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fartVader


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 05 16:31:20 UTC

				

User ID: 625

fartVader


				
				
				

				
2 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 16:31:20 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 625

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.

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.

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.

2 things can be true at the same time.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

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 would like to know the answer to this as well.

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.

That makes a lot of sense. Where I lived, the church bells only rang twice a day.

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.

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.

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.

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 ?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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)

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.)

Not sure how true it is, but the "letter to america" was likely written by Al Qaeda's head propagandist and Osama's advisor - "Azzam the American" https://twitter.com/IsmailRoyer/status/1725353618675474837

Now here is the spicy part - Our dear Azzam is a radicalized son of California Liberals. Oh wait, it gets spicier. Not just any liberal, but a part-jewish descendent of ADL leadership. Say what you want about the jews, but if you want a wordcel, you hire a jew.

American intelligence officials allege that Gadahn inspired bin Laden's September 2007 video, in which bin Laden, among other things, made reference to the subprime mortgage crisis.

Al Qaeda hired a jew and he started writing about money & wall street. You can't make this shit up. Best piece of black comedy I have read all year.

( I have deliberately written it in a snarky tone. LMK if this breaks our rules)

I had great success with this method last year, but haven't been able to keep it up this year as work has gotten impossibly stressful. So I'll say this before even starting : "you cannot build new habits if you don't have some extra juice left in you by the end of the week."

That being said, here is what works for me (as the ADHDiest person you know)

Detailed tracking is impossible. So focus on broad rules that have an impact.

Here were my broad rules for diet:

  • No liquid calories. Especially on weekdays. (Alcohol, Lemonade, Soda, Tea, Sweet Coffee)
  • No deep fried things
  • No oil-based sauces. (Yogurt based sauces are a great substitute)
  • Smaller servings of rice & wheat

Generally speaking, if I keep this up, I just end up eating lower calorie meals without thinking about it too much. I also allows me to eat fairly delicious foods, so none of this feels like sacrifice. I love cooking, so to me this almost feels like an exciting challenge than a struggle.

Portion control is obviously important, so here were my broad rules for that:

  • No breakfast except coffee. If I must, then it it is unflavored (full fat) Greek yogurt with berries. I don't explicitly intermittently fast, but this basically facilitated the same thing.
  • No snacking outside meals. If I am craving something sweet, then it is fibrous fruits. (Plums, Pears, Pineapples, Musk Melons, etc). More importantly, never bring snacks back to the house. If I am really craving them, buy and eat them at the grocery store.
  • Promote food waste. (jk). Sometimes I am only craving the first bite of something. I am human, I break my rules. I normalized throwing away the rest of the dish after the novelty of the first bite had run out. Total gratification stays the same, calories are much lower.

For working out, I pick a hobby I love : Soccer, climbing. But I don't enforce much other than:

  • Put dumb bells / pull bar in a highly trafficked area in the house. If you touch them, you must do 2 sets.
  • Cycle when possible

I was down to around 16-17% late last year, but I too have climbed up to 22-24% now. I have been in the midst of massive life change the last year, so I have been kind to myself. But, things are finally stabilizing. So, the target for the next 6 months is to be back to the 17% target before mid-next year.

LMK if you want suggestions for delicious low-calorie meals that still have decent amounts of protein.

I am not much of a drinker, and have never been drunk. So, my choice of alcohol is almost entirely about taste.

My top are:

  • Catalan Vermuth : Casa Mariol ships in the USA or MorroFi if you're in Barcelona. It's the best. I'm glad I found it later in life. If I'd found it at 18, I'd be an alcoholic.

  • Vinho Verde : The cheap trader joe's stuff is great. Perfect with fresh sea food. Perfect for lunch. Perfect for those who don't want to feel like alcoholics for day drinking. Also a great cooking wine.

  • Azulejos Tequila : It was the first Tequila I tried, and could not for the life of me figure out why people in the USA hated tequila. Unfortunately, my first experience with cheap shots was all I needed to understand the unwarranted Tequila hate. AzuleJos is not only excellent tasting as a sipping spirit, but it has the prettiest containers.

  • Taylor Fladgate 10 year tawny port - This rubs my Vermuth itch in the USA. If you like sweet wines, but like more character than just plain sugar, then this is the one for you. Perfect dessert wine.