domain:putanumonit.com
FtttG
24m ago
I suppose not. In the link under "sorry my finger slipped", Scott explains the chain of reasoning better than I can.
Rov_Scam
27m ago
I looked into the archeology of the channel, and the findings were interesting. The channel uploaded its first video on August 31, 2017 (a 2 minute clip of an interview with Kara Swisher), and the first "Just the Facts" video appeared that October. There have been over 120 videos posted in the past 8 years, yet only 12 of them cracked the million views threshold, and the first video to do this was a video about immigration posted on August 1, 2024. This was following a nine month hiatus, prior to which the previous video, about mammograms, only got about a thousand views.
The obvious explanation is that the videos are being heavily promoted. But I don't know if this is the case. It's my understanding that YouTubers generally don't pay for promotions, for the simple reason that it doesn't work. An alternative explanation is that the video times increased from under two minutes to about fifteen. By 2017, most YouTubers were making longer videos, and the algorithm had adapted accordingly. Making videos that short in 2017 indicated a channel that hadn't done basic research into the zeitgeist, as the kind of viewer looking for World Almanac type information isn't looking for a two minute video. That may have been true in 2006, when streaming video that worked was novel, but there was enough better content out there by 2017 that few people would bother. That being said, under 1000 views suggests no action on the algorithm and no promotion, just uploading and forgetting about it. If these videos had been promoted but failed to take off, I'd expect at least a few thousand views.
Part of the reason YoutUbers don't like promotions is that it gives a few extra views but doesn't do anything to promote the channel. Basically, it will show more people the video in their feed, but only a certain percentage will actually click, and only a certain percentage of those will watch for any appreciable amount of time, and only a certain percentage of those will actually subscribe or otherwise become a regular viewer. It also does nothing to boost numbers from sponsors, since sponsors look at other metrics like average view time and percentage who watched the whole thing when making decisions, and those numbers are harder to fake using bot farms. We don't have access to Balmer's number for that, but one number we do have is comments. Bots don't leave comments, and leaving a comment means you were invested enough to engage with the creator and other viewers. I'd imagine that comments are more valuable than views.
The trade and tariffs video got 12.5 million views and 688 comments. The DOE video got 11 million views and 232 comments. These numbers are pitiful. Looking at some of the channels that play to a smarter audience and looking at the numbers for videos that got around a million views:
- Adam Ragusea - Edible shelf fungus (chicken of the woods 'mushroom') - 1,182 comments
- Wendover Productions - The Logistics of Music Festivals - 1,122 comments
- Stewart Hicks - Inside the Station Nightclub Tradgedy - 1,715 comments
- Technology Connections - How Much Thrust Does a Ceiling Fan Produce? - 5,042 comments
- Practical Engineering - California’s Tallest Bridge Has Nothing Underneath - 943 comments
None of these videos are about anything that could be described as a hot-button topic that will stir engagement based on subject matter alone. So generally speaking, an established channel with an audience can expect around a thousand comments per million views. There may be some point of diminishing returns where we can't expect that to scale linearly, but I've looked at a pretty wide sampling of channels and this holds. Take a channel like Deb Armstrong's which has an incredibly limited audience that has natural constraints on its growth. Ms. Armstrong unexpectedly won gold in women's GS in the 1984 Olympics and currently works as a ski instructor and youth race coach in Steamboat, CO.
The audience for ski videos in general is small. Only around 3% of Americans skied in the past year, and most of them went skiing once. Ms. Armstrong, furthermore, does not make videos designed to entertain a wide audience, or teach tricks, or review resorts, or have bro hangouts. She makes technical videos from the perspective of a ski instructor that appeal to the kind of skier who is actually interested in improving their technique. Bode Miller, Franz Klammer, and Lindsey Vonn have made appearances on her channel. But only briefly, and not in a way that exploited her connections. Her most-watched video is titled "Use of the Inside Leg to Change Turn Radius", which got 711,000 views and 437 comments.
