burkeboi
12d ago
Andrej Karpathy is a cofounder of Open-Ai and he has a course named Neural Networks: Zero to Hero. It requires some coding knowledge, but by the end you will understand what a neural net is and a very basic version of GPT and how a tokenizer works. That should give you at least a generalist understand of what is going on with LLMs. I went over it as a software developer and found it enlightening.
burkeboi
13d ago
I think all of your arguments are true, and it tracks my experiences with Southern family and living in the South, and I think we may have a bit of a terminology dispute. When I read, “the cause of the South”, I interpreted it as specifically “the Confederate cause” rather than “fighting for Southern wellbeing in general.” While people fought for both the Union and Confederacy for tons of individual reasons, the Confederate leadership was pretty unified that the purpose of secession was the maintenance of the slave system and planter dominance in the South.
Tons of later Southerners viewed themselves as having kinship to the Confederacy, but almost none of them wanted the socio-political-economic system that was the raison d’etre of the Confederacy. Even the Redeemers after the Civil War had a very different class and social basis than the pre-war Planter class. They may use Confederate iconography or argue for the nobility of certain Confederates or even the cause as a whole, but I don’t consider that really supporting the Confederate cause.
Your average guy who has a Confederate flag is either a Southern regional patriot or Red Tribe person who dislikes Blue Tribe and/or people who don’t like the South. I view it as similar to a Ukrainian who uses Nazi/Banderite iconography today; they don’t support Nazi Germany or probably even the politics of Stephan Bandera. They are just using the symbols of a previous fight for their use in a current fight without endorsing the politics of the previous fight.
burkeboi
13d ago
I think it’s important to disambiguate the cause of the CSA from the Redeemer and post war conservative Southern causes. The core telos of the CSA was the maintenance of slavery and planter dominance. All of its leadership agreed on that. Post war Southern conservatives from the Redeemers onward desired different things. There is overlap, such as both wanting to limit Yankee power more or less and support for white supremacy until the 60s, but they are different political projects.
Groups like Daughters of the Confederacy use the history of the CSA for their own purposes, but they don’t share the same ends. The CSA response to the question of “Was the US Civil War about slavery?” Is “YesChad. Slavery needs to protected.”
burkeboi
13d ago
Lincoln probably could’ve done a bit better, he could’ve maybe sacked McClellan earlier, but he is rightfully considered a great wartime leader. There were also political constraints; he couldn’t start off hard war/total war immediately without destabilizing the north and possibly scaring the hoes/border states. There isn’t much more he could’ve done better, and a lot he could’ve done worse.
If John C Fremont was president, you probably would’ve had a souther victory through sheer extremism and heavy handedness and arrogance. I think a replacement level northern republican leader would’ve won. They likely would’ve gotten a worse deal though. Maybe a Brazil style gradual emancipation and/or unchallenged Black Codes in the South.
The Southern case is interesting, though. The North materially can beat them; the only way the South gets independence is if the North decides the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. If they can keep the war reasonably competitive by November of 1864 such that there is years more combat in front of the north, I think they got a shot at a very desfavorable for them peace. It would involve things like the union controlling the Mississippi River and key Southern forts, but they would still get legal independence.
Of course with the cotton crash of the 1870s, there goes their economy. Welp. They are probably reabsorbed by the 1880s, with most Southerners considering it a terrible failure.
burkeboi
13d ago
Do people really identify with the cause of the South now? The Confederacy fought for a very specific slave based political economy. That economy was destroyed by the war and never came back. All political fights in the US are within the political-economic universe created by the victorious Union.
I consider modern people who use Confederate imagery as similar to Ukrainians who dress up like the Nazis; they are appropriating the dress and iconography of a previous movement despite not advocating for that goals of that previous movement.
burkeboi
17d ago
An interesting counterfactual I sometimes wonder is if Reza Shah, or more likely a replacement monarch, could’ve made a similar Pahlavi-Political Islam pact in Iran to what we saw in Saudi Arabia.
burkeboi
18d ago
It seems for most of these cases withdrawing non-palliative medical care would cause the patient to die anyways, if somewhat slower. Are there cases where euthanasia provides benefits vs Palliative care plus just letting the person die somewhat more slowly? I’m obviously not a doctor, so I imagine it’s probably not as simple as my mental model is.
burkeboi
18d ago
If you look at the poll below, more women would convict Clancy than exonerate her, and of those would would exonerate her not all are necessarily just using arguments as soldiers to get a sister off.
