site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Your stuff through 2028 is already happening. People are already trying to do basically canned drop in tech workers at every software shop I'm aware of, you're basically just describing Claude code/cursor. Those start ups already exist. Models are already making big progress on erdos problems.

They begin to think about targeting non-coding white collar work like finance and spreadsheet

This has already happened. I'm baffled that you don't know that the models can now handle spreadsheets. They do so pretty well, especially after Opus 4.7.

the models are not getting much better at JavaScript, having used up all of the JavaScript data in the entire world

This is a misunderstanding of how models improve. It's not a matter of finding more undiscovered java script code to ingest, much of it is now post training self play and should continue to improve as general model scale increases. Of course it's already perfectly capable of writing good javascript and has been for several models, the limitations are mostly in reasoning about larger chunks of the code context.

More attention is turned to local models as a result, but these are hard to run on normal hardware and the best is Sonnet 4.6 level at this point and requires $10,000 worth of GPU machinery.

It's too bad Ilforte left because he'd eviscerate this. I tend to be less optimistic on the Chinese models than some but both Deepseek and Kimi have offerings that are comparable to sonnet 4.6 if you trust the benchmarks, I don't but fully expect them to have a sonnet 4.6 level model by end of 2026 and likely an opus 4.6 model by then. And you can run these models on rented hardware for pretty cheap. Although they'd be hard to run locally for a lot of complicated reasons that have to do with it being much more efficient to batch queries than run them individually. In any case though the weights are public and anyone can set up an api to sell tokens at affordable rates.

I'm skeptical of your ability to predict the future as you seem incapable of predicting the past.

I tend to be less optimistic on the Chinese models than some but both Deepseek and Kimi have offerings that are comparable to sonnet 4.6 if you trust the benchmarks,

They do not, the best deepseek is maybe GPT o3 tier. Ilforte is delusional about China.

Chatbot Arena ranks deepseek-v4-pro-thinking at 30th for [text (1461 ELO) and 17th for coding (1459 ELO). By contrast, claude-sonnet-4-6 is 22nd for text (1468 ELO) and 6th for coding (1524 ELO); there is a definite gap. On the other hand, kimi-k2.6 is 29th for text (1462 ELO) and 7th for coding (1519 ELO), which is closer. And glm-5.1 is even better; 20th for text (1472 ELO) and 5th for coding (1532 ELO). So it looks like the strongest open source Chinese models are equal to or better than Sonnet.

Text Arena

Rank Model License Score
20 glm-5.1 MIT 1472
22 claude-sonnet-4-6 Propietary 1468
29 kimi-k2.6 Modified MIT 1462
30 deepseek-v4-pro-thinking MIT 1461

Code Arena

Rank Model License Score
5 glm-5.1 MIT 1532
6 claude-sonnet-4-6 Propietary 1524
7 kimi-k2.6 Modified MIT 1519
17 deepseek-v4-pro-thinking MIT 1459

Can I only point how clustered they are? Unless this coding benchmark is heavily logarithmic in weighting the models - the results say that all of the models are good enough.

I've never used glm-5.1, I'll try it today.

The longer I spend here, the more I understand why @DaseindustriesLtd got so fucking mad at some of the quality of the takes on AI and decamped to fairer lands. I mean, I'm still here, and I'm not really going anywhere, but I've already said I'm largely bowing out of the conversation.

That's probably because I am less Russian and more patient than he is, but some of the bullshit I've heard has driven me towards drink*, and my patience is at an all-time low. I just get where he's coming from.

*Making me spiritually Slavic, or at least Scottish. There are no shortages of European nationalities with a national fondness for drink.

I get a distinct feeling of Gellman Amnesia reading a few of the recent top level posts in this weeks thread. And I wouldn't even class myself as a particularly knowledgeable person when it comes to AI, I simply keep up with the news and developments. It's really something to see the number of posters, whether here or the ssc reddit or similar locations, who confidently spout complete garbage when it comes to AI, seemingly unaware of things that happened even months ago.

And now I can't help but worry that many of the other posts on the Motte are similarly compromised. Have we become (or always been) just another midwit debate site?