If you noticed, this comment ratio is below the 1,000 comments per million views average, which is interesting because most of her videos get fewer than 100,000 views but over 100 comments, in line with or a little above the average. My suspicion is that this is an artifact of a video that triggers the algorithm for no conceivable reason. I doubt there are 700,000 people worldwide with any serious interest in learning how to use their inside leg to lead turns. Hell, most skiers have zero idea what that even means. (For the layman, most carved turns are initiated with the outside leg, which comes naturally to most skiers. Pros, however, will use the inside leg as well, which takes a certain amount of practice and intentionality to get the feel for since it's not a natural movement). The video features an unusually self-aware 12-year old whom Ms. Armstrong engages in a Socratic dialogue about how use of the inside leg has improved his skiing, complete with videos of him making buttery smooth turns. I imagine that the kid caused something in the algorithm to trip, which in turn caused the video to show up in the feeds of people who wouldn't usually see it, some of whom watched a bit of it before moving on with their lives. So it got more engagement than her other videos by dint of higher viewer numbers, but not as many as one would expect if her actual audience had grown to the point where she was regularly getting those kind of numbers.
The upshot of this is that these videos aren't being viewed due to a natural audience developing for the channel. Usually when that happens it's similar to Glenn and Friends Cooking, whose 2019 video where he attempted an old Coke recipe got millions of views for a channel that hadn't broken a thousand in nearly 15 years of regular uploading. While the video certainly grew his audience, he wasn't consistently getting numbers like that video. It currently sits at 18 million views, while number two has just over a million. It should be mentioned that Glenn is very up-front about how he's not chasing sponsorships, optimizing for the algorithm, or making videos for anything other than his own personal edification, which means that his numbers are skewed by him regularly breaking all of the "rules".
So it's clear that there's something going on other than Ballmer's videos hitting the algorithm at the right time. But how does this square with promotion when most YouTubers say promotion doesn't work? I think the answer lies in the fact that most YouTubers looking to pay for promotion don't have the kind of budget Ballmer has. If the average guy looking for a boost pays $500 to get his channel going, at $0.10 per view that only buys 5,000 views, which is nothing. 20,000 views per video, which seems to be the minimum I see among people who are doing it for a living, would cost $2,000, and would be cost-prohibitive for anyone trying to jump-start a channel.
And it gets even worse. Since real channels with real audiences get a certain level of engagement, this engagement drives the algorithm as much as it drives advertisers. If you boost your video, and it's shown to people who don't like it and who don't comment, it's a black mark against your channel as far as the algorithm is concerned. So rather than jump-start a moribund channel, it can actually make things worse, since the algorithm is now less-inclined to show people the video on its own. The only way this could possibly work is to keep feeding money in until enough of your natural audience finds the channel that it can support itself (say, 100,000 average views). But you're now paying millions month in and month out to hopefully get a channel big enough to generate a middle class income.
So there you have it. Ballmer is almost certainly paying through the nose to get a synthetic YouTube audience, and I've just spent seveal paragraphs stating the obvious conclusion that OP reached in the original post. As to why he's doing this when he doesn't seem to be pushing any kind of agenda, I dunno, maybe he likes it? Maybe he wants a bigger audience and just figures that since he has the money he'll throw money at it? I don't know how billionaires think.
Tenaz
29m ago
It doesn't mean anything to be God unless there is a something that God means.
You're still using "God" as something other than an identifier.
God is whatever person or entity did the things described in the Old Testament, performed the Atonement, etc. It's not a definition, it's an identifier. It doesn't have to mean anything--identifiers, such as our names, generally don't mean anything at all. And God isn't "a god", he's God; if the word were "Blogalsnarf" it would work just as well to signify who it is that we're talking about.
