domain:freddiedeboer.substack.com
TheDemonRazgriz
4hr ago
I disagree quite strongly with this, I think it represents a failure of imagination on your part. Yes, that war was brutal, involved many players, and had a lot of civilian casualties (especially if you include deaths from famine and disease). But it was frankly not that large of a war. Over the entire conflict only a few hundred thousand combatants, at most, were involved across both sides (Wikipedia actually estimates it as less than 100,000 total). Most combat was in the form of skirmishes; daring but small-scale raids; guerilla actions; and cyclical series of atrocities against civilians, reprisals for the atrocities, reprisals for those reprisals, and so on. You have to consider the possibility of much more industrialized warfare between countries with much larger populations with the ability to raise much larger armies. Consider the possibility of a “water war” between not just Sudanese rebel groups and Ethiopia, but between the Ethiopian and Egyptian armies. Or a war involving the likes of Kenya, or Nigeria. These aren’t realistic possibilities in the short term, it’s true, but after another 10 or 20 or 30 years of population growth and industrialization, maybe throw in some unexpected coups or stronger dictatorships… the worst case scenario is much, much worse than the Second Congo War.
And, perhaps more importantly from a Western perspective, the modal “poor African civilian” has a lot more options for migration— and, crucially, awareness of those options— today than at the time of that war. Not to mention the sheer explosion of population. Even another war of the same scale as the Second Congo War would likely trigger a much larger wave of migration to the West today than it did at the time, never mind a war with armies (and often civilian populations) an order of magnitude larger.
Note that these newly massive populations are also youth-heavy, which means a lot of disaffected fighting-age men. Sure, a lot of the time this just leads to civil war, but all it takes is one charismatic dictator to direct that energy into outward aggression and you could have yourself a good old-fashioned war of conquest. Get two of these situations going at once and you could have a catastrophe. A lot has changed in Africa from 2000 to 2025, and a lot is going to change from 2025 to 2050.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
4hr ago
I hate cutting weight. My lifts (never impressive to start with, but acceptable) have gone to crap and I feel tired all the time.
215-220 lbs (at 6'2") overall felt great. My lifts were decent, I still had abdominal definition, and running 2-3 times per week (where my long run was probably 6-8 miles) felt pretty good. Some health numbers were trending in a way I didn't like, though, so I signed up for some trail races and have been working on getting my weight down.
I'm now around 195. My health numbers have shot back down to what they were a few years ago, my running distances are up, and I have way more definition, but as I said, my lifts are now terrible and I'm tired all the time. I'm still 3 months from the first race and having another 5-10 pounds gone would make a marathon much easier, but I'm already wishing I could go back to being heavier.
faceh
4hr ago
When the entire world is experience a massive decline in relationship formation simultaneously, I think complaints and concern are merited, and the people who are claiming disbelief are in fact being... obtuse.
Y'all start sounding like boomers saying "sharpen up your resume and go and give the hiring manager a firm handshake."
Everyone seems to easily admit that the job market is harder on new entrants than it used to be, and is dysfunctional for the average person. Most would admit that the housing market is WAY harsher on new entrants than before, and is extremely distorted.
Most people can even acknowledge this is due to broad factors that distort those markets, NOT individual action.
But try to say the same thing about the dating market, and they immediately go "Well YOU must be doing something wrong."
Nah bro. You're just being a spiritual boomer.
Of course, I keep pointing this out to @Primaprimaprima, and they keep ignoring the point to drill down to individual solutions, which as we see are just not viable.
GBRK
4hr ago
For the 99% of American veterans and their families using the VA, the gender column is a redundant sex column. Its deletion changes very little
Again, nothing was actually deleted, it was a straight rename. If data HAD been deleted, then conversely the liberals would be entirely right to worry-- both at the object level (because it would make it harder to track the health outcomes of people whose sex differs from their stated gender identity), and at the meta level (because it would prove that the VA was staffed by people perfectly happy to delete inconvenient data to serve their political masters.) It's important to mantain all the current data, and to have it clearly placed in a well-defined structure. Storage is much cheaper than compute, and just "having something in the chart" is way less convenient for medical researchers looking to make conclusions about aggregate data than a checkbox. Actually, if you'll let me climb up onto an even taller soapbox-- I privately suspect that a massive fraction of healthcare inefficiency is ultimately caused by incompatible and difficult-to-parse data standards that waste the time of providers and make it difficult to provide care. I don't have ANY of my childhood medical records, for example, because they're stored in hard copy in another state in my childhood doctor's medical office. And unfortunately, the process of taking old bad records and unifying them into a smooth, unified system is beyond nightmarish-- so any attempt to obstruct that where it's happening is literally costing lives.
