domain:natesilver.net
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
9m ago
The word you're looking for is"war".
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.
Israel has done other things, up to and including withdrawing both military and civilian populations from the area. Result: Gaza Palestinians elect Hamas to represent them and step up the attacks. The Palestinians are going to hate them and attack them no matter what; the best the Israelis can do (short of actual genocide) is degrade their ability to do so.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
9m ago
If the "ping" in "ping-ponging" is ethnic cleansing, would the "pong" be "ethnic dirtying"?
I just meant ping-ponging as having them shuffle back and forth across the strip, not a metaphor.
getting someone out temporarily because it's an active war zone and then bringing them back when it's safe is just good manners, not ethnic cleansing.
I agree, except with 2 caveats:
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I think shuffling a bunch of humans around an area as you bomb it into gravel in an effort to wipe out an organization who's primary recruiting tool is the anger generated in humans who are being shuffled around an area as its bombed into gravel is equal parts evil and stupid. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.
-
given this area will never stop being an active war zone (only more or less intense of one), and frankly given neither side has any interest in making it not that, I feel like "being wildly unwilling to create a lasting peace" somewhat offsets the good manners part of moving people around to keep them safe in the micro level (i.e. day to day or month to month), when on the macro level you have absolutely 0 interest in them ever actually being safe.
Were the latter just suckers, to take such risks only to have critics ignore their existence?
Yes
Amusingly, the Chen Sheng story strikes me as the perfect summary of how the Gazans feel. It's not quite as extreme, but this is literally how Hamas has a never ending string of young men signing up to get blown up
"The moral of the story is that if you are maximally mean to innocent people, then eventually bad things will happen to you. First, because you have no room to punish people any more for actually hurting you. Second, because people will figure if they’re doomed anyway, they can at least get the consolation of feeling like they’re doing you some damage on their way down."
I'd say it's entirely applicable. "without getting in too much trouble" is one of the two main throttling mechanisms on the tribal hatred engine, and is tightly linked to the other one, the fact that the search is "distributed". The search being distributed reduces how much trouble individuals get in, and reduces the efficiency of the search because it's conducted in a less-conscious fashion. It's the part people miss when they niavely predict the outbreak of civil war over the atrocity du jour.
Here's a gradient:
"X are bad" > "X shouldn't be tolerated" > "It's pretty cool when an X gets set on fire" > "you should set an X on fire" > "I'm going to set an X on fire" > actually going out and setting an X on fire.
You can graph the gradient in terms of actual harm inflicted on the outgroup, by the danger of getting in trouble, or by the amount of trouble you'll get in. There's a sweet spot on the graph where you find the greatest harm inflicted for the least cost incurred. The Culture War consists of people, with various degrees of consciousness, searching both for that sweet spot and for changes to social conditions that make the sweet spot larger and sweeter. Increasing consciousness of the nature of the search increases search efficiency greatly. Being unaware of the mechanics of getting in trouble likewise increases the efficiency of the search, since even if you get in trouble, you still provide valuable data to the rest of the search nodes. Various coordinated actions, changes in social norms or in formal policies likewise increase the efficiency of the search by asymmetrically reducing the threat of trouble being gotten into. Affirmative consent policies, DOGE, "who will kill Elon" and "are those level-4 plates?" are all variations on a theme.
Blue hostility toward the Church and Red hostility toward Academia are the same thing: coordinated meanness against an enemy tribal stronghold, moderated by the need to not individually get in too much trouble. The tribes successfully purge each other from their institutions, and then are shocked when the other side no longer values the institutions they've been purged from and begins reducing them with metaphorical bombardment.
...And for those who've read this far, this is your reminder that this process is not your friend. Our capacity to maintain flowing electricity and running water rely on the sweet spot staying quite small and the search being quite limited and stable over time.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
14m ago
Does he? Wouldn't surprise me, but I think we need weebs subject matter experts to disambiguate on our behalf.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
15m ago
I'm reading the paper, but initial issues that caught my eye:
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They're not evaluating GPT-4. They're using 4o. The exact implementation details of 4o are still opaque, it might be a distill of 4, but they're not the same model. As far as I can tell, that's a point of confusion on your part, not the authors.
-
4o, even at the time of publication, was not the best model available. Very far from it. It is a decent generalist model, but not SOTA. It isn't the best model, the second best model, or even the third... best model, on almost any metric one opts for.
I have, as far as I'm aware, never claimed that LLMs match or outperform professional human translators. My core contention was that even basic bitch LLMs are good enough, and an improvement over previous SOTA, including DeepL, which this paper supports.
