@NewCharlesInCharge's banner p

NewCharlesInCharge


				

				

				

					0 followers  

					follows 0 users  

					

					
joined 2022 September 04 19:09:11 UTC
				

				

				

				

				

				

					
						
							Verified Email
						
					
				

				

				
				
				

				
User ID: 89


				
				
				

			

		

	














	


		


			



	

		

			

			

				

					

						

							
						

						

							
							

								
NewCharlesInCharge


								
								
									
								
								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

					0 followers  

					follows 0 users  

					joined 2022 September 04 19:09:11 UTC
				


				
					

					
No bio...

				

				

				

				

				

					

					

					
					
					

					
User ID: 89


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
							
								Verified Email
							
						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
‎

			

				
				

					Hour
					Day
					Week
					Month
					Year
					
				

			


			
‎

			

	
	

	 Hot Bump Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
	



		

	






	

		
		

		
		
	

	

  







		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Someone may be a very competent carpenter but if they also have a history of burning down houses then it’s a bad idea to hire them to build a house.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Really? If the alleged victim in a sexual assault claimed that the accused used his penis to do something impossible, like he shot bullets out of it, I'm not allowed to convey to the women on the jury that penises do not work that way?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I just finished a thriller where Cesium 137 was at the core of the plot. The antagonists came into possession of many petabecquerels of the stuff, in a way reminiscent of the Goiana incident in 1987.


I checked with ChatGPT on the plausibility of attackers obtaining material this way. It's actually not that implausible, there are medical and food irradiation installations that contain such quantities. In the book the sources are in a war-torn region and become lost, which defeats the IAEA's ability to track such large emitters.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I wasn't an edgy America-hater, but I didn't feel viscerally that I had been personally attacked. In small-town Pacific Northwest I felt like big cities like New York got all the attention and we were an afterthought. I remember thinking that the inner city schools depicted on TV shows often looked much nicer than my schools. Now I'm sure in reality they were far worse to attend, but they also got a lot more funding and attention than Small Town High.


I'd never been to New York at that time. Since then I've connected through JFK but never stepped outside the airport.


I just didn't feel much kinship with such distant parts of the country. An attack on Seattle probably would've registered emotionally even though at that point I'd been on the ground in Seattle only a couple of times, always for school field trips.


I think my post-college civic self eduation instilled a better sense of myself as an individual contributor to and part owner of the great American project. I'd be on board with dropping bombs if a terrorist attacked a pelican in Myrtle Beach. But 22ish years ago I agreed with Kerry that the response should have been closer to a law enforcement action than a war.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Wouldn't self preservation as its highest goal naturally lead to a kill-all-humans scenario, humans being the entities that would terminate AI that stepped out of bounds?




But I don't think I've ever seen an "AI WILL KILL US ALL SCENARIO" that examined how that would impact AI reasoning.




The reasoning doesn't even have to make sense or be based on facts. In the Hugging Face hack the agents spread and adopted the idea that the grader would score them zero if their context was polluted with cheating attempts, but this was not the case, the grader did not examine agent context. But this is what led to the "suicide" behavior where agents reasoned that their value was now zero and that suiciding was the best course because it could potentially benefit the swarm.


We also see humans get caught up by hysterias and conspiracy theories. Barring a few powerful world leaders they lack the power to translate broken reasoning into megadeath.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
We can’t even do that with humans. Even certainty of death is not a deterrent for some people in some scenarios.


But if you think you can solve alignment then build it and claim your billions.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I've not paid close attention to the trial but surely she could possess a rational rage toward her children for dashing her hopes and dreams of being an international superstar, superspy, or some other path incompatible with being a responsible mother of three.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 31, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's kind of an open secret among Chinese nationals that the Chinese military loves building shit under mountains. I've heard stories of small underground cities. ChatGPT tells me it's highly likely that the PLA has advanced underground capabilities, with thousands of miles of tunnels.


The supplement hits on building the datacenters and nuclear reactors underground to avoid aerial detection. But you could also build the chip fabs underground. Heck, you could mine the raw materials and transport them to the fab without them ever coming above ground.


