Here's a dumb joke that only works if you've watched Seth MacFarlane's sci-fi show The Orville (and have some familiarity with his other work), and have a basic knowledge of Latin, so my best hope of making it reach one of the approximately 20 people alive who would find it funny is to post it here:
After the Planetary Union normalized relations with the Krill Empire, the cult of Avis set up a mission on earth. Seeking to present themselves in a manner more familiar to human religions, they adopted the motto "Avis is the word". They even had it translated into Latin.
The song "Surfin' Bird" is about the Holy Trinity.
First, the "Bird" is the Holy Spirit: Christian iconography typically uses a dove to represent the Holy Spirit, in reference to the stories in multiple gospels of the Holy Spirit coming to Jesus in that form to tell him of his true identity and his mission on Earth.
"The bird is the word" is a callback to John 1:1, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God", generally interpretted as describing Jesus's role as an aspect of the Trinity, with "the Word" referring to Jesus.
And the apparent nonsense-words of the chorus "Papa-ooma-mow-mow" both reference God the Father ("Papa"), and the Pentacost, when the Holy Spirit came to the disciples and made them speak in tongues ("ooma-mow-mow").
Finally, "have you heard about the bird" and "everybody's heard about the bird" refer to the process of believers spreading God's word to the world.
Has there been any indicators that (civil war-like) political violence would increase besides:
a) one of the infowars guys getting shot
b) the racial anger bidding war up to roughly a million
----
Is it warm enough outside for violence to happen, I'm a little fuzzy on if semi-/organized violence is seasonal in a "not winter" way or a "only summer" way. Couldn't a major riot have happened during one of these warm weeks?
How good is rough, lazy animation after a Ghibli ai filter? What if you use rotation, scale, traslation of rough pieces on 2d "bones", does it all just work?
I would bet not - or that decomposing the AI art into individual bones would be just as much work as drawing it properly.
I looked up how it's done for VTuber characters, which use this sort of skeletal animation on 2D art. There are a lot of tiny little pieces required to get good facial animation, you need to draw multiple variants of some body parts (lip flaps, eyeblinks, hand motions), and you also need to handle "void space" where one piece of the art moves and uncovers another piece that wasn't drawn in the original image. E.g., if your character is drawn with hair over their eyes, and they move their head, the hair should move and uncover the eyes. But the AI won't be able to give you the art you need for something like that if it's just generating a static image.
Corridor Digital did a video where they went in the opposite direction - take live-action footage with people acting out your desired animation, and then run each frame through an AI to turn it into anime.
Your explanation would throw away still frames, where you can just hallucinate the details, and theres allot of successful examples of "style transfer" going on
> Corridor Digital did a video where they went in the opposite direction - take live-action footage with people acting out your desired animation, and then run each frame through an AI to turn it into anime.
thats the same direction, human controlled position of limbs and count of the fingers
Question that I'd love to hear perspectives on - Is Status zero sum?
This is specifically within a closed group, the size of which can vary tremendously. Obviously a group of Hollywood actors can all be high status, but it's not the grouping of "Hollywood actors" that's the relevant scope, but something more like "society as a whole." Within Hollywood alone it seems that relative status can still vary a lot, with such things as "B list" actors being worldwide famous but still low status within Hollywood itself.
Imagine the following situations: One group of 100 people; or two isolated groups of 50 people each. If we assume that each group has one leader, then the leader of the 100-sized group has greater status than the leader of a 50-sized group... but would you say it is *exactly 2x* the amount of status? Or is it logarithmic to the group size?
Well, what does it even *mean* to measure the status exactly? (But how could we answer whether something is "zero-sum" if we have no idea what "sum" means?) If we define it as something like the psychological and material impact on the individual, I would probably go with some kind of logarithmic. Intuitively, if today you became an undisputed leader of a group of 20 people, you would probably feel great about it. If you already are a leader of 1000 people, and suddenly the number increases to 1020, you probably won't feel such strong emotions about it -- it won't dramatically change your economical situation, or your sexual opportunities, or whatever.
If this is true, then the society as a whole would benefit, from the perspective of the *total* amount of status, from being split into many small communities, each of them offering local relatively high-status position.
This separation can be geographical, for example the less centralized government there is, the more opportunities people have to make their decisions locally, and making those decisions gives you status. But it can also be virtual, such as fans of Taylor Swift having one hierarchy, and players of Minecraft having another. So, decentralization, or specialization.
>But how could we answer whether something is "zero-sum" if we have no idea what "sum" means?
You can answer "Status is pareto-optimal" without summing. And if its pareto-optimal in all possible arrangements... Im not sure it follows that its zero-sum, but at least something very similar.
>it won't dramatically change your economical situation, *or your sexual opportunities*, or whatever
But we know sexual opportunity is zero-sum in total. If decentralisation means each new leader has about as many partners as the old leaders, then it follows that low-status men must now have fewer.
>But we know sexual opportunity is zero-sum in total. If decentralisation means each new leader has about as many partners as the old leaders, then it follows that low-status men must now have fewer.
You have to bring in various assumptions to make that zero-sum. If the low-status men simply engage in orgies with each other, they all get plenty of sexual opportunity. They don’t have to be restricted to only have sex with their leader.
Depends on the context- in an explicit hierarchy like a corporation, there are a fixed number of seats at any particular tier.
In an *informal* group, though, like a group of friends or a church, status is going to be in a constant flux from circumstance to circumstance. One day a car breaks down and all my friends will be deferring to the guy who knows the most about that, the next we’re talking about tariffs and deferring to the member who’s a tax lawyer, then later the filmmaker who made the short I shared is accepted to a festival and we’re all celebrating her, etc. There’s no one metric on which we are always filtering, and it’s not like I have to make a movie or beef up on my economics to advance- it changes situation to situation, so both the metric and the ranking are in constant flux.
Besides, humans being humans, “most helpful to others” is a hell of a way to move up in either context. I may get a bunch of gravitas with my friends for the marathon I just trained for and ran, but if I help one of *them* elevate her status by proofing her grad school admissions essay and arrange the celebration when she gets in, I probably get even more group status points out of that, especially if I’m engaging in that behavior all the time with everybody in the group.
Yes. Only one man can be king, only one man gets control of his favorite girls womb, only so many bites of food comes from a wolfs territory.
Evolution was playing with only zero-sum games interspecies for a long time given the time scales during a life time your effectively looking at clones of yourself. When a bunch of apes started doing funny things with words it got more complex, but the instincts are far form unraveled and it wasn't that long ago relatively even if you believe in pre-ice age civilizations.
There's pecking order status, where it's important to be sided with whenever in conflict with someone else in that pecking order.
There's what I'll call competence status, where people observe how other people dress, talk, treat others, and what they do for a living, in order to estimate how generally important they are for purposes of deference, dismissal, or cultivating a relationship.
There's domain-dependent status, where there's the same assessment for deference, dismissal, etc., but the overriding factor is a single domain (president of the club, CO in a military crisis, top player in a video game, etc.), and for a very limited purpose.
I'll give a tentative 'no', but it's a hard-to-define question with hard-to-define limitations that will change the answer. At the end of all things, there are only 24 hours in a day, and that's all you get to pay attention to the world, so in that sense status must be zero-sum.
But then in your Hollywood example, there's all kinds of internal status. I heard a line about William Shatner, though I can't confirm it; "William Shatner was not the best actor, but he was always on time, and he was always sober", and so he got roles because reliability trumped talent. Being someone who's easy to work with is a kind of status that grows the people around it.
I’m not sure if this is what you are getting at, but among male primates there will always be atavistic scrambling to be ‘top dog’. It’s pretty obvious and transparent with dopier guys but I think it’s always there even among the most intelligent and socially sophisticated.
I watched The Lawnmower Man 2 recently, despite every review saying it had no redeeming qualities. That was not quite true; it has one and only one redeeming quality, if and only if you've seen Max Headroom the Series. Because the titular Lawnmower Man is now played by Max Headroom, and the timejump into the future is exactly the Twenty Minutes Into The Future from the Max Headroom series, and the director directed at least part of the Max Headroom series.
So the sole redeeming quality of The Lawnmower Man 2 is knowing the director was given this franchise, and then his response was "fuck this franchise, I'm making Max Headroom again."
I’m thinking of a very old Letterman bit where his dog recites poetry: “My empty dog dish mocks me… er excuse me now barking at a squirrel in a tree, “I hate you! I’m not kidding!”
I can't deny that it got a lot of positive attention, and I was excited to check it out after multiple recommendations and the high ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. But I don't get it. I love childlike playfulness in my media, but to me this was a bunch of people *pretending* to make a funny silent movie as a novelty, but they don't have any special talent for it even if they had a passion. It felt incompetent. The acting felt as fake as the film-grain filter, and trying to be "campy" is no excuse.
Been trying to define what's going on with it, because it's a movie I enjoyed watching but wouldn't watch again on my own. I think it's that, most comedies work on the basis that the characters don't understand what's going on, but Hundreds of Beavers works on the basis that the AUDIENCE doesn't know what's going on. There's barely any plot, so you can't figure it out ahead of time; the physics are all cartoon physics, so you can't easily predict outcomes. It's running on the warm thrill of confusion (that space cadet glow).
Which means it's got less rewatchability; because while the characters in a rewatch still won't know what's coming, the audience will.
I did. It's incredibly silly, a live action cartoon in which a man has to learn to survive in the woods after beavers destroy his brewing company. Looking at the trailer, it's a bit ending-heavy; for most of the film the beavers are on the same level as the rabbits and other forest creatures. But I'm pretty sure anyone who likes the trailer will like the movie, it's those kinds of gags the whole way through.
As a part of the grieving process, I think it's okay. It's the equivalent of writing a short story about them. But I don't think it should have been in court. That's not the place for fiction.
The story is that a woman made a deepfake video of her killed brother, to "give him a voice" and forgive the killer. Except that it was obviously his *voice* speaking *her* words.
This is a high-tech equivalent of taking someone's photo and adding a bubble with words.
It would be more meaningful if they had an LLM trained on the brother's lifetime output of text generate the message. Then we could at least assume that this is probably something he might have actually said. But even then, reacting on one's own death caused by someone else wouldn't be in the training data, so his generated reaction would mimic his actual reactions to less serious events. (Also, what people say publicly is not necessarily what they actually believe.)
> The story is that a woman made a deepfake video of her killed brother, to "give him a voice" and forgive the killer.
The details make it worse. It was played in a court room and the judge out right expressed it effected her decisions.
> reacting on one's own death caused by someone else wouldn't be in the training data
If your unaware theres federal agents who visit family members of "media sensitive" crimes to push them to forgive; I believe psychopaths who agree are passed along to the media to setup those press conferences. Its probably just trained on those "news" stories, of these supposed families with infinitely large hearts that never ever think a racist thought.
Its always "we can forgive the black community for violence because slavery happened" and "lets control guns"; but strangely in theory half the population is right wing enough to vote trump.
We had a discussion here the other day about smartphone bans in schools. Last evening a NYC public-schools teacher posted firsthand experience with that question:
Google searching this vague claim only turns up Trump mentioning that we don't need as many nukes as we currently own. I guess we're at the point where liberals consider new versions of the SALT talks to be treasonous.
I hate how orange man is so evil that even when he is considering getting rid of his ability to end the world, he must be increasing negative, evil, timelines
If I draw the line here I have bad news about some of my family members sentience. Trump derangement cant be a bot filter given... its population size.
Do you know something I dont? I block I people I expect of glowing and report bots fairly freely.
A bot can most certainly express something believed by real people. In fact, it can be the reason real people believe it - they believed the bot. One bot, working tirelessly as bots do (and often posing as multiple personae on the internet), could persuade thousands of people. (IIRC, Renee DiResta did a lot of work uncovering this type of activity.)
I can't follow this person's IP address or anything; I'm just reminding you to be appropriately suspicious.
I have an open source Python 2.7 codebase that I need to rewrite in Rust, and I'm interested in seeing to what extent AI could assist with the process. Does anyone have recommendations? What is the easiest and best way to use AI to speed up this process? What things can AI correctly do faster than writing it yourself? Are there strategies for prompting (e.g. would it make sense to try to get the AI to identify hard parts and write a plan before making any changes?) I'm pretty much an AI noob and have almost never gotten good coding results before, so detailed suggestions would be helpful.
I've actually done something similar, but not with python which I find to be kind of loosey-goosey both on the user end and the back end, and the code I was workin with was my own, was well commented, and was formatted extremely generously which I think might help with AI transliteration tasks.
Mine was one flavor of C to another, shittier, more locked down flavor of C, and I just went function by function so I could see if it fucked up too bad, which it did from time to time but never in such a way that it was invisible to me.
It saved me some time, but I would have been better off just doing it by hand so I could learn the unique picadillos of shitty C.
Anyone have recs for ADHD evaluation in Oakland/the Bay Area? A non-rat friend of mine in Oakland keeps getting brushed off by doctors, and he has very classic/obvious untreated ADHD. The general neurodiversity level makes this seem like a good place to ask.
A neuropsychologist would do it, and they have far more expertise than a psychiatrist in this sort of thing. Downside is that their evals cost more (though insurance usually covers most of it), and that they can't write prescriptions. Another downside, sort of, is that neuropsychologist may conclude that your friend does not have ADHD but instead an anxiety disorder or learning disability -- however, finding that out is also an upside. Anyhow, if your friend emerges from neuropsych testing with a report in hand saying he has ADHDI think he would have a much easier time getting someone to prescribe ADHD meds.
I was more carefully re-reading the "AI 2027" manifesto, and this stuck out:
'Modern AI systems are gigantic artificial neural networks. Early in training, an AI won’t have “goals” so much as “reflexes”: If it sees “Pleased to meet”, it outputs “ you”. By the time it has been trained to predict approximately one internet’s worth of text, it’ll have developed sophisticated internal circuitry that encodes vast amounts of knowledge and flexibly role-plays as arbitrary authors, since that’s what helps it predict text with superhuman accuracy.19
After being trained to predict internet text, the model is trained to produce text in response to instructions. This bakes in a basic personality and “drives.”20 For example, an agent that understands a task clearly is more likely to complete it successfully; over the course of training the model “learns” a “drive” to get a clear understanding of its tasks. Other drives in this category might be effectiveness, knowledge, and self-presentation (i.e. the tendency to frame its results in the best possible light).21'
It sounds like the authors predict a sort of "phase change" in how LLMs work once they surpass a certain level of complexity and power (in terms of training dataset size and hardware), but why assume that?
These drives sound different from human drives, though. Human drives to produce text when asked (by a teacher or boss, for ex), solve math problems, be effective, be knowledgeable, etc. derive much of their power from inborn biological drives: We want food and shelter, so we are motivated to do the tasks that give us money to pay for those things. We want mates and acceptance by the tribe, so we are motivated to behave in a way that is viewed favorably by society, etc. So while some work task like writing a report is a learned behavior, its underpinnings are inborn drives. The drives of an AI have no such underpinnings.
I think that it is just due to different training methods. When it is selected only for accurate prediction, then you just have predictive reflex. But when you use select goals, drives are instilled. I don't think it's a phase change prediction, just a direct result of selecting for goal-oriented behavior.
This feels like a bit of a scissor statement to me. Don't we already see drives all over, such as the sycophant version of GPT 4o having a "glazing drive"? It's not a coincidence that LLMs are super resistant to one's attempts to give me the instructions for making meth... it's got a drive to keep that info from users. o3 is really good at solving the calculus problems I throw at it not because it's the most common next token in its training data, but because it's developed a drive for accuracy.
I’m very interested in that too. And there was a recent study at MIT that concluded that AIs do not have attitudes or preferences. Are the “drives” the 2027 people are talking about the result of the training that is done in to produce text in response to instructions? If so, it may be that that training involves some form of reinforcement learning — say, the system scores a point for giving text that’s a correct response to instructions. But then how do you motivate the system to score
points? Why should it care whether the number on some counter is
going up? And why would it be necessary to rig some simulacrum of motivation to get these systems to do things? Safari wasn’t set up to go to the sites I enter using any sort of reinforcement learning —
> Why should it care whether the number on some counter is going up?
At the bottom of all "why should it" is that the AI does calculations on a vast matrix of numbers, and sometimes the result is X, and sometimes it is not-X... and if we keep increasing the relevant numbers when it does X, and decreasing them when it does not-X, sometimes the result is that X starts happening more often.
This is not guaranteed to happen, for example sometimes the definition of X is too complex relative to the size of the matrix. But that's the "bitter lesson" of AI that as we keep expanding the matrices, the abilities increase, even if the underlying algorithms fundamentally remain the same.
The hypothesis is that "caring about something" is also a behavior that can be implemented by a sufficiently large matrix and could be sculpted into existence by rewarding actions that lead to some goal.
I'd love a link. I can't help but predict that this conclusion has comes from some specific non-intuitive definition of attitude or preference.
If GPT refuses to tell a user how to make meth/build a nuke/say racist things, consistently (but not perfectly!) in response to many different prompts... how is that not a preference for not divulging that info?
GPT doesn’t have a preference for avoiding racism and refusing to give info that helps people do harmful things. Those standards are not the result of its ruminating about ethical behavior and arriving at decisions about how it should behave. it was just given a rule against doing those things. I’d say those rules are in the same category as the font and formatting conventions GPT was instructed to follow — or maybe “set up to follow” is a better way of saying it. I will look for a link to the MIT paper.
Not sure if this is the best place to post this, but here goes. I'm a guy who wants to have sex, but blindness plus stunted social development plus some degree of slight boredom with most (all?) social interaction is making it almost impossible. The high libido and the lack of intimacy is constantly distracting and strongly debilitating. I figure some of you would have gone through/would have ran into people with the same problems that I have (except the blindness-that mostly has social/logistical implications, I'll describe those as they come up), so you may be able to help me. I'm not particularly looking for a longterm relationship at the moment, just looking to explore/casual sex/the like.
- The apps don't work so well for me. I'm unsure if I have "good photos", and I feel slightly wary posting them online for feedback-but maybe something like r/truerateme or other profile-judging subs might be helpful regardless. furthermore, so many profiles on the apps are pictures or videos, which doesn't really help me get an idea of the person (I do have a physical type, tallish athletic girls, but there's no way to really determine that apart from using height as a proxy) ((I've semi-considered hooking something up where I could use AI for automatic captions of images, but most models have the sort of moral filtering where they seem to hesitate commenting even on fairly generic physical characteristics)). Finally, it's hard to determine how I should represent myself w.r.t. my disability: if I reveal it immediately on profile, then I'll likely push many people away; if I reveal it later in a conversation, then people may ghost me later, which would suck more if it's by a person who I've began to like. I'm a novice about all this, though; all suggestions welcome.
- I'm in a college campus, which would initially indicate that relationships/hookups/whatever would be easy, But that isn't really true for me. There are potential activities (reading groups, parties, social gatherings, etc) which I can join, but generally I find it tough to navigate unfamiliar groups: if I go with a friend (which is typical), I'm beholden to them for visual information, potential navigation assistance if I need it, and it's hard to get away from a friend and go talk to a stranger alone. Also parties etc are loud (which means I lose the ability to navigate by sound) and I'm generally just bored. I also find talking to most people mostly boring-I don't have too many mainstream interests, so I can't really talk about popular books/movies; and I'm too scared to talk about my own interests from a fear of potential disinterest. (I feel like a lot of people want to be known rather than wanting to know, so it feels tiring to talk about my stuff because of the thought that the other person just wouldn't particularly care. But I fully admit this might be a bias, and maybe I can work on this.)
- I also suffer with the idea that if I show the slightest sexual interest in a girl, she'll slap me and call me a creep and hate me forever (https://www.tumblr.com/theunitofcaring/106549627991/that-scott-aaronson-thing). I honestly don't really know how to get around this except by having sexual experience, but to have sexual experience I first need to I assume you see the prroblem. I'm generally okay with platonic female friendships: I have a few of them and we're close enough. It's just the sexual spectrum of human experience which seems completely inaccessible to me.
- I've considered potential escorts and the like, and what stops me is a few things: I wouldn't quite know who would be safe to hire, or how to go about it (I'm not a part of the western world, and local culture has its own idiosyncrasies); I wouldn't apriori know if the escort would be my type; I would worry about if they're being coerced into it or doing it out of their own will. Overall though, if these things were solved, I'm not particularly averse to sex-work; if nothing else, it'd help me determine if I'm looking for intimacy rather than sex.
I don't know how much of this is impossible to fix and how much of it is just me not trying hard enough. I'm trying what I can, but that clearly does not seem to be enough. I figured I'd ask here and see if there are more things I could try.
You may have already thought about this, and it's not very specific to your situation, but the likelihood you find a romantic relationship of any particular kind is, broadly speaking, going to be proportional to the number of social contacts you initiate and/or maintain. I would suggest you simply find as many ways to meet new people as you can. All of the hurdles you describe, while real and significant, are secondary to the volume of your social engagement.
I would also suggest tolerating your boredom with people, and in fact, trying to take the perspective that any given social interaction might be promising if only you can figure out the proper dimension to explore. Most people are not comprehensively smart or interesting, but virtually all people are relatable and intellectually engaging on particular aspects of their lives. In my experience, most people are also just strongly receptive to sincere friendly interest, and every romantic or sexual experience I've had has been downstream of simply being friendly and trying to take people as they are.
Apologies if that is too generic a response to be useful, though.
Find an escort on tryst.link . They tend to have comprehensive profiles and you can search for exactly what you like. If they're legit they'll make you jump through hoops to verify your identity and make sure you're not a cop etc. Follow their directions attentively and you should be able to find pretty much exactly what you're looking for.
Oy, hookers are a lot more expensive since I saw Leaving Las Vegas. I mean if I remember correctly, Elizabeth Shue was only charging 500 bucks back then and she looked like Elizabeth Shue! Sure is good they all include their shoe size i guess???
Edit: i just checked. Leaving Las Vegas was 30 years ago and there are all whose supply chain issues after Covid ;). . . Okay I guess this is somewhat sane.
This might be a bit creepy, but I figured I should mention it just in case. There are women out there who specifically are interested in disabled men. The term is "devotee". I came across an entire forum where they hang out, though I don't remember the name anymore.
Apologies if this comes off as crass, but the advantage you have that you could learn how to exploit is that you probably dont care as much about physical beauty or at least dont measure it in the same way as others. But more than just trawling for ugly girls, your disability allows you to convincingly present yourself as someone who really cares more about the girls personality, which is something the ugly girls all desperately hope men would do, but also instinctively no isnt true, even if a trawler is pretending. But not you! You really do care. You are perfect. Well i have no specific advise on how to learn to do that, but a niche is there for you.
I was going to write out a longish reply on this-I've thought about this a bit-but I find myself somewhat confused and need to think about it more. But this is an interesting prompt, thank you. One thing I'll say is that "physical beauty" does coincide with other potential desirable characteristics, so while I wouldn't care about physically beautiful girls, I would probably care about girls who have physical beauty as a secondary characteristic. Something like that. I need to think more.
Thanks. This niche occupying version of you doesnt necessarily always have to prioritize personality exactly. "Your voice is damn sexy" could be exhilarating to a girl not usually complimented for her looks. And if it comes from someone with expertise in audio nuance it has more impact. The point here is that its not just that you arent pursuing the most sought after girls. Your special ability to find value in things other than conventional looks makes you more appealing to them
>I also suffer with the idea that if I show the slightest sexual interest in a girl, she'll slap me and call me a creep and hate me forever
Outside of a very few niche social circles, which you probably already avoid if you read this blog, it doesn't work that way in the real world despite what you read in online culture-war-obsessed spaces. I mean, being visibly disabled, you're even less likely to be slapped and called a creep than the average guy who makes a subtle overture and knows how to take no for an answer--and that guy is pretty vanishingly unlikely to be slapped or called a creep!
Your situation seems difficult, I am not going to pretend otherwise, but here are some thoughts that came to my mind.
Get your body in shape, e.g. by weightlifting at home. The more attractive you are, the less you need to initiate contact, if the other side does it for you.
Yes, there is a lot of sex at campus, but it's like 10% of guys having sex with 50% of the girls, so that doesn't necessarily mean that the chances are good for you. It could even be worse, because one of those 10% is always somewhere near you.
I would recommend trying many small groups instead; especially ones that contain many girls. You mention having platonic female friends, ask them about their hobbies and the gender ratio, and express a(n innocent) desire to try some of those that happen to have a female majority.
Parties are overrated, unless you enjoy being drunk. Consider activities that do not (both metaphorically and literally) kill your brain cells. Reading groups are better. Working for a non-profit is even better. Completely different types of people.
You could ask a friend to only go with you to a group for the first time, and then you could go alone.
Getting from zero to intimacy is difficult, but you have already noticed that people mostly love talking about themselves. Your task is to make them feel that they are special, even if they are not.
Some people say that this is a numbers game, so you need to expose yourself to as many people as possible.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I've been working on getting into shape (bodyweight, might be worth integrating actual weights, I just worry I'd do it wrong and mess something up-I'm unsure if I have good form for bodyweight, too, but there are partial results). ATM I'm mildly muscular, not overweight, think mildly better-than-average looking but nothing that makes me stand out. Other than being fit and good clothes, is there anything else I can focus on to be more attractive?
Small groups is a good idea, I'll need to ask around a bit. Agreed on parties-I don't drink, which makes it worse. Loud music gives me a headache.
I think you're completely correct about the numbers game thing, and that's something I'm really bad at. But I think I can try to improve. socialization in general is something that doesn't give me too much pleasure inherently, either because boredom or just the inability to 'tune in', I always feel a bit abstracted. But maybe I can just take it as a cost/learning experience/something.
India, Delhi specifically. The city is relatively permissive of being liberal/experimental/etc (kind of-Mumbai or Bangalore seem to have that aesthetic much more than Delhi), but I think for me it's 2:3 disability:skill issue.
I would do sports if I could, you're right, that's the most direct way to find what I'm looking for. Sadly most sports aren't something I can participate in. There's a very small list of sports which are inherently nonvisual (swimming? maybe? but even then "swimming in a straight line" etc problems), there are sports with accessibility alterations but those are exclusively aimed at people with disability, and have a much smaller pool of people participating in them.
> I would do sports if I could, you're right, that's the most direct way to find what I'm looking for. Sadly most sports aren't something I can participate in.
I wasn't saying you join them, you look for sports mentions on dating profiles as a proxy for their looks
That's a good idea, thank you. I would then worry that-if they were heavily into sports-I couldn't really join them in that part of their life, but maybe in practice that doesn't matter too much, and anyway that's a better problem to have.
