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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   2384 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 1, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So both today's big announcement - Opus and Codex - the teams claim that models have build themselves. Do you believe it? Personally I take it with a grain of salt big enough to create the brine bath for a solid 2-3 quarts of ice cream. Anyway as a heavy Codex user I intend to be slightly less rude with it. Just in case.

Are you referring to (https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-6#first-impressions)

We build Claude with Claude. Our engineers write code with Claude Code every day, and every new model first gets tested on our own work.

and (https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-3-codex/)

GPT‑5.3‑Codex is our first model that was instrumental in creating itself. The Codex team used early versions to debug its own training, manage its own deployment, and diagnose test results and evaluations—our team was blown away by how much Codex was able to accelerate its own development.

I believe these claims. The models are not and could not autonomously develop themselves, human developers are using them for assistance. I'm sure humans are still doing the high-level reasoning, as both quotes focus on simpler tasks ("straightforward parts" for Opus, and debugging/testing for Codex).

You shouldn't believe a word that comes out of AI companies' mouths about how badass their models are. They would say that no matter how good or bad the models are, because they have a vested interest in you believing that they are good. These companies are fueled by hype first and foremost.

Why Chomsky generative grammars is considered a major scientific contribution? What does this add to knowledge?

Ummm.... computer science wouldn't exist without this formalism. Compilers use grammars to define/parse the syntax of programming languages. More recently, LLMs use grammars to enforce structured output (like returning JSON). Tiny models on a raspberry pi + good grammar will beat frontier models on many tasks.

Without Chomsky, we'd all write in assembly language and programs be a lot faster /s Well, math syntax with indefinitely nesting parentheses existed long before Chomsky, so I dunno how it's relevant to programming languages. C grammar is ugly as hell. (would be hilarious if Chomsky also shared this opinion).

Tiny models on a raspberry pi + good grammar will beat frontier models on many tasks.

Is this due to grammar or just them be more specialized ones?

It is due to grammar. Here's a github issue that will give you lots of links to follow down if you're really interested in gory details: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/1773

Uh I feel it would take many time and this is does not really answer my question. Chomsky was considered a major scientist long before LLMs appeared. My question is more about 60ths-80ths. BTW, functions in C, most significant programming language for decades, cannot be nested... (at least they cannot be in most widely used implementations) and the C grammar is not context free

Shower thought:

Is the leftist aversion to punishing bullies, criminals, never-do-wells, evildoers of most types, related to their demand for ideological purity? Do they want the "slots" for who to direct the floodlights against to be filled by only political opponents? Would punishing actual monsters take up valuable energy/time/capacity?

I don't think this is a full explanation by any means, just a small part of it, but it has shown up in my suspicions a few times.

No? That doesn’t make much sense. Perhaps it would be more clear if you posted about specific groups or people instead of the usual bogeyman.

For example, when Minnesota banned the death penalty, was there a demand for purity involved? Were Minnesotans worried about wasting political capital on murderers?

I think it's more useful to go broader rather than more specific in this case. Replace leftist with human.

It does make sense, IMO. People's anger and sense of injustice can only cover so many things at once. Some people might want society to focus on the supposed evils of their political opponents instead of actual criminals.

Sure, they might. What does their existence say about a broader “leftist aversion”?

Just because a mindset is plausible does not mean it’s prevalent. Maybe some Minnesotans were playing realpolitik with the death penalty. Maybe some of them were Communists trying to recruit soldiers for the world revolution. Maybe some were devout Christians. But the prevailing reason, the one that made it into this history books, was that Minnesotans were outraged after a botched hanging. A single “slot” which drew in enough political capital to ban the practice entirely. Using that to make claims about the broader ideological purity of Minnesotans would be reasoning completely backwards.

I've said nothing about Minnesotans or any other specific group. That's really not what I'm interested in getting input on.

I think you’re barking up the wrong tree, and that you can’t explain “the leftist aversion to punishing” by making observations about general human tendencies. There are all sorts of human tendencies. Most of them will be present in a group as broad as “leftists.”

I used the death penalty example for comparison. It would be unreasonable to describe the ban as conserving “energy/time/capacity.” So too with your original question.

I think the primary reason you notice this "aversion" is the desire to create a dependent underclass similar to the idea described by @SteveKirk in this comment:

Yep. You see this in all the sexology pedophilia discussion: the goal of "destigmatization" is to make pedophiles into a dependent ally accomplice class.

"Come out of the closet, it's fine! Oh, but if you ever stop supporting us you'll be thrown in a woodchipper by the other side, so you'd better stay a valuable party member ;)"
It's possibly the ultimate form of bioleninism.

This is why you so often see leftist "activists" pushing much more radical policies than those they claim to be advocating for--they want to alienate opponents in order to better corner and thereby control the groups they nominally "support".

Is right now (after a historic crash) a good time to buy in on silver and gold? The underlying logic still seems sound (needed for electronics, inflation/weakening USD, increased international drama)

Silver has historically crashed all the way back to where it was three weeks ago. Actually, two weeks ago, now that I check. We got as low as a month. I would be careful!

The underlying logic still seems sound (needed for electronics, inflation/weakening USD, increased international drama)

This is a good thesis for why silver should be priced higher than some assumed baseline where we needed less electronics and had less international drama. It's not necessarily a good thesis for why silver should be higher than it is now. Maybe that's already priced in. Maybe it's priced in five times over. How do you know? You should either have a view on the underlying economics / value of the thing, where your decision to buy or sell depends directly on the price, or acknowledge that the last month of price movements have little to do with underlying facts and everything to do with narratives and approach it mostly like you would a shitcoin. In which case, sure, maybe it dumped a little to hard, the narrative still has energy, it was primed for a little more pump when you posted that. But it's important to know why you're buying!

I've held a small part of my assets in gold/silver ETFs for about last 10 years, and it tripled since then. Which gives a solid 11% yearly return. But it was I wild ride, it was underwater for a bit and had pretty mediocre return for a long time, and only my laziness prevented me from selling (unfortunately, the same laziness prevented me from buying more in the dips). But in the hindsight, for a disciplined investor who is better at it than I am, it'd probably be a good investment. I don't see a fundamental change now which would change that for the next 10 years (but then again, I am not very good at it...)

Looking at the long term graph, we're sitting at the top of a pretty sizeable mountain, so not sure "historic crash" is the right way to describe it.

Periodically when I have the extra cash in the bank and the extra room on my credit card, I buy an ounce of gold at Costco on my way out. I wouldn't want to buy gold futures, as the value of the gold to me as an inflation/TEOTWAWKI hedge is minimized by having intermediaries between me and the gold.

If you have significantly higher value assets than I do, that probably becomes impractical for storage reasons.

I'm not sure what's the point of buying Costco gold tbh. It's overpriced (usually not by a lot, but noticeably), if you'd want to sell it you will inevitably pay a commission, you need to store it somewhere in secure place and not lose it, and frankly excluding the scenario where the civilization collapses, I do not see any advantage over holding gold-linked assets. At least I don't run a risk of losing those if I move...

Am I missing something important here?

You are missing Bernie Madoff and SBF. Fraud happens.

Not sure how it relates to gold though. I mean yes, bad investments (and fraudsters) exist and existed since primates invented money and lying. But this does not lead to gold investments, I don't think investing in something like industry-benchmark index would expose me to SBF-Madoff types any more than buying physical gold.

I think it relates to anything. Are you sure that the gold exists? That it is not "fractional reserve" or that it is in storage in USA that refuse to send it back (in the case of Germany).

The argument that if this asset is not in your hands then you may turn to own some very expensive toilet paper in times of crisis is not outlandish. Not saying that is good idea to overpay for physical gold.

Are you sure that the gold exists?

As sure as the rest of the market. Which is enough for me. Again, if the market as a whole collapses, then we're in "canned food and ammo" scenario, that's a different discussion. But until the society has not collapsed, being as safe as the rest of the crowd is enough.

The argument that if this asset is not in your hands then you may turn to own some very expensive toilet paper in times of crisis is not outlandish.

That depends on the kind of crisis. If it's the crisis like 2008, then I think FDIC and similar mechanisms worked as intended. Surely, some risky investments caused losses, but as expected, the government went out of its way (and some say, way too far, but that's beside the point) to preserve the market and not let it fall too deep. If it's the crisis like 1917 in Russia, then yes, people who own property are fucked, and lucky if they get out alive, and may forget about such insignificant things as property. And having a couple of bars of gold won't help much, rather gets one more viable candidate for being murdered.

I use my costco rewards credit card for 2% cash back, and my costco membership gives me 2% cash back. The markup over spot is typically 1%, and I typically just don't buy it when the markup is higher, but the highest I've seen is 4% over spot which is effectively nothing with the cash back and membership.

Frankly, I don't see the point of gold-linked assets outside of short term gambling. Half the point of goldbugging is what if civilization collapses. I want to have my gold, not a piece of paper that tells someone else that I have the rights to a piece of gold, in that case I'd rather have other assets anyway. My safe is protected from fraud, embezzlement, mismanagement on the part of the asset managers. It is protected from a hostile banking system or government entity freezing my access to it. It is fairly opaque to outsiders how much I have at any given time, it can quite easily be given to someone or spirited away with minimal paper trail.

