domain:youtu.be
Clementine
1d ago
Thank you for sharing (here and in real life). And I hope your continued recovery goes smoothly.
Clementine
1d ago
Where I live abortion is allowed as a blanket rule if the mother is under 18, the mother is married but the child is not her husband's, the child is a product of incest or rape, the pregnancy is a threat to the health of the mother, or the child has been identified to have a serious disability.
All other cases of abortion need to get past an ethics panel to be allowed.
I consider this to be a very good state of affairs and a very reasonable solution that everyone should be ok with. I admit not everyone agrees with me, on either side, but blanket statements about no one on the prochoice side being happy with reasonable compromises because they want a family planning card is just you strawmanning your opponents.
No_one
1d ago
There's some motivation out there. This tweet recently caused some consternation. If someone's younger, they need to be reminded that time is marching on ever faster as one ages.
It's way too late for me to have a real life. I'm not getting married I'm not ever having a real relationship I'm never going to build a house or buy one and make it the way I like it. I don't have the time or energy for any of that. I am an adult adolescent until death now. I got no chance to start any sort of a life that makes sense. You know I'm 40, right? I'm not in great health from stress issues stemming from the pandemic, and I can't handle 100% of my own needs, never mind a family.
Sure there's a lot that I can contribute to the world but I'm not going to get much back for it. No matter how much money I get there isn't much I can do with it. Maybe get a nice place to live or a car but not a real life
Indians always blame other Indians. When you ask Indians why India has to be so dirty, squalid, poor, emaciated cows in the street, no hygiene in cooking, even $1000 hotel rooms or $5000 Air India first class seats grimy and disgusting, they always blame other Indians. The upper castes blame the lower castes, the lower castes blame the upper castes and often each other. You can’t fix it because then “village people will just destroy it again”. There is no will, there is no program for change. I respect that (unlike certain other peoples) they at least accept responsibility on a national level, but that is still no solution.
If India needs to be saved, someone needs to seize power and exert force on their own countrymen. India is historically an easy place to conquer, the British ruled it with only 12-15,000 men. The military was humiliated in the recent bout with Pakistan and they’re not going to nuke their own people (and you say the army is mostly upper castes too, so would hardly be opposed), I don’t see why an Indian couldn’t do it. The real conundrum is why the BJP don’t just end democracy. No major constituency stands against them. It’s clear the lower castes are not advanced enough to vote. If Congress socialist elites kick up a fuss, they can be exiled to America and Britain.
But someone needs to end the squalor. Every building needs to be repainted and plastered in vernacular colors every 2-3 years. Littering needs to be punished with some form of public humiliation. Wild animals should not be allowed to roam in public. Hygiene standards should be rigorously enforced. Random piles of dirt, construction materials and so on need to result in extreme fines for landowners, up to confiscation. Driving laws strictly enforced. Violation of basic civilized standards of behavior should again be public humiliation. Failure to leave a public facility clean should likewise result in extreme punishments. Those disgusting peasant farmers protesting in favor of their price fixing handouts and unmechanised family farms need to be forcibly expropriated and replaced by large scale industrial farming for goods sold at market prices, with any resistance crushed with extreme force. Do this and in 20 years India is mostly fixed.
sun_the_second
1d ago
That sounds like shit. I only wish that if I'm ever unfortunate enough for such a situation I'd weaponise my autism enough to wall the redhead out and out-annoy the security guy until they either make me leave or fuck off.
Altacct
1d ago
I also felt/feel totally blindsided by pregnancy and more specifically, postpartum, after having my first 5 months ago. I couldn’t walk for 3 weeks postpartum due to the pain and dizziness and I still can’t have sex without extreme pain. I just saw the GP due to the bleeding and pain after sex and was basically told “that sucks”. Seeing the pelvic floor PT is helping but, anyway, what I actually wanted to say is that I haven’t shied away from talking about my experience. We’re the first in my husband’s circle to have children and I don’t want any of the others to feel as blindsided as I did.
We were having a family meal a couple of months ago during which my husband was wearing the baby. One of the middle-aged women made a comment about how she wore her baby all the time and it was so helpful/nice and my husband replied that it was a shame I couldn’t do it. After which I admitted that the one time I tried I basically peed myself which was met with silence…so yeah, it does make people uncomfortable but I do think we should talk about it more.
Edit - I'd like to retract my statements about ai safety, I'll pen a clear criticism, my comments are not very coherent. Apologies.
The amount of absolute benefits provided by these language models is high but it's miniscule compared to the constant hype they get.
