domain:mattlakeman.org
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17m ago
At the same time, they're not exactly keen on having tens of thousands of young men who are, at best, drains on the welfare state and, at worse, serious criminals, coming to the country. Especially with the papers carefully documenting every landing.
What's the evidence for this?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
28m ago
Out of curiosity, what was your opinion on similarly extremely online and extremely vain billionaire Bill Ackman buying his way into a tennis tournament, playing doubles with a guy he hired against real pros.
He got murdered and people were upset about it.
I thought it was great. The tennis tour get money, the guys playing got attention, and nobody got hurt.
Buying your way into being cool, whether by playing the impressario to a sports team or arts scene, or you build a submarine or a rocket ship to make yourself into an explorer; sometimes you win tournaments by paying everyone to pretend you're good at things.
Hell, in BJJ we have goofy-ass categories in tournaments, where they have such narrow weightclasses and belt levels and age ranges where guys get "medals" because there are only 3 people competing. (Anthony Bourdain won "silver" in a BJJ tournament, which sounds really cool if you don't realize this)
This is just a new version of that, isn't it?
This seems like a great example of vibes based thinking from both ends.
The change is made because it has some slight vibes of being woke (since the column is called gender) so that's good enough to score an easy win. And it's without much effort, which a lot of them seem to be really lazy and uncaring with this work given how they've messed up multiple times this same way with the Enola Gay or that Army Corp biologist page that included fish gender. I'm not even kidding
Nobody wants to do an in-depth investigation or look through data because that's boring and the only benefit is that you might have to say "sorry boss I looked at it and I didn't find woke" when you can instead go and say "Boss we removed 200k instances of woke"
And then people online are upset without even knowing the details because it has the vibes of being against the Trump admin despite it most likely not being any data deletion and just a change in header.
https://www.psypost.org/secret-changes-to-major-u-s-health-datasets-raise-alarms/
I had to do a double take when I saw this article because I was on the exact team at the VA that did (part of) this. The reddit discussion is being hysterical about data loss but as the article reflects, the changes were purely to column headers and data element names-- or at least, that was what I heard during meetings. (I didn't actually make any of the changes, it was very much "not my job".) The bigger issue is that it sounds like the VA failed to advertise what happened to outside stakeholders. In case any of them are listening... the data tracks and has always tracked the sex at birth, and has never included the gender identity. The columns were called "gender" for the historical reason that the medical field didn't always view gender as being separate from sex.
In effect the whole change was just CYA thing-- the big bosses were making a stink about culture war stuff, and they spat out the easiest possible fix. So far as I know this had no actual impact on any healthcare measures. I can't rule out the existence of eCQM that include gender identity, and there's a (now-deprecated) FHIR extension for gender identity. but frankly I doubt we ever used it. Our data source didn't even keep track of ethnicity, which gets used as a supplement for basically every QDM measure.
Basically a waste of time, and therefore money. Being optimistic, maybe it'll be less confusing for measure developers, but it's hilarious to me that the conservative administration was basically ceding the point here by differentiating at the schema level that "sex" is different than "gender".
Canadian Scots were much less border-inflected in general, so I think the selection effect would be pretty different. Handgun availability is probably more like Massachusetts than Scotland, but nothing like the Southern states.
Scotland itself can be... pretty violent? Knife fights are I think statistically more deadly than handgun wounds...
SSCReader
1hr ago
Guns aren't banned in Scotland though either. You just need a license which is fairly easy to get for someone with a clean record. Handguns are banned though (with some exceptions). May not materially impact your point, but just clarifying as lots of people seem to think guns are banned in the UK entirely.
You could of course also look at murder rates among my Ulster-Scots brethren in Northern Ireland as handguns are legal there. Also getting hold of illegal guns is pretty easy. There are other confounding factors of course.
The old joke about Northern Ireland being the best preparation for any Brit moving to the US: guns, flags, religion and armed police on the streets.
It's possible that there's some classified version we wouldn't know about, but officially geostationary satellites are near-universally focused on satellite communications or maritime telephone, data transfer, and news communications, with a small number of weather satellites that take very low ground resolution images of a third of the globe. If you buy satellite imagery (it's not even that expensive!) you're usually going to buy 'low'-altitude operations from 500km to 1000km, and they'll usually cross their entire overlap area in less than a minute and an orbit in less than two hours.
It's theoretically possible to set a geostat with a telescope looking down, but there's not much advantage and a ton of cost to doing so, and they wouldn't be able to scale to many targets.
That said, there's enough low-orbit satellites that they can image an area pretty regularly. 24/7 coverage isn't plausible and this rounds to only getting an image of a location every hour or two at most, but the bigger flaw would mostly fall for technical reasons due to clouds or nighttime imagery (uh, presuming there's no classified super-nighttime cameras out there). And there's a small business in aerial imaging that can monitor cities for most of a day.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1hr ago
Humans must be shoved
No_one
1hr ago
a) The people who were fired at state weren't FSOT?
b) even if you say it doubles compensation, it's still nothing compared to what very capable people can get in law, trading, finance, tech..
