fartVader
1mo ago
There is no amount of social welfare that can convince a person to have kids. There are more important things that are aren't in place.
You need
- Labor support (Retired parents and an extra room)
- A stable partner (Time to date through your early 20s, rather than slog it out in your career)
- Your own house (lol, good luck)
All govt. assistance ends up being fed to landlords downstream. Italy tops the list of western-european countries where 25-35 year olds still live with parents. Don't try anything another solution unless you fix housing first. Everything else is downstream.
I know a ton of people in their late-30s who're struggling to have kids / 2nd children becasue they're too old. The urge to be parents exists. Things just take a LOT longer to stabilize.
fartVader
1mo ago
replacing Castro's secret son this next election cycle
Still think about the video of the opposition leader eating an Apple.
no one speaks English/French anymore
Canada's point based system that incentivizes uneducated 18 year olds to move on an instant GC has to be the most brain-dead immigration policy I've witnessed. To repurpose a popular quote : "When Mexico India sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs trucks. They’re bringing crime."
It's sad. Canada is an appealing country to immigrate to. But, their system appears to prefer under-educated and under-resourced immigrants. Compare this to the H1B immigrants in the US. They are high skilled immigrants who pay more taxes than the average American, can't claim social-security benefits and usually takes 5-100 years to get a Green Card. (I am talking about those who aren't abusing the H1B through loopholes)
Wait times at medical clinics have gone from weeks to months to years
Isn't this because the entire graduating class of Canadian doctors moves to the US ? This is a
housing is 5x more out of whack than the US
True. But both Canada and USA are pretty under built by world standards.
downtown is going to look like New Delhi
Dude, get your cities right... It's Ludhiana.
fartVader
1mo ago
The sea route around Africa is already being used because of Suez instability.....and it is already a massive pain in the ass. Shipping companies to the US are preferring to go through the Pacific and Panama rather than go through Africa. Africa is a lot bigger than the maps indicate, and re-entering the mediterrainean from the south-west for European shipping is prohibilively expensive.
fartVader
1mo ago
Oh they do, and they care a LOT.
Here are the countries that explicitly avoided signing up for any Belt-and-road deals. That list of QUAD countries (US-Aus-Japan-India) and Israel.
Israel and Israel-Saudi relations are the center of how the next generation of trade routes to the west pan out. On one hand you have the West-Israel-Saudi-India corridor. West friendly nations with a poor endpoint in India, but all of Israelis, Saudis & Indians are economically ascendant. On the other hand, you have the Belt-and-road initiative that goes China-Pakistan-Iran-Iraq-Turkey-West.
The Iran-Iraq-Turkey corridor looks comically unrealistic, but if Israel becomes a no-go zone and Saudis pull out then the competitor wins by default. If the Houthis can keep the Suez Canal unstable, then China suddenly finds itself in control of how the next generation of trade routes pan out. If Hamas loses, then Saudi-Israel relations normalize, Houthis become irrelevant and now China is left holding the worst option with B&R.
fartVader
1mo ago
Tiktok is getting pushback because the parent company is controlled by China. That is all you need to know, and that's the only bit that matters. Anti-semitism and Gaza are excuses. 'Think of the kids' is an excuse and so are accusations of 'Tiktok killing attention'.
Don't get me wrong, Tiktok performs badly on all of those accusations. But, it is just the latest in a long line of social media companies that all transformed the youth along similar lines.
The US will go to any length to control the global narrative of 'freedom'. Tiktok is the greatest deepest invasion on American soil since communisms capture of academia, and the US is woefully underequipped to push it back. The US uses Israel to complain about Tiktok, because if they revealed the real reason, then it would correctly show the US for the paper tiger it has now become. The US is still the most powerful country in the world. But Pax-Americana is over.
fartVader
1mo ago
2 things can be true at the same time.
-
Women's health needs to be studied more because their hormones show large fluctuations every month and over a lifetime. More women take a daily dose of drugs (birth control) than men, and the higher potential for damage requires higher funding for women's health.
-
In an equal world, women and men are assumed to have the same expected lifespan. The worse outcomes for men suggests that theyre the ones being discriminated against.
