dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
No bio...
User ID: 583
I am beginning to low key worry about how good the latest coding agents are, claude code and codex, within the last two weeks. I am routinely building apps in 2 hours now that might have taken me a month if I had to use my own brain.
They'll tailor make stuff to any level of customization or weirdness. Use io_uring? Do this part in x86-64 assembly? Want a JIT for you app? Want to see if we can make this algorithm run on your GPU? Sure it's all good.
If I spot a bug it will take less than five minutes to fix. They never give up.
The slowest part of the loop here is me. I can't test changes and describe features fast enough.
This latest app I've put down about 3500 lines of code and haven't looked at any of it. It may as well have been written by a total stranger in a language I don't understand, it just slows things down too much if I try to read the code.
I am guiding it using my skills and experience but it doesn't really matter. When it can rewrite the entire app in an hour there are not that many bad architectural decisions that can't be undone.
Obviously in a mature product with users and deployed infrastructure, radically changing your approach is harder. But even already it tries to steer me away from crazy stuff.
I'm sorry but software engineer grunts are cooked. If you can't design or product manage yourself, you're going to be unemployed. What does it mean to be a SWE in a world where software is built as fast as you can describe it?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
21hr ago
OP is reasonably expecting survivor testimony and other physical evidence the FBI had access to substantiate, which seems in short supply.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2d ago
But I would fault a person who had prolonged, extended, beneficial relationship with Epstein while fully knowing who he is.
That's the key here. How do you prove someone fully knew who he was? My contention is that the people who were curious about it were probably satisfied pretty easily. From my original comment:
A man with that much social approval could easily say, if anyone ever confronted him, "oh, that. yeah, it was a thing with an escort. it was consensual. she said she was over 18. it got blown up into something. I paid my dues. trying to move on" and be happily believed. Due diligence: done. Very few people with the liberal morality to [okay with people hiring escorts] wouldn't have bought that excuse
Absent seeing him mess with underage girls, or noticing a lot of underage girls in his company, it's probably not that legible.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3d ago
Well, what's the actual difference between someone who marries you that thinks you're perfect versus someone that marries you because you check a lot of boxes but not all of them? The person who thinks you're perfect could still discover some other person that's better than you in some way and leave you for them?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
4d ago
I still have a hard time believing the average person would not accept an invite to a party at a rich guy's mansion if it had a few household names in attendance. And feel chuffed to bits if Epstein took a liking to them and wanted to introduce them to more people, and would easily look past his minor legal trouble.
97% is hyperbole but it would be high.
The other day, quantum computing expert(?) Scott Aaronson wrote about how he didn't meet Epstein and summed up in a comment something I had been thinking as well.
I had a further thought. Back in 2019, when Epstein became a central topic of conversation following his arrest and then death, and lots of my scientific colleagues were telling stories about their contacts or near-contacts with him, it struck me that there were zero stories about any scientist—liberal or conservative, male or female, morally naive or morally astute—saying, “no, of course I want nothing to do with you, because you’re friggin’ Jeffrey Epstein, the infamous mass rapist!”
So I concluded that, if anyone now imagines that they would’ve responded that way, it’s almost certainly pure hindsight bias. Indeed, even after Epstein’s first conviction, a short jail stint in one’s past for “soliciting prostitution” simply doesn’t sound disqualifying, according to the secular liberal morality that most academics hold, unless you researched the details, which most didn’t.
All of the pearl clutching about how powerful men (and women) who associated with Epstein must have clearly known what he was about and what he was up to as a convicted pedophile ephebophile, when it's almost certain that 97% of the population would have gleefully accepted an invitation to one of his parties filled with leading scientists from MIT and Harvard, heads of state, CEOs, inventors, billionaires, and the rest of the somebodys.
