dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
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To continue the drama around the stunning Chinese DeepSeek-r1 accomplishment, the ScaleAI CEO claims DeepSeek is being coy about their 50,000 H100 GPUs.
I realize now that DeepSeek is pretty much the perfect Chinese game theory move: let the US believe a small AI lab full of cunning Chinese matched OpenAI, with a tiny fraction of the compute budget, with no ability to get SOTA GPUs. Let the US believe the export regime works, but that it doesn't matter, because Chinese brilliance is superior, demoralizing efforts to strengthen it. Additionally, it would make the US skeptical of big investment in OpenAI capital infrastructure because there's no moat.
Is it true? I have no idea. I'm not really qualified to do the analysis on the DeepSeek results to confirm it's really the run of a small scrappy team on a shoestring budget end-to-end. Also what we don't see are the potentially 100-1000 other labs (or previous iterations) that have tried and failed.
The results we have now are that -r1 b14 and b32 are fairly capable on commodity hardware, and it seems one could potentially run the 671b model which is kinda maybe but not actually on par with o1 on a something that costs as much as a tinybox ($15k). That's a remarkable achievement, but at what total development cost? $5 million in compute + 100 Chinese worth of researchers would be stunningly impressive. But if the true cost is actually a few more OOMs, it would mean the script has not been completely flipped.
I maintain that a lot of OpenAI's current position is derivative of a period of time where they published their research. You even have Andrej Karpathy teaching you in a lecture series how to build GPT from scratch on YouTube, and he walks you through the series of papers that led to it. It's not a surprise that competitors can catch up quickly if they know what's possible and what the target is. Given that they're more like ClosedAI these days, would any novel breakthroughs be as easy to catch up on? They've certainly got room to explore them with a $500b commitment to play with.
Anyway, do you believe DeepSeek?
I had originally posted this in the Friday fun thread but it turns out that it was killing the vibe in there. Not sure what I was thinking. Anyway...
Note: I will completely qualify Portugal Europe and Portland Oregon in this article because they're easy to mix up.
Is liberalism peaking in Oregon?
In 2020, the state of Oregon passed a referendum, ballot Measure 110, which decriminalized all drugs(!) with a vote of 58% in favor.
Voters in Oregon (such as myself) believed this was the path to enlightened drug policy, being informed by the revered Portugal Europe model. Tacked onto the referendum was a bit of social justice theory as well: the police would be required to document in detail the race of anyone they stopped from now on for any reason. To ensure the police weren't disproportionately harassing the 2.3% of the population that's black.
As an occasional drug enjoyer, I do find it a relief to wander the streets of Portland Oregon squirting ketamine up my nostrils like I'm a visionary tech CEO without fear of police. But in broad strokes it appears to be a disaster.
Indeed, the ensuing data was an almost perfect A/B test, the kind you'd run with no shame over which kind of font improved e-commerce site checkout conversions.
By 2023, Oregon's drug overdose rate was well outpacing the rest of the country, so much so that the police officers regularly Narcan with them and revive people splayed out in public parks. Sometimes the same person from week to week. It's true this coincides with the fentanyl epidemic, which could confound the data and have bumped up overdoses everywhere but that wouldn't explain alone why deaths have especially increased in Oregon. The timing fits M110.
https://www.axios.com/local/portland/2024/02/21/fentanyl-overdose-rate-oregon-spikes
Oregon's fatal fentanyl overdose rate spiked from 2019 to 2023, showing the highest rate of increase among U.S. states, according to The Oregonian's crunching of new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
At some point someone decided to compare notes with Portugal Europe's system. Some stark differences!
https://gooddrugpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/PortugalvOregon1.pdf
Briefly, Portugal Europe uses a carrot and stick model with a lot of negative incentive, whereas Oregon just kinda writes a $100 ticket and suggests calling a hotline for your raging drug problem maybe.
In the first 15 months after Measure 110 took effect, state auditors found, only 119 people called the state’s 24-hour hotline. That meant the cost of operating the hotline amounted to roughly $7,000 per call. The total number of callers as of early December of last year had only amounted to 943.
The absence of stick appears to not be very effective in encouraging users to seek treatment.
Are the kids having fun at least? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/31/health/portland-oregon-drugs.html (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/fHxWk)
“Portland [Oregon] is a homeless drug addict’s slice of paradise,” said Noah Nethers, who was living with his girlfriend in a bright orange tent on the sidewalk against a fence of a church, where they shoot and smoke both fentanyl and meth.
That's the brightest part of the article. The rest is pretty depressing and sad and sickening and worrisome.
After a few years of this, the Oregon legislature yesterday finished voting to re-criminalize drugs.
The NYT again https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/us/oregon-drug-decriminalization-rollback-measure-110.html (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/3zksH)
Several prominent Democrats have expressed support for a rollback, including Mike Schmidt, a progressive prosecutor in the Portland area. After the decriminalization initiative passed in 2020, Mr. Schmidt implemented its provisions early, saying it was time to move past “failed practices” to “focus our limited law enforcement resources to target high-level, commercial drug offenses.”
But he has reassessed his position, he said in an interview this week. The proliferation of fentanyl requires a new approach that treats addiction as a health issue while holding people accountable, he said. The open drug use downtown and near parks and schools has made people feel unsafe, Mr. Schmidt said.
“We have been hearing from constituents for a while that this has been really detrimental to our community and to our streets,” he said. Mr. Schmidt said the new bill still prioritizes treatment and uses jail as a last resort. That, he said, could ultimately become the model Oregon offers to states around the country.
The governor has indicated that she would sign.
Critics are out in force, arguing that the legislature overrode the will of voters (remember it was passed by referendum) and that the state sabotaged the program by not efficiently distributing treatment resources to addicts. This poster believes the low uptake and missing negative incentives prove that drug harm reduction is not primarily about access to treatment, but about incentive not to use. I do sympathize that better public services and addiction resources that people actually trusted would help, but fentanyl complicates the situation substantially. People need to hit bottom before they seek help (or so goes the popular saying) but fentanyl is so potent and unpredictable that they're dying of an unexpected OD before they find themselves at bottom, ready to seek change.
Frankly, I'm surprised Oregon repealed this so quickly. Has liberalism peaked in Oregon?
As someone who voted for the referendum back in 2020, I'm a little sad that some of the overdose deaths are on my hands. Kind of. Like 1 millionth of the overdose deaths perhaps. It's good to run experiments though, right? This was a pretty good experiment. We at least have an upper bound on how liberal a drug policy we should pursue.
I believe this shows Oregon is not quite as ideologically liberal as previously led to believe. Or, at least, not anymore.
Not posting in the Gaza/Israel thread since this is more generic, IMO.
