sohois
2d ago
What exactly is new here? "High class escorts" have existed for many years (see Pretty Woman in 1990). The incredible earning power of female sexuality has been known for not quite as long but a very long time. OnlyFans blew up more than 5 years ago, and the top OF models make far more than the earnings quoted. Even if we're talking only the sale of intimacy, I'm pretty sure pornstars have been selling themselves for very high fees online for quite a while. Or see the numerous stories about Instagram models going to the Middle East for some "Dubai Chocolate". As another poster mentioned, the media has a peculiar fascination with the sex lives of Silicon Valley, but that's the only unique thing about this.
sohois
3d ago
Lawyers and doctors are a rather special case though (and self-driving cars appear to have been solved given Waymo's rapid expansion). When a company hires a product manager, a customer support person, an executive assistant, a marketing executive, a salesperson, a software developer, or the myriad other back office roles that fill a standard corp, they are not especially worried about potential liabilities (financial roles excepted). You don't need many of those roles to be replaced before serious economic consequences become apparent, and the protection of law or medicine is rendered moot.
That being said, I do think there will be a lot of inertia just by the nature of corporations. Most big corpos are already too big and could probably have slashed 20% of their workforce even before AI. It's part of the nature of the firm and not something easily shaken off.
sohois
6d ago
I've got to say, I really don't understand the relation between Google Maps and the election here.
Maybe I'm in a bubble, but I've never met anyone who doesn't have the default maps view on all the time. Is satellite view more common in the US?
Also, are people using google maps to make voting decisions? Do voters not go near the burned areas ever, and one day scroll through maps - for fun perhaps? - and see it all rebuilt and just go huh, must have been rebuilt since I last checked?
sohois
7d ago
The aftermath of the case seems like a classic Toxoplasma of Rage situation - not the controversial, toxoplasmic one that gets everyone whipped up, but the Eric Garner style. The murder, the police behaviour, the family behaviour: everything is so cut and dry terrible that there is no controversy. Even on UK reddits, which are as fortified progressive as you can get, there is almost universal outrage here.
Unlike George Floyd, where his past criminality and the fentanyl accusations gave plenty of meat for culture warriors to help spiral it into a national emergency, Nowak's murder looks destined to fizzle out. There's not even some low sentence for the murderer, while the authorities have been quick to recognize the blowback against his family and sought to charge them with related crimes.
Ironically, if the police had actually found some spicy memes or similar in Nowak's phone, it probably would have helped the overall cause.
sohois
17d ago
I get a distinct feeling of Gellman Amnesia reading a few of the recent top level posts in this weeks thread. And I wouldn't even class myself as a particularly knowledgeable person when it comes to AI, I simply keep up with the news and developments. It's really something to see the number of posters, whether here or the ssc reddit or similar locations, who confidently spout complete garbage when it comes to AI, seemingly unaware of things that happened even months ago.
And now I can't help but worry that many of the other posts on the Motte are similarly compromised. Have we become (or always been) just another midwit debate site?
sohois
17d ago
I lived in Dongbei - well, Heilongjiang - when I first moved out to China, living mostly in Daqing (also tier 3) and a bit in Harbin (tier 2). Later on I moved down to Shanghai, and eventually met my wife, a Henanren. Her family lives in a town, still 500k people of course, though technically their original home is in a tiny farming village an hour outside of the town.
Nonetheless, short of the villages, no matter where in the country I've gone, no matter how big or small the city or town is, it really is striking just how similar they all are when it comes to architecture and design. And I'm not just talking about the communist blocks. In every place, there is always a "Computer City". Probably even with the same name. There is always a once shiny, now dilapidated mall. But the mall always has the same rows of clothing vendors and dodgy sellers as in your pictures. I originally wrote a sentence that you were just missing the plaza with massed granny dancing, before seeing you had indeed mentioned it at the bottom of your post.