If your concept of God is more closely tied to the definitional one (God as the first cause) then to your direct experiences with him, then in my hypothetical, the being who performed everything in the Old Testament, performs miracles, atoned for our sins, etc. would not be God. They would instead be two separate entities, who I'll call scripture-god and platonic-god, and it would be questionable whether the latter even exists (in this fake hypothetical, of course).
I think this is wrong. Our belief in God should be based on direct experience with him, and relatively direct experience (e.g. through scriptures, through others' accounts with him), much more than it should be based on philosophy. This is the point of my whole line of questioning. I'm not saying philosophy is wrong, but in the end if reality and philosophy conflict, reality should win out; and even if you think they will never conflict, it still matters that you give reality precedence on the off chance you happen to be wrong about the philosophy.
Have you ever had someone who agrees with the Cosmological argument explain it, asked them questions, etc? Or is your exposure mainly by people who don't agree with it giving their rebuttals?
I haven't read any rebuttals of the cosmological or ontological arguments, they just seem obviously wrong to me. If you'd like, I'll read into them some more to make sure I understand them, and then take you up on the implicit offer, thanks.
TheBailey
soapy mop
47m ago
why people have emergency funds[?] Why not just spend your regular savings[?]
I don't understand your confusion. What's the difference between those categories, in your mind?
Why not just…use a line of credit and slowly pay it off, spreading the cost out over a longer period of time? Or if you need a new car, why not finance it?
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Any car with a market value high enough that a bank would consider financing it is going to be depreciating at a rate I'm not comfortable being liable for.
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There will be interest, at rates likely higher than Ultrashort Treasury yields.
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If I want said interest payments to be less than ~11%, the financer will force me to purchase Collision coverage (and I remind you, avoiding purchasing this was the entire point of opening this thread in the first place.)
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
51m ago
I take it this means you are not actually up for showing me why there's a partisan side under which tariffs are sane and well thought out and are actually expected to achieve some specific goal? And you didn't actually mean it when you said
If you disagree with this, name a policy, and I'll show you its partisan sides.
Or are you saying "the point is to break shit because I'm mad, I don't actually care about outcomes". In which case please speak directly into the microphone.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Trump style isn’t Vance’s forte, Vance’s forte is talking like Obama- you know, where he always seemed like a reasonable person talking directly to you, even if you disagree with him. I can see Vance saying ‘now let me be clear, we’re going to keep America great’ much better than ‘we’re going to make America even greater- the best it’s ever been, you’ll be tired of winning’.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
I mean, do you think he knows Vance is kinda ambivalent on trade(but pro-union)?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
My biggest negative on smartphones and tablets is how much everything on them is designed to be distracting. Like you don’t just dip into an app, it’s working hard to make you spend as much time as possible there instead of doing something else. It’s a hyper stimulating experience and im tired of looking around everywhere at people who think socializing means sitting in silence staring at separate screens and not talking or doing anything.
TwiceHuman
1hr ago
I don't think humans really attack themselves, they just close themselves off of the world in a manner which is unhealthy. It's like dying of thirst in front of a puddle of dirty water (edit: Or just water which you don't know the purity of before you drink it). Nietzsche advocated isolation for the purpose of growth, but he also wrote "whoever would remain clean among human beings must understand how to wash himself even with dirty water". I wonder if he thought of this as being possible.
It was much less true in the past, I think (at least, in our own communities. I'm not sure about our relation with strangers/outgroups). We've become much more exploitative, we're also more prone to look for the worst in others, as well as to look for weaknesses which can be exploited. I don't think old people are easier to scam because old people are dumb, I think it's because society has gotten less honest faster than old people have managed to adapt to that fact.
We're in the age of resource exhaustion, and "trust" is no less of a resource than oil is. Even "dignity" and "reputation" are resources. Companies like Blizzard are currently burning these. Resources like honor and respect are nearly depleted in the western world in my opinion. Mathematically, I think the solution is to optimize for the long-term rather than the short-term. If you optimize for an infinitely long period of time, it appears to me like you're immune to all social dilemma's and things like Goodhart's law and other harmful incentives. So the entire problem seems to be excessive short-term optimization.