In the most recent Sam Harris podcast, he elevates the problem with Hamas to the more general problem of jihadi terrorism. The episode is here and there's also a transcript here.
In this, he paints a picture of Hamas being a jihadi terrorist organization that's beyond reasoning with in terms of any reasoning we'd consider compatible with liberal western civilized order. He reads this quote from a member of a different jihadi group that had just finished slaughtering young children:
Human life only has value among you worldly materialist thinkers. For us, this human life is only a tiny, meaningless fragment of our existence. Our real destination is the Hereafter. We don’t just believe it exists, we know it does.
Death is not the end of life. It is the beginning of existence in a world much more beautiful than this. As you know, the [Urdu] word for death is “intiqaal.” It means “transfer,” not “end.”
Paradise is for those of pure hearts. All children have pure hearts. They have not sinned yet… They have not yet been corrupted by [their kafir parents]. We did not end their lives. We gave them new ones in Paradise, where they will be loved more than you can imagine.
They will be rewarded for their martyrdom. After all, we also martyr ourselves with them. The last words they heard were the slogan of Takbeer [“Allah u Akbar”].
Allah Almighty says Himself in Surhah Al-Imran [3:169-170] that they are not dead.
You will never understand this. If your faith is pure, you will not mourn them, but celebrate their birth into Paradise.
He makes the point that atheists have a lot of trouble understanding how utterly fanatical and unreasonable jihadis can be. People of Christian or Jewish faith know, because they know how powerful their own faith is in their lives. But atheists are eager to attribute this kind of proclivity towards sadism and murder as a reflection of terrible conditions that they must be living under. That people living in a utopia would never succumb to such depravity. Sam argues that Muslims of faith are just as destructive outside of Israel and disputed Israeli territories.
For more concrete stats, I found this from Google generative results
According to a French think tank, between 1979 and May 2021, there were 48,035 Islamist terrorist attacks worldwide, causing the deaths of at least 210,138 people. Of these attacks, 43,002 occurred in Muslim countries, resulting in 192,782 deaths. This represents 89.5% of Islamist terrorist attacks worldwide and 91.7% of deaths
The culmination of this episode is Sam practically condemning belief in Islam entirely. Almost bordering on saying that every Palestinian is a mope in the Muslim Matrix who could become inhabited by a jihadi Agent Smith at any time. He argues that unlike Jesus, or Buddha, the central most beloved figure in Islam is Muhammed, and he was not anything like a saint:
The problem that we have to grapple with—and by “we” I mean Muslims and non-Muslims alike—is that the doctrines that directly support jihadist violence are very easy to find in the Quran, and the hadith, and in the biography of Muhammad. For Muslims, Muhammad is the greatest person who has ever lived. Unfortunately, he did not behave like Jesus or Buddha—at all. It sort of matters that he tortured people and cut their heads off and took sex slaves, because his example is meant to inspire his followers for all time.
There are many, many verses in the Quran that urge Muslims to wage jihad—jihad as holy war against apostates and unbelievers—and the most violent of these are thought to supersede any that seem more benign. But the truth is, there isn’t much that is benign in the Quran—there is certainly no Jesus as we find him in Matthew urging people to love their enemies and turn the other cheek. All the decapitation we see being practiced by jihadists isn’t an accident—it’s in the Quran and in the larger record of the life of the Prophet.
What I hear from this is that there are no "good" Muslims, or if they are good it's an aberration, or that they're Muslim in name only.
How does one operationalize such a belief? Is Sam arguing that accepting Muslim refugees is a mistake, full stop, and that the only way to deal with jihadis is the grant them their wish: death, because there's nothing else in the world we could offer them? Is that even enough to cure the problem?
There are two billion Muslims in the world. If bringing them capitalism and the pleasures of modernity (everyone gets Starlink, Steam deck, dirt cheap halal KFC and Chil Fil-A, etc as a poster recently suggested for pacifying the Palestinians) does not innoculate against jihadi mind viruses, what would?
It took Europe about 1000 years for their culture to develop antibodies to dogmatic below-the-sanity-waterline Christian crusader ideology, and Christianity's deck was not nearly as stacked against it (its central figure was still practically a hippie). Will we have to wait this long for Islam to do the same? Sam sounds like he's advocating a form of genocide by another name.
In his 261 word "manifesto"[1], the UnitedHealthcare CEO assassin cited that the US is 42nd in the world in life expectancy but first in health care spending. Cremieux reviews it in more detail here and makes something similar to the RCA argument that the US spends more because it's wealthier and gets more medical procedures done and offers alternative explanations for why the US has low numbers.
By coincidence, while this CEO shooter drama was going down, I was listening to Peter Attia's podcast where he interviews Saum Sutaria, the CEO of a health care system[2]. He drops the following claim (copied from the show notes):
Life expectancy has improved remarkably. A lot of that has to do with infectious disease and other things. So when we say our life expectancies in the US are paltry, what we’re really asking is, “Why are we 3 years behind everybody else?”. Especially when we’re spending 60-100% more. “Spending the most, we’re not getting the best out. And I think you make a really good point… somewhere between 60 and 75, the equations slip" Somewhere between age 60 and 75, we go from dead last to first (and the lifespan is the best in the developed world) Because the medical system we’ve created that optimizes for access, quality, sophistication, technology, the best drugs, flips It’s actually quite effective at creating longevity from that standpoint We can discuss whether the lifespan is improving with or without the healthspan
He further argues that US life expectancy is reduced by factors like cultural issues: gun violence, car accidents, etc. Indeed, the US has high infant mortality but also high rates of teenage pregnancy, which are risk factors for higher infant mortality. This echoes Crimeiux from earlier.
Anyway, I went about looking for a source for the claim that longevity rankings increase as we age in the US and found one in Ho and Preston (2010)
US life expectancy at birth sucks versus peer countries, and even still sucks around age 40. But as you get into retirement years it reverses, and the US eventually climbs to 4th place among the 18 countries
The paper tries to explain this but mostly doesn't find anything satisfying.
One interpretation (not from the study, mine and perhaps the Tenet Health CEO's) suggests if you don't get murdered, or into a car wreck, or overdose, or kill yourself, or your mom didn't attempt a home birth at age 16, you actually have good survival odds. The best in the world. The health care system can actually help you. That's what that $10k/capita is all about.
There's some obvious alternate explanations too. Maybe those extra ten years of life are when you're stroked out and have a pretty terrible quality of life and it would've actually been great to meet a health care system with a death panel that said "mmmm actually, there's no treatment available for this condition. so sorry" and you could die with dignity and your family (or someone's family, or maybe collectively) could have an extra $400,000.
