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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
5d 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.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
6d ago
They're implying that this illegal immigrant from Guyana is a sketchy character and it seems like he is a sketchy character
This is profoundly circular
"The media is trying to make them look sketchy, and from media reporting, they seem sketchy, so that makes sense"
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
7d ago
It's the only other place on the internet (aside from here) I regularly interact with as the users don't immediately make me want to scream.
Best I got lol
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
7d ago
Quite literally the old school definition of left but I admit at this point "left" means "shitlib" and not "Marxist" despite the old dictionary definition
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
7d ago
link a mainstream left-wing forum, where the news broke, and everybody's aghast at what happened
https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1ndmpmj/charlie_kirk_shot_at_utah_event/
https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1ndpw16/charlie_kirk_has_died/?sort=top
Almost every top comment is some form of "oh shit this is gonna get worse" and "this is bad"
Maybe if you scroll hard enough you'll find people crowing about it, but all the top comments I saw were unhappy he was shot.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
7d ago
I think you're of the age where your school experience was a "last chopper out of Saigon" situation.
Grievance politics is larger now, although I strongly suspect it's incredibly school and teacher dependant.
In "generic suburban highschool #42 outside of Boise, Ohio" I bet it's similar to what you wrote. In "MLK Jr highschool in Bushwick" I bet it's a lot more grievance-y
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
7d ago
What level of incompetence and acting like the elite in Versailles is required for the constitutional right to fight back to take effect?
It's simple. If the person fighting back is part of the in-group, they are based and understandable, if maybe a bit over the top.
If they're in the out group... They are horrible borderline terrorist individuals who are wholly representative of the entire out group, justifying why the out group sucks and must be crushed into impotence.
Why do you hate fun?
"Oh no, hundreds of millions of humans will be able to express themselves artistically in ways that were never possible before, resulting in an explosion of creativity and human expression"
You don't have to scroll the Facebook newsfeed or Tiktok brainrot. Both of which were absolute slop even before ChatGPT 3.5
It's not like HBO is going anywhere. In fact, I would assume AI lowering the cost of VFX, etc will result in more prestige TV, not less, as lower costs allow for increased scale and more risk taking. Plus lower barriers to playing with art may mean more people discover/develop latent artistic talent and get into the industry.
Low quality fan fiction has been available in infinite quantities for decades, and yet there are still high quality books being published. Low quality digital art exists, and there are still excellent artists. Quality art will always rise to the top (AI will probably help you discover it).
All I can think about when people get cranky about AI art is what portrait painters in the 1800s must have sounded like sneeding over how cameras aren't real art because it requires no skill as the camera does it for you.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
8d ago
I wouldn't say "This incorrect. Pant waist size means the number that a hypothetical tape measure would read when measuring around the waistband."
Because you're not a valuator.
"fair market value (FMV) is the highest price, expressed in cash, at which property would change hands between a hypothetical willing and able buyer and seller, each acting in their own interest in an open market without compulsion to buy or sell, and with reasonable knowledge of all relevant facts"
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
11d ago
Suffice to say, no, its not a class thing, it is a race thing.
So you think the behavior is genetically hardwired?
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
11d ago
At my white collar office, "yes sir"/"thanks sir" has become so overused I wouldn't be surprised if women are saying it to each other.
It's like a weird intersection of young people imitating "business speak" combined with frat dude culture combined with some actual respect, but taken to pantomime levels.
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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