kky
1d ago
I dunno, am I the only person who hasn’t noticed performance issues with VSCode? I keep myself to a pretty tidy set of plugins, and the thing lets me edit files just fine. I’m not running an overpowered rig or anything.
This is an open request for horror stories if anyone has them; they’re always good fun.
kky
1d ago
Russian history, perhaps? The Mongol domination was, if memory serves, fairly traumatic for their self-identity. Might be worth doing the legwork and going through a history of the Mongol period and immediately following.
Japan has an interesting postwar phenomenon where the masculine was severely repressed (i.e. pushed down from open representation) in favor of cute feminine and childlike appearances. But I’m not sure this was the American occupation so much as it was the fact that the previous ruling ideology was so overtly masculine and that it totally failed the country to the point of destroying their holdings and getting them occupied.
kky
1d ago
I wouldn’t say so, no. Learned helplessness is more: I couldn’t, therefore, I can’t, starting with the paradigmatic example of the tethered elephant. A lack of traction is more: I don’t know how, therefore, it’s impossible. A major difference is that you should expect the former only after extensive cudgeling, but the latter can arise out of a simple lack of stimulus. After all, the default state is not knowing how.
Small example. When my daughter was learning to crawl, she was REALLY mad. She wanted to get somewhere, but had no idea how to make it happen. She wound up going backwards a lot of the time! If I’d let her onto incel forums she’d be posting about “walkchads” and “leg ratio” and that she was NGMI (to the rattle which we’d put out of reach). But then she figured it out and everything was OK. She was frustrated, there was a lack of traction, then things came together. But you definitely couldn’t call that learned helplessness. Where would she have been able to learn it?
kky
1d ago
I’d disagree with you - your post seems to be entirely aligned with the blackpillers, in that it shares a central outlook on things. That outlook could be summed as nihilism, but the overtones of philosophical malice which that word implies are pretty misleading, in my opinion. If I were to give a real summary, it would be: the feeling that nothing one does is working. And to be quite clear, I think this is not about dating specifically.
There’s a particular psychological phenomenon, which I’m sure has a proper name but which I will term traction. Traction is the guttural sense that you are getting somewhere. It is the feeling that the things you do have a palpable effect on larger circumstances, and especially on your own fate. Traction is the internal representation of your own agency. Failing to find traction is, correspondingly, absolute torture.
Traction requires the experience of matching your own efforts to meaningful results. If you work hard, and do the right things, you will be rewarded. But there are two ways for this to go wrong: first, for a person to fail to find things to do which will yield tangible rewards, and second, for a person to get rewards despite failing. Both paths lead to despair, to the sense that what you are doing doesn’t matter. A person without traction is perpetually frustrated, in a sort of frictionless distortion of a world, all intangible images and no hard if painful reality. This experience is outright torture.
I’d argue that our immediate society is effectively set up to maximize frustration, starting from childhood. Schools have few avenues for real success or failure. If you are convenient for the teacher you will get approval, but excellence at the material has no outward effect. There’s no actual way to fail either, no real consequences to suffer, No Child will be Left Behind. And kids are stuck in that fake world for most of the day, leaving little time to go explore elsewhere. At home may be better, but a complacent parent will provide distractions for the kid that have no connection to their behavior (we used to call this spoiling the child) and make no real demands of them. College is little better, of course. And the political moment is so far against failure that even adults who should be failures are able to scrape by as if nothing was ever truly lost, and even collect Social Security as childless elders instead of facing their failure to directly or adjunctly reproduce the next generation who will care for them.
Anyway. Career trajectory is obviously part of this. If you can’t swing extra work into extra pay, or if that extra pay cannot visibly lead to things that concretely matter to you, then you have no traction at work. Why not skate by at minimum? Dating is as well. There’s a phenomenon where someone is trying to make a bigger leap, in terms of their own ability, than they think they are - usually because they’ve been carried past the point where they’d typically learn the elementary pieces. But making that leap in a single burst of effort is impractical, and the inevitable failure is frustrating. And if you keep getting your dole payments that bring the floor up on where you should be, such that if you were to go stand on your own two feet it would be a long and painful journey to get what you can currently get for free, then getting traction is a monumental task.