Whatever this is, I think it's pretty clear that the health care system in the US exists and can deliver results. Whether or not these results translate to best QOL is more murky and we can debate that effectiveness. Either way, that doesn't have the same revolutionary zeal!
Coming up for air here, and approaching the #assassinbae story from a different angle, at what point can we consider misinformation surrounding this life expectancy vs health expenditure chart as stochastic terrorism? I don't know a single left-of-center person who has more than 2 brain cells to rub together who doesn't allude to this as Exhibit A in every discussion about how corrupt the US health care system clearly is[3]. And it's arguably wrong. And it's now getting people murdered. It's not quite as psychotic and singular as Alex Jones, but it's definitely something sinister. Maybe even more dangerous if it's the start of a trend.
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people are beating him up for writing such a short and lame manifesto but he might not have intended it as a manifesto, more of a confession
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guessing this is the last we're going to hear from a CEO of a health care system for quite awhile, so this was well timed
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which isn't to say it can't be corrupt, just, again, the health care system failing to save people from high rates of car accident deaths and also for maybe keeping grandpa alive because their family doesn't want them to die is not exactly a stinging indictment of health care itself
This is the "birthright citizenship" case: does the Court agree with the Trump administration that some people born on U.S. soil are nevertheless not American citizens? IDK! Because the Court doesn't answer that question.
I'm honestly a bit frightened by this one. I don't find most of Trump's stuff all that worrisome but this seems potentially pretty society altering.
My parents were illegal immigrants. They had me here in the late 70s so I had citizenship by birth. My parents have since received amnesty and even applied for citizenship and received it as well. But I think if the EO holds I don't see why they could not apply this retroactively. If it makes sense to do it for the future it makes sense to do it for the past too.
My parents would have more standing to stay in the US than I would.
Would be kind of funny to have to pack up and start a new life in the old country though in middle age.
EDIT: my club HOR linked turned out to be fake. How embarrassing. This protest movement probably does not have hipster appeal.
In Germany, it's illegal to sing songs that can be considered hate speech or aligned with Nazi ideology.
Several days ago, at a beach club in Northern Germany, a video went viral of a bunch of drunken Germans singing along to dance music track with lyrics that say "Germans for Germany, Foreigners Out" https://youtube.com/watch?v=xZZztdyd0PQ
Authorities have announced criminal investigations in response, though this does not appear to be silencing the hipster youth of Germany from enjoying the song. More recently, this popped up in an "underground" techno broadcast at Club HÖR https://x.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1794390427388588274
Is this an actual hipster event? Yes. They have their origins in illegal parties being done in basements or warehouses where everyone is hurrying to get their dance on before the authorities shut it down. Though they're much more popular now, they have kept the subversive raw industrial space motif.
Isn't this scene aligned with gay and otherwise leftist social mores? Yes. Typically, German techno is LGBTQ-coded and events can feature anything-goes public displays of sexual activity.
Are they just dropping the track because its beat is sick? Absolutely not. The song was originally produced by an incredibly cheesy Italian producer-DJ as a club anthem. In the hipster spaces this is as cringe as it comes. You would have to kill yourself if you dropped this as a place like HÖR. Perhaps the sickening cheesiness of the song is having its sign flipped because the insipid romancey lyrics were replaced with illegal German nationalism?
Hot anti-immigration thoughtcrime breaking out into the subversive mainstream but still fashioning-itself-as-underground techno scene in Germany is an unexpected development, though it did not come without foreshadowing. The "far right" Alternative for Deutschland party (AfD), is apparently now the most popular party among 14-29 year olds.
via Google Translate:
According to a study, adolescents and young adults are more dissatisfied and are turning more towards the AfD than in previous comparative studies. 22 percent of the 14- to 29-year-olds surveyed would vote for the AfD if there were a federal election now. That is more than twice as many as two years ago, according to a representative survey presented on Tuesday for the study "Youth in Germany 2024". In 2022, nine percent voted for the AfD, compared to twelve percent last year.
For most of its life, the AfD party was previously associated with square, middle-aged, clearly uncool xenophobes.
The parallels between this and the alt-right in the US around the early Trump era are noticeable. It appeared that the youth of America was so tired of cringe progressivism that their parents were into that the alt-right acted as a kind of new punk, though in the US the alt-right evaporated fairly quickly after Trump was elected.
In Germany in 2024, aligning with nationalism may be analogous to a kind of new punk that will definitely freak out your parents and set you apart from the older lamer generations. Can this translate into a revolution? As above, being the most popular party among young people in Germany doesn't say much because young people are not the biggest voting bloc, and unlike in the US there are many more political parties.
Still, this is probably going to stump historians of techno for years to come. (Or not! Since my hipster club link is fake. The other one with the preppies is probably real though)
I'm going to be contrarian and say I thought Biden's debate performance was horrifying but I think it's still fine to run him if voters were like me and not like normal people.
I realize he looks terrible but is the President not being in peak fitness actually that important? Biden doesn't strike me as insane, or malevolent, or like he's so completely out of it that he'll launch nukes because he mistook the big red button for the toilet handle.
I'm probably too cynical but I think the President's job is probably a lot like a doctor's job in a hospital: the nurses all know more or less what the patient needs but they need the MD to make decisions. Sure you'd like a brilliant doctor like House for the truly difficult problems but any doctor that just did what the nurses told him to would probably make for an okay hospital. Biden probably spends his days picking from a set of reasonable proposals offered by his handlers. If he makes too many batshit decisions in a row too often he'll eventually get replaced.
I also don't think Trump has any edge on the mental side that would make up for the fact that he's him. Also his edge isn't great anyway, he's also incoherent, except he presents with speed freak energy. I wouldn't expect his judgment to be any better and he could just as likely start sundowning any day now as well.
It'd be sweet if they ran a Biden that was 20 years younger, but I still think he's better than Trump.
I'm posting this in Small-Scale because I don't want to get too weighty on this, but rather commiserate with other smart people about how difficult it is to appreciate how not smart the rest of the world is. Or at least convince you that it's freaking ugly out there.
A little bit of background first.
I consider myself retarded and slow and like I make lots of easy stupid mistakes. My brain feels really noisy and like I would regularly kill people if I worked in an ER or intensive care because I'd mis-dose them or get confused about what step in what procedure we're following. (Though some of these are probably ADHD issues, which a psychiatrist agreed enough with to write me an Rx for, as an Adderall-seeking adult)
I found myself becoming a misanthrope in public school because I considered it extremely, absurdly slow and boring and my school didn't appear to care. I'm sure I didn't make it easy for them because I found everything so trivial that I wouldn't do the work. I also thought most of my teachers were slackers who just wanted an easy job and didn't look up to them in any way (though there were some diamonds in the rough) and perhaps my contempt came across my facial expressions. I started cutting classes to hang out in the computer lab and write OpenGL programs. I can see how few if any teachers wanted to take a risk and advocate for me or would even imagine I was bored to tears intellectually. I also had no friends in HS, not even other supposedly smart kids. I'm not autistic by any means. Everyone just seemed... off. And also my carefully cultivated set of friends on IRC were so much better.
