Pasha
Defend Kebab
No bio...
User ID: 481
Pasha
Defend Kebab
11hr ago
She is reaching the end of her career in the coming decade and still has to live off her earnings for close to half a century. If she cannot arrange some alternative income stream that is probably actually barely an upper middle class lifestyle living off her current wealth and not leaving much to any children.
I think the burden of having a very well known prostitute as your mother also does require some more golden spoon than the average to carry.
And she has been hanging around relatively wealthy successful people and prostituting herself to very rich men for a while. I am sure her perception of wealth is quite skewed.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
13hr ago
Kitty Genovese
I remember learning about this stuff in my English class as a teenager (in the context of some weird psychological mystery of how nobody helped etc) and the actual story went completely over my head. After some life experience of racialised underclass dynamics and now that I google and see photos of the perpetrator and the victim... the story suddenly clicks in my head very well
Pasha
Defend Kebab
3d ago
Is there any reason the test was treated as a holy grail other than the "Turing" name brand? I can't see any theoretical justification for it.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
3d ago
I cycle through Amsterdam city center very regularly and any part of the city where you might visit as an outsider is totally not representative of a city with good cycling infrastructure (which is almost every Dutch urban area except center of Amsterdam). Narrow 17th century canals with uneven side-streets and rarely any sidewalks wider than 1.5 Americans. It is a city designed for boats and commerce, not for a million tourists strolling around unaware of their surroundings. Also the cars are blocked from the city not for pedestrians but for the bikes. The problems you describe arise because unlike many other old touristic European city centers, Amsterdam is not simply a tourist attraction and has a very dense population who live and work in it. These people go almost everywhere almost entirely by bike. Cyclists you come across aren't a separate breed of people, I have literally never met anyone in this country (except 2 American expats) who don't bike in their daily lives.
Also they shout at you because you are a tourist and they hate you.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
5d ago
Overall GDP can grow thanks to a couple of sectors while most others are left stagnating. Without looking too much into the numbers, one can guess finance and tech had this role in western economies in the last decades.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
7d ago
I would have never believed what you are describing if I didn’t see it happen to a friend in real time. Big gay pedo rape fanfic writer and all. This was a rather cute but just very shy and nerdy girl who explicitly flirted with me a couple times at the beginning of college but nothing ever happened and I think she went from kissless virgin with weird internet habits to full blown weirdo of exactly the type you are describing during the corona years after some sad family experiences and a lot of social isolation. Once in a while I get a sad “could I have cured her if I pursued her sexually” thought and suppress it.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
14d ago
As a funny add-on: a photo of core Rust (programming language) contributors celebrating the 10th anniversary of the language launch: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/05/15/Rust-1.87.0/
Pasha
Defend Kebab
15d ago
Probably was true back in the day when diet drinks were niche and only fat people drank them. Nowadays I can hardly find coke with sugar anywhere
Pasha
Defend Kebab
15d ago
Congratulations and good luck! Do keep in mind that when you work in the type of companies that pays that sort of salaries, you will start meeting the type of people who earn significantly more than top-1 percentile. Easy to lose perspective and get sucked up into an unhappy race.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
26d ago
Greek-Turkish population transfers were negotiated between Greek and Turkish states at peace time with no direct urgency or threat. It’s not a good comparison at all.
Don’t get me wrong, I also wish my countrymen could be more enlightened about their patriotism. But then I should ask, as I know many British people personally from various backgrounds and education levels, where are these principled defenders of the British Empire? I certainly haven’t encountered many. What sort of effect do they have on the national consciousness of the general public? Close to none. The country we are supposed to imitate according to you is so lethargic that it cannot even react to the organised race-based rape of digit percentages of its young girls. Fuck no thanks I will take jingoism over that.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
27d ago
There is something rather reprehensible about picking up on certain events that happened 100+ years ago and then insisting on prefixing every mention of a nation with that event like a Homeric epithet. It has only two possible outcomes: maximal woke virtue signaling competition to derive somehow moral superiority from talking about horrible things your grandparents have done (a la Germans) or Balkan-style history fights because if you are aware of any history beyond John Oliver sketches then you know that events don’t occur for no reason.
In 1915 something like a quarter of the Muslim population in Anatolia were recent refugees ethnically cleansed out of Caucasus and Balkans in very similar ways to Armenians. Country was fighting for its survival against the Entente that had explicit plans to further this ethnic cleansing from both western and eastern directions until Russia collapsed. Probably a majority of non-Kurdish population of Turkey today has near ancestry who were ethnically cleansed out of their homelands during the events of late 19th-20th century. Something like half the countries in yesterday’s Eurovision rooster holds some significant responsibility for these series of cleansings which included the 1915 Armenian one too. Somehow as long as they don’t challenge NATO consensus these countries never get to carry a genocide epithet.