Dating is like this, I think. Porn, both for men and women (romance literature), gives a person sexual experiences they don’t really have a right to. Ditto the sorts of wish-fulfillment literature that lets a person self-insert into an infinitely pleasant and unchallenging relationship. Meanwhile, the actual starting point is obscured: the person who wants to date needs to start by learning to be decent around the opposite sex, what things they do or don’t appreciate, how to charm them and not offend them, and only then progress to things like flirting and courtship. An explicit dating relationship can only really happen on top of that foundation. And this applies to women too: if you’ve heard anything from the women miserable that they’re stuck in a “situationship” where they put out for a guy who won’t date them, it sure sounds like they’re the unfortunate equivalent of a guy who’s been relegated to simp orbiter. Neither knows what to do to get what they actually want.
The blackpill is nothing more than an expression of this condition. Nothing you do seems to matter; maybe nothing could ever be done at all? And it can apply to anything: dating, career, hobbies, even politics. We have a lot of political blackpillers on this forum, which I personally take as a sign that they’re trying to influence national politics instead of the more appropriate first step of coming to terms with one’s friends, family, neighbors. But national politics continues to deliver people political wins they don’t deserve, so we’re likely to continue seeing frustrated people for the time being in that dimension. And for you, friend, I have sympathy. I don’t particularly know what your struggles are, as your post mostly talked about generalities, but I’m guessing you’re from a striver background and are on the first or second rung of some or other intense career and feeling pretty lost. Or something else! I’m not a psychic. In any case, I wish you the best in finding something that is, to you specifically, worth the effort which you are capable of.
kky
2d ago
Verifying the output depends on the use. Code gives you a pretty easy time verifying. Searching docs depends: if you’re trying to find some info in the docs, this can be sufficient to get keywords and navigate to the section you want.
Lots of current LLMs are pretty good at copying text out of prompts when told to, e.g. page numbers. That can help a lot, since verifying is very quick.
Hallucinations and other errors are still very common and you must account for them.
kky
3d ago
I agree it’s complicated. My area is in fact building, if slowly, and localizes said building to defunct industrial zones. I certainly don’t oppose that, and even certain renovations to older areas. Obviously it’s better than unending penury for people on the margin. And just as obviously, new things need to be built for realistic amounts of money. You have my full deference on these points.
But it gets on my nerves a little, the YIMBY assertion that these population shifts are just a fait accompli, that there’s nothing to do but adjust. Because from my perspective, there are large companies which have an easy time justifying investment and expansion in these specific major areas which have generated the crisis as a side effect of their operations. Which, you know, I get, it’s just how things go, the strong will crush the weak without noticing, it’s just a matter of size, and at that scale you can’t care about every little feeling. Believe me, I get it. But at the same time, I expect more of our leaders, you know?
There’s one software company, out in WI, whose founder decided to just stick in the area. So they have, and have pulled money in. There’s a town close to me, fairly cheap, lots of universities, where you could probably stick a cool tech campus. Pull in some kids out of college for reasonably cheap, do good work. Short train ride from the big city. Why don’t we have that here? Is it just that this one founder was part of the Ubermenschen and everyone else is stuck with Last Men? Don’t we deserve more? Actually, don’t answer that last one.
I appreciate the conversation, by the way. You were respectful on the differences, brought receipts, and read what I wrote over just using it as a way to launch into polemics. It’s very much noticed and appreciated.
kky
3d ago
I appreciate that you brought receipts! It let me look at the area you’re talking about. It’s about 2x as dense as the areas I’m familiar with, meaning the rules obviously change. Looking at Parkdale, it’s clear that all the antique shops cluster at the end of Queen Street where there’s a big parking lot. I’ve never been there myself, but this doesn’t seem coincidental! The rest of the street appears dominated by entertainment, like restaurants.
you are aware it's this exact attitude that is causing the housing crisis right?
