WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
No bio...
User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
Having kids is pretty awesome and generally brightens my day, no matter how retarded things get out in the real world.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
My quest to the 200 54# Kettlebell Snatch goal is taking some detours. I seem to have plateaued at around 160 where my exhaustion hits a point where the fatigue overwhelmed my form and injuries happen. Nothing major, torn calluses, back gets a little tweaked, etc. I think I'm going to start trying to do 2-5 sets of 100, since knocking out 100 in a row has gotten fairly easy. Did two sets today as a try out and it seems promising. Might add a 3rd set of 100 next week. Fingers crossed. I'm hoping after stacking enough of those sets, once day I can just drop the rest period and go for 200 straight.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
No. The struggle never ends to find shirts that I can actually move my shoulders in, but which aren't also flapping in the breeze around my waist. I've also found it very difficult to find nice pants that fit my quads, but aren't cinched up like a sack cloth. There was a brand or two, but their QC went to shit.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
Oh my god, you're right. I was raised with "Hell is other people".
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
You know what, I could die happy if people tried to make a magic dirt argument to aliens about how we could raise their GDP if they just allowed us into their empire, and the aliens just went "Then why didn't you do that already on your own planet?" and hit delete on all of us.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
Based on a current understanding of physics, the only reason to launch an invasion would be to acquire the population as human capital for empire building
Somehow I doubt our "elite human capital" is that elite. I'd cross that one off.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
It's all fun and games until they've H1B'd critical infrastructure you didn't even realize existed. Oh the things I've seen...
It's one thing to laugh and joke about Meta or Microsoft enshittifying everything thanks to H1B value extraction. But you have no idea the enshittification that's coming in areas that desperately require a high trust, conscientious workforce.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
I think of AI a lot like I think of my experiences working with H1Bs. LLMs have no concept of truth, no actual work ethic, and basically make whatever mouth sounds get you to leave them alone. With enough supervision they can generate work product, but you can never exactly trust it. If you put them in charge of each other, things go completely off the rails exponentially.
The problem with LLMs will always be supervising them. I think in any area where the truth doesn't matter (fiction, art, chat, summaries of text to a lesser degree) LLMs might crush it. I think for many other automated tasks (data entry from disparate documents), their error rate will probably be in line with a human. But in terms of advanced knowledge work, I expect their output to always have a high variance, and it would be catastrophic for any company to integrate them into their workflow without even more knowledgeable and experienced humans in the loop.
Of course, you then run into the problem of not training up those humans because AI is doing the entry level jobs, or allowing them to go to seed because instead of keeping their skills sharp, they are doing nothing but double check AI output.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
Discord
Every time I'm foolish enough to venture into a Discord for a game or youtuber I'm interested in, it's full of trans poly individuals proselytizing their lifestyle to children. It's like all those people ever talk about, despite the server ostensibly being about anything else. And of course all the discords have rules against "hate" which means you can't ask them not to.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
Read old stuff. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Tarzan, but also John Carter of Mars. The latter is out of copyright and cheap as shit. Disney made a movie of it and unintentionally made one of the greatest literature to movie conversions of all time (in the same league as the Lord of the Rings and Watership Down.
I bought all the John Carter books in their hardcover format with the Frank Frazetta artwork on the dust jackets, because I am a man of culture.
They are ok. I've read up to The Chessmen of Mars, and each novel seems to have the same strengths and weaknesses. I find the characters profoundly boring, with almost no life or dynamism to their actions. They won't surprise you in anything they do even once. However, each novel tends to have at least two or three interesting hooks or twist in the overall texture of the world building.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
This seems to be a bedrock of how you feel about this topic. How did you first form this opinion,
Taxes
and what keeps you feeling this way?
I don't really see much difference between Reagan's welfare queen and the Walton family, whose business is only viable because the government enables them to pay below-livable wages with their welfare programs. Both parties simply exploited a bureaucracy.
Yes.
I don't know what to say. I have a visceral disgust reaction towards people who can't even support themselves. Taking my money to give to them, no matter how round about it is, just adds insult to injury.
Sometimes I think of the wisdom of say, giving out free food on Thanksgiving versus all year round. If the food is a one day thing where you get to enjoy a nice meal with some dignity, awesome. If it's a stipend that lets you indulge in the dangerous delusion that you're actually taking care of yourself, or capable to producing dependents, well that's another thing entirely.
