domain:astralcodexten.com
DirtyWaterHotDog
10hr ago
The stubborn 10 pounds that's spilling out of my pants. (╥﹏╥)
Do we actually think some people are getting a helping hand through a shiny new loudspeaker, with the twin express aims of promoting their ideas and drowning out ideas someone doesn’t like? Or is it just the case that people whose ideas get more reach have skilfully figured out the content algorithm game?
If you look at any public statements made by Google, pre-acquisition Twitter etc. they are absolutely clear that they are attempting to promote trusted, authoritative sites (as judged by them). There is a reason that google medical searches always route to Healthline and WebMD: ever since the 'Google Medic Update' google has routed medical, financial and disaster-related queries to trusted and usually governmental partners.
Google also engages in strategic banning, throttling and promotion of information:
Tackling misinformation online is an ongoing challenge that Google continues to invest in, including researching novel approaches to the problem. For the past several years, Jigsaw, a unit within Google focused on threats to open societies, has collaborated with researchers from universities of Cambridge and Bristol and American University to study the effectiveness of a tactic called prebunking. While a more commonly known tactic, “debunking” seeks to correct false claims already in popular discourse, prebunking helps individuals build psychological resilience to misleading narratives before they ever encounter them.
Prebunking works by alerting individuals to attempts to manipulate them, along with the false claims or tactics likely to be used to do so, coupled with a thorough refutation of those claims or tactics. The approach is highly flexible and can be adapted to a wide range of media, from a simple billboard to long-form narrative content. Academic research has shown it to be effective against a variety of false narratives, from white supremacist hate speech to COVID vaccine misinformation. In the fall of 2022, Jigsaw ran a large-scale trial of prebunking seeking to counter anti-refugee narratives in Central and Eastern Europe following the mass influx of Ukrainians in the wake of Russia’s invasion of the country.
We will continue to fight this pernicious problem by taking a flexible approach to tackle misinformation across different products, taking action at scale, elevating trustworthy information* and equipping people with skills to detect misinformation.
Google literally says here that they are promoting some material in order to drown out and make ineffective other material. I can't even say that all of this is wrong, I am not necessarily keen on a laissez faire approach to e.g. selling medical products in all cases. But it is absolutely manipulation of the discourse by promoting favoured voices and banning, shadow-banning or drowning out others.
The Dept. of Health also cites communiques from Facebook, Twitter and TikTok to state that:
Some technology platforms have improved efforts to monitor and address misinformation by reducing the distribution of false or misleading posts and directing users to health information from credible sources
https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-misinformation-advisory.pdf (page 6)
gattsuru
10hr ago
A 'blade'-style automotive fuse housing costs 50-75 cents at scale, and a glass vial-style fuse holder costs 30-50 cents, and the fuses themselves cost money on top of that. A single 0606 500ma fuse is cheaper at unit one digikey prices; at scale, they're basically free. They're probably only included at all because they're part of the USB standard -- overdraw could and does kill older motherboard USB ports, and rarely even entire motherboard USB controllers! -- not that it stops designers in other cases.
Ideal answer would involve a PTZ self-resetting fuse (though they're not great options for USB devices people are likely to leave plugged in indefinitely, and usually end up 5-10c), or a through-hole conventional fuse that could be fixed by anyone with a soldering iron and patience (though mixing SMD and through-hole parts gets stupid expensive, esp for boards with SMD on both sides). But it's not as nonsensical as it looks at first glance.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
10hr ago
The polities live similar lives, eat similar foods, consume similar mass media, display similar politics on issues primarily determined by age (social security, medicare), enjoy similar past times, have similar incomes, etc. The median red and blue voter are both very identifiably American when mixed into a global pool of people.
How is that a far lesser divide? These things are completely superficial.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
11hr ago
For what it's worth, the cultural divide between red and blue America is still far lesser than the divide between the two great bay colonies that would eventually unite against the crown, even if current levels of general contempt for the other are about the same.
The polities live similar lives, eat similar foods, consume similar mass media, display similar politics on issues primarily determined by age (social security, medicare), enjoy similar past times, have similar incomes, etc. The median red and blue voter are both very identifiably American when mixed into a global pool of people.
Its easy to pick out salacious examples of this not being the case, but how much of this is driven by:
a) The various outrage optimization engines, and b) One's own human tendency to remember the remarkable and aggregate exceptions, ie to over pattern match
5434a
11hr ago
I have a Microsoft wireless Xbox360 controller I bought to use with emulators on my PC. I very rarely game so it sat around for a couple of years, and when I came to use it again the dongle was dead. The giant dongle. The giant dongle with the ~2m wire (why?!). I have a wifi dongle that is barely larger than the USB port it plugs into and that can handle bi-directional network speed data transmitted to the other end of the house, but a receiver for what amounts to little more than single key presses sent from the chair towards the screen has to be the size of a 240V wall plug for some reason.
