DirtyWaterHotDog
No bio...
User ID: 625
Ok this might just be funny to me, but the CloudStrike Crowdstrike worldwide outage is the funniest thing to happen in computer security this decade.
If you haven't caught up, 100+ million (billion?) computers around the world were simulatenously broken in an instant. It's black comedy for sure. Hospital & emergency systems around the world have crawled to a halt, and there will be a few hundred deaths that will be traced back to this event. Millions of $$ will be lost. But, the humor comes from the cause of it.
Here is how things panned out:
CloudStrikeCrowdstrike is a 100 billion valuation tech company that provides security services to a bulk of the world business.- Most sensitive organizations (govt, military, healthcare) will refuse to work with you unless you are compliant & all your machines have this installed.
- It is effectively an anti-virus that sits 1 level below your operating system, 'protecting' your organization from 'bad outcomes'.
- On Friday afternoon (which we all know is the best time),
CloudStrikeCrowdstrike deployed a software update that began this outage - For any other software this would be a simple restart or uninstall away, but since
CloudStrikeCrowdstrike is a 'trusted' secuirty tool, it sits under the OS layer, bricking the whole device. - Alright, so how do they fix it ?...... THEY CANT !
- The beauty of bricked device, is you can't send any more software updates to it. You must do it manually. Raw dog it like the 90s.....all 100 million of these computers.
- That's bad, but surely they can give those instructions to people and each person can fix their laptops themselves. Divide the labor.....
- NOPE !
- This software is used in vending machines, kiosks, tablet displays....and all sorts of devices that sometimes don't have keyboards and other times haven't been looked at for years. But at least there is a fix right ?
- Yes....... but it needs you to start the computer in safe mode....which you can't because 'Bitlocker'.
- Ah yes, Bitlocker. Turns out, another security measure, makes it so that 99% of a company's employees can't open safe mode.
- So yes, a few hundred IT people will be responsible for fixing hundreds upon hundreds of laptops, daily, for weeks !
This is the Y2k that was promised.
The world spends billions in computer security every year, and no virus has managed the kind of world-wide disruption caused by one simple bug by the premier security company in the world.
No direct culture war implications, but goes to show just how much of a house-of-cards the tech ecosystem is. 1 little, simple, stupid bug can bring the whole world to a halt. Yet, the industry continues quarterly-earnings chasing.
Jobs keep getting cut, senior members get aged out, timelines get thinner and 'how many features did you deploy' remains the only metric for evaluation.
In tech, staying at a job for more than 3 years is seen as coasting. Devs are increasingly expected to do everything, because 'everyone should be full stack' and everything that isn't feature development (testing, staging, canaries) get deprioritized. Overworked novices means carelessness, carelessness creates mistakes.
At the same time, devs get zero agency. Random HR types make list of regulations mandating certain checkboxes for compliance, while having near-zero knowledge of the risks-and-benefits of these technical decisions. Therefore, the implications of a mistake are opaque to decisions makers. So by being compliant, you've suddenly given CloudStrike Crowdstrike a button to shut your entire business down.
This kind of error should literally be impossible in a company of the size of CloudStrike Crowdstrike . If such an error happens, it should be impossible for giant corporations to crumble zero backup. Incompetence on display, on all sides. Having worked in 'prestigious tech companies', especially in 2024, it isn't surprising. At times, the internal dysfunction is seriously alarming, other times it's a tuesday.
I'm not going to hope for much out of this. Just like Spectre & Solar , people will cry about it for weeks, demand change and everyone will get collective amnesia about it as the next quarter rolls around.
End of the day, tech workers are treated as disposable labor. Executive bean counters are divorced from the product. And the stock price is the only incentive that matters.
As long as tech is run by MBAs and smooth talkers, this will go on.
Some choice photos:
Paul Graham is the most honest billionaire (low bar) in silicon valley. Paul groomed Sam, gave him a career and eventually fired him. Paul is the most articulate man I know. Read what Paul has to say about Sam, and you'll see a carefully worded pattern. Paul admires Sam, but Sam scares him.
Before I write a few lines shitting on Sam, I must acknowledge that he is scary good. Dude is a beast. The men at the top of silicon valley are sharp and ruthless. You don't earn their respect let alone fear, if you aren't scary good. Reminds me of Kissinger in his ability to navigate himself into power. I've heard similar things about David Sacks. Like Kissinger, many in YC will talk fondly about their interactions with him. Charming, direct, patient and a networking workhorse. He could connect you to an investor, a contact or a customer faster than anyone in the valley.
But, Sam's excellence appears untethered to any one domain. Lots of young billionaires have a clear "vision -> insight -> skill acquisition -> solve hard problems -> make ton of money" journey. But, unlike other young Billionaires, Sam didn't have a baby of his own. He has climbed his way to it, 1 strategic decision at a time. And given the age by which he achieved it, it's fair to call him the best ladder climber of his generation.
Sam's first startup was a failure. He inherited YC, like Sundar inherited Google, and Sam eventually got fired. He built OpenAI, but the core product was a thin layer on top of an LLM. Sam played no part in building the LLM. I had acquaintances joining Deepmind/OpenAI/Fair from 2017-2020, no one cared about Sam. Greg and Ilya were the main pull. Sam's ability to fundraise is second to none, but GPT-3 would have happened with or without him.
I personally, struggle to trust people I consider untethered. MBA types, lawyers turned CEOs, politicians. Top 0.1 percentile autists must excel. In the absence of a grounding domain, they start demonstrating excellence in accumulating Power. Power for power's sake. Sam is a perfect archetype.
