wlxd
2yr ago
I remember sitting at the table with an M.D. who's doing some kind of fellowship at Harvard and hearing her say airily, "Yeah, blockers are safe and totally reversible." Even with my rudimentary freshman bio understanding, this never sounded plausible to me.
Indeed, this is extremely implausible a priori, and so people repeating this must have crimestop in their mind preventing them from doing any thinking on the subject at all.
The image I have in my mind is this: we have someone who is taking “puberty blocker” from age 10 to age forty 50. He never went through puberty as a teenager (or at least, I am led to believe this is the outcome of taking these drugs). Because of this, he now looks and behaves as… well, definitely not a middle aged male. Am I really expected to believe that once he stops taking these drugs, he goes through normal puberty at 50, and his body ends up the same as if he never took these drugs, and went through puberty around 15? This is simply ludicrous on its face.
Or, even better, consider a woman in post menopausal age, who finally gets off puberty blockers. Will she now finally begin menstruating, and be able to bear normal children? Highly unlikely.
I would expect the typical retort to this from pro sex modification side to be “but you are not supposed to take this drugs for so long”, which is a tacit admission that the effects of these drugs are only reversible for so long, until they aren’t. This much makes sense, but then repeating the mantra that they are reversible without saying loudly that this is true only if you stop taking them until they are no longer reversible (which might very well only be a couple of doses!) is criminally deceptive.
wlxd
2yr ago
And this was for a drug possession crime that US citizens are locked up in US jails for right now.
Actually, how many people in US actually are jailed for a possession of a less than a gram of weed? Does it actually happen in practice?
wlxd
2yr ago
I’m pretty conflicted here. On the one hand, I think people should have right to commit suicide: prohibiting people from doing that, keeping them prisoner in this world, is rather ghastly. At the same time, I don’t think that anyone should actively assist in the process, except in cases where the person is literally unable to actually proceed at the task, and only to the extent of their actual physical inability. For example, quadriplegics who can still move their heads get a setup where they get a button that they can press that will inject them with lethal drugs, people who have enough motor control to inject themselves could have the drug delivered to their beds, so that they can pull it into syringe and inject themselves, and people who are “just” depressed, but otherwise physically fine, get no help whatsoever.
I find the idea of euthanizing a healthy young person rather morally revolting. If they want to kill themselves, they should just do it, and if they can’t bring themselves to do it, this strongly suggests that the person is not actually fully into this. The person in question has, allegedly, two prior suicide attempts. Normally, most suicide attempts from young women are just performative attempts at getting attention, so they are not meant to succeed, but here it is more likely to have just been ineptness at getting things done, given that you do not sign on a professional to do the job done if it’s just performative. Still, I would be more fine with the setup of 1) getting a professional advice on an appropriate method, 2) creating some kind of DNR statement, so that if you fail at killing yourself quickly, nobody will try to rescue you, and 3) doing it in some place and time where and when you are unlikely to be get interrupted in the process, so that nobody is actually put into position of having to decide what to do about your not quite yet dead body.
This way, while healthy young people killing themselves will still be a tragedy, at least nobody will be complicit in this. Euthanizing healthy young people due to “mental health trauma” seems akin to me to deciding that giving heroin addicts as much heroin as they want is actually a perfectly good solution to the problem of heroin addiction, or, at even more basic level, giving a child a candy any time they ask for one. Indulging someone else’s wishes is not always good for them, and killing a healthy young person is definitely a central example. We should inculcate virtues, instead of maximizing expressed utility functions.
wlxd
5mo ago
Why would you hate it? The only downside I can conceive are trivial relative to benefits.
wlxd
4mo ago
This will come for blue collar jobs pretty soon too.
Consider meat processing: parting out chicken or pork carcasses is something that’s hard to automate. Every carcass is slightly different, and the nature of the tasks makes it hard to build a machine that will do this with good enough accuracy and low enough waste.
Now, imagine we have robots with flexible arms like humans. Current AI tech solves the image recognition problem, so that the robot understands the carcass like human does. It also solves explaining the purpose of the task, so that the robot understand the actual purpose of separating thighs or breast, instead of just mindlessly following the programmed moves. Lastly, it solves the reasoning part, so that the robot can plan the task independently for each carcass, and adjust to conditions as it proceeds.
All that remains is integrating these into one performing system. This is by no means an easy task: it will still probably take years before the finished product is cheaper and better than illegal immigrant. However, 5 years ago, the idea of training robots to part out chickens was complete science fiction.
wlxd
4mo ago
Yes, DOGE efforts are highly irregular, and massively disruptive to government agencies. That’s kinda the point. Your analysis of the email thing is somewhat superfluous, because we already knew that the DOGE exists precisely to get the government out of the ruts it’s been stuck following. And, of course, nobody is surprised that many employees don’t like it.
wlxd
2yr ago
While I agree that there is some strangeness about the entire story, I think the “gay escort” theory is highly unlikely, for the very simple reason: people like Pelosis can afford and procure services of higher quality providers than crazy hobos.
