roystgnr
16d ago
I'm not sure the people arguing for build build build aren't imagining they're solving the problem of housing is so fucking expensive.
Fortunately, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." That's a counter-intuitive realization (that quote postdates the divergence theorem!) but it's not wrong.
roystgnr
16d ago
If you had an employee whose work you had to check every single time, you'd fire him.
Where I work, that would mean firing everybody - no work gets deployed without at least a second person reviewing and approving the proposed changes. That's a fairly common Quality Assurance practice everywhere, sometimes because an application is critical enough that human failure rates are intolerable, sometimes because a deployment is large enough that even the cost of a tolerable mistake multiples out to be larger than the cost of double-checking to reduce mistake frequency.
AI currently doesn't count as a "second person" for us, but just as a review of human-written code typically takes much less time than writing it did, two reviews (the reviewer plus the "author") of AI-written code can go faster than hand-writing plus review. The last time I reviewed AI-assisted code, the "tell" that AI was used wasn't that there was anything wrong with the code, it was that the documentation was better-written than you generally get from a junior human developer. We apes tend to want to just write the fun stuff and shy away from the tedious stuff.
Why should a machine be held to a lower standard?
Do you know anyone who'll help e.g. write a C/C++ reader for a simple HDF5-based format for ... well, I think that was before we got a work ChatGPT account and I used a free AI that time, but call it $200/month for ChatGPT Pro? I'd never used that API before, and the docs for an API I'd never used before weren't as clear or voluminous as I'd have liked (damn it, everyone else shies away from the tedious stuff too), but searching up and reading better tutorials would have taken an hour or so; double-checking LLM output took five minutes.
roystgnr
16d ago
If you find Heinlein entertaining, you might look at Pournelle & Niven's "The Mote In God's Eye"; Heinlein helped with the editing and called it "a very important novel, possibly the best contact-with-aliens story ever written". It's had 50 years to be surpassed, but I'd still say it's top-five and I think most people would say top-ten or at least top-20.
It's definitely not explicitly Christian sci-fi - Niven is (or at least at one point was; he doesn't talk about religion much) an atheist, one of the main characters is Muslim, and there's not anything theological about the plot. But it's set in a world of Pournelle's where humanity is under the aegis of a mostly-Catholic empire, and both that and Islam have an impact on the story; it's definitely not just religion of the Star Trek "how cute; they'll grow out of that soon" or "look they made a cult around some aliens" varieties (though there's one of the latter too).
roystgnr
18d ago
Last edit as I type is the "Sigh, not solved", but for what it's worth, whereas for ~36 hours the site has been so slow for me I thought it was entirely down, right now it seems completely back to normal.
Thanks again for all you do here!
roystgnr
22d ago
The Jordan Peterson-esqe "cultural Marxism" shibboleth is genuinely gibberish.
As @naraburns memorably explained once, it was a term coined by the original cultural Marxists themselves, not by Peterson or by any other of their opponents. The memory holing of that is just weird.
In the short term his interlocutor tried to cling to the theory that Peterson was the designer of a phrase that, by some weird coincidence, also happened to be a related field of study with diverse academic citations for decades prior, but in the long term that entire account was deleted, so perhaps there's only so much cognitive dissonance a person can take.
It's literally just "I 'ate communism, I 'ate wokism, refer to 'em interchangeably, simple as"
No; it was a self-appellation. It may have gotten too embarrassing to hang on to at some point, but that's language for you. The same thing has been happening to "woke", for that matter, after it happened to "social justice warrior". Some groups are so proud they'll even adopt exonyms their enemies created; others are so uncomfortable they have to keep escaping their own endonyms.
roystgnr
23d ago
I'm just glancing at numbers, but it looks like white emigration from South Africa is about 2% per year, as opposed to around 40% per year for the pieds-noirs during 2 years of "suitcase or the coffin". South African white emigration has been slow enough that fertility has kept their population pretty steady over the past few decades in spite of it.
roystgnr
23d ago
I'm not a frequent enough LLM user to say how much of this was solid improvement vs luck, but my experience with free ChatGPT 5 (or any current free model, for that matter) versus paid GPT-5-Thinking was night vs day. In response to a somewhat obscure topology question, the free models all quickly spat out a false example (I'm guessing it was in the dataset as a true example for a different but similar-sounding question), and in the free tier the only difference between the better models and the worse models was that, when I pointed out the error in the example, the better models acknowledged it and gave me a different (but still false) example instead, while the worse models tried to gaslight me. GPT-5-Thinking took minutes to come back with an answer, but when it did the answer was actually correct, and accompanied by a link to a PDF of a paper from the 1980s that proved the answer on like page 6 out of 20.