I was so disgusted with school and other people that I never went to college. The thought of taking any step in that direction was a hard no, I was desperate to get out into the work force and got a computer job when I was 18 and didn't think much about intelligence, for awhile.
I've slowly, eventually come to terms with the fact that I have a fairly big cognitive edge over most people. I don't mean this with a sense of pride. I mean this in a sense of horror.
One thing that's confused me a lot is that over the last decade or two, "verbal IQ" has gone up considerably. In the olden days it seemed like people on the internet were either smart or they were obvious morons because the obvious morons couldn't write, being new to keyboards and chatting. But nowadays even the most dimwitted Redditor writes English fluently and they'll even use words from the scientific and intellectual classes to argue, so I would spend a long time arguing with people who were just never going to understand me. Like man-years, I'm sure.
Anyway, it was still really hard to realize I have a cognitive edge? Charles Murray argues in Real Education that many smarter people don't realize just how smart they are, due to sorting. They seek out other smart people and compare themselves and see that they have minor relative strengths and weaknesses and conclude the differences between them, and thereby everyone actually, are cases of nurture and not nature. Meanwhile the people who can't do basic arithmetic in their heads or who could never handle a hypothetical conditional don't enter your universe, or you probably sense you're not very alike and don't get to know their intellectual life.
A few things have broken me out of this. In the Parable of the Talents, Scott writes:
I work with psychiatric patients who tend to have cognitive difficulties. Starting out in the Detroit ghetto doesn’t do them any favors, and then they get conditions like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia that actively lower IQ for poorly understood neurological reasons.
The standard psychiatric evaluation includes an assessment of cognitive ability; the one I use is a quick test with three questions. The questions are – “What is 100 minus 7?”, “What do an apple and an orange have in common?”, and “Remember these three words for one minute, then repeat them back to me: house, blue, and tulip”.
There are a lot of people – and I don’t mean floridly psychotic people who don’t know their own name, I mean ordinary reasonable people just like you and me – who can’t answer these questions. And we know why they can’t answer these questions, and it is pretty darned biological.
Disturbing.
Did you see the conditional hypotheticals thing? Scott again, quoting the anonymous IQ researcher posting to 4chan this time (so grain of salt)
I did IQ research as a grad student, and it involved a lot of this stuff. Did you know that most people (95% with less than 90 IQ) can't understand conditional hypotheticals? For example, "How would you have felt yesterday evening if you hadn't eaten breakfast or lunch?" "What do you mean? I did eat breakfast and lunch." "Yes, but if you had not, how would you have felt?" "Why are you saying that I didn't eat breakfast? I just told you that did." "Imagine that you hadn't eaten it, though. How would you have felt?" "I don't understand the question." It's really fascinating [...]
Other interesting phenomenon around IQ involves recursion. For example: "Write a story with two named characters, each of whom have at least one line of dialogue." Most literate people can manage this, especially once you give them an example. "Write a story with two named characters, each of whom have at least one line of dialogue. In this story, one of the characters must be describing a story with at least two named characters, each of whom have at least one line of dialogue." If you have less than 90 IQ, this second exercise is basically completely impossible. Add a third level ('frame') to the story, and even IQ 100's start to get mixed up with the names and who's talking. Turns out Scheherazade was an IQ test!
Time is practically impossible to understand for sub 80s. They exist only in the present, can barely reflect on the past and can't plan for the future at all. Sub 90s struggle with anachronism too. For example, I remember the 80-85s stumbling on logic problems that involved common sense anachronism stuff. For instance: "Why do you think that military strategists in WWII didn't use laptop computers to help develop their strategies?" "I guess they didn't want to get hacked by Nazis". Admittedly you could argue that this is a history knowledge question, not quite a logic sequencing question, but you get the idea. Sequencing is super hard for them to track, but most 100+ have no problem with it, although I imagine that a movie like Memento strains them a little. Recursion was definitely the killer though. Recursive thinking and recursive knowledge seems genuinely hard for people of even average intelligence.
I tried the "didn't eat breakfast" thing on a few people I know. All of the adults got it (whew). It's very interesting to try it on kids. Kids five and under can't do it flat out, but at about 6+ they can. Imagining that some people are forever 5 years old in that part of their brain is freaking wild.
Swiveling back to Murray in Real Education, he tries to convince you of how not smart the average person is by showing a series of fairly trivial 8th grade exam questions and detailing how wrong most kids get them.
The Anasazi made beautiful pottery, turquoise jewelry, fine sashes of woven hair, and baskets woven tightly enough to hold water. They lived by hunting and by growing corn and squash. Their way of life went on peacefully for several hundred years. Then around 1200 AD something strange happened, for which the reasons are not quite clear.
Here is the item:
Example 7. The Anasazi's life before 1200 AD was portrayed by the author as being
(A) dangerous and warlike (B) busy and exciting (C) difficult and dreary (D) productive and peaceful
The answer is
55% of Illinois 8th graders get this wrong.
I've posted a few of these to Twitter. Some are mathy, and some are word problems. This one about the Asanazi drives some people berserk; people apparently can't separate the author's portrayal from their own portrayal, or do the basic constraint logic needed to rule the rest out.
I saw someone joke in a different part of Twitter that stuff like LSAT questions are designed to maximize toxic Twitter engagement and I have to concur.
Last one. Scott again, writes recently.
According to tests, fewer than 10% of Americans retain PIIAC-defined “basic numeracy skills”, even though in theory you need to know algebra to graduate from most public schools.
I don't really know what this PIIAC thing is, so I asked ChatGPT4o to generate an example question that demonstrate proficiency.
You are planning a trip and need to budget for fuel costs. Your car’s fuel efficiency is 30 miles per gallon, and the distance to your destination is 450 miles. If the price of gasoline is $3 per gallon, how much will you spend on gasoline for the trip?
IMO you should be able to do this in your head in a few seconds. It feels embarrassing to even talk about something this easy and connect any hint of pride to it, like this is an example of any cognitive edge at all. Yet huge portions of the population will struggle with it. I asked an 11th grader taking AP classes this question and they said they would need pen and paper to figure it out(!) He at least knew how to organize it in terms of x.
I could see a grand majority of the population never writing it in terms of x = ... and solving that way.
