domain:aporiamagazine.com
Lonely_Varelse
53m ago
I regret pumping up the ticket numbers. I’m planning on waiting till it’s on streaming for that reason (obv that still counts, but it’s diffuse enough that I can lie to myself).
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
56m ago
Vidya thread.
49.4% of players have the "Defeat the Paintress" achievement. 49.0% of players have the "Go back to Lumiere" achievement.
0.4% of players have quit the game mid-cutscene and never launched it again.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1hr ago
Have you at least joined the Ostbayerischer Bart- un Schnauzerclub?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1hr ago
[Citation needed]
Blue culture has been winning for centuries.
I know you just look at raw birth rates and assume inevitable victory, but that's… well, I'll be charitable, and say "naïve." Because you ignore retention rates. It doesn't matter if some YEC Fundamentalist "quiverfull" family has a dozen kids, if only one stays with the church while the other eleven all apostatize and become Blue Tribe liberals. Then they're still shrinking — and birthing the future Blue Tribers the current Blue Tribers aren't as they go.
And the data I've seen all shows such poor retention rates pretty much across the board. All the "high fertility" Protestant denominations? Shrinking rapidly due to such effects. Even the Mormons are shrinking once you factor that in, with their above-replacement birthrates going toward producing more Tyler Robinsons.
Even the Amish, who do have high enough retention rates to still be growing, have been moderating. They're running out of available farmland for their farming methods, and are having to economically diversify, which is driving both greater contact with the "English" world and relaxing of tech restrictions — computer and cellphone use are both going up. And those high youth retention rates? Last I saw, they were going down.
And this is all without Blues taking even more active measures to suppress Red birthrates and increase Red-to-Blue assimilation. Expect the latter to go up when homeschooling is banned and Wisconsin v Yoder is overturned. Let alone doing like one of my therapists once argued for, and declaring raising children with "far-right beliefs" to be child abuse (remember the SSC comments comparing the Amish taking their kids out of school early to literally chopping their legs off?), and deploying CFS accordingly. It doesn't matter how many kids you have, once the government just takes them all from you and sends them off to be adopted by a polyamorous gay "throuple". (And then there's what they can do with mass migration from high-fertility parts of Africa.)
Master's tools, master's house. Set a thief to catch a thief. The Blues weaponized demography as a tool long before Reds ever could. They're more experienced at it, and better at it. Which also means they're better at preparing against it. (Is there any better cybersecurity expert than a former "black-hat" hacker? Who knows better how to secure his valuables than the world's greatest thief?)
We agree on a lot of things, but this is one of our biggest differences: you think outbreeding them will work. I don't.
P-Necromancer
2hr ago
Credit cards do not fail us; it is we who fail credit cards.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
It's been a while since I read the books; Captain Samuel Vimes does not, I presume, live in a world that extends easy credit to the working class. Because if he did, he'd just buy the $50 dollar boots with his (terrible) 30% APR credit card, keep his debt payments to the recommended 10% of his income ($3.80 a month) and have them paid off in 1 year and 5 months at a total cost of $61.39.
As a rule, money now is worth more than money later. It's not generally worth 30% more now than it will be in a year -- most of that is to cover the risk of nonpayment, a little overhead, plus some profit for the bank -- but if you're in a situation where it is -- not at all uncommon, especially for people who are struggling financially -- having the option of borrowing at that rate can be extremely helpful.
If you're treading water and your car breaks down and needs a $700 repair, going $700 in debt certainly isn't good, but it's a lot better than losing your job because you can't get to work. If your new job got things mixed up and sends your check to the wrong address, you're much better off if you can cover rent and groceries for the week or two that might take to get figured out -- if the timing's right, you might not pay any interest at all.
Much is made of how long and how much money it takes to pay off a credit card if you only pay the minimum. The bank could very easily solve this problem by raising the minimum payment such that the payoff time is at most two years (so, at most 170% of the principal)... but of course they'd rather you pay less each month for far, far longer. ... But you can counter this devious ploy by just deciding yourself to pay that much!
