pbmonster
3d ago
Am I the only person in the world who wasn't familiar with the song "Mr. Brightside"?
No, same. Both my work and my extended family listen to (different) classic/vintage/modern rock radio stations 24/7, and I'm 100% certain this song hasn't been on rotation once on any of them since it was released.
pbmonster
3d ago
That's unnecessary, right? Neither eggs nor larvae can survive stomach acid. The dangerous thing are female flies laying eggs on you.
pbmonster
4d ago
With a little bit of luck, that's the absolutely cheapest way to drive for the next couple of years. Even if you buy the cheapest, crappiest Chevy Bolt and charge it only using your solar panels, it's going to be more expensive per mile than this car. I'd try to get this thing to 300k miles out of principle.
pbmonster
5d ago
Contrary to the other responses, the job can extend to include many of the responsibilities of management of a club. It can be a real, full time job.
The promoter can be the one to book/organize/run logistics for live acts and DJs, control the guest list, be head host, run all of marketing, head of sales, ect.
What alternative investment thesis would you propose?
Global index funds, as always.
There's a chance the AI bubble will look 2001-ish, and I don't think tech is To Big To Fail yet, so they are going to save the banks but let tech go through the market correction. In that case, index funds will bleed badly, but I can just hold and whoever ends up buying the IP and infrastructure for cents on the dollar will be in the index anyway - and the rest of the economy will continue to produce value, so they'll make it through the following credit crunch, inflation and/or interest rate turbulence relatively intact.
And if AI isn't a bubble, performance will be good either way, since most index funds are tech heavy anyway and most other constituents will also greatly benefit from AI takeoff.
pbmonster
5d ago
I think the question is, why is there no sympathy for Russians wanting to escape conscription
The current answer to that for most of western Europe is "because there's currently no credible fear of conscription for Russian men". The moment the Russian military actually starts drafting and punishing conscious objectors, I expect full asylum rights for Russian men that can show a well-founded fear of persecution or a risk of serious harm.
This is already happening, a Russian anti-war activist could apply for asylum pretty much anywhere in the EU.
pbmonster
5d ago
You're right, Amazon isn't the best example. For comparison, the rest of FAANG make more than $500k of profits per employee and have been for a long time. Amazon has to many people in comparison - but even here, $50k extra per year makes a significant difference for the janitor. Maybe makes it more obvious that Bezos only got there by exploiting a large number of workers.
In the Mondragon system, the share itself actually has no value, since it is not tradeable by design.
The thing that has value is the capital account, and those typically only vary by how long a worker has been with the company - and it only gets filled with actual profits. So Bezos and janitor #1 have pretty large capital accounts, but the rest of the 1.6M employees have less, since they haven't been with the coop for as long.
pbmonster
6d ago
which is plainly impossible
I don't think it's that clear cut. If Amazon would have been set up e.g. like the Mondragon Corporation (a worker coop), a janitor with the company from the very start would have been a worker-owner from the beginning, accumulating dividends in his individual capital account within Amazon. His salary would have been lower than Bezo's by orders of magnitude, but the share of the company both of them held and the size of their dividend accounts would have been the same.
Now, Mondragon isn't nearly as large or successful as Amazon - but they are relatively large and successful.
Other fuels have gone through saudi arabia to the red sea. Iranians are trading at record rates through the caspian sea, pakistan and through central asia. Iraq has a land boarder with Turkey.
This is optimistic. Land borders are irrelevant, the Caspian is irrelevant: because we're talking multi million barrels per day, the only thing that matters is existing pipeline capacity, available short term. And there's really only three pipelines in the area that matter: the Saudi East-West pipeline to the Red Sea, the Abu Dhabi Crude Oil Pipeline to Oman, and the Iraq-Turkey pipeline to the Med. Their max capacities are around 7 million barrels per day, 1.5 mb/d and 1 mb/d, respectively. But they all already carried fuel before Hormuz was closed (albeit not at full capacity), so if you want these pipelines to substitute for crude carriers through the strait, you might get an additional 4 mb/d through them, 7 mb/d if you're lucky (that requires the Saudi to do some real magic to their pumping stations, and you need to unfuck the political trouble between Iraq and Turkey that prevents them from using that pipeline - and even then, it doesn't even connect to Iraq's major oil fields in the South).
That leaves the global market short 13 mb/d, -13% in total. And that's a major oil crisis, almost double the shortfall of the Arab oil embargo of '73, which quadrupled oil prices. Once the strategic reserves run dry, the oil price is going to do violent things.
And then there's, of course, the matter that pipelines are extremely large, effectively impossible to protect and thus really easy to bomb with drones.
pbmonster
13d ago
It can go a long way by basically feeding you an existing project and not mentioning where it got it. I don’t mean to oversimplify and say that this is all models do and that there’s no reasoning, but I think people underestimate just how much is memorised
I have the same experience. It's just so glaringly obvious when it has to code something that is rare in its training data.