Gamers know that gaming isn't "cool" in the way alpinism would be cool even if no rich people considered climbing Everest worth their time. Hence the bafflement that Elon tried to fake being good at it, along with taking mild offense that the lie was so transparent.
Path of Exile 2 is not even a game where direct competition or direct cooperation exists in any big proportion, unlike WoW. The entire point of having top gear is to farm top content easier so you get more top gear and currency. There's no fighting the best PvP players, there's almost nothing like completing legendary WoW raids in a feat of top-notch cooperation (party play in PoE is largely done for optimized farming and not as an accomplishment in itself), there's no social status in the larger world because gaming is not Cool(tm). The fact that Elon did it exposes him as an alien who simply doesn't understand people.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr ago
This is true, and it's also important to remember that this is happening on the margins, not to everyone. It's not that NO ONE is getting laid. It's that a few percentage fewer people are. But in the same way that an economy with 5% unemployment is radically different than one with 15% unemployment even if the majority of people have a job under either condition, a world where 25% of people are unwilling virgins at 30 is vastly stuff from one with 5%.
faceh
4hr ago
The idea that the woman would spend 4-6 years in tertiary education and come into the relationship with $15-50k in debt is a pretty new innovation though. Only about 30 years old, even.
Which is why I think attacking that particular factor might bear fruit, although women will flip out about it.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
4hr ago
PoE2 is not a player versus player game, and as far as I recall Elon was not on any leaderboard.
jkf
4hr ago
Gamers are not flattered because no one but Elon ever wanted to be an accomplished PoE player on top of a world-class business career, and Elon did it in such a cringe way that if anything, he tanked their status along with his.
If they are so much better than him, they should be able to slaughter him despite his PtP account though, right?
Maybe the gamers feel low status because all their grinding doesn't amount to a hill of beans in the end.
The thing that REALLY gets me is that financial troubles are easier to weather with a partner. It's easier to build wealth with a financially sensible co-tenant, even if you aren't joining all your funds together. It just is, by any sane approach.
So guys who are trying to build wealth in order to become worthy of a woman are, BY SHEER DEFINITION, going to take longer than usual to build that wealth and thus will be dating much later in life, missing out on vital experience and still ending up poorer overall.
I'm pretty much moved on from my Ex, but every time I think about how much more financially better off we'd be if she had stuck around I cringe in mild mental pain.
Previously we could split our approximately $2200/month basic living expenses down the middle. And split chores, and helped out with basic stuff like watching the dogs (instead of paying for boarding) or splitting food deliveries and such.
Upon her leaving, I immediately went from shouldering $1100/month in living expenses to just about the whole $2200. In addition, she is now going to have to shoulder a $1300-1600/month for her own separate living expenses.
Granted I could have downsized, and I didn't, but at least now I'm almost immune to lifestyle inflation, can't afford to upsize!
So I, personally, am now $14,000+/year poorer than I would have been in the counterfactual world where she stayed.
Between the two of us, we're collectively like $24,000+/year poorer than we'd have been than if we'd continued splitting expenses.
There's a lot of stuff that could have been done with that money. I guess in a Keynesian sense that having that extra economic 'activity' is somehow better overall, maybe. But there's no doubt that we'd both be wealthier and have a better financial future.
So this logic that "you have to have your own life together and be completely financially independent before you seriously start dating", which is peddled to women AND men, is ass-backwards from my perspective.
Also, I've seen enough Caleb Hammer episodes to know plenty of people will NEVER. EVER. get to that point.
Its financially sensible to find someone reliable earlier on to help contribute to your mutual growth. That's a big point to getting married at all.
And as per usual, I'm starting to lose my mind when the response to this is to put more and more pressure on men to step up, without examining what the actual incentives are, and why the problem is so widespread.