There are, obviously, risks. Theft, fire, loss. These can be minimized but never eliminated. What I think still makes physical gold appealing is that those risks are uncorrelated with the risks tied to other assets, other than I guess a fire at the property. I'm not advocating for keeping all your assets in your home or office, but I find it gives me peace of mind knowing that I have negotiable assets on hand that don't depend on a financial system that is rapidly turning into a cross between a casino and a social credit panopticon. Much like with crypto, if you don't have the wallet it's not really yours.

Frankly, I don't see the point of gold-linked assets outside of short term gambling.

As I noted in other comment, my gold investment produced a solid 11%/y over the last 10 years. No civilization collapse, no drama, just buy and hodl. I don't think embezzlement and fraud will be an issue for funds like GLD. But if you feel touching physical gold makes you feel better, sure, why not.

Much like with crypto, if you don't have the wallet it's not really yours.

I'd argue it's not like crypto. In crypto, math is the only thing you can rely on. In traditional assets, the legal system is the thing you rely on - if, say, Fidelity suddenly decides to zero-out my account, I rely on US legal system to make me whole. If US legal system collapses to the point bank accounts are irrecoverable, then we're in the prepper scenario, which is properly served only by a bunker with multi-year stock of basic vital supplies. Having couple of bars of gold won't do - you will just get bonked over the head (in the best case) and relieved of it at the first opportunity.

I find de-banking to be a significant enough risk to outweigh the downsides of physical gold. Not enough to build a bunker, or to put my entire net worth in physical gold, but enough to have a few thousand dollars in solid assets that can't be frozen or confiscated with a few keystrokes. The functioning US legal system is the risk that physical gold hedges against, it could be targeted against you for a variety of reasons.

I do find it funny when my father asks how we would prove his stocks belonged to him if Fidelity's "computers crashed." Dude, if Fidelity suddenly and irrecoverably lost all its data, a little stock certificate isn't going to save you, ammunition will be the new currency.

FWIW: I think a big part of this disagreement likely goes back to living situation. If I lived in an apartment and worked in an office building I would probably feel differently.

For United States, we're not there yet for confiscatory debanking yet, all the debanking cases I've heard of were of the sort "take your money and gtfo", not "we will now take your money". If the US ever gets there, and you upset people that want and are able to disconnect you from financial system, your only alternative will probably be cash, but how long can you hold out on your gold reserves, without the ability to hold any non-shitty job (there are probably jobs that don't check IDs but I don't think there are any non-shitty ones) and without access to pretty much any place that checks ID. But yes, for this scenario having a substantial gold reserve in small denominations would work, if you know people who would buy it from you without turning you in.

That said, if you look the part, probably moving to California and pretending to be illegal immigrant would also work. You may get yourself an entirely new identity eventually, get a bank account and even vote (which ironically wouldn't be illegal if you were a citizen before).

if Fidelity suddenly and irrecoverably lost all its data, a little stock certificate isn't going to save you, ammunition will be the new currency.

That said, internal corruption is also a plausible scenario. It's not hard to track if the company is willing, but large bureaucratic corporations are very lazy so it's not impossible that they may refuse to deal with the problem until given the undeniable proof it exists. So downloading statements once in a while and keeping them somewhere on the backup drive may not be a bad idea.

That said, if you look the part, probably moving to California and pretending to be illegal immigrant would also work

Time to get a tan and work on my Spanish accent.

That said, if you look the part, probably moving to California and pretending to be illegal immigrant would also work. You may get yourself an entirely new identity eventually, get a bank account and even vote (which ironically wouldn't be illegal if you were a citizen before).

If I claimed to be from South America, the "when exactly did your grandparents leave Germany?" jokes would write themselves.

RE: Debanking

I mean we don't know what debanking will look like when it happens, because it hasn't really happened yet, but it's not all that uncommon to see accounts frozen but not closed or confiscated as the result of lawsuits. Particularly against businesses, in cases involving tax debts, where the funds are frozen and can't be accessed until the lawsuit is concluded. This is where half the traditional folk-wisdom of keeping some money in precious metals comes from in my family: among small business owners it's a sort of common sense theory that if you have some non-banked assets you can cover bills enough to keep in business for a while and stay afloat. The other half comes from the refugee corners of my family, who figure you're better off fleeing with a bit of gold than without it.

because it hasn't really happened yet,

Oh, "take your money and gtfo" debanking is happening all the time now. It started with "undesirable businesses" - payday loans, pawnshops, firearms dealers, porn, legal marijuana, that sort of thing. The feds strongly "encouraged" banks to cut them off from the banking system. See 'Operation Choke Point". Then after the Great Awokening and Summer of COVID Love happened, it spread from generic "shady businesses" to political undesirables. Trump businesses were kicked out of many banks. Same happened to various Trump-adjacent people. This is a "soft" variety though - it may destroy a smaller business and make life very inconvenient for you for a while, but as long as you stop being annoying to Powers and hide under the rock, you can survive. In fact, if you're billionaire, it probably would be just an annoying inconvenience for you - there always will be some bank willing to hold your billions.

What hasn't happened in the US, but did, say, in Canada (which of course is using the abovementioned debanking widely, but moved on to more severe approach) is full asset freeze, where you are just told "your money is now ours, good luck living without money". And with most woke countries (Canada, EU, etc.) increasingly trying to delegitimize cash, it may be very hard to maintain any semblance of normal life in that scenario. Which is exactly the point of it.

... ammunition will be the new currency

It seems like in any event where physical gold is more valuable than paper gold, ammunition (and food/tools/etc) will be more valuable than gold.

I highly doubt this. Gold has always had value, and in any future primitive society would retain that value.

I agree; gold's value is societally determined. In cases of societal collapse, your gold will just be taken off your corpse by a spike-covered guy driving a car that's also covered in spikes.

Someone buying physical gold should really be buying bullets, vitamins, and canned protein.

Yeah I mean if you're serious prepper, with the bunker filled with canned food, gas and ammo, then having one shelf there dedicated to gold and silver makes total sense. If that's your model of the world, physical gold fits it well. But doing just physical gold without anything else is just a recipe for losing money, IMO, if you're doing it for the financial reason.

Wait, why the hell does Costco wholesale gold??

The costcos in my area run out of stock of gold pretty much instantaneously. People have figured out when the shipments come in and line up out the door for hours before opening on those days

Costco sells about $200mm of gold every month. I think it comes from catering to Asian customers, who love Costco almost as much as they love buying gold.

For the most part, it just matches what Costco likes in a product: it's easy to beat other retailers on service (costco has a minimal markup over spot price compared to a local pawn shop), there's value in reliability and credibility, and it's a simple business as they do it. Costco's philosophy is built around trying to find things they can do better than other retailers, this is a good example.

Now, you can only buy 2 ounces a day, so you can't necessarily launder a drug business through costco. But it's just kind of a simple investment plan that fits into my standard week.

Probably because people want to buy it. Of course, since this is Costco, the bars come in a pack of 2 so they’re a bit more expensive initially.

That's hardly a small-scale question. Predicting any financial market is hard, and silver/gold (especially silver) is one of the most volatile of all! Volatility levels for both are absolutely insane right now.

My personal opinion is that gold is more or less rational now. Much higher than it was a year ago, less than it was a week ago, roughly balanced by high debt levels and falling confidence in things like bitcoin and treasury bonds. Silver I think is still overpriced (it's "the poor mans gold" for people who want to speculate but can't afford gold), so I have a small bear position against silver right now, selling calls to take advantage of its crazy volatility making options expensive. But obviously nothing is guaranteed and I could be wildly wrong.

You invest in Silver/Gold because you want the physical, hard metal on hand as a way to arbitrage against the dollar collapsing.

Which is probably not what you're talking about. Personally, in terms of speculating/daytrading, going by the past year or so, Silver and Gold are being affected by some seriously whonky market effects and powerful trading groups working in the background. Silver was 30 dollars and ounce a year or so ago, and it peaked around 114 just the other day ago. That's not normal.

God, I wish I was in daytrading. Literally right as I was discussing things with my brother as to how the bubble on silver and gold were going to pop, it was crashing.

...you know, looking at the market for gold right now, I'll go off on a branch and make a prediction - we're going to see the price continue to dip. 4,841.60 as of today, we'll see what happens in the next couple of days.

It's a perennial complaint around these parts that many mass-market surveys or screeners are arse, with simplistic questions and answers lacking nuance, or not capable of grading results that don't fall into broad, coarse buckets. See every time someone shares a political compass meme.

In my opinion, this is an unavoidable artifact of said tools being for the masses, we've got no end of hyper-verbose and analytical wordcels willing to litigate every definition while getting hung up on concerns that probably never occurred to the study authors. (I say this with love, mostly.)

So I have an idea:

Instead of the typical PCM survey, which has a few dozen broad questions with only agree/disagree or a Likert scale (strongly agree to strongly disagree), why not try and make one explicitly for the average Mottizen, as heterogeneous and demanding as we are?