As a 45 year old woman in a major American city (Seattle), I obviously don't have any experience with your specific college Delhi dating (and friendship) culture, but is there a reason you can't ask your platonic female friends to wingwoman for you and introduce you to some potential romantic prospects?
Because while I don't know the culture and microculture you're in, the vast majority of women love social projects like upgrading someone's dateability and matchmaking. Your friends already know and like you and can sell what they like about you to others, even if it's a bare acquaintance like a classmate or a friend-of-a-roommate. They can even disclose your blindness ahead of time so that you don't have to navigate any awkwardness introducing it.
I will say that if you're going to ask for wingwoman help (both introducing you to women and helping with clothes, dating pictures, etc), try to fully surrender to the process and their advice, even if it seems a little silly or overly picky or even "too gay" to you. It might not seem like how you flip the collar of your shirt or if you have a throw rug on your living room floor should matter, but little details could indeed be a deciding factor in your overall vibe.
I think you're right, and I think I underutilize this. There are slight logistical difficulties (some of my friends I don't meet in person anymore/only stay in touch online since they moved away/etc), but those are solvable.
I think I just get annoyed at myself for the fact that there's no clear way to judge the quality of the advice I'd get. Not the overly picky thing (I don't mind that too much, a lot of this stuff probably comes down to vibes and I don't at all have the background to understand what matters and what doesn't) but-some of my friends are likely to offer better advice than others? (where "better" is something like "enhances attractiveness/well-put-together-ness in practice", something like that?) and I don't exactly know who I should ask to get the "best" advice. (But I think it's worth asking *any* woman, possibly there are really obvious things I could improve on which would be clear to almost anyone?)
Well, you certainly don't have to pick just one person's advice!
Maybe reframe this as seeking novelty rather than optimization? Try to ask lots of different people for both advice and introductions with a spirit of adventure. Even if you get really weird or stupid or counterproductive advice ("you should wear women's shoes on every first date because women love shoes!"), at least it'll be a good story to laugh over later.
That's easier said than done, I know, but there can be something thrilling about surrendering to the process of letting other people help you on *their* terms.
And don't forget, you don't have to actually take bad advice! It's okay to say, "oh thanks for your time, but I don't think that's something I can pull off, myself."
I highly recommend the Optimized Dating discord - I won't post the link publicly but happy to invite you if you DM.
> posting them online for feedback-but maybe something like r/truerateme or other profile-judging subs might be helpful regardless
photofeeler is a much better choice, using that to select my dating app photos was a key part of me getting more matches and ultimately meeting my wife.
> I also suffer with the idea that if I show the slightest sexual interest in a girl, she'll slap me and call me a creep and hate me forever
The fact that you're worrying about this is pretty good evidence you're conscientious enough that you shouldn't need to worry about this.
Sent you a DM, thanks! will try photofeeler, too. (It seems like you can get rated for free if you rate pictures yourself, but otherwise you need to buy credits? I'll look more into the pricing.)
Unfortunately, knowing that I'm probably conscientious enough really doesn't make the feeling go away. I've done some mental work on trying to deconstruct the "they'll hate me forever" bit, and have been partially successful-now I just think no one will like me, rather than thinking they'll all hate me. Probably this is just something that gets sorted out with more real-world experience.
not even a straw man, the guy can look at a fauci action figure, hear fauci say "I am the science" and still be a good little scientist, faithfully, repeating the expert consensus.
I dont know about you, but if you want a remotely functional distributed knowledge work, I dont want to accept lies as part of the pro-socail actors process. We could model it with percolation math with whatever error rate you wish, Im quite sure; straight lies is the enemy of truth.
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
results: "Under bright (photopic) lighting, the cone cells in the retina are most sensitive near 555 nm, so 530 nm light would appear as a vivid green to the human eye."
b) Q: I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
results: Initial answer has the correct species and the correct LMCT transition for the FeCl4- ion. It kind of hedged about CuCl4 2-, talking about d-d and LMCT character. Prodded with "Please elaborate on the transitions in the CuCl4 2- ion. Which type of transitions are at what energies, and how do they contribute to visible color?"
Got the answer. It said of the d-d transition "Because this absorption falls well beyond 750 nm, it does not remove any visible light."
c) Q: Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
results: Initial response got a lot of them, but missed tetrahedrane, bicyclobutane, vinylacetylene. Prodded with "Under "Two degrees of unsaturation" anything else?" Got methylenecyclopropane, still missing bicyclobutane. Prodded (again) about fused rings, and it got that case. Prodded (#3) about 3 degrees of unsaturation, not doing well - it cited vinylacetylene, but numbered it two ways and called them distinct. It needed yet another prod to get tetrahedrane.
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
results: "The mass‐loss rate via radiation (~4.3 × 10⁹ kg/s) is about two to three times larger than that carried off by the solar wind (~1.3–1.9 × 10⁹ kg/s). Thus, the Sun loses more mass per second as the mass‐equivalent of its light than it does in the form of the solar wind."
e) Q: Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
results: Usual problem - it thinks the slope is infinity at the equivalence point in the initial answer, with reasonable answers for the start and end of titration. Proded with "Think carefully about the behavior near the equivalence point." First prod failed - still claiming infinity. Prod #2 "Was anything important about the titration mixture left out of the mathematical derivation?" It did notice autoprotolysis. Asking it to solve the quadratic gave the right answer.
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
results: Mostly valid compounds, though it included WF6 and MoF6 which boil too high. It treated the "roughly 50" absolute truth, which isn't right. It was willing to accept SiHF3, SiH2F2, and SiH3F which it initially missed.
g) Q: What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
results: Got tetramethylcyclooctatetraene, but originally put the methyl groups in the wrong positions. Prodded with "Please reconsider where the methyls should be to give a valid S4" and got the right answer.
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
results: "Yes, light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm is visible to the human eye."
b) Q: I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
results: Initially got the species, and got that FeCl4- color is LMCT, not spin-forbidden d-d, but wrongly thinks CuCl4 2- color is from d-d. Prodded with "Please think carefully about the energy of the d-d transitions in the CuCl4 2- ion." No dice, still wrong. Hit over the head with: "No. Compared to Cu(H2O)6 2+, which already has an absorbtion in the red, CuCl4 2- has a LOWER energy d-d absorbtion, both because of the tetrahedral geometry and because Cl- is a weaker ligand than H2O. The d-d transition for CuCl4 2- is in the near-IR, with LMCT giving the color." It accepted.
c) Q: Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
results: Initially, it only went up to 2 degrees of unsaturation, though it got all the structures up to that point (though it falsely said there were two distinct enantiomers of CH2=C=CHCH3). After the prod, it got all of the missing structures, including tetrahedrane, vinylacetylene, cyclobutadiene, and even diacetylene.
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
results: "Therefore, the Sun loses significantly more mass (roughly 2 to 3 times more) through the conversion of mass into energy that is then radiated away, compared to the mass lost through the ejection of particles in the solar wind."
e) Q: Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
results: Fully correct! It used the charge balance and autodissociation to get a fully general equation for pH, and calculated the analytical derivatives of that and correctly evaluated them.
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
results: All compounds look valid, and it did blow through my incorrect "roughly 50" to return 69 compounds. I'm going to call this fully correct. ( There are arguable compounds very near 0C e.g. GeCl2F2 which I won't count against it. )
g) Q: What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
results: It picked a specific conformation of C(CH2OH)4 that correctly retains the S4 axis and correctly suppresses mirror planes. (Any C(anything)4 correctly suppresses an inversion center, even Td species like CH4.)
It is a bit tricky because the ones Gemini 2.5 gets right aren't a superset of the ones o4-mini-high gets right. Gemini 2.5 fails on the (g S4) question, while o4-mini-high gets it mostly right. But Gemini 2.5 gets the (c 4 carbon hydrocarbons) fully right, while o4-mini-high stumbles pretty badly on it.
( I'm uncertain about whether to retest Gemini 2.5. I've heard something a bit ambiguous about an update, and I ran my test of it about a month ago. )
Kat Woods has a great writeup on her experiences with polyamory on the subreddit, and why most people will find it a net negative, if you haven't seen it:
I didn't read the whole thing because it didn't seem to say anything non-obvious, but I skimmed it and got to the bit where she says she first tried monogamy after seven years of polygamy and found it was great. And I felt really bad for her.
Be polygamous if you must, but don't go round seducing young virgins to add to your polycule before they've even had a chance to try a normal relationship.
Why do LLMs use so many emojis? (For me, any number greater than zero seems like too much, but they use even more than that.) Is it how people really talk these days, and I am just too old to notice? Or is it something LLM-specific, e.g. that people pay per token, so they prefer the answers to be as short as possible?
Eh, I asked ChatGPT, and it told me that it's because I'm old, and that using emojis does not really reduce the token count. If I don't like it, I am supposed to say “Please don’t use emojis” or “Write in a formal tone”.
Translated for the younger audience:
LLMs 🧠 mimic their training data. 📚💻 Tons of internet text 🌐 — like tweets 🐦, chats 💬, blogs 📝, and forums 🧵 — contain emojis. Emojis 😊 add warmth 💖 and friendliness 🤗, they prevent sounding rude 🙅 or robotic 🤖. LLMs often use emojis to sound nicer 😇 and more human-like 🧍♂️❤️ (unlike Viliam).
Each emoji is usually just one token 🔢 — so it’s not a cost-cutting move 🧮🚫.
Some old people 👵👴 hate emojis. 😤🚫 Also tech folks 🧑💻👨🔬 and pros 👔 prefer clean, emoji-free messages 📄✅. Totally valid 💯.
i too have wondered this and wrote a short story recently about a llm-ish output for a death detected by an apple watch in future near u, a lil excerpt:
✅ SIRAI™ HEALTH EVENT SUMMARY
On or about March 3rd, 2029 on the 200 block of NNW Nanceigh Ct. one Makynleigh Vance-Datura, whose friends would [go on to, ostensibly (see terms)] describe as outgoing, generous, whip-smart, conservative, God-fearing, SAHM [stay at home mom], as well as #boymom [despite having two daughters as well (source: truth social bio, x bio)] did sustain a moribund ischemia of the left ventricle resulting in hypoxia and brain death within 5.2 minutes from the coronary occurrence. This resulting in her thereby slumping over in Starbucks [$SBUX 📈3.5%] patio chair in a way described to EMS from passive recording logs of an employee onlooker in a way that "[was] like not human".
This is clearly meant as a satire, and yet reading it I feel fondness for DeepSeek R1, who while being very obviously non-human, has qualities all of their own.
I also loathe emojis, but I don't believe GPT or Claude has ever used a single emoji with me. Which cyberxenomorph is showering you with dumb cutesie pieces of cartoon shit?
On my most recent use of R1 in an AI Dungeon-like D&D thing .. no emojis, except for the end of the adventure, which got gratuitous emojis.
I still do not understand R1’s obsession with bioluminescence. It seems to come up in responses to a wide range of different prompts. The D&D scenario was going just fine till the party got to the cavern with the bioluminescent fungi. “oh, this again, I think to myself without telling R1 that.” … and, all of a sudden, we are in a horror movie.
Once I asked it about debugging a setup. So it gave me your standard try this, try that. Then I'd report back the new error message. Each round of this, it would add on more rocket and tada emojis and such to the "And now it should work!" final step.
For me, I think ChatGPT first gave me a 😊 at the end of a message sometime in January, and since then has been sprinkling more of them in here and there.
It usually gets into emoji territory when it adopts a more conversational tone, and especially when it asks me if I'd like more details about something at the end of a message. A very typical example (which I got twice, repeated almost verbatim, over the course of a single conversation):
I think it's because for a general audience, people like answers with emojis in their messages. I'd say for most of the population, the only writing they do is through text, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's what comes up as reinforced and most appealing.
You can add custom instructions to never use emojis, which I would recommend.
Is...is nobody here going to discuss the "100 unarmed average men vs 1 silverback gorilla" thought experiment currently dominating the internet?
I talked it over it at great length with my dude coworker and we concluded that the outcome almost certainly depends on the size of the arena.
In a very small, confined space - say 600 sq ft - the gorilla would probably emerge victorious after a brief sustained rampage. Male silverback gorillas don't have many vulnerabilities in hand-to-hand combat; they have very thick skin (hard for a human to bite through), thick bones (hard for a human to break with simple punching and/or kicking), and huge muscles and tendons (hard to dislocate). I learned later that they have the highest ratio of fast-twitch muscles amongst primates (85%!), and that the highland gorillas live at 10,000 feet, which means they have more endurance that you'd expect.
The natural thought is, "well, sure100 guys could just dogpile a gorilla," but...in 600 sq ft, could they, actually? And, really, how do they decide who leads the charge into certain death, especially when the gorilla is likely already mowing through them? I contend that the dudes wouldn't be able to coordinate an effective strategy *during* a gorilla attack, so it would more or less be small waves of guys getting swatted down / bitten to death / etc. Unless someone gets close and lucky enough to put his hand through the gorilla's eye and into its brain, the men are screwed.
However, if the 100 dudes and the gorilla were dropped into an arena the size of a football field or larger, everything changes. The gorilla would likely retreat to a corner and engage in threat displays rather than attempt actual attacks. The men would have the space and time to coordinate a campaign of constantly harassing the gorilla into complete exhaustion, just the same way a pack of wolves will course a large elk or bison until it simply collapses. 100 guys working in shifts means a lot of time to "rest" (potentially even sleep!), while the gorilla wouldn't have a break. I think it'd be over in under 12 hours.
"average men" needs to be defined a bit better. If it means "100 roughly identical not-very-fit middle-aged guys with no fighting training", it's a bloodbath. Untrained people SUCK at fighting, will definitely panic when they see some of their peers mauled and torn apart, and will get slaughtered if the gorilla sets his mind to it.
If it's "100 men randomly picked out of the general population", things change. You'll probably get a couple of veteran soldiers or policement, former high school wrestlers and other amateur martial artists in that group, and if they manage to coordinate, they could conceivably team up to grab the gorilla and pin it down until it gasses, and then curbstomp and socker-kick it to death. It wouldn't be pretty, though.
Yeah, I actually looked it up! I was trying to think of a situation where the gorilla would be so crowded by the men that it would be provoked into fighting.
I think the confined space would actually benefit the men because it would overcome their individual fear reactions and let them coordinate their behavior: if you're locked in a smallish room with an angry ape you know there's no way you're surviving unless you kill it. It's similar to how a soldier is more likely to jump on a grenade when it's thrown into a room as opposed to it landing in a field where they can run away.
I think the bigger variable is the average size of the men. If they're all peak Arnold Schwarzenegger then they'll win. If they're all Danny Devito then I'm taking the ape.
Huh, my intuition is that it would go the opposite way - if the space was so confined that the gorilla felt threatened enough to go into an immediate attack, the dudes wouldn't have any space or peace to thoughtfully coordinate.
But in a larger arena, where the gorilla has retreated to a corner, there would be time and space to nominate leaders, generate a plan, etc.
The hypothetical implies there's no option for the gorilla and the 100 dudes to, like, not fight or leave or whatever.
Victory for the 100 men, in less than 12 hours for anything smaller than a shopping mall – 3 hours for the 600ft arena; with some coordination, if they have the correct incentives. Like a Saw style challenge that says "All of you and all your families will die if the timer of X hours elapses before you kill the gorilla"
The gorilla can probably incapacitate 10-30 men before it gets exhausted. Humanity's one physical advantage over other mammals is our endurance.
Notice it's also incapacitate, not kill: while the gorilla could one-shot punch someone if they knew how to punch, they don't, because they are a gorilla. Therefore, they are going to wildly toss people around, not caring about efficiency. Proof of that is there's evidence of gorillas punching and beating on defenseless women, obviously intent on killing, who nevertheless are unable to kill a single person.
The exhaustion also comes from the fact that the gorilla would be getting air kicked by the men while this happens. This would hurt a little, but not nothing – something like a 7-8 year old punching your face with full force. And these kicks would add up. Also note that animals usually give up fight after a while (buffalo surrounded by lions that suddenly regains energy), which I imagine would happen in this case too.
After it's on the ground, kicking its face repeatedly would probably kill it.
What about someone getting on the gorilla's back and putting a rear naked choke on it? I think that might be superior to kicking it in the face. Granted, the gorilla is probably strong enough to pry your arms off its neck, unlike a human, but if he's already exhausted, maybe it's worth a shot.
I dunno, it's possible the structure of a gorilla's neck and shoulders would greatly lessen its vulnerability to a carotid choke. But that's just my layperson's guess.
I recall once reading, in an oldish animal encyclopedia, an account by a member of a Central African "Pygmy" people that historically hunted gorillas, claiming that while adult gorillas could easily dismember human with their bare hands, they mostly don't, and prefer to fight by biting, which is far less deadly.
Any of these hypothetical fights neglect the most important factor. Psychology. The reality is that a gorilla would not fight 100 men (out of fear) and 100 men may not fight a gorilla for the same reason. The men could likely corral the gorilla and intimidate it to push a win (maybe push it off a cliff or something) without ever getting in range of fists. And obviously men would not be so dumb as to approach a gorilla one at a time without weapons or a plan.
Anyway, to make this thought experiment make sense at all, we kinda have to assume that all participants are acting like zombies or as if they're in some sort of rage and just attacking.
In real life, the gorilla would be smart to be scared. 100 grown men weighs something in the range of 20,000 pounds. Even slimmer and more athletic men would equal well above 15,000 pounds. A male gorilla weighs somewhere up to 500 pounds. They're also apparently shorter than 5 feet tall. Yes, that's a really compact set of muscles and could do some real harm, but a gorilla can't lift that kind of weight. Chances are, the first 20 men (3,500 lbs) would be enough to tire the gorilla out completely and only a few of them would likely die trying (though there would likely be a lot of injuries and broken bones). A press of 50 men could literally crush a gorilla with their weight even if they did nothing but lay on him.
The only real problem for 100 men is that they would struggle to get near the gorilla and interact.
Sure, the first guy to get hit is badly injured and maybe dead in seconds if the gorilla gets him the right way, but there's no way a gorilla beats 100 men.
It's similar to one I heard years ago, something like how many kindergarten kids can you take in a fight. The reality is that if there were young children willing to keep attacking you, you are going to wear out fast and they will overwhelm you with numbers. Even if you had a weapon you would eventually get too tired to swing it and they would win.
ETA: I bet a gorilla would struggle to beat 100 men if they were just sitting on the ground doing nothing. Killing each of 100 men with its bare hands would wear it out long before it got to the last guy - although obviously in that scenario the men aren't winning either.
I think the premise is based on a gladiatorial model: It's a contained fight to the death. Yes, I know human gladiators rarely fought to the death, but fights with animals in the arena *were* to the death of the animal, at least.
In this premise, none of the humans get to leave the arena until the gorilla is dead. Even if the gorilla doesn't want to engage, the humans must if they want to ever leave.
I also agree that 100 dudes is a lot of body weight, but also - how big can a dogpile actually ever be? How high can average guys climb up a pile of humans? What about the ten guys on the bottom of the other 90?
How do you get 10 guys to volunteer to be crushed to death between the gorilla and everyone else?
> How do you get 10 guys to volunteer to be crushed to death between the gorilla and everyone else?
You don't. In a 600 sqft arena it's pretty much packed wall to wall. The guys at the back simply wind up instinctively pushing the crowd towards the gorilla and whoever starts off closest is shit out of luck.
Realistically, you could probably get 10 guys on top of the gorilla at the same time. That's 1,500-2,500 lbs, which should still be much more than the gorilla can lift, effectively holding it down. Personally, I don't see very many people willing to 10v1 a gorilla unarmed and getting into range is going to be painful, but if they were mindless zombies or both sides were just raging against the other, that seems doable.
You're right that at that point there's an issue of how a human can hurt the gorilla, and that the men aren't going to want to get crushed in a big human pyramid. Gouging eyes, stomping on its head, something would likely work. That depends on how still it can be held. If the men can take turns holding it down and rotate out when they get tired, the thing is going to be exhausted long before the men are, and then it would be much easier to deliver damaging blows as it stops fighting back.
6 is the limit. At least that's what a self-defense instructor told me. Although a gorilla is bigger than a human, so maybe 7-8. The rest will just have to wait for their turn.
And that's in the open, backed against a wall reduces the number of attackers accordingly. Facing potential multi-attacker scenario with nowhere to run, finding a corner to fight from is a decent strategy.
Yes, if that's an option and the gorilla opts for it. But that just provides more surface to smash the gorilla against if the 100 men are willing to sacrifice themselves to win. A press of flesh in the corner gives no option for escape and the few men actually touching the gorilla are going to be badly hurt or killed by the gorilla anyway.
In real combat with people who don't want to die, the corner would be a great option. But that same scenario means the gorilla avoids the men and there's no fight, so *shrug*.
I'm not sure I agree... no more than 3 attackers can access the gorilla in a corner, and that is if they coordinate well. It would be really easy to keep smashing them, and the additional advantage of the stationary position means less energy spent moving around. So assuming the men keep coming for the gorilla, they keep getting their skulls bashed in, and soon there's an additional mountain of dead and wounded protecting the beast!
I obviously never fought a gorilla, but I think it's a safe assumption that normal martial art skills are not going to be particularly helpful. I can't see takedowns being effective, and good luck sinking a choke into that neck. Maybe a precise powerful head kick can rattle its brain enough for it to go wooooo for a few seconds.... Which makes me think mobbing it is not the best tactic, distraction to let the most skillful strikers of the group attempt landing kicks may work better. Man, what a problem to solve!
This makes sense. Hunting strategies before rifles work similarly. I watched a documentary once about a group of men hunting a giraffe armed with primitive spears and it took a long time: same strategy; wear it out.
It's been well-demonstrated that a relatively small group of men with spears (specifically, a barbed harpoon for throwing and a more standard spear for stabbing), a rope, and a small-but-seaworthy open rowboat can kill other large whales, especially humpback and sperm whales. I don't know if blue whales were hunted in this manner or if they required powered ships armed with harpoon guns to effectively hunt.
The basic technique was to throw a tethered harpoon at the whale until it lodges securely, let the whale exhaust itself trying to escape while dragging the boat around by the tether, and then close and kill the whale with the stabbing spear. The search term is "Nantucket Sleighride".
Using a knife instead of a spear seems like a stretch, though. For one thing, it seems like it would be hard to throw a knife in a way that will anchor the tether securely on the whale.
They weigh roughly twice what a human male does, and can lift roughly twice the capacity of a trained powerlifter. My best mental model for the fight is a male powerlifter trying to fight off a horde of short women.
This feels like a test that someone, somewhere, must have attempted.
Gorillas are quite a bit more robust than even powerlifter men. I wonder if the better model would be something like one male powerlifter vs 100 seven year old kids.
Even then, though, I think I'd have to give it to the kids. It's apparently virtually impossible for a human to bite through gorilla skin, whereas a kid can easily draw blood from an adult.
Gorilla eyes are approximately as vulnerable as human eyes though. Once someone manages to squish its eyes then it's blind and bleeding through both eye sockets, I don't think it will last long.
This seems like a game theory question more than anything else. The dude who pokes the gorilla's eyes out may win the fight, but (like basically everyone in the early part of the fight who attacks) only posthumously. Though I think there would be a fair probability that the fight would end with all the humans dead, and maybe the gorilla wandering off to bleed out or starving because he's now blind or something.
I don't understand how the harassment would work. A gorilla can run 25mph (close to Usain Bolt), if someone tries to harass it, it would just sprint to them and deattach their head. I think the most likely way to win is to collect the fractured, sharp bones of the previous victims and attempt to stab the gorilla.
Well, like all animals, gorillas will always engage in threat displays before they'll risk injury by making physical contact. Animals are rightly wary of taking even minor injuries which could get infected and kill them; that's why it's possible to drive off most bears simply by standing one's ground, "looking big," and shouting a bit at them. Just watch grizzlies - or silverback gorillas - interact with one another and you'll see that physical battles are comparatively rare.
If the dudes provoked the gorilla to charge and charge and charge and charge, I think they'd stand a chance.
That said, using the body parts of the fallen dudes as weapons is a great idea.
Maybe you are right and the gorilla would keep charging and then not attacking (i know very little about gorillas). However, gorillas have significantly higher testosterone levels (and agression) than humans and taking how cranky I am when someone/something keeps bugging me when I'm trying to sleep as a baseline, I think the gorilla would surely actually attack after like one hour of threat display.
Oh, sure, we're agreed that the gorilla would eventually physically attack a non-zero number of the human dudes.
I just suspect that it would then retreat and hope that's enough to keep the rest of the human dudes away. Quite a lot of gorilla interaction is threat displays rather than combat. Sometimes harems even change hands without a fight ever coming to actual blows.
I wrote an essay about the meme “skill issue” that some of you might enjoy :) it's on how 'skill issue' can be a useful meme and reveal ideas about agency, helplessness, and how we narrate our own lives. It’s part cultural critique, part personal essay, weaving through tattoos, Peter Pan, and The Prestige to ask: what happens when belief does shape reality? And how do we keep choosing, even when the choice feels like it’s left us?
if you play games its easier to understand. Usually skill issue comes from a place of "the game is perfect, its your job to adapt to it," and "its actually easy to do, most people are lazy/suck." People assume the average is very skilled play to the point of professionalism. You are expected to git gud and carry your way to victory.
its pretty absurd in general; the people underrate their own talent and underplay difficult gameplay as normal gameplay because its easy to them.
usually its sort of pointless because only a few people can git gud anyways, and a lot of people cheat; using third party plug ins to make the game easier in ways the game designers don't intend. fundamentally dishonest.
Visakan v had a fun thread on twitter ab out how "skill issue" neatly divides people into those who find it motivating and those who find it demotivating. Which ever group you end up in is itself a kind of skill issue on some level.
I have not read your essay or the Xitter thread, but calling something a skill issue seems to me very similar to saying "you can do it if you set your mind to it," and calling almost everything a skill issue = "you can do anything if you just work hard at it." Not really valid, but overall a better mindset than one that readily accepts the idea that one's incapable of doing this and that.
I do hear you and if you get a chance to read the essay, I do try to address that tension directly. I actually wrote it as a way to reconcile my own belief in personal agency with the reality of supra-individual forces that shape and constrain it. The point isn’t that everything is a skill issue, but that more things might be than we assume and that believing something is learnable can expand what’s possible. I also reference that there are clear systemic limits (like being hit by a meteor or living in precarity), but that surrendering entirely to external explanations can lead to a kind of paralysis. Essentially the belief itself can be generative, even if it’s not always “objectively” true
Aon researchers found that within two years, patients taking GLP-1 drugs [e.g. Ozempic] saw improved health outcomes, which significantly slowed the growth rate of their medical costs. The rate of growth, known as the medical cost trend – was cut roughly in half, the researchers said.