Wrong, actually. The housing crisis is a migration crisis: from old factory towns in middle America to the cities where prosperity seems to cluster. Why is that the case? Is that an inevitable property of reality, or is that the changing conditions of American markets driven by “knowledge economy” interests? There is an incredible amount of land in America. Why can’t people make a living in most of it any longer? This was not always the case, but it’s easier to talk about spoils in the few areas people have decided to fight over than the destitution of the rest.
kky
3d ago
No, the streetcar suburbs around where I live are definitely not downtown, and a very sizable fraction of the customer base for all the little squares comes in by car. It’s very visible. Thankfully, a sizable portion of that traffic can overflow onto the reasonably-but-not-overwhelmingly dense residential areas, which mostly have off-street parking and can absorb the surplus. This works in most mid-density suburbs and creates a nice environment, especially if you can take advantage of public transit on major commuter corridors to lower congestion at the worst hours.
There's no reason we can't have smaller retail units in condo podiums that mimic the way small storefronts on streetcar suburbs are.
I hate to say it, but the reason the small storefronts are better is that they’re managed independently. Centralized control has a way of making things anodyne and unpleasant. I’ve watched the million corporate developers try to ruin my homeland, and it makes me more certain than ever that such things should be left to the small.
kky
4d ago
You know, I don’t really feel the same way. I commute through the streetcar suburbs, and businesses there deeply need some kind of readily accessible parking for their customers, or they’re going to be forced to decamp for the malls and get replaced by walk-only substitutes like boba shops. That would leave major swaths of these areas unserved by any remotely niche businesses. I’ve seen this happen; I know a guy who lost his in-front parking to a bike lane and is considering moving for it. And I know this street well! Traffic doesn’t really back up around there, and there are extremely regular bus services for commuters.
This idea makes sense for max-density areas, but most of where I am is very old and divided in lots too small for any underground parking, unless you want to undermine small ownership in favor of the ubiquitous big developers. Personally, I like distributed decision making better.
kky
4d ago
You mean traditional bike lanes, next to the parked cars? Sure, it helps a lot with the standard problems. When I’ve cycled in the past, I prefer routes with bike lanes. Where I live, they’ve extended them such that, at traffic lights, there’s a “bike box” ahead of the stop line that left-turning cyclists can use. So you don’t have to merge with traffic, you just get over when the light is red and mosey ahead in full view of the cars before getting back in your lane. It certainly helps that the vast majority of cyclists are commuters running predictable routes, so you can get away with skipping infrastructure on most streets.
Unfortunately, they’ve also pioneered a new kind of lane that goes behind the parked cars. This is supposed to protect you from getting doored, which I admit is scary. A lady almost managed to get me when I was around 20; turns out my reflexes work just fine. But they introduce two new problems: first, traffic from side streets has to cross over the bike lane in order to merge; second, turning traffic and cyclists are obscured from one another by a screen of parked cars. This is part of what actually stopped my work commutes. The added tension of having to slow at every intersection to figure out what cars were doing was unpleasant enough to make me just give up and find other means.
Can’t imagine it’s fun to be a responsible driver in that part of town either, which is why I avoid going there by car too.
kky
4d ago
Maybe it was me that was missing the context. I wouldn’t worry about it either way.
kky
4d ago
And the menacing component. A cyclist who stays in their lane is no concern, but one who leaps around erratically is seriously worrying to drivers.
kky
4d ago
What speeds were you going, out of curiosity?
Zipper merge works fine at 20mph - lots of lanes in my area do it. That much is an everyday maneuver, especially when everyone is synchronized by a red light. Highway speeds, I’m less convinced.
kky
4d ago
That only works when cars are neatly spaced at double the safe distance, such that they can just move in without anyone dropping speed. In moderate traffic and above, doing something similar requires progressively greater slowdowns in order to merge successfully, frequently resulting in a jam.
I’m guessing it’s not a coincidence that the video is from Idaho?
kky
4d ago
- Yes.
- Under 5 for stop signs. Full stop for lights.
