domain:rifters.com
hydroacetylene
1d ago
The same way ‘woman/minority owned business’ fraud does.
birb_cromble
1d ago
Wait, what happens if you don't hit the minimum? Is there some kind of penalty that's worse than just burning tokens to hit the minimum?
Drinniol
1d ago
Wouldn't is correct.
"Only enter information you wouldn't mind being leaked"
birb_cromble
1d ago
how many companies can directly turn voice synth
I recently called a plumber that had an AI receptionist pretending to be human, so at least one.
Something about it was so off-putting, though, that I ended up calling somebody else.
Oh wow she just now dropped a new video laying out a lot of her theory in one place.
It seems like this is something of anti-Yakub theory, a modern well-informed reaction to it that proposes the actual proximate mechanism for creating white people: heavy metal poisoning causing DNA damage causing albinism. This was initially an accident, then may have been done deliberately (unclear by who or why), and is now starting to happen accidentally again to both Black Americans and to Africans (who are, I gather from other videos, unrelated to each-other). She's very mad at people who are still insisting on the old theory that white people came from (Yakubian?) genetic engineering mixing animals with human DNA, which she's disproven.
So it all started in Tanzanesia, where artisinal mining exposes everybody to heavy metals accidentally causing birth defects like albinism. There is still some further level of deliberateness here (there's a "they" doing it) which I don't understand. But pale-skinned people are actually a very recent development and come from this Tanzanesia heavy metal poisoning. Albinos are still to this day treated badly there, which is why white people hate black people: in revenge for their recent memory of being abused and mutilated as albinos by Africans. And it's starting to happen to Black Americans too because seafood boils are exposing them to heavy metals causing vitiligo.
She doesn't actually get in to the Native American stuff in this one, but my head-canon is that it's something like: everybody everywhere was black, but then everyone other than Africans and (completely seperately with no relation) the real Native Americans (Black Americans) got this heavy metal poisoning and turned pale. Then at some point later the fake Native Americans (Siberian/Asian, she mentioned this in another video I skimmed but I'm not going to find it again) invade or are imported or something, and invent/are forced to believe the lie that they were there first.
From some screenshots she included, it seems at least some of this is LLM-potentiated.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
1d ago
Twitter is advertising Scottish HIV testing, shortly after I visited a gay bar. Does it know something I don't?
Secretaries have barely existed for like 25 years at least and call centers aren't pink collar work. Pink collar work is overwhelmingly face to face service work, like nursing, teaching, childcare and social work.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1d ago
Sorry, you got the gist at least.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
1d ago
The existence of LLMs makes me a better doctor (and I am studiously silent on whether you could replace me entirely with one). Perhaps this is an artifact of me being relatively junior in my career, but I had an uncle, who is a consultant psychiatrist with more degrees than a heat wave ask GPT-4o questions. He begrudgingly admitted that it gave a more satisfactory answer to one of his thorny questions than the overwhelming majority of other consultant shrinks.
(Said question was on the finer details of distinguishing schizoaffective disorder from bipolar disorder with psychosis. Why 4o? I used the Advanced Voice Mode for the sake of future shock, o3 could have given an even better answer)
Let's just say that my willingness to pay for SOTA LLMs is far higher than their sticker price. Thank god for market competition, and the fact that I don't need nearly as many tokens as vibe coders. The price I pay is comparable to the delicious pork belly I'm eating at a nice Chinese place, and I know what I'd take in a pinch.
Still slogging through Way of Kings. It is getting better as it goes on, but at the same time, it's so god-damn slow. I know Sanderson is relatively popular in the rationalist community and I can sort of see why (the world-building is very unique and interesting, even if not particularly realistic), but man the guy needs an editor, especially for his dialogue.
Reading Capital for philosophy book club. Marx is quite frustrating to read some times because he is smarmily dogmatic (I guess this where the infighting in the Soviet Union has its roots). It has its insights, but I think some of the ways he presents his arguments leave a lot to be desired. For instance, he seems deliberately obtuse about the fact that trade actually can generate real value, and this fact isn't even incompatible with the labor theory of value: the merchant does a fair bit of labor in identifying the market, transporting the goods, etc.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1d ago
A fun thought experiment article, but it has some flaws.
