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I didn’t care for Luca much. In general, I think Pixar does best at movies that show “the world within the world”, where there are non-human characters who are related in some way to humans and we see what the “human world” is like from their perspective. Once you notice that pattern, you realize all of Pixar’s best movies fit that pattern.

Toy Story is about toys who have to navigate the world of children playing with them. Monsters inc is about monsters who scare humans, but are deathly afraid of them. Finding Nemo is about fish having to navigate the world of commercial fishing and aquariums. Wall-E is about robots who have to clean up after lazy humans. Inside Out is about internal emotions who have to try and regulate themselves to deal with the problems of their host person. (Not actually the first time Disney developed that concept.)

Luca, Brave, Elio, and Coco are the opposite: about humans exploring the inner world. I find that inherently less interesting. Coco is by far the best out of the bunch I really like; day of the dead has such color as a cultural festival, and the idea of an elderly grandmother with memory issues remembering her father is such a raw and poignant human experience that I’m not sure anyone left the theater with dry eyes. But I liked Elio more than most people seemed to have; I’m considering an effortpost review since it came up.

Soul and Turning Red (never saw that one) I guess are like that, but less about a world and more about a transformation? Not considered Pixar’s best.

There are also the “non-humans as a human allegory,” like Cars, A Bug’s Life, Onward, Elemental. These are, at best, controversial. I think humans need to be in a Pixar movie, but not as the main characters.

I never saw Lightyear, and I think that was their worst ever concept for a film. I hated that they made a 3d Pixar movie as the in-universe buzz lightyear movie; I prefer the original 2d galactic command TV show. Toy advertisement media is far more silly and zany than a Pixar film.

In general, Pixar is at their best when we get to imagine non-humans “inside” our world and what they might think of us. If I were an exec, I would be demanding that creatives pitch more of those ideas.

Also, given the falls he survives in 3 and 4, it seems that the bulletproof-ness applies to all impact. I was actually reminded somewhat of the Die Hard franchise, where John McClane went from a competent off-duty cop barely making it out of his depth in 1 to a Marvel superhero taking down a fighter jet with a Mack truck followed by surviving sliding down a crumbling bridge in 4. Hollywood might have somewhat of an issue with making everything bigger and more over-the-top with sequels.

I quite vividly remember someone posting a comment about there being a siren and someone else saying "can't find any news confirming it" and not piping in with "it's me, I'm the news, posting from the spotty internet in the bomb shelter". And then it became just increasingly not the right moment for it (also I was quite sleep deprived and dealing with lots of other more immediate concerns).

Those posts from the shelter would probably have been awesome, actually, though I completely understand you having other concerns that were far higher priorities at a moment like that.

Now if you feel that I've been unfairly dismissive, antagonistic, or uncharitable in my response towards you then perhapse then you might begin to grasp why i hate the whole "bUt HuMaNs ArE FaLaBlE ToO UwU" argument with such a passion. Im not claiming that LLMs are unreliable because they are "less than perfect" i am claiming that they are unreliable because they are not only unreliable, but unreliable by design.

I don't understand why anyone would hate that argument. Humans are also unreliable... not by design, perhaps, but intrinsically due to the realities of biology. The point of the argument is that, even though humans are intrinsically and inescapably unreliable, we still manage to make reliable systems based around relying on them, and as such, the intrinsic, inescapable unreliability of LLMs doesn't make them incapable of being used as the basis of unreliable systems.

There are good arguments to be made against this. It's possible that we can't get LLMs' unreliability to be lower than humans at the same cost. It's possible that even if that were possible, the nature of the unreliability of LLMs will always remain less predictable than that of humans, in such a way as to make making reliable systems based on them impossible. The fact that LLMs can't be shamed or punished based on failing in their reliability could be a fatal flaw for creating reliable systems based on them. And there are probably a myriad of other better reasons I haven't even thought of.

But I'd like to actually see those arguments actually being made. Maybe that video you say you linked makes them, but I'm one of the users of a text-based forum like this who don't have either interest or ability to view long-form videos during normal usage of this forum.

