YoungAchamian
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User ID: 680
YoungAchamian
5hr ago
I did not pick that up in the slightest, GW at it again.
YoungAchamian
5hr ago
I mean if so thats posteriors in the direction that Henry was being very stupid. With drunkenness there is some level of excuse to be made for making a bad decision as you have imbibed a substance that is known to cause impaired decision making. Taunting a sword-wielding gangster while sober is Darwin-Award level behavior. Maybe BC is right and a sizable portion on the native British population is just retarded.
high trust society interacts with a low trust one.
Ehh this is what happens when an honor culture meets a legalistic culture. I don't think high/low trust has anything to do with the outcome of taunting weapon wielding strangers at night.
YoungAchamian
6hr ago
Wait which book? I do not remember anything on the sort in Book of the New Sun.
YoungAchamian
6hr ago
That bodycam video to this day enrages me like no other. I'd bring back Scaphism for that cop.
YoungAchamian
7hr ago
But this example, America is a soft-Empire. These are mostly internal problems plaquing Europe. Not things the American Hegemony really cares about. America is similar to Rome in this case, as long as the taxes are paid, deference is shown, and the client states know who wears the pants, the Hegemon leaves them up to their own devices. Even then America clearly lets its client states have far far more leash than any other known empire in history.
YoungAchamian
7hr ago
I think I agree with your framing that this boils down to a UK frat bro vs angry honor culture immigrant type-situation.
Novak misunderstood the rules of engagement in these types of situations and thought he could spout off words because violence is so verboten in modern society. Digwa comes from an honor culture where violence (even lethal violence) is an adequate response to slights, and tribal family loyalty outweighs societal notions of fairness that WEIRD people have. This created a lethal situation for Novak as Digwa responded to his taunting with unrestricted levels of violence. His family backed him up by closing ranks, as is expected of community oriented values. A tragedy of multicultural origins with all too human details.
YoungAchamian
7hr ago
I think lumping balls and brains along colonial possessions is the likely incorrect assumption. The post WWII UK still tried to pull stuff like the Suez Canal. I think the loss of the "balls and brains" has happened much more recently vs the colonial possessions being, as you said, war reparations of the Americans for needing to come in and save the Brits.
America definitely isn't holding Europe's balls or brains. A case can be made that America likes a weaker Europe so as to not challenge the American Hegemony, but internal matters like immigration and culture seems to be a nutcracker the Euro's designed all on their own.
YoungAchamian
8hr ago
Apparently. I'm not sure its possible for the British to un-psyop their society back. It would require acknowledging some very-uncomfortable realities about the world that would be impolite and ungentlemanly. I can't imagine the culture of the stiff upper lip can have that sort of honest dialogue
YoungAchamian
8hr ago
"He seems like a wannabe violent asshole".
I think this is accurate. He's a thug, which a chip on his shoulder looking for an excuse to pop off. Clearly has anger issues. As Catsnakes said, he's a wannabe gangster with a sword.
YoungAchamian
8hr ago
Agreed, just because the victim was an idiot does not make the crime permissible. Having lived in a major metro and needing to take buses and subways home while drunk, even the schizo's generally (as in I nor any friends have ever seen/heard of this) won't physically attack you if you don't acknowledge them.
His mistake was that he didn't just keep walking. Say in this drunken haze, you correctly identify the guy with the shortsword and the honor culture, is just a pozer who thinks he's tough. Do you really need to insult his honor and force him to do something about it? This is the shit I'm talking about. Like just shut up and walk, its not your problem.
YoungAchamian
8hr ago
It was not designed for tribal savages. This was a good thing and its unraveling is a tragedy.
It's really not. A society that educates out bloody survival knowledge from its populous is a failed society. You don't need to have a society that is designed for tribal savages to also have a society that acknowledges how the real world works. Creating a bunch of quokkas is not a good thing. Also we are talking about the same Britain right? The one with football hooligans??
Note that Brits will never see an armed man in the course of ordinary life.
Its a fucking shortsword, I don't need to see a man with a shortsword and a scowl on his face to know I'm not going to interact with him in any but the most polite and avoidant manner.
More cynically, one might say that a lifetime of antiracist education completely compromised Nowak's ability to assess threats in a sensible way. It simply did not occur to him that the scary-looking Indian in religious garb walking around with a scowl on his face (and perhaps visibly carrying ceremonial weapons) might not respond too favourably to playful banter.
I buy this, I think the article points out the 8-incher was externally carried and is what Novak got stabbed with. I'd bet that is externally carried. But it would make sense to me that a lifetime of not-noticing + mainstream British education has made an entire generation of kids be unable to exist in a world with any sort of real-world aggression.
f so, I doubt the possibility even occurred to him that Digwa was armed.
Note: however, a lifetime of multicultural education should inform you that Sihks as a religion are specifically armed. I learned this shit decades ago in social studies, in a fly-over state in America. Long before I actually ever interacted with a Sihk in person.
