Men really aren't built for monogamy, huh? [...] 3. The few who actually just disagree.
I'm certainly in 3. I think most men are, too. I barely have the time or interest to put up with/keep track of one woman at a time. I'll also take monogamy (and an IUD) over condoms and a harem. If I ever blow anything up for the cause, spare me the 72 virgins - I'll take one moderately slutty broad who know what the fuck she's doing and hates texting.
Cases like Greene's seem to vindicate me.
Do they? He's so far from a typical guy. I have an enormous amount of trouble understanding how anyone's response to any of this is "ah yes, let's post about my legal troubles on Youtube." I may be old.
lagrangian
25d ago
to the absurd ("speeding is actually safer because a vehicle that isn't keeping up with traffic causes more accidents when people try to pass').
I have always assumed this is true. The famous graph of it is called the Solomon curve, showing that the lowest rate of accidents occurs slightly over the mean speed of traffic. It's from 1960, so take it with a larger grain of salt than most studies even, but I don't see why it's an "absurd" claim that this is true.
Doing some further research, what I'm seeing is that the rate of accidents is, as per Solomon, lowest at the speed of traffic. But, that the fatality risk and injury severity if you are in an accident increase with speed. This makes it a non-obvious EV-maximization problem to answer what speed to drive at.
It is absolutely plausible that accident rate varies with # of cars passing you (or that you pass). My mental model is that the safe thing is to go the same speed as the cars in your lane. In principle if that were faster than road conditions allow (rainy, curvy, but somehow left lane is still doing 85), it's an unsafe lane - but probably still safer to travel at the speed of those around you.
I'm open to the idea that going at the +10 found in slower lanes is safer than going at the +20 found in the faster lanes. But, I think "going the speed limit is safer, in any lane" is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence.
I'm curious, Mottizens: what speed would you drive at in perfect conditions (straight, flat, sunny, minimal traffic), in a 70 mph interstate?
Had a second date today. She's great. I mean, great. Just objectively an obscene number of things in common, but different enough to be interesting, and the chemistry was there. Never felt this way really, although one other time was in the ballpark (...and then I moved out of state).
Unfortunately, she learned today that she's "definitely" leaving the state for work related reasons, permanently, in a month. If I had any sense, I'd've walked away when she gave me this news, early on in the date, along with the suggestion that I do so. Instead, I'm going to just ignore this fact, I guess, despite my dating goal being "a very serious relationship at a minimum" - next date Saturday. Why ignore this fact? Well:
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there's some reasons (omitted for anonymity) to believe it's more "probably" than "definitely"
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genuinely enjoying the dates
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market research
And it's not even a "well, let's at least get laid" kind of thing (or I'd just text my ex instead of being back on the apps...). I wouldn't be shocked if we do sleep together, but I might actually try not to, in the interest of not getting hurt more than necessary. Might, anyway.
At a minimum, I think I've just found the bar by which future secretarial interviews will be judged. At a maximum, hell, I work remotely and make rash decisions sometimes - maybe I leave the state, too. I "definitely" won't do that. Even if she stays, I think long term she leaves, but by that point it'd be not crazy to imagine following.
I do in fact realize the above is rashly strong, I really do. The saner takeaway here is that I should approach dating more seriously, more optimistically, and with higher standards - women like that do exist. But damn, if not for the atomization of society, the tendency of high achievers to move around so much; if we'd met in some small town before the internet, the outcome would, with reasonable probability, be the obvious and happy one.
I did some napkin math. With 3.5M people in my greater metro area (~1 hour driving radius), I estimate 22 potential matches (though she clears a bar more than a bit higher):
| constraint | frequency | dating pool |
|-------------|-----------|-------------|
| human | | 3500000 |
| female | 2 | 1750000 |
| 25-34 | 5 | 350000 |
| 99% iq | 100 | 3500 |
| attractive | 3 | 1167 |
| attracted | 3 | 389 |
| politics | 2 | 194 |
| single | 3 | 65 |
| personality | 3 | 22 |
I can't decide if 22 is good news or not. I lean "good news" but finding 'em is a bit elusive.
lagrangian
8mo ago
A comparison I haven't seen posed: Kamala vs Hillary. I think the comparison points to a Donald victory. Since he beat Hillary, he'll beat Kamala. (Meta: why is it that Trump is rarely referred to by first name?)
Hillary has the stronger resume: U.S. senator (2001–09) and secretary of state (2009–13) for Obama. Compare to Kamala: attorney general of California (2011–17), U.S. Senate (2017–21), VP (21-). Or, maybe it's a tie, if you're somehow impressed by her time as VP.
