domain:cspicenter.com
Tree
10m ago
The birkenhead drill is not rationally justified, is my point. I doubt it would apply today, and I certainly wouldn’t go along with it if it did. Of course some people may still worship the ground women walk on like they used to worship cows, a sacred tree, or a magical stone.
quiet_NaN
21m ago
This is only true if your Rome is a paradise with exponential growth. If you have limited resources, then allocating them to making babies you can not feed is not a winning strategy.
(I would expect that in reality, things would be messy and complicated. Being able to bounce back more quickly after a non-fatal disaster is certainly an advantage, but so is having a higher fraction of your population (which is capped by food supply) on the battlefield.)
Another consideration is that in some societies, males had a big advantage in acquiring food, e.g. hunting mammoths or back-breaking agriculture.
Of course, in a species where the 25/75 ratio was magically fixed, sexual dimorphism would decrease as women find themselves in situations where their best genetic strategy is mammoth-hunting or cattle-raiding. So you end up with an androgynous population which can make a lot of babies when times are good, but in which in typical times, the average woman would have 1.33 kids which survive to reproduce, and spend most of her fertile life-span on toiling in the fields to feed them or stab some other woman to death so her own kids can thrive in a world of limited resources.
OliveTapenade
30m ago
Regardless of technical chops, the real value here is of course exposure, a first decent shot at normiefying the whole edifice. Elon may be a fake gamer, the gravest insult I can levy against my fellow man, but fringe interests make for strange bedfellows, and I'm glad to see the first public attempts at rather literal waifutech make the twitterati seethe.
This may speak badly of me, but the Path of Exile 2 incident was actually a big factor in lowering my opinion of Musk. I never particularly liked him but prior to that I had tended to assume that there was a level of baseline stability there.
The PoE2 incident really undercut that for me - it was so obviously pathetic, so clearly the behaviour of a deeply insecure loser, that it was impossible to interpret any other way. It makes no sense in strategic terms, since non-gamers do not care and will not recognise anything about Musk's gamer skills, and actual gamers will instantly recognise that he's never played the game before. It is a move guaranteed to lose him status everywhere. What's more, the stakes are so incredibly low. Musk doesn't need to play PoE2 to get nerd cred. He has easier ways to get that if he wants it. And that's the only prize! Nobody else cares at all, and in fact being on top of a leaderboard for an action RPG is probably seen as vaguely pathetic or dorky by most normies.
It was a childish, ill-thought-out pretence, risks that are all downside and no upside, all for winning a prize that is of no value, and which he could more easily obtain in other ways. It is not the move of a man who has his life together. It is the move of an extremely wealthy person with the emotional maturity of a child and very little impulse control or ability to think ahead.
I have not updated in the direction of thinking that Musk is incompetent at absolutely everything. I believe that he has some skills as a manager and entrepreneur, and his commercial success suggests that there's some real ability there. I have, however, updated in the direction of thinking that even if Musk is a brilliant businessman, manager, and engineer, he is a brilliant businessman, manager, and engineer who is simultaneously a sad, pathetic little man.
I suppose I should say something about Grok.
I can't really think of much. AI waifus have been around for a bit now, so this isn't breaking any ground. What stands out to me most, I suppose, is how tasteless Musk's advertising of this feature is, but again it's not really news that Elon Musk says creepy or tasteless things, on impulse, on Twitter. I suppose my advice to him would be that if you're selling porn, or selling products morally equivalent to porn (i.e. things that most people regard as shameful or anti-social to indulge in), you need to either have some fig-leaf of pretending that you're not (e.g. CharacterAI markets itself as fun and social), or get in the ghetto. AI girlfriends are a ghetto.
FtttG
32m ago
not only did the developers preserve most of the existing bugs, they somehow managed to introduce new bugs as well. The game remains janky as fuck and you can effortlessly break the game.
Based Todd.
FtttG
34m ago
My understanding of gender-critical feminists/TERFs etc. is that they chafe against the ancillary gender roles and social expectations assigned to female people by virtue of their biology, pointing out that the fact they're female doesn't imply that they should be expected to be good at cooking, shouldn't be expected to stay home and look after the children, shouldn't be expected to wear skirts and pink clothing.
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.