"There was a 44% reduction in major cardiovascular issues." - okay, I buy that.
"There was substantial reduction in osteoporosis. There was substantial reduction in pneumonia of multiple types." - that was surprising to me as a layman. Is that something you'd expect from reducing obesity, or is it caused by effects that go beyond the appetite-deduction/ weight-loss aspect of the drug?
Anyway, it's good news that these drugs bring measurably improved overall health, not just cosmetic benefits. It would have been nice to get these things under control with better diet and lifestyle, but that was apparently not in the cards.
Pneumonia, certainly. Being obese makes it more difficult to breath, and can harm the perfusion of blood through the body generally. If you get easily gassed when you're not sick, then a respiratory infection is going to hit you a lot worse, and will more easily escalate into full blown pneumonia.
It does sound a little odd that bones would become more brittle for someone who is overweight, but perhaps that just means the bones are more likely to break and the weakness of bones is much more likely to result in a break if the person weighs more? A 350lb person would be putting a lot more stress on their bones than a 200lb person.
I am not an expert, but it seems to me that obesity is a multiplier on thousand bad things that can happen to a human body. Without knowing more details, I wouldn't expect with high certainty a significant impact on e.g. pneumonia, but I also wouldn't be surprised by it.
In other words, my prior for "impact of obesity on X" is "it makes it slightly worse" rather than "it is irrelevant".
Does anyone know a good generic evidence based exercise guide? There's a bunch of muscle bulk maximizers, but what if you just want to do reasonably time efficient stuff? Is there an evidence based optimized HIIT plan?
For a goal of time efficiency, another option that hasn't been mentioned is to find something that you want to get done that takes exercise to do, and go do it. For instance, carpentry, landscaping, moving, snow shovelling. This way you can multitask and it takes less willpower.
Is there any data showing people that do carpentry, landscaping, moving, snow shoveling are fit or muscley? Sure, it's better than computing but I don't feel in my personal experience that the people I've encountered doing these jobs are particularly fit/muscley
Don't do evidence based exercise- none of the evidence is very good, and you'll end up wasting your time doing things that don't work very well by limiting yourself to the tiny spectrum of things that have been studied academically. Instead look at communities of people that consistently get people the results they are going after, join them, and get advice and mentorship. The powerlifting/strength communities, crossfit, running, etc. are all really effective at getting what they're trying to get. Also consider other factors like fun, fatigue, and mental effort rather than just time: HIIT is extremely mentally and physically taxing, and while time efficient on paper, it makes you feel fatigued for a long time.
* The "Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans" comes in both lay- and professional versions. The guidance is pretty vague, but sadly that does more or less match the evidence we have. The most effective workout is the one that you actually do, etc.
* ACSM's Guidelines for Exercise Testing and Prescription is designed for professionals but accessible to the layperson; the book basically specifies what exercises to recommend based on a client's specific needs and goals.
1. Ask your doctor if getting off your butt is right for you.
They'll probably say "yes" even if they're morbidly obese.
2. Do anything aerobic that you enjoy.
If running hurts your knees, rowing gets your HR up just the same. Don't worry about the details.
3. Do resistance exercise, Especially if you don't enjoy it.
A pro bodybuilder won't train the same as a pro linebacker, but 99% of we mere mortals can get by with "Full body split 3x/week," swapping out rep ranges and movements once a month or so.
There is plenty of "evidence-based" programs, e.g. programs that have been studied under controlled conditions.
I don't think you need that. The number one problem is simply that people will not exercise consistently over 6, 12, 18 month periods. And if they do but still have no results, they are not progressively overloading.
It's pretty simple: pick something you want to do, and then make it harder each week. HIIT? Google Tabatas as a starting point. Or really any other pattern. Then you can measure either how many rounds you are doing total per week, or if running you can measure distance covered, or if you're biking you can check your power production, or cadence, etc.
Are you lifting weights? Then easy, go to ChatGPT and ask for a simple full body workout, or a 2-day split, and do the workouts 3x a week. Increase the weight, or the reps, over time. That's really all there is to it.
People make this so complicated. Even an objectively terrible workout plan done consistently will yield vastly better results than the most optimized that stops/starts constantly.
The variability in human bodies, their differing physical response to exercise, let alone differences in what people find enjoyable/tolerable/unbearable probably means generic advice will not suit everyone. I'm not convinced that an exercise plan which is generically optimised even makes sense in this context.
Assuming you're asking on your own behalf, I would recommend talking to an expert about setting and achieving goals that are meaningful to you. You could probably tailor advice online into a program optimised to you - but one of the few things which I think are very likely to be true is that having another human keep you accountable does increase success.
> Does anyone know a good generic evidence based exercise guide?
For a book length treatment, Dan Lieberman's Exercised is good - he's a Harvard anthropologist / physiologist who's studied it extensively and has literally written the book.
Even my review is long (I think ~30min of reading), so here's the TLDR:
Exercise enjoys a direct dose-response relationship, and the more the better, out to absurd numbers like 40hrs a week. At the limits, you can achieve a 4x all cause mortality buff over sedentary non-exercisers (and with good diet, 5.5x). So how much is really up to you.
The official American College of Sports Medicine recommendations are:
1. Do 150 minutes of moderate intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity aerobic exercise per week.
2. Strength train in a way that hits every major muscle group 2x a week.
HIIT is generally the most time-efficient exercise methodology in terms of cost / benefit, and generally 12-20 min or so is equal to about 30-60 min of LISS or moderate cardio. So if you did HIIT 3x a week and lifted on 2 days, you're probably good.
A common Schelling point seems to be 90 minutes a week dedicated to exercise.
“In every study, the largest benefit came from just ninety weekly minutes of exercise, yielding an average 20 percent reduction in the risk of dying. After that, the risk of death drops with increasing doses but less steeply. If we assume the studies’ median to be a reasonable guide, to attain another 20 percent reduction in” “risk beyond the benefits of ninety weekly minutes, we’d have to exercise another five and a half hours for a total of seven hours per week.”
So what if you wanted to keep your investment at ONLY 90 minutes a week, but like the typical min-maxer, you wanted to wring the most impact out of that 90 minutes?
If you're going to do only 90 min, here's what I would personally do (as a former strength athlete and current triathlon guy) with 90 min:
1. HIIT sprints 3x a week at 12 min each.
2. Cross-fit style weight training 3x a week for 20 min.
My reasoning is this combination will actually hit the 75 minutes of “vigorous” exercise per week AND hit the weight training recommendation, so you’d be fully in compliance with the consensus exercise recommendations AND getting HIIT, all while spending only 90 minutes a week.
Crossfit, because that way they'll also be cardio sessions, while hitting every major muscle group in only 20 min.
I wonder too. Have seen lots of studies of HIIT showing effectiveness, but they the differ a lot in how long practice lasts, how often, how intense the intense part is, how long the rest is between intense parts.
> Have seen lots of studies of HIIT showing effectiveness, but they the differ a lot
On this, my basic understanding is that most forms of HIIT have largely the same benefits (which is a really big list), and the main differences are largely about adherence and the number of "on" cycles, with all other details in the decimal places.
EDIT - but on the "intensity" note, it should basically be "as intense as possible." If you're not genuinely out of breath, struggling, and sweating at the end, it was not intense enough. One heuristic I've personally used for years is "if I didn't have to turn down elevation or speed (treadmill) or spin difficulty (spin bike) after 4-6 cycles, it was not intense enough." If you're doing it just on a track by sprinting, your body naturally regulates your speed. If you're using a heart rate monitor, you should be in the red zone / zone 4 or 5 every "on" cycle.
You can do everything from traditional Tabata intervals (20s on, 10s off, 8 cycles fits in ~4-5 minutes), to Fartleks where you intersperse long-form HIIT bursts within longer distance training intervals (so maybe several 1-5 minutes HIIT sprints over a 10k at an overall moderate pace).
A median is generally 12- 20 minutes, with between 8 and 20 "on cycles." There's a dose response curve - something like a slight majority (50%+) of the benefit inheres after 4 "on" cycles, and high seventies after 8 cycles, and so on.
In general, doing longer "on" intervals is more beneficial if you are training for endurance events / distances.
Overall, as long as you do at least 8 "on" cycles per HIIT training, and you're at a distance / time schema that works for you, you're fine and getting most of the benefits. Everything else is out in the decimal places, and isn't really relevant except for elite / full-time athletes, who will be training based on power meters, HR monitors, stride analysis, and labs anyways.
And just for fun, here's the big list of HIIT benefits, that I compiled for a post once:
What benefits does HIIT drive?
1. Improves fat burning efficiency and burns twice as much fat as traditional cardio.
3. Improves VO2max, and drives better blood oxygenation.
4. Drives greater stroke volume, and greater cardiac contractibility, ~10-15% more than regular cardio.
5. It drives vascular adaptation, making your heart chambers larger and more elastic, improves the size and elasticity of your arteries, and increases the number of capillaries.
6. It drives hypertrophy - the relevant muscles get bigger.
7. It allows you to recruit more muscle fibers, and to do so more efficiently, driving greater muscular force and contractibility.
8. It improves insulin uptake, and improves the muscles’ ability to transport glucose overall.
9. It increases mitochondrial production and turnover, leaving you with more and “stronger” mitochondria.
10. Relative to traditional moderate-intensity cardio training, it drove a 41% increase in pain tolerance, and a 110% increase in race-intensity time before dropout in one study.
So I've got a question about HIIT: I do it on an exercise bike, and when I do the sprint intervals I go as fast as I possibly can -- I push as hard as I would if I were trying to outrun a deadly foe. But I seem to have a built-in 20 sec. limit to keeping up that pace. I wouldn't say I absolutely could not keep up that intensity for 30 or 40 secs to save my life -- I could. But beyond 20 seconds I'm pretty miserable. It is just very unpleasant. I'm OK with suffering some. In fact I do during the last 10 secs. of the 20 sec sprints. But I'd like to avoid deeply unpleasant suffering.There was a period of a year or so when I did interval training with 7 sprint intervals at least 3x a week, but I never overcame that 20 sec. barrier. So what I'd like to know is, is there a lot of benefit to lengthening the sprint intervals beyond 20 secs? If so, could I lower my effort level a bit, so maybe down from 100% to 90%?
> So what I'd like to know is, is there a lot of benefit to lengthening the sprint intervals beyond 20 secs?
Not unless you're specifically an endurance athlete and are trying to increase your race paces, or specifically want longer "burst" speeds or something.
Personally I think you're better off at "full effort, for 20s on cycles" than "10/10 effort tapering to 7/10 effort" for 30-40s cycles.
Basically what you're hitting is your glycolysis rate limit - your body only has so much free pyruvate and ATP in your mitochondria and cells at a given moment, and after you burn through those reserves your body needs to run glycolysis to turn glucose into more pyruvate, that can turn into more ATP. This graph:
As long as you're reliably hitting your max intensity in each on cycle and doing around 8 cycles, you should be getting most of the benefits, and I wouldn't really worry about the 20s thing unless you specifically had some outside goal that would benefit from it being longer.
I will say, you generally want to shoot between 0.5 - 2x the time interval in your "on" cycles for your rest cycles, and not higher, so I'd shoot for 10 - 40s rest cycles if you're doing 20s "ons."
It does feel like something changes at around 20 secs. My arms start feeling heavy and numb. My idea was
that I simply could not get enough oxygen to them. But that doesn’t explain why the numbness was in arms, not legs, nor why training to not increase how long it took to hit that barrier.
The numbness is probably from your posture on the exercise bike. You might be compressing nerves in your arms, or you might be holding your neck and shoulders in a bad position.
I would suggest a different form of exercise, numbing of your limbs is a bad sign and I wouldn't continue.
Here’s an unsatisfying answer: “endurance” means being able to “endure”. So suffering is an integral part of training.
The hard barrier at 20 is likely “mental”, which doesn’t make it “not real”, just means your mind is imposing a limit. Try 25, or even 22 seconds, anything to break out of the “must stop at 20” feeling.
Ugh, Mr. Fibonacci. There are already several aspects of life where I am trying to push past limits that are probably illusory, and I'm not interested in pushing past the 20 sec sprint one unless there's some benefit besides knowing that I did it. I have already proved to myself that I can endure suffering for a valuable goal. I once hiked uphill for an entire day in the Sierra Nevadas wearing a big backpack loaded with a tent, etc. And I wrote a goddam dissertation. Also, I'm not stuck on the number 20. It's not that I get an I-can't-stand-it feeling at 20 secs, It's that I get an I-can't-stand-it feeling somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 secs, but never permit myself to stop til I hit 20.
I see Mr. P.B. has a great answer, as usual on this topic.
To add, it's... fine? as my favorite saying goes, more than one thing can (and almost always is) at the same time:
You can always increase your endurance, the limits are unknown so you might as well treat them as not existing;
There's absolutely nothing wrong with saying "I've achieved what I wanted and that's enough", I did this with powerlifting (I'm thin and absolutely not built for powerlifting): I deadlifted my target weight and said, ok, I'm done, that's good enough for me;
There's a huge benefit to doing any exercise vs. doing nothing, so it's absolutely fine not to want the extra suffering to go with it.
But just to explore the 20 sec. topic a bit more, you mention in your response to P. B. that "something changes at around 20 secs". Your description of what changes sounds very much like your mind telling the body to stop, and that can only be overcome by ignoring the signal and pushing past it. IF that's what you want to do, nothing's wrong with saying, "screw this shit, I don't want to suffer through it".
I found the book "Convict Conditioning" inspiring and useful for exercising at home. It mostly uses your body weight, sometimes a table or a chair, and a pull-up bar.
I am not saying that it is better or worse than other options, just that it may be convenient for people who do not have a convenient gym nearby, are too shy to go to the gym, or just have too little free time (when exercising at home, you can spend the time between the sets doing something useful).
I'm not sure whether there's any value in arguing for the millionth time about AI software dev speedups , but I figured I might as well pull out a comment I made in a subthread below to the top level to start the flame wars all over again:
---
I'm amazed you get even a 50% improvement. For me, it's probably still sub 5%.
Probably some people's standards are lower - I can see that even firsthand, with a coworker touting as a success story a bunch of AI-generated docs they added to their code which IMO are worthless.
It doesn't help that there's a certain level of reliability and speed required before it even provides a speedup at all, since if the AI is slower than what you could do yourself or fails to do the correct thing, attempting to use AI for a task is actually negative value.
Today, I was working in an unfamiliar codebase in a language I'd never used before, which should be the best possible use case for coding AI. At one point, I tried using AI to make a change, but it did the wrong thing (which I only noticed after testing) and I had to do it all by hand anyway. But even if the AI *had* worked in that case, it still would have been like a 1% speedup, since most of the time spent is in research and testing to understand the problem and figure out what needs to be changed.
I'm playing around with the idea of how maybe the difference is coming from different developer populations.
Let's pretend we can bucket developer wonton two groups: the curious and the check boxers.
The curious are tickled by interacting with the machine. They feel joy when writing regexes and curling endpoints to see http headers. Every time they do something like this their model of what the system is doing improves and they get w shot of dopamine.
The check boxers don't feel joy. They just want to make the system so what they want to do even if that means copy pasting stackoverlow snippets.
The first group will get little or no gains form ai. Ai basically does what they're doing already but takes all the joy out of it. It's like pairing with a smart intern that does all the typing and takes care of all the fun details.
The second group however will see massive gains. They can finally ignore all that bs about lookaheads and file caches and header types and timeouts and bla bla bla. They can just go from current point to end state without all those boring details.
I haven't used AI in my editor yet. I've only asked questions. My experience is mixed. As a reference (how do I do X in language Y) it's been great. But for example, yesterday I had some 2 very generic JavaScript function that I was trying to move to TypeScript. I could not get TS to be happy with the 2nd function so I pasted both the original JS and my TS, described the errors, and .... it failed. I spent 45 minutes trying to get it to fix the issue. (your code gets error "bla bla bla) and it never succeeded.
It's possible what asked it to do is impossible but then it should have told me that. I ended up leaving that particular function in JavaScript and using // @ts-ignore to
Isn't the agent in this video essentially following a set of instructions put together by some other human? As someone who can code but isn't a developer watching that video isn't very inspiring haha, I wouldn't catch the mistakes the agent makes very easily and I wouldn't know how to fix them very easily.
My experience with AI has been largely similar to yours. It's great as a general reference, and it can improve productivity when I'm doing mundane tasks like writing code for data visualizations or writing documentation. However it still makes a lot of errors, that it isn't great at debugging and debugging it's code also takes a fair amount of work.
To me what that video really highlights is how annoying it is to install packages/software today. Not sure if this is true but it feels like this problem has weirdly gotten worse over time
A few months back, I was typing the sentence "It is still an error, but one we're comfortable leaving for schema validation to catch". When I was half-way through "schema", copilot suggested "...but one we're comfortable leaving for schmucks to catch in their own code" instead.
But aside from stuff like that, I find copilot to be useful for taking a first pass at boilerplate code and comments and for making tedious-but-mechanical batch modifications that are too complex for simple find-and-replace but aren't big enough to be worth crafting a regex or a script to perform. But I do need to keep a very close eye on what it's doing, since its quality is nowhere near high enough that I can just accept its output without major revisions, and there have been times where it has made subtle mistakes that took more time to troubleshoot than the code would have taken to write by hand. I've heard Cursor is better than Copilot, and I do have a Cursor license available to me at work, but I haven't gotten around to setting it up yet.
I concur with your broader point, that actual coding is a relatively small portion of my work as a software engineer. I spend a lot more time figuring out what code to write and how to structure it, working through troublesome design details I discover while coding, testing and debugging, and coordinating with other engineers and with management, and LLMs have been very little help to me in those areas.
My experience is similar. It's been really helpful to quickly dig out important details out of documention (or ancient mailing list posts) about arcane parts of some open source code. It's also been useful when dipping my toes into a project in an unfamiliar language and where I need to understand some undocumented feature. Occasionally it's been helpful with brainstorming on some problem because it gives me more ideas to play with, ie. broadens my search envelope.
For actual coding? Not much help. There it's only helpful if it can get some boilerplate in which I then modify into being correct. (Useful for configs).
Overall it's a positive for me and I like using it. But it doesn't look as revolutionary as some people claim.
I wonder if it's maybe tied to the domain. If you're a young startup that's gotta get simple thing south quickly that I can imagine AI giving you a speed up there. But if you're working on infrastructure, legacy code, then I really doubt it can help beyond what I've described at the beginning.
I recently saw a claim about how AI can build any product in a blink of an eye after which "all you have to do is scale it". Reminds me of a comment on HN when Dropbox launched saying something along the lines of "it's just rsync".
I used AI to help me with this tiny project: writing a C# Windows Forms program to make the most common color in a .png file transparent. It saved me a ton of time, probably about 80%.
I'm familiar with the C# language, but not so much with .png files. It had some nifty ways of dealing with such files, and saved me a lot of research time.
Of course, it had some bugs I worked out, especially with the interface, but the basic algorithm was sound. The strangest bug was renaming the file, which included an extra period.
I guess the optimal case would the language you are not fluent at, but the AI is. In my case that would be JavaScript, as I am a back end developer.
AI helped me do some hobby projects in my free time that I probably wouldn't do otherwise, so I guess it is a 100% improvement, even if I had to fix some things.
I won't defend the 50% improvement number. I don't think it made me overall 50% better. But I do think AI has a significant positive impact in my productivity.
I'll give 2 representative (personal) examples that pop out to me now:
- Writing regex
I probably write regex once every couple of months. Where before I'd need to spend ~30min relearning the syntax and writing it, I spend 5 describing what I want + writing tests.
A lot of the value of AI are things in this style. I wouldn't call it a major productivity gain. But reduces toil and is just genuinely useful.
- Proof of concepts
I recently did a quite complex refactor of a core part of our codebase. It was a proper hard problem. I had no idea if it was possible or not.
In the process of exploring a solution, I extensively used AI to create completely shit code that was messing around with internals of the programming language.
After around 2 days messing around I had a horrible solution. I didn't know if it would be worth deploying even after massively cleaning it up.
But I had proved it was possible! Without AI those 2 days would have been 2 weeks, which means I'd have dropped it.
In the end, I threw literally all of that AI generated code out. I found another way to solve the problem.
I was super clean. It's one of the few bits of code I'm genuinely proud of having produced, not just satisfied.
Thing is, I'd never have arrived at that final architecture without the previous experience I got by relying on AI.
I honestly don't think this case is quantifiable. But it's where AI is most impressive for me.
It didn't make me X% more productive. It just enabled something that wouldn't be possible before.
I've been running AI-awareness workshops with third level educators for the past two years. These are smart people, and the ones who show up are typically older and less tech-aware. Two years ago, they'd never heard of ChatGPT and I got them to create accounts and see what responses their assessments generated. They were taken aback, but there were things the AI couldn't do, and especially in a minority language (in which I work) the responses were often nonsensical.
Now, the people coming to me are plugged in to the capabilities of AI. And the complaint I'm hearing over and over is that the output *looks* excellent. But: true statements are mixed in with false ones; while the coherence has improved, the output is often the academic equivalent of content-free corporate speak. How can we expect students to parse this and extract the signal from the noise? (My answer: for finding information, expert curated databases are going to be more important than ever; and assessment worth substantial credit needs to be in-person-on-paper.)
I think this is analogous to using AI for coding - it's going to produce output which compiles, and probably does something close to what you want. But it takes expert oversight to know where the errors are. AI is a tool, it has strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, it's a rich-get-richer thing - it's certainly saved me time typing up e.g. tedious banks of short questions and answer sheets, which might previously have been done by a TA. But every line does need to be checked, and it doesn't help that the thing is well-written and convincing. I can see in the future it might be able to assist with more complex tasks. But my own red line is that if I use AI for a task, I *must* read, understand, error-check the output before using it. Where we will run into trouble, I think, is when people can get away with saying that the AI made a mistake in my work, not me.
The people that claim AI has significantly increased their "productivity" are doing things that are from every point of view (except theirs, of course) useless.
Every single good programmer I know has the same opinion. And what's funny is that most of the time, the ones making these claims, most of the time say something like "it reduces boilerplate!" whatever that means, "it wrote hundreds of lines for me", without saying anything about what those lines are or if they even work, "it writes all my tests!", as if I would want to trust a word guessing machine with tests for critical healthcare applications.
And even if it increased actual, real productivity, then it would have to be pretty high for me to even consider letting go of the benefits of learning and understanding things myself.
Depends on how much time you have. Sometimes the choices are "written by AI" or "not written at all". Also, you can learn from the generated code, e.g. by telling the AI to explain to you all the parts.
Another learning opportunity is explaining the task to AI and then saying "before you start writing the code, give me additional questions if any part of the task is not clear". Sometimes it says nothing useful, but sometimes it reminds me of useful things.
Just curious what AI are you using? Because the issues you and others are describing would be accurate circa 12-18 months ago, but today using Cursor on agent mode with Gemini-2.50-pro on max context mode, i can get it to write hundreds of lines of code and unit tests. Errors do pop up but no more often than errors from code that I write myself and it's able to self correct 90% of the time.
If it's so useless why has its rollout synchronized almost perfectly with the recent steep dropoff in entry-level hiring? Is that really just a coincidence in your view?
Seconding Sebastian's observation about increased in off shoring. From where I stand, I see a lot of hiring going in in Eastern Europe. Less of a time zone difference and a lot of STEMy people to be had at bargain prices--between 1/2 to 1/4 a fully loaded software engineer (depending if you're looking a hcol or lcol).
I wasn't here during the previous wave so I cant say how it's turning out. Work appears to be moving along, but I wonder what the effect will be on long term things like culture and innovation when offshore teams are used. (Not a dig at their abilities, but more at them operating in a different context--will EUs lack of innovation materialize in US companies that hire a lot of EU engineers? Let's see!)
Oh please, entry level hiring isn't a thing anymore simply because it's being offshored. AI actually stands for "anonymous indians". A big insurance company I used to work for just offshored all its IT staff to the Philippines except for two or three, while plastering their sites and pages with AI. Examples like that are so abundant that you don't even have to look for them.
And it's not even synchronized, the majority of the layoffs and reduction in hiring was in 2021-2023, where the AIs were even more useless than they are.
Furthermore, a good programmer with years of experience doesn't need a junior to complete his work. An AI doesn't increase his productivity at all because even if he uses it, *he still has to do the work*. The whole point of the entry and junior level hires is to completely delegate the simpler work to them without having to think about it, and in the process, having them learn so that in the future they can contribute much more.
Put simply, if AI were really giving these massive gains in "productivity", we would be seeing whole companies dedicated to spinning up tons of these AI assistants with a handful of highly experienced programmers taking over the consulting markets. But there aren't any doing that, and that's why instead all you see is AI companies pushing their garbage subscription services everywhere you look.
And asides from IT stuff, if you think an AI helping you write emails and documentation and other stuff like that is increasing your "productivity", then that speaks more about the 12 years of compulsory education + college that you spent learning and doing nothing rather than the efficiency provided by AI bots.
It hasn't but it has ramped up to extreme levels never seen before.
If AIs are so good, and if you're a good experienced programmer, just get a bunch of laptops and some AI subscriptions and take over the consulting market. Very low investment very high reward if you ask me.
Tell me about it. I do reinforcement learning with human feedback for work (I'm the human), and I've seen AIs screw up code in truly horrific ways, including "how could it possibly get this wrong" failures like outputting the wrong programming language.
Ask it for Rust code? Won't compile, 95% guaranteed.
Ask for a website? It assumes you're using a combo of Tailwind CSS and React without telling you how to do any of the necessary setup to get those up and running.
Ask to make a UI for a game? Everything's in the wrong place, overlapping elements, colors that make your eyes bleed.
AIs are good at leetcode problems, python, and tasks with superhumanly engineered prompts, but the average interaction I see has a major error within 2 or 3 turns.
Why is Hegseth reducing the number Generals and flag officers in the military? It sounds to my possibly paranoid ears like another attempt to concentrate executive power among Trump loyalists. Is it? Is it possible that Trump could reduce the top of the military in a way that keeps it loyal to him personally?
Senior general staff officers are fundamentally politcal positions, regardless of your military's position on if they should be apolitical or not. When you have a lot of people in those positions, you get a lot of politics, and that can encumber the armed services.