For the longest time, our understanding of medicine came from the outcomes on American college students. They tended to be young, male and white. So it is reasonable to expect every other cohort to be less understood. Women are the largest of that cohort that felt left behind, and raising funding for them makes sense. Ofc, the make up of colleges since the 2000s means that this is more so an act of 'correcting the past', than fixing the present.
a cringe side story from a few weeks ago.
In feb, 2 close friends were crashing at our shared house for a weekend getaway. My roomate, an amazing cook, spent the entire morning making us his special waffles. He placed the waffles in a plate in front of me.
It was the morning. I was scrolling. I hadn't had my coffee. God, the excuses only make it worse.
But I ate the served waffles. I ate. I ate. I ate. And in my absent mindedness, I thanked my roommate for the amazing meal and went my merry way. Minutes later, it hits me. I went back to the living room. The guests had woken up. They'd heard about the special waffles. The amazing waffles that I knew all to well. But there were none. They found an empty plate, my gluttonous ass and a distinct lack of waffles.
The horror. Find every idiom on embarassment and those would still not be enough. I was red in the face. I was aghast. I could not meet my friends in their eyes. I was ready to cry. The last one wasn't a metaphor. Hell, I mean them all literally.
My bros were forgiving. After some initial confusion, justified leg-pulling, a heart-felt apology and genuine forgiveness, they moved on. But, it has kept me awake ever since. I'm supposed to be socially well adjusted. I'm supposed to be an adult. I don't have any real skeletons in my closet, but I have done worse things than eat an extra waffle. Yet, it's funny how this social faux-pas weighs on me more than any failure, outrage or altercation that I can remember.
I was in Carragher's shoes and I hope the poor lad can find sleep soon enough. Cringe is a powerful insomniac. (Lost some context here. Carragher is a football player turned tv personality. Yesterday, he had a similar faux-pas among his friends/colleagues and you could see the visible discomfort on the poor man's face)
P.S: I have since prepared a 5 course meal for the friend who cooked the waffles, now it weighs lighter on my conscience.
fartVader
2mo ago
This is a total shot in a dark.
But, does anyone in the bay area want to start a reddit competitor ? I don't wanna talk much more about it.
If you are:
- Senior+ level fullstack engineer
- Could rebuilt old-reddit from scratch if they had to (at moderate scale)
- Has strong intuitions & opinions about every part of the stack
- Likes to mentor
- At a FANG-ish/Unicorn and
- In the SF/LA area
- Moderately presentable
Then I would love to talk to you.
I have fleshed out a lot of it pretty well. But wanna see if there are people intersted in joining in.
I can do
- most ML work (model building, model deployment, some pipelining, all prompt engineering),
- soft-skill work (talking to people, finding investors, out reach, PR)
- and L3 Google Engineer level programming (I can make reddit from scratch if I had to, but it would be an all python static website that is barebones like hackernews than reddit yknow. Good enough to be an engineer in a team, not to architect backend systems).
Some questions
- Why this - I have a specific 'killer feature' in mind that sets it apart
- Why now - I have a strong hypothesis for market opportunity
- Why you - how many people care passionately about internet forums
- Why AI - There is an AI component that makes it easier to get funding in this climate
Likely follow up questions
- Have you validated the hypothesis with a large enough set of real customers - No
- Do you have a demo yet - No
- Is the proposal anything more than 'reddit but better'. Yes, yes yes. But I don't wanna puke it all out.
It isn't that small scale. But would love to talk to people if they're interested.
I want to take this in another direction. - 'The universal empathy for the remaining life of a parent who has lost a child at a young age.' Susan is a billionaire with power, access and status. Everything you wish for, she has. And I am certain that she would give it all away to bring her son back.
Events like this hold up a familiar but often ignored mirror to the face of young people like me. My parents are still around. I will have kids one day. I have the one thing Susan has lost: time and agency.
Or close to 3% of US population at current rates will die by a drug overdose
No matter how much money I earn, it takes 1 not-so unlikely event to unilaterally turn me into a hollow husk of a person. Whether that be a permanent disability due to a car accident, death of child/spouse or slightly misplaced tap on my head.
From a utilitarian perspective, I am better off minimizing the changes chances of a unilaterally disastrous event, than trying to get billions. Because the money only matters if these disastrous events don't happen. I could live an unimpressive life where my kids live tiil a ripe old age, and I bet Susan would trade my life for hers any day. The negative utility of losing a child is THAT high.