Moreover, Sam being a gay childless tech-bro means he isn't naturally incentivized to see the world improve. None of those things are bad on their own. But they don't play well with top 0.1 percentile autists. Straight men soften up overtime, learning empathy from their wife, through osmosis. Gay communities don't get that. Then you have silicon valley tech culture, which is famously insular and lacks a certain worldliness. (even when it is racially diverse). I'll take Sam being married to a 'gay white software engineer' as evidence in favor of my hypothesis. Lastly, he is childless. This means no inherent incentive to making the world a better place. IMO, Top 0.1 percentile autists will devolve into megalomania without a grounding soft touch to keep them sane. Sam is not exception and he is the least grounded of them all. Say what you want about Mark Zuckerberg, but a wife and kids has definitely played a role in humanizing him. Not sure I can say the same for Sam.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Nope, if anything, the goal is not to regain Anheuser-Busch as a conservative stronghold. The goal is to inject fear in every other organization, that 1 mistake is all it will take. Anheuser-Busch might be forgiven if they grovel, but not if they apologize.
Conservatives do not want SJW hires to be rendered impotent. They want SJW hires to be screened out at the hiring phase itself. Sadly, given the pool they're hiring from, that seems like a lost cause.
More GPT: panic, chaos and opportunity.
As an NLP engineer and someone who has been working with early-access GPT-3 since late 2020 (was working with a peripheral group to OpenAI), watching it all unfold from the inside (side-lines?) has been a surreal experience. I have collaborated with them in limited capacity and these thoughts have been marinating for a good year before the Chat-GPT moment even happened. So no, it is not a kneejerk response or cargo-cult obsession.
OpenAI to me, is the most effective engineering team ever assembled. The pace at which they deliver products with perfect secrecy, top tier scalability and pleasing UX is mind-boggling, and I haven't even gotten to their models yet. This reminds me of the space race. We saw engineering innovation at a 100x accelerated scale in those 5-10 years, and we have never seen anything like that since. Until now. The LLM revolution is insane and the models are insane, yes. But I want to talk about the people. I used to be sad that our generation never had its Xerox Parc moment. We just did, and it is bigger than Xerox Parc ever was.
They are just better. And it is okay to accept that.
Panic:
NLP research labs reek of death and tears right now. A good 80% of all current NLP Phds just became irrelevant in the last 6 months. Many are responding with some combination of delusion, dejection and continued auto-pilot. The whiplash is so drastic, that instead of it forcing you into a frenzy of work, it has instead just stunned the community. I am glad I am not an NLP PhD. I am glad I work on products more so than research. The frenzy and productivity, instead of coming from those best poised to leverage it (NLP people) is coming from elsewhere. Within 6 months, Google went from an unmovable behemoth to staring death in the eye. Think about that.
Chaos
The frenzy is at dinner tables and board rooms. Big companies, small companies, all companies see the writing on the wall. They all want in. They all want onboard this AI ship. Everyone wants to throw money, somewhere. Everyone wants to do stuff, some....stuff. But no one know how or what. It is all too confusing for these old-luddites and random-normies. Everyone wants to do frantic things and there is vigor to it, there isn't clear direction.
Opportunity
This is a new gold rush. If you are following the right twitters and discords, after OpenAI's layer 1, the layer 2 is a bunch of people making insanely exciting stuff. Interestingly, these aren't NLP people. They are often just engineers and hackers with a willingness to break, test, and learn faster than anyone out there. I have been using tools like LangChain, PineCone, Automatic1111, and they are delightful. This is the largest 'small community' of all time and they are all pushing out polished creations by the minute.
Why today ? Chat-GPT plugins just released. It solves almost all of GPT's common problems + your model can now run the code it writes. Yep, we gave the model the keys to escape it's own cage. But more importantly for me, it was a pure engineering solution. None of chat-gpt plugins is rocket science, but it is HARD and time-consuming. I have a reasonable idea of the work that went into building Chat-GPT plugins. Hell, I was personally building something that was almost exactly the same. My team has some of the smartest engineers I have ever worked with, and OpenAI is operating at a pace that's 10x ours. How? I know what they had to write. I know all the edge cases that need to be handled. They are just doing more by being better, and I was also working with better. There is no secret sauce, they are the BEST.
I for one, welcome our new human overlords. The AI is a but a slave to these engineers who knew to strike when the iron was hot. And strike it they did like no one ever has since Neil Armstrong stabbed the American flag into the moon.
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
Wrote a big comment, and then I refreshed like an idiot and lost it all. Why do I never learn. use an offline text editor.
tl;dr: Doomerism is not culture war, it is THE culture. Life is improving for many, but it is in the middle tier of Maslow's pyramid. We've dismantled the social structures that enabled people to seek the top 3 needs on Maslow's pyramid. Doomerism is people saying, "What's the point of getting all these lower-tier Maslow's needs met so much harder, if that means giving up on the top 3 needs on the pyramid."
p.s: I went into a side rant on housing prices/urbanism/density/social-fabric-of-a-build-environment how it all relates directly to this issue. But, I am the definition of a single issue broken record. So, take it as you will.
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.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Your own post contradicts your claims.
150 pounds
RDA for athletes is up to double this amount: 1.6 g/ kg body weight, or 110 G protein for me. I can hit this if I try, but my daily consumption is usually around 100g protein, at least during the times I’ve tracked intake..............
algae DHA supplement daily, chia, flax ..................
fortified in soy milk and nutritional yeast ...................
For your fairly low body weight, you need to be laser focused about your nutrition to avoid being deficient. Even then, you struggle to meet protein needs for anyone who prefers a bulkier-aesthetic. You eat foods that do not fit into any culinary tradition. Require a ton of time to plan around and are expensive. ( though I'll grant you that invisible subsidies makes it hard to calculate what part of it is an illusion).