A man with that much social approval could easily say, if anyone ever confronted him, "oh, that. yeah, it was a thing with an escort. it was consensual. she said she was over 18. it got blown up into something. I paid my dues. trying to move on" and be happily believed. Due diligence: done. Very few people with the liberal morality to be condemning him for hiring an escort wouldn't have bought that excuse and gone back to dreaming of rubbing shoulders with the who's who and maybe getting a sweet private jet ride. "Can he really be such a bad guy if all of these other great people are hanging out with him?", thought all of the other great people hanging out with him.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
4d ago
By "sex was hot af" I don't mean "the person was more attractive", but rather "sex with crazy/sociopathic people is exhilerating".
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
4d ago
Do men not have the same thing?
Men also have that borderline girlfriend, you know, the one that's an artist, where the sex was hot af but the relationship was otherwise tumultuous and they had to stop seeing them because they kept getting fall down intoxicated in public while out by themselves. Eventually they "settle" for the girl who doesn't have the mental illness and drug abuse issues but it's true they don't like to dirtytalk as much.
One of my great fears is being caught in a struggle session like this. I'm not really kidding. I used to have nightmares about it as a kid, when I didn't even know what a struggle session was. I would dream that there was a huge crowd around me and they were angry at me, and someone that was my friend would be interrogating me with inane questions that seemed to have no right or wrong answer, but no matter what I answered the friend would announce it to the crowd with disgust and I'd be booed and jeered. Just complete lunacy.
I put myself in the yoga studio manager's position and wonder what I would say. The troll in me would lean into it: "do you stupid motherfuckers think we took the sign down because we're trying to welcome ICE agents to do yoga? do you think they do yoga?" and "so, what I'm hearing is you're mad that we had the anti-ICE sign up but had to take it down? how mad are you at yoga studios that never had the sign up to begin with?"
But I realize the right move would be to say "actually, " lowering voice " one of our dark skinned owners is anti-ICE, but she's afraid her green card will be revoked if ICE finds out she had that sign up. Please be her voice out there, because she cannot speak for herself, here" and then we all :resist-fist:
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
5d ago
I think all those facts might be related. If you're old enough and wealthy enough that you don't have to work anymore, it can be a shock to your sense of identity. What do you do with those extra 2,000 hours a year?
I can just imagine society finally becoming wealthy enough by 2035 that we could institute a sweet UBI for all, and then by 2037 we have the most brutal civil war because we believe we're the most oppressed people ever.
Prediction markets probably have no good things. The author of The Laws of Trading wrote about why prediction markets can't deliver what they promise. A bit technical on the trading side but should be navigable by laypersons.
In 1964 there were 458,000 measles cases, and 421 deaths, over a smaller population, no lockdowns.
How barbaric. Our ancestors were truly uncivilized.
Isn't it, compared to influenza, 10x as infectious, with 10x the hospitalization rate and 5-10x as deadly?
If we had a vaccine that reliably stopped influenza (instead of the bullshit yearly one people try taking which misses 75% of the time) I can't imagine why we wouldn't all be on it? But the measles vaccine is a lot more reliable than the influenza vaccine? And you don't have to take it annually?
It seems like a tragedy that our society is rejecting the measles vaccine. What am I missing?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6d ago
I mean, 99.9% chance none of that happened so I'm okay with saying if your state is that competent and brazen you deserve to dominate us.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
7d ago
I'm still skeptical, as it ascribes to netanyahu/idf intelligence a level of power that seems unreasonable on multiple layers, but it would be the very, very funniest writing of this season if the thing that gave away his cover was a public (now-private) fortnite profile, of all things.
If the Israelis busted Epstein out of jail and left a body double and he's just been hiding out in Israel this whole time they deserve to rule the world.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
11d ago
It's quite a mindfuck to have AI produce like 700 lines of code that work on the first try, which would cost like $500 to have a human write, but if you ask it to write a 1000 word essay it goes by in a blur that seems okay at first but if you read it with your brain on it sounds bad and wrong.