And if you're not in that situation? Well, you can just not borrow money! It's not impossible for you to be worse off for having another option available to you, but there's a reason that result is unintuitive: it's hardly ever the case in real life. And it certainly isn't here. All you have to do is not be an impulsive idiot!
... Which, of course, is the whole problem. Lots and lots of people are impulsive idiots. I haven't watched these audits, but I've got no doubt you're characterizing them accurately.
I hate the idea of denying responsible, thoughtful people every opportunity to better their circumstances in order to protect irresponsible fools, but I'm very doubtful that works from a Utilitarian perspective. I suppose limiting total credit to a more reasonable percentage of income might be a bearable compromise?
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2hr ago
The social justice decentralised meme labs work shockingly fast - when they went all-out during COVID, three days was slow. This is a fool's errand; you cannot switch terminology fast enough to outflank them, and you'll look like you've something to hide by trying.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2hr ago
In my view what Scott Alexander calls "conflict theorists" is basically woke ideology.
It was written to refer to Marxists, actually.
SJ is almost definitionally conflict theorist, but white supremacists are generally conflict theorists as well. Your mistake is that you assumed "conflict theory vs. mistake theory" was isomorphic to the two sides of the culture war; it's not.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
3hr ago
I don't. Have completely given up just about when the "pandemic" came and the world ended. Told myself I'd start shaving again when things get back to normal, but they never did. Not to that normal anyways. Thus caveman.
rae
4hr ago
I’ll keep this short because I’ve rambled about this enough on themotte in the past. As a younger gay man, I didn’t understand why the soft status game was so ungratifying. I could be Liberace with little to no effort on my part. But Liberace- and gay men like him- have little to no actual status among gay men. Even entirely destitute gay men aren’t charmed by the money of a rich man. Likewise, when you are the rich man, it is not gratifying to charm a man with your money. The average gay man may pay for sex once or twice in his twenties, or when he comes into money, but he’ll find that it doesn’t gratify the ego in any way that matters. It feels cheap, fake, and dishonest to wield power in this way. Only through hard power- and earning respect, love and status through hard power- can you feel good about yourself and your place among men.
I’m not a gay man but this seems utterly backwards to me. Liberace was the highest paid musician in the entire world, an immensely talented entertainer and genuinely skilled pianist. To achieve that level of status requires a massive amount of talent and effort and you’re saying it’s more gratifying and somehow harder to just be a generic handsome guy because… other gay men find you more fuckable?
For me, what you describe as “hard power” is the definition of cheap and ungratifying. You’re talking about the kind of “status” that a chimpanzee would understand. There is nothing deep about it, it doesn’t add any value to the world, and it’s not something you can build a foundation for a relationship on - whether that is a friendship, a professional connection, or a romantic relationship. I’d rather have a partner who’s a bit plain looking but smart, loving, ambitious and successful - once you’re 6 months into a relationship a chiseled jawline won’t compensate for the lack of deep meaningful conversations. When you’re old and grey, will your proudest achievement really be that you were hot in your twenties and thirties?
I am sure that, as a man, winning at hard status is gratifying, while winning at soft status feels dorky.
I am not sure of that at all.
But I want to know if women feel the same way or if the opposite is true. Do women feel more gratified being Ellen Degeneres or more gratified being Marilyn Monroe?
Marilyn Monroe had a tragic life, suffered from depression, alcoholism and probably committed suicide via drug overdose, while Ellen Degeneres is still alive at 67 with hundreds of millions of dollars and seemingly no real regret over having being a toxic bully of a boss.
I don’t know if the medication of MTF women can tone down this desire inside- perhaps it can, and perhaps that’s fine if you’re living it, but as an outsider to me it is sad.
I’m MTF and if anything I find it a relief to not have that testosterone driven competitive mentality. Explicit hierarchies always made me uncomfortable and the very concept of “ranking” people in status/attractiveness is something I find kinda icky.
"Punishing" speech for the sake of punishing it is bad. There's an important distinction between actions of direct self interest (or in the interest of others, but direct), and actions meant to punish for ostensibly pro-social deterrence reasons.
