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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

I believe I value multiple things, as one might expect. But I suppose if I had to put my "highest" value in as concrete terms as possible, it would be "that which pays respect to the mystery":

"[Object a] represents God. Object a is the unsymbolized object-cause-of-desire. [This position] is fundamentally unknowing, fundamentally hysterical [in the precise Lacanian sense] because at the very core of his position is an unsayable, unknowable mystery. Christ is the barred subject, because Christ goes, 'my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' And this is why it's beyond theism and atheism, because technically object a doesn't exist, right? But let's say it's the unsymbolizable real.

"It confronts the congregation to create knowledge. I want to create a church where the liturgy is hysterical. Where the liturgy embraces doubt, complexity, unknowing, and mystery in the music, in the art, in the ritual, in the sermons. You, the congregation, kind of without knowing it, we have an ideology. We have an ideology of wholeness and completeness. We would be confronted by an hysteric discourse that causes us to rethink and generate new ideas and we start to enjoy not knowing. We start to enjoy the process of life itself. And what sustains this entire project is a fundamental ontological mystery."

(I recommend listening to the whole video if you have time, it's really quite lovely.)

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

You know, I'd actually vote for President Mandingo if he promises to "fuck them canadians all to death".

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

Are there any current day TnA mags still being printed?

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

Technically I’m supposed to call her a former porn actress, but the actual level of ‘acting’ that is involved in all of this makes me decide against doing so; supposedly she also appeared in a grand total of one casting video only (by Pierre Woodman) so calling her an actress would be a big stretch either way.

Yeah, she acted as a porn actress employed by a well know porn director in his porn film. What else would you call her other than a porn actress? If somebody murdered "grand total of one person" or somebody only burglarized "grand total of one house" - then such a criminal would only be "technically" murderer/burglar? What is this. How would you call her? I am genuinely curious.

PS: As a wise person once said - you may have built thousand bridges and only sucked one dick. But forever more, you are not going to be known as a bridgebuilder, but rather as a dicksucker.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

I'm very curious on your original assertion, that Ukrainians as a class are bitter on the US forcing them into fighting Russia

That wasn't his point at all.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

Why not have literal whores become politicians?

Directional whoring is pretty much the overtly default career of young (and not so young) women in the West. They dress skimpily, date industriously, engage in serial monogamy, and are not at all averse to material benefits resulting from these activities. Many women very aggressively argue that all sexual practices and all sexual conduct that does not harm any one party without their consent is nominally okay, and if you listen closely you'll notice that the valence of such conduct is actually considered very positive. That they sometimes turn around and viciously shame individual women for their promiscuity or sexual practices or material benefits derived from either seems more like pokerfaced opportunism than ideological inconsistency.

At the same time, politicians are widely known to be the scum of the earth. Eternally corrupt, consummate liars, shameless hypocrites, will sell out your country for a handful of cash and will ruin your life's work out of sheer incompetence. At best they're naive idealists who produce policy catastrophe after administration catastrophe, but let's face it, when people think "politician", they think either of morally bankrupt sociopaths looking to line their own pockets or of rabid ideologues aiming to stroke their egoes. Natural selection among politicians selects for the ability to out-smear your opponents, not for any sort of object-level competence or moral stature. Politicians are, by necessity, cheats and liars and if they weren't they wouldn't survive.

So why not have whores becomes politicians? Do we lose anything by this happening?

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

Avoiding the tendency of the hobby to suck you in and make you more and more devoted to the game at the expense of work or social life.

Is your "AI Assistant" smarter than an Orangutan? A practical engineering assessment

Thank you! Hopefully the next generation of models will improve to the point where I don't need to drag you away to answer my queries. That's several hundreds of thousands of dollars in opportunity costs for you, assuming the cheque Zuck mailed did cash in the end.

