domain:kvetch.substack.com
orthoxerox
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1yr ago
Now I'm really curious if you've played Dragon Age,
DA:O was great, I've played through it multiple times (I think I installed the Fade-skip patch after my second playthrough, though)
DA2 was meh. It's peak BioWare companions, and I didn't like the companions in the game.
I didn't even try DA:I
and if so, your feelings about the new one that was announced!
Alien(s) and The Terminator are two perfect dilogies and I'm glad they haven't made any sequels to either franchise. That just about sums up my feelings about DA4.
Loquat
1yr ago
Yeah, I was expecting it to go more like this:
Low: wants Biden replaced, not knowing the rules prevent it
Mid: must support Biden because the rules prevent replacing him
High: wants Biden replaced, because rules are made by man and can be changed if extreme circumstances require it
If Democrats had allowed some sort of positive legacy to survive from the Trump presidency and hadn't made it so personal with the lawsuits, maybe he wouldn't be so incentivized to run again. But they went and reversed everything and even deny him the objective foreign policy wins that aren't partisan politics. Likewise, for Biden, if he wasn't running against Trump the election wouldn't feel to him like a direct referendum on whether he ended up being worse than the guy he was supposed to fix the messes of; if he was facing anyone else, or was polling above Trump, he could ride into the sunset with the satisfaction of having done his job.
Jiro
1yr ago
That said, DeepSeek seem to not be very sold on socialism as a universal principle
Neither is China.
"Socialism" would be a code word for "whatever the Chinese government wants", not for actual socialism. The results wouldn't be very socialist, but probably wouldn't tell you about the Tienanmen Square massacre either.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1yr ago
I don't think Brutus intended for things to just wind up in Augustus' hands. The point is that he tried to do something to save the Republic, even if he ultimately failed. I call that pretty heroic.
SSCReader
1yr ago
And where did that come from? Just happened for no reason? Or did that happen because of open discrimination legal and otherwise against black people in the US? The Civil Rights Era occurred for a reason. DEI and wokism is a response to what came before.
NewCharlesInCharge
1yr ago
Kamala's incentive is to ride with Biden so that she will become President after he dies or is incapacitated. She likely knows that her odds are worse if she's at the top of the ticket.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
Methinks you and Trace are both a little guilty of performatively shouting I DON'T CARE I DON'T CARE SO HARD CAN YOU SEE HOW MUCH I DON'T CARE MOFO?!
dukeleto
1yr ago
I think it’s worth pointing out that pipe bombs were placed outside the nrc as well. Which makes this whole effort to assert that it was some sort of false flag operation seem ridiculous https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/seeking-info/suspected-pipe-bombs-in-washington-dc
DirtyWaterHotDog
1yr ago
I've seen a consistent stance on 'open & educational' approach to ML from China.
Not just deepseek, the BGE family of embedding models and the YI series of LLMs explain their workflows better than any western counterpart.
I guess you get a lot of time to write good papers, when you have to wait on V100s to do your training.
China has dominated in ML for quite some time now. Open csrankings.org and sort by AI. The top 4/5 universities in the world are all Chinese. These arent bogus papers either. Proper CVPR, ICCV, ICML dominance.
Im surprised China isnt further ahead.
Tiber727
1yr ago
Right, I get that, but that's not my point. I understand the fantasy. But trying to live the fantasy I don't think would bring them the things they want out of the fantasy. If it's something like "Women are hot and feminine. I want to be hot and feminine," well you're not going to be hot or feminine, you're going to be a dude in a dress. If you want to know what sex is like for a woman, surgery is not going to get you that.
I am saying that I would generally imagine that most with autogynephilia would desist with acting out their autogynephilia in public in disappointment. Not all, but a significant percentage.
Jiro
1yr ago
If that's what the shoplifting means in the metaphor, then we could just catch the criminal shoplifting because they do it all the time, and setting up a sting operation instead of observing actual shoplifting brings no benefit at all.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1yr ago
Just happened for no reason?
It happened because
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Black people believe voting tribally is perfectly valid, just like pretty much every other racial group except white people and
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The Democratic party's long-term strategy involves spoils for women and minorities.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1yr ago
Well, @Hoffmeister25 has explicitly stated that he wants racial segregation and ethno-states. Which he would like to be accomplished peacefully, but when pressed, he admits that probably won't happen which leaves only literally "shipping people off" or worse on the table. You're right that that specific issue wasn't part of the homeless thread, but it is relevant to the "Why would you think I'm a bad neighbor just because I secretly believe you should be forcibly relocated?" question. Hence my question: if you are nice to my face but I know that you are working on a political project to disenfranchise me, am I justified in considering you a bad neighbor?
I actually share your (and his) "concerns" about black behavior and black culture. I am not willing to go over to the wignat side; I know too many black people who clearly do not match their hostile image, and I do not believe that every decent black person I know is some fraction-of-a-percent outlier. But while I personally wouldn't be unwilling to hang out and chat with Hoffmeister in meatspace, I can understand why a black person, knowing what Hoffmeister believes, might balk at it (though some probably would be willing to engage civilly with him, and props to them).
