rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
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User ID: 1473
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
My goal in writing these stories was to capture how AI set up to maximize profit could fuck over the little guy by optimizing existing business processes. I think that's more likely than anything else.
Seems like the extent of contamination is scientifically a similar problem to something between fallout tracking and rocket engines (combustion chemistry). It would be really fun to build a team to model this but realistically noone will pay for it when the victims are a few thousand poor rurals in Ohio, except the companies seeking to minimize liability. Naturally the residents will be skeptical of the accuracy of any modeling done by chemical companies.
Wow. That is a crazy ruling. That's basically holding that society must provide some form of shelter to everyone, either directly or via land-grants at the location of their choice, and it must be situated within city limits. I thought declarations like that were usually constitutional amendments or acts of congress, not court decisions.
As a heartless pragmatist, I would like to point out that the local prison is shelter, and usually has plenty of capacity. There is also a ton of room for innovation in public shelters/public housing: public office space is not used at night which could double as shelters, public parking space could be requisitioned for the contruction of shipping container capsule hotels, and cheap homes could be bought up and partitioned.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
I'm annoyed at the reporting requirements too, but the mirror image of money laundering is tax evasion, and governments are very motivated to prevent tax evasion by any means possible, up to and including totalitarian monitoring of all money flows.
With respect to the specific requirements to report foreign accounts: the reporting requirement is clearly stated in tax instructions and up to a few years ago the IRS was remarkably lax about requiring people (with less than $50,000 in their accounts) to report on time. The form for reporting foreign accounts even included checkboxes where one could state one's "reason for reporting late": "I forgot" and "I didn't know I had to" were valid options.
Granted, I'm still a bit confused by the reporting requirements and process for large wire transfers.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
What's the point in forgiving someone who is dead? We're not going to forget mass murder, and we're not going to prosecute anyone for it either (now that they are all dead or prosecuted). So why forgive? What does it even mean to forgive someone you don't - and can't - know personally?
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
I'm a bit out of the loop. Are warrants required in the US, or is there absolutely no oversight?
Where this gets very interesting is when the database gets dense enough and DNA testing gets good enough to identify anyone, even people whose not at all in the database. "The state of Pennsylvania is looking for a male suspect age 20-25, height 5'10" to 6', with blue eyes, blond hair, sharp nose, and small ears, in the Amish community."
Also, give the population 10 years to acclimatize to this, and people will start asking why we don't do DNA testing for nonviolent crimes.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
This is true, but only to a point. "Today I went to Allie's house and had dinner with them," has a very strong connotation to me that Allie is married and dinner was with the couple, rather than dinner being with a singular person who uses "they" as a pronoun.
But I maybe I've been under a rock for too long.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
23d ago
It's not just the ownership that matters, it's that renting is frouned upon, housing loans are not cheaply available (30% down payment is common, IIRC), housing is treated as an investment, the closing price for typical condos is now 20x~30x the median annual salary. I only know one 20-30 year old who purchased a condo in the last 5 years without parental assistance (and the one guy sold his startup to a conglomerate for millions.)
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
How would we know what the effect (or intended effect) is? Perhaps the CCP wants to sway the election left, and their only thumb on the scale will be spreading pro-D get-out-the-vote videos on election day. Or perhaps they want to sway the election right. Perhaps they just want to keep Chinese citizens abroad from hearing about corruption at home, and all it takes is a thumb on the scale to keep China out of the minds of TikTok users. Perhaps the goal is intelligence collection rather than propaganda, and anything viral is fair play, as long as it gets data from the highest number of devices. Or perhaps the goal is the disintegration of Western Society, and all the inane influencer trends that go viral are centrally programmed so that the most inane and least productive ideas enter the largest number of impressionable young brains. It is even possible that they want to swing the opinions of the American electorate to be anti-China, so that the anti-China US turns into a bogeyman to distract from a stagnating domestic economy.
My point is that we have no way of knowing what the CCP propaganda goal (at any moment in time) would be and the algorithm is a black box (with different output for every user), so it is entirely impossible to see the broader effect the algorithm is having, let alone whether that effect is intended. The result is that anyone concerned about epistemic safety would support banning the black box.
I concede that the same concerns apply to other media companies, too. While I would argue that there is a qualitative difference between TikTok and domestic social media companies in that the owner and programmers of Facebook at least in theory lives in the same society as me and share some of my values, the ability to cause a partisan shift in voting rates or voting direction - by say 10% - is too large of a power to entrust to any black box controlled by a single entity. As they say, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
The article you linked is from early January 2022. In 2021 (the Omicron wave!), excess deaths could attributed to Covid directly or to the general failures of the healthcare system as the system was dealing with Covid (including people hesitant to seek care due to Covid concerns).
