domain:cspicenter.com
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6m ago
I think that's overshooting in terms of adjustment.
Being a domain expert is obviously helpful when it comes to using LLMs. Being an expert is helpful for most things. Even Terence Tao benefits from using GPT-5T (and he doesn't even use Pro), so clearly an LLM doesn't have to be as good at maths as Tao in order to still be useful to him.
I think LLMs are very good at medicine, certainly at psychiatry. I suspect they'd be excellent at surgery, though my surgery days are behind me. Medicine simply doesn't require as large a "context window" in the human sense (working memory, conceptualization) as programming or IT work.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
11m ago
I wonder if that would improve or ruin my use of the book as my "read a bit before bed" book, the whiskey might cause me to pass out faster by that ruleset, but the hangover would be killer.
I think any profiler should start from a place of sympathy with their subject, even if it is ultimately a hit piece, the story will hit harder if you start by looking at them as a hero. Even a biography of Stalin or Mao is better if you start by looking at them as on Campbell's Hero's Journey and then show them going off the rails, show them becoming a villain. If you start out hating them, it kind of undermines the story. The closest he gets is the kind of standard shitlib "oh he was kind of sad and pathetic and poor before he joined the army" thing.
Particularly I guffawed when he described Delta Force selection ending with a "40 miles ruck that would turn a normal man's ligaments into gelatin." Which, I'm sure I wouldn't pass half the stuff they have to do there, and I'm sure it would suck, but 40 miles isn't gonna kill you. But the guy just clearly doesn't do anything.
Wohlfe
28m ago
A secondary issue that's been smoldering in the background for sure, my guesses from most to least likely:
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The economy and the job market, even the out of touch boomers are starting to notice prices just keep going up and their grandkids with a fresh college degree can't get a job no matter how many times they tell them to walk in with a firm handshake and a can-do attitude.
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The AI bubble deflating, even if the bet pays off in the end the rate of cash burn is insane at current revenues. I expect it to at least take a major haircut possibly causing a cascading panic pullback when investments slow down and timelines extend.
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Trump rapidly and obviously declines physically/mentally like Biden.
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Republicans do something truly insane like massive election interference or rejecting midterm results if Democrats are making big gains.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
33m ago
cc @dr_analog
The thing which motivated the question was that we were doing iperf tests from one location on our network to others, and observed that there was a significant difference in speed between one stream and 10. With one stream we might see a 200 Mbps speed, but with 10 we might see 400 Mbps. That seemed odd because like I said, you would think a single stream would be faster due to less overhead.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
40m ago
You mean the guys who drive pick up trucks and already destroy the environment with their capitalist spending habits? Guys like those will turn Nevada into even more of a wasteland? Anger! Let the culture war commence!
UnopenedEnvilope
46m ago
I was raised ELCA. My best friend from high school is now an LCMS pastor, and my wife was raised WELS.
I don’t think the ELCA is quite what’s described above. The Lutherans, even the ELCA, at least started from a comparably-confident theology. The ELCA still includes the Book of Concord as one of its guiding texts and creeds. And the ELCA still holds the most stereotypical Lutheran theological belief: real presence (say it with me: “IS MEANS IS!”).
My wife and I are church shopping and are having a heck of a time. We both feel too conservative for liberal churches and too liberal for conservative churches.
One really sad thing is that there are cultural trends not inherently and inseparably wed to any theological difference that shape liberal and conservative Protestant denominations.
Namely, the median conservative Protestant (and not just Lutheran) church uses contemporary worship music that, for us, turns a Sunday into an aesthetic ordeal.
And particularly so having been raised Lutheran. Bach, Handel and Mendelssohn were all devout. Some of Bach’s works are deliberately Protestant in composition, designed to allow his congregation to sing simple lines that combine to create complex harmonies. Per capita, Lutherans are the undisputed champions of worship music.
Which is why the number of acoustic guitars and tambourines found in LCMS churches hurts.
The WELS are one of the rare exceptions, anywhere in American Protestantism, of very conservative churches who still insist upon traditional worship music. It remains as a part of their insularity. Also as they’re not on trend as a conservative Protestant church, their numbers are declining.
Conversely, and even aside from theological disagreements, the depth of theology found in the sermons of ELCA (and other liberal mainline churches) sermons, in the aggregate, is wanting. I agree it is wonderful God sent Christ to die for our sins, and that I should be kind to others. Hearing not too much more than that in almost every sermon doesn’t really help me, as a layman, grow in my faith.
My wife is a hard no on returning to the WELS, as the church she grew up in dealt… less than honestly… with one of her elderly relatives in convincing the latter to make a sizable bequest. She also attended a private WELS school which didn’t prohibit non-WELS children from attending, as this is a big source of revenue for the WELS. A high school classmate and friend of hers who wasn’t WELS died, suddenly, of a heart problem. And her school pulled all its students together to remind them they were not to pray at the subsequent funeral.