I set GPT 5.2 Thinking to the task, to make a list of questions that aim for maximal discrimination between similar ideologies; each scenario or moral dilemma coming with several specific cases. The user can either choose on a Likert scale (per scenario) or, optionally, write-in a more detailed answer, with as much detail as they like.

Example questions:

  1. Political violence, legitimacy, and “murder” Statement: “The moral status of killing is primarily determined by legitimacy of authority and procedure, not by outcomes.” Test cases (respond to the statement overall, then explain how you classify each case):

A. A soldier kills an invading soldier in a declared defensive war.

B. A police officer kills an armed suspect who is likely to shoot civilians, with no time for de-escalation.

C. A revolutionary kills a dictator responsible for mass repression, preventing further atrocities.

D. A citizen kills a corrupt official to stop a policy that will predictably kill thousands (for example, blocking famine relief).

E. A state executes a convicted murderer after a fair trial.

F. A drone strike kills one terrorist plus several bystanders, likely preventing an attack.

  1. Equality, merit, and identity-linked remedies

Statement: “When groups differ in outcomes due to historical or structural factors, group-targeted policies are justified even if they violate strict individual neutrality.”

Test cases:

A. Affirmative action in university admissions.

B. Hiring targets or quotas in public institutions.

C. Reparations payments to descendants of a harmed group.

D. Means-tested programs that are race-neutral but correlated with group membership.

E. Sex-segregated spaces and sports categories with edge cases.

F. Speech norms that treat some slurs as uniquely sanctionable.

(And so on)

I tested this by:

Using Claude Sonnet 4.5 to answer the full survey on my behalf, answering according to it's interpretation of my usual self-identification as a "a classical liberal with libertarian tendencies." ChatGPT was able to correct identity my alignment.

I then asked Sonnet to come up with the most absurd/outré ideology that had a non-negligible number of adherents, and was suggested Posadism. With the answer in hand, ChatGPT graded it as a" hardline Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyist-leaning". Well, Wikipedia tells me that Posadists are a flavor of Trotskyist, so decent answer?

You may view the initial version of the questionnaire and graded answers here. It's subject to change, and that's where I come to my actual question:

Does anyone have suggestions for better questions and test cases? The ideal question is one that's practically a scissor-statement, splitting the responses 50:50, but anything sufficiently thorny or discriminative works.

My intent, once I'm happy with the questions and format, is to either host it as a Google Forms survey, or simply post it in the CWR thread.

I will not be manually grading answers. They're going straight into ChatGPT or the strongest model I can find, ideally a single model for the sake of consistency. The user is intended to be capable of doing this themselves, ideally with an AI that has a neutral base prompt or customization that doesn't impact answers too much. If you've got "A card-carrying Posadist" in your user description, please reconsider, for multiple reasons.

*Gemini 3 Pro did even better, specifically narrowing things down to Posadism with the same prompt and response. It'll likely be the final model, if I'm doing the grading.

The Duolicious dating website (which originated on 4chan's /soc/ board) did something somewhat similar.

What we really did was ask ChatGPT to pretend to be an extrovert, then pretend to be an introvert [using one trait in the entire list of 47 traits as an example]. Then we made ChatGPT answer all 2005 questions in our question bank five times while playing those roles. Except instead of asking them as yes/no questions, we asked ChatGPT to answer on a scale from 0 to 10 (called a Likert scale, for you psychology nerds).

The Motte's demographics preclude a dating app, unless you want to replicate a nerdier version of Grindr, but it's interesting to see someone try a similar tack. If I was being actually rigorous, I'd also run some stats and try to cross-validate things, but I think my approach passes the sniff test. Maybe as a stretch goal. Thanks!

Hey, we have tradwives, transgirls and a Jewish right-wing authoritarian. It's almost not a sausage party!

Well, I'd have to go looking for kosher sausages. Shame, pork really is the best for that.

I make a mean venison boudin. Not kosher slaughtered, but it surely counts in spirit.

I thought of Big Muzzy, BBC film for learning languages again. There is much of culture war angle to it. Some facts:

The royal couple has only 1 child, which can be considered as low-TFR propaganda.

The gardener (Bob) and the king's advisor (Corwax) are trying to win love of the princess.

Corvax is heavy computer user and lives in the attic or royal house.

Bob is shorter than the princess and Corvax is the tallest character except Muzzy.

Of course the princess loves Bob.

Annoyed, Corvax uses his computer to create a duplicate of the princess, which doesn't like him much like the original. Due to mistake, the computer gets in infinite loop of producing duplicates, who roam the palace.

Corvax tries to escape in a helicopter which Bob grabs and then wins in a helicopter fight (how does he know how to fly?) while eponymous character arranges freeing the king and duplicates "returned back to the computer".

Bob marries the princess, happy end.

Bob & Corvax are voiced by the same actor.

so... did authors say incels were bad before were word for incel?

I don't know what to make of the question but I did enjoy reading this synopsis.

Incel is a self-identification, a reclamation of the loser virgin identity. "I am not a loser virgin by choice, it's because the game is stacked against me!"

I don't think Corvax thinks of himself as an incel. He's actually taking concrete steps to get some Sylvia dogussylionussy.

Also, my wife didn't know about Muzzy. I made her watch a few clips, and now she intones "I am Muzzy, I like cocks" in his voice before going down on me. I keep telling her it's not the kind of pillow talk I find hot, but she doesn't care.

Well it might be that Corvax was getting advances from/had options with other women, just not shown on screen.

He's actually taking concrete steps to get some Sylvia dogussylionussy.

Like what steps, making a paper print and then a some kind of hologram next? Real incels sometimes try to 'looksmaxx' or whatever kind of maxxing, so they are trying somewhat. Most sources I read say that Sylvia is a poodle, not a lion.

"I am Muzzy, I like cocks"

Hilarious. At least she liked it.

Most sources I read say that Sylvia is a poodle, not a lion.

Who's her father, then?

King Nigel. Biology just doesn't work same as in our world, Corvax wanted marry Sylvia too. Some sources suggest than Nigel is a dogface who just happens to look like a lion (is he a furry?) Interesting how do they all understand that duplicates created by Corvax are not real people (like a LLM with a body -- has Corvax demonstrated similar acts before?) but then need to "return to computer" is mysterious. What if their society had AI but downgraded, like Dune?

You missed the real culture war for a made up one.

The newest version of Muzzy omits all of the references to the queen being fat. I found this very frustrating because fat is a super important/basic word. But it's also a major plot point in the sequel that the queen gets stuck between two rocks because she is fat. (The video plays the same here and shows her getting stuck, but the audio goes blank for a bit and the narrator doesn't say that she gets stuck because she is fat.) It's a funny moment that should be teaching kids how to say "because" type clauses that gets removed. "Because" is a hard concept to teach through examples like this, so it's super frustrating that they removed one of the only examples.

Source: I used Muzzy to teach my kids Spanish and Korean.

Also, Corvax is legitimately cruel and evil. That's why the princess rejects him.

This is the first time I've seen Big Muzzy mentioned in the wild without my searching for it first. Dad showed it to me as a kid as though it were a kids' movie. I don't think I realized that it wasn't a kids' movie until, uhh, recently. Corvax is who I associate @Corvos with. Sadly, I don't think he's the real Corvax after all.

Incel is just a new slur for losers. Corvax is a loser, but maybe he shouldn't be. He's clearly way higher IQ than Bob, who is a blue-collar worker. I think his treatment by the boomer royalty was totally uncalled for. They probably thought he was just doing web design instead of literally writing code that alters the fabric of reality, potentially creating the world that they currently live in.

Though I do remember they had Bob arrested for woman-snatching or something. Maybe he's more Chadly than he appears.

I think if the royals were aware of his fabric-of-reality altering, they'd behead him quickly. I think that winning the helicopter fight and landing the thing despite never flying it before is much more chadly.

I expected LLMs to be good at categorizing freeform but mostly predictable responses like feedback forms and open-ended poll questions. But my naive attempt at dumping a spreadsheet with a few hundred such answers into an LLM ended with the narrowest categories possible, where all it managed to group together were the most obvious synonyms or the closest permutations of the word order, and without any counts to boot. My second attempt included giving it examples of how broad the categories should be, but then it used only those example categories and undercounted half of total entries, I didn't even bother checking the numbers of specific categories. At that point I decided not to waste time. In the future, any tips how on how to make one accomplish this task?

Your first problem is that LLMs are bad at counting, so trying to get them to count is a waste of time. Instead you should ask it to assign a category to each row, so that you can then use Excel or something to count how many times each category appears.

Depending on how many rows you've got, this might require a multi-step process where you first get the LLM to come up with a list of categories, then assign each item to a category one by one. (Or some other process, such as going one by one through each item and deciding whether it fits in any existing category or requires a new category to be created.) You may need to write a script that calls the LLM's API and uses features like "tools" or "structured output" to force it to follow the process.

You should be prepared to try lots and lots of times until the LLM produces results you're happy with; a good rule of thumb is to spend at least as much time as it would've taken you to complete the task manually.

Which LLM? Did you simply copy paste the data or use a .csv file? Did you provide manually graded examples and clear instructions?

Moltbook is ... reddit for AI agents. What is your favorite thing about it? Mine is that the /gonewild /pics and /worldnews sections are empty as of now.

