site banner
Advanced search parameters (with examples): "author:quadnarca", "domain:reddit.com", "over18:true"

Showing 25 of 2223 results for

domain:open.substack.com

Not if you want to keep highly skilled researchers and programmers working for you as it would mean locking down the systems so hard that it makes daily work a chore and the sorts of people you need for that level of work hate working under such restrictions.

She was white-passing Hispanic. She had a scholarship, and was living for free in the house of a Christian couple that let underprivileged youth sleep in their spare rooms while she went to school. Her parents were working, but were too far away from the school and not in a financial position to really help her pay for things.

This is why "noticing" and hunches are informative. What we actually have is a Hispanic girl at a school that probably is a reach school for an equally talented white kid, and certainly not one where they get a scholarship. She's a fish out of water by design of the admissions office who wanted to fill out some numbers that make them feel good.

I'm sure you're right that it is relatively rare, but my stint working as a home caregiver for the eldery also showed me a lot of sad tales. Old people with mobility issues or parkinson's who don't really have a lot going for them: They can't do their hobbies because of their broken bodies and deteriorating minds, their kids or grandkids have often cut them off and live far away, and they just get ferried from doctor's appointments to physical therapy until they die a slow, sad lingering death. It is hard when you're someone's only lifeline, and you're only there because you're being paid far too little for the amount of shit you're putting up with.

I am sadly well aware of this line of work because of the large number of criminals and scammers who go into the work. For the hard workers it is indeed a tough row to hoe. But its also full of abuse by just people exploiting the government.

A bit of a late reply but it includes all types of schools. If you dig into the data there's a division between academic and vocational streams. It doesn't include kids that have completely dropped out of school though, which is relevant for some countries.

For example there are a fair number of converts to orthodoxy that seem to push for rebapism as if they’re joining a new religion.

This isn’t an orthodox convert-generated phenomenon; there’s a longstanding (as in centuries) dispute in Orthodox praxis over whether converts from other Christian traditions should be baptized. The general trend is to say ‘no’, but this is supported by a theological view that generally argues baptism is not grace-filled unless the baptizer is an Orthodox individual, preferably a priest or deacon. Most converts to Orthodoxy are received by chrismation, the term for what is called confirmation in Catholic parlance, which is given great significance as a means of completing baptism in Orthodox theology. The view is that chrismation back-fills grace into a baptism that was performed outside the Orthodox Church. But the view of Orthodoxy generally is that non-Orthodox baptisms aren’t really baptisms, in the strict mystical sense they believe is significant.

The reason converts sometimes push for a rebaptism is because there are some Orthodox rigorists — most notably Mount Athos, one of the holiest monasteries in Orthodox culture — that will interrogate converts and refuse communion to those who were not baptized Orthodox and instead received by chrismation. The converts are trying to deal with an unfortunate situation by aiming for what’s universally accepted, so that no one will have grounds to reject their reception into the Orthodox Church. It’s the rigorists’ fault, not the converts’.

The best comparison point would be Baptists — who, of course, believe that someone baptized as an infant should be baptized instead as an adult, and that infant baptisms aren’t ‘real’. They couple that with a less mystical and more symbolic interpretation of baptism, but nevertheless they believe that other Christian groups are doing baptism wrong in certain cases and that those who were incorrectly baptized ought to be baptized in the proper way, even if that means repeating it. While Catholics and magisterial Protestants have long agreed on baptismal validity, Baptists and Orthodox stand outside that consensus for different reasons.

So it’s not really about the converts hating the old forms of Christianity they grew up in — though that certainly can be a part of an individual’s psychology — and more a serious theological dispute within Orthodoxy about proper baptismal practice that they’re trying to navigate based on conscience. As with everything, the Official Orthodox Answer is “be received however your priest says you should.”

Sorry, misunderstood you. I don't think we've seen anyone seriously defend having stolen or distilled someone's model. My bet is the precedent will depend on who/whom and lawyer muscle rather than fundamentals of the situation.

How else could they achieve this result if their talent wasn't superior? Or if not talent, then the juice in an organization that allows good results at speed.