Frankly, your link makes me more skeptical of you.
you better believe no respectable institution is even going to be looking at vaccine side effects, not with their grant money controlled by the NIH.
There are 25+ countries in the world with functional public health establishments. Surely one of them is actually doing follow-up studies on vaccinated vs. unvaccinated populations. I'm sympathetic to the idea that the vaccines were a population-level experiment with unknown 4+ year side effects, but ... it's been two years now. We should start seeing signals.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
If you're actually raising a child, would you tell that child at some point in their life that you had had an abortion previously?
I am in the situation of being the baby that was supposed to be aborted, but contractions started and so I was born instead. It wasn't really a choice on my mother's part: she needed to undergo chemotherapy and they couldn't do it while she was pregnant.
I think I first understood the import of this story in late middle school, and it didn't have much of an effect on me: I was surprised, but my parents love me and our relationship didn't change. I probably went back to thinking about what teenage nerds think about. Now that I think back on that story it just makes me feel lucky. But I'm an outlier who leans toward stoicism, positivism, and "life is tough. Get over it". YMMV.
I'm skeptical the Kursk was about national pride at all, although I would believe you if you told me it was corruption or officer-level CYA. Nuclear submarines, their limitations, their strengths, their uses, and their construction are highly prized national secrets, to it stands to reason that the Russian Navy would be reticent to welcome foreign aid, let alone rescue subs or divers from NATO navies, which would no doubt be beaming video direct to Langley.
To put it another way, from the perspective of Russian Naval command, the secrets of the Kursk are arguably worth more than the lives of the crew (even before accounting for corruption and CYA), as those secrets protect all the other submarine crews. But telling that to the public in so many words is a great way to ruin future crew recruiting efforts.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
If one listens to Peter Zeihan, the war was motivated by Russia's long-term unenviable defensive position: there are virtually no geographical barriers within the Russian heartland, and with population set to fall, defending Russia is an expensive proposition (young men in productive economic activity or in civil defense; pick one). Hence all the wars since the early 2000s to reunite Russia with strategic and defensible passes that were part of the USSR: these can be garrisoned at much lower manpower, leaving the heartland to economic activity.
Or if one listens to such Russian writers as Alexandr Dugin, rejection of Western hegemony and reconquering of Soviet nations is just part of the Great Geopolitcal Game.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
In English, they say they're the Communist Part of China, or CPC.
This is a complicated topic to say the least. It seems to have arisen from a non-issue to an issue just as tensions between the US and China rose in 2020. (I'm reminded of the euphemism treadmill.) While the Chinese diaspora seems to prefer CPC, the English-language scholarly literature has long used CCP. Even the official media outlets of the Party seem to have no problem calling themselves the CCP occasionally (ex. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201710/27/WS5a0d0875a31061a738408157.html).
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
My understanding is that the Starlink has three potentially profitable strategies, all of which depend on inter-satellite links to really be breakthroughs:
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HFT without fiber latency. This is where clients will be able to pay eight to nine figure subscriptions per year, with major routes forming a high speed web between New York, London, Brussels, Singapore, and Tokyo.
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Military/aviation. It's hard to put a dollar value on military contracts, but this is probably seven to eight figures per year total, since military already has their own communications web.
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Worldwide consumer access with less than worldwide infrastructure. Note that once access (downlinks) are installed for the above contracts, the marginal cost to expand civilian access to the globe is almost nil. The cost of satellite launch may be spilt between customers across the entire broadcast range: Africa, Europe, Asia, all the ocean shipping and cruise ships, etc.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
This is the opposite of how grocery stores actually work in true urban areas: in the walkable urban area, the grocery store (and its selection) scales to fit the space available, so that it can afford to rent out a profitable location. My neighborhood grocery is less than than 30 ft wide and 90 ft deep on the ground floor of an old 3-floor building, but that building is halfway between a residential area and the subway and right next to a bus stop, so the foot traffic on the sidewalk is on the order of 10 people per minute. (The walk from subway to residential area is 10 minutes, tops.) They do their best to lure in customers by placing fresh fruit and sale items literally on the sidewalk. (I hear this would not work in America, because all the food would grow legs and walk away.)
Before a recent move, this grocery store was in an adjacent building with even less floor space (which building was torn down to install a 20-floor monstrosity). A tradeoff is made to between selection and bulk: the "snacks" aisle only has one, maybe two display items of each product, and the average American grocery run (with a grocery cart) would buy them out of their standard inventory. (They don't have grocery carts, the aisles are too narrow for them.) Fruits and vegetables are available fresh and in bulk, but you get what is seasonal or standard for local cooking. You pay a lot more than at a big box store like Costco, but that's the price of convenience and for having a store halfway between the subway and the residential neighborhood.