Jeremy Howard is not an unserious person, he may be cavalier but he has actually changed machine learning for good, Dawn bench, his work on kaggle and ULMFiT are impressive feat which are much more serious than most ai safety people who couldn't train a simple model with llm assistance of their lives depended on it.
I see the constant obsession with ASI as a religious obsession, not one steeped in rationality as many rationalists are simply rationalising what they believe in.
I was using Google reasoning model yesterday fo a beginner exercise in processing where it got basic beginShape arguments wrong despite me linking it to the repo. Things are better, I'm not sure if we are closer.
Language models spit out text, they aren't a different form of human cognition. I would change my tune if the ai safety people and those making money from these models were to stop with constant lies and plot out a decent graph that does not assume scaling beyond a point (including reasoning).
I don't want Sci fi stories and podcasts where where you keep quoting the same three people. It's egregious, you have amazing tech but you're using it to talk about hypothetical scenarios right out of a movie.
Garry Marcus has been wrong about neural networks since forever but his post on the benchmarks floating around isn't completely fake. We know how transfer learning works, we also know how transformers work, why should we believe that something magical may happen such that they keep progressing super fast (which they aren't as even top of the line models get plenty wrong despite using dspy).
I'm not an insane ai skeptic, my bachelor's thesis was on machine learning with graphs, I'm a noob but I'm not a complete illiterate. You attach a sane conclusion (llms are getting better) with equal parts insanity (they will come up with ways to automate away research or engineering tasks) that is hilarious.
I may very well switch to more ml focused things after my sabbatical ends but it won't be out of religious fervor. I like computers, I liked seeing my computer spot birds from photos but it's not the coming of ASI and that's not why I will do it either.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
1d ago
This is just a sneer, isn't it?
Can you put some meat on it?
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
1d ago
Pajeet actions are beyond comprehension. Everyone wants a kickback and the social distrust is so extreme that most things break down. You see less flowing rivers and more actual rivers of literal drainage in small towns here as bureaucrats, the politicians and even the industrialists have no stake in the smaller cities they don't live in.
If they do live here, making a change means you get martyred and your kids lead unsafe lives as any meddling beyond a point shakes the foundations of everything else. It's an accepted fact here literally everything, everyone is corrupt. If you're a smart person, you sell your soul for stem exams like the Asians as you can at most only ever be a nerd so might as well do that abroad.
Due to ever growing red tape and more bio leninists winning, setting up an industry means you end up paying more than half your budget in just kickbacks. A big reason behind Indians abusing h1bs is that these people couldn't conceive the growth of computers so could not stifle their growth, after enough growth, the owners of these firms simply used these pajeet tendencies agaisnt others. So the Indian it service companies that write worse code than gpt 2 like Wipro, Cognizant etc (they are called WITCH like FAGMAN in the US) ensured that they get a free hand but no one else enters India.
The older industrial families in India also played a huge role by going along with the government which led to a bad sort of monopoly. Ultimately, it's a lot of these anger inducing evil things that I can't precisely condense down coherently that ensured we stay as poor as Africa.
Also remember, Gandhi deserves a lot of blame too since he like Nehru and every other Indian elite at the time was a socialist. So Indians took away land from feudal families to redistribute it to peasants which also cut the yields. Norman Borlaug was given the name annadaata (giver of grains) because his tech saved close to a billion lives. The thought of rival elites and hick peasants who don't wish to move beyond agriculture left land here fractured so even agriculture could not modernize itself.
So a disdain for any rivals, poor iq of peasant class, literal socialist common born elites and having zero skin in the game led to this thing. Today, the Indian Foreign Minister and Defence Secretary have sons who are US citizen. I don't expect people down the ladder to have much care for their homeland if the best are uppgo upto this.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
1d ago
Can you name any specific and forseeable advantages that space manufacturing may have? And if so, would they be significant enough to offset the disadvantage of needing to ship things from and to space?
2rafa
1d ago
Ok, were I a Musk aid I would be strongly advising him to shut his mouth.
This is a man who fired his entire PR team, the media equivalent of choosing to represent yourself in court. There are ways of making even extremely impulsive and annoying celebrities look better in the press by seeding certain narratives, but Musk is reliant on his friends, business partners, ideological allies and (ex) girlfriends doing this ad-hoc, and they all have their own competing interests with no real coordination.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
1d ago
there's no money in space exploration
The engineering challenges that have to be overcome to do this tend to create some rather interesting products; space manufacturing may also have unique benefits, and that'll likely require human staff if only to oversee and maintain the equipment doing the manufacturing.
Being able to pick things up from the planet and deliver them back down is the first step of that; nobody's bothering to build machines or research processes for space because we're still working on getting there from here.
