domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
DiscourseMagnus
14hr ago
I get some sort of autistic pleasure from obfuscating language
That doesn't sound very autistic at all, actually.
crushedoranges
15hr ago
As a child of immigrants myself, I appreciate the liberal cosmopolitan attitude: many of the kindest and most considerate people I have met have been whites who took great pains to live up to the color-blind promise. And I do reciprocate those feelings. But many immigrant and children of immigrants do not feel as I do. You can pave over a lot of problems with prosperity and wealth, but when times are hard those attitudes will come to the fore.
This ultimately doesn’t say too much though. You can't really look at a bunch of women's clothing, check for ones that have pockets, see how well they're doing and then draw any conclusions about whether the lack of pockets in women's clothing is demand-driven or not. It is possible for women's clothing with pockets to sell well and for the lack of pockets in women's clothing to still be demand-driven.
To put forward a simplistic example let's say that 15% of women would want pockets, and that the remainder don't. Let's say that a slightly smaller percentage of women would be willing to pay extra for pockets due to the additional cost of sewing on functional pockets (note that pockets are a pain in the ass; even the non-functional ones are if they have flaps and bindings and the rest, but the functional pockets take a lot more time even than that). If ~13% of women's pants have functional pockets, and the remainder do not, clothing with pockets will still sell well even when the relative lack of pockets in women's clothing is demand-driven, since the supply of that good is appropriately scaled to its demand.
Unfortunately I am not aware of any economic studies on this, likely because the topic is trivial and the answer is obvious. Most of the literature I am able to find on it is ideologically-infused sociology without even the slightest hint of rigour. All I can say is that personally, as a dude, I actually don't like pockets, it doesn’t feel particularly secure and I often carry a sling bag along with me in non-professional circumstances where it would be more socially acceptable for me to do so. I assume that the incentive to just use purses is greater when you want to carry makeup and other items (the women I know pack a ton of stuff in their purses; I'm honestly not sure what half of it is for).
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
15hr ago
I can't fathom Total War working well on mobile. And why not get it on PC, where you can use one of the many mods? I just don't see any upside here, get it on PC imo.
phailyoor
15hr ago
If the letter is real, then showing the letter itself will lend a certain amount of legitimacy without giving up the source. It won't be proof but it would be a whole lot more believable.
pigeonburger
15hr ago
So, he wants to run a hanania republic.
The arc of history bends towards machine dominance in all tasks. Just the other day we had OpenAI's contender come second to some Polish genius who was practically sweating blood in an invite-only programming optimization contest.
https://officechai.com/ai/openai-places-second-behind-human-coder-at-atcoder-progmming-event/
But we can't retrain Psyho for 10,000 years of subjective time on more optimization. His brain is capped at 20 watts or so, just like the rest of us. God isn't going to release homo sapiens max (now with denser neurons and a bigger cerebrum!). The bioethics brigade won't let us step it up and nobody has the balls to ignore them, plus it's too late now. In contrast, Nvidia has a 2-year release timescale.
One would think after watching various chess masters get crushed in the 80s and early 90s we'd have learnt. But it's like you said, nobody learnt anything 'Oh it can beat an amateur but a master has deep conceptual understanding' -> 'oh it can beat a master but Kasparov has deep intuition' -> 'oh it's a nothingburger, let's move on to text'. We continue to not learn the trend even today when progress is much faster and in many more domains. Gary Marcus somehow still has a following, he's the Gordon Chang of AI.
phailyoor
16hr ago
I get some sort of autistic pleasure from obfuscating language (my friends and I came up with an insane number of codewords for too many things) so maybe you caught me in some sort of subconscious trap. Irregardless, I will still not say the words.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16hr ago
Can't he find some way to put pressure on Murdoch and Newscorp to give in? Donald Trump does have considerable resources for suppression and dirty tricks. He's trying to put the screws on Elon right now but perhaps doesn't realize Elon's preparedness to shoulder costs for his beliefs. But Elon Musk is an exception and not the rule among major business leaders.
Now if it's Murdoch + Elon + broad billionaire coterie who are unhappy with tariffs and generally erratic behaviour then I can see how Trump might be outmatched here.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
16hr ago
I just found out that Total War Medieval II is available on mobile devices, and I'm tempted to buy it. It's one of the few entries in the franchise I missed out on, I played more than my fair share of Rome 1, it ran surprisingly well on a shitty 'netbook'.
Unsure whether to buy it there, on pc, or just hold out for a remaster.