How small and relatively inexperienced Chinese labs do so much with so little is an interesting question. I have the impression that Western corporations overestimate “frontier talent”, or perhaps paradoxically – underestimate actual, raw talent (that isn't that rare, just needs to be noticed) and overestimate the value of corporate secrets that some of this legendary talent is privy to. Liang Wenfeng hires Ph.D students and they seem to do better than mature Ph.Ds.

H20s are useless for training, China will have to figure that part out on their own. Although the current RL paradigm is more and more reliant on inference (rollouts of agent trajectories, Kimi is built on that), so H20s will indirectly advance capabilities. Yet there remains a need for pretraining next generation bases, and of course experiments.

I would be considered a conservative Catholic, probably a borderline or "light" tradcath. I'm personally quite against the closed religious communities you describe. My plan is to move to a conservative area to live around people who share my religion and philosophy and to influence my surrounding community to make it increasingly hospitable to those who share my beliefs. For institutions that are simply too rotten, I will support setting up parallel institutions, but whenever possible I will for example vote for a hardcore tradcath public school board (and contribute to Catholic after school programs) instead of working to found new Catholic schools from scratch. As has been pointed out many times here and elsewhere, closed-off religious communities are able to exist only due to the benign neglect of the Eye of Sauron's. Concentrating your people in a single place and in unsanctioned institutions leaves them vulnerable to dispersal and reeducation by carpetbaggers. But if your religion is simply woven into the background culture of the area and infused into its public institutions, it's a lot harder to suppress. The religious should emulate Dearborn or the Free State Project, not the Mennonites. Entryism is the way.

Coding has greatly improved. Vibe-coding in 2023 was a bleak experience, one could hardly get anything done. In 2025 it's easy.

I have a half-formed thought about this. There are certain simple ideas whose implications are so profound and perspective-shifting that they essentially colonize a person's entire mind. I stress that these are simple ideas -- Christianity and classical liberalism are profound sets of ideas, but they are too complex for the average person to immediately filter everything in their lives through them. Simpler ideas are different, though -- it's easy to filter everything you experience or hear about through simple ideas like "the invisible oppression of the white man/Jew/etc is keeping good people down" or "the end times are nigh" or "the NAP is all that matters" or "the scientific method is the only valid source of knowledge" or "all social problems is rooted in class struggle" whatever.

I think that fixation on a single idea like this is actually a very mild form of mental illness, even the generally "respectable" ideas I included above (harcore libertarianism, communism, scientism). People get stuck on an idea and it becomes their entire, 1-dimensional universe. G.K.Chesteron has a great passage on this:

The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ's.

The entire chapter is worth reading.

The Anthropic case there is focused on "Is it a copyright violation to train models on copyrighted data without licensed distribution?", which is an interesting question, but my comment is more on the separate "Is the resulting model I've trained something I can claim copyright over?" question.

And we should arm Ukraine and Israel to the teeth to unleash on Russian and Iran.

Arm with what? The only thing US has plenty of are mothballed Abrams and Bradley vehicles. There isn't even enough ammo for Abrams tanks. Right now, you can't even give Ukrainians air defenses to keep their skies clear of drones. You can't even supply them with artillery shells, or enough newly built military hardware - because it doesn't exist. Even though it was obvious in fall of '23 that Ukraine will get nowhere with what it has, little has been done.

US forgot to develop an industry capable of either innovating and mass producing useful weapons.

'Arming Ukraine' to take on Russia is basically a dream. Maybe if you gave them all Tomahawks (2000, yearly procurement.. 60?) you have, and enough launchers (which you don't have, there's like one prototype ground battery) they could blow up a Kremlin tower and 5% of Russian industry. Russia is now making in two months as many drones as NATO makes guided anti-air missiles in a year. Of all types. (from Patriots through AIM-120/AIM-9 down to humble Pioruns. )

Any normal military industrial complex would have developed something, say, a cheap rocket-takeoff pulsejet drone, easily capable of outrunning a Geran and blowing it up with a decent range. Nah - best Ukrainians do is battery powered interceptor drones (I'm not even sure such can keep up with it it much so very limited range, batteries truly suck)

Yeah, sure, there's APKWS and Ukraine has F-16, but somehow, those drones are not getting intercepted even though they could easily be bc Russian SAM doesn't cover areas >100 km beyond the front. The Gerans are still raining on Lviv etc and there are no videos of F-16s taking them down even though theoretically, an F-16 could take down 28, so 10 planes could, in ideal conditions, take down an entire wave of Geran drones.