This would hold true even if the authors had chosen to use something like o3, Opus 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro etc. It is unclear to me if they were aware that better options were unavailable, there's little reason to use 4o if one wants to know what the best possible output is.
And even if it is true, it doesn't matter. The models are consistently getting better. We have a new SOTA every few months these days.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
16m ago
Amusingly, we got sucked into bickering about definitions, which I had actually hoped to avoid by using "ethnic cleansing" over the much more volatile "genocide". Admittedly, I opened up pretty flippantly, so maybe that was the wrong word, although it felt amusing and volatile in the moment.
My core thesis is that I think shuffling a bunch of humans around an area as you bomb it into gravel in an effort to wipe out an organization who's primary recruiting tool is the anger generated in humans who are being shuffled around an area as its bombed into gravel is equal parts evil and stupid. I don't really care what we call it at the end of the day, there is a metric shitload of human suffering happening, much of which is being deliberately and callously applied.
Gaza is one of the most efficient generators of human suffering I've ever been made aware of. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
24m ago
CBT and DBT have excellent evidence bases for instance and are meant to be highly structured with clear end points. We also have a pretty good understanding of what patients and situations should use each of those therapy modalities.
What is a good way to learn more about our understanding of best practices of when to apply which flavor of therapy?
VRChat (and most other social virtual reality worlds) allow people to choose an avatar. At the novice user level, these avatars just track the camera position and orientation, provide a walking animation, and have a limited number of preset emotes, but there's a small but growing industry for extending that connection. Multiple IMUs and/or camera tricks can track limbs, and there are tools used by more dedicated users for face and eye and hand tracking. These can allow avatar's general pose (and sometimes down to finger motions) to match that of the real-world person driving it, sometimes with complex modeling going on where an avatar might need to represent body parts that the person driving it doesn't have.
While you can go into third-person mode to evaluate how well these pose estimates are working in some circumstances, that's impractical for a lot of in-game use, both for motion sickness reasons and because it's often disruptive. So most VRChat social worlds will have at least one virtual mirror, usually equivalent to at least a eight-foot-tall-by-sixteen-foot-wide space, very prominently placed to check things like imu drift.
Some people like these mirrors. Really like them. Like spend hours in front of them and then go to sleep while in VR-level like them. This can sometimes be a social thing where groups will sit in front of a mirror and even do some social discussions together, or sometimes they'll be the one constantly watching the mirror while everyone is else doing their own goofy stuff. But they're the mirror dwellers.
I'm not absolutely sure whatever's going on with them is bad, but it's definitely a break in behavior that was not really available ten years ago.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
26m ago
It should be illegal to ask ChatGPT to write something that would take you less than 2 minutes to write yourself.
I would love to know what other minuscule things you'd outlaw as dictator of earth.
phailyoor
29m ago
This paper: https://arxiv.org/html/2504.18221v1 grades gpt-4 versus other translators with actual human grading (not bs like ROUGE which is useless) and finds that gpt-4 doesn't seriously outperform deepl, and google translate, while worse, isn't even that far off.
This test is actually also unfair in favor of ChatGPT, as since the test text is a story by a famous author, ChatGPT has likely already taken a peek at human translations of the work during training.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
29m ago
The translation of "edit" as 編集 also feels iffy to me - I haven't seen that word used in the nominal sense for a product of editing, but only in the verbal sense for the act of editing. The term that JP net culture uses for these sorts of videos is MAD, or if you are okay with dropping any connotation that the clips were modified as opposed to just stuck together, you could stick with just 編 or even 編成動画 (compilation video).
"Hardest" feels borderline untranslatable, with its simultaneous connotation that the edit itself "goes hard" and that it makes the RDA look hard. It's actually serendipitous that 最強 works as well as it does - I couldn't think of anything that would work as well in German.
Bartender_Venator
36m ago
Sadly Turok's discussion of class was less than worthless, and seemed to mostly be about his own unexamined class insecurities. As I said elsewhere, "It's a funny barber-pole-of-status-signaling thing. I have never encountered someone on the internet who is actually upper-class for whom "lower-classness" is an object of vitriol rather than of disinterested study." But bringing that directly into discussion would also violate the norms of this space, such that any discussion from his posts was already drawing from a poisoned well.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
37m ago
That's an interesting and fair point, obviously a big mac in NYC is not substantially better than a big mac in Boise, but at the same time there is probably some amount of value for what you said about "big mac in NYC is worth more because you can eat it while being in NYC" because that is convenient.
I'll have to think on this more, would you mind expanding on the "But PPP would disagree with you there." part?