I'm trying to fill a position at work right now. A sys admin role. I want to ask that gas mileage question during technical interviews but I'm afraid the people who will get it right will be so insulted that they can't believe I'm asking this, while the people who get it wrong will feel very unfairly brutally discriminated against because I could pop such an irrelevant-to-their-job question on them.
So. How do we expect to become a Star Trek, space faring civilization again? There's so much work to do that we need smart people for and so few smart people.
We know how to avoid being overwhelmed by 65 IQ adults. In childhood you can ensure they don't suffer the worst poverty and go hungry and give them a K-6 education. Then they'll have 80-90 IQ. That's still grim, but a huge accomplishment.
Ignoring the Flynn effect, do we have any idea at all about how to shift, say, the middle of the curve from 100 IQ to 130 IQ? Is there any therapy or drug or surgery anywhere on the horizon that could achieve this?
My parents grew up south Europe, born during WW2, and I couldn't believe the level of poverty they endured. I visited the 7,500 person town they grew up in and even today in 2024 it still doesn't have consistent running water and each house has maybe 20 amp electrical service max. You could eat a chicken once a month on special occasions. Dinner involved some starch and beans, every night, usually the same thing. Family members having spent time either in prison for being reported by neighbors with a gripe, or serving as conscripts, or both.
Violence too? Each parent had a sibling killed under circumstances they never quite explain to me. Another sibling (my uncle) becomes mentally retarded from some disease they couldn't even put a name on, because access to health care didn't exist. "He just had a fever when he was young and was never the same when the fever went away". This is almost certainly from a preventable childhood disease that no longer exists in the modern world.
How fucking frightening a world was the relatively recent past. And yet my parents hardly complain about anything. I cannot fucking deal with listening to them stoically describe their upbringing and early life in the US (as illegal immigrants, another fun adventure) and then contrast with the median gen-Zer complaining about their absolute life of amazing luxury today.
I'm sure the horror damaged my parents in ways that aren't legible and that they would not have chosen it if they could do life again, but I'm also not sure this life of absolutely pure luxury we have today (by contrast) actually is the stuff that a good world springs from. Maybe the problem is bad morals, but I struggle to articulate it. It sure would be a shame if you needed the hard times to create the strong men.
On MAD, some is more MA than others
One detail about the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that I was not really aware of until now is the relative asymmetry of it.
In a nuclear exchange, MAD deterrence depends on both sides being able and wiling to destroy the other if they detect a first strike.
In the case of NATO vs Russia, MAD is not even! If Russia decides to first strike NATO, it's possible they could wipe out Europe before it has time to respond, in perhaps 10 minutes. But the US part of NATO is another story, and could take up to 30 minutes to wipe out. That's considerably more time for the US to order and launch a counterstrike that wipes out Russia.
The inverse does not hold, however. NATO can launch a first strike on Russia that ends them entirely in 10 minutes, cutting off options to respond. To be clear here some response would happen, like a few cities within the NATO bloc get nuked, but it's quite probable Russia could be wiped out entirely with only a minor amount of apocalyptic damage done to NATO.
What further alarms Russia is that this 10 minute window drops considerably if Ukraine is added to NATO. A decapitation strike against major cities in Russia launched from Ukraine could take as little as 5 minutes. That's not even enough time to notice, get positive confirmation and wake people up: Russian leadership would just sleep through Armageddon.
If you take Russia at face value, and that they invaded Ukraine because it would not commit to neutrality, it would seem to be a strategic blunder on the side of the US to not consider this more seriously. The logic of launching a first strike against Russia seems crazy to us, but that's almost certainly playing half-court basketball. If you think like a Russian, people who have endured centuries of extremely cruel militaristic and fuck-you-got-mine rule, a cold blooded NATO first strike that sacrificed a mere tens of millions in deaths in Europe might be a real fear. Especially if Russia senses its own competence wrt nuclear war is weakening. Also it's not like the US is not capable of unspeakable hypocrisy and cruelty when it comes to geopolitics. Regime change is a thing we've gleefully engaged in.
Anyway, learning about this asymmetry in nuclear MAD makes me more sympathetic to Russia's POV. The war with Ukraine was not inevitable and the possibility of allying Ukraine with NATO has, in hindsight, high cost with relatively little upside?
Am I misreading anything with the MAD situation? I understand there exist planes and subs that can deliver nuclear warheads but I don't see Russia's force projection capabilities being able to fulfill the retaliatory threat. For example, I understand it's somewhat an open secret that Russia's subs are confined to near-Russia and the US actively tracks them and can pre-emptively obliterate them the moment things get hot.
Carrying a big stick sounds important for global stability, but probably also avoiding scaring the shit out of failing and desperate nuclear armed powers is key.
On The Poverty Equilibrium vs NIBMYism
Big Yud recently posted an interesting thought, The Poverty Equilibrium. The most brutal possible summary is: despite an insane amount of technological progress over the last centuries, some people still toil all day in miserable jobs to provide for some urgent need and it's not clear why this is happening and therefore it's not clear that another 100x increase in utility will make it any different.
I have a not quite neat rebuttal. Maybe call it a partial agonist rebuttal: poverty kind of persists because of NIMBYism, but NIMBYism also prevents more poverty.
Lets take my town of Eugene Oregon as an example. Eugene has become a desirable place to live the last 10 years. It has moderate weather, rarely snowing but also rarely hitting the 100s. Is very bike friendly and it exhibits Portlandia levels of absurdity regarding organic and local food and products. You can exercise outdoors all year round, comfortably, and stunning natural beauty is a stones throw away. You're also surrounded by sensual hippies and violent crime is below average for the US, though there is the usual west coast share of scary homelessness and menacing.
Naturally, as a near-coastal elite city, building is heavily restricted and housing inventory is low so prices are high and home ownership is unreachable if you only make minimum wage ($14.70/hour). There are constant calls to build more affordable housing, but instead all that seems to get built are luxury apartments that don't alleviate housing shortages, regularly outraging the /r/Eugene subreddit.
EAs cry incessantly that NIMBYism is to blame for this state of affairs and if we would Just Fucking Build the cost of housing would plummet and gripping poverty would be solved.
One digression. Eugene has, wedged immediately against it, a town called Springfield. The quality of life is nearly identical, you have access to all of the luxuries I said above but maybe add 10 minutes of drive time. It's less bike friendly and the public spaces are a bit less nice. Alternatively, the police do enforce laws harder. Anyway, the cost of this almost-but-not-quite Eugene town is that housing is about 30% cheaper, into the range of comfortable if you make minimum wage. However, nobody wants to live there. Instead people treat living in Eugene like some human right and Springfield Oregon may as well be Springfield Missouri.