Let's try a concrete example. Excerpted from here:

The o1 model identified the exact or very close diagnosis (Bond scores of 4-5) in 65.8% of cases during the initial ER Triage, 69.6% during the ER physician encounter, and 79.7% at the ICU

65.8% accuracy isn't that great, but buddy, have you seen humans?

—surpassing the two physicians (54.4%, 60.8%, 75.9% for Physician 1; 48.1%, 50.6%, 68.4% for Physician 2) at each stage.

The state of the art for generating accurate medical diagnoses doesn't involve gathering the brightest highschoolers, giving them another decade(-ish) of formal education, then more clinical experience before asking for their opinions. It involves training an LLM.

You did not say "no", as such i find it disingenuous of you to suddenly back-pedal and claim to care about reliability after the the fact.

Buddy, have you seen humans?

Humans are unreliable. You are a human are you not? You have not given any indication that you care about accuracy or reliability and instead (by chosing to use the trick calculator over doing the math yourself) have strongly implied that you do not care about such things.

Now if you feel that I've been unfairly dismissive, antagonistic, or uncharitable in my response towards you then perhapse then you might begin to grasp why i hate the whole "bUt HuMaNs ArE FaLaBlE ToO UwU" argument with such a passion. Im not claiming that LLMs are unreliable because they are "less than perfect" i am claiming that they are unreliable because they are not only unreliable, but unreliable by design. I know its long but seriously watch the video essay on Badness = 0 I posted up thread. It is highly relevant to this conversation.

I would be very interested to read that if you ever do a write up.

Fixed the link.

It's this one.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=NDWKRFSZlCM&t=64

This scene in the Mario Movie has NO REASON TO EXIST, they don't resolve anything, it lasts less than 2 minutes, there's no real danger, and they just solve the problem without even thinking about it, and get back to the storyline. Literally the next scene leads into the final showdown.

The whole movie feels like this.

When you moderated a forum, what did you do about posters who threatened to leave and take their valuable perspectives with them if they didn't get their way?

(I promise that thought came to mind before I realized it would come off as accusing you of doing so. I can say I hope you're not.)

You see, moderators do not have the power to keep members in a community: they can only ban/punish or not. Members have their right to decide to stay or go. And here, many left-wing posters have left not with a permaban but with a flounce: a public door-slam denouncing the moderators, and/or the posters, and/or whomever, for tolerating the wrong kinds of people too much and the right kinds of people not enough.

Or they just didn't make the jumps: there are still plenty of well-known left-wing posters from the /r/slatestarcodex Culture War Roundup days still seeming to post their same views under the new "no culture war" regime. (Speaking of which, it occurs to me this community has twice been sent off into exile, both times on account of outside demands/threats over too much right-wing activity.)

But what do you do about flouncers? The most obvious solution is to give them what they want: give them special treatment, "affirmative action for left-wingers," as Scott did on SlateStarCodex. You can do that, but, in this case, affirmative action doesn't prove effective at healing underlying divisions. The majority ends up rankled and chilly towards the officially-favored minority, it seems.

Offhand, I don't have any other policy proposal options based on the history of the Scott-sphere. Now, I thought about asking about your experience handling intractable disagreements, not as a forum moderator, but as an Israeli, but that seems like it could get really pessimistic really quickly, so maybe we shouldn't get into that.

Thats the one addition I simply cannot defend. If he can tuck his head behind the suit and be instantly bulletproof (regardless of the weapons being used against him) then whats the risk?

They used to rewrite movies until the execs thought they were good. Maybe they didn't have to do that to make money and that's why they stopped or maybe the execs that did that were replaced and the newer execs don't because they don't care or it's become harder to do something like rewriting a movie four or five times until you get something that you think is right like Gladiator. But it used to be a pretty common thing, Tom Stoppard would punch up all the dialogue in The Last Crusade or Aaron Sorkin for the Rock/Enemy of the State but I don't here about script doctors anymore and not really about things like Gladiator where they just couldn't stop rewriting it. I don't hear about studio meddling anymore, do you?