Load this folder of data (convoluted structure, some data is binary): perfect oneshot
Build a database from it: perfect oneshot
Do some signal processing on the data for cleanup: good ideas, uses the correct libraries and algorithms unprompted, but not immediately usable
Make plots for me to debug the signal processing: perfect oneshot, signal processing is now usable with minimal handholding
Data analysis, involving multiple integrals over the data along different axis: completely wrong, not even close. A first year grad student could solve this in a few hours, this is in at least a dozen of standard sub-field specific text books and has a very specific name - but it's probably not on github.
Discussion about a factor of 2 included in some text books, but not in others: completely wrong. having this discussion with an actual parrot would be equally as productive as the stochastic parrot.
pbmonster
15d ago
Here’s why it’s a problem. (Some basic science)
Slopslopslop.
And not even good slop, no, non-thinking low parameter slop.
pbmonster
19d ago
That's insane, is this online shopping from unknown brands or emergency shopping right before an event?
My hit rate is 100%, because I'm picky and I only shop in person and I try everything on. I often leave without buying anything, because I know what fits and what looks work for my body type and aesthetic.
Either you need to simply walk away more often, or this is a skill issue. The latter can be condensed into a hand full of straight forward rules. "The cuff needs to be this long", "the shoulder seam needs to sit right on this bone", "lifting both arms must look just so", "squatting in new jeans must feel like that and show this much ankle". The exact values for all that can be gotten from YouTube or guides on manosphere blogs and /r/malefashionadvice. All 3 are dangerous, because half those people dress like retards, so look at the pictures and decide if you want to look like that.
I've added a couple of additional rules that save me lots of time by not even trying things on ("absolutely no synthetics, 1% is unacceptable", "the maximum size of a logo is 1/2", "no baggy/skinny cuts", "only plain, neutral colors"), but that's basically it.
pbmonster
19d ago
I mean sure, there's tons of jobs in robotics like that, but those robotics competitions were designed (at least originally) to funnel young nerds torwarts going to college for electrical engineering. Because the field needs large amounts of those, too, and for the last 20 years you could more easily make more money (unless you made it into Boston dynamics et. al) if you went into pure software instead. So a little PR for a career close to the hardware was a good idea in principle.
If you'd want more technicians straight out of school, you'd do something like an RC racing league with a build phase for the car/drone.
given that the birth rate decline is being caused by less coupling, and not by mothers having fewer children.
It's all of those, right? There's women who want children but lack partners; but there's also women who have stable partners and never end up having children anyway; and women who have children, but stop after 1/2 - either because they started to late, or because of lifestyle choices (housing/career/hobbies being in conflict with having a larger family). I suspect each of those groups to be significant. "Conscription" could help with the latter two.
Of course, conscripting women for motherhood is gonna be tough
I think there's pragmatic ways. Allow women to delay their non-military national service until they're 25, and wave it if they have children by then. Hell, do the same for men. Allow the women to drop out immediately upon reaching the second trimester while still maintaining their pay. Have the non-military national service use mandatory barracks for unmarried personell, and co-locate those with the military bases that do basic training for the conscripts. Don't actively hinder the inevitable parties to much.
Still, no way this gets you TFR > 2. That requires a pretty radical social change. I suspect making parenthood high status might be the only way.
pbmonster
27d ago
I don't think I have ever, in my entire life, heard anyone discuss fertility rates "in real life", outside the Internet.
Interesting, is this in the US? In Europe in general, but especially in France and Germany, the "demographic transition" has been a permanent fixture in the media and in public discourse for at least 30 years. I have childhood memories of seeing inverted age pyramids in newspapers.
Understandably, since the fertility rate (or "children per family", the more palatable euphemism) has cratered earlier here, and the financial scheme behind their social systems is reliant on young workers. Which means they are even more fucked than all the other countries with low fertility, so at least they are aware of the problem.
pbmonster
28d ago
And if they don't die, they need to change. The doctors know the stats, at the very least they could/should be frank with their patients.
A friend of mine was told during her first consult with the IVF clinic that a chance of success at "high confidence" would require a number of eggs equal to her age at implantation - so to prepare for 3 rounds of egg retrievals at the bare minimum, and as soon as possible. She got unlucky, and the first round only retrieved about 4, so the number of cycles was immediately upped. When she asked if they couldn't try those 4 first before cycling again, she was advised to not waste time and get the inventory as young/soon as possible, and to expect more setbacks.
Sounds like this lady did a single (more successful) retrieval cycle, and nobody showed her the math.
pbmonster
1mo ago
OK, all good arguments. Maybe I'll have to take a deep dive on what's possible in open source land on that front (I refuse to touch Adobe/Abelton et al.). Do you use commercial models/implementations or do you have a recommendation where to start if I want to set it up myself?