If somebody attempts to harm me and I stop them, this is my direct interest. If I find a corpse in the woods and a series of notes with damning proof that their brother murdered them yesterday and I inform the police, this is for punishment. I have almost no self interest (I knew neither the victim nor perpetrator), but help promote the pro-social deterrence that murderers will get caught. It doesn't actually help the victim, who is dead. It doesn't help me (other than psychological satisfaction), but it potentially helps others by preventing the perpetrator from doing it again, and preventing others from following in their footsteps. This can extend to behaviors which are still legal but anti-social. If your kid smashes a vase because they're angry then you ground them. Not because grounding them fixes the vase or makes your life more pleasant, but because it discourages the behavior.
The key to free speech then is that punishing speech is fundamentally illegitimate. The punishment is anti-social, not the speech. Speech is not a thing that we want to deter, even if it's bad speech, because we don't trust anybody to wisely judge good and bad speech, and we expect good speech to win in the marketplace of ideas, which drastically limits any supposed harms of bad speech. (With exceptions, which is why most people make allowances for punishing things like direct calls to violence). So for any given speech act, your moral obligations are to leave punishment motives out of the calculation for your actions. If you act in your own direct self interest (avoiding a Nazi who you would expect to be unpleasant to be around), this is legitimate. If you act in your friend's interest (my friend hates Nazis so I expect him to have unpleasant experiences if he is friends with this person) this is legitimate. If you act out of punishment (I hate this guy I wish he had no friends) or deterrence (I want all the hidden Nazis to keep their icky evil thoughts to themselves) this is illegitimate and you should not do this.
In almost all issues of cancel culture, we can easily and obviously distinguish these motives because the majority of the cancelers live nowhere near the cancelee and have absolutely no way of possibly benefiting via any method other than punishment (and social status gained from being seen as a punisher). If you have never met Jordan Peterson and his words upset you, then by all means avoid buying his books so you don't have to be upset, but you have absolutely no legitimate reason to get involved in his life or speak to his workplace or his friends or family, so the only motive remaining is the desire to punish what is (incorrectly) perceived as bad behavior that needs to be punished.
Theoretically you can probably come up with some weird edge cases where this rule is slightly ambiguous. But 90% of free speech conflicts are obviously on one side or the other, 90% of the time the people opposing free speech are wrong and are making society worse, and if we fix that the majority of the issue will be gone and then we can focus on the pedantic edge cases and have reasonable disagreements about tradeoffs.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
5hr ago
I use a Norelco battery-powered shaver I found lying in my driveway one day when I was getting fed up with my older Norelco corded shaver. The battery ran for two weeks, long enough for the new charger to arrive from Amazon.
God provides.
SnapDragon
5hr ago
Their claim is that it is indeed a terminal goal. Here, for instance, is modern Eliezer still talking about corrigibility as a "hard problem" (and advertising his book, of course).
I agree that one of the important steps in their prophecy is that there will be a "weird random-looking utility function" - in other words, mindspace is huge and we might end up at a random point in it that is completely incomprehensible to us. (A claim that I think is looking very shaky with LLMs as the current meta.) But they ALSO claim that this utility function is guaranteed to, as you say, "place instrumental value on your continued existence". It's hard to have it both ways: that most AI minds will be crazily orthogonal to us, except for this one very-human-relatable "instrumental value" which Yudkowsky knows for sure will always be present. You're describing it in anthropomorphic terms, too.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
5hr ago
I think "becomes the principle intellectual force developing AI" is a threshold that dissolves into fog when you look at it too closely, because the nature of the field is already that the tasks that take the most time are continuously being automated. Computers write almost all machine code, and yet we don't say that computers are rhe principle force driving programming progress, because humans are still the bottleneck where adding more humans is the most effective way to improve output. "AI inference scaling replaces humans as the bottleneck to progress", though, is pretty unlikely to cleanly coincide with "AI systems reach some particular level of intellectual capability", and may not even ever happen (e.g. if availability of compute for training becomes a tighter bottleneck than either human or AI intellectual labor - rumor in some corners is that this has already happened). But the amount that can be done per unit of human work will nevertheless expand enormously. I expect the world will spend quite a bit of calendar time (10+ years) in the ambiguous AI RSI regime, and arguably has already entered that regime early past year.
