theincompetencetheorist
No bio...
User ID: 1270
It was totally arbitrary and there where so called "journalists" that needed it for their "job". Because the blue check came with increased visibility and access to other blue checks. So your jetsetting friend was probably interesting enough to be someone to write a post about or since knowing everyone could be a way to get access to someone. When Elon bought Twitter and started messing with the blue check people like Stephen King started whinging that they lost their two tier Twitter and the plebs was going to show up on their timeline. So much for equity...
theincompetencetheorist
25d ago
I recall that the Blue Check system was utterly corrupt. Money exchanged hands for that little icon. It was status that needed to be guarded if you wanted to keep it. Making it a virtual panopticon where anyone not demonstration the right opinion they where severely punished with a loss of status and possibly economically at the workplace by informal ESG-auditors.
theincompetencetheorist
26d ago
Ok, I'll post an archive link and edit my post to point to it. https://archive.ph/CXqXE thank you!
You don't have to believe it, you can try to search for proof to the contrary or you can try to find other aspects that might prove my claim. Absence of other things that might disprove the thesis that the coordination happened on Twitter.
In my view is that coordinating effect of Twitter trends can't be underestimated in my view. The activists lost the thumb on the algorithmic scale when Elon kicked out the activists. And the ensuing exodus of the most extreme voices the decline was cemented. They are trying to recreate the feel with bluesky and mastodon, but they can't artificially create culture war with trends with the same way anymore.
But there is another aspect to it. So if we go back to the credit crunch of 2008 and after a couple of years(2011) after was the Occupy Wall Street movement. Now not many people remember or care to know that mainstream media was making fun of the woke groups that was part of the protests. Clips are near impossible to find with google(or maybe I suck at googling). Those segments that I saw on Comedy Central was the first contact I got with woke terms. I've gotten the distinct impression that the most extreme activists derailed the whole occupy movement. And for some reason Blackrock and Vanguard started pushing ESG and most of the talking points that where made fun of became holy for the mainstream media. Strange that.
The last thing that I also think is contributing to the decline: Rob Henderson's Luxury Beliefs is really well named and that a bunch of people can't afford to hold luxury because they simply can't afford it anymore, since people can't be bullied anymore because of lack of coordination and less usage of ESG scores. Regular people speak up with less fear because of the political climate and layoffs that affect non-producing departments like HR and DEI initiatives.
theincompetencetheorist
29d ago
As an external observer to this whole thing of US politics but affected by it when living in a western nation: We are watching western democratic institutions unraveling and no political ideology can save them. For me the whole woke/DEI/BLM/third wave postmodern feminism marxist march through institutions to unravel them is equally damaging for the human potential as whatever project 2025 is doing with appointing Trump commissars in the very institutions that were in control of the opposition last year. No one in power for the last say six decades have been about maximizing the potential of the human race which has been the point of institutions and western democratic governance in my interpretation.
It seems like we each trust different institutional mechanisms, but I can't help but think that formal governmental processes with built-in restraints are more reliable than grassroots social pressure that operates without those same safeguards.
What if you both are right? What if neither of those institutions are to be trusted? Because my view is that the institutions is not about to protect the people it is there to protect the power.
theincompetencetheorist
1mo ago
If you start with the assumption that the well has run dry and LLMs are never (not any time soon, at least) going be much better or much different than they are now, then yeah, very little about the market makes sense. Everyone willing to put substantial money into the project disagrees.
I'm actually assuming that the dumb money is pumping up a bubble with a significant gaps knowledge on what they are actually investing in and don't have any realistic way of getting a return. Much like other investment bubbles in the past.
Lets reverse the responses
Who wants to blow piles and piles of money on custom silicon that might eventually reduce their inference costs by a bit (though, since they were working with RISC-V, I kind of doubt it'd have ended up being better per-watt; cheaper only after licensing costs are factored in, probably) when a new architecture might render it obsolete at any moment?
Didn't Google already do it with TPU:s although not based on RISC-V?
Inference costs are exaggerated (and the environmental costs of inference are vastly exaggerated). It's certainly a big number in aggregate, but a single large query (30k tokens in, 5k out) for Google's top model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, costs about $0.09 via the API. And further queries on substantially the same material are cheaper due to caching. If it saves your average $50,000 a year office drone 30 seconds, it's more than worth it.
Google ends up losing a lot of money on inference not because it's unaffordable, but because they insist providing inference not only for free, but to search users who didn't even request it. (With a smaller, cheaper model than 2.5 Pro, I'm sure, and I'm sure they do cache output.) Because they think real world feedback and metrics are worth more than their inference spend, because they think that the better models that data will let them build will make it all back and more.