Have kids, help them not kill themselves and you're already living a life that's the envy of many billionaires.
After a 24 hrs existential crises resulting from having the mirror held to my face, I shove it into the closet of 'things to think of when I have time.' I wake up, 2 continents away from family, 1 continent away from my partner, and innocently continue grinding it out in hopes of making a couple of millions in silicon valley at the expense of my 20s and 30s. Some people never learn. Hopefully, I won't stay this way for too long.
Even on this anonymous no-name forum, I feel the urge to say I'd never wish such a tragedy on anyone. I wish she finds the support and space needed to get through this difficult time.
fartVader
3mo ago
That makes a lot of sense. Where I lived, the church bells only rang twice a day.
fartVader
3mo ago
The 'Adan' (call to prayer) is less grating than the church bells of Europe.
That's the most surprising part for me.
I grew up in a 33-33-33 Hindu-muslim-Catholic neighborhood, so both the Church bells and Adan are familiar sounds. Adans are sung. So they've always sounded more intrusive and distracting to me. The church bells last less than 30 seconds, have no words and ring out with a pleasant decay. The sounds have a generally warm timbre. (for the lack of a better phrase). On the other hand, the throaty and nasal composition of the adan feels sharp.
I wonder if the adan in Iraq is qualitatively different, or I'm just observing some level of internalized bigotry.
fartVader
3mo ago
I had decent dating success in graduate school
You're in NYC, the options are practically endless. (from fellow late 20s south Asian male who used to be in NYC). Climbing and mixed-gender sports are the easiest places to get started. If you were socially well adjusted enough to get laid in school and be a TA, then you'll be alright.
all Match Group apps (Tinder, Bumble, etc.)
Bumble is not owned by the match group
Circumvent the Ban
Also, yes. Circumvent the ban. If you can't afford a new dual sim phone, then you can't afford to date in NYC. Use your middle name or change the spelling. The wifi thing sounds like a good idea. Similarly, if you don't have enough new photos, then you need to be going out more. Dating apps won't help here. See, even if you get dates, you need to be interesting enough to hold their attention. If your life is boring enough that you can't come up with good photos for hinge within 3 months, then you would have gotten ghost with or without the ban.
Unfortunately, I was stupid enough to do the "recommended" facial verification on my old profile
What's the worst they can do ? Ban you again ?
I've been playing around with some models for generating photos based on Stable Diffusion and I've managed to generate some fairly realistic pics of me,
The extent to which a man will go to stay inside.
For having an unironically decent track record as president ? (bad human, worse husband, terrible role model.....solid track record)
- Putin did not invade Ukraine
- Got Abraham Accords signed
- Correctly re-sanctioned Iran
- Restarted the on-shoring of American manufacturing
- Economy flourished until Covid
- Started building the wall. I made fun of it, but I was wrong. It is necessary and urgent
- Made illegal immigration to the US seem unsafe, and led to reduced illegal immigration attempts
- Got the Vaccine to approval at 'light speed'
- Tried to keep lockdowns to a minimum, which in hindsight was especially important to economic recovery and schooling
- Served as a useful deregulation counter-weight to the Senate/House's pro-regulation instincts.
- Correctly banned Tiktok
The way I see it, Trump doesn't give a fuck. Ramaswamy, DeSantis and especially Haley care too about much about their career after politics. This means they are more or less beholden to the whims of the American elite. Also, after seeing them debate, I do not think Haley has any change of victory. DeSantis has sounded more and more bitchy as the campaign has lost momentum and Ramaswamy is a little too early to the game. US is not there yet, racially.
So as much as Trump is not the ideal candidate to face Trump Biden, he is the only one who might win and maintain his anti-establishment status. Yeah, a white Ramaswamy or a less whiny DeSantis would have had a better chance. But, that's not on offer.
edit: Note that I am talking about his presidency rather than the Republican house. A republican house + senate have shown themselves to be pretty incompetent. However, they don't have much to do with the President.
fartVader
4mo ago
Same, I can only binge shows. If the show doesn't drive me to binge it, then it wasn't worth watching the first place.
fartVader
5mo ago
Hell, I have been in America for the last 6 years and I cannot comprehend this.