I look at things like Smile today (many days ago, I guess) and I can see that the execs knew they had a hit there with the idea alone. They got a really fancy production team on board, they got Cristobal Tapia De Veer for the music, They got decent to good actors, they marketed the shit out of it but they didn't try to fix the CW-level plot that existed in the middle for some reason. Maybe the execs that were artists themselves and could see what made something good or not are gone and now we're left with people who can only see what makes money because the two things are so far apart now. There's nobody like Roger Corman looking at your movie and telling you its shit because it doesn't have enough explosions and then shrugging and giving you carte blanche to go out and shoot the movie again with more explosions. But everyone's an auteur. There's some kind of allegory or symbolism. Can you imagine someone trying to fix the extra hour that exists in the Substance for some reason nowadays? They'd get quiet cancelled or something like that like that for "being a piece of shit."

But I suspect the main reason is that it makes no difference. Maybe it did at one point but there's no reason to try to fix Love and Thunder when it will probably piss Taika off and all the people who have to come for reshoots and you won't make any more money. Who'd want to take charge of something like that anyway? Joss Whedon was basically cancelled for dealing with the people on the Justice League reshoot and trying to get a black person to say lines in the script.

Though it's also clear that there are many major executive decisions at studios to not make things good. You can look at Amazon or Netflix, they didn't try to get good writers or even lovers of the material they were making for The Witcher or Wheel of Time. Why would Disney continue to employ Russel T. Davies to take a massive shit on Doctor Who again? Maybe its cheaper but Russel T. Davies is probably more expensive than the CW also-rans that seem to be able to get their hands on best-selling book franchises, so I expect there's a lot of cronyism or simply just lack of any understanding or care about the things they're making because known IPs don't have to be good they just have to exist so give The Witcher to that girl that wrote a few episodes of Riverdale or let's reboot Buffy with someone that wrote an episode of Poker Face. If it fails who cares we made some money and we can just reboot it again later.

Elite human capital is pretty clearly code for Bush era democrats with moderately libertarian economics. They're very concerned about increasing religious right influence(lol, LMAO even), and think constantly sounding the bugle on it is a necessity. They support gays but not trans, may have some skepticism of- but mostly a vague idea about- US foreign policy. They're very pro-abortion, very concerned about conspiracy theories. Compared to current day progressives they don't seem to care much about drugs or criminal justice much, they might even be (moderately)conservative on the issue, it's hard to tell.

Edit to add: the title of the movie was pretty awful as well. Like who (or what) the hell is “Elio”? It gives you absolutely nothing to work with, nothing about space or aliens or anything. So matching that up with the bland art and the minimal marketing gives no hook at all to actually want to go out and see it.

I don't necessarily think that was a problem, considering how well liked Coco is, but Coco has a much better hook. There are school field trips to see live musical performances inspired by Coco, for instance, which they organize around Day of the Dead.

Luca was at least very summery, and came out when the art style was a bit fresher. I thought it was cute, and my four year old liked it a lot.

My jalapeno and cheese sausage turned out well; I'm probably going to try my hand at andouille if I can bag a hog this year. It's probably my last batch before deer season opens in the fall.

Apply the same low bar consistently. Let people have an actual conversation with actual disagreement.

I am not aware of any banned person who was trying to have an actual conversation with actual disagreement. People mainly get banned for being obvious bad faith trolls who are just here to deliver drive-by insults and then vanish without making any arguments for their position.

Sure, there are some people who do that and don't get banned, but that's not quite the same thing, is it? I don't think it's so terrible to err on the side of giving people the benefit of the doubt. There are few enough posts here that tolerating a few more won't take away attention from anyone more deserving.

And for the record, I would be willing to bet that >75% of this forum is non-antisemetic (is there a word for that?) and a commanding majority support Israel over its various Muslim rivals. There are a few antisemites lurking about darkly Implying Things, but much like the leftists they tend to scurry away when you shine a spotlight on them rather than actually stand and fight.

It is not a consensus opinion that smothers dissent, it's the opposite. It's an embattled minority opinion that no one is willing to stand up and openly defend. You don't have to tiptoe around anything.

Here, watch: I think antisemetism is stupid. Much like a primitive savage who thinks thunder is caused by an angry god, antisemites anthropomorphize the impersonal forces of politics and economics. When confronted with a phenomenon they don't understand, they assume it must be caused by a cabal of scheming humans. They do this because they're superstitious idiots. They're also poo-poo heads.

