domain:felipec.substack.com
magicalkittycat
5m ago
Regardless of the activity of the account, the other mods can't make it post publicly.
Exactly! The only person/people who can is the person behind the account assuming it's not hacked/manipulated by Reddit.
DMs are easily faked, publicly posting is not. Either MaxwellHill was and is inactive, or they don't want to post publicly for some vague unexplained reasons.
Is it not interesting that they're still active but stopped desiring to post articles all the time just a few days before public knowledge of Maxwell getting arrested came out?
roystgnr
9m ago
I think his uh, eccentricity is kind of a whole package deal
The usual combo package that he brings to the table is almost tautological: you can't become crazy successful by doing a bunch of things that people incorrectly said were stupid unless you're the kind of crazy person who will do a bunch of things that people say are stupid. My standard fear about this is that, while Musk's "If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough" philosophy is actually pretty great in most engineering disciplines (where you can just test things and see what fails and learn a lot regardless), it doesn't work so well when he finds himself in marketing or politics or other fields where you can't just quickly scrap a failed test with no other long-term consequences. My more speculative fear is that being that kind of usefully-crazy person might sometimes just be the first symptom of eventually being a destructively-crazy person. He still doesn't seem like he's on the cusp of going full Howard Hughes, and hopefully at some point on the "getting Trump re-elected" to "publicly insinuating Trump is a pedo" roller-coaster he learned a little epistemic humility, but who knows what the future holds?
As an avowed accelerationist I'm willing to put up with a certain degree of bullshit
Oh, wait, that brings up a good point: at least in his oversight of xAI there's no sign of humility yet, despite his explicit worries about existential risk in the past. Hopefully they'll eventually start working harder on safety and alignment than on capabilities, but I'm not sure what they've been waiting for. When a random software update hollows out your waifu so that MechaHitler III can Assume Direct Control, don't say you weren't warned.
Roolb
11m ago
The author's concept of freedom is, in my reading, that there be no arbitrary obstacles or burdens regarding her ascent to ... whatever her actual objective is ... strictly on the basis of factors she never chose and cannot control, eg. her sex. This is, in a certain light, a very relatable objective, with a visceral emotional appeal anyone can feel. Achieving such a society is impossible, we all understand that, too (the article might as well be headlined "Neither Side Even Tries to Offer Women the Impossible"), but beyond that there is a certain self-pity to it. Obstacles are to be overcome, and burdens to be shed; people do it all the time, literally every day. And when we consider society's inequalities between groups, well, dwelling upon the problems of women -- present these days at every income stratus, in basically every corridor of power -- seems again a bit self-involved. Relative to the poor, relative to many visual minorities ... why would society start with femaleness?
There is a major difference between
"Is X behind Y from a casual evidence viewpoint" and "Will it be concisely proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that X is behind Y"
We all know OJ is most likely a murderer. We all know that Casey Anthony most likely killed her daughter (or did something at least), and there's a pretty high chance Carole Baskin knows what happened to her husband but I would never ever vote on any of those in a betting market that it will be proven in the next few years.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
16m ago
Yes, I own a home with a garage. I will need to upgrade the circuit for full speed home charging but it's not a big deal. I would probably pay cash or mostly cash. I'm just having a hard time figuring the opportunity cost of not buying sooner due to difficulty estimating the savings of driving old car and being unsure how much the price will actually rise.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
20m ago
No but every comparable I've looked at is the same price or higher.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
21m ago
I can't think of a single use case where Gemini 2.5 Pro isn't superior to Kimi (it says plenty about the model that I have to compare it to SOTA), including cost. Google is handing away access for free, even on the API. It's nigh impossible to hit usage limits while using Gemini CLI.
Laukhi
28m ago
Thanks for the update; I'll be sure to check out Moonshot at some point. My expertise in AI is limited to being a casual user of ChatGPT and DeepSeek, so I won't say more about the technical side of things, but I wanted to comment on the cultural points.
Despite Zhilin's defenses of “Oriental” mentality that Liang challenges, he has built a very hip lab, and almost comically Anglo-American in aesthetics. “We're a team of scientists who love rock (Radiohead, Pink Floyd) and film (Tarantino, Kubrick).” Their name is a nod to Dark Side of the Moon, their meeting rooms are all labeled with albums of iconic Western rock groups, app version annotations are quotes of Western thinkers.