I followed up with a harder question, and GPT-5-Thinking did something even more surprising to me: after a few minutes, it admitted it didn't know. It offered several suggestions for followup steps to try to figure out the answer, but it didn't hallucinate anything, didn't try to gaslight me about anything, didn't at all waste my time the way I'm used to my time being wasted when an LLM is wrong.
I've gotten used to using LLMs when their output is something that I can't answer quickly myself (else I'd answer it myself) but can verify quickly myself (else I can't trust their answer), but they seem to be on the cusp of being much more powerful than that. In an eschatological sense, maybe there's still some major architectural improvement that's necessary for AGI but still eluding us. But in an economic sense, the hassle I've always had with LLMs is their somewhat low signal-to-noise ratio, and yet there's already so much signal there that all they really have to do to have a winning product is get rid of most of the noise.
roystgnr
25d ago
$/hour, I'd guess.
(But yeah, normally when someone says "N-figure salary" they're talking about $/year)
"But where is a social network for the people who aren't sewage?"
"The what now?"
roystgnr
26d ago
If I google "nitromethane" I get two sales links among the results; apparently reputable racing and model racing leagues think it's too dangerous to allow, but it's not banned for private use? Well, either that or the two shops were Fuel Booster Inc and All Top Fuels and either would be happy to rush a team of "salesmen" to my house after I placed an order.
Thermite is basically powered aluminum mixed with powdered rust, isn't it? I once considered a demo for my kids, and at that time IIRC the only obstacle to getting everything off Amazon was that the smallest sizes for sale would make for a lot of demos. I'm not sure how it would be useful for a would-be murderer, though, unless the target can be convinced to stand in a specific spot under a prepared mixture and then not look up when they hear sparks flying above their head.
Proper detonators I've heard are difficult to make, but any crazy person can make something they think is a detonator, if it never ends up getting tested.
roystgnr
27d ago
$16 billion on research through 2019. Their conclusion was that the whole enterprise was a money pit and that they'd never be able to climb out of. Car and Driver put this in perspective by noting that they could have given every licensed driver in America two brand new Ford-F150s and still have cash to spare.
Got a source for that?
$16B divided by 230M is under $70. That is more than enough for two sets of F150 wiper blades for every licensed driver in America, but only if we don't splurge on Rain-X.
roystgnr
28d ago
Are we not arresting people? There have been a few stories lately (the first to come to mind: Decarlos Brown Jr.'s 14 prior arrests) that suggest that the problem is later in the pipeline.
roystgnr
28d ago
People were noticing the problem a decade before 9/11 too:
Homer: "That little Timmy is a real hero."
Lisa: "What makes him a hero, Dad?"
"Well, he fell down the well and... can't get out."
"How does that make him a hero?"
"Well, it's more than you did!"
-- The Simpsons, "Radio Bart", 1992
It's silly to claim that victims of natural tragedies are all heroes, but it's no worse than silly. I think the psychology here is a much more concerning problem in contexts like due process and free speech rights, though. Most people really don't like "defending scoundrels", as the old quote goes. For someone who can't get past that, the only ways to resolve the cognitive dissonance are to either abandon the defense or pretend the defendant isn't a scoundrel, both options that can have awful consequences if they become popular enough.
the various minor offences they committed as juveniles
Nah. Either they were guilty of what they confessed to, or they were guilty of implicating each other with false confessions. Even supposing the cops bullied them, and the other half dozen witnesses, including in front of their parents, that would just make the false-accusation offences excusable, not minor.
roystgnr
28d ago
If you go to his Google Scholar page and look at the list by citation count it's topped by fiction ("I, Robot": 2670 citations), then adds popular science writing ("Asimov's biographical encyclopedia of science and technology", 663) and other non-fiction, then eventually gets down to science textbooks ("Biochemistry and human metabolism", 54) and science research ("Acid‐phosphatase activity of normal and neoplastic human tissues", 48).
IIRC it could have been even worse. He went into biochemistry, so was relatively immune to the quantum chemistry revolution sweeping upward through the field, but I recall him describing the horror with which experienced chemists discovered that they would have to practically get a second degree in physics just to keep their own chemistry research relevant.
It's kind of a shame that he's now much better-known for his science fiction writing than his science writing, though. He jokingly had the "Clarke-Asimov treaty", acknowledging Asimov to be the second-best SF writer and Clarke the second-best science writer, but IMHO with SF Asimov was (among their contemporaries) second-best to Heinlein, whereas with pop science he really was the best around.
roystgnr
29d ago
He wrote some giant two-volume biography first, and then cut it down to that one (and added more recent material) a decade later. It's easier to avoid being boring if you have to force yourself to cut most of what you've written.