I have yet to see a manager in these jobs that isn't in their 40s, so may be skewed, but still. That's an excellent wage. You would struggle to make a tech wage that good outside the big tech cities or in consulting out of the Big-3 MBB.
How is there any poverty in the US at all ?
fartVader
5mo ago
The US certainly discouraged Indian interference in the Bangladeshi genocide of 1971. Since that was at the peak of Kissingers powers, that is one real genocidal accusation that he cant easily shirk responsibility for.
fartVader
5mo ago
Fully agree on frogs legs.
Objectively a better chicken and wont be convinced otherwise.
Dunno about pig offal, but chicken liver takes amazing. It's my home town delicacy. I also cook really great gizzards, but theyre admitedly work.
Haggis is the mosy disgusting thing in planet earth and i really did give it a fair try.
fartVader
5mo ago
To be fair, Thailand seems to have some of the best beaches in the world. The part that surprises me most about India is how many beaches we have, and how almost all of them are heavily 'used' (abused?). (to put it politely).
1.4 people and nature do not go well together.
fartVader
5mo ago
I like that you gave the example of India. It is filled with instances of "place vs place". If anything, Kashmir is the more recognized version of 'place vs place' within India. Kashmir is well known, but the political instability around the region has made it difficult to recommend as a tourist place.
Kolikkumalai India vs NaPali Hawaii.
The western ghats, eastern 7-sisters and Himalayan areas are seriously underexplored.
I especially see the 'place vs place' phenomenon with food.
Pate, Escargots, Foie Gras & Caviar are all seen as delicacies. On the other hand, goat brain (bheja), frogs legs, tripe, gizzards, etc. are all seen as disgusting offal eaten by barbarians.
I see a similar trend in American Carnival food vs east-asian street food. Indulgent street food vs shitty gas station food. Korean street food gets praised to high heaven, while the exact same stuff in the USA gets made fun of for being hill-billy food.
fartVader
5mo ago
I work in academia and so does everyone I know
I have been fortunate to be surrounded by people much smarter than me, but academia style snark was central to me not doing a phd. Thanks for calling me out. Admittedly, my comment came off as snarky. I should rephrase it.
Some examples: Most middle manager jobs don't help in any realistic way. Most manual labor is yet to be robo-automated because human labor is cheap, not because we can't do it. Most musicians/artists do not produce anything other than shallow imitations of their heroes. Most STEM trained practioners act more as highly-skilled monkeys who imitate what they are taught with perfect precision. Hell, even most R1 researchers spend most of their time doing 'derivative' research that is more about asking the most obvious question than creating something truly novel.
There is nothing wrong with that. I respect true expertise. It needs incredible attention to detail, encyclopedic knowledge of all edge cases in your field and a craftsman's precision. However, if a problem that needs just those 3 traits could be done badly by an AI model in 2010...... then it was going to be a matter of time before AIs became good enough to take that job. Because they were already recognized to be solvable problems, the hardware and compute just hadn't caught up yet. These jobs are stupid in the same way sheep herding for a Collie is hard or climbing a mountain as a goat is stupid. They are some combination of the 3 traits I mentioned above, performed masterfully. But, the skills needed can all be acquired and imitated.
That is the sense in which I say 90% jobs are stupid. Ie, given enough time, most average humans can be trained to do 90% of average jobs. It takes a couple of order-of-magnitude more time for some. But the average human is surprisingly capable given infinite time. In hindsight, stupid is the wrong word. It's just that when expressed like that, they don't sound like intelligence do they. Just a machine made of flesh and blood.
Here is where the 'infinite time' becomes relevant. AIs do actually have infinite time. So, even if the model is stupid in 'human time', it can just run far more parallel processes, fail more, read more & iterate more until it is as good as any top 10% expert in whatever they spend these cycles on.
Now coming to what AIs struggle to do, let's call that novelty. I believe there are 3 kinds of true novelty : orthogonal, extrapolative and interpolative. To avoid nerd speak here is how I see it :
- Interpolative - Take knowledge from 2 different fields and apply they together to create something new.
- Extrapolative - Push the boundaries within your field using tools that already exist in that field, but by asking exploratory what-if questions that no one has tried yet.
- Orthogonal - True geniuses are here. I don't even know how this operates. How do you think of complex numbers. How do you even ask the 'what if light and matter are the same' kind of questions ? By orthogonal, I mean that this line of inquiry is entirely beyond the plane of what any of todays tools might allow for.