Also in general, PPP aside, I just think it's ridiculous to make sweeping judgements about the subjective value of things to people, it's not just clearly wrong, it adds very little value to a conversation to be like "I like X more than Y, thus X is better in all cases".
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
41m ago
Slowly, snailfashion, glacially, at a pace I dread to think about (because at this rate, I will not get anything done in my life), I have chewed away at my Actor positioning/scaling/parenting issues in Unreal. I'm getting a progressively better handle at it, but it's still infuriatingly very similar to Unity/Godot but off by just enough to confound me at every turn.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
44m ago
Sure, I agree with this for the most part, although "as they should" is really funny given the proven lack of efficacy in the real world.
I find the distinction somewhat unneeded because I'm only concerned with the actual effectiveness and not semantically splitting it into component parts.
My thesis is that telling your kids not to have sex is demonstrably a bad way of preventing teenage pregnancy, and to think otherwise is to be willfully ignorant, generally due to ideology.
I guess in general, what I'm also trying to say is that just because something is theoretically effective, if it actually isn't effective in practice then who cares. What matters is what real humans do in real life, not what hypothetical outcomes could happen if hypothetical humans did or did not do things (especially when we know the real humans won't act like the hypothetical humans).
jkf
47m ago
I don't know basically any Japanese, and I'm pretty far from streaming culture -- but based on my knowledge of how these things work I'm pretty sure both are failing badly in their interpretation of 'support on live stream'; I'm pretty sure he means that he plans to, like, give her money? Probably not all of his money ("support her with everything I've got"), but certainly "cheering my lungs out" would be atypical behaviour on a livestream, no?
Thanks!
Hm. It may not be as applicable to my topic as I thought. "Without getting in too much trouble" doesn't seem very accurate at the current stage.
Edit: No, I'm wrong. It remains accurate. It's not like POTUS Trump is getting into any trouble he wouldn't have been in anyways.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
52m ago
So the difference between dating a 21-22 year old and a 28-29 year old on a maturity level is often negligible.
What's your sample? As a highly social individual / serial dater between long-term relationships, I've noticed that are shocking differences in maturity between even a 26 year old and a 28 year old. To be clearer, when I was 29-ish I found nearly every 26 year old that I dated (n=6ish) insufferably superficial and indecisive, but I found much more success the further into late 20s I went. That's when you usually get your first biggest pay raise, graduate from post-secondary education, change jobs, move cities, etc. These are all highly formative events that may afford you different privileges or even humble you. As a woman, you may even shift your dating priorities from "want to find love" to "want to find someone suitable to raise children with".
But, my bias is urban and at least the "some university" bullet option on the census form - i.e. since high school, I haven't dated anyone who only has a high school education.
And yeah, a lot of dudes don't mature much through their 20's either.
My bias is also that most people who do not seek complexity in their life (not a value judgment, just an observation) beyond the age of 22 also do not tend to develop personalities beyond the age of 22 - they are essentially frozen in time. In comparison to individuals who do stretch themselves, those "frozen in time" tend to appear less emotionally and socially mature. Those groups also highly correlate with people who chose to (or accidentally) have children "early" (< 22) - but I don't personally believe that's necessarily causal in either direction. It also brings to mind the insult "peaked in high school" which I think has some classist / blue-tribe-on-red-tribe undertones.
Sometimes those emotionally or socially stunted people have a midlife crisis or some sort of later-in-life mellowing that causes a shift ("Barry really got his life together!"). In sadder scenarios, they may fall into alcoholism or other crippling addictions that are associated with an underformed prefrontal cortex. In the worst case they get elected to congress because they manage to get other like-minded people to the voting booth just by screaming and tweeting about complex problems having simple solutions (populism).
Personally speaking, I had some major shifts in maturity around the ages:
- 12 (puberty)
- 17 (parental independence)
- 21 (humility through a challenging experience)
- 24 (first big job / no longer a "broke college kid")
- 27 (end of first long-term relationship / lots of dating / big pay raise)
- 30 (mortgage / no longer talk shit at pick-up basketball)
I was an insufferable asshole at the age of 20. I'm still an insufferable asshole, but in a much different way now.
Aside, as I didn't want it to detract from the thrust of my main statement:
Most women don't take bad experiences and learn from them and improve... they become more bitter about it, and it makes them less appealing overall
This sounds like a character problem, not an estrogen problem. I've met plenty of bitter men who never learn from their bad experiences.
gattsuru
53m ago
You used to get this sorta thing on ratsphere tumblr, where "rapture of the nerds" was so common as to be a cliche. I kinda wonder if deBoer's "imminent AI rupture" follows from that and he edited it, or if it's just a coincidence. There's a fun Bulverist analysis of why religion was the focus there and 'the primacy of material conditions' from deBoer, but that's even more of a distraction from the actual discussion matter.
