domain:houseofstrauss.com
Getting excited about A Play About David Mamet Writing About Harvey Weinstein, in which "Mamet is poisoned, castrated and murdered with his own playwriting award": https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/arts/mathilde-dratwa-david-mamet-harvey-weinstein-play-1236317797/ My play about this play about the famed playwright will settle all of this. In all seriousness, I am struck by the interview at the link, in which the younger playwright Dratwa seems much more upset with Mamet than with Weinstein, and for the crime of lasting success in her field (admittedly long past his prime, by all accounts). Addendum: I guess this is a temptation facing everyone in the arts: you might go into it thinking you have something to say about society, or humanity, but you’ll probably spend all day thinking about art, so guess where you’ll find inspiration? Film, which seens to have been Dratwa's previous field, seems especially bad for this -- just filthy with "movies about the magic of movies."
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
49m ago
Not saying the post was good. The "someone on Twitter" bit is annoying, because you can't even check if they actually said that, if his interpretation matches that of other people, etc. I'm just saying it doesn't break the bare links rule, or wouldn't even if there was a link.
HereAndGone
54m ago
"Rings of Power" got into trouble for exactly this. I'd give Queen-Regent Míriel a pass (we don't know in canon anything about her mother's family or who her mother was, and there were good Haradrim/Easterlings who interacted with the Edain, so it's not impossible that her maternal family were persons of colour) but the Hobbits, sorry, Harfoots and Stoors, were just too much. A lot of jokes about "and is the final season going to end with they get to the Shire and then there's a mass genocide where only the white Hobbits survive?" since this is meant to be prequel to the LoTR movies and that is established canon that the Hobbits are all white.
I'm waiting for season three to see how they write themselves out of all the corners they've written themselves into, but I wonder will we ever get that season three in the end?
For years, the story of AI progress has been one of moving goalposts. First, it was chess. Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, and people said, fine, chess is a well defined game of search and calculation, not true intelligence. Then it was Go, which has a state space so vast it requires "intuition." AlphaGo prevailed in 2016, and the skeptics said, alright, but these are still just board games with clear rules and win conditions. "True" intelligence is about ambiguity, creativity, and language. Then came the large language models, and the critique shifted again: they are just "stochastic parrots," excellent mimics who remix their training data without any real understanding. They can write a sonnet or a blog post, but they cannot perform multi step, abstract reasoning.
I present an existence proof:
OpenAI just claimed that a model of theirs qualifies for gold in the IMO:
To be clear, this isn't a production-ready model. It's going to be kept internal, because it's clearly unfinished. Looking at its output makes it obvious why that's the case, it's akin to hearing the muttering of a wild-haired maths professor as he's hacking away at a chalkboard. The aesthetics are easily excused, because the sums don't need one.
The more mathematically minded might enjoy going through the actual proofs. This unnamed model (which is not GPT-5) solved 5/6 of the problems correctly, under the same constraints as a human sitting the exam-
two 4.5 hour exam sessions, no tools or internet, reading the official problem statements, and writing natural language proofs.
As much as AI skeptics and naysayers might wish otherwise, progress hasn't slowed. It certainly hasn't stalled outright. If a "stochastic parrot" is solving the IMO, I'm just going to shut up, and let it multiply on my behalf. If you're worse than a parrot, then have the good grace to feel ashamed about it.
The most potent argument against AI understanding has been its reliance on simple reward signals. In reinforcement learning for games, the reward is obvious: you won, or you lost. But how do you provide a reward signal for a multi page mathematical proof? The space of possible proofs is infinite, and most of them are wrong in subtle ways. Wei notes that their progress required moving beyond "the RL paradigm of clear cut, verifiable rewards."
How did they manage that? Do I look like I know? It's all secret-sauce. The recent breakthroughs in reasoning models like o1 and onwards relied heavily on "RLVR", which stands for reinforcement learning with verifiable reward. At its core, RLVR is a training method that refines AI models by giving them clear, objective feedback on their performance. Unlike Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which relies on subjective human preferences to guide the model, RLVR uses an automated "verifier" to tell the model whether its output is demonstrably correct. Presumably, Wei means something different here, instead of simply scaling up RLVR.
It's also important to note that previous SOTA, DeepMind's AlphaGeometry, a specialized system, had previously achieved a silver-medal level performance and was within spitting distance of gold. A significant milestone in its own right, but OpenAI's result comes from a general-purpose reasoning model. GPT-5 won't be as good at maths, either because it's being trained to be more general at the cost of sacrificing narrow capabilities, or because this model is too unwieldy to serve at a profit. I'll bet the farm on it being used to distill more mainstream models, and the most important fact is that it exists at all.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
Yeah, I think the moral (as this was the 60s so the Second World War was much closer in time) was a warning about "it couldn't happen here" - yes it could, and even well-intentioned people can be seduced by something that offers what seems to be the public good. The entire German nation wasn't composed of horrible monsters, they were mostly people Just Like You, and they fell for this for different reasons, mostly because they were promised solutions to the mess that was happening right then. And Hitler delivered, for a time, on those promises.
No_one
1hr ago
One of the weirdest things I noticed is that the best chess player in the family (he was in top 20 nation wide(small country tho) in his prime, I think) is so scatter-brained that car maintenance and dealing with paperwork was something his wife did.
He has legendary skills at messing up anything computer related.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
I suppose, as normally used, it's "short term gains mean long term losses". Being enticed away by something that sounds good, to the point you ignore all other intervention, then you end up losing everything.
HMK2
1hr ago
Re-watched Robocop (1987) recently. I hadn't remembered that, though it's set in Detroit "twenty minutes into the future", pretty much all the criminals are white.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
When you make deals with the Devil, do not try to welch on the deal, it never ends well.