But I don't think the store would possible in America. The only parking is the loading area in the back, the display which lures people in would be subject to too much theft for the sole proprietor to make a profit, the aisles are too narrow for wheelchairs, and the entryway has a few stairs up from the sidewalk, which would fail any ADA requirements.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
You really think the Chinese can’t figure out how to get a few latest generation ASML machines? I doubt it.
I don't think it matters if they get an ASML machine. What they need is the support contract, and that is part of what is unavailable to "Chinese military companies".
To put it another way, if someone gave you (and generously, your friends) a space shuttle and all the relevant infrastructure, would you be able to launch it within five years? There's going to be some critical knowledge of the cockpit or the refueling system or the inspections process that you can't figure out.
With ASML, we're talking about machines the size of a shipping container, with mechanical parts that are calibrated to move wafers at the nanoscale, but which otherwise dampen vibrations, high-performance lasers that won't even work in a standard atmosphere, which require a continuous flow of high-purity chemicals only made in one or two countries, and all depend on proprietary software which probably gets custom modules built and delivered based on the needs of the customer whose fab it sits in. If the servos or beam-line or vacuum gets misaligned, or get slightly over-spec on dust, or some chemical formula changes slightly, or some part burns out prematurely, then it's not going to get the 5 nm resolution which it was sold for.
So yeah, I think this is the end of Xi's China. They can go through a trade war, their economy can sputter along, but China's industrial development is doomed to go the way of the USSR: pulling off epic feats of engineering and brainpower just to keep their existing (high-speed) trains running, while the West gets to start reaping the benefits of software eating the world.
Well, of course the West will still come up with 50 different philosophical and political reasons to justify shooting itself in the foot, but when it does its gun will be equipped with computer-controlled sights.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
Mostly survival and personal career progress. I'm planning on leaving after a few years, but I would prefer to do my small part to improve the culture.
You're onto something here. Where I did my degree, the following was pretty much understood by all the students after their first few years:
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The purpose of research grants is to get research done for the funder more cheaply than is possible in other sectors of the economy.
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The purpose of Professors is to get funding and write grant proposals. This means anticipating what research will be trendy and making a lot of friends among the people who staff grant proposal review committees.
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The purpose of the older graduate students is to do the research, write papers, and write grant reports, while mentoring the younger students.
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The purpose of the younger students is to study and learn, while assisting the older students on writing grant reports and doing experiments. Oh, and to teach undergraduate classes.
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Graduate students needing additional mentorship must actively seek it.
(We didn't have post-docs or research staff, but they basically allow scaling of the grant-writing work and supervisory work of professors.)
This was a decent system for graduate students who were self-driven and capable. It had many different failure modes, however: It rewarded professors for just enough surface level knowledge to come up with cool sounding projects that were in reality infeasible. It was hell for students who were given the new projects, because they had no mentors in their specialty, and had no idea that things were infeasible. Older students could be abusive or predatory, and unscrupulous younger students could wait until an older student had worked out nearly all the kinks in an experiment and then swoop in to take credit for the results. Professors had a bias for sudents running simple but creative experiments over meticulous work that was actually necessary long term for good engineering.
Like you, I had a professor with only a surface-level knowledge of my research domain. I was often given bad advice and advice that wasted time. (The students figured out that our PI didn't read papers, but read abstracts and skimmed figures, which made for some funny misinterpretations of the literature.) The PI's feedback on student work was vague and hard to understand. However, when it came to overcoming stuck research projects my advisor was a genius. The experiment-breaking result became the new goal of the experiment, easily publishable. My advisor also eventually communicated an understanding of how to write a good research paper, after which all those vague comments suddenly made perfect sense. So the relationship turned out quite valuable.
The worst part was the social environment. In order to get the PhD students had to become first author on multiple papers, but the PI would assign multiple people to each research project, bringing in more people the longer it took. I'm not sure there was sabotage (I'm dumb enough to fuck things up myself, thank you), but there was definitely spying and theft of results between students. The students needed favor with the professor to buy equipment: seeking the favor of the professor resulted in schemes much like those of medieval courts. Reading The 48 Laws of Power during my PhD, the content of the book depicted the social environment of the lab quite accurately.
Overall, it was a fun time, but I would probably recommend a gap year after a masters degree instead of a PhD. Travel the world, get more life experience, suffer less stress, have more fun, and in the end you didn't spend four years becoming the world's foremost expert in some experiment that is only performed in one lab.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
Martian colonies have an asteroid dropped on them, and whatever pathetic escape craft we make in the next 20 years get swatted before they reach the orbit of Saturn.
