quiet_NaN
23d ago
However, the demand that other people refer to you with a specific designation is not really a natural right, and in fact, suppressing or compelling the speech of others is a violation of other people's rights to free speech.
So forcing the German Jews to adopt the name Israel or Sara on legal documents was not a violation of their rights? If some racist jerk wants to call everyone he considers Black 'Nigger $lastname' instead of 'Mr. $lastname', or if a state mandates this, that is all just fine?
You can not compel people to really treat you as your identified gender any more than you can compel them to treat you as one of the cool kids. If a bearded person in a dress complains that none of the guys at the bars are buying them drinks, that is not really actionable.
I think there is no reason to even track the gender or sex on driving licences or in DMV databases. Outside Kansas, people are generally not driving with their dicks.
I think the US is generally rather accommodating with name changes. If you do not like the name your parents gave you, you can change it. The government is generally not going to say 'you were assigned Kevin at birth, you will never be a Benjamin'. But here the government of Kansas is saying 'all of you who have changed their name to Benjamin, all your identity documents are invalid effective immediately. Get new documents which say Kevin.'
This is basically 'your passports are invalid until you get the J stamp', the state unreasonably punishing an outgroup for partisan reasons.
To the extent that I would have a problem with the current state of affairs, I would find that the entire licensing regime that the government imposes on the people -- forcing them to register and pay fees in order to drive and participate in society -- is the actual problem here, not merely an unpreferred gender marker.
Making driving a car an inalienable right would have large negative externalities. Of course, the libertarian approach would be that what qualifications you need is between you and your liability insurer.
By contrast, for all the moral panic about trans people from the Republicans, the state not caring about your gender identity matching your sex assigned at birth will not have such negative externalities. Nobody is forcing anyone to suck trans cocks. As a straight guy, I can spend weeks without thinking about the existence of dickgirls at all, something which MAGA seems completely unable to achieve.
I am also doubtful that for all the CW-ness of transness, it will be a vote winner for either side. Most people are not trans, nor do they frequently suffer from their tinder dates having unexpected genitals or losing to bearded people in athletic competitions. When the SJ left campaigned on trans, they mostly lost badly, but not because Americans hated trans people, but because they were apathetic -- "here I am stuck trying to make ends meet, and you want me to care about the plight of some sexual deviant". I have high hopes that the reaction in 2026 will be similar: "grocery prices are through the roof, and the MAGA elites want to tell me that forcing some Kansas trannies to get new driving licences is a win for the little man somehow".
quiet_NaN
23d ago
Technology has always replaced jobs, thats how it always goes. New jobs will arise.
I would argue that this time, it is different from the industrialization or the computer revolution.
The computer revolution was the first time the machines came for stuff which had previously required intelligence. In the niches where they were good, they totally crushed humans. Before electronics, computer was a human job. Today, I can waste more multiplications on playing a video game for an hour than humanity solved in total in 1900.
On the other hand, electronics also came with very sharp limitations. A human who might have worked as a computer in 1900 still had skills which the machines did not have, and could thus be running Excel in 1995.
This time around, it is much less clear that the median human will still have any intellectual comparative advantage over the machines. Heck, even the median MINT PhD might not find employment for their brain in 2035 any more than anyone found employment for their multiplication ability in 2000.
So your "new jobs" which will arise might well being the biodrones of an AI: wear AR goggles and simply follow instructions. Walk to the indicated rack. Unplug the indicated network cable. Plug it back in at the indicated port. Drink exactly 50ml to avoid failure from dehydration without requiring more than the minimum of bathroom breaks. An exciting day at work for the most qualified biodrones might be when they were used to replace the CPU in a machine.
quiet_NaN
23d ago
I think you can trivially make an LLM deterministic in the technical, narrow sense that for exactly the same input you get exactly the same output. Just initialize the pseudo-random number generator deterministically.
However, where LLMs differ from most classical deterministic algorithms is that they are not stable, a small change in the input might result in a big change in the output.
Suppose I have a list of strings I want to sort lexicographically. If I use std::sort (and stick to ASCII), I can expect to get reasonable results every single time. If instead I give the task to a neural network, such as a human, I will get some significantly non-zero error rate. If I use an LLM, I would also expect an elevated error rate. Of course, both the LLM and the human might also refuse to work with certain strings, e.g. racial slurs.
Generally, nobody uses neural networks to solve problems which are easily solvable by classical algorithms, teaching aside. But there are a lot of problems where we do not have nice classical algorithms, such as safely driving a car through the city or translating a text or building a website from informal specifications. So we accept the possibility of failure and hand them out to LLMs or grad students.
quiet_NaN
26d ago
I am not sure this is a good top level CW post. In large parts it is basically the format of Scott's link posts, each line with a link and a sentence or three of hot takes.