Clearly the Piper is not an ordinary human being, and when you think about it, neither is the plague of rats. If you have a mysterious plague then hot on its heels a mysterious figure turns up offering to fix it for you, pay the goddamn gold and be glad that's all you had to hand over. The city officials were both greedy and stupid, and the entire town had to pay the price as a result.
Maybe also "government officials have always been on the take" as well.
iprayiam3
1hr ago
Our (very weak, if it even exists at all) Affirmative Action policy for left-wing trolling is, shall we say, not up to the task of tolerating this any longer.
To be clear Turok is not a left winger. Hes a hananianite libertarian who is butthurt that they couldn’t co-opt the right from the conservatives.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
I found you in the comments section of a Hanania tweet
That does not surprise me, now that you told us, but it does give me much more context for where Alexander is coming from.
HMK2
1hr ago
They didn't even need to do that!! The Sea People are canonically black, and so is the Seanchan princess!
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
I haven't heard the words (quadroon, etc.) uttered out loud unironically ever in my life, and I was born and raised in more or less rural Alabama, and both sets of grandparents regularly used the term "nigger" though notably (to me) neither of my parents ever said the word within my earshot and wouldn't allow it said in the house (by me or my brother.)
I remember 'mulatto', 'mestizo', and 'half-caste' used. Adult males may or may not have used the word nigger occasionally, but not in the presence of blacks or women- and none would object to it even if they didn't personally use it. It was definitely a cultural descriptor as much as it was a racial term though. Nowadays people know what a 'cholo' and a 'castizo' is and might use the term, but only the former is derogatory.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
At the same time, "someone on Twitter said" doesn't tell us much. What 'someone'? Right wing someone, left wing someone, progressive Marxist someone, Aryan supremacy someone? There's a lot of ground that "someone" covers and we don't know if the tweet, taken out of context, is supportive (I'm a liberal, told ya that reality has a liberal bias), is grudgingly supportive (I'm a tankie, liberals get the bullet too, but this once they were right), is supportive from the other side (I'm conservative, this is where we can agree with liberals), is condemnatory (I believe in the superiority of the white race as proven by HBD and the stupid liberals are trying to tar us as spreading misinformation, this is what we have to fight against) or what.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Do dogs have more variance? A lot of the phenotypic differences are driven by single genes; it's not implausible that genetically chihuahuas and great danes are slightly closer than Yeniseians and Negritos.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
I'd be curious to know about how good most genetically distant populations, Mbuti pygmies and Australoids fare in that respect.
There's plenty of partly-aboriginal people running around in Australia. They just look white. And there's an entire ethnic group(cape coloreds) descended from Dutch-Khoisan crosses in South Africa.
Stellula
1hr ago
You’re wrong. Epsteins schtick was to find young troubled girls as young as 11 or 12. He would even get them to find more girls for him:
Stellula
1hr ago
Epstein was raping 11 year olds (allegedly): https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2020/1/15/lawsuit-alleges-epstein-trafficked-girls-as-young-as-11
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
It's worth noting that Latin American immigration is not universally non-white, has a long history of assimilating pretty well- and generally not to the criminally inclined underclass, the Hispanics and blacks hate each other and the Hispanic underclass is probably not, proportionately, much higher than the white one- and that Hispanic fertility in the US holds up much worse than native white TFR.
There are criticisms of Latin immigration- they're terrible drivers who raise premiums for everyone, they drive down wages for the native lower-working class, etc. But America's underclass is, mostly, black. The non-black underclass has plenty of whites in it, and I wouldn't claim those whites are any better than the blacks. The median Hispanic in the US works as a cook or a mechanic or construction worker, pushes his kids to move up the social ladder but doesn't complain when it's only one rung, and uses no drugs worse than pot. His daughter is likely to marry a white man, give birth to European looking and acting children, and have higher fertility than her peers who marry other Mexicans. His son likely has a better chance of stable and productive employment than his white peers. The developed parts of Latin America with lots of whites are, by the standards of high income inequality middle income countries, the best in the world- much nicer places to live than former soviet countries, South Africa, etc. It's unlikely that Hispanic immigration will raise income inequality or suppress economic growth by enough to reach, say, Chilean levels. Hispanic migration is simply not a crisis to US ability to maintain its functioning civilization.
marinuso
1hr ago
I don't know how reliable they ever were. Before the Internet, the traditional mass media were the only media. There were no other voices. They could easily have been as bad as they are now, and nobody would have known. If anything they might've been worse, as they had less scrutiny.
The structure of it alone practically demands an oligopoly. After all, how many people can afford to run a national TV station, and that's before we start talking about licensing and permits. The same goes for large publishing houses.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
Very well, since the two of you did speak up for him, I'm going to knock it down to 2 weeks. It'll only get worse if he doesn't get better.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Nazi Germany mostly inherited the imperial German military system, essentially intact but unused. Reviving it was politically popular and the sort of thing that was inevitable from whoever rose to the top in the Weimar republic. Hitler's main military reforms were either net negatives like the SS or copies of the adaptations other major powers made to the lessons of WWI, coupled with the existing highly-competent Prussian officer corps's adaptations to the lessons of the Spanish civil war.
It's true that Hitler did some common-sense reforms that he can fairly get credit for, but these reforms were, well, commonsense- few of them were unique to Germany.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
You can see it, but I think in general deeper messages just don't get though. Heavy-handed moralizing is used because it works.
I'll take your word for it. My eyes glaze over when I read this posts. Now that you mention it, he certainly does strike me as a Hananianite or a Hanania-lite. As someone with libertarian sympathies, I wish I had better representation.
More options
Context Copy link