But back to NIMBYism, building more affordable housing would actually make living here worse and it can be argued mathematically: median income in Eugene is $30k. In the US, the top 10% of taxpayers provide about 70% of government funding. If you invite people who make less than the top 10% into your town, you make your town poorer. But it can also be argued in hand waving qualitative fashion: the population of the town is about 175,000. If we built 100,000 tiny houses that cost $400/month, the cost of housing would certainly plummet but the quality of life in town would collapse. Traffic, which barely exists here, would become awful, the public spaces would be full of much more homeless menacing, crime and littering would increase and the public services would be stretched thinner.
Aside from tragedy and also usual bad decisions that contribute to poverty (addiction, bad with money), poverty persists because it's actually pretty hard for some people to leave their town if it becomes unaffordable (family obligations, can't find a job in cheaper towns). Similarly, there are not robust ways to accommodate more poor people without making the entire town poorer. I can see how Kowloon Walled City can accommodate high population density but living there seems pretty unappealing compared to quiet quaint little Eugene. Could a 100x increase in utility fix this? Probably! If building was radically cheaper, I could imagine beautiful Sim City style arcologies that have these peaceful pockets of small towns that can support millions of people. But until then, NIMBYism is good actually and prevents poverty from spreading.
If you want Kowloon Walled City in America, on the other hand, what's stopping us? Plenty of room in Nevada. We can build a tech bro metropolis around it. Hell, I'd visit. I'd probably even buy an apartment there that's vacant 50 weeks a year.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
7mo ago
Re: United Health CEO, I feel that I'm among the extreme minority of the population that thinks it's bad to celebrate political assassinations and also that it is a social good for companies to offer insurance in the US. I am astounded by how relatively unprofitable being an insurance company is and also why anyone would go into this industry and put up with the abuse and general scorn.
Imagine being at a party and saying you work at a health insurance company. Total hatred from almost everyone.
It's amazing that people do this at all?
The Nvidia H20 exports ban is back on?
Lets recap. DeepSeek stuns the world by dropping a model almost as good as SOTA models while flexing incredible performance gains through cunning Chinese hacking. It's revealed they used lower end H20 GPUs vs the more decadent A100 / H100 / B100 class chips that fat American programmers use. Thusly, the US moves to ban exports of H20s as well.
Except last week, on April 9th, following the news of Jensen Huang dropping a million bucks at a Mar-a-Lago dinner with Trump, the ban is apparently lifted, stunning all China hawks in the country (and AI safetyists) and demonstrating that Trump will sell out his country to fucking China for a $1 million donation.
But today, Nvidia announces the export ban is on. And ... apparently was never lifted? The market reacts and knocks them down a few points.
What... happened? Checking back, it seems the only source for the news that the H20 ban was lifted was "two unnamed sources" reported by NPR.
Following the Mar-a-Lago dinner, the White House reversed course on H20 chips, putting the plan for additional restrictions on hold, according to two sources with knowledge of the plan who were not authorized to speak publicly.
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/09/nx-s1-5356480/nvidia-china-ai-h20-chips-trump
Weirdly, neither the USG nor Nvidia commented on it.
Can we read into the fact that since neither party commented on it, lifting the H20 ban was actually on the table? Was this leaked by one side to put pressure on the other? Was it a trial balloon? Or do we even trust that NPR actually reached out for comment like they said they did?
The trial of Sam Bankman-Fried begins tomorrow.
As a person that has worked in crypto quant trading[1], I have the tiniest slice of sympathy for him. He still seems like an unsympathetic freak overall, and has done some stuff that seems pretty unethical, and some of his actions are definitely criminal. He has given EA a bad name as well.
There are certainly a lot of process crimes he's guilty of. The fact that the US has pulled his international operations into US jurisdiction means he's in for a universe of pain and if they can't fight that he's going to jail for infinity years. I consider this legal theory a bit dubious but the US has taken the position that it can prosecute crimes that happen in the rest of the world if they even marginally involve US citizens[2]. Is everyone in the world really supposed to follow US laws? That strikes me as a bad precedent; on the other hand, I also do appreciate it sometimes that the US is an international law enforcer of last resort.
That's not really where my sympathy lies though. He knows he was playing a dangerous game. Pretty much everyone who works in quant finance occupies enough legal gray area to worry that they could all be shut down at any time and end up in court. This is even worse in the crypto era, as the position taken by the SEC and friends is shameful, giving very little guidance on new forms of financial technology and telling firms years later by indictment that they were frowning on their behavior all this time.
Many tradfi firms prostrate themselves before the SEC in the hopes of maintaining a good relationship. Even still, reputable firms who were attempting to operate outside of US jurisdiction have been caught with their pants down in the crypto era e.g. Trading Firm A, B and C in the recent Binance indictment: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-03-27/the-cftc-comes-for-binance (paywall bypass: https://archive.ph/aMi5Q )
It's still not clear to me that SBF and FTX spent user funds as a matter of course, or if it effectively became spending user funds because so much of their other assets imploded. Though, again, that's not necessarily a crime if you operate outside of US jurisdiction, which is what their international arm believed it was doing. But, that's also sort of secondary.
The primary question I keep coming back to, and I come to this every time there's a large corporate fraud scandal, is: what is fraud, actually? Because it seems indistinguishable from "I thought our business was legit and every indication I had was that it was legit and then it failed and it failed really hard and lots of people lost money".
FTX was a successful business. It was a high quality crypto exchange among many exchanges where the standard at the time was "complete clown show". They were probably the last people I would have bet on imploding and disappearing user funds. The failure is shocking. It's so shocking it's hard to believe.
One thing that's common to these frauds is that people always seem to have a moment of reckoning where they know they're fucked and they can either pack up and go home and face the consequences, or they double down and hope it'll all work out. Indeed, there are some legendary stories from doubling down: FedEx for example where the CEO literally doubled down with their last remaining $5000 in Las Vegas to turn it into a much needed $27,000 to keep the business alive. In this timeline FedEx is legitimate, but if it hadn't worked out he could've possibly gone to jail.
As far as I can tell Uber was based on complete fraud. Its business plan from day one appeared to be: completely ignore taxi laws the world over and just push out a product that was so much better than calling taxis that before jurisdictions knew what was happening they would have tons of passionate users that would be furious if Uber was taken away. This seems to be a resounding success. But it was very much organized crime? If Uber had failed their founder would have definitely gone to jail. In fact he was involved in so much other generally shady stuff that he was forced out. Yet he definitely moved the needle.
Anyway, this isn't meant to be an impassioned defense of SBF, more like my continuing fascination and horror at this alien thing we call modern business. Poor fool tried to play the game of changing the world and got burned. And in this case the burning is fantastic public spectacle.