I've called you out, antisemites of the Motte! I've called you all poo-poo heads! Show me how fearsome and numerous you are! Dogpile me into oblivion!

This is why the whole Elite Human Capital thing has already flashed in the pan and gone as a memetic trend. There's no register used by its proponents other than shallow antagonism towards broad swathes of (usually caricatured) outgroupers. Beyond Hanania's mild advocacy of orthodox liberal/libertarian economics, it's incredibly rare to find any positive platform whatsoever buried in all the mud-slinging - as shown on this forum by the complete confusion of many posters as to what positive ideas you actually believe. Out of politeness, I'll refrain from speculating on the psychological motives or personality types involved. But I suspect there just isn't any positive platform because, when people are motivated by one, they're usually excited to win others over, to learn how to convert with argument and rhetoric. If that's what you're trying to do, rather than sling insults because they feel good, then I suggest revising your approach.

On the other hand, if you're looking to antagonize people, here is a guide on how to do it while being as polite as possible.

A little bit, but I doubt it's very significant. Granted, I don't know much about the comics, but from what little exposure I have to Superman, I've never seen any reason to think that the way Superman behaves as a journalist is particularly Jewish. If an Irish-American guy wrote a story about a space alien who comes to Boston and becomes a cop, I wouldn't view the cop as particularly Irish-coded unless he did, well, Irish-y things as a cop. But like I said, I don't know much about the comics, so I could be missing something.

Then you are poor at evaluating evidence or unable to look past your biases. I assert confidently and objectively that you are wrong.

Okay, so why don't studios make movies for less? We know fully well it is possible; Super Mario Bros and Oppenheimer were both made on a budget of $100 million, and both did great at the box office ($1.361 billion and $975.8 million, respectively).

Why are the budgets so out of control? What possessed Disney to invest $250 million on Snow White, or Warner Bros to drop $200 million on Joker 2?

That's fair, o3 has a conversational style that is rather unique, even when considering other SOTA reasoning models. It's like a bright zoomer intern with ADHD who will try just about anything.

if you’re not a domain-specific expert

I would hope that a doctor using o3 would be able to parse the jargon! If not, they have bigger issues than merely using an LLM. 4o might be more conversational, but for knotty problems, I'd rather use o3 itself to explain arcane terminology or have another model break it down for me.

Epstein very likely killed himself in a physical sense, but there's a non-zero chance he was coerced/blackmailed/bribed into doing this

One would think that if they went to all the effort of making him commit suicide instead of just murdering him, they would have made the scene of the suicide less suspicious.

Screenwriting is a specific skill on which the screenwriter's guild has a monopoly. My guess is this'll get disrupted by AI eventually(remember that I am on record as thinking AI will have relatively minimal impacts to the economy), but that skill is mostly about formatting. Except these people refuse to acknowledge that they aren't creative professionals and have a monopolistic guild backing them up, so they can wreck filmography trying to 'express themselves'.

Revolt of the woke embarrassed elites, sure, but I don't think the proximal cause is shoving too much gayness in.

I agree with this take.

In my experience, the people who are really worried about decaying former company towns are also worried about places like Detroit, which used to have a higher proportion of functional, employed black men with families (they say, I'd be open to an argument that this is a myth I suppose).

The people who are really worried about good New York schools crowding out white and Asian kids in favor of racial quotas because of disparate impact are different people, much more likely to go on about "HBD," but they're probably just as upset about being yelled at on the subway by black, white, or hispanic druggies. I think these are the ones who are tired of trying to solve the druggies' problems for them, and would like them to be locked up or denied expensive, repeated medical care, and would be completely unsurprised at the stats about their average demographics.

I moderated a forum once.

Like many forums it struggled with one of the basic problems of forum moderation — how much niceness do you enforce, which I'll explain by way of some endemic user types in any forum with enough people and anything but the most milquetoast topic.

A: Here's the troll who comes by only to post egregiously offensive "go kill yourself [list of slurs]",

B: Here's the more subtle troll, who keeps toeing the line as much as he can get away with.

