domain:youtube.com
faceh
12m ago
This is actually a very defensible position
It was a very defensible position every time, then some new advance blew past it.
I'll listen to the defense, but I'm not placing my bets on that side.
UnopenedEnvilope
20m ago
In terms of slop, I’m surprised Amazon hasn’t cracked down on AI-generated knockoff scams. I recently purchased Graydon Carter’s new memoir, and in searching for “Graydon Carter memoir”, the first result returned was the actual hardcover, When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines.
Then, the AI-generated paperbacks and e-books immediately followed: Graydon Carter Memoir 2025: From the Golden Age of Mazines to the Digital…, Graydon Carter Memoir 2025: When the Going Was Grand, Graydon Carter Memoir: When the Going Was Perfect, Graydon Carter: The Biography…
Perhaps Amazon is just dealing with a game of whack-a-mole, or maybe they don’t really care?
FtttG
32m ago
Well actually my point is that there are plenty of self-identified trans women who don't even put on a dress or try to speak in a more high-pitched voice.
UnopenedEnvilope
36m ago
Looking at mass-death events from 800 to 1850 it’s within the realm of possibility the Mongol invasion killed enough people to infinitesimally lower CO2 levels. The second claim is based on genetic testing , coupled with some historical presentism regrading how consensual were the Kahn’s harems and concubines. Third claim amply addressed by other replies.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
37m ago
Epic fantasy!!! and scifi. mostly. Uhh idk man I like anything as long as its well written.
"Mid-Budget Hollywood" would be approximately any recent A24 film..
With stringent enough definition and an agreeable arbiter, I'd put up $500 in favor of it, at even odds.
Note I'm NOT saying the film gets a theatrical release or gets published on a streaming platform, just that someone releases the movie for the viewing public, even if its just a random download link, and an average American citizen could watch it and NOT immediately guess it was AI-Generated. Doesn't have to fool a film buff, but also could fool an adult, not just a kid.
I'd also still consider it a win if the film were less than 90 minutes long, but that's the fairish benchmark for 'feature length' that would differentiate it from a TV episode.
thejdizzler
47m ago
Just wanted to say this is fantastically put!
Tree
48m ago
The only (practically) people who think of Mormons as Christian are Mormons who are being dishonest (hence: the motte and Bailey).
No. Most people in the world, non-christians, think mormons are christians. It's difficult to tell them apart if you're not in it. They fit in the broad category "christians".
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
50m ago
companies were saying that with the tariff's they would lose $100+ selling a $100 PC case for example.
Everyone has been saying that the $100 case will now cost $200, but it seems the companies here aren't willing to raise prices and bet on that.
If nothing else, this seems like it will provide some interesting data on the exact shape of supply/demand curves. I doubt either extreme is exactly right: prices will probably go up (if nothing else, to cover the tariff), and demand will probably go down. But as to exactly how much of each, nobody wants to admit it's a bit unknown.
urquan
I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness.
51m ago
I won’t be deceptive about my belief that Mormons are not Christian. There is no hidden “meat” (to use their “milk and meat” framing) coming next.
Unfortunately, "milk before meat" is just a common feature of religious apologetics in general. Actually, it's a part of persuasion more generally -- you get people to agree on common ground before you talk about things they might find objectionable. Just like you probably shouldn't begin a first date by talking about your worst traits.
And there is a dishonesty about it, and I have been personally affected by it before and felt betrayed, but it's a practice that everyone does. There is nothing really unique in the way the LDS church does it. Christians do it to each other all the time; Catholic apologists do it to Protestants, Protestant missionaries do it to Catholics, Baptists do it to Lutherans, Lutherans do it to Calvinists. Everyone wants to persuade.
It's notable that you're saying "general consent" is the definition of who gets to use the term "Christian" -- because I can present to you many Protestants, and many more in the past, who said that Roman Catholics should not be described with the term "Christian." They set a defininition -- "Christians are people who believe justification is by faith alone" -- and then they applied it. You're doing that, too, but with a slightly more expansive definition.
And so that's the fundamental problem I have about your point of view -- you're saying that the definition of "Christian" you use is the true one, that all others are simply false scotsmen, and in so doing you're fighting over words instead of doctrines. But we cannot know what is the true Christianity a priori. We have to, as the apostle wrote, "test everything; hold fast what is good."
I even see in the Mormon faith things to praise, things to find common ground with, things that could lead to an actually fruitful discussion where we both come away with a greater respect for each other -- which, if you believe someone should convert to your religion, is the only way to begin. Milk and meat, and all that. It is for this reason that when St. Paul went to the areopagus, he began his preaching by praising the Greek pagans: "Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious."
