Pasha
Defend Kebab
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User ID: 481
Pasha
Defend Kebab
8d ago
Main driver in wmaf relationships is usually the Asian woman being very into the man and doing way beyond an equivalent white women to keep the relationship going. I have seen this countless times and experienced once myself dating such a girl (I am Turkish, white presenting enough for East Asians). It’s definitely quite a pleasant and attractive feeling as a man when a woman works so hard for you and this is the main attraction for most white men in such couplings.
I still think white women would definitely win in an “equal” setting where they aren’t insufferable and fat. Unfortunately they often are in relative terms.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
13d ago
I am surprised everyone seems to be missing the obvious explanation. Bezos is a guy who has been transitioning from businessman into a power player in American elite and needs to build up connections with the media, capital and political elite. She is probably an absolute operator who knows everyone, seen everything and can plot power moves in a way very few people are capable of. And she obviously knows how to take very good care of a man.
Another similar businessman, Elon Musk just tried his hand in politics obviously without the guiding hand of such a woman. Look how that turned out for him
Pasha
Defend Kebab
13d ago
In what way? I am seriously struggling to think of any analogoes other than a vague “it isn’t going as planned”. And even then it’s going badly in a wholly different and opposite way. In the occupied territories Russia has zero resistance and can govern as if everything is normal. But the initial battle plan was a fiasco. This is the exact literal opposite of Iraq invasion
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College (NYMag)
Article describing what was predictably coming to college campuses since GPT3 got released. The narration follows some particularly annoying Korean-American student trying to make quick bucks from LLM-cheating start-ups and a rather dumb girl who can't follow basic reasoning, which makes the read a bit aggravating and amusing but overall the arch is not surprising. Recommended for a quick read. Basically all the grunt work of writing essays and the intro level classes with lots of rote assignments seem to be totally destroyed by cheap and easy high quality LLM output.
Some interesting highlights for me:
- There is a consensus in the article even shared by the cheating students that writing essays in "Indigenous studies, law, English, and a “hippie farming class” called Green Industries" is an important transformative experience and if young adults miss out/cheat on this for 4 years then we must be seriously worried about the next generation.
- It is not explored much what the students are doing with their time instead of writing these very important essays. There is one throw-away quote from a brain-rot girl about how she scrolls TikTok all day and has no time for essays. Perhaps all the students are getting one-shotted by dopamine addiction algorithms but perhaps they are not and many are socializing or learning actually interesting things instead of writing indigenous studies slop essays. This should be a major question but just left unexplored.
- None of the journos or the academics quoted in the article can bring themselves to question if these young adults should even be in the university if they are all so eager to cheat (and earlier pandemic-era mass cheating spree is mentioned as well). There is a whole paragraph dedicated to justifying seemingly pointless essays, never-again-remembered-calculus-exercises, and the importance of doing "hard things" (which is apparently writing pointless essays and never-again-remembered-calculus-exercises). But there is not a single example of a "hard thing" students are missing out on because of LLMs in the whole article. Literally every single example is students automating busy work which should cost any 120+ IQ individual little brain power but lots of time. And a bizarre out of place paragraph about the need to "consider students more holistically" with a non-sense blurb from some academic.
- Academics sound extremely lazy and whiny about trying out the most obvious solution: ditch all course-work based grading in favor of oral examinations and comprehensive graduation exams. This would immediately solve the whole problem (it would even align the incentives to get students to use LLMs for studying instead of cheating) and it is not even a "revolutionary" solution, just how universities used to work not that long ago. But obviously this would fail 90%+ of the current university students and likely destroy the entire industry as vast majority of the students providing their income stream are not nearly smart or conscientious enough to pass then.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
9d ago
I doubt you could get an article published suggesting this but if you look at the revealed preferences of almost any other group of people when they have any choice to mate with Europeans at all, this seems quite obviously true. “Western” bit is a stretch though. Slavs or actual Caucasians obviously win over English/French at physical beauty. Southern Europeans too imo.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
9d ago
It’s not necessarily looking ugly or strange but the fact that someone can’t figure out that they look off-putting even though they could fix this with some work, is profoundly disturbing. It suggests something unhinged about you as you are the sort of person without anyone in your life to tell you such a thing. What did you do to drive everyone away? What other social norms are you oblivious about?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
8d ago
I also did such dating, no judgment. Replied under the other thread
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo 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
2mo 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
1mo 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
24d ago
This is obviously not true though? Men can look fine/good without hair but hair is obviously better. Shaved is usually better than balding but nothing beats a full head of healthy hair.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
Sorry but I get a strong feeling you have never been exposed to any university system other than modern American liberal arts colleges. What I have seen around Europe typically was that learning happens during exam crunch time and coursework is either just recommended or has relatively little effect on your end grade. If you are doing a “hard” degree then for many major exams you are also responsible for subjects of previous semesters as well so you have to stay on top. This works perfectly fine. I don’t think American students are any lazier than their counterparts in continental Europe, I think they just got conditioned heavily by the only education they have ever experienced.