In truth if you look at the code more closely you could make it much prettier and more sensible but it all kind of works well enough that you don't care. Whereas it's really hard to make a written essay acceptable.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
11d ago
Someone recently claimed that people here would greatly outperform the market given their higher-than-average intelligence.
IMO the way to beat the market with your higher than average intelligence is to either bust your ass and build something great that people need or join a quant fund and work in a mentorship with other traders and use their capital and proprietary technology stack. Everything else is just spinning a roulette wheel.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
11d ago
ie “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” was a favorite discussion topic both on the SSC open thread and on this forum in the early days, and still comes up occasionally.
The problem with trying to profit off of being smart is that
(a) Prices are set by the marginal trader, not by the average. There's a lot of stupid people pushing prices every which-way. It's true that dumb people create what could be opportunity, but other dumb people also ruin the opportunity
(b) Related but different, is there often isn't enough liquidity to exploit your information.
Sort of tangentially, something that comes up a lot of the time in like, any real business I've looked into, is that local competition is crazy and desperate enough to disregard regulation. They get away with it most of the time, but I'm just not comfortable risking six figure fines (or worse) just to make a go at house flipping.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
12d ago
Why isn't trespassing law enough at the minimum? The minister says "you are trespassing and must leave" and if they don't they become arrestable? That should shut protests down plenty well.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
12d ago
I just have no idea how much enshittification Microsoft can get away with due to lock in effect, and I don't think anyone does
A lot. Businesses will do anything to avoid migrating to a new platform. It is a tried and true business model for PE funds to buy platforms, fire the founder and quote contract renewals at some major proportion of each client's disposable income and they will just bend over and take it.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
12d ago
At least one site claims the "Girls FTW!" email is fake and does not appear in the release.
Sounds nice. I live nowhere near Minneapolis and protestors have been teargassed twice three times this week. They keep trying to break into/smash up the federal building, which is in the middle of town and on the way to a lot of errands, so I've been pinging subreddits and the news every time I go out to see what's up.
Businesses were pressured to close on Friday out of "solidarity", a good number did, with others sheepishly putting up signs explaining they're staying open because their employees need a paycheck, in the hopes they would not end up on the 'supports MAGA' shitlist.
Checking up on last night's carnage, it seems counter protestors showed up, open carrying and each side was recording the other promising to expose them all on social media.
The terminally online mentally ill folks have broken containment, it's just not very evenly distributed yet.
Watching him write such incoherent slop to Chomsky and then reading his glazing replies is unbearable. Can't piss off the donor. Or turn down his offer to get a ride in his private jet.
Pinker was wrapped up in this too and I read his defense a few years ago and didn't really appreciate where he was coming from and thought he was just trying to distance himself.
The annoying irony is that I could never stand the guy [...]. Friends and colleagues described him to me as a quantitative genius and a scientific sophisticate, and they invited me to salons and coffee klatches at which he held court. But I found him to be a kibitzer and a dilettante — he would abruptly change the subject ADD style, dismiss an observation with an adolescent wisecrack, and privilege his own intuitions over systematic data. I think the dislike was mutual—according to a friend, he “voted me off the island,” presumably because he was sick of me trying to keep the conversation on track and correcting him when he shot off his mouth on topics he knew nothing about
Now that I'm much more familiar with Epsteinspew I completely get it.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
13d ago
Fair enough. I guess everyone would benefit from looksmaxxing before they do something heinous, but at the very least they should glow up their socials.
What's the difference? The intervention with the wife is so much more personal and less ad hoc than randos (hypothetically) calling up my employer and trying to get me fired?
That this is not just random Twitter psychopaths but otherwise normal friends of my wife becoming inhabited by Agent Smiths?
Not anymore. They're basically as good as a senior software engineer now, except they finish 100x faster. And never need to rest.
At this point anyone not using them is resisting out of inertia. Or fear. Well placed fear, perhaps.
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