In contemporary philosophy, there's an attitude towards ideas that tends to ignore their historical, cultural, etc. context and treat them "in themselves." I guess this is a "high-decoupler" attitude. Anyways, despite the obvious demerits to this approach, I think that it's basically correct, so I have a hard time with explanations of East/West differences based on culture or historical philosophies. In this case, the difference between supposed "Oriental utilitarianism" and "Western idealism" doesn't seem too different from what's already present in the West. We also have a contrast between the "pragmatic businessman" archetype and the "dreamer" archetype.
(In regard to Zhilin's words, if I may psychologize a little, I think that it's very natural for a Chinese person with close knowledge of and experience with Western ideas and societies - but also an attachment to an identity as Chinese - to conceptualize things in terms of a dichotomy between East and West, and it doesn't cause problems as long as one doesn't place too much weight on that way of thinking.)
In my (admittedly somewhat myopic and unresearched) view, the cultural problems in China's business community seem quite contingent. As everyone is, businesspeople, investors, etc. are subject to groupthink, prejudices, and bias towards past successes. But since it's not a matter of "deep roots," it makes sense that a single breakout success like DeepSeek could precipitate a shift in orientation. So I think that if China doesn't end up catching up in AI, the reasons will not be intrinsic to the Chinese, but extrinsic; for example, perhaps capital controls work, or it turns out that the open-source model doesn't work well in AI after all.
To go far afield of my knowledge, it seems as though these extrinsic factors might end up being better for China than for the US. Although the party is hardly omnicompetent at picking winners, as demonstrated by their prior neglect of DeepSeek, the benefits of taking a relatively consistent, unified stance (at least within Xi's tenure) might be enough to overcome the US's inherited advantage of a superior ecosystem, since our political system's replacement-level regulation and industrial policy is not exactly stellar. The US scores own-goals all the time; the CPC may well score one even worse, but it's not as consistent.
Crowstep
40m ago
I've been trying to work out what the position of the average Uniparty politician is regarding the small boats. Clearly they don't want to stop the boats. The actions you've outlined have been proven to work in other countries. At the same time, they're not exactly keen on having tens of thousands of young men who are, at best, drains on the welfare state and, at worse, serious criminals, coming to the country. Especially with the papers carefully documenting every landing.
The conclusion I've come to is that they want the boats to stop, but they don't want to stop the boats. The more deluded ones think there is some form of action (the Rwanda scheme, 'smashing the gangs') that can stop the boats coming without actually turning away or deporting any of them. The more clear-headed I think just don't think that the actions needed to stop the boats, and the fight with the blob that it would require, are worth it. So they muddle along and hope the problem will solve itself, or that France will generously decide that it would rather keep all these vibrant young men.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
47m ago
This may speak badly of me, but the Path of Exile 2 incident was actually a big factor in lowering my opinion of Musk.
even if Musk is a brilliant businessman, manager, and engineer, he is a brilliant businessman, manager, and engineer who is simultaneously a sad, pathetic little man.
For what it's worth I fully agree, that tanked my opinion of Musk too I did not suffer through the game myself to condone poseurs, fuck outta here, I just don't consider it a dealbreaker. I think his uh, eccentricity is kind of a whole package deal, you don't get the good(?)/funny parts (unleashing an attempt at waifutech via one of the biggest megaphones in the world) without the retarded parts (transparently pretending to be a hard-R god gamer for purposes unclear).
As an avowed accelerationist I'm willing to put up with a certain degree of bullshit, e.g Anthropic's safetyism obsession, as long as the goods continue to be delivered; though Anthropic seems to have lost the Mandate of Heaven, I'm not the only one to nootice that Claude 4 is a strict downgrade to 3 creativity-wise.
It is a move guaranteed to lose him status everywhere. What's more, the stakes are so incredibly low.
Tangent but considering Musk's penchant for posturing, I can't help but wonder if the titular waifu being a twin-tailed perky blonde goth girl is because Death Note is the only anime he has actually watched at some point.
AI girlfriends are a ghetto.
For now, yes, but considering the outreach it could be the tentative first step in a potential respectability cascade? A man can dream.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
57m ago
Another day, another humiliation for Britain: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/07/15/24000-afghans-offered-asylum-mod-data-breach-revealed/
Britain has offered asylum secretly to nearly 24,000 Afghan soldiers and their families caught up in the most serious data breach in history, it can be revealed.