There's a boring sense where it's kinda funny how bad deBoer is at this. I'll overlook the typos, because lord knows I make enough of those myself, but look at his actual central example, that he opens up his story around:
“The average age at diagnosis for Type II diabetes is 45 years. Will there still be people growing gradually older and getting Type II diabetes and taking insulin injections in 2070? If not, what are we even doing here?” That’s right folks: AI is coming so there’s no point in developing new medical technology. In less than a half-century, we may very well no longer be growing old.
There's a steelman of deBoer's argument, here. But the one he actually presented isn't engaging, in the very slightest, with what Scott is trying to bring up, or even with a strawman of what Scott was trying to bring up. What, exactly, does deBoer believe a cure to aging (or even just a treatment for diabetes, if we want to go all tech-hyper-optimism) would look like, if not new medical technology? What, exactly, does deBoer think of the actual problem of long-term commitment strategies in a rapidly changing environment?
Okay, deBoer doesn't care, and/or doesn't even recognize those things as questions. It's really just a springboard for I Hate Advocates For This Technology. Whatever extent he's engaging with the specific claims is just a tool to get to that point. Does he actually do his chores or eat his broccoli?
Well, no.
Mounk mocks the idea that AI is incompetent, noting that modern models can translate, diagnose, teach, write poetry, code, etc. For one thing, almost no one is arguing total LLM incompetence; there are some neat tricks that they can consistently pull off.
Ah, nobody makes that claim, r-
Whether AI can teach well has absolutely not been even meaningfully asked at necessary scale in the research record yet, let alone answered; five minutes of searching will reveal hundreds of coders lamenting AI’s shortcomings in real-world programming; machine translation is a challenge that has simply been asserted to be solved but which constantly falls apart in real-world communicative scenarios; I absolutely 100% dispute that AI poetry is any good, and anyway since it’s generated by a purely derivative process from human-written poetry, it isn’t creativity at all.
Okay, so 'nobody' includes the very person making this story.
It doesn’t matter what LLMs can do; the stochastic parrot critique is true because it accurately reflects how those systems work. LLMs don’t reason. There is no mental space in which reasoning could occur.
This isn't even a good technical understanding of how ChatGPT, as opposed to just the LLM, work, and even if I'm not willing to go as far as self_made_human for people raising the parrots critique here, I'm still pretty critical for it, but the more damning bit is where and deBoer is either unfamiliar with or choosing to ignore the many domains in favor of One Study Rando With A Chess Game. Will he change his mind if someone presents a chess-focused LLM with a high ELO score?
I could break into his examples and values a lot deeper -- the hallucination problem is actually a lot more interesting and complicated, questions of bias are usually just smuggling in 'doesn't agree with the writer's politics' but there are some genuine technical questions -- but if you locked the two of us in a room and only provided escape if we agreed I still don't think either of us would find discussing it with each other more interesting that talking to the walls. It's not just that we have different understandings of what we're debating; it's whether we're even trying to debate something that can be changed by actual changes in the real world.
Okay, deBoer isn't debating honestly. His claim about New York Times fact-checking everything is hilarious, but his link to a special issue that he literally claims "not a single line of real skepticism appears" and also has as its first headline "Everyone is Using AI for Everything. Is That Bad?" and includes the phrase "The mental model I sometimes have of these chatbots is as a very smart assistant who has a dozen Ph.D.s but is also high on ketamine like 30 percent of the time". He tries to portray Mounk as outraged by "indifference of people like Tolentino (and me) to the LLM “revolution.”" But look at Mounk or Tolentino's actual pieces, and there's actual factual claims that they're making, not just vague vibes that they're bouncing off each other; the central criticism Mounk has is whether Tolentino's piece and its siblings are actually engaging with what LLMs can change rather than complaining about a litany of lizardman evils. (At least deBoer's not falsely calling anyone a rapist, this time.)
((Tbf, Mounk, in turn, is just using Tolentino as a springboard; her piece is actually about digital disassociation and the increasing power of AIgen technologies that she loathes. It's not really the sorta piece that's supposed to talk about how you grapple with things, for better or worse.))
But ultimately, that's just not the point. None of deBoer's readers are going to treat him any less seriously because of ChessLLM (or because many LLMs will, in fact, both say they reason and quod erat demonstratum), or because deBoer turns "But in practice, I too find it hard to act on that knowledge." into “I too find it hard to act on that knowledge [of our forthcoming AI-driven species reorganization]” when commenting on an essay that does not use the word "species" at all, and only uses "organization" twice in the same paragraph to talk about regulatory changes, and when "that knowledge" is actually just Mounk's (imo, wrong) claim that AI is under-hyped. That's not what his readers are paying him for, and that's not why anyone who links to him in the slightly most laudatory manner is doing so.