Criticism of Hillary's demeanor is around being elitist and robotic, which beats Harris's positionless word salad.
Trump 2016 was much scarier: as a total unknown, it was at least a little more credible he'd do, uh, much more than be in office while three Supreme Court judges died.
lagrangian
6mo ago
Absolute raging bullshit. The chances that the most major breakthrough in physics debateably ever happened without any indication on Arxiv etc is tiny. The chance that furthermore the engineering work to scale up the discovery happened without it being leaked massively is zero.
I am embarrassed that the responses here so far are giving this any credence at all. It's always nice to be reminded of how wrong I must be about areas I know little about given that when people comment on my areas, they're often confidently hilariously wrong.
lagrangian
2mo ago
Do you agree that capabilities have progressed a lot in the last few years at a relatively stable and high pace?
Yes and no. Clearly, things are better than even three years ago with the original release of ChatGPT. But, the economic and practical impact is unimpressive. If you subtract out the speculative investment parts, it's almost certainly negative economically.
And look - I love all things tech. I have been a raving enthusiastic nutjob about self-driving cars and VR and - yes - AI for a long time. But, for that very reason, I try to see soberly what actual impact it has. How am I living differently? Am I outsourcing much code or personal email or technical design work to AI? No. Are some friends writing nontrivial code with AI? They say so, and I bet it's somewhat true, but they're not earning more, or having more free time off, or learning more, or getting promoted.
Do you agree that it's blown past most of the predictions by skeptics, often repeatedly and shortly after the predictions have been made?
Again, yes and no. Yes: Scott's bet about image generation. The ability to generate images is incredible! I would have never thought we'd get this far in my lifetime. No: anything sufficient to really transform the world. I have not seen evidence that illustrators etc are losing their jobs. I would not expect them to, any more than I would have from photoshop. See also Jevon's Pardox.
I think that is the crux of our disagreement: I hear you saying "AI does amazing things people thought it would not be able to do," which I agree with. This is not orthogonal from, but also not super related to my point: claims that AI progress will continue to drastically greater heights (AGI, ASI) are largely (but not entirely) baseless optimism.
Are there even in principle reasons to believe it will plateau before surpassing human level abilities in most non-physical tasks?
Nothing has ever surpassed human level abilities. That gives me a strong prior against anything surpassing human level abilities. Granted, AI is better at SAT problems than many people, but that's not super shocking (Moravec's Paradox).
Are there convincing signs that it's plateauing at all?
The number of people, in my techphillic and affluent social circle, willing to pay even $1 to use AI remains very low. It has been at a level I describe as "cool and impressive, but useless" forever. I will be surprised if it leaves that plateau. Granted, I am cheating by having a metric that looks like x -> x < myNonDisprovableCutoff ? 0 : x, where x is whatever metric the AI community likes at any given point in time, and then pointing out that you're on a flat part of it.
If it does plateau is there reason to believe at what ability level it will plateau?
No, and that's exactly my point! AI 2027 says well surely it will plateau many doublings past where it is today. I say that's baseless speculation. Not impossible, just not a sober, well-founded prediction. I'll freely admit p > 0.1% that within a decade I'm saying "wow I sure was super wrong about the big picture. All hail our AI overlords." But at even odds, I'd love to take some bets.
lagrangian
1yr ago
Does anyone have advice for transitioning from FAANG -> finance/HFT?
I know some c++, but not a ton, so "learn more c++" is the obvious first step. Beyond that, unclear to me what to do. I'd like something fully remote that pays better than FAANG and is less soul crushingly boring. Something with high performance code instead of just tons of business logic.
Relatedly, I'm about halfway from (1-2 years away from) promotion to senior. Worth sticking around to get it, or jump ASAP? Leaning "stick around" to hedge my bets and have time to study.
lagrangian
5mo ago
Could we hear from a mod who wants an AI policy even as permissive as "quoted just like any other speaker"?
My two cents:
How AI generated content can be displayed. (off site links only, or quoted just like any other speaker)
off site links only, other than very short quotes not making up the bulk of a comment, and even that I kinda hate
What AI usage implies for the conversation.
the end of my interest in a thread and a sharp drop in my respect for the user
Whether a specific rule change is needed to make our new understanding clear.
yes, please. otherwise, it's far too easy to spam, lowering quality and increasing moderator effort.