Perhaps current parasites are no worse than those of old, but there seems to be many more of them now that we're all global rather than members of small local communities. And being "local" had advantages, I think it's the cause of the whole "high trust society" thing. A king would suffer if they hurt their own kingdom, so incentives like that protected against evil somewhat. But now, you can earn money by hurting somebody 1000s of miles away.
I'd ask "Which is best, to adapt well to a sick society, or to adapt poorly to a sick society"? Personally, I'm not entirely sure.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I mean sure, but most advice isn’t “just do the right things.” It’s generally at least something the person understands how to do. Work smarter, not harder is advice if you define or explain what that means. Setting a specific goal using SMART frameworks is good advice.
But assuming the advice is actually good advice as in useful to the person receiving it, a bigger problem is that the person doesn’t want to do the work, doesn’t want the grind, doesn’t want to miss out on fun to reach the goal. Quite often they blame the advice when it wasn’t bad advice so much as you made excuses for not doing it. I think there are plenty of things I could be getting better at, I know exactly what to do, but it’s just hard to follow through. And if I don’t, it doesn’t mean that the advice sucked. The advice is fine. The problem is me, and placing the blame in other places is not helpful.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1hr ago
The health care payment system is screwed up in all sorts of ways. But even if we're going to bite the the bullet and say "If your insurance doesn't cover this operation and you can't pay, you die", it shouldn't allow the insurance companies to moot the issue by stonewalling until you die, which is exactly the sort of thing I'd expect them to do if they get away with it.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1hr ago
Then by 2019 we're at "11,544 (65.9%) genes were associated with at least one trait (Supplementary Table 7). Of these, 81.2% were associated with more than one trait and 67.2% with traits from multiple domains".
This isn't my main area of expertise. Someone else could give a better answer than me, possibly even on this forum.
That said, did you read the paper? They have a list of 3,000 traits they pull from and any gene associated with more than one trait is called pleiotropic. The 81% figure is functionally meaningless because showing that a gene can predispose you to both lupus and arthritis, or depression and anxiety is not particularly meaningful. They try to get around this with the 67% figure (i.e. grouping traits by domain), but even that is fraught.
Take, for instance (from their paper):
Interferon gamma (IFNG): Going to assume you have no knowledge of immunology, but I can be more granular if you like. This gene is important for the immune response to many different infections, many of which occur in the gut. SNPs in IFNG are also linked to GI issues, but these are downstream to it's role in the immune system controlling the gut microbiome/infections. Is this 'pleiotropy' as you would understand it? There's plenty of examples like this I could give.
If you really want to dig deep, look at supplementary table 19 or figure from that paper. The fraction of genes linked to cognitive traits that also have significant associations with inter-domain traits is very low for body structure, skeletal, connective tissue traits.
I'm far from the authority on human genetics, but look at the complexity from a casual conversation and trying to distill academia's definition of pleiotropy to a practical understanding. And if OP is so confident in his assertion, shouldn't he have the references/arguments ready at hand?
Why was faith in our institutions so high 50 years ago?
Because most of the senior people in US institutions at that time were rags-to-riches war heroes. There would have been people there that were literally born in a hole in the ground, and every single one of them would have experienced the Great Depression.
That sort of thing tends to bring... certain perspectives that most today lack: that without restraint, and conservation of the same political mechanisms that took them from rags to riches, it could all be destroyed if mismanaged. For instance, the hysteria over the uncommon cold would never have occurred with them in charge, because this actually did occur, twice, with flu viruses that were deadlier per capita than said cold.
The generation in charge now, in aggregate born in 1970, is past the cutoff point to have any memories of that; it's taken for granted. The opposition to their institutional prerogatives now is people directly made poorer due to their mismanagement, which is something the US has literally never had to deal with before.
Has Trump ever told his supporters to be nicer to Biden?