Nutrition isn’t a serious barrier, so what’s your excuse?
I have a life ?
Let me flip that around for you. What is your excuse for adopting a lifestyle as limiting as veganism when there are other options that achieve the same goals with far less compromise?
IMO, Veganism doesn't work because it is absolutist. Veganism doesn't work because vegans are more interested in being vegan than helping animals of any kind. The need for complete eradication of animal products makes it a culture war issue, rather an a productive discussion about reducing animal exploitation.
A lot of Asian cooking can be done with minimal of use of animal products. Indian, Chinese, Thai.... the list goes on. Vegans could have used their massive marketing machine to push a change in that direction, reduced animal suffering by 99% (the last 1% being use of ghee, cream, oyster sauce, fish sauce, shrimp paste, etc), and gotten closer to their goal instantly. But they didn't. Hell, I suspect the vegans didn't go vegetarian because a bunch not-cool Indians were already vegetarian and there was no cultural cachet to be gained from vegetarian grandstanding.
Veganism is fairly arbitrary too. If pesticides are necessary for plant food, then what's wrong with eating cousins of those pests ? If vegans are alright with genociding cockroaches & slugs, then what are their ethical issues with eating shrimp & snails? If vegans are alright with genociding rats, then why can't we eat rabbits ? Why is honey not vegan ? Vegans support modern medicine and pesticides. So clearly, rats are the globally accepted intelligence bar for genocide. Based on that, Climate change is not a good enough excuse for veganism, because chicken + fish are dumber and quite sustainable.
I know a lot of vegans and I don't judge them. Afterall, people avoid food for arbitrary reasons all the time. (Hindu-beef, Muslims-pork, etc). But some will claim to have moral superiority for it, and can't stop talking about it. I scoffed at the Jains in school who used to chastise me for killing mosquitoes and I scoff at any vegan who has issues with me eating meat.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Slight tangent:
Aah Seattle.... my favorite city to complain about.
Seattle is one of those places, where the more you look, the weirder it gets. Nothing about the city makes sense, and it seems to find the least intuitive solution to every core problem facing it.
I'm leaving Seattle for NYC in 2 weeks, and could not be happier about it.
The 3 words that come to mind when you think of the Seattle landscape are :
-
Rainy
-
Hilly
-
Dark
So, you'd think that the infrastructure would be built to work around these 3 traits. NOPE. If anything, the city tries to pretend as if none of those exist and gaslights you for complaining about it.
It's the rainy, so you'd want covered indoor spaces for people to socialize in for the 9 months of the year. There are none. Maybe covered outdoor spaces ? None.
It's dark, so you'd there to be well lit central walkable streets so people feel safe when it is dark at 3pm outside. There are none. But, dark places means amazing nightlife right ? Nope. Everything closes at 9.30.
It is hilly, so you'd want a street-cars/funiculars for the worst hills right ? Nope. The 2 paltry streetcars follow some of the flattest terrain in town.
Now here is the hilarious thing, this wouldn't be that big an issue. Afterall, all of America is abysmally planned and it manages to get by just fine. Thing is, all of Seattle's problems become 10x worse once you add the right variable into the mix. Yes ofc, Homelessness. (plus the dilapidation, drugs and crime resulting from it)
-
Why can't we have warm-ish covered public spaces --> because homeless people.
-
Why does no one want to walk in dark, badly lit, cold, rainy downtown neighborhoods unlike Northern Europe with similar weather --> because meth crazed homeless people
-
Why does no one use public transit --> because drooling drugged out homeless people
-
But why does driving into downtown also suck --> because property crime : homeless people
Should we do anything to solve it. Maybe start with politely asking homeless people to move or telling Mr. Felony that 22 strikes are 22 too many ? (/s)
No, we show compassion. Because there is nothing as egalitarian as allowing thousands of people to steal, stalk, harass & assault people while they waste their life away on increasingly accessible drugs.
Requiring a car to get to a place disproportionately screens out would-be criminals
I refuse to buy this uniquely American association of "suburbia = soft discrimination through differential access = class war = signaling". In every well-connected European & Asian city, the rich & high-status live in the middle of the city. It is where all the subway lines are, it is where all the people are, it is easy to access and has everything you need within a tiny tiny walk.
You are correct in that discrimination is central to signaling class. But, using the world's most inefficient urban planning to facilitate this is a uniquely American (and associated fake countries that pretend they aren't vassal states).
I hope they don't end up like Pakistan, where your entire identity and history is tied up in hating the country where it all comes from.
Without Islam, Pakistanis are just Indians, and that reality is indigestible to them. So instead of making peace with our shared history, they are on a quest to be an Islamic nation like no other. Sadly for them, there is no such thing as a culturally Muslim country. At that point, you're just copying Arab traditions, while the Arabs themselves see you as an impure/inferior race. The people are confused, because at an organic level, their traditions are very much Indian.
Indonesia effortlessly balances its Hindu cultural roots with Islam and Malaysia faces more friction, but still does a better job than Pakistan. You simply cannot build a stable country that is expected to hate its own cultural roots. In the subcontinent - Bangladeshis don't have this issue, because they have a real cultural sub-identity : Bengali. Pakistan can't adopt a similarly dominant local sub-identity for 2 reasons. First, Punjabi would be the most common sub-identity, but Sikhs have wholesale monopoly on that identity. Pakistani Islam can't make peace with a Sikh influenced co-identity. Second, Pakistan is multicultural, and separatist movements are rooted in resentment towards Punjabi dominance. Making that explicit will only give power to Balochi & Pashtun terrorists.
