ThenElection
No bio...
User ID: 622
Someone submitting code that broke the Google search button would cost the company on the order of a million per minute; it's only natural that Google would pay a lot to minimize that risk. Of course, there are automated processes in place to prevent and mitigate those kinds of mistakes, but that makes the work more complicated than messing around with some CSS. And even that doesn't cover all the work involved in something as seemingly simple as maintaining a button--accessibility, brand consistency, i18n, framework migrations, etc. This work is very lame but also very necessary, and not something a random trucker could do or even (unfortunately) the average CS grad could do.
Also, just informationally, as others have pointed out it's pretty much impossible for any SWE (not even the head button changer, who's probably some L7 taking home a million per year) at Google to take a decade to accumulate a million. Maybe five years or so, depending on your career progression, especially with the bull market of the past decade.
ThenElection
10d ago
One plausible outcome is TACO, leaves the SoH under effective Iranian control, and loudly proclaims victory because he blew up a bunch of shit.
And sadly that is one of the better ways the current situation might develop.
ThenElection
11d ago
That is extremely compelling, if not what I would call reassuring. Thanks.
ThenElection
11d ago
That does shift my opinion toward the laundry explanation, thanks. That's a lot of lint.
ThenElection
11d ago
I'm agnostic on what happened, but knowing the base rate of laundry fires taking out carriers in the US military would be useful information.
ThenElection
11d ago
We've done the middle two very comprehensively.
Indeed, we've totally obliterated the Iranian military at least once a week since the war began.
ThenElection
13d ago
I've heard the quip than Don Quixote was the first postmodern novel.
ThenElection
13d ago
The first time I ever enjoyed Shakespeare was in a tavern that served food and booze while putting on the performance. Can't recommend highly enough (no tomatoes thrown, alas).
ThenElection
13d ago
Hoofprints in the snow might not tell you something is a horse. But then you see a tuft of shoulder-high fur caught in the brush, then a stirrup, and then, hey, it's Brunellus.
I suppose the broadness of the term "postmodernism" is one of its weaknesses, but reasons I'd argue for it:
- It's a meta story: the story itself is framed as being a lost manuscript.
- It's a pastiche: high literature, philosophy, theology meets genre detective fiction
- Intertextuality: abundant references to an expansive group of external texts
- Thematically, it's all about no one overarching institution or system (even rationality and empiricism) having a monopoly on truth.
- A major element is signs: we don't have direct access to the thing in itself, only references to the thing. Hence, the name of the rose, not the rose.
Keeping a notebook while reading Gravity's Rainbow is not how you should be reading it; you'll inevitably be bogged down. The jazz analogy is right, but perhaps not how you mean it: it's a kaleidoscope, and the fractured lack of a coherent narrative is itself what you're supposed to get out of it. It's an experience, not a textbook.
I'd also not overly index on Gravity's Rainbow as postmodern literature, just as it wouldn't make sense to overly index on Finnegan's Wake as modernist literature. You could just as well choose Pale Fire or the Name of the Rose as exemplars of postmodernism, and those are excellent and have a highly readable narrative.
As to their value, I enjoyed those two exemplars immensely; if they bring value to your life, then they have value. Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest have the unfortunate status of being i-am-very-smart books, and if read as that, you're not going to have a good time or get any value out of them.
You are entirely correct that Cormac McCarthy is unsurpassed in 20th century literature, though.
This assumes that the Wuhan lab knew The Truth about what was going on. Another possibility: no one in any position of authority had a clue about the reality of the situation (not at all unique to China), they panicked and freaked out, and then one way or another dropped or pulled the database. Could even be a low level employee just covering their ass. Likely good for your expected longevity to preemptively do that, even (or perhaps especially) if you're unsure what the database contains. Getting rid of all evidence aligns the interests of the Chinese state with your own: they're more content to run with it than any alternative, and the benefits of exculpatory evidence would pretty much only go to high level Chinese officials, while evidence of blame would be used to string you up, quite literally.
On balance, I think a lab leak is more likely than not. But many people err on the side of ascribing more competence to Chinese institutions (to e.g. execute on a conspiracy) than actually exists: in some ways, it's comforting to think that institutional competence exists somewhere, even in a mortal enemy, because it gives hope that someone, somewhere knows what they're doing.
ThenElection
19d ago
Has it achieved any goals? At what cost?
I'd also score "we never really thought about what our goals are" as not achieving goals. Right now, the main goal seems to be an open Hormuz and stable markets... Which we had before the war started.
ThenElection
21d ago
Depends on how much "alignment" programs work out. If it's possible for the government to align AI and control it, you still end up running into public choice and Hayekian flavored failures of communism.
