aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
1mo ago
And it remains a silly thing to believe while also demanding resources and concessions from the rest of society. If there is nothing to the claim but a preference, an extreme form of self crippling tattoo, then we are certainly not giving minors access to it, we are certainly not bending over backwards to allow people with a sports league preference, we are certainly not paying for this tattoo with a substantial amount of my tax dollars. I believe enough in freedom of form that people should be allowed to whatever they want to their own bodies but if what they're doing is for preference they owe it to the rest of us not to do harm in their pursuits.
aqouta
1mo ago
That's an incredible cope and makes a mockery of the claims that trans people need recognition and support or will face risks of mental health and suicide. In the counterfactual world where they were cis they could have found meaning is better ways. You can justify practically any bad thing with this framing. Should we praise and no prevent child abuse because it allows one to overcome it? Cripple children so that they invent new modes of locomotion? Genuinely absurd.
aqouta
3mo 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
4mo ago
I don't understand people who can see the current state of AI and the trendline and not at least see where things are headed unless we break trend. You guys know a few years ago our state of the art could hardly complete coherent paragraphs right? chain of thought models are literally a couple months old. How could you possibly be this confident we've hit a stumbling block because one developer's somewhat janky implementation has hick ups? And one of the criticism is speed, which is something you can just throw more compute at and scale linearly?
aqouta
2mo ago
I'm retired, full-time research, theory, and writing since 2009, formerly 50/50 residential construction and corporate I.T.
While working in corporate IT when you have a basically working system if someone came up and informs you that the silicon in all the electronics you use is susceptible to solar radiation that can occasionally make calculation incorrect and that you should consider alternatives to silicon what would you do? Maybe if you had the time to kill you could kick around the idea with them, the fellow may even be right about the silicon being susceptible to solar radiation, you vaguely remember that something like that can occasionally cause a bit to flip here or there. But really, how seriously are you going to take this warning? It's not really been a big problem before, you even had some redundancies set up so even if in a freak accident it mattered it'd probably be fine. There are some experimental alternatives to silicon materials, Germanium, Graphene, cubic Boron but it's not even clear if any of them solve the original problem and you manage tons of electronics. You realistically cannot even source a single Germanium chip, let alone replace your servers. You express skepticism and they accuse you of being negligent. That's kind of what it feels like to see you morally load this conversation by call capitalism psychopathy with a makeover. It just kind of comes off as silly and frivolous. Maybe there is an alternative and maybe we can talk about those alternatives but I live in downtown Chicago, I'm looking around at these sky scrapers and millions of people moving about keeping everything running and it may actually be easier to switch every electronic in the city to graphene then get this working without ownership as we know it.
I'm happy to talk about this, but don't call my a psychopath for being skeptical.
How can you understand an alternative if you bat the spoon away when someone says, "Here, just taste it" ??
We've been offered many spoons, some we have later verified were filled with dog shit.
That's the codependence talking. The ball is ALWAYS in your court unless you've given up your game to play someone else's. Let's just say it turns out I'm onto something here, and within the next ten years it will become common knowledge. Tomorrow I'm going to bike into town to food shop. Let's say I get hit and killed by a car, and you never hear from me again. Where is the "ball" then?
I think you're mistaken of the dynamics here. There are tons of courts. If discussing this with you is tedious I can go up or down a thread and participate in the forum's 800th discussion on whether Trump is good or bad, the 480th thread on whether lgbtq2s+ acceptance has not gone too far enough or even spicy new topics like the India/Pakistan conflict. This topic is of special interest to you because it's been a brain worm for you for years, it's of special interest to us because we do actually appreciate the opportunity to engage with new views. If the engagement is not forthcoming, if the ball stays in your court we can and will move on. As we were counting assumptions earlier the belief that your perspective will win out is is an assumption you're making and it's on you to convince us of that.
Societies have collapsed, of course, but give me just one example, just one, that collapsed as the result of a failed experiment in radical change.
Depends what your standard is for collapse. I'd argue maoist china collapsed in a way. The Weimar republic probably counts. The soviet union might count. Usually a society is able to survive and change course after the implementation of bad ideas, see Trump tariffs.
As far as Black, I promote him in the interest of expanding minds, not endorsing his views/"solutions". I don't think he has any solutions. He's an anarchist, we've corresponded, I've tried to engage him, but he demurs. That's basically when I realized I've gone far beyond anarchism.