Bottom line, I think we need to discourage AI heavily. Otherwise, long form content - the hallmark of much of the best content here - is immediately suspicious, and I am likely to skip it.
lagrangian
6mo ago
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Lasik is great, independently of the rest of it. I did PRK despite qualifying for Lasik, because it's better and how bad could the pain be for a week or two? Excruciating, as it turns out, but worth it to not have a flap in my eye
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How'd you get banned from Hinge?
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Could you literally hire someone to be your full time dating assistant/coach/fashion coordinator?
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My career is going well enough that I would definitely be willing to spend ~$50,000 in a single night if it would guarantee me sex
Well that one's definitely doable. In all seriousness, maybe a sugar baby? In addition to achieving the proximal goal, it could help you build confidence.
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If you don't have a trainer, get one. Ideally get one who doubles as good practice interacting with women, if a lack thereof is part of your problem.
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If your company is hiring remote employees, uh, DM me (faanger)
We have lots of programmers and aspiring programmers on here. Is there interest in my hosting a (possibly regular) "office hours" via discord etc? Career advice, code review, anything I can help with. --FAANGer
Edit: link is http://meet.google.com/ieq-zixv-xwf
lagrangian
4mo ago
I'd rather not even talk to the cashier. I definitely don't want to fuck the hypothetical harem (given the alternative option of a ~zero-effort monogamous casual arrangement, or, even better, a high-effort monogamous serious one).
freely fuck but not otherwise have to interact with in any meaningful way
But "fuck" is a whole lot of interacting with a stranger. (don't) Fuck that.
lagrangian
1yr ago
statutory rape is very much not rape
To be clear, are you espousing the belief that an adult (e.g. a 30 year old man) is in no way morally transgressing to have sex with an enthusiastic twelve year old? Nine year old? Toddler?
lagrangian
4mo ago
To me, this is impressive, but not that impressive: sure it answered the question, but it didn't pose the question. In the same way, LLMs are decent at writing code, but have ~no ability to decide what to write. You can't just point them at your codebase and a bunch of email threads from PMs and hope it writes the right thing.
I don't know how many plausible hypotheses there are for the question it solved, or how hard it is to generate them, but it's surely much easier than looking at the state of the field as a whole and coming up with a new idea for which to generate hypothesis.
AI is a junior engineer.
lagrangian
1yr ago
getting taken advantage of
I think a key detail here is that alcohol is a helluva drug. It's quite easy, especially as a smaller, younger woman to overestimate your tolerance. Either of you also might not know what's in the punch exactly, or how long you hit the keg.
So, the ethical thing is to look at the person as you're getting to bed and ask "ok, but really, is it OK to have sex here?" I think if she'd never in a million years have sex with you after a moderate amount of alcohol, no. If in the heat of the moment and a bit buzzed, she'd probably have said yes, you're at least in grey territory, potentially fine, depending on the details.
We finally fired the guy. (I'm a SWE at FAANG.) I'm so relieved. You would not believe how much time and documentation it took. I'll estimate 20 pages of explaining his mistakes, not counting the code itself, over the course of six months. I have no idea how much time and energy our manager had to put into it - probably more than me. After 3.5 years, he was at what I consider 1-1.5 years of skill. How the hell he got promoted, I do not know.
I got asked to be his lead (kill me), which is good for my shot at promo to senior (results tomorrow!), so obviously I said yes. I immediately start complaining. Our manager doesn't see the problem. After a couple months of casual complaining (read: spending ~half my highly-valued weekly 1:1 sharing examples), I put together a meticulous spreadsheet. He sees the problem and says Junior needs to rapidly improve or will be fired. Junior makes no progress. Junior insists he is making great progress. Four months later, Junior is offered a severance or PIP and, in his first display of real intelligence, takes it.
Two of my favorite mistakes:
- He asserted that my code review idea to use an interface was conceptually impossible because when he tried it, the compiler said "attempting to assign weaker access privileges; was public," which apparently he found inscrutable. Solution: change the impl to also be public.
- On a project whose entire point was "set a timestamp, then filter stuff out if it's before that time," he set the timestamp wrong. It was set to the epoch. He had no tests that caught this. After this was pointed out, he pushed a new commit that was also wrong (differently). Twice. After four months on this project, he almost finished - the smaller half of it, which should have taken 2-3 weeks.
I have complained about this ongoingly to everyone I know for months. It was getting to be a problem. Work is so much chiller now. I can literally see the day he got fired in my sleep tracking metrics, as everything discontinuously improved.