Only some 15% of the American population currently receives retirement benefits from SS and some 20% are on Medicare. It doesn't seem unreasonable for the rest to be in favor of large cuts here due to their unsustainable nature and limited likelihood to benefit much more people due to the looming insolvency.
Maybe he can bring some of that spirit to his own companies, and actually deliver on some of the insane things he's been promising.
He was given quite a bit of power and room to play with DOGE, promised to find billions in waste and fraud, and came back with essentially nothing. The only reason he was even given this, is that he helped out by buying Twitter, and that debt needed repaying, but with time it became obvious he's a liability, so they had to cut him loose.
functor
1d ago
Most likely Elon came in with incredible energy and his typical spirit of wanting radical change in a pace that leads to cities on mars with autonomous cars and humanoid robots in 10 years. He then comes into government and has to act with mainstream republicans that are tugging on Trump in the opposite direction.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1d ago
Jeremy Howard, who wrote ULMFiT (one of the most important papers in NLP according to many, so much so that transfer learning for ChatGPT was inspired by it), simply laughs at statements about AI taking away all jobs, publicly claiming that we are as far away from ASI or AGI now as we were 20 years ago.
I looked at the clip where he says this, he says there's no more reason to think ASI is close than there was 15 years ago. He says people are fooled by the interface changing from computer-friendly to human friendly, our brains think it's qualitatively different.
The man is fundamentally unserious. I don't care what papers he's written or what expertise he has. It doesn't matter if Major-General Augustus Smythe fought against the whirling dervishes of Sudan with distinction, if he thinks a bayonet charge is going to beat a machinegun, he's a fool. Augustus Smythe doesn't really think this, it's more that he looks down upon all this low-class and crass engineering taking the limelight from his glorious, romantic cavalry regiments. He's not going to actually charge a machine-gun nest with his saber, he's not really confident in what he's saying. Jeremy Howard is no different, he admits the progress on benchmarks and the progress of recent years albeit in an understated way. What benchmarks of AI coding were there 15 years I wonder? He doesn't truly believe the nonsense he's saying, he wants to express a sober, mature, classy, balanced position like Yann LeCun and the others. It's a reaction to style and taste rather than anything substantial. Gary Marcus does the same thing and is infamously wrong in so many of his predictions.
It's perfectly understandable to oppose the nerdy, icky AI doomers or eager non-technical singularitarians or the slick, snake-oil-seeming marketers. It's very seductive to be 'the adult in the room'. But you can't let that get the better of you and mislead people on a very serious matter.
There is a qualitative difference, a stark and obvious qualitative difference to asking a question and getting an immediate answer from an AI, not just in a single domain but in so many domains, at considerable depth where the 'question' might be laying out the setting for a fictional universe and the 'answer' could be a thousand words of a story. It is obvious that huge strides towards superintelligence have been made since 2010. Coding, vision, reasoning, plotting, extended pursuit of abstract tasks... ASI is much, much closer than in 2010, where all there was was IBM Watson and Siri.
After all, LLMs have in fact slowed down in terms of progress.
No they haven't. The shift to reasoning models happened 6-9 months ago. The new R1 came out a matter of days ago. It's super cheap and a massive leap up in writing, I haven't even tried it on code since Claude is so good. 'Progress is slowing' is ironically enough a real mental illusion as old benchmarks are saturated. There's been next to no progress on MMLU because we've moved on from that to new challenges.
nopie
1d ago
You probably are better with numbers and can provide better estimates. Tyler Cowen has analytical blog post about this issue: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/06/claims-about-debt-and-productivity-growth.html
My understanding is that it is a time to become “fiscally responsible”, i.e., try to cut expenses. The current growth is not enough to stop interest payments to skyrocket.
nopie
1d ago
Yes. When I hear “fiscally responsible” on news I have no idea what it means. I just tried to offer a better phrasing that could resonate with people. If something wasn't clear, now I have provided interpretation above: https://www.themotte.org/post/2015/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/332917?context=8#context
You are asking for non-public numbers that being a non-public company SpaceX is under no obligation to provide
I know, that's my point. My entire argument is that he's setting money on fire for gimmicks, and that if said gimmicks won't provide an actual return on investment, the parts of his companies that are bringing in revenue won't be enough to cover for the losses. To that I'm met with an endless stream of "but look at all the launches" arguments, that never actually show said launches are bringing enough profit to bailout projects like Starship, let alone the decline of Tesla.
account for roughly 2/3rds of the company's revenue, and since most of that is for actual services rather than hardware it probably has a decent profit margin, but everyone has their own assumptions.