Damn what an infuriating read. I'm torn though, everything the murder and his family did is beyond evil. However is there any evidence that Novak was accosted without any provocation on his part? It sounds like he was drunk and drunkenly his called out to the non-drunk guy with a big fucking sword, and tried to banter with him in an insulting way. Like does he have any survival instincts? You do not insult the guy with the sword. You don't acknowledge them, you just keep fucking walking, silently. I've seen people with guns, knives, or just general dangerous dispositions while drunk, out and about, you better believe I don't engage, interact or acknowledge them. I definitely don't try to be funny and insult them.
Maybe brits are just stupid and coddled to the point that they can't survive in a world filled with non-coddled, tribal savages. Maybe its an American thing to have at least some danger sense and self awareness. Assume everyone is carrying, be nice, and ignore them.
EDIT: This is the part I'm talking about, like dude just shup up and keep walking.
Nowak resumed filming. The footage shows Digwa walking away, and Nowak saying: “Innit bad man, what bad man. You’re a bad man, say you’re a bad man, go on.”
It's clear to me Digwa is a malcontent, angry at the world, angry at society, and not in a good mood. Some drunk white guy starts talking shit and he just snaps, right to murder, torture, gaslighting, etc. Novak is the effigy for all his hate at the world.
YoungAchamian
14hr ago
As much as the symbolic American story holds in our hearts and minds. the current US upper class did not climb there due to their own abilities. Very few of the Ivy League admits are there because they are some small town genius who worked their way up through merit and hard work. Most are just the sons and daughters of already powerful people. They definitely like to pretend the former is the case, but that's because being "self-made" still holds a certain cultural gravitas, and thus requires them to reframe their stories through that light. Just like how they need to reframe their origins through being the underdog, another very American conceit. I'd further postulate that a core esoteric symbol of American/Western culture is that of the Merchant. We are a society of merchants, not warriors, priests or nobles. Frontiersman/Explorers(aka Yeomen) and Merchants. And Merchant values are fundamentally mercenary.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
merit (which is generally what hereditary privilege implies)
What merit does it take to be born to the right parents? One of the major and common failure states of hereditary privilege is that the failson of someone with merit inherits all the power and fucks everything and everyone up (generally combined with fuck-all recourse).
The ruling class in modern society has no Noblese Oblige because they are extremely mercenary. Noblese Oblige requires a recognition of the common man as part of your tribe/society/culture. A rootless cosmopolitan mercenary who feels no ties to any one society or tribe is of course not going to feel any oblige to the downtrodden.
YoungAchamian
1d ago
is dependent on information services
This is a consequence of the government procurement process. Essentially the government would rather buy software services at a billable hourly rate with forward engineer support than do their own development. This is in large part because a billable rate is a line item in the budget that they can pass to congress. Actually doing their own software development, so as to not be beholden to third party vendors would require not existing in a "use it or lose it" budgetary culture. Obviously the vendors also like this approach and lobby the politicians for it, who consequently control the purse.
I'm not sure their is a solution other than nationalizing the companies at this point (which is bad) because the system works for the people at the levers of power. The fact that it is corrupt and inefficient is a feature not a bug to some. A competent government also has the problem of being competent at wielding its power tyrannically leading to other people to oppose competent software development practices.
YoungAchamian
2d ago
Was MIRI ever considered actual AI research? Or just a jobs program for the nerdy connected word-cell rationalist in the bay. It feels like MIRI just conned a bunch of wealthy weirdos out of some grant money and then posted alignment papers akin to science fiction musings about an AI that does not exist.
YoungAchamian
7d ago
Thank you for the invitation, let me see which ones I could attend. Do you know if the Neurips/ICML host a professional society like IEEE or AAAI?
I'd like to think its because this is a very niche argument about where the boundary on one field is vs another. It's not really culture war material, its not an existential moral argument. Its pretty much two nerds disagreeing about what constitutes ML research, and and on a meta level, the telos of the modal ML research paper.
This forum has devolved a bit on the civil discourse front when it comes to culture wars, sign of the times I guess.
YoungAchamian
7d ago
Except that AlexNet was published at NeurIPS
Damn Google's AI overview led me astray. Good old NIPs was the publication. (Yes I know they changed their name to not be a slur). The other two I knew because I read them in undergrad. I could not remember AlexNet's OG home.
you are actively trying to help people come into the clique who want to
We might have different definitions of "actively". Yes they are open, but strictly classifying ML as a very specific thing is not. It still looks to me like gatekeeping a very specific boundary that is not reflective of the wider reality
Ok I can grant that the conference communities are distinct. But I do think there is still some difference between those two papers and papers like these: CATs and DAGs: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14485, Distributed Alignment Search: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.02536. I had a solid idea of what these papers were doing in ~10 minutes of reading them. But it took me several hours each to understand the Prior-Fitted Networks, then the math paper behind it, then the Causal Prior-Fitted Networks and lastly the Causal Foundation Models with partial information, at a level that I could apply or implement them. If you are saying that's because I am >20 textbooks and >1k papers behind on the background understanding, then sure I can't argue with that. But I could implement CATs and DAGs and DAS within the hour of reading them.
If I am not the target audience for any of them, how come some are more approachable from a practical side and others are not? I would expect truly being an outsider to have a roughly even level of penetration on the topics, not a wildly disparate one. To me that is indicative of a level of quality, skill on the author, or even writing to a wider audience (pretty much a skill) instead of writing to the clique (poor intent).