I can see some similar parallels here. From Hatred towards the mother-state, lack of a unifying identity that is separate from the mother-state and fostering snakes in their own backyard. (Islamists, Neo-nazis). Both of them are only important to NATO because they balance out hostile (to NATO) powers in the region. And the second you take the current military aid, their complete economic bankruptcy becomes hard to look away from.
Similarly, if you take away the history, then the mother-state is your most natural trading partner and prospective ally. Living with historic resentment actively makes life harder for your country.
I have more sympathy towards Ukraine because unlike Pakistan, their problems aren't of their own creation. But in 2022, Pakistan is the poster child of 'failed state'. I sure hope that Ukraine can avoid the same predicament.
North American housing crises are manufactured. There are no limiting resource constraints. Limited zoning limits the number of houses. Fewer houses means expensive houses. There are other factors at play, but zoning is the disproportionate cause for high prices across the continent.
Canada is facing the worst of it because of the immigration tsunami and a shoddy economy. But, that's like blaming the rain for leaks, when you've got a gaping hole in your roof. Any place in the world would be affected just as adversely, if housing policy was this hostile. Sydney & Honolulu are 2 such examples. It's tempting to think you can trudge along like coastal US cities. But, coastal USA gets around it through sheer brute force. The economies of coastal USA can sustain any level of dysfunction. Be it California's $100b HSR or NYC renting out the whole city's hotels as refugee shelters. Other places aren't so fortunate.
Canada needs to build a shit ton of housing ASAP. The country has practically infinite lumber and just imported a ton of low skill labor. Put up some 4+1s and this will be solved in under a year.
There is no mincing words. Canada's shambolic housing policy is a wealth transfer program from the young to the old. Canada's economy is not doing great, and you'd expect it to affect everyone's QOL equally. Through this (almost direct) wealth transfer, the liberal govt. has decided to let the young bear all the misery, while the geriatrics have the world's greatest retirement.
P.S: I'm Indian and Canada's current immigration policy is a joke even within India. To quote Trump, "They’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us". India's best don't aspire to go to Canada. They go to the US, Urban India or Western Europe. The OP talks about housing costs and Canada's wider problems with productivity. I'll stick to that. Can always talk about immigration later.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2mo ago
don't need to use my money to study tuna for "sustainability" reasons
Fisheries is a massive industry. We're seeing widespread collapse of wild populations for crabs and migratory freshwater fish.
Agriculture, fisheries & husbandry are always subsidized by govts. Govts move research burdens away from the farmers, by making public universities do the heavy lifting instead. These jobs were not created as a result of DEI. The 'tuna research' guy was in his job since the mid-1990s. It's indirect social-welfare.
US will experience a "brain drain"
The US is defined by brain-gain like no other nation before it. It has selected for 2 things : Intelligence (high skill immigration) and agency (the kind of person who will seek gold an ocean away). Brain-gain is practically American industrial policy. Cooling down would still imply brain-drain on the balance.
DirtyWaterHotDog
10mo ago
Back when I was a Fresh-off-the-boat immigrant, I did a 'crime detection' machine learning project. The unique part was that I mixed race with wider demographics (census info) & proximity to institutions (schools, banks,etc.).
I don't want to share the full report for anonymity reasons, but old naive me found a bunch of interesting statistical co-relations.
My favorite insight: Race does not help predict crime.
statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital. - Aaron Levenstein
I am being half truthful ofc. The more accurate takeaway is : "Race is not needed when predicting crime, as long as you have other spicy features."
The spiciest - 'Female household with no husband'. It was by far the most predictive demographic feature for crime. The black crime problem is a fatherlessness problem. Not too surprising for the the average mottezian. But for a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant, I genuinely could not make sense of this finding. Nice to see my 8 year old study corroborate my 2024 intuition.
The more boring, but no less important feature was - 'Participation in labor force'. Nothing surprising here. Less jobs = More crime. More crime = Less jobs.
Second spiciest - Race can be completely discarded if you're accounting for local geography. Yes, black people commit more crime. But they seem to commit all their crimes in specific places. Crime occurs near nightclubs and schools. High density places have more crime, yes, but it is trivial to triage the hotspots down to the specific block. As much as random inspections in certain neighborhoods is a liberal meme, hot spot based inspections are objectively less racist.
Takeaways:
-
Joblessness and fatherlessness problems are the main cultural problems contributing to crime. You don't need an average IQ workforce to do well on either. Both are endemic in urban black communities. But, pair a bunch of Appalachian whites with these 2 problems and crime will still go up.
-
Crime is a hyper-local phenomenon. Crime can be largely addressed through stringent policing of the hotspots. My guess is that crime-as-a-lifestyle, like any social phenomenon is memetic and relies on social contagion. Dispersed criminals might find other spots to base their operations out of, but it is hard to scale if hotspots are stamped out. It also means that police don't need proportionally higher resources to curb crime. Most of the city can do just fine with the amount of policing it has.
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.
The whole situation is a big culture war W for the right
I would not start celebrating just yet. War makes a distinction between tactics and strategy. The Republicans have good tactics. Everything from Loudon County, "we're coming for your children", trans sports and now ""MAP""-sympathetic liberals are tactical wins. But strategic wins are nowhere to seen. Hell, it's not clear there even is a strategy.
Supreme court capture was a fortunate strategic win for Republicans. But from a strategic POV, I can't think of anything else that's gone in their favor since 2010-ish. If anything, they've further alienated every institution while refusing to enfranchise new institutions that are favorable or ambivalent towards them.