The fact that the Republican base went with someone like Trump, rather than someone like more Hanania-adjacent, is somewhere between 'something that will never be forgiven' and 'It's not like I wanted to be popular with you' and 'I knew you were all idiots anyway.'
Hanania-chan is tsundere?!
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
16hr ago
AI art is a democratizing force, anyone can use it. Consider George Droyd for instance, a Solana shitcoin supported by AI video memes: https://x.com/FloydTerminal
https://x.com/FloydTerminal/status/1927219300055572563
https://x.com/FloydTerminal/status/1888370796550373792/video/1
The far-right has less resources for art (see https://x.com/DacistRapian, clearly talented and artsy but nobody is going to give him money, he keeps getting banned off twitter and making new accounts) and the MAGA-right just aren't that rich in art either, though they do have resources. MAGA by nature is not well-organized, not a top-down force. It's mostly Trump charisma and the sincere effort of his supporters, not a honed hollywood/media operation. There's no Trump equivalent to the movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apprentice_(2024_film), which is basically a hatchet job on Trump. They don't have the resources or the organization. When they do try and do something top-down it often ends up being hideously crass and cringe.
What people on the right can do and do well is repurposing and rearranging other art for their own purposes. The only time I see The Apprentice referenced online is when the film version of Trump gives his sigma speech about tactics and Trump supporters go 'based!' see here for an example. They reappropriate the work of others: https://x.com/PierceKeaton/status/1865222291157598458
Or in 2016, remember MAGApedes? Can't Stump the Trump? WH40K God-Emperor memes? Today on the far right there are chudjaks, soyjaks, basedjaks and troonjaks. That was all bottom-up stuff. It's the opposite of hard to MS Paint up a drawing.
AI art is a natural extension to the resource-poor, bottom-up approach. One person can do it in a few hours with a trivial amount of money, often for free. It meshes poorly with the left-wing top down approach. Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert were running with million dollar budgets, Colbert supposedly was burning through $100 million a year, which is why his show was cancelled. With those resources there's no need for AI art, you can just do it the slower, more expensive way. The left are the slow-moving established players, the right are the disruptive start-ups, they're always going to make more use of new technology.
ABigGuy4U
16hr ago
Ah there it is. The appeal to Politically Correct “history” that is the final refuge of every anti-human subversive. “The witches abduction of Gunnlaugr in the Eyrbyggja Saga is clearly a premodern attempt to describe an alien abduction!” bleats the graduate student with a research grant sponsored by The Groom Lake Institute for Advanced Aeronautics and Cultural Understanding.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
17hr ago
I can hope too. I'm just imagining they had to spend like $100k in inference compute or whatever to really kick the asses of the high school students. They spent around $1,000 per question on ARC and that was stuff we expected ten year olds to solve.
If that's the world we're in, I see the bubble bursting long before we finish building up to superintelligence. Companies aren't going to invest $500b/y for decades on this when the payoff in the meanwhile is kinda maybe you can fire the dumbest Jr SWEs on your team.
This is also if we accept the argument that completing the Math Olympiad is Real Reasoning and if the model truly just used its own thinking.
WhiningCoil
17hr ago
WhiningCoil is flirting with a permanent ban himself, actually.
Yeah, about that, I sent a modmail about this accusation that I'm running alts, because it's bullshit, and I'd appreciate a response.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
17hr ago
Nah, man, this is silly. His name was George Floyd. That's simply a fact. He was a person of historical significance who had a name that we use the same way we use names to refer to anyone else when we're trying to convey information about who we're discussing. You are not "Saying his name" in the liturgical BLM sense just because you use his name to communicate data.
You can despise him and the Black Lives Matter movement all you want, but literally Voldemorting words is giving "the enemy" more power over you than if you just used accurate names and descriptions for things. Notice that I typed "Black Lives Matter" without in any way implying that I endorse the movement, because everyone understands what I mean by referring to it.
These awkward affectations you use to avoid typing words remind me of Zoomers saying "unalived" or "grape" - originally because they had to censor certain words on TikTok, but now it's just becoming a Zoomer thing that you can't Say Those Words.
It's ridiculous and it isn't making some political point or p0wning the Wokes, it's just you contributing to the obfuscation of language.
phailyoor
17hr ago
consult with ... attorneys
He did consult with attorneys. Or else who other than one of his attorneys filed the court papers?