The distinction is important.
To me, Interpolative innovation is quite common and honestly, AIs are already starting to do this sort of well. Mixing 2 different things together is something they do decently well. I would not be surprised if AIs create novel 'interpolative' work in the near near future. It is literally pattern matching 2 distinct things that looks suspiciously similar. AIs becoming good at interpolative innovation will accelerate what Humans were already doing. It will extend our rapid rise since the industrial revolution, but won't be a civilizational change.
Models have yet to show any extrapolative innovation. But, I suspect that the first promising signs are around the corner. Remember, once you can do it once , badly, the floodgates are open. If an AI can do it even 1 in a million times, all you need is for the hardware, compute and money to catch up. It will get solved. When this moment happens is when I think AI-security people will hit the panic button. This moment will be the trigger to super-human hood. It will likely eliminate all interesting jobs, which sucks. But, to me, it will still be recognizable as human.
I really hope AIs cant perform Orthogonal innovation. To me, it is the clearest sign of sentience. Hell, I'd say it proves super-human sentience. Orthogonal innovation often means that life before-and-after it is fundamentally different to those affected by it. If we even see so much as an inkling of this, it is over for humans. I don't mean it's over for 99% of us. I mean, it is over. We will be a space faring people within decades, and likely extinct in a few decades after.
Thankfully, I think AI models will be stuck in interpolative land for quite a while.
(P.S : I am vey sleep deprived and my ramblings are accurately reflecting my tiredness sorry)
fartVader
5mo ago
Truth is, 90% of all work is stupid. The difference between a committee of competent Harvard grads from every major (smart and competent, but no genius) and the kind of people who create true innovation is a couple of orders of magnitude.
AI might be around the corner, but super-human intelligence that can innovate (Neumann, Terence Tao) is much much much farther away than we think.
fartVader
5mo ago
If it was anywhere even near sentient AI then the Feds would have taken over by now. No, I don't mean 1 random DC strategist on the board. I mean that OpenAI's network would have been air-gapped and massive gag orders would have been placed on anyone. No multicolored twitter hearts. OpenAI, for all their generation defining technology, still has a rather spotty record of crying wolf when it comes to sentient AI. I don't think this one is any different.
But, but , but ......... it is likely that they have stumbled upon another step change improvement over GPT4, which likely means they can destroy another few hundred startups, businesses and careers.
It wouldn't take too much to make all but the top 10% of the following jobs obsolete:
- Translators
- Data Analysts
- Simple CRUD backend makers
- Simple Form/static front end makers
- Generic Consultants
- Virtual Doctors
Note, the biggest issue with Agents has been that they lose context part way through that process or meander. But all current agent architectures are super-naive when compared to the kind of swarm-RL stuff that has been out for a good decade. With GPT-4 Turbo 128 they have effectively solved all RAG, which allows it to pretty much surf the entire internet without meandering for a lot longer. Thus making its intelligence upto-date and functionally infinite.
My guess is that they have managed to fully stabilize agents for certain usecases and are fairly sure that they can deploy 'robot employees' for certain jobs in the span of a year.
But I might be wrong.
If it is just better MCTS, slightly better RAG and better GPT-4 RLHF then I will be soo disappointed. Yes, it is much better, but honestly, it speaks more to Google's incompetence and Facebook's complete not-giving-a-fuck for OpenAI to build up this kind of lead. None of this is fundamentally novel.
We are in an era of free-lunch where people think OpenAI are the best around just because everyone around can barely walk without tripping over themselves. (I say this as someone who still considers OpenAI to be the best applied engineering team assembled since Xerox Parc)
fartVader
5mo ago
Most of my sauces are greek yogurt based. Starches also help create low calories sauces.
I hate what i call 'non satiating calories'. You could go throigh a pot full of mayo dip withour realizing that is a 1000 calories by itself. On the otherhand, the yogurt based dip is 200 calories and no one notices the difference. (Very important to use full fat yogurt.)
The oldest gen-Z is 26 years old. Their home acquisition numbers are reflective of inheritance and a minority with social media success. Addtionally, home ownership is a useless metric if you don't know their monthly premium. Home ownership is only 'liberating' if is is somewhat affordable.
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