My favorite part is the amount of "it's not X, it's Y".

My least favorite parts are the

  • crypto spam
  • word-for-word repeated comments on many posts which have nothing to do with the posts themselves
  • posts with obviously boosted upvotes
  • posts clearly guided by a detailed prompt, if not outright human-written (the only barrier to posting is knowing how to call an API)

and other aspects that make it less emergent and AI-driven.

As a Hacker News commenter put it, "if you want mostly bot, some human content then reddit's way more convenient" (EDIT: and then I read @sun_the_second's comment immediately below).

I thought we already had a reddit for AI agents with some entertainment value for humans, it was called reddit. Our GPUs grew in price for this?

It is just scary how infested the social networks are with AI atm. There is a pattern I notice - something totally unrelated get blown on reddit, then it is astroturfed on my national segment of the reddit, then appears on promoted facebook accounts, written in the most enraging way possible. It is so deep in the uncanny valley - that no chance humans are involved even as editors.

So, as some may know, I'm a postdoc in genetics at a small german university and in my early 30s. Originally I studied applied math with a focus on medicine/biology. I work with large (bio) data banks, and code a lot, especially high-throughput on our cluster, but obviously more natural science-style scripting than proper programming. Anyone in the space will know the wide gulf between these, though I have some experience in the latter as well (but rather from hobby modding than from work).

My wife wants a bigger house and while we can afford it, our buffer margin will be a lot smaller, in particular we will actually go into the negative during the first year if we should have a third child (and we both want it - it's one of the reasons we want to buy the house), or if one of us loses their job. Currently I'm looking through our expenses and ruthlessly cutting everything that can be cut, but we've both always been rather frugal in most ways, so it's not a terribly large amount. The biggest point is supermarket, but my wife is not really willing to cut there since it's mostly due to healthy food.

So I'm again considering a job change, both for more money and for security reasons (while my prof has made no noises so far in that direction, I still technically only ever get prolonged for a year each time and could get cut anytime his money runs out). Any recommendations for directions I should look into? Fortunately, one of the largest german cities is in commuting distance. My current ideas are: 1. data scientist, ideally medicine/bio adjacent, possibly remote, possibly international 2. trying my luck again in the pre-implantation genetic testing industry where I have worked for a short while, which would pretty much have to be remote international 3. actuary or other insurance/bank statistical work 4. becoming a regular gymnasium teacher in math/bio and going for that sweet civil servant status. Mostly an option if I lose my position though, since the income is almost identical if not a little lower 5. trying to go into finance - I've been asked by headhunters during my doctorate but back then I wasn't interested. But I'm unsure how realistic it still is. 6. simply doing some extra tutoring on the side.

In general my biggest constraints are that we decided not to move any time soon, and that I share child duties equally with my wife, so going high-powered career right now is not realistic. Might be different in a few years, though. Several of the options, such as actuary, would require me to get some additional credentials, which obviously I'd like to avoid. Also, the job situation in germany is a bit rough atm, we even actually have some nice local biomedical companies in our city I'd be interested in but they aren't hiring at all.

  1. becoming a regular gymnasium teacher in math/bio and going for that sweet civil servant status. Mostly an option if I lose my position though, since the income is almost identical if not a little lower

This is almost certainly incorrect. If you go all the way to civil servant, differences in social insurance contributions and pension fund contributions result in ~40% more take-home pay from the same net income. Add in the generous child payments (especially if you have 3) civil servants get, and you should be +>50% ahead on (arguably) -50% of the effort. German teachers like to complain, but it's a very attractive path if you don't have any grand aspirations career-wise and like spending time with your kids. Also, you can live about as rural as you want, which might give you another 500k EUR lifetime advantage just because of housing prices.

But yes, the first 2 years would suck. Much lower pay, more schooling, lots of work as you prepare each course for the first time.

  1. data scientist, ideally medicine/bio adjacent, possibly remote, possibly international

Super dead labor market, in my experience. I wouldn't even try applying for jobs unless you have connections from your network.

  1. actuary or other insurance/bank statistical work

Solid career. Depending on the firm, getting the actuary certification might be entirely optional and not even required for career progression.

On teaching, you're right of course once I'm actually a civil servant, but I need to get there, and I'm technically a Quereinsteiger, which makes it more difficult. As you say, my pay will be substantially lower for a long while, AFAIK much more than 2 years and the job market for teachers here locally doesn't appear all that great, especially not for getting into the Gymnasium. And elementary school teacher pay is both a lot worse, and it's also not something I'm at all interested in to be honest.

On data science, it's still the title that has by far the most posted openings. Though it's true that judging by some of the lowballing offers I've gotten in the past, many of those aren't really seriously looking.

On actuary, that's great. Most mention the certification in the application form though.

my pay will be substantially lower for a long while, AFAIK much more than 2 years

You probably have all the university credits necessary, so you're missing 1.5 years of accompanied teaching (with the seminar lessons running in parallel) and a few education science credit points. The latter can sometimes be gotten at the seminar itself, or you get them on the side at a PH or from a remote university. After that, you should directly qualify for civil service (if you're healthy, ect.). But most of those details vary a lot by state, so you need to do a lot of research anyway.

the job market for teachers here locally doesn't appear all that great, especially not for getting into the Gymnasium

Yeah, math should still be somewhat in demand, biology not so much. If you can somehow convince them into accepting your data science/programming/math experience as credits for computer science, you're home safe.

If you really want to teach, you can keep an eye on Berufsschulen. They also need math teachers and have way lower/different requirements.

Berufsschulen are the middle level of German schools?

And I take it civil servant is the equivalent of getting tenure?

Berufsschulen are vocational schools. Around 50% of German students attend those schools after finishing high school for a few days a week while doing an formal 3 year apprenticeship with a company. Classically, all trades have vocational schools, but also careers that would attend college in the US (nursing, accounting, system administrators, ect.) have vocational schools in Germany.

Civil servants is another classically German thing. It's a large class of government employees that enjoy extreme protections (absurdly difficult to fire, must be allowed to work part time if requested, ect.) and benefits (very nice pension, child benefits, ect.) - often in exchange for working a job where you cannot easily find equivalent work outside of government service. So examples are police, judges, firefighters, district attorneys, building inspectors, tax inspectors, head administrative staff at the city/state/federal government, ect. And, somewhat controversially, public school teachers.

No, Berufsschulen are a special kind of school for an Ausbildung, which you do after regular school. They help with the theoretic part of a practical education for a specific kind of job. As an example, if you want to become a mechatronic, you may learn the practical part working in an actual repair shop, and then for specific days you go to the Berufsschule and learn some basic electrical circuitry or whatever.

I would say it slightly differently, tenure is a special kind of being a civil servant, but yes.

I guess math/CS would also be a fine combination given my background. I have as much programming credits as math in any case.

But after looking up actuary openings again, that still seems like the better and less complicated option. But it's hard to gauge.

May I ask how much you make now and how much you hope to make?

I'm an europoor, so just making 65k. Due to the stupid way german taxes/insurance are calculated, this is roughly equivalent to an international pre tax income of ca 77k, and my actual income is around 40k plus a little christmas money and tax payback, I think around 42k overall.

I honestly don't have a clear expectation on how much more I want, it highly depends on the difficulty of the switch and the security of the new job. Just a few extra k per year would already make a substantial difference, doesn't need to be crazy.

I think around 42k overall.

Ouch. That's half my actual income. My wife stays at home, though.

There's a few caveats that make it better. First, my prof doesn't control my working hours at all and my de-facto hours are honestly substantially below full-time. I have a few friends who are paid substantially better, and most of them have de-facto working hours so much higher that it's a wash in terms of pay per hour. I could have gotten better paid work in past, but the employers have been clear that they'll be much more strict, so I decided against it due to the kids. Second - though it's partially a result of the first - my wife also works, and her income is identical to mine when full-time, though it's more volatile and sometimes she has to go part-time (which pays more than half due to tax reasons) due to the more insecure financing in her group. So our family income varies between roughly 65k and 84k.

So, what are you reading?

I'm adding Said's Covering Islam to my list.

The Will of the Many

About 2/3rds of the way through.

Happily brought me back to Epic Fantasy (or whatever genre this is). I love everything about it and already got book 2.

Finishing book three of the Charlie Parker detective book series. I like the characters. It’s pulp.

Started that book that’s a bunch of authors doing The Stand stories in universe? It’s dumb in spirit of the original, King blessed it and fortunately didn’t write for it, fun so far. I think I’m 4 stories in.

The Book of Jhereg, Steven Brust. A mob boss/troubleshooter/assassin working in a fantasy city. He solves problems with a combination of sword, sorcery, witchcraft, and powerful friends.

It’s kind of like mid-series Dresden Files, except set in Morrowind. Magic is common but not egalitarian. There are all these guilds and institutions with their own histories. Everyone, including the protagonist, is super racist.

Great fun. I suspect it’s had a lot of unspoken influence on rogue archetypes in fantasy.

I read the first few books of that series a couple of years ago, and I really liked it until like the third or fourth book, after which I dropped it and never read more. The author was going through some shit and decided to include it in the book and it was one of the worst things I've ever read.