It’s commonplace for Turks like your friend’s boyfriend to act opportunistically hypocritical but I am generally quite proud that our population at larger never succumbed to the propaganda regarding their own ancestors unique evilness.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
30d ago
Is getting into 3D printing something you would recommend? I don't have any specific things I want to print. I am not into any figurines or any other such nerd table-top hobbies. I have some professional experience with microcontroller development and robotics but don't do it as a "hobby". But it feels like I would probably find interesting things I could do if I started digging into this
Pasha
Defend Kebab
30d ago
This pattern of spending 70%+ class-time on the national lore and the rest of random tid-bits of history nobody quite remembered anyway was also present when I went through K12 education in Turkey. Every single detail of Ataturk's life and 1918-1923 history of Turkey drilled again and again in increasing detail for us instead of course. I wonder if there is any national curriculum anywhere with an alternative history that avoids this trap. But then what would you teach? History sounds very difficult to grapple with kids without some sort of narrative.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
30d ago
Very difficult to prove but I would be really surprised if many TAs and lecturers already didn't use LLMs to do some forms of assessment for them.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
30d ago
Amusing that training your own employees more or less this way with apprenticeships used to be the norm until governments started using the public university system to subsidize the costs of educating the labour force. This allowed universities, a medieval guild system designed to groom young men for power positions (plus medicine) to spend a century LARPing at bringing enlightenment to lower classes by forcing them to write low quality essays on Nietzsche or whatever and then handing them middle class admission cards. It seems that the racket got too ridiculous to keep up by now and we are regressing back to apprenticeships.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
30d ago
Using the word "modern" in any such discussion without exactly specifying what it is supposed to mean is usually a massive source of confusion. The comment you are replying to seems to use it with the meaning of post-1945-liberalism, and with such a comparison of course historical fascism is not "modern". post-1945-liberalism was pretty explicitly theorized to be a complete refutal of historical fascism.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
30d ago
Going from memory of how a friend described his Oxford classics education to me a while ago, amount of tutoring required per student sounded quite minimal actually. Mostly the students did a gargantuan amount of self-reading and the tutors were there to direct their efforts and thinking rather than do anything particularly time intensive.
Of course this obviously can't be replicated anywhere else except in the most top universities of each country (who already usually have their own separate traditions of elite education) because you need a very impressive student body to sustain this.
I actually wrote a long comment with my reasons for holding a similar opinion before: https://www.themotte.org/post/970/smallscale-question-sunday-for-april-21/206072?context=8#context
edit: I have just realized this comment was a response to you actually
Pasha
Defend Kebab
30d ago
As someone who totally picked up this habit from my education, totally agree with you. I almost always learned tremendously more when I actually got myself to read the whole thing, except when it was badly written, and often it unfortunately was. I really hate the justification of poor educational practices with "corporate life also sucks, this prepares you for it". You don't need to pay for a degree to teach you basic life hacks. You can pick up the ability to realize a text is not important and skim through it in a couple weeks into any corporate job. The college degree was supposed to teach you to read deeply with high quality sources.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
30d ago
What am I supposed to do? Keep standards high and fail them all? That’s not an option for untenured faculty who would like to keep their jobs. I’m a tenured full professor. I could probably get away with that for a while, but sooner or later the Dean’s going to bring me in for a sit-down. Plus, if we flunk out half the student body and drive the university into bankruptcy, all we’re doing is depriving the good students of an education.
This is so strange to read. Literally half my degree dropped out in our first year because of self-selection and mandatory credit requirements. This was treated as entirely normal and a good thing, as it is obviously a bad thing for people to waste their time and money on degrees they don't like/aren't capable of following.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
30d ago
Undergrads here are typically 3 years. I remember having 8 crunch periods per year for my degree. 4 quarters with one review exam in the middle and one big one at the end. Besides this, nobody stopped you from taking extra courses to graduate earlier and many did.
By no means continental European university system is great. Most countries have their own pathologies and the Bologna Process makes everything typically shittier but it’s pretty strange to claim students got to goof around because they don’t have constant deadlines to write parroting essays about queer indigenous history.
I fail to see how almost any of my education would had been disrupted by the LLMs the way the New York mag article is describing. The only courses I can imagine are currently swamped with LLM problems are the bunch of liberal arts inspired nonsense courses I had to follow for credits.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
30d ago
I wonder if AI will make us all polyglots because it’s an incredibly useful tool of language learning or eliminate any learning altogether because it’s also really good at translating. Or perhaps it does both at the same time simultaneously so we have a bunch of conscious smart learners mastering new languages in 6 months and everyone else loses any motivation at all because any digital content they ever encounter is instantly perfectly translated (desire to access broader internet/gaming/tv shows was the reason I got good at English as a teenager, school instruction was useless)
The life experiences she gets from her weird upbringing/being very attractive/hypersexuality/knowing interesting people/extreme class mobility/unusual revenue streams make for an interesting read of her blog. Her data science work is just dogshit people tolerate for the rest. It is like talking to an elderly woman about your life while using horoscopes as the "context". The point is not the horoscope, it is talking about your life to someone.
More options
Context Copy link