Anyway after a little reading around I prised open the giant dongle's case and replaced the microscopic fuse component (why use such a small component when there's so much space?) and restored it to working order. Apparently this is a common fault. Imagine how many people have resorted to just binning it and buying another. Probably not many at the price they charge, the size they make it, and the frequency with which it breaks.
TwiceHuman
12hr ago
Good thing you bring up those two terms, they're making the difference. I'm saying that the internet is privately owned, and that the fact that real life isn't, is the main reason we have any sort of freedom at all. The rest of the difference is purely mentality. It doesn't feel weird for people to say "We shouldn't allow people on the sex offender registry on our website", and yet, you don't hear of sex offenders being banned from walmart, or blacklisted from electricity companies, and for some reason, this doesn't lead to either company being accused of aiding sex offenders. If we ran the real world like we ran the internet, then you could easily kill people just by making them unpopular. They'd be unable to buy food, to drink water, to find a place to sleep, to get a car, etc, with the argument that anyone who provides a service to criminals are criminals as well. Which is why that idea is insane.
I recall reading that a company should either act like a platform or a service, rather than try to enjoy the advantages of both but admittedly not in dept.
thejdizzler
12hr ago
Thank you for the words of encouragement.
thejdizzler
12hr ago
Thank you for this! It’s what I’ve been thinking as well. I really need to earn more money so I can provide for a family (which would also help me escape from the college student lifestyle).
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
12hr ago
I did a detox fairly recently and I think the key is to find some other activities that you replace scrolling with to help ease the cravings. I found if I had things like books, puzzles and art supplies or writing supplies close at hand you can choose to scratch the itch in more useful ways.
It’s rough because I’m discovering that the screen itself is a hyperstimulous and therefore when you use a screen for an activity it creates a sort of craving for more screen time. Even switching to a soduku app instead of a paper book makes a difference— I’d crave my iPad to play soduku where I could take or leave a soduku book or crossword book. Realizing this is valuable to me, and really kind of scary. Even under the best of circumstances, it’s hard to get away from the idea that screens are generally the worst way to handle anything, and that they really need to be treated like any other potentially addictive stuff.
I’m personally skeptical of time blocking because of this addiction aspect. Making rules around how you use an addictive substance not only isn’t recovery, but is often used as a way to say “I don’t really have a problem.” If you have a drinking problem that you’re pretending to control because you only drink after 5pm or only on weekends, not only are you still addicted, but you’re impeding your recovery. TBH I’ve often used such things as a quick test of addiction— if you are saying something like “not me im in control because I …” that’s a huge red flag.
striker
12hr ago
I think the soundproof room in a dungeon is another false equivalency. But for the sake of a civil argument let’s agree on the loudspeaker question. Do we actually think some people are getting a helping hand through a shiny new loudspeaker, with the twin express aims of promoting their ideas and drowning out ideas someone doesn’t like? Or is it just the case that people whose ideas get more reach have skilfully figured out the content algorithm game?
Personally I think that it’s convenient for some people to claim that they’re being throttled by some nefarious group of actors, rather than build the skills necessary to be more successful in the algorithm.
I think the second reality is much more likely, but that turns down the dial on conspiratorial thinking. Messy reality is scarier than a perception of victimhood, which appeals because it moves the locus of control away from you and me.
TLDR - it’s more attractive for us to believe our freedom of speech is being limited by bad actors than accept that we’re not skilled enough or our ideas aren’t very good.
aqouta
12hr ago
There is in principle no more reason to associate ourselves with a group or "whole" based on skin color than there is to do so based on eye or hair color and in fact more reason to associate based on shared culture, resident city or voluntary associations. I don't even share a language with most of my ancestors. My nation is America, my people are Americans.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
13hr ago
Being polite doesn’t mean accepting every idea that comes along. It simply means that you express your disagreement in ways that, to paraphrase the rules of this place “give light rather than heat.” That’s entirely possible even in cases like pedophilia where the acceptance of such a bad idea would be a disaster. Saying there are only two genders is perfectly within the bounds of free expression and I don’t think you should be harassed or fired for that. Saying something like “there are only two genders and those who disagree should be considered dangerous to society,” that is over the line. Saying “Trump should not be sending the National Guard to American cities” is fine, saying “Trump is doing an authoritarian power grab by sending the National Guard to American cities” is too far because words like authoritarian, fascist, Nazi, and related are incendiary and dangerously lead to the acceptance of violence against anyone smeared with those terms.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
13hr ago
It used to be a podcast, don't know if it's still going on.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
13hr ago
If this is the motte, then what’s the bailey?
