ThenElection
No bio...
User ID: 622
ThenElection
2d ago
The transformer came out of Google Brain, not GDM.
ThenElection
4d ago
Mostly Bay Area weather. I'd increase the number of days with heavy low-laying fog and add thunderstorms to make it a bit more interesting, and I'd make Friday and Saturday nights much warmer to make patio and rooftop dining/drinks actually pleasant.
ThenElection
4d ago
I'm skeptical that MDMA gets dumped in a drink of an unsuspecting victim at any significant scale.
It has played a role in the rapes I know of in the rave scene. But, similar to the alcohol ratchet, the victim knowingly consumed it, overshot and reached an incapacitated state, and then a predator took advantage. Still very much a rape, but "date rape drug" has much different connotations than that scenario.
ThenElection
5d ago
Even ignoring the pre-Clovis peoples, native American tribes regularly warred with each other: the successful ones expanded, and the losers fled to more marginal lands, had their women integrated into the replacing tribe, or were killed.
1492 wasn't at some equilibrium state where everyone was where their ancestors had been for thousands of years. Even post-exchange, this process continued: who does Mount Rushmore belong to? The Lakota, who were dominated by the US? Or the Cheyenne, who were dominated by the Lakota? Or whatever group preceded the Cheyenne before somehow being erased from the historical record?
ThenElection
5d ago
I'd add that getting and holding a professional job for a couple years is itself a strong assimilatory force; I can't think of any H1B who aided or carried out a terrorist attack. Which isn't to say H1Bs don't bring their own issues (preferential hiring of their in-group being a major one), but the biggest offenders there aren't people from Muslim-majority countries.
For what it's worth, I've been unable to reproduce the cockroaches in penis answer. Though I'm sure at least some of the viral screenshots are legitimate, and there's definitely a team spending their entire memorial day weekend quashing these as they come up.
Technically, one issue is that there would be a different LLM being used in search than elsewhere. The one used in search would prioritize cost and speed above all else. A couple minutes worth of Google search inferences is a greater volume than probably a day's worth of inferences across all of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Naturally, quality is going to suffer. And even if Google were inclined to, it simply doesn't have the hardware to run its top-of-the-line model for every search query. (No one does.)
For comparison, Brave handles maybe 10 QPS? Google is closer to 100k QPS.
Google needs to improve quality, but that's probably not even its main priority right now: it needs to decrease costs.
ThenElection
8d ago
"I came for my Vicodin for my joint pain, not to be fat-shamed, you sexist pig!"
ThenElection
9d ago
Yeah, workshopped it for a minute or two and that's the best I could come up with. And agreed, Trotsky ice axe jokes will never get old.
Bisexual atheistic male here. And I also don't want the list of buzzwords--meritocracy, equality, the rest--you list.
But your supposed vision (to the extent you describe it here) has no appeal to me. I want very simple things: clean, safe streets, limited crime, pretty buildings, parks, reliable infrastructure, consistent paycheck, good food, a nice glass of wine, friends, family. I really don't care who happens to rule over me, so long as I have those things and the rulers don't bother me too much aside from taking up to half my income and using it wisely. In a perfect world I'd never be asked to think about politics again; in the next-best world, I'd pay attention only so far as it meant participating in city politics to make sure the government does spend my income wisely. And I don't care about what hairstyle anyone chooses; I can like it or not, but beyond that it's meh. And I don't think democracy is itself better than any other system of government, but transitioning away from democracy to another one would almost certainly cause more chaos and suffering than it's worth.
In a word, I'm a hobbit.
ThenElection
9d ago
What's interesting about Lenin's writings is that he's usually pretty forthright about what he wanted and planned. For much of the 20th century, there was an internecine dispute between orthodox Communists and a motley group of Western intellectuals (heavily influenced by the trots) about whether Stalin had "betrayed the Revolution." But Stalin was an organic evolution, and Lenin and especially Trotsky didn't just theoretically support measures of brutal repression but actively executed them. Stalin won in the 1930s because he was the moderate; Trotsky's point of view was something like there wasn't enough worldwide violence, not that there was too much. Naturally, once he decisively lost the fight, he changed his tune, but it's unlikely anything really changed inside his head until his death.
ThenElection
10d ago
"Date rape" drugs are largely an urban legend, except for one: alcohol. And it's still absolutely true that men will encourage women to drink to excess, particularly through a ratchet where each successive drink lowers judgment, leading to susceptibility to another drink, etc, to the point of being black out drunk and having no judgment at all.
This is pretty messy: each step is consented to, and there's no deception about what's being consumed. Sometimes it's even innocent, particularly when both people are getting trashed. But enough women regret it that I'd be a fan of stigmatizing and punishing this behavior, particularly when the alternative is encouraging women to never have a single drink on a date for fear of falling prey to this ratchet.
ThenElection
10d ago
The gender norms being biologically driven would be almost reassuring: if it were just our genes driving the behaviors, we will at some point in the future be able to move around a couple base pairs and solve the issue entirely.
If they arise purely from social dynamics and have nothing to do with biology, on the other hand, they are self-sustaining and have resisted millenia of attempts to change them, across massive geographic and temporal spaces. That seems much harder to fix.
ThenElection
10d ago
I got a wife by changing my strategy, and we make each other extremely happy, so the outcome was definitely net good for us. And I'm 90% confident that continuing on my previous path would have ended in actual suicide.
In the end, I'm not going to martyr myself, or advise anyone else to martyr himself, to satisfy an imagined set of rules the vast majority of women don't even themselves follow. Make it even 25%, and I'd reconsider.
ThenElection
10d ago
The "some people miss sex they could have had" direction is understating that error. It's more like "some people miss highly meaningful, mutually respectful relationships that massively increase the well-being of both parties." It's not merely a matter of someone not getting their dick wet enough.
