domain:novum.substack.com
striker
24m ago
I’m not brushing over it or not noticing. You’re making completely false equivalencies between publicly owned and privately owned.
Now you might argue that X or YouTube etc should be publicly owned (I.e. commandeered by the state). But thats a completely different argument.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
31m ago
The concept of a failed state had nothing to do with failing its people, even in the minds of the most high-minded Blairites - nobody saw North Korea as a failed state. A failed state was a state that was so dysfunctional that it couldn't prevent its territory being used to attack other states, like Somalia with pirates, OG Taliban-ruled Afghanistan with Al-Qaeda, or Syria with ISIS.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
39m ago
For one, they seem very interested in ruling you.
"Interested in ruling me" would imply they take actions likely to make this happen. They mostly are interested in doing their own thing on the other side of the world.
It is true that you have little to gain from ruling them. However, you have plenty to gain from the $72.25 trillion in oil they possess (total value of Middle Eastern oil reserves, per ChatGPT), or any of the other resources they control, or simply the land they inhabit.
We are not as rich as we once were, but we are not so poor as to require banditry, and we certainly are not in need of additional desert.
A lot of black men would not be in prison right now had they simply realized that crime is a bad idea and they should stop doing it.
Sure, and there will likely be serious consequences for Europe for the mistakes they're making. I, however, am not a European.
To the extent that your enemies' values are a proxy for the values of non-Europeans/East Asians, the threat they pose is a paper tiger.
...My enemies are a threat because of their values, not because their values are a proxy for those of non-europeans/east asians. I am not worried about Africa or the middle east. I am worried about people who live in my country and don't want me to keep living in it.
None of these arguments are persuasive on why attempting to rule the world is a good idea. Leaving other people to do as they wish elsewhere is simpler and both morally and physically safer.
While I had gotten a good deal further than you had at a similar age, i regardless had insecurities in similar ways and my impression was that a it was true for a lot of my (successful) friends as well, so i don't really think success solves this issue, even if it might lessen it.
My only real advice is to keep your head down and work on the material goals so that you secure your financial future. This will allow you to solve your other problems (but not solve them by itself) and for me almost all of my anxieties went away with becoming a father. I feel like society really understates just how meaningful parenthood is and how it ties you together with your family, community and the future in general.
confidentcrescent
1hr ago
Your browser has probably run a hundred little arbitrary Javascript programs so far today, and the worst they could have done would have been to churn your CPU until you closed a tab, because anything more serious is sufficiently restricted. Crooks sending you links to rnicrosoft.com still depend on you typing in your credentials or downloading and running something heinous afterward, even though the second you click a link like that they get to send your computer arbitrary programs that it will immediately run.
Firefox released a patch to fix a sandbox escape* just a few days ago. Properly sandboxing a program has not been solved; it is an active problem that consumes a lot of developer time and current solutions likely still have many holes to be found.
Crooks mostly rely on users downloading and running scripts because it's easy and it works. Writing exploits against browsers isn't worth the effort when you can socially engineer people and get the same results.
Most sandboxing is also bad for performance. Javascript on a random webpage generally doesn't need to perform well but a recommendation algorithm will.
Practically speaking, you just do what any automated test suite does: you define "infinite" to be 5 minutes, or 5 seconds, or however much you expect you can spare per run at most, and if the algorithm isn't done by then it gets killed anyway.
Any cut-off aggressive enough to meaningfully restrict denial-of-service attacks would make algorithm-writing functionally impossible for the majority of users and probably also prevent most of the possible algorithms people would like to write.
* I can't see the bug report but based on the reported severity this appears to be a between-page sandbox escape rather than fully leaving the browser.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
We can't agree on what constitutes murder, or child abuse. We can't agree on what Rule of Law means. We can't agree on what the Constitution means, or what laws require generally. We can't agree on how to run a Justice system. We can't agree on what is valuable, honorable, decent or depraved. We can't agree on who should be protected or venerated, or who should be disgraced or shunned. The disagreements and others like them cut deep through every facet of our culture, and that culture is visibly coming apart at the seams as a result.
Yes, there is always the danger that enlightened centrists like yourself will be so disgusted by our behavior that they will side with the tribe that has been engaging in such behavior without consequence for a decade. At some point, one must accept that such enlightened centrism is indistinguishable from Blue partisanship, shrug, and proceed with the best strategy available.
Aren't you supposed to be patriots?
The Constitution is dead. America is dead. Loyalty is for the living, not for rotting abstractions.
Having mutually incompatible values doesn't mean that we disagree about the value quality of literally every single thing.
True. I'm focusing on the marginal cases. To the extent that our values are mutually incompatible, cooperation is harder, especially in pursuing those values. To the extent that the gaps in values are small and isolated, only small amounts of separation are needed to avoid significant value loss or conflict; maybe the normal separation we have between people, families, social groups, churches and so on is sufficient. The larger the gaps, the more separation is needed, until it's more separation than our society can reasonably accommodate in its current configuration; people start moving to different areas they perceive as lacking the gap, change jobs or careers maybe. As the gaps get bigger and available separation can't keep up, fighting over power becomes increasingly attractive.