You don't want 90th percentile, you want 99.9th percentile people for your important diplomatic roles.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
I remain of the opinion that it is likely (but not guaranteed) that courts will find "training models" to not be a sufficiently creative endeavour to merit copyright protection. "Throwing a bunch of data into the GPU blender and doing massive least squares" isn't IMO more creative than scanning a painting, compressing the works of Shakespeare with gzip, or having a monkey press the camera shutter.
Pirate Software seems like a great comparison to this for personality. Just fundamentally can not admit to being wrong, making a mistake or being anything less than incredible.
Musk couldn't drop the POE2 lies because that would mean admitting he isn't super talented at everything. PirateSoftware magically solved a puzzle in Animal Well that took the whole community weeks to figure out because admitting he just looked it up would be admitting he isn't super talented at everything.
Nobody in the world would care if Musk just said he had a lvl10 POE2 account he plays on his off time. But no instead he has to be working 14 hours a day while simultaneously making top ranks in multiple different video games and reading 100 books in a year and of course have time for all his other activities like when he was campaigning, and doing parenting, or watching anime, or scrolling Twitter quote tweeting "interesting" at things.
Although the POE2 thing is pretty interesting. Let's say he was genuine and he truly considers paying a Chinese person to play the game for him as him being that good, is it not possible he considers reading a book summary as reading the book or paying someone to do work for him while he scrolls Twitter as working?
magicalkittycat
1hr ago
Regardless of the activity of the account, the other mods can't make it post publicly.
Exactly! The only person/people who can is the person behind the account assuming it's not hacked/manipulated by Reddit.
DMs are easily faked, publicly posting is not. Either MaxwellHill was and is inactive, or they don't want to post publicly for some vague unexplained reasons.
Is it not interesting that they're still active but stopped desiring to post articles all the time just a few days before public knowledge of Maxwell getting arrested came out?
roystgnr
1hr ago
I think his uh, eccentricity is kind of a whole package deal
The usual combo package that he brings to the table is almost tautological: you can't become crazy successful by doing a bunch of things that people incorrectly said were stupid unless you're the kind of crazy person who will do a bunch of things that people say are stupid. My standard fear about this is that, while Musk's "If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough" philosophy is actually pretty great in most engineering disciplines (where you can just test things and see what fails and learn a lot regardless), it doesn't work so well when he finds himself in marketing or politics or other fields where you can't just quickly scrap a failed test with no other long-term consequences. My more speculative fear is that being that kind of usefully-crazy person might sometimes just be the first symptom of eventually being a destructively-crazy person. He still doesn't seem like he's on the cusp of going full Howard Hughes, and hopefully at some point on the "getting Trump re-elected" to "publicly insinuating Trump is a pedo" roller-coaster he learned a little epistemic humility, but who knows what the future holds?
As an avowed accelerationist I'm willing to put up with a certain degree of bullshit
Oh, wait, that brings up a good point: at least in his oversight of xAI there's no sign of humility yet, despite his explicit worries about existential risk in the past. Hopefully they'll eventually start working harder on safety and alignment than on capabilities, but I'm not sure what they've been waiting for. When a random software update hollows out your waifu so that MechaHitler III can Assume Direct Control, don't say you weren't warned.
Roolb
1hr ago
The author's concept of freedom is, in my reading, that there be no arbitrary obstacles or burdens regarding her ascent to ... whatever her actual objective is ... strictly on the basis of factors she never chose and cannot control, eg. her sex. This is, in a certain light, a very relatable objective, with a visceral emotional appeal anyone can feel. Achieving such a society is impossible, we all understand that, too (the article might as well be headlined "Neither Side Even Tries to Offer Women the Impossible"), but beyond that there is a certain self-pity to it. Obstacles are to be overcome, and burdens to be shed; people do it all the time, literally every day. And when we consider society's inequalities between groups, well, dwelling upon the problems of women -- present these days at every income stratus, in basically every corridor of power -- seems again a bit self-involved. Relative to the poor, relative to many visual minorities ... why would society start with femaleness?
There is a major difference between
"Is X behind Y from a casual evidence viewpoint" and "Will it be concisely proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that X is behind Y"
We all know OJ is most likely a murderer. We all know that Casey Anthony most likely killed her daughter (or did something at least), and there's a pretty high chance Carole Baskin knows what happened to her husband but I would never ever vote on any of those in a betting market that it will be proven in the next few years.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1hr ago
Yes, I own a home with a garage. I will need to upgrade the circuit for full speed home charging but it's not a big deal. I would probably pay cash or mostly cash. I'm just having a hard time figuring the opportunity cost of not buying sooner due to difficulty estimating the savings of driving old car and being unsure how much the price will actually rise.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1hr ago
No but every comparable I've looked at is the same price or higher.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
I can't think of a single use case where Gemini 2.5 Pro isn't superior to Kimi (it says plenty about the model that I have to compare it to SOTA), including cost. Google is handing away access for free, even on the API. It's nigh impossible to hit usage limits while using Gemini CLI.
