domain:natesilver.net
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
There's a lot of space between "Ending the relationship" and "Don't even mention it."
Lodging formal complaints, and making public that they are doing so to assuage public concern, can lead to Israel telling its government officials do not diddle kids.
Eetan
2d ago
The truth always comes out in the end.
70+ years on, and UFO/UAP truth is nowhere to be seen. Maybe there is really nothing out there, except layers of psyops upon hoaxes upon scams upon bullshit.
Trust the plan.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2d ago
Yet would [3] really be the motive with the highest good in a consequentialist sense? It may not be, insofar as the motive and conduct of Christ is for our imitation. Because if we believe that Christ’s guiding motivation was pure love for others, then we would likewise believe that our own guiding and primary motivation ought to be love for others. But here we may be wrong. Because Christ never says that love for others should be paramount, only that love for neighbor should be equivalent to the love we have for ourselves. The love for God is the paramount love, significantly greater than our love for neighbor, uniquely requiring “all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength”.
If Christ’s overarching moral motivation was to obey God for God’s glory, knowing that he will share in that glory and receive honor from God, then his motivation makes a lot more sense. Glory has been the motivation for all kinds of self-sacrificial acts throughout human history, whereas “love for humanity” is rare, if not nonexistent. (The man does not rush in to a burning home to save strangers because he loves humanity, but because he knows (from media) that this is glorious, and a glorious way to die). Additionally, the Epistles say that when we suffer morally, we should do so with glory in mind:
rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you.
We do not suffer because “it’s right”, or love our enemy (though we ought to do so), but because we will feel glory. And to be Christians means to be —
heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ—if indeed we suffer with Him, so that we may also be glorified with Him. I consider that our present sufferings are not comparable to the glory that will be revealed in us.
The “social rewards” from God are intrinsically linked to moral conduct by Christ:
Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me. / Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets before you.
If Christ’s motivation was glory, both for his Father and for his divine family and for himself, then we would likewise imitate this, and this would lead to glorious moral acts. But if Christ’s motivation was pure and uncorrupted “love for humanity”, then we will only feel a gnawing discomfort at the impossibility of our ever replicating this motivation in any legitimate sense.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
2d ago
So what's your expectation of this new UAP hearing? Anything different from the previous nothingburgers?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2d ago
But definitely knock it off with this "We all know" attempted consensus-building.
There's something kind of funny to both accusing @SecureSignals of engaging in consensus building when he says we all know what he means, and saying that we all know what he means.
rae
2d ago
If you think you’re being subsidised on a $20/month plan, switch to using the API and see the price difference. Keep in mind that providers make a profit on the API too - if you go on OpenRouter, random companies running Deepseek R1 offer tokens at a 7x cheaper rate than Claude Sonnet 4 despite Deepseek most likely being a large model.
As @RandomRanger said, it would make little sense for ALL companies to be directly subsidising users in terms of the actual cost of running the requests - inference is honestly cheaper than you think at scale. Now, many companies aren’t profitable in terms of revenue vs. R&D expenditure, but that’s a different problem with different causes, in part down to them not actually caring about efficiency and optimisation of training runs; who cares when you have billions in funding and can just buy more GPUs?
But the cat’s out of the bag and with all the open weight models out there, there’s no risk of the bigcos bumping up your $20/mo subscription to $2000/mo, unless the USD experiences hyperinflation at which point we’ll have other worries.
SnapDragon
2d ago
Some managers, sales reps, and HR workers come to mind (note that I'm not saying there's no need for those roles, but I get the impression there are far too many people in them). Heck, even many coders, despite having a real thing they make, are just skating by and not making a difference to anyone's life. I would possibly include myself in that. And I'm working for a successful company - I'm sure it's a dozen times worse in, say, the government, where even the distant hand of the market can't reach you.
I'm also open to the argument that 95% of jobs are useless but it's humanly impossible to know exactly which those are, so you need to keep everyone employed. I'm not arguing from omniscience here, just from my instincts after decades of code monkeying.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
2d ago
The truth always comes out in the end.
Mainstream science dismisses the concerns and sees the object as ordinary red colored D-type asteroid.
Mainstream science told you to mask up and get the covid vaccine too.
FtttG
2d ago
If a Scotsman finds out you knowingly transmitted human immuno-deficiency virus to them, they're sure to SHIV you.
theincompetencetheorist
2d ago
Sure it is incrementally better on what we already have. The problem I'm trying to illuminate with it is that is the compute worth the provided value? It is hardly taking away a job from anyone doing the proof reading, it is an improved version of what we already have.
Jiro
2d ago
"I would like an illustration for my fanfiction/roleplaying character. No, I'm not hiring an artist--I'm doing this for free, after all."