I don't know if you've gone beyond anarchism, but I don't know much about your views.
aqouta
1mo ago
I would think it would prove more salutary, they have air, sea and ground superiority and countermeasures against massed barely armed troops not present in the past. Of course a smaller version of the Palestinian strategy of being killed so hard and publicly that western people stop out of pity may work on Israel itself but I just can't see how Israel loses this one. Of course once that's on the table a lot of other actors might change their tune.
aqouta
1mo ago
I'll chime in to note that all of my china visit posts went through an ai spelling check pass because as a dyslexic with only a phone for composing them it was that or a lot of typos.
aqouta
2mo ago
Alright, no one else is so I'll defend inheritance. It's not about the rights of the heir, it's about the rights of the deceased to decide where their fruits go. Defending meritocracy, especially from a libertarian angle, doesn't commit you to preventing a person from doing with their earthly possession whatever they want in the last moments of their lives any more than it commits you to finding the person who would be the best CEO of amazon and installing him against their will and the will of the board.
Is the act of giving your wealth to someone who hasn't earned it meritocracy maxing? Probably not. Is having a system of ownership that incentivizes those with the most merit to earn as much as they can because they love their kid and want to pass on wealth to them merit maxing? Maybe, arguably. But it's also the pro liberty thing to do and libertarians are perfectly reasonable in coming down on the side of allowing inheritance.
If you're a high-school student or literature major with zero background in computer science looking to build a website or develop baby's first mobile app LLM generated code is a complete game changer. Literally the best thing since sliced bread.
You have to contend with the fact that like 95+% of employed programmers are at this level for this whole thing to click into place. It can write full stack CRUD code easily and consistently. five years ago you could have walked into any bank in any of the top 20 major cities in the united states with the coding ability of o3 and some basic soft skills and be earning six figures within 5 years. I know this to be the case, I've trained and hired these people.
If you are decently competent programmer working in an industry where things like accuracy, precision, and security are core concerns, LLMs start to look anti-productive as in the time you spent messing around with prompts, checking the LLM's work, and correcting it's errors, you could've easily done the work yourself.
I did allude that there might be a level of programming where one needs to see through the matrix to do but in SF's post and in most situations I've heard the critique in it's not really the case. They're just using it for writing config files that are annoying because they pull together a bunch of confusing contexts and interface with proprietary systems that you need to basically learn from institutional knowledge. The thing LLMs are worst at. Infrastructure and configuration are the two things most programmers hate the most because it's not really the more fulfilling code parts. But AI is good at the fulfilling code parts for the same reason people like doing them.
In time LLMs will be baked into the infrastructure parts too because it really is just a matter of context and standardization. It's not a capabilities problem, just a situation where context is splined between different systems.
Finally if you're one of those dark wizards working in FORTRAN or some proprietary machine language because this is Sparta IBM/Nvidia/TMSC and the compute must flow, you're skeptical of the claim that an LLM can write code that would compile at all.
If anything this is reversed, it can write FORTRAN fine, it probably can't do it in the proprietary hacked together nonsense installations put together in the 80s by people working in a time where patterns came on printed paper and might collaborate on standards once a year at a conference if they were all stars. but that's not the bot's fault. This is the kind of thinking that is impressed by calculators because it doesn't properly understand what's hard about some things.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here. No one's examples about how it can't write code are about it writing code. It's all config files and vague evals. No one is talking about it's ability to write code. It's all devops stuff.
A week ago we went in for our 8 week ultrasound. I watched the screen as the resident OBGYN, a baby doctor baby doctor, manipulated various gels and tools to summon on a screen some queer portal into the feminine realm of creation. My wife is a third year psychiatry resident that had strongly considered going into the specialty of baby doctoring when she was in med school. The two women were more able than myself to divine meaning from the various blobs and sacs that came in and out of view. Maybe they saw a cyst? the big black blob at the top was the bladder. I paid close attention but learned little as the good doctor tapped away measurements. And then after what must have been a few minutes of building suspense the star of the show made its appearance. Among the grayish blobs came a white circle containing what most resembled a sea horse.