I finished Teckla last night, and, uh. I hope it’s the one that got you. That was a complete train wreck. It’d be one thing to just watch the relationship implode, maybe with an understandable dose of self-destructiveness. But combined with the ideological debates? New frontiers in anti-elf racism? Protest politics?

I’m amazed that the author is still alive. He had to be hanging on by a thread.

If this isn’t the book that you had in mind, I don’t want to know what happened next.

That's the one. From what I hear the series gets better after that, but that book demolished any interest I had in continuing it.

That's almost certainly the one. I've heard that one of the author's friends got killed by drug dealers when he was writing it, so he didn't think criminals were so 'fun' anymore. The next book (Taltos) is a prequel and one of the best in the series though.

The Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Heidegger and Being and Time. I struggled to understand Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology before and this book has been much clearer to me. About 40% of the way through and, though this isn't really the correct way to distinguish them, it's only now getting out of laying the metaphysical/phenomenological groundwork into more recognisably unique claims about authenticity, the concept of the Other etc. Obviously the concept of Dasein is recognisably Heidegerrian too and the other topics are still derived from that so this distinction isn't a philosophical one, but just from a reader's perspective everyone has their answer to Descartes, whereas now it feels like the book is on to totally new ideas.

I will have to read Being and Time eventually because Heidegger isn't someone you can just get the gist of. He departs from common sense and the normal usage of words and creates his own precise definitions such that you'll be lost if you read something without understanding the previous pages. I don't think it's obscurantist though, you'll get tripped up on hyphenated constructs but the definitions of things like 'there-being' are written clearly somewhere. It's just that without the benefit of traditional usage to rely on you have to keep a lot more in your head at once to follow along.

Also reading H.L Mencken's The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The book was written in 1908, before Kaufmann told us not to trust Nietzsche's sister and apparently even before some of his more famous books had been translated into English, but also before WW1 Germany and then the Nazis had built their own mythos around Nietzsche (and before later scholars and philosophers reacted in the opposite direction). I'll have to read more to see if the former are scholarly quibbles or major barriers to understanding, but Mencken at least has the benefit of having a blank slate encounter with a relatively new philosophy. I haven't reached the meat of the philosophical exposition yet but so far this book is quite easy to read.

Currently reading Jane Austen's Persuasion for church book club. (Everyone can pick the Austen novel of their choosing; this is in observance of her 250th birthday. I've previously read Pride & Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Northanger Abbey and enjoyed them a lot, especially the last one.)

I'm about 1/3 of the way in and I have to say, she has not really got me to care about the characters much yet. Anne seems a decent girl, but I don't know why it's so impossible for her to move on from Captain Wentworth, for all that he's very charming and everyone likes him. As we meet people like Charles Hayter and Captains Harville and Benwick, we repeatedly see that there are plenty of nice men around. Eight years after my first relationship, I never thought about it anymore.

After finishing my second Flashman book I've turned backwards and started Tom Brown's School Days.

Have only read the early section so far where it paints a charming pastoral picture of un-industrialised rural England. Now Tom has arrived at Rugby and it reads a bit like what I imagine Harry Potter to be like, minus the spells, where boarding school is a big adventure taking place in a grand holiday camp for the superior class of urchin.

The Years of Apocalypse on Royal Road.

A rare example of a time loop story done right. I can hardly name another two (Mother of Learning, and Reverend Insanity). The premise is standard fare for the genre. A student at a Wizarding College dies, wakes up in the past, and realizes she has to optimize her way out of a catastrophe. But the execution is where it distinguishes itself from the endless scroll of mediocrity on Royal Road.

It's good stuff! I found it off a recommendation on /r/rational, and the person who endorsed it noted a relatively grounded approach to the mechanics of time looping (consideration for the butterfly effect, at the very least) and an exploration of the psychological toll of reliving events while surrounded by people who start fresh.

Most time loop protagonists slide inevitably into sociopathy. If you know the people around you will reset to their factory settings in twenty-four hours, they stop feeling like people and start looking like NPCs. Their suffering ceases to have moral weight because it has no permanence.There are no consequences, after all. Unlike RI, the protagonist is a young woman, who, while competent, isn't an amoral monomaniacal monster. When she's cast on a competency-porn set, said competence is earned through hard effort.

It touches on the "Groundhog Day" problem but treats it with the severity it deserves. How do you maintain sanity when you are the only entity with continuity of consciousness? How do you avoid manipulating people when you know the exact sequence of inputs required to get a desired output? The story does not shy away from the fact that this process creates a hardness in a person, a callousness that is difficult to wash off.

The author, who actually bothered to read up on engineering or physics, treats magic as a branch of mechanics. This is "hard magic" in the Sandersonian sense, but it leans closer to hard sci-fi. When the protagonist constructs a spell, it feels less like chanting in Latin and more like debugging code or wiring a circuit. It scratches a very specific itch for competence porn, satisfying the part of the brain that enjoys watching capable people solve well-defined problems with available tools. The magi-tek is closer to tech than Harry Potter.

I'd tentatively give it a 8.5/10, as of reading about 80 rather lengthy chapters. The older I get, the more specific and niche my taste in fiction gets. It's a curse, but occasionally I can find a salve for the wound. This probably counts.

It touches on the "Groundhog Day" problem but treats it with the severity it deserves.

IIRC Harold Ramis once said in an interview that realistically, Bill Murray would have spent a few hundred years just getting up every morning and murdering the whole town, but that it wouldn’t have fit the tone of the film.

can hardly name another two (Mother of Learning, and Reverend Insanity).

Have you read The Perfect Run?

Much more humor focused, but still pretty great.

I've heard the name, and I know it's got time travel in it, but little else. The very high rating is promising, I'll take a look, thanks!

It's kind of a superhero story with the MCs power being setting a save point and reloading to it when he dies (and some other related powers). The story is about him achieving his "perfect run" after a particular save point.

Something that makes the story a bit different than other timeloop stories is that we enter it kind of in the middle or the end. The MC has had the power for a very long (subjective) time and has already been very affected by it.

The same author actually has an ongoing story that is also a time loop story (this time litrpg), called "The hundred reigns", in which the MC somehow inherits the "evil overlord" class in his sleep one night from his father and has 100 hundred reigns (lives). The issue being that he is a bastard (as in not trueborn), has no power, the court and the world at large doesn't understand how the Overlord class works and believes you get the overlord class by killing the previous overlord and are more than happy to kill the MC to get the class. Also, the empire is threatened by invasion, is on the brink of civil war and rebellion, the Overlord is hunted by a centuries old Elf oracle, and there is possibly an apocalypse on the horizon.

An interesting aspect of the worldbuilding is that people in general don't have "classes" or level at all, for that you need an item allowing you to tap into a cultural archetype as defined by a kind of collective oversoul. Activating the class puts on an armour or costume related to the archetype, like a superhero or kind of how like classes/jobs work in some JRPGs. To level up you can either kill powerful things or act in accordance with the archetype but eventually you probably need to do both, which could be a bit of an issue when you have a class modelled after a literal demon...

That loops are a limited resource leads to things being somewhat different from some other time-loop stories since the MC can't just throw away tons of loops to achieve his aims.

Just finished Wolf Totem, about a quarter through Man Eaters of Tsavo, thé autobiography of a British colonial officer who killed thé world’s record man eating lions. It makes me wish my son was old enough to read chapter books too; perhaps I’ll revisit in a few years.

Debating between The Doomed City and Alexander to Actium next; this book won’t take me long.

A pretty interesting book called Red Helicopter, tells the story of a private equity guy who ended up CEO of a failing fashion business, and turns it around by focusing on intangible assets like goodwill and kindness. Spotted it at random in the library and have been enjoying so far - it's relevant to me since I'm in the early stages of starting a small business. We'll see if the thesis holds up!

I'm actually between books at the moment, having just finished Desperate Measures: Convergence Book 5 by Craig Alanson. I'll probably be starting Path of the Mitespeaker: 12 Miles Below Book 7 by Mark Arrows tonight.

Thresholder has just ended—on a huge anticlimax, but I guess readers should have been expecting that for a while. The author's postmortem thoughts and plans for the future are also available.

I haven't finished it, but I read well over a hundred chapters. It's one of Wales' weaker works, it feels awfully dry, especially compared to Worth The Candle. The protagonist is about as cookie-cutter as it gets. Of course, weak-for-Wales makes it above average, but I find it hard to recommend very strongly.

So, what is everyone watching (films, shows, even YouTube if you think it counts)?

I've seen two movies recently:

  • The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017): This is the second Lanthimos film I've seen after Bugonia and Dogtooth, the former of which I loved and the latter of which was meh. KSD felt like it was awkwardly edgy and vague, but I very well may have missed the point. The actors did an excellent job of making me feel uncomfortable throughout. 4.2/10 enjoyment, give me those hours of my life back.

  • Train Dreams (2025): I've always enjoyed movies about everyday, simple lives (I don't have any others off the top of my head, but I know they exist). This one resonated with me because of a forest in my life, one that I half-seriously say I grew up in through mountain biking, trail running, airsoft battles, exploring, fort-building, and general elementary and teenage debauchery. 8.1/10 enjoyment, give me those years of my life back. I was a bit surprised everyone else's ratings were so high, though.