Where are those smooth 2 lane roads in rural areas? This certainly has not been my experience in Washington state. Most of the roads that are yellow on Google Maps, except actual interstate freeways and certain non interstate freeways in urban areas (like 520 or 169) are single lane. Overwhelming majority of US 101 highway over the Olympic Peninsula, for example, is single lane. Almost all US 2 is single lane. All major highways in northeastern Washington are single lane. One counter example I can come up with is highway 97, which has passing lanes for most of its course, but beyond that, it’s mostly single lane roads except in busiest urban areas and actual Interstates. These are some of the most important roadways in the entire state, the most important ones in their region. Is it any different in other states? Where exactly rural roads are made to be two lane?
edit: found another counter example, highway 395 is double roadway (so two lanes each direction), and given where it’s at, I can’t imagine it getting a lot of traffic, but overall, very few of rural roads in Washington are double lane.
wlxd
4mo ago
Unlikely. When you join early a company that then becomes highly successful, the equity grant you get is going to the moon. So yeah, maybe they got offered $300k TC when they joined, but that $300k is worth much more after a year or two.
wlxd
5mo ago
There is one more benefit of punitive justice: satisfaction for the victim. If you suffer, or people you care about suffer, it is satisfying to see the perpetrator of suffering to suffer in return. It’s a restitution of sorts.
You don’t see this argument being made though, even though this is extremely obvious and natural to most people (you can find millions of examples on X of people, both on left and right, full of glee from people being punished by criminal system), because it is obviously invalid in the enlightened liberal framework under which the discussion is happening.
wlxd
2yr ago
What I find interesting is how much easier your actual (ie. not the warmup one) problem is, relative to the problems I was given when I interviewed at the exact same company a decade ago. Then, when I worked there, the problems I was giving people during interviews were easier than the ones I was given, but harder than the one you are giving.
I think that this was ultimately unavoidable, given the number of people the company wanted and did hire over this time period. It did result in the transformation of the image of the company within the industry though, from the coolest place that everyone wanted to work at, through a place that everyone wanted to have on their resume, to another Microsoft: a steady job paying well, but not particularly exciting or hard to come by.
wlxd
4mo ago
You clearly don't actually understand how equity works. It obviously is worth something, because investors are paying billions of dollars for it. Being public or private only has indirect effect on how much stock is worth.
Going public provides easy liquidity, which is good, especially to small stockholders, but private companies of the size we are talking about also usually provide liquidity options to stockholders. SpaceX, for example, had a tender offer a couple months ago. This event allows individual SpaceX stock holders to sell their holdings to institutional investors, in case you don't understand what that is.
To put it in more concrete terms: I'd happily go to any of these X AI employees, and buy whatever they vest in a year for $10,000. This offer establishes that their stock is worth something. (I'm not just making a point, this offer is 100% serious: if you work for X AI, feel free to DM me, I'm open to negotiations even).
However this says 188k - 440k
These figures only include cash compensation, and they are a very reasonable range for cash part of the comp for between junior and staff levels.
I image the 440k is for for Senior and Staff engineers, Like 2-3 on that whole team
There are around 40 people in the photo. I bet you that at least 10 of them are seniors or above.
wlxd
2yr ago
You didn’t pay attention to this stuff back in 2020? We discussed it extensively at the motte.
Pfizer execs didn’t have to “acknowledge” that they didn’t test for transmission reduction, it was quite obvious from the get go, based on the actual design of the clinical studies. This was never seen as a requirement for approval.
It sure would have been nice if vaccines stopped transmission, and many (including me) believed at the time that the vaccines will in fact do so. This turning out not to be the case was initially a big disappointment, and then, when they started doing forceful vaccination mandates when we already knew they don’t do shit for stopping transmission, was pushing me into white rage every time I thought about it. Nevertheless, the actual studies never tested that.
The reason was twofold: first, the higher priority was to figure out if there actually is reduction in symptoms and negative outcomes — this is what was meant by “efficacy”. Initial studies used for approval showed pretty huge risk reductions, on the order of 90% reduction in having observable Covid symptoms with positive tests. I don’t believe that anyone believes that the vaccines have this good efficacy at blocking symptoms today. I am not sure what is the reason for this discrepancy. Maybe it’s because the vaccines were targeting original variant, and the virus evolved to be much better at spreading. Maybe the elevated response from vaccine lasts for very short time, couple of months at most. I don’t know, stopped paying attention at Covid science altogether somewhere in the middle of 2021, when I realized that the science and the truth were mostly irrelevant for the policies and narratives.