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
51m ago
I donno man. Even before 2024 Trump, I've been seen weird "read between the lines" predictions that China's economy is secretly fucked.
I don't know about "secretly fucked". But they are very dependent on exports, and the US is their second largest market (after the E.U.), so whether they were fucked before or not, the tariffs fuck them now.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1hr ago
How does this line up with your personal predictions for how this was going to proceed?
Loosely in line, though I'm not on record so you'll have to take my word for it. My expectation for this entire tariff routine is that after a great deal of can-kicking things will settle into a slightly-to-moderately worse approximation of status quo ante that will be harmful but not catastrophic. Trump will present this as a massive win.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1hr ago
I suspect you may be letting your feelings about transwomen ("gross, obviously masculine"?) cloud your understanding of the word. If you search for combinations like "work emasculating", you will see an abundance of discussions where people consider as "emasculating" things that include being called "cute" by older female coworkers, doing any desk work at all, being involved in childcare and having your wife earn more than you. I have also seen discussions of children's propensity to insult less assertive peers as "gay" as emasculation. Surely putting on a dress and trying to speak in a high-pitched voice on a regular basis is more of whatever is common to all those scenarios; and if your understanding is that being considered cool and imposing by women, doing physical labor, leaving housekeeping tasks to women and being a dominant provider who is definitively not at all gay is bad, then being far removed from those ought to be a good thing.
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
They have state controlled media. They can always just lie. Also, they can just cheat on whatever deals they do make and brag about it. Maybe Trump won't even notice.
I donno man. Even before 2024 Trump, I've been seen weird "read between the lines" predictions that China's economy is secretly fucked. But I never know what to take seriously, because it's basically a choice between believing state run media, or cranks. One side says everything is amazing and they have 8% GDP growth, the other side says China is already in a recession.
Then again, they say the same thing about the US...
But I find it not impossible to believe that inside the black box that is the Chinese economy, the wheels already came off long ago and it's just barely holding together with chewing gum and rubber bands.
And the rubber bands were manufactured in China.
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
1hr ago
"Demisexual" is a stupid term, and especially stupid to lump under the anything-but-boring-straight rainbow umbrella, but it's not a universal descriptor for a "normal" woman.
"Demisexual" is a nearly perfect term for a "normal" woman to use, though; you just buried the lede as to why.
If it is in the interests of Most Women to assert a need for an emotional bond[1] before sex, but market conditions (where the marginal value of "seeing a woman naked" has dropped to zero, so it is simply an expectation that women offer sex to men up front rather than exchanging it for commitment as their biology and instincts are screaming at them to do) contradict that, then it is only natural that they'd seek to hide behind the framework of sexual identity as a bargaining tactic ("you should pay more because I'm Special, also other people will think you're lesser/bully you if you don't buy into my brand"[2]). Asexuality is used in the same way, by the same sorts of people, for much the same reason.
Furthermore, it is in Most Women's interest to deny that liberated women who aren't quite as encumbered exist, because from this socioeconomic standpoint, they function as strike-breakers in comparison to the emergent collective bargaining of Most Women (and it is beneficial at the margins since 'man's willingness to risk -> break pointless rules' is generally attractive to women in itself).
The first story is The Feminist
It occurs to me that in a recently-established environment of equality we should expect mothers to [not necessarily intentionally] sabotage their sons romantically by failing to explicitly point out how and why female sexuality works. Uniquely, men are evolved to do this with their daughters with respect to male sexuality because up until about 150 years ago the inequality tilted that way- since this is a new requirement for women, an outsized proportion of mothers will fail to do this (and will then hide behind "social justice" as a means to escape blame for that failure).
[1] More cynically, this is "before the man has offered the desired price [in commitment] for the sex; the emotional bond is instinctual after that".
[2] Pair-bonding/dating is inherently a market negotiation; "all marriage is just prostitution" is the correct framing so long as you give prostitution a neutral moral valence (furthermore I assert that when people don't, it's also just basic instinct- a company seeks to protect its trade secrets, and both Men, Inc. and Women, Inc. don't like it when you reveal relationships follow market dynamics and/or resent being a slave to them).
NunoSempere
1hr ago
My roundup for last week:
- India and Pakistan have agreed to a ceasefire, and despite initial breaches, it now seems to be holding.
- The Trump administration and China agreed to reduce tariffs for 90 days while talks continue. Markets rejoiced.