Perhaps, but this just looks like a restatement of the supposition "tolerance can't work due to human nature."
Rather, "Tolerance is not a general solution to human nature." It works great over a very wide range, but there are edge cases where it stops working. If you can't cooperate on a few things, maybe you can cooperate on other things, and the value is still net-positive. But there's obviously a point where cooperation just costs too much value on net and it's not worth it any more. Further, we can see these points coming, and act in advance of their arrival, and we can respond to others doing likewise, with the usual caveats about the dangers of acting on predictions.
I just don't think that's always the case, and I also don't think that's the case today in most of the West, or at least America.
Things like this seem over the line to me. Also things like this. ...I'd prefer not to do a large-type airing of grievances, but there have been a lot of things Blue Tribe attempted or executed over the last ten years that seem to me to amount to irreconcilable differences. It doesn't matter if some of the things didn't work, or others were reversed when cooler heads prevailed; the knowledge these incidents generated about what Blue Tribe is willing to commit to means that it does not seem to me to be a good idea to trust them to have power over me ever again. Maybe that's partisanship talking. Maybe it's really not all that bad. Maybe nothing ever happens.
...I think there will be a backlash to the things my side is doing now. While that backlash is predictable, it does not seem wise to refrain from doing those things to forestall it, and it will almost certainly be a good idea to generate a backlash of our own when theirs arrives. It is hard to imagine the point at which I will conclude that there's been enough conflict, we should make peace instead. Objectively, it is hard to imagine the other side reaching that point either. We will each perceive what the other has done as reason to double down, and our own actions as justified. The difference, of course, is that I perceive my side to be correct, and their side to be insane. And sure, I would, wouldn't I? This is how tribalism works, we can always retreat into abstractions until there's no difference between right and wrong, good and evil, cue the Dril tweet.
Here in the real world, there's not much of an off-ramp I see. When we cannot agree on the definitions of basic terms like murder, child abuse, rule of law, treason... it seems wiser to me to admit that the problem is beyond us, and pack it in before we really hurt each other.
That said, I'd still insist on tolerating them, as long as they stay within the bounds of agreed upon mechanisms of power struggle.
If I convince you that I intend to coordinate unsurvivable meanness against you, your willingness to abide by the bounds of agreed-upon mechanisms of power struggle are likely to decline precipitously, especially when those bounds are nebulous and poorly defined, and playing border games puts me in a progressively-stronger position for clearly violating them to get what I want without paying the consequences.
All these systems are fragile. That doesn't mean they don't or can't work, it means they work when used properly and don't work when misused.
But if they just want to write essays and films about how awesome it would be if we just committed civilizational murder-suicide, in an active effort to recruit more people to their cause, then, well, live and let die. Just don't let them kill.
Do you expect them to respect this principle the other way? When it's my side saying that the soap, ballot and jury boxes have been expended and it's time for the ammo box, are they going to agree in principle that only the people who actually act on it are culpable, and not those of us encouraging it? There are principles I'm invested in enough to uphold even alone. If free speech worked the way I was taught it did, if it worked the way I used to believe, it would still be one of them. But after what I've seen this past decade, I'm much more skeptical on the value of the principle, and even the sheer possibility of getting net-good out of it at all under even slightly adverse conditions. Again, this does not make me a censorship enthusiast, just a pessimist on what we're paying and what we'll get in return.
Corvos
1hr ago
Well, yes, your example causes a lot of misery too.
Like I say, I understand the reasoning but getting punished for being virtuous is still very frustrating!
clo
2hr ago
I have to laugh because otherwise I'd cry. Baudrillard was right and I hate him for it.
Just to be clear, here's what happened:
A certain subset of Americans decided that the military banning beards was racist. Afghan tribespeople think people without beards aren't men. American soldiers think beards are for cool elite people.
Does anyone else feel a deep despair at this? Or is it just me? I don't want the desert of the real either, but is the endpoint of this just complete breakdown in shared language and everyone just chucking rocks to see if they have the power to enforce their meaning?
FistfullOfCrows
2hr ago
This is very interesting but please next time, label the axis labels at the top and right, that is at x+/y+
CertainlyWorse
No one is coming. It's just you.
3hr ago
This type of self-development journey is more common than you'd think. Also everyone goes through a period of feeling the mortality of their parents and themselves.
From the outside it seems like you're doing pretty good. Finishing a PhD is no joke. Also some of your other achievements aren't small things.
Keep doing what you're doing. I wish I had a bit more to add, but you're already socialising in hobby groups and keeping fit. Meeting a romantic partner would nice, but its not as easy as it sounds while you're juggling all the other stuff.
anon_
4hr ago
my sense is that UCal has already been on a tighter leash for some of these things than many other unis
Yeah, California famously voted to make racial preferences illegal decades before SFFA v Harvard, and reiterated that in a recent vote.