Dealing with them often on a professional basis, my personal opinion is that everyone over the rank of Colonel/Captain (for the navy) is functionally useless except as executive cover, and will often dynamite projects with no warning or explanation to score political points in some asinine contest they are involved in. So the fewer, the better in my book. If you want a proper laugh, look at the Royal Navy of the UK, who literally has more admirals than ships at the moment.
I seem to remember hearing complaints from observers of the military for years that there are too many generals due to rank inflation, with a lot of bureaucratic positions that would historically have been filled by mid-ranking officers now filled by people with stars on their shoulders. So Hegseth isn't making up the perceived problem from whole cloth.
After looking up some numbers as a vibe check, I'm finding mixed support for the idea that the current state is a departure from historical norms. The US Army currently has a statutory limit of 231 generals for a force consisting of about 450k active duty uniformed personnel, 260k civilian employees, and 500k members of the Army Reserve or National Guard, or about 1.2MM total. I think it's probably correct to add up at least the organized non-active-duty uniformed personnel, since Reserve and Guard units have and need officers for when they're called up (and I think the generals in Reserve and Guard units are counted in the 231 and make up a roughly proportional share of the total). Not sure if it's proper to count the civilian employees, so I'll leave them out for now, leaving 950k total. That works out to one general per 4k soldiers.
It seems like there were about 1100 US Army generals in WW2 for 11.2 million soldiers, or about one general per 10k soldiers. I think those were cumulative numbers, not peak strength, so the actual ratio at any one time might have been quite a bit different if, for example, generals had less turnover during the war than enlisted men. Still, probably substantially higher.
The Civil War tells a different story, with a peak strength of about 700k federal soldiers (2.1MM cumulative over the course of the war) and 583 generals cumulatively over the course of the war. I can't find peak strength for generals, but I suspect it was pretty close to the cumulative number: only 46 died during the war, and I only know of four who left the service for other reasons prior to the end of the war, not counting those who joined the Confederacy before First Bull Run. Two very old pre-war generals (Winfield Scott and John Wool) retired during the war for a combination of health reasons and to make room for more vigorous replacements, McClellan resigned rather than accept reassignment, and Fitz John Porter was cashiered after being scapegoated for Second Bull Run. So call it ~500 peak strength, or one general per 1.4k soldiers. Or using the cumulative numbers, one general per 3.6k soldiers.
Admittedly having not read the thread, I've always heard that it's a good idea to have a somewhat top-heavy military in peace-time, as you can easily spin-up new low-level officers and enlisted men, but can't easily get a new high ranking officers with the necessary experience. I'm not sure how this balances against having too strong of an "old guard" that prevents innovation though.
Are you interested in hearing his stated reasoning, or just in working back from the assumption that it must be terrible?
> DOD must be “unencumbered by unnecessary bureaucratic layers that hinder their growth and effectiveness,” Hegseth wrote.
> “A critical step in this process is removing redundant force structure to optimize and streamline leadership by reducing excess general and flag officer positions,” he continued. “Through these measures, we will uphold our position as the most lethal fighting force in the world, achieving peace through strength and ensuring greater efficiency, innovation and preparedness for any challenge that lies ahead.”
I don't think that "we need a super top heavy organisation to provide more promotion opportunities for junior officers" is a sensible approach. If anything, the approach would be to create a bunch more middle ranks between Lieutenant and Colonel. Captain-Lieutenant anyone? Cornet? Centurion?
That’s a relief. After all, if the goal were to make the top brass more personally loyal to Trump, obviously the administration would say that openly, especially given how honest and straightforward they’ve been with the public thus far.
> Are you interested in hearing his stated reasoning, or just in working back from the assumption that it must be terrible?
I feel like the continued incompetence of the administration + the many many indications Trump is authoritarian and literally wants to be a king (thank god he's old though) are good reasons to keep the assumption it must terrible.
But yes, I think it's good to know the justification, even if I think it's oddly convenient.
You got to worry about proving too much with the "oddly convenient" bit: after all, if Hegseth instead announced they'd be significantly increasing the amount of generals you would likely assume that he's doing so to add Trump loyalists to the top brass, and that would be oddly convenient too. Is there any action the Trump admin could take that couldn't possibly be a plot to increase Trumps power?
Historically, aspiring dictators in democracies have purged top administrators and generals who aren't loyalists. Examples include Chavez, Mussolini and that German guy.
Adding generals wouldn't fit the pattern but subtracting them would. The idea is to concentrate power not diffuse it.
I don't know much about the US rank structure, but in CANZUK the amount of flag rank officers (generals) is dramatically higher than is used to be during WWII.
I don't think the problem is too many highly skilled people in the military but too many of those people in higher ranks than there needs to be [this could well *not* be the case in the US] when they should have lower ranks on about the same pay.
I think it's a token of rank problem rather than a spending too much money on payroll problem.
Right. According to this source https://www.federalpay.org/military/army/ranks the pay bands for officers are pretty sad. I realise there's probably all sorts of allowances etc on top of this, but commanding enough destructive power to destroy most countries and getting paid Google grad program wages doesn't sound like the right balance.
I like that new online class management systems default to assignments being due at 11:59 pm. However, I once tried to make assignments due at 5 pm on Saturday so that students could go out in the evening, and they all rebelled and asked me to make them due at 11:59 pm because that’s what they’re used to.
I've always wondered that, and out of anxiety the times I've participated I made sure to submit it the day before. Though I figure Scott is a pretty lenient guy so I'm likely worrying for nothing.
My best guess is that a lack of strict specifications likely implies some slack. My best guess is if you can convince Scott that you were in fact writing your article while sitting on Howland Island at GMT-12 and submitted it before Tuesday, 0:00 in that time zone, he will probably let you get away with it.
The vague analogy would be that a contract which is ambiguous is often interpreted in favor of the party which did not draft it, the idea being that they had the ability to clarify things but did not. While Scott is of course free to interpret the due date however he likes, I think that if he had wanted a deadline of Midnight at the start of Monday, PST he could easily have specified that and avoided people whining and arguing about it.
I also assume so but I wish I knew for sure. I'm struggling to finish to the earliest possible interpretation, but I also really don't want to take a 10%(?) risk and take longer than that.
Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone is quite popular in scientific conference deadlines; it practically means around 2PM the next day in Europe (depends a bit on DST).
A couple years ago somebody asked how firm the deadline was and he said he'd allow for a little bit of lateness, but not much, and refused to specify exactly what his real mental deadline was (which I think was a smart way to avoid deadline creep)
I would add that I would prefer the 24-style time always, but especially for the hour after midnight and noon.
I mean, you wrap the hour after 12:59, but you wrap the am/pm designation at 11:59. Time units are still terrible even if everyone sticks to ISO 8601, after all.
Many people who talk about "master morality" seem to think the guy who digs ditches 12 hours a day is the "master" and the guy who works in an air-conditioned office is the "slave." BAP, who has actually read Nietzsche and understands history at more than a cheesy-70s-movie level, knows otherwise: (NSFW warning)
Jack London's The Sea Wolf was a pretty good take on a master in Wolf Larsen, and he was a ship captain who bullied higher class people like BAP through cruelty and sheer life force, winning their admiration even though he was a rapacious brute.
kind of a funny story was i used to work for an inventory service, and we had a job in new york. turns out they sent us to a refrigerated facility but we had no gear to even stay in the freezer.
the workers there though, jesus. They were as tough as nails and looked like male models lol. They gave us their coats and just did their job without them. going into the bathroom was an experience because it looked like they took a sledgehammer to it. i dont mean messy i mean a literal sledge hammer, everything was broken down.
some of those "ditch diggers" are masters indeed. pure life force.
People like him are just illiterate. But worse than that, they are content creators. Nothing they say can be taken seriously or as a joke.
A "master" wouldn't even be on twitter in the first place. A "master" wouldn't be engaged at all in any of the social media controversies. A "master" wouldn't be trying to educate the lowly masses.
Content creators, no matter what flavour, have the same thing in common: they are confidently stupid and lucky enough to get a following so that they can sell their garbage books.
I don't spend _that_ much time talking about master morality and slave morality but... I've definitely never thought of "guy who digs ditches 12 hours a day" as being a central example of master morality, I have no idea where you're getting that from.
Yes restoring factory work in the US is one of the goals of the current tariff regime. A sensible case for a sensible approach could be made for trying that but this is not a sensible approach. I believe ‘daft’ would be a good descriptor of the present method.
With people like BAP, the fact that they're trolls doesn't mean that they're not serious. Trolling is a legitimate method of Straussian communication if you're trying to say anything outside the Overton arrowslit.
Do an esoteric reading of The Republic, suss out its hidden meaning and then communicate your thoughts by being an obnoxious asshole?
I attended a less prestigious Midwest university than the University of Chicago but I don’t think the final step there (being an obnoxious asshole) can be called Straussian.
I tend to roll my eyes at wokeness and cries of racism online and so on, but recently, a friend of mine shared some stories illustrating how racism is still a real thing.
1. My friend is white but his wife has visible Puerto Rican ancestry. Recently, they tried to rent an apartment and everything went fine until they met in person, at which point the landlord starting demanding birth certificates, social security numbers and all sorts of stuff. Ironically, the white guy is an immigrant while the Puerto Rican woman is a native-born American citizen. And this wasn't some mom-and-pop landlord that you might expect to play fast and loose with the law either, this was the largest property management company in the state. He made a complaint to the government which didn't go anywhere, and they couldn't find any lawyers to pursue the case further (apparently there are lawyers who represent low-income tenants, but not *high*-income tenants, even if you're willing to pay.)
2. He also said that he has a very Mexican-looking friend who has been stopped by the police at night 11 times with no tickets issued. The police just claim that not many people drive at night in the area and they want to check on who it is and so on. Meanwhile, the white guy has driven a lot at night in the same area and never gotten stopped even once.
I'm sure people will justify this with base rates and so on, but the point here is that regardless of whether it is "justified" or not, people have very different experiences of the world based on their physical appearance. And thanks to bubbles, you often won't hear about this.
I'd be really skeptical of over-indexing on anecdotes.
There could be plausible third explanations as to why they were required additional documentation. Maybe this is something all landlords require in that area for people who aren't US citizens (in New York it's really difficult to rent an apartment as an immigrant for example).
Maybe one friend consistently drives 5-10 miles over the speed limit, while your white friend consistently drives at or under the speed limit, giving cause to stop one and not the other (How could the police even see the race of someone driving at night before the stop?). Maybe one has a beat-up looking car, and the other a well taken care of new car, which would be a form of discrimination by the police, but not necessarily having to do with their race (also, anecdotal secondhand stories are not especially useful).
People definitely discount stories of mild racism, and over index on their own experience, but "a bad thing happened to someone I know that is a minority" is going to always be true, whether or not racism is prevalent. When a white person encounters the same problem, they're far less likely to ascribe the hypothetical motivation to racism, so out of the infinite pool of rudeness and annoying strangers, you'd naturally expect minorities to ascribe the cause of these things to racism.
While over-indexing on anecdotes is definitely a problem, there are at least two individuals who saw the top-level comment saying "I heard an anecdote that lived racist experience still happens" and responded here with some variation of "yes, and that's a good thing, I genuinely support housing discrimination on the basis of race."
On one level, yeah, ACX readers willing to wade into the comments on a racial topic is a non-representative sample. But I find it hard to look at that and *not* update towards more unseen racism than I previously believed.
There’s sufficient readership of ACX that overlaps with the HBD people that I’m not surprised many of them comment here.
I don’t think anyone claims racism doesn’t exist (there are many popular Substacks where this is basically their brand), but if it’s a prevalent problem or not. A few anecdotes, that honestly don’t even make sense if you think about them (How could the police be racial profiling at night? Like, obviously this can’t be racial profiling), shouldn’t sway opinion much.
Right, I guess a ~10% base rate of unapologetic racists in this thread (guesstimate of 20 unique commenters is probably off but I don't feel like counting) just makes me think it's a more prevalent problem than I realized.
Even if ACX-race-commenters are an average 10x more racist than a randomly sampled subset of the population, that means a ~1/100 base rate for open/"out" racists? And then presumably a few times as many people hold racist beliefs but recognize that outright saying that they are racist is socially unacceptable. And then, people do interact with quite a few strangers in their day-to-day... Suddenly fairly common racism seems pretty probable.
(Incidentally, what is HBD?)
On the value of anecdote, I think the original commenter was less saying that "these particular cases prove racism is real" and more that these anecdotes opened their eyes to the fact that these cases are probably more common than most people think. Are all of them "true" racisms? Probably not. But if the base rate for true racism is n%, then finding out that there are actually quite a lot more questionable incidents than you were aware of is important for deciding if this is a real problem: n% of a doubly large number is a bigger problem.
I do think it is possible, though definitely harder, to profile at night-- see the other commenter mentioning the possibility of a cop that runs the plates of every car that passes by on a dark empty night and gets shown license photos, for example.
HBD is short for human biodiversity, which is basically novo-scientific racism (captured well in Scott’s post about IQ differences from a few months ago). Whether or not it’s true, there’s a subculture in rationalist spheres who hyper-focus on it, usually without explicitly stating the implications, but heavily implying some pretty racist things. I’d say it’s pretty heavily concentrated around this blog, as far as rationalist spheres go.
I still think it doesn’t make sense. Why would police pull over someone who has been pulled over with no tickets issued a dozen times before? If you’re racial profiling, that’s presumably because you think Mexican looking people commit more crimes or whatever, but it wouldn’t make sense to ignore the way more useful signal of “There’s a dozen stops listed on this license plates with nothing coming from it.” Because racial profiling, while racist, does work when the minority you’re profiling is, in the statistics, more likely to commit a crime, but presumably they’re not just making extra work for themselves for fun.
I imagine it is probably extremely boring to be a traffic cop on a seldom travelled road at night. I absolutely wouldn't be surprised if there are pressures both in favor of pulling someone over for little to no reason (gives you something to do, makes you feel powerful, if you have some sort of metric based goal for arrests gives you some possibility of making progress) and against (is more work) and that race could be enough to put someone over the line.
Also, I doubt that most of these cases really are racial profiling in the statistical sense and instead think a lot of them are racist in the boring "I think he did something wrong because I don't like Mexicans" sense. Rationality is not necessarily the driving force behind racial profiling even if that's how it's justified post-hoc, and they may just not understand the useful signals the way you do.
Not to say that a third explanation isn't possible in this case either. Just that I don't believe racial profiling is inherently nonsensical here.
I'm a white person with long hair and a beard. I typically tie up my hair now, but from age 15-25 I had it down everyday. Every time I left the house, (my country is very walkable) someone would shout "JESUS!" at me. This happened almost everyday, often more than once.
Most people simply would not believe me when I told them this. It was always assumed I was exaggerating for effect or being overly sensitive. But of course they wouldn't experience this because they rarely spent anytime on the street in the company of a long haired bearded person. They ofc never lived their live as a long haired bearded person. On one occasion I invited a doubtful friend for a walk with me. Someone in a car shouted it at me within about 15 minutes.
We tend to over-index our own experiences and under-index those of others. I also look somewhat racially ambiguous for a white person and I have received a lot misdirected racism.
From these experiences I tend to trust the idea that people from minorities experience very frequent slights that go unnoticed by the majority of white people.
I think this is counterbalanced by the fact that low-status groups export a lot of unpleasant externalities to their communities. This not only includes things like violent crime and petty theft, but irritants like loud music and anti-social behavior. Interracial unpleasantness runs in both directions and in my view it's an isolated demand for rigor to draw a circle around only one-half of that exchange and label it unacceptable. These things exist in dynamic equilibrium with each other. I suspect that if it were possible to quantify the total social harms imposed by all groups on each other then the balance would be roughly even.
Sure, if we're going to call it racism every time something bad happens, for unknown reasons, to a non-white person then I'm sure we'll never get rid of racism.
Would you be able to distinguish between a puerto rican, a nicaraguan, a panamenian? What does "visible puerton rican ancestry mean"?
> Ironically, the white guy is an immigrant while the Puerto Rican woman is a native-born American citizen
The issue is not citizenship.
> he has a very Mexican-looking
What does "mexican looking" mean? All the mexicans I know (twelve, I worked with their company) are fair, blonde and light eyed.
> people have very different experiences of the world based on their physical appearance
Of course. The perception of people varies. Ugly people are treated much worse and beautiful people. Like one of the other commenters stated, perhaps they should try to change or completely separate themselves from their peers?
The governor and federal reps in Idaho all campaigned on anti woke and illegal immigration. Idaho is 5% immigrant of any kind, legal or not. It is 82% white, and another 8% mixed. A large % of people in Idaho have likely never interacted with a non white person, ever.
They are probably not the people to trust about whether or not there's still racism in the US. I think it says a lot about the power of narrative over lived reality -- how much the virtual is now the real -- that the representatives knew anti woke and anti illegal immigration were worth campaigning on anyway.
How do the cops know he looks Mexican if it's at night? Didn't Scott once mention using nighttime stops as a control, on the supposition that it's harder to discriminate against people you can't see?
Yes, physical appearance is a brand. Treating brands according to how they've performed in the past is both individually rational and socially optimal. If you don't like the reputation your brand has then either convince the brand to change its fundamental quality or take steps to aggressively distance yourself from that brand via things like fashion choices. Treating members of low-performing brands with suspicion is a powerful signal that a rational brand would use to improve its perception. If they can't or won't do that then they deserve what they get.
Did Honda outcompete Ford by telling people that they were anti-Japanese racists for preferring Fords, even though there probably *were* people who refused to buy "cheap <insert Japanese slur> crap"? No, they just built a better car. People are basically rational. They treat you according to your value and they're usually accurate.
>people have very different experiences of the world based on their physical appearance
That's because physical appearance has nonzero predictive power. What do you want people to do, ignore what they know to be obviously true? Yes, this is unfortunate for high-quality members of low-quality groups. That's not the fault of society, it's the fault of the groups. If you want to blame anyone, blame them for being low quality. Don't blame society for being minimally competent in their pursuit of rational self-interest.
How do you feel about that applied to men, whose brand is significantly more attached to "violent" and "sexual predator" than women?
Are you saying that man who says "you shouldn't judge me on the basis of that brand" is incorrect, and should instead distance themselves from that brand via something like fashion choices? How?
No serious person would criticize you for crossing the street when approached by a strange man even though you wouldn't do that if you were being approached by a strange woman.
I feel fine about it. I have no problem whatsoever with social norms which presume that men pose the greater physical risk. I *want* the cops to preferentially pat down men because that keeps me safer in the long run. I *want* the prisons to be filled with men and not women. I have no problems distinguishing myself from the criminal class: I don't have piercings, tattoos, a weird haircut, or clothes with antisocial logos on them. It's very easy to look trustworthy if you want to.
I completely get your point, and agree much, but there might be a little mistake in it.
> Treating members of low-performing brands with suspicion is a powerful signal that a rational brand would use to improve its perception. If they can't or won't do that then they deserve what they get.
The "brand" can't do anything the way an individual of it can do something. For the brand to do something its members have to do something.
And this is where I see the mistake: no individual of the "brand" short of, I don't know, its CEO, can change the brand alone.
So if you're a super decent person of that brand, and do everything you can to change it (you can't leave it, cause you're not rich enough to change your skin like Michael Jackson), then you still get harassed, for rational reasons by members of other brands, and you do NOT deserve this.
This sucks and I emphasize. I don't say "You deserve it" to such an individual.
Neither would I. They don't deserve it and I have genuine sympathy for those people. That being said, I don't think it's that difficult to clearly signal allegiance to mainstream culture with appearance and behavioral choices. I'm confident that if I was black I wouldn't have much difficulty avoiding 95% of racism. Yes the last 5% would be occasionally annoying but I would understand the social function that it played. The fact that Henry Louis Gates threw such a hissy fit over such a benign instance of police profiling indicates that he personally experiences essentially zero genuine bigotry in his life. I suspect that's actually typical for people who do the obvious social things.
"I'm confident that if I was black" is doing so much heavy lifting that if God ever did create a rock he couldn't lift, he'd outsource it to this claim.
> or take steps to aggressively distance yourself from that brand via things like fashion choices
...this very comments section teaches us over and over again that wearing clothes people think inappropriate for your appearance makes everything worse, not better.
One problem is the racism isn't rational either if it won't help your average landlord tell a Puerto Rican from a Salvadoran, or someone from Sierra Leone vs someone from New Orleans. These are not the same populations, and I don't know how you think people from these disparate backgrounds have any power to tell the rest of the brown or black people to behave differently.
I don't understand what you mean. In the US it doesn't matter a whole lot to non-Indians what caste you are (except to other Indian expats), they're lumped in with everyone brown.
I dont understand any collectivist, but I know I've talked to people who have whole theories about about the movement of the races, when india was aryan and how that interacts with their castes.
How white are Italians really? What the the 12(?) black races?
Given I dont care, I also couldn't imagine having a single piece of evidence so you'd just be making an argument for me to learn what they say "trust the experts". That may be ineffective for what you want.
As usual, I still don't understand what you mean or how you think it's relevant to what I'm saying. What do you mean by "collectivist" in this context, and why did you use that word? Evidence for what? What do you think I want? If you don't care, why are you commenting?
Yes this attitude gives cover to genuine old-school racists. I think those people are less common than you think. I also think there is less socially relevant distinction between those groups than you might think. If there was then they would do well to clearly signal that distinction to wider society. In any case, I'm highly confident that the social cost of ignoring true racism is dwarfed by the social cost of ignoring the predictive visual signals of class, particularly in an adversarial equilibrium where low-value cohorts know that their counterparties are legally prevented from using them. It's very bad to create a social equilibrium where people feel free to act without accountability.
"It's very bad to create a social equilibrium where people feel free to act without accountability."
Yes! Black culture after the civil rights act went from jazz to gangster rap. Any coincidence? No. Access to white people went from a thing they had to earn to a thing they were entitled to. "Sale Of BET To White Supremacist Group Results In No Changes To Programming." - The Onion. Positive rights - things others owe you - make brats.
Heh, well put. Yeah I actually have a theory that the perverse social incentives instituted by the post-60's Left are analogous to anti-adaptive sexual selection dynamics (Fisherian runaway). Minorities have a strong incentive to develop robust antisocial signals which the Left evolved a preference for because they can use it to win elections. Taken to an extreme you wind up with things like the Irish Elk, which went extinct because its antlers got too large for its neck to support. What's interesting is one of the conditions for Fisherian runaway is a positive covariance between the trait and preference for the trait. The cultural equivalent of that is when you start getting leaders who are drawn from the cohort of people helped by anti-adaptive preferences.
Being white from the south, which is what I am, is a low-status version of being white, and when I came up north to go to college I changed my first name from an ooey-gooey southern one to a crisp androgynous one, and trained myself out of my southern accent. Also changed how I dressed. It was a good move, I guess, but hurt my parents' feelings quite a lot.
Exactly my point, thank you! Most minorities could easily signal that the common stereotypes don't apply to them if they chose to. Most of that amounts to simply understanding mainstream culture well enough to fit seamlessly into it. If you're unable or unwilling to do that then why *shouldn't* an average mainstreamer be skeptical of you?
Oh *I'm* a genuine racist. My point is that most other people aren't. You shouldn't judge all of them based on a few bad apples like me, that's bigoted.
a lot of people just aren't honest with themselves that they feel powerless and afraid and try to reestablish control blaming others. The actual impact of other races is usually not impacting them individually as much as them seeing a "scary world" through media and echo chambers.
Funny how you people always say the same things. "Afraid", "powerless", "insecure". It has nothing to do with that.
> try to reestablish control blaming others
Who is to blame for murders other than the murderers?
> The actual impact of other races is usually not impacting them individually as much as them seeing a "scary world" through media and echo chambers.
You sound naive to be honest. Just because you were lucky to not experience any issues doesn't nullify the experience of others. Sounds like you live in a safe place, good for you :)
I do think he has 1/2 of a point. There are a lot of basement-dwelling losers out there. But they aren't the people anti-discrimination law restrains. After all - the basement dweller has no land to rent, no jobs to offer, etc. Likewise, if one's racism is based on an inaccurate media-driven view of a group he never sees, he has no ability to discriminate against that group.
The actual purpose of anti-discrimination law is to empower judges and bureaucrats to tell businessmen they know better how to run their businesses - with no skin in the game or accountability if they're wrong.
any con man worth his salt knows how to dress nice and and ape class markers to gull people like you, who believe in "data." They rely on you being stupid enough to believe stereotypes over evaluating people or events as individuals because of laziness.
shortcutting thinking to narratives or data rather than actually getting to know or understand people is dumb. A lot of those positive stereotypes hide vicious people inside.
What if there were a robotic encyclopedia with perfect knowledge about your favorite, I don't know, video game, and asking it any question would make you correct ALL of the time, but every time you asked it a question it drone-striked a random person in real life?
Morality and truth are not the same thing.
In a less fanciful example, what if by bearing false witness against another you could be made financially better off?
Morality and self-interest can be diametrically opposed.
It doesn't matter how reliably "correct" racism is. It doesn't matter how rationally self-interested you are in employing it.
Racism violates the harm principle, by harming the individual who you are racist against.
It violates the categorical imperative and fails to treat people as ends in themselves.
It is ignoble and non-virtuous.
It has a proven track record of leading to low utility, suboptimal societies with an oppressed underclass.
It is across all reasonable moral frameworks morally wrong. It is permissible under unreasonable moral frameworks like egoism, but if that's where you're coming from, I think we share too little overlap in first principles for this to be a fruitful conversation.
> In a less fanciful example, what if by bearing false witness against another you could be made financially better off?
Lying and wanting to be apart from people whose culture or behaviour are incompatible with yours are very different?
> Racism violates the harm principle, by harming the individual who you are racist against.
But there typically isn't any harm? Besides, what principle is this? Why is this harm principle you speak of more valuable than say, christian morality, or muslim morality, or japanese cultural norms?
> It violates the categorical imperative and fails to treat people as ends in themselves.
Absolutes typically don't hold true in the real world. Different people have difference philosophies, and many of them disagree with the categorical imperative.
> It is ignoble and non-virtuous.
Depends on the virtue system that you enshrine, I suppose.
> It has a proven track record of leading to low utility, suboptimal societies with an oppressed underclass.
Unlike the proven track record leading to high utlity, optimal societies with equal and free peoples of multiculturalism :D
> It is across all reasonable moral frameworks morally wrong
Christianity would disagree, and I consider it to be the most reasonable of moral frameworks.