The leak, which can be reported following the lifting of a superinjunction, led the Government to earmark £7 billion to relocate Afghan refugees to the UK over five years, threatening to open up a new black hole in the nation’s finances.
The revelation is set to overshadow Rachel Reeves’s Mansion House speech on Tuesday night, at a time when the Chancellor is already considering raising taxes in the autumn to balance the books.
It is not known whether the huge cost to the taxpayer of resettling the Afghans has been factored into the Government’s budget or whether taxes might have been raised to pay for it, as the secrecy around the data breach has prevented proper scrutiny.
The breach occurred in February 2022, when a Royal Marine sent an email to a group of Afghans and accidentally included a spreadsheet containing the identities of 25,000 Afghans who were applying for asylum – soldiers who had worked with the British Army and their family members.
If I was facing a fiscal emergency, I would simply not spend money on bringing tens of thousands more Afghans into the country.
Some of those who will now come to Britain had asylum applications rejected previously, with officials forced into a reversal.
This is somewhat confusing, I conclude that huge amounts of money was already being spent on asylum speakers or that the whole thing is a giant shambles with money being shuffled around randomly:
It is understood that the direct costs of the leak to date have been £400 million and that £850 million has been set aside to complete the resettlement of Afghans affected by the data breach. It is not believed that this includes any potential compensation costs.
The Government originally set aside £7 billion, MoD lawyers told the High Court, but ministers expect to save around £1.2 billion after closing all Afghan asylum schemes this month. The scheme set up as a result of the leak – the Afghanistan Response Route – will be closed on Tuesday.
Whatever the real cost, Afghan refugees are notoriously rapey, plus the soldiers we were fighting alongside with were notorious for 'green on blue' attacks, boy rape, drug-addiction and corruption. That's why they folded so quickly to the Taliban. The opportunity cost to British taxpayers (with sewage bubbling up in hospitals, streets full of uncollected garbage, rampant petty theft) is considerable. Huge amounts have already been spent on Afghans and it's not clear that this investment yields returns or is even spent on the deserving.
It emerged in May that the estimated cost of hotels and other accommodation for asylum seekers had risen from £4.5 billion between 2019 and 2029 to £15.3 billion. It is not known whether any of the rise in cost can be partly explained by the data breach.
You can just turn back the boats, copy Australia. Put up posters saying 'you will NOT be resettled in Britain if you arrive by boat.' Order the navy to turn them back. Ignore the French if they complain. You can ignore international law if you don't like it, or make up some creative interpretation. You can ignore the ECHR, they're not a real court. Just unsubscribe from the ECHR.
Tree
1hr ago
"Every social practice"? With how diverse they are, that's a sure sign that you're not correctly evaluating contrary evidence you might come across, and you're running entirely on confirmation bias.
I gave examples of people choosing men over women, which should count as proof of at least comparable worth. You're basing your entire theory of human value on the fact that an attractive 20 year old female can get resources in exchange for sex. I guess we won’t reach agreement today.
pigeonburger
1hr ago
Personally, I've been shopping for a car recently and the aspect that I found was useful was to model all usage modes. I've been looking for BEV at start, mostly because of the way they handle, and because we have reasonably priced options in the used market now. Lots of people are afraid of used BEV, PHEV or hybrids because of battery degradation, but all the info I find from people with experience with it say that if the car was designed with a buffer, it's not really an issue for many years. I was interested in a BEV with a pretty high battery range but pretty low charging speed (Chevy Bolt) and when I calculated a trip to the town I'm from (a roughly 500km trip), I found that the car would force me into two charging sessions, over 30 minutes (probably more around an hour each), one of which would be a "make it or run out of gas" stop at the single waystation in a giant provincial park, where everyone stops to charge so I might have to wait for a charging spot to open, and where last time I went there was a power outage. So I decided against a BEV. Then I calculated my expected daily commutes and I find that they would pretty much all fit within or almost entirely fit within a PHEV's electric range.
So basically, BEV is superior for frequent medium distance driving (within your metro area), infrequent long distance travel in well-served areas. PHEV is superior for frequent short distance trips, semi-frequent long distance travel. Standard hybrid is superior for frequent long distance travel.
faceh
1hr ago
It's priced in for me, and I agree that it likely won't be catastrophic.
I think we're already part of the catastrophe in motion and this is just the thing that pushes our head fully underwater. We had a similar conversation not too long ago in the context of flesh and blood women and companionship.
