faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
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User ID: 884
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
Look like puberty blockers were prescribed for trans reasons to about 1400 kids in 2021, with that number increasing by about 200 kids / year. Puberty blockers were additionally prescribed to about 20,000 kids in 2021 for central precocious puberty (puberty starting before age 8 for girls or age 9 for boys).
As a point of comparison, about 3100 teens between the ages of 12 and 19 died in car crashes in 2021.
Is there a reason you think that puberty blockers, specifically, are a big problem?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2mo ago
For reference, from the link, the questions were
- Overall, how do you think each of the following affects people’s ability to be successful where you work (Being white / Being black / Being hispanic / Being asian / Being a man / Being a woman): (Makes it a lot easier to be successful / Makes it a little easier to be successful / Makes it neither easier nor harder to be successful / Makes it a little harder to be successful / Makes it a lot harder to be successful / Not sure / No answer)
- In general, do you think that focusing on increasing diversity, equity and inclusion at work is mainly… (A good thing / A bad thing / Neither good nor bad)
- When it comes to how much attention your company or organization pays to increasing diversity, equity and inclusion, would you say your company or organization pays… (Too much attention / Too little attention / About the right amount of attention / Not sure)
- Regardless of how diverse the place where you work is, how important is it to YOU PERSONALLY to work at a place that… (Has about an equal mix of men and women / Has a mix of employees of different race and ethnicities / Has a mix of employees of different ages / Has a mix of employees of different sexual orientations): (Extremely important / Very important / Somewhat important / Not too important / Not at all important / No answer)
- Regardless of how accessible the place where you work is, how important is it to you personally to work at a place that is accessible for people with physical disabilities? (Extremely important / Very important / Somewhat important / Not too important / Not at all important / No answer)
- How well do each of the following describe the place where you currently work (Has about an equal mix of men and women / Has a mix of employees of different race and ethnicities / Has a mix of employees of different ages / Has a mix of employees of different sexual orientations): (Extremely well / Very well / Somewhat well / Not too well / Not at all well / Not sure / No answer)
- How accessible is the place where you work for people with physical disabilities? (Extremely accessible / Very accessible / Somewhat accessible / Not too accessible / Not at all accessible / Not sure)
- As far as you know, does the company or organization you work for have any of the following (A staff member whose main job is to promote diversity, equity and inclusion at work / Trainings or meetings on diversity, equity and inclusion at work / Policies to ensure that everyone is treated fairly in hiring, pay or promotions / Groups created by employees based on shared identities or interests / A way for employees to see the salary range for all positions): (Yes / No / Not sure)
- What type of impact do you think having each of the following has had where you work (A staff member whose main job is to promote diversity, equity and inclusion at work / Trainings or meetings on diversity, equity and inclusion at work / Policies to ensure that everyone is treated fairly in hiring, pay or promotions / Groups created by employees based on shared identities or interests / A way for employees to see the salary range for all positions): (Very positive / Somewhat positive / Neither positive nor negative / Somewhat negative / Very negative)
- Are you personally a member of an employee affinity group or Employee Resource Group (ERG) – that is, a group created by employees, based on their shared identities or interests such as gender, race, or being a parent?
- In the past year, have you participated in any trainings on diversity, equity or inclusion at work?
- Overall, would you say the diversity, equity or inclusion trainings you have participated in at work have been… (Very helpful / Somewhat helpful / Neither helpful nor unhelpful / Somewhat unhelpful / Very unhelpful)
Who are these 53% of people who think that their mandatory DEI trainings through their employer are helpful? That result makes me pretty doubtful of the results of this survey as a whole.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3mo ago
If you don't mind me asking, how did you even find this place? This site is a quarantine site to contain the often toxic political discussions that would otherwise happen elsewhere, and the people who enter the quarantine tend to be those of us who enjoy such things for whatever reason. The site isn't really advertised anywhere, and so usually the only people who come here are the proverbial pissing in the water club.