This line especially sent me to WTF-istan:
In its most extreme form, capitalism behaves like a collectivist hive.
That's a category error (social vs economic system) wrapped in a demonstrably false statement about capitalism. It's assertions like these that make me "smh" about crypto bros' economic literacy.
I also think there's a misunderstand of macro level data in the article. Many things can be true at once:
- Returns are following more of a power law, especially in tech
- Real wealth per capita has risen substantially post WW2
But but but "wealth inequality" one might counter. The US has this horrible Gini coefficient. Well, let's look at the Top 10 most equitable income countries on earth based on the Gini:
- Kyrgyzstan 26.4 2022 est.
- United Arab Emirates 26.4 2018 est.
- Moldova 25.9 2022 est.
- Czechia 25.9 2022 est.
- Netherlands 25.7 2021 est.
- Ukraine 25.6 2020 est.
- India 25.5 2022 est.
- Belarus 24.4 2020 est.
- Slovenia 24.3 2022 est.
- Slovakia 24.1 2022 est.
Are we really going to pretend that any of those countries - The Netherlands included! - have social, economic, and political conditions that represent a better life or life possibilities than the United States?
Because I am a fan of steelmanning, I'll point out this post - today! - from Marginal Revolution which has a lot to say about status games in wealth societies.
The conclusions are pretty interesting and heterodox. But there's an easy lesson to draw at the meta level; don't play status games. Make money in order to support yourself and your family, save for the future, and then to pursue things you generally enjoy. If you're making money to buy status, you're playing a negative geometric mean game (i.e. from the article linked in the post I am replying to) and you're almost certainly going to "lose" over the long term - or hit the jackpot and be someone rather famous (which is a loss in its own right if you ask me).
The more I think about it, the more I think the "the economy isn't working" arguments that are in vogue on both sides of the political spectrum today are category errors that conflate a lot of modern anti-social habits with a mysterious yet central "flaw" in capitalism. Capitalism is a means of efficiently trading resources to order to generate economic growth. Imperfect as it may be, it's the best thing we've come up with a species. But capitalism will not - and has no role in - making you feel good about yourself in society. That's a far trickier situation that involved politics, community, and personal values systems.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
If for some reason, people decide the economic data has partisan spin
Under Biden, it was routine for BLS to publish jobs data, gather all the press and then "update" it to lower numbers a couple of months later which the mainstream press largely ignored (rare counter-example: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/revised-data-exposes-overstated-job-creation-claims-by-harris-biden-admin-revealing-818000-nonexistent-jobs/ar-AA1pc1Ez). Shenanigans like this is what makes people to decide economic data is being used for partisan spin purposes. Of course, since it wasn't Trump doing it, nobody in the chattering class gave a hoot about it. It is possible that "announce high numbers, than revise it to much lower numbers" is how the process works and in fact there's no way to make it work otherwise - I seriously doubt that, but let's assume it were the case. In that case, an objective non-partisan official should have spent a lot of effort to inform the public that's what is going on, and to make sure the corrections get at least as much attention as the original - incorrect - data has gotten, and that the initial estimates are reported as rough estimates, to be substantially corrected later, and not as objective truth. This is not what has been happening.
In general, I think the chances that Biden administration appointed an absolutely neutral, non-partisan purely technical person to a politically sensitive position which generates a lot of press attention, are close to zero. Thus, for Trump it's completely legitimate to dismiss that person, and appoint his own choice. Of course, it should have likely been done on day 1, but given as anything he does will be presented in worst possible light anyway, it doesn't matter too much. Will Trump's new appointee be better? Hard to say, the history gives equal chance both for a competent worked and a complete disaster. We'll see.
I guess really my question is, if US economic and public health guidance is no longer seen as trustworthy
Never had been. Only now, because Trump, it's being highlighted, and once the other side takes the power again, it will be deemphasized again. The quality of data will not improve from that.
how do you get the right decision makers to use the right data to make sound decisions?