How much of the inference run on Google TPU:s and how much on GPU:s?
theincompetencetheorist
1mo ago
Sure it is incrementally better on what we already have. The problem I'm trying to illuminate with it is that is the compute worth the provided value? It is hardly taking away a job from anyone doing the proof reading, it is an improved version of what we already have.
theincompetencetheorist
1mo ago
I'm not deeply plugged in to the industry, nor the research, nor the subculture, but it seems like the substantive value increase per watt is rapidly diminishing. If that's true, and there aren't any efficiency improvements hiding around the next corner, it seems like we may be entering the through of disillusionment soon.
Well there seems not enough money is being spent on trying to reduce the power use of inference. A startup that work with silicon for inference tried that can't raise funding enough to retain their engineering teams. Like something is off if companies that try to solve the concrete problem can't get funded but other companies lights stacks of cash on fire to subsidize model usage just to capture market share. The whole thing looks bonkers to me!
theincompetencetheorist
1mo ago
How about proofreading a long document? You can get LLMs to go through page by page and check for errors like sate instead of state, pubic instead of public, dependent vs dependant...
Spellcheckers and grammar checkers have been a thing for ages in word processors, without throwing massive amounts of compute at it.
theincompetencetheorist
1mo ago
Yeah but my hypothesis has nothing to do with Trump. It is just suggestion to ask: "Cui Bono?". I make claims with little elaboration and very little proof but gives my view that it is an useful avenue of thought if it is simply matter of corruption regardless who occupies the White House.
theincompetencetheorist
1mo ago
The question if GLP-1 drugs are a net positive financially for the medical system is extremely cynical.
Well I agree that it is cynical. But I also find the view that it is a pure plutocratic exercise of who has the most lobbying dollars as equally cynical. Those who are interested profiting the issue that Semaglutide solves is not only McDonalds. It is is a whole host of US domestic companies that extract profits by providing both the cause and management of the symptoms as a result. A weekly shot from a Danish company is a threat to the bottom line of fast food, healthcare providers recurring visits and lifelong medication by domestic pharma. Maybe the politicians gives patriotic rebate to the lobbyists?
theincompetencetheorist
1mo ago
Another effect is the removal of GLP-1 drug coverage for obesity. I don't think I need to prove that they're very effective at weight loss, and obesity is a major health issue so a lot of people finally finding themselves losing weight are going to be hurting in the next few months as their prescriptions get cut. While GLP-1 medications isn't yet a net positive financially, the impact it has on people's health can not be ignored.
Here is a fun idea maybe the junk food producers lobbied to get the coverage removed. It is a net positive in cost for everyone except those who profit to keep people eating pseudo-food and selling medications to fix the symptoms caused by obesity.
I think that the issue is the network effect and centralization is the problem that attracts the shaping of opinions. Why this place still feels authentic is because of size. Maybe the solution is to have an aggregator of independent smaller forums where the forums are actually independent moderation and actual resource ownership as opposed subreddits that are controlled by reddit.
theincompetencetheorist
2mo ago
Why did it take 20 years for Reddit to turn a profit? Looking at another heavily moderated forum in the past Twitter! How often did it turn a profit? Why did these companies keep on getting funding at ridiculous valuations? Maybe it is a way of doing sentiment engineering at scale through various behavior modification tricks with Likes, upvotes, retweets. Maybe that was the purpose? Not turn a profit but to modify behavior to do social engineering, maybe that is more valuable to the owners?
theincompetencetheorist
2mo ago
Well part of the problem is that all social media tech is that a small group of people deciding everything based on how much they can trap you in their algorithms to shove advertisement in front of your face. I would not characterize that as decentralized! It is the very nature of the companies gives the two-digit IQ megaphones on social media, it is encoded in the incentive structure of the business models. Someone stupid getting their voices heard get the slightly smarter people spending energy on feeling good about how they are smarter than the idiot got boosted.
Misinformation and disinformation is not an internet problem it is a (social) media problem and the quote just conflated that.
theincompetencetheorist
3mo ago
The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis, or numbness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system.
Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves. There have been cynics who insisted that men fall deepest in love with women who give them back their own image. Be that as it may, the wisdom of the Narcissus myth does not convey any idea that Narcissus fell in love with anything he regarded as himself. Obviously he would have had very different feelings about the image had he known it was an extension or repetition of himself. It is, perhaps, indicative of the bias of our intensely technological and, therefore, narcotic culture that we have long interpreted the Narcissus story to mean that he fell in love with himself, that he imagined the reflection to be Narcissus! Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 1964
Those who engage in this projection of their identity out on social media are narcissists plain and simple. The feedback they receive have none of the corrective mechanisms since that would reduce the use of the media, so there is an obsession by the platform too soothe and allow sycophancy to further lull in a narcotic state while allowing the further projection of their aspirational identity which they love. They aren’t in love with themselves they are in love with the identity they project on the world. Which in my view is a worthwhile distinction.