ThenElection
21d ago
How likely is it for AGI to lead to communism, if achieved through corporations? I can imagine governments deciding to nationalize it, or the achieving company to become a de facto communist government. But there are other outcomes possible, and $250M isn't going to shift the needle much on which outcome is most likely regardless.
I think if your terminal goal is communism (as opposed to personal security, widespread material prosperity, etc), you'd want to do a variation of this. Invest in AI, but target a broad portfolio of research programs that aren't currently in vogue and saturated in capital, betting on the possibility that current approaches aren't sufficient. They probably are, but if they are, you can't change their trajectory much; so you assume they aren't and try to get get there first.
ThenElection
25d ago
It probably depends, but I know a radiologist who just finished their fellowship with an offer for >$500k, not in the boondocks. Another friend (more mid career) is an allergist at $250k, but working only part time. It doesn't seem that implausible for someone to get into seven figures income, though I don't have a sense of how common that is. Maybe you need to start a private practice for that? Or are those well and truly dead?
ThenElection
27d ago
Warren Farrell would be a good example, but he is about a thousand miles away from the contemporary manosphere.
ThenElection
27d ago
guys like that were common 20 years ago, 50 years ago, and so on. Are they more common today? No, not really.
The misogynist basement dwelling rapist incel and the cock carousel riding woman are both myths. Not in the sense that there don't exist individuals who might qualify as those categories--sure, it's possible to find both. But their primary purpose isn't as labels meant to describe people you're likely to meet in physical reality, but to be symbolic avatars for people to project their deepest neuroses and fears onto.
The algorithm detects that people engage strongly with their neuroses and fears and so presents them more and more of the same. And so these virtual types end up displacing conceptions of the typical man and woman informed by interactions with real men and women.
ThenElection
27d ago
If you (or, more accurately, Trump) could convincingly guarantee a US victory as defined by either your total capitulation or stone age scenarios, those are outcomes I'd happily take, at least given the situation we are in now. But it's not all a given that those aims would be achievable or even plausible, even for an administration that had shown the ability to focus on something for more than a few weeks at a time without stepping on a rake.
There's reasonable ambiguity about how things are going to play out from this conflict, and I'm highly skeptical that either of your scenarios will come to pass. Most likely, the US will continue bombing for two or three months more, get bored, and move on without getting any resolution to the root issue, leading to bad foreseeable issues five or ten years from now. And that's kind of a best case scenario: significant ground troops, loss of a significant military asset, and even breaking out into a much broader, global war are also outside risks that still might present themselves.
ThenElection
28d ago
Even "don't do GOF research in a dense 10M+ megacity" would reduce the risk a lot.
ThenElection
1mo ago
There is no solution. There is no proof-of-work or proof-of-humanity that is not severely error prone
It's difficult to get any of the leading foundation models to write a comment full of racial slurs. DeepSeek also refuses. (Grok is currently broken for me.)
Maybe that could be the future proof-of-humanity? Obviously it's nothing inherent in the architecture and there are workarounds, but I don't see those safeguards being removed anytime soon.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Newsom has consistently underperformed a generic Democrat in California. Not nearly as bad as Kamala, but still trailing other Democrats.
The issue is that (recent) California politics rewards different traits than more partisan-competitive states. It is incredibly cutthroat and involves genuine skill, but it is much more cloak and dagger and focused on managing the groups and building alliances with other politicians. These have some carryover to national elections, but it would be much smarter for Democrats to select someone whose skill set involves winning competitive elections.
Then again, he's tall and has a good head of hair, and that may well be enough if the economy or the war go south.
ThenElection
1mo ago
In the event of a hot war with China, no commercial shipping will be going through any region of the ocean close to China. This is extremely painful to China, but it's also very painful to all of the US and its allies--you can expect an immediate double digit percentage drop in GDP of Japan, South Korea, and the Phillipines (and Australia, likely to be more significant than SK and the Phillipines), and Taiwan is worse off than even China in that scenario. US and the rest of the world also will feel significant pain.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I wonder if the Venezuela operation has expanded Chinese leadership's scope of imagination. Before people mused about the possibility of China doing something similar, but it seemed almost absurd fantasy. But the US has shown that it's possible, and an existence proof of an operation like that succeeding has a powerful draw to it. And, if they can pull it off, it solves a lot of problems with a protracted war against US forces.
I think a strategy of keeping most of your investments in SPY, and then occasionally (every couple of years, but only when a real opportunity presents itself) making strong, reasonable bets during major events where you have high confidence can get you outsized returns (e.g. I almost doubled my net worth during the first couple months of COVID).
The issue is that psychologically, waiting around for those types of events is really boring. And success begets failure, as you really want to start looking for opportunities where your edge is smaller or realistically non-existent.
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