So the question, then, is how we create the social conditions so that women feel empowered to give that "no" and men feel compelled to respect it.
You've got to create a consent culture. If most women positively responded to very fastidious requests for explicit consent and respect for hesitance or rejection, men would go for it, every bit as much as they would start walking everywhere on their hands if that's what women wanted.
But, having spent too much time in the wild, women generally hate it when you ask for explicit consent; I've been told multiple times that I ruined the mood by asking if it was okay if I kissed her. Instead, there's a set of implicit rules that men are never explicitly taught but are expected to learn through repeated failed attempts. Underlying all of that is still the goal of discerning real consent, but obscured by social games. (This isn't something that comes up nearly as much in gay culture; if you want to fuck, you can ask someone if they want to fuck, and it won't affect your chances either way.)
So long as that's the landscape that heterosexual men have to navigate while dating, there will still be "consent accidents" where the man mistakenly misreads a signal, and there will still be men who take advantage of the ambiguity to get what they want but excuse it by feigning confused signals.
ThenElection
10d ago
Supposedly, they hired the actress before reaching out to ScarJo.
Not sure it matters; outcome depends on the vagaries of California law and how sympathetic the judge/jury are.
One option might be currency directly: if the Ukrainian state ends up destroyed, presumably the hryvnia will be of lower value. So you could potentially sell a UAH/RUB (or UAH/anything; probably USD or EUR would be better) pair. Spreads there are likely large.
You could look at European companies and see which ones have been heavily impacted by sanctions on Russian gas and may significantly benefit once the sanctions are lifted (though that's more of a bet on a quicker end to the war than consensus opinion, not on a particular victor).
COVERED ALGORITHM.—The term “covered algorithm” means a computational process, including one derived from machine learning, statistics, or other data processing or artificial intelligence techniques, that makes a decision or facilitates human decision- making by using covered data, which includes determining the provision of products or services or ranking, ordering, promoting, recommending, amplifying, or similarly determining the delivery or display of information to an individual.
I wonder how that would apply to dating apps; would they now be required to design algorithms such that an Asian man, black woman, or trans woman all get equivalent number of matches to their privileged counterparts? Or is that not discrimination?
ThenElection
13d ago
Recently, the Guardian doxxed Lom3z, the right-wing author best known for What is the Longhouse, based on an unwise registration of a linkable LLC name. As Ahmari points out, he's "an erstwhile Bernie-ish bro who at some point snapped, or became disaffected with the millennial left, and shifted rightward." An MFA holder who was a lecturer at UCI (not tenure track, of course) for a decade, of an unsurprising "off-white" background.
What I'm confused about: why is this a story at all? Presumably, the main effects of this are to make him unemployable and perhaps cause some interpersonal issues. What is a random reader expected to do? Unless you happen to employ him, seemingly nothing. The exposé does detail his sins, which includes publishing ponderous Yarvin tomes and obscure works by Russian White counter-revolutionaries.
And yet it is a story, and a story that gets me emotionally invested, so I suppose my question should really be less why is this a story and more why do I consider this a story? As much as I like the longhouse concept, it's hard to consider Lom3z or his biography at all important; he could die tomorrow, and no one aside from his loved ones would notice.
I think what gets me is that there's simultaneously an appropriation of victimhood (evil bad guy publishes anonymous essay causing evilness!) combined with an inquisitorial zeal to punish, and apparently the power to do exactly that. I just don't see how someone can have both these traits simultaneously, and yet it's depressingly common. I guess I see the doxxing as a distillation of the current zeitgeist of exceptional purity, and that's something to point to when thinking about it.
Another question: what happened to Ahmari? I recall him being on the outs for theoconnery, but now he's publishing snark in the New Statesman about other right-wing writers. Did something change, or did he have some kind of beef with Lom3z?
ThenElection
14d ago
young men will go crying and waving every bloody progressive-cause shirt to simp, but they are making a mistake.
My misspent youth, alas. Note to readers: reading Judith Butler and bell hooks does not, in fact, make women any more likely to date you. (Someone here will doubtlessly point out this is obvious, but when the women around you all suggest that the solution to dating woes is to Be More Feminist and Read Woman Authors, it's easy for a naive kid to get confused.)
ThenElection
14d ago
Women have always been the social sinews that held together relatively atomized men; they've always been heavily politically engaged, even during the brief period where men had the vote and they did not. From prohibition to the Satanic ritual abuse panic to 1970s bussing opposition to the defeat of the ERA, they provided the nexus around which politics was organized. Note that these weren't uniformly or even mostly left-coded movements: if you want a movement of any kind, you need women.
ThenElection
15d ago
Yes, please.
ThenElection
16d ago
Just gotta know the right people and right sketchy warehouses to go to.
The point, though, was about the complete lack of anything to do in most parts of the US, not about how Bay Area nightlife compares to NYC and LA.
ThenElection
16d ago
Bay Area housing is expensive because its workers tend to be far more economically productive than most areas in the US.
Reason not to be reactionary: it allows me to live in the Bay Area, with the alternative being stuck in the same shithole podunk town where I grew up and the only nightlife after 9PM is hanging out at the local Walmart.
The issue with experiments is that you need to objectively evaluate and act on their outcomes. In principle, I think it's possible for an individual to (imperfectly, but still much better than random guessing). But any social-wide experiment will create institutions that are embedded in the conditions of the experiment, and they will do their utmost to maintain and expand the conditions they're adapted for. Maybe some won't, but those will be selected against. This would apply both in your capitalist and socialist examples (as well as any other I can think of, from anarchist collectives to feudal fiefdoms).
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