You should accept this rather that complain that they are too hard or gatekeeping.
"Too" is a load bearing word that I don't think I have used. My complaint is some of these are fairly arcane, use complicated math to obfuscate a straightforward idea, or are deliberately being written in a way to gatekeep.
The division here is not academic/industry like you suggest.
Some industry labs are essentially better paid academic labs, and attract prestigious academics. Google, Deepmind, FAIR, Microsoft, and plenty of small startups targeting PhD students. OpenAI started out that way. Other industry labs/research companies are far more implementation focused, in fact I'd say the majority are the latter. You'll get PhDs but also ML Engineers (like me) who transitioned as time/interest went on. And yeah we publish in the CVPRs and ACLs. ImageNet was a CVPR publication, AlexNet was a Nature publication, Resnet (major introduction of skip connections used everywhere in ML now) was CVPR. If you'd like to say those aren't "ML" then I'd say you definitely have a purity issue, if you want to grant them access to the vaulted halls, then its farcical to say that CVPR is not part of the ML community (doesn't need to be exclusively, I'd grant that the CV community and the ML community have not always had overlap)
EDIT: After mulling this over, you've actually planted the idea that many ML academics are essentially writing pointless papers that explore some weird theoretical idea but have no desire for that paper or theory to even get implemented in anything besides a toy problem. In essence, they are slop. And because they are circle-jerking slop papers, they are written for other circle-jerking slop authors in the wider ML community.
YoungAchamian
7d ago
We seem to have a different definition of what constitutes "ML Research". I'd break it down into two forms: Basic Research and Applied Research. Basic is probably not the precise word because a lot of core research is non-basic, but core is also an imprecise word, as is making a boundary around theoretical.
But Applied Research is pretty straight forward. It is the application of ML theory and algorithms/models to real-world practical problems. The "Basic" Research is generally more on developing the ML theory of what can work or is possible. You seem to think Applied Research is not actual "ML Research". I'm not sure the ML community agrees with you because there are prevalent conferences like CVPR or the NLP one I am blanking on. These are considered ML conferences, focused on a particular practical field. Industry research is almost always Applied, not all of us have the luxury of working on grants, business want returns and the research is around applying ML theory to real-problems. Like the Cuffless BP Nature paper. I think your definition is overly purity focused, though I imagine our tension is one as old as time between Academic PhDs and Industry Researchers.
The last two are definitely the "core/theoretical/basic" side of research because they aren't actually applying it to real problems. One's just a theory on Causal Modeling al la Pearl or Schölkopf. The pipeline is that someone like me takes these more theoretical models and implements them in the real-world.
Grassmann manifolds are outside of standard ML math, but the explanation in 2.2 was easy to follow.
Maybe I suck at math (a real possibility) or maybe you are just good at math (also a possibility) I still am very shaking on what a Grassmann manifold is. I don't think the paper is earth shattering in itself. I've seen several papers about kernelizing attention, or linearizing it, or anything to make it non-quadratic.
Again, this doesn't seem very mathy to me
I don't think this one is mathy, but it is arcane on the applications of meta-learning as bayesian priors to allow a model to generalize across out of distribution problems during inference time. Claiming it can do zero-shot inference on unrelated tasks because it learns how to formulate problems as an approximation of bayesian inference in a practical amount of time is a wild idea. It's making a very complicated claim that takes a long time to wrap your head around.
Having to look up 3 references to read and understand a paper seems absolutely reasonable to me.
Unfortunately this is a constraint in industry, I have a job, there is work to get done. spending 8+ hours to digest a theory paper is a large impact on my time. Even if it leads to something useful.
I am a ML researcher, in Industry without a PhD. The papers are absolutely for me. (And if they aren't then thats a major clique/circle-jerking issue, as I'm the one actually trying to apply what is being done)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-07087-2 This paper I recently tried to replicate for research on IoT cuffless BP, it absolutely fails to replicate. Not only that, but it also suffers from massive subject leakage on how it splits the data. It's pretty much overfit with a 75% overlap between signals and then it shuffles those between train and val. Even copying it's splitting approach I failed to get more than a MAE SBP of 6.07 and DBP of 4.3. Paper claims sub 2.0 for both.
Then there's this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.19428. Maybe you know Grassmann flows and manifolds but I definitely did not learn this naturally. I pretty much need a background tutorial on this.
I actually enjoyed this paper's concept: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.14972 But needing to read 2-3 additional papers, one of which was super mathy proving out the intuition was a lot of work. It still takes me a bit to conceptualize this because it is DEEP in the bayesian world.
Maybe you are in a different subfield than I am, but I have consistently failed to replicate paper results for the occasional paper for the last 4-5 years. It happens, it's a thing. If I say that to other industry researchers they pretty much agree. One of the reasons we think poorly of academics.
The quoted bit from the article/videos sounds like he essentially was telling Digwa, "What a right proper gangster you are, I bet you think you are such a naughty boy and all the bollocks". How innocuous you think that is up to you, but that would start shit across the pond in America if you said it to some inner-city wannabe gangster too.
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