Also no I liked maths a lot and I have an engineering job using a decent amount of trig-calculus level maths regularly. But I also observed how nonsense the maths requirements were for most degrees.
Incidentally I found it amusing you chose the student using chatgpt to write personal introduction for an “ Ethics and Technology class” as a particularly egregious example. I have never been exposed to an ethics class that wasn’t total non-sense taught by dimwit professors. Just all around busywork. We were either forced to take such classes because of vague ideas about how it would make us more ethical or something or people did so for easy elective credits. The whole faculty had a jobs-program feeling to it. It would be absolutely my top course to cheat through with an LLM.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
Forcing students who has absolutely no interest and need to do some mid-level maths courses for half baked pedagogic reasons was one of the biggest cheating incentivizers when I was a student. Remember a hot business studies chick in my dorm slept with half the econometrics track guys to get them to do her maths homework. I guess that is some sort of “preparation for life”…
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo 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
2mo ago
Yes. I believe if you do a proper classics study in those unis even today the experience isn’t that far off according to a friend who did so a while ago. One of the most inspirational uni life stories I have ever come across is Bismarck’s actually. 3.5 years of non-stop drinking and partying and sword dueling topped with insane half a year crunch to graduate. Great recipe to create great men.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo 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.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo 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
1mo 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
29d ago
What damage did Israel exactly inflict on Iranian nuclear capabilities so far? All I have seen is a couple dead scientists and some bombed non-critical infrastructure near the nuclear facilities. I have a hard time believing Israel’s opening attack wasn’t the best they can do with tons of smuggled bombs/drones and local collaborators as well as unprepared Iranians.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
3mo ago
A lot of this doom rhetoric just assumes things like democracy (olds controlling politics), welfare state (olds sucking up resources) or even high life expectancies (olds living long beyond retirement) will keep up. If even a fraction of the predicted problems hit these countries, world will change way beyond our current comprehension and most of these things likely will stop being problems in the currently predicted ways.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
22d ago
I don’t think I understand your cop-out unless you are saying “some women like bald men”
Pasha
Defend Kebab
6mo ago
As someone living the “not very well integrated brownish expat working a lot in high earning sector in the West” life it makes me rather nervous to see the calibre and the intentions of the people supposedly vouching for my interests in this debate.
The social contract I came here for is simple. I broadly like the society these people created. I don’t think a different people could/would create this society so I am happy people of broadly the same ancestry and culture stay in control of it. In exchange of living in it and having my children become a proper part of it I can pay a lot in taxes and generally be a modal citizen at the sidelines of the society.
I am aware of the costs I am imposing on the society here. I am pricing the residents out of the housing market, causing some wage suppression, watering down their culture and social cohesion and giving them mixed-race grandkids who doesn’t quite look like them.
The desirable scenario for me is that immigrants are not too high in numbers and generally similar in profile to me so that the tensions aren’t too big and our posterity assimilates without attracting too much negative attention.
The very undesirable scenario for me is that high profile individuals shout it to the regular people from the top of their lungs that their culture is worthless, their children are deadweights, and they will use armies of people who look somewhat like me to teach them a lesson.
This is a very dangerous game they are playing. Many PMC immigrants seem entirely incapable of sensing the zeitgeist and subterranean societal currents of the countries they are living in. The people from the subcontinent are especially bad at this
Pasha
Defend Kebab
28d ago
Yes they obviously thought about it quite hard and the solution is to bribe and blackmail enough American politicians (with child rape) to get the American military to complete the job.
“Best” is a meaningful term because Israelis don’t have the means to actually destroy the facilities themselves. If they would, this would change the strategic picture massively.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo 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/
Can someone explain to me why these companies are open sourcing their models? Developing/training this stuff seems enormously costly, what’s the business case for just giving it away?
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