domain:streamable.com
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Another week, another humiliation for Britain.
https://thecritic.co.uk/exclusive-osborne-to-give-elgin-marbles-to-greece/
The Critic understands that George Osborne, Chairman of the British Museum, has agreed to give the Elgin Marbles to Greece.
The move is unlikely to be blocked by the Government since the Prime Minister has expressed several times his commitment “not to stand in the way” of a deal between the Greek government and the British Museum.
In order to give the Marbles to Athens permanently, the government would need to amend the British Museum Act 1963 which prevents the deaccession of items. But it is thought that Osborne’s plan to give them away on loan would side-step this requirement.
Since the Greek government claims legal ownership of the sculptures, it is extremely unlikely that they would ever return to Britain.
Spain has to be salivating at this point, not to mention Argentina. There's oil in the Falklands.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
they will come up with ways to automate away research or engineering tasks
This is already happening. Papers have been published on it! This is partly why the AI safety people start to sound so deranged, because people are confusing reality with science fiction, not the other way around.
Research and engineering is being automated, piece by piece. R1 can write helpful attention kernels: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/automating-gpu-kernel-generation-with-deepseek-r1-and-inference-time-scaling/
Also consider this paper:
Many promising-looking ideas in AI research fail to deliver, but their validation takes substantial human labor and compute. Predicting an idea's chance of success is thus crucial for accelerating empirical AI research, a skill that even expert researchers can only acquire through substantial experience. We build the first benchmark for this task and compare LMs with human experts. Concretely, given two research ideas (e.g., two jailbreaking methods), we aim to predict which will perform better on a set of benchmarks. We scrape ideas and experimental results from conference papers, yielding 1,585 human-verified idea pairs published after our base model's cut-off date for testing, and 6,000 pairs for training. We then develop a system that combines a fine-tuned GPT-4.1 with a paper retrieval agent, and we recruit 25 human experts to compare with. In the NLP domain, our system beats human experts by a large margin (64.4% v.s. 48.9%). On the full test set, our system achieves 77% accuracy, while off-the-shelf frontier LMs like o3 perform no better than random guessing, even with the same retrieval augmentation. We verify that our system does not exploit superficial features like idea complexity through extensive human-written and LM-designed robustness tests. Finally, we evaluate our system on unpublished novel ideas, including ideas generated by an AI ideation agent. Our system achieves 63.6% accuracy, demonstrating its potential as a reward model for improving idea generation models. Altogether, our results outline a promising new direction for LMs to accelerate empirical AI research.
Are there caveats on this? Yes. But are AIs running AI research hilarious? No. Nothing about this is funny or deserving of casual dismissal.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
Oh I don't agree with it, I just like the surreal nature of the video. Like the commenter says, it's like you're strapped down as a prisoner watching these guys looming over you.
FtttG
2d ago
Last night, I was telling the missus about Countess Constance Markievicz, an Irish revolutionary who was the first woman elected to the House of Commons, participated in the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule, and was appointed as Minister for Labour in Ireland's first Dáil.
As a member of the Citizen Army, Markievicz took part in the 1916 Easter Rising... Markievicz fought in St Stephen's Green, where on the first morning —according to the only two pages surviving of the diary of an alleged witness — she shot a member of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, Constable Lahiff, who subsequently died of his injuries... Markievicz supervised the setting-up of barricades on Easter Monday and was in the middle of the fighting all around Stephen's Green, wounding a British army sniper...
The Stephen's Green garrison held out for six days, ending the engagement when the British brought them Pearse's surrender order. They were taken to Dublin Castle and then to Kilmainham Gaol through what Matt Connolly described as "several groups of hostile people". There, she was the only one of 70 women prisoners who was put into solitary confinement. At her court-martial on 4 May 1916, Markievicz pleaded not guilty to "taking part in an armed rebellion...for the purpose of assisting the enemy," but pleaded guilty to having attempted "to cause disaffection among the civil population of His Majesty". Markievicz told the court, "I went out to fight for Ireland's freedom and it does not matter what happens to me. I did what I thought was right and I stand by it."
She was sentenced to death, but the court recommended mercy "solely and only on account of her sex". The sentence was commuted to life in prison. When told of this, she said to her captors, "I do wish your lot had the decency to shoot me".
I miss the era when feminists were tough as nails. The only things "triggering" this woman were the guns being fired at her. Every time I read about her, a frisson of awe runs down my spine. We used to be a proper country.
rudig
2d ago
basically anybody that isn't Barack Obama or Rosie O'Donnell
He seems to be quite friendly with Barack Obama these days as well, judging from those pictures at the funeral.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
2d ago
Arg that just makes me angry. I hate that so many people game these systems and defray costs onto others.
