DirtyWaterHotDog
in an abusive relationship with you lot
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User ID: 625
DirtyWaterHotDog
in an abusive relationship with you lot
1d ago
Southern Blacks don't decide elections anymore. NC and GA have lost importance. Dems don't need either state to reach 270. PA, MI and WI are the most important swing states now.
On a longer timeline, the Democrat's dream of a multi-colored coalition is no more. They imagined an impregnable blue wall built off the increasing number of Hispanics, Browns, Blacks & Liberals. That illusion has been fully shattered, as many men of all persuasions have gone full MAGA.
The Democratic National Committee will choose one state each from four regions as well as a possible fifth state:
- East: Delaware, New Hampshire.
- Midwest: Illinois, Iowa, Michigan
- South: Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia
- West: Nevada, New Mexico
If Pete gets through the primary, Blacks are still going to vote Democrat. Losing a small percent of black voters isn't disastrous. For these primaries, early voting states will matter a lot. I'd say Pete has a good shot with 3/4 regions.
DirtyWaterHotDog
in an abusive relationship with you lot
1d ago
He'd be an excellent VP. A Newsom-Buttigieg may work. I get the sense that Newsom loves to be a pretty face, while an in-the-weeds VP gets work done. A Reagen-Bush1 / Bush2-Cheney ticket if I've seen one. #ReturnOfTheNeolibs ?
DirtyWaterHotDog
in an abusive relationship with you lot
2d ago
TBF, getting anything done as secretary of transportation under the woke, catty and obstructionist Biden admin may be a harder job than being President. Look at Kamala. I don't know her personal opinion on open borders, but it didn't look like she had much power to affect what would happen at the border.
Did the Biden admin get anything done ? Cabinet members were seen blocking policies, doing woke stuff and allocating budgets. Sounds like those were the only things the wider apparatus allowed them to do.
It's not branding. Compared to the other candidates (Kamala, Newsom, AOC), he is the the technocrat chungus. Then there are the 'blue-winners-in-read-states' candidates, none of which have differentiated themselves.
DirtyWaterHotDog
in an abusive relationship with you lot
2d ago
you're right....
DirtyWaterHotDog
in an abusive relationship with you lot
2d ago
Trump is in a bad place.
It's 6 months before the mid-terms and polls imply a blue wave. In 2018, He had higher approval ratings, a thriving economy and no war....yet he got knocked down by a blue wave. With the way things are trending, it would take a great fumble for Dems to lose the house. Trump may also lose sufficient seats in Senate, so that 2028 could shape up to be a trifecta win for a Democrat.
Remember when Biden was making stupid decisions, and every Republican was (correctly) convinced he'd gone senile? That's the center-left on Trump right now. Occam's razor. Trump is losing a war. He's out of ideas. He is panicking. His incompetent and arguably America's all-time lowest IQ cabinet does not help. Rubio and JD are smart, but they can't salvage this mess.
2028 will be very hard to predict. The next (likely Democrat) President will either need to be a great uniter or a technocrat policy wonk. Newsom is highly divisive, esp in Republican states and seems kinda stupid. Would be quietly disastrous for the US. I hope he doesn't win the primaries. I like Pete, but black-homophobia may tank his campaign again. Would not be surprised if an out-of-left-field candidate showed up for 2028.
DirtyWaterHotDog
in an abusive relationship with you lot
3d ago
'Never waste a good crisis' ?
The weight creates shame. The shame motivates effort. Helps my system hit terminal velocity willpower. Thankfully, my mental health is a good place, so I use shame productively.
I like the point about GLPs. I'm lucky to easy access to cheap GLP drugs. Then there is story about when the CEO of one of the largest GLP startups tried to sleep with a thinner me, but that's for another day.
DirtyWaterHotDog
in an abusive relationship with you lot
3d ago
Thanks for information btw.
As it stands, I have updated by priors. Reduced my apprehension towards them and calibrated the urgency to get on them.