It's one of those strange thing politically, that UCB might be far more progressive than (e.g. Brown) along a number of axes (Chesa failed upwards from his recall in SF to law prof) but has long had a far more meritocratic (albeit still biased) admissions process.
anon_
4hr ago
I'm just flabbergasted that you posted something about Michael Jackson that doesn't have him a the peak of soft power. The man was among the first truly universal superstars. He commanded the admiration of millions.
anon_
4hr ago
I think in the case of the USA the red and blue tribes share quite a lot
Indeed. I think the points of agreement are so broad and deep that they almost vanish into the background. We take them for granted and so the only things that are salient are the outliers.
anon_
4hr ago
I don’t object to free expression of ideas even in contentious situations on controversial topics.
That is true. On topics where there is a live social controversy (most of the Culture War), this is probably ideal.
At the same time, I think this can be weaponized to by people that want to express ideas that are beyond the pale and who want to reap the social approval of having people accept their views because of "etiquette". One particular example that comes to mind is the voluminous academic (at least in the sense of "coming from the academy") literature rehabilitating the "Minor Attracted Person" and wanting us to take this idea seriously. It's a demand for social acceptance of something that society ought not accept.
Of course, the inverse kind of weaponization happens as well -- cancel culture as an entire phenomenon is predicated on wielding this against views for which there is no social consensus. The fact that some views are outside the window of acceptable discourse is temptation enough to realize that one can try to put one's opponents views in that bucket.
[ And of course, this is all inside the bounds of free speech. But then again agitating someone's employer to get them fire for asserting there are 2 genders is also free speech. That doesn't solve much. ]
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
4hr ago
I had chikungunya once, back in India. Worst fever of my life, and it prostrated pretty much my entire family. This was presumably well before vaccines, I was a small child.
DradisPing
4hr ago
The mosquito-borne disease discussion always bothers me. The diseases are tied to specific species and to me the solution is obviously that we should make an effort to eradicate those specific dangerous species.
There's always a knee jerk "oh no we can't do that". But generally things like the Anopheles mosquito are invasive and well outside of their natural territory. There is just no downside to exterminating them in most areas, and no real downside to completely wiping them out.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
4hr ago
Is this what is going on? I had thought deep thinking had more to do with scaffolding built to continuously reprompt itself sometimes even using totally different specialized models for tasks.
Reasoning models can be a little heterogeneous as a class. But if you're talking for different "specialized models" in this context, you might be thinking of either a mixture-of-experts setup (a name that sounds obvious but which is somewhat misleading) or a routing system where prompts are assigned to different models depending on what they're good at it/what the prompt requires. That would be the router seen if using the auto mode for GPT-5.
A minimal definition of a reasoning model is one that spends a certain amount of time generating tokens that do not necessarily represent the intended final output to the user, usually delineated by special tokens or tags. Then a lot of funky additional post-training happens to enhance capabilities, you'll have to ask someone better informed.
Speak for yourself, I want my output to be part of the machine god.
Oh I want to be immortalized too. But Apollo included a canary, and if I'm quoting them this much, I feel obliged to ensure I'm not the reason the data gets scraped. In general, I couldn't care less if I'm trained on, and I actively prefer it.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
5hr ago
I want to see more political prosecutions, and I want to see more naked corruption between republican governments and their aligned NGOs
Emulating the worst aspects of communist governments... to own the libs?
I'm perpetually amused by the argument of "the Dems shot our country in the foot, therefore, when we're in charge, we should make sure we shoot the other one even harder"
Aren't you supposed to be patriots? You clearly don't want what's best for it
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
5hr ago
I imagine this isn't the kind of recursive self-improvement you probably had in mind, but I think you'll find it enlightening to examine your intuitions about why this kind of recursive self improvement doesn't "really count".
Maybe I'm too tired but I'm genuinely not sure what the enlightenment is here
Doesn't this just mean that when people say "recursive self improvement" what they actually mean is "holistic full stack recursive self improvement that allows the entity to improve all bottlenecks simultaneously"?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
5hr ago
That's not my own canary, I quoted extensively from Apollo's posts and I included their canary to help reduce the risk of accidental contamination when some scraper comes and takes a snapshot of us.
That's likely the most common route for benchmark contamination. Even if a lab is responsible and doesn't directly train on the test, there's no guarantee that the information won't leak from someone else and end up in the corpus.
It'll only work if a scraper is well behaved, but at least Apollo and other labs will be able to tell that a leak happened, should future models be able to generate that canary string.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
5hr ago
I mean my entire post, of course. If you want to see how biased they are in less clear-cut cases, feed the wiki page of Kobi Kambon and ask if this is science.
Yeah, that's one part of it, the largest one. A second part is that, at any given point, you have a handful of specific bottlenecks where incremental investments produce outsized impacts, so the benefit of full generality is not large. The third part is that improvement that is not "self"-improvement is still improvement.
When I consider all three together it seems really unlikely that there's any particular meaningful "threshold of self-improvement" - the capabilities we actually care about in terms of altering the world in large scale and potentially bad-for-humans ways will probably be unlocked quite a bit earlier than fully-general recursive self-improvement.
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