domain:tracingwoodgrains.com
birb_cromble
2d ago
If your charitable interpretation is correct, what kind of timescale would you predict before you hit break-even?
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
2d ago
1st prize: Cadillac 2nd prize: steak knives 3rd prize: you're fired.
Totalitarianit
2d ago
I listened to Blood Meridian, and it was very difficult for me to follow. The long detailed descriptions of scenery, old tools, weaponry, dress, etc. would get monotonous and my attention would slip. There was also no real shift or change in tone between the description of a baby being slammed to death by someone in the gang versus a description of a sunrise. The amount of times the color blue was used to describe multiple different objects or pieces of scenery felt repetitive. I didn't really pick up on some of the themes or details in real time as I was listening to it either. I only registered some of the implied depravity of the Judge after reviewing the chapters online. I knew of the character's reputation before I listened to the book and had a loose idea of what he was, so I wasn't completely in the dark. I listened to it on a road trip and then finished the rest as I lay in bed for the evening, which took about 3 or 4 days. The online review filled the gaps pretty well, but I was pretty disappointed when I realized how much detail had slipped by me when I was listening. I get the hype surrounding it, but it was hard to absorb in real time.
Sloot
2d ago
> make whatever mouth sounds get you to leave them alone
> zero pride in work
> zero interest in getting something done in a final in production sense
If your and @WhiningCoil's characterizations of H1Bs are accurate, that makes me think H1Bs are low-key based in being Punch Clock Villains (or should it be Heroes?)—in contrast to Westerners (especially Americans), who will "go beyond the extra mile" or whatever in grinding hard for some self-actualization and to make someone else rich. Although granted, they'd not sound like great coworkers.
It's like the only goal is just to generate more work - good, bad, repetitive, doesn't matter - so that the billable hours stay strong.
Generating billable hours would be a refreshing contrast to many a young Westerner in law/consulting/accounting/etc., who might work 60 hours in a given week but then shave it down to 40 (lest a partner or project/relationship manager tut-tut that he or she had to perform the Emotional Labor of shaving hours off the bill [or present the bill as is]). However, then said young Westerners in law/consulting/accounting/etc. will then fret as they might not have enough "utilization" for a given year due to their lack of billable hours during downtime between projects.
Chad H1B Billable Hour-Generator vs. Virgin Western Billable Hour-Shaver.
I think the Freedom Alliance Elites are a closer parallel. From To the Stars by Hieronym, Chapter 34:
Defeats on the battlefield failed to put the remains of the Freedom Alliance in the mood for surrender, however. The hyperclass oligarchs, by now thoroughly indoctrinated by their own poisonous ideology, placed the blame for failure squarely on the shoulders of their soldiers, declaring that if their soldiers could or would not perform, then they would be modified until they would. In underground laboratories around the world, scientists tinkered with the genomes of vast arrays of clones, designing thicker cranial plating, muscular augments, toxin glands, and whatever else might be expected to improve combat performance, regardless of personal welfare or the source of the genetic modifications.
Perhaps the most disturbing modifications were those made to the brain, the seat of consciousness itself. Some brain regions were enlarged; others were shrunk or deleted entirely, written off as unnecessary in an instrument of war. Empathy, love, fear—all these were unnecessarily evolutionary adaptations that could now be placed squarely in the dustbin of history. The tools of war, these "perfect" soldiers would not need to ever question their orders, or indeed do anything but show their prowess in combat.
This horrific disregard for basic human dignity showed itself amply in the names of the abominations that would serve as the FA's elite soldiers in last stages of the war. Grunts, Tankers—these were not nicknames given by their enemy, but their actual designation, followed of course by a serial number. These soldiers came in different varieties, each shaped by their battlefield role—giant hulks for assault troopers, lithe, giant‐eyed nymphs for snipers. The Tankers were some of the worst, barely more than an out‐sized head on a shrunken body, perfect for connecting directly to the life‐support system of a medium armored vehicle.