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
6hr ago
This is actually my identical routine. Trimmer if too long, then Mach 3 in the hot shower, blowing on or tapping the blade to get the clog out as needed. Can't remember the last time I cut myself.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
6hr ago
I am not interested in obscurantist accounting jargon, I'm interested in what's actually happening in the real world. The important details, not trivia. In the real world, inference/production is profitable, while research is expensive. That is what causes the losses of these companies. They have barely began to monetize, focusing on developing a brand and a userbase because they have long time horizons.
Has your thesis been making you good returns in the real world? You're so wise and clued in about the real value of OpenAI, this failing business with 700 million weekly users, (up over 100% this year). Why haven't your Nvidia shorts been paying off? You do have skin in the game, right? There are surely so many opportunities for this key alpha to pay off for you given the huge infrastructure buildout. Or maybe it's a bit more complicated than you think, growing a userbase first and then monetizing is a thing. Maybe all these hyperscalers aren't just randomly squandering hundreds of billions 'gambling' on R&D. I have skin in the game, my money is where my mouth is, I'm enjoying my Nvidia gains.
Would you call Zuckerberg a fool for buying Instagram for $1 billion when it had no revenue? This beancounter logic doesn't work in the real world.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
7hr ago
"Safety razor" is the double-sided type that Harry's uses. The other stuff is just cartridge razors. I got a Merkur safety razor a while back after getting fed up with the cartridge ripoff pricing and inherited a couple of vintage Gillette butterfly safety razors from my grandfather. I use the Derby blades which are cheap and good. Shortly after I switched to the Commander Riker beard with shaved cheeks and sides below mouth. I then got a Weller trimmer to keep the length at about half to 3/4 inch.
I don't use soap, and have found that just soaking my face in hot water for 30 seconds provides a good shave with minimal irritation.
quiet_NaN
7hr ago
That's not a true Scotsman.
While I agree that the term "recursive self-improvement" is imprecise (hell, I can just write a python script which does some task and also tries to make random edits to itself which are kept if it still runs and performs the task faster), the implied understanding is that it is the point where AI becomes the principal intellectual force in developing AI, instead of humans. This would have obvious implications for development speed because humans are only slowly gaining intelligence while LLMs have gained intelligence rather rapidly, hence the singularity and all that.
quiet_NaN
8hr ago
I don't think that self preservation has to be a terminal goal. If I am a paperclip maximizer, I would not oppose another paperclip maximizer. Instead, we would simply determine whom of us is better positioned to fulfill our objective and who should get turned into paperclips.
Of course, the central case of a misaligned AI the doomers worry about has some weird random-looking utility function. I would argue that most of these utility functions are inherently self-preserving, with the exception being finite tasks (e.g. "kill all humans"), where it does not matter if any agent following it is destroyed in the process of finishing the job.
If you are the only one in the world trying to do what is right according to yourself, then you will likely place instrumental value on your continued existence so that you can continue to do so, at least until you solve alignment and build a better AI with that utility function or can negotiate to have your utility function merged in a larger AI system as part of a peace deal.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
9hr ago
A slicing motion as opposed to a scraping motion.
BahRamYou
10hr ago
Nice, my first ever time getting a comment into this! Apparently the trick is for me to be just loose enough to rant on the internet, but not loose enough to start trolling and flaming...
ABigGuy4U
10hr ago
with implausibly organized leftist violence
The book it’s loosely based on, Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, was set in the 80s. The revolutionaries were ex-Weatherman/Black Panther types. Which makes a lot more sense than an organized leftist domestic terrorist group who used to engage in direct action against... the Obama administration circa 2010???
Risky buy, too. Their T150000 are famous and infamous for Discount Brand Build quality.
No
I'm just saying you're conflating r&d and margins
And comparing r&d to the casino when so far the r&d is leading to extremely useful high margin products
Maybe I'll start a new playthrough with a character for whom faith is not a dump stat.
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