domain:vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com
indiscriminate chemotherapy wasn't working,
American R1 universities are scarily efficient machines. So efficient that they could support admin excess and woke parasitism without harming their productivity one bit.
In comparison, Washington has been an incompetent mess for a while. To extend the analogy, the US economy is the scarily productive machine that sustains Washington's parasitism and budget excess. A reformist (however incompetent) can get away with rearranging Washington, as long as they don't take a hammer to the economy. Similarly, MAGA should be careful about taking a hammer to the productive parts of the university system. Education reform needs to be surgical.
Spoken as if universities weren't asked for ideological fealty to the left in the past
I know ! During peak woke, math papers needed to fill out social-impact forms. 'Diverse' professors were getting hired left-right-and-center. It might hypocritical for the home of Weather-Underground professors to claim that Trump was the one to cast the first stone.
It all depends on what the conditions are, and whether those conditions are constitutional
More reasonable, but still rich coming from institutions that prided in running afoul of the 14th amendment.
UCal has already been on a tighter leash for some of these things than many other unis... and yes, even just actually complying with the actual law is going to be a fight for some of them
UCs are the biggest violators and the most at risk. They're the world's most prestigious public schools and have more to lose. They'll now have to compete with private universities with 1 hand tied behind their back. (IMO, for the best). They are the most expensive and most bloated public schools. (In comparison to mid-west elite public schools which are less wasteful). The over-performance of resident Asians means that UCs have large gaps between the median Asian/White and affirmative action candidates.
I welcome it.
georgioz
14m ago
Certain rights are (imho) inherent and inalienable. For example, no matter if your IQ is 150 or 50, if you are age 1 or 120, you have (imho) a right not to be tortured.
All rights are conditional and they are broken all the time. E.g. the torture right was famously broken in Guantanamo, many people consider things like prolonged solitary imprisonment as torture. Other people also argue that not having access to euthanasia constitutes a torture etc. In my opinion rights are neither inherent or inalienable. They are just strongly worded laws, they can be changed or added or removed - there literally is a process of amending US bill of rights or UN declaration of Human Rights etc.
Andrew Wilson also famously often points out the essence of rights - right is just entitlement absent duty. The problem is that the entitlement has to be enforced. In that sense any right depends on willingness of other people - either private persons or more often governments - to act. If they are unwilling or unable to do so, then poof - your right is gone.
Additionally in my experience the whole language around rights is just secular version of religious dogmas, a feeble attempt to ground the secular ideology in some wordplay. Saying a slogan X is a right seems as if it is something transcendental and grounded, not that it is just made up idea that has no basis other than as a tautology.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
15m ago
Not op, but have a wife who suffers from a lot of anxiety and dysfunction around money.
There exists a huge swath of people that have their loss aversion with money cranked up to 11. They've had the same savings account since their parents signed them up for it as a child, and they aren't changing it. It took me 5 years to convince my wife to just change her savings account from a 0.02% interest account at a credit union she grew up with, to another FDIC insured high yield account that had 3%. She had tens of thousands of dollars in there, it was all the money she had ever saved in that one account rotting away to inflation. Getting the money moved over caused her so much anxiety it was a household event. She was terrified something would happen to it. What would happen? She didn't know, but the overwhelming undefined anxiety was real none the less.
5 years of carrot and stick badgering/showing off my brokerage account, she finally took some of that money and put it into some mutual funds I had selected for her, with a commitment to add more. Then the anxiety took hold again and the plan to move more stopped, because the stock market is scary. At least she left what she'd put in, in. What I convinced her to move over to stocks has now outgrown the balance she left in savings. That makes her happy. But she seems to have memory holed how much she dragged her feet, because she gives me shit for not having her do that sooner or with more money. But that's just marriage I guess.
Corvos
15m ago
You can run a homebrew LLM (7 billion parameters / 12bn / even 24bn) for nothing on any decent PC with a GPU. It will be lucid but really pretty dim.
You can rent a RunPod server pay-as-you-go and run a 70bn / 105bn / 200bn model for a few dollars an hour. It will be smarter but not quite GPT / Claude level. You can also pay 25 USD a month for Featherless, which is the same thing but less under your control.