Can an orangutan? (No)

I should have been more clear. I was asking if someone wanted to put an orangutan in a can, and I expect the market demand is very limited.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

Both are monetizing sexuality in a fairly direct way, one is just a bit further along the spectrum. If you're saying the two can be distinguished, sure. If you're saying one is disqualifying for public office while the other isn't, I disagree.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

A couple of months ago we discussed the cultural legacy of the Playboy mag of all things under an effort post by @FiveHourMarathon. I was reminded of this by a recent lame-ass political scandal in Hungary in which a local/district volunteer coordinator of the main opposition party and apparently a single(?) mom was doxxed by some pro-government journos as a former porner / sex worker. Technically I’m supposed to call her a former porn actress, but the actual level of ‘acting’ that is involved in all of this makes me decide against doing so; supposedly she also appeared in a grand total of one casting video only (by Pierre Woodman) so calling her an actress would be a big stretch either way. Pretty much the only factor fueling this whole thing was that the party leader and MEP was pictured shaking hands with the ‘lady’ during some public events.

What does Playboy have anything to do with this, you might ask? Well, said party leader decided it’d be a swell idea to reverse the accusation of sleaziness and would also be some sort of clever gotcha to point out that a 51-year-old woman who’s a government commissioner and a former ‘Secretary of State for Sports’ (if you’re one of the few female politicians in Eastern Europe, it’s the sort of government position of lesser importance you can ever hope to fulfill, I guess) appeared in a photoshoot in the local edition of Playboy ages ago.

Anyway, I’m aware that culture wars are waged with maximal cynicism, dishonesty and opportunism, and this is a case of culture-warring alright; no need to remind me of that. Still, I found myself asking the rhetorical question: who the heck actually believes that posing for a photoshoot in a completely mainstreamed, slick, high-class magazine which eventually shifted to a women's fashion and lifestyle brand is the cultural/moral/social equivalent of anonymously getting your holes stuffed and swallowing cum/urine on camera for a handful of cash?

Is your "AI Assistant" smarter than an Orangutan? A practical engineering assessment

Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece? (Yes)

Can an orangutan? (No)

[...] I'm also going to send out a bat signal for @faul_sname to chime in and correct me if I'm wrong.

This is actually an area of active debate in the field.

Shitpost aside this seems reasonable to me, aside from a few quibbles

  1. RLVR is absolutely not only a year old -- you can trace back the core idea REINFORCE paper from 1992. RL from non-verifiable rewards (e.g. human feedback) is actually the more recent innovation. But the necessary base model capabilities and training loop optimizations and just general know-how and tooling for training a model that speaks English and writes good lean proofs was just not there until quite recently.
  2. How important the static model problem is is very much a subject of active debate, but I come down quite strongly on the side of "it's real and AI agents are going to be badly hobbled until it's solved". An analogy I've found compelling but lost the source on is that current "agentic" AI approaches are like trying to take a kid who has never touched a violin before and give them sufficiently good instructions before they touch the violin that they can play Paganini flawlessly on their first try, and then if they don't succeed on the first try kicking the kid out, refining your instructions, and then bringing in a new kid.

Intelligence is the general-purpose cognitive ability to build accurate models of the world and then use those models to effectively achieve one's goals

I basically endorse this definition, and also I claim current LLM systems have a surprising lack of this particular ability, which they can largely but not entirely compensate for through the use of tools, scaffolding, and a familiarity with the entirety of written human knowledge.

To your point about the analogy of the bird that is "unintelligent" by the good swimmer definition of intelligence, LLMs are not very well adapted to environments that humans navigate effortlessly. I personally think that will remain the case for the foreseeable future, which sounds like good news except that I expect that we will build environments that LLMs are well adapted to, and humans won't be well adapted to those environments, and the math on relative costs does not look super great for the human-favoring environments. Probably. Depends a bit on how hard to replicate hands are.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

There's a fair bit of other work (truck driving, security work etc.) that wartime experience also permits in peacetime contexts. However, most of the presumed remittance-sending work would be typical blue-collar labor (plumbers, nurses etc.) that many Ukrainians can do on the basis of that being their job already.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

Thank you for providing an elaboration at request. (And that is a sincere thank you. An ! would feel flippant, but the gratitude is meant.)