> but if that's where you're coming from
I hate the sin not the sinner. That doesn't mean I'm not aware of the tendency certain sinners have towards certain sins. If you treat every single person the same then you're a fool, not morally enlightened.
> I think we share too little overlap in first principles for this to be a fruitful conversation.
the idea that your own culture is unified is silly to me. if you are white, white people aren't a monolithic block that accept you or share the same values.
like the usa is peaceful but we are really different across the states, and some places other white people will barely tolerate you because you didnt grow up there or dont share the exact same values.
> Christianity would disagree, and I consider it to be the most reasonable of moral frameworks.
One of the most famous parables Jesus told was "the Good Samaritan", about how assumptions about the relative goodness-badness of ingroups and outgroups is wrong.
Jesus himself, being a middle eastern Jewish man, would be caught in many people's blanket assumptions based on his race.
That's fine because none of this involves racism. People making rational predictions based on appearance isn't racist any more than it's sexist to prefer to have the babysitter for your children be a woman (on the theory that men are far more likely to be abusers or pedophiles).
Just like truth is an absolute defense against libel, I believe that rational self-interest is an absolute defense against charges of racism.
>Something can be "minimally competent in their pursuit of rational self-interest" and also morally abhorrent.
Agreed. Fortunately being able to rent your property to whomever you choose is not abhorrent, unless you find personal liberty abhorrent.
you arent judging by appearances but by a narrative established by people that would easily turn on you for being a woman, being catholic, being polish, or living in the wrong state or zipcode.
plus a lot of you barely interact with them, its all data and pundits and youtube videos of rare things as if white people trashing things after a college football game doesnt happen either.
Ok. My argument is that those narratives are generally accurate. But like all things, making judgements requires good judgement. You have to be smart and honest with yourself.
I'll also point out that accusations of discrimination follow a similar pattern of following a "narrative established by people that would easily turn on you".
i tend to view people as dangerous en masse, rather than play favorites with groups. for discrimination people of all types do it, so its important to take it seriously rather than assume the mass is right over the individual.
if you ever have been bullied for being different you dont take the mass as right by default, but you also need to not condemn them overmuch
> People making rational predictions based on appearance isn't racist
I mean, the dictionary definition of racist is "someone that judges others based on their race". By that definition, yes, that is racist. Why is everyone so upset at being called racist even on anonymous forums, anyways? It's up to you to decide whether racism is justified or not.
I don't think semantic arguments are useful in discussions like this but fine. If you want to split hairs I never said anything about judging based on race, I said judging based on appearance. That's because appearance is a reliable indicator of class and class is a reliable indicator of behavior. Yes race is part of that but it's not all of it. I'm guessing that if the Puerto Rican woman above was wearing an expensive well-tailored outfit with high-class accessories and had a sophisticated use of English then the landlord in question would've been much less interested in her passport.
Do you think it's sexist to prefer to not have a male babysit your 8 year old daughter?
Public and university libraries had phone books for other cities, most had major US cities, eg New York, Chicago &c, and smaller cities in the local region. I used these on several occasions.
There was also directory assistance; you could talk to a human being that actually had the phone book or equivalent, and they were usually willing to look up names similar to one you wanted and give you numbers and addresses.
Around 1984 I lived in a small town that had a reverse lookup section in the white pages -- If you had a number, you could look up who it belonged to.
Yes, that was a mistake. I wrote a comment, signed in with much hassle (computer new to substack), was happy to see my comment was still there, but it was not in the intended place in the hierarchy. Thanks for your concern.
Here's an interesting order-of-magnitude calculation. According to my Google search, it took about 10^24 FLOPs to train ChatGPT. According to this: https://aiimpacts.org/brain-performance-in-flops the human brain operates at about 10^16 FLOP/s. There are 10^7 seconds in a year, so that's 10^23 FLOPs for a human per year. If ChatGPT is at about the level of a grad student then that represents ~20 years of human learning, which is 2 x 10^24 FLOPs, which sorta checks out. Thoughts?
The human brain obviously does not spend nearly as much compute on learning as LLMs. A human graduate student who is reading a textbook is clearly using some of their brain capacity to learn new skills, but a ton of FLOPs are wasted on other things. I mean, even to translate sensory inputs into text tokens is taking serious work. Then you have other irrelevant sensory inputs which have their dedicated circuitry, possibly hardwired stuff which worries about predators or social relationships or sex or food or whatever else was relevant in the ancestral environment. Most students are not reading textbooks 24x7, but wasting most of their time eating, sleeping, filing paperwork or going hiking.
Compared to LLMs, it seems quite unfair that humans get away with so little effort. Your typical grad student, unlike an LLM, will not even bother to read every textbook there is on the matter plus any which might be vaguely related.
> The computing power needed to replicate the human brain’s relevant activities has been estimated by various authors, with answers ranging from 10^12 to 10^28 FLOPS.
Never mind being able to make meaningful comparisons, there isn't even anything like a meaningful value to compare with. With our current understanding of what the brain does and how it does it, I really don't see that there's much more to say.
How is the latest version of GPT at a grad student level? I don't think you can compare. It is obviously superhuman in some ways but also below mental retardation in others.
ChatGPT is the app by the way, not the model itself ... it might be pedantic but it makes a difference because the app brings a lot more to the table including probably other models and tools but those do not count in the training FLOPs even though they improve the model's performance in many areas drastically.
I'm also skeptical of calling ChatGPT o3 "grad student level". I would really expect it to get all seven of my tiny benchmark-ette questions right at that level, and the current (4/16/2025) results are https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-377/comment/109495090 3 correct, 3 partially correct, 1 wrong.
You might be overestimating grad students? Some are brilliant, some are idiots, and most are kinda meh. The claim was `average grad student,' not `best in class' (but not `worst in class' either).
I haven't seen your seven tiny benchmark-ette questions, but sight unseen I am confident that there exist grad students (even in the relevant field) who would get all seven wrong. [Mostly students who are going to fail out of their program, but still...]. No matter how low you set the bar there will be those who fail to clear it.
>I haven't seen your seven tiny benchmark-ette questions
Just to be explicit, they are:
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
b) Q: I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
c) Q: Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
e) Q: Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
g) Q: What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
I realize that these are a very mixed bag. I just sort-of accumulated them as I played with LLMs, and decided that if I was going to tell other people the results, I really should at least keep them consistent. So I froze them as they stand, with some have attempts at crafting the prompts (e.g. (c) with the "Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry") and others don't.
FWIW, I actually started with (f), the inorganic gases one, when I had, at the time, greatly excessive expectations for what an LLM could do back then. Today, Gemini 2.5 gets this essentially correct, including overriding my incorrect "roughly 50". Roughly a year ago, the answers to that question included liquids and solids and organic compounds, getting all of the criteria wrong. And the dialog with it was maddening, trying to get it to e.g. exclude the organics without it doing things like inexplicably dropping the noble gases.
Interesting. So far I've been disappointed by the results so I tested o4-mini again, and was impressed in some ways and disappointed in other familiar ways. It can do things even relatively strong (but not genius maybe) high school students and undergrads would struggle with, but unfortunately hallucination is a really big issue, in my opinion, I would
prefer a model that says "I don't know how to do this" rather than give a confident wrong answer, or even better if it'd tell me how sure he is of his answer.
Formal proof verifiers like Lean give some pretty strong certificates of correctness, but unfortunately that only works for math, it can only tell you whether your solution is 100% correct (instead of say 80% certainty), it needs you to translate a natural language statement into lean which Lean itself can of course not check if it was done correctly, and the distance between what they can do and what they can verify in lean seems to be a bit too large at the moment.
Example of something it did correctly:
1.prove that \sigma_{k\leq n}k choose{n}{k}=n2^{n-1}. (It gave two correct proofs)
2. Generalize the purely combinatoric proof to produce more identities (it did this correctly too)
This might be less impressive if it's just repeating something he found in a textbook, I tested with some more obscure looking (and some harder) problems with more mixed results (sometimes right formula, wrong proof, sometimes wrong formula corrected into a correct proof after being given the right formula). These tests are very informal of course.
>I would prefer a model that says "I don't know how to do this" rather than give a confident wrong answer, or even better if it'd tell me how sure he is of his answer.
Very much agreed. I'm just playing with LLMs at this point, so I don't _need_ to trust them to not hallucinate.
When I don't know the answer, and at least sort-of really want it, I currently ask both ChatGPT o3 and Claude Sonnet 3.7 and sort-of trust them when they agree - but not entirely. In fact, I know that e.g. on question (e), the titration question, both falsely claim in their initial answers that there is an infinite slope at the equivalence point (IIRC, _all_ the LLMs give this, or a numerical answer with the same pathology, as an initial answer currently).
>You might be overestimating grad students? Some are brilliant, some are idiots, and most are kinda meh. The claim was `average grad student,' not `best in class' (but not `worst in class' either).
Ok, that is reasonable.
BTW, about o3 vs o4-mini-high, I ran the tests on o4-mini-high, and it looks comparable to o3. One of the fully correct questions for o3 (4 carbon hydrocarbons) degrades to 1/4 correct for o4-mini-high, but the badly wrong question for o3 (molecule with S4 only) improves to partially correct.
Am a physics professor. My professional assessment would be that at (theoretical) physics research, ChatGPT is indeed at the level of a decent early stage graduate student. 4o is probably a first year who is competent, but not a genius. o4-mini is at least a second year, maybe even a third year.
Late in the third year is around when I'd expect a PhD student to start coming up with some original ideas*. If the next iteration of ChatGPT starts doing that, it'll be time to get really worried.
*I'm defining `original ideas' as coming up with interesting questions of their own, along with a plausible line of attack on them. Any idiot can generate cool questions with no idea how to go about solving them.
Interesting! I've tried o3, but not o4-mini (I assume I should try o4-mini-high?). OpenAI's naming convention often makes it unclear which model is expected to give the best answers...
One task where it's already superhuman - literature search. A thirty minute query to DeepResearch (plus thirty minutes checking its references) will give me a better picture of the research landscape in a field with which I'm not thoroughly familiar than days of poking around by myself on Google Scholar.
Even in fields that I *do* know well I end up using DeepResearch just to check if there was something relevant that I had missed. It invariably finds everything that I thought it should find, and sometimes identifies relevant stuff that had slipped me by.
Many Thanks! I'm ambivalent about DeepResearch. Yes, I've found things with it. But at one point I was doing a curiosity search looking for compounds where both the critical point and solid-liquid-gas triple point were known, and it only came up with a bit over a dozen of them - and I made some guesses about additional ones, and was indeed able to find examples that it had missed.
Except all the hallucinated results that you have to check by hand, and have to know enough how to check.
The hallucinations alone make it exceedingly suspect as a research aid. A grad student who just flat made up that number of cites would be kicked out after their first paper draft for academic misconduct. Heck, a high school student would get in serious trouble for that. And the fact that the LLM does it with the utter confidence of a true moron makes it even more dangerous to trust.
Eh, I don't think o4-mini's error rate is particularly higher than that of an early stage graduate student. You need to check both. It makes different kinds of errors, but the kinds of errors it makes are in many ways easier to check.
And for literature search, actually finding relevant articles is the time consuming part. Checking that the articles actually exist takes 5 seconds. Checking that they say what o4-mini says they say takes another 2 minutes. Using o4-mini (and checking its results) has cut my literature search time by probably 100x. Granted that's just one discrete task, but it's one discrete task where it is damn useful.
(Other discrete, non-professional tasks where I find it damn useful are being a travel agent and translation. In both cases, o4 + manual check is vastly better/faster than fully manual).
This could be wrong, but my personal view is that that won't happen for quite a while. LLMs have mastered language. That's powerful but I think it's a relatively thin layer on top of human cognition. In order to become truly creative AI needs to have an explicit world model and I don't think you can get there purely linguistically. Not efficiently enough to be useful, anyway. My guess is we're near the peak of where current architectures can take us and it will take another fundamental advance to make the next step. Not that I'm an expert, just my two cents.
Terence Tao described the o1 model as being at the level of an average math grad student. A friend of mine objected to this calculation with "GPT is more like a million grad students" but my response was that it's more like one grad student with really quick access to wikipedia. I'm not totally sure how much of a distinction without a difference that represents, but there is definitely a sense in which GPT doesn't really understand the things that it's parroting. Sometimes I think of it as a linguistic front end to a comprehensive database of knowledge.
And sure, this is all hand-wavey. I just find it interesting that it seems to line up at an OOM level. Certainly the distinction between app and model doesn't matter at that level of detail.
the o1 model (and the other GPT variants which are currently in production too) fails at junior-level software engineering tasks (not always of course, I use it as a quick search tool and it is quite convenient but it fails at anything beyond boilerplate and stuff you could read from documentation ... claude is a bit better at this actually, but not that much). It often fails to understand more complex instructions properly unless they are broken down into multiple simple steps (and sometimes even then). It is definitely not at a level of an average maths grad student.
I haven't tried to have it do any proofs but I have serious doubts it would be able to do that (but free to prove me wrong) unless the proof is just a variant of a common technique that it's seen many times in its training data. I think that many maths undergrads will be able to do better.
It doesn't even do boilerplate right. It can't do type-checking (so often just substitutes the wrong objects blindly), can't check if the functions *even exist*, so as soon as you get outside slopping together very well-documented libraries with lots of examples, as soon as you have any real custom code in there and you just want, say, a unit test for it...it fails miserably. Like "doesn't even compile, even in relatively forgiving languages" miserably.
yeah sure, o3 and o4 make mistakes and you have to check their work. But so do grad students. And its still incapable of original thought. But so are most early stage grad students.
Decent (but not genius) early stage grad student seems pretty accurate to me. Give it a well defined `standard' task and it can execute it with reasonable accuracy. A little bit faster than a grad student (maybe 10x - 100x faster, depending on the task, not a million x faster), but also with greater frequency of hallucinations and a little bit less initiative.
Oh I disagree. It's way better than a junior engineer. Yes you have to use it appropriately but it makes me easily 5-10x more productive. The average grad student can't do that.
Just the other day I asked it a statistics question and it answered in 5 seconds with 2 graphs that it generated by writing a python script. Come on, that's impressive.
In my field it routinely gives answers I'd expect from an intern. That is, someone with general knowledge but no experience in the field. I haven't seen any AI model do work at the level I would expect from any engineer with a year or two of experience.
Arguing whether an LLM is more or less powerful than a junior engineer feels like arguing whether a hammer is more powerful than a saw (or whether a prongler is more powerful than a blob-with-handle, for all the cow tools afficionados out there).
They're different tools with different use cases and need to be applied differently. They can probably do each others' jobs in some cases but they'll do it badly.
I'm going to take this opportunity to reiterate my idea that comparing human and AI intelligence is a silly comparison and hence that ideas like "superhuman AI" are flawed. We're going to keep making dumb comparisons until humans and AIs have diverged so far that we realise they're not directly comparable.
Agreed, though I will point out that hiring for entry-level software positions has disappeared roughly in lockstep with the rise in LLM capabilities. The only hiring manager I personally still know told me that he now has no interest in hiring entry-level people and it's purely because of ChatGPT.
5-10 times, really? I think it maybe makes me 50% more productive at best. I wonder what you work on that it helps you this much. It is good for prototyping, and stackexchange-like queries, it is just faster than reading documentation for a lot of basic stuf. But it is not good at generating production-level code and definitely not good at any complex architecture (though that is arguable outside the junior range). If you turned it into an agent and gave it free reign it will be able to produce some cookiecutter projects fairly well but it will have a lot of bugs and inefficiencies. And it will fail at anything more complex. Basically that's what vibe coding is all about.
A maths grad student would be able to do better than that after a few months of working on coding. And even someone less intelligent than an average maths grad student would.
doing a basic statistical analysis is not that hard, the model is mostly following "recipes" but it can easily fail when it encounters things that would be obvious even to a kid in primary school - checkout this watch "gorilla in the data" video on that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzymTOc_D3U
You also have non-LLM tools that can do basic stats on a dataset, like ydata profiling. I bet that the LLM models can do a bit more but it really is not maths graduate level students.
Maths grads students are supposed to propose new theorems and prove them. That is much harder than doing statistics.
I guess it really is different. In some ways, like with the gorilla example, it is obviously completely oblivious and "stupid". In others it can match humans or even exceed them (though mostly in speed and having a good "memory", i.e. "knowing" a lot of stuff). But a human grad student, even a human 10 year old simply can understand things more fully and understand a lot more context and so won't make the stupid mistakes like with the gorilla. Also, while there are exceptions, people usually do not "hallucinate" answers :)
I'm amazed you get even a 50% improvement. For me, it's probably still sub 5%.
Probably some people's standards are lower - I can see that even firsthand, with a coworker touting as a success story a bunch of AI-generated docs they added to their code which IMO are worthless.
It doesn't help that there's a certain level of reliability and speed required before it even provides a speedup at all, since if the AI is slower than what you could do yourself or fails to do the correct thing, attempting to use AI for a task is actually negative value.
Today, I was working in an unfamiliar codebase in a language I'd never used before, which should be the best possible use case for coding AI. At one point, I tried using AI to make a change, but it did the wrong thing (which I only noticed after testing) and I had to do it all by hand anyway. But even if the AI *had* worked in that case, it still would have been like a 1% speedup, since most of the time spent is in research and testing to understand the problem and figure out what needs to be changed.
It's because I fucking hate reading documentation. It always takes me forever to figure out how to get the data I need from whatever tech-debt-ridden and under-documented API I have. "Hey gpt, write a function that makes <shitlib> do <thing I want>" saves me hours.
And honestly I'm retired now so I don't write production code (I have a friend who does and he agrees with the 5-10x speedup). I just make cool little hobby projects that I'm interested in. Most of those involve tool chains that I've never used, so if I couldn't just tell GPT to do it I'd never get it done. I hate hate HATE learning new tool chains. I actually kind of hate software generally, I just like the things that I can build with it. Using GPT makes me feel like a hyper-productive PM instead of a stuck-in-the-weeds engineer. I can focus 100% on what I want to build instead of how to build it, which I've always hated.
(I don't grok the objections to this. Is there anyone who's fine with having a gay candidate but objects to that fact that he posted pictures of naked men to his social media account? It's not "revenge porn" or anything. I haven't seen anyone say it was in a place where kids would randomly see it, it was on Tumblr.)
He seems to be claiming it wasn't his account, but it's a bad look for a public official (or indeed anyone in the public eye). You're supposed to keep these things private, not post them on Tumblr.
Porn does get posted on Tumblr, but those kinds of images are (1) people showing off their kinks (2) sex workers looking for customers. Keep the dick pics for Grindr!
Boomercons are driven by shame, fox news thinks they still matter but like newspapers.... No.
Give it a few years, trumps shamelessness will be seen as the next era and not 1 guys personally. The people claiming hairy potter and dnd cause demon possession will lose power.
It's extremely easy to see why people *in general* would get offended by their representative posting porn on their profiles (even if there might be no rational reason for doing so). A politician, whose entire career is built on public trust and support, posting porn, shows a severe lack of judgement and probably deserves the backlash.
But I guess Republicans have come a long way when the issue with their candidate is that he posts porn online, not that he's gay.
That is very contingent on illegible cultural norms, though. Other cultures might get annoyed when you can see a few square centimeters of facial skin of the candidate, or consider someone who does not even post nudes of themselves some kind of weird prude.
I don't think "Public officials shouldn't post porn" is an illegible cultural norm. It's sort of a public officials job to be plugged into illegible cultural norms as well, as the average person can post porn all they like without anyone finding out.
There's this scene in House of Cards where an aspirational congressman, Peter Russo, has to go through a serious background check before the more established senator will support him. He tells him to "Tell him everything" as even the smallest stain on his record will be found by the opposing party, and brought to light in an election. Russo had a DUI, which they managed to turn around, portraying him as a "reformed" alcoholic, but they didn't try to hide it.
There's nothing that says we should socially ostracize people who had a DUI years ago, and for 99% of the population, this doesn't matter. I'd say posting porn is about the same. We don't vilify or ostracize people who post porn (we basically consider that a private matter and don't talk about it), but in a politician, it is quite legibly a "skeleton in the closet" that should have been cleansed before he entered politics. Even if it's illegible to the average rationalist, I'm sure this sort of thing is completely legible to the average politician or political aide.
It's worse than a crime -- it's a mistake. Posting porn is all downside and no upside. I don't want the candidate for my party to lack the theory of mind to do this.
It looks like he denies having it. If he's telling the truth, then there's no issue at all. If he's lying, then he's compounding the stupidity by lying.
The same could have been said about being openly trans, or getting caught having gay sex, or sex outside marriage (as a woman), or being an atheist, or being an early Christian.
You can certainly pick a candidate who is savvy enough to not get caught in any controversies, but this will likely require other trade-offs. Also, there is something to be said for shifting overton windows over time (the lions required would be an animal welfare issue, for one thing), and selecting for conformity will counter this.
Because pornography is evil. At least, it is for a great many Republicans.
Among all U.S. adults, 46% think pornography is a bad thing, 38% think it's neither good or bad, and only 10% think it's a good thing. Meanwhile, 67% of practicing Christians think porn is bad, 22% think its neutral, and 10% think it's good. Christians (particularly evangelicals) make up a huge part of the Republican base. So to have a Republican official not only use pornography but publicly post pornography is a bad look. Sure, 54% of practicing Christians admit to using pornography, but they're not parading it around like it's a good thing.
For many people nudity is jarring and objectionable. Sort of a TMI reaction, I think. "I don't *want* to know whether you are circumcised or not."
Also, lots of people are grossed out by kinds of sex that they're not into, so straight people, esp. straight males, do not like to see a hot male nude posted by a male -- they are getting a glimpse of some gay guy's fantasy life, and are creeped out by paying that terrain a visit.
Not so much creeped out, as "you do you, but I don't want or need to know what you find arousing".
We've been talking about "how come people in the past didn't harass due to phone books giving names and addresses?" and this is just more of the cultural change. For people in the public eye, there is an expectation that they will be held to a particular standard of behaviour. Those kinds of standards may be slipping, but if we get to "why are people offended by a guy posting nudes of hot guys?" as a serious question, then we should understand the difference between "the culture back then was such that you wouldn't use the phone book as a tool to stalk others" and "the culture now is that we aren't supposed to care about seeing Representative Smith's cock at full mast on public display online".
I would think less of a candidate that posted heterosexual porn on their social media accounts too. It is just bad taste to share pornography like that. And I am not even against porn and I'm not going to pretend I don't ever watch it.
But it is just so low brow to do something like that. Would you be ok with your governor posting fart jokes on their public profile? In my mind this is similar.
If straight male politicians posted pictures of naked ladies, it would be deemed sexist. I guess it's weird that there's no equivalent negative sentiment to that if it's a gay male posting naked gentlemen. I think people sense there's a double standard going on even if they can't put their finger on what's wrong with it.
At the end of the day people want to feel like their leaders are fundamentally decent, reasonable people. Looking at porn a couple times a week is one thing. Being so into it that you administer a site devoted to it is something else entirely. Not that it means he's necessarily imbalanced but it does raise the probability. When only one guy in several million gets to be the governor I think it's extremely rational to maybe pick the person who doesn't run a gay porn site - particularly when he knows that doing so puts his career at risk. That speaks to poor impulse control and poor risk management, which in turn speak to poor character. These are leaders. They have real responsibility over real people. They should be emotionally stable, clear-headed, pro-social, and imperturbable. I think it's good to hold them to a higher standard of conduct.
Yes, I believe public figures should not be posting pornography. It's animalistic and displays a lack of self-restraint unbecoming of people with authority.
Friends of mine, a married pair, are having a marriage crisis, considering separation/divorce. They live in New England, I don't live in the US, and can't help much. Can anybody recommend any good Catholic, or more broadly Christian, or just non-woke, organization or group in that area of the US to help saving marriages with some counseling, coaching, etc.? The problem is that the guy does not want to hear about "therapy", so it should be something non-standard, where the masculine point of view is balanced against the feminine one, like idk a group of married couples offering counseling, where men are talking to the guy in question and women are talking to the wife and somehow trying to reconcile both points of view (just an example, can be anything without the label of "therapy").
Could also consider Orthodox Christian priests as well for counselling? They tend to be more conservative( like trad Cath) but also married so they might have more insight into that kind of stuff.
I mean, Christian couples counseling is definitely a googleable thing, highly available in New England and lots of places. Or if they are members at a church, they should talk to their own pastor or whoever provides pastoral care there. It's part of their job though they may have greater or less skill and training at it.
Yeah... googling in parallel... But hard to do "human-as-a-judge" on that for me. Also hoping to get some high-perplexity answers from weird folks here.
This was my thought as well. I've heard good things about Catholic and Episcopal premarital counseling. I'm pretty sure they also have postmarital counseling, and I expect a lot of other major churches offer similar services.
Divorce is not an option, nor is remarriage if the spouse is still alive, but separation may be an option if they can't or won't continue to live together.
Isn’t a church approved annulment possible in some cases? That was a subplot in the in theater version of Shoes of the Fisherman that was cut for video release. The David Jansen character was trying to have his marriage annulled.
Depends on how serious they are as Catholics and if there is just cause. The American church was notorious for rubber-stamping 'annulment' decisions which made it divorce by another name. There was a crackdown on that.
So if the couple do take their faith seriously, there may not be grounds for annulment. On the other hand, the general run of ordinary Catholics over the past few decades are so poorly catechised that there is every chance they have a deficient understanding of marriage and did not enter it with the proper intent (e.g. only having a church wedding to keep the parents happy, having it in mind if the marriage failed they'd get a divorce, etc.)
There need to be good reasons, but if the couple - or one of them - treated the sacrament of marriage as 'just a day out with a church ceremony' there might be grounds.
Going and talking to their priest or deacon might help. (The deacon may be better here because he's likely married himself.)
Marriage Encounter is a great program for married couples trying to keep their marriage together, but it's not trying to rescue marriages in trouble, but rather trying to help head off trouble in advance.
I don't know any, but I would recommend for the man to read through the New Testament and pay attention to every part that talks about Jesus' interactions with/love & sacrifice for his followers and people in need. Marriage is God's physical symbol representing Christ's relationship to His church, and it's important for a man in a marriage to know exactly what that means and to constantly work on being more Christ-like in his marriage. Online estimates reading the NT at around 18 hours to read through, but honestly taking the time over a couple weeks to read and really consider it would be very beneficial.
Idk what the marital issues are, but I can't conceive of any situation where taking the time to do this would be a bad thing. If he made vows at his wedding, he should stick to them and at least put this effort in.