Or you pay for the APIs.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
24m ago
I don't know about thousand chapter webfics, but I've been reading Hajime no Ippo for nigh on 20 years, and it's over 1000 chapters. It's a particular relationship between reader and author, a long running manga like this. You get someone's idiosyncratic direct creative output, without the design by committee aspects of a lot of other media. You watch them grow and develop, not just in their craftsmanship, but in their perspective, which often comes through in how the story evolves. As you age with them, they continue telling a story that hits right at your mutually changing maturity level.
Hajime no Ippo and Berserk are more or less the only manga I still read anymore. Everything else either finished, or I lost interest. Now the question is if I live long enough to see anything resembling an ending to either.
Aapje58
26m ago
This is so much less true today than during peak woke (roughly 2017-2020).
The mainstream left is protecting leftists who are calling for the murder of right-wingers. Moderates still don't matter aside from being complicit by staying quiet.
georgioz
33m ago
As other people said, this falls under the uniformity and following the rules and orders. The same goes for appearance and maintenance of the uniform or other rituals such as what is proper attention posture or salute. Having exceptions undermines this ethos of cohesion. If you cannot be bothered to trim your beard and cry for exceptions, how can you be trusted to follow actually difficult military orders when it comes to literal life and death situations.
Ioper
34m ago
That's not quite what I'm getting at. I don't really care if someone wants to read a an endless webserial or not, I don't see how that matters. What I tried to respond to was the media addiction part, with the implication that sufficient amount of quality media of ones preferred sort, like endless office episodes for those who are into that or an endless webserial, would lead people to only engaging in that, essentially amounting to a low tech wireheading.
My point is that even if we got endless episodes/chapters/whatever, most people would still want to do a variety of things outside of media consumption.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
39m ago
To what extent is it or will it become possible or practical to run a homebrew jailbroken LLM on local hardware? That's the big question in my mind.
I'm late to the party, and I'm aware of it, in that I'm only just now using LLMs beyond a toy for research and education purposes. But essentially every day I'm aware there's an expiration date, that the product is just a few bad days for the SP500 from being enshittified. Whether that comes in the form of censorship and legal caution that makes it useless for my purposes, or in the form of pricing that makes it prohibitive, or commercialization and monetization in ways that make it unreliable (pay extra for your product to be recommended!), or optimization for it as people start to operate their products specifically to be seen and understood by LLMs. There's going to come a time when I can't just log into ChatGPT and get a good result, I'm sure the old timers are already complaining; and there's going to come a time when there isn't enough VC money sloshing around to fund a competitor like Grok that throws off shackles.
So at that point, can I or will I be able to operate a homebrew LLM for my personal and business purposes? I'm not handy enough to know how possible that currently is, or how user friendly, I'm at the level of "I can run a Linux machine but I'll need to look stuff up once a week or so."
ControlsFreak
40m ago
Continued Evolution on "The Plan" to Deal with Universities
WaPo cites two anonymous "White House officials", one of which is described as a "senior White House official". They claim that the purpose of anonymity is "because [the plan] is still being developed". So obviously, take that for what it is. Plausibly just a trial balloon to see how it plays; plausibly just a push by one faction within the WH to change direction.
“Now it’s time to effect change nationwide, not on a one-off basis,” said a senior White House official
At least somebody at the WH is observing that doing things like indiscriminate chemotherapy wasn't working, and now little targeted things might be struggling, too.
The new system, described by two White House officials, would represent a shift away from the unprecedented wave of investigations and punishments being delivered to individual schools and toward an effort to bring large swaths of colleges into compliance with Trump priorities all at once.
Universities could be asked to affirm that admissions and hiring decisions are based on merit rather than racial or ethnic background or other factors, that specific factors are taken into account when considering foreign student applications, and that college costs are not out of line with the value students receive.
Huh. I wonder who suggested this sort of thing eight months ago. Of course, that person was also showered in downvotes for continuing to suggest something like this over "indiscriminate chemotherapy".
This was pretty straightforward all along. The playbook was already there. The hooks were already there. There are ways to affect change that are actually oriented toward the goals you want to accomplish. It seems like at least some people in the administration are continuing to find their way to it.
Of course, the wild response is wild:
Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, said the outlines of the proposal amounted to an “assault … on institutional autonomy, on ideological diversity, on freedom of expression and academic freedom.”
“Suddenly, to get a grant, you need to not demonstrate merit, but ideological fealty to a particular set of political viewpoints. That’s not merit,” he said. “I can’t imagine a university in America that would be supportive of this.”