C: here's the user who is not a troll. They actually do participate in discussion and are clearly trying to be a part of the community. They're also abrasive and/or obnoxious and/or inflammatory.

D: And then here's the final type of user that's problematic as a mod: They're a sensitive snowflake. Honestly they need to be sub-divided further, because some of them are just born snowflakes that can't handle any opposition to their viewpoint at all, and others are retaliatory snowflakes, because if I got a ban for three days for saying this opinion is dumb then that guy also needs to get a ban for three days for saying this other opinion is dumb.

The forum was one that was trying really hard to be heterogenous in terms of opinions and also to be nice and moderating it was a nightmare, not because of the obvious ban on sight trolls but because inevitably when you want to moderate niceness now 90% of your mod time — and the mod time becomes a balloon that expands to fill all available space — is spent on dealing with constant playground supervision of the snowflakes. Also you've been slowly but steadily banning your type C members when they eventually accrue enough complains from the type Ds, and because they're really annoying you initially don't miss them until you realize that conversation in your forum is drying up a bit and also some of the valuable forum members who were friends with type Cs also got pissed off and left and also mixed into the type Cs and their friends were, inevitably, some of the more useful members of the forum who knew a lot (and hence got into arguments that annoyed snowflakes).

Also it turns out snowflakes are basically never satisfied as long and are just a self eating death spiral of a forum culture.


After my experience moderating that forum and swearing off moderating ever again, I ended up lurking the notorious kiwifarms. It was full of people who engaged in what would definitely be termed elsewhere as hate speech against me. Now, I never actually made an account there, and I also stopped visiting a few years back so idk if things have changed, but at the time I remember being struck by how much less of a threat I felt reading kiwifarms, because yeah slurs were being thrown around but users were actually arguing, you didn't just have someone with the viewpoint that was the forum consensus and then everyone else against that consensus gets to tiptoe around what they can say or get banned. Everyone shared their most idiotic opinions and had other people arguing with them no holds barred, the forum also had reaction emojis so you could freely post your insane conspiracy theory but wou would get 50 "lol look at this insane conspiracy theory" reactions.


I remember a few years ago people were still making fun of t*kt*kers and how they would asterisk everything or use idiotic word substitution like "krill myself" because otherwise they'd get blackholed by the TikTok algorithm.

Meanwhile I took a long long break from reddit and only recently returned, to a forum dedicated to a game I play, and discovered that in the interim reddit has added some kind of probably AI based site-wide moderation against violent language (or actual human beings are being this dumb idk) and it's impossible to talk like a normal person there anymore, because if you say, in a joking and friendly fashion perfectly understood by you and the person you are talking to to be friendly, "you said my build was bad, I'm gonna have to shove you off a cliff" (this example is not great because I forget the actual exchange, but whatever, fill in something more normal) then you get banned from all of Reddit and the poor guy you were talking with gets to post your exit speech from the discord you're both in as well. It does appear to be a strike system where first you get warned, since I got my first warning for telling someone who posted about a pedophile moving into their neighborhood that hopefully the pedophile would die suddenly.

It's hard not to turn this into some kind of doompost about how the internet is turning into a horrible little hellhole where no one has a normal argument anymore just constant barricading themselves into their own opinions lest they be offended by the not niceness of having to hear someone else's opinions, each little forum and its own narrow band of acceptable ideology, all while the biggest social media sites are enforcing the most transparently fake bullshit kindergarten language upon us all. It brings out the free speech absolutist instincts in me, it really does.


But what if you don't want an aggressively anti-censorship forum that will involve a forum culture of calling everyone slurs? You want the veneer of respectability and gentility but also the ability to have an actual conversation?

Well I already listed the shitty experience I had trying to moderate such a forum, against what was not bad faith actors but just human actors acting predictably human hence this being a pattern you can see all over the place, and now I have to address the flip side of the coin.


Let's by analogy discuss locker room culture. I don't actually know if locker room culture is a real thing irl so I'm going to discuss hypothetical locker room culture.