It is fascinating to see how something that was absolute NO in traditional rules of war "Generals do not take pot shots at each other" became normalized in the rules based order.
{{Citation needed}}. I will grant you that in medieval times, people were more likely to kidnap and ransom a noble where they would just have stabbed a commoner to death. But even in WW1, flag officers were killed quite frequently -- shells do not discriminate, after all.
I think that assassinating generals is probably the most humane way to wage war. After all, a general is much more costly to train than a squad of infantry, so it causes the maximum of monetary damage for the minimum of human suffering (apart from shooting down a fighter jet, perhaps).
It would however not work as a broader strategy in Western countries like the US. My estimate is that if you managed to magically kill the top 1000 US military officials, the effectiveness of the US forces would perhaps drop by a few percents, because the US has no shortage of people who are both competent and loyal.
Contrast this with an autocratic regime like Iran. Military coups are a real threat in such countries, so successful dictators engage in coup-proofing. You want someone who is loyal to you personally while also being competent. It is a dynamic not unlike that of vassalage (as seen in the Crusader Kings series, for example): you need to appoint a noble to manage some fiefdom you conquered, but how do you make sure he won't stab you in the back at the first opportunity? Often you pick someone who is family or has married into your family, or perhaps a childhood friend. Or at least a protege who is known to be in your favor.
The Iranian army will probably have plenty of people who are competent to lead them. It is much less certain how many they have whom the Ayatollah would trust with leading the army, though.
3/ Yet more Middle Eastern issues
Israeli ultra-orthodox revived ancient European tradition of burning cats and dogs alive as part of celebration
Very based and trad pilled.
Per your link:
Liani first learned about this phenomenon – an unexplained act of abuse popular among teenagers – when she was in sixth grade in Ramat Gan.
The way your source it describes it sounds more like a social media fad than an ancient tradition revived by the ultraorthodox. Why would the orthodox revive a cruel spectacle which was popular with 18th century's gentiles? Why not accuse the Jews of murdering Christian babies while you are at it? This seems especially pointless as Nethanyahu's idea of peace in Gaza remains clearly visible, the ultra-orthodox are quite bad without them burning puppies and kittens alive for religious reasons.
quiet_NaN
27d ago
And something like LLMs with automated theorem provers seem incredibly well-suited to potentially get us toward something like this.
This would have been my suggestion as well. If an LLM can produce mathematics on a PhD student level, then surely it can also formalize that to the point where it can be verified by a theorem verifier.
So you can run them in tandem: an unreliable LLM prone to hallucination, but somewhat creative, and a deterministic small verifier with a small code base.
That it is much easier to verify a result than to come up with it is a pretty unique property of mathematics (though certain analogues exist in CS). Contrast with experimental particle physics: there is most emphatically no verifier with a small code base which can test if a given data analysis is sound or unsound (which is foten a bit of a judgement call, in any case).
I think alignment might be easier if we focused solely on proof generating AIs. Of course, even then it is not impossible that an ASI might create proofs which contain infohazards which will cause humans to set it free, but an ASI would have to be a lot more powerful to deduce how to hack humans just from knowing what kinds of math they have invented instead of being literally trained with the accumulated knowledge of mankind.
Sadly, this is not where the money is expected to be, so we won't do that.
quiet_NaN
27d ago
The Start Menu, and searching within it, is far and away superior to the way macOS handles applications (and Linux splits the difference and fails at both; both KDE and Gnome suffer from this, though in different ways).
The superior way to start an application is to type the name of the binary, optionally followed by a space and arguments, optionally followed by an ampersand, followed by the enter key.
I have about 4k different programs in /usr/bin/. Menus are tolerable if there are a few options to pick, like at the ATM: Do you want to withdraw money, see your balance, recharge a prepaid card or quit? I certainly do not want to specify twelve bits using some GUI. Yes, keyboard searching might make that more tolerable, but can only hope to approach the comfort of the command line interface. (I should mention that I am not some purist, I think that it is fine to use a GUI and mouse for things which map very well upon a concept of a 2d surface, such as vector graphics, CAD or first person shooters. But 'pick a program to run' is not one of the problems which has an intrinsic 2d representation.)
Apart from that, judging operating systems by their user interface is a bit like judging a motor vehicle by its infotainment system: sure, it is relevant, if the navigation system is too painful that is bad. But at the end of the day, most vehicles are not picked for their infotainment system, but for a mixture of other factors such as signaling, price, capabilities, TCO and so on.
quiet_NaN
28d ago
I think this is a good idea. It's not like many AAA games are acclaimed for their dialogue, characters and writing, people literally joke about how crap their writing is. Let people have conversations with in-game characters, why not?