I am setting a concrete deadline for end-of-year to get my cholesterol & weight in control. If it doesn't work, I'll take my doctors advice on statins.
I'm skipping GLP-drugs because I want to solve the root cause, not just the symptoms. Sleep, diet and work outs first. Rest will follow.
DirtyWaterHotDog
in an abusive relationship with you lot
4d ago
I am worried about my heart.
I'm in a well compensated but demanding phase of my career. A promotion is on the cards, but hours are long. I have a chip on my shoulder, so the promotion is as much about career advancement as much as proving something to myself. It has taken a toll on my body. My weight has gone past 200 lbs and stayed above 200. Workouts, sleep and diet are all suffering. I don't like it.
I have a benign heart condition (Mitral valve prolapse) and South-Asian fat distribution puts me at elevated risk of heart disease. Then last year, my cholesterol went past the normal range. I've ignored(with her knowledge) my doctor's precautionary recommendation to use statins. The idea of a 30 yr. old being on permanent medication scares me.
For a bit, I put health first, and it worked. I lost 10 pounds and reached solid conditioning. Since then, my weight & conditioning have suffered as work has piled up. I have delayed my most recent blood test because I am worried the numbers spell disaster for me. Not a good look.
That brings me to last week. I have felt some tightness in my chest. Now, the location switches between the left and right side, so I'm sure it's some combination anxiety (too much coffee) and bad sleep & diet induced digestion issues.
But it scared the living shit out of me. Man, what am I doing ? I'm a grown man. I worked this hard to get to enjoy life and escape my 3rd world hell hole. I have my whole life in front of me. Need to get my priorities straight.
DirtyWaterHotDog
in an abusive relationship with you lot
6d ago
You're projecting MAGA demographics onto to woke people.
Woke people are usually aware of both Modi and the caste system. It may a couple of sentence, but they know. "Isn't Modi the hindu fascist? Isn't the caste system like slavery but worse? Are there still untouchables in India? I hear Modi is genociding the muslims in India". They know.
Indians in the west are politically homeless. Neither the woke or MAGA want them. It's mostly gray tribe 'Indians looks good on statistics' crowd that defends them.
DirtyWaterHotDog
in an abusive relationship with you lot
6d ago
I don't believe it yet. Let me sit on it.
It it'll take a few months for the acid reflux to go back down. May give it a shot then.
I know the core thesis I'll be going for:
If HBD is real, then a meritocratic world is an unfair world. If society offers no means for the 'idiot' to flourish, then one must resort to the oldest response : violence. The idiot is fooled by rhetoric and imagery. Give them representative faces and a rhetoric, to keep them docile. Elites get to be elites as long as they pay woke dues and the idiots find dignity in being part of the underclass. It's corporate harassment training implemented for society at large. No one enjoys the theater of it. But, it's a stable equilibrium and there is something to be said for stable equilibria.
DirtyWaterHotDog
in an abusive relationship with you lot
6d ago
I think you missed the 'kill me' part of my comment. Gamergate happened right as I was becoming political. I was anti-woke from the very beginning.
India has the world's most popular right wing leader - Modi. Therefore, it is hated by the woke. Western Indians are wealthy, which also puts them at the bottom of the woke totem pole. There is reason that MAGA has so many Indians. Most aspiring Indians pray at the altar of merit. It puts them at odds with the woke. 2nd gen Californian Indian women and Indian muslims have specific reasons for being woke. They're edge cases that'll take their own post. But the median Indian stem guy disagrees with woke culture and hates socialism.
at least supportive of brown people who suffered from colonialism
The woke, in their wilful ignorance, view western Indian hindus as upper class Brahmins. It treats them as oppressors. Little sympathy is extended to this lot.
Now, back to where we were....
Maybe woke wasn't so bad after all
It is an uncomfortable question I am asking myself as much as I'm asking the community.