It's a group of like fifteen guys in a guy's only space. They're basically all normal guys, plus rapey Kenneth and edgy Doug. Sometimes rapey Kenneth makes a joke about how some girl in the school really needs to be fucked into her proper place in society and Doug will make some follow up joke and everyone else is maybe thinking "c'mon man can we not do this" if it's been like too many times that day but usually you're just trying to finish getting dressed and maybe John also is like "that's not cool man" and pushes back. But like, the rest of the time the atmosphere is just a comfy men's only space plus the occasional rape joke or comment about how women suck or are all gold-diggers or are responsible for everything wrong with society.

Anyway, if for whatever reason that locker room decided it wanted to actually be a co-ed discussion space instead, it would have a little problem, which is that any individual woman walking in would get the vibe — they're the barely tolerated outsider — and then leave unless they're like extra autistic/socially challenged.

Because there's just the microculture of what kinds of things are ok to say there and what aren't, and sometimes what's ok to say is anything negative about group A and what's not ok to say is anything negative about group B, and it's not really about an active policy one way or another it's just this is the overall culture of the social group, read the room and get out.


This is, unfortunately, the part where I admit that I've spent weeks now debating if I should just quietly show myself the door. I didn't mean to enter themotte under false premises, I just decided my first post wouldn't be some "here's all my labels and opinions" and would be an actual post about a controversial topic I wanted to talk about. And then before I had the chance to like, casually drop the relevant information about me and get it over with (I despise sharing personally identifiable information online, but it was nonetheless something that needed to happen eventually if I wanted to talk about any number of topics I wanted to discuss), my government did a surprise attack on Iran. I quite vividly remember someone posting a comment about there being a siren and someone else saying "can't find any news confirming it" and not piping in with "it's me, I'm the news, posting from the spotty internet in the bomb shelter". And then it became just increasingly not the right moment for it (also I was quite sleep deprived and dealing with lots of other more immediate concerns).

And in the meantime I got to have the uncomfortable sensation of listening in on conversations I felt were very obviously not meant to include me. For several days now I've been debating doing a rip the band-aid off kind of post (how? What framing?) to get it over with and be able to discuss things again or to just... Leave.

Because of course the alternative is to figure out the correct, respectful way to tiptoe around the conversation over whether Jews control the American government/assassinated Kennedy, since we aren't doing kiwifarms style dialogue where someone talks about the kikes ruining everything and someone else responds by calling him a retarded autist, you've got to politely request sources and carefully have respectful mutually productive dialogue.

Or to just like ignore that the conversation is even happening? Stick to discussion of feminism and essentially continue faking being a normal non-Jewish mottizen...


Polite respectful mutual dialogue.

But only for some opinions, because others are an "immense pain in the ass".

Yes this is the actual reason I ended up writing this comment instead of continuing to waffle over if I should just leave. Because it is actually really annoying, if I need to play nice with the neonazis and have polite and measured conversations — I am willing to do this, even though conversations with people who are (only theoretically!) interested in me and my family being dead are a "pain in the ass" to conduct civilly — and to then see someone else express some opinion that is more objectionable to the baseline motte culture, but expressed according to all the rules of the site, and get banned (temporarily) for it. Because it just means setting the lines around what kinds of people are in the locker room, which is pretending to be a co-ed discussion space, but isn't. And yes I'm biased by being more inclined towards free speech over banning and thinking that it's better to have the opinions and talk it out then constantly police what people say, sure, but if the forum can tolerate holocaust denial I think it can also stretch itself to tolerate libtards. I'm not interesting in doing some tit for tat thing where I'm like "well if you banned them for this, why didn't you ban that other person for that" because like I stated up front that's just the path to a death spiral where almost no one interesting sticks around. But still, come on, you didn't ban them for constantly sticking their conspiracy theories into every discussion couched as consensus building obvious fact. Apply the same low bar consistently. Let people have an actual conversation with actual disagreement.

With significantly older generations it was common to go into the military for a couple of years either due to the draft or get your draft obligation out of the way. Then they'd try to be a real novelist. After failing at that they'd go into screenwriting. Those people are all long retired.

I've got an idea swirling around in my head about how the draft is necessary(not sufficient) for a free, western society, in a way that goes back to the beginning of time. I think mass culture is just one expression thereof.