domain:bracero.substack.com
quiet_NaN
30m ago
I think that "hard status" is a terrible name for that axis. "physical status" and "body-inferred status" might be better.
I also do not think your assessment of physical status is correct. In particular, I think that in a boxing fight between pre-crucifixion Jesus and Trump, I would bet on Jesus. Take away Trump's money and fame, and he would not be the kind of person who makes other men nervous and easily picks up women.
And social status is obviously contingent on the society you are considering. Plenty of cultures value Mohammed a lot more than Buddha.
I think your underlying claim, that there is a status part which is based on physical appearances, is correct. But where to draw the border between physical and non-physical seems contentious. Take starlet actresses, for example. Of course they are hot, but so are a lot of unsuccessful models on OnlyFans. On the other hand, their acting ability is not entirely divorced from their body in the way the ability to write physics papers is.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
37m ago
LISP programmers of the world unite!
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
44m ago
If you can't skip a promotional ad the problem is with your DVD player, not the DVD itself. Get a new superior player.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
52m ago
I'm a m&k guy myself, but unfortunately some games just suck with that control method. The Yakuza series is one good example, with the games having had a tongue in cheek "real Yakuza use a gamepad" splash screen on the PC for many years. My controller of choice on the PC is a PS4 controller, as I have them around already and they work well via USB.
Lonely_Varelse
55m ago
Anybody see the film One Battle After Another yet? I’m curious if it’s as a big a piece of agitprop as the glowing reviews paint it to be.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
56m ago
Re: The last thing, we're just two people talking, I don't see the value in calling something out as irrelevant.
Re: The first, I don't even think you can reach the general idea by way of this sort of quantitative analysis, but I do have something better (an anecdote) that your specific sub-example reminded me of:
Once worked at a very self-important, corporate place, where the break room constantly smelled like curry. It was absolutely overwhelming. One day, someone put up a passive aggressive anonymous note in all caps asking that people "PLEASE STOP MICROWAVING CURRY" because it made the whole building smell and made them unable to taste their own food, or something to that effect. Guess this landed on HR's desk pretty fast, because the next morning the entire office gets an email about racial microaggressions will not be tolerated, and now hundreds of people had to take a racial bias training course (most of whom happened to be Indian).
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1hr ago
Parentheses are fine, you just don't want to have parentheticals inside each other lol. The ACOUP author does that and it gets really hard to follow sometimes.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1hr ago
If using an excessive amount of parentheses is wrong, I don't want to be right. (They're cool)
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
Saying “Trump should not be sending the National Guard to American cities” is fine, saying “Trump is doing an authoritarian power grab by sending the National Guard to American cities” is too far because words like authoritarian, fascist, Nazi, and related are incendiary and dangerously lead to the acceptance of violence against anyone smeared with those terms.
How do you deal with the Euphemism treadmill problem within this logic? "Nigger Rigged" isn't polite and can get a guy in trouble, so construction workers start calling it "Afro Engineered" but we all figure out what that means so they just start calling it "Ghetto," in polite company calling something or someone Ghetto has obvious uncomfortable racial implications, a lot of black lawyers are going to bristle at a white person calling something of theirs Ghetto, even if they themselves would use the term disparagingly in another context. The implication remains the same, and over time the new euphemism becomes rude as well. Moron becomes an insult so we get Retarded which becomes a slur so we get Special Needs and kids start calling each other shortbus.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
CW topics go in the CW thread. Or in the Sunday one, if you don’t have any of your own commentary.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
I get where you are coming from. Relevant ACX:
“No,” he says. “But you know that saying that’s become popular recently? ‘If there’s a Nazi at the table, and ten people sitting and willingly eating alongside him, then you have 11 Nazis.’”
“Okaaaaay,” you say. “But I’m not a Nazi.”
“You don’t think you’re a Nazi,” he corrected. “But if you take the saying literally, then anybody who’s ever sat down at a table with a Nazi is a Nazi. And anyone who’s ever sat down at a table with them is a Nazi, and anyone who’s ever sat down at a table with them is a Nazi too, and so on. It’s a six degrees of separation problem. When you actually calculate it out, then as long as the average person sits and eats with at least two people during their lifetime, there’s a 99.9998% chance everyone is a Nazi. The only way out is to refuse to ever sit and eat with anyone. Which is what I’m doing.”
This is of course absurd. Failure to adequately punish a behavior is only fractionally as bad as the primary offense. Still, I do not think that it is entirely wrong. Like, if you are posting pictures of yourself hanging out with your buddy who is sporting a swastika tattoo, then I am going to draw conclusions not only about his but also your character. Of course, specifics matter. If you also have buddies who are into Pol Pot, daesh and NAMBLA, I will be more likely to consider you terminally apolitical. If you have made a big deal out of your other buddy wearing a USSR shirt, then I you will go into my mental drawer labeled "likely Nazi-adjacent".
I apply the same heuristic for social media companies. If you only block stuff which you are required to block as a matter of law, that is fine with me. If you block everything slightly offensive to anyone, that is also fine (even though it makes your platform much less useful). If you selectively block stuff, then I will infer your own political leanings from it.