- The Trump administration continues to look into ending due process for immigrants to be deported and is making arrangements to deport undocumented immigrants to many countries around the world.
- Israel is set to start a major operation in Gaza soon.
- The nonprofit OpenAI will retain control of the for-profit arm after restructuring.
NunoSempere
1hr ago
Thanks!
birb_cromble
1hr ago
The tariff's hurt China too. For reasons I can only speculate, all I've ever heard about tariffs are that they are stupid when the US does it, and brilliant when other countries (especially China) do them to us to protect their industrial base.
I factored that in to my prediction when I made it. Do you think the situation over there is so dire that they can't even afford to try and save face?
Stellula
1hr ago
Correct. I do not think that Mormons are Christians, and neither do most (all?) Christians. The only (practically) people who think of Mormons as Christian are Mormons who are being dishonest (hence: the motte and Bailey).
I won’t be deceptive about my belief that Mormons are not Christian. There is no hidden “meat” (to use their “milk and meat” framing) coming next.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
I have been keeping an eye out for Vlad Taltos books every time I go to a used bookstore for…years now. Still haven’t found the first one of any subseries.
roystgnr
1hr ago
If you train a sufficiently large LLM on chess games written in some notation, the most efficient way to predict the next token will be for it to develop pathways which learn how to play chess -- and at least for chess, this seems to mostly have happened.
Yeah, but surprisingly poorly. 2024-era LLMs can be prompted to play chess at amateur to skilled amateur levels, but to get to the superhuman levels exhibited by doing move evaluations with a chess-specific neural net, you need to train it using self-play too, and to get to the greatly-superhuman levels exhibited by the state-of-the-art chess neural networks of several years ago, you need to also combine the neural nets with a framework like Monte Carlo Tree Search. Just pushing human data into a neural network only gets you a third of the way there.
I'd guess that the "just pushing human data into a neural network only gets you a third of the way there" rule of thumb applies to a lot more than just chess, but it's a lot harder to "self-play" with reality than it is with chess, so we can't just make up the difference with more core-hours this time. Using "reasoning" models has helped, a little like how tree search helps in chess, by allowing models to try out multiple ideas with more than just one token's worth of thinking before backtracking and settling on their answer, but with a chess or go tree search there's still a ground truth model keeping things from ever going entirely off the rails, and reasoning models don't have that. I'm not sure what the AGI equivalent of self-play might be, and without that they're still mostly interpolating within rather than extrapolating outside the limits of their input data. Automation of mathematical proofs is perhaps the most "real-world" area of thought for which we can formalize (using a theorem language+verifier like Lean as the ground truth) a kind of self-play, but even if we could get LLMs to the point where they can come up with and prove Fermat's Last Theorem on their own, how much of the logic and creativity required for that manages to transfer to other domains?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
Once upon a time, this is what I got out of Wheel of Time. It didn’t matter if the prose was florid or the plotting glacial. The sprawl was the point. I wasn’t reading it to find out what happened in each finale, but to watch the setting evolve, further selling the illusion of another world.
I would argue that this is the ethos behind most of the great fantasy doorstoppers, even the ones like ASOIAF which stumble into the mainstream. “Journey before destination,” hmm?
Buuuuuut I’m not going to pretend that these satisfy your third sentence. For a superior ratio of wit to word count, allow me to make two suggestions.
Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse is an iconic, delightful bit of English absurdity. Every other page offers some combination of words previously unseen in the language. The comedy works both in the short term, via dialogue and gags and ever so many puns, and in the long term, thanks to incredible brick jokes and a fundamentally silly premise. Great fun. The full text is available here, though I thought it benefited from a print copy.
I’ll also recommend Levels of the Game by John McPhee as a more serious sort of cleverness. It’s a synthesis of two biographies and a play-by-play tennis match. Since both players are near the absolute peak of their sport, the physical competition is recast as a psychological one. I can’t do it justice without explaining how little I expected to care about tennis, and how compelling I found it anyway. You can read some (all?) of it here.
benmmurphy
1hr ago
I suspect most countries now have some form of anti-trust legislation. Wikipedia has some details on the price fixing page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing However, there may have been periods of time where countries had strong unions but no anti-cartel legislation. I think Australia only cracked down on price fixing after 1974.
One could argue that both the Enlightenment and the later Progressive moment falsely took credit for quality of living improvements that were actually just the result of the Industrial Revolution and the uncorking of more and more energetically concentrated fossil fuels. When the quality of the gas stopped getting better and better all the supposedly related social improvements suspiciously stopped.
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