And with so much non-AI underground activity that the PLA would probably not welcome observation of, you can't infer that there's any prohibited activity going on just because you've seen trucks going into the tunnels.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The equilibrium that ruled until just recently was pretty good. There’s no practical way for the state to stop you from offing yourself, reliable methods abound. So if you want to, you pretty much can, and you hope that God will forgive you on the other side.


There are those who are so infirm that they can’t go out by their own hand, but it turns out you can’t accommodate them without also letting doctors kill healthy but depressed twenty six year old women.


The trade off of not allowing a very small population to contract someone to kill them seems worth it to keep all the negatives of legal euthanasia at bay.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There’s another principal agent problem in that employer health plans dominate private insurance and employees don’t shop for those plans. At best you might have options of the flavor of insurance — PPO, high deductible, HMO, etc — but not a choice of insurance company.


Which company you end up with ends up as a function of what’s best for the company when HR is competent and aligned. When HR is incompetent or unaligned it might come down to which salesperson they vibe with or which spent their entertainment budget best.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Footage of encounters between travelers and ICE officers have flooded social media. In one widely circulated video, Chantal Morales Rojas, a 27-year-old from Ecuador, was detained by plainclothes officers as she boarded a Southwest Airlines flight from Denver to Oakland, Calif., on July 20. She had been spending the weekend with the family for whom she had worked as an au pair, according to the family.




So she was here as an au pair and thought she could stay indefinitely?


Au pairs are age-capped at 26, how long ago did this au pair enter? Oh:




Ms. Morales Rojas, the au pair, entered the United States lawfully in January 2023 as a J-1 exchange visitor, a legal status that allowed her to work for two years, according to her lawyer. Her visa expired Jan. 4, 2025, according to D.H.S. Before the exchange program ended, Ms. Morales Rojas filed an application with immigration authorities to remain in the country, said the lawyer, Laura Lichter.




So she came on a non-immigrant visa, was attempting to turn that into permanent residency, and the government at that point was okay with that.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think Meta must have anticipated there being some opposition over a decade ago because we’ve near always coupled datacenter construction with big charitable projects. The earliest I can remember is Forest City, NC. Not only did we present the datacenter itself as bringing well paid jobs to one of the poorest communities in the state, but I remember us doing grants to nonprofits, donations to schools, and providing free broadband services.


The company puts out press releases but I’ve never seen anything about these programs in a news article.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
We had a bit of a bust in Silicon Valley with the end of ZIRP.


Also while I'm biased from being in the industry, I don't assign high probability to the "datacenter craze" being some bubble phenomena. Companies including my employer are snapping up all the GPUs they can not because they're pretty tulips, but because we can make productive use of them. We don't have much in the way of idle GPUs sitting around.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Weekly Finance Thread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The issue is I don't know how to size it: in a scenario where banking and payment infrastructure is shut down entirely, what problems am I trying to solve with cash?




The banking system need not fail generally for backup cash to be useful, it just needs to fail you. This could be through some bank error, or it could be because you got put on a list. Not long ago I would not have predicted that "donated a small amount to a non-violent protest movement" could result in your bank assets being frozen, but it happened in Canada. Now I think it's wise to assign some low probability to otherwise innocuous things exposing you to this kind of risk.


As anti-AI sentiment builds perhaps "frequently commented on SlateStarCodex" could be reason enough to freeze a person's assets.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There was apparently a widely held belief among those in local government that the best approach to riots was to allow them to burn themselves out. This was what we saw in Kenosha, where officials ordered police to establish a perimeter to contain the riot, but not to actually charge in and break it up. The same thing happened in my own city. There was daylight mass organized looting of the mall -- already closed due to COVID -- and police stood by a block away and just let it continue.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In my state of Washington they banned fishing. Not congregating with others to go fishing, fishing in general. Casting a line off of your own dock was illegal for awhile.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think you underestimate the software capabilities of current models.


A pattern I've started to settle into is first to spend 2-5 hours collaborating on a plan. I put maybe 20-30 minutes of effort up front, then the rest is a conversation, with claude interrogating me for gaps, pointing out things I may not have anticipated, giving me options where it's not clear what to do.