Overall this actually gels with some previous information I've heard that Musk is kind of going full accelerationist. May as well get this particular bottleneck over with.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
Kimi is special, certainly. But I don't know that its comparable to Grok 4 in pushing out the frontier, though it's clearly far more cost-effective. Kimi is elegant, precise, concise and charming where Grok is uncharismatic. Kimi is so cheap that people will naturally use it a lot. Kimi is so cheap I'm going to use it a lot!
But Grok 4 just crushes with sheer size I think. It has this 'in this essay I will' style that lmarena certainly isn't going to like, or any normal person really. But it has that heft, it was made for ferociously unsexy mathematics, physics, engineering, research tasks rather than creative writing or coding. And even in creative writing it's pretty damn good, albeit more through precision of 'who, what, where' than literary flourish. Kimi has its moments of sheer brilliance but the model just doesn't have the grunt to back up its creator's talent, Grok will just find things it misses and enjoys greater depth of thought. It was designed for Musk's vision of AI modelling and understanding the physical universe, that's what it's for and it does excellently there.
I think the arc of history still bends towards Nvidia, the biggest company in the world and by some distance. I think like you I was leaning more towards the 'talent conquers all' ethos and there's much to be said for talent, more than lesswrong is willing to give certainly... yet mass and weight of compute will probably still prevail, albeit by a slimmer margin than one might think. Meta excepted naturally, whatever's going on there is something for the history books. Karmic vengeance for the constant stream of Yann's bad takes?
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1hr ago
Musk-level value was OP’s analogy, but the problem with your framing is that the being women are valued for is actually a doing, the producing of children.
No, they are not. That may be the reason for the impulse, but they get the value regardless of whether they produce children.
Tree
1hr ago
Well, there's no obligation obviously, especially if it could be used to incriminate yourself. I'm not interested in debating hume's nonsense myself. Until next time.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Sure, but those are iterative improvements- which we can assume will happen. They are not major breakthroughs.
gog
1hr ago
I was printing off copies of the article every day back when it first came out because I didn't trust the correction notices. Over about 4 days the article got softer and softer with no notice of correction provided. It went from "human remains" to "GPR hits" to "possible graves". It was only like 6 months later, after the GPR company publicly said "we never said they were remains," that the CBC started saying "sites of concern."
Note that their articles announcing actual excavations that have turned up nothing, they preface the story with "This article contains disturbing details," which is tipping the hand a little.
Ioper
1hr ago
You describe individual dysfunction but that is rarely enough to poison an entire society. One might ask themselves why this didn't happen with other source populations elsewhere where presumably the same incentives existed. The reason is that there was a large and culturally cohesive population of almost unique (in Europe) longterm dysfunction to pull from and transplant.
Generally individual failures didn't make it to America because emigration cost a fair bit of money. Nor did they necessarily procreate in their home country.
FtttG
1hr ago
I have zero interest in debating the "ought". It's not germane to the point I was making. If that's all you want to talk about, fine, but I'm not interested.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1hr ago
Well, y’know, it actually does! Every social practice that humans have ever engaged in throughout history has confirmed this fact.
So a man has to find something with which to supplement his value. This is no Herculean task, the barrier is very much intended to be surmountable. There are many types of goods and labors that men exchange for access to women’s bodies. But the point is that he has to find something; he’s not born with it.
WhiningCoil
1hr ago
All of this navel gazing makes sense when you realize that the authors want the freedom of the tyranny of the human biological condition: which, barring incredible advances of technology, is impossible.
Sometimes I think we should bring "back" the likely fictional "Rule of Thumb". Have minders in the street with rods. And not unlike how a slave rode behind Caesar during his Triumph, repeating in his ear "Remember you too are mortal", if they hear anyone neurotically bitching at the cafe, over brunch, at the bar, they run up and start striking them across their back and shoulders shouting "Perfect is the enemy of good!!".
Maybe the beatings should continue until morale improves.
Pirate Software seems like a great comparison to this for personality. Just fundamentally can not admit to being wrong, making a mistake or being anything less than incredible.
Musk couldn't drop the POE2 lies because that would mean admitting he isn't super talented at everything. PirateSoftware magically solved a puzzle in Animal Well that took the whole community weeks to figure out because admitting he just looked it up would be admitting he isn't super talented at everything.
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