Well, there was that time after Jan 6, 2021 where he could have issued a blanket pardon to the meanest supporters he had [from the Blue viewpoint]. But he didn't do that, and once he left office it was open season with a de facto pardon issued to the meanest supporters Blue tribe had [from the Red viewpoint].
Doesn't matter, the response is only either gloating or increased pessimism.
I legitimately think that when reformers are empowered, and reform happens, that things improve. I think the efforts of Red tribe to end what is functionally slavery in Blue states should improve things for the native population, I think constraining the powers of the education-managerial complex [and forcing it to follow its own laws] is long overdue, I hope that reform continues (and believe that what has occurred over the last 6 months has been impressive) and hope the rest of the Western world starts following that example, though I acknowledge it will take them longer to do that due to never really having been Great in the first place that war-winning culture the US did all those years ago.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
And on a lot more than BJJ at that.
I realize I'm doing that annoying thing where I tell a story and then add details to it in a later reply, but you'd be very wrong to do so. The amount of absolutely horrifyingly bad advice on divorce, real estate purchases, finances, and car repair...it's actually shocking.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
2hr ago
As captain Haddock would say...
MAGA inherited the power and organizations that old-school conservatives have left. They're aging out of the game of life, and their kids hate them and want to destroy their legacy, so they have decided to vote for their grandchildren's interests instead.
The goal of any rational traditionalist at this point should be to throw their support behind the political bloc that sees them more as a quaint curiosity (perhaps with a younger man writing an elegy for them) rather than an enemy to be destroyed. The new Red party is not going to advance Christian interests, but a draw in this matter is as good as a win given the alternative.
ControlsFreak
2hr ago
They may send it to a collector. They may also just sue you directly, which is apparently a thing that has been happening more often. One of those things where, sure, if you're flat broke and judgment proof, then perhaps you can 'get away with something'. I was under the impression that you were inclined to disfavor systems that inherently gave free stuff to broke, judgment proof folks and crushed upstanding citizens with assets to lose.
Ultimately I think that's simply because most people are intuitively centrists or flexible, but that's a tough position to defend in debates, because keeping your options open is also what someone without a plan would say they're doing. But ideology blinds and binds. Whenever a politician is out of power, they argue like ideologues, and they argue that whoever is in power is failling their own ideology by not sticking to it. It's an easy position to stake. Keeping your options open, while smart, makes you an easy target for nasty headlines, anything you refuse to rule out off the cuff while talking to a journalist (and they won't give you time to think) will be held up as "(politician) could/might/is considering doing this stupid thing!" Trump got very good at evading the trap, but most politicians stumble, they either submit and rule out the stupid thing and then they're made to look weak or stupid for having even considered it, or they find themselves driven into defending the stupid thing.
And that's how we find ourselves in a situation where people kind of hates all sides and no politician can really ever seem like just a smart honest person. Because you can't argue the same positions in the opposition and in power.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2hr ago
It doesn't seem like your hiatus has given you much optimism on the culture war front.
It's been asked repeatedly in this thread, but can anyone name a single time Democrats opted for grace and forgiveness, for not "punching back twice as hard", for not "sending one of theirs to the morgue"?
The gap between 'grace and forgiveness' and 'punching back twice as hard' is wide enough to drive a semi through, but I'll try:
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After the conservative majority on the supreme court (viewed by many on the left as obtained through defection) struck down Roe v. Wade, many people here and elsewhere predicted riots and burnination in every major city in America. Ask Whiningcoil and FC about that one. Where, exactly, is the punchback from that one? Jane's revenge?
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Similar predictions of riots, defections, #resistance after Trump's inauguration in 2024. Even the protests were muted compared to 2016, Trump deleted USAID, laid off some largely indeterminate number of federal workers, is extorting Harvard and the other major colleges for hundreds of millions for 'antisemitism' (among other things). NIH and NSF have proposed budget cuts of ~40% each for 2026 - I suppose congress can appropriate the funds and Trump can just do to NIH/NSF what he did to USAID.