They are predatory though. I'm torn.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
Are there enough Dems who genuinely want infrastructure / railroad / whatever funding to pass a bipartisan budget?
My recollection of the last decades was that the Democratic Congressionals were more than happy to raze the commons they might have shared with Trump, and that this inclination has only gotten stronger.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
2d ago
Easily one of the most important and immediately impactful business decisions of my lifetime.
I’m amazed at people’s ability to forget how bad things were in 2020 / 2021 on the internet.
I suppose it’s easy to forget the constant fear /r/TheMotte was living under for years if you were always willing to jump ship to /r/TheSchism or some other wasteland full of doe-eyed quokkas ever willing to castrate themselves to placate the eye of Sauron
cae_jones
2d ago
I've spent more time on the floor praying for mercy from heartburn and constipation. Toe-stubbing is worse than ball busting, IMO, although it's easier to stay upright afterward.
Getting hit in the balls is like 30s of ache. Gut stuff is Hell.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Buying Twitter did not improve things.
You mean in the eyes of Blues / Greys, or actually? Because in my opinion it objectively did.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
Why does the rDrama engine insert paragraph
<del>breaks</del><ins>margins</ins>of different sizes?
I think it's some kind of weird interaction between margin-top:0;, margin-bottom:1rem;, the collapsing margins behavior, and the fact that the paragraphs (<p>) are inside list items (<li>).
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Elon Musk’s friends
Ah, the press. Always exaggerating.
Remember 2015, when Musk was unironically used by Scott as an example of someone who was doing good effectively?
Insofar as there’s no such thing as innate aptitude, I have no excuse for not being Aubrey de Grey. Or if Aubrey de Grey doesn’t impress you much, Norman Borlaug. Or if you don’t know who either of those two people are, Elon Musk.
Back then, it could be assumed that a Grey Tribe member would admire Musk, and there was certainly much to admire. By making EVs cool, he certainly made an important contribution to the decarbonization, and the SpaceX concept of recycling rockets certainly has decreased the cost of space flight a lot.
But since then, there have been few obviously pro-social successes of his. His social media persona was not very endearing, calling random people pedophiles will not make you look a great role model. Buying Twitter did not improve things. Openly supporting election denier Trump likely cost him most of his friends outside the MAGA bubble. Now this messy breakup with Trump likely cost him his friends within MAGA.
I am sure that he still has a following of loyal fanboys, self-interested grifters, and yes-men, who will sit in silence while he lashes out against them, but with his break with Trump, I doubt that anyone with an ego of a similar size as his is anywhere near him on a social graph.
cae_jones
2d ago
Youtube will profit considerably. Between the Democrats paying for ads, and how many people get Youtube Premium for the first time to escape the ads...
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
2d ago
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
That's objectively untrue, you may have had some jet losses but Pakistan saw it's airbase blown apart at which point the US intervened. It may have been a neutral stalemate at best or a loss of face for India in western media but it wasn't humiliating given that Pakistan got a third of its bases blown out in a five hours and had to get the US to intervene.
The other parts of the comment are completely true. The brits could rule over due to better tech and better cooperation. India suffers the ills of bioleninism but without the industrial base of the west. The west has gotten worse, so Indian society coming apart isn't surprising for me. I agree with most observations, someone needs to step up and do so soon. The Indo Aryan remains will die out a painful death otherwise. Everyone smart I know lives beyond our borders. My family didn't leave because they had land, they state took away that anchor from me.
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.
This is incorrect, they lost seats Las election and all of Indian politics is based on caste vote banks, so people can would switch parties, it's a W for bjp in terms of total seats but it means that the same person is still your local minister. It's like why the UK doesn't simply kick out of most of its welfare leeching immigrants who have formed rape gangs. Upper castes are after all a much smaller portion than heritage Americans or Englishmen.
What can I do personally? I thought about it, so far every answer requires me to get rich which is what I'm trying for now. There's a term chakravartin which is used for emperors who united parts of the fractured land and the they'd would do horse sacrifices wherein a horse would roam around land randomly, if you're an opposing ruler and the horse is allowed to roam, you accept the emperor, if you stop the horse, a fight happens. The last horse sacrifice of this kind was done in Jaipur by Jai Singh the second but at a smaller scale, 4 hundred years is a long time. We need another one soon.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2d ago
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.
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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.
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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.
Clementine
2d ago
Thank you for sharing (here and in real life). And I hope your continued recovery goes smoothly.
Clementine
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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.
2d ago
This is just a sneer, isn't it?
Can you put some meat on it?
Mildly interesting autopsy report related in a court opinion:
The murder weapon was a Ruger revolver of a caliber not specified in the opinion. So feel free to assume it was .22 caliber and make jokes accordingly.
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