Second, it is actually pretty hard to design a study that measures efficacy at stopping transmission with any good degree of confidence that would be approved by IRB, a notoriously NIMLY (Not In My LaboratorY) bodies. Useful studies are “””unethical””” to run, so we’ll let the virus spread to billions and kill millions without trying to understand how it does so through direct experiment, instead we collectively decided to just watch its shadows on the cave’s wall.
Yes, I agree with you that most of the covid restriction have made very little sense at best, and starting from somewhere in 2021, they were basically a lunacy. But, dude, Covid is so last year, we already litigated this here to death, there is probably nothing new you can say here on this topic that hasn’t been already said last year by others. At this point, I’m so over it that I’m actually puzzled when someone around me even brings up Covid unironically. I will never trust the “””experts””” on this, or any other topic that actually matters to the society ever again, but, again, I already said it last year as well. It’s over, current thing is different now.
wlxd
2yr ago
I am very interested in hearing how much it is going to cost you. My 15 year old heat pump broke last winter, and I was considering replacing it instead of fixing, but the quotes were in $16-20k range, compared to $1000 to repair, so I decided to punt it. This is in expensive liberal coastal city.
wlxd
2mo ago
The problem is not with these immigration “judges”, but with actual Article III judges like Boasberg or Xinis, who override the determinations of Article II examiners at will, making it effectively impossible to enforce law at scale. If every illegal gets Article III judiciary proceedings before finally getting removed, we will never be able to actually enforce the law. Imagine if military had to get a court decision before being able to kill an invading soldier.
wlxd
4mo ago
You say:
Anyone who worked for xAI would be a fool to take this offer because you are massively lowballing them.
You also say:
It could be that Elon is offering stock but we don't know that. Until they IPO their fake money is worth literally nothing.
How can I be lowballing them when their stock is literally worthless? Can you make up your mind?
I linked twitter salaries in the above thread. Everything in the Bay is talked about in the TC range because it sounds more impressive.
No, you quoted an article that was citing figures from job postings. Those figures are not there to sound impressive, they’re there to satisfy legal requirements California imposes on job postings.
wlxd
5mo ago
In fact, I think it is a flaw because it causes people to act in ways that are less utilitarian/net good.
the exact course of action that should happen for the greatest benefit
Yeah, that’s the enlightened liberal framework I was talking about. Most people (fortunately) do not subscribe to utilitarianism, but nonetheless this is the dominant framework for the discussion, along with some specific assumptions, like granting substantially similar value to utils received by the perpetrator and the victim.
wlxd
1yr ago
What weapons the west gave to Poland that allowed it to beat Soviet military and throw their shackles? What military strategy was used?
(4) provides the option to have a large successful family. The EV is much much higher.
Why wasn’t Ukraine on this path before the war? Poland started off around where Ukraine was in early 1990s. It failed to thrive, to put it mildly, and the pre-war trajectory was not optimistic. The neighboring puppet state of Russia, Belarus, has done much better for itself.
If the plan is to build stronger ties with the West, join EU etc similarly to what Poland did, isn’t better strategy to cut the losses, stop the bleed, and negotiate peace with Russia, where you cede some territories in exchange for Russia acceding to your western strategy in future?
wlxd
3mo ago
They can, however, move out themselves and their stuff out of the blast radius, which actually does make a difference.
wlxd
2yr ago
But so what if it is due to people treating you phenotypically? This is still genetic causation. It might indeed be interesting to some to figure out exactly through what mechanisms differences in genes result differences in income, but how exactly is this relevant for our ability to predict real world outcome of our policies? Can you show one example where “naive” (according to you) HBD would get some real world application seriously wrong, compared to approach informed by your phenotypic casual pathway correction?
wlxd
3mo ago
The fruit from the poisonous tree doctrine as applied in the US is pretty stupid. It is beyond retarded that good faith procedural errors can allow obviously guilty men go free. Most of the rest of the world does not have it, or does not have it to the same extent as US does.
wlxd
4mo ago
The Wlxd stance seems to be that is 450k TC and I would be stupid to turn down nearly half a million! I could work there for 5-10 years and retire early!
No, my stance is that you need to use your judgement to decide how much the stock is worth to you, taking into account all relevant data points. For example, you should consider the likelihood of that company succeeding or going bankrupt, and incorporate it into the expected value. You implicitly ignore this when you say that
[the] startup (...) is (...) trying to do the next big LLM/LLM Agent/LLM dongle/Dohicky/Whatever.
as if it didn't matter what the startup is actually doing. It does. Similarly, for me, there's a difference between how much I value Blue Origin vs SpaceX equity.
