aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
7d ago
Yeah, almost certainly a resolution problem, models are trained to work with pretty specific width/height ratios and if you throw them off things get ugly.
They're per capita gdp is still much lowe, it's not chips to notice that it's catch up effects. China didn't even contain the most productive Chinese people. Do you think deepseek is still ahead?
aqouta
10d ago
I'm going to need a source for China out innovating us. Certainty they benefit from igniting or copyright and I'm not of the camp that thinks they don't innovate at all. But out innovate us? And China does have IP law.
aqouta
11d ago
As someone with a lot of networth in Nvidia I'm happy about this and if it were put up to a vote of the shareholders I'd vote to not sell these chips to China. We absolutely don't need to hand them the rope that the intend to hang us with.
aqouta
11d ago
I've seen plenty of Nuking Three Gorges Dam posting, “China is the welfare queen of nations” posting, “we built up those chinks with our toil and look at how they repay us” posting, “Ways That Are Dark” posting, “only steals and poorly copies” posting and all other sorts of unhinged, entitled and dismissive posting that receives applause lately that I feel secure in saying that there is an undertone of stereotype-driven racial animus and condescension/cope, and it goes way back to the Chinese exclusion act.
There are more groups than the normies and the kind of people who are engaging in the China vs US threads on X. I'll note that when I have the misfortune of making the algorithm think I'm interested in China related politics I am fed some truly outrageous sludge both from anti-china hawks and mao apologists all slinging the hottest takes they can think up. There's a dynamic there and I fear you may be being misled about what smart Americans actually think on this subject. Things like the three gorges dam posting strike me more like apes pounding their chests at a rival than the thoughts of serious people.
Again, this is also visible in the smug confidence with which Trump's team initiated a trade war, assured that Xi will fold due to his sweatshop of a nation being existentially dependent on exporting cheap junk to the US.
I would hesitate to draw much inference from what the guy who clearly doesn't understand trade deficits thinks about the ability to win a trade war. Yes yes, to my great shame this idiot was elected to the highest office of the nation. I understand that this is what might be called a bad look. I'm just saying that him in particular being smuggly confident and wrong about some subject shouldn't really be taken as the opinion of thinking Americans. Thinking Americans, when they want to speculate on an Achilles heel on China are more likely to come up with the birthrate issue, the inflated housing market or the general issues of having a state substantially run by the kind of guy who can make people who bring him bad news disappear. These are all arguable points but they're not "these people are racially incapable of defeating us".
I'll also say that I've definitely seen some Americans liken Ruskies to Orcs, but generally it's a European (or even specifically Baltic) thing, I will grant that Americans do not imagine themselves Elves, they're happy enough being citizens of a real great nation.
Most of what I've noticed when the topic of Russia comes up, and it's really fallen quite a distance out of focus, is that people are mostly talking about Putin in particular and not Russians in general. It's described as "Putin's war" and if people are feeling spicy they might bring up the oligarchs. Maybe it's a hold over from narratives of us spreading freedom but usually if we believe a country to be headed by a dictator we mostly feel bad for the citizens and pour most of our animus into the dictator. Deep in our cultural outlook we still believe if we got rid of the corrupt leadership that either the people would immediately thank us or the scales would fall from their eyes and they'd embrace us as friends.
Scooters on sidewalks, however annoying, are a far cry from human feces on sidewalks - a matter of lacking civic virtue or manners, but not decay of civilization. I don't see scooters on sidewalks here in Buenos Aires, but I do have to look where I'm stepping. Was the other way around in Moscow, would that it were the same way here.