Even though they're not selling a lot of hardware, they still need to make a lot of it to maintain the service. Starlink satelites have a 5 year lifespan. They need to keep making, and putting them into orbit. If launching them with Falcon was enough to justify the company's existence, I doubt he'd be trying to make Starship the Next Big Thing so quickly.
I know Musk is one of the richest people on Earth, but even he doesn't have unlimited cash to throw at a failing endevour.
Correct, this is why I called him "a dead man walking".
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
1d ago
Sad. I hoped to see those two getting some things done (almost doesn't matter what, as long as "you can actually do things" gets signal-boosted). This kind of outcome isn't unexpected, but it certainly is disappointing.
No_one
1d ago
Yeah, for reasons that probably whoever was doing foreign trade fell out of favor at court. Well guess what - there's no money in space exploration. It's an endless money pit.
Whatever economy you build out there won't affect things down here. It is actually a perfect sink for the 'overproduction' problem China supposedly has.
No_one
1d ago
I muted him on twitter in disgust months ago. It wasn't really outright lies or manipulation, but basically he was pushing stupid ideas that were generally aligned with what he wants, but were obviously unworkable and yet a person with an IQ somewhere around 140 thought 'fine, I'll post this'. I like the guy for his contributions to space but he is just like his dad. Shameless when it suits him.
There is no subtext, no reading between the lines, no scheming behind the scenes.
That you know of.
Books I've readAnime I've watched, Magical girls update It's less than two weeks until my next digital fast, but I have watched two additional series about magical girls in the meanwhile. As usual, the ratings go from -2 to +2.Gushing over Magical Girls, 0. It's not as edgelordy as Redo of Healer, but the basic idea is the same: make the setting more spicy so you can put some tits in (and yes, they are schoolgirls' tits, so you are on another watchlist now). The actual plot is not bad, but ends up sabotaging itself: the protagonist is a loser who is obsessed with magical girls. Bam, a cliché creepy-cute mascot appears and offers her superpowers. Uh-oh, turns out he's a creepy-cute mascot in charge of the other side and she's not a frilly magical girl, but a magical dominatrix with kinky powers. And she realizes she loves using them on her idols a lot. But not too much, it's no fun if they stop being magical girls, is it?
There's a small plot arc where she obtains equally dysfunctional teammates and is embroiled in a struggle with other evil generals that take their job too seriously for her liking, but that's where the premise starts to hobble itself: the protagonist's nature reconstructs the typical dynamic of a mahou shoujo series through a new lens: the villains are seemingly toying with the protagonists and not pressing their advantage because that's what they are actually trying to do. But this also means that Gilligan is never leaving the island: the plot is seemingly moving forward in each episode, but it's running on a treadmill, as the premise established in the first episode cannot change.
The opening song is disgustingly catchy, though.
Magical Girl Raising Project, +1. This anime is a much more straightforward subversion of the genre and you can tell it must have been inspired by Puella Magi Madoka Magica: the creepy cute mascot is rather obviously nefarious, being a magical girl is a dangerous and often gory affair, and becoming one won't solve whatever issues you might have had as a regular girl.
The plot is quite straightforward: people are recruited into being people-helping and crime-fighting magical girls by playing a phone game and when there's sixteen of them, the mascot announces a gradual downsizing. When the girls realize the losers' termination is terminal in more ways than one, the situation devolves into a battle royale, with everyone forging desperate alliances and trying to survive the longest. Now this is a plot that forces itself to move forward, and I really enjoyed this aspect of the series: by the end of episode 12 almost all of the cast is dead and the plot has reached its conclusion. Like the equipment in Fukasakus' original Battle Royale, the superpowers some of the girls have sound completely useless, and watching the girls find a use for them was a joy. Summoning puppies anywhere, indeed.
One surprising aspect of the series was how... Western the writing felt. The light novel was written in 2012 by a Japanese writer and the anime was released in 2016, but the characters might have been written by a socially progressive Californian. We get to see the characters' mundane lives and backstories, and they come from all social classes, some are disturbingly neurospicy (while some of them might actually be mildly retarded, there's another explanation that I won't spoil), some have gone through some serious shit in their so far very short lives. You don't see this kind of stuff in your run-of-the-mill anime.
Where the series shows its roots is that it isn't a slave to the pyramid of oppression. If your have past trauma, you are not saved from becoming a villain, you are free to do heinous deeds, you don't even get a free path to redemption. If you have had the most miserable life out of all the cast, you don't get to be the final girl. You are judged only by the content of your character as shown by your actions.
All in all, I quite enjoyed the series. The music is meh, though.
Why does the rDrama engine insert paragraph breaks of different sizes? This is really annoying.
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