ThenElection
No bio...
User ID: 622
Data centers are far, far more complicated than setting up a desktop and WiFi in your home network times a million. To give a taste of the problems:
-
Power. They're incredibly power hungry. You can't just hook them up to the local grid; the local grid might not even have the capacity to support them. You've got to expand existing plants or build entirely new ones. And then how do you handle power surges? A naive approach is going to cost you tens of millions of dollars when a spike comes through and kills a thousand GPUs. Of course, you've also got to figure out how to distribute the power internally and plan for inevitable component failure at multiple layers. How do you distribute thousands of amps (safely and without melting the insulation)? And what about when the grid fails? You've got to have backup power sources ready for a day or two of unavailability. Not doing these things will make your data center uneconomic, as all that expensive capex is sitting around unused.
-
Heat. All this power has to go somewhere. Air conditioning and fans don't work at this scale, so you've got to use liquid cooling. But where do you get this liquid and where do you send it? And how do you pump it through hundreds of miles of plumbing? How do you minimize the rate of pipes getting clogged, and how do you handle it when pipes do get clogged? And remember: if this plumbing fails, your GPUs are going to rapidly start failing as well, to say nothing of the risk of a highly corrosive liquid being sprayed all over billions of dollars of investments.
-
Weight. A rack, by itself, weighs over five tons. Now add all of the equipment and liquid needed to handle 1) and 2). You've got to have a massive foundation that can support that. This isn't just a big Amazon warehouse.
-
Security. You've got a lot of investment here, all in one place, and quite delicate. How do you prevent a hostile actor from taking a truck or drone and destroying your investment? To say nothing of state-level actors, who absolutely are trying to break in.
-
Networking. You've got thousands of very chatty, data dependent GPUs coordinating in a highly choreographed dance to transmit trillions of parameters to each other. And the slowest link determines, by itself, the overall speed. When you've got thousands of nodes, that is pretty slow. Your mega ultra gaming WiFi 7 ASUS gaming router is going to have some trouble here. And that's just internally: you're receiving and transmitting massive amounts of data to the outside world. How do you prepare for a backhoe running through, or a shark chewing through, one of your fiber optic cables? Every hundred miles or so, you also need to amplify the signal, which comes with its own power, security, etc requirements. And what about truly bulk data: if you're transmitting 100Pb of data, is it better to saturate your measly 1 Pbps capacity (displacing your other network needs) for a painful amount of time, or to use trucks with hard drives to ship it cross country? And, if you have a bunch of these trucks, how do you efficiently unload them, without causing needless congestion or buffering in the physical world?
There's maybe half a dozen organizations in the world that can handle all these concerns. All of them are American.
ThenElection
14hr ago
Women in cities do tend to have better physiques than elsewhere (same with the men, of course). There's also a level of achievement in cities: you have to put up with the In This House We Believe crowd a lot more, but, absolutely and proportionately, you find more people who are deeply ambitious, agentic, and capable of making an important mark on the world. The culture of the suburbs is more just finding the joy in the day-to-day, which has its own value, but some people want something different.
ThenElection
1d ago
There are a couple different speech policy regimes that could exist in England, all consistent with "you're not allowed to criticize Muslims or migrants." I'm just trying to get a better sense of which one best describes England.
-
Muslim supremacy: you can't criticize Muslims, but white people and especially Jews are fair game.
-
Inter-ethnic protections: you aren't allowed to criticize people outside your ethnicity.
-
Wokeness: depends on who, whom, and the particular ordering of the progressive stack. 1) is kind of a degenerate version of this.
-
Universalism: no one is allowed to criticize anyone aggressively.
None of those are my preference, but 2) and somewhat 4) seem like defensible approaches. My guess is that 3) is closest to what's happening, but that's just based on Twitter vibes.
ThenElection
1d ago
Asking a question instead of making (plausible) assumptions. Some cultures do take being polite more seriously than child rape.
ThenElection
1d ago
To what extent is this applied fairly in England? E.g. if someone posts "death to the Jews" or "English people should all die in a fire," do they get Big Brother knocking on their door?
I prefer American speech norms, but if it's a matter of different cultural approaches to conflict and politeness, I don't object to it. Different folks, different strokes.
ThenElection
2d ago
I'd call it a failure. But that's not because of failing to understand the story or ugly visuals, but just because it's a really hard story to adapt to the screen--I'm skeptical a human could do any better (maybe what I proposed is a benchmark for ASI, not AGI).