(add in the fact that women are increasingly likely to have a student debt burden as well, so the man will be paying for THAT too!)
Like you say:
This no longer sounds like a problem that can be fixed merely through self-improvement.
Its not viable, UNLESS there is more incentive/pressure on women to date guys who aren't yet financially independent but have all green flags otherwise.
Which is to say, pressure women to settle, and settle earlier. But good fackin' luck finding any voice saying anything like that, meanwhile the amplified message is "don't ever lower your standards girlie, in fact, raise them. If you can't find what you're looking for its just proof that you're too good for this world. You owe nothing to men, and their concerns don't matter."
The system is broken and pretending that individual actions can fix it is, frankly, delusional.
Yep. But saying it out loud marks you as lower status, "hah, this guy is poor and can't get bitches." Well maybe, but a bunch of us are poor and can't get bitches, and if we can't talk about the problem it'll get worse for everyone.
When do we admit the current advice is insufficient?
jkf
4hr ago
I mean it's certainly possible to release your training code as well as the resulting weights for an LLM -- now I'm curious as to whether this company is actually doing that or not?
If not, agreed that "OS" is a big misnomer here -- there are certainly lots of individuals floating around who might like to train their own version of this and could afford to do so (FIRE startup retirees spring to mind) and "you can use our weights" is quite different from "you can try to make improvements on our process". More like free beer than free speech.
thejdizzler
4hr ago
I'm not saying that the individual shouldn't do the things he mentions. They will work. The problem is expecting this to resolve the crisis on a larger scale. The system is broken, gaming it won't magically fix things.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
4hr ago
This may be due to my lack of familiarity with gaming, my last real experience with anything close to high end gaming was WoW circa 2010. My impression was always that a player who bought equipment but didn't have the talent would be shown out fairly quickly, similar to a player with a great racket but no skill, difference between the games I guess.
But ultimately I find this to be pretty standard rich dude behavior. Like buying a race car: you can hack it in some SCCA local stuff but not in the pros. And ultimately, by pretending to be a top gamer, Elon reifies the idea that being a top gamer is something to be aspired to, in the same way that rich people climbing mount everest reifies alpinism as something to aspire to.
thejdizzler
4hr ago
Probably true, as long as we remember that is the case for both genders not just dudes. Girls can easily obtain instagram orbiters or read things like Fourth Wing that push those buttons without putting in effort.
thejdizzler
4hr ago
Guaranteed monogamy is also one of the few ways that actually produces stable societies. You mess with it at your peril.
jkf
4hr ago
at least they had the fig leaf of 'it is not about ideology, but the bad term is hurting really people!'
"it's not about ideology, the bad (incorrect) term is polluting our data" seems pretty good -- we are talking about a medical database here, peoples' sex is actually a thing that matters; gender not so much.
(to the extent that it's a thing that actually exists, which I agree that the thrust here is that it's a 1:1 match with sex, and therefore would be redundant to track separately)
ace
4hr ago
Guaranteed monogamy for all is nothing more than the socialized ownership of the means of reproduction.
That's good!
WhiningCoil
4hr ago
So, a funny story about how motivation is contagious.
I was working on some chairs. I keep trying to make steady progress, because the longer I go without working on them, the less motivation I feel to get back in the saddle and just finish the damned things. My wife waylaid me with a task of making some floating shelves, which I knocked out in about a weekish. The finish is currently curing and then they go up on the wall.
Anyways, I'm explaining how I stay motivated to my daughter, and I ask her "Is there anything you wanted to do, but then got distracted and now it's hard to get back to it again?" She goes "Yeah, riding my bike without my training wheels." This apparently lit a fire under her five year old butt, and she's been going hard at it. After we got the driveway redone on Thursday so it's nice and flat and smooth, and every single day since she's been out there with her training wheels off. Friday I was giving her a push before she fell 5-10 feet later, Saturday she was pedaling down the driveway but couldn't make it uphill. Sunday she was making it uphill. Monday she was making it uphill and downhill and turning at the bottom. Yesterday she frustrated herself to hysterical tears trying to get going all on her own without a push, and by the end of the day she'd pulled it off. Not 100%, but she got her foot in the door. Couldn't be more proud of her.