Not to mention they tend to have ridiculous censorship
That's the nice thing about just renting a VM on expensive hardware from runpod. They don't care at all what you do, because you provide all the software yourself.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Interesting, does the software integrating those non-LLM AI functionalities offer to run this in the cloud for you? My experience with both image generation/manipulation and local LLMs has been that its almost always better to run those loads in the cloud - either directly from the big AI labs, through a vendor like openrouter.ai or on a rented GPU like runpod.io.
You can very well do it all locally, but it's a pointless toy with 8GB of VRAM, semi-interesting with 16GB and you're finally cloud-independent with 24 GB of VRAM. And you can get many hours of GPU time on runpod.io for the price you'd have to pay for this much VRAM.
But yeah, I haven't worked with audio models and the things Photoshop can throw at a GPU.
pbmonster
1mo ago
what stupid and crazy people are like. They always existed, and always had these ideas. The only thing that has changed is that Duggan can now see them. Nothing got worse - if anything from my impression, the internet makes correct information easier to get than ever
I think unfortunately, this also goes the other way. Misinformation is also much easier to get, giving us the toaster fucker problem:
"Man wakes up in 1980, tells his friends "I want to fuck a toaster" Friends quite rightly berate and laugh at him, guy deals with it, maybe gets some therapy and goes on a bit better adjusted.
Guy in 2021 tells his friends that he wants to fuck a toaster, gets laughed at, immediately jumps on facebook and finds "Toaster Fucker Support group" where he reads that he's actually oppressed and he needs to cut out everyone around him and should only listen to his fellow toaster fuckers."
I have previously been using an old non-subscription version of AutoCAD, but I’m not sure the budget will support paying for a subscription moving forward, so I’ll need to switch to something free/cheaper. I was thinking most likely FreeCAD.
This sounds like light hobbyist use, like for some 3D printing? Any laptop from the last 5-7 years will have no trouble running that. Unless you're designing large assemblies or planning on doing simulation work on your designs, I'd just get >16GB of RAM and call it good.
I'm a firm believer that nothing important has happened in the PC space for the last 15 years (Apple Silicon is another matter, but it didn't sound like you're interested in that). We did everything you want to do 15 years ago on Windows 7, and it was fine. Because we suck at software design, doing the same thing now needs more RAM, so we gotta buy that. Done.
If my current PC dies, I'm getting another Thinkpad X1 Carbon, probably 8th Gen (those are from 2020 and go for around $500 when getting a good condition business lease return, and sold for >$2000 6 years ago). Matte full HD screen, good keyboard, solid build. X series Thinkpads have lasted more than 10 years of hard use under my care historically, and I would expect this one to continue the legacy.
But really, any PC from that era will do fine at your workload. I'd choose on price or other secondary features. If you get a desktop tower, spend your money on a nice display/mouse/mechanical keyboard and maybe passive cooling instead of compute.
pbmonster
1mo ago
The writing smacks of the fedora, if you catch my drift
Reddit certainly loves it, yes. Read it on recommendation from one of the SF subs, and hated it. Its main weakness is that Locke is such a Mary Sue. I find characters that simply excel at everything annoying. Other than that, it's decently written Fantasy James Bond with forgettable world building.
Would not recommend.
do slave concubines even count against the 4 wife limit?
Of course not, what are you talking about!?
In that sense, the predominant genetics of the area got polluted.
There's no genetic evidence of this happening. Northern and Southern Italians differ genetically quite significantly, but that difference goes back much longer - bronze age and copper age. Southerners are most similar to Greeks, while northerners are most similar to French.
Also, that span of genetic difference isn't really that uncommon. North and South Germans have similar genetic differences, for example.
Maybe it's a regional thing?
At least internationally, for sure. Ironically, women in France almost never wear "French manicure", but anecdotally I'd say wearing nail polish in a muted color on short nails is more common than in the anglosphere. Practically all French (or western European women in general) I can think of at least sometimes paint their nails at home, and wouldn't even get acrylics for their wedding.
This is true, but I think you put the cart before the horse: US electricity demand has been flat between 2005 and 2020. Renewables have been replacing aging coal plants that were not economic to run under those conditions - the most expensive generators went off-line first, starting with aging coal plants that would have needed major CAPEX.
This might have resulted in more environmental protection, making coal even less competitive than it is anyway. But make no mistake, coal would not have been competitive with natural gas plants either way. It's all around worse, not only because the tree hugging hippies getting their way politically. Coal is more expensive to produce (especially since the shale revolution), more expensive to transport, more expensive pre-treatement, the plants are more expensive to staff, the plants are significantly less thermally efficient and the plants are much slower to ramp. And, yes, pollution control is significantly more expensive for coal.
There's a reason why most data centers try everything to get their hands on a gas turbine or to even get a nuke back online, and nobody even thinks about building a mine mouth data center.
People could have built more aluminum/silicone smelters or arc furnaces in the US in 2005, paid market rates for electricity and keep those coal plants going for a little bit longer (until the next gas turbine - or later, solar panel - would have put them out of business anyway). But they built those in China, because steel workers and coal miners and power plant personell are much cheaper there. And yes, pollution control is also cheaper there.
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