I think every forum has some Gellman Amnesia (and déjà vu), unless it's heavily moderated like r/AskHistorians. And real life small talk has much more. If people only stuck to their domain expertise, more forums would be barren (see next paragraph), and people don't know what they don't know (Dunning–Kruger).

At least most replies point out the errors. Domain experts are often too busy, lazy, and private to browse and reply to random internet questions; except they miraculously find the time, effort, and public interest once someone else responds with a wrong answer (Cunningham's Law).

Hey, at least Hlynka is gone (suicide by mod). While he's enjoying his retirement, my blood pressure does much better.

And now I can't help but worry that many of the other posts on the Motte are similarly compromised. Have we become (or always been) just another midwit debate site?

We were supposed to at least be midwits? I got 70 on my IQ test, which must be 70% of the maximum and a passing grade!

Your joke made me wonder if redefining IQ as the percentile would make it more legible. Or 50+the percentile, to keep 100 as the middle ground. Probably not, IQ90-110 would be mapped to IQ25-75, that's fifty points reserved for midwittery. I can already imagine people claiming they are 3x smarter than their opponent.

Aww, it's sweet that you thought I'm joking. No. I have brain damage from too many exams, including having to memorize all the fun properties of a normal distribution, as well as the abnormal ones.

I think the properties of the Cauchy distribution are much more fun.

I'm couching my words carefully: I'd rather stay in my couch and let the experts handle these things. I have few neurons left to distribute to even the most normal of tasks.

Bad takes on AI seems to be the one commonality across creed, race, and IQ. This one from theringer is a particularly egregious example, but its rare to find anything both sufficiently technical to understand how it does and could work, and sufficiently "big picture" to understand societal impacts. (Of course, many others would consider my AI takes to be just as bad).

My current modus operandi is to be whatever the other person is not. If they are an AI maximalist I am the pessimist. If they are the doomer I am the optimist. If they think this technology is all hype I become the autistic technologist with in-depth details and explicit examples.

got so fucking mad at some of the quality of the takes on AI

It's actually one of the best ways to bait me. I thought that now that I'm old and wise, I would stop taking bait, but they're just so wonderfully confidently wrong and I cannot resist. It makes me so tilted, but the "I told you so" as we stand in the breadlines is going to hit so nice.

Brother, insight without action is as worthless as the spectacles it came with. Don't take the bait, at least if it comes at the cost of your sanity. Or do, if you end up feeling some degree of catharsis, idk, I'm not your shrink. I'm not doing a very good job at being my own shrink.

Perhaps it does serve a useful function to point out when people are being pigheadedly wrong about things. Someone's got to do it, or ought to do it, and I'm just glad that someone is very rarely me these days. I've got booze to drink, and Scottish women to introduce to the single mother lifestyle.

But yes, if we meet in the breadlines or in the intake unit for the paperclip factor, I'll save an understanding nod for you. Fist-bumps wouldn't be befitting.

Making me spiritually Slavic, or at least Scottish. There are no shortages of European nationalities with a national fondness for drink.

Better question would there be any without a national fondness for drink.

Terrible driving and a fondness for alcohol is something that unites just about every culture and demographic.

Bostonians often openly admit that the nationwide reputation of Boston drivers as being especially awful is true. Is this just a form of self-aggrandizement, and, actually, every locality believes their drivers have reputations for being the worst?

I can't think of a single demographic group of humans who are considered "good drivers"

Similarly, I've never once heard anyone say "yeah the drivers in my $LOCAL_AREA are great! I love it! We all get along on the roads :)" and I've heard every version of the opposite, so I'm assuming everyone sucks everywhere.

Back when I was a young lad I would have told you "yeah the drivers in Germany are great". Nowadays, between Germany getting diversified, and the driving culture in my country improving, the contrast is not so stark. Some time ago I also saw a video from an Indian guy saying that Italy, of all places, has good driving culture (though I suppose it makes sense if India is the reference), and when he was driving there he felt this subtle pressure to perform up to the standards of the rest of the country.

You're right that everyone might complain about their neighbors, but different groups definitely perform differently.

Italy was the only country where the drivers would change lanes to speed past the car than stopped in front of me on a pedestrian crossing. I can't imagine what India is like if that's good driving culture.