- To be clear I think crypto is not that world changing and its only redeeming quality for the foreseeable future is of the flavor "casinos are fun to build and play in".
- Arthur Hayes of Bitmex was busted for something similar, though he was "wink wink" keeping US citizens off of his exchange whereas FTX International was pretty serious https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1323316/download
EDIT: Matt Levine's newsletter today is about SBF's trial, which hit my inbox right after I submitted this comment. Amazing, as usual. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-02/sbf-s-defense-will-be-tough
EDIT2: As replies have pointed out, I am probably technically wrong for calling what Uber did fraud. Sorry to distract. I should've made my case that Uber was more like a plan to openly disregard and defy taxi regulations across many jurisdictions with the excuse that this isn't a taxi it's a "carpooling app" tee hee. I think this is an insane business plan and it depended on them delivering an amazingly useful app. And if they hadn't succeeded (by delivering an amazingly useful app) they would've all been busted for something rising to the level of organized crime.
Suppose you were a moderate leader of the Palestinians. What on Earth could you possibly do to end the suffering and negotiate a lasting peace?
Palestinians appear to feel very strongly about unrestricted right of return. In the failed Camp David talks, Arafat demanded 150,000 Palestinians in the diaspora be allowed to settle Israel per year while Israel pushed back and said 100,000 total, though they offered a $30 billion fund to help Palestinians abroad to attain permanent settlement abroad.
This is pretty far apart. Israel doesn’t want to be demographically obliterated but Palestinians that fled Israel consider it their ancestral home.
How do you reconcile this? Wouldn’t any Palestinian leader that negotiated a peace deal without this be considered illegitimate and probably marked for death?
On the other hand, would the hostilities even end if Israel somehow agreed to unrestricted ROR? There’s so much bad blood that even this is hard to imagine as being the thing that achieves lasting peace.
I’m not sure any concession short of Israel packs up and leaves forever would end the violence.
Is it wrong to demand that Israelis relocate to Florida? It’s not like they can’t move all of their holy buildings. Surely the terra itself isn’t sacred?
I have a lot of sympathy (or maybe pity) for SBF. "Stole client funds" appears to have solidified as a meme much the same way "crossed state lines" had in the Rittenhouse case.
I think it's hard for people, including technologists who haven't worked as quants, to appreciate the level of technology risk that's present in quant trading. In most of tech your biggest risk is having all of your data destroyed, and you can address that with well worn improvements in backups. You also risk being hacked but those breaches tend to be embarrassing rather than company ending. Even Sony, which was pwned as hard as you could possibly be pwned, ultimately recovered. But an additional risk in quant trading is accidentally and irrecoverably giving all of your assets away in a few seconds.
Even companies that are following all of the rules and have the right number of members of the professional management class in their ranks can destroy themselves in a matter of minutes. Knight Capital Group destroyed itself in 30 minutes by (with some creative license) failing to follow heroic practices around retiring old flags in protobufs.
Alameda/FTX had a culture that resembled "move fast and break things". They grew extremely quickly. I'm highly skeptical they were able to stand up robust accounting and practices to mitigate technology risks in so short a time.
When SBF says he didn't realize they were leveraged due to accounting error, I believe him. It's not like you can just install the QuickBooks Enterprise Crypto Derivatives Exchange plugin. All of this stuff was bespoke, and in a hurry.
When you thought you had $30b in assets and minimal liabilities, you can spend a billion or two on indulgences, charitable giving and campaign contributions. Your can say confidently you're not investing client funds. If those assets are suddenly marked down 90% you look like a fraud and you're in deep shit.
That's the nature of the business and he knew the risks. But probably in hindsight I'm sure he wishes he had been even more careful.
This isn't to say that I believe he definitely didn't commit fraud. Rather this is me saying that as someone who has pushed code that I thought accidentally gave away $10 million of my employer's money (the gigantic exhale of relief came when we learned I failed to scale by 1000x in the reporting and not the ordering), I am defaulting to blaming it on stupidity before malice.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
And conservative communities have little difficulty producing positive role models for boys. Which seems like an obvious drawback- leftist communities need to astroturf someone into a role that is already filled elsewhere.
Asked with genuine and humble curiosity, what are some positive conservative role models for boys?
I remember in the late 90s and early 00s, reading many a diatribe about how Microsoft was done. They then went on to grow by 10x and are almost hip again.
I'm not sure what changed all that much. They were just well positioned to tax computer industry growth and it grew massively. Hardly anyone can point to a brilliant innovation at Microsoft during this period.
To me, being a futurist brand guy that's well positioned to capture value in the growth of the transition to EVs, development of space, and AI is a pretty fantastic position. And unlike Microsoft, Elon still has big bets to make.
Speaking of which, have you made any bets?
I'm in my 40s and believe I'm finally hitting my stride as a young cranky old man. What did it?
Working at a company full of Python developers using Google Cloud.
OMFG I do not care about
- Kubernetes
- Terraform
- cloud triggers
- Celery jobs
- Python in general
- anything that ends with .yaml
- Docker
It's not because I don't know these technologies and can't handle it. It's because they're stupid. They seem like they were some half-baked approach done by someone barely competent at the task they were given and bam they're now the industry standard and we all need to use it and everyone frowns at you like you're an idiot if you think people shouldn't be forced to huff that original barely competent developer's farts all day every day.
Well, fuck that and fuck you if you agree with them. We should not tolerate the simplest things taking 100ms (or 5 seconds) or taking 100MB (or gigabytes) or 10 approved PRs.
I'm going knee-jerk write everything I possibly can in C++ from now on. I'm pushing straight to main prod. I don't care if it's not memory safe or difficult to reason about or not "best practice". I will use indomitable volition to solve the problem and when I do it'll be so much faster and I get to really dig in and be cranky and old and superior. Behold, this actually takes only 50 micros and uses 5MB of RAM and the Hertzner server costs 1/10th and the overall cost is 1/100th and this is right and good and just. While you're entering day three debugging some inscrutable GCP error I'm shipping.
I am elite and I know how computers work and this is how you do it. Sorry if you can't keep up, young whipper snapper :sunglasses: :muscle_arm: :smug_smirking_face:
Get. Off. My. Lawn.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1yr ago
Instructions unclear. Started compassionately guillotining terminally ill cancer patients.
Surely the indignity of the guillotine is that it turns someone's execution into a humiliating blood spraying spectacle? You can almost look cool standing in front of a firing squad, blind folded (obligatory: smoking a cigarette). Nobody looks cool on their knees with their head in a guillotine stockade, even with a cigarette.
