually operated their 100k GPUs as a single cluster. They probably had them split up. 5 20K GPU clusters is a different beast than 1 100K GPU cluster.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
Drastic surgery is not always better than the alternative.
Plenty of people out there have been made worse off from unnecessary surgeries.
Awhile back I was having some back issues. Saw a surgeon who leveled with me that he could justify surgery, but he could do it for just about anyone my age, almost everyone's got some disc abnormalities that will show on an MRI. He told me that the outcomes from surgery would almost certainly be worse than non-surgical options. And so I went the non-surgical route and don't have back issues any longer.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
If you prove it can be done without the state, then you'll have a much harder time arguing that it should be the responsibility of the state.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
Silicone rings in vaginas are commonly self inserted and removed.
NuvaRing is a fairly common birth control drug with this delivery method.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
Even worse, the funding is contingent on abiding the federal government’s whims.
Under Biden schools risked losing their funding for not accommodating transgender kids in bathrooms and on sports teams.
Now it’s probably going to be the opposite.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
The pre undress pics in my feed are maybe the first I’ve seen that lady fully clothed.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
The US has a $36 trillion debt. A quick Google shows all foreign aid is about $70 billion per year. About 0.2% of the total debt.
Later in that thread Scott shares that he donated about $350,000 to charity last year.
To analogize this to the US foreign aid situation, this would be like donating $350,000 to charity while you have debt of $175 million. And it's not a debt that you've addressed in any real way, and it grows substantially year after year.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
This makes more sense than "they can use it to spy our citizens."
There are data brokers that operate in the open that will sell you nearly everything TikTok could collect about you. Having access to an app would give you a bit more, like real-time geolocation data rather than stale geolocation data. But for targets where that matters you'd be better off having your intelligence agencies compromise the target's phone. Anyone with reason to be paranoid about the Chinese government spying on them would not have TikTok installed anyway.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
Interesting. I guess if I didn't mind the risk of financial ruin I could test my idea that operating a proxy is protected speech.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
My state legislators don't even kayfabe it, they not-my-job it. When they were considering, and eventually passed, bills that clearly violated the stipulations of Bruen, I wrote them cathartic letters expressing as such, not expecting to get more than a form letter response.
I did end up getting a substantial response from a staffer. After some back and forth, I found the position was essentially this: It would be inappropriate for the legislator, not being a constitutional scholar or a member of the Supreme Court herself, to even entertain the question of whether the bills she votes on are constitutional.
Here's one of the responses, obfuscated slightly by ChatGPT to make it difficult to link me to this exact text:
Senator X, who is not an attorney and does not serve within the judicial system, operates in the legislative branch and is unlikely to participate in any cases before state or federal supreme courts. Therefore, it would be inappropriate to expect them to form an opinion on constitutional matters or to provide historical examples for judicial proceedings.
If clarification is needed, I can share a document outlining the separation of powers and the distinct roles of each branch concerning the creation, execution, and interpretation of laws.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
If you run with the lower classes good odds you know of someone who is collecting disability but could easily work some non-back-breaking job. I know a few. One guy I know collects veterans disability but could easily do even heavy labor. His claimed disability is PTSD from an event that happened off-base in an allied country and outside the line of duty. The guy just parties all the time.
There are 8.9 million SSDI recipients in the US. The average monthly payment is $1,483.
Say you paid investigators to go out and spy on one person each working day. There are 240 working days in a year.
If you paid the investigator $70,000, they'd need to catch four people to break even on their salary.
If more than 1.7% of people are committing such obvious fraud that you'll catch them with one day of observation, then it's worth it to hire the investigator.
I’d assume some basic competence in mapping influence networks. They’d certainly know of the rationalists, and if so would know of SSC, and if so would likely know of this place.
Imagine you were tasked with knowing about Internet culture circa 2005. You’d certainly know about the Something Awful forums. Though I guess this place is more like FYAD. Or the piracy forum spinoffs.
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