The above being said, I suspect there is a big gap cohort wise. Given republicans support her being guilty more than democrats, I suspect the numbers for democratic women are more pro-Clancy. Similarly, I bet older women due to being more conservative probably are also more anti-Clancy than younger women.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you add everything up, the younger, and especially single, PMC women who make up so much of the filter bubbles of the people here may be very pro-Clancy and give people the false impression that “women support Clancy”.
burkeboi
19d ago
That makes sense. The ideal of a nation as being “A commonwealth for the benefit of its people. Its people being equal citizens operating as individuals, rather than corporate entities like guilds or villages. And the citizens being culturally uniform.” Is the culmination of the 19th century liberal project, and really only stuck in northwest Europe and Anglo America. Latin America, despite the dreams of some of its people, never really got there. It was never “individual <-> state/nation”. You always had some form of clientelism or corporate identity in between.
burkeboi
19d ago
The National Citizenship model where you had the nation essentially be an extended family of homogenized citizens with the state/commonwealth representing them and citizens being equal under the law and socially, while never fully realized, was/is a real thing. Britain and France are the classic examples. This was the end goal of the 18th/19th century liberal/progressive project, and they got most of what they wanted in northwest Europe. This is being undone, partly but not entirely by immigration, and you are right to notice that.
My point is more that LatAm never had that. Individual liberals wanted it as an ideal, and some nations like Argentina arguably got closer than others, but you never had anywhere near the social cohesion and unification Europe had. LatAm always had clientelism, corporate privileges for Indios, or integration into the state via corporatism or parties in the 20th century.
Talking about the breaking of the liberal nationalist societies you see in Europe and/or assimilation in a LatAm context is a category error.
burkeboi
19d ago
That’s a different thing than assimilation, though. A failure of assimilation is failing to join the society. In LatAm, all of those groups are part of society; their society just has a lot of people in different roles.
It’s the same with AADoS in the US; they have always been a part of US society. The question has always been their place in it, not if they were an alien presence in it.
burkeboi
19d ago
How do you define assimilation? I can’t think of a single LatAm country that has the European mass conformity into a single mold model. Beyond that, almost all of Latin America has an assumption of patron-client relations rather than atomized citizens unified only by the state.
burkeboi
22d ago
I think the self-interest and entitlement of liberal women will mean they don't budge an inch.
I do agree with this. Blacks who are seen as on the side of the enemy, black conservatives being the most famous case, do not get treated nicely.
Middle class white women continue to be the main beneficiaries of DEI despite other groups being ostensibly ranked above them on the oppression totem
What do you mean by this? What the numbers I’ve seen, affirmative action boosts white women individually less than other groups, like black women. Is it a case where, in aggregate, white women benefit the most or their cultural preferences are the most dominant?
burkeboi
22d ago
My family is Southern, and it’s very clear that class has a huge affect on the desegregation experience. My boomer relatives who integrated with middle class or above blacks typically described the experience either positively or, more commonly, neutrally. My boomer relatives that had the experience of integrating lower class blacks universally hated the experience. Lots of violence and sexual harassment once you reached high school.
burkeboi
22d ago
While I don’t think the US would’ve gone communist without blacks, I counterintuitively think it may be more progressive now. The main things the South provided politically was a strong counterbalance to Republicans who wanted to turn the US into Yankeestan in the 19th and early 20th century and and later to progressivism after the New Deal hit. Had the South not resisted the Republicans so much, I could very well see the US being a centralized and conformist nation-state like those of Western Europe. When progressivism really comes around in the 20th century, there would be fewer institutional and cultural blocks to domination by experts. The US Red Tribe would have faced for generations more institutional hostility and less cultural diversity. It’s situation would be closer to its equivalents in Germany or France than what it enjoys today.
burkeboi
23d ago
If Canada wants independence, they need their own nuclear weapons program and probably a command economy since North America is a natural and profitable economic unit. Mass immigration and an imperial style of citizenship so they can sidestep assimilation and just get resources from millets would help too. A nuclear powered command economy with 100 million people would definitely be independent.
burkeboi
23d ago
At the very least the legal loopholes and bizarre methods that inevitably would be used to get around the amendment would be interesting. It reminds me of the Comte Rendu, when Necker claimed that actually France had a budget surplus under Louis XVI.
burkeboi
23d ago
His biggest legacy is a giant increase in military spending to force the Soviets to respond, thereby collapsing their empire.
