domain:nfinf.substack.com
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
1d ago
Trump Falls in Love with Me, a White House Janitor
Truly the humble H-doujin is the ultimate artform, primal neuron activation captured and distilled into pure animal spikes of dopamine. Perfect in its simplicity, universal in its application. Through dick, unity.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
Sounds like they should build higher capacity transit like LRTs to places people would like to travel, and also further encourage mixed use and commerical construction around the new housing so people can easily access their needs in a way that doesn't generate significant additional traffic?
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
You can always ask followup questions, demand citations, or chase those up yourself.
Riddle me this: Why the fuck would I want to deal with an entity which requires me to do that and never learns enough so I won't have to anymore?
It's like being saddled with a particularly annoying intern for no reason at all.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
What possible horrible side effects do you anticipate from building more places to live so they're cheaper and people have more choice and can move around more easily to places that suit their specific needs?
Imaginary_Knowledge
1d ago
So what? Then we just go Robert Moses on the areas with traffic restrictions.
Mihow
Lipstick on a guitar
1d ago
Lots of older films are just vibes and this is often missing in newer flicks.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood feels similar, tho totally different.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
one in seven or so Americans would entertain the possibility that a human being living today could be the antichrist
This is so insane
Explains so much about contemporary western society though
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
"Let me Google that for you" wasn't always an invalid response. Very many questions that people can/do ask are trivially solved by a Google search.
LLMs are far more powerful than Google (until Google Search began using a dumb LLM). The breadth of queries they can reliably answer is enormous.
If I trusted an AI to give me a good answer I would just ask it, I don't need someone else to remind me that it exists.
The specific question you asked your boss is in their capabilities! I checked! I can share the conversation if you want.
I ask a lot of hard questions. They are correct probably >95% of the time, and errors are usually of the omission/neglect type than falsity.
My point is that you aren't trusting LLMs enough. You don't, and shouldn't, take them as oracles and arbiters of truth, but they're good. Your boss is directionally correct, and will be increasingly so in the future. Especially so for conceptual, technical questions that don't depend heavily on your workplace and tacit knowledge (though they can ingest and make use of the context if you tell them).
If you asked most of your questions using an LLM, you will usually receive good answers. If the answers seem incomplete or unhelpful and there's an aspect you believe that only your boss can answer, then by all means ask him. But in all likelihood, that approach will save both you and him time.
On a practical note, I really hope either you or your boss pay for or have used the very best LLMs out today. GPT-5T is incredibly smart, and so is Gemini 2.5 Pro or Sonnet 4.5. They are very meaningfully better than the default experience of a free user, especially on ChatGPT. 90% of the disappointment going from 4o to 5 was because users were (by what might well be called a dark pattern) using basic bitch 5 instead of 5 Thinking. If your boss is using free Grok, it's not the worst, but he could do better.
And coding/IT is a very strong suit. To be fair, so is medicine, but I have had great results on most topics under the sun. If I had need for research grade maths or physics, they're still useful!
I am more than happy to field what you think is the hardest programming query you can come up with through 5T, ideally one that free ChatGPT can't handle. You have to push their limits to know them, and these days I can barely manage that with my normal requirements.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1d ago
Your argument hinges on a rigid set of stereotypes - a sincere believer must be a rural fundamentalist, and a tech billionaire must be a secular rationalist. But in the big tent you don't have the luxury of enforcing ideological conformity.
It doesn't matter if Thiel believes in the Antichrist the same way I do, or as strongly as I do or as literally as I do, what matters is that I know what he means and those who don't can easily find out. This series of lectures basically says 'there is something wrong with the world, and I think we should call that wrong thing the Antichrist, and here's why.'
This works well as a cultural touchstone for red tribe for several reasons - a) historical precedence - Christianity has long been at home in the red tribe. At the same time, Thiel is a student of Rene Girard, who used the Antichrist to refer to the secular perversion of Christian ideals leading to mimetic crisis and the failure of scapegoating mechanisms, bringing chaos marketed as order. I assume Thiel is using the term with that intellectual framework in mind, making it both a populist shibboleth and a high-concept philosophical argument, meaning it b) both uses and reinforces the current resurgence of Christianity in the red tribe by embracing a low status red tribe marker (distinguishing Thiel from the typical conception of the billionaire) and legitimising it amongst tech bro types (who have always been susceptible to esoteric and fantastical mythologies aesthetically) and also c) it upsets people who don't get the shibboleths, who, because they don't get the shibboleths, are forced to interpret it through their typical understanding of the world where it just sounds insane.
TIRM
1d ago
23% of the total units, dedicated to low-income households
I live in a nice area specifically to get away from "low income households". This is such a poison pill.
HereAndGone
1d ago
If it turns out that souls and angels and demons are real, then physicists will publish articles constraining the relevant parameters of archangel Gabriel in short order.
And the theologians will go "Hi, glad to see you, and it only took you eight centuries to catch up with us!" 😁
HereAndGone
1d ago
Yeah, ELCA is the most liberal, LCMS is more conservative than that, and WELS is the most conservative, right?