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Since you want to talk about immigration, where's the liberal defection in response to Desantis and Abbott sending busloads of illegal immigrants to Martha's Vineyard or other liberal strongholds? People bitched about it, but it's not like Desantis/Abbott are being harassed by the feds or blue states are shipping red-county fentanyl addicts to Florida and Texas.
In the dim recesses of the past, I can recall John McCain telling one of his supporters to be less racist and cruel towards Obama. But I sincerely can't think of an instance from the other side more recent than Bill Clinton's Sister Soulja incident.
Your example for Republicans is what, 17 years old? And isn't even from a sitting president. Has Trump ever told his supporters to be nicer to Biden? There's no asymmetric defection here.
For God's sake, we just had four years of lockdowns,
You mean the lockdowns that started during Trump's administration, that he could have stopped at any time for months? Lockdowns that had overwhelming bipartisan support in the first 1-6 months of their institution? Lockdowns that, I'll remind you, many people here predicted would be permanent as they asserted the government would never voluntarily relinquish power that they had taken from the people and it would be 'lockdowns forever.'
total defections on having a border at all. They went Stalinist levels of low to throw Trump in jail and bankrupt him, and as many of his supporters as possible alongside him.
You're not concerned about Trump calling a governor and asking him to find votes after losing an election? I'm genuinely asking - do you think it was justified because democrats stole the election in Georgia, because this is normal behavior for presidents who lose elections, or you just don't think he should face consequences?
The totality on the left of people who gleefully cheered when Trump was arrested spent this weekend crashing out because war criminal John Bolton was arrested
Come on, this is your steelman for why people are worried that John Bolton was arrested? The guy publicly had a falling out with Trump, wrote a nasty book about him and now he's got the FBI kicking down his door. You're not worried at all about the weaponization of the DoJ?
If Democrats honestly think this is "0.9-tits-for-a-tat", then we should just start the civil war.
There's this funny phenomenon I've noticed during my time here. Regardless of what happens in the real world, regardless of the fortunes of Blue Tribe or Red Tribe, blackpilling only increases. Lockdowns/COVID end? Roe V. Wade overturned? Trump wins a trifecta in 2024? Doesn't matter, the response is only either gloating or increased pessimism.
I genuinely still don't know why this is. Are the moderates leaving the site and losing interest, and all that's left is the bitterest remnant? My perception is that this seems to be broader than TheMotte, though. And my recollection of you, at least, is that you were fairly restrained in your rhetoric and beliefs.
Secondly - much ado is made about the loss of faith in institutions over the last decade, but I have to admit the inverse is just as interesting to me. Why was faith in our institutions so high 50 years ago? Do you really think the government or New York Times were that much more honest with the plebs in the 70s than they are in the 2020s? And if not, is faith in flawed institutions nevertheless adaptive for a society?
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
2hr ago
If there was a concerted effort at any point in time, it would have to have been a pan-national cover up of frankly astonishing proportions
Steelman: the mistake is the assumption that you need a coordinated coverup. What about uncoordinated one?
Scientific literature has no shortage of results that don't hold up. If you take proponents of Bayesian statistics seriously, vast majority of statistical methods in all published literature use subpar methodology (NHST p-values) which is often misinterpreted. Does this need coordinated malice? No, incentives are sufficient to yield uncoordinated malice. I see similar stuff everyday at my work.
What is the one largest possible incentive? Find out that the institutions made a mistake, nearly everyone was pushed vaccine that has harmful side-effect, young adult males most at risk.
It is only a steelman however. Personally, my problem is that no anti-COVID-vaccine skeptic has ever pushed a study that attempts to there is prominent rise of side-effects and they can be attributed to vaccine, not COVID itself. Secondly, when vaccines really do cause notable increase of major side effects, people have previously noticed relatively quickly.
