domain:alexberenson.substack.com
thejdizzler
21hr 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
21hr 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
21hr 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
21hr 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
22hr 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
22hr ago
It used to be a podcast, don't know if it's still going on.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
22hr 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
22hr 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.
23hr 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
23hr 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
23hr 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
23hr 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
23hr 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
1d 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
1d 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.
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
"Interested in ruling me" would imply they take actions likely to make this happen. They mostly are interested in doing their own thing on the other side of the world.
What did you think jihad meant?
I, however, am not a European.
I meant "Europeans" as in whites. It is my observation that a critical mass of whites are congenitally inclined to believe that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere; the missionaries, the activists, the reformers, the revolutionaries. These impulses can and will be directed towards whatever ideological end is fashionable.
...My enemies are a threat because of their values, not because their values are a proxy for those of non-europeans/east asians. I am not worried about Africa or the middle east. I am worried about people who live in my country and don't want me to keep living in it.
Your enemies don't want you to keep living in your country because of the threat your values pose to the intersectional coalition, whose most powerful demographic are non-whites/asians. They believe that the things you believe are lower-order avatars of the same egregore whose purer incarnations included colonialism, patriarchy, homophobia, etc.; I think that they're more correct than you'd give them credit for.
Leaving other people to do as they wish elsewhere is simpler and both morally and physically safer.
You are correct. However, as I have established, I don't think that whites will be able to resist the allure of the Burden even if your side wins. To the extent that I wish they would take it up, it will likely be for misaimed motives and ineffective means, but a man can dream.
The only alternative is too horrible to detail.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
Mildly interesting court opinion:
-
A woman and her daughter allege the following: In the middle of the night, they are about to get out of their car in front of their house. They look out of the car's window and are terrified to notice a cousin of theirs standing outside the window and pointing what appears to be a pistol at them, with his finger on the trigger. They hear two clicks, but no gunshot occurs. The two alleged victims flee to a nearby alley. By the time they return to their car with a police officer, the cousin has disappeared.
-
The cousin is charged with possessing a gun as a felon, possessing an instrument of crime, assault, and reckless endangerment. A search of his residence turns up no gun. Nevertheless, at a bench trial he is found guilty of all charges and is sentenced to 26 years of prison (with the possibility of parole after 13 years). The appeals panel vacates the conviction of reckless endangerment since there is no proof that the gun was loaded, but affirms the other three convictions, and leaves the 26-year sentence untouched since the trial judge imposed no penalty for the reckless endangerment.
Don't forget that you can be convicted of serious charges in a "he said she said" case, on witness testimony alone, if the jury (or the judge in a bench trial) finds the witnesses more credible than you are "beyond a reasonable doubt"!
Mildly interesting court opinion:
-
While driving around in the middle of winter, a police officer observes a woman crying and yelling as she bangs on the front door of a house while wearing only a bathrobe and a pair of slippers. When the officer stops and inquires, the woman states that her romantic partner pushed her out of the house after an argument. The romantic partner exits the house and talks with the officer. The officer advises the woman of her state-law rights to seek a restraining order or press criminal charges for domestic violence, but the woman refuses to do so.
-
Several minutes later (after, among other things, using her car's computer to review the department's training on domestic violence), the officer returns to the house and talks again with the woman to advise her even further of her rights under state law. The woman still isn't interested in doing anything. However, since the police have been called to this house five times in total, the officer tells another officer to contact a detective for further investigation.
-
Later on the same day, the woman is found dead in the house. The romantic partner pleads guilty to manslaughter. The woman's estate sues the officer for negligence, arguing that the officer was obligated to arrest the romantic partner because there was evidence that the romantic partner had perpetrated domestic violence (pushing, which constitutes the crime of assault) against the woman. The officer moves for summary judgment, arguing that state law grants absolute immunity to liability for any failure to make an arrest. The trial judge denies the motion.
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The appeals panel reverses. The law says that an officer is obligated to arrest an alleged perpetrator of domestic violence if the alleged victim "exhibits signs of injury". Here, the officer observed no such signs. And, in any event, that domestic-violence law does not override the separate law that grants absolute immunity to liability for failure to make an arrest, which applies in all cases where the officer acts in good faith. The woman's estate will not be getting any damages.
Not-so-fun fact: While both the federal government and the New Jersey government allow random members of the public to access all the documents in a case docket online, it appears that the Pennsylvania government does not! Rather, electronic access to Pennsylvania judicial documents is restricted to lawyers and case participants "for legal and security reasons", and members of the public must request documents manually by submitting a form to the court clerk.
Microsoft has a convenient list of controller manufacturers that are sufficiently high-quality to be trusted with the official Xbox license.