Loquat
1yr ago
Okra varieties can be really different on size and edibility - I once planted seeds of one called, IIRC, Milsap White, and those pods were still good even at 8 inches long. Alas, the vendor I got it from no longer sells that variety, though I did get a different one this year that claims similar performance. I may or may not be able to verify that this year; my four-year-old likes to pick and eat raw pods when they're still quite small.
Jiro
1yr ago
I can see where that analogy might work for homeless advocates, but how does it work for warhawks? Are warhawks advocating something that's equivalent to giving up your bank account to thieves?
Atian_1
1yr ago
If I had to guess I would say you are right that it stunts everything and that it does limit intelligence. Like ulyssessword said, funding probably limited how many studies have been done on this subject. Just hypothesizing, but maybe there are people that are more psychologically and physically resilient (genetically) so that they are not affected as much or at all by the stress of poverty, making the data messy. It could be there is no effect for certain people.
But I can't imagine why it wouldn't be true on average that, if you had twins where you had one live in poverty and had the other live a middle class life, the wealthier one should be bigger, stronger, and smarter. Unless they're both resilient, then I guess the outcomes could be the same.
But if you have many examples of such cases of twins and take an average, maybe you could see the overall effect poverty has, eliminating the effect of some pairs being resilient/robust to the effects of poverty. Not sure if this has been done, assessing IQ AND health markers of many pairs of twins living at opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. It would be interesting to see if pairs with larger differences in IQ had larger differences in health markers as well.
orthoxerox
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1yr ago
I didn't get deep enough into Starfield to interact with the plot in a meaningful way, but from what I've seen and what I've read online, it's even more barebones than the one in Skyrim.
But at least Skyrim felt like you were exploring fantasy Norway. Starfield didn't feel like a space exploration game at all.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1yr ago
I feel a moral obligation to pick Homer so we can get the missing poems from the Epic Cycle
Homer: why the fuck did you invite me, then? I didn't write them, your own... Βικιπαίδεια says so
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1yr ago
My four great granddads, none of whom I've ever met, and Hitler for some physical exercise, otherwise they would get drunk too quickly.
SSCReader
1yr ago
And why do they feel that way in the United States of America? Why is the strategy that way? What formed some kind of divide between black and white people in the US of A? Any kind of situation or series of events that may have had some kind of impact on race relations? Something even the Founding Fathers thought might become an issue down the line? Might have caused a mild civil contretemps? Something that created a coalition of minorities? Something about discrimination being legally enshrined, one race being owned by the other?
The USA is the way it is because of the history of slavery and everything that came from it. Jefferson recognized it. So did many others from then until now. Saying Oh people prefer white candidates because Democrats push non-white candidates but refusing to go back the extra step as to WHY that coalition happened the way it did is probably the biggest frustration I have with parts of the right in America. You don't have to support how things are now (wokism etc.), to at least understand the chain of events that led to it. This didn't just spring up out of thin air due to racial spoils on behalf of black people. It was racial spoils on behalf of white people first, that was legally enshrined that then was overturned, over a long period of time. And the USA has been unable to escape that history. But ignoring that is not going to make it go away. And because Democrat's don't ignore it is why they punch above their weight. Like it or not, many white Americans do feel significant white guilt and that includes many conservatives who buy into the "All men are created equal" founding mythos. Whether they should feel that way or not is irrelevant, they do.
Wokism and DEI emerged in the US and not in say the UK because of the specific history of the United States. If you want to cut history off at a certain point and complain about how Democrats pushing DEI pushes you into preferring white candidates but without thinking about the extra cycle about what historical events caused them to push DEI in the first place, then you are going to struggle to attract people to your side, who do see those epicycles.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
1yr ago
Next he's going to praise America's best buddy in the Middle East, the Shah of Iran!
Getting close to a year ago, I talked about GOLO, a weight loss program that I heard about from an ad in a podcast I was listening to. I found it oddly satisfying, because they were trying to launder the standard science on CICO through explicit anti-CICO messaging; truly a beauty of capitalism. Their biggest tag line for what they think is going wrong with a lot of people was insulin resistance. Whelp, while I was at the gym this morning, what popped up in my podcast list? A two hour long Peter Attia podcast specifically on insulin resistance with MD/PhD Gerald Shulman, an academic researcher on the topic.
They talked about the prevalence of insulin resistance in the population. No, it is not obscure. Obesity basically causes it directly, and yeah, the population obesity numbers are high. They also talked about diabetes, both Type I and Type II, as well as some studies on healthy, lean young adults who had two parents with Type II diabetes and who displayed insulin resistance (i.e., at high risk of developing Type II diabetes). But yeah, lots of people do have insulin resistance, so things like GOLO are at least capturing a slice of reality, even though it's clear that they're not really specially targeting insulin resistant individuals. They're not testing people for insulin resistance and then tailoring their program accordingly; they're again just laundering the standard advice and giving it to all comers, whether they're actually insulin resistant or not.