(Anti-anti-steelman, which makes me nervous: Swedish-Finnish pandemrix-narcolepsy case is about as well established as such causal relationship can be. It is notable that publications by anglosphere institutions like CDC and NICE and WHO seem to downplay it, presumably due to risk of fueling perceived fake vaccine scares?)
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2hr ago
This still isn't first principles; first principles would be something like inventing the concept of women from whole cloth based on extremely abstract ideals.
It's reasoning from nature. You deduce your wife's nature from your senses and then reason from that nature to other things.
It's the same with me and God, just His nature is different from your wife's.
Have you ever had someone who agrees with the Cosmological argument explain it, asked them questions, etc? Or is your exposure mainly by people who don't agree with it giving their rebuttals?
And this is where we disagree! I think the entity that is described in the Old and New Testament is God even if his actual nature is very different from what I expect.
But then what does God mean? Is it any different from telling me that the entity described in the Old Testament is a Lion or a Blogalsnarf? It doesn't mean anything to be God unless there is a something that God means.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
You can't make all advice part of yourself, though. For the same reason that you cannot be every class at once in an RPG game.
Agreed, you can't be universally naively trusting. You can end up following really bad advice, or you can end up endlessly switching paths as you are persuaded by new advice. In an RPG, if you never specialize down any skill tree, you never reach the higher level skills that make the whole thing work.
I don't entirely disagree with negative traits of modern people, but resisting submission does make sense from one perspective. Think of it like an immune system.
What do we call someone with an immune system that attacks vital organs? Sick or healthy?
Most people who preach something merely want your money. Most people who do speeches merely want you to invest in their cause. Most charities are scams. Everything competes for our attention and uses advanced techniques to manipulate us for the sake of making money.
Was this less true in the past, or is it merely that the grifters of yesteryear have mostly been forgotten?
It's perhaps true that much of the clergy was cynically parasitic on the medieval body politic. But that's a different question from whether they were net positive!
07mk
2hr ago
There are some people that treat advice as a full on gift giving process. They expect accolades for giving the gift. They expect the receiver to at least pretend that they liked the gift. And the gift they'd always like in return is for the receiver to act on their advice. This seems like a toxic approach to me.
As an aside, this seems like a toxic approach to gift-giving, not just advice-giving. The entire point of a gift is that you're giving it to someone without expectation for anything in return; that's the very nature of the gift that makes it a gift, as otherwise it would be an implicit bribe or payment. The gratitude and pomp and circumstance can be pleasant and even appreciated when they're there, but expecting it in return for a gift means that it wasn't a gift in the first place, it was a payment, in order to get the receiver to play-act the part of "grateful gift recipient" for the gift giver's satisfaction.
They're not nVidia (and not even Intel's own foundry, lol), but the ARC models are encouraging. A bit better for inference in raw specs than an nVidia 4060, mostly hampered by poor software support that's quickly improving, and that the chips themselves are just coming from whatever spare time is available on a mostly-saturated TSMC line.
If Intel can get the software support figured out, and get their own foundry up and running, they'll have a pretty major impact on the market. But while the former isn't a huge leap of faith, the latter has got a lot of question marks on whether they're even going to try for it.
EDIT: While less central, there are some industry components to the CPU side that matter a bit, with AMX doing well enough that AMD felt they had to kinda smear it, and I think there's some KV cache stuff they're ahead on Intel around. Less important for training and especially the 500B+ parameter space that modern LLMs have moved into, but there's a lot of strategically relevant spaces well below that range.
My point is that "just work harder" is to some extent something people (me) don't understand how to do, so everything that hinges on this (most advice) falls into this category. There is a lot more to discipline and human psychology than just flexing your indomitable human spirit if you want something hard enough.
"Work harder" isn't bad advice so to speak but it's not that useful. So, by extension, "Just wake up every morning and exercise for 30 minutes" is also not necessarily that useful.
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