The LCMS (and even the smaller LCMC which sits ideologically in between the LCMS and ELCA) churches in our area all make use of drum sets, guitars and keyboards. Plus we both disagree with the LCMS on young-earth creationism.
And our local ELCA churches have followed the national organization’s postmodern, progressive tendencies, and offer shallow, redundant services.
We’ve branched out and are currently, desperately searching for a church among other Protestant denominations, even if it is an outlier in relation to the views of its national organization, that has traditional music and theological depth in its sermons.
We were very impressed by the pastor at a PCA church we visited, but infinitely less-so by the cajón behind him. And, there were no bibles in the pews at this church — some things even if we leave for another denomination, having been both raised Lutheran, we just can’t accept.
The search goes on…
Skulldrinker
51m ago
They may pivot back to blacks if ICE isn’t working though
I have a hard time imagining the whole Black Bodies, People of Color, Black-owned Businesses, Defund the Police thing coming back in full force; we're supposed to be over peak woke. I'd like to believe normies got a little sick of it.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
54m ago
Marxism and the History of Philosophy:
Most people in most places, including intellectuals, have never worked out their basic worldviews, and thus, they flounder without foundations. This is what Marxism has to offer: foundations and meaning.
We have a worldview that is clear, coherent, comprehensive, and credible. We bring a way to think that combines totality with historicity, a way of processing experience that is both integrative and empirical, and a way of synthesizing that is not an abstract unfolding of a mystified idea, but a constant and dynamic interaction with nature and with labor in a material historical process.
We need to show how the system structuring people’s lives, capitalism, is responsible for the terrible injustices of the world, the ecological destruction of the world as well as for the cultural decadence and psychological disorder of the world. We offer not only analysis in understanding the nature of the system generating the most basic problems, but also a solution in a movement to expose this system and to bring about an alternative system, socialism. We offer both meaning and purpose. [emphasis mine]
If this sounds a lot like a religion, then that's because it should. Marxism undoubtedly shares many structural features with traditional religions in its fundamentals.
(I have argued previously that wokeism is not identical with Marxism. The relationship between wokeism and Marxism should be understood as being something like the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. Adherents of the newer religion incorporate the sacred texts of the older religion as their own, but they also make a number of modifications and additions that adherents of the older religion would stridently reject. Nonetheless, the two traditions are united in certain ethical and philosophical commitments that more distant outsiders would find baffling.)
Much ado has been made about the "crisis of meaning" in the contemporary West, and how "we", as a civilization, "need" religion (and how in its absence, people will inevitably seek out substitutes like wokeism). But speaking at this level of generality obscures important and interesting psychological differences between different individuals. Many, perhaps most, people are actually perfectly fine with operating in the absence of meaning. And they can be quite happy this way. They may be dimly aware that "something" is missing or not quite right, but they'll still live docile and functional existences overall. They achieve this by operating at a persistently minimal level of sensitivity towards issues of meaning, value, aesthetics, etc, a sort of "spiritual hibernation".
It is only a certain segment of the population (whose size I will not venture to estimate -- it may be a larger segment than the hibernators, or it may be smaller, I don't know) that really needs to receive a sense of purpose from an authoritative external social source. And this segment of the population has an outsized effect on society as a whole, because these are the people who most zealously sustain mass social movements like Christianity and wokeism.
Finally there are individuals who are seemingly capable of generating a sui generis sense of meaning wholly from within themselves. This is surely the smallest segment of the population, and it's unlikely that you could learn to emulate their mode of existence if you weren't born into it -- but you wouldn't want to anyway. Such individuals are often consumed by powerful manias to the point of self-ruin, or else they become condemned to inaction, paralyzed with fear over not being able to fulfill the momentous duties they have placed upon themselves.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1hr ago
And this is why you have to know at least as much as the LLM to ask it advanced questions. "Good catch! You are absolutely right, you have to clamp the vein or the patient might die. ☠ If you want, I can prepare a step-by-step surgery checklist with detailed instructions."
DirtyWaterHotDog
1hr ago
Are there ascendant political figures to the left of Netanyahu for the country to unify around ? I know new leaders have emerged to the right of Netanyahu, but thought that political space to his left had being choked out after Oct 7th.
I guess there is Yair Lapid, but he struggled to stay in power in the calm before Oct 7. So, I don't have much hope for him.
JarJarJedi
1hr ago
You know why. Because Hamas started the war with Israel on October 7, 2023. Since then those waters are a war zone. There's nothing "humanitarian" in the selfie flotilla though - there is no single thing that they could benefit any humanitarian cause in any way. Of course, they are certain kind of "aid" - but to the Hamas leadership, intent on inflicting damage on Israel, but these people are the furthest thing from a "humanitarian" possible.