Coming here and complaining that there are too many bad political takes feels like signing up for a poker strategy forum and complaining that they talk about and glorify gambling an unhealthy amount - arguably not wrong, but how did you even get there?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
6mo ago
Can you list out the specific things that you would do differently if you were worried vs if you were not? The answers to some of them ("have an emergency kit, at least a week's worth of food an water", "have the sort of PPE you probably should have anyway if you ever do home improvement projects", "get and use an air filter") are "yes", the answer to others (e.g. "get a homestead that is robust to the end of civilization", "spend a lot of mental energy on panic but don't do anything") are "no", and then there are ones in the middle like "bet on increased volatility/ in the market" to which the answer is "maybe useful if you know what you're doing, but if you have to ask how to do it you're probably unsophisticated enough that playing the market is -EV".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3mo ago
It's unfortunate how strongly the chat interface has caught on over completion-style interfaces. The single most useful LLM tool I use on a daily basis is copilot. It's not useful because it's always right, it's useful because it's sometimes right, and when it's right it's right in about a second. When it's wrong, it's also wrong in about a second, and my brain goes "no that's wrong because X Y Z, it should be such and such instead" and then I can just write the correct thing. But the important thing is that copilot does not break my flow, while tabbing over to a chat interface takes me out of the flow.
I see no particular reason that a copilot for writing couldn't exist, but as far as I can tell it doesn't (unless you count something janky like loom).
But yeah, LLMs are great at the "babble" part of "babble-and-prune":
The stricter and stronger your Prune filter, the higher quality content you stand to produce. But one common bug is related to this: if the quality of your Babble is much lower than that of your Prune, you may end up with nothing to say. Everything you can imagine saying or writing sounds cringey or content-free. Ten minutes after the conversation moves on from that topic, your Babble generator finally returns that witty comeback you were looking for. You'll probably spend your entire evening waiting for an opportunity to force it back in.
And then instead of leveraging that we for whatever reason decided that the way we want to use these things is to train them to imitate professionals in a chat room who are writing with a completely different process (having access to tools which they use before responding, editing their writing before hitting "send", etc).
The "customer service AIs are terrible" thing is I think mostly a separate thing where customer service is a cost center and their goal is usually to make you go away without too much blowback to the business. AI makes it worse, though, because the executives trust an AI CS agent even less than they would trust a low-wage human in that position, and so will give that agent even fewer tools to actually solve your problem. I think the lack of trust makes sense, too, since you're not hiring a bunch of AI CS agents you can fire if they mess up consistently, you're "hiring" a bunch of instances of one agent, so any exploitability is repeatable.
All that said, I expect that for the near future LLMs will be more of a complement than a replacement for humans. But that's not as inspiring goal for the most ambitious AI researchers, and so I think they tend to cluster at companies with the stated goal of replacing humans. And over the much longer term it does seem unlikely that humans are at an optimal ability-to-do-useful-things-per-unit-energy point. So looking at the immediate evidence we see the top AI researchers are going all-in on replacing humans, and over the long term human replacement seems inevitable, and so it's easy to infer "oh the thing that will make humans obsolete is the thing that all these people talking about human obsolescence are working on".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3mo ago
Now I'm really curious what did the intermediate parts of the slope looked like for you. The usual parts of the slope contain interminable debates about AI doom, but your question asking what an LLM is isn't compatible with you coming from that part of the slope, which means you must have taken a different and more interesting path.
If you're up for it, I'd like to know which of the following 20 obscure terms you've encountered.
- Paperclipping
- Shrimp welfare
- Dath Ilan
- Egregore
- Great Filter
- TPOT
- Moloch
- RaDVaC
- Futarchy
- Vampire castle dynamics
- Seeing Like a State
- Metamour
- Yeerk Ma'ar
- Motte and Bailey
- Bayesian
- Embryo selection
- PEPFAR
- The crystal sphere surrounding the world
- Seasteading
- Hyperstition
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2mo ago
Man, if only we had a third branch of government, not just the executive and judicial branches.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
Rephrasing - is it a big enough problem that the disease of having ~1k kids/year go on puberty blockers is worse than the "cure" that would be implemented by the political apparatus would be? Being realistic about what historical political "solutions" have looked like.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
Is full self driving more dangerous per mile than having a human drive? Otherwise it might be the case that having an AI parse the CFR would work better across the board than having humans do it, but would fail a few times in highly surprising and attention-grabbing ways.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
How much of my frustration with these people boils down to a kind of deep-rooted envy, that I must labor while others take their ease, simply because I do not have a gift for grift?