I also have the same appreciation for Chinese KFCs, though in my case the far inferior version I'm comparing them to are in the UK. I assume it's mostly because KFC is still relatively pricy for China: 40-50 kuai is hardly expensive, but compared to the 10kuai you would pay for a bowl of noodles or whatever, it does position them a bit more upmarket. So they can afford to get better quality in comparison to the Western chains, who are very much positioned as the cheapest tier of food around
sohois
21d ago
According to the linked tweet, he lost his job, not merely wages, so you'd have to compensate for future wages lost and possibly reputational damage?
sohois
29d ago
That there are some stories of dogs penetrating humans doesn't really tell us much about this particular story. There are going to be extremes in every species, much as the existence of Usain Bolt doesn't demonstrate that every human can run a 10-second 100m.
The question is: can you train presumably multiple dogs to do it on command? Can they even do it, given the size and difficulty of anal penetration? The extent to which the woman+dog meme is true it would very likely involve vaginal penetration.
sohois
1mo ago
I agree, but Elder Scrolls isn't actually a great example. The fact that they still haven't released a new mainline title seems to be largely down to the stupidity (or genius, depending on how you view the extra juice they squeezed from Skyrim) of their development choices. After Oblivion, it was 2 years to Fallout 3, 3 years to Skyrim, 4 years to Fallout 4, 3 years to Fallout 76, and 5 years to Starfield. Pretty consistent
sohois
1mo ago
First I'm gonna go ahead and nitpick your summary of the Far Cry series.
I really don't agree that Far Cry 2 codified anything genre-wise. It was a really interesting game, to be sure, but ultimately an interesting failure, and it was 3 that defined all of those successors you name. The original Far Cry isn't worth mentioning here; its sequel was Crysis, and the only reason Far Cry 2 shares a name is because it was easier for Ubisoft to slap a recognized IP on an entirely new FPS (worth mentioning as well that Ubi made like 4 FarCry:Spinoff titles in between Far Cry and Far Cry 2. I really liked Far Cry:Instincts)
It's been a long time since I played Far Cry 2, but I don't think anyone would recognize it as being a game of "crafting and collectables". It was a really ambitious game, and I was super hyped leading up to the release. I think the closest parallel was probably GTA4. Both made big promises of being much more realistic, grounded games, with a strong emphasis on story and loads of interesting interactivity and AI. Both failed to deliver, with mediocre stories and gameplay that got so bogged down in realism it made them bad to actually play.
Second, I don't really agree that Far Cry 3 is particularly essential. There's a lot to recognize of 2 in Far Cry 3, but they are still quite different games. 3 used 2 as a base, but cut out a lot of fat, and a lot of good stuff, for something much more streamlined and 'gamified'. I remember an anecdote on a podcast once where someone was getting involved in this important, sombre cutscene. They get control back, and immediately the first thing they see is this big, jarring "Gun Vending machine" and it immediately throws them out. Far Cry 2 was at pains to craft a fully believable world for the player and would never have placed something like that. Which did mean a lot of irritation, but the storytelling was stronger for it.
My abiding memory of Far Cry 3 is rescuing Jason's girlfriend. You end up in this cave, and I can't remember why but the girlfriend ends up bursting into tears. You regain control with her quietly sobbing, and all you can do is leave to go back to killing. Except, except, there are also these optional flashbacks in the cave, which you can access by finding pills and going on a 'trip'. And it just so happened I found one, went on a drug-fuelled trip, and obviously passed out in the cave. But when my character came to, there was still the girlfriend, still sobbing away. And all I could think about was the hilarious juxtaposition of this traumatised girl crying her eyes out while her boyfriend is just trippin' balls 20 feet away, before he finally comes down and goes out to buy more guns from the gun vending machine.
Anyway, I do think it is a much better game than 2, but I don't think it's really interesting beyond the fact that it influenced so many other titles with the approach to open world crafting and collectables. Like other responses have mentioned, there are other titles like Spec Ops which did the whole player agency story a lot better.
sohois
1mo ago
Just ignore the mails. You can go online and state that you don't need a licence, but it's easier to just do nothing, and ignore any attempts at contacting you. The enforcement group has zero power and it's basically impossible for them to ever demonstrate you have watched the BBC unless you literally let them in your house while you're watching it.