It came in and out of focus and several minutes were spent doing some kind of action where a vertical line was drawn on the screen aiming for the center of mass and then a kind of sine graph would appear. The chest of the sea horse noticeably bulged with regularity and it seemed to be this bulge they were targeting. My wife had not so subtly signaled that she knew what was going on and the woman doing the measurements did not explain their purpose. I didn't profane the ritual with a question. From context clues I deduced that they were taking snap shots of the heart rate.
From the question of whether she was sure that she had measured her last period correctly and a somber tone in the room where I had expected excitement I knew something hadn't gone to plan. The resident left and my wife told me that the size was much smaller than was expected and the heart rate was quite low. She had come off an IUD just before this so it was floated that perhaps the gap in period had delayed things and we were simply early, maybe this was a 6 week visit instead of an 8 week visit. I could tell she was not convinced of this.
The superior doctor came in and told us that we hadn't done anything wrong, never a good sign. They said much of what my wife had just said, that the size was off for how far along she should have been and the heart rate is concerning. We were scheduled for a follow up the next week, last Thursday. I called an Uber home and canceled the plans to call the inner circle to first announce the pregnancy. Resisting the urge to announce early showed its prudence. She seemed to have no real hope that it was viable but I resisted. It didn't seem right to give up on them before their hearts stopped beating. If this all worked out how was I going to look at a son or daughter and explain that I'd given up on them when they were fighting for their life? I didn't quite say this, she was protecting herself and I wasn't going to make her feel bad for it.
As the second session started I had come to terms that the odds were dire. The ritual started with only slight variation from the previous. The preamble of measurements seemed like a burying of the lede. Her bladder was more full this time, I confided in her later that it looked like the eyes of a yoshi of ninja turtle with her womb forming the snout. As the star came into view it was the same size as before and the regular pulse had gone. No one said it directly, it was just measurements but I could tell.
After the procedure the doctor laid out our options. We could wait it out or induce it earlier, we were early enough to use chemicals to induce the miscarriage or surgery if we preferred. It seemed like we had skipped a step. No one made an announcement, no one said that my kid was dead. We had all seen it and that was quite enough. We're flying out to China to see her extended family in a couple weeks, no longer bearing the good news we had hoped to share, and couldn't reasonably just wait it out. Not that there was seemingly any upside in doing that. We opted for the chemicals, it was pragmatic, the right option.
After another Uber home I mixed her up an old fashioned, her favorite that she'd been denied for months. The chemicals, which aren't to be taken with alcohol, wouldn't arrive until the next day and I'd grown up with the catholic habit of celebrating both good and bad news with a drink.
Life continued, we both worked yesterday and she took the first of the two types last evening, a few hours ago she had to keep several pills in her cheeks, which I referred to as chipmunk medicine, a phrase she liked. The medicine she liked less, it was reportedly chalky and unpleasant. She's in the other room now, experiencing painful cramping. I do what I can to help, she has a little stuffed bear that you can microwave to warm which helps a bit and I can bring her tea and Tylenol but beyond that there isn't much to do besides write a rambling post on themotte.org.
Spirits are high, we're both of the opinion that this sucks but we'll get 'em next time. In fact unless I try, unless I torture myself with imagining kids that could have been I don't really feel anything at all about this. I think we're both kind of watching out to help the other through what we expect to be a hard thing emotionally but it's just not really happened. Neither of us have really broken up about it.
I don't know if this post has a purpose. I've not told anyone else about this and just wanted to put it down.
aqouta
2mo ago
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.
aqouta
4mo ago
Not totally sure why we should take ziz seriously. This reads exactly like the kind of thing you'd come up with if you took the poisoned dualist interpretation of why trans people are the way they are and then tried desperately to attach it back to materialism. The whole premise reads more like a fantasy writer's first attempt to build a magic system than anything grounded.
aqouta
7mo ago
My empathy for trans people is precisely why I find the entire phenomenon so impossible to look away from. I can find in myself some ability to reason myself into what they're claiming to be going through. I can imagine myself as a kid, not particularly popular and with plenty of angst, deciding that what is really wrong with me is my gender identity and clamping down on that idea. I am privileged to know what not doing that results in and it's a good life where I get over my angst. I fear for people who might trap themselves in a false understanding of the world that will lead them to living much worse lives than they could have led.