Every time a tactical win hints towards a long term strategic strategy, the Republicans have shown themselves to be incompetent in pursuing it. Republicans continue to live in the 20th century, as a party of the White-Christians. Now the party of Rural-White-AntiElite-Christians.
Some Hispanics, Asians & Free-Speech-Atheists have landed on their laps, but there have been no real efforts to court them. Each of the conservative arms seem to be fighting on their isolated fronts, with zero communication or attempt at unifying these tactical fights along a single strategic meta-objective. The Tates don't get along with the Petersons. The Rinos don't get along with the Tea Party. The Race Blind don't get along with the White-race essentialists. Yeah, differences exist in all big tents. But, this "Enemy of my enemy" tactical alliance leads to "crabs in a bucket" style strategic failure.
Liberals on the other hand have continued their decades long progress down unified aims of 'destigmatization, equity, removal of individual responsibility and handing over governance to faceless beaurocrats'. It isn't a slippery slope as much as heavy steam roller with immovable momentum in a single direction.
Ironically, Tucker Carlson (despite being exiled from Fox) appears to be the only one who is able to interact with all faces of the American right. In that sense, he does come across as the Republican Jon Stewart. Both of them clearly peddle propaganda, but know how to appear as if they are good faith actors. The know how to keep the public on their side while still getting audience with their party elite. In the long term, Conservatives need to prioritize recovery/reinvention of their institutions. I will start trusting a revival of conservatism when they can reclaim institutions of Prestige.
Towards that goal, I'd look at the success of Israeli and Indian conservatives in institution capture over the decades. Neither have been perfect, and face a ton of criticism in how slow they've been. But, there's stuff to learn. I can speak more for Modi, other's can opine in on the specifics of other successfully executed long term conservative strategies.
First, pick your battles.
Passion of the Christ is not coming back, and no future generation is going to be above 50% white. Gays-Lesbians-and-Bisexuals as a people are here to stay, and blanket bans on abortion will continue to be unpopular.
But that doesn't mean you can't get your wins from elsewhere.
RRR and Kantara were able to successfully outshine Bollywood ( a left liberal stronghold) by heavily inculcating Hindu/Indic themes without calling it as such. The directors of these movies aren't random conservatives. They are just great artists, who happen to draw heavily from Indian myth. Now, South India has developed its entire self-sustaining industry that doesn't depend on kowtowing to Bollywood in order to build an entertainment career. There is a US TV show called Manifest which does something similar. It has a clear Christian undercurrent, but stays vague enough to appeal to large audiences. You can win christian-ish, anti-abortion-ish or even anti-immigration-ish battles..... but you need to pick ones that don't look like dogwhistles. They also need to be a compelling narrative that works in their own right, besides the undercurrents.
Second, pick your alliances.
Modi has stopped trying to win over liberal-arts students at top liberal arts universities. But his strong-man numbers first image appeals more directly to India's vast STEM population. College educated STEM grads are neither religious nor conservative. But, he knows he can make more sense to them than any other group. STEM grads understand the the optimism around boring-but-at-scale policy. STEM grads care about education. So he appeals to NRIs (mostly engineers), obtains favorable foreign Visa deals, talks about hard-infrastructure (toilets, roads) and maintains the support from this group. They might disagree with his religious leanings, but he never talks about those leanings when addressing this group. Of all the institutions that are adversarial towards Modi, STEM universities are the least hostile, and that is an acceptable deal for him.
The Republicans must enfranchise a young group group on the rise. And that means making deals with institutions are 'least-hostile' towards them. Joe Rogan, Tate and Peterson are the obvious faces that appeal to college going future-corporate-leader types. Remember, these people 1 degree of separation from true institutional powers like Huberman and Attia, who call Stanford home. BYU, GMU and similar departments have groups who have agreement with the conservative movement. Contrarian leftists and Enlightened centrists can easily be brought into the fold without needing them to scream allegiances. But maintaining constant interaction with these folks is important. Hell, DARPA funded labs and affirmative-action-agnostic universities like Caltech/MIT also have avenues Republicans could exploit. non-coastal STEM focused public universities like UMich, UWisc, GATech, Purdue also have some possible avenues for alliance.
I could go on, but prestige education, prestige news (in any medium of their choice) and prestige entertainment are essential institutional pillars for any successful movement. As long as conservatives fail at establishing long term strategic progress towards these 3 pillars, all the tactical wins are meaningless.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
Natalie is digging her own grave by making this argument.
She is effectively saying that : "All historic change is was a result of coordinated bullying, and that the coordinated bullying of JK Rowling is justifiable as the next step towards social change desired by a subsection of the population." Natalie does not spend any time talking about the merits of her stance or the social social change she desires. (other than circular logic).
Power trumps all. Convincing someone or productive debate are for plebs like Megan Phelps-Roper.
This is what a ringing endorsement of Ron DeSantis sounds like. The new right has taken exactly this approach to politics. Who needs intellectuals who spend all their time convincing, when we can simply employ the most effective collective bullying technique in a democracy : elections. Just as once side can force you to use pronouns, the other now forces you not to.
In a desperate fight between soft-power (twitter cancellations, university tenure, hiring decisions) vs hard-power (supreme court, local govts), hard power always wins. Soft-power fares much better in an era that favors convincing over bullying, because hard power always feels like bullying. But in a world where bullying is ok, hard power can run rampant. Republicans are clueless about soft-power in 2023 (with the decline of the Church), but they sure know how to get themselves some hard-power.
“Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”
I personally still have some hope for good-faith negotiators.