DiscourseMagnus
1hr ago
I feel like the political leverage the hostages represented was probably worth a lot more to Hamas than 2000 additional warm bodies. In spite of any Israeli rhetoric to the contrary, I'm pretty sure if the ceasefire breaks down, Israel will no longer be fighting with one arm tied behind their back.
srf0638
1hr ago
the Fort Bragg Cartel
My buddy (who has periodically contemplated trying out for the 19th SFG and could probably hack it) put me on to this. It's entertaining, but if I had to take a drink every time the author delivers what is supposed to be harsh criticism of Delta or ST6 that actually makes them sound absolutely fucking rad, I would have passed out in a state of advanced intoxication a quarter of the way through.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
I don't think this is likely. There's definitely agitating for it, but having those sorts of riots depends on the authorities tolerating them, and if it happens Trump is going to invoke the Insurrection Act and send in the National Guard before the relevant Federal judge even wakes up.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
1hr ago
I think it was just an atavistic reaction, partly to the simple idea of it being the height of wrongness for the God-Emperor to not get what he wants at all times and partly to the "brown foid from a shithole country? Must be a woke commie!" kneejerk assumption.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
You can't have a wrong opinion, that's not how it works. You can only be wrong about facts like 'X is richer than Y', not opinions like 'I don't like X'.
Sorry, once you're using value judgements like "backwards" and supporting them with said opinions, you've already given up that position.
Going on a boat did not create a new people.
It's selection. Certainly the European urge to bureaucratize exists in the US. But it's a lot weaker here because those who came here tended to have less urge to bureaucratize than those who remained in Europe.
roystgnr
1hr ago
I'm not a frequent enough LLM user to say how much of this was solid improvement vs luck, but my experience with free ChatGPT 5 (or any current free model, for that matter) versus paid GPT-5-Thinking was night vs day. In response to a somewhat obscure topology question, the free models all quickly spat out a false example (I'm guessing it was in the dataset as a true example for a different but similar-sounding question), and in the free tier the only difference between the better models and the worse models was that, when I pointed out the error in the example, the better models acknowledged it and gave me a different (but still false) example instead, while the worse models tried to gaslight me. GPT-5-Thinking took minutes to come back with an answer, but when it did the answer was actually correct, and accompanied by a link to a PDF of a paper from the 1980s that proved the answer on like page 6 out of 20.
I followed up with a harder question, and GPT-5-Thinking did something even more surprising to me: after a few minutes, it admitted it didn't know. It offered several suggestions for followup steps to try to figure out the answer, but it didn't hallucinate anything, didn't try to gaslight me about anything, didn't at all waste my time the way I'm used to my time being wasted when an LLM is wrong.
I've gotten used to using LLMs when their output is something that I can't answer quickly myself (else I'd answer it myself) but can verify quickly myself (else I can't trust their answer), but they seem to be on the cusp of being much more powerful than that. In an eschatological sense, maybe there's still some major architectural improvement that's necessary for AGI but still eluding us. But in an economic sense, the hassle I've always had with LLMs is their somewhat low signal-to-noise ratio, and yet there's already so much signal there that all they really have to do to have a winning product is get rid of most of the noise.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1hr ago
Intertia: But mostly, I think the best steelman is that changing the system would have unpredictable effects on the economy. Between two thirds and three quarters of Americans get a tax refund. The average refund (I couldn't find the median where I looked) is around $3,000. This is essentially a forced savings program by the IRS, in which Americans are forced to save a small amount from each paycheck and then given the money back in a lump sum later. This might have systemically important functions at this point which lead to significant switching costs nationally
I am going to reply to this post but I wonder if you people have some misapprehension what it is like in countries with pre-filled forms.
In countries where the tax authority pre-fills your forms, they still have tax refunds if employer withheld too much (and back taxes, if your income changed in other direction). You still get a document that shows how much money the state collected from you and what is your confirmed final tax. You usually get clear instructions when and how you can get credits/deductibles and what to change in your form to claim then.
Only difference that there is no need to pay for a 3rd party software do the latter part.
FtttG
1hr ago
I can definitely envision nationwide anti-ICE protests in the same ballpark as 2020 BLM next year.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
If you want to accept just what Bezos provides you, that's fine, but they're not full-sized grocery stores.
daguerrean
1hr ago
Mass riots over some ICE injustice. In the leadup to George Floyd you could tell the media was agitating for it with Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, it took them about six months of sustained efforts to get the temperature high enough. The media has certainly been trying with ICE, but until somebody gets shot on camera I don’t think they’ll get much traction. They may pivot back to blacks if ICE isn’t working though
sodiummuffin
1hr ago
The "blood boys thing" was just him investing in longevity research companies looking into the thing where mice given blood transfusions from younger mice are seemingly rejuvenated. That got media outlets that hated him running sensationalist titles about him being a vampire and the TV show Silicon Valley taking inspiration from them. I think investing in medical research is good and not an indication of being a serial killer, especially longevity research which seems badly neglected.