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
13hr ago
"Would you love me if I was a worm" interestingly suggests the opposite - that women would prefer to be loved primarily for their personality (which persists after they are no longer hot). Conversely, I feel better when complimented for my looks (primarily the immutable parts like height, face structure etc) rather than other personal qualities, and I suspect it is because having looks is effortless to me while keeping up prowess takes work - it is more reassuring. And I'm straight.
Don't PUAs hammer in over and over that the boyfriend's nice personality is only praise because it is predicated on him being the boyfriend in the first place?
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
14hr ago
Something you may not get if you are primarily same-sex attracted is that the qualities straight people find attractive in an opposite-sex partner and the qualities that make them feel fuckable for themselves are different. Most straight men don't care about being hot, except instrumentally in that it may (depending on the surrounding culture and the particular guy's dating strategy) help get them laid. They care a lot about their partners being hot, because male sexuality is what it is. Another guy, or even a woman who isn't in my dating pool, telling me I am physically attractive doesn't emotionally validate me in the way that someone telling me I am good at my job, or a good cook, or even physically strong - all expressions of prowess and not fuckability. As a happily married man I don't find myself getting anxious about fuckability, but in so far as I think about it what makes me feel fuckable is my wife praising my bedroom technique - i.e. prowess again. I think this is true for most straight guys who are not PUAs, and of course the whole point of PUA culture is to turn an attractively masculine personality into a learnable, teachable skill - i.e. prowess yet again.
I am not claiming to be an expert on women, but based on standard cultural scripts (outside spaces where everyone is performatively denying sex differences), women writing about their petty anxieties (Blue Tribe/Unculture elites give women a lot of high-pl), and my experience supporting first my little sister and later my wife, women assume (mostly correctly, given straight male sexuality) that their own fuckability is 90% about their hotness. But their own attraction to men is mostly emotional, and only partly visual, and they know this. For a woman to tell her girlfriends about her boyfriend's adorable personality is high praise. For a man to tell his bros that he is into his girlfriend because of her personality is a relationship-ended if she finds out - it's a euphemism for "she's ugly."
I strongly suspect that your desire to be hot and loved for your intrinsic qualities comes from the same source that made you trans-curious when you were younger. It is a profoundly feminine trait.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
14hr ago
I own an 8bitdo pro 2 controller. I learned that I hated controllers, but my son uses it every day and it's still going strong after several years of abusive gaming.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
14hr ago
The first reasoning model for which we have decent documentation, and one which basically defined the research field (as OpenAI/Google/Anthropic hide their recipes) is DeepSeek R1. They've finally had it published in Nature, too. The supplementary has been very informative, because people kept speculating about implementation details.
…we aim to explore the potential of LLMs for developing reasoning abilities through self-evolution in a RL framework, with minimal reliance on human labelling efforts. Specifically, we build on DeepSeek-V3 Base8 and use Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO)9 as our RL framework. The reward signal is only based on the correctness of final predictions against ground-truth answers, without imposing constraints on the reasoning process itself. Notably, we bypass the conventional supervised fine-tuning (SFT) phase before RL training. This design choice originates from our hypothesis that human-defined reasoning patterns may limit model exploration, whereas unrestricted RL training can better incentivize the emergence of new reasoning capabilities in LLMs. Through this process, detailed in the next section, our model (referred to as DeepSeek-R1-Zero) naturally developed diverse and sophisticated reasoning behaviours. To solve reasoning problems, the model exhibits a tendency to generate longer responses, incorporating verification, reflection and the exploration of alternative approaches within each response. […] During training, we design a straightforward template to require DeepSeek-R1-Zero to first produce a reasoning process, followed by the final answer. The prompt template is written as below. “A conversation between User and Assistant. The User asks a question and the Assistant solves it. The Assistant first thinks about the reasoning process in the mind and then provides the User with the answer. The reasoning process and answer are enclosed within ... and ... tags, respectively, that is, reasoning process here answer here . User: prompt. Assistant:”, in which the prompt is replaced with the specific reasoning question during training.
Then they do a large number of rollouts for questions, automatically verify, GRPO creates gradients based on answer correctness within each rollout, model is updated, continue for thousands of steps and that's basically it.