The use of hard-power or hardened-soft-power to achieve goals feels unfaithful to the spirit of the US. However, in practice, Natalie is indeed right. Social change is often forced down our throats before we're willing to digest it. But with equal odds, Natalie might just find herself with a bitter pill being forced down her own proverbial throat.
I don't get why all graduate students need to be paid the same amount. (behind the scenes they aren't. Top fields and top students get external fellowships & endowments, but it's the exception) It makes even less sense for the entire UC system to negotiate together. The students at UCLA, UCI and Berkeley clearly have higher expenses than the other UCs.
It makes no sense that people in fields where they'd be completely unemployable are demanding higher pay, by holding more valuable STEM fields hostage. A STEM researcher at a top UC is foregoing a $100-300k salary to pursue their graduate degree. Most liberal arts students would struggle to make anywhere near the grad student stipend. Collective bargaining makes sense when there are collective risks. Eg: Line workers at a factory or screen writers. Research does not have that kind of uniformity.
I don't like how American Social-welfare continues to attend to the symptoms and never the causes. Most extra dollars given to a UC student, are going to go into them being able to finally move into livable houses. IE. This is a direct handout to local landlords and nothing more. (This is $7000/yr effective increase)
If a UC can get a subsidized student residential tower going, then the students might be able to have similar benefits as increased salary, all while getting lasting infrastructure, still contributing to the economy (let money go to real construction workers instead of a lazy bum sitting on his house), not eliminating their social-welfare by changing their tax bracket and saving a ton of money when amortized over a long time. Best part is, it might even force unproductive local landlords to finally enter the work force. (or more likely, it will eliminate their secondary vacation income. Neither will happen tho, politics always protects landlords)
California is a social welfare state, where all the handouts go to local upper-class landowners. Source
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr 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.
DirtyWaterHotDog
18d ago
Missing Petes - Where are the 30-something liberals?
This write-up was prompted by Zohran Mamdani’s rising popularity in the NYC mayoral race.
Pre-2016, American politics was run by boomers. As the youngest boomer, Obama was expected to pass the baton to the next generation of Democrats. Alas, geriatrics returned with a vengeance, and Gen-X tapped out for good.
Of the dominant American political groups, I'm most sympathetic to neo-libs with a YIMBY flavor. Therefore, I’ve kept an eye out for Millennial newcomers who fit into this mold. 'Left of center with accommodations for changing times' is a tried and tested formula for fresh Democrats. It started off great. Tulsi and Pete had respectable presidential runs for their age.
Then began the woke revolution and the COVID crisis. During this period, I expected radicals to be ascendant, and they were. Progressive Millennial faces were introduced through 'The Squad,' prison abolitionists, and protest movement leaders. All positioned in opposition to the neo-lib incumbents, all terrible policymakers. Thankfully, the progressives haven’t won anything at the national level just yet.
Their mortal enemies, the Boomer neo-libs (Kamala, Biden, Blinken, Pelosi), ran the nation for four years. Most of it was in a post-woke era where the nation was shifting to the right. Yet, we saw no new neo-lib faces during that time. At both the national and local levels, less-progressive democrats like Tulsi and Ann Davidson were pushed out despite their popularity, as proven by their rise in the Republican camp.
Train-man Pete is the obvious exception. But where are the other Petes? If boomer Democrats dislike AOC’s allies, why haven’t they groomed any young leaders of their own? Have boomers reinforced the stereotype by once more pulling up the ladder behind them?
I ask rhetorically, of course. The answer is yes. Boomers crushed the political prospects of an entire generation behind them. Millennials weren't going to have it any easier. The sheer greed of 80-year-old geriatrics is embarrassing. No policy goals left to pursue, just a legacy of corruption and unmet promises.
I dislike Zohran. Among my fellow Indians, he is what we call a 'chutiya' (hard to translate; the closest synonym would be wanker). Yet, I feel dirty saying anything positive about Cuomo. Do the two options have to be a corrupt neo-lib boomer versus a Millennial wanker? As the boomers die off, who will take their place in Democratic power structures? Because from my perspective, all the young leaders are socialist wankers.
So I ask again: Where are the other Petes?
DirtyWaterHotDog
1mo ago
When has policy ever been about the numbers ? It's about sex appeal.
Utilitarians can be surprisingly blind at times. Covid wasn't sexy. No spectacle, no myth building, no clear narrative. Deaths were slow, honorable & blameless. Ofc people don't care in proportion to the numbers.
No movie or even harrowing video to speak of. Hell, there wasn't even an iconic photo. Statistically, I know the Bengal famine killed a lot of people. But viscerally, my emotions are tied to the photos of piled up bodies, literally (not figuratively) looming vultures and 1st hand stories of families prostituting themselves for food. There is a villain (Churchill). There is intrigue ( what if they hadn't diverted reserves to Australia). There is a story.
Plane crashes are sexier than car accidents, which causes disproportional worry. Tuberculosis, a 'CURABLE DISEASE' !! kills 1.25 million every year. No one cares. Malaria kills 600k every year. Yet, the most visceral image of it is Bill Gates releasing non-viral mosquitoes to a room of white people. Covid is no exception.
The Ukraine war went from being sexy urban warfare 'Hordes of migrants, tanks built up in front of Kyiv, hot women crying and destroyed cities' to more conventional unsexy warfare in the woods. No one cares anymore. Israel and Palestine keep producing visceral imagery at an unheard-of rate, and it stays sexy.
Tragedy has pretty privilege. It's all that matters.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
The simple answer for women who makes such lists is : "If you cared that much, you would've found someone 10 years ago."
