pbmonster
3d ago
I don't just want an open source model roleplaying as Homer Simpson (or whatever), I want it thinking nothing but Homer thoughts from the ground up.
The main problem for something like that will training data. You say "at only minor expense", which means you're considering renting GPUs (as opposed to just training on a gaming PC)? The most common tutorials on that scale use many hundreds of millions of tokens of training data (training on TinyStories (500M tokens) and Wikipedia English (4B tokens) is common, books3 (100B tokens) is sometimes used for more ambitious and capable toy models).
And even if you just take a small open source model (or your own toy model trained on TinyStories) and do some post-training fine tuning, you'll still need millions of tokens of training data. I'm not sure Homer had enough lines across the almost 40 seasons to even get this far.
And all but one of male friends have paired up with women who are also not like this, even if some may be a little woke, and only one or two ever spent significant time on the apps the rest just met at work or school like the old days.
Exactly, and all my female friends and family members also all have paired up with entirely normal men (desperately holding out for Chad to finally commit never seems to have been an important part of their lives). The vast majority also still get married.
With regards to the fertility crisis, the real problem seems to be that all those "normal, old school" couples seem to consciously choose to have exactly zero or one child. Even two children is rare in my bubble, three or more totally unheard of. Which, of course, results in exactly the TFR we're seeing.
I don't really understand why. Especially the in-official one-child-policy baffles me. Maybe having one child already scratches the itch of parenthood enough? Maybe the tolerance for discomfort has gotten lower, and most young parents end up being surprised how difficult (especially without significant support from family, who universally live far away now) the first few years are - and choose never to do that again? Maybe the "universal theory of housing" is correct: most of us live in classic 3 Bedroom apartments, condos or town houses, which works out exactly to parent's bedroom + child's bedroom + study/guestroom?
In the era of ChatGPT, Google, and Wikipedia, ignorance is inherently willful.
Don't overestimate the median poster on social media, especially on the images-and-video side of the internet. Even GPT is TL;DR. Wikipedia isn't only much to wordy, it's straight incomprehensible. Google just wants to sell them something, or get them to watch a video made by somebody just as well informed. I'm not saying it doesn't often start with a bad actor working on an agenda. But the spread (and memetic drift) is entirely fueled by very incomplete information supporting a preexisting ideology.
I've met well-educated and otherwise capable people who support "de-growth" and "solar punk" aesthetics. Their eyes glaze over when they hear the first "calories per acre" or "supply chain of poly-silicon". They like the idea of gardening. And that's enough.
pbmonster
8d ago
I don't know how common that's in the US, but doctors at hospitals are probably the career professionals that can most easily reduce their working hours without significantly impacting the quality of their work. Want to only work 2 days a week? No problem, just take fewer shifts, and the hospital hires more doctors of your specialty.
In Europe, this leads to many doctors reducing working days while their children are small.
the people who want intelligent reasoned discussion are the same people who come to the correct conclusions on most topics.
"Most" is doing a lot of work here. The audience of theMotte is only human, and as such perfectly capable of dealing with cognitive dissonance in unproductive manners. From the top of my head, I remember several discussions on "leftist" topics like vegetarianism, anti-car ideas, electric cars, solar power, urbanism, ect. that not only didn't result in "correct conclusions" (whatever that means in any context), discussion (and voting) wasn't very "intelligent" or "reasoned".
I think you could discuss those matters objectively and rationally. I think on a topic of... I don't know, "the culture of meat consumption in the west, and the necessity of factory farming to sustain it" you could come to a objectively and rationally "correct conclusion" after considering the ethics, economics, health impacts and negative externalities.
But I also think you couldn't do that here.
That's just classic "toxic masculinity", with "macho" and "chauvinist" being the closest linked slurs.
They don't land as hard, maybe because of the tacit acknowledgment that many women find some degree of macho/machismo attractive, and "chauvinist" is just to... intellectual, I guess.
pbmonster
9d ago
Having the LLM do expensive things cheaply in e.g. python is doubly beneficial, since a lot of the tool calls (again: game states, chess engines, navigation software, ect.) are not only much cheaper (in FLOP/s), but also are often CPU loads instead of GPU loads. That frees up the GPUs for LLM inference of other customers, while a cheap CPU runs some python scripts on the side.
An again, the results will be much better. Using python for math will get correct results to math questions. Calling a chess engine means almost all humans will loose that game. Only calling a map app unlocks correct world model answers to navigation and spatial reasoning questions.
pbmonster
9d ago
Alright, I stand corrected. Still, sounds like it was a lot less frequent for agricultural labor (which probably always was the vast majority of slaves) than in other systems of cattle slavery.
pbmonster
9d ago
Yes, all of those. Instead of burning hundreds/thousands of tokens on game state/memory each turn, you can run a simple state machine for comparatively free compute. This will also be more deterministically correct (you could even do correctness proofs if you really want to, or just have the LLM write a bunch of tests), because if you keep game state as tokens, you currently have no guarantees/tests.
pbmonster
9d ago
it told me that it could fix these problems. And it did so in an interesting way: After each move in the game, it spelled out the game state in text. After that, it stopped making errors
And that's the worst way to solve this problem. What it should have done is write a tool call (to a state machine in python it itself wrote, mapping your rules to logic; or an open source chess engine; or a geodata software suite - whatever is required), and then just using the language model for interacting with you and the tool. This solves many problems created by the lack of a word model - much better than plain text ever could.