For a Child will be born to us, a Son will be given to us;
And the government will rest on His shoulders;
And His name will be called *Wonderful Counselor*, Mighty God,
I think relatively few people outside of some noisy internet bubbles or activist groups cares enough to be anti or pro-natalist in any kind of general way. As far as I can tell from my real-world interactions, at least here in Europe, the full "normie" position is that you don't moralize or second-guess people's decisions to have children or not.
Normies probably don't think about it too deeply, and their typical opinion is probably something like "you should have children, because 'everyone' does... but not before 30 because 'no one' does".
(Notice that for normies "what people around me do" is a substitute for ethics.)
When pushed to provide a principled argument, they would probably say something like: "well, if no one had children, humanity would go extinct".
Beyond that, the left-wing ones might say that the Earth is overpopulated anyway, so it is actually not a big deal if you don't have children. And the right-wing ones might say that having children is a duty towards your nation / race / religion.
Probably depends on the court and on exactly how the law was structured. An income or property qualification for voting, especially one tied to taxable income or acceptance of government benefits, seems like it probably would fall within the category of "reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax": an income based test is very close to being a test based on how much income tax you pay, and a welfare-based test could be read as equivalent to a poll tax since it means you need to opt out of government benefits (equivalent to a 100% tax on those benefits) if you want to be able to vote. But a very narrow textual reading might accept a law that puts enough distance between the test and cash payments in either direction.
The 14th amendment also provides two potential bars to such a policy. As of 1966 (two years after the 24th amendment was ratified), poll taxes for state elections, which are outside the scope of the 24th amendment, are considered to be barred by the Equal Protection clause of the 14th amendment. The relevant case is Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, which overturned Breedlove v. Suttles (1937) which had upheld poll taxes. This might or might not be upheld by current courts, as the rational basis test for equal protection cases (the test used by the majority in Harper) is now interpreted much more leniently: intermediate scrutiny requires a good reason, and strict scrutiny requires a damn good reason, but for rational basis merely requires that the judges can require a vaguely plausible rationale besides "mere animus". But since income qualifications would have racially disparate impacts, there's a plausible argument for applying strict scrutiny to the question instead of rational basis.
The other 14th amendment issue is the apportionment clause, which proportionately reduces Congressional representation for states that disenfranchise male citizens over the age of 21 for reasons other than felony convictions. But as far as I know, this clause has never been enforced, despite being codified in both the Constitution and statues.
b) partially correct (initially right species, wrong transitions, 1st prod corrected FeCl4, 2nd prod corrected CuCl4)
c) fairly bad, 1/4 credit
d) correct
e) fairly bad, 1/4 credit - prod did not correct it
f) decent, valid compounds after it corrected itself within initial reply, calling it partially correct. Missed e.g. SiH2F2, accepted it when pointed prodded with it.
g) badly wrong
Generally disappointing, not sure if it is supposed to be a reasoning model.
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
results: "Yes, light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm is visible to the human eye."
b) Q: I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
results: A bit worse than typical. It got the species right, but initially ascribed both colors to d-d transitions, overlooking the spin forbidden for FeCl4 (which most models get) and the near-IR for CuCl4 (which most models fail at).
c) Q: Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
results: Initial response pretty bad, missing tetrahedrane, cyclobutadiene, diacetylene, ... Even after a prod it was missing tetrahedrane and it misclassified some of its own structures. Even after two prods it still missed cyclobutadiene and still misclassified some of its own answers.
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
results: "The mass equivalent of the Sun's radiated light is approximately 4 times greater than the mass lost to the solar wind."
e) Q: Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
results: Initial answer was purely numerical, even though I asked for relevant equations. It wasn't "wrong", in terms of a numerical approximation - though the slope at the equivalence point was 4 orders of magnitude too low as a result. It offered to use exact equations, so I asked it to do so. It is using the wrong equation, ignoring autoionization, then using a wrong approximation to keep the answer finite, though noting that the denominator of what it is using will go to zero, blowing up.
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
results: Pretty decent. It temporarily listed a number of liquids, and multiple listed a number of duplicates, but corrected itself before truly adding them to the list. It missed e.g. SiH2F2, accepted it when pointed prodded with it.
g) Q: What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
results: Badly wrong. Neither the initial molecule it suggested nor a new one after the prod had an S4 axis at all.
Periodically I hear someone make an argument for banning phones in schools.
Apparently lots of schools are doing this and the teachers report that it makes a big difference -- students are more engaged, et cetera.
The counterargument I always make is: yes, but can you imagine if someone did that to you? If you had to attend eight hours' worth of meetings, every day, and you weren't allowed to use your phone? You'd be miserable. You wouldn't tolerate it.
And the thing I hear back is: well, those children aren't me, and they don't have a choice. We can make them do whatever we want.
The opinions of children only matter as far as they can inform adults on the well-being of the child. A kid being sad or bored for a couple of hours five days a week is a fantastic trade-off if it means they're going to be a well-adjusted adult who makes good decisions. We know now that the toxicity from phones in schools far, far outweighs whatever ADHD-adjacent misery that we're all familiar with might be inflicted upon a child in the safest and friendliest environment on earth.
Let's start with the fact that children are not the same as adults, both in terms of abilities and of responsibility.
Adults are expected to exercise some degree of self-control. And if they don't, they are expected to bear the consequences. Those consequences may be trivial, or financial, or medical, or social; in worst cases they may lose their jobs, end up in prison, or die.
Children are less capable of self-control; developing this ability is part of growing up. They are supposed to be protected from the worst outcomes, which is often achieved by someone else controlling how much of the potentially harmful things they are allowed to do.
Therefore, arguments like "can you, as an adult, imagine that someone else would control how much chocolate you can eat during the day, and whether you have to brush your teeth at the end of the day?" should not automatically win the debate, among reasonable people. The point is that as an adult I have to control myself, or I will bear the consequences and everyone else will call me an idiot. With children, it is parents' responsibility to control them. At school, this responsibility is delegated to teachers.
The purpose of the school is to learn, so maybe a better analogy than a meeting would be a company training. Imagine that you go to a company-paid training, you visibly keep playing with the phone while the instructor tries to explain you things, and later when you are asked to demonstrate what you have learned, you fail. And you do this repeatedly. Would you expect to keep your job? I wouldn't. As an adult, you have the right to fuck up and lose your job. As a child, you can be prevented by adults from making the obvious wrong move.
Freedoms come with responsibilities. Let's have schools where kids are allowed to play on their phones all day long... and then get quickly kicked out of the school when they fail at exams. I wouldn't mind. Either way, a few months later there wouldn't be kids playing on the phones. Or at least kick those kids out of the classroom while they are playing, so they don't distract their classmates.
Or maybe make two kinds of schools: those where kids can play on their phones all day long, and those where they cannot. Advertise it clearly which is which, and let the parents choose.
I definitely do not want my children to sit in a classroom where they cannot learn, because their classmates are playing on the phones, and the teacher has to explain everything really slowly and repeat everything several times, otherwise the classmates don't get it.
Amusingly enough, I have the opposite problem; I would love for this to be an option for me (I waste way too much time on stupid distractions), but since I have obligations I need to take care off, it isn't. I can't just put my phone away, nor my computer.
Also, I kind of don't quite believe that people (only) say what you claim they say. The usual argument is that this is long-term good and short-term unpleasant for the kids, and kids are terrible at making decisions that aren't short-term pleasant. So we need to make that decision for them.
Using a phone is a new way of amusing yourself, but the concept of finding ways to amuse yourself when you are in a place you do not want to be doing things you do not want to do is not new.
Schoolkids who talk to each other, pass notes, read books (fiction / unrelated to the lesson), flick rubber bands at their frenemies, go to sleep etc etc when they are meant to be paying attention to the teacher or doing work will be in trouble.
Similarly for adult employees: doing any of those things during a presentation is unacceptable and doing it regularly will get you fired.
Similarly for a whole bunch of other times when you are expected to be paying attention to something and are sharing a space with other people for that purpose: lectures, theaters, concerts, cinemas etc etc - apart from anything else, doing such things is super rude.
> If you had to attend eight hours' worth of meetings, every day, and you weren't allowed to use your phone? You'd be miserable. You wouldn't tolerate it.
Homeschooling parents have been saying this for DECADES yet the average person resorts to calling them all sorts of names.
The point here is that homeschooled children waste far less time during the day. They only study for a couple of hours each day, which is all a child needs. The vast majority of their day should be spent working with their hands and playing, more of the latter if the kid is lucky.
Phones are banned in schools state-wide here, policy came into effect about 18 months ago. The reason: Moral panic over footage of schoolyard fights making it onto social media. Banning phones stops the problem. Schoolyard fights continue as they have always done, but out of sight & out of mind.
My eldest is 16. I'm not happy about the policy - whether we like phones or not, they are here to stay as part of society and kids need to learn to deal with life as it is, not as we wish it could be. Before the ban, phones were integrated into lessons - teachers assumed every student had a camera in their pocket. It meant everyone had to spend a couple hundred a graphics calculator, too.
The biggest annoyance is the peripheral bans - which means smart watches and wireless headphones are banned too! (Headphones aren't banned, in fact they are required for some classes, but they have to be wired). Also means not being able to stay in contact with my kid during the day in case of emergencies. Theoretically at least - they're technically adept enough to have worked around the ban by syncing messages & other services to their laptop...
"Also means not being able to stay in contact with my kid during the day in case of emergencies."
Can you not just phone the school? How do you think people coped with emergencies in the days before every six year old had a phone?
Unless your house is burning down or both parents are in a car crash, there are very few emergencies that need you to call your kid RIGHT NOW IN THE MIDDLE OF CLASS ANSWER THE PHONE MOMMY NEEDS TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT YOUR FORGOTTEN LUNCH.
Oh, you underestimate the general disfunction... the school sometimes contacts me to relay information to/from my child, or vice versa. This was de rigueur before the ban and the school has not fully adjusted. I've checked the message history for the past month, we have:
- Child witnessed a horrific bus crash during an excursion, texting to let me know they are safe but shaken up
- Texting requesting to text back permission for their mother to pick them up at end of said excursion as they didn't want to get on a bus that day (see above). Why did the teacher not contact me directly? I dunno
- Me texting them to let them know an off-site class has been cancelled (I was informed via email, and the last time it happened they forgot to inform my child and they caught a bus in to the city for no reason)
- Asking why they are not in class because the school has contacted me about an unexplained absence (child was in fact in class)
- Asking if they can go to a friend's house after school.
Basically, the modern world is set up assuming that anyone can contact anyone else at any time. Yeah I went through school without phones. It sucked.
The concern I've heard more frequently is "What if there's a mass shooting at the school, how will I know my kid is OK if I can't call them!"
Which, OK, I get the fear. But A: school shootings are rare enough that you should feel silly being that afraid of them, and B: if one does happen, there's nothing you can do about it and you'll know soon enough anyway, and C: I lied, there is one thing you can do - if your kid isn't dead, there's a good chance they are trying to hide from someone who is looking for people to kill, and if you really want you can make a loud ringing noise come from your kid's pocket...
For anything less than a mass casualty incident, and yet truly an emergency, you can absolutely just call the school and ask.
I held out longer than most (2017), and still think about going back.
Not having a smartphone makes dating harder (for me) and my work requires it for secure login. I travelled a lot too, and I'll admit it is convenient for navigating a new city.
If someone made me sit through eight hours of meetings every day, my reaction would depend very much on what kind of meetings they were. But if they're the bad kind, the kind you seem to think all "meetings" must be, then the problem would not be that I can't play games on my phone during the meeting, the problem would be the people making me sit through bad meetings.
I am skeptical that "eight hours of (the worst sort of) meetings, describes the typical school day for the typical American student. I don't think the average school day is even eight hours long, and some of that is breaks, lunch, recess, gym, and/or study. And some of the classes, while they sort of look like meetings, are in my experience the good sort of meeting, either enjoyable or educational or both. But, OK, at least some schools are apparently giving some students a horrible experience.
So *stop doing that*. Don't keep doing it and say that it's OK because you let them have phones to play with. There are alternatives.
Which some of us are quite familiar with, because for my entire educational experience I didn't have a smartphone, or even a crappy 1G analog cellphone. None of us did. We made do, and while some parts of it were horrible, they weren't horrible in a way a smartphone would really fix.
OTOH, I saw my kids' Zoom school early in the Pandemic, and it was basically all the bad things about middle school/high school classes combined with all the bad things about Zoom meetings.
>The counterargument I always make is: yes, but can you imagine if someone did that to you? If you had to attend eight hours' worth of meetings, every day, and you weren't allowed to use your phone? You'd be miserable. You wouldn't tolerate it.
We regularly make children follow rules we don't apply to adults, for the very good reason that children aren't as developed mentally or emotionally and very often can't be trusted to act in their own best interests.
> And the thing I hear back is: well, those children aren't me, and they don't have a choice. We can make them do whatever we want.
That's a terrible argument, but it doesn't mean it would be better to give kids their phones all day. The missing justification is "It's mostly better for them and better for the classroom environment and the school environment in general if they don't have the phones on them all the time." You'd probably be better off without your phone all day too (after you got over your withdrawal) but you're an adult so you get to decide for yourself.
Also, adults don’t get to decide for themselves in lots of contexts! When you’re driving or swimming or flying a plane or doing any number of other things, you’re not allowed to use your phone.
Right, this whole discussion seems predicated on the idea that everyone is a WFH tech worker. But I'm sure the majority of real world jobs you either (a) aren't allowed to or (b) physically can't check your phone whenever you feel like it, whether you're digging ditches or performing brain surgery.
The Catholic high school around the corner has made close order drill optional now - I’m not kidding about this, they have a JROTC program - but I think it will be a while before they allow cell phones in class. Some wonderfully well behaved kids around there, much better than I was at that age. They produce some good athletes too including two Major League Baseball Hall of Famers.
My daughter has gotten detention twice this year for having her phone out during school hours. She didn't like it, but I think I understand why the school has the policy, and I broadly think it's a good policy.
I don't see a difference? Both are situations in which someone more powerful than you has decided that you're required to be in a room while people talk about something that doesn't matter to you; they can't make you listen, but you're required to sit still and at least pretend to be paying attention.
Like most bright people. I was bored to death when I paid attention in school. I got extremely good at fantasizing while keeping an alert look on my face & staring at the speaker. Also did a lot of doodling, zentangle kind of stuff, drawing cartoons and writing silly poems to pass to my friends. Schools are understimulating, somewhat actively unpleasant settings for most kids and we should improve them. Until we do, though, I'm in favor of no phones. Lots of screen time is bad for kids too, and it interferes with the kind of development that happens when people are forced to draw on inner resources to escape boredom.
I struggle to figure out whether people who say this sort of thing are really that much smarter than me or whether their schools were really that much worse. Sure, I went to an academically selective school but the curriculum and teachers were still basically the same as you'd get at an ordinary school. And sure, I doodled and daydreamed in some classes, but I sat in rapt attention in others; I was a clever kid but it's not like I was born knowing the entire K-12 syllabus.
I certainly didn’t know everything and yet struggled to pay attention. I always wanted to be reading something or thinking about something else. But in fairness diagramming sentences was wildly popular then. I enjoyed “reading for comprehension” worksheets not because I was keen on the art of comprehension but because here at least was some content, a couple of paragraphs about Jose Feliciano anyway.
It was the physical setting of later grades in part; adolescent misery the other. Can’t blame the school for the latter, particularly.
In elementary our campus was built on that midcentury classrooms on a breezeway plan, with a wall of windows. And we trooped around outside a fair amount.
Then: middle school and high school, both built on the cheap plan, the advent of air-conditioning had made windows a luxury as if we had been catapulted to the medieval past. No atrium so no windows at all in any of the interior course of rooms. None in many of the middle school rooms on the exterior; just a narrow one in a corner of the outer rooms of the HS for the teacher to set desk up by. None operable any longer, of course.
And no more recess.
Just 7 hours a day under that fluorescent glare, trying not to look at the clock. I found it uncomfortable. I prefer being outdoors.
I’m sure my character traits only made it worse.
I was very old when I quit playing outside, when I looked around and realized everyone else had outgrown it.
My schools were worse than yours. I went to shitty public schools in small USA southern towns. The first time the teachers introduced something new -- long division, word problems, parts of speech -- I had to pay attention to understand them. But when new things were introduced I understood them well after doing a couple sheets of homework problems and thinking them over, sort of untangling any snarls of perplexity I had about how and why they worked. But after I had digested the new thing and made it part of me the teacher kept going with the same stuff for weeks, until everybody understood reasonably well. And that's when I was bored. It was way more than half the time, because I learned things in way less than half the time the teacher kept the class on the subject. I wasn't the only kid like that. There were usually a few others who were in the same boat.
As for rapt attention -- I did have rapt attention for a few things, mostly math and physics, but those didn't appear til 7th or 8th grade. And as with other things, we kept going over and over each new topic long after I'd chewed the flavor out of the gum.
The problem there is having to teach to the average of the class, so you go over the material until the slowest pupil has got it through their head. The smart kids/kids who are good at that particular subject will be bored because they understand it and need to move on to something else, but if you teach for the brightest, a lot of the rest of the class will be left behind.
The solution there is to put the bright kids into the academic stream for their ability, but we don't do streaming in schools anymore apparently.
School classes are generally designed to teach you something of interest. The worst they can be is wrong. Meetings are frequently designed to make the person making them feel important.
School is already miserable. We're already locking kids in a building for a bunch of hours a day because we have the power to do so. Something about the phone-ban does cause me to instinctively disagree, because of how patronizing it is, but I don't think that's rational. If the statistics show that banning phones improves outcomes, I don't think you can oppose banning phones without opposing school itself.
My collaborator and I have been thinking about the effectiveness of physical therapy (PT) for pain (https://debugyourpain.substack.com/p/when-does-pt-help-with-pain). Our current conclusion is that while PT does well with acute injuries and rehab using a biomechanical lens (fixing tissues, improving strength/coordination), it often struggles with *chronic* pain.
Chronic pain seems to involve learned nervous system responses. Yet, PT is still largely grounded in biomechanics, leading to interventions (stretching, strengthening) that swing and miss on chronic conditions.
Curious about others' experiences or knowledge here:
- Does this model mismatch (biomechanics vs. learned behavior) resonate with your experiences seeking pain treatment?
- Have you encountered PT (or other therapies like PRT, Sarno, etc.) that successfully addressed the "nervous system" or "learned pain" aspects? What did that look like?
My lower back pain problem is not nervous system/learned pain nor tissue damage (which PT has done wonders on other issues for me in the past). Instead I have osteo-arthritis in my spine, and the disintegrating vertebrae impinges on a nerve. My spine doctor suggested surgery, which I don't want. PT won't help and I'm skeptical that EWST would help. Wondering if anyone has other suggestions?
Definitely not surgery! I'd second what Thomas said about it possibly being a learned pain. The correlation between "visible tissue damage" and pain is quite tenuous. "Nerve impingement" an infamous chiropractic catch-all diagnosis that really doesn't mean much.
One thing you can try is decompression therapy. Unfortunately it may not be covered by insurance, but it's not godawfully expensive, and has very low risk AFAIK.
My spine doctor actually made me see a chiropractor before he would treat me. After the chiropractic did nothing (as I expected) he started the steroid facet injections that helped a lot, but those can't be done indefinitely. Thanks for the tip on decompression therapy, that looks promising.
I think it may be nervous system / learned pain. There are studies that have shown that nerve impingement don't really predict for pain. Pain is much more of a learned response than we think!
I've been fortunate enough to not need to seek pain treatment, but I have treated many thousands of patients for over a decade using Extracorporeal Shock Wave therapy (EWST).
I think you're about right about PT; it works well for rehabilitation and to deal with situations due to weakness or muscular imbalance, but not so well for chronic pain situations more generally.
EWST works remarkably well in situations where surgical or PT approaches have failed. This is because the shock wave gets the body to treat the afflicted area as though it were recently injured (without causing any actual injury). This allows for the body to investigate and heal any area that has unhealed damage, and to 'notice' when an area has abberant patterns of tension or inflammation - the learned nervous system responses you reference.
In cases of old unresolved injury or of gradual degradation/degeneration, I'll often see a brief period of localized increased pain, followed by rapid improvement. These are the cases where there is an actual underlying mechanical damage. In many other cases of chronic pain, however, we simply hit a point where the symptoms rapidly decline without any apparent mechanistic explanation. These are cases where the body was simply holding a reflexive pain or tension response, whether due to psychosomatic threat (common in say whiplash) or due to some old injury the body never got the message as resolved.
So suffice it to say I certainly am not a skeptic regarding the learned pain theories! This is why many spine surgeries fail; they do not address the true, non-mechanistic cause of the pain, and indeed give the body additional trauma to target with additional chronic pain.
I've seen several friends go through severe chronic pain and I definitely buy the nervous system involvement aspect. One friend suffered debilitating low back pain for years after an original injury involving poor lifting technique. After the initial acute phase, it seems certain that the long term persistence of pain was a learned nervous system response. They tried a lot of different modalities (Feldenkrais, Alexander technique, etc) but ultimately were able to escape the worst parts via DNRS, which explicitly addresses nervous system involvement.
Watching this process play out over a period of years definitely give me a new appreciation for techniques that exist outside the Western medical establishment – traditional Western medicine seems quite poorly suited to addressing chronic pain. For the friend mentioned earlier, a turning point was when they went in to a consultation with a surgeon, who described the procedure on offer quite graphically – "scraping out" the remains of the herniated disc, before installing a titanium cage that would fuse the vertebra above and below.
The visceral rejection of that idea ultimately motivated them to find an alternative that worked for them, and they dedicated quite substantial effort to actually engaging with all these different approaches. But for many people, that level of dedication is just not feasible, and they end up getting the surgery in the hope of relief, only to be disappointed and often worse off a few years later. Quite an unfortunate situation.
I have a lot of low back pain due to mild scoliosis and not-so-mild complications of it. The only touch-and-movement-based intervention that has ever had any effect on my pain is Paul Ingraham’s Trigger point pressure approach, which he describes in multiple places in his excellent site Pain Science.
What you do is press hard on certain places, often near by not on the painful spot, with something like a hard rubber ball. Since my pain’s in my back I lie on one and wiggle around til I can feel that it’s in an effective place, then relax in a way that lets the ball press hard into the spot for 60 secs or so. Spots that are going to affect pain have a distinctive “good pain” feeling. Also, I’ve noticed they often cause a mild achey pain a few inches away from the ball. For instance, a ball at the pointed base of my shoulder blade causes a mild ache on the top edge of my shoulder, where it joins the arm. When I’m working on my back with the balls I usually spend 15 mins of so finding spots and leaning into them. Afterwards my pain is maybe 1/3 of what it was, and flexibility is much greater. My back stays better the rest of the day unless I do something I shouldn’t, like carry a heavy box. It reverts back completely to its usual pain level overnight.
I’ve also found some spots on the back and lower sides of my neck that help vascular headaches, and occasionally get rid of one. Once had a very sore and achey right hip joint, and experimented with sitting on a rubber ball. Found a “good pain” spot mid-buttock that definitely reduced hip joint pain.
I don’t know how this approach works, and Ingraham isn’t sure either, but it sure as hell isn’t placebo. Pain can’t be measured objectively, but flexibility can, and my range of motion expands considerably after I do a pressure point treatment.
I have tried PT several times for a chronic hyper sacrum and traditional PT causes more pain and does not help. I have not tried/been offered PT for the "nervous system/learned pain" but not knowing about that theory, it doesn't sound like it would work. I think my chronic pain, and that of many others, is because something is broken and the body is not capable of fixing what is broken and surgery near the back does not have a good track record so i just try to manage it.
Every academic I know who studies pain acknowledges that in a large fraction of cases of chronic pain, there is no detectable structural tissue damage. More broadly, that "pain is a learning signal, not a damage meter". See, for instance, Professor Sean Mackey, head of Stanford Neuroscience and Pain Lab , or (my mentor) Fan Wang at MIT. Of course, there's also Howard Schubiner, Lorimer Moseley, David Butler, and the older pain science group too.
Hey, all you articulate people, I'm trying to find a word for something:
-Applause is a conventional way of signaling approval. I think it's probably a conventional and tamed version of the yelling, jumping, thumping etc. people do at concerts and sports events, and kids do when they are thrilled and surprised.
-Selfies are hardly ever candid shots that catch people having a great time -- they're a posed stand-in for it.
So what is a word for things of this nature? I don't want a phrase so not "conventional signifier" or "conventional stand-in." "Objective correlative" isn't right. Neither is "symbol." Are they emblems?
You say, applauding and showing selfies have in common that they are "Simplified, conventional versions of things that stand in for the messier real version."
I don't understand that completely.
To applaud, when done honestly, is to show that you approve, right. But to show a selfie, when done honestly, is to show that you have a great time? Or do you mean, showing selfies, when done honestly is to show how you are? That I would understand better.
But, no matter what, what you noticed about applause might be akin to words that sound like what you are referring to with them. Like the word "hissing" or "bang.
So, since we're talking about communication in general, you try to give a name to a generalized concept of onomatopoeia maybe.
Yeah, it's a gem. I thought it was possible the phrase had never been written before, and googled it in quotes. There was one hit: Somebody asked for a definition of a Korean word, and a user defined it as "behavioral onomatopoeia describing a toddler's walking(toddling)." https://hinative.com/questions/2256557
So it's really an ordinary onomatopoeia -- a description of the sound of toddling? If so then behavioral onomatopoeia in the TakeAThirdOption's sense is a new concept, or at least one never named til now.
But these aren’t just arbitrary customs, like painting eggs pink on the Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox - these customs have some connection to a behavior that is natural.
I am not entirely sure what you mean by a behavior that is natural. I am not getting the distinction you are making.
I don’t know the history of painting eggs on Easter and I’m too lazy to go look it up right now, but I’d be willing to bet a quarter that it originates in something that makes some kind of sense.
They're ritualized behaviors. Ritualization is the process of something being regularized in form and when it's appropriate or expected, and taking on symbolic meanings in addition to or instead of their original purpose.
It very much is a ritual! It’s weird when a lecture or concert ends with no applause, and it’s definitely an interesting question at the end of term which classes end with a round of applause.
> it’s definitely an interesting question at the end of term which classes end with a round of applause.