What drove me the craziest was that my manager, reasonably, was too discrete to be straight with me about his agreement. I'm not sure at what point I really won him over. This left me chronically feeling unsure if, in the eyes of He Who Writes My Reviews, I was nitpicky and disagreeable, shitting on a coworker who he thought was just fine. Thankfully, the ending of the story strongly suggests he didn't think that, but it's still unclear if it hurt my reputation.
Or helped it - I did just save the company over 1 SWE-yr/yr, in perpetuity.
lagrangian
2yr ago
I've been seeing a woman for two months now. Both early 30s. She's very busy with work (which often takes her out of town), but even so, we've had an all-day date each weekend. She's finally in town during the week, so we're getting dinner tonight. I think I'm going to ask her to be my girlfriend. We talked about things a couple dates ago and established that we're not seeing other people. I feel like exclusive and girlfriend aren't even very different, but a little. More expression of intent to grow things. It's not that we discussed and avoided bf/gf labels last time, we just didn't talk about it.
It's been a minute since I've gotten this far into things with someone. (Four years ago, a three month relationship; seven years ago, 7 months; some fucking the ex mixed in there...) And the last couple times I have, I felt like I had more sense that there was a reason things wouldn't work out. This one actually seems plausible, which is scary. It's not entirely clear to me how I feel about her, which is reasonable for two months. But it just makes me feel guilty, like am I just saying things and following steps because it seems like the thing to do (and also, sex)?. I don't think so, I really think there's something here, but feelings are confusing. Who knew.
We've both basically lived alone and had intense jobs forever. It's weird imagining fitting someone into my life, maybe even living with someone eventually. Weirder, I think I like the idea. This just in: even programmers are social mammals.
Also weird is that I'm in good shape and have money now. I've never been terrible on either front, but man, does seem to be helpful. How to split expenses is an awkward thing I haven't figured out yet, and I just don't care that much. She seems quite well off actually, for not being a programmer/doctor/lawyer. Also, hot. And not crazy. Didn't seem to particularly care for my briefly discussing the motte style politics, but also just doesn't seem to care about politics or generally be terminally online, which might be better than agreeing with me in the first place...
There's a lot of middle ground between "unaffordable except for the hyper rich" and "just skip your starbucks sometimes and you too can have it."
E.g. once a week for four hours is ~50*4*35 = $3500 7000/yr - considerably less than many people spend on vacation or dining out. I think Scott's point is more that he was failing to acknowledge that even that level was possible for him. Even if you drop that to once a month, it's still a real quality of life change to be able to recharge somehow without the kid as needed.
Of course there's something to be said for living near family and not needing to pay for this, but that's a harder option to make possible for many people than budgeting for occasional help.
lagrangian
1yr ago
Related followup: what is the safest OTC sleep aid? Thoughts on doxylamine (unisom)?
lagrangian
4mo ago
Are you saying you consider moldy bread edible? I throw away the whole loaf, and would look at anyone doing otherwise strangely. I'm wondering if this is a geographic/cultural norm - I'm from the US, for context.
For some reason, growing up, for cheese we would cut off the moldy part plus a couple inches, but I've mostly chalked that up to "grew up less well off than I am now" + "Jewish cheapness".
lagrangian
4mo ago
lagrangian
5mo ago
I haven't actually heard you say why you feel you haven't had sex, explicitly anyway. Could you just choose to do it?
I feel like there is a significant range of attractiveness that isn't sufficient to be all that exciting from a strictly visual standpoint, but is entirely sufficient to want to sleep with someone you love.
I don't think it's as obvious as others seem to that not sleeping together for one year is immediately a problem. I would happily take the least attractive of my exs' bodies with my favorite ex's personality over the reverse.
I'm automating Hinge. Android emulator, pyautogui, PIL, GPT-4o. It's almost too easy.
The flow is:
- pyautogui: take a screen shot. With a 1:8 aspect ratio on the emulator this gets the whole screen. Earlier versions scrolled and stitched together, which mostly worked, but boy do I feel stupid not thinking of it sooner.
- AI: prompt to extract information from the info section (height, job, age, education, etc), an assessment of personality (nerdy, travel loving, high fashion, etc), and a physical description (weight, race, hair color), and an overall assessment of if she's my personality/physical type. (Note: the goal is nerdy but hates travel and isn't high fashion!)
- python: ignore literally all of #2 except the job and education. If either matches a whitelist of terms that signal smarts, proceed.
- PIL: split the screenshot into sections, using the like buttons.
- AI: transcribe (for prompts) or describe (for images) each section (separately) and provide a response. (My favorite part: I have it refer to her as The Candidate, which is how we have to write interview feedback at work.)
- AI: given all the transcriptions/responses, pick the best one.