Given the difficulty of proving defamation in the US (touched on downthread), even if the letter is absolutely fake it's extremely unlikely that Trump will be able to make a pleading that survives contact with the court. Meaning that his lawsuit will likely be dismissed immediately as a matter of law, without proceeding to any fact finding or depositions. It will likely end with Trump yet again screeching at the liberal judge who nuked his lawsuit, even though that nuking is completely and entirely justified. I don't think Trump really has much to gain here, except maybe by showing his "sincerity" by doing everything he can to "prove" that the letter is fake.
It's amazingly hard to prove a counterfactual. Even if Trump has the feds release literally everything they have on Epstein, that doesn't prove that the letter the WSJ has allegedly seen (BTW nobody else has ever seen it) is a fake.
In fact I wonder why the WSJ didn't leak the actual letter. The WSJ reporter saw the alleged letter and was able to transcribe its entire text, yet they couldn't release an image of the letter? My guess is that it's a shoddy fake and that if the internet got to see the letter itself then the charade would fall apart immediately. But if the WSJ "journalist" puts his head in the sand and turns off his brain, they can legitimately say they had no idea it was fake.
Beyond what @sarker pointed out, Grok 4 is practically deep-fried through training on test sets, and it only managed a 12% the last go around. OAI isn't the most trustworthy company around, but I don't think they're fucking around here.
anti_dan
17hr ago
I think the WSJ article was probably an unforced error on their part. They have no way of proving the fidelity of this alleged document in court without burning their source, and there really is no journalistic justification for source anonymity in this case either. Selective leaking of documents involved in a criminal investigation are not something a responsible publication should be doing. I know many do it. And Watergate is, for some reason, considered peak journalism. But really this sort of thing is peak hackery.
That's great--my classical liberal heart is warmed--but it would be interesting to know for certain whether you are indistinguishable from their family in the ways that matter to them.
Yeah, I struggle with this myself. I do sometimes wonder whether I'm naive on this issue and if my out-group would extend the same courtesies to me.
What I'd say is that the in-group bias is definitely present in the first-generation immigrants and it results in mini ethnic enclaves being formed, but it's more of a product of not being comfortable with English than it is some deep cultural incompatibility. By the second generation these differences disappear. My kids have Hispanic and Asian friends because me and my wife hang out with Hispanic and Asian families. And there's so much intermarriage! I don't think the intermarriage would be as high as it is if they thought white families were really different from them. This isn't to say ethnic identity is abandoned; not at all, but I think the differences are exaggerated, and if anything, people become much less Chinese, Filipino, and Indian, as they're absorbed into the amorphous American blob.
"thanks for the help, we're going to take everything that is given to us to help our ingroup and, if possible, to become the dominant power, at which point we will then suppress our outgroup."
I wouldn't describe the immigrants I know as being "given" much beyond the opportunity to immigrate to the U.S. That's significant!, but they worked their ass off to climb from their poor neighborhoods to Fairfax County. I also don't think my family is perceived as the "outgroup" in any meaningful sense that affects our well-being.
Basically, I think your objections are too abstract. That's a nice quote, but how are my freedoms being suppressed? I think I would have noticed by now.
Honestly I don't think about it 99% of the time because I just grill in irl and the enemy hasn't come for that yet.
If I was a hardcore hokey pokey dancer then sure this would be a major problem but it's really not an issue.
it's them who has power over you, not you over them.
This is in fact true when the enemy controls all of the institutions and positions of power. Where for many people, simply having a job requires many implicit and several explicit oaths of loyalty to the enemy. I am fortunate enough that I am not one of those people.
You also have to remember, the enemy has been doing the hokey pokey and gloating about it, nonstop, 24/7 for 5 years now - on the streets, on tv, at work, in the papers, at the hospital, in the technical documentation for some random API, etc. I'm not the one who made it such a big deal. And NO, I will NOT do it.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
17hr ago
Information? No. Anecdotal observations? A few. But might I suggest you just create a thread in Small Scale questions or something?
sodiummuffin
17hr ago
Good idea I can say that, as it's a way to refer to the event without saying his name.
Different event, same effect. The Ferguson Effect refers to the rise in crime following the death of Michael Brown, and by extension any similar event. (Michael Brown being the guy who protestors chanted "hands up don't shoot" over, who wasn't actually holding his hands up and was in fact attacking the officer and grabbing his gun shortly after having robbed a store and assaulted the store employee). It was somewhat contentious whether the Ferguson effect was real, but then we had the Floyd Effect which was much bigger and less ambiguous.
You're probably right. The biggest driver was just being able to sneak in games while work was slow.
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