But then you started circling the idea of bullshit jobs too, and how much work is actually productive. One man's blue sky research is another man's wasteful spending. Sometimes you get Xerox PARC or Bell Lab's Idea Factory, and sometimes you get whatever the fuck this is, NSFW btw. I might have a bullshit job. I might not. Gun to my head I might just be a bit player on the outskirts of an industry that may or may not generate some ecosystem of products that makes the world marginally better to live in. If I'm lucky. What can I say?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
Who said anything about concentration camps? All most people want is to be left alone. Stop taking my money to provide for them, leave them to their own devices, stop creating a dependent population with excessive charity, and the problem, if it doesn't go away on it's own, will at least develop some sort of homeostatic boundaries.
But if we insist on having a welfare state... well... then we need to pretty aggressively determine who deserves to be a part of it.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
So, the problem I've run into with partners in industry, and you'll see this in the github issue I linked, they read the GPS_RAW_INT.alt_ellipsoid field, thinking it's the height above the WGS84 ellipsoid. It is not. It's the height above the EGM96 geoid. MAVLINK does not consider this a bug. It results in a lot of confusion over and over and over again with people insisting adamantly that they are providing the "raw WGS84 height above ellipsoid from the GPS unit".
I keep that github link handy to escape the endless cycle of "But it's the alt_ellipsoid field!" Which is understandable. If I were reading a field called alt_ellipsoid I'd assume it was the altitude over the ellipsoid as well. This is usually caught when they are 100' off a known ground level.
My field is drone airspace management, so this is mostly a concern with drones using GPS to autopilot. In a recent region of interest, the difference between the WGS84 ellipsoid and the EGM geoid was about 100 feet of altitude. So if people weren't on the same page, there could be drones up each other's asses while they are supposed to be stratified by altitude. GPS is natively in the WGS84 ellipsoid system for altitude, but that doesn't mean your specific GPS system nor the things you have digesting that data and sending it along the chain aren't converting it to something else. I don't process raw GPS, so I can't personally attest to this "fact". Lots of people tell me their GPS outputs EGM or MSL.
Now, I'm not a pilot from the 50's, but I believe their analog instruments for altitude worked off of barometric pressure and were calibrated against MSL. I believe every increasingly sophisticated EGM geoid model is attempting to match more precisely the reference frame of observed MSL. Generally pilots think in MSL because if you ever look up the altitude of an airport, it's reported in MSL. But like I said, not a pilot, just my observations from the outside.
I have witnessed relentless confusion, to just not even having an awareness that there is a difference, between the WGS84 ellipsoid and MSL/EGM geoids. Especially, but not limited to, between the old world of manned aviation and the new world of drone aviation. When things like this happen I'm amazed it doesn't happen every fucking day from the shit I've seen. I don't know where the government is hiding all the competence.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
Whenever I read wholesale dehumanization of groups of people who live in squalor I think to myself: maybe it's the empathetic part of the human brain becoming overloaded and the response from the rest of the brain is to rationalize it as "Well, they're not humans like me.". Yes, words like "dysgenic" and "caste" and "elite" qualify as dehumanization for me, even if they don't for everybody.
I mean, maybe. But my entire life has been living in a boomer project of trying to uplift these communities... to no impact what so ever. Build them critical infrastructure and they destroy it. Give them free resources and they just have as many kids as it takes to reduce them to their prior squalor. At the end of the day, they live like that because they choose to live like that. At least in so far as any of us choose to live any particular way while struggling with the human condition. It just seems that the human condition they struggle against seems to be on the extreme tail and at a horrifying scale.
A society that is 1-2% horrifying unreformable anti-civilization monsters might be able to get away with putting them up in nice abodes, letting them have a terrifying number of children, and generally dealing with the disproportionate drain on society this minority creates. When that rises to the level of a voting block of a country, it gets into "I don't fucking know man, it's literally impossible to accommodate them all, they're gonna drag us all down with them!"
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
TBH I think I'm struggling with a culture and language barrier, but would it be fair to summarize your rebuttal as "Hinduism didn't fail India, India failed Hinduism"?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
Your first impulse was the right one. A person without kids musing about why legacy doesn't matter is the same as a person without sex organs musing about why sex doesn't matter.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
These are very half formed thoughts. Musings really. So take everything I'm about to say with a grain of salt.
I think a lot these days about what makes a civilization. I definitely lean towards the line of thought that culture is downstream of genetics. If you replace a people inhabiting a land wholesale, you get a different nation and a different civilization. I harp on IQ a great deal, but there are all manner of uncorrelated or weakly correlated personality traits that influence a civilization at scale.