2rafa
2d ago
tl;dr: his posited comparison is that in both cases, the USG had a tradeoff between "help Israeli intel" and "prosecute pedos" and chose the former.
Only if the former case was Israeli intel, which is the point under discussion.
iprayiam3
2d ago
I'm surprised that this is controversial. I didn't think it was a hot take. Even at my first internship (at a large tech company), during the general onboarding, I was introduced to the concept of the Pareto principle, used to explain that 80% of the work is done by 20% of the employees.
If you think so, you should post your short positions.
Shorts on who?
Eetan
2d ago
Some hard science news, that nevertheless became part of culture wars.
As you probably heard, third recorded interstellar object is on the way. It stands out of sample of three, just like the previous two.
The usual suspects, most prominent Avi Loeb and John Brandenburg of ancient nuclear war on Mars fame sound an alarm to warn from incoming alien invader.
Mainstream science dismisses the concerns and sees the object as ordinary red colored D-type asteroid.
< tinfoil hat> well, what are they supposed to do? </tinfoil hat>
Not that "we" as mankind could do anything if ayys were really here. See just Avi Loeb's proposals.
What Should Humanity Do on the Day After an Interstellar Object is Recognized as Technological?
...
All nations must agree on a coordinated action plan
...
A representative international committee will be appointed to communicate with the alien visitors
Nah. I cannot imagine better way to ensure Earth's swift destruction than to introduce aliens to United Nations. Compared to this plan, doing nothing at all is the superior alternative.
Does anyone seriously think that these tech companies are selling $200+ worth of compute for $20? The natural assumption should be that they're making good margins on inference and all the losses are due to research/training, fixed costs, wages, capital investment. Why would a venture capitalist, who's whole livelihood and fortune depends on prudent investment, hand money to Anthropic or OpenAI so they can just hand that money to NVIDIA and me, the customer?
Anthropic is providing its services for free to the US govt but that's a special case to buy influence/cultivate dependence. If you, a normal person, mega minmax the subscription you might use more than you pay for but not by that much and the average subscriber will use less. Plus you might praise it online and encourage other people to use the product so it's a good investment.
What evidence points in this direction of ultra-benign, pro-consumer capitalism with 10x subsidies? It seems like a pure myth to me. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Take OpenAI. Sam Altman said he was losing money on the $200 subscription. But Sam Altman says a lot of things and he didn't say 'losing 10x more than we gain'.
The company has projected that it would record losses of about $5 billion and revenue of $3.7 billion for 2024, the New York Times reported in September. The company’s biggest cost is due to the computing power used to run ChatGPT. Not only does it require huge investments in data centers, it also demands vast amounts of electricity to run them.
If the company is losing 150% of revenue (and Anthropic is similar), not 1000% or higher, then clearly it's what I'm saying, not what you're saying. Inference/API is profitable. User subscriptions are profitable. Investment is not profitable in the short term, that's why it's called investment. And they have their fixed costs... That's why AI companies are losing money, they're investing heavily and competing for users.
Furthermore, one study of a selected group of coders doing a subset of software tasks with old models does not disprove the general utility of AI generally, it's not a major, significant fact. I could find studies that show that AI produces productivity gains quite easily. That wouldn't mean that it produces productivity gains in all settings, for all people.
Here's one such study for instance, it finds what you'd expect. Juniors gain more than seniors.
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/how-generative-ai-affects-highly-skilled-workers
Or here he lists some more and finds productivity gains with some downsides: https://addyo.substack.com/p/the-reality-of-ai-assisted-software
The metr paper just tells (some) people what they want to hear, it is not conclusive any more than the other papers are conclusive. And a lot of people don't read the metr paper closely. For instance:
Familiarity and inefficiency in use: These devs were relatively new to the specific AI tools. Only one participant had >50 hours experience with Cursor; notably, that one experienced user did see a positive speedup, suggesting a learning curve effect. Others may have used the AI sub-optimally or gotten stuck following it down wrong paths.
Botond173
2d ago
On part of the Israeli guy, this seems a major failure of judgement. I mean, that guy was in fucking Vegas, and could not be arsed to hire a hooker who at least claimed to be 18?
It's probably simple arrogance.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
· Edited 2d ago
Why? This seems like a pretty random comparison. Your theory for Epstein is that his operation was an Israeli intelligence plot to gain kompromat. What does that have to do with an Israeli official getting arrested in a sex sting (with 7 other people, who have a mix of Anglo, Hispanic and South Asian names) unless you’re suggesting that the sting was also an Israeli intelligence plot (in which case why was he arrested and his arrest publicly announced)? The Israeli government obviously used diplomatic pressure for his release since a senior intelligence official under serious felony charge is highly vulnerable to interrogation, not only by the US but by anyone else who can get to him in jail or on bail. They may have traded something, they may not, but Shaun King certainly doesn’t know.