- Nope. Follow the flow of traffic. 5 over is almost always fine. Reduce heavily on quiet residential, out of respect.
- Only real rule is: don’t match pace with someone on your right. Speed up or slow down. Getting over is the best thing to do. Don’t ride anyone’s bumper, because it’s an obvious way to get in an accident and get stuck paying all the bills.
- It’s a little more nuanced. When you need to get over, be assertive, but be safe. Don’t play chicken or fuck around with physical law. But you don’t need someone to lay down the red carpet before you move.
- Follow the rules.
- If you realize you’re in the wrong lane at a light or some such, is it OK to break the flow of traffic to go where you meant to go, or should you continue as designated and course correct later?
FWIW all these questions are, to me, subsidiary to the real rules of driving, which are, in order of importance:
- Be in control of your vehicle.
- Keep yourself and others safe.
- Do not menace others, especially those who are more vulnerable, but also don’t worry people who are at risk of hurting you with your own vulnerability.
- Proceed in an orderly and predictable manner, following the customs and laws of the road.
- Ensure that everyone can get to where they’re going swiftly and cleanly.
Everything else is just a logical consequence of the above.
kky
5d ago
Agreed. I generally like these, because they’re fun and quirky rulings on edge cases for the law, unusual things that come up from time to time but which you wouldn’t really think about. The weird ones are the best.
This case is not that. It’s a bog-standard murder case where an unprovoked attack wound up killing someone, where the murderers did not obviously intend for the death but just as obviously did not care about whether or not it happened. There is a specific class for this kind of killing in every jurisdiction that I’ve bothered looking at, because it’s how you classify the casual killings committed by people who think violence is funny or a normal means to whatever end. The only thing unusual is how on Earth the trial judge dismissed charges in the first place, and any speculation there either stops at concluding ignorance or continues on into Culture War territory.
kky
5d ago
I really don’t get the proposal here. Is it that we naturalize the children of foreigners generation over generation for the service of doing work no one else wants to do, or that we maintain a permanent underclass of legally distinct residents who are restricted to such work? Those are the only two iterated versions of the model that I’m aware of, both have been tried in American history, and the second crashed and burned in a famous way while the first is currently in the process of doing so. So saying, in effect, “we already have a solution” seems a little strange here.
kky
6d ago
He’s not cynical, not exactly, or possibly just in a more original sense of the word. Obviously he’s got a biting tongue, and is quite funny and engaging, but his style goes further than that. He smoothly switches registers from that sharp humor to dispassionate but engaged explanation to quiet compassion to thundering moral imperatives. And at the heart of it, the beating heart that gives the writing meaning and purchase, is a sincere and rich if off-beat and cantankerous sense of what it means to be human, and a good one at that. He believes, and believes so strongly that those who read him often can’t help but to believe as well. It is, in my opinion, the core characteristic of the best artists (whatever the medium). Weak artists communicate their raw skill, or the popular views of the day, or self-interested navel-gazing, or shallow platitudes (sometimes positive, often negative). Great artists have a perception of the world, an almost indescribable richness of essence, which they strive to share. They see the clean and the corrupt, the fractures in the simple and uncomplicated views, and try to communicate what they see. And especially they love the goodness of it, which impels them to expression, however imperfect. I find that this imperfection is actually the hallmark of great art, a certain roughness around the edges, a strange and stilted section here or there, the part of a novel or movie that drags on a little long, a corner of a painting that is not perfectly lovely, an awkward sidebar in a thesis: this is the uncomfortable, indescribable real poking through. It is not necessarily in full contribution to “the point” or what have you, but it is necessary nonetheless. And Alone, for my money, is one of these serious artists, probably the only real and powerful thinker I’ve read in the 21st century. There are some pretty acceptable second-rate writers, who are quite good for the time, and perhaps Alone will wind up being too focused on contemporary issues to be particularly worth remembering in a historical sense. But my sense is that he stands with the best.
kky
6d ago
I happen to rather like that Alone post.
