domain:betonit.substack.com
shoeonfoot
2m ago
many of the Orthodox priests I know personally are surprisingly liberal.
In what ways are they liberal?
TIRM
6m ago
It's not clear any company running this sort of thing can seriously prevent leaks over a long enough time for it to be relevant.
With sufficient will, they could do just this. This is a choice they actively make one way or another.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
10m ago
There's real technical ability in lawyering and banking too, but it's always engineering that gets singled out for treating women wrong. Somehow or another (male) engineers are the worst of the worst in terms of oppressing women.
Or... the narrative is completely wrong. Engineering gets singled out because women prefer the bros to the nerds.
Blueberry
13m ago
Meditation and yoga sessions and cheap decorative Buddha statues you can put into your garden/house without making a strong religious statement.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
17m ago
I’m not sure how sinful it is, but most of the people who talk about it seem a bit off. Like they don’t really seem to care about anything else.
gattsuru
18m ago
I have two. I'm not a good writer, and a lot of my better writing I'm not really comfortable linking under this name, but I think they say something about what could be useful to good writers.
This is the all-audiences one: reviewing the review of the re-view. Not every recommendation here is good or even correct (Grok either can't or doesn't notice that I mention that the "Matryoshka doll" story is explicitly fictional and couldn't be known to be true in Mahaffey's version, and probably doesn't have access to the original book; it also handwaves errors in fatality numbers in an aircraft crash are actually pretty damning), but it does catch errors I didn't notice after multiple rereads ("opposites side") and that I definitely mirrored Mahaffey's approach far more heavily than I'd intended or even recognized, along with a few good style recommendations.
((Uh, and the recommendations about asides, nested parentheticals, and being a pedantic hater might be correct, but not exactly useful given that they're kinda my intentional tone.))
[cw: nsfw text and themes below, though nothing worse than you could put on YouTube]
My other example is from a bi furry piece, albeit an except stripped of the actual bedroom activities. So that may make it unusable for examination. If not...
This isn't perfect. There's a good portion of it that's either blowing smoke up my skirt ('cheeky'), or only finding corrections that are trivial (duplicated words, comma errors) that I or a beta reader would probably have caught on a re-read, or that are amadan's extremely generic your first how to write advice (slow pacing). Some of the tone emphasis between flirty and platonic is arguable or even just, imo, plain wrong, as is one of the comma errors where it recommends a 'fix' that's already in the original text. Others are pretty clear good advice, such as on rising tension and characterization, but probably an artifact of my limited experience as a writer and .
(and, tbf, that this is a small excerpt).
By contrast, the problems with the wristband themes would be very hard to figure out with a beta reader: they're a moderately common convention in bi furry stuff, such that almost anyone who'd want to beta read would be so familiar with it as to take it as a given, but they're not so common that I should have assumed every reader or even every experienced reader would have gotten it.
But this is a subgenre-of-a-subgenre-of-a-subgenre piece. I could believe that grok has enough (mmf) furry smut in its input to avoid being absolutely one-shot! There's not really enough orientation play involving multiple male characters, furry or otherwise, for me to think the stochaistic parrots complaint applies, here. And this particular version of that subgenre focus is defined in no small part by a logical inconsistency. Even in the long-form, grok could 'recognize' it was being 'confused' that the character's self-identifications didn't match up with their behaviors, even if it came up with the 'wrong' response; that's about as good an evidence that you'd need to clarify what's going on as available from human reviewers.
and this is Grok's two-generation-old model.
Terracotta
32m ago
I mean, I chose engineering because it's an area where genuine technical ability/ technically excellent work exists, and because it draws personality types (both male and female) who tend to get excited about the material work itself and who want to use their technical ability to do a good job. Also because I have first- and second-hand personal experience of adjacent things happening.
Sales and similar bro-professions seem much more like jobs where persuasion through performing a social role is the whole point, so it's hard to imagine someone complaining about their externally-imposed social role getting in the way of their good work. I know a realtor who works her augmented breasts very effectively as part of her job, and she doesn't seem upset about it at all, any more than the local car salesman who leans into stereotypes with his down-home aw-shucks accent. But maybe I'm being unfair to sales, and actually there is a lot of technical subtlety there as well, who knows?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
34m ago
Just wanted a tattoo because it felt cool lol. My best friend came up with a design I really liked, and on my deltoids it went. You could also consider it a getting into med school/becoming an adult gift to myself.
Stellula
35m ago
Personally I see a fusion of Buddhism x Christianity already happening, and expect a sort of Christian orthodoxy mixing in Buddhism mental techniques as the most successful religion of the 21st century.
What things do you think that Buddhism offers that Christianity does not?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
39m ago
I've got a single tattoo, that's usually covered up.
Was this a "transhumanist bucketlist" sort of thing?