They talked a lot about molecular mechanisms, evolutionary explanations, etc., in great gory detail, far more than I could do justice trying to reproduce here. I'll hopefully suffice by describing one concept; they distinguish between insulin resistance in muscle versus what happens in the liver down the chain (which can cause fatty liver disease, which is now working its way up to being one of the leading causes of death or other conditions that cause death). Apparently, many folks develop muscle insulin resistance, so glucose is not able to be deposited in muscle as glycogen, so it ends up in the liver, and all sorts of problems follow.
What can we do about this? "Exercise reverses this muscle insulin resistance ... exercise in muscle actually will prevent fatty liver and liver insulin resistance". [EDIT: They talked about a couple different studies, but Upon further review in the comments below; I think this part was just one study. They did talk about other studies generally, but I had interpreted this section as referring to two different studies, but now I think it refers to just one] remember that population of otherwise healthy, lean, young adults with parents who have Type II diabetes? They had them do a single bout session of exercise (45min 3 sets of 15min at 65% VO2Max), and that was sufficient to open up the necessary translocation pathway, resulting in "more glucose deposition as muscle glycogen and significant reductions in [something too technical for me to try to explain in this comment] and significant reductions in liver triglyceride."
What about beyond that population, thinking about just other obese people? "What can we do about this? If we can get our patients to lose weight; this of course is the best. Diet and exercise of course is the best thing, and that's the first thing I tell my patients. We really drill into them how we can really fix everything that's wrong with them through this process. [Emphasis added; italics felt true to the audio; bold is my own focus]"
We know a lot about how this works. We know how to fix it. Exercise still is the single most effective medical intervention we know of. If exercise were a pill being prescribed, it would be hands down the most effective thing for all-cause mortality. Paired with diet, it's basically a superpower against a vast swath of modern maladies. Doctors know this, they know how it works and why, they've known this for a long time now, and they'll say it in public. Some, like this guy, will even say it so bluntly to patients. But many doctors know that patients don't want to hear it. They don't want to hear the science; they don't want to "follow the science" (i.e., actually do the thing). He also mentions that even though they try to drill this into patients, many of them still just don't do it. Patients get annoyed with doctors telling them the truth, and this results in a lot of doctors giving up and not even telling them anymore. Just avoid the topic. I had one obese friend tell me that she practically begged her doctor for advice with her weight, and he said, "You know, you're just getting older..."
You don't have to believe the GOLOs of the world. You don't have to believe the sign on the gym swearing that they'll help you lose 20lbs in 30 days. They're grifting, and they're helping to confuse many many people about how their bodies work. But the evidence is pretty solid that basically whatever the excuse is, in this case insulin resistance, the most well-documented and scientifically-supported solution is still diet and exercise.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1yr ago
I have heard reasonable explanations of the new passkey systems that the big tech companies are slowly trying to roll out. It's effectively replacing a symmetric password (client and server both know the password) with an asymmetric signature (my client can prove itself to the server without the server itself learning enough to do so itself). It doesn't solve the two-factor problem itself, but probably could change how user passwords are handled.
On the other hand, they are distinctly too complex to commit to memory, so they end up having to be stored in a physical device, which has its own issues. Also viable backups and account restoration have conflicting concerns with privacy: keeping a copy of your credentials on Big Tech servers is, for some, the antithesis of the goal.
Here I've posted my long-postponed AI update.
Tl;DR:
Open source AI, in its most significant aspects, which I deem to be code generation and general verifiable reasoning (you can bootstrap most everything else from it), is now propped up by a single Chinese hedge fund (created in the spirit of Renaissance Capital) which supports a small, ignored (except by scientists and a few crackpots on Twitter) research division staffed with some nonames, who are quietly churning out extraordinarily good models with the explicit aim of creating AGI in the open. These models happen to be (relatively) innocent of benchmark-gaming and do almost measure up in these narrow domains to top offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, but are less polished and also somewhat… Chinese. For example, if you ask DeepSeek-Chat-V2
– then here's what you get:
and it does follow these directives religiously, see pic.
That said, DeepSeek seem to not be very sold on socialism as a universal principle, and want to offer region-specific content moderation packages (what they describe as Harmony in Diversity: Decoupled Values Alignment of Large Language Models).
I believe that in terms of contributing to global open AI, they're second to none; in applied research, first in China; and in terms of deployed model capability right now – as far as I can tell, only second to the far better resourced and connected 01.AI. (The only group that I'd say rivals them pound for pound is an even smaller OpenBMB; recently there was a kerfuffle where a couple of Stanford students (originating from another Asian superpower in the making, if names are any indication) stole their work, obfuscated the crime with some Gaussian noise and variable renaming, won intense but short-lived community interest for Matching GPT4-V with a 100x smaller model and 500 dollars and got exposed in a pretty badass manner because OpenBMB know their models inside and out. So much for the «China can only steal and copy» narrative.)
The modus operandi of DeepSeek is starkly different from that of either other Chinese or Western competitors. In effect this is the only known group both meaningfully pursuing frontier capabilities and actively teaching others how to do so. I think this is interesting and a modest cause for optimism, as well as for a general discussion of the state of the international AI race and what it might mean for the culture.
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