The core difficulty is that the story is very deeply intertwined with Gummitch's internal dialog. That's hard to represent even for a human character, but for a cat, you're likely to land in ridiculous territory. The video sidesteps this by using music to narrate what's going on. But, something about it just comes off as a saccharine commercial.
That said, I appreciate the attempt!
ThenElection
4d ago
Off-topic, but I recently came across Fritz Leiber's short story Space-Time for Springers. It's about a super-intelligent kitten who can't yet speak but longs to become a man. Very good (though melancholic) if you like cat literature. AGI will have been achieved once it figures out how to adapt it to screen.
The paper was from over a decade ago and had like 40 boys, not all of whom were gender atypical. More likely than not, not a single one of them were "dysphoric" or wore skirts, with conditions like being short or shy or showtunes being the drivers of atypicality.
They tested four mental health measures, and two of them showed mediation by teasing (for boys), and two didn't. If it were a matter of gender atypical people with mental health issues reporting more teasing, you'd expect all four measures to show mediation. This paper either 1) shows something more complicated or 2) is reporting on noise.
A teenager with gender dysphoria has a high chance of interpreting innocent comments as teasing, and doubly so if they are depressed, but the study sought to determine whether teasing mediated the experience of depression among dysphorics.
The authors actually found, for self-esteem and anxiety:
Although partial mediation was indicated, the relationship [between gender typicality and low self-esteem] was still strong. Thus, regardless of gender-based teasing, boys who were low in typicality had lower self-esteem. Girls’ typicality was unrelated to their self-esteem.
Thus, regard- less of gender-based teasing, boys who were low in typicality were more anxious. Girls’ typicality was unrelated to their anxiety.
So, the study says that self-reported teasing did not mediate anxiety and self-esteem for boys, and that the negative mental health effects of being gender atypical came from being gender atypical, not from teasing.
The paper is kind of badly organized and an info dump, and I don't care enough to dig into the actual statistical methodology of it, which I assume is what's typical for a psych paper (i.e. bad). But it seems, if anything, less biased and ideological than a typical paper from the field.
(It's also worth pointing out that this isn't looking at dysphoria or wearing skirts, but atypicality in the sense of e.g. being short or bad at sports is gender atypical for boys.)
ThenElection
4d ago
Going by the rubric, she clearly deserved significantly more than a 0.
But it's a terrible rubric, and the goal shouldn't be applying shockingly low standards to all students fairly, but to apply reasonable academic standards fairly. If successful, this red-tribe push is far more likely to just further hollow out American universities as glorified daycare for post-teens than it is to get reasonable standards applied fairly.
Though, I can see an argument that universities are already doomed, so might as well accelerate the collapse so that something better can take their place.
I have a hard time imagining anyone reading her essay and thinking it's actually good--more precisely, to avoid consensus building, I'd assume anyone who defended it has such a radically different conception of what a university education should look like that we likely wouldn't have much to say to each other. I also don't think it's intentionally poorly written: you could write a significantly better version of it while taking the same line and and still manage to score a 0, which would be more effective for outrage mongering.
What would be useful is to know what the other essays that scored higher look like. Students at many universities struggle even with basic grammar, let alone knowing how to make a strong argument. I would expect that at least one student wrote equally bad pablum of a progressive flavor and got a passing grade; but, there's no way to verify that, because students don't complain when they're given an unjustifiably high score.
Should we care, though? If we see universities as credential mills, yes; dumb conservative students face discrimination that dumb progressives don't, which impacts scholarships, graduation rates and times, etc. But if we aspire for universities to educate and improve human capital, then we shouldn't. In that case, to the extent that anyone is being harmed by the grading, it's the progressive students who are getting more screwed here, because they're not getting feedback to improve (Fulnecky is at least getting a coarse signal).
ThenElection
4d ago
My "starter home" was a 500 sq ft condo, 1br, in a sketchy area, that ran $680k a decade ago. Sigh, urbanity.
Available in the technical manual appendix:
https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/sat-suite-assessments-technical-manual-appendix-pt-1.pdf
Page 136, Table A-6.9.1.
Found via Gemini. Interestingly, I'm told it drops significantly for students who attend elite schools, to around 0.6, due to restriction of range effects.
ThenElection
5d ago
Sheer intelligence is very valuable, but it's not actually that important in the bulk of jobs (although there's a clear floor that you want people to be above). Diligence and consistency, paired with a moderatively above average level of intelligence, seems like the sweet spot for most jobs. I'm not sure the legal system really needs brilliant people to implement correctly; and, to the extent it does, that's a failing of the legal system.