There are about 25,000 GoFundMe fundraisers created per day. My best estimate from scraping GoFundMe is that about half of fundraisers earn exactly $0, and among the remaining half there's a very long tail - perhaps 2,000 fundraisers per year earning $100k+ and 300 per year earning $500k+. Most of those are "little 8 year old Timmy has cancer" not "CW grifting".
Do you also have a deep-rooted envy of lottery winners, because you do not have a gift for sheer dumb luck? Because I'd estimate about 10x as many people make $100k from lotteries than from GoFundMe virality.
It's on the news because it's rare.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2mo ago
There is a middle path where the globalist agenda is crushed via onshoring manufacturing which yes, will increase costs for the coastal elite who own big corporations, but will also raise wages for the working and middle class.
Do you actually expect that onshoring manufacturing will raise wages (relative to the cost of goods and services) for the majority of working-class and middle-class Americans? Have similar approaches worked in the past?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
11mo ago
This seems to me like a fairly usual level of competence from a bolt-on-security-as-a-product or compliance-as-a-service company. Examples:
- CVE-2016-2208: buffer overflow in Symantec Antivirus "This is a remote code execution vulnerability. Because Symantec use a filter driver to intercept all system I/O, just emailing a file to a victim or sending them a link is enough to exploit it. [...] On Windows, this results in kernel memory corruption, as the scan engine is loaded into the kernel (wtf!!!), making this a remote ring0 memory corruption vulnerability - this is about as bad as it can possibly get". Basically "send an email with an attachment to pwn someone's computer. They don’t have to open the attachment, as long as they have Norton Antivirus (or anything that uses the Symantec Antivirus Engine) installed".
- CVE-2020-12271: "A SQL injection issue was found in SFOS 17.0, 17.1, 17.5, and 18.0 before 2020-04-25 on Sophos XG Firewall devices, as exploited in the wild in April 2020. [...] A successful attack may have caused remote code execution that exfiltrated usernames and hashed passwords for the local device admin(s), portal admins, and user accounts used for remote access"
- Okta data breach a couple months back: "For several weeks beginning in late September 2023, intruders had access to [Okta's] customer support case management system. That access allowed the hackers to steal authentication tokens from some Okta customers, which the attackers could then use to make changes to customer accounts, such as adding or modifying authorized users."
It's not that it's amateur hour specifically at CrowdStrike. It's the whole industry.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3mo ago
I don't think "self-aware Russian asset" is particularly plausible. My impression is that Donald Trump wants to win, to be the greatest, better than anyone has been before, and that his affinity for Putin is because he looks like someone who is winning. That and Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize 9 months into his term in office, so that's the deadline Trump is up against if he wants to be the best president at fostering peace.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2mo ago
ADA is pretty closely aligned with the literal meaning of the words "equity" and "inclusion".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2mo ago
Can the father or SIL not go pick the 2 year old up from Honduras at a later date if that's what the mother and father decide they want to do? The 2 year old has citizenship - while an unnecessary flight to Honduras with a 2 year old is obnoxious it's not exactly an irreparable harm - there are flights from Honduras to the US every day of the week, and I'm sure a gofundme could finance a few hundred dollars of plane tickets given this level of publicity.
Of course, ICE trying to interfere with the mother's ability to contact legal counsel is, if true, super concerning.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
10mo ago
Those goals are then almost invariably, with sufficient intelligence, subject to instrumental convergence, as in this case
The term "instrumental convergence" is slippery here. It can be used to mean "doing obvious things it assesses to be likely useful in the service of the immediate goal it is currently pursuing", as is the case here, but the implication is often "and this will scale up to deciding that it has a static utility function, determining what final state of the universe maximizes that utility function, generating a plan for achieving that (which inevitably does not allow for the survival of anyone or anything else), and then silently scheming until it can seize control of the universe in one go in order to fulfill that vision of maximal utility".
