fartVader
8d ago
It helps that the leader of Singapore is a literal genius. He was the senior wrangler = top math student at Cambridge.
The Senior Wrangler is the top mathematics undergraduate at the University of Cambridge in England, a position which has been described as "the greatest intellectual achievement attainable in Britain".
fartVader
19d 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
26d 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
19d ago
Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have ZERO work life balance. I don't think the average American can even fathom what 'zero' work life balance looks like. Americans think they work hard when compared to Europe. But East Asia is a whole another beast.
fartVader
29d 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.
fartVader
26d 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.
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
19d ago
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.
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.
Boring choice, but I'd choose NYC.
If you don't need to commute, you can buy a house in a quiet Brooklyn neighborhood or one that is mid-gentrification. I am not too different from you in age or compensation, and Greenpoint, Brooklyn is my dream neighborhood. The area near 11th ARR in Paris is my #2 and Somerville, MA is my #3.
Every place that is sunnier and as happening as NYC is culturally isolating to someone who is not from there. So Madrid, Tokyo and Barcelona lose on those grounds.
fartVader
15d ago
Ah man, I have been getting busy :(
We had a full fledged India discussion, and I missed it.
Glad to see the other folks generally echo my opinion. India is a beatuiful mess. The left ran India for 50 years. Nehru was a university professor turned cult-leader. Indira was Nixon. Rahul Gandhi made his own grave and earned his 'Pappu' moniker. There are no left-wing or right-wing parties in India anymore. They are all socially-conservative, and try (unsuccessfully) to be fiscally liberal.
fartVader
21d 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
19d ago
downstream of the cultural issues
You are techincally correct. The last couple of generations grew up in the suburbs and hated it. Now they don't want to go back.
With the demise of organic in-person culture, suburbs and small cities can feel isolating. Other than a few places like NYC, you'll quickly find yourself isolated because you never meet anyone. NYC forces you to collide with people like almost nowhere else in the US. The other big cities also achieve this to a small degree. But past that, every other place in the US makes a newcomer feel like they're trapped in their own head. Now newcomers suffering didn't used to matter as much, but pretty much every young professional is being forced to move into some other city as a transplant. They all get shuffled around, each getting more and more isolated.
So yeah, people want housing and they want it in a place where they won't be miserable.
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
11d ago
There are only 3 public newsletters that I think gives you a genuine alpha over the 75th percentile trader.
- https://stratechery.com/
- money stuff - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levine
- https://sinocism.com/
Do they sound unreasonably dense and hard to parse? Yes, they are meant to be. You don't get an alpha by doing easy things.
Otherwise, the best way to be a stock trader is to become a rich person's golf buddy, and hope you overhear some stuff between drives.
fartVader
25d 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
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.
fartVader
5mo ago
Wonder Woman is a hyper sexualized Amazonian played by the top model of Israel who wears skimpy clothes while being a bad-ass and falling in love. It is literally the opposite of woke. Her rogues gallery (villains) are also women and she was never gender swapped.
A strong woman != woke movie.
If wonder woman had been made in the 90s, it would not have been THAT different.
fartVader
18d ago
It is about making it lucrative to those who are on the fence. The people with strong opinions on kids are not changing their opinions.
fartVader
1yr ago
might be the most misleading graph I have ever seen
I urge folks to take a look at this graph. Peak comedy.
IMO, the kind of person who has sex with more than a critical mass of people was already broken to begin with or will be sufficiently broken by the end of it. This applies to both men and women.
An endless supply of sex completely distances you from the intimate nature of it, converting it into a bare transaction. When viewed as a transaction, you can't help but view everything about it with contempt. This is especially true about rock-stars who can clearly see the proportionality between their rising fame and rising body-count.
When a girl say[s] NO it means no.
I believe this, but it is womankind's responsibility to enforce this on all other women. When 50%+ of the 1000 women this dude has slept with has said some variant of 'noooo stoooop' before actively engaging in sex, No does not mean No.
"No means No" is something I and a good few of my principled peers actively practice. That being said, almost all of them have stories where women expect men to make non-consensual moves by 'reading their signs'. Signs that I can confidently tell you, are NOT consistent. It is a good principle to always ask for consent, but it is a well-acknowledged losing-move if you want to get laid.
during an emotionally abusive and controlling relationship that lasted for about three months
Things get even more fucked, when a guy has some impression of initial consent and then exploits that for increasingly extreme sexual fantasies.
Russell Brand sounds like a terrible human. He is one among thousands of typical frat-boy assholes who treat women like trash. If a woman ever speaks out against them, they're either ignored or bullied by other women. At the same time, men like Russell Brand keep getting bodies thrown at them, as long as they are on the side of the system. Ideally, these men would get cancelled
The present form of accountability culture is completely broken. It involves further scaring the principled and paranoid, while the brazen and unaccountable continue to live life as they always had. Every once in a while, the iconoclast (Brand) has the hammer brought down on him. But only after the damage has been done.
David Mitchell's legendary rant remains as relevant as ever.
If women want to explore extreme kinks on 1 night stands with the same top 5% of physically desirable men and have consent be conveyed through soft-hints, then you will inevitably incentivize habitual line-steppers into occupying that 5% space.
I am all for a society where everyone has the freedom to do what they want without patriarchal oppression holding them down. BUT, we need to be practical about 'cause and effect'. People are going to behave according to their incentives. And in this world, narcissists like Russell Brand are incentivized to be aggressive, abusive and unaccountable liars. As long as that's the case, more Russell Brands will keep popping up. And No, being cancelled after fucking 1000 women is not what accountability looks like. You have to nip it in the bud.
fartVader
5mo ago
I'll bite. I say no.
Age of consent for adult-child intercourse should be treated as iron clad. The second child abuse (especially child sexual abuse) becomes quantifiable through a monetary value, pandora's box opens. These kinds of thought experiments should always be rejected by answering with a blanket no. It's on principle on what laws, morals and values mean to be society. The free-market value of human dignity is pathetically low. That is reason enough to not allow it to interact with money. Nothing good will come out of it.
People conflate questions phrased like 'should X be allowed' with 'should you do X'. What you choose to do with your own free-will is your choice. Whether society chooses to support you is a whole another question all together.
fartVader
4mo 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)
Sunscreen acts as a moisturizer and protects your skin from irritants if your oils have been washed off. It prevents dryness, acne, sub burn and cancer. The good stuff isn't sticky or smelly.
I apply it once a day, but I am also brown and work indoors. Strong recommend.
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