The scooters on sidewalks was more noting that things tended to be trending in the improvement direction as far as orderliness goes.
aqouta
11d ago
Depends on where you draw the line at for poor really. Wealth is a lot swingier than weight, you can't in a single evening consume enough calories to be the equivalent of gambling away your life savings. If by poor you just mean they are low wage earners with minimal skills for upward mobility then it is not their "fault" that they're poor. Although maybe having minimal skills could be thought of as a fault in some sense, usually we use fault to mean a problem with conscious decisions but it could also mean just having a unfortunate qualities. If someone is poor because they gamble away 20% of their paycheck and carry credit card balances then yes it's their fault.
aqouta
11d ago
There is a kind of motte and bailey going on. The motte criticism of CICO is that it's actually very difficult to calculate exactly how many calories are exhausted per second of exercise given how many variables go into such a thing and it's also difficult to calculate how much food is able to to be absorbed by an individual's digestive system therefore we can't calculate out the exact to the calorie differential. The bailey is therefore it's impossible to just consume less calories each day until you find the equilibrium where you're losing weight. You absolutely don't need to have an exact measure of Calories in and calories out to make sure the sign of the difference is negative and the broad tools of calorie restriction will easily allow you to flip that sign to negative. We can't make sure it's -500 and not -485. But this swing aren't even that large as things average out.
aqouta
11d ago
Regardless, @aqouta's recent trip and comments paint a picture not very matching yours.
I'm not sure if my travels could cut cleanly in one way or the other on this honestly. If someone's vision of China is of cities openly falling apart then that's at least definitely not true of Shanghai or Nanjing. It may have been due to the older, mostly to my experience solved, problem of smog but I do remember the buildings browning more than I've noticed in American big cities. I certainly didn't stay long enough or speak enough of the language to get a sense of any kind of society wide duplicity. My wife reported that obeying traffic rules had improved since her last visit and you did still see pretty frequent incidents of scooters riding on the walking area. I was in the familial ingroup for most of the people I spoke to, someone living and breathing the culture would have a better idea.
I'll recount the story of a friend of the guy I met in Osaka who is hopefully getting out of Chinese prison soon, call him Andrew. I do trust this Osaka friend but am less sure how much I trust Andrew. Supposedly Andrew moved to Beijing on a business visa partnered with some local to start an American BBQ business that took off pretty well, growing to a couple locations. Fast forward to covid and Andrew needed to go home for some reason, can't remember if it was family or Chinese policy. When he returns he finds that his previous partner has opened a competing chain and claims that Andrew lied on his original work visa, landing him in Chinese prison while the previous partner took possession of all of his restaurant assets. This is of course an anecdote and perhaps a dubious one, Osaka friend vouches that Andrew isn't the type to falsify business documents but you have no reason to believe that and I give it maybe a 20% chance he's at fault. My wife found it plausible if that means anything. I like almost all the Chinese people I met, but I don't think I'd want to try and live in China full time.
I think Americans might well compete with North Koreans, Israelis and Arabs in the degree of being brainwashed about their national and racial superiority (a much easier task when you are a real superpower, to be fair), to the point I am now inclined to dismiss your first hand accounts as fanciful interpretations of reality if not outright hallucinations. Your national business model has become chutzpah and gaslighting, culminating in Miran's attempt to sell the national debt as «global public goods». You don't have a leg to stand on when accusing China of fraud. Sorry, that era is over, I'll go back to reading papers.
I've noticed a trend of our Russian posters being very obsessed with framing American views on geopolitics in a racial angle. I haven't seen a single American call Russians orcs but seen many Russians accusing Americans of thinking in those terms. If Americans have a racial view of Chinese people it's as nerdy math kids, hardly the kind of people you'd be prejudiced against when it comes to ML research. Among the researchers I've known there has definitely been some sneering at the research paper output of the mainland, Wife and Mother in law both say that in the past it was a problem where China produced a lot of not very good papers but supposedly this has gotten better. Americans certainly have some neurosis around race but not in the way you should be merging it with American Exceptionalism to form American Racial Exceptionalism. Much ink has been spilt on how Americans deal with being a very multi-racial society and how that experiment is going. American's views on China has much more to do with their communist government than with their racial character.
aqouta
12d ago
You can't even fathom why people would be ideologically committed to their country not being consumed by Russia?
aqouta
15d ago
The Dissident Right picked it up recently, and I've seen it around, but it's usage isn't terribly common.
Interesting, maybe it's just the examples being used but it screams leftist to me.
aqouta
15d ago
Do you seriously believe there are no possible financial instruments that could result in complex projects being completed without IP law?