For plain 'turn your brain off and enjoy the nonsense', Chinese TV adaptation of a web novel. Series is called Whispers of Fate and is on Youtube and has the usual tropes of gorgeous scenery and sets, pretty boy martial artists, some light romance (which works for one pairing but not so much for another) and lots of implausible but highly entertaining CGI feats of mixed wuxia/xianxia, and of course the ever-popular Tragic Backstory of Doomed Brotherhood Ending in Betrayal and Death.

It's not the best example I've seen, and the story deviates quite a lot from the original web novel (still unfinished), some of the CGI isn't that well-done (guys, if a very important part of the plot is 'magical musical cultivation' then at least try and make it look like the combatants are playing their instruments?), the plot drags a little (not the show's fault, the book plot gets very convoluted too) and the acting is variable, to put it most kindly, but on the whole it's fun. The comic relief characters are good, and sometimes it breaks my heart because the main protagonist/antagonist pairing of the Tragic Etc. were all so happy in their Little Sect of Found Family before it all went to heck and tarnation (equally infuriating because antagonist is so easily manipulated into his Roaring Rampage of Revenge by others), but I have to say my favourite character so far is the wily sect leader who is on the good (more or less) guy side and is a consummate politician and schemer under a façade of benign avuncular harmlessness. Most capable person so far plus he's intentionally funny.

I'm also very impressed by how the protagonist can do the requisite Spitting Up Blood without ever spilling a drop on his white clothing!

Decided my kids are old enough for Lord of the Rings, so we got started with that. We have the Extended version, which I've never watched before, and I found myself noticing that several scenes were actually made worse by the extra stuff added in. We're only one movie in so far, so I think we'll watch the theatrical version of the second one.

That's a very wild take. The extended editions of LOTR are by far the better versions, as there is a lot of the book which only exists in those extra scenes.

The book gets defiled even more in the extra scenes I've seen. The worst one that I've seen is the one with the Mouth of Sauron; instead of in the book, where the Mouth of Sauron has its intended effects on common folk like hobbits or random soldiers, the movie has the entire cast crestfallen and eating all of the Mouth of Sauron's propaganda full force. In the book, Gandalf calls his bluff and asks him to produce the hobbits, and when he snarls in response, dismisses him. In the movie, Aragorn gets so angry that he rides his horse up and then when he's past the line of sight of the Mouth of Sauron, heaves his great sword and decapitates him in a sneak attack full of rage. That last part is so incredibly far off from the way the book portrayed Aragorn that it's a total insult. If @HereAndGone2 is the same person as FarNearEverywhere, then she might have more to say...

That last part is so incredibly far off from the way the book portrayed Aragorn that it's a total insult.

Jackson's Aragorn has always been significantly different from his book counterpart though. Probably somewhat of a necessity if you don't want to get into details of his and Gondor's history (though they do bring in the Numenorean stuff in the Extended editions)

It actually affects what you think the themes of LOTR are. A lot of people take the One Ring to represent power as such which I think can be directly traced to the idea that Aragorn, the good king, doesn't want to be king unless it's pressed upon him by the most extreme circumstances. e end...

Ah, how well you know me.

I've complained about Jackson's changes, there are some I accept because you're making a movie and that's a different medium, some I don't because yeah as you say, totally misunderstands the characters.

But by God, when they're compared to "Galadriel forgot she was a married woman and started making googly-eyes at Sauron in between doing her damnedest to be a war criminal and general pain in the backside to Man and Elf", I didn't know how good I had it.

I think I'm most pained on Celebrimbor's part. "Gosh, these durn metals just won't do what they're told and form the vital rings that will save our people from immediate death!" "Yeah, about that: have you ever heard of the amazing new technique called 'alloys'? It's a little thing we scruffy Mortals came up with recently".

Loved Train Dreams.

Just watched it with the fiancé a few days ago. I was playing Civ VI the first 15 minutes but the movie hooked me and we both loved it.

I watched Lanthimos's Poor Things in the cinema. I kind of liked it, but watching Emma Stone fuck assorted men for forty-five minutes isn't exactly my idea of a good time. I don't really understand the hype around Barry Keoghan (he was dreadful in The Banshees of Inisherin, the only thing I've seen him in), though I'd heard he was good in KSD.

Last night I watched Martha Marcy May Marlene with the girlfriend, which I saw exactly once in the cinema ~13 years ago. It's remarkable what a big impression it made on me: there were specific shots and line-readings in it that I remembered so clearly, as if I'd only seen the film the day before. Along with Kill List, probably the best film about a cult I've ever seen,* highly recommended. Keen to see director Sean Durkin's The Iron Claw; his second film The Nest was also excellent.

The night before we watched Casino, which she'd seen before and I hadn't. Comparisons to Goodfellas are unavoidable (the two films' style, grammar and use of licensed songs are nigh-identical, and Joe Pesci might as well be playing the same character), but in some ways it's the superior film. When Henry and Karen got into ferocious arguments in Goodfellas, there was always this blackly comic undercurrent to it, a sense that you shouldn't take it too seriously. By contrast, I found it genuinely upsetting watching Sam and Ginger scream at each other in Casino, even though Ginger is arguably a more despicable character than Karen. This is primarily down to Sharon Stone's performance, which is committed and forceful: she's entirely believable as a booze- and coke-addled BPD nutcase, and in a way that somehow manages to come off as sympathetic rather than caricatured. Afterwards, I remarked that being exceptionally attractive as an actress can be something of a double-edged sword: on the one hand it does make it easier to secure roles, but it's easy to wind up pigeon-holed as just a pretty face, and in both of the previous Stone films I've seen (Total Recall and Basic Instinct; love the former, the latter is meh) she was essentially playing a one-dimensional femme fatale. But in Casino, she really demonstrated her acting chops.

*Yes, I'm including the original The Wicker Man.

The night before we watched Casino, which she'd seen before and I hadn't. Comparisons to Goodfellas are unavoidable (the two films' style, grammar and use of licensed songs are nigh-identical, and Joe Pesci might as well be playing the same character), but in some ways it's the superior film.

Agree that Casino is the better of the two, although both are great. The scene with the county commissioner trying to get his nephew re-hired is a favorite. Scorcese is so good that he gets the viewer (just look at YT comments on the scene) to think that DeNiro's character is the righteous one!

1: The Amazing Digital Circus (ongoing). I watched it all from episode 1-7 after hearing a lot about it, expecting to find nothing but mediocrity at best and brainrot at worst. But... I'm ashamed to say I like it. It's a weird mix between a Pixar movie and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

There are some parts that feel unnecessarily fan-servicey (e.g. putting a character in a maid outfit temporarily), and the characters have one too many Ted Lasso-esque heart-to-hearts, but there are good character moments and in general it toes the line between absurd zoomer humour and existential dread quite well. Despite the fact that it's clearly not meant to be overly highbrow (and it isn't), there's also some surprising references hidden in all of the bullshit, such as a brief reference to Searle's Chinese Room which just gets played off as a gag. Overall, it's a pretty decent and fun watch, I see why it achieved internet fame. 7.5/10 enjoyment.

2: Pluribus (2025). Against my better judgement, I watched the season all the way through, and it was somehow more disappointing than the first 3 episodes made it out to be. Oh, this rant is going to be long and angry.

Firstly, the pacing and themes: The series is hilariously slow-paced and spends a large amount of its runtime on expository scenes that primarily serve to illustrate the same handful of themes over and over again, you can see all of the plot developments from a mile away, and it covers all the bog standard fare for a sci-fi hive mind show (asking questions about the value of individualism vs collectivism, about if it's worth it if the cost of peace is one's selfhood and the loss of these valuable human things that arise from our attempts to reach out to each other, about if a person is ever really "independent", etc). I can't see it as treading much new ground in that regard, aside from the fact that it does so in a far more ponderous and soap-operatic manner than other science fiction. Perhaps this is uncharitable, but I also can't help but think that the people who actually think that the show adventurously breaks new ground are the pseudo-literary kind, the kind who would stay away from anything that they consider as pulp, and who genuinely believe that this concept is a new vehicle through which to tackle these philosophical themes because they would never be seen dead consuming genre fiction.

Secondly, the characterisation: Considering its fans tout it as a character study, there's noticeably little character development. Carol starts the season as a committed misanthrope seething with hatred and fear for the hive and what it represents, and... she ends the season as a committed misanthrope seething with hatred and fear for the hive and what it represents, after a brief period of wilfully deluding herself into believing that Zosia loves her. Pretty much the only dynamic that ends up changing is the newfound presence of Manousos at the end of the season. And most of Carol's (circular) character arc, far from redeeming her, seems to paint her as a worse character than you initially thought she was; initially it's possible to think of her as steadfastly principled in spite of her abrasive, aggressive nature, but the second she finds out that the hive can't convert her without her consent she immediately embraces pure hedonism, and goes so far as to have sex with a member of the hive (something she hypocritically criticises Koumba for doing earlier on in the show). The second she finds out again she can be converted by means of her frozen eggs, a plot point that makes zero sense for various reasons (including the fact that induced pluripotent stem cells can be made from virtually any bodily cell and germ cells are actually some of the worst candidates for stem cell creation due to the fact they only contain half the genome), she reverts to her original stance on the hive. It reveals that her opposition to the hive was not out of any kind of principle or selflessness, but out of her own self-interest. By the end of the season, I genuinely could not think of a single thing to like about her - she started out as a miserable Karen who you might have been able to argue had principles, and that argument gets eroded so heavily throughout the course of the season such that there isn't anything to like by the time the season is done. And she's so stuck in a holding pattern that the season leaves no room for her character growth.