Welcome to the basic problem of socialism. Yes, capitalist countries aren't free from it too, no more that airplanes are free from gravity. The data is dirty, and will probably get dirtier as the partisan politicization of everything continues. Would I like for it not to happen? Sure. Do I have any hope it is not going to happen? Nope. One of the reasons why I have no hope is that almost nobody speaks about it in terms "destroying the integrity of research is a problem". It's always "Trump destroying the integrity of research is a problem" - and once it's not about Trump, then there's no problem, right? And the other side, predictably, adopts the mirror stance, so now both sides are hard at work destroying it and everybody pretends it's somebody else's fault.
Will doctors no longer be allowed to administer medications even though they know they would work
That has long been the case. There are a number of medications which are approved in Europe but not in the US, for example.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Reading Stranger I had two main thoughts:
-
I didn't realize how influential it was. Dune is largely the same thing with heavier/harder scifi, Star Wars is largely Dune, and a million things since Star Wars are ripoffs of Star Wars. But they all come back to Heinlein.
-
It is definitely very 60s in its view of sexuality.
Look forward to hearing more of your thoughts on it!
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Like Ioper says below, you're romanticizing the idea of merchants traveling and what that was actually like. How does this sound to you: You'll spend 22 hours in a plane (including 4 1/2 hours laid over in Los Angeles) flying from Sydney to Indianapolis, at which point you'll rent a car and drive an hour to a small town that's home to the CVS Pharmacy Midwest Distribution Center. You'll check into a Holiday Inn, eat dinner at an Applebees, and spend the next two days touring a warehouse so you can prepare an estimate on light bulb costs as part of a redesign of the lighting system. On the second day you'll take a late flight back after work that has two layovers but avoids the need to stay an extra day.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Fair, I probably misinterpreted your post.
But still, I don't even know if that data said it isn't useful! If I published an article telling you that I ran the numbers, and the 40-1 bets on UFC fights hit 5% of the time, that would be a huge gambling tip telling you to bet on the longshots.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1d ago
I would agree that its analysis is often better. Even in cases where I ask it to solve a bug and it fails at doing that the description of the code and the problem often point me at a solution.
We're probably getting into definitional problems here, Gym Muscles vs Strength vs Performance vs Whatever. So let's zoom back out to a general vision of Fitness. This is where I cite back to the original Crossfit What is Fitness? Essay laying out the ten general physical skills. While I haven't done crossfit in the sense of belonging to a box or doing WoDs in a long time, I still think the theoretical logic of crossfit's first standard is the best vision of fitness:
They are cardiovascular/respiratory endurance, stamina, strength, flexibility, power, speed, coordination, agility, balance and accuracy. You are as fit as you are competent in each of these 10 skills. A regimen develops fitness to the extent that it improves each of these 10 skills.
Then you have the second standard:
Picture a hopper loaded with an infinite number of physical challenges, where no selective mechanism is operative, and being asked to perform feats randomly drawn from the hopper. This model suggests that your fitness can be measured by your capacity to perform well at these tasks in relation to other individuals. The implication here is that fitness requires an ability to perform well at all tasks, even unfamiliar tasks and tasks combined in infinitely varying combinations.
And the third:
There are three metabolic pathways that provide the energy for all human action. These “metabolic engines” are known as the phosphagen (or phosphocreatine) pathway, the glycolytic (or lactate) pathway and the oxidative (or aerobic) pathway. Total fitness, the fitness that CrossFit promotes and develops, requires competency and training in each of these three pathways or engines. Balancing the effects of these three pathways largely determines the how and why of the metabolic conditioning or “cardio” that we do at CrossFit.
Anyway, with that theoretical framework in place, the question becomes more clear. What we're looking at here is a second standard problem, the infinite hopper. If you take a ditch digger and have him compete at ditch digging, he's going to do better at it than a computer programmer who powerlifts.* And in turn, the powerlifter will do better than the ditch digger at the power lifts. But how will each of them do across a wide variety of tasks? Who can help me move a piano? Who will be the better linebacker in a football game? Who is better in a fight (fitness wise, leaving aside propensity to violence etc)? Who would you rather have in a platoon of soldiers? Who can run, or walk, ten miles on foot faster?