While some of these creations were sentient, after a fashion, the nature of such a sentience was loathsome—tied to one task until death, devoid of human or even animal emotions, and each bound irreversibly by its cortical control module to its masters. It is telling that, at the end of the war, there was essentially no resistance to the Emergency Defense Council's Decree 224, ordering the summary execution of any FA "Elites" found anywhere.
In the end, the FA spared not even its civilian functions from such "enhancement"…
— Excerpt, Unification Wars, textbook for Primary School History
After the war, Zhou Zhi Yi was executed for her role in creating the Elites.
srf0638
2d ago
The inability (in work capacity or mental fortitude) to lift all day is the same as not being "all that strong at all" - no matter what the little numbers on the plates say when they get moved around for a grand total of 10 minutes every other day.
It seems more or less pointlessly obfuscatory to use the word "strong" like this when you yourself invoked the more accurate "work capacity or mental fortitude" (and we might also or instead say endurance, heat tolerance, hand skin toughness, ....). People surely do love to define "true strength" as what they, themselves, are good at, even when it has very little to do with maximal force production.
srf0638
2d ago
hopper
I would push back against this a bit. If a "hopper" scenario is what motivates you to go put in the work, fine, cool, whatever. But it sure seems to me that this scenario is just as contrived and fake as actual real competitive sports with standards established through a history of wide participation, particularly when you look at the multisport competitions that actually exist. To my ear, it vaguely rhymes with a Rawlsian veil of ignorance--"how would I train if I didn't know what I had to do?" Of course, there may be an answer to this question, but in a world where I do pretty much know what I have to do that answer shouldn't have much action-guiding force. Meanwhile, the cost of invoking a "hopper" scenario is that it invites mediocrities to be smug, cf my point above about established standards--"Mark Allen? what's his Fran time?"
when one is talking about muscles we're mostly talking about aesthetics.
Indeed. I class talk of "gym muscle" much the same as "I don't want to look like one of those gross bodybuilders", "lean, toned muscle", " Tyler Durden in Fight Club", "swimmer physique", etc. etc.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
LLMs truely can boost productivity in most tasks except for pure manual labour we would see GDP roaring.
Ironically, I personally suspect that the current AI revolution may find its best use cases in manual labor fields. Replacing software developers is sexy, but hard. Training a model to operate robotics for conventionally "hard" problems (picking fruit, sewing garments, sorting trash) that require a bit of intelligence due to inconsistent inputs (fruits differ, fabric bunches in non-deterministic ways, trash isn't worth sorting) seems much more viable than groking a full software stack.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
2d ago
In the US it's a current event: T-Mobile claimed selling location data without consent is legal—judges disagree. One might be able to opt out.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
Your phone probably feeds geolocation data to ad networks. The rest is obvious.
JarJarJedi
2d ago
As far as I know, Coinbase still allows you to withdraw your coins to your own wallet whenever you want.
Yes, of course. But: this is only while everything is well. At any moment if something goes wrong Coinbase could stop withdrawals, and you can do absolutely nothing about it - short of suing them of course. Just as with the bank: normally, you just transfer money with a couple of clicks, but if the bank has problems, you have problems. Except there's no FDIC for bitcoin, so you're not protected by anything.
Unless your suggestion is that he find some dude to sell him BTC for cash, I dunno how else he would come to acquire the coins in his wallet.
No, acquiring coins through Coinbase is just fine. But then get a self-custodial wallet (I prefer offline hardware ones, but you don't have to go as far if you don't want to, any computing platform can hold a wallet - though do back up it and/or the keys if you use software) and move the funds there. That's what I do when I DCA - it's very convenient to set it up on the exchange, but once it gets to something sizeable that I'd hate to lose, I move it to my custody.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2d ago
I had a very similar experience when I read Neuromancer a year or two ago. I always knew it was influential, but I didn't get just how influential until I read it. It is honestly an understatement to call it "influential", every cyberpunk setting is basically copied wholesale from Neuromancer. It was pretty wild to see how strong the influence is.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2d ago
Way of Kings is one of the slowest books Sanderson has written, I'd say. I almost gave up on it because I was waiting for the plot to actually start happening, so I sympathize. If you read his other books (say, Mistborn) they are much better paced. Way of Kings does pick up towards the end, but it takes forever to get there.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
2d ago
I mean, SIV is the simian equivalent/originator of HIV, but I don't think Scotland is quite so far gone.