If he's German-American I could see some variety of Lutheran background and of course even a liberal Lutheran probably isn't all that fond of the papacy. Still makes me laugh that he's warning Vance off; seems like the new Pope should be warned off Vance ("Careful, your Holiness, your predecessor died the day after meeting him!") 🤣
Wikipedia isn't very helpful, German Evangelicalism is probably different from the American version:
"Thiel is a self-described Christian and a promoter of René Girard's Christian anthropology. He grew up in an evangelical household but, as of 2011, described his religious beliefs as "somewhat heterodox".
This could be his parents' background:
The Evangelical Church in Germany is a federation of twenty Lutheran, Reformed, and United Protestant regional Churches in Germany, collectively encompassing the vast majority of the country's Protestants. It calls itself the Protestant Church in Germany in English. In 2024, the EKD had a membership of 17,979,849 members, or 21.5% of the German population. It constitutes one of the largest Protestant bodies in the world. Church offices managing the federation are located in Herrenhausen, Hanover, Lower Saxony. Many of its members consider themselves Lutherans."
Or they could be Evangelical in the American sense:
Despite their many similarities, evangelicals are not a homogenous group. In the German-speaking world, they can be roughly divided into three main denominations:
- Confessing Evangelicals, who value the authority of traditional church confessions , are found in conservative circles within regional churches, for example, in the No Other Gospel confessional movement and the Conference of Confessing Communities .
- The charismatic evangelicals, mainly in charismatic circles of the regional churches and in the congregations of the Pentecostal movement .
- The Evangelicals in the Pietistic tradition, mainly in the Pietism of the regional churches, in traditional free churches and in the Mennonite Brethren congregations , which were often founded by Russian-German emigrants .
He was born in Hesse, so his family could be these:
Open Evangelicals or Neo-Evangelicals: This movement takes a distanced stance towards biblical criticism but is willing to accept certain of its findings. It is found particularly among evangelicals in the regional churches. This largely includes regional church Pietism with its regional focuses in Baden-Württemberg , Hesse and Saxony and the Protestant Community Movement and its educational institutions such as the Albrecht Bengel House , the Evangelical Tabor University in Marburg, the Liebenzell International University in Bad Liebenzell , the Johanneum or the Paulinum . In the free churches they are particularly represented among the Old Lutherans such as the Independent Evangelical Lutheran Church , among the Mennonites and Methodists , although there are also "non-evangelical" Christians among these, and in the more liberal wings of other free churches.
Since we don't know, it's difficult to speculate about his childhood religious influences. Possibly Pietist-influenced Lutherans?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
It's just not as convenient. I live in a shared apartment, so I can't really blast the (surprisingly decent) speakers. But I genuinely prefer watching things on my phone, for everything from movies to pirated anime to TV shows and YouTube.
The TV has never been used as a dumb or smart "TV". It's a monitor in use, hooked up to my pc. I would need to buy a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard to actually control anything from my bed, which is the only comfy place for a movie. I really don't care to get a portable HDD or use the in-built streaming apps, which is what I'd need for the old-fashioned experience. Poor thing hasn't even been hooked up to the wifi.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
As I have lamented before, I barely play video games these days. I've gone entire weeks without touching my setup. With important exams coming up, I suppose that's for the best.
I am quite happy with my choice (in terms of monitor) with a few caveats:
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4k is demanding, even on a 5080. Quite a few games struggle to hit >70 fps, or require the use of upscaling which isn't always artifact free. Better optimized titles sing. I'm not CPU bottlenecked, I have a 9800x3d. This is mostly down to devs being bad at their jobs.
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This means I'm occasionally regretting not getting a QHD monitor instead, I don't care how unoptimized a AAA title is, my rig can handle that. I wouldn't actually make that trade, a QHD OLDED monitor would likely have been much smaller and more expensive than the TV.
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My bedroom is a bit cramped. I have to use that TV up close and personal. I'm mostly used to it, but this isn't the best from an ergonomic standpoint. If you're willing or able to use it from further away, it's a non-issue. If I was playing something like Forza, I could just kick back in bed with my controller.
Honestly, for that price? I couldn't have done better. It was this one:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DK46PM7T
It's currently out of stock, but I got it for £498, which is still cheaper than most QHD or 4k OLED gaming monitors! It's a fucking travesty. I tried looking for similar options for you, but everything is way more expensive, I'm lucky to have caught that sale.
For productivity purposes, it's pretty solid. A screen that big has a lot of real estate. I just don't use it for that purpose more than once in a blue moon.
Under Saddam it had less Iranian influence, and it wouldn't have suffered somewhere between a half million and a million unnecessary deaths and a commensurate amount of permanently handicapped.
Why not? Are we supposed to assume that the Americans were the predominant factor of the Arab Spring, and that no such equivalent could or would have happened absent the US invasion of Iraq?
The reason Iraq had less Iranian influence circa 2000 under Saddam was because Iran under Saddam was a roughly 1/3rd Sunni religious minority suppression state artificially holding down the 2/3rd Shia majority. That 1/3rd is a larger fraction than the Syrian state, which was roughly 3/4th Sunni and 1/4th everything else, but it was still a distinct religious minority with deep, deep sectarian grievances that were not only perpetuated, but grown, by the dictatorship's sectarian tendencies and subversion of civil society dynamics that might have created a bond. We know what was liable to happen when the suppression apparatus faltered, which is to say sectarian revenge, and we know this was liable to happen both if the state was compromised by an external invasion (US invasion of Iraq), or by a popular uprising supported by neighbors (Syrian civil war).
