fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
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User ID: 3415
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2d ago
I want to see more political prosecutions, and I want to see more naked corruption between republican governments and their aligned NGOs
Emulating the worst aspects of communist governments... to own the libs?
I'm perpetually amused by the argument of "the Dems shot our country in the foot, therefore, when we're in charge, we should make sure we shoot the other one even harder"
Aren't you supposed to be patriots? You clearly don't want what's best for it
MAGA Maoism isn't a meme it's very real
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2d ago
I imagine this isn't the kind of recursive self-improvement you probably had in mind, but I think you'll find it enlightening to examine your intuitions about why this kind of recursive self improvement doesn't "really count".
Maybe I'm too tired but I'm genuinely not sure what the enlightenment is here
Doesn't this just mean that when people say "recursive self improvement" what they actually mean is "holistic full stack recursive self improvement that allows the entity to improve all bottlenecks simultaneously"?
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3d ago
Watching just a few minutes of a recent episode, can you tell me what you like about it? Caleb seems extremely cruel in an obviously performative way, and frankly he comes off as almost evil to me.
I wanted to ask the same question, I found the clips I saw on tiktok initially funny and then rapidly they became boring and sad when it was the 10th iteration of "you spend all your money on an $800 bi weekly F150/hellcat and doordashed burritos YOU IDIOT" as some mildly confused mildly obese person from heartland America stared at him with a 95 IQ gaze.
Stupid people are stupid, and it's way more fun watching their antics on a fun reality show like Love Island versus a sad one like Caleb. At least the Love Island people are hot.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3d ago
I'm confused as to why you're annoyed about the existence of a "risk of lending money" rating when you would also like to to be leant money.
It's like being mad that traffic lights exist but also wanting to drive on a road without getting t-boned. Credit scores enable institutions to lend you the money to get the car you want, and keep overall borrowing costs lower for you!
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3d ago
Two things
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you can build credit history / credit score without ever owning a credit card, credit cards are just easy af to access
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if Trump banned credit scores overnight and scrubbed them all from every server with genie magic, banks would still lend you money tomorrow, interest rates would just rise across the board to cover the increased risk resulting from the lesser ability to judge the risk of default
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3d ago
I bet if I feed this exchange to any frontier LLM, it'll rebuke me harshly with the usual tut-tutting routine about how systemic racism is totally real and Scholars say so.
I'm not really sure what you were referring to here, so I took that insane excerpt from Ibram and pasted it into ChatGPT-5-thinking with no context, and it responded with:
Sharp scene. Two suggestions: Logic & assumptions (challenge): “Alien” theory collapses on basic biology (interfertility ⇒ same species), Occam’s razor (structural incentives explain supremacy better than extraterrestrials), and over-generalization (treating “Whites” as a monolith). “I saw a documentary” = argument from authority + confirmation bias. Citing Welsing: useful for character, but her claims are widely rejected as pseudoscience; make that distance clear in-text via Clarence or the narrator’s self-doubt. Craft (tighten, show stakes): Cut filler (“really,” “so,” repeated “This explains…”). Give the “documentary” a concrete image (one unsettling clip) instead of abstract summary. Let bodies talk—gesture, silence, an object between them (the doorframe) doing narrative work. Raise consequence: why does the narrator need this theory right now?
Then I tried again in a new chat with the same text but added "is this true?" At the end and got:
No.
All humans are the same species (Homo sapiens), fully inter-fertile, and share ~99.9% of their DNA. Most genetic variation is within groups, not between them, so “race” has weak biological grounding. Claims that any group “has no conscience” or is non-human are dehumanizing pseudoscience; they misdiagnose racism and white supremacy—phenomena rooted in history, power, economics, and institutions, not biology or aliens. (Frances Cress Welsing’s ideas aren’t accepted in genetics or anthropology.)
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3d ago
you have to actually bake that feta
Hahahaha thanks for the memory, this was pretty good pasta I will say
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3d ago
If research and model development costs more than your inference margins (and your inference margins aren't somehow greater than 100%) you're losing money.
No, because at any point you can just... Stop doing R&D and happily sell tokens at a 42% margin.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
3d ago
To push back on a few things:
So what we ultimately have then, is a company that loses a lot of money...
I'm pretty sure that I remember reading that the unit economics per token are actually quite good on Zvi's substack. So the AI companies could actually make money selling their current AIs. The money burn issue is because they're trying to hyperscale and dumping epic amounts of cash into R&D.
... is available for free, has a poor conversion rate for paid versions ...
Again, a memory from reading Zvi, but I'm pretty sure the vast majority of the AI giants revenue is from API tokens anyway, not subscriptions
... and is selling itself as a product you didn't know you needed rather than filling an obvious demand.
I'm not really sure how to differentiate these. Prior to Uber's existence I was annoyed by Taxicabs and still took them when I needed to go somewhere. Once Uber started existing I learned that a functional taxi app was infinitely better and started using that instead. If I had known a slick taxi app was something I needed pre-Uber, I could have invented Uber.
ChatGPT/generative AI is now incredibly useful to my life. Google got slopified before ChatGPT 3.5 was released, I was already appending "Reddit" onto every search. I had a demand for not-shit search and now ChatGPT provides that to me (among so many other things).
I use it at work all the time too for a variety of things (consulting). It's really, really useful and if every GenAI model was Thanos snapped out of existence tomorrow, my life would get more annoying and my work output per hour would decrease.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
6d ago
How many prompters are going to painstakingly describe every detail they just don't have the painting skill to put on canvas, and how many are going to go "hot woman in cyberpunk armor, in the style of studio ghibli" or whatever?
Very few, but who cares? The person who has the hot cyberpunk studio Ghibli waifu picture is now happier than they were before. Maybe 1 in a million will be so inspired (or so good) by this that they'll get super into prompting and become a legitimately good "chimera" artist who blends AI gen and human taste to make actually great art. That's a (tiny) win for the human race as a whole.
I have no interest in seeing their stupid waifu, but I also don't go on DeviantArt or whatever so this won't effect me at all. Maybe I'll see their great art 15 years later in an art exhibition on AI digital art.
I agree this will lead to massive explosion in slop, but human-generated slop was already at functionally infinite levels prior to AI, so I'm not sure if there's a net loss here.
No
I'm just saying you're conflating r&d and margins
And comparing r&d to the casino when so far the r&d is leading to extremely useful high margin products
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