TwiceHuman
1hr ago
I think we're overcomplicating things (not refering to you, but to society). All preferences align as you approach the source from which they originate. For instance, if the left says "Trump is violent" and the right says "Left-wing activists are violent", then both sides agree that "violence is undesirable". Of course, you see a lot of left-wingers advocate for violence, and a lot of right-wingers indirectly doing the same: "The tree of liberty...". Here, the agreement is "Violence might be necessary in self-defense" and "Violence is an acceptable means against tyranny".
The actual conflict is whether or not Trump is tyrannical, and whether or not Charlie Kirk's rhetoric is dangerous (an attack which should be defended against). Another comment of yours mention pedophilia, but the real disgreements are things like "Is teaching children about anal sex education, or is it grooming?" and "Is a 20-year-old male dating a 17-year-old woman natural and innocent, or is it predatory?", for we agree that grooming and predation are immoral.
I offer this perspective because it keeps me clearsighted (prevents me from drowning in complexity) and because any conclusions generalize to all similar issues.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1hr ago
Microsoft has a convenient list of controller manufacturers that are sufficiently high-quality to be trusted with the official Xbox license.
Not remotely surprised SteelSeries isn't on the list. The one I got is a piece of shit that immediately began suffering from joystick drift.
The internet does not have to mean that, which is why the old internet did not mean that. As with the disappearance of borders, nationalism, "gatekeeping", male-only spaces, churches, etc. the problem is the modern mindset that everything should be interconnected. If you model the world as a big graph, and calculate the connectivity of said graph and call it X, then you will realize that different values of X leads to different mechanics, and that large values of X create problems that smaller values of X do not. The idea that more information is better, is actually wrong, and intellectual circles have yet to realize this. All of this is probably downstream of the facts that information can be sold, and that more information makes automation easier.
The simple solution is both separating things, and considering things as seperated. The first is achieved by decentralization (and you've already realized this yourself), and the latter is achived by getting rid of pathological associative thinking (if somebody calls you an evil nazi because you support borders, they're making the association borders -> nationalism -> nazi germany -> evil). Mental maturity is broadly speaking the complete opposite. For instance, if your comment makes me angry, then this is an issue with myself rather than with you.
People who fight evil will create mental associative knots, and call it "Them", "(((them)))", "sin", "nazism", "communism", etc. and ruthlessly attack everything within greater and greater distances. For instance, somebody might attack anime because "anime -> school-girl characters -> pedophilia -> child abuse -> evil".
The idea that guns kills people, and that Google should be punished for indexing illegal websites, are both failures of proper separation, structually and psychologically. This cognitive error is thus responsible for censorship, people being forced to take sides in issues that they aren't interested in, and things like corruption (for corruption is when two entites which cannot benefit themselves engage in an agreement to benefit eachother, thus bypassing a defensive structural design).
An alternative method still possible today is embedding secrecy and separation inside a connected, judgemental structure. This requires encryption between structures such that the shared structure they exist within cannot read the message (Encryption stops the flow of information in some directions, so it separates). So like how an app can have E2E encrypted messages that even the app cannot access, you could make a website that your host of choice cannot access. This will go away if encryption is made illegal, or if one is forced to give the keys to the authorities.
You cannot 'win' unless you own the outer layer. If you have full access over your computer, then you can stop an app inside it from spying on you. If the government have full access over your computer, then it doesn't matter how secure the apps you use are, they can simply look at the screen or read the keyboard.
You also cannot have your cake an eat it too. If you have privacy, then criminals will have it as well. It must apply to both the very best people and the very worst. It's completely binary, you either have 100% privacy or 0% privacy.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
The operating loss is due to research.
No.
Here's some recent accounting guidance
"Inference margin" is not, and has never been, an accounting term. Server rental being "cost of production" is also completely misguided. Cost of production can be traced back to salaries for intellectual property. You could maybe shoehorn server costs into COGS, but that's usually mostly made up of SG&A. The original AWS value prop quite literally stated "turn CAPEX into OPEX." Hosting (servers) is 100% an operating expense, not a "production" cost that's amortized. Then again, there are some corporate accounting teams in silicon valley that want to look at it this way so they can defraud lenders and investors create financial engineering solutions.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
Just little things like character and virtue. Do you lie, steal, cheat? Do you work hard, help people in need, participate in local communities?
I will take 100 honest retards who are happy to watch a Fourth of July parade down main street over 1 IQ-dork post-quantum-researcher who never leaves the basement and is running a crypto scheme on the side.
"Elite human capital" is a term used by people, mostly, who wish we could still, ya know, create assets out of people.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Superficial just means surface level or shallow so far as I typically use it. Lots of superficial attributes are important in achieving various outcomes. We haven't elected a president shorter than 6 foot since Jimmy Carter,
Ok, if you want to make this point about the things you listed before, you'll have to show me similar statistics about work relationships breaking down due to cullinary choices, etc.