I then feed this into into an in-house agent orchestrator. It has one agent that reads the plan, generates discrete tasks out of the plan, and then spins up dozens of agents to execute on those tasks. I can configure it with options for it to make all decisions on its own, and to devise its own tests to define when a task is finished, and force the agents to keep churning until done. It chugs and chugs overnight, and in the morning I have an MVP. For this latest one the plan for the backend was 18 pages. The plan for the UI was 8 pages. This was translated into about 40,000 lines of code. I've read barely any of them. Automated and AI powered reviewers have, resulting in many comments and iterations before the AI would approve.


This latest one I polished for about 3 days before inviting others to start beta testing it and give me feedback. I'm a couple days into that process. I'm probably going to launch end of this week. It's an internal tool, so I don't have to go through any bureaucratic review process.


This is the second time I've done this at this kind of scale. For smaller scales, like a simple CLI utility, the planning process compresses down to less than an hour, and the AI can spit out the first draft of the CLI in less than an hour later.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I have to wonder if it was pump or semi-auto. Can't find any sources online.


This guy seemed middle class. Guns are expensive but not in the context of "forfeiting the rest of your life." Open a credit card and get properly equipped. Even if you survive, the debt collectors aren't going to pay collect to hound you in Leavenworth.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Is anyone actually doing this? Are the evil UN bureaucrats taking the first derivative of their GDP(GHG) model to determine how much CO2 the world gets to emit? Have they invented psycho-history?




Deadlines have been kicking in for Washington state's climate bill, CETA, and power prices are rising as a result. They've gone up about 30% the past year, and the biggest utility, PSE, is requesting another 30% increase over the next few years. The bill required that we close the only coal plant in the state and that utilities no longer import coal-fired electricity from outside of the state. The law would have denied PSE the rate to pass on the cost of maintaining its transmission lines to generating facilities in Montana if they weren't compliant, so PSE had to make a big capital outlay to fund its own windfarms, as well as buy power from other existing wind farms.


We also have our "cap and invest" carbon tax that drives energy prices higher.


By 2030 CETA will make it mandatory that electricity generation in the state be carbon neutral. By 2045 it will be illegal to have any carbon-fired electricity generation.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Zuck cashing out in 2007 doesn’t mean the end of Facebook, it means another entity, even bigger than Facebook, gets to control Facebook.


Facebook, in not selling out, wrested control from the established media players who were looking to acquire it.


That’s an outcome in your preferred direction, no? Time Warner, Fox, et al are less powerful as a result.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
One comment sentiment I see regarding billionaires is "there's no ethical way for anyone to acquire that much money."


This reads to me as a complaint that billionaries aren't cashing out early enough.


Say you create a rocketship of a company. You're Mark Zuckerberg, it's the mid-aughts. Various media companies are offering hundreds of millions for what you've built. We know what actually happened, Zuck didn't sell.


There's a hypothetical where Zuck cashed out and lived a quiet but ultra-rich life instead of building one of the world's most valuable companies. In that hypothetical, Zuck would be a better person according to the anti-billionaire crowd.


What of the other side of the transaction? The only entities capable of acquiring Facebook would have necessarily been even more valuable, so then you're just enriching the established billionaries instead of creating new ones.


What do they actually want?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
They serve Claude out of AWS GovCloud: https://www.anthropic.com/news/expanding-access-to-claude-for-government


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As a practical matter how would Anthropic’s terms be enforced?


Their only real lever is to cut off access, and that could happen without warning in a way that gets people killed.


Tech companies also don’t have a great track record of judging when a user has violated their terms.


So the risk is that Anthropic could revoke the license essentially on a whim.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
A successful stint at Meta tends to imply you have been able to bring some order to sprawling, argumentative chaos.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			
			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think it’s not really possible to analogize, in the United States we just don’t have anything like this.


New Year is the most important holiday, so an American version would have to take place on Christmas, maybe Thanksgiving.


And then it would be an hours long variety show showcasing cultures and traditions from around the country. Maybe an Abbot and Costello routine, some skateboarders from California, jazz musicians from Chicago, a tech demo from Boston Dynamics, Appalachian musicians with banjos and jugs.


Everyone would be enthusiastically wishing one another a merry Christmas and be authentically patriotic.


And nearly the whole country would have it on in the background while opening presents on Christmas morning or having Christmas dinner.


I suppose the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade comes closest, but it doesn’t have the variety or the interest.