As well as the progressive enhancement of reasoning capabilities during training, DeepSeek-R1-Zero also demonstrates self-evolutionary behaviour with RL training. As shown in Fig. 1b, DeepSeek-R1-Zero exhibits a steady increase in thinking time throughout training, driven only by intrinsic adaptation rather than external modifications. Mak- ing use of long CoT, the model progressively refines its reasoning, generating hundreds to thousands of tokens to explore and improve its problem-solving strategies. The increase in thinking time helps with the autonomous develop- ment of sophisticated behaviours. Specifically, DeepSeek-R1-Zero increasingly exhibits advanced reasoning strategies such as reflective reasoning and systematic exploration of alternative solutions provided in Extended Data Fig. 1a, substantially boosting its performance on verifiable tasks such as maths and coding. Notably, during training, DeepSeek-R1-Zero exhibits an ‘aha moment’, shown in Table 1, character- ized by a sudden increase in the use of the word ‘wait’ during reflections, provided in Extended Data Fig. 1b. This moment marks a distinct change in reasoning patterns and clearly shows the self-evolution process of DeepSeek-R1-Zero.
At the time there's been a lot of suspicion about it but now it's pretty solidly settled and replicated science.
Not enough to make a really useful model (I've tested R1-Zero, it was somewhat unhinged), but for reasoning as such. Everything else is basically a quality of life or speed-increasing implementation detail. Using reward models to grade qualitative queries, branching and merging, iterative dataset augmentation and dozens of other tricks add little to the core principle.
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
14hr ago
It's a belief that whites as a class as superior to other races as a class which requires an additional very important racial consciousness layer that is not necessarily present.
Civilizations can be considered as the cumulative efforts of a people/race "as a class".
That I'm closer to the center of a bellcurve of my race than my equally qualified colleague Milton is a curious bit of trivia that need not concern either of us.
It concerns your hypothetical colleague when women cross the street when they see him coming, when his kids stand out in the good schools he sends them too, when the criminals on the news always seem to look like him.
You'll note that I mentioned group dignity as a reason why non-whites/asians are understandably hostile towards HBD. I'm working on a post expounding on this at length, but for now I'll leave you with @hanikrummihundursvin's comment on a related thread:
[Humans] exist as biological entities. Genes expressed in an environment. We are a 'social animal'. We exist in groups. We interact with groups. You don't exist as an idea. You exist as a part of a greater whole. [...] I wish that the individual, reason driven, enlightened and fair minded people could understand and empathize with the emotion being displayed in the OP. Being part of a 'whole' that is in some ways lesser than another is a constant feeling of badness. The aforementioned minded, who want to rise above such silly emotions, or simply lack them, need to understand that they are a minority of a minority.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
14hr ago
Why would anyone want that???
The advertised purpose is "ultra-portability". Note that the thickness of the Lite 1 is only 16 mm (0.6 inch), versus 35 mm (1.4 inches) for the Lite 2.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
15hr ago
I can get it new on Amazon UK for £33, though I have little interest in another controller I won't use, let alone one without analog sticks. Why would anyone want that???
Possibly the funniest controller ever is the 8BitDo Lite 1, which has three directional pads and zero analog sticks. Unfortunately, it appears to have been discontinued in favor of the Lite 2, which has two analog sticks as usual.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
15hr ago
I own an 8bitdo controller. It's Bluetooth, runs off a rechargeable internal battery, and does everything I ask of it. For £17 (I think), can't really ask for more. The build quality seems decent
Of course, I'm a diehard m+k user, so I must admit I've used it literally once for a session of Forza before never using it again. Money well spent.
Game theory problems only emerge at scale. Smaller communities don't suffer from them nearly as much for this reason. I believe in the capability of exceptional individuals, humanity has advanced thanks to great people/'giants', the mediocre masses add very little value.
I also happen to have reverse engineered some of these dynamics, and probably better than 99% of researchers, for I have solutions that I don't see anyone else talk about directly. Granted, Jordan Peterson wrote a book warning about excessive order, but I don't think he realizes that he's mathematically correct in warning against that. And do you know that the definition we use for "rational agent" is one which always seeks its own advantage? If our ideal for how one ought to think is completely void of good taste (like that definition is), then we will run into problems which didn't exist in the past because good taste used to protect against it.
How do you get somebody to do 1000$ worth of labour, without paying them, and without coercion? It seems impossible mathematically, and yet, my grandma has sometimes done this, just because she enjoys helping people. By making people more intelligent, but less human, less things become possible. General intelligence might conflict with instincts, as learning logical thinking is all about suppressing your natural biases, instincts, emotions, etc.
Accurate world models aren't bad per se, but they're not sufficient. Being completely objective also puts you at a high risk of becoming a nihilist.
Of course our coordination is getting worse. We're also becoming more lonely despite being "more connected" than ever. The reasons are more obvious the less educated one is.
More options
Context Copy link