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

mitigating the NEET attractor

What does this mean?

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

I have some doubts about the modal immigrant's desire to become German. Maybe you're right on some psychological level, but that's pretty intangible. Immigrants' ostentatious insistence on their own separation from the natives, on the other hand, is highly visible. And if in doubt, I'll take the more obvious interpretation: They don't want to be German, they just want to benefit off of Germany.

Ping me when you get around to writing that post.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 20, 2025

Edit: You wear steelframed high quality eyeglasses in my mind's eye. German-made, of course.

Oakleys, actually, by my optometrist's recommendation. I might have picked German-made ones if I'd had any idea of what my options are, but I'm still new to the whole glasses business.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

Your wish shall be granted, given that most things that humans read will be AI slop in the near future, if only because that's just infinitely more economical than having humans write things. Soon enough everyone and their dog will accept LLM-generated text as the default provenance of written communication, just like we accepted that we naturally read digitally-transmitted text messages instead of communicating orally and in person.

Is your "AI Assistant" smarter than an Orangutan? A practical engineering assessment

Charitably, I'd say OP sacrificed a bit of accuracy to attempt and convey a point.

I would have let it slide, except for the fact that it was followed up by:

Directionally speaking we may be able to determine that "true" is an antonym of "false" by computing their dot product. But this is not the same thing as being able to evaluate whether a statement is true or false. As an example "Mary has 2 children", "Mary has 4 children", and "Mary has 1024 children" may as well be identical statements from the perspective of an LLM. Mary has a number of children. That number is a power of 2. Now if the folks programming the interface layer were clever they might have it do something like estimate the most probable number of children based on the training data, but the number simply can not matter to the LLM the way it might matter to Mary, or to someone trying to figure out how many pizzas they ought to order for the family reunion because the "directionality" of one positive integer isn't all that different from any another. (This is why LLMs have such difficulty counting if you were wondering)

Both claims are wrong, and using the former to justify the latter is confused and incorrect thinking.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

You can take em-dashes and other perfectly reasonable typography from my cold dead hands.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

The inability to provide a metric for use value makes this moralism, not an economic theory.

You can make similarly sentimental arguments that some things are worth economic inefficiency, hell you can make convincing ones, but that has essentially no predictive power.

The question then is why should one listen to Marxist moralism instead of Christian moralism, even in these specific matters?

Is your "AI Assistant" smarter than an Orangutan? A practical engineering assessment

Charitably, I'd say OP sacrificed a bit of accuracy to attempt and convey a point.

Yes, but the problem is that OPs 'sacrificed accuracy' level explanation about dot products of word vectors is clearly an explanation of a different architecture, word embedding model such as word2vec, which was all the rage in 2013. Charitably, yes old transformer based LLMs usually had an embedding layer as a pre-processing step to reduce the input dimension (I think the old gpt papers described an embedding layer step and it is mentioned in all the conceptual tutorials). but the killer feature that makes LLMs a massive industry is not the 2010s-tier embeddings (I don't know, do the modern models even have them today?), it is the transformer architecture (multi-head attention, multiple levels of fancy kind of matrix products) where all the billions of parameters go and which has nearly magical capability in next-word-prediction with word context and relationships to produce intelligible text.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

I don't think this is anywhere close to true.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

FWIW my first thought on seeing this thread was "oh yeah, I guess it has actually been a while since the last major Ukraine discussion here" so I think you might still be on track.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

I wish people would stop trying to make tortured analogies like this. The US doesn't have a good comparison in its history to Taiwan, nor to Ukraine, stop trying to force it.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 21, 2025

I think national security threat is overselling it a little bit, but it's an extremely potent propaganda weapon. The fact China hasn't weaponized it yet has more to do with their patience for when it matters, than it does some lack of utility.