I know that memes are powerful enough to do this people. Memes can bend people into myrters, Jihadists, self immolators kamikaze pilots, and many other forms in service of the meme. Maybe the framing where I'm cis by default is true and they really are experiencing some extra sense that I am blind to. But I know, absolutely know, that given the right circumstances growing up I could have been made to think I was feeling that sense. I know, absolutely know, that if I had convinced myself of it I would be stubborn enough to cement it into my identity. Because of this I know that there is a boy somewhere that is going to sacrifice his health and exceptionally happy future to chase being a mere mimic of a woman. I see myself in him, I recognize that for the grace of god go I, and that breaks my heart.
aqouta
1mo ago
If we get down to the physics level China literally cannot produce enough chips for this calculation to matter and matrix multiplication benefits immensely from not having to have separate chips talk to each other. It just is not the case that china is producing enough chips even if they had infinite power.
aqouta
26d ago
You can say you dislike territoriality as a national interest but it's not without reason. I think you're confusing arbitrary with contingent. Borders could have been different if circumstances had gone differently but they were reasoned and fought for with blood and statecraft for various very real purposes.
They're neither arbitrary in that they were set up for no reason nor arbitrary in that they make no difference. It's like if you insulted some guy and he punched you in the gut, you wouldn't call his actions arbitrary even if the response could have been a wide variety of actions. He had reason enough and it certainly matters to your gut that he decided on punching rather than harsh words.
aqouta
2mo ago
Ok, taking all this in good faith then I think the only real shot at overcoming deprivation is by pushing forward. Continue expanding productivity through capital investment. Make more and more things too cheap to meter. Ownership isn't the source of deprivation really, only the shape it takes, it's scarcity that would need to be defeated. In practice, at least in the west, we've basically defeated scarcity on things like foodstuffs. Our poor suffer from obesity and not really hunger. Our poor mostly don't lack for running water, clothes on their backs, even shelter for most of them although I do have particular changes I'd like to see on this subject.
The chronic homeless wither not because society is unable to house them but because our sense of individual freedom won't allow us to commit those that can't function without aid. This example muddies the issue. The deprivation here might appear to be proximately caused by ownership of homes, trivially if homeless people could just go in and occupy anyone's home then they would be cured of their homelessness but this wouldn't really solve the underlying issue. I don't know how you could prevent self imposed deprivation, or at least how you could do so without forfeiting freedom.
Cool! Then notice that an ability is not a right, and let's keep them straight. I'm talking about a preemptive principled right to universally deprive. I can deprive every single person in the whole world of a $100 dollar bill by burning it to ash. Totally my right as an owner (ignoring the complication that money is not something we "own" strictly speaking) but impossible if I ain't got no matches. Right vs. ability.
Alright, then I revise what I said to "My conclusion is that the right to deprive is probably necessary for any social system that scales past around the Dunbar number and depending on how you operationalize "deprive" maybe far below that number."
Is this the world you want your loved ones and great- and great-great offspring to live in? Is this or something resembling it as good as you want it to get? My answers to those are resounding NO FUCKING WAY! Settling for better-than-worse to avoid the possibility that you might break something by attempting good-as-we-want has never made sense to me.
I do want things to improve. I observe the history of society and see that as we build out new technology and capital infrastructure we increase abundance and things get better. I would like to separate the concept of "things being better" into things made better systemically and things made better by material progress. We don't need to change the system for things to be made better by material progress. It's genuinely incredible how much better things have been made by material progress. I don't have to worry about infections. I can spend a Wednesday evening relaxing in a comfortable chair listening to tunes on high quality wireless headphones eating good food in a large air conditioned house responding to people on the internet. I am the envy of kings of old. I'm more skeptical about things being made by, radical, systemic changes.
Still I would like things to improve. I'm never sure if I should call myself a liberal or a conservative. I'm freedom loving and optimistic. I think if we mostly leave people alone and minimally adjust the system things will simply get better over time. So I oppose rash and under thought out changes to the system. You could say I conserve the system. I'm not opposed to all change, in fact I fiercely support some changes and updates as the material conditions change. But I find radicalism off putting, ungrateful, pessimistic and short sighted. You're not only risking what good we have, you're risking the good that the current system will produce if we only allow it to. You may see ownership as a rotten board of a rotting house, but I see it as a vital component of a prosperous and growing society. So from my perspective it really is on you to explain why and how we should get rid of it or I'm going to default to declining. If that's conservative then I am a conservative. If it's madness then I am mad.
