ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
2yr ago
Speaking purely from the political grandstanding perspective, it mostly makes DeSantis look silly and buffoonish: at the margin, it lost him votes, possibly even in future Republican primaries. You can talk about hypothetical second-order effects on marginal illegal voters all you want, but the public doesn't care, and it'll be hard to convince anyone that this escapade was DeSantis courageously trying to institute good policy despite any negative effects it might have on his grander political ambitions.
ThenElection
4mo ago
However, I find it fairly unlikely (<50% chance) that by the end of 2025 there will be an AI that exists that can 1) be able to play Pokemon at the level of a human child, i.e. beat the game, able to do basic navigation, not have tons of lag in between trivial actions, and 2) be genuinely general (putting the G in AGI) and not just overfit to Pokemon, with evidence coming from being able to achieve similar results in similar games like Fire Emblem, Dragon Quest, early Final Fantasy titles, or whatever else.
Back in 2020, Google announced MuZero, which could play not only chess and go but also Atari games. It wasn't an LLM, but it was a deep RL system, and I'm pretty confident that it's capable of learning to play Pokemon well past the level of the average child.
LLMs playing Pokemon badly is like managing to teach your dog perfect English and then observing that in the process he picked up mediocre French, despite not being taught it . Would we criticize the dog for that? What's impressive about Claude is that it can kind of play at all, despite it not being trained to.
Now, is there a significant gap between Claude and MuZero? Who knows; MuZero did use (lots of) task-specific training, and maybe with some Claude could match it (not interesting to me; I only care about Pokemon as a test of how well a model can one-shot it). But 3 years ago, transformer-based models were very limited in what they could do compared to today; 3 months ago, they couldn't play Pokemon at all; today, they play Pokemon as badly as a 90 year old grandma with dementia (though badly in a very alien way). I'd be surprised if 3 months from now any LLMs could play Pokemon as well as a child, but I'd be even more surprised if 3 years from now they didn't play flawlessly. And although getting there from here is highly nontrivial, it's also not some vast unknown researchers and engineers have no idea how to approach.
ThenElection
8mo ago
This is basically where I'm at. My vote doesn't matter, but it's going to Kamala (unless I get particularly annoyed at something in the next week). Regardless, it's a bad sign for our institutions that these are the choices we've been given.
My personal wish casting is Republicans take the legislative branch, to make all of her policy platform stillborn. And she wins the electoral college but loses the popular vote (appearing slightly more likely in recent polls). The wailing and gnashing of teeth from everyone would be amazing.
Compare where we were in 2017 to where we were in 2021. Was the state more or less intrusive into our lives?
Now, you might say that's unfair, and there were new circumstances that gave the state more opportunities to seize control that Trump was unable to effectively push against. And yes: that's exactly my point. Even his greatest success during the pandemic (getting the vaccine developed ASAP) was seized from him by bureaucrats who delayed its release until after the election for the sake of "political neutrality."
Inevitably, there will be new circumstances that arise from now until 2028. The state will maneuver around him, and he'll just flail around at best. War with China? We need copious controls to make sure no one is misled by misinformation. New pandemic? Now we know better how to do a real shutdown for public health. Etc.
That trend is inevitable, regardless of who's in office. My belief is that Trump's flailing will likelier hurt the market and my 401k worse than Kamala's empty suit.
Google doesn't exist.
It's just a bunch of people, sending messages to other people, with its components arranged in a particular way that has created self-sustaining income streams (largely based upon luck and having stumbled on ads and executing on them effectively before anyone else). Even if Google did have some deep ideological principles, it would be unable to translate them into some kind of transformative cultural force.
From that, principal agent problems dominate. There's no way for individuals' actions to cohere enough for any collective Google agent to arise. Google doesn't want a woke fascist state, or to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, or even to make a profit. It's just a bunch of bureaucratic fiefdoms posturing to other fiefdoms to get a bigger cut of ad revenue. So an individual can get an edge in getting a bigger cut of ads revenue by leveraging woke arguments: who's going to say "well, it's stupid to ban Gemini from generating white people"? Because it certainly won't actually help them in getting their own bigger cut.
This kind of falls under your 2), though calling it stupid assumes a bit too much an entity that uses its agency in an obviously counterproductive way. How to distinguish each possibility? In isolation, the Gemini debacle doesn't give too much evidence (although it weakly indicates against 3; if demoralization was the goal, Google wouldn't have walked back the image generation). But if you place it in the broader constellation of issues that plague Google, 2 is the simplest and most consistent explanation.
