ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
1mo ago
They're not mutually exclusive options, either. Chavvy white underclass girls doing chavvy things in a park, molesty migrant approaches them because they're chavvy and he's molesty, and he bites off more than he can chew.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I don't see the Intel buy as motivated by revenge politics. It seems more motivated by Trump's desire to be seen doing things: do a lot of random, high profile things, and select those that work out as proof of your leadership (those that don't, of course, fail because of the wreckers).
Maybe the revenge narrative makes sense, but not a revenge against Trump's most visible enemies, but the layers of bureaucrats and experts whose main function tends to be saying you can't do things and then acting to make it harder and more expensive to do things.
(All that said, in this case the naysayers are entirely correct, and Trump should be picking his things to do more judiciously.)
ThenElection
1mo ago
The number of people who don't show up because they think it will be ineffectual (I somewhat agree) is dwarfed by the number of people who don't show up because they don't really care. Because however ineffectual it is, it's still more effectual than updating a profile pic with a slogan, retweeting something, or liking a TikTok short, which far more people do.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Oh, I definitely did the same thing in my 20s. Sooner or later, though, you end up with that hot fling you stayed in touch with breaking into your condo and threatening you with a handgun unless you get back together with her. Which teaches a useful lesson, but it may be one of those lessons that can only learned by direct experience.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Although I enjoyed reading this and enjoy rubbernecking at a potential car wreck as much as anyone, what's the point of staying in touch with her? It seems she provides mostly idle amusement and the possibility of future sex. It also seems to have some outside risk of blowing up in your face--e.g. ruining a hypothetical future relationship that does have real potential. If it's primarily charity, then there are millions of other recipients who would likely benefit more from your ministrations with a much lower risk profile.
ThenElection
1mo ago
or do you want more academic freedom
You left out a third option: I want a magical pink unicorn who shits gold and whose farts cure cancer. I genuinely see that as more plausible than getting our current university system to support academic freedom.
It's all quite unfortunate, and I suspect there is some genius way to get from where we are to a healthy higher education system without use of a flamethrower. But, no one, and certainly not Trump, knows that genius way, so this is maybe the best of a bunch of bad options.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I learned analysis from his excellent textbook on it. Felt it gave me much more solid intuitions than Rudin, which I was struggling with. (To be fair, I don't glaze Axler, so there's still a gap.)
ThenElection
1mo ago
That's pretty convincing that he wasn't merely coasting along but more enthusiastic (or, at least, more hopeful of positioning himself for more spoils) than the average. Quite disappointing: I had a recollection of him speaking against the new equity based California math standards, which improved my opinion of him, but I can't find that anywhere so I must be misattributing. Sad.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Isn't UCLA's math department built on ancestral and unceded land violently stolen from the Tongva by white settler colonialists? By actually dismantling oppressive structures instead of just giving lip service, Trump is implementing the woke program.
I'm a bit more sympathetic to Tao: he lives and works in a milieu where not signing that letter would have made many of his colleagues and students (maybe even his wife) shun him; and if he didn't, he would absolutely have been hounded and targeted to to make some statement because of his stature. He still had more agency in the matter than most, but it's a mitigating factor. Do we condemn Kolmogorov?
ThenElection
1mo ago
If you're anticipating capex in the 13 figures, it's still surprising that large companies don't do more research on fundamentally different learning algorithms and hardware. Which isn't to say they don't (e.g. there are a couple researchers at GDM doing excellent work in neuromorphic and more brain-inspired learning), but I'd be surprised if the aggregate research spending among the big three on this (as opposed to tweaks to make transformers perform incrementally better) exceeds $1B/year. Any given research path is likely to not lead to anything, but the potential payoff is enormous.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Simply seizing as many resources as possible is an entirely rational decision. If grabby civilizations outcompete nongrabby ones, then those are the ones we'd expect to proliferate in the universe. Even if a civilization is internally nongrabby, if they encounter a grabby one, they're likely to resort to grabbiness as a survival mechanism. (This is why humans should be grabby preemptively; there can never be any kind of effective galactic UN.)
ThenElection
1mo ago
Usually, the buyer has to eat the difference. The seller gets to collect the money.
On the individual level, if you're the director who wanted to put a feather in his cap about how he's a forward-thinker pushing the company forward, you end up with egg on your face. So, before it happens, you mandate that all employees have to use AI. Then, once that goal of token consumption is hit, you declare victory and get a sweet bonus before jumping ship to another company to help modernize their processes by integrating AI based on your success in the first company.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Recently at my company, all job level descriptions were updated to include use of AI, and all promotions now have to include a bit about how you use AI.
I'm definitely on the bullish side, but it's quite ridiculous. I just have a script that I run every morning to burn up a bunch of tokens so I meet whatever metric they're tracking. (I did use AI to write that script!)
ThenElection
1mo ago
I get joy at the idea that some small part of me will help someone down the line. I don't claim any deep philosophical justification for it; it's the same part of my brain that picks up a piece of litter to throw it away in a place I'll never revisit. Meaningless in the grand scheme of things, perhaps, but it still makes me happy.
Do you pick up litter? If so, why?
ThenElection
1mo ago
There's a lot of inconsistencies among Democrats'/popular progressivism's stated beliefs. Plenty of courses of action available but untaken that aren't even the least bit risky or illegal.