As I understand, his reading here is that (1) this case provides evidence that the US government and criminal justice system puts higher value on Israeli intelligence interests over prosecution of pederasts, and are willing and able to engage in perversions of justice and coordinate gaslighting of any public observers to implement this preference; (2) for the "there is nothing particularly fishy about Epstein" theory, the assumption that the above conjunction is wrong is load-bearing. The argument generally is one of compounding implausibility - "Epstein worked for Israeli intelligence" is an extraordinary claim, as is "the USG first sabotaged any legal means to stop him, and then killed him or arranged for him to kill himself when it could no longer be delayed", as is "the USG apparatus successfully conspired to maintain official denial the aforementioned facts", so a theory that requires the three of them to hold is extraordinary indeed - unless the three statements are not in fact independent, in which case the resulting probability may in the extreme case just almost equal the probability of the single proposition of "Epstein worked for Israeli intelligence" alone, which looks a lot better when weighed off against the "series of unfortunate events" null hypothesis.
tl;dr: his posited comparison is that in both cases, the USG had a tradeoff between "help Israeli intel" and "prosecute pedos" and chose the former.
Rov_Scam
2d ago
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
It's sad that there's this misapprehension that girls are being kidnapped by abusers, when a huge number of runaway girls (something like 20%-40% in most studies) are fleeing sexual abuse in the home.
Right--I've seen other studies suggesting that a majority (perhaps more than 70%) of runaway girls experience some kind of sexual abuse, but I don't have access to the study to see whether they distinguish based on when and where that abuse occurred (i.e. prior to running away, or as a result of it).
Also, no small number of teens run away from home because they are addicted to drugs and their parents are trying to stop them from using. It really is an extremely multifaceted problem.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2d ago
And none of them will fix errors like 'pubic law'. It won't notice when 'losses of profits' should be 'losses or profits'. It won't call out a date of 20008.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
the US doesn't officially recognize dual citizenship
What is this supposed to mean? The US allows dual citizenship explicitly, and there is no shortage of official US government material acknowledging this possibility and even outlining special rules surrounding it. How much more recognising can you get than writing "U.S. dual nationals owe allegiance to both the United States and the foreign country (or countries, if they are nationals of more than one). " in official communication?
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
Sure, you might start here. Some tidbits:
In effect, the more disrupted the family, the greater the likelihood of running away. Youth living with both biological parents were least likely to run away, followed by those with at least one nonbiological parent, those with single mothers, and those in other family structures.
...
The finding that females were more likely than males to run away was unexpected given results from prior research showing that males are more likely than females to have spent the night in a shelter, public place, abandoned building, outside, underground, or in a stranger’s home. In that study, however, youth were not asked directly if they had run away, and some may have had other reasons for being away from home, such as family homelessness. It also is possible that female runaways are more likely to stay in locations not included as response options in that study, such as with a friend or acquaintance (sometimes known as “couch surfing”). Although perhaps less dangerous than other destinations, couch surfing still constitutes a risky environment for youth. Future research should investigate gender differences in patterns and contexts of runaway behavior.
In other words, there is some information available, but for the most part researchers aren't drawing the lines we're drawing here, which is what I mean when I suggest that the statistics on these things conflate a great many complicated and distinguishable events.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
Software spell check (on early computers at least) required a cute algorithm --- the Bloom filter --- to work reasonably efficiently. Actually checking each typed word against the whole dictionary wasn't (and likely isn't) practical, but a statistical guess of correctness is good enough.
Throwaway05
2d ago
I think it is probably worth thinking about how in the U.S. we are on the receiving end of a very successfully propaganda apparatus arguing that working hard and having pride in your job is stupid and pointless. Sure it's generally framed in something like "working for the man" or "capitalism sucks" but it is very successful, and past generations with similar views (ex: hippies) had quite a bit of pride in the endeavors they actually got up to which helped avoid this.
It's killing what makes America... America (and yes for the right excess immigration without cultural assimilation isn't helping).
I remember the days where you were more likely than not to find a helpful worker in a retail store. Those days are gone.
People have no pride in themselves or desire for excellence. It's sad.
In medicine it gets very gross because doctors still have that vibe but a lot of nurses do not and the ones who become NPs are often the worst. I've stayed late hundreds of times because I had the right skillset, I didn't want the night team to get swamped and so on. NPs just walk off.
After reading more of your thoughts I'm actually much more in agreement with them than how I interpreted them initially
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