ThenElection
1yr ago
More bread and circuses. Americans, it is very clear, prefer to identify themselves as being in perpetual conflict with near symbolic enemies than far actual enemies. It's an indictment of democracy that people prefer to project their emotional hangups onto political figures (either as avatars of good or evil, depending on partisan valence) than to view them as flawed mortals to be pressured to achieve national objectives.
Although we might benefit from having angels as our political leaders, that's unrealistic. And I don't think anyone can plausibly say we deserve angels.
ThenElection
2yr ago
why the hell do we subsidize incompetent mothers one penny
Subsidize is doing a bit of work, here; as far as child support goes, it's a choice of how we split what's currently the man's contribution. Regardless of anyone's level of sympathy for irresponsible mothers, there's no reason that they should get less sympathy than irresponsible fathers. And even if we did want to subsidize irresponsible fathers compared to the status quo, allowing financial abortions would unleash a dynamic that results in substantially greater financial subsidization of children by taxpayers.
And hypothetically, at least, all this money is going to the upkeep of the child. If the money not actually ending up benefitting the child is the concern, you'd get a lot more buy in (from me, at least) with ideas on how to make sure a greater proportion of child support goes to benefit the intended beneficiary.
ThenElection
7mo ago
Crimes are real, and people in high places commit them. But prosecuting them is reactive, and prosecutorial discretion lends itself to petty political witch hunts. Trump supporters, of all people, should realize this.
What would be gutsy and genuinely salutatory would be for Biden to offer broad, blanket pardons of controversial figures on both sides. And it would be helpful for Democrats: they wouldn't spend the next four years chasing down crimes, real or imagined, that don't really matter (compared to other issues) and that don't help them win elections.
ThenElection
11mo ago
Do we want every controversial decision by local governments reviewed by state governments?
As someone who follows true crime more than is average for a guy, Zahau's case was absolutely sketchy. But if everytime a controversial decision is rendered, it needs to be reviewed by a Higher Power, there's basically no point in having a local justice system. You can say a review is necessary only under very clear criteria, but that's what happened here: it didn't fall under any clear criteria (the local system being idiotic is not one of them).
ThenElection
2yr ago
Under a Democratic SCOTUS, the team looks out for the team. Under a Republican SCOTUS, it's just the opposite.
ThenElection
2yr ago
Did I call him a pedophile? Just pointed out that he had an age-inappropriate relationship with a teenager, which is true.
The broader point is that sexual peccadilloes don't matter one way or another in terms of the value of someone's work, and (secondarily) cultural context matters. In the case of Foucault etc, they lived in a milieu where society hadn't yet decided that having sex with a teenager who was not yet of age was the Worst Thing Ever.
ThenElection
2yr ago
The shooter was identified as Audrey Hale, 28, of Nashville, according to the chief, who said she identifies as transgender.
Glad that we're finally closing the mass shooter gap.
ETA: I'm pretty sure, given the phrasing, that we're talking MtF.
Movies can be great even if they go heavy on the DEI side of things: see Everything, Everywhere All At Once, which, although polarizing, definitely stands out in good ways.
I think there's pretty much no DEI -> bad quality relationship. It's more that, if a movie or show flops, there's a bunch of buck passing; gesticulating wildly at racist chuds is a useful strategy because it allows everyone involved to point to someone without implicating each other. So RoP gets to have lots of good press about how it's failing because of racism, while HotD is quietly stuck with people who want to watch it.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Eh. I'm sympathetic to your point, but I don't buy all the conditions (or even strictly any of your conditions, except for obesity, which if you can provide health insurance for your family is itself fixable) are necessary for a good wife. Many of them are also heavily correlated: condition a woman on simply being college educated and having a professional career, and the majority probably meet your criteria.
A woman could do the exact same thing: list 10 traits that are requirements for a man and calculate how large her dating pool is. And in fact we did this for a single female friend who was bemoaning her dating situation: when we added up all her requirements, there was an expectation of only a couple dozen men in the entirety of California who met them. Is that a sign of how bleak women have it, or more a sign that her requirements were unrealistic?
And, speaking from experience, I'm a 5'3" bisexual guy in what's probably the toughest dating market for men in the USA, and I managed to get happily married, though currently living the degenerate DINK lifestyle. And I've notched up more (opposite-sex) partners than my wife. My personal most-restricting requirement was to find a single woman who made approximately as much as me, which is likely more restrictive than all your requirements put together.