Suppose it's 2024, and you believe Trump is neo-Hitler and also that America is a fundamentally racist and sexist society. Doesn't that then call for nominating a relatively milquetoast white man who takes no unpopular stances? You might have to put off your more out-of-the-mainstream policies for awhile (or at least implement them surreptitiously), but that is still far superior to having a Fourth Reich.
All you've got to do is vote in a primary as if winning the election is important as opposed to moral posturing. Instead, identity issues dominate.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Can even get a nice bidding war going between the UK/US and China. Basically free money.
ThenElection
1mo ago
So, similarly, I've also had plenty of people express interest in me. Enthusiastic, plentiful, sometimes even stalkery. Been asked out multiple times on the street in broad daylight, in fact; three months ago someone cold approached me on my way to work and told me I was really attractive. The thing is, they were all men. Which is fine: I'm bisexual.
But that same kind of ease is something I have never once in my life experienced from women. It was always a complicated process to get even the slightest time of day. And I think that's the difference: for some people, they've got to approach the process strategically and analytically, or they will never have any success.
trying to build a relationship on top of a friendship just doesn't work
Which is exactly the issue: many men do want relationships to form through the same process as friendship. Something organic where both people naturally recognize the value of the other person. And, for dating other men, it can and does happen exactly that way (though there are even simpler ways...), simply because baseline attraction is more evenly distributed. But, for dating women, getting over the attraction hurdle is a huge, difficult step, and TRP (at least in its lighter, non-neurodivergent varieties) is useful for understanding how to actually do that, even though the initial dating process remains entirely devoid of pleasure.
(A critical piece of context: I'm also 5'3", which explains why I have such a different experience between the two audiences. In my online dating days, when I as a test listed myself as 5'10", I got all the same enthusiasm from women as I did from men, and so I doubt it'd be necessary to rely on eldritch rituals to find success).
Amen. The core of RP ideology is that there are strong, gender-specific trends in what women like that you can change about yourself in order to be more successful dating: all women are like that is an overstatement, but its cousin "most women are like that" is spot-on.
Growing up, I took all of the mainstream advice to heart, which aligned with my natural instincts anyway: just treat women like people, as if they were a friend you liked a lot and that you'd like to become a best friend you have sex with. This, surprise surprise, led to complete failure before picking up lite red pill tactics (much too late in my 20s, alas).
So long as men like relationships and sex, they will work to understand what factors lead to relationships and sex. And so long as all women are like that, men will notice that and deploy strategies to navigate that.
Not my ideal world, but short of a commitment to lifelong celibacy, there's not much I could do about it. The ball's in women's court.
ThenElection
1mo ago
In principle, you can let doctors, Catholic hospitals, etc opt out of any obligation to provide assisted suicide, even if it's "medically necessary" under some rubric. Even if you're extending the concept of coercion to taxpayers being forced to fund assisted suicide, you can block government funds from being used for it.
In practice, I recognize the slippery slope here.
ThenElection
1mo ago
That's all true, but the best argument against Freddie deBoer isn't a bunch of words but just to point out that he suffers from severe mental illness and is desperately trying to shed that reputation he's gained by attacking overly enthusiastic nerds.
ThenElection
1mo ago
She says her other children adore him and will fight over who gets to look after him when they are older.
I really hope that the parents are actually saving enough to pay for services for Jaxon the rest of his life. Thinking your kids will do it, even if you can get them to say they're eager to in the moment, is a terrible plan.
What's the source of sympathy over casting couch situations? It's gross and worthy of judgment, but against both participants. The only people getting screwed are 1) the investors in the project, as the caster is misusing their authority to choose a (presumably inferior) casting option instead of fulfilling their responsibilities; and 2) the superior casting option who gets passed over. Just a particularly sleazy form of graft.
The young women choosing to do this might have economic struggles, but those aren't unique to them; whatever empathy they deserve for that should also be extended to all the women (and men!) who have the same economic struggles but don't choose the couch.
At least at my school, the econ majors absolutely would know calculus, and more. My econ friends went well beyond it: analysis, measure theory, stochastic calculus, etc. More mathematically rigorous than the average engineering or science major.
Though I suspect there's really two econ majors, one that's kind of a business for poets version and one that's intended to prepare you for a rigorous econ PhD program.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Offering a data point of myself:
Does this place actually overwhelmingly support JD Vance's statement?
I would reject it, though I'm not sure I represent the typical Mottezan's viewpoint. Then again, I question whether the typical Mottezan is even a meaningful category.
Is this statement actually anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic as defined above?
Yes.
Are the above interpretations of meritocracy and individualism reasonable and consistent with anti-individualism and anti-meritocracy being very bad things or are they just word games?
Word games, but "meritocracy" and "individualism" are just pointers to confused concepts that are themselves products of a long series of word games.
Within five years, virtually all of that money will be going to companies building AI models, generating AI videos, and scripting AI interactions. They will also be monetizing sexual desire much more efficiently: instead of having an LLM or Filipino contractor write formulaic responses as they do now, they will use push messages, track interaction history, include advertising, and write personalities customized to the consumer. There may be a split market, one marketed as AI-driven and dominated by AI, and the other marketed as AI-free and dominated by AI.
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