That policy was actually started by noted arch-reactionary … Jimmy Carter. This was in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. If you look at Raegan only policies, and not ones he inherited and expanded, he’s even more fiscally irresponsible.
Patronage in general is the dominant strategy in a democracy. I think Latin America is an instructive example: they way the 19th century oligarchy, and later right wing movements, got popular support was via patronage. It could take the form of anything between local Don Gonzales getting you a loan to el Partido Conservador in Colombia handing out government posts based on loyalty to Vargas in Brazil making the state the patron and protector of the urban worker. Even in the US, you had patronage in the form of machines like Tammany Hall and in forms like “write your congressman and his staff can help solve your problem.”
While libertarianism and economic liberalism is a political current even in culturally clientelist Latin America, having “vote for me and if you want recompense that’s communist” be the default right wing position is very anomalous since it just isn’t competitive politically.
The choice is in between left-wing or right-wing clientelism; libertarians can somewhat limit the whoring, but they can’t stop it.
EDIT: To add a bit of nuance, pro-market politics in the age of mass politics aren’t totally doomed the fail. The Neo-liberal turn in the 1980s and 1990s globally was a very real success. At the same time, I honestly can’t think of any society after the advent of mass politics that one could describe as “libertarian” that didn’t include patronage, welfare, or industrial policy.
burkeboi
25d ago
From what I’ve seen of the proofs, you still have a case of researcher + AI solving them rather than just pure AI. An “issue” with following the progress AI development is that until we reach AGI, which allows it to be independent and flip the board, you still will keep the paradigm of AI plus human even as the AI gets better and better. AI is going to keep getting more and more useful for a period of time until it becomes independent and we get full AGI. Until then the paradigm, and the existence of the researchers jobs even if the number is reduced, will not change.
burkeboi
29d ago
It seems to me part of the moral justification of the insanity defense in the granny case is that she is an otherwise decent person who is temporarily not herself (using colloquial terminology). In this case, fixing the UTI makes her herself and punishing her for her actions under its influence seems unjust to me.
When I look at cases where it’s not curable is when I think the morality shifts for me. If the grandmother has incurable dementia, I still think she deserves mercy albeit under confinement/treatment. If it’s some homeless dude who is permanently loopy, I’m happy throwing the book at him and just punishing him.
My own morally intuitions collapse to the questions of: is it curable and who/whom. I suspect it’s similar for many folks.
burkeboi
1mo ago
Perhaps “nigger” is the modern Bloody Mary. Say it three times in a bathroom mirror and the ghost of Saint Floyd will show up with his ghost buddies to rob your house.
Fixed
burkeboi
1mo ago
Likewise you note the loss of ethnic Roman identity circa 400 AD Rome, at the twilight of their own empire.
Rome rejected its ethnic component well before that. They granted citizenship to non-Roman Latins in 300s BC. Complete citizenship to non Latin Italians in the 80s BC. Julius Caesar was adding foreigners from outside Italy to the senate. Roman Society became civic focused well before the decline of their empire.
America is TBD but the rejection of the ethnic component of Americanism has led to disastrous consequences within a single generation.
I still maintain from the start the US was civic nationalist. For most of its history it believed certain peoples could not be good citizens, but it was never explicitly an ethnos. Ethnic Americanism was an intellectual and often popular trend that has always existed, but never achieved institutional dominance.
Were America to retvrn to the past, it would be to argue certain groups are incapable of exercising the duties of citizenship. That’s an argument within the right wing Overton window of today, even if the racial essentialist parts of the arguments are not.
Ethnic purity is impossible for empires but maintaining a sense of imperial ethnic identity is not impossible and is a core feature of building and maintaining empires.
I would replace this with Civic rather than ethnic. The British identity is civic vs the ethnic English, Scottish, etc. identities. The French identity is famously civic as well, both in the Ancien Regime and post Revolution definitions. China and Russia are empires where the people serve the state rather than vise-versa.
None of that is to say importing Mirpuris or Somalis is a good idea. Prudence regarding immigration is a related, but separate topic as to who can reasonably contribute to the body politic.
What are the consequences of this? The big issue with trying to be a PUA at work is that if people don’t like you, they have direct levers to harm you. You get that to a lesser degree dating in a friend group. If everyone is a stranger, does it matter what others think if they can’t harm you?
More options
Context Copy link