I suspect GPT would have solved the problem this way with a little nudge, or if called from a coding harness instead from the chat window, because many of those capabilities were added over the last few months. Previously difficult world model questions like "I'm driving from Bordeaux to Prague. The drive will take two days. Find a spot to spend the night, roughly in the middle, where I can go rock climbing. Don't add more than 60 minutes of additional driving." are now trivial, since the LLM just creates a hand full of Google Maps calls. Without tool use, arguing its way to correct solution was not possible - the travelling salesman cannot be argued with.
Unfortunately, this only shifts the problem a little. You now need good tools for manipulating the world. Many already exist, but others need to be created now. Some of those tools need a lot of non-LLM AI themselves (lots of robotics is like that, but getting a robot to fold laundry seems to be in reach), others probably need an entirely new approach (getting an LLM to call a CAD kernel to create 3D parts and assemblies seems like a monumental task, both in old-fashioned logic and vision capabilities).
How can society better support the men who sincerely look up to Clav as role model? Is there a way to become as viral as Clav by doing pro-social things (so offering a viable competing worldview)?
A counter-example to Clav would be a Youtube channel like Sickos. It's six childhood friends who try to make viral videos by doing Redbull-fueled stunts into water, snow and dirt, and a big part of their videos is just six bros ribbing each other, goading each other to bigger stunts, partying together and just hanging out.
They've been doing that for half a decade now, and their fans (mostly tween boys, from the crowed they pull at fan meetup events) got to watch them progress pretty considerably in their extreme sports skills, get rejected by girls they hit on, meet long-term girlfriends for the first time, and become financially successful on Youtube. While most are conventionally attractive men, several of them are self-admitted short kings who struggle with approaching women. While most of them are extremely athletic, their wide variety of sports almost guarantees that at least one of them sucks at the sport they're filming at any given point, which gets exploited for laughs. They show that all that is OK. And a recurring part of their videos is showing that they're afraid before big stunts, and that overcoming fear is worth it.
They speak Clav's language, but mostly make fun of it. They're very aware of status (they often approach girls in clubs by telling them they have "surfed Nazaré" - highest wave in the world in winter, they surfed it in summer, neither of which most of the girls will be aware of) and "chester-maxxing/peakcocking" (they often go outfit shopping together before partying and end up buying crazy fits), but they always show that not taking those things to seriously is important.
Certainly not without its faults (getting this good at surfing/skiing/motocross it's an expensive way of life), but a much better world view than red pill/PUA/looksmaxxing culture.
So you would need to mandate TPM chips in every device with more than four kilobytes of address space or something.
This is the direction the wind blows. I think it's almost inevitable. Phones, tablets and laptops are basically there already (TPM/secure boot/ect.), the one thing missing is that the boot loader on a few phones and most laptops isn't locked yet. But it will be, soon, just like the phones. The industry wants it that way, and politics wants it, too.
The next steps are easy. The only bootable OS on those devices comes with age checks and a locked app ecosystem. The only browsers available will cooperate. Then websites will be required to implement hand shakes dependent on keys in the TPM, and only serve data to valid devices.
And sure, you'll be able to get around it for a while, especially on niche hardware. But if industry and politics cooperate, getting onto Instagram will soon be as difficult as getting a 4K Netflix stream on a "custom operating system" (i.e. only by the grace of Usenet/torrents).
pbmonster
10d ago
Russian serfs didn't have to be afraid their wives or children would be sold off to a far away plantation at any time, for one.
pbmonster
16d ago
Archive.is basically abuses the fact that most publications want their content to show up on search engines. It pretends to crawls the html once and then just displays the cached version to the user.
pbmonster
16d ago
My favorite autobiography is Barbarian Days by Will Finnegan. It's special, because most people with interesting lives aren't very good writers, and most good writers didn't live all that interesting lives. Finnegan is different. He's an exceptionally good writer (the book got him a Pulitzer), and he had an extremely interesting life - which he mostly spent surfing. It's pretty low drama, but full of interesting people, places and times.
He reads the audio book himself, an does so well.
It certainly helps if you like surfing, but I don't think it's required.
pbmonster
16d ago
Follow-up: Anyone have a reliable way for Substack? I'd gladly get a subscription along the lines of "unlock 10 pay-walled articles per month", but I'm not paying several hundreds of dollars per year for just a hand full of authors... they really need to rework their subscription model.
Also, by my impression going up the corporate ladder of some BigCorp has a much better floor AND a better ceiling unless you're exceptionally confident in yourself. But it probably depends highly on the field.