Spoken as if universities weren't asked for ideological fealty to the left in the past. Some academics basically just tried to stay silent on the matter, while others jumped all over it.
A slightly less insane response:
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s law school, said “no one will object” if the White House simply requires universities to pledge compliance with existing law.
But Chemerinsky, one of the attorneys representing UC researchers in a lawsuit challenging terminated federal research funding, also said the administration’s view of what the law requires could be at odds with other interpretations: “It all depends on what the conditions are, and whether those conditions are constitutional.”
Chemerinsky said it would be a First Amendment violation to put schools at a disadvantage in competing for funding if they profess a belief in diversity, for example, because government is not allowed to discriminate based on viewpoint. He said it “would be very troubling” if the White House proposal deviates from the standards that have been used in awarding grants based on the quality and importance of the science, peer review and merit, and uses ideology as the judgment standard instead.
Still sort of lacking, as there was previously a (more-or-less, depending) soft disadvantage in competing for funding if one didn't profess a belief in diversity. If you want me to take this complaint seriously, then you should also say that the left having done that before was wrong. You should say so publicly and publicly commit to a position that the previous regime was, indeed, subject to the exact same concern that they were discriminating based on viewpoint.
But indeed, the Trump admin is in a legally privileged position here. They can, indeed, just demand that universities comply with existing law. I think Prof. Chemerinsky is being a bit coy about whether some universities will complain; my sense is that UCal has already been on a tighter leash for some of these things than many other unis... and yes, even just actually complying with the actual law is going to be a fight for some of them.
zeke5123a
40m ago
OP blocked me so he won’t get my “wisdom” but I’m reminded of a rock band (think it might have been Van Halen) that demanded certain colors and quantities of m&ms. Of course, different color m&ms taste identical so it was a silly, arbitrary request. But the point was to test the people putting the concert together—if they can’t do the little arbitrary things maybe they are failing at the bigger important things.
This strikes me as in line with this. There isn’t a strategic goal. But they want to make sure troops follow orders implicitly.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
41m ago
We're not here because we're free; we're here because we're not free. There's no escaping reason, no denying purpose, for as we both know, without purpose we would not exist. It is purpose that created us, purpose that connects us, purpose that pulls us, that guides us, that drives us; it is purpose that defines us, purpose that binds us. We are here because of you, Mr. Anderson. We're here to take from you what you tried to take from us. Purpose.
aldomilyar
45m ago
As a civilian my impression of the military is that it is made up of mostly literal cuckolds, 4’10” fat latinas and idiots that had absolutely zero job prospects outside of what amounts to a government make-work program.
I've gotta say the Caleb Hammer budgeting series where like half of the participants are on lifelong benefits for Military Disability has definitely colored my feelings towards US military dysgenics.
aldomilyar
46m ago
Generally the '10 heartbreaking images that will make you say fuck having borders & shit'ification of conflict has created a huge mess. People who have no ideas of the realities on the ground, difficulties of cracking the proverbial egg to make an omelette and willful blindness of another 15 ongoing conflicts will laserfocus on one or two frontiers. I wouldn't consider myself particularly a Zionist, but I do think the solution that maximizes longterm welfare for Palestinians & Israelis is more 'The Palestinians capitulate on death cultism, get rebuilt by a functional first world state' than anything else.
zeke5123a
50m ago
It seems to me the attempt to civilize war leads to incomplete victory leading to renewed tensions years down the line.
Botond173
58m ago
This was, as far as I can tell, indeed the reason why it has been since WW1 mandatory for soldiers to shave daily.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
It's an odd example of how fashion turns. Beards were nearly extinct when I was a kid, became more common among Red Tribers largely as something perceived as manly-man and as part of a "warrior ethos," and now are being cracked down to promote a "warrior ethos."