Throwaway05
2d ago
it's food for thought nonetheless
Lol I mean I maintain shit ain't ready yet like I always have - it's very common for diseases to present atypically and even more common for patients to poorly explicate things. Neither of these is well captured in the literature and therefore the data set.
birb_cromble
2d ago
Especially in China, world leaders in personal surveillance?
Maybe my understanding is out of date, but I thought that China was also a world leader in bribing the people who interpret the surveillance footage as well
birb_cromble
2d ago
Where are the parentheses in that statement?? Which part is Scottish????
birb_cromble
2d ago
I’m in a building full of programmers
I'm also in software, and we've seen value in the following areas:
- Keeping juniors from completely stalling when unsupervised for a day or so (at the expense of going down a rabbit hole), like a beefed up search engine.
- Toy scripts to show management that we're "AI ready"
- Spinning up a lot of boilerplate on a Greenfield project that's similar to other pre-existing problems.
They seem to all be absolutely terrible for large legacy codebases. I've lost count of the number of times it spit out code in the wrong language entirely.
At this point, I don't think AI is a dead end, but I'm starting to think LLMs might be a blind alley for this particular application.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
I’m expecting that most of the internet will be abandoned by humans by 2050 as bots, fake images and videos and so on continue to spread. Eventually “I read it online” will have the same effect on future generations as it did in 1995 — a sign of something that’s unverified and therefore suspect. The number of outright hoaxes is high enough now that I think most people have had tge experience of being fooled by a fake-news story, picture, or video, or reading or listening to someone who has. It’s crazy enough now, but give it 25 years and I think it will be so difficult to spot a fake that people will be forced by necessity to return to the equivalent of old school news sources, people they actually know or have good reason to trust.
self_made_human
Sajjano durjano bhūyāt, durjano badhyatāṃ sadā, baddho'nyān nibandhāyet
2d ago
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12334947/
This the one? It's mildly ironic I found it using GPT-5T, but it's food for thought nonetheless.
NunoSempere
2d ago
This is a good point. I consider the above an early draft, with fewer signposts, mostly pointers to the primary sources I'm using, because The Motte can take it. Maybe you might derive other interpretations from the primary sources than what I am getting out of them. The final polished version, read by about 3K people, is here.
A Chinese navy ship collided with a Chinese coast guard vessel while pursuing a Philippines coast guard boat. Subsequently, China claimed to have expelled US warships from “Chinese territorial waters” in the South China Sea.
The link under "claimed" links to a more neutral source, because in this case it remarks:
Beijing has also pushed back what it calls infringement of its airspace and maritime waters by the US and its allies, while the latter claims it flies and sails its military assets in international airspace and waters.
anon_
2d ago
How much of this is attributable to the extremely low startup cost of an AI project? Having someone spin up a few Claude instances and seeing if that works can be surprisingly cheap.
Previous technologies have required far more initial investment, so this might just be “everyone can have $10K tokens to try whatever you want if you can write a half cogent proposal”.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2d ago
I don’t find this compelling.
there's no lack of New Testament passages that identify Jesus as God, using theos (no definite article) as a predicate to describe the nature of Jesus — that is to say, Jesus is God, or divine, or of the same nature as The God, his Father. See, for example, John 1:1, 20:28, Romans 9:5, Titus 2:13, Philippians 2:5-8, Hebrews 1:8, 2 Peter 1:1, or John 1:18.
Even this is too much. John 1 doesn’t tell us what happened to the Word upon becoming flesh, or in what sense the word became flesh, or even to what extent it became flesh. The exclamation of Thomas is just as likely to be the exclamation of someone having witnessed the power of God in Christ, of referring to God generally due to the shocking experience (as we say “my God” today). Romans 9:5 is just as easily read as a doxology to God the Father https://biblehub.com/commentaries/romans/9-5.htm
There are similar interpretative issues with the other mentioned passages. Hebrews 1:8 is the most compelling, but it quotes a psalm which itself speaks about David. Jesus himself teaches us how to understand this, when the Pharisees falsely accuse him of labeling himself a god despite being mortal:
“Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken— do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’?
