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
1mo ago
I would assume practically everyone would wish there were fewer trans people in the world, same as they'd wish there were fewer people with any unfortunate condition. Having your body disagree with you is worse than not having that be the case.
aqouta
1mo ago
It can be described but I'm not sure everyone is talking about the same thing when they use the term.
aqouta
1mo ago
I think that is evidence but not proof. "I'm the opposite sex actually" is not so conceptually foreign to normal experience that I wouldn't expect it to come about as a normal error spontaneously occasionally. "the position of the stars mean something to or ordinary lives" is a false conclusion arrived at by multiple civilizations.
Now, maybe having that error and it getting ingrained deeply enough just is gender dysphoria and star believer would also spontaneously appear at some base rate and further the best thing to do about this is let them buy crystals and get gaudy piercing to their heart's content. But if that's the case then it does sound like something we ought to be able to talk a rational person out of, and should probably try pretty hard to given the severity of the costs associated with transitioning. Finally granting all of that falls on the side of letting them transition anyways being the best for them, this being a disorder caused by an idea it would be exactly the kind of thing we'd worry about social contagion on. It becoming a fixation may be a much lower bar than it being spontaneously arrived at and then affirming it as a normal thing widely seems like a pretty big mistake.
Then there is the other possible conclusion. If It's caused by some kind of physical thing and would show up not only separated from the concept of transgenderism but in some kind of Truman show style total separation from the opposite sex. This would be very strong evidence indeed and some kind of model where we can do a brain scan and very accurately predict transgendered identification would be strong evidence. But then I'd want the transition gate kept on those grounds.
aqouta
1mo ago
Is there any actual scientific evidence in favor of social contagion playing any part in transgenderism? The pro-trans tribe claims that social contagion plays no role, and to me, it's trivially true that social contagion plays an astounding part, as well as fetishism and abuse, and autism. I have no idea how many kids genuinely become gender dysphoric due to genetics, if there are any at all. And if there are any, I certainly don't think that it's a given that they need puberty blockers. How the hell did that become the default? But anyway, has The Science turned up anything on social contagion
The problem with empirics here is that the whole phenomenon is unfalsifiable. I think that many trans people are indeed experiencing something whether it's sociogenic or a physical ailment because they are doing a lot of costly harm to themselves to a degree that makes no sense if they aren't actually suffering. But there just isn't really a way to tell if a kid is going through a phase or has this more real thing assuming there is a real thing. Even the prospective trans person themselves can't know if what they're experiencing is what other trans people are experiencing. It's all guessing all the way down.
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
1mo ago
It is indeed a meme, The thirty year old boomer
aqouta
1mo ago
Deepseek wasn't really a compute constrained thing and they did use ndvia chips. They basically did 2 things with deepseek.
- Trained a model using the nerfed nvdia chips but with some hacks that got around most of the nerfing. Nvdia basically half passed nerfing them to comply with chip export controls. This doesn't mean export controls aren't good, it means we need to actually enforce them in spirit.
- They were the first to release chain of thought scaffolding which isn't compute constrained but also almost certainly something western labs had in house but hadn't bothered to productive yet as evidenced by the release only a few months later.
They didn't use Chinese chips so I'm not really sure how it could say anything about Chinese chips.
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
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.
aqouta
1mo ago
I agree and have for some time agreed that Trump is an abomination and embarrassment to conservatives. The problem for actual conservatives is what is there to actually do here? Join the Democrats? There are some rational positions where that is the greater of the two evils. Perhaps this abundance agenda is the invitation they need to throw behind a Democrat side of the aisle that disavows a lot of the leftie fringe that the rest of the Democrats have been a little too beholden to.
aqouta
1mo ago
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.
It’s not unhinged to know, as a fact, the facts of the day: that many houses were destroyed by tanks, that a survivor testified to tanks firing at their house and killing their family, that many cars were destroyed which were on their way into Gaza, that there were instances of friendly fire. It’s unhinged to have any opinion on the conflict without knowing this, unhinged to hide from it because you find it uncomfortable to acknowledge.
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.
And while it’s not unhinged to distrust “footage” that came out weeks after the attack, I find it inadvisable, because every developed nation has the ability to fabricate footage
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?
aqouta
1mo ago
This was debunked, I’m pretty sure.
There's video of it happening and hamas claims it happens. The only thing really up for debate is if they use specifically EU funded pipes.
But more to the broader point you understand they still regularly lobbed rockets at Israel right? You can't just let your neighbor that's doing that get easy access to more serious weapons.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/10/10/eu-funded-water-pipelines-hamas-rockets/
Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if every non military age male was killed in the Hannibal Directive rather than by Hamas. Because I don’t think Hamas went in with the RPGs required to
Are you under the impression that most Israelis on October 7th died in cars on the way back to gaza? This is a totally unhinged thing to believe. There is footage, you can watch it. Should go without saying but very NSFW https://www.hamas-massacre.net/
I think so, yes
I genuinely don't understand how you could convince yourself of this. Hamas leadership had been very consistent in denying this.