The question isn't if woke is bad. The question is whether it is the lesser of 2 inevitable evils. Let's assume the disillusioned populace wanted to express their populist discontent by associating with a stupid and shiny movement. In that scenario, was woke the worst of all options ? MAGA and the woke are cut from the same cloth. Both view the world as a zero-sum race conflict. Demographic and loyalty points take priority over merit. Both movements have their gray tribe intellectuals and policy wonks who're kept at an arms length from power while the identarians find themselves on the throne.
If these negatives are a foregone conclusion, which flavor of it would I be able to live with ?
Idk. I genuinely don't so. That's why it is an interesting question.
DirtyWaterHotDog
in an abusive relationship with you lot
6d ago
Reads like consensus building.
TheMotte is the TheMotte. Exiled weirdos call this place home, as do normies with high openness. Neither gets to define what this place is or isn't.
It's no secret that the median individual on this forum has been steadily shifting right. It's a valid concern. The place risks turning into an echo chamber. Scratch that. The risk was realized, and this place is nearing a complete transformation into an echo chamber. I don't mind a shift in the Overton window. I do mind the decreasing quality of discourse.
Sometimes it feels like TheMotte is stuck in 2020. Woke is over. Trump is president. MAGA won. Where is the America that was promised ? Consider this. What if the forum has gotten boring because people are too scared to express the true contrarian opinion?
"Maybe woke wasn't so bad after all." (kill me)
First of all, so long, farewell!
Thanks, but no thanks. I liked what this place was. In its current state, it still exceeds the bar (low as it may be) for discourse on the internet. I'll bitch and moan as much as I like. That's my right.
I was about to summon my heritage motteizan creds. I hear JD's worldview carries weight around these parts. Alas, you created an account 1 full day before me. I concede defeat.
DirtyWaterHotDog
in an abusive relationship with you lot
6d ago
Some unlikely recommendations:
Blue Period. Does an excellent job of capturing coming of age anxieties through the lens of art-commenting-on-art.
Oyaji. I don't know what it is about this manga. It conveys a flawed patriarch's parental love in visceral manner. It is short, and I couldn't put it down. It's not perfect but it is focused and memorable.
DirtyWaterHotDog
in an abusive relationship with you lot
6d ago
Anti-anything is a bad way to raise children. Pro-something is a better.
How does one handle the hypergamy question?
In my experience, lead by example. In my extended family, a cousin's likelihood to stay in committed relationships is directly related to the health of their parent's marriage.
How to balance tolerance with an appropriate level of caution around "inner-city youth"?
Exposure. Take them around the city. Let them see the city. They'll start pattern matching. The most sheltered are the most delusional.
gospel of success through hard work and mastery through practice?
Set up increasingly demanding loops of challenge -> struggle -> gratification.
At a personal level, figure out if you want to indoctrinate your kids with your opinion or give them the tools to form their own.
DirtyWaterHotDog
in an abusive relationship with you lot
11d ago
It relates to the traditional wisdom - "Regulations are written in blood". Much like it, "enterprise software is written in the tears of disillusioned engineers".
Yes, Adobe Premier is a few million lines of code, and LLMs can create millions of lines of code within weeks. However, Adobe premier wasn't one-shotted by a person, and an agent can't one-shot it either. The only way to build an excellent enterprise tool is to build a shitty enterprise tool, get feedback, and improve it with time. In startup speak, this private feedback is referred to as 'moat'. LLMs make this loop faster, but you can't skip it. eg: State of the art forecasting have great benchmarks, but routinely generalize worse than ARIMA. The only way to know this is to have spent years in the trenches trying to get some new paper into prod. The techniques needed for AWS to provide 11 (0.000000000001% chance of failure) 9s of durability will never be discovered by OpenAI unless they pay-off the hundreds of AWS people who meticulously got it there. That information is guarded in vault somewhere.
Coding agents are an exception because AI companies are their own customers (so feedback loops can precede adoption) and the code/discussions/learnings are publicly available.
The king is dead, long live the king!
Startups like Runway and Chinese companies like Kling are still around, and AI video generation is only getting more popular. The big players like Google and Tiktok have better in house models than OpenAI. It is a crowded space. Sora was first to market for this caliber of video models, but the space has left Sora behind.