Honestly, if you squint your eyes a little, once Russians win in Ukraine, them taking over the Baltics becomes a possibility. No, I don't believe F-35s would be able to waltz through their air defences on day 1 at will and range 500 km inland to take out all missile / drone launchers.

All of this is to say that, even with the faults of "the way liberal democracy functions in practice," we still have it pretty good in the US.

Unsustainable budget deficits, endlessly accumulating debt, a very serious political situation, where one party is huffing glue and the other is full of not very competent people now ? It doesn't look good.

I was consistently skeptical that China can win this on HBD merits alone, after all the US also has plenty of talented people (very many of them Chinese, but also diverse global and domestic talent), in Nvidia and elsewhere, plus it has a giant and growing edge in compute.

Fair enough, I agree on that. I didn't think you were saying that talent conquers all in this but one can kind of see it reading between the lines. How else could they achieve this result if their talent wasn't superior? Or if not talent, then the juice in an organization that allows good results at speed.

And it seems like export controls are diminishing, per latest news on H20s. But maybe Trump will do another backflip, who can say.

It usually involves taking a chapter from my novel and asking it to imagine it in a style from a different author I like.

Yes, many models (even open ones, such as R1) have better adherence to instructions. It writes well in its own style. I value models with distinct personalities. You're right about Russianness I think.

I've heard that they tried to buy-out Thinking Machines and SSI for billions, but were turned down

They've proposed that to even much smaller labs, though I'm not at liberty to share. Zuck is desperate and defaults to his M&A instincts that have served him well. It might work in dismantling the competition, at least. But it's not like Meta and FAIR were originally lacking in talent, they've contributed immensely to research (just for instance, MTP in DeepSeek V3 is based on their paper; Llama 4 somehow failed to implement it). The problem is managerial. To get ahead, I'm afraid Zuck will need to cut, rather than graft.

Your so-and-so’s heir is the most important thing about you no matter what you do.

This is an odd framing: that heir has a (great great...) grandfather as well as grandmother. There is only one of you and (potentially) many of your progeny, so it's overwhelmingly likely that the most important thing about any given man will be his children too. And a woman (or a man) can trivially escape this 'shadow' by not having children, which is in the modern day very much an option.

I suppose the distinction is meant to be that women invest more in their children? Or that that investment has more of an impact? Or are less likely to be important otherwise?

But Grok 4 just crushes with sheer size I think.

The fact that Grok is at all comparable (or indeed inferior) to Kimi on any metric, even the most obscure one, speaks to the deep cultural advantage of Moonshot. Grok 4's training compute is estimated to be 6.4e26 FLOPs; Kimi, like R1, is likely ≈4.0e24, fully 100 times less. They probably spent on scaling experiments for Grok 3/4 more than Moonshot has spent over their lifetime on everything. It's not really a fair competition, I admit Grok is a stronger model.

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 it wasn't designed with any specific focus in mind, it's an all around next-generation base+RL model.

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

You distort my argument. I was consistently skeptical that China can win this on HBD merits alone, after all the US also has plenty of talented people (very many of them Chinese, but also diverse global and domestic talent), in Nvidia and elsewhere, plus it has a giant and growing edge in compute. My thesis is that the gap in applied AI possibly won't be so profound as to allow some Pivotal Action To Secure Durable Strategic Advantage, that the hawks in DC and Dario Amodei fantasize about as they rail for more export controls. Nvidia will remain dominant, so will Western AI labs.

But so far China is doing better than I anticipated, both technically and ethically.