All that said, it's absolutely true that (at least initially) dating is harder for men than for women. I'm not sure that anyone would dispute that, though, and I don't think your model provides good evidence for it. Better would be to come up with some quantitative and more direct measure for how hard dating is (for each percentile of attractiveness) and estimate it to provide a comparison.
Or, if the goal is to actually solve the problem, learn to exhibit masculinity, lift weights, and constantly put yourself out there and cast a wide net.
ThenElection
11mo ago
They aren't ignorant: they know that SAE has you say ask instead of axe. Otherwise, they wouldn't axe someone who used ask: "why you speaking white?" And people can and do regularly code switch depending on their audience.
Vernaculars are used as a way to indicate tribal membership. Going out of your way to use a vernacular mismatched with your audience is always going to raise eyebrows.
ThenElection
2yr ago
"Who has it worse" is not a productive or answerable question. There are different lived realities to men and women, and whether someone is affected worse by those different lived realities is highly individual.
The OP's entire frame of argument is a mirror version of the frame propounded by most feminists, who have as a uniting theme the idea that women have it universally worse than men. And it inherits all the faults of the feminist frame.
ThenElection
2yr ago
A breaking change in the kernel is different from a breaking change in an application; perpetual backwards compatibility would slow things to a halt. Should e.g. k8s have kept support for docker shim indefinitely? It was a constant source of maintenance issues (and if Reddit were using it, it would have caused a similar outage).
ThenElection
2yr ago
I initially questioned myself about whether it was worthy of a top level drive-by post and agree in retrospect. I'll avoid it in the future.
ThenElection
2yr ago
The reduced effectiveness against Omicron appears to be due to the virus being better at evading the immune system not due to a mismatch between the vaccine and the virus. Although that's difficult to tell because it's hard to find an entirely immune naive individual to expose to Omicron (either the actual virus or a vaccine).
One approach: why not engineer a new virus that the vaccine doesn't protect against and that mimics Omicron's ability to evade the immune system? It could give us deep insights into future pandemics.
ThenElection
1yr ago
Just gotta know the right people and right sketchy warehouses to go to.
The point, though, was about the complete lack of anything to do in most parts of the US, not about how Bay Area nightlife compares to NYC and LA.
ThenElection
1yr ago
I agree with everything you said, and no one should have to worry about making sure there isn't a homeless encampment a block away from a Four Seasons.
That said... 2cim isn't some yokel from Kansas City visiting San Francisco for the first time with her corn-fed husband and kids unexpectedly finding herself surrounded by syringes and shit. She is absolutely aware of the issues with San Francisco, and she's quite capable of finding and staying in parts of the city that are liveable.
ThenElection
2yr ago
I agree that the US is uniquely well positioned, though I think that high quality immigrants are going to be harder to come by, particularly in the quantity needed to reverse the costs of an aging population. My hope is that we try to reverse the culture of anti-fertility starting now and that technology will catch up in the next decade or so to help with the dysgenic effects.
ThenElection
2yr ago
On a social level, there's not much people can do individually. Someone can reasonably point at the single childless 30 year old professional concerned about TFR as somewhat hypocritical, but I agree: individually, we all must make do as best we can, and there's not much point in railing on individual choices.
When thinking of it as a social problem, though, if someone correctly recognizes it as a serious issue, I think it's reasonable to ask them what they're willing to give up to solve it. It's similar to environmentalists worried about climate change who refuse to even consider nuclear power: when faced with hard choices for them, they are just saying "I want all of what I want and refuse to make any trade offs." It reveals a great interest in signaling and a lack of any deep commitment to solving the Serious Problem.
The higher TFRs in the Philippines and Niger likely is driven by the lower classes and has a dysgenic effect, but despite that they're still likely to have higher growth rates than comparable countries with low TFRs.
ThenElection
2yr ago
Removing the gender aspect, if you're in a fight with a substantially stronger person, your first order of business is going to be putting distance between you and him and hopefully buying a few seconds to scream for help or find something to defend yourself with. That's possible in a regular room or hallway; it's not possible in an elevator, where you may well be knocked out as soon as anything starts. Not too different from the risk of being in a narrow alley as opposed to a wide street.
That doesn't detract from the fact that it's social norms and laws that are doing most of the work here. But it's defense in depth; adding a layer of being in a physical space where you're not as disadvantaged is a reasonable approach to risk mitigation.
Aks predates ask; it's the form preferred by Chaucer and the author of Beowulf. Ask is a modern degeneration enforced by London statists in their government building exercise. An unsavory task (or, more appropriately, tax).
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