The question of Bulverism versus factual debate is an important one, but it's undermined when the facts don't matter, either.
I mentioned it in another comment but the typical workflow of intermediate speakers would be to write the work directly in the target language, rather than translating it. Machine translation with LLM is certainly pretty good right now but using it doesn't help anyone learn the language.
We certainly might be heading towards a world where everyone uses machine translation by default and nobody bothers learning a new language, but I'm certainly a luddite in that lane.
the availability of ChatGPT represents a massive improvement over the previous status-quo.
I don't agree. Better translation tools like deepl have been around for a while, and arxiv papers haven't shown that gpt series models seriously dominate dedicated translation models. But on the other hand ChatGPT is giving everyone a huge gun that people can shoot themselves with because it does things besides translate.
I would even argue that by virtue of using ChatGPT wrong, the user ended up with a worse result versus just using a shitty translation tool like Google translate.
FtttG
1hr ago
A week ago I said that I'd finished cutting stuff out of the first draft of my NaNoWriMo project and was reading to start adding new things in. On reflection I decided I hadn't killed quite enough darlings yet, so I'm halfway through a second pass. It's now down to 109k words, with the goal of the second draft being no more than 85% of the first draft i.e. 113k words.
TheDemonRazgriz
1hr ago
It should be “X’s and my Y”, not “X and I’s Y”. So for example, “Elon’s and my moral systems are deeply at odds.” Like people saying “me and him” instead of “he and I”, something being a common mistake can make it acceptable in everyday speech but does not make it correct usage in a more formal context.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
Not only did I reach my "replacement for Nitter" milestone, it seems to like it's even a functional replacement for the Miniflux component. I deployed it yesterday, currently ironing our compatibility issues as they pop up (there's a different OS on my web server than on my home machine, and not all of the packages available on one are available on the other at the same version). If there are no big surprises I'll push it to github over this week.
How are you doing @Southkraut?
Depends on what you mean by "tech companies", technically unless you do fulltime VPN at least your ISP has the full list of all websites you visit. Given that we have confirmed report of dragnet surveillance installed at least at some major ISPs, you can assume NSA (and whatever TLAs they share with) has the full log of these (storage paid for with our tax money, thank you very much!) though they probably don't check it unless you become a focus of their attention somehow.
Google/Apple most definitely has these data, and likely they sell some of it, and give some of it on a search warrant. The government can request it, the legality of it is kinda debated but it's legal at least in some cases, so you can assume if the government wants it, it will have it. I don't think we have any info about Feds keeping independent logs, but they wouldn't need to.
Not likely, as it would be a direct violation of wiretapping laws AFAIK. Unless, of course, you got into trouble enough for The Law to be able to get a wiretapping warrant on you. Though really with all the rest of NSA shenanigans I wouldn't be totally surprised if they start doing it, but I haven't heard any indications of that happening yet.
Not likely, since the traffic to record it all would be large enough for people to notice and start talking about it. It is plausible that there could be "keyword triggers" that record specific conversations and clandestinely ship them back to the phone/OS company (where the previous items apply), but for full transcripts of every word it'd be hard to do without people noticing, and since we don't have AFAIK any good evidence of this right now, I'll tend to say no, at least in the form presented. They definitely could listen and update e.g. your advertisement profile - that'd be very hard to catch without having enough access, though the longer we go without somebody Snowden-ing it out, the lesser is the probability that it is actually happens. If NSA couldn't keep their secrets secret, why Google or Apple would be able to?
In general, it all depends on a) what is your threat model and b) how interested the government is in you. For most normal people, the government is not interested in them unless they become a target of the investigation - which means they did something to trigger it, or somebody else pointed at them as somebody to watch. If that happened, pretty much any contact with modern society means you're screwed. Bank account? Forget about it. Driving? You better wear a mask and steal a car from somebody that doesn't mind they car being stolen. Communication? Burner phones probably would get you somewhere but don't stay in the same place too long or use the same burner for too long. It's possible to live under the radar, but it's not convenient and usually people that do that have their own infrastructure (like drug traffickers) and if you're going into it alone, it will be tough for you. OTOH, if you're just a normie feeling icky about your data being stored at the vast data silos, you can use some tools - like VPNs, privacy OS phones, etc. - with relatively minor inconvenience, and avoid being data-harvested. But it wouldn't protect you if The Law becomes seriously interested in you.
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