I think an your typical AAA game needs LLM-powered NPCs as much as a drowning man needs a rock. If nobody thought to give the NPCs more dialogue, filling the gaps with AI slop is not going to help.
I think an LLM might substitute for a mediocre DM in an RPG, though. Certainly in text-based formats, but possibly also in something with graphics (e.g. Neverwinter Nights). The benefit would be that it could accommodate player character ideas. So rather than saying "You can not play a lycrantrophic half-elf changeling", it would modify the setting. Perhaps figure out how the fey fit into the cosmology and the overall plot. Invent relevant side quests, just like a human DM would.
The problem with this approach is that presently, if I have to pick between a pre-generated character with a questline written by humans (BG3) and a character of my own invention with quests written by AI, then I would much rather stick to BG3. Likewise, even if I were totally into dinosaurs, it seems highly unlikely that I would enjoy a version of Tolkien's epos where all the non-hominid animals (horses, ponies, eagles, black wings, dragons, spiders, etc) are replaced by appropriate dinos better than the original, simply because AI is nowhere good enough to write something like LotR from the scratch.
quiet_NaN
28d ago
that homosexual transsexuals or HSTS and autogynephilic transsexuals or AGP constituted two clearly defined, vastly different populations of males who identified with womanhood or female-ness.
While it is probably not intentional, the term homosexual transsexual would mean different things to different people (because some would consider a trans-woman who is into women homosexual (e.g. lesbian), while Blanchard considers the trans-woman who is into men the HSTS), and is thus probably best avoided. I am open to formulations which are less clunky than 'transwomen who are into women'.
I find it hard to believe that these transwomen are particularly interested in lesbian relationships with ciswomen.
I think that there are some trans women who want titties so that (more) men will want to fuck them (which includes your Thais), and some trans women who love titties so much that they want their own. The latter might ideally want a ciswomen partner, but might find that few women are attracted both to tits and dicks. I imagine trans for trans is more of a pragmatic strategy in the absence of interested ciswomen. Of course, the ones who are into men don't have this problem because men as a collective will pretty much fuck anything with a pulse.
quiet_NaN
29d ago
Okay, not a constitutional rule.
But I suppose it might actually be against WTO rules.
Basically, any country which makes use of retroactive tariffs is not someone you would want to do business with. Nothing stopping them from nationalizing your company by retroactively applying a 500% tariff on all of the goods you have been importing in the last decade. This would not be much better or worse than just deciding to nationalize your company outright. Investors and creditors tend to hate such things.
Now, in this particular case, the retroactive tariffs would merely replace the unconstitutional ones. So one might frame it as "dear Mr foreigner, we had a minor judicial hiccup with the precise process of how to enact the tariffs, but don't worry, the amount on your bill is still correct".
Of course, the situation might be more accurately described as a chief of police deciding that local shops will need to pay for protection, and when a court says that this is not actually how things work, the city council instead tries to reframe the protection money as taxes so that they can keep it.
But if Congress will not authorize Trump's tariffs (which I believe and hope they won't), then all of that is moot.
A good indicator would be what a claim against the US gov for bogus tariffs is worth on the market at the moment, but it seems that these are not publically traded.
quiet_NaN
29d ago
This would still leave him with having to pay back some 200 billion dollars, I think.
And nobody would assume that SCOTUS would let get Trump away with his next harebrained tariff scheme, so the money companies pay in tariffs might just be considered a credit extended to the US.
quiet_NaN
29d ago
I seem to recall the argument for why they didn't need to grant a stay on the tariffs was that resolving them after would be easy. Did something change in the meantime or was that claim a lie? But even more so the argument doesn't make much sense to begin with "they shouldn't have to return stolen money because it would be difficult" just encourages stealing more money.
Not having stopped this with a temporary injunction is a total fuckup on the SCOTUS part.
And of course any tariffs paid will have to be paid back, but the damage to the economy is already done.
There is a simple solution to this, President Trump could try to get his tariff agenda passed in Congress.
Of course, even that would not save him from having to pay back the tariffs people already paid, because anything else would be retroactive.
German here. I have a Dr. rer. nat., but don't really identify as it. In the course of earning one, you typically get disabused of any notion that they signify elite human capital. STEM is full of jokes to the tune of 'Oh, you have a PhD? Don't worry, I will speak slowly then.'
When I was perhaps eight and playing some outside, I corrected a kid referring to my father as 'Herr $lastname' to 'Doktor $lastname'. That did earn me quite the talk.
There is a cliche of lower class people calling their physician 'Herr Doktor' or 'Frau Doktor' (which is especially funny given that what you need for a Dr. med. would not even earn you a Bachelor of Science), but the upper middle class prefers more subtle class signifiers.
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