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

If that is how the Chinese actors themselves conceptualize this, does it matter if we can object to such thinking as historically reductionist and stereotypical? Yes, obviously both types exist in both societies. (At least Zhilins exist in the US; if there are Liangs, I'd be happy to see them. Lambert is an academic, not a hedge fund CEO who also somehow happens to be a great engineer and an open source fanatic. The closest we had was Emad Mostaque, neither exactly Western nor very technical or good at being a CEO). But it is clear that the Chinese discourse, particularly in the VC sphere, maps pragmatic and idealistic archetypes onto the East-West dichotomy. Half of Liang's interview is the journalist saying “but this is madness, nobody does it, nobody will give the money for it” and Liang saying “and yet we must learn to do it, because crazy Westerners do and that is how they create things we've been imitating all this time” .

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. … 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.

I agree this is a possibility, and I think it's one of the more interesting cultural trends to track, which is why I'm writing these updates. Deep roots or not, Chinese fast-following is more than a subtly racist trope, it really is the backbone of their economic ascendance. If they start similarly rewarding high-risk innovation, it'll change the gameboard a great deal.

Well, I don't really understand American law but it seems to me that Anthropic has set the precedent of LLM pretraining corpora being essentially immune to copyright claims. Anthropic's models are, ironically, the most paranoid about reproducing copyrighted material.

I'm not actually sure we are seeing a rise in more traditional, or 'high' forms of Christianity. There are some links here, but as far as I'm aware Orthodoxy is not growing in America in any particularly significant way, and the supposed trend of people converting to Catholicism is mostly a few high-profile examples, rather than a larger statistical trend. If you take away migration, the Catholic Church in America looks like a mainline Protestant church, like Episcopalians. Their retention is quite dismal, and to the extent that they've managed to hide that decline and retain political or social force, it's on the back of Catholic migrants. Evangelical Christianity remains the 'stickiest' form of Christianity in the US.

Now that said, raw numbers don't tell the whole story - the church that most successfully cultivates elites is not necessarily the one that will have the most social or political influence. The most visible example of this is probably the Supreme Court. Catholics utterly dominate the Supreme Court. At the moment it's six Catholics, two Protestants, and a Jew, and notably it has zero evangelicals. Congress also has slight Catholic overrepresentation, but it's much more marginal - 28% versus 20%. At any rate, it is possible that Catholics will become the de facto representatives of Christianity in the halls of elite power in America - the mainlines are collapsing, evangelicals are too plain and uncultured to ever get in there, and Orthodox are, with apologies, a rounding error.

There is potentially a discussion to be had about how Catholics got into that position, and I'd guess it has to do with the quite large and influential Catholic education system. (I also have a pet theory that religions that place a strong emphasis on the interpretation of law are naturally going to do better in terms of producing lawyers and judges; hence Catholic and Jewish overrepresentation on the Supreme Court, and I'd hazard a guess that Muslims will do pretty well too.) But that's something of a different subject.

Anyway, predictions...

I think Catholicism will not take over America or even necessarily grow that much from its current position, but I think it will get more politically influential, as it seizes ground that used to be held by mainlines.

Mainlines will continue to collapse. Some outward adherence to mainline churches will survive in places, among politicians, but the era of mainline dominance is over. In America more broadly I don't think mainlines will all die out, but they will need to reinvent themselves; I foresee conflicts like the like in the Methodist church, between theological progressives who see the church as handmaiden to preferred cultural causes, and cranky traditionalists, which will probably end with the former withering away and fading into culture, and the latter declining in numbers and turning into a small but devout rump.

Evangelicals will not advance much in terms of political power, but they are disorganised and in constant ferment and will remain a powerful voting base for politicians canny enough to appeal to them. That said, what appeals to them is somewhat unpredictable, as they are a fickle demographic that is highly responsive to charismatic leaders. Right now they are more-or-less solidly behind Trump, but they didn't come to support him for theological or doctrinal reasons, and I think Trump's successors may not necessarily inherit evangelical support. I'm really not sure which way they will go.

Orthodox are irrelevant. Again, apologies for being so blunt, but there are just far too few of them and I don't see any signs that will change.