You put the labor in, but it's a toxic workplace and is killing your mental/physical health so you quit and forfeit. How much is that comp worth?
Working in toxic environment might command a pay premium? Wow, I didn't know that. You're telling me now for the first time.
More seriously, obviously you should take this into account while valuing the compensation offer you received.
Because after all, you value it as $0 or somewhere low like that. However like any MLE, you are a smart fucking cookie and you look at your $250k salary and the estimated 200k equity you have and think 10k REALLY?. Would you really be so dumb as to take literal pennies on the dollar for your equity?? It's not worth anything now and it very likely could never be, but 10k is fucking chump change, pardon my french.
The point of my $10k offer was to argue that the equity in a private company is not worth nothing, contrary to what you said. This argument was extremely successful, because you are now arguing for my side, telling me that the stock is worth more than $10k, and that the owner of that stock should hold out for better offer than mine.
I've been in this field for a bit and know of zero no-name MLEs who make 448k salary. Maybe an Ian Goodfellow, or a Yann LeCun would command that sort of cold hard cash.
Have you considered that maybe X AI is trying to attract talent of this caliber?
In any case, the salary brackets in job postings for this segment of the market have no actual relevance for anything. Everyone knows that equity is where the action is, and since the California law does not mandate including equity compensation in these brackets (as if there even was a reasonably useful way to do that), nobody cares about these figures.
wlxd
5mo ago
I acknowledge the human need to feel better about wrongs, but I think it can do more harm than good in a society of many.
Harm to whom, exactly? Good to whom, exactly? Think about it: you're putting avoiding harm to the criminal above the well-being of his victim.
There is little evidence to show that punishment acts as a deterent for crime in our current society.
I see people say things like that, and, frankly, I find it mind-boggling.
First, this is so contrary to all human instincts and experience, that it would take some extraordinary evidence to compel me to take it seriously. Somehow, my children are deterred from committing "crime" against me by threat of punishment. I am deterred from committing crime by the threat of punishment -- for example, I feel extreme urge to smack the shit out of the street hobos that aggressively accost me, and the main reason I don't is because I know that the law will protect the menacing hobos and destroy me for it. I can come up with more examples like that.
Given that I, and many people I know are deterred by threat of punishment, the only way punishment could not act as a deterrent is if encouraged some people to commit crime. I don't believe this is plausible.
Second, this statement, even if it was true (which it is not), it is cleverly crafted to distract from the main argument for punishment as we practice it: it doesn't need to act as a deterrent in order to do the job you want it to do, which is to prevent future crime. Indeed, all it needs to do is to incapacitate the criminal, and it does so tremendously. Criminals who are in jail cannot victimize people outside of jail, and dead criminals are even less capable of victimizing anyone. This means that executing criminals is a good way to prevent crime, even if literally nobody is deterred from committing crime by the threat of capital punishment.
If the solution creates a bigger problem, (...)
I think you forgot to mention what problem is created by retribution. The only one I can think of is suffering of the criminal, which I see as a benefit, not a negative.
Or a step further: if retribution is a solution but there is a solution with better outcomes that does not involve retribution, the latter is better.
This is just a tautology: a better solution is better.
I think the greatest pitfall of retribution in a large society (versus a small one, where it makes a lot more sense) is that the moving parts are no longer in sync. You can see this with public shamings that target relatively innocent people with great impunity and consequence.
Few cases involve any publicity. In most cases, nobody cares about people close to victim and to the perpetrator. These form a small society.
wlxd
1yr ago
I think you can make arguments in favor of using it in the absence of better knowledge, but once more direct signals have been acquired the race no longer serves a useful purpose.
This is true in principle, but in practice, you will never get enough of more direct signals to completely discount the priors coming from the race, and this is if you even get a chance to collect more direct signal at all: collecting signal itself is not free, you cannot run background checks on every passerby on the street.
The race is a sort of highly universal prior, and it carries immense amount of residual predictive value even after controlling for more direct predictors.
AIDS and Malaria cannot “just make a jump”. AIDS only is a thing in western world thanks to gays and drug addicts. Without them, we’d, uhm, flatten the curve by now (in fact, it would probably never become a thing in the first place, it only became a thing thanks to gay Canadian flight attendant who really liked to fuck random guys in places he flew into).
Malaria is not a disease that spreads from person to person, and we cannot have malaria become a thing in US, because we already stopped it being a thing. We used to have malaria in US, and we destroyed the conditions that allowed malaria to exist. We can’t have malaria now without recreating this condition, which, given the land use patterns, is highly unlikely.
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