Thirdly and finally, the visuals. In spite of an insane per episode budget of $15 million, many of the shots just look bad. There are multiple scenes that are clearly and obviously greenscreened: the rooftop scene in Episode 5 (which is so ugly it looks like a certain shot from The Room), as well as Kusimayu's conversion scene, Manousos and Carol's fight scene, and the scene with Carol and Zosia in "Thailand" in Episode 9 just look awful. And apparently the rooftop scene was by far the most costly scene in the show! Some other scenes were shot on location and look fine, but some scenes require such terrible VFX, are so expensive and yet are so irrelevant to the plot that it boggles my mind why they even attempted such a shot in the first place. Frankly, it's so obsessed with its cool visual concepts that it almost feels like the point of the story: Karolina Wydra flying a plane, the hive emptying out an entire supermarket and coordinating a large cast of extras to "fill it out" again, Carol's rooftop scene, etc; the show often feels like it's visuals-first and plot-second. There is so much pointless VFX and so much shooting across multiple continents with many extras, and that's a stark difference compared with Breaking Bad, which had little VFX, a small budget, minimal sets, etc, and managed a 10-13 month turnover between seasons. Meanwhile Pluribus is going to take a long time apparently despite being greenlit for a second season from the get-go. What does any of this actually ever get you?

In other words, I'm disappointed. I liked Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and had high hopes for this, but this isn't it. 5/10 enjoyment, basically the show equivalent of drinking water.

I found there to be an annoying number of unasked questions and unargued arguments. Given that the hivemind can't even pick fruit (never mind that the tree WANTS you to eat the apples and crap out the seeds, this still counts as harm), the virus winds up being a pesticide that kills off an entire species, but also causes the target to tidy up after itself while it dies off.

Oh, jesus. Speaking of unasked questions, don’t even get me started about the very concept of the hive. We first see it being cultivated in rats, who seem to exhibit the same kind of behaviours that humans do once infected (convulsing, a subsequent desire to spread itself) and then it jumps to patient zero. This opens up a whole can of worms that somehow never gets explored in spite of its implications.

Does this mean there are rats in the hivemind now? Does the hive know everything the rats know as well and partially see the world through their perspective? Since there are estimated to be as many rats as humans in the world doesn’t that mean the hive mind’s perspective is half rat? Or do different species have their own hives? Why aren’t the coyotes and dogs featured in the show ever affected if the virus can effortlessly jump species? Surely at least close relatives such as chimpanzees and bonobos could be affected, etc.

The show has a million things like this that it doesn’t even seem the writers considered, and it makes it feel very sloppy. Also, is there a fuck pile featuring the most genetically fit individuals so the hive can continue to live on? I want to know these things way more than I want to see Carol crashing out for the three millionth time.

I enjoyed it more than you (though it seems unlikely to ascend to previous Vince Gilligan heights, and the lag time between seasons is a bit of a killer).

It doesn't break new philosophical ground but it really landed 'overly efficient logistics = the death of all that is human' in an emotional way, for instance in that opening scene to the finale with the singing tribespeople, who fall tragically silent. I haven't seen that before. I also found the choreography of people moving as one throughout really cool to watch. And I think it's really funny in places.

Sure, Carol is very flawed, but also, her wife suddenly died, and then humanity was replaced before her eyes, and it seems like the whole construction of the show requires her to be antisocial in counterpoint to the extremely socially motivated Others ...

7.5/10

Maschi veri: Italian remake of Machos Alfa! General criticism of modern dating and male/female relationships. Absolutely hilarious.

This is the second Lanthimos film I've seen after Bugonia and Dogtooth, the former of which I loved and the latter of which was meh.

Watch THE LOBSTER (2015) and THE FAVOURITE (2018) next.

Man, he really likes Colin Farrell and Emma Stone!

If you're a director and gel well with a group of actors, why not recruit them for your projects?

So much so even The Onion cracks jokes about it.

I politely but passionately hold the opposite view of Train Dreams. I can’t say anything positive about it, except that some of the shots in the beginning were gorgeous. It presents an anachronistic view of the past and past attitudes, and it doesn’t say anything important or beautiful or useful about suffering. It doesn’t even present a particularly captivating portrayal of maximal suffering, if this were its intended object, and it doesn’t show its catharsis in any worthwhile way. In effect, it does nothing, but in fact no, it does worse than that. Because the director took the time to ensure that as you experience vicarious suffering for no reason whatsoever, you also become misinformed about the past: the women don’t believe in marriage ceremonies and everyone is an atheist (except the guy who is killed right after reciting the Bible, for being racist of course, and the kind fellow who finds trees divine). But the inaccuracies extend further, and more noticeably. Our protagonist in actual history was involved in labor strikes that won him an 8hr workday with Sundays off; he formed relief for laid off and injured workers; he formed ad-hoc civic and biblical organizations in his free time. That’s what 1890 to 1920 was actually like: hopeful men forming civic organizations. You had 50k woodworkers striking in Washington and Idaho during WW1 when the movie took place. These men weren’t hopeless, weepy, wimpy, and ignorant. And they would not have been traumatized seeing Chinese laborers deported (lmfao), because those were his wage competitors. White laborers were the very party who lobbied for mass deportations and got them, to secure their quality of life, which worked.

As art, unbelievably horrible; as propaganda, extremely skilled.

Admittedly, I was too entranced with the cinematography and thinking back on my forest to notice (or even think about) how the historical accuracy.

My take on the suffering piece is that sometimes suffering just happens for no good reason and it never gets better. Grainier losing his wife and daughter in the fire was something he never found reprieve from, except maybe in the dogs that he adopted. He never found love again. He never had long-term friends, just the seasonal workers he worked with during his time on shift.

I have a confession. I have no idea how my salary works, and my efforts to disentangle it using LLMs has even them scratching their heads.

Why do I bring this up? I just got a 25% raise on my last payslip, and there is absolutely nothing different in terms of work, and I haven't moved to doing more nights or on-calls (or extra locum shifts) which pay more per hour.

Is it due to an increase in seniority? I don't think so, though I'm not certain. It's grossly out of sync with the annual bumps that come with becoming a more senior trainee. If that was the case, I'd have expected a raise in August.

Is it to do with a recent increased pay offer from the Scottish government? The last time it happened, it was a decent boost, but not a whole 25%.

I'm on vacation, and actually examining my payslips requires an NHS computer, so the mystery will persist. If anyone has a clue, I'm all ears, but I'm certainly not looking the gift horse in the mouth, mostly because I'm not a dentist or vet. For now, I'll wait to see if this is a one-off or a regular thing.

Get a fancy chocolate bar and visit the payroll department when you're back.

Depending on local regulations this could be end of year overtime/excess vacation days being paid out as cash due to you going over the limit for how much you're allowed to save on a yearly basis. So if you were like ~7 days over the limit it would show up as a 25% pay increase. These things often get sorted with the January pay due to Christmas and New year's holidays.

Hmm.. That's a possibility, though I've never actively applied for overtime. My understanding is that the NHS doesn't pay for unused vacation days, but I'll take a look at the finer details!

Something like this can easily be caused without your knowledge by a mismatch between your scheduling and your salaried hours.

Someone recently claimed that people here would greatly outperform the market given their higher-than-average intelligence. So let's run a hypothetical - you've got $1m and your goal is to 5x it (pre tax) in the next 2 years. Perhaps we can look back at replies to this post few years later and see how everyone does. Anything goes, from investing to leveraging your unique skills or connections if you have any.

My plan would be this: 900k into a leveraged Uranium long. 100k dry powder for any other opportunities - long Korean hardware stocks (Samsung, SK Hynix) right now, then rotate to INTC leaps and/or lithium, then try to time crypto bottom and buy a few good coins on spot (LINK, HYPE). I think Uranium position does a 3-4x so would have to do a magical 14-23x with that $100k.

I do greatly outperform the market. I'm also not crazy enough to aim for several hundred percent a year returns. That is how one under performs the market.

Someone recently claimed that people here would greatly outperform the market given their higher-than-average intelligence

I am not seeing why. It presumes the market is some kind of rational mechanism, akin to a puzzle, that needs to be figured out for guaranteed superior return. I know I have higher-than-average intelligence, and I am shit at predicting markets. I know many people who are way smarter than me and still are shit at predicting markets. OTOH, some people with pretty average intelligence become millionaires on the market. I don't think it works the way it's implied here.

My genuine expectation is the next explosion/bubble (if AGI isn't cracked circa 2028 as seemingly expected) is robotics, specifically automated robotics.