And the answer, to me personally, is straightforward: the strongest guys I know are all concrete contractors, but they also all powerlift. So I kind of reject the premise: lifters aren't exclusively people who don't labor and laborers aren't exclusively people who don't lift. And anyway, we've gotten afield talking about "gym strength" versus OP's "gym muscles;" when one is talking about muscles we're mostly talking about aesthetics.
*I'm operating under the assumption that each task will be better for training at itself, though this isn't necessarily true. There are many cases where the best way to train for a task is not to do the thing itself, either exclusively or predominantly.
ChickenOverlord
1d ago
But how many companies can directly turn voice synth into revenue?
Not directly, but I've started seeing (or rather hearing) tons of ads that use AI to generate the voice work for the commercial, so that's probably huge savings over hiring a voice actor and booking recording studio time. My favorite is when I hear a voice rehularly used for meme being used for ads (I heard this voice in a radio ad about dealing with depression and just busted up laughing):
https://old.reddit.com/r/creepcast/comments/1gg2cjh/try_not_to_get_scared_scariest_stories/
Sloot
1d ago
Would mind, I imagine. Some companies have (supposedly) locally self-contained, non-information-sharing LLMs for this reason.
Although it’d be funnier if it’s indeed “wouldn’t,” that your company wants to hoard employee-created memes for itself, lest they get plagiarized by LLMs.
celluloid_dream
1d ago
Does your area have any unique traditions/customs that have arisen organically over the years?
Eg. In my area, there is a church - nothing special about it except its location. It happens to be at the junction of roads leading to the local mountains and up the sea-to-sky corridor: popular outdoor rec areas. The nearby residential streets also allow parking. Over time, the church has become "the meeting spot" for anyone doing outdoor stuff. If you go there on any weekend morning (and most weekdays) at 5-8am, you will see: hikers, climbers, mountain bikers, mountaineers, motorcyclists all standing around waiting for their party to arrive for the day so they can carpool in one vehicle and head off.
As far as I know, the fact that this church is "the spot" is never explicitly talked about, but anyone who does any kind of outdoor pursuits knows about it, and knows exactly what you mean if you say you want to meet at the church. Frankly, it would be weird not to meet at the church. It only takes being invited there once to understand what's going on, and why it is so great.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1d ago
I know Copilot is used a bit here. They mostly use it to look up things and write tiny scripts.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
If there was a rail line running along every interstate, it probably would be.
Well. Maybe not? You’d still need similar personnel to get supply from the railheads to each Wal-mart and gas station. We just load the trucks up earlier.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
What’s a current example of “A Thing” that’s limited to some cities? I figure with mass, interconnected culture, everything unifies pretty fast.
Sailing? No way. Sails are barely even viable as a hybrid solution. Sure, tech will improve, but a full sailboat is not going to be competitive on most routes.
…which is where my weird prediction comes in. Carbon capture is going to improve a lot by 2050. We’ll be using the most solar- or wind-friendly places in the U.S. to reassemble hydrocarbons, which in turn will be burned in our most energy-dense vehicles. Honestly, this might not be that weird. I don’t really know the state of biogas or whatever they’re calling it.
fraud
How is motherhood fraud supposed to work? Especially in China, world leaders in personal surveillance?
birb_cromble
1d ago
It just seems odd to declare AI dead based off this data.
I may have miscommunicated here. I don't think it's dead. I think it'll be useful on a much longer time horizon than was predicted, and not in a way that we expected. The slope of enlightenment is next.
I've ping-ponged between countries at one point, not for work but to fulfil other obligations. It got tiring and I got fed up at many points, yet I still somehow romanticise the idea.
The highly wistful bent of the third paragraph isn't meant to say "travelling is great" but to illustrate the strong compulsion I feel towards doing it in spite of the bits that aren't great. Which comes back to the idea of adaptation promoting certain behaviours.
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