ThenElection
6d ago
It may just be the quality of people who attend and staff education schools. In other countries, admission is highly competitive; in the US, it's close to "we'll take anyone we can get." Smart people in the US have better jobs available than teaching, while it's probably one of the better careers available in other countries. And so we get some of the duller crayons in the box becoming teachers, doing research, and deciding education policy. And, since math and statistics is hard, you get much more emphasis on autoethnography and social theory than empirical research.
ThenElection
6d ago
Makes for a solid venison chili, though more of something from my youth than present (illegal to collect in CA).
ThenElection
6d ago
I've also said here that I describe myself as a vegetarian, despite eating bivalves (and roadkill, and caviar, and etc...)
It's just much less work to do that than explain to a restaurant the exact things I do eat. There is a word--ostrovegan--that kind of describes it, but most people would be confused by it, as it's obscure enough to be overly precious.
That's just communicating dietary requirements, though, in the not especially common scenario when I need to. I wouldn't say I identify as any particular terms associated with dietary restrictions.
ThenElection
8d ago
One argument in favor of speaking (even, or perhaps especially, lubricated with alcohol): you're much more likely to get people's true beliefs and gut reactions. With writing, as you say, you state what you mean and an argument and evidence. But it's not quite those things themselves, but public representations of those things. When people write, it's less immediate; there's time for revision; and there's a public record of what you say that can be held against you for all eternity. This introduces more opportunities for dishonesty and crafting an inauthentic argument, either intentionally or not.
There's also a quickness and flexibility with concepts that speaking teaches in a way that writing doesn't, which probably helps with thought more generally.
Both modes of communication have their pros and cons. I'd say something like 25% speaking/75% writing is near the ideal, though I don't have real evidence of that or know one way or another what evidence would even look like.
ThenElection
10d ago
A lot of the streetcar suburbs that developed in the 1890s-1920s would count, and they'd probably still qualify in the 1950s.
ThenElection
10d ago
Worth pointing out: although $1.1M is nothing to sneeze at, $100k in 1950s NYC would afford you a live-in maid, live-in cook, and a governess, along with a 10 room apartment on Park Ave and a house in the Hamptons. I don't think $1.1M would go that far today; I think you'd need maybe $3M or so for the same baseline luxury (though, the 1950s elite would have an even harder time buying an iPhone).
ThenElection
11d ago
Challenging situations that force us to learn, adapt, and act on the world, with real consequences.
ThenElection
11d ago
Humans are not today mere consumption machines, but they will be. And that's a bad thing.
I agree that the goods and services available would (and will) radically increase. But human agency will be lost: there will be no way to set out to hone your skills and world models against other agents, because there will be, in the foreground, AI that is strictly dominating on all fronts.
You can speculate that we could have games or human reserves that are AI-free, but these will be inherently decoupled from reality: we'll be learning a set of arbitrary, artificial rules (ones dictated by what's convenient for the owners of the system), and humans will have to opt into them.
This is all the worst aspects of our current system reaching their apotheosis. The future is everyone being made a welfare dependant, getting gold stars for winning gacha games. Caged monkeys whose brains are wildly overspecced for their lives.
ThenElection
14d ago
HRC is being pulled in two different directions: one, to maximize an estimate of the number of reported trans people; two, to maximize the number of trans murders. The former is a much easier task than the latter, because the same amount of work can get you any estimated number you want. The latter is much harder, because (AFAIK) most places don't report the gender identity of victims; so instead, they have some intern trawl through news reports and flag the ones that explicitly list the gender identity of the victim.
So, although I think the HRC estimates of the number of trans people countrywide are significantly inflated, the bigger factor is that the HRC is not capturing most of the number of trans victims.
ThenElection
15d ago
That's a true clarification, but I doubt many people here are unaware of the demographics of criminals.
That's a orthogonal concern as to whether it's a big infrastructure project. Maybe they're going to be giant boondoggles; maybe not. The same applies to most of China's infrastructure projects; it still represents a high level of state/social capacity.
And the biggest builder of these projects (Google) usually funds them out of cash on hand. To the extent it issues bonds for them, it's for financial engineering/tax reasons. And investors for whatever reason are desperate to buy "green bonds," and are willing to take spectacularly low rates for the chance to buy them.
More options
Context Copy link