And then I look at the fall of the Roman Empire. On the one hand, there is a story that can be told where the Roman Empire became just another economic zone, too decadent and corrupt to bother with the labor of maintaining it's own existence. On the other hand there is a story where Christianity somehow carried the seeds of Roman greatness through the ages so that they could flourish among dozens of different people's in the successor Kingdom's in Europe where the rapacious barbarian's settled. They were taught to settle, cultivate, and have a lower time preference. It's hard to imagine a pagan Europe, where Christianity had never been invented. I don't think anyone can figure that counter factual. But it does appear, or at least a story can be told, that the religion of the Roman Empire which outlived it, helped elevate the dozens of tribes that brought it down in it's place.
Although I suppose there is also a discussion to be had about the role of Christianity in allowing infinite rapacious barbarians inside it's open doors these days. I donno, I can see it both ways.
To address your post more directly, even were I to assume that ancient aspects of the Pagan Hindu faith are the only living, practiced Pagan tradition between some far flung Ayran common ancestor... what does it have to offer me to "retvrn" to it? Compare the post-Pagan European society to a Pagan India today? You can make the appeal to some sort of authentic ancestral legacy, but it takes more than that to sell me. There are a few peer nations that seem to have something over on modern day European civilization which I would consider taking a lesson or two from. India is probably in the bottom quintile of that list.
Or to phrase it another way, take what Christianity did to recivilize Europe in the aftermath of one of the most devastating civilizational collapses since the Bronze Age Collapse, and compare it to what the Vedas have done to uplift India.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
Everything about the UK is a cautionary tale at this point. It's a conquered country.
They had two policewomen jog around with their camel toe's out (not joking, look at the photos). They do this for the same reason police in the US write tickets for people going 45 in a 30 instead of 90 in a 55. It's safer, easier, the person going a measly 45 is more likely to comply, and they just don't give a fuck.
I've also heard theories this is a desperate hail mary to game the stats and have more white people committing "sex offenses" since the current stats are so stubbornly brown. Honestly I doubt that, unless you start seeing it at scale.
Personally, I think these two badged Karens had an idea, and nobody up the chain of command had the right IDPOL cards to shut it down. Or maybe it was a way to keep them busy and out of the way of people doing actual work.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
LLM companies are desperately fighting to move up the value chain, they all want to sell their models as equivalent in performance to PhD candidates, or independent agents capable of doing high value knowledge work.
I donno man. How much value is there really here? Unless you just let'r rip and see what happens, all those LLMs doing PhD level knowledge work will need to be overseen still by PhD level knowledge workers to check for veracity and hallucinations. It runs into a bit of the "How does a stupid writer depict a smart villain" problem.
And as for the companies that decide let'r rip without adequate oversight, well... I can't venture to guess. Really playing with fire there.
There is probably perfectly adequate shareholder value in getting a billion lonely midwits to pay $10/month rising to $inf/month in the way of all silicon valley service models, and keeping them hooked with the LLM equivalent of tokenized language loot boxes. I'd wager its even the more significant hill to climb for shareholder value.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
People who try to keep objects in the air properly stratified by altitude. And as a bit player on the outside, oh the things I've seen.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
Perhaps maximal truth-seeking conflicts with warmth and empathy. It's possible the tails come apart. But I don't think they're outright opposed to each other, and you can probably find a Pareto frontier that makes most people happy.
I think the tails will come apart in the marketplace before the come apart on a technical level. LLMs will get enshittified like everything else, if they haven't begun enshittified. They are optimized for engagement and selling access more than they are optimized for productivity. An effective LLM is an LLM that puts itself out of a job in many tasks.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1mo ago
It gets even worse when you go off into the weeds of what WGS84 means, because EGM96 is part of that spec. Often times the only hint you get if WGS84 actually means "WGS84/EGM96" is a reference to a geoid or an ellipsoid. But oftentimes you don't get that, so you are left searching the data for an obvious reference point that gives the reference away.
Throw in the aforementioned Mavlink bug, and even the data is suspect.
Also everyone I've worked with at a three letter safety organization has gotten this wrong 100% of the time.
I don't fly anymore.
Man, I donno. Girl Dad to Boy Mom, I don't envy raising boys in this environment. All the same, if he's gonna grow into a man that doesn't want to end up a professional pariah or in jail, he's is going to have to learn to stuff his anger into the seeds of a cardiac event. Just a man's lot in life. Best advice I ever got is "When you have to eat shit, take big bites".
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