Doesn't this just mean that when people say "recursive self improvement" what they actually mean is "holistic full stack recursive self improvement that allows the entity to improve all bottlenecks simultaneously"?
Yeah, that's one part of it, the largest one. A second part is that, at any given point, you have a handful of specific bottlenecks where incremental investments produce outsized impacts, so the benefit of full generality is not large. The third part is that improvement that is not "self"-improvement is still improvement.
When I consider all three together it seems really unlikely that there's any particular meaningful "threshold of self-improvement" - the capabilities we actually care about in terms of altering the world in large scale and potentially bad-for-humans ways will probably be unlocked quite a bit earlier than fully-general recursive self-improvement.
There's a mental pattern people (including past me) sometimes have where they basically think of it as there being a "game over" screen that pops up when AI "reaches the RSI threshold", but it sure looks like we've already reached the threshold of meaningful but non-generalized recursive improvement and the situation will continue to look muddy for the foreseeable future.
striker
1d ago
I’m not brushing over it or not noticing. You’re making completely false equivalencies between publicly owned and privately owned.
Now you might argue that X or YouTube etc should be publicly owned (I.e. commandeered by the state). But thats a completely different argument.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
The concept of a failed state had nothing to do with failing its people, even in the minds of the most high-minded Blairites - nobody saw North Korea as a failed state. A failed state was a state that was so dysfunctional that it couldn't prevent its territory being used to attack other states, like Somalia with pirates, OG Taliban-ruled Afghanistan with Al-Qaeda, or Syria with ISIS.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
For one, they seem very interested in ruling you.
"Interested in ruling me" would imply they take actions likely to make this happen. They mostly are interested in doing their own thing on the other side of the world.
It is true that you have little to gain from ruling them. However, you have plenty to gain from the $72.25 trillion in oil they possess (total value of Middle Eastern oil reserves, per ChatGPT), or any of the other resources they control, or simply the land they inhabit.
We are not as rich as we once were, but we are not so poor as to require banditry, and we certainly are not in need of additional desert.
A lot of black men would not be in prison right now had they simply realized that crime is a bad idea and they should stop doing it.
Sure, and there will likely be serious consequences for Europe for the mistakes they're making. I, however, am not a European.
To the extent that your enemies' values are a proxy for the values of non-Europeans/East Asians, the threat they pose is a paper tiger.
...My enemies are a threat because of their values, not because their values are a proxy for those of non-europeans/east asians. I am not worried about Africa or the middle east. I am worried about people who live in my country and don't want me to keep living in it.
None of these arguments are persuasive on why attempting to rule the world is a good idea. Leaving other people to do as they wish elsewhere is simpler and both morally and physically safer.
While I had gotten a good deal further than you had at the same age, i still had insecurities in similar ways and my impression was that a it was true for a lot of my (successful) friends as well, so i don't really think success solves this issue, at least not normal levels of success, even if it might lessen it.
My only real advice is to keep your head down and work on the material goals so that you secure your financial future. This will allow you to solve your other problems (but not solve them by itself) and for me almost all of my anxieties went away with becoming a father. I feel like society really understates just how meaningful parenthood is and how it ties you together with your family, community and the future in general.
confidentcrescent
1d ago
Your browser has probably run a hundred little arbitrary Javascript programs so far today, and the worst they could have done would have been to churn your CPU until you closed a tab, because anything more serious is sufficiently restricted. Crooks sending you links to rnicrosoft.com still depend on you typing in your credentials or downloading and running something heinous afterward, even though the second you click a link like that they get to send your computer arbitrary programs that it will immediately run.
Firefox released a patch to fix a sandbox escape* just a few days ago. Properly sandboxing a program has not been solved; it is an active problem that consumes a lot of developer time and current solutions likely still have many holes to be found.
Crooks mostly rely on users downloading and running scripts because it's easy and it works. Writing exploits against browsers isn't worth the effort when you can socially engineer people and get the same results.
Most sandboxing is also bad for performance. Javascript on a random webpage generally doesn't need to perform well but a recommendation algorithm will.
Practically speaking, you just do what any automated test suite does: you define "infinite" to be 5 minutes, or 5 seconds, or however much you expect you can spare per run at most, and if the algorithm isn't done by then it gets killed anyway.
Any cut-off aggressive enough to meaningfully restrict denial-of-service attacks would make algorithm-writing functionally impossible for the majority of users and probably also prevent most of the possible algorithms people would like to write.
* I can't see the bug report but based on the reported severity this appears to be a between-page sandbox escape rather than fully leaving the browser.
Thank you for the words of encouragement.
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