There are 2 reasons OpenAI abandoned Sora, and it has little to do with the viability of AI video gen.
The primary reason is because OpenAI was spread too thin. Enterprise agents are the trillion dollar market, and OpenAI is currently losing to Anthropic. It spooked OpenAI and late last year, they changed focus to Codex. Since then, OpenAI has deprioritized ChatGPT, voice models, music models and ofc, Sora. It's not that video generation is not a lucrative market. But, it's 2 orders of magnitude smaller than the enterprise agents market.
The secondary reason is that OpenAI is not well positioned to win here. Video generation and editing is primarily about control and iterative improvement. You start with a story board -> create a 1st draft -> use a vast tool-kit to iteratively get it to the final version. Sora is great at creating the 1st draft, but the likes of Adobe & Apple have the whole tool-kit built out. Unless the model is capable of fine edits, it will not be a useful substitute for filming it manually. ChatGPT: the product is a thin wrapper on top of ChatGPT: the model. The effort needed to turn it into a commercially viable product is minor when compared to the research effort of creating a GPT v-next model. On the other hand, most of the effort with a commercially viable video generation product is in the product engineering, not the model itself. That's asking a lot lot of effort from OpenAI in an area they are not best equipped to beat seasoned product engineering teams at.
tl;dr: Video generation will survive. The bubble isn't popping. A better analogy is - 'The gold rush ended because someone just discovered a Diamond mine'.
For context, I worked for an LLM/diffusion based content-gen AI startup for a few years. I was very early to this. Frankly, it an indictment of my judgement that I am not yet a millionaire. Should've joined OpenAI or Anthropic in early 2023 while I still had the chance. SMH
The thing that is keeping me up tonight, l is that I can't actually do much
Yes.
It's my big learning of 2026. Took me years to accept this about my sibling.
We have a shared upbringing, shared experiences, shared professions and shared genetics. I was his confidant, his mentor, his taste maker. As a result, I took mutual empathy for granted. Turns out, I was wrong. I couldn't walk a mile in his shoes, not for his biggest problems. Those problems are his own. The assistance I so eagerly offer, is counter-productive. It hurts more than it helps.
I've since accepted that I can't offer assistance without trying to erect safety nets around the worst possible outcomes. Problem is, I have judged those outcomes to be the worst in context of my own insecurities. Put simply, I was projecting. It's not the vicarious pressure of an Asian tiger-mom. It's less malicious, but harder to put a finger on. Big credit to my girlfriend, she helped me give form to it.
You can't protect your brother from being judged by Indian society. You can't protect your brother from your father. You can't protect your brother from his own demons. You can't protect him from heartbreak. He sounds like a great guy. You must trust him. Let him take his decisions. Just be there for him as an unconditional shoulder. Life will work itself out.
That's at least where I am today. It's a difficult pill to swallow. But, I'm digesting it, slowly.
I've seen this pattern with high agency people. The more they care about something, the more effort they want to put into fixing it. To them, everything is a problem that can be solved. Find a problem, break it down, chip at it, repeat until solved. It's horrifying to learn that there will be problems that both keep them up at night and they can't do anything to solve. But yeah, end of they day, it's is someone else's life. It becomes intrusive, real fast.
P.S: Random comments and disclaimers I need to give because I am hopeless like that:
- Who would've thought I'd be advocating for 'learned helplessness' in 2026 ? Not on my bingo card.
- If it wasn't obvious already, for reasons, I've become a surrogate father of sorts, and am struggling to separate myself as my brother comes of age. Your sibling relationship may not be the same as mine, so YMMV
- We are still close, talk every day, and I offer help whenever he asks. In practice not much has changed. But, our conversations feel less strained now. I am still deathly scared that he may face catastrophic failure. I just keep to myself now.
- You mentioned it below, but want to emphasize. Can't tell family you love them enough times. My brother taught my family to explicitly say it 5 years ago. Still takes my Indian ass some effort to say it, but always worth it.
