domain:traditionsofconflict.com
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17hr ago
It's how some people talk about women here. You notice the nails that stick up. People's impression of discourse they dislike is based on notable examples of that discourse, not examples to the contrary.
quiet_NaN
17hr ago
I think that it is a mixture of two things. First, I do not think that any formerly communist country has an abstinence-only constituency on par with the US evangelicals.
The other relevant fact is that Hungary is ranked the #82 least perceived corrupt country in the world by transparency international, an honor they are sharing with Burkina Faso, Cuba, South Afrika, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago. My perception from the outside is that as long as you take care to pay the ruling party off, you can get away with pretty much everything.
roystgnr
17hr ago
I'd rather not elaborate further somewhere that could be web searched some day; I'll message you privately.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
17hr ago
7 months ago, but who's counting?
I donno man, everyone is different. Some people have a very "There's no ring on this finger, it's none of your business" attitude, some people have a "My last relationship was 5 years and we've only been together 7 months, who are you to get all up in my business" attitude, some people are moved in and married inside a year, for others a year is still well within scoping this other person out and how long and how serious the relationship is has been more of a slow climb of a smooth gradient than an on/off switch. More over, CriticalDuty might not even be on the same page about the level of concern and commitment (and control) that is appropriate at this point in the relationship.
But like I said, I can't presume to know their relationship, it was just a perspective I hadn't seen yet, so I thought it was worth giving.
Mantergeistmann
17hr ago
one thing that quickly became clear in that case was that the disorder had developed and been reinforced primarily because it provided a feeling of power and control in a life that had been very heavily controlled by others. Part of the solution was to logically explain just how self-destructive the disorder was, but a bigger part was to improve the level of and awareness of more wholesome ways to assert self-control, and to aid in that self-control in a way that made me seem like an ally rather than just another oppressive external source of control
I don't suppose you could elaborate on that? I know someone who I suspect may be in a similar situation, but it's not an eating disorder.
quiet_NaN
17hr ago
Regarding Steam, I think it is fair to say that PC gaming is probably the least restrictive as far as content policing goes. While it hurt me deep in my soul to praise MS, compared to most of the walled gardens which have popped up since 2000, the PC is a rather open platform. Anyone can develop and distribute any game, no matter how disturbing or distasteful."Windows Defender has prevented the execution of Holocaust Simulator 3000.exe because it violates the PC content policy" is not a thing that happens.
For every other platform except the very niche (GNU/Linux) and Android (depending on what the OEM allows), you have exactly one software distributor for your hardware. While I do not own any gaming consoles or iThings, I imagine that Sony, Nintendo, Apple and MS/XBox are likely much more restrictive in what content they will allow than Steam was. For one thing, they are protecting the reputation of the platform. With PCs, there is no reputation to protect, any youth who owns a PC can download free smut games without restriction. (Personally, I would argue that the potential to run software from f95zone is more than offset by the potential to use computers for all sorts of creative tasks from CAD, 3d modelling, software development, game modding, video and audio editing, drawing, writing, and so on, but presumably some parents would disagree.)
Also, the power of the payment processors frankly sucks. If they were competing on a level playing field, I would not worry too much, if Visa rebrands itself as "smut-free" and Mastercard rebrands itself as "smut-friendly", then the market could sort it out and Visa would likely go the way of Betamax.
The problem is that both banks and payment processors are rather regulated, and the government has plenty of leeway to selectively enforce their interpretation of the law on uncooperative entities. So when some government official says off the record "trust us, dealing with porn companies/wikileaks/sex workers/arms dealers/... will be more trouble for you than it is worth", they are making a credible threat.
In theory, this could be solved with creating/enforcing a standard for real-time cashless money transfer, but the very entities which would have to push this are the governments who like to has this additional power without any judicial oversight.