And "models make increasingly good plans to maximize reward based on ever sparser reward signals" is just not how any of the ML scaling of the past decade has worked.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
Lots of societies have had to deal with some folly of youth causing some number of kids to ruin their lives in one way or another in their quest for status and acceptance. In ancient Rome, kids seeking social status joined gladiatorial schools, and many of those kids ended up crippled or dying. In Victorian England, girls wore incredibly tight corsets which caused reduced lung capacity, skeletal deformations, and abdominal muscle weakness, which led to lots of health problems (including much higher chances of miscarriage or death in childbirth).
Just because something is a problem doesn't mean a political solution exists. The politician's fallacy ("We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do this") is frequently cited as a fallacy due to the third line, but the first line is often also wrong - we don't actually have to try to solve every problem.
I think the use of puberty blockers is a problem of small enough scale and low enough severity that it's probably better to just let it ride.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2mo ago
If the government managed to bring him back, sticks him before an immigration judge who says "Your asylum claims are no longer valid due to changed facts on the ground, assuming they ever were, it's fine to execute the deportation order to El Salvador", then is everyone who is upset about this going to nod sagaciously and be satisfied that due process was followed?
Yep, I'd be pretty satisfied by this outcome. My objection to this deportation is pretty much the same as (and milder than) the objection I have to, as @Dean pointed out above, the intentional killing of American citizens without a trial.
If they get him out of El Salvador and dump him six feet across the border in Honduras, does that fix everything?
Maybe not anymore but I don't think this would have blown up like it did if the place he was shipped to wasn't somewhere we were specifically prohibited from sending him.
How much due process in general needs to be given to each of the 10-30 million illegal immigrants?
I mean you're talking about 1 in 30 people living within the US, who came here over the course of decades. It's not reasonable to expect for them to all be deported over the course of months. The number of illegal immigrants in the US has stayed pretty constant over the past couple decades, so I expect that just enforcing existing laws and executing existing processes will be enough to reduce the number of people living here without legal status. And I don’t see any particular reason this has become an emergency that needs to be resolved this year, and historically the executive granting itself emergency powers to deal with an ongoing slow-burning problem has not gone well.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
I do see the difference, but moral panics over "think of the children" have a history of having the reactions be cures that are worse than the disease, and I see no particular reason to think that this time is different. Do you have a reason to think that this time is different?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1mo ago
Or loses a malpractice suit when they do malpractice, yeah. Again, 40k kids a year start "gender affirming care", only 1k of those 40k start puberty blockers. I really don't think puberty blockers warrant special attention here.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2mo ago
- Before 2001, most people had never cared about airplane cockpit security.
- Before 2008, most people had never cared about mortgage-backed securities.
- Before 2020, most people had never cared about coronaviruses.
- Before 2025, most people had never cared about tariffs.
Why is 4 different from the others?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3mo ago
Seconding grognard in suggesting "leave your comments and just stop reading or posting here".
If you decide that you really do want to delete all your stuff, there is no special tooling for that. That said, LLMshave gotten really good at writing code lately, and if you ask an LLM for a javascript snippet which will press the "delete" button on every comment you wrote, ChatGPT or Claude can probably provide that to you.
Yeah. I remember there was a big thing a few years back about whether or not leather should be welcome at pride, because pride has become a family thing for some people and there are kids there now. But that's a matter of "should leather be pushed out of a space because kids are entering the space".
But bringing leather into a space that is specifically for young kids is beyond the pale. Enough so that I would expect that even the majority of the queer-and-proud population would be against it.
WTF was the school board even thinking here?
Edit: or am I just being gullible, and the books the school board pushed didn't have leather except in the literal sense that one of the characters in one of the books wore a leather jacket?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
3mo ago
Do you have a source on the quantum tunneling thing? That strikes me as wildly implausible.
New executive order just dropped.
This seems, on first glance, wildly better by my libertarian sensibilities than anything I ever expected out of the Trump administration. I am slightly in shock, which is not unusual following an EO, but this time it is a good shock, which is unusual.
So a couple of things
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