Hieronymus
47m ago
Prosperity-gospel televangelists exist, but evangelicals broadly regard them as heretics and scammers. For example, Mike Winger has a whole playlist condemning Benny Hinn.
Evangelicals didn’t support Trump in the 2016 primary but did support him in the 2016 general election. Appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe bought him some political loyalty among us, though.
JarJarJedi
50m ago
I am bipedal, featherless and have broad flat nails. Didn't really like the Death Note either.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
55m ago
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 fact that it's always engineers, and not lawyers or salespeople or other such professions filled with actual bros, gives away the fact that no, it isn't this. This is a narrative with no factual backing.
JarJarJedi
57m ago
Israel is probably willing to spend many more of its own lives in this conflict.
In fact, the projections of losses from Iran and Hezbollah operations were much higher than actually happened. I don't have exact numbers handy but I heard from 3x to 10x more, and it still was deemed acceptable to begin the operations with that level of loss projections. So yes, at least as far as Israel government is concerned, they estimate they could bear 10x more casualties without losing the war. I hope we will never verify that in practice, but at least it was the assumption of people whose job is to make such assumptions and decide whether or not to go to war based on them.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
1hr ago
You are mistaken, pushing is the answer
gattsuru
1hr ago
There's a big breakdown here, but my summary take --
Business case:
- Models aren't useful products on their own; there's too much competition, too shallow a moat, and few buyers have the skillset and equipment to use a model themselves. Runtime with effective models is where these businesses expect to make their money, made more convenient by their familiarity with optimal operation and tuning of their own models, and by the giant sack of GPUs that they happen to have sitting available.
- This is especially true where (as now) model creators don't have a good understanding of all or even a large portion of use cases for a model. Where exposing an API, as increasingly many western LLM-makers are doing, limits you to prompt engineering, an open source model can be rapidly tuned or modified in a pretty wide variety of ways. You can't necessarily learn from everything someone else has done with an open-source model, or even what they've done without breaking the license, but you can learn a lot.
- Businesses producing open-source models can attract specialized workers, not just in being skilled, but in having a very specific type of ideology, similar to how linux (or rust) devs tend to be weird in useful ways.
- 'Sticky' open-source licenses have the additional benefits of allowing most innovations by other smart people to filter back in. (In more legally-minded jurisdictions, they also put down beartraps to other developers that would love to borrow a great implementation without complying with the license.)
- (Cynically, they can only succeed with government backing, and open sourcing a model makes them politically indispensable.)
Philosophical arguments:
- Open-sourcing a model is Better for what it allows; interaction with academic communities, rapid iteration, so on. A business that emphasizes these topics might not be the most remunerative, but it'll be better at its actual goal.
- (Optimistically, some devs want to get to the endgame of AGI/ASI as soon as possible, and see the API business model as distracting from that even if it does work.)
Pragmatic argument:
- The final models fit on a single thumb drive. It's not clear any company running this sort of thing can seriously prevent leaks over a long enough time for it to be relevant. There's an argument that China is more vulnerable to this sort of unofficial espionage, but we've also had significant leaks from Llama, Midjourney, etc.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
Error rates have fallen drastically, and I'm someone who has regularly benefited from context windows becoming OOMs larger than the best 2023 had to offer.
I know specific questions, in programming and maths most obviously, but also in medicine, where I wouldn't trust the output of a 2023 model, but where I'd be rather confident in a 2025 one being correct.
Reasoning models are also far better at task adherence and thinking logically. Agents are still less than ideal today, but they were borderline useless in 2023.
Other very nice QOL features include image and file input and generation, artifacts, voice conversations etc. If I had to go back to a 2023 GPT-4, I'd be pissed.
Terracotta
1hr ago
As far as I can say she does, in fact, get to say this. Literally what is standing in her way?
People normally engage with the world using preconstructed schemata, so once a set of expectations is in place, everyone's pleasure or disappointment in you gets measured in terms of those expectations. For most people, a pet cat that decided it loved playing catch-the-Frisbee would just be a fucked-up and confusing pet, even if it was really good at Frisbee. Because Frisbee time is what you want from your dog, not from your cat.
What people want from the office hot girl is cute mannerisms, new outfits, and opportunities to flatter her (and smugly affirm your own superiority) by overpraising her work. Nobody expects actual valid professional ideas from the office hot girl, and if she volunteered any, she almost certainly wouldn't get genuine interest or constructive critique. Similarly, what pro-DEI people want from their diverse colleague is fierceness and funkiness, unusual hair and activist politics, and the opportunity to appear younger and more hip by ostentatiously approving of her. Nobody expects or wants actual good work ideas from that person, either, and they would almost certainly be confused and annoyed if they bothered to listen in the first place.
Solid professional ideas are what you expect from Bob down the hall who is neither a hot dateable woman engineer nor a brave diverse woman engineer, but just an engineer. So everyone listens seriously to Bob's engineering ideas, hopes they will be good, and is pleased with Bob when he meets those expectations.