- On personalities of gay men - Anecdotally, I found that many less-flamboyant & monogamous gay men come out of STEM. Not sure why, maybe it's just the general introversion and fixation of things over people. But yeah, if he's in Mumbai, then breaking into those circles may help him find that kind of guy.
- On non-monogamy - My girlfriend's best friend is a married gay-man living the idyllic suburban life, with selective non-monogamy. From the sounds of it, it's closer to being swingers than the kind of eyes-wide-shut reputation that the media associates with gay men. Non-monogamy is a spectrum, of sorts.
DirtyWaterHotDog
in an abusive relationship with you lot
13d ago
Not a single female trump voter I know hasn't had a major cosmetic procedure
Wow. I thought it was limited to the mar-a-lago types. Didn't realize it was affecting normal people. Do you live in a location at the intersection of performative beauty and polarization ? Miami, Orange County, Hamptons ?
TBF, I don't know any 21-40 yr old Trump voting women in person. I know MAGA men of all ages. I know MAGA women of advanced ages. But no young women.
majority of the normie democrats are right there with them
Could be where you live.
It's an unfair comparison. <1% of America's women have Onlyfans. Pre-Onlyfans, ChatGPT (high thinking) estimates that around 0.4% of women were engaged in sex-adjacent work (prostitutes, bikini models, strippers, porn).
Today, the number remains inside that 0.1-1% order of magnitude.
deep in female nature is the desire to present themselves for sex
Evidence points to a <1% base rate of type of woman. That's still ~3 million American women, a large absolute number.
For comparison, around 50% of American men played computer games as a primary hobby at some point in their life. (controlled for those born after the 90s because computers games weren't accessible before then). Among U.S. teens today, 97% of boys say they play video games, and about 6 in 10 teen boys play daily.
Very different numbers.
DirtyWaterHotDog
in an abusive relationship with you lot
16d ago
The constraint is fundamentally ensuring adequate training quality
Sounds like a convenient way to set an arbitrary bar that limits the supply of doctors. Lawyers went through a rapid expansion in supply, and it did not reduce the quality of law. If anything, allowing the competition to take place in the open has increased the bar for getting into elite law-schools. But now, there is also a sufficient supply of mediocre lawyers who fulfill mundane legal duties.
People with more knowledge than anyone here (including me) have been working this problem for a long time
I apologize for sounding harsh, but that is a bad justification. More so on a forum that prides itself in identifying collective incompetence and blind-spots in elite circles. This is the common excuse of Bureaucrats & careerists who love abstractions more than action.
Every year a large tranche of students doesn't advance to the next level of training
Don't the abusive conditions of residency have a lot to do with why people drop out ?
The other piece has been an explosions in mid-levels, they suck frankly. Guess who makes a better cardiologist?
Aren't mid-levels explicitly 'not cardiologists'. My understanding is that majority of issues are obvious and having a mediocre individual take care of it is a correct allocation of resources. I have a heart problem I have looked at by a cardiologist every 2 years (back in India). The most valuable thing he does is to look at my ultra sound. The ECG is taken by a mid-level and he does the ultrasound because I am long time customer, but a mid-level could do that too. The highest value thing he does is review the ultra sound, and then tell me that my heart is still okay and I am good to go.
His resources are best used for the last part of my checkup (the review) and to spend majority of his time on real emergencies. What's wrong with that ?
Stealing doctors from other countries is a popular solution and it has some ethical and practical problems
eh, I disagree on both points. The ethical problems have never been an issue in the US. Brain-gain is a fundamental national value. Practically, the USMLE + residency matching is hellish for international candidates. I'll let @self_made_human chime in, but it USMLE qualified doctors being incompetent is setting off a bullshit alarm for me.
If I had to speculate, the bottleneck for international candidates is the residency. And it is easiest to get residency slots in the least-desirable towns and cities. It's possible that top international candidates would never agree to waste 3 extra years in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, and therefore only mediocre candidates apply. Top candidates are in competitive fields like cardiology, which needs them to waste about 6-7 extra years in bumfuck nowhere, making it more unlikely that they'll apply."