I think the original poster has it right, even by the lights of shuffling people from one program to another. What is SSDI to SSI if not a recategorizing of benefits?
The concept of "SSDI is just SSI, but targeted at a slightly younger and more blue-collar workforce" seems to be borne out by the second chart here (look at the small, pale blue bars). The numbers keep going up the closer you get to retirement age. In a somewhat more proper sense, this could be explained as: this is quite specifically the cohort you expect to get disabled, as they're manual workers who get old enough for all their little injuries to come back and bite them. Either way, not nearly as knee-jerk offensive as Alone's example, except in the sense that no matter how you decide who gets what, you're still creating a large class of people who are drawing on entitlements from the labor of unrelated others. But that's a far deeper topic.
The race-based charts just line up in the traditional poverty order. I dunno if there was ever any possibility of it being otherwise.
kky
7d ago
Preach, brother. Software is made to be clear and predictable. Learning to make it that way, one line at a time, is our craft. You can always tell the brilliant programmer apart because 99% of that code is simple as can be and 1% is commented like a formal proof. Worse than LLMs, reliance on LLMs risks undermining this skill. Who can say if something is correct if the justification is just that it came from the machine? There needs to be an external standard by which code is validated, and it must be internalized by humans so they can judge.
kky
7d ago
The Turing Test ain’t simple pass/fail. It doesn’t specify an amount of time for the interaction, for instance, or whether it iterates, or whether people know the characteristics of the AI. I’d say that current LLMs could fool Turing himself, on the first go, but given a few iterations and enough time he’d notice something was up. Look at how our mods play spot the LLM. This would be a blanket yes/no if the Turing Test were pass/fail, but in reality it’s an evolving thing.
kky
7d ago
But when it was written, the US made its own ships, on colossal scale. Getting US ships was no issue. It’s only after US shipbuilding declined that any of this became a problem. That’s why I’d lay the blame more at the feet of deindustrialization.
kky
7d ago
I’ll give a description of what I do.
I manage servers. Or rather, I write code to do this, in accordance with some rather specific customer contracts. The times we take action, and the actions we take, are highly constrained. Even the basic concept of updates is not especially simple. I’m sure you remember Crowdstrike taking most of the Windows world down in a day. What I do is not so apocalyptic on the world scale, but our customers would find a similar event devastating. So most of my time is spent figuring out every possible path through server states and ensuring that they all lead back to places where faults can be cheaply recovered. These properties lie above the code. You can’t understand them, for the most part, just by reading the code. But they are incredibly important and must be thoroughly safeguarded, and even highly intelligent humans who just happen to be ignorant of the problem space or are a little careless have made really, really bad mistakes here. The code compiled, the tests passed, and it even seemed to work for a little in our integration environments - but it was horrifically flawed and came within an ace of causing material customer damage. So I don’t much trust an LLM which has a much more constrained sort of awareness, and in practice, they don’t much deliver.
I realize that’s a little vague, but I hope it explains a little about a more backend perspective on these problems. If I were more clever I’d give a clear example which was not real, but barring that, I hope a characterization helps.
If we're talking dating in specific, the eternal challenge is that, like a job search, you have nothing to show for it until you have something to show for it. It's a binary; zero or one, success or failure. There's no obvious progress, it just doesn't work until it does work.
