domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
gattsuru
20hr ago
Right now the primary obstacle is that it costs $300 a month to run.
I'm... not sure this is true. I was able to get Companions running for a couple short prompts on my phone without any active subscription. Higher usage is supposed to be locked behind SuperGrok (30 USD/month), and I did get delays on free level. SuperGrok Heavy doesn't advertise any Companion-focused capabilities, instead emphasizing the Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy 'supersmart' LLMs.
((Which makes sense; most workflows I can imagine are closer to a couple nVidia 4090s, rather than the nightmare-mode power that the bigger LLM models can do. It's weird to have text be more expensive than video, for once, but compare WAN local to deepseek local, and maybe it's not as goofy.))
Conversely, I think it's going to be very interestin whether Grok gets booted from the IOS store.
guajalote
20hr ago
I am skeptical of using LLMs to critique your writing if you are already a good writer. LLMs are not good writers in my experience, and I have a hard time imagining their critiques will be helpful if you're not making basic mistakes. Can you give any examples of truly useful writing feedback you've received?
Tiber727
20hr ago
Trans activists turn this on its head by actively reifying the ancillary gender roles and arbitrary social expectations, particularly those assigned to female people. Rather than claiming "you are a woman, therefore you have to wear skirts and pink clothing", they claim "I like wearing skirts and pink clothing, therefore I am a woman". They thereby reduce the status of "woman" to the ancillary, contingent gender role, the very thing the radical feminists are seeking to abolish. Radical feminists want to deprecate the ancillary, contingent gender roles altogether; trans activists want to elevate them above all else. Perhaps these goals aren't quite antithetical but they certainly aren't aligned with one another.
This is somewhat right, but misses that there's a weird way they are able to internally square the circle, even though it's externally baffling. And that is that gender has a near-infinite number of possible meanings and takes on whichever actual meaning it needs to at the moment. Skirts and liking pink are part of the female gender role, but not necessarily because not all women like them, and some men like them. Wanting to cut off your dick is a sign that you are trans, but not all trans people want to change their body. I've even brought up the point that "if sex is your body and gender is your mind, why is getting surgery called "gender affirmation surgery" if it's changing your body?" and was told that breasts are "gendered." Which is ironic when you consider that they often complain that "woke" means too many things.
There's gender identity, gender identity, gender performance, etc. and new permutations will be added as needed. Simply put, they want society to not impose patterns onto people. They want people to be able to choose any number of these and impose society to engage with these in whatever way the individual wants, and without any of the negative impositions.
hydroacetylene
20hr ago
Dogs aren’t really like a human child. They can’t talk, for one.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
20hr ago
Or American. It's not an ethnicity, and even Native Americans can be ambiguous.
gattsuru
20hr ago
You're concerned about what this will do to the psyche of teenage boys, but I'm surprised you haven't thought of the male version (which no doubt will exist). A tall dark sexy boyfriend who will treat you only exactly as roughly as you want to be treated, and will listen to you going on about your problems and your neuroses with endless patience and understanding and affirmation?
Other than reach and better animation, I don't think this is different from the AI companions that have been available for a while.
It's got some other complications going on; even at the free tier, there's a certain level of Animal Crossing going on when you return to the 'companion' mode. I don't think that's devastating yet -- the real place where this goes off the rail isn't going to be when this is more human-like, but when it becomes easier to handle interactions with other humans through it -- but it's a step down a road that has a lot of skulls.
bewilduhbeast
20hr ago
I've always wanted to build a West Greenland skin-on-frame kayak, ever since I briefly owned an ancient stitch-and-glue wood kayak that was an absolute dream on the water. I'm not an experienced paddler or anything, but a well-crafted kayak just feels so satisfying to pilot, compared to the heavy plastic boats the rental companies operate. Unfortunately, I don't have the workshop space for this kind of project right now, but there's no shortage of instructional books/videos/blog posts etc. on the topic, and even kits if that's your level (but more fun to do it from scratch I would think). I don't know if you have a suitable body of water nearby, but you should look at some plans and see if they speak to you.
The more clear-headed I think just don't think that the actions needed to stop the boats, and the fight with the blob that it would require, are worth it.
This requires indigenous young men to go out and shoot the people on the boats. They'll stop coming once they know it's a death sentence.
Europe isn't capable of doing that; its old men, old women, and (to an extent) its young women are all in agreement that indigenous young men should be replaced for [whatever reason]. They'll do anything to avoid raising their station in life because they believe they'll revolt as soon as it does, which is not an unreasonable thing to fear given that's when regime change generally happens.
(Well, Eastern Europe still can, but Eastern Europe is poor enough that the migrants won't stay in the country anyway, so it realistically still falls to the Western Europeans to start stacking bodies if they don't want to be invaded.)
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
21hr ago
At the same time, they're not exactly keen on having tens of thousands of young men who are, at best, drains on the welfare state and, at worse, serious criminals, coming to the country. Especially with the papers carefully documenting every landing.