(When the hot woman engineer turns 40 or gets chubby, she will be nothing - literally will be able to say a thing in a meeting and have nobody hear it at all, until Bob repeats it and people listen with interest. Same with the strong diverse woman engineer if a more fashionable political category turns up. This is why women like the one who wrote the OP's article seek permission to be Bob instead.)
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
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Commoditizing their complements. This is particularly true of Meta, which wanted to use Llama to undercut competitors like OpenAI. Meta doesn't need their models to be profitable, that's not the core of their company. But OAI? Without people willing to pay for access to their models (or if they're able to clone them cheaper and run them elsewhere), they'd be utterly screwed.
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Gaining market and mind share, and either finding other ways to monetize (consulting or fine-tuning services), going paid and closed-source, or using the hype and investor confidence to raise money.
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Attracting talented researchers, who often want recognition and the right to publish their research instead of having it all be locked down internal IP.
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Actual ideological commitment. Or at least lip-service to help with points 2 and 3.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1hr ago
I believe Thomas meant to emphasize the lower-case orthodoxy in his statement about what could be successful in the 21st century. It's admittedly hard to distinguish sometimes when people are talking about Eastern Orthodoxy or Oriental Orthodoxy or mainstream Nicene lowercase orthodoxy, but, well, all Christian groups claim to be a part of the "Church Catholic" (which means in parlance something different from the "Catholic Church", but try telling the LCMS that), and most Christians are big believers in the evangelion, and most believe in the charismata... so the ambiguity goes on.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1hr ago
Why Buddhism? Only 1.1% of Americans are Buddhist. Admittedly that is about the same as the number of Orthodox Christians in the country, but 40% of Americans are Protestants and 19% are Catholics. Do you really think it's likely that two religious groups that are each only 1% of the population are going to outcompete the 60% of Americans who are some other kind of Christian?
Buddhist meditation is certainly popular among the elite class (particularly the West Coast elites) but they take the meditation and leave the religion part, I can't see them pivoting to Orthodoxy.
Interestingly, in cishet girl lore, there's a coping fantasy about a particular kind of female physicality, distinct from the normal T&A variety, that somehow connects up with a woman's soul and channels male physical attraction into magical emotional intimacy and commitment. You can see it in Disney films and romance novels, where the hero absolutely never starts by noticing the protagonist's bouncing breasts, but may be magnetically drawn to something spiritual and ineffable about her hair or eyes or posture, which turns out to express some deeply unique feature of her personal character.
I would probably get accused of lying for saying this, but while I certainly don't lack attraction for a woman's curves, the physical feature that makes me feel deep attraction to someone is their facial features. I don't know about "spiritual and ineffable," but a warm smile and deep, thoughtful eyes make my heart melt, and a connection of shared vulnerability gives me butterflies in the chest. Someone once told me I made her "feel like I'm in a romance novel," because I talk that way, and similar statements have been made by other people I've dated. But I'm also well aware my romantic orientation is not typical for men, and I have no clue how I ended up with those feelings. It's one of the biggest mysteries for me.
That said, I would not describe myself as "demisexual," and I have the hardware and software for immediate sexual interest. It's just not something I particularly like acting on, and never have. For me, the romantic and sexual attraction have to happen together -- typically, if I find someone romantically attractive, they have a warm smile or seem smart and kind and radiant, I'll find them sexually attractive at the same time. I will admit that a passionate love affair in which sex occurs early has its attraction. But only because it would mean the passion is so strong and intense that we found ourselves unable to control the sexual tension -- which is remarkably similar to the sexual fantasies that women will sometimes admit to.
I can also find people sexually but not romantically attractive, though that's almost always because they have some personality flaw that I find repugnant and I see no vulnerability to which I can relate. If I find you attractive, and you find me attractive, I will find myself staring into your eyes or fantasizing about what it feels like to hold you close or whether it would feel like being in a whirlwind to kiss you, probably more than I will fantasize about what sex with you would be like. My own experience is that sex fueled by passion is just massively more pleasurable, even in raw, hedonistic terms, than sex divorced from it. It's just hotter.
All that being said -- the male complaint is that men with this attitude are often more shy and reserved, and oftentimes get passed over or not romantically noticed by women. And when they do get noticed, the things they say and do that demonstrate their strong romantic orientation are often seen as fake or dissembling, precisely because men try to fake it to play women. And the orientation is so rare among men that I'm not sure most people believe it even exists. I just don't know why my psychology on this is so unusual, or how I ended up there.
YE_GUILTY
1hr ago
Yes, but when compared to the opportunity to compel the nation to submit to your worldview, those benefits are small potatoes. Tax exemptions may be enough to motivate a medium-time con-man to declare his pyramid scheme a church, but those with higher aspirations might be willing to forgo them.
Note that is frowned upon by most genuine Buddhists.
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