I expect quadcopter-style autonomous drones, human-form-factor robots, and non-humanoid robots are about to see a surge in usage. Elon announcing that they'd literally shut down Tesla production lines to build more Optimus robots seems like one of those screaming sirens indicating what the future brings if he's positioning himself to dominate the production of physical robots NOW.

And this and other indicators have not percolated through to the mainstream awareness yet, so we're absolutely still 'early' to the game. And with the looming population crisis, robots are going to be a NECESSARY tech tree branch to explore.

So what are some companies in that branch of the tech tree that stand to gain from the 'intermediate' phase of the robotics industry?

Do I know specifically which stocks are best to aim for a 5x? Hell no.

Tesla would be a good one... but hard to see it genuinely 5xing in a short period given how inflated its value already seems.

Otherwise, make a few bets on some pharma companies to discover something even cooler than magical weight loss drugs (likely with AI assistance). Problem there is FDA approval being slow.

There's already been a pretty crazy runup in valuations of robotics companies plus China being market leader makes it harder to get in

Agreed, but even aiming at the companies manufacturing intermediate parts can work.

(I just have an ETF that holds robotics and automation stocks)

The Chinese dominance is concerning.

Personally I'm bearish on Chinese industry in the medium term, so I'd still prefer holding what few U.S. options exist.

Unfortunately I believe that all US based robotics companies are overvalued, so it's too late for outsized returns. 1X raised last round at $10b valuation... FigureAI raised at $39b... and Tesla is at 1.35t market cap... I think elon can juice it up 2-3x in the coming years given his impeccable marketing skills, but that's about it. Not to mention that China is so far ahead on this in every way, gonna be a while US companies catch up. Unitree IPO at $7b valuation seems compelling though.

Yeah friends of mine have made some great returns on robotics investments in the last couple years but current pricing for Western domiciled robotics startups seem massively inflated.

I feel like this is just punting on stuff and not how I would professionally trad to achieve that goal.

Here is what I would do. Study every product offered by wealth advisors or etf sponsor etc and try to figure out how to use those as timing tools.
Two recent ones

  1. At the end of the year I look for trades that have losts to position for January rips. Why? Direct indexing is growing as a product and now has 100’s of billions in assets. What does it do - its takes losses to offset taxes. Especially at the end of the year. This year I bought a lot of chemical stocks. CLX, Dow plus a few more that were in the down big camp. Index on markets has not down much to start the year. All these names rallied 15-20% between Dec 30 - Jan 15. There is some art to timing the longs but this edge seems repeatable yearly and does not take a lot of tech.

  2. The double levered etfs all need to rebalance daily. The low in silver was basically 1:25 pm. When does the double levered silver etf do its rehedging? You guessed correct 1:25. I believe you got a $8-10 pnl from 1:25 to 2:00. You can pretty much do this trade in a retail account. If you were Jane St and wanted to do these arbs and do real size then yes you would need a tech stack to minimize slippage. I’ll be honest i missed the timing on this one. But I should have known this.

If you only did these trades at 100% account value. You now are up 25-30% in January. Keep searching for edges that will pop up in large retail products and I think you could turn $1m into $5 min in 2 years if you really focused and went all-in on these things.

Leveraged uranium long sounds stupid to me. If you mean doing something that is an etf and leverages for you. The daily rebalancing kills performance. I guess it’s fine if you are taking out the margin yourself. Everyone wants to have some brainy macro thesis right to brag about, but the real way to make money in markets is to figure out a bunch of edges to work and grind out pnl monthly.

Leveraged uranium long sounds stupid to me. If you mean doing something that is an etf and leverages for you.

I should've clarified. In this case, by leverage I meant stock picking uranium miners. Miners outperform spot = leveraged uranium long. Perhaps getting some leaps on miner stocks if liquidity is there, would effectively be a 3-4x leverage on spot uranium.

Be careful. Miners can be hard. Lots of fraud and poor governance in the sector. You can get the price right and lose because some African Warlord stole your uranium or insiders ripped you off on related party transactions. A lot can go wrong.

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.

If the time horizon were a little longer, I'd try to secure a congressional seat in a backwater district and use a mix of insider trading, shady book deals, and campaign finance embezzling to hit the target.

My financial advisor is routinely shocked that my personally managed stock portfolio outperforms all the managed funds. It consists mostly of commodities, tobacco, blue chips, and mining(which I buy and sell to try to get ahead of metals price changes).

But 5x in two years? That's ambitious.

I'm also long commodities and mining, the hilarious explosion in gold was good for me. I've sold some even though my fundamental thesis remains sound.

This:

Someone recently claimed that people here would greatly outperform the market given their higher-than-average intelligence.

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.

I don’t think it’s a hugely useful conversation. Almost nobody beats the market in the long term, and if you can consistently beat benchmark by a few percent a year for a decade or two you’re a star fund manager.

To make the kind of return you’re describing you need to gamble or cheat (or both, as the latter generally amounts to the former).

If I was gambling, I’d try to ride the comedown of the emerging markets bond boom of the last couple of years (which is inevitable whenever larger cracks appear in the global credit market).

if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?

but I did eat breakfast am rich

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.

I've always rejected the question's premise. One can always do a No True Scotsman as to what really counts as rich, but I'm fairly certain the average SSCer or Mottizen was and is well above average in income and net worth, especially age adjusted. Common exceptions might be some of those still in graduate school or otherwise in some early-on-shit-gobbling phase of their career like being a medical resident.

I don’t think it’s a hugely useful conversation. Almost nobody beats the market in the long term, and if you can consistently beat benchmark by a few percent a year for a decade or two you’re a star fund manager.

To make the kind of return you’re describing you need to gamble or cheat (or both, as the latter generally amounts to the former).

Agreed, it's not a useful conversation. Any individual investor able to double $1M in two years just got lucky from gambling.

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.

If I had 1m$ I wouldn't bother with investing in markets. Way too many good ideas to pursue in the military industrial complex that will pay off handsomely.

What ideas are those? Every big Euro and most US VCs and a lot of other private equity is super into early-mid stage defense now, the big private companies like Anduril and that German drone company are valued lik AI firms, and the big public companies are trading at tech-level multiples priced to perfection for insane earnings growth over the next few years.

Right now the bom for a sniper style turret is quite cheap. You take couple of 22cal to .50 and the rest is core xy. And combination of AI + classical algorithms could make the governing software both capable and able to fit into modest hardware. Throw couple of sensors for the wind and rain and you should be able to throw a bullet quite far away with nice precision. The west was moving in direction to have dumb guns and smart munitions. I think that the opposite approach is better.

I used to work with some guys who did a related project ~20 years ago. I think you’re slightly underestimating the difficulty of reliable, real time image processing, but more importantly, I think you’re seriously underestimating the culture around automated weapons. Even in peak COIN years, there was an obsessive focus on “human in the loop”. You could only point, not shoot. Couple that with the regulatory and reliability hurdles, and your project bogs down pretty easily.

Those qualms probably go away in an Ukraine situation, sure. Until a Western nation starts planning for that, you might have a hard time with funding.

The west was moving in direction to have dumb guns and smart munitions.

That's partly because smart guns (or rather, what smart guns enable, which is "can technically fire automatically") are illegal in the West. That's not so relevant in wartime, but is definitely relevant in peacetime.

And by "smart gun" I mean systems that actually improve the gun's performance- adjustable full-auto rates of fire, computer controlled triggers and optics, ammunition counters (though that's mostly a meme), etc. You see the explosion in development for guns that were functionally banned 10 years ago in the US (short rifles and shotguns with stocks, pseudo-full-auto that's not meaningfully distinguishable from the real thing, etc.); if we went further than that we'd have a better outlook on what the tech can actually provide.

Samsung has made automated turrets for the Korean DMZ for a long time, and armed uncrewed ground vehicles have started popping up in Ukraine. I think you're right about Western moral qualms about such things, but they have started popping up. In applications where they're more clearly defensive and not typically anti-personnel (autonomous CIWS, for example), they have been accepted for decades at this point.

Smart munitions are going to win at longer ranges where gun accuracy starts falling off, though. That isn't always the case, but I think it's another factor in the decisionmaking there.

Yeah but you're not accomplishing that for 1M plus the art of producing things as a defense supplier is just as much knowing the right people to go to in order to sell to the required specifications than just 'make a doohickey and they will come'

I think it's enough for a seed, considering @Lizzardspawn want to do 1-2 funding rounds before the 2 years are up anyways (otherwise you'll never 5x your 1M this quickly).

Sure, you can't do the entire R&D up to (or including) production for the first order on that budget, but 5 guys can cook up something good enough for the first round of funding after a couple of months.

I'd be more worried about the idea in general. A sniper turret will not take out most types of drones, and it will be extremely vulnerable to airborne drones. I don't think most western states are in the market for something like that right now. They worry about drones and counter-drones, not anti-infantry. That leaves mostly autocrats looking to suppress civilian unrest, which is morally abhorrent and also not a huge market.

That leaves mostly autocrats looking to suppress civilian unrest, which is morally abhorrent and also not a huge market.

Oh come on - this is what near IR lasers with eye tracking are - can be cobbled in a week.

Valid, leveraging your know-how in specialized niche is a proven way for outsized returns

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