IIRC he did leave in my favorite part, the bit about becoming the most popular teacher at Boston University and having his writing career take off but being belittled for not doing enough research:
I finally felt angry enough to say, “…as a science writer, I am extraordinary. I plan to be the best science writer in the world and I will shed luster on the medical school. As a researcher, I am simply mediocre and…if there’s one thing this school does not need, it is one more merely mediocre researcher.”
Of course he got ... not fired, since he had tenure by then, but effectively "constructive dismissal" from the administration? Still he disclaimed coworkers' admiration for the incident:
I shrugged, “There’s no bravery about it. I have academic freedom and I can give it to you in two words:
“What’s that?” He said.
“Outside income,” I said.
roystgnr
29d ago
I think the phrase he was looking for was "wether vein", the metaphor about how you can tell a sheep is getting ready to follow the flock when its heart starts pumping harder.
roystgnr
29d ago
It seems that people are interpreting "someone on the right engaged in violence or violent rhetoric and Trump offered nothing but a full-throated, unequivocal condemnation" to mean "nothing-but-condemnation of the violence", in which case your request was a reasonable one, but it has been answered. But it seems to me that you meant "nothing but condemnation-of-the-violence", in which case your request might not be answered, but it was an unreasonable one.
Recently I brought up Obama as an example of a very high-profile Blue Triber who was neither cheering nor minimizing the murder of Charlie Kirk ... but should I have been criticizing him instead? He was quick to point out that he thought some of Kirk's ideas were wrong, and to bring up left-wing victims too; he definitely failed the "nothing but condemnation-of-the-violence" standard despite passing "nothing-but-condemnation of the violence".
So, which standard are we looking for here? If "The point wasn't whether he was technically correct when he implied that all sides engage in political violence." then we have no choice but to criticize Obama too!
For that matter, could you clarify what standard Trump was failing with his slippery slope argument? The slope was indeed slippery, including with regards to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in particular. The only "league" in those statements is the class of people whose statues were in jeopardy, and it turned out that he was correct that they were all in that same class. I mostly like your reasoning better, personally! The idea that the Founding Fathers should have been in a league of their own beyond anachronistic condemnation was defensible, until we discovered it was wrong. It's only the part where you get upset at him for being right in foresight where you were wrong despite hindsight that you went off the rails.
Some of these may be "stopped clock is correct twice a day" situations for Trump, but then just stick with the incorrect things to criticize instead! The trick to criticizing people for merely being "technically correct" is that you have to remember that our goal is to be morally correct in addition to being technically correct; you can't be morally correct instead. I get that it's infuriating to have to hold yourself to a higher standard than the President of the United States, but in a virtue and deontological sense that's the right thing to do for its own sake; and in a consequentialist sense, the worse the target of your argument is, the more important it is to not just throw mud at the wall to see what sticks.
roystgnr
29d ago
I'll agree with that in theory. In practice, note that "in appropriate conditions" requires "when the highway designers kept sight lines clear enough for that speed, including to any intersections or on ramps where someone might be trying to enter the highway after checking for traffic expected to be near the speed limit". Since highway designers never actually design for 115mph on purpose, you're pretty much stuck with places where it happened by accident, where the land was so flat and empty that you can't not see the road ahead of you for miles. I've had friends who enjoyed stretches of road like that in New Mexico, but I don't think any of them exist in Virginia.
My friends mostly enjoyed those stretches, I mean. One of them totaled his first car when a deer ran out into the road in front of him. In my experience most people who love driving that fast give other cars roughly the same consideration that he gave that deer, an implicit unexamined assumption that the highway ahead will be either clear or occupied by drivers doing the speed limit, that nobody will suddenly appear in front of them at surprisingly low or no speed. That assumption is usually correct, but it only has to be incorrect once.
Citation?
The first numerical summary I could quickly find suggests that, while women get into approximately 13% more accidents per passenger-mile, men drive so many more passenger-miles that they get into approximately 45% more accidents per year. Their hyperlinks are broken, though (looks like someone just hit "copy link" to URLs whose results depend on session cookies) and they might have misinterpreted something.
The "highest-value damage" here, of course, is human life; nearly 3/4 of car accident deaths are males, despite females being more likely to die in any particular crash they're in. It's a value judgement as to what makes someone a "better" or "worse" driver, but for a US value-of-life metric it takes several hundred typical non-injury accidents to add up to one fatality.
[Edited to change "~" to "approximately" to fix a formatting bug]
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