In my opinion, cash transfer without government oversight was the real problem which cryptocurrency was meant to solve, but few except for dark net markets ever used it that way. Instead, the unwashed masses decided that BTC would be a great investment, so you got an endless procession of shitcoins and NFTs instead.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
17hr ago
I find this comment bizarre. They've been going out at least a year, and probably considerably longer considering this was brought up as a concern a year ago. At what point would you suggest that a concern for another person's mental and physical wellbeing becomes one's "business"?
I'd also suggest a girlfriend would not be out of her lane to have concerns about any of the examples you mention (porn, gaming, the insanity of constant online argument). There are of course various ways to bring these things up, some much more strident and ineffective than others.
You are free to have your views of course but I disagree.
LateMechanic
17hr ago
Yeah I think it's just backward-looking in his conception. To the extent it was profitable at all, then that's the extent that the labor turned out to have been 'socially necessary'. So it's supply & demand after all.
I think it basically works as a way to think of where the profit value comes from: putting together inputs and selling the output for more money, thus you got more 'use-value' out of the inputs than you paid for their 'exchange-value'. But I agree with others that there's no reason for Marx to have said that only labor can have a use-value greater than their fair exchange-value (apparently he just switched on a dime while writing Capital and declared that, in order to make the theory of value into a classical labor theory of value, and then got tied in knots trying to justify that declaration).
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
18hr ago
“Consent to allow someone to view something that exists only as a moment in time or exists only in their memory is very different than consenting to allowing someone to have something that remains a permanent object and can be shared or viewed indefinitely,” Gibson said in the interview.
Or in other words, she can't monetize repeat viewings, and her self-worth is (in this case rationally) inextricably linked to being able to do exactly that.
Holding both that "sex work is real work" and that it's proper to be unable to function for 2 weeks because the only quality you could monetize has been made available for free is a logically consistent position.
Of course, a politician who [clearly demonstrates they believe] their main asset is something they got for free should not be a politician.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
18hr ago
When you say "almost everyone", who would you exclude? I agree directionally, but where we probably disagree is on who is included or excluded in "almost everyone".
YoungAchamian
18hr ago
How exactly does an LLM know that Mozart wasn't a fan of hip hop without some kind of world model? Do you think that fact was explicitly hand-coded in?
It's learned statistical representations and temporal associations between what Mozart is and what hip hop is. Statistically Mozart and Hip hop likely have no statistical co-occurrence. When you ask if Mozart liked hip-hop, the model isn't "thinking," "Mozart lived before hip-hop, so no." Instead, it generates text based on learned probabilities, where statements implying Mozart enjoyed hip-hop are statistically very rare or nonsensical.
Do you think that fact was explicitly hand-coded in?
I specialize in designing and training deep learning models as a career and I will never assert this because it is categorically wrong. The model would have to be very overfit for this to happen. And any company publishing a model that overfit is knowingly doing so to scam people. It should be treated similar to malfeasance or negligence.
To predict them well, it must compress latent generators: seasons, cities, typical temperatures, stylistic tropes. When we bolt on retrieval, we let it update those latents with fresh data.
I strongly agree that latent spaces can be surprisingly encompassing, but I think you're attributing more explicit meaning and conceptual structure to LLM latent spaces than actually exist. The latent space of an LLM fundamentally represents statistical relationships and contextual patterns derived entirely from textual data. These statistical regularities allow the model to implicitly predict plausible future text, including semantic, stylistic, and contextual relationships, but that doesn't amount to structured, explicit comprehension or 'understanding' of concepts as humans might interpret them. I'd postulate that GLoVe embeddings act similarly. They capture semantic relationships purely from statistical word co-occurrence; although modern LLMs are much richer, deeper, and more context-sensitive, they remain statistical predictors rather than explicit world-model builders. You're being sorta speculative/mind-in-the-clouds in suggesting that meaningful understanding requires, or emerges from, complete contextual or causal awareness within these latent spaces (Which I'd love to be true, but I have yet to see it in research or my own work). While predictive-processing metaphors are appealing, what LLMs encode is still implicit, statistical, and associative, not structured conceptual knowledge.