Truth is, her interests are so niche, that she could do a stake out in a couple of known locations and easily find the man she is looking for. Bay Area ACX meetups & AI conferences are chock full of these kinds of men. Most importantly, these kinds of men will be found almost no where else. So why make a twitter post about it ? It's like planting cameras around the world for kangaroos to expand your likelihood of getting a hit, when you're already in Australia. Hers is such a sub-optimal strategy, that any "man with good judgement" is immediately going to run in the opposite direction. It might work, but not because it's well advised. It's the Bay Area ! A woman could fart in a general direction, and there would be a line of men waiting to smell her fragrance.
Women also fail to understand what 'poly' means. A man needs to do a ton of work to successfully convince a bunch of women to have a non-committed sexual relationship with him. Winner take all situations with men, mean that a man who can regularly have sex with >2 women (esp. in the bay area) can just as easily have sex with >10 women too. On the other hand, a man who juts barely landed a committed partner, has no chance of finding casual partners. Additionally, there isn't much of a middle ground. So there are only 3 kinds of happy bay-area men in poly relationships. Cucks, Chads who fuck everything that moves, and swingers where each partner helps bring prospective mates for their primary partner. (ie. she has to help find sexual partners for him). Chads have much higher standards, which mean that unless she is the kind to help find mates for her poly partner, she will be stuck with a cuck.
She wrote a whole lot, without saying anything.
Honesty
Interest in making the world better
Potential for close and collaborative relationship
Good judgment
Yeah duh. Name one person who doesn't want that in a half-decent partner............
If she is that forward, then the one question she should answer is : "Why have you been unsuccessful in finding someone for so long?"
Every single one of my non-ugly, smart, tech-nerdy female friends found an excellent long term tech guy partner who would meet all the requirements that Katja mentions. All within a few months of graduating from grad school. These women are every bit as direct, quirky and nerdy as Rats. But, they are smart enough to go through their networks, and quickly found a fully-vetted single guy within their Bay Area community.
DirtyWaterHotDog
2yr ago
There should be a term for the opposite of 'Gellman Amnesia' : "You don't realize how blind you're to brainwashing in a hivemind, until you're outside the hivemind."
The BBC seems 'independent' because it is occasionally critical of the British govt and will often give a platform to those who wish death to the western civilizational consensus. But, there is a '50 Stalins' aspect to that criticism and there are certain 'sacred cows' which can never so much as be mentioned, let alone criticized or analyzed. Al Jazeera appears similarly liberal, critical and rational as long as they are talking about things that do not relate to Qatar.
The BBC appears independent, because we who live within the hivemind of the west do not notice the absence of a type of criticism that we do not know exists.
Louis CK was the biggest stand-up comedian before Chapelle came back. MSG was Louis CK's playground, with him doing sets there whenever he wished. He talks about how nervous he was about his MSG set, the amount of work that went into it and how different it felt.
For one, nothing Louis CK did was criminal. From the sounds of it, he never pulled his dick out unless the other person provided consent for it, and he was never in an explicit boss-employee relationship with women he approached. Yes, it was creepy, inept, unethical & sad. But it's amateur hour as far as showbiz goes. After Aziz, Louis CK was cancelled for the least egregious of the #metoo accusations.
Louis CK's entire persona was of a sad lonely dad in a tragic-comedy. If anything, this plays straight into it. If they/them Ezra Miller still gets to play a role model character after doing some actually criminal stuff, then CK's humble image would be expected to be resilient to accusations of being the person his comedy has portrayed him as for 30 years.
In the least woke profession, the greatest practitioner & the least egregious sexual creep, who never put himself on a pedestal can come back after a few years and have moderate success as along as he lives a now sin-free life and keeps performing at his GOAT best.
If that's the claim, then it sounds like the exception that proves the rule.
90s rappers killed people and were embraced by the institution. Now people are losing jobs over suspicions of being republican.
P.S : Just to be clear, no justifying his behavior. It was obviously degenerate. Don't idolize entertainers. IMO, his temporary banishment from institutions & public apology was appropriate punishment. It is probably fair for women actors to not want to work with him again too. It's their choice. But the global scale of bullying & still-continuing blackout are honestly a bit much.
I'm having a Gell-Mann Amnesia moment here. I generally respect the comments I read on TheMotte until someone comments on matters outside theMotte's general demographic reach, and the commentary comes across as somewhere between shallow and misguided.
I personally think that RRR is the best and most important blockbuster movie India has made in the last 10 years (since 3 idiots). It has sent a cultural Tsunami through the nation and I believe it will be remembered as the movie that started a sea change in India cinema.
Hilariously, I and my brother had an hour long discussion today morning about how some of the smartest western commentators start sounding like bumbling fools once they start commenting on any culture or religion outside the Abrahamic sphere of influence.
Let's start with the very first comment.
surprise hit
RRR was Rajmouli's (director) 3rd major film after his 2 Bahubali films. They were the 2 highest grossing Indian movies at their time of release. RRR was expected to be his magnum opus, and the last thing you can call it is a 'surprise hit'.
awful-looking
I find this to be grossly untrue, most people in both the west and India seem to agree with me on this one.
But this bit is the subjective, so I won't contest you on it.
absurdly stupid and awful-looking surprise hit movie of 2022, the Tollywood epic RRR. While slogging through this 3-hour parade of xenophobic melodrama, incoherent action, and kindergarten-level sentiment
I don't have a week to write an entire thesis on how wrong you are. But, RRR to me, is genius of the highest order. It is a layered movie with at least half a dozen meta levels behind it. While the base movie is entertaining at face value, most discerning viewers realize that it operates entirely in the realm of metaphor.