OTOH, with a firing squad, you probably look much less cool suffocating to death from all of the holes ripped through your lungs; not sure what I'd pick.
Why can't the production studio be looking at the demographics of the customer base and decide that hey some %age of our customers are black, and so they may relate to the story better and spend money on it if we include more/any black characters?
I've barely read LOTR but unless whiteness was a critical part of the story it seems fine to change skin color. It's a movie about, like, whole different species of humanoids right? Different skin colors should be well within bounds?
I agree a lot of productions feel like they're bending over backwards to include more races and it comes off as cheap and woke fearing (see: children's books), but the more basic business case seems valid too.
EDIT: I've not seen the show nor have I read the books and I mostly watched the original movies with 'drinking game' style interest, so pardon my ignorance. I see from the responses that the sprinkling of racial diversity is done in a clearly cheap and ham-fisted way. Thank you to everyone who took my question seriously.
I view this lawfare as both morally wrong and deeply destabilizing.
Why is this lawfare? And why is it wrong? I can see both sides of the issue but want to make sure I'm not missing something.
Camp: this is terrible
This is a tragedy for justice. Trump did stuff that, sure it was technically illegal, but it took prosecutors like 5 years to charge him for this. The fact that it took so long is sus. The fact that it's during an election year is sus. Also, there are tons of people committing actual horrific felonies in NY that aren't being prosecuted. Additionally, it really seems like the prosecutor had to squint to find something to bust him with. This seems very politically motivated and like it sets a terrible precedent. It simply shows that you can prosecute any business leader for something if they infuriate the establishment enough. Additionally, you can't really read too much into this. He was charged and convicted in NY, a place that's full-on Trump Derangement Syndrome. He probably would've been sentenced to death for a parking ticket if the court allowed it. America is in danger.
for contrast
Camp: this is fine
This is a victory for justice. Even former Presidents are not above the law. He did a crime and he was convicted of it. He very much had a guilty mind, surrounding generally bad behavior, and did bad things while campaigning to be a leader of the country, one of the most important positions in the world. In the process of these morally bad acts he crossed a legal line and he's being called to account for it. Sure, it took a long time and sure it might have some twinge of political motivation to the timing, and this is a crime few people can really relate to, but you also want leaders held to a high standard and you also want them to be accountable. Juries may hate Trump but it's just implausible to expect even 12 New Yorkers to find him guilty of something just because they hate him. America has demonstrated its commitment to rule of law and we should celebrate.
PLEASE try lowering the temperature, Dems.
I agree, but let us also remember to pin some blame on Trump for doing the ICE raids as flamboyantly as possible.
Obama deported 410,000 people in 2012 and managed to avoid cameras far better.
I am convinced Trump wants liberals to overreact because it's the best campaign ad and the mobs are happy to take the bait.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
5mo ago
The Democrats in Congress don't have the votes to impeach him though, so that indeed creates the crisis.
The Republicans in Congress may have the votes to ratify the freeze though. That resolves the issue.
Alternatively there could just be escalating contempt of court proceedings against underlings and disregard for the judiciary.
I'm currently working as a cybersecurity engineer and I'm a former Google SRE. So, I request you do not kneejerk dismiss me as some kind of technical ignoramus if you think that's what my argument hinges on.
Whenever privacy warriors complain about privacy I find myself rolling my eyes and thinking okay boomer. Even though more people than boomers say this and I do believe privacy is important. To be clear I mean privacy in the abstract. "I don't use Facebook because [privacy]". "I am looking to adopt a GrapheneOS based phone with no Google apps because [privacy]".
Privacy is obviously important. I don't want some rando, or worse, some personal enemy to rifle through my all of my digital data looking for ways to harm me. But the abstract privacy concern takes the form of a Motte and Bailey between the two. Google, Facebook and friends mostly act on your private data in the aggregate, but the privacy advocates generate worry that your intimate conversations or pictures are being personally viewed.
I also find privacy warrior claims rather, lets say, Joker-level anarchistic about rule of law. Everyone should have end-to-end encrypted messaging and the government should be locked out of private spaces no matter what. In no other domain do we accept a claim like "this dungeon in my house is off limits even to detectives with a court order because it is my private property" but apparently yes this digital cache of self-produced child pornography or evidence of a ticking time bomb terrorist plot[1] is something we can take to our graves regardless of any legitimate pursuit of justice. The level of hostility towards government here surpasses any of government's responsibility to protect its citizenry.
I'm not arguing against having digital security. It's very important for both organizations and individuals to have basic opsec lined up, especially because of how many automated and directed attacks there are trying to steal money and secrets. But in this battle companies like Google, who privacy advocates possibly fear only less than Facebook, are far closer to friend than foe because they provide a level of sophisticated and free security and direct privacy guarantee that almost nobody can achieve on their own.
The level of fear and worry privacy warriors generate rises to the level of conspiracy-adjacence. The word "qanon" pops into my head. Someone, Out There, is collecting all of your private information and you need to disconnect from the grid right now. Abandon all petty conveniences like being able to share photos with grandma, your life depends on it.
Ironically, the self-hosted Trust No One approach appears to make people even more vulnerable to attack. Even very technically sophisticated friends of mine who have hosted their own email have been hacked and their identities stolen (and used against them for extortion) in ways that would not have happened if they had stuck to GMail and used their FIDO2 two factor key for second factor.
I have another friend who decided to take his family's photos and files out of iCloud and Google Drive. He set up a home RAID array and was cruising along fine but neglected to monitor the drives. One failed and he didn't know, so when the second failed all of his data was gone. He didn't have backups, because why would you if you have RAID and snapshotting. He's not some noob either. He is also a sophisticated technology professional.
My argument against individual actions you can take on privacy are something like: you can do a few basic things to radically improve your personal opsec, and anything else is rapidly diminishing returns at increasingly greater inconvenience and, worse, may be a net increase in your vulnerability to attack or data loss.
My argument against regulatory action on this is, well: Europe leads the way on this. Does anyone think, say, GDPR has made Europeans much safer than Americans? At what regulatory and compliance cost? Mostly GDPR seems like a joke.
The fact that privacy fretting appears to primarily afflict men (with notable exceptions like Naomi Brockwell) suggests that there must be something autistic about it.
(Mostly, I can't shake the strange feeling that inside of all of this is a The Last Psychiatrist style phenomena (made with impeccable erudition that I could never live up to) that privacy worries are a proxy for dealing with some... thing(?) that people would never allow themselves to acknowledge consciously)
In the end, excessively fretting about privacy mostly is costly (in time), increases inconvenience and annoyance, increases the nanny/regulatory state, puts you at greater risk, and just makes the ads being served to you dumber.
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