AI will come eventually but it isn't ready yet.
You'd be surprised. The cutting edge of AI (complex agent swarms) is years ahead of what people think is the cutting edge. (chatgpt subscription).
For example, a chatgpt subscription is 20$/month. I routinely burn 100s of dollars/day in LLM costs. The strongest models are capable of insane things, but it feels like only people in some small circles have realized it so far.
It's still not ready yet, but objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.
Edit: saw the post below. Thanks
A summary or link would help.
The general understanding is that supply for doctors is artificially constrained. The bottleneck maybe residencies, credentialing bodies or just cost of entry.....but they're artificial barrier regardless.
For starters.
- Why isn't medicine an undergrad course
- Why is it near impossible to transfer medical credentials from 3rd countries to the US
- Why can't AI be used to empower NPs and PAs handle minor cases. Here, the specialists can serve as reviewers and rubber-stampers.
At this point, anyone who thinks AI can't disrupt knowledge work has their head in the sand. It may still work out, given the strength of the cartel. But that'd be a case of deliberate sabotage, not inadequacy on part of the AI.
DirtyWaterHotDog
in an abusive relationship with you lot
17d ago
This is gold.
I find it useful as a yardstick, not an absolute. Generally agree with the article.
For starters, I think there’s a pretty large kernel of truth to the general idea of “effective reps.” I think the “hard” version of the idea (“the last 5 reps before failure are all the matters”) has major problems, but a “soft” version of the idea is almost self-evidently true. To maximize hypertrophy on a per-set basis, you do almost certainly have to get somewhat close to failure, in basically any context I can think of. If you can do 12 reps with a certain weight, doing 3 sets of 10 is almost guaranteed to get you more growth than doing 3 sets of 3.
unsurprisingly, stopping each set REALLY far from failure did compromise hypertrophy.
Altogether, these studies support the idea that in order to maximize growth on a per-set basis, you do need to be reasonably close to failure, but actually reaching failure probably isn’t necessary, especially for trained lifters.
Yeah, that's good advice.
DirtyWaterHotDog
in an abusive relationship with you lot
18d ago
I like AthleanX's 'effective reps' concept
you can do something called effective reps. This style of workout is highly intense and ensures that you are not only going to, but you are going through failure as well. You start with an ignition set of 10-12 reps then you rest up to 30 seconds and start your reps again to failure. Now, you will find that the number of reps you can do in a set will come down from 10-12 to about 7-9. Once you reach failure, you will again rest up to 30 seconds before you start your reps again to failure. Now, you might only get 4 or 5, then maybe 2 or 3 after that. You keep going in this fashion until your targeted number of effective reps are reached
tl;dr: Every set should have a few reps that feel hard. If you aren't grinding out the last few reps, then that isn't a hard set.
My definition of grinding out a rep = Proper grimace, rep needs perfect breathing and a few optional groans.
The only exception is RDLs (or any deadlift), where I stay below failure to avoid breaking my back.
Another exception is hack-squats (or any squat). Here, the 1st set is never that hard and the last set feels like death regardless.
DirtyWaterHotDog
in an abusive relationship with you lot
20d ago
"Never let a good crisis go to waste"
TSA workers should stay fired. Replace them with overt surveillance and heavily promote CLEAR+ and TSA-Pre. TSA has been an over-funded albatross around the neck of global aviation since 9/11. About time we upgraded to something automated and effective.
The shutdown gives solid political cover to both parties. Both parties can blame the other while TSA workers find employment elsewhere. Once the shutdown eases, they can evaluate whether to rehire individuals or let technology fill in the gaps.
In my framing, Blue Wave in house = House flips decisively, and Senate flips a few unexpected seats. Blue Wave in Presidental election = trifecta. My 'probably wrong' opinion for 2028 is that Dems will try to remove the filibuster. In such a world, you don't need a 60% majority for a blue wave.
Unfortunately true. A significant and consistent trend.
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