I think they won't be anarchism. Plausibly trade secrets if the field lends itself to them. It's not just the complexity, it's also the risk element. Anarchists would do well to remember that the basis of private property to begin with is guaranteed by the state, intellectual property is special case of private property which can be deconstructed in much the same way. Can you build some things without a state protected right to own your tools? Sure. Can you build large scale projects? Maybe, but it'll be much harder than if you can rely on the police to prevent people from riding away with your tractors.
Patreon is an an object lessons of how the market adapts to scenarios where IP law stops being relevant
Patreon exists within a context where IP law exists. Most large scale projects for media are completed outside of patreon, in fact the vast majority of media spending operates under traditional IP law frameworks.
Kickstarter proves that complex engineering products can be pre-funded directly by consumers, without need for investors. It's true that we don't currently have Biotech Patreon, for example-- but I'm arguing that that's a consequence not of the boundary conditions of capitalism, but of the specific market distortions introduced by government enforcement of IP law.
I'm not saying you wouldn't be able to produce some small scale projects. I'm saying you're going to have orders of magnitude less resources deployed. much fewer life saving drugs.
I'd love for there to be a realistic alternative to IP law, and as an improvement I think IP should have a much much shorter life span. But replacing it with nothing will cost us a whole lot and you're just hand waving that loss away.
aqouta
15d ago
at least, commensurate to how often it's used
I can count how many times I've heard it used on one hand honestly. What sub community is it actually used all the time in? I would assume it's a kind of death of the author but applied to systems thing, which is mildly useful.
aqouta
15d ago
You're talking about things that can be done by a single artist for the most part here. Simple media products with little to no logistics necessary and practically no risk. You can't run a drug research program off of kickstarter. You can't build a new airplane internal part by having all the airlines sign up for an engineer's Patreon.
aqouta
16d ago
You're going to inevitably end up in one of two separate outcomes here.
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A substantially less is invested into these searches for new tech
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As much is invested and it's done by what is essentially the same apparatus as today.
As it sounds like you want to do away with patents entirely option 1 seems very likely. And this is all very naive about the risk of these attempts to discover new tech not panning out. Every individual hospital is really going to become expert in which new drugs to invest into during the research stage? No, they're going to developed specialized companies.
aqouta
16d ago
Tariffs weren't really a huge deal until last week. They were generally considered bad policy with a couple edge cases and much of America's presence in the world was preaching free trade, which in practice meant no to low tariffs. Trump's hallucinated list of tariffs imposed on us notwithstanding there was bipartisan consensus that they were bad policy outside of very specific targeting. When the bear wakes up from its long hibernation and begins mauling people it is unsurprising that bear related discussions go from very rare to quite frequent.
aqouta
17d ago
IP is corrupted because investors capture most of the value of the IP development what if instead we [A system in which investors capture most of the value of the IP development].
in return they guarantee me the right to buy a certain quantity of the product early, which gives me access to a potential for arbitrage.
Why would you even need such a right if IP didn't exist?
aqouta
17d ago
Look, I understand finding a topic uninteresting but we're talking about a thing that could upturn the whole world economy. And the reason there is so much uncertainty about it is because the president of the united states is intentionally yoyoing us back and forth across the precipice. It's not a psyop that this is being discussed, some thing are actually genuinely important.
aqouta
27d ago
The internet told us it was OK to drink in Nanjing and Shanghai proper but we didn't risk it. Still they didn't even ever try to chill water bottles except in rare circumstances.
aqouta
28d ago
We actually had the golden arches for lunch today. The spiced breaded wings were of surprisingly high quality
aqouta
28d ago
Running out of things to say really, may write up the last few days just for completing but we're basically just riding out the tourist bits in shanghai.
aqouta
30d ago
We did the confucius temple last evening, it'll be featured in part 3. I think we could easily spend weeks here but have only 3ish days in the city proper. With her family being here we will return for future trips. FIL says the wall is wide enough to ride horses on and I'd like to see it. I'm not totally sure what our plan for tomorrow is.
It's a curious problem I think. I am against most of that stuff being taught in school but the whole "teach the controversy" thing must have some limits. What would my enemies do with this veto? I'm not so sure the opt out is the correct thing to demand, the battlefield should surely be the curriculum itself.
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