Absolutely depends on field. The vast majority of Germans (and basically all other Euros) cannot independently reach real wealth by being wagies. There are exceptions - if you have the education (enough credentials in the correct field) to really go up the corpo ladder or to become an expert at the local branch of a US company/startup, you don't need to risk anything - but the overwhelming majority of people simply do not have a route to break into a 6 figure salary while employed. The distribution of salaries is just to narrow, and there's almost no long tail in Europe (things look orders of magnitude more dire if you aim above 200k: less than 1% of adults in Germany earn more than 200k EUR, and that number includes all sources of income - so there's a lot of business owners, partners and capital income recipients in that block).
But if you own a business? There's no cultural monetary limits. No education/credential requirements. "Just" the soft skills, the drive and some luck (which you need to climb the cropo ladder as well) can get into the top few percentile points of income/wealth. And sure, you need to build momentum. You need to pick a field that allows for commerce (because selling things scales much better than selling labor) and that allows you an easy path to exploit the labor of the people you hire. But both come practically built-in with many blue collar careers: many of the people in those field do not want (or cannot) directly compete with you, they want to be hired; and most of your customers don't only need to buy labor, they also need physical products (which you can sell them with good - and often obscene - margins).
pbmonster
21d ago
I'm curious what those particular folks think of this today.
Strongly against, as always. Getting fingerprinted should require a warrant. Collecting this data without suspicion of a crime is a human rights violation, the data collected this way will eventually be misused, and almost all of it is ineffective security theater anyway - if you're a danger to society, this won't stop you.
I'm also definitely jaded with time. The stuff is unavoidable, every part of the West is on its way to become a surveillance society. In the intermediate future, car licence plates will be tracked by toll cameras, people will be tracked by facial recognition and gait analysis through surveillance cameras and the new eID systems they're building will be required daily to do anything at all online.
pbmonster
21d ago
Even in that fight Halmich got caught in a grapple.
Boxers do that all the time, right? No real penalty for doing so, so you don't have to avoid it. Getting on his inside and using her shorter levers and better technique might even have been advantageous. But yes, catastrophic for her in an MMA fight.
pbmonster
21d ago
Yes. Same goes for the fighting style itself. Black Widow goes in close, often for a quick take down.
The tactic that worked for Halmich was staying out of range with far better leg work, provoking strikes at his range limit to tire him out, dodging/blocking them easily and then going for low risk ripostes as he obviously ran out of gas after a few rounds. Doesn't make for good cinema.
pbmonster
21d ago
We don't, same way we don't know that he didn't have insider knowledge of what the next set of "random" tasks he excelled at would be. But he's know to be comically competitive and overambitious, it would be out of character for him to throw a fight or cheat. But yes, we can't know.
There is/was a German TV host that can serve as our "slightly above average man": Stefan Raab. In the early 2000s, he had several successful TV shows, one of them was pretty simple: a challenger needs to beat him in a tournament of random tasks. Quizzes, shooting pool, racing cars, rock climbing, race of cutting bread loafs, classic tug of war, ball games. The details are not terribly important, but Raab was comically difficult to beat. He destroyed a long list of (perfunctorily) competent looking opponents.
He's also relatively tall and heavy. And he had the bright idea to challenge Regina Halmich, female world champing in flyweight boxing for 12 consecutive years, to a boxing match. He reportedly trained for 4 weeks, and she destroyed him in 6 rounds, breaking his nose in the process. And it was not close. He had absolutely no chance, only a freak knockout could have saved him - but he can't really touch her at all, making that difficult.
So that's one data point. I'd put Raab at around +1 SD of the adult male, both in general fitness and in boxing. That is not enough for the female +4 SD, at least not in boxing. I'm sure wrestling and MMA would have looked different... but maybe not, not sure if 4 weeks of training is enough not to end up falling on top of the female world champion - just to get choked/arm barred immediately anyway. Also, Halmich (above) is a flyweight. A heavier/stronger woman, one who additionally is trained (and allowed) to kick, might shift the difficulty for the average man again.
Still, looks nothing like Black Widow, obviously.
pbmonster
21d ago
The best female athletes in the world across a variety of sports roughly equal the athletic performance of ten to twelve year old boys.
No need to go overboard here. Let's go with 15 year old boys on elite teams. Not doable without at least some testosterone and some training.
pbmonster
27d ago
I mean it's possible that I've been reading propaganda. But what's your explanation why the carriers were inside the Persian Gulf during Operation Iraqi Freedom, but this time they're so far offshore they need to run aerial refueling operations for most strike aircraft to make it back?
It's gotta be anti-ship missiles, right?
Come on, this is oversimplified to a degree it's wrong. "Masculinity and dominance and physical power" is only one dimension of what makes an attractive man. There's also charisma, verbal/emotional intelligence, appearance/style, competence, and (of course) status.
If you send the most masculine gangbanger to a party also attended by a sunny boy pro surfer, a lead singer/guitarist of a half-decent band, a frat bro lacrosse player, a male ballet dancer and a navy fighter pilot - and they all agree that gangbanging is low status - the gangbanger will not pull, not even secretly.
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