Thus, the appellation of “god” applied to a mortal as used in the psalms should normally be intepreted as an exaggerated title of honor. This cannot refer to anything more, because “scripture cannot be broken”. The passage is telling: Jesus rebukes the idea that he is divine, and instead comes calling himself “son of God”. This was a title used to refer to those of supreme righteousness in the Book of Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus, which were important works circulating at the time. This is crucially important: no one at the time would have interpreted “son of God” as indicating a being as equally God as the Father is God.
Or in Mark 10
a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.’” And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.” And Jesus, looking at him, loved him
Note that the man revises the title of Christ according to Christ’s teaching. Christ is Good because God is good, not because he is God/god/ sharing in the divine nature or anything else. This passage makes virtually no sense in a Trinitarian understanding, because if Jesus is equally God he is equally omnibenevolent, inherently good. Well, that’s obviously not what Jesus is saying. All mortals are good only insofar as we radiate the glory of God, allowing ourselves to be sealed by His imprint (Hebrews 1:3).
What you do not find — and would never find, in either biblical literature or in the writings of the Greek-speaking Church fathers, who were abundantly clear about the divinity of Jesus
The way in which Jesus is seen as divine (I would choose “heavenly”) is not as clear as you would expect. In the Shepherd of Hermas you find:
he is Lord of the people, having received all power from his Father. But hear why the Lord took his Son and the glorious angels as counselors concerning the inheritance of the slave. The preexistent holy spirit, which created the whole creation, God caused to live in the flesh that he wished. This flesh, therefore, in which the holy spirit lived, served the spirit well, living in holiness and purity, without defiling the spirit in any way. So, because it had lived honorably and chastely, and had worked with the spirit and had cooperated with it in everything, conducting itself with strength and bravery, he chose it as a partner with the holy spirit, for the conduct of this flesh pleased the Lord, because while possessing the holy spirit it was not defiled upon the earth. So he took the Son and the glorious angels as counselors, in order that this flesh also, having served the spirit blamelessly, might have some place to live, and not appear to have lost the reward of its service. For all flesh in which the holy spirit has lived will, if it proves to be undefiled and spotless, receive a reward. & Now you have the explanation of this parable."
This is divine in an adoptionist sense, though the passage isn’t clear about when this adoption takes place (some verses in epistles seem to indicate after death).
the Creed goes on to confess belief in the Son, who is of the same nature as the Father: That is to say, Jesus is divine in the same way the Father, who begat him, is divine — just as I am human in the same way that my father, who begat me, is human
This is not a good argument, because Jesus is clear that we are all born again from God, that we all become a son of God with the same oneness as Jesus is the son of God (John 17:22-23). Of course we are not turned into sons of God in the sense that we are suddenly turned into a divine being. Neither are we the preeminent Son of God, the firstfruits. But it’s totally anachronistic to make this into an argument for his being God, and it just reads as someone trying to trick those unfamiliar with how words were actually used at the time period.
Ultimately, the importance of adoptionism and “low Christology” is not because it’s the oldest and original, but because it’s essential for the religion to actually have an effect. The Christian must imagine Christ the Man tortured and slain. Truly dying. Truly identifying with him. Complicating this by turning the man into something unimaginable makes identification impossible, destroying the power of the cross. We cannot imagine a divine being with two natures dying on the cross and having this mean anything to us. That’s like telling us the Terminstor died for us. What do you expect the congregant to feel here? Does the mortal Christ have “locked in” syndrome as the divine nature impassibly does whatever is perfect without suffering? This does not inspire any feelings. It’s no longer a drama or tragedy, it’s just worthless philosophical syllogism.
KingOfTheBailey
2d ago
I'd like to get as irritated as you (rather, I'd like to get things right and not irritate my readers), but my English education was terrible. Where can I learn the real rules?
Yes, but anything hyper local is too much even for my laughably nonexistent opsec.
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