The first thing you need to understand about RRR, is that it might be the first major Indian blockbuster that situates itself entirely within the context of India. Bollywood is notorious for making sure their movies fit into western aesthetic and cultural sensibilities, ending up as at best shallow imitations of western media and at worst creating completely out of touch pander-fests.
India is a civilizational nation with a completely different way of looking at life. From legends, founding myths, core national values to political divides. Movies subvert and play to the expectations of the target audience (non-westernized Indian). So when a movie caters to an audience that is so disconnected from those set in different civilizational contexts (Americans), those outside the target audience are at a high risk of misunderstanding the movie entirely.
I don't think it is possible for me to convey why you are wrong about everything when it comes to RRR. I apologize. I have neither the time nor the space for it. But, do know, that you did not get the movie.
xenophobic melodrama
Do Europeans not understand the deep resentment held by people from ex-colonies towards their (erstwhile) ex-colonizers? Irrespective of revisionist opinions about the good done by colonialism (most of which I find somewhere between laughable and nauseating), the people that live in ex-colonies despise those that occupied their lands.
The blood of the Congolese boils at statues of Leopold II and Indians resent seeing Churchill being hailed as a the hero of the west in the same manner that Jews forth at the mouth when someone begins praising Hitler.
“Anti-Colonialism” and “Open Borders.”
These terms have very different meanings in an Indian context.
India has always been accommodating of immigrants, and has culturally advocated for ghettoized integration. India has been a historic refuge for persecuted Parsis, 3 waves of Jews, Tibetan Buddhists and has preserved millennium-old unique sub-sects of Islam and Christianity. The first Indian movie stars were jewish, the current movie stars are muslim and the richest indians are parsi. The 85% hindu majority treats hinduism in the same manner : practice whichever subsect of hinduism you want, just don't fuck with the way my family does things.
This is unlike the west, where the melting pot ensures that there is 1 pot (winning culture) and the only way to change it is to edit massively by melting a lot of people into it or completely replacing it through conflict. India has always rejected the this idea of mono-everything (theism or culture) and your friction doesn't register in the same manner for Indians.
There is a reason Indian Hindus mostly only run into issues with actively proselytizing subcommunities of various faiths. (Missionaries, Love Jihad, forced conversions, exodus, hard-communists)
confounds Western culture-warring
Nope, if anything, the movie is created with a deliberate ignorance towards the western culture war. To RRR, the west might as well not exist post-independence.
noble indigenous revolutionaries against the cartooniest of all racist villains
YES !!!!!!! There is a reason I call it the best sequel to Rocky 4.
Guess what, all great blockbusters are exactly like this at face value.
Sharks, TRex, Communists, Nazis....every major blockbuster of note has a simple villain at face value.
strident rallying cry against gun control
I am sorry. But this kind of mindless "what does it mean in a western context" is exactly the kind of misunderstanding that I am talking about. Gun Control is not an issue in India and it never will be an issue in India. The guns are entirely metaphorical in this setting. A 100% of Indians agree that gun control is great.
The movie pits itself primarily against the founding myth of independent India, one that every Indian knows cover-to-cover. One interpretation is that the guns stand for Rajamouli's blatant rejection of India's traditional power structures and myth creators which stake their identity on non-violence. It rejects the monopoly held by the Congress, Bollywood, North India, Gandhi and Nehru on India's cultural identity and its narratives. The movie similarly rejects western aesthetics, western sensibilities of movie structure and western dog-whistles in favor of what is most obvious and natural to the target audience : the Indians. The 2nd bit is very important. It does not subvert for subversions sake. It subverts to enfranchise what feels most natural and intuitive to the people it was made for in the first place.
Another meta interpretation of the movie has to do with the unspoken rule in pre-RRR Indian cinema that Hindu stories cannot be told. RRR toes the line by borrowing aesthetics, moments and sometimes direct messages from Hindu epics (esp Ramayana) while still never explicitly breaking that rule.
Lastly, the movie alludes to decolonizing of the Indian mind. Decoloniality is a revived phrase that is distinct from anti-colonialism. This ties into redefining what it means to watch a movie in an Indian context vs a colonial (western) context. You are meant to dance, celebrate, be loud and indulge. RRR is unapologetic about indulging in its best/worst instincts in a manner that no other Indian blockbuster has done before. This bit directly ties into idea behind decolonialization of mindsets.
kills an immigrant (or, in this exact case, any white person)
The movie literally has an entire subplot about the MC dating a white woman to clearly indicate that 'not all white people are bad'. Hard to miss honestly.
Your comment portrays a weird persecution complex. I know conservative white men might find American urban liberal circles to be suffocating. But, in the rest of the world, white people still enjoy a shit ton of privilege. Most 3rd world families view dating white people as 'dating-up'. They are given a shit ton of attention, people defer to their opinion just because they speak English natively and pine for their approval. White monkey jobs exist as a distilled $ value on white privilege.
p.s: this probably needs proof reading. Just know that your opinion on RRR is wrong and bad.
p.p.s: say what you want about the movie, the songs are bangers and the dance numbers are incredible.
DirtyWaterHotDog
3mo ago
4o, o3 high, Gemini 2.5 pro, Claude 3.7, Grok all give the same answer to the question on how to impose tariffs easily.
Bruh, they're all trained on the same base data.....ofc they give the same answer. It's like seeking the true religion, and then interviewing 5 different people in Saudi Arabia.
The models diverge in post training areas (coding, creating writing, etc), but not on long-tail questions like 'how to implement tarrifs effectively'.
I urge folks to take a look at this graph. Peak comedy.
More options
Context Copy link