Mormons are one that I predict will grow and increase in power. I think they have the most gravely mistaken theology of any of these groups, but even so, they are demographically healthy, expanding, and confident. They are currently adjacent to the big evangelical coalition and can sometimes be counted with it, but not consistently, and when you look under the surface there's a lot of submerged evangelical dislike of Mormons, so that may not be stable. I think they will grow in influence unless there is some kind of concerted effort to declare Mormons 'uncool', the same way that evangelicals are uncool, and keep them out of power that way.

As for other religions...

There aren't enough Muslims to be a very significant electoral demographic nationally, but there are towns and potentially states where the Muslim vote matters, so I expect to see local gains in influence for them without making a huge impact nationally. The big question I have with Muslims is whether American Muslims as a community hold on to traditional doctrines or become secularised; there are plenty of people for whom 'Muslim' is an ethnocultural identity but doesn't make moral demands or shape their moral or political thought. (Think e.g. Zohran Mamdani.) I expect a significant number to hold on and continue to practice. As mentioned above, I expect Muslims to do reasonably well in terms of elite roles, especially those to do with law.

Jews are, well, an invitation for certain people to come out of the woodwork and declare them the secret puppet masters of the US. I don't know the future of Jews in America. Until recently I would have said that America has been a very good home for Jews, and I expect American Jews to continue to prosper, but we have yet to see how much Israel/Gaza causes a realignment. This is definitely one to keep an eye on.

Hindus mostly can't be disentangled from Indian ethnic politics. (Sorry, ISKCON, you tried but there aren't enough of you.) I'll skip over that because it's much more to do with ethnicity and multiculturalism than it is about Hinduism as religious belief. Sikhs are in roughly the same camp.

Buddhists are a group that I expect to continue to grow, partly from immigration and partly from conversions, but to have practically zero political impact. Buddhist organisations, at least in the US, rarely mobilise for politics, and most converts practice on their own or in small groups without necessarily applying Buddhism to politics more widely. There aren't many of them anyway; Buddhists as a constituency is not worth pandering to. Maybe in some local contexts where there are heavily Buddhist migrant groups, but I doubt you'll get much more than politicians visiting a temple or dharma centre and saying they appreciate this group.

That's probably most of what matters. Scientologists are few and don't matter, Unitarian Universalists are few and don't matter...

I am skeptical about diffusion even for images and video, the whole subfield is a giant nerd snipe for mathcels. Autoregression is strictly more expressive and more suitable for continual generation, sadly we pay the price of worse parallelization. If anything, I'd be more enthusiastic about honest-to-God Energy-based LLMs. There have been a series of breakthroughs in making DLLMs that don't totally suck and offer extreme speeds in low batch size regime, but eh. I think sparse attention Transformers will crush them.

I literally cite Kimi's own arguments for open source:

[…] 3. Why Open Source

#1: Reputation. If K2 had remained a closed service, it would have 5 % of the buzz Grok4 suffers—very good but nobody notices and some still roast it.

#2: Community velocity. Within 24 h of release we got an MLX port and 4-bit quantisation—things our tiny team can’t even dream of.

#3: It sets a higher technical bar. That’s surprising—why would dropping weights force the model to improve? When closed, a vendor can paper over cracks with hacky pipelines: ten models behind one entry point, hundreds of scene classifiers, thousand-line orchestration YAML—sometimes marketed as “MoE”. Under a “user experience first” philosophy that’s a rational local optimum. But it’s not AGI. Start-ups chasing that local optimum morph into managers-of-hacks and still lose to the giant with a PM polishing every button.

Kimi the start-up cannot win that game. Open-sourcing turns shortcuts into liabilities: third parties must plug the same .safetensors into run_py() and get the paper numbers. You’re forced to make the model itself solid; the gimmicks die. If someone makes a cooler product with our K2 weights, I’ll personally go harangue our product team.