Incidentally last I heard there was some research on the subject indicating it also works with saline + 5% albumin instead of young blood, but that's from 2020 and I don't know what the current state of the research is. A quick search finds this 2025 study claiming it's about "diluting age-elevated proteins as the way to re-calibrate systemic proteome to its younger state" but I don't know if that's the mainstream view. I don't know whether any of this is close to applications in humans.
I may have exaggerated slightly. Prior to Covid, the gay marriage referendum was the thing everyone in Ireland was talking about for the first half of 2015 and several months prior. The campaign to legalise abortion via constitutional amendment was likewise a really big deal for several years prior to its successful legalisation in 2018, occupying discussions almost as much as Brexit and Orange Man Bad (Irish people would put "Repeal the 8th" in their Instagram or Tinder bios, and plain black sweaters with the word "REPEAL" emblazoned on them in all caps sold in their tens of thousands). One sometimes gets the impression that progressive politicians and activists in Ireland were victims of their own success: after both gay marriage and abortion were legalised with massive public mandates, they found themselves at a bit of a loss for what to do next, hence their eagerness to lend their support for foreign causes like Ukraine and Gaza. Nebulously-defined "trans rights", nor farcical efforts to portray Black Lives Matter as a movement which has the slightest relevance to Irish politics, don't scratch quite the same itch. The campaign to amend the Irish constitution to remove any reference to "marriage" or "mothers" was a resounding failure, being rejected even by many who consider themselves progressive. Likewise the so-called "hate speech bill", which was never put to a public vote but which was so controversial that it was shelved.
Other than those two, in the linked post, I listed some domestic Irish issues which were the Current Thing in Ireland — but, as a rule, only for the duration of a single news cycle. For a few weeks in January 2022, everyone was talking about the murder of Ashling Murphy, then promptly forgot about it as soon as her killer was arrested, and immediately started talking obsessively about Ukraine for the next twenty months.
Looking back over the past two years, I sincerely cannot think of any domestic Irish event or issue which captured the public's imagination (or had nearly as much staying power) as much as the conflict in Gaza has. There have been literally hundreds of protests against Israel across the country; both our prime minister and President have weighed in on the conflict several times, as have virtually every recently-minted Irish celebrity (and some less recently minted); our government are considering passing a bill which would make it a criminal offense to do business with certain Israeli firms and so on and so forth. The only domestic issues which even came close to this level of omnipresence were a) the ongoing debate about immigration, and by extension the anti-immigration riots in Dublin in November 2023; and b) the civil rape trial against Conor McGregor, which everyone was talking about from the tail end of last year and early this year.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2hr ago
“I will flee like a rat to the suburbs and abandon the civilization my forefathers built because getting rid of homeless psychos and dealing with violent crime seems like too much work”
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My forefathers never lived in those cities. Mostly they lived in rural areas and small towns. Well, some lived in Jersey City for a time, but you'd have a hard time finding its golden age to point to; it was a dump when they lived there too.
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Even if I had a solution to homeless psychos and violent crime, I do not have the power to implement it. I am neither omniscient (to come up with the solution) nor omnipotent and neither is not a valid source of shame.
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There are a lot of people with power who support the homeless psychos and violent criminals.
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Number 2 is true of "the American right" in general. "Red Tribe" / "Blue Tribe" derives from the old rural/urban split. And the left, largely through it's association with minority groups, has pretty much pushed the republicans out of positions of power in the major cities. Every once in a while New York City will elect an authoritarian Republican to sweep away some of the excesses, but they always return to form (and the city council and all other structures remain solidly Democratic). Other cities don't even do that.
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Even if none of this was true and the cities didn't have crime and bums, they still have far too many people in far too little area. There will always be conflicts over the limited resources, and they will always be settled by the politically powerful in favor of their clients. So maybe instead of Ramón and Dante's gangs monopolizing the parks by pure menace and police indifference, it ends up being Ralph and Buffy and their friends who somehow manage to get a city permit for its exclusive use every weekend and all the holidays.
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Rats, who thrive on the discards of human society, are known to prefer urban areas to suburbs.
Indeed, but the quotes in OP are not that far off from what he sounds like in this hour long interview with Ross Douthat. My pattern matching him to the demon possessed Weston from Lewis' novel is more of a rough vibe based thing, rather than a precise analogue, so the claim of similarity should not be taken too seriously. I am just rereading the novels in question and noticing similarities with somebody like Thiel who merges some sort of scientism and techno-optimism with religious or spiritual language. Lewis himself was of course a bit of a luddite (as am I, I must confess), so it should be no surprise that the syncretism between transhumanism and spirituality is evaluated rather negatively.
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