It's been known since the 80s that the worst thing you can do in a brainstorming session is criticize the ideas that arise instead of accepting and exploring them. (de Bono's Serious Creativity is great on this point.)
I'll note that this is the culture war thread, we're here to discuss the culture war. The default valiance anyone will approach any underspecified idea with is that there are culture war/political implications to what you propose. I know you directly said in the OP that you were looking to brainstorm and it can be exhausting to have to overly signal that you're not advancing any particular objective but your OP would have been much better received if you had put some effort into making it clear that you didn't have an axe to grind.
aqouta
19d ago
This is perhaps analogous in some ways to AGPs and transwomen more generally who are bullied or ostracized for femininity and come to believe that they really are a sissy loser who can't be a man and might as well embrace the only gendered path that seems possible for them.
I don't think this is actually the correct reading of AGPs. Is there actually any reason to think that AGPs are more feminine than baseline?
aqouta
5mo ago
I don't really get this critique. You're seriously looking at the 922 page long wish list of a major republican thinktank, noticing that a lot of elements of that wish list are being implemented by a republican president and deciding that the parsimonious explanation is that Trump is just following the checklist? It can't be that a Republican president has a lot in common with a Republican think tank?
The reason that people tried to say that project 2025 was the Trump plan was because, in addition to the stuff that is popular enough for Trump to want to run with, it includes stuff not popular enough for Trump to run with. It's like if Kamala won and implemented some passport support for trans people that also happened to be on NAMBLA's "let trans-aged people attend highschool and sleep with children" 2025 agenda and thus it was right to tar her with every policy on the document this whole time.
aqouta
2mo ago
We're going to have to have a special "I did my Asia trip writeup" badge at some point. Great write up, really enjoyed it.
aqouta
1mo ago
Didn't we have some china bulls in here just a few weeks ago talking about how good Huawei AI chips are? I personally don't buy it but we also have AMD and intel maybe a generation or so behind Nvidia, but nobody wants to use them because it's just more work and could run into unexpected hiccups.
Huawei chips are significantly worse than nvdia chips at a higher cost and lower yield. They're stuck on 7nms that actually compare to how tsmc's 3nm chips are made and some cope 5nms that use a layering technique that isn't worth the yield hit to use. America definitely has a big compute edge on china.
If you're at all serious about AI being a big deal in the next decade then maintaining this edge over our main geopolitical rival is actually really really important.
Currently China is gobbling up nerfed chips because qualitatively they're not that different from the latest and greatest. They'll be more power hungry and less cost efficient, but they are still capable of training a gpt-5 level model if needed.
Takingthe advantage to taking months VS years to train a model at this kind of cutting edge iterative process is difficult to over state.
aqouta
1mo ago
If conservatism is when you refuse to address entitlements, blow up the budget deficit, tarrif our allies because you don't understand trade policy, behave like a petulant child in every possible situation and fall for lowest common denominator X slop posts then what even remains of conservatism? What is Trump conserving exactly?
aqouta
2mo ago
Or he could just walk next to the person in the basket for as long as needed.
Possible murderer was getting onto a boat.
aqouta
2mo ago
Circling back around because I do enjoy a little bit of what are essentially economic thought experiments. In your world where we do away with ownership what is the model of production for semi-complex goods? Presumably we'd still have like pencils and paper in the world you envision. Who is working in the pencil factory and why? Who is working with sanitation and ensuring human waste is properly processed, the hands on parts of the job in particular?
aqouta
1mo ago
As long as mainland firms have access to TSMC fabs for their blackbox designs, China won't be lacking in compute.
Can you source this claim? It goes against a substantial amount of writing and commentary I've heard about this subject. China is significantly lacking in computer as evidenced by their attempts to get their hands on even the nerfed versions of chips and all the mainland labs use nvdia chips.
The point with the pipes is that obviously hamas is trying to make rockets and bombs using any material they can get their hands on. We're in agreement that they've dug up water pipes and made rockets out of them.This is the justification for blockading and inspecting things thing into Gaza.
Your claim is that you wouldn't be surprised if only military aged men were killed by Hamas. We have videos of the indiscriminate killing. Not that killing military aged festival goers is somehow justified. You're out of your mind here.
You're trusting hearsay about tanks but not video footage? For real? There is plenty of testimony of indiscriminate killing as well, do you trust that testimony or only the rumors spread by pro hamas accounts?
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