What's the evidence for this?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
21hr ago
Out of curiosity, what was your opinion on similarly extremely online and extremely vain billionaire Bill Ackman buying his way into a tennis tournament, playing doubles with a guy he hired against real pros.
He got murdered and people were upset about it.
I thought it was great. The tennis tour get money, the guys playing got attention, and nobody got hurt.
Buying your way into being cool, whether by playing the impressario to a sports team or arts scene, or you build a submarine or a rocket ship to make yourself into an explorer; sometimes you win tournaments by paying everyone to pretend you're good at things.
Hell, in BJJ we have goofy-ass categories in tournaments, where they have such narrow weightclasses and belt levels and age ranges where guys get "medals" because there are only 3 people competing. (Anthony Bourdain won "silver" in a BJJ tournament, which sounds really cool if you don't realize this)
This is just a new version of that, isn't it?
This seems like a great example of vibes based thinking from both ends.
The change is made because it has some slight vibes of being woke (since the column is called gender) so that's good enough to score an easy win. And it's without much effort, which a lot of them seem to be really lazy and uncaring with this work given how they've messed up multiple times this same way with the Enola Gay or that Army Corp biologist page that included fish gender. I'm not even kidding
Nobody wants to do an in-depth investigation or look through data because that's boring and the only benefit is that you might have to say "sorry boss I looked at it and I didn't find woke" when you can instead go and say "Boss we removed 200k instances of woke"
And then people online are upset without even knowing the details because it has the vibes of being against the Trump admin despite it most likely not being any data deletion and just a change in header.
https://www.psypost.org/secret-changes-to-major-u-s-health-datasets-raise-alarms/
I had to do a double take when I saw this article because I was on the exact team at the VA that did (part of) this. The reddit discussion is being hysterical about data loss but as the article reflects, the changes were purely to column headers and data element names-- or at least, that was what I heard during meetings. (I didn't actually make any of the changes, it was very much "not my job".) The bigger issue is that it sounds like the VA failed to advertise what happened to outside stakeholders. In case any of them are listening... the data tracks and has always tracked the sex at birth, and has never included the gender identity. The columns were called "gender" for the historical reason that the medical field didn't always view gender as being separate from sex.
In effect the whole change was just CYA thing-- the big bosses were making a stink about culture war stuff, and they spat out the easiest possible fix. So far as I know this had no actual impact on any healthcare measures. I can't rule out the existence of eCQM that include gender identity, and there's a (now-deprecated) FHIR extension for gender identity. but frankly I doubt we ever used it. Our data source didn't even keep track of ethnicity, which gets used as a supplement for basically every QDM measure.
Basically a waste of time, and therefore money. Being optimistic, maybe it'll be less confusing for measure developers, but it's hilarious to me that the conservative administration was basically ceding the point here by differentiating at the schema level that "sex" is different than "gender".
Canadian Scots were much less border-inflected in general, so I think the selection effect would be pretty different. Handgun availability is probably more like Massachusetts than Scotland, but nothing like the Southern states.
Scotland itself can be... pretty violent? Knife fights are I think statistically more deadly than handgun wounds...
SSCReader
22hr ago
Guns aren't banned in Scotland though either. You just need a license which is fairly easy to get for someone with a clean record. Handguns are banned though (with some exceptions). May not materially impact your point, but just clarifying as lots of people seem to think guns are banned in the UK entirely.
You could of course also look at murder rates among my Ulster-Scots brethren in Northern Ireland as handguns are legal there. Also getting hold of illegal guns is pretty easy. There are other confounding factors of course.
The old joke about Northern Ireland being the best preparation for any Brit moving to the US: guns, flags, religion and armed police on the streets.
It's possible that there's some classified version we wouldn't know about, but officially geostationary satellites are near-universally focused on satellite communications or maritime telephone, data transfer, and news communications, with a small number of weather satellites that take very low ground resolution images of a third of the globe. If you buy satellite imagery (it's not even that expensive!) you're usually going to buy 'low'-altitude operations from 500km to 1000km, and they'll usually cross their entire overlap area in less than a minute and an orbit in less than two hours.
It's theoretically possible to set a geostat with a telescope looking down, but there's not much advantage and a ton of cost to doing so, and they wouldn't be able to scale to many targets.
That said, there's enough low-orbit satellites that they can image an area pretty regularly. 24/7 coverage isn't plausible and this rounds to only getting an image of a location every hour or two at most, but the bigger flaw would mostly fall for technical reasons due to clouds or nighttime imagery (uh, presuming there's no classified super-nighttime cameras out there). And there's a small business in aerial imaging that can monitor cities for most of a day.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
22hr ago
Humans must be shoved
No_one
22hr ago
a) The people who were fired at state weren't FSOT?
b) even if you say it doubles compensation, it's still nothing compared to what very capable people can get in law, trading, finance, tech..