And it was seemingly kicked off by me having a candid conversation with her about putting effort into staying motivated.
jkf
4hr ago
I think gardening leave is still legal in both places though; after all it's just an extended notice period with modified duties essentially?
Last Friday I read the first draft of my NaNoWriMo project, which I completed at the very end of May and didn't look at for six weeks.
It's... decent. The story is coherent and I think the characters are believable. Right now, I think the main thing that's holding it back is pacing. It's broken up into five acts: I think the first, fourth and fifth are quite strong and very readable, whereas the second act is a little slow, and the third needs to be edited quite heavily to add in a new "hook" that only occurred to me after completing the first draft. Additionally, at the end of the fourth act and the start of the fifth act there are three very long chapters back to back at which the pace grinds to a halt, which I need to cut down very dramatically so the pacing doesn't flag too much.
On Sunday I began work on the second draft, chopping down the first with a goal of removing (per Stephen King's writing advice) at least ten per cent of the total word count. This has not been challenging at all: by the time I finished work on Sunday, the combined word count of the first and second acts was already 24% shorter than the equivalent word count in the first draft (I even cut an entire chapter from the second act I didn't think added much). I've been really enjoying the process. Once I've finished cutting stuff out, I'm going to add in some ideas I had since completing the first draft, again with the goal of my second draft being no longer than 90% of the first draft's word count (preferably shorter). Then and only then will I let someone other than me look at it.
2rafa
5hr ago
I increasingly agree with the suggestion that infinite easy entertainment online, constantly available, means young people are just less interested in the opposite sex overall than previous generations were at the same age.
Sure, in the abstract the average 19 year old would probably still be interested in having ‘a girlfriend’ or ‘a boyfriend’, but that’s different to going out and making it happen. And there’s a real sense in which maybe they want one a little less than their equivalents did in 1990 or 1965.
Some young man sated by porn, twitch, games, TikTok whatever might still want a girlfriend, might still take one if she fell into his lap, but he is often still going to put less effort into looking for her than his father did at his age. Maybe that’s all bullshit, but I don’t think so.
The humiliation, self-consciousness, embarrassment of seeking romantic affection that most people experience to some extent is just less desirable and more easy to defer if good alternative (in the moment, not long term obviously) entertainment sources exist.
Gaashk
5hr ago
Yes, I think that's pretty much it. The modal <50th percentile woman seems to be a heavy single mother, who will bring a lot of drama into her boyfriend's life.
In my experience, it's not even that they have to be making $70k now, either, but more like that they clearly would be able to buckle down and do it if they ended up having kids together.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5hr ago
I think R1 and the wave it's caused have already had an effect. It's frozen the ceiling on «frontier» pricing around $15/1M for models slightly but clearly better, such as Sonnet or 2.5 Pro (there are higher-tier offerings but they get very little purchase), encouraged the consumption of small distilled models like grok-mini or -Flash which directly compete with Chinese output, and clearly led OpenAI and Meta to try to ship a better open model for prestige (OpenAI may succeed yet). Amodei is coping, his company is among the more vulnerable ones and with the worst velocity; no matter how hard they lean on the DoD pork and national security rhetoric, everyone in the US does that now.
Expenditures have already happened, largely; datacenters are getting completed, giant training runs will be just a way to amortize that by producing models that will warrant higher inference volume and pricing. Base models on the level of Grok 3 are the floor for this generation, soon GPT-5 sets the next frontier floor. There is also an obvious pivot to agents/deep researchers/reasoners with extremely bloated, branching, parallelizable inference, and you need models to be smart enough to make sense of all those vast context dumps. Synthetic data scaling is focused on RL now, that also in effect requires to run a great deal of inference to produce higher-utility models. They won't cut expenditures, in short.
I don't know what to tell you except for: not they don't. Like, where did you get this idea? The world you describe is completely alien to me anecdotally, and if you push me I could probably even justify it academically. As far as I can tell people like to engage in some of the old Noticing, but the moment your break a pattern in a visible way, they reassess you individually. I'd sooner believe in actual misogyny-driven patriarchy, than I would in a bespoke expectations-driven "implicit bias" system.
Even what you say about the cat sounds deranged to me. I aged out of caring about it, but a pet like this would be... well, I think the kids these days would call it "a cure for the male loneliness epidemic".
More options
Context Copy link