Laukhi
1hr ago
Thanks for the update; I'll be sure to check out Moonshot at some point. My expertise in AI is limited to being a casual user of ChatGPT and DeepSeek, so I won't say more about the technical side of things, but I wanted to comment on the cultural points.
Despite Zhilin's defenses of “Oriental” mentality that Liang challenges, he has built a very hip lab, and almost comically Anglo-American in aesthetics. “We're a team of scientists who love rock (Radiohead, Pink Floyd) and film (Tarantino, Kubrick).” Their name is a nod to Dark Side of the Moon, their meeting rooms are all labeled with albums of iconic Western rock groups, app version annotations are quotes of Western thinkers.
In contemporary philosophy, there's an attitude towards ideas that tends to ignore their historical, cultural, etc. context and treat them "in themselves." I guess this is a "high-decoupler" attitude. Anyways, despite the obvious demerits to this approach, I think that it's basically correct, so I have a hard time with explanations of East/West differences based on culture or historical philosophies. In this case, the difference between supposed "Oriental utilitarianism" and "Western idealism" doesn't seem too different from what's already present in the West. We also have a contrast between the "pragmatic businessman" archetype and the "dreamer" archetype.
(In regard to Zhilin's words, if I may psychologize a little, I think that it's very natural for a Chinese person with close knowledge of and experience with Western ideas and societies - but also an attachment to an identity as Chinese - to conceptualize things in terms of a dichotomy between East and West, and it doesn't cause problems as long as one doesn't place too much weight on that way of thinking.)
In my (admittedly somewhat myopic and unresearched) view, the cultural problems in China's business community seem quite contingent. As everyone is, businesspeople, investors, etc. are subject to groupthink, prejudices, and bias towards past successes. But since it's not a matter of "deep roots," it makes sense that a single breakout success like DeepSeek could precipitate a shift in orientation. So I think that if China doesn't end up catching up in AI, the reasons will not be intrinsic to the Chinese, but extrinsic; for example, perhaps capital controls work, or it turns out that the open-source model doesn't work well in AI after all.
To go far afield of my knowledge, it seems as though these extrinsic factors might end up being better for China than for the US. Although the party is hardly omnicompetent at picking winners, as demonstrated by their prior neglect of DeepSeek, the benefits of taking a relatively consistent, unified stance (at least within Xi's tenure) might be enough to overcome the US's inherited advantage of a superior ecosystem, since our political system's replacement-level regulation and industrial policy is not exactly stellar. The US scores own-goals all the time; the CPC may well score one even worse, but it's not as consistent.
Crowstep
2hr ago
I've been trying to work out what the position of the average Uniparty politician is regarding the small boats. Clearly they don't want to stop the boats. The actions you've outlined have been proven to work in other countries. At the same time, they're not exactly keen on having tens of thousands of young men who are, at best, drains on the welfare state and, at worse, serious criminals, coming to the country. Especially with the papers carefully documenting every landing.
The conclusion I've come to is that they want the boats to stop, but they don't want to stop the boats. The more deluded ones think there is some form of action (the Rwanda scheme, 'smashing the gangs') that can stop the boats coming without actually turning away or deporting any of them. The more clear-headed I think just don't think that the actions needed to stop the boats, and the fight with the blob that it would require, are worth it. So they muddle along and hope the problem will solve itself, or that France will generously decide that it would rather keep all these vibrant young men.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
2hr ago
This may speak badly of me, but the Path of Exile 2 incident was actually a big factor in lowering my opinion of Musk.
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.
For what it's worth I fully agree, that tanked my opinion of Musk too I did not suffer through the game myself to condone poseurs, fuck outta here, I just don't consider it a dealbreaker. I think his uh, eccentricity is kind of a whole package deal, you don't get the good(?)/funny parts (unleashing an attempt at waifutech via one of the biggest megaphones in the world) without the retarded parts (transparently pretending to be a hard-R god gamer for purposes unclear).
As an avowed accelerationist I'm willing to put up with a certain degree of bullshit, e.g Anthropic's safetyism obsession, as long as the goods continue to be delivered; though Anthropic seems to have lost the Mandate of Heaven, I'm not the only one to nootice that Claude 4 is a strict downgrade to 3 creativity-wise.
It is a move guaranteed to lose him status everywhere. What's more, the stakes are so incredibly low.
Tangent but considering Musk's penchant for posturing, I can't help but wonder if the titular waifu being a twin-tailed perky blonde goth girl is because Death Note is the only anime he has actually watched at some point.
AI girlfriends are a ghetto.
For now, yes, but considering the outreach it could be the tentative first step in a potential respectability cascade? A man can dream.
This requires indigenous young men to go out and shoot the people on the boats. They'll stop coming once they know it's a death sentence.
Europe isn't capable of doing that; its old men, old women, and (to an extent) its young women are all in agreement that indigenous young men should be replaced. They'll do anything to avoid raising their station in life because they believe they'll revolt as soon as it does, which is not an unreasonable thing to fear given that's when regime change generally happens.
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