- pyautogui: click heart button, type response, send.
Costs me about $0.04 to reject, $0.10 to message. I think I can get that down some. I only ran it for one batch, and it got a match faster than I normally do. Small sample size, but I am optimistic.
As to why #3 is so simple - I initially had a hand written weighted average of all the things, but looking at the actual behavior realized that:
- Really all I care is that she's smart and not terribly fat
- GPT-4o is not good at telling me if she's fat, so far.
Favorite kerfuffle: it messaged a woman, shown in a photo by a giant 10ft novelty planted pot: "is that enormous, or are you tiny"? It...was certainly not the latter.
This raises some questions for me:
- Do I let it do more than the first message? Probably not - it's just the endless swiping/messaging into the void I dislike. Conversion rate match -> date is tolerable.
- Could I let it literally do everything up to and including putting a calendar event on my calendar? Probably so - I'd say it'd cut my conversion rate in half.
- Do I admit I'm doing this? n=1, but I did, immediately, and it went well for me.
lagrangian
1yr ago
Reading the details, this strikes me as reasonable on the part of the Biden admin.
Two major caveats on what you've written:
- The news in the press release is about an additional 7.7 gigadollars for 160 kilopeople. Your figures are for the total over his entire term.
- This is, like all previous loan forgiveness by Biden, not a giveaway so much as letting people qualify for forgiveness programs for which they fell through the cracks. E.g. from here
Automatically cancel debt for borrowers who would otherwise be eligible for loan forgiveness under income-driven repayment (IDR) plans, like the SAVE Plan, or Public Service Loan Forgiveness but are not enrolled in those programs.
It's also forgiving loans for people on permanent disability. That one's a little more questionable - I imagine some "permanent disabilities" are sketchy at best. But, still not "free money for all."
I think it's important to acknowledge that this is (afaik) very much not a giveaway to all or even most loan holders, including those doing well. I'm against executive orders/overreach, and I want to see the government stop giving out loans for underwater basket weaving as much as the next Mottizan, but this is just much less crazy than it seems at a glance.
On the plausibility of Mars Bases vs that of AI
Responding to @FeepingCreature from last week:
That was a continuation of this discussion in which I say of AI 2027:
As to Mars:
Most of what I know here comes from reading Zach Wiener-Smith (of SMBC)'s A City on Mars. It was wildly pessimistic. For a taste, see Gemini chapter summaries and an answer to:
"Given an enormous budget (10% of global GDP) and current tech, how realistic is a 1 year duration mars base? an indefinite one? what about with highly plausible 2035 tech?"
I agree with the basic take there, both as a summary of the book and as a reflection of my broader (but poorly researched) understanding/intuition of the area: Mars is not practical. We could probably do the 1 year base if we don't mind serious risk of killing the astronauts (which, politically, probably rules it out. Maybe Musk will offer it as a Voluntary Exit Program for soon-to-be-ex X SWEs?)
My main interesting/controversial (?) take: there is an important sense in which Mars bases are much less of baseless scifi nonsense than AI 2027.
Mars is a question of logistics: on the one hand, building a self-contained, O2 recycling, radiation hardened, etc, base requires tech we may (?) not quite have yet. On the other hand, it strikes me as closer to refinements of existing tech than to entirely new concepts. Note that "enormous budget" is doing a lot of work in here. I am not saying it is practical to expect we will pay to ship all of this to Mars, or risk the lives, just that there is good reason to believe we could.
AI is a question of fundamental possibility: by contrast, with AI, there is no good reason to think we can create AI sufficient to replace OpenAI-grade researchers with forseeable timelines/tech. Junior SWEs, maybe, but it's not even clear they're on average positive-value beyond the investment in their future (see my previous rant about firing one of ours).
I don't understand how anyone can in good faith believe that even with an arbitrary amount of effort and funding, AGI, let alone ASI, is coming in the next few years. Any projection out decades is almost definitionally in the realm of speculative science-fiction here. Even mundane tech can't be predicted decades out, and AI has higher ceilings/variance than most things.
And yet, I am sensitive to my use of the phrase "I don't understand." People often unwittingly use it intending to mean "I am sure I understand." For example: "I don't understand how $OTHER_PARTY can think $THING." This is intended to convey "$OTHER_PARTY thinks $THING because they are evil/nazis/stupid/brainwashed." But, the truth of their cognitive state is closer to the literal usage: they do not understand.
So, in largely the literal sense of the phrase: I do not understand the belief in and fear of AI progress I see around me, in people I largely respect on both politics and engineering.
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