In 20 years the AGI apocalypse will not be nearly as romantic as that. It is much more likely to look like a random bank/hospital sending you a collections notice for a home loan/medical treatment you definitely didn't agree to, bringing you to court over it, and putting you up against the equivalent of a $100M legal team. The AI-controlled Conglomerate wins in court and you spend the rest of your life subsistence farming as a side gig while all your official income is redireted to the AI Conglomerate.
For extra fun, if you are married, social media and increasing economic struggle poison your relationship with your spouse and both of you apply for the services of AI Legal. The hotshot AI Legal representatives fight acrimoniously, revealing every dark secret of both you and your spouse, and successfully breaking apart your marriage in divorce settlement. Honestly, you don't remember why you ever loved your ex-spouse, or why your children ever loved you, and you totally understand your real-world friends distancing themselves from the fiasco. Besides, you don't have time for that anymore. Half your salary is interest on the payment plan for AI Legal.
As a smart and independently wealthy researcher, you look into training your own competing, perhaps open-source AI model to fight back against the Machine, but AI Conglomerate has monopolized access to compute at every level of the supply chain, from high-purity silicon to cloud computing services. In despair, you turn to old web and your old haunt The Motte, where you find solace in culture war interspersed with the occasional similar story of despair. Little do you know that every single post is authored by AI Conglomerate to manipulate your emotions from despair into a more productive anger. Two months later you will sign up to work for a fully-owned subsidiary of AI Conglomerate and continue working to pay off your debts, all while maximizing "shareholder" output.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
The story of how and why they did this is long, and despite being matters of public record, not widely known, but that explains the difference.
Could you provide links to this story, or at least provide a hint where to start looking? It seems worth knowing more about, if only so other countries can avoid the American issues.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
How do Chinese children learn to read, if their every word is an ideogram? Do they all have abysmal literacy rates, like these "balanced literacy" children from the US?
First of all, there are only ~3000 commonly used Chinese characters, and they contain patterns which make them easier to memorize once you memorize a few hundred. At one character per day, you can learn all the characters in 12 years of schooling. Realistically, the characters are introduced much faster than one character per day and used much more frequently.
One might compare this to the number of phonetic exceptions in English: I remember 5-10 new words for the spelling test every week, from 1st grade to 9th grade.
Note however that if you are going to memorize English words without learning them phonetically, there are many more English words than Chinese characters. A few orders of magnitude more.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
That doesn't explain whay this is a problem in America. Seoul Subways are cheaper (1/40000 median income for a one way ride) and also lack bouncers (police enter the train 5 stops after an incident). We have a few screamers and a lot of drunks but hard drug use on the train does not exist.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
1yr ago
Maybe affordable unit requirements mess with this? idk
"New residential development" in NIMBY cities (as opposed to rural America) usually means tearing down existing single-family homes on large lots and replacing them with high-density housing on small lots, which consists of multi-floor, multi-family apartments, at least 20% affordable or subsidized units, and no yards. While the developer makes a lot of money on these due to the high-density, the price paid per household is almost always lower than the area average, the area loses some of its greenery, and the average social class of the area falls.
I think getting rid of the affordable housing requirement would result in some developers focusing on large high-density, high-cost, high-quality condos near in-demand areas, but the affordable housing requirement puts a limit on unit sizes and quality overall, and makes NIMBY the equilibrium position of a neighborhood.
As a single point of data, a far-left millennial friend of mine (who probably thinks I'm a stealth conservative based on the conversations we used to have about feminism) blew up when I said I had started a diet and begun to lose weight: "Dieting doesn't work," "I've noticed you have some toxic ideas about weight," "I've heard you making insensitive comments before," etc. They then recommended I read a Health At Any Size activist's autobiography to engage with these ideas because she's "very eloquent."
The book was mostly personal and second-hand experiences of trauma due to people pointing out morbid obesity and its negative externalities. There was a whole chapter about doctors and the medical establishment being shaming and misguided. I scanned the bibliography for any academic papers (now on my reading list), but most of the references were to articles from the likes of Huffpost. Then I gave up on the book.
As regards the issue of obesity, I do think the problem is systemic: the US population has lost its ability to cook proper healthy food at home, has lost the last remnants of a culture which despised "gluttony," and has been brainwashed by Big Ag to think that eating more and more is normal, and that it's all genetic. Meanwhile Big Ag has hired flavor scientists to engineer hyperstimulus into food, hires lobbyists to keep politicians from addressing the problem in any meaningful way, and pays useful activist idiots to write books about Health At Any Size.
However, as an individual, I don't have many options other than to tune out the propaganda, establish my own system, and live my life of moderation. If that makes me "toxic" and "insensitive," ... fuck it. I'm not sacrificing my pursuit of excellence for some moral fashion.
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