You can stop blockading the Gaza Strip What do you mean by
blockading? Do you mean controlling what goes in to the territory where the governimg body uses the pipes meant for water supplies to make rockets? Yeah, no country is going to allow supplies in unexamined in that situation.
stealing land in the West Bank and illegally imprisoning
I agree, the settlements should not happen, but the Palestinians should have by now come up with state borders which would have prevented this rather than clinging to the delusion that they're going to retake Israel. We should have two people negotiate proper borders but the Palestinians are uninterested in this.
You can not use the Hannibal Directive, which killed some unspecified % of the hostages and civilians (it’s crazy we still don’t know the extent of this)
What percentage of the deaths on October 7th do you think died to Hannibal directive? The policy rescinded in 2016.
You can implement the most asinine security measures to prevent any future attack, starting with a common sense “don’t throw raves right next to Gaza”
Do you attribute any agency at all to Gazans? Are they just animals incapable of higher reasoning in your estimation? They can't be expected to differentiate right from wrong?
You can pursue diplomacy based on returning encroached land in the West Bank
Would hamas accept a two state solution on these borders?
aqouta
1mo ago
Falluja was fought against insurgents in Iraq. While 60% or more of the buildings in Gaza are destroyed, after this battle (the worst of the urban combat in Iraq) only 20% max were destroyed.
The battle of falluja was less than 2 months long and there weren't extensive tunnel networks dug out specifically to prevent the forces from being effectively routed. This is the type of war Hamas specifically prepared to fight and provoke. You need to deal with there being two agentic sides to this conflict.
even the comically worst enemy of history weren’t despised with genocidal intent as Israelis despise Palestinians.
This has a lot to do with holocaust justification for the war being post hoc and Americans just not really caring a much about a conflict half the world away as evidenced by the long resistance to entering it.
They launched an attack on American soil that killed twice the number as Oct 7. We went after Al Qaeda and Baathists as a result. We didn’t aim to starve them to death. This is the closest thing to a 1-to-1 comparison.
Afghanistan just isn't in any way comparable to Gaza.
This is unfalsifiable.
A call for an alternative strategy is definitely falsifiable although it's a weird term to use. The relevant question is what do you actually do if you're Israel and recognize that your neighbor is lead by a death cult that legitimately will go to whatever ends are within their ability to kill as many of your people as possible and have extensive tunnel networks that make actually rooting them out nearly impossible. Your options are basically extreme violence, as we see now, or just enduring regular attacks.
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
Indeed, even today there are people who seek hormone therapy without shooting for a binary transition - starting with various non-binary/genderfluid types. I know many vaguely nonbinary transmasculines who are happy going by "he" or "they" but don't break off in hives at being "she"-ed. (As a matter of fact, Ozy is one.) Those people would still seek breast reduction and testosterone injections even in a world where there was no concept of social transition and they remained classified as women, which they'd be basically fine with so long as they got to be very butch women.
I'll note because others haven't that I don't know if I'm a conservative even if I often side with them on the trans question but I basically can get behind the "I just like it and it" justification for adult transition. It's the reality claims that I can't square with my other observations like the existence of some kind of gendered soul that make me get off the train. I do believe what follows from this formulation is no child transition, gendered sports and a fat maybe on trans people in women's restrooms depending on a lot of negotiated factors.
If America gets to "let's stay out of it" Israel is doomed.
I don't think this is actually the case. If America wasn't involved and Israel didn't care about appeasing western sensibilities at all they'd just behave like the other powers in the region and genocide their troublesome minorities.
aqouta
1mo ago
The destiny's crucible series by Olan Thorensen is like this. The writing is not amazing but if you don't care too much about that it scratches that kind of itch.
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
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
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.
I haven't worked at very many firms but it has not been my experience that any of the office jobs in my department are perfunctory. Around 200 of us move billions of dollars in investments, originating and underwriting new construction investments, managing those investments over their lifecycle, inspecting them and eventually exiting them. As one of the tech guys that builds and maintains the tools used by the teams doing these various tasks I have a decent idea of what each group does and I just don't really think it's the case that any of the job categories are bullshit. How big each group is does have some politics to it, maybe originations could be run leaner and our tech team could run at either a lower headcount and need to focus on keeping things working or a higher headcount and build more tools in our backlog but ultimately that isn't arbitrary and the marginal employee will add more value even if it's not clear if the marginal value exceeds the marginal cost.
Some of our employees are very much doing email jobs, they interface with outside syndicators who hunt for deals for us to evaluate and then enter the deal information into our system. We even build tooling and imports to make this process smoother but someone actually does need to be the person to ask the syndicators what's going on when things aren't perfectly normal and build up the case for or against an individual investment.
I'm not sure what exactly people are imagining when they think about bullshit jobs, it's always some vagueness or pointing out that a lot of time is spent waiting around rather than hammering nails for the whole shift or whatever. But it actually is genuinely important that when the email comes in you have someone to evaluate what it's saying and pull the right levers in response. The act of coordinating these people is also itself a pretty complicated job and I can attest that automating these tasks is tricky and full of difficult process questions.
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