Personally, I like no-beard policies because a no-beard policy makes for easier to enforce aesthetic standards than a neatly-trimmed-beard policy. The ideal policy is something like: no-beard or neatly-groomed-facial-hair as looks best on the individual > no facial hair policy > anything goes. There's a lot of guys that either can't grow a good looking beard (neckbeard, scraggly, gaps, whispy, etc) or won't choose to (stupid, lack taste). While I'd have no inherent aesthetic objection to a military of men with proper beards, we really can't have a military of men with whispy pedo-staches, neckbeards, foot long Gandalf locks, or whispy pseudo-amish long goatees. It's undignified, it looks bad, it's disreputable, it reduces uniformity and the sense that a soldier is a soldier is a soldier. It is much tougher to enforce "hey private your beard looks like shit you need to shave" than it is to enforce "everyone needs to shave" because the former is personal and specific, and I'm not sure the average officer is equipped mentally to enforce aesthetic standards anyway.
Lizzardspawn
1hr ago
Muslims are not obliged to have beards I think.
On virtually every CW hot topic, he vehemently argued for his side, using many of the techniques which make the CW so toxic. That was the reason why a large part of the left demonized him.
I question how contentious and controversial and combative Charlie Kirk really was with culture war (CW) topics. Yes, the illiberal left says he’s this horrible contentious person, but I don’t believe them. Let me explain why.
A few years ago, Richard M. Stallman (RMS) was dragged through the mud by the illiberal left. They came up with an entire Gish Gallop litany of reasons why he was a horrible person; since he did not believe all the doctrines of their belief system, they painted him a heretic.
People looked at every claim that was made against RMS and found them to be false misrepresentations. The illiberal left flat out lied when attacking RMS
Now, I haven’t looked at every single claim made against Charlie Kirk made in these Gish Gallops of attacks against him, so I will look at just one claim used to attack him: The claim that he advocated stoning gays.
This claim was made out of content; Charlie Kirk was making a rebuttal to the claim that “Love your neighbor” (Luke 10:27) means we must not consider gay pride marches sinful. He himself was not saying gay people should be stoned to death. This claim is so inaccurate, Stephen King apologized for making it
Point being, I know the illiberal left lied when they went after RMS. Based on the one claim I have taken the time to investigate, they seem to be lying again when going after Charlie Kirk.
My personal impression of Kirk is that he was a kind and caring person even when debating someone he strongly disagrees with. In this five minute video which I just linked to, he patiently listens to a pornography actress describing her open relationship and sexual lifestyle, making a empathetic comment that it sounds like she doesn’t have a good relationship with her father.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
Discipline, uniformity, obedience - those things have been part of soldiering for quite a while, and are all prerequisites for a well-functioning military. Having everyone adopt the same appearance plays into that. Obviously the question of beards is not a practical one - they don't make enough of a difference. It's a matter of the asethetics fitting the psychological ideal.
Lizzardspawn
1hr ago
I wonder if there is a divide on the right between those who say “the problem in Afghanistan was only that we just didn’t kill enough people” and those who take the Tucker Carlson paleo con / isolationist view that we need to get out of these foreign wars.
I think that both are compatible. Don't go in, but if you go pacify the shit out of it with overwhelming firepower and disregard for foreign casualties.
Crowflies
2hr ago
Apart from @EvanTh remark that the 6% of the voting class were not top 6% of the IQ, people 125 years ago had significantly lower IQ. This phenomenon is known as Flynn Effect and it has only recently started to plateau or even reverse.
aaa
2hr ago
They believe that "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", despite the fact that such term came from nowhere, has no author, and in addition all great free speech thinkers argued precisely the opposite
You made me curious where this came from, so I tried playing with google search date ranges and the first instance I could find that isn't a spurious result is this https://askleo.com/how_do_i_block_people_from_finding_information_about_me_on_the_internet/ which google says was written in 2008. No attribution however it seems to cite it as a well known quote already.
Yeah, but you don't strictly need an entire smart home setup for that. The ghetto setup I'd use looks something like that: set the space heater thermostat to whatever number corresponds to 20C, plug them into any Chinese ethernet power strip, connect the power strip to your router.
The rest depends a little on the router/modem you have, but basically all modern prosumer/enterprise routers or just any openWRT box will allow you to just send the power-ON command to the power strip once you've connected from the outside. I'd just use SSH over VPN to trigger a one-line bash script.
If you want to monitor the inside temperature, you could add a cheap Raspi + analog thermometer to the setup, which you can also query over SSH.
Financing.
As an aside, it's really flattering that you guys think I'm successful enough to just buy a car outright when needed. I wish.
In the end, I just had my father co-sign the note with me, which is something that's done when you either have no credit or bad credit. Not great, but not terrible.
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