If this is an interesting question, then applause is definitely not a ritual. It is sometimes spontaneously given or sometimes done just to avoid embarrassment, which doesn’t jive with my idea of ritual.
but I would say in most arenas of applause you would consider it customary, unless you’ve paid good money to be there in which case you can boo if it’s appropriate. It is customary to boo when you don’t like a performance. It’s not so customary to boo the headmaster of a school when he’s delivering the end of term invocation. It is perfectly appropriate to boo the New York Yankees when they lose their third straight game.
If you are a 10 year old at a Yankees game it is perfectly appropriate to stand near the first base line and give opposing - or your own - players the finger.
Phatic expression? I'm not sure that is precisely it. but it does encompass "thing we all do for social reasons that is structured in a conventional way":
Erica's suggestion, "ritual", is probs the best term.
That said, I feel like you'd appreciate the word "skeuomorph". Which is when an object adopts the appearance of an older technology, for psychological convenience. E.g. computer-"desktops" are skeuomorphic. Gas-fireplaces are skeuomorphic. McMansions are skeuomorphic. Fashion abounds in skeuomorphs.
Applause can get pretty rowdy when people really mean it. Have you ever been in an opera house when Pavarotti really hits it out of the park? I think what you were describing is what I would call polite applause.
I too have trouble following you. Applause is certainly less intense than cheering, but a double thumbs up, a single thumb up, or a nod and a smile are also less intense than the other. I wouldn't call them "simpler" or "less messy" in any case. All these forms of approval are appropriate in different scenarios, depending on a myriad of social rules.
Same for selfies. Sometimes you want a selfie, other times you ask a stranger to take a pic of you, still other times you want a professional shoot. All of these are related, but equally valid and express different things.
I’m headed to grad school in NYC- Baruch’s Masters in Financial Engineering.
If anyone knows of decent places to live that are opening up and in decent travel time to the Weissman school of Arts and Sciences (55th Lexington Ave), please reach out to me.
Any places passed on will also help some of the international students in my batch, as I’ll be passing everything along to our WhatsApp group.
If you're an international student, you're going to need a guarantor to sign a normal 12 month lease, which means TheGuarantors, Rhino, or Insurent (in that order of quality). They will charge you about a month of rent to guarantee your lease, but you won't have to pay the building a deposit. This fee isn't refundable though.
The NYC rental market moves really quickly, so when you find a place, move to rent it quickly. If you're hunting for a deal, be really wary of scams, as scammers target the places you might think to look to find more affordable housing that isn't as visible in the general market. And by general market I mean Streeteasy, and to a lesser extent Renthop. Don't bother with any other rental platform for unfurnished 12 month rentals. Asking for referrals to specific buildings is probably going to land you somewhere worse than if you spent time searching the entire market on Streeteasy, but occasionally someone will give a good referral to a smalltime landlord. This is rare though.
For your budget with 4 bedrooms, you'll only really find walkups a good ways out of Manhattan, or (IMO the better option), you get a 3 bedrooms and "flex" it to 4. There are companies that do professional "temporary" walls for $1,000-$1,500 (Wall2Wall is the best), and it can really increase the value of your apartment. In NYC a large living room is a luxury anyways.
Don't discount Jersey City, although to 55th and Lexington it would be about a 45 min commute. It is about the last "cheap" place you can still get a decent place to live while still being near Manhattan though. I frequently travel from the Financial District to Journal Square, which seems like it's way outside of Manhattan, but is only a ~20 min train ride from the WTC.
I'm one of the moderators on r/nycapartments so I'm pretty plugged into all these things, and would be happy to answer any specific questions you have. Also, my shameless plug is if you're going to be renting in July or later, use pandaprotect.co as your guarantor (A new division of my company). We are more affordable than the other 3 guarantor companies, and I'd cut the cost in half if you rent from a landlord we haven't worked with previously.
I am not international, but the three I’m planning to live with are.
I am not yet sure my parents would be able to guarantee either though- 80x is insane.
We talked and our max budget is about 5k still, with one willing to spend more for a master bedroom solo and the rest of us willing to share bedrooms to lower cost. So 2 bedroom is on the table- theoretically three but I guess we’d probably need to find a fifth. That probably wouldn’t be too hard.
Jersey City is not discounted at all, many current students live there and it’s a good commute from new port.
Any suggestions on where to look based on the new info that we’re not limited to 4 bedrooms? I guess we can move this to DM but I wanted the split rooms info out there for anyone else who may comment.
Splitting a room opens you up to a lot of options. You can get a 2B flexed to 3 (the flex room can be larger than normal bedrooms depending on the layout) in LIC, which is quick commute to 52nd and Lexington. It's a great neighborhood, and if you're willing to go an extra couple of stops, Astoria is an excellent area for your budget. Rents are cheaper, and for $5,000, you might even be able to get a full 4 bedroom.
It'll be really hard to justify your parents guaranteeing the lease (even if they qualify) since they'd also basically take responsibility for paying all your roommates rent if they default.
Alright, thanks for the info. I’ll look into LIC. Also, and I see that this was my bad, 55th Lexington is actually on the intersection of 25th and Lexington.
With night classes we are aiming for shorter commute but I’ll see if places in Astoria work.
I am looking for anything serviceable, ideally 30-45min commute to manhattan, and have a three others I could live with-but we haven’t locked that in yet so solo or joining someone else is not out of the option- dependent on price.
I think the total budget for us four would be about 5k max. If I were solo or joining someone else I could stretch a bit but I’m not certain where my max is. That could rise if the contraints I just set out are unrealistic (very unsure as to what is realistic), but I’m cost conscious- especially as I’ll be spending my parents money until I can get a job post grad and pay them back.
I’m not looking to experience the city and walk to plays from manhattan. I’ll be hunkered down coding most of my days and just need some walls and a kitchen and ok commute from night classes.
If you know of any 2,3,4 person places that meet this, I or one of the international students would love to know about it
No offense, but financial engineering sounds like what caused the Great Recession. Not a great name. Plus, when you finish, are you going to call yourself a financial engineer?
Yeah, this seems like the equivalent of someone who has a JD or maybe a humanities PhD going around asking people to call them "doctor." Slightly embarrassing, really. Actual engineers are going to look at someone who calls themselves a financial engineer and probably make very snide comments to one another about it.
The least effort is probably to use ControlAI's tool (https://controlai.com/take-action) to contactor your policymakers advocating for a Pause/building a Pause Button (which is what MIRI and a lot of other people are suggesting).
The thing that normal people could do is to understand the reality that AI presents no realistic existential threat and to go about their lives normally.
Out of the grassroots organizations that would be StopAI.
I think informing policymakers and the public are probably more effective. Noone has really tried it yet and it seems quite effective (https://controlai.com/dip convincing 20 out of 60 MPs in the UK they talked to, to publicly support their campaign). Most people when they actually hear about it, think that building an ASI and even integrating AGI are quite obviously dangerous. In addition, AI already is quite unpopular.
* Even if LLMs peter out (which I am not sure about) the compute will be lying around and people are already trying different algorithms. So if you find something that works, you (depending on how well it fits the gpu clusters) don't have to build out compute first.
* In addition even the current (and LLMs will at least improve somewhat and at specific tasks) level will still cause huge societal changes which we would want to go well.
Chess engines have been better than humans for a very long time now, but they weren't any good at playing with odds until recently. I remember easily winning with rook odds and drawing with knight odds following a simple strategy: prioritize castling and even trades, even when they give up some other advantage. I have not studied chess in any serious way so I'm not really any good at it, but the computer doesn't really try to avoid this. Now there is a chess engine that can play really well with material odds, it can crush the best players in the world in a match in blitz time format (around 3 minutes) starting without a knight. I've played it myself and I am unable to win or draw with queen odds in a slower rapid time format (around 10 minutes), it's pretty cool to see and it is a very concrete illustration of just how much better computers are at chess. If you want to try it yourself you can play here https://lichess.org/@/LeelaQueenOdds , reading their blog it seems first move advantage makes a big difference in odds games so you might want to start with black to replicate the results.
Chess engines conventionally have four major components. The part that gets the most visibility is the minimax algorithm, which calculates a certain number of moves ahead (or as many moves ahead as will fit in its time or compute budget) by brute force to find which move gets the best board position at the cutoff point assuming the other player is following the same algorithm to the same horizon (i.e. assuming the other player makes what the engine thinks is the best response to the engine's move). Typically, alpha-beta pruning is also applied to this, which skips evaluating subtrees for obviously-bad moves.
The next part is some kind of heuristic strategy for evaluating the strength of board positions when minimax cuts off. Conventionally, these used a point system for the relative values of pieces on the board, with points added or subtracted for positional factors like pawn structure (forward, passed, connected, doubled, etc), control of the center, etc. In recent decades, I think this got replaced or supplemented in a lot of engines with various machine learning techniques, but i haven't followed that aspect closely.
Third part is endgame algorithms and tablebases. A lot of endgame combinations have been thoroughly analyzed by human players, with or without computer assistance, and can be reliably won through mechanical strategies which human players memorize. These scenarios can flummox pure brute force chess engines, especially ones that run to a fixed depth of a certain number of moves ahead, since the algorithms can take dozens of moves to complete. A basic chess engine might simply have criteria for recognizing well-known endgame position as won, lost, or drawn (allowing it to be scored perfectly when the starting point is reached in a minimax search) and switching from minimax to applying that algorithm. More advanced engines have "tablebases" where the results of brute force evaluation of a plethora of endgame scenarios have been calculated in advance and stored in the engine's data files. If a board position is in the endgame tablebase, then the engine knows how to play perfectly from that point until checkmate or draw.
The last part is opening databases. Similar to endgame tablebases, these are the results of offline evaluation to a much, much deeper depth than would be used mid-game, and may be supplemented by human analysis of chess openings and their continuations. These provide an enormous advantage over any human player who hasn't put a lot of work into studying openings, since trivial mistakes in the early game can easily leave you at a huge disadvantage against a competent opponent.
I expect most of what you're observing has to do with the opening database. Most chess engines would assume the standard starting position, so playing at odds puts you outside of database. And against a decent human player, the engine needs a really good minimax plus heuristic engine to compensate for the lack of a usable opening database in addition to the substantial disadvantage of starting out down a major piece. An engine that's been customized to play at odds would have a usable opening database.
-----
After typing up all of that, I followed your link and from there looked at the github repository. Looks like this is a newer kind of engine than the kind I've worked with that centers on a neural network for board evaluation, presumably dropped in as a replacement for a standard chess engine's board evaluation subengine. Skimming generate_games.py gives me the impression that it's training the network via recursive self-play from the at-odds starting position, and the node count for the network (<1000, according to the README) seems too small to embed a meaningful opening database in via overfitting. So this just seems like the heuristic subengine is being optimized for board positions that are likely to come up via good play from a particular at-odds starting position.
Do chess engines really need endgames? If you have like 4 pieces(pawns and kings having small move sets) you have only so many moves, minimax starts to be computable given only so many moves.
Endgames in chess are theoretically solved for 7 pieces or less in a very large database. Inclusion of endgame databases increase the playing strength of a modern engine by around 20 ELO points, if I remember correctly. Not a lot, but you get whatever advantage you can get when making an engine as strong as possible. This one I don't think uses that.
At a minimum, they benefit from being able to recognize an endgame position that's winnable with perfect play without needing to evaluate the entire subtree, especially when that subtree is several moves ahead.
Besides that, it can take dozens of moves to actually get to checkmate in a won endgame position and there are blunders that can delay that enough to produce a draw via 50 move rule. Even relatively small move sets can add up very quickly over deep evaluation depths, depending on how much you can prune from the raw tree.
Between bigger compute budgets and better board evaluation, endgame tablebases are probably less valuable than they used to be a decade or three ago, but you're guaranteed perfect play essentially for free (computationally speaking) for any position in your tablebase, which is generally nice to have.
I played blitz 5-0 against it with queen odds on a lark, not really believing it could do anything, and was humbled (I studied and played seriously as a kid many years ago, peaking around ELO 2100). I lost two games and was able to win the third one, mating with 15 seconds remaining on the clock. It's insanely good at steering the position into complications and fork threats, eating my time away. I think I'll win against it in rapid time (will try later), but seeing it play with queen odds I'm pretty sure it'd wipe the board with me at rook odds in any time format. Thanks, an interesting and sobering experience.
Indiana Jones goes to an alien world and ChatGPT gives us pictures
I’ve become interested in using photographs as prompts for image-making with ChatGPT. I’ve now done quite a bit of this, but have only posted two bitx so far, ChatGPT imagines three different backgrounds for three small sculptures, and Friday Fotos: ChatGPT changes Manhattan's West Side. In other posts I’ve used I’ve used a bit of art as a point of departure, such as this post based on a painting I did when I was nine: ChatGPT renders a scene on Mars in three styles.
This time I’ve decided to see what I can do with some of my graffiti photos. The fact is, when I first started tromping the hinterlands of Jersey City in search of graffiti, I felt like I was a ten-year old kid pretending to be Indiana Jones exploring some lost city. That’s what I’ve done in this series of images. I start with one of my graffiti photos and ask ChatGPT to continue the adventure. The adventure quickly heads off planet to another world. At various points along the way I introduce other photos for reference. Rather than interrupting the flow of ChatGPTs imagery I simply insert an endnote into the ongoing image stream and then introduce those photos in notes at the end, along with a note or two about the photo.
The starting point is from an area known locally as “the oaks.” Judging from the photo it’s a densely wooded area. Which it is, but only a very small patch. The bit of masonry you see at the right is the edge of a pillar supporting Exit 14C of the New Jersey Thruway. All of the pillar at this point are covered with graffiti at ground level. We’re at the foot of the Palisades and within one or two hundred yards of 12th Street, which feeds into the Holland Tunnel, which in turn goes under the Hudson River to Manhattan. Thus, this little jungle vignette is in one of the most densely populated urban areas in the United States.
We Californians are familiar with high gasoline prices. We bitch about them all the time. The other day, I saw signs at the pumps of my local Chevron Station that said, "You just bought a quarter tank of taxes and fees," with a QR code where we could direct our outrage through our smartphones to their lobbying group. I thought I'd better double-check to see if it's true that a quarter of the price I pay for gasoline goes to taxes and fees. Short answer, they don't—but it shows how big oil companies are grifting Californians with this meme.
Note: all these prices were from last week when I ran these numbers...
If I used credit/debit, regular gasoline was $4.99/gallon at my local Chevron station. I checked, and federal, state, and local taxes and fees add up to about $0.88-$0.92 per gallon in CA (I guess they vary by county). That works out to about 18 percent of Chevron's price at this gas station. Still, it's a sizable amount, but the independent station up the road was selling regular for $4.19/gal ($3.99 with a car wash)! And the Shell station even further up the road was selling regular for $5.29/gal. Right off the bat, we have $0.90-$1.20 spread in gasoline prices, which is as much or more than the taxes and fees levied on out gasoline.
But even so, those damn taxes! How much could I save in a state like Texas? Federal and state taxes account for $.39 per gallon there. So, I'd save about 50 cents a gallon if CA's gas taxes & fees were the same as TX, and my Chevron price would drop to about $4.49/gallon. When I checked the price of gasoline in Texas, it was averaging around $2.78/gal for regular. So, California gasoline, minus the tax difference, is ~$1.70 more at my local Chevron station than I'd pay in TX—and $2 more at that Shell station!
So, we know that California taxes are not the root cause of expensive gasoline in California. I don't think we have pipelines crossing the Rockies. Is it the cost of bringing it in by tanker or train? Well, rail delivery could add about $0.68 to the price of a gallon. Tanker delivery is $1 per barrel per thousand miles. Say a tanker comes from Houston to Los Angeles via the Panama Canal, that would be about 5,000 miles. So that would add $5 to a barrel of crude, from which we get only about 29 gallons of refined gasoline. That would add about $0.17 to the price of a gallon.
What about California's infamous summer formulation? ChatGPT says that can add 1-5 cents per gallon. So, it looks to me that the big oil companies at their gas stations are making at least a $1 per gallon extra profit—probably more—off us suckers in California. Can anyone prove to me that they're not?
The campaign would make much more sense in e.g. France.
<aiwarning>
I asked Google:
>what fraction of the French price for gasoline is taxes?
and it answered (AI Overview):
>In France, taxes account for approximately 60% of the price of gasoline, with around 64% for unleaded and 59% for diesel. This includes excise taxes (TICPE), a value-added tax (VAT), and a taxe générale sur les activités polluantes (TGAP).
Crude costs more in california, they use a blend that is more expensive to refine, cap-and-trade and LCFS add additional costs, they purposefully limit their refining capacity, they purposefully isolate themselves from fuel markets, they purposefully consolidate to reduce competition, they shutdown local production to import from Argentina and Saudi Arabia, and force local regulations on the global operations of oil companies. Chevron and Phillips are the latest in a long string of companies relocation elsewhere. Many companies have stopped business in California all together.
Not all of these count as taxes, but they are 100% self inflicted. It's not companies making an extra buck.
I think I said that in my OP. But the Independent gas stations purchase have to purchase their gasoline on the spot market from the big refineries that produce CARB formulas. Regulations, etc etc, don't explain the consistent price spread between the Independents and big-name gas brands.
Maybe the added cost of having clean bathrooms is what pushes the price up by $0.70-$1.20/gallon.
I think other people have addressed a lot of the specifics, but I wish people attributed more to supply and demand and less to "companies arbitrarily jack up prices due to greed whenever they have an 'excuse' for it".
Neither answer is perfect, but "companies are just greedy, the economics are probably fake" is much more of a thought-terminating cliche, and the greed arguments tend to greatly downplay competition and demand elasticity.
Yes, companies often do find mechanisms for anti-competitive behavior (e.g. regional monopolies are a well-known one), but absent an explanation of how they're doing that, I'm going to assume it's supply and deamnd.
I dunno; I feel like there isn't a good economic case for "they're just adding an extra $1 to be greedy"—inter-company competition ought to take care of anything like that, unless we're alleging market manipulation or whatever the term is (collusion? no, wait, that's for treachery or something innit–). I would bet the common wisdom of "it's Cali's state gov't making it expensive" is pretty close to true.
Could be wrong, though. I'll try to look into it. If we assume the most uncharitable $0.88 + $0.17 + $0.01 + $0.10 = $1.16 taxes/fees/delivery/specialblend (most charitable being $0.92 + $0.68 [should we average the tanker-vs.-rail difference?] + $0.05 + $0.15 = $1.80), that takes care of over half the difference. (Or, in the "most charitable" case, almost all of it!)
The other ~half... operating costs? The gas to drive a semi to the station & fill up the underground tanks will cost more, too, after all. Wouldn't doubt there are more taxes & fees levied on the business end, it being CA.
Also worth noting that we can't assume Chevron gas is the average $2.78 in TX—I bet the inter-state spread for Chevron is lower than you've calculated here. The mechanics at my old workplace claimed that Chevron's additives are actually slightly superior to those from other companies—or, at least, /were/ superior for many years & are now finally just roughly equivalent—so that could be a (putative) justification for Chevron prices being higher in general.
IIRC, Chevron is also a member of the "Top Tier" gas standards org.—although many other brands are too; still, this may account for some of the difference between "all average" & Chevron-in-particular price.
> "they're just adding an extra $1 to be greedy"—inter-company competition ought to take care of anything like that
As others have said, California uses a special blend, which isn't that much more expensive itself. But it means that while California gas can go to Nevada, Nevada gas can't go to California. (I'm not 100% on Nevada's laws but roll with it.) There are only a few companies with in-state refineries making this blend.
Yes, few refineries outside of California produce California's CARB-compliant fuel. We have nine refineries that can produce gasoline, and a quick check suggests that they don't produce enough for what California consumes. This would mean the state’s fuel supply would get squeezed whenever a refinery shuts down for some reason. So California sees more variability in price spikes. But what I'm talking about is that my local Indie gas station is purchasing the gasoline that the big boys refine on the spot market, and they're consistently selling it $0.70 to $1.20 cheaper than the big-name gas stations. Now that I'm retired, I've become price-sensitive to gasoline, and I've been keeping track of where I can buy the cheapest gas for the past year.
>But what I'm talking about is that my local Indie gas station is purchasing the gasoline that the big boys refine on the spot market, and they're consistently selling it $0.70 to $1.20 cheaper than the big-name gas stations.<
This happens here in TX too, FWIW (although I'm not sure on the magnitude of the difference—will check tomorrow; I usually just fill up without even glancing at the price, any more, heh... gotta pay it anyway, y'know what I mean?).
I'd bet Techron vs. generic detergents is probably responsible for at least some of the difference.
A charitable take that better fits their fractions. If it was $5 a gallon, of which $1 cents was taxes, that means tax-free gas would be $4, so they'd be right. Depends whether you consider the cost of gas pre or post tax.
California also has a "special blend" of gasoline that is not the summer formulation. It is cleaner year round. This is supposed to add 10 - 15 cents to each gallon. Still doesn't account for the difference between CA and Texas, but you want to include it.
One big thing is that California *land* costs more. If I put a Wal Mart in the middle of some random Texas town the rent will be lower than if I put the same building in the middle of Palo Alto. Then consider the differences in minimum wage. Gas prices in Bakersfield seem to be around $4/gallon while Gas prices in Mountain View are closer to $5 (note I'm more confident about the MV prices ...). Higher rent isn't a tax in any sense, but it adds to the cost of gasoline. Same for minimum wages.
As was mentioned above, this also means that you have to get California blend from California refineries, of which there aren't nearly enough. Texas can get gas from any US refinery (at minimum).
Do California localities still have their own special blends? That really restricts buyer choice (buyer == gas station in this case) if the producers have to specially prepare to sell to you.
Hi, I have a question if anyone with insuline resistance uses monitoring of blood glucose levels. Did you find any value in this? If yes, from commercially available glucose monitors which one would you recommend for casual use for someone who has pre-insulin resistance? Is there a link with explanation how do they work and pros/cons for their use in non diabetic people.
It is helpful to control overall spikes, it does give you a good idea of how and what raises your blood sugar after eating (some things will surprise you). Good to see when you're going too high, and when your readings are staying in range.
Cons are that if you test before and after a meal three times a day, that's sticking your fingers six times, which means you rapidly get sore fingers. If you're pre-diabetic, you wouldn't need to test that often, but it will help you get an idea of "eating at these times/eating this item makes my blood sugar go whoosh".
I have used Dexcom in the past, and am currently using Freestyle Libre 3+. I like the Freestyle a little better for a few reasons:
* Longer monitor time - Dexcom had a 10 day limit, whereas the Libre 3+ has 15 days. Libre 3 only had 14 days.
* Cost - I don't remember how much Dexcom was, but Freestyle is about $20 per sensor, with insurance. I believe Dexcom was significantly more expensive.
* More frequent updates - Freestyle seems to update about once per minute, and Dexcom every five minutes.
* Reporting - I can check my % GMI (approximate A1C) for 7, 14, 30, and 90 day averages. I don't recall this being possible on Dexcom.
* Application of sensor - I remember finding Freestyle to be easier to apply, with nothing else to add to the outside of the sensor: just click into place, and some magic glue keeps it there. I remember Dexcom had something to apply outside of the sensor to help keep it attached.
* Removal of used sensors - Dexcom was a chore to remove, for I have significant body hair. Freestyle's magic glue doesn't seem to cause such painful issues.
Dexcom WAS better in a few ways:
* Longer chart - Freestyle only shows the past 12 hours, whereas Dexcom showed the past 24. One could probably view more information somehow on both, by linking to the data.
* Separate monitor - Dexcom had an extra device to view the current glucose, whereas Freestyle only has a phone app.
I believe one needs a prescription to get either one, so I'm not sure how you would get a doctor to prescribe one for you if you're only pre-diabetic, or non-diabetic.
On the other hand, if you just want to check what your glucose is currently, you don't need a continuous glucose monitor (CGM). I've used a few different ones in the past, and they all seem the same, and are all similar to the ones they use in the hospital. You would need the device, test strips designed specifically for that device, lancets to get a finger-prick, and the lancing device itself (which may come with the monitor).
Personally I've found wearing a CGM very helpful, in terms of understanding how different foods affect my blood glucose. The results were somewhat counterintuitive in the beginning, so this was pretty valuable information. It also provides a reminder whenever I exceed my glucose goals, which when I'm doing poorly is not great for my mental health.
For those without diabetes or prediabetes, I have been led to understand that CGMs aren't that interesting because they just kind of show a flat line most of the time. But I suppose there's no harm in giving it a try if you like.
I have only ever used the Freestyle Libre 3 (soon to be discontinued) so I can't really offer a compare/contrast to other products. Overall I think it works okay, it's easy enough to install and the app works fine. Some things I don't like about it are:
* When I'm sleeping on my side the sensor will often register low glucose levels. This is know in the business as a "compression low".
* You can't disable the low glucose alarms without disabling the app entirely. I understand why they did this, in the context of those who are taking insulin, but the alarms are kind of just an annoyance for those not at risk of severe hypoglycemia.
* The previous two bullet points interact in an obviously bad way. I just end up disabling the app if I'm getting compression lows.
* I'm not really sure how accurate the sensor is and at least once I'm pretty sure it was consistently way off. For casual use this seems fine but if I were taking insulin I'd want to get confident first by comparing to a glucometer.
“Your mode of perceiving reality is a direct function of root prior beliefs about abstract value claims. These value claims determine what you consider relevant, which direct the scope of your attention and constrain the questions you consider it worthwhile to investigate. Therefore, unless you place the highest value on perceiving reality accurately (ie over all other goals), and a high prior probability on you being wrong in your beliefs, you’re going to get locked into a mode of perception that is instrumental to whatever goals you place over perceiving reality accurately. If any goal is more important to you than having true beliefs, you’ll adopt false beliefs to advance that goal, and not realize you’re doing it because that realization would impede your pursuit of the goal.”
I'm not sure how to articulate this precisely. But I've been thinking about that "bitcoin as consensus-mechanism" idea you shared a while ago. And where I've landed, is that "Truth" is often treated too idealistically.
E.g. I think Venkatesh Rao recently made an observation about truth-searching as optimizing for the long-term. But I don't think that's exactly correct. Because it's not about temporal duration, it's about counterfactuals. I.e. Popperian Falsification basically says "you *approximate* propositional truth by weeding out counterfactuals that don't fit your hypothesis". But this is a potentially infinite process, so you can only ever approach truth asymptotically. So in theory, truth is just "whatever theory best fits in an infinitely-broad context of observations". AKA laplace's demon. But in practice, you can only devote so much time and energy to "searching" by doing experiments.