...Except that's not true, as far as I've been able to tell. The most romantically gifted men, starting from puberty or even before, don't see things that way, as evidenced by their actions. I'm talking the playboy type, casual and friendly and involved with women without any aggressive need for sex, natural at swinging that into a relationship when and as he pleases. He keeps score in a totally different way: by how he enjoys talking to women, being friendly or flirting or something more as the case may be - and if it isn't anything more, who cares? He's already on the board. And, as a matter of fact, those are the elements of cross-sex engagement that form the foundation for actual dating, the awareness of what women are like socially developing into a sense of what excites them and how to win their hearts. Put another way: imagine your average kissless virgin were to happen to get a girlfriend. Wouldn't he struggle massively until he was able to fill those same elements back through his experience with her? Wouldn't he have trouble satisfying her romantic needs, keeping her excited and attached, and even interacting with her on the banal dimension of the everyday? Even if you can skip the tutorial, there's no replacement for the basics. And obviously, the same applies to women, just in a different form. And I don't think that's just true of dating. Every one of the seemingly binary outcomes in life actually have concrete elements that constitute the potential for the correct outcome. The job search is a good example: people who are really, really good at careerism are always cultivating their contacts, they enjoy networking, they get a kick out of an interview just to learn what a certain place is like. And, in fact, that is the baseline for finding a good job and navigating upwards in it. Even trying to beat Magnus has concrete prerequisites - to have any chance at all you need to be at least 2500 ELO, for example, and that in turn requires you master the various basics of chess, and so on and so forth, and whether or not you get remotely close to your goal is of course founded in your native talent but also in how much you can appreciate and pursue those lesser accomplishments. And, for what it's worth, I think that merely becoming quite good at chess can be a great outcome, even if your initial goal was foolishly to score a point off of Magnus Carlsen.
So much for the practical side. How about theory?
Deciding on what to pursue and why to pursue it is the unsolvable question of life. Some things we get more or less for free, like basic drives for hunger, sleep, etc, and some things we get socially, like the sense that a girlfriend or a white picket fence should drift into frame at some point. But what exactly one should do, what marks success as distinct from failure, is inherently a value judgment and has no absolute scientific answer. Of course, that doesn't stop people from waffling about evo psych or some such if it's their wont, but we all know about the naturalistic fallacy. But knowing what your destination is, even in a rough and sketchy sense, is an absolute requisite for navigating life. Imagine the captain of a ship who does not know where he is going or what he hopes to do when he gets there. What would the point be of such a voyage? He stares across the horizon not knowing if open sea or visible land is preferable; he adjusts the steering and the rigging not knowing if he should go this way or that or faster or slower; he comes across a beautiful island or a vibrant port and stares dumbfounded, even coming in to dock briefly, but soon leaves again as he has no idea what to do there; and in the end, he develops a sense that storms are to be avoided because of their unpleasantness but little else. But a captain who has a goal, even a vague one of "find what lands there are in this direction and what they are like," is grounded and guided in his ventures, even where his knowledge and ability might be vague. He can learn and adjust as he travels, become a better captain, and eventually have something to show for it.
And this sense, as it applies to life, is one of the central pillars of the old liberal arts education: the aesthetic. Aesthetics, the sense and study of what is beautiful and what is not, is the fundament for all subsequent judgments. When we say we want a good life, what I believe actually obtains is that we want a beautiful life. We want to be surrounded by what is beautiful and meet, to have the cadence of our lifestyle bear a harmonious rhythm, and to have our life story tell itself a lovely tale. But telling the beautiful from the ugly requires some education. In the old days, this was done (for the common folk) through repetition of folktales and religious extracts or (for the elite) through explicit indoctrination into a specific tradition. This, I think, holds across the entire world, as a pattern. But these days this story is weak. Postmodern perspectives refuse to judge beauty if they do not actively attack the beautiful. The common folklore is shared through advertisements and popular media, and peppers vague platitudes into the central message that the good life involves a credit card. Finding the right thing to do is harder.
But, of course, it isn't impossible. The prescription is simple: engage with art, especially older and more spiritual art, and decide on what is beautiful enough to pursue. Just imagining that one is obliged to find a girlfriend is insufficient. What does a romance mean, what kind of woman does one want, what kind of man does one have to be to be a partner to that woman, and what kind of woman would want the kind of man one would have to be to be a partner to the kind of woman one wants? And given that, where might she be found, approached, attracted? That's the real question for our imagined incel. And even then, the answer doesn't have to be concrete. A failed search for the East Indies can instead yield the West Indies, although I guess that's not really a positive analogy for the ladies in this scenario, given what happened next. But a lifelong pursuit of the aesthetic and a vague goal to motivate can help one hone in on a real set of goals, something real to accomplish. And that accomplishment has to start with the notion that there is something worth accomplishing.
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