RLHF shapes behavior. It does not build the base competence.
RLHF guides style and human-like behavior. It's not based on expert truth assessments but attempting to be helpful and useful and not sound like it came from an AI. Someone here once described it as the ol' political commissar asking the AI a question and when it answers wrongly or unconvincingly, shooting it in the head and bringing in the next body. I love that visualization, and its sorta accurate enough that I remember it.
By insisting on “explicit, grounded, structured” you are smuggling in “symbolic, human-inspectable, modular”. That is a research preference, not a metaphysical requirement. Cognitive science moved past demanding explicit symbol tables for humans decades ago. We allow humans to count as having world models with distributed cortical encodings. We should use the same standard here.
I'll consider this, will probably edit a response in later. I wrote most of this in 10-20 minutes instead of paying attention during a meeting. I'm not sure I agree with your re-interpretation of my definition, but it does provoke thought.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
18hr ago
I know you're male, and I think you have a family. Beyond that you're one of the several on here for whom no picture emerges.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
18hr ago
“Directional whoring?” That’s ridiculous and insulting.
None of my half-dozen female cousins are whoring themselves out. None have any overlap between their careers and their relationships.
That’s not because they’re all following the same script, either. One’s an accountant, another works for the government. A third got pregnant in college, but married the guy and started a stable family. She only has a job now that the kid is in school. Not exactly a gold digger.
What’s your justification for insulting the modal Western woman?
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
18hr ago
FWIW, the opposite extreme ideology is easily dismantled as well: that the West in perfectly meritocratic and there is no need to study or even acknowledge power structures that affect and influence socioeconomic conditions. I suppose I could call this "right-wokism" and attack it as a strawman.
Woke, when I was first introduced to the concept from a leftwing perspective, would be the middle ground: an acknowledgement that arbitrary[1] power structures exist that continue to exacerbate adverse socioeconomic conditions. To be "awake", or "aware" of those power structures. It wasn't a call-to-arms, but more of a sly-wink of "Hey, be kind to one-another, because things don't have to be this way."
But now, woke as it's used from a rightwing perspective, is an extremism as you've described: that all socioeconomic conditions are due to perverse power structures that benefit only white men (self-victimization), and they are therefore thieves and exploiters.
My personal take, before anyone tries to paint me as a believer of a specific ideology, is not necessarily that government needs to play the role of dismantler of those power structures, but that it definitely should not continue to enable them to fester as open wounds in the social fabric of our society. E.g. don't test nuclear bombs near the indigenous peoples, but maybe also don't shoehorn social justice concepts into every bit of middle school curricula (just read a link from the Freddie de Boer post linked downthread).
[1] arbitrary, in the sense of an opposite of meritocratic
roystgnr
18hr ago
Do I just put my foot down and confront her, pushing her to be serious about her health?
This could horribly backfire, depending on what's underlying her behavior. I helped someone get over a very serious eating disorder, a very long time ago, and one thing that quickly became clear in that case was that the disorder had developed and been reinforced primarily because it provided a feeling of power and control in a life that had been very heavily controlled by others. Part of the solution was to logically explain just how self-destructive the disorder was, but a bigger part was to improve the level of and awareness of more wholesome ways to assert self-control, and to aid in that self-control in a way that made me seem like an ally rather than just another oppressive external source of control. I fear even the "logically explain" bit might have been counterproductive if I wasn't the sort of nerd who mostly interacts with the sorts of nerds that that kind of thing actually works on.
That all sounds ridiculously vague, partly because I'm trying to be respectful of privacy, but partly because your girlfriend may have a completely different underlying problem, and I don't want to give the impression that I'm recommending a particular fix rather than just a search for a deeper problem.