You don't want 90th percentile, you want 99.9th percentile people for your important diplomatic roles.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
22hr ago
I remain of the opinion that it is likely (but not guaranteed) that courts will find "training models" to not be a sufficiently creative endeavour to merit copyright protection. "Throwing a bunch of data into the GPU blender and doing massive least squares" isn't IMO more creative than scanning a painting, compressing the works of Shakespeare with gzip, or having a monkey press the camera shutter.
Pirate Software seems like a great comparison to this for personality. Just fundamentally can not admit to being wrong, making a mistake or being anything less than incredible.
Musk couldn't drop the POE2 lies because that would mean admitting he isn't super talented at everything. PirateSoftware magically solved a puzzle in Animal Well that took the whole community weeks to figure out because admitting he just looked it up would be admitting he isn't super talented at everything.
Nobody in the world would care if Musk just said he had a lvl10 POE2 account he plays on his off time. But no instead he has to be working 14 hours a day while simultaneously making top ranks in multiple different video games and reading 100 books in a year and of course have time for all his other activities like when he was campaigning, and doing parenting, or watching anime, or scrolling Twitter quote tweeting "interesting" at things.
Although the POE2 thing is pretty interesting. Let's say he was genuine and he truly considers paying a Chinese person to play the game for him as him being that good, is it not possible he considers reading a book summary as reading the book or paying someone to do work for him while he scrolls Twitter as working?
magicalkittycat
22hr ago
Regardless of the activity of the account, the other mods can't make it post publicly.
Exactly! The only person/people who can is the person behind the account assuming it's not hacked/manipulated by Reddit.
DMs are easily faked, publicly posting is not. Either MaxwellHill was and is inactive, or they don't want to post publicly for some vague unexplained reasons.
Is it not interesting that they're still active but stopped desiring to post articles all the time just a few days before public knowledge of Maxwell getting arrested came out?
roystgnr
22hr ago
I think his uh, eccentricity is kind of a whole package deal
The usual combo package that he brings to the table is almost tautological: you can't become crazy successful by doing a bunch of things that people incorrectly said were stupid unless you're the kind of crazy person who will do a bunch of things that people say are stupid. My standard fear about this is that, while Musk's "If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough" philosophy is actually pretty great in most engineering disciplines (where you can just test things and see what fails and learn a lot regardless), it doesn't work so well when he finds himself in marketing or politics or other fields where you can't just quickly scrap a failed test with no other long-term consequences. My more speculative fear is that being that kind of usefully-crazy person might sometimes just be the first symptom of eventually being a destructively-crazy person. He still doesn't seem like he's on the cusp of going full Howard Hughes, and hopefully at some point on the "getting Trump re-elected" to "publicly insinuating Trump is a pedo" roller-coaster he learned a little epistemic humility, but who knows what the future holds?
As an avowed accelerationist I'm willing to put up with a certain degree of bullshit
Oh, wait, that brings up a good point: at least in his oversight of xAI there's no sign of humility yet, despite his explicit worries about existential risk in the past. Hopefully they'll eventually start working harder on safety and alignment than on capabilities, but I'm not sure what they've been waiting for. When a random software update hollows out your waifu so that MechaHitler III can Assume Direct Control, don't say you weren't warned.
I don't know, she seemed pretty clear to me. Here's the key passage that answers your specific question:
Regardless of norms in the family or on dates, earlier-wave feminists wanted to not be judged by their gender in the marketplace, in professional and political life. The idea was, as you correctly identify, for a female engineer to be perceived by her colleagues as an engineer first and not "hey, tits!... oh yeah, and I guess it's an engineer too or sth."
The author seems to be arguing that the modern left has replaced that interaction with "hey, diversity points!... oh yeah, and I guess it's an engineer too or sth." Either way, the individual woman is reduced to a passive carrier of purely instrumental value for somebody else, and (critically) not in ways she herself chosen. She doesn't get to say "my competent engineering, which I've worked hard to develop, is the value I offer the world," because the people around her have already decided that her key value is either (a) tits or (b) decorative diversity points, neither of which redound to her personal credit or are in her control. That's what I take to be her point about self-authorship still being out of reach.
Yes, this matches how I read her argument. Although re: the intrinsic value of the male body... this is something I never quite understood about the whole female-privilege "men have to be human doings, women get to be human beings" meme. If a man longs to be passively valued for the fuckable parts of his body, by people he doesn't especially want to fuck, it seems like that should be trivially achievable by hanging out in more gay men's spaces. I'd imagine a comparable range of male body types would be admired there, and pretty young men could get nearly the same mileage a pretty young woman could get. Maybe the target audience is not quite as large, but there are easily identified locales where you'd have solid odds of finding someone appreciative. In complete seriousness, when guys complain that it would be so nice to have a body with intrinsic value in others' eyes, why do they not explore the many places where this is already true?
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