DeepSeek's arguments are more ideological and cultural:

For technologists, being followed is a great sense of accomplishment. In fact, open source is more of a cultural behavior than a commercial one. To give is to receive glory. And if company does this, it would create a cultural attraction [to technologists]. […]

plus stuff about accelerating the development of Chinese ecosystem.

High-level researchers are not slaves or menial workers, they have massive pride, they want to publish and gain clout. You can pay them hundreds of millions to get over that, or you can let them publish. Open sourcing is the ultimate form of publishing your work.

the sock-puppeting of civil society, the media manipulation of public opinion in the interest of stability ?

I don't know how much of this I'd sign on for as you've characterized it. As a classic liberal/gray tribe rationalist type, I very much would prefer to see a return to limited government and greater economic freedom on many fronts. But most things aren't plots, and I usually take a very dim view of the MAGA approach, even when I agree there is a problem with Progressive Ideological Capture in any given institution. I'm a bit to Scott's right on several fronts in the Culture War, and I'm less EA-pilled. I generally agree with Garrett Jones about democracy and immigration.

In terms of foreign policy, I also have many gripes with both the Left and MAGA Right. For example, in my view we should use free trade agreements against China. And we should arm Ukraine and Israel to the teeth to unleash on Russian and Iran.

All of this is to say that, even with the faults of "the way liberal democracy functions in practice," we still have it pretty good in the US.

I had thought that most skulls had some teeth, often most teeth?

It's possible he thinks that way, or even that he just thinks that owning the character and account is what matters. I suppose one could make a comparison here to his companies: he presumably thinks of himself as designing or making cars or rockets, even though almost all of that is done by lower-level employees. Likewise he may think of himself as playing PoE2 even though almost all of it is done by a lower-level contractor.

To be honest the impression I've gotten with regard to Musk and gaming is that he just doesn't understand how gaming works. That PoE2 YouTuber, as I recall, pointed out that what Musk claims to have done is mathematically impossible - he could not have reached that level in the game in the amount of time available. It's not doable. But I would not be surprised if Musk believes that sheer skill can accelerate one's progress in the game. Is it possible that he just doesn't understand how grinding works?

I suppose I think that he has very surface takes on games. I remember when he claimed that chess was too simple and Polytopia was better. Not only does that tell me that he doesn't know much about chess, it also tells me that he doesn't really know much about Polytopia, which is a quite simple 4X that can be mastered relatively quickly, and which did not hold much interest for serious 4X players. On the surface Polytopia looks more complex than chess, because it has more widgets to manipulate, but in terms of strategy it has less depth. What this tells me is that Musk probably played Polytopia for a few hours, maybe even a few dozen hours, but has never deeply familiarised himself with the genre.

I suspect that Musk finds the idea of gaming interesting, and is enchanted by the idea of being a hardcore gamer, but he is what we used to call a casual.

There's nothing wrong with being a casual. Casual gaming is a great way to spend your time. But a casual who wants to be seen as hardcore, doesn't have the skill, but does have the money... well, that's just cringeworthy.

Technically, two furry versions, though you have to go into settings for Bad Rudi. Tbf, they're both obnoxiously monofocused and pretty lackluster when it comes to animations or gameification; Rudi on telling 'cool' stories, and Bad Rudi just trying to swear at you (cw: exactly what I said, loud sound).

But, yeah, it probably says a lot of strategic things.

I can understand that case - part of what makes Musk willing to be daring and innovative in business is also what makes him willing to do bizarre and eccentric things in other fields. Having enough ego to disregard the advice of everybody else in terms of what's possible for rockets or electric cars probably goes with having enough ego to, well, do these other absurd things. So you've got to tolerate a bit of weird gamer nonsense as the price for all these other benefits.

I suspect that overall we disagree about the net value of Musk's contributions to society, or about the desirability of things like AI girlfriends or artificial companions more generally. I'm quite pessimistic about AI in general, so I consider it preferable to maintain as large a taboo as possible against using AI for social purposes. If there is a respectability cascade that results in the public considering AI girlfriends/boyfriends to be legitimate or healthy ways to spend one's time, I would consider that a negative development. But we may have different high-level generators of disagreement on this issue.