Another way of framing it is that radical feminists think that, when assessing a person's identity and the role they should play, our society places too much emphasis on immutable biological traits over individual characteristics. Per the OP, they would rather be seen as e.g. a scientist first and a woman second, rather than as a woman first and a scientist second. All well and good. But there's no conflict between asserting that our society places too much emphasis on immutable biological traits over individual characteristics when assessing people's identities, and recognising that acknowledging the reality of immutable biological traits is still necessary and unavoidable. Outside of gender medicine, virtually all of the major flashpoints in the trans culture war are domains in which immutable biological traits are obviously more germane to the discussion than individual characteristics: when it comes to one's likelihood of committing a sexual assault, being male (or not) has far more predictive power than basically any other trait; in most tests of strength, speed and/or stamina, virtually any male person will have an insurmountable competitive advantage over any female person. It's like the radical feminists are saying "our society places too much emphasis on immutable biological traits" and the trans activists are saying "yeah, we shouldn't acknowledge biology at all!" and the radical feminists are like "no, just because our society places too much of an emphasis on biology doesn't mean it doesn't matter at all". Just because you're a libertarian who thinks that there are too many laws doesn't mean you want to abolish the prohibition on murder.
Tree
34m ago
The average human alive has twice as many female ancestors as men.
Complete non sequitur.
Biologically humans produce offspring at 50/50 sex ratio by Fisher's Principle.
Your statement is a vague, theoretical, general principle that most species tend towards a 50/50 ratio. Mine is the actual sex ratio of humans, which slightly favours males. The two statements are not necessarily contradictory. Mine is just more precise and empirically supported.
Consider if you could choose to found your Rome with a population fixated (stably) on genes for 25% male babies or 50%? By the 3rd generation the first group has more men than the latter.
I already decried this reasoning in this thread. You’re assuming infinite resources like it’s a bacterial culture. And Romulus was a reference to the rape of the sabines, where the male-skewed romans just stole women from their neighbours. The only 25% men tribe would get overrun quickly.
“Behold, I will now prove the undeniable superiority of women:
Imagine you’re on an island. There’s no war to be fought, ever. No work to be done, either. Not even a jar to open. All there is to do on this magical island is to go shopping. And the goal is to produce as many babies as possible. Would you prefer 100 men and 1 woman or 1 man and 100 women? Checkmate.”
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
48m ago
A God-tier shitpost I am memetically compelled to spread due to the worms in my brain:
I want to make something with my own two hands but I'm not quite sure what. Recently I've been looking at many historical and traditional forms of woodworking, sculpture and pottery, and find myself thinking that I would really like to do something like that to a very high level. To make something functional, practical and yet highly decorative in a way that isn't being satisfied by most of the output coming out today.
If I'm starting this, I want to try to be good at it. Really good. But there's a pretty big issue - unsurprisingly there isn't very much information on most of that stuff and learning how to do any of that stuff authentically seems downright prohibitive if you are unable to be physically present. Much of this stuff is taught through an apprenticeship/mentorship model where you have to be there, and very little of that technique seems to be available through any online means. Many of these skills are also hyperspecific enough that just learning the foundations won't be enough, and you'll have to aggressively trial-and-error your way through trying to properly do it (just because you know basic music theory doesn't mean you can compose a fugue).
As an example, I was looking at Chaozhou wood carving today and was highly impressed with all of the layers of multi-level detail they were able to pull off (gallery of examples here). Look at this Gilt Woodcarving Large Shrine right here, that looks insane. This is an art form that's still actively practiced in the Chaoshan region of China, so I expected there would be at least some detailed information on the techniques and perhaps some demonstrations of the tools used - but there's nothing. Looking that up in Chinese? Nothing, either. This shit is basically the Dark Arts, passed down through families and occasionally made accessible to the outside world through master craftsmen. It's the same for high-level European woodworking arts as well, not everyone can carve like a Compagnon. Most online guidance teaches you to do things to a very low level.
Even traditional European Renaissance painting techniques (I'm not necessarily looking at doing painting myself) aren't being actively taught in many art colleges. The Royal College of Art, Calarts, and the University of the Arts London offer no specific courses in Renaissance painting techniques, though there is a fine art painting course in the University of the Arts London that... doesn't focus on classical painting skills but includes other important topics such as how "postcolonialism, climate change and feminism" have inspired artists' studio practices. If you want to learn how to implement the principles and techniques used by Renaissance artists, you have to go to more specialised places like the Florence Academy of Art, which isn't particularly feasible if you live on the other side of the world.
I suppose much of this is meant to prepare people for the commercial world where these traditional skills now find a limited market, but it's kind of dismaying just how inaccessible these art forms are even in an age where they should be more available to anyone than ever, and that much established art practice that most people will be exposed to effectively teaches you how to make Deviantart-level shit or stuff that would sell at a modern art gallery that's a poor front for money laundering. There's not really a systematised way where you can learn how to do some of this stuff, and to do it right, at least not on your own.
Thoughts? What do you think I should try my hand at?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
55m ago
I'm not Dase, alas, but I want to say that I was profoundly surprised that Diffusion as a technique even works at all for text generation, at least text that maintains long-term coherence. I'm utterly bamboozled.
sohois
59m ago
It did not! Impressively, not only did the developers preserve most of the existing bugs, they somehow managed to introduce new bugs as well. The game remains janky as fuck and you can effortlessly break the game.