sohois
1mo ago
I agree on the Shield. I think it came out just a bit too early to really benefit from being 'prestige TV'. Breaking Bad's popularity exploded in later seasons thanks to the growth of the internet and social media, but more than that it had the room to focus on Walt. The Shield was too long, bogged down with a lot of aimless plotlines; it felt like the production was still caught between making a serious character study, and a procedural cop show at times.
sohois
1mo ago
Claude managed to peg me again
Finally AI is delivering what the people really want
sohois
1mo ago
An LLM, strictly speaking, can't do that
That depends on how specific we want to be with "LLM". I would be surprised if ChatGPT did not have superior chess performance to someone directly calling GPT 5.4 and giving it no scaffolding beyond "We're playing chess", but few people would argue that using ChatGPT is giving an LLM extra capabilities. How much of a harness is appropriate?
If you give Claude or Codex access to a notepad skill to record any chess moves, their performances would improve. If you gave them a simple chess application with a virtual board to record moves, it would probably get even better. Would you still say that an LLM can't "strictly" augment itself in this situation?
As you yourself have pointed out, the LLM you played your simple game with independently proposed maintaining a log of game state within text, so it would be fair to say that LLMs can recognize and attempt to remedy weaknesses without human intervention, just as a normal person would do
sohois
1mo ago
The chess argument is not at all a good analogy, because like a huge bunch of AI criticism, it vastly overstates normal human capacity.
What's the biggest reason an amateur teenager doesn't make impossible moves? It's because they have a chess board right in front of them. It's extremely easy to track the state of the game and position of pieces when you have the laws of physics doing it for you. How many amateurs do you think could perfectly recreate a given game state if someone came along and threw the board over?
LLMs play chess entirely through text. It's the equivalent of asking a person to play a game of correspondance chess, buth they can't recreate the game physically, they can't have any drawings of the game, all they can do is have a record of moves already made. Outside of literal chess masters, how many humans would get through such a game without making a mistake?
sohois
1mo ago
AI agents are still in that awkward spot: "I spent 3 hours automating a task that would have taken me 5 minutes manually". Except previously only those skilled with computers could try this on a small range of tasks, and now anyone can do it for pretty much anything.
You absolutely could spend a week setting up Claude or Codex or whatever, putting in all the connectors and skills you need, and running a bunch of trial runs to fully automate a big chunk of your job. You'll still end up bottlenecked by stuff. Depends how much you actually enjoy working I suppose
sohois
1mo ago
2 and 3: I expect the Claude Chrome add-on could handle those, depending on who each website is set-up. Two issues though: first, Claude is actually pretty slow going through Chrome, and no guarantee it wouldn't be faster to just do it yourself. Second, you're opening yourself up for all kinds of security risks at the moment.
1: As a below post says, agents can now use computers directly, but it's not great yet. Not knowing much about the situation, I expect an MCP would be enough, but it heavily depends on the software.
Tbh, the easiest solution would be to see if any of these have some kind of "Export to csv" option, then just chuck those files at Claude/ChatGPT/Whatever and tell it what you need
sohois
1mo ago
I saw this Code setup in one Zvi's roundups. Might be a bit OTT for your uses though:
sohois
1mo ago
Despite the name, it isn't really coding specific. I presume "Claude cowork" is largely the same as Claude code but with a name that doesn't scare the hos.
From what I can recall, Cowork was announced back when Claude Code was still only available through the terminal, and Cowork was the easy ho-accessible version. And then they make Claude Code available through the Claude app anyway, so not really clear what differences there are anymore
sohois
2mo ago
Regardless, a few developments have happened recently that have motivated me enough to actually make a top-level post about this. The first being my (employer-mandated) use of Claude to generate code. "You're not using the latest model, just one more model and we'll reach AGI"-bros officially in shambles after this one
This was with the latest version of Claude Sonnet
>I totally used the latest version and it still sucked!!
>Look inside
>Not the latest version
I'm not even gonna claim Opus would make a huge difference because the differences are quite small at this point, but fuck me you would think you might have a little humility when making such an emphatic claim, just to contradict yourself within a paragraph.
sohois
2mo ago
To be clear, I don't actually disagree that access to low skilled labour can suppress business investment. It's more the specific idea that this access is the biggest factor in low productivity or wage growth which I find absurd. I would be surprised if was even one of the top 5 most important factors.
sohois
2mo ago
I'm not sure South Africa is the best comparison point or example for "Anglo democracies", given the unique historical factors that drive its current malaise. South Africa's democratic situation is closer to a nation like Japan, where they are essentially a one-party democracy, never deviating even in the face of catastrophe.