I also feel like it's cruel but necessary to point out that there may be no fix. A BMI of 16.3-and-decreasing is getting into the range typically associated with anorexia. Anorexia gets called "the most lethal mental disorder" because even when it's professionally diagnosed it's not always professionally remediable. Don't blame yourself if it turns out that you can't figure out a remedy here either. Getting her doctor and sister on the case may have been the best you could do, and encouraging and supporting them may be the best you can do now.
faceh
18hr ago
Yeah, I will say they might literally be the ONLY exchange I know of that was fully expecting, well in advance, the need to navigate regulatory environments and fight off attempts by regulators to bully them, and the plan was more than "ignore it until they're kicking the door in to serve a warrant."
I was in early enough to see what happened to Mt.Gox, so my choice of exchange way back then was very carefully reasoned, and Coinbase seemed like the only one that wasn't grown from tainted seeds (i.e. drugs, gambling, or money laundering).
Would make very little sense to chase 100x gains whilst ignoring the 20-30% chance of your preferred exchange getting fined or sued into oblivion or crashing due to incompetent leadership.
Kraken has been alright to me as well.
erwgv3g34
18hr ago
I was not prepared for their Wikipedia photo.
If she was born in 1951, she must have been 57 or 58 at the time of the photo. She aged incredibly well.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
18hr ago
There have been various attempts at defining "wokism", but for me the distinguishing characteristic is the set of tactics it employs and not just its goals.
Pulling at this thread more - wokism isn't (strictly?) an ideology, but a set of tactics to bring about social change. I agree that many of these same tactics are being used - or have been historically used - by the right. And, might I add, for every tactic to bring about social change "the left" has that "the right" doesn't, there also seems to be one "the right" has that "the left" doesn't, e.g. evangelism.
That does make its comparison to Marxism interesting, though, if one views Marxism as an ideology to bring about revolutionary social change to end the class struggle under capitalism. But apart from self-described leftwing revolutionaries, I don't personally know anyone "woke" who desires revolutionary change rather than incremental change, because incremental change seems to have been working pretty well over the past ~60 years or so. Someone recently posted "capitalism, but nice" in this thread and that's pretty much the extent of "woke" that I experience. Otherwise we would just call them communists. But if we're saying that woke = communist then we're back to the original strawman position.
gattsuru
18hr ago
It may be worth evaluating whether it's a fear thing, a social thing, or a genuine lack of hunger; all are problems, but they'll have different solutions.
You're treating it like it's a social thing (habits, how others see her, so on), so assuming that's the case, I'd caution that it's usually more effective to work within existing habits than around them. Try to negotiate a slightly higher calorie intake, or add a protein requirement (even if vegan proteins), or have one meal once a week away from the cell phone, rather than get rid of the calorie-counter app entirely. Suggest vitamin or macronutrient supplements rather than changing what's on the dining room table. That'll not only avoid problems with being controlling; it should also make it easier to acclimatize toward.
Regardless of approach, be aware that sustained significant increases in calorie intake (or most macronutrients) aren't much easier to actually do than decreases.
quiet_NaN
19hr ago
Not every capital allocation decision is beneficial. Housing in cities is famously supply-inelastic: if you increase the prices of houses by another factor ten, this will not result in much increase in the supply. If we magically prevented billionaires from investing in cities with high rents, I doubt that there would be bad consequences.
Or take the stock market. Nvidia has a net profit of 76G$/year and a market cap of 4T$, so it is worth about 50 years of profit. If there was less capital around to be invested, it might only be worth 2T$ instead, but I fail to see what would be so bad about that.
Some "capital allocation decisions" are actually better seen as consumption in disguise. When Bezos invested in Blue Origin, or Musk bought Twitter, that read to me as much as a consumption decision as some nerd buying Magic boosters. Sure, it is always possible that the cards will appreciate over time, but the real value for the buyer comes from the joy and prestige of ownership itself.
I think that it is good that people who for whatever reason are good with investing money have capital to invest, at least assuming the investments are done is broadly pro-social endeavors (which can be controlled through regulations to some degree). I do not however think that this is the only good use of money, and for example would be opposed to giving taxpayer money to successful investors so that they can invest even more.
Wait, are you saying countries which fought directly against Stalin are more charitable, or less?
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