It is also worth noting projection out on the media isn’t strictly necessary. This state can be also achieved with watching content that “educates” like self-help, health and so on where simple act of consuming of the media fuels a narcissistic self-image which under no circumstances can be manifested in the real world since that would it would shatter the projection.
theincompetencetheorist
4mo ago
If you find your work meaningful and seeing that it is not bullshit, well good for you. I've also been mostly lucky in that aspect that I've done very little bullshit through the years. But I've ended up recently in "Bullshit Jobs" territory by doing stuff is that essentially specializing to tech that is designed for scaling to millions of concurrent users and applying it for B2B that is going to see tops of a couple of thousands users if they capture the majority of the market. There is very little wrong with the tech in itself, and it is useful... but the thing that I'm using it for is not benefiting the business, improving the world or making me happy because it is being misapplied. I quit my last job for the very reason, thought I was out of it and all of a sudden I got transferred back to doing the same thing at the new place.
theincompetencetheorist
5mo ago
My pet theory is also that the whole system is designed towards us consuming. We consume more when we are unhappy. We are force fed belief that the next shipment is the solution to our happiness, while we have a gadgets that is having us comparing our lives with impossible standards constantly nudged in our feeds by algorithms, pointing towards the next solution to make us happy. And then that cycle is hijacked by the powerful to shape our politics that is only in their own interest.
theincompetencetheorist
5mo ago
I'm that kind of person that is slightly obsessed following up the genealogy of the memetic slogans like "The purpose of a system is what it does" as it turns out it is minted by Stafford Beer one of the architects of Cybersyn. Let me give you the short version in my view what Cybersyn is. It is societal engineering through computational power. It is one of those horrible ideas that can't be flushed like stubborn turd that floats in the toilet minds of its proponents. It devolves into the Social Credit Score to subjugate the plebs. We are already half way there where consent is manufactured on reddit and other "social media" platforms with content moderation policies and the panopticon social approval of likes/dislikes, there are already reports of people of being debanked for their political opinions. Now we have that memetic idea surfacing again when we got the LLM:s that the failed experiments was missing it and they will fix it this time. It is extremely worrying that an avid reader of Trostsky is quoted again...
theincompetencetheorist
5mo ago
Also I'm not too keen on it being destroyed. But it is not in the cards that we are able to stop it, just accept that it is happening and trying to get the best outcome of what is to come.
theincompetencetheorist
5mo ago
Because both of the sides of the culture war wants to destroy the system and the system is being destroyed?
theincompetencetheorist
7mo ago
In my view Gamergate is only a symptom and not the cause for anything. It didn't do anything with the political landscape although I agree that it just happened to malign a group people that happened to be used to it so they stood tall to the abuse, and gave the opportunity to spotlight it for the more general populace. But I'm convinced that could have happened in other ways because the core of the ideology these activist in media espouse is rotten. There are no blank slates and noble savages!
theincompetencetheorist
7mo ago
Wasn't the kickoff event of Gamergate to do with artsy SJW types capturing some sort of indie game award, though?
The rage was ignited by the coordinated attack of about bunch of articles(about 20 IIRC) showing up in various media outlets trying to "kill" the gamer identity, because a small bunch gamers of notices the SJW types getting coverage for their shit. Gamergate wouldn't exist and nobody would have noticed if it weren't for the "gamers are dead" articles. It just showed that activist had infested the gaming journalism space and people started noticing on how the infestation was present in regular media.
theincompetencetheorist
8mo ago
Too bad the adults in the "room" whenever a disaster strikes on social media are drowned out by the tribal people. One tribe blames DEI and looking at mastodon yesterday the other tribe is putting the blame Trumps federal employee shake up. Fuck that, it is a tragedy most likely a tragic accident and the tribes takes to social media to score political points and if someone tries to say that this isn't the time get shouted down by immature idiots in both camps.
My take is that most of the people that are trying score points haven't grown up yet!
Now that you see that it is only shadows on the wall, get out of the cave! Sorry the tragedy is entertainment and you just found out that it isn't entertaining. None of these talking heads are there to inform you or improve your life, they are there to entertain you, to distract you and to passivize you while the future is being stolen by subscriptions.
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