Plenty will argue that South Africa represents the likely future for the UK and Canada as they increasingly fracture upon ethnic lines, but there is another anglo country with massive levels of low skill ethnic minorities that is an even closer comparison - the United States. The US, not long after its inception, imported a permanent underclass that still numbers around 15% of the population, and for the past 50 years, they've had a constant influx of illegal immigration. In comparison to the rest of the anglosphere, they have a much lower % of white Europeans. Nonetheless, the US is much, much richer.
While concerns around immigration, integration, and crime are not going to be solved by money alone, South Africa's issues are clearly heavily economic in nature. The breakdown of their society is heavily influenced by the rampant corruption, the collapse of their infrastructure, and, as you say, the anaemic growth and mass joblessness. For the UK, I'd go so far as to say that the combined vote % for Reform, Restore and the Greens would be <10% if they had even kept close to the US over the past 20 years.
Both the US and Apartheid South Africa demonstrate that the economic conditions of a country are largely detached from immigration/demographics. In right-wing UK circles, I see a lot of "cope" around the plans of Reform/Restore, in which the major factor for productivity collapse is entirely low skilled immigration, and once they are kicked out companies will be forced to pay much higher wages. It's an oddly left-wing viewpoint, one in which greedy companies are keeping all the money for themselves, and you just have to force them in order to get that money to the wider public.
The reality is that the UK's pathetic productivity has been decades in the making. Clamping down on immigration levels might collapse Deliveroo and numerous Turkish barbershops, but it will not suddenly unlock hidden growth.
Most of the replies below are skeptical of saving the UK via democracy, because, I assume, they don't think that [Reform will be elected/they will try to cut immigration/they will successfully cut immigration]. I think this is the wrong viewpoint when it comes to decay or recovery. What will push UK towards South African outcomes is their complete failure to build infrastructure. It's the dead cities and towns and villages outside of London. Its the unending growth of the housing market to the exclusion of all else. It's the most expensive business energy rates in the world. And its the wages and jobs that will soon pay less than even the former communist bloc in Eastern Europe, if they exist at all.
There's not a single party that even thinks about these issues. Sure, you can find MPs and advisors that at least understand the economic woes and can propose ideas - like Danny Kruger for Reform - but even Labour and the Tories have some individuals who get it. None of them are at the centre of power, and there is such structural rot that even if they were, it would take a Herculean effort to turn things around.
So no, I don't think the UK is going to recover.
Will it decay? I'm not sure this is the truth either, more like just stagnation. There are a few bright spots for the UK: the brain drain which smashed SA is restricted for the UK. Europe is just as fucked, and so the only escape route is America. But the US has its own immigration issues, and they make it very difficult for the ~top 20-2 percentile to move there. A US that threw open the borders to white Europeans could instantly decimate most of Europe.
More than anything though, I think timescales are long enough that AI is going to render this entire conversation moot, one way or the other
sohois
2mo ago
I'd say the first Opium War is easy to defend. For all that Britain wanted to force open China for trade, they had genuine grievances over treatment in Canton by the time the attack began.
But you can barely describe it as a "war". Britain peeled off a small expeditionary force from India, essentially to seek redress, probably expecting that a small show of force would be enough to bring proper negotiators to the table, instead of the belligerents that were positioned in Canton.
It turned out that the Chinese empire was in such disarray that this relatively tiny force was enough to basically sweep through the entire nation. They didn't particularly aim to cause major damage, inflict casualties, or loot the Chinese, unlike the second opium war.
I've not seen a single proper source for that 500m claim either, but everyone seems to just accept it at face value.
The one time I saw something like an original image for the claim, it was from an Indian subreddit (or twitter, I can't remember exactly) and had no currency attached. So if it were 500m rupees, that would only be 5m USD. That would make a lot more sense to me
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