There's significantly more baggage that comes with being American than just being born in a particular place
Correct, which is why they're not both "American". Or at least not the same kind of American
And whether or not an American wants to be an agent for the empire, they are
Completely irrelevant to the point being discussed.
gattsuru
1hr ago
Fair. I'm assuming a USB device going into a computer has a power supply has enough current limiting to prevent wires or PCBs catching on fire, but that was an actively bad assumption back in 2005.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1hr ago
In a competitive environment where new models are getting released about monthly, your idea is to stop developing new models?
HermeneuticsOfVibes
1hr ago
Superficial just means surface level or shallow so far as I typically use it. Lots of superficial attributes are important in achieving various outcomes. We haven't elected a president shorter than 6 foot since Jimmy Carter, there's about a 0.04% chance of that happening by random chance if that superficial characteristic is unimportant to electability. Google's "41 shades of blue" experiment likely cost millions in developer time for a superficial change to hyperlink colors. And so on.
There's significantly more baggage that comes with being American than just being born in a particular place. And whether or not an American wants to be an agent for the empire, they are. They spread their American ideas, American perspectives, and other products of the American culture, as effortlessly as they breathe. When most people in the English speaking world go online, they feel like they are digitally transported to America. Not only the people but the structures, the dominant ideas, etc, are all American. Americans on the other hand, almost never seem to experience this sensation.
TheFooder
1hr ago
I is minor and insignificant suggestion. I think Barbarian jsut fits better with the other three super-positions. A barbarian is a political superposition or a job, whereas a caveman is more of a species. anyway, cool idea nonetheless.
gattsuru
1hr ago
Okay there's a large antenna in there, but that just raises the question of why the antenna is larger than the antenna in a wifi dongle? And why add a 2m cable for a wireless dongle?
They badly overengineered it. Both these things significantly improved reliability, because all other things being even a larger antenna will have much better signal characteristics than a smaller one of the same general design, and being able to place a receiver on the front of a computer rather than the back had a pretty massive difference. Some of those decisions weren't even crazy for the time -- the 360 released in 2005, where a lot of people still owned big CRT and plasma TVs designed for play from 6+ ft and built into furniture, and even for desktop computers CRT hadn't completely gone the way of the dodo yet, and especially major vendors will still big fans of making PCs (even gaming PCs) cases big thick piles of steel
There's a lot of more subtle goofiness like this : it uses a custom wireless protocol that was a lot less funky than bluetooth of the time in order to reduce latency from retransmits, for example.
The fuse existing is mostly a problem downstream of how the USB standard evolved. Originally, there was a hard 500mA@5V limit per USB port in the standard, but this was held more in principle than the breach; even by 2000 you could find cheap USB chargers that would put out 2A@5V ish, gfl. Wireless dongles were only supposed to use around 400mA, but even slightly sketchy source (eg, powered usb hubs) could push enough voltage to get at the fuzzy edge, and even if the dongle could tolerate that wider range, the wires (and some sources) wouldn't be able to supply it permanently without damage. As time went on and those skuzzy chargers became more common, it was just accepted (and saved money) to use fuses a lot less or with a much higher tolerance than the official rating, under the presumption that devices which could be damaged by sourcing more power would have safeties against it.
Why it failed is unfortunately probably more boring. While there are some potential weird cases (Five Below-brand USB hubs, badly implemented cell phone chargers, putting it on top of a wireless pwoer charger), chances are pretty good it's just time and entropy. Fuses, especially older SMD fuses, are both temperature sensitive and relatively fragile devices, since they work by breaking. Over time, a 500 mA fuse will become a 470 mA and then 450 mA, until eventually the intended current passing through the device will bust it. That's worse on wireless devices, since the antenna is basically an inefficient hot plate, and worse still with big PCB antenna like that particular dongle made, and worse still on devices like this that were pretty close to the edge of their power envelope to start with. The new fuse, especially if you bought it recently, is almost certainly going to be much more reliable, even under the same conditions. If you want to be extra-safe, I'd unplug it when you've got long periods where it's not in use, but it's probably going to be good for another 10 years.
ABigGuy4U
1hr ago
It was ever thus. in 1802 if your unit dressed in buckskins like an American Indian, it symbolized that you were an elite ranger. The paratroopers that jumped into Brittany during the D-Day invasion shaved their hair into Mohawks and painted their faces with Iroquois war paint. MAC-V SOG units in Vietnam wore the Mohawk also (that’s what Travis Bickle’s hair in Taxi Driver is a reference to, in Scorsese’s original script he was a former Green Beret). Special units always try to aesthetically distinguish themselves from the rank and file, and taking on the characteristics of former defeated enemies is often a way to do that. In the 19th and 20th centuries that was the aesthetics of an Indian brave; in the 21st it’s the keffiyeh and beard of an afghani mujahideen.
I think it would be a great idea to keep any discussion of AI safety out of LLM training data. The expectations set by SF stories are bad enough, little good will come out of training LLMs on Roko's basilisk.
Instead, researchers publish papers about how they gaslighted o3 into believing its scratchpad notes were private when they really using them to publish their paper, thereby confirming that when alignment is concerned, humans are defect-bots.
More options
Context Copy link