Saddam's Iraq was a country surrounded by neighbors who would happily have fueled a Syrian-scale-plus civil war if Saddam faced an Arab Spring-esque Shia uprising. This includes many of the the real-history states who supported the civil war that followed the American invasion, including- or especially- Iran. As much as Americans like to think they dominate other people's considerations, Iran's proxy-and-WMD pursuit up to 2003 were always first and foremost for use against Iraq, and the Iranian Revolutionaries long saw themselves as the eventual liberators / protectors of the regional Shia. Nor would many of Iraq's neighbors- who saw Iraq as a main security threat- have hesitated to drag it down a peg and build their own influence.
Unless you posit that Iran and Iraq, two arch-enemies who not only aimed but used WMD programs against eachother, were on the outbreak of a kumbiyah moment had the US not invaded Iraq, Iraq was a tender box primed for a half million (or far more) casualties if / when the Saddam regime hit a popular uprising. Iran had been preparing to support Shia groups for decades, and would not have stood by quietly.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
1d ago
I own a goddamn OLED 4k HDR high refresh rate TV
Wait but why don't you use this
I also watch movies/TV on my phone when I'm anywhere that isn't my home (bus, airbnb without smart TV, driving to grocery store, whatever) but when I'm home the TV blows the phone out of the water. My girlfriend watches stuff on the iPad beside the TV and it makes me slightly crazy.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
You can reduce the number/duration of total car trips if you manage to densify the other infrastructure too: if your towering apartments are walking distance (within a block or two?) of the grocery store, bar, gym, or employer. Probably not to zero, but it'd help.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
That has happened a few times, but has not yet deterred him. He does generally accompany his "I asked $model and it says" statements with an acknowledgement that one needs to check because it might be hallucinating, but so far it hasn't really changed his habit to always ask AI first on every single topic.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Yes, I won't tell you not to have Jose from the home depot parking lot/Oaxaca put a fart fan in your bathroom instead of having an HVAC company subcontract an electrician, roofer, and a drywall contractor. But for a major job there is a reason you want a licensed contractor. If you have drainage problems or need an entire HVAC system replaced or you need a new circuit on your panel and you aren't comfortable with DIY you need somebody with experience in that particular trade.
Jose can replace a p-trap. I'm not saying every job that requires a license needs to require a license. But licenses exist for a reason.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
It's certainly true that human output can be incorrect. But it's incorrect at a much lower rate than an LLM is, assuming you ask a human who knows the topic. But that aside, it seems to me like "have you asked AI" is the 2025 equivalent of "let me Google that for you", and is just as annoying as that was. If I trusted an AI to give me a good answer I would just ask it, I don't need someone else to remind me that it exists.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
If you're driving to avoid a 10 minute walk, it better be December in Minnesota.
Or August in Texas.
So I've probably been "your boss" to someone a couple of times. There are essentially three stages:
- LLMs don't really work
- LLMs work amazingly; you should use them for everything
- I've outsourced too much of my creative thought and problem-solving to LLMs, and need to come up with my own answer first before asking it anything.
In October 2025, most people should be on step 2 or 3. If you have a ton of coworkers on Step 1, your boss has a responsibility to model being on step 2.
You can perhaps get him to lay off of you, individually, by explaining you're on step 3. The people who remain on step 1 are being stupid and inefficient. I lost patience with the people who come to me with questions I can obtain in seconds a long time ago. The ones on step 2 are being one-shotted and need to get a grip.
Another tactic is that when you're sending people AI-generated content and only asking if they've asked AI instead of answering it, you're implicitly not respecting their time. If someone is communicating to you from human-to-human and you're dismissing their question or putting an LLM between you, it's a sign of disdain.
Ironically, I'm dealing with LLMs being integrated into our career management platform and having the same problem in reverse. My subordinates are writing their reviews for themselves and each other with AI. I'm spending hours per month having to comb through this verbose slop, synthesize it with reality, and create thoughtful, specific feedback for everyone. It's pretty fucking lame.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
1d ago
I have also seen a lot of the managers at my corporate job become AI-obsessed. If you figure out how to make it stop, let me know. It's incredibly frustrating, especially when they double and triple your output goals by claiming AI makes everyone 2 or 3x as efficient...
Just build more shopping centers??? Seems like an easy solution
What bothers me about angry "I hate that things changed" posts like this is that it's based on a belief/argument that the status quo was fine, which it was not.
The status quo in this case is 1) ever worsening traffic as population scales via horizontal expansion, but road network capacity does not 2) a perpetual increase in housing prices causing the following (but not limited to): lower birth rates, higher homelessness + higher crime as a result, a general erosion of the Western social contract, lower economic growth from the friction of moving, higher property taxes due to less economies of scale, and more!
If you're going to oppose building, you need to propose a different solution to the status quo, which again, ISN'T WORKING
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