They were a few casualties though like the ominous dark brotherhood entrance being replaced with a boring texture, but pretty minor in the scheme of things
Celestial-body-NOS
Why should Man not rebel against Nature, when Nature herself is in rebellion against Justice?
1hr ago
Does that mean the Maya were right after all?
Tree
1hr ago
That’s the definition of an analogy. You did say the female body is one of the most valuable possessions on earth. Your thesis is that her high value makes her insecure. I think it is the gulf between her appraisal of her own value, which is externally reinforced, and her actual, lower, value.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
Excellent work as usual Dase. I was sorely tempted to write a K2 post, but I knew you could do it better.
challenges the strongest Western models, including reasoners, on some unexpected soft metrics, such as topping EQ-bench and creative writing evals (corroborated here)
I haven't asked it to write something entirely novel, but I have my own shoddy vibes-benchmark. It usually involves taking a chapter from my novel and asking it to imagine it in a style from a different author I like. It's good, but Gemini 2.5 Pro is better at that targeted task, and I've done this dozens of times.
Its writing is terse, dense, virtually devoid of sycophancy and recognizable LLM slop.
Alas, it is fond of the ol' em-dash, but which model isn't. I agree that sycophancy is minimal, and in my opinion, the model is deeply cynical in a manner not seen in any other. I'd almost say it's Russian in outlook. I would have bet money on "this is a model Dase will like".
Meta's AI failure are past comical, and into farce. I've heard that they tried to buy-out Thinking Machines and SSI for billions, but were turned down. Murati is a questionable founder, but I suppose if any stealth startup can speed away underwater towards ASI, it's going to be one run by Ilya. Even then, I'd bet against it succeeding.
I don't know if it's intentional, but it's possible that Zuck's profligity and willingness to throw around megabucks will starve competitors of talent, but I doubt the kind of researcher and engineers at DS or Moonshot would have been a priori deemed worthy.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1hr ago
pak chooie
Does it have to be a Tesla?
pak chooie
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I mean if you’re doing a female centric hobby and your video content is mostly watched by other women, you might be able to get by with doing that, but even “disembodied hands” videoed will read “woman! Who happens to do X hobby,” when the audience contains more men. Even their voice over the internet, or a chosen screen name in gaming and they become a Woman and thus get treated like an object of desire rather than “just another dude playing an online game.”
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1hr ago
If it's the AI thread, what do you think about diffusion models for text?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
I don't think anyone nominated me for a UVP, so I haven't had the opportunity. I probably would nominate you if it came up.
(Maybe you're thinking about the doge contest)
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1hr ago
There probably isn't a delay, plans to ship it in May to capitalize on the hype were entirely hallucinated by jo*rnalists as far as I can tell. It might take many months yet.
Thank you. I will clarify that by RL, I don't mean bog-standard RLHF, but more recent techniques like RLVR that have been around since o1.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
1hr ago
I'm just waiting for DeepSeek R2. Not happy with the delay and while R1-05-28 is pretty damn good it isn't at the very top. K2 is non-thinking which means that while an excellent base model it isn't the best of the best when quality rather than speed matters.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1hr ago
It's not really verbose in normal use, rather the opposite. It is verbose in agentic mode, writing docs and commentary rather than thinking traces. RL has been used for all serious LLMs since GPT 3-instruct, this is independent of the current long-CoT paradigm. It is dubious that Kimi has been trained on CoTs because it doesn't do them. More likely, its training data is largely final outputs of a reasoner (like Kimi's own 1.5/1.6). They have a section in the paper on 1.5 about penalizing verbosity.
2rafa
1hr ago
Great post, you’re one of my favorite commenters here. This makes me wonder if I ever did the User Viewpoint series. I think I did (maybe @self_made_human nominated me), but I can’t remember.
2rafa
1hr ago
The NYT’s house style was deliberately constructed in opposition to the British style of quoting everything.
NYT: Earthquake kills thousands
[London] Times: Earthquake “Kills Thousands”.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
yes yes another post about AI, sorry about that
Feel that AGI baby!
It's obvious what the trends are. I predict that, on the midnight before ASI, the Motte's going to be 124% AI commentary. It might even be AI doing the commentary.
It's a primarily agentic non-reasoner
I have read claims that it's a pseudo-reasoner, and it was trained on COT traces and had RL done even if it doesn't use explicit reasoning tokens itself. I've also heard that it's 3x as verbose as most NRLLMs, almost on par with RLMMs, making the distinction academic. This was on Twitter, and I don't have links handy. I'm not sure how strongly to index on that.
Probably true for most people, but I think it speaks to a bug in the human condition more than anything.
It's awfully depressing if the point of building a relationship is to try and fix your inferiority complex...
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