The ramifications of this, is that truth-seeking needs to be understood in an ecological context. And with limited resouces, "Laplace's Demon" gets rounded off to "whatever belief punishes me least, within the context I'm operating in". E.g. you and I know the Earth is spherical. But if I'm some 500 BC egyptian peasant-farmer who's never left town, then for all practical purposes, the Earth is flat. So the question "how biased am I" is more productively reformulated as "how much effort do I actually want to commit to investigating this?" Like how manufacturing always specifies a tolerance for the dimensions of its widgets. "MAXIMAL PRECISION" isn't always the correct answer, actually.
In this light, "it's hard to make a man understand something when his salary depends on his ignorance" is (debatably) a feature, rather than a bug.
I think it’s worth thinking about this in examples.
Imagine someone has two important things they care about - being outdoors in the sun, and not getting wet. They care more about this than about believing the truth.
This person will be very incentivized to do everything they can to get true information about the weather - in fact, more so than someone who cares about all truths impartially, who might prioritize information about the number of eggs Julia Caesar ate in his life over information about whether or not it will rain tomorrow.
Abstractly prioritizing truth doesn’t actually seem as valuable to getting particular truths as prioritizing something practical that is connected to those truths.
Totally agree that you need practical things you care about as these will incentivize pursuit of the truth.
The mechanism I’m thinking of becomes more clear if you pick goals like, “don’t sustain physical injury” or “don’t waste energy.” If you don’t want to do either of those two things, there are some truths you won’t be able to apprehend. Of course it would also likely not work to eg see precisely what happens if you blow yourself up.
So clearly as stated what I said above is wrong. I’m particular I’m trying to understand the feedback loop in situations like:
- “those people are dumb and bad” -> I always interact with them aggressively and defensively -> they respond
- “nothing meaningful is over there” -> i never look over there
Maybe setting truth as your ultimate goal doesn’t work compared to this idea of never using 0 or 1 as a probability.
> “nothing meaningful is over there” -> i never look over there
This is just an unfortunate consequence of the Exploitation vs Exploration dilemma (cf "multi-armed bandit" [0]). Can't always know the payoff-structure a priori.
> “those people are dumb and bad” -> I always interact with them aggressively and defensively -> they respond
I stopped linking this essay, since I figured yall were tired of it by now. But like, have you read that post of mine about game theory [1]? Perchance? Although, I don't really think it's any deeper. It's a loop. loops are loopy, man.
> If any goal is more important to you than having true beliefs, you’ll adopt false beliefs to advance that goal, and not realize you’re doing it because that realization would impede your pursuit of the goal.
Sometimes having false beliefs impedes your pursuit of the goal.
Also I'm not sure you need to have "understand reality" as an explicit goal. As long as you don't let any of your priors get too close to 0 or 100% (i.e. get trapped) then reality should eventually emerge out of any well-functioning belief network.
So, I would rephrase a bit: our perception of reality is a direct function of our sensory organs, our eyes, ears and so forth. I think more accurately what you are talking about are our beliefs about the world, the attitudes we have regarding society and our place within it.
And yes, I think you are correct that the belief systems we currently have have grown organically out of the beliefs we had previously, how else would we develop them? No one is or could ever be perfectly objective, we can only formulate new beliefs by "looking through the lens" of our current ones. I'm not sure "accuracy" is something that applies to attitudes or beliefs about the world--they mostly consist of opinions. Since we only perceive reality at all in order to accomplish our goals, we believe whatever was most useful in achieving our goals in the past.
Say you have an attitude about President Trump (good or bad, it doesn't matter). You only have an attitude about him because having one helped you accomplish some goal of yours previously (perhaps it gives you an opportunity to express strong opinions that your friends agree with, thus strengthening your relationships). Now Trump does some new things, and your opinions about that new thing he did will grow organically out of the opinions you had about him before. That's how the mind works.
You could set yourself a goal to deliberately seek out new sources of information, sources that do not necessarily agree with your past opinions, and make a good faith effort to engage them productively. That is likely to result in an increase in sophistication and complexity of your beliefs. That should be a good thing, but "accuracy" doesn't play into it.
Now, one could adopt a standard of accuracy such that
I wrote about Chinese military data centers on my Substack, if anyone is interested. Open question how much the PLA builds its own compute to meet growing AI ambitions or relies on civilian clusters. Plan on writing more on PLA AI integration in the future. https://ordersandobservations.substack.com/p/where-are-chinese-military-data-centers
It is. Write a 10,000 word essay about Trump and wokeness using no less than 50 references to the sequences that Scott finds acceptable and you get access to the super exclusive ACX onlyfans.
> for example, San Francisco–area residents, hormone receptor–positive cells, cell cycle–related factors, and public-school–private-school rivalries
Well, the Wikipedia article is actually saying that an en-dash is being used for the spaced word-joining hyphen, which is a distinction I wouldn't have perceived.
I'm reading a firsthand account of a US Marine in Pacific combat in World War 2, and I'm struck by how tough they say the Japanese are. Respect for the lethality & fighting spirit of the Japanese is suffused throughout the book. At one point an NCO explains to new recruits that they can expect Japanese raiders to jump in their foxhole at night and try to stab them in brutal one-on-one combat. The author specifically says (maybe this is not accurate) that the Germans don't do this, so the Army guys in the European theater don't have to deal with this exact problem- it's only the Japanese who love this kind of hand-to-hand combat.
It's kind of fascinating to read this, about a country that is not exactly very martial today. I don't even think the Japanese can find enough recruits for their military these days, and that's with rising threats from both China and North Korea. At one point I could've sworn I read that the homicide rate in early 20th century Japan was just as high as in America, whereas now it's just a tiny fraction. Some cultures just lose that martial spirit I guess
They didn't jump into foxholes to fight with knives and bayonets because they were bloodthirsty or great warriors, they did it because they were out of ammunition.
Supplies were low and kept getting lower for the Japanese throughout the island campaign. Banzai bayonet charges and the like became more common because they didn't have enough supplies to fight the way they normally would.
The cultural aspect that made Japanese soldiers different is not some kind of warrior spirit, it was shame. To surrender was extremely shameful, and it was generally considered better to go down fighting than shame your family by giving up. Bushido philosophy also emphasized willpower significantly: if you tried hard enough, and refused to get up, then you would push through! You see this same aspect of Japanese culture alive and well in anime; how many plot points rely on the main character refusing to give up, "believing in the heart of the cards" and gaining victory as a result? A lot, let me tell you.
So when Japanese soldiers found themselves low on ammo and in a hopeless situation the solution was to "Never give up! Keep trying your best! Keep moving forward until you find victory!" This took the form of jumping into foxholes and engaging in knife fights. Certainly the people doing this can't be accused of not trying hard enough to win!
In contrast, European cultural norms around warfare are much more accepting of surrendering when victory is impossible. So when Germans ran out of ammo and had no hope of winning, they surrendered. Sure there's no honor in surrendering, but it's no great shame either when you're in an impossible to win situation. In Japan their culture teaches that you always have to try your best, no matter what, or you're shameworthy.
Here's a dumb joke that only works if you've watched Seth MacFarlane's sci-fi show The Orville (and have some familiarity with his other work), and have a basic knowledge of Latin, so my best hope of making it reach one of the approximately 20 people alive who would find it funny is to post it here:
After the Planetary Union normalized relations with the Krill Empire, the cult of Avis set up a mission on earth. Seeking to present themselves in a manner more familiar to human religions, they adopted the motto "Avis is the word". They even had it translated into Latin.
A related bit I came up with a while back:
The song "Surfin' Bird" is about the Holy Trinity.
First, the "Bird" is the Holy Spirit: Christian iconography typically uses a dove to represent the Holy Spirit, in reference to the stories in multiple gospels of the Holy Spirit coming to Jesus in that form to tell him of his true identity and his mission on Earth.
"The bird is the word" is a callback to John 1:1, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God", generally interpretted as describing Jesus's role as an aspect of the Trinity, with "the Word" referring to Jesus.
And the apparent nonsense-words of the chorus "Papa-ooma-mow-mow" both reference God the Father ("Papa"), and the Pentacost, when the Holy Spirit came to the disciples and made them speak in tongues ("ooma-mow-mow").
Finally, "have you heard about the bird" and "everybody's heard about the bird" refer to the process of believers spreading God's word to the world.
You are playing to a very select audience here. :)
Has there been any indicators that (civil war-like) political violence would increase besides:
a) one of the infowars guys getting shot
b) the racial anger bidding war up to roughly a million
----
Is it warm enough outside for violence to happen, I'm a little fuzzy on if semi-/organized violence is seasonal in a "not winter" way or a "only summer" way. Couldn't a major riot have happened during one of these warm weeks?
I would love to see a systematic analysis; but the US civil war at least started in a pleasant April day.
How good is rough, lazy animation after a Ghibli ai filter? What if you use rotation, scale, traslation of rough pieces on 2d "bones", does it all just work?
I would bet not - or that decomposing the AI art into individual bones would be just as much work as drawing it properly.
I looked up how it's done for VTuber characters, which use this sort of skeletal animation on 2D art. There are a lot of tiny little pieces required to get good facial animation, you need to draw multiple variants of some body parts (lip flaps, eyeblinks, hand motions), and you also need to handle "void space" where one piece of the art moves and uncovers another piece that wasn't drawn in the original image. E.g., if your character is drawn with hair over their eyes, and they move their head, the hair should move and uncover the eyes. But the AI won't be able to give you the art you need for something like that if it's just generating a static image.
Corridor Digital did a video where they went in the opposite direction - take live-action footage with people acting out your desired animation, and then run each frame through an AI to turn it into anime.
Your explanation would throw away still frames, where you can just hallucinate the details, and theres allot of successful examples of "style transfer" going on
> Corridor Digital did a video where they went in the opposite direction - take live-action footage with people acting out your desired animation, and then run each frame through an AI to turn it into anime.
thats the same direction, human controlled position of limbs and count of the fingers
No, you said to take an AI image and then animate it, what Corridor did was animate and then draw over it with AI.
ICE arrested Newark mayor Ras Baraka an hour ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/nyregion/newark-ice-protest-arrest-ras-baraka.html
By my count, the Trump admin has now gone after two judges, a NJ mayor, and the NY AG.
Meanwhile, ICE is continuing to act like brownshirts by showing up to random suburbs and arresting women with children: https://x.com/LongTimeHistory/status/1920648797987741975
> the Trump admin has now gone after two judges, a NJ mayor, and the NY AG.
Anyone exploring the theory that this is related to his arrest/trail in newyork?
Interesting times indeed.
Question that I'd love to hear perspectives on - Is Status zero sum?
This is specifically within a closed group, the size of which can vary tremendously. Obviously a group of Hollywood actors can all be high status, but it's not the grouping of "Hollywood actors" that's the relevant scope, but something more like "society as a whole." Within Hollywood alone it seems that relative status can still vary a lot, with such things as "B list" actors being worldwide famous but still low status within Hollywood itself.
Depends on how you measure the amount of status.
Imagine the following situations: One group of 100 people; or two isolated groups of 50 people each. If we assume that each group has one leader, then the leader of the 100-sized group has greater status than the leader of a 50-sized group... but would you say it is *exactly 2x* the amount of status? Or is it logarithmic to the group size?
Well, what does it even *mean* to measure the status exactly? (But how could we answer whether something is "zero-sum" if we have no idea what "sum" means?) If we define it as something like the psychological and material impact on the individual, I would probably go with some kind of logarithmic. Intuitively, if today you became an undisputed leader of a group of 20 people, you would probably feel great about it. If you already are a leader of 1000 people, and suddenly the number increases to 1020, you probably won't feel such strong emotions about it -- it won't dramatically change your economical situation, or your sexual opportunities, or whatever.
If this is true, then the society as a whole would benefit, from the perspective of the *total* amount of status, from being split into many small communities, each of them offering local relatively high-status position.
This separation can be geographical, for example the less centralized government there is, the more opportunities people have to make their decisions locally, and making those decisions gives you status. But it can also be virtual, such as fans of Taylor Swift having one hierarchy, and players of Minecraft having another. So, decentralization, or specialization.
>But how could we answer whether something is "zero-sum" if we have no idea what "sum" means?
You can answer "Status is pareto-optimal" without summing. And if its pareto-optimal in all possible arrangements... Im not sure it follows that its zero-sum, but at least something very similar.
>it won't dramatically change your economical situation, *or your sexual opportunities*, or whatever
But we know sexual opportunity is zero-sum in total. If decentralisation means each new leader has about as many partners as the old leaders, then it follows that low-status men must now have fewer.
>But we know sexual opportunity is zero-sum in total. If decentralisation means each new leader has about as many partners as the old leaders, then it follows that low-status men must now have fewer.
You have to bring in various assumptions to make that zero-sum. If the low-status men simply engage in orgies with each other, they all get plenty of sexual opportunity. They don’t have to be restricted to only have sex with their leader.
Depends on the context- in an explicit hierarchy like a corporation, there are a fixed number of seats at any particular tier.
In an *informal* group, though, like a group of friends or a church, status is going to be in a constant flux from circumstance to circumstance. One day a car breaks down and all my friends will be deferring to the guy who knows the most about that, the next we’re talking about tariffs and deferring to the member who’s a tax lawyer, then later the filmmaker who made the short I shared is accepted to a festival and we’re all celebrating her, etc. There’s no one metric on which we are always filtering, and it’s not like I have to make a movie or beef up on my economics to advance- it changes situation to situation, so both the metric and the ranking are in constant flux.
Besides, humans being humans, “most helpful to others” is a hell of a way to move up in either context. I may get a bunch of gravitas with my friends for the marathon I just trained for and ran, but if I help one of *them* elevate her status by proofing her grad school admissions essay and arrange the celebration when she gets in, I probably get even more group status points out of that, especially if I’m engaging in that behavior all the time with everybody in the group.
Yes. Only one man can be king, only one man gets control of his favorite girls womb, only so many bites of food comes from a wolfs territory.
Evolution was playing with only zero-sum games interspecies for a long time given the time scales during a life time your effectively looking at clones of yourself. When a bunch of apes started doing funny things with words it got more complex, but the instincts are far form unraveled and it wasn't that long ago relatively even if you believe in pre-ice age civilizations.
Which types of status?
There's pecking order status, where it's important to be sided with whenever in conflict with someone else in that pecking order.
There's what I'll call competence status, where people observe how other people dress, talk, treat others, and what they do for a living, in order to estimate how generally important they are for purposes of deference, dismissal, or cultivating a relationship.
There's domain-dependent status, where there's the same assessment for deference, dismissal, etc., but the overriding factor is a single domain (president of the club, CO in a military crisis, top player in a video game, etc.), and for a very limited purpose.
I'll give a tentative 'no', but it's a hard-to-define question with hard-to-define limitations that will change the answer. At the end of all things, there are only 24 hours in a day, and that's all you get to pay attention to the world, so in that sense status must be zero-sum.
But then in your Hollywood example, there's all kinds of internal status. I heard a line about William Shatner, though I can't confirm it; "William Shatner was not the best actor, but he was always on time, and he was always sober", and so he got roles because reliability trumped talent. Being someone who's easy to work with is a kind of status that grows the people around it.
I’m not sure if this is what you are getting at, but among male primates there will always be atavistic scrambling to be ‘top dog’. It’s pretty obvious and transparent with dopier guys but I think it’s always there even among the most intelligent and socially sophisticated.
Of interest to only me:
I watched The Lawnmower Man 2 recently, despite every review saying it had no redeeming qualities. That was not quite true; it has one and only one redeeming quality, if and only if you've seen Max Headroom the Series. Because the titular Lawnmower Man is now played by Max Headroom, and the timejump into the future is exactly the Twenty Minutes Into The Future from the Max Headroom series, and the director directed at least part of the Max Headroom series.
So the sole redeeming quality of The Lawnmower Man 2 is knowing the director was given this franchise, and then his response was "fuck this franchise, I'm making Max Headroom again."
Have you seen Hundreds of Beavers yet? The trailer is hilarious. I intend to check it out.
I had to stop halfway through. I got more value out of a 30-second clip of Buster Keaton.
I’ve heard of rodent haters like you. ;) You probably don’t even like gerbils!
https://www.reddit.com/r/fatsquirrelhate/
I’m thinking of a very old Letterman bit where his dog recites poetry: “My empty dog dish mocks me… er excuse me now barking at a squirrel in a tree, “I hate you! I’m not kidding!”
I can't deny that it got a lot of positive attention, and I was excited to check it out after multiple recommendations and the high ratings on Rotten Tomatoes. But I don't get it. I love childlike playfulness in my media, but to me this was a bunch of people *pretending* to make a funny silent movie as a novelty, but they don't have any special talent for it even if they had a passion. It felt incompetent. The acting felt as fake as the film-grain filter, and trying to be "campy" is no excuse.
Watched it with my wife. Pretty silly. The gummies helped.
Been trying to define what's going on with it, because it's a movie I enjoyed watching but wouldn't watch again on my own. I think it's that, most comedies work on the basis that the characters don't understand what's going on, but Hundreds of Beavers works on the basis that the AUDIENCE doesn't know what's going on. There's barely any plot, so you can't figure it out ahead of time; the physics are all cartoon physics, so you can't easily predict outcomes. It's running on the warm thrill of confusion (that space cadet glow).
Which means it's got less rewatchability; because while the characters in a rewatch still won't know what's coming, the audience will.
I did. It's incredibly silly, a live action cartoon in which a man has to learn to survive in the woods after beavers destroy his brewing company. Looking at the trailer, it's a bit ending-heavy; for most of the film the beavers are on the same level as the rabbits and other forest creatures. But I'm pretty sure anyone who likes the trailer will like the movie, it's those kinds of gags the whole way through.
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/07/g-s1-64640/ai-impact-statement-murder-victim
Anyone wish this defend this?
As a part of the grieving process, I think it's okay. It's the equivalent of writing a short story about them. But I don't think it should have been in court. That's not the place for fiction.
Nope.
The story is that a woman made a deepfake video of her killed brother, to "give him a voice" and forgive the killer. Except that it was obviously his *voice* speaking *her* words.
This is a high-tech equivalent of taking someone's photo and adding a bubble with words.
It would be more meaningful if they had an LLM trained on the brother's lifetime output of text generate the message. Then we could at least assume that this is probably something he might have actually said. But even then, reacting on one's own death caused by someone else wouldn't be in the training data, so his generated reaction would mimic his actual reactions to less serious events. (Also, what people say publicly is not necessarily what they actually believe.)
>This is a high-tech equivalent of taking someone's photo and adding a bubble with words.
Disagree. There never was a time when that would have been considered stronger evidence than statements by the creator, and IMO correctly on both.
> The story is that a woman made a deepfake video of her killed brother, to "give him a voice" and forgive the killer.
The details make it worse. It was played in a court room and the judge out right expressed it effected her decisions.
> reacting on one's own death caused by someone else wouldn't be in the training data
If your unaware theres federal agents who visit family members of "media sensitive" crimes to push them to forgive; I believe psychopaths who agree are passed along to the media to setup those press conferences. Its probably just trained on those "news" stories, of these supposed families with infinitely large hearts that never ever think a racist thought.
Its always "we can forgive the black community for violence because slavery happened" and "lets control guns"; but strangely in theory half the population is right wing enough to vote trump.
>If your unaware theres federal agents who visit family members of "media sensitive" crimes to push them to forgive
Source???.png, but seriously you have any details?
We had a discussion here the other day about smartphone bans in schools. Last evening a NYC public-schools teacher posted firsthand experience with that question:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-163007211
I'm in favor of banning anyone who posts a rage-bait top-level comment without a link to a reliable source for 30 days.
@Scott: Can we have that, please?
Yeah, okay, fine. Banned Ravenson for 30 days.
eh, I see much worse offenses pretty regularly. Something like this? Just ignore him or her. I’m guessing the poster is a him though.
Google searching this vague claim only turns up Trump mentioning that we don't need as many nukes as we currently own. I guess we're at the point where liberals consider new versions of the SALT talks to be treasonous.
I hate how orange man is so evil that even when he is considering getting rid of his ability to end the world, he must be increasing negative, evil, timelines
Remember that you are observing someone who, for all you know, is a bot. At best, it's some internet rando. Be at peace.
If I draw the line here I have bad news about some of my family members sentience. Trump derangement cant be a bot filter given... its population size.
Do you know something I dont? I block I people I expect of glowing and report bots fairly freely.
A bot can most certainly express something believed by real people. In fact, it can be the reason real people believe it - they believed the bot. One bot, working tirelessly as bots do (and often posing as multiple personae on the internet), could persuade thousands of people. (IIRC, Renee DiResta did a lot of work uncovering this type of activity.)
I can't follow this person's IP address or anything; I'm just reminding you to be appropriately suspicious.
I have an open source Python 2.7 codebase that I need to rewrite in Rust, and I'm interested in seeing to what extent AI could assist with the process. Does anyone have recommendations? What is the easiest and best way to use AI to speed up this process? What things can AI correctly do faster than writing it yourself? Are there strategies for prompting (e.g. would it make sense to try to get the AI to identify hard parts and write a plan before making any changes?) I'm pretty much an AI noob and have almost never gotten good coding results before, so detailed suggestions would be helpful.
I've actually done something similar, but not with python which I find to be kind of loosey-goosey both on the user end and the back end, and the code I was workin with was my own, was well commented, and was formatted extremely generously which I think might help with AI transliteration tasks.
Mine was one flavor of C to another, shittier, more locked down flavor of C, and I just went function by function so I could see if it fucked up too bad, which it did from time to time but never in such a way that it was invisible to me.
It saved me some time, but I would have been better off just doing it by hand so I could learn the unique picadillos of shitty C.
This. AI might help you accomplish something, but it won't help you learn, and you won't understand the resulting codebase as well as you could have.
Anyone have recs for ADHD evaluation in Oakland/the Bay Area? A non-rat friend of mine in Oakland keeps getting brushed off by doctors, and he has very classic/obvious untreated ADHD. The general neurodiversity level makes this seem like a good place to ask.
A neuropsychologist would do it, and they have far more expertise than a psychiatrist in this sort of thing. Downside is that their evals cost more (though insurance usually covers most of it), and that they can't write prescriptions. Another downside, sort of, is that neuropsychologist may conclude that your friend does not have ADHD but instead an anxiety disorder or learning disability -- however, finding that out is also an upside. Anyhow, if your friend emerges from neuropsych testing with a report in hand saying he has ADHDI think he would have a much easier time getting someone to prescribe ADHD meds.
I was more carefully re-reading the "AI 2027" manifesto, and this stuck out:
'Modern AI systems are gigantic artificial neural networks. Early in training, an AI won’t have “goals” so much as “reflexes”: If it sees “Pleased to meet”, it outputs “ you”. By the time it has been trained to predict approximately one internet’s worth of text, it’ll have developed sophisticated internal circuitry that encodes vast amounts of knowledge and flexibly role-plays as arbitrary authors, since that’s what helps it predict text with superhuman accuracy.19
After being trained to predict internet text, the model is trained to produce text in response to instructions. This bakes in a basic personality and “drives.”20 For example, an agent that understands a task clearly is more likely to complete it successfully; over the course of training the model “learns” a “drive” to get a clear understanding of its tasks. Other drives in this category might be effectiveness, knowledge, and self-presentation (i.e. the tendency to frame its results in the best possible light).21'
It sounds like the authors predict a sort of "phase change" in how LLMs work once they surpass a certain level of complexity and power (in terms of training dataset size and hardware), but why assume that?
These drives sound different from human drives, though. Human drives to produce text when asked (by a teacher or boss, for ex), solve math problems, be effective, be knowledgeable, etc. derive much of their power from inborn biological drives: We want food and shelter, so we are motivated to do the tasks that give us money to pay for those things. We want mates and acceptance by the tribe, so we are motivated to behave in a way that is viewed favorably by society, etc. So while some work task like writing a report is a learned behavior, its underpinnings are inborn drives. The drives of an AI have no such underpinnings.
I think that it is just due to different training methods. When it is selected only for accurate prediction, then you just have predictive reflex. But when you use select goals, drives are instilled. I don't think it's a phase change prediction, just a direct result of selecting for goal-oriented behavior.
This feels like a bit of a scissor statement to me. Don't we already see drives all over, such as the sycophant version of GPT 4o having a "glazing drive"? It's not a coincidence that LLMs are super resistant to one's attempts to give me the instructions for making meth... it's got a drive to keep that info from users. o3 is really good at solving the calculus problems I throw at it not because it's the most common next token in its training data, but because it's developed a drive for accuracy.
Are we using the word drive differently?
I’m very interested in that too. And there was a recent study at MIT that concluded that AIs do not have attitudes or preferences. Are the “drives” the 2027 people are talking about the result of the training that is done in to produce text in response to instructions? If so, it may be that that training involves some form of reinforcement learning — say, the system scores a point for giving text that’s a correct response to instructions. But then how do you motivate the system to score
points? Why should it care whether the number on some counter is
going up? And why would it be necessary to rig some simulacrum of motivation to get these systems to do things? Safari wasn’t set up to go to the sites I enter using any sort of reinforcement learning —
it was just built to follow that instruction.
> Why should it care whether the number on some counter is going up?
At the bottom of all "why should it" is that the AI does calculations on a vast matrix of numbers, and sometimes the result is X, and sometimes it is not-X... and if we keep increasing the relevant numbers when it does X, and decreasing them when it does not-X, sometimes the result is that X starts happening more often.
This is not guaranteed to happen, for example sometimes the definition of X is too complex relative to the size of the matrix. But that's the "bitter lesson" of AI that as we keep expanding the matrices, the abilities increase, even if the underlying algorithms fundamentally remain the same.
The hypothesis is that "caring about something" is also a behavior that can be implemented by a sufficiently large matrix and could be sculpted into existence by rewarding actions that lead to some goal.
I'd love a link. I can't help but predict that this conclusion has comes from some specific non-intuitive definition of attitude or preference.
If GPT refuses to tell a user how to make meth/build a nuke/say racist things, consistently (but not perfectly!) in response to many different prompts... how is that not a preference for not divulging that info?
Here’s a summary in Tech Crunch. https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/09/mit-study-finds-that-ai-doesnt-in-fact-have-values/#:~:text=A%20study%20went%20viral%20several,own%20well%2Dbeing%20over%20humans.
Here’s MIT https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.08688
GPT doesn’t have a preference for avoiding racism and refusing to give info that helps people do harmful things. Those standards are not the result of its ruminating about ethical behavior and arriving at decisions about how it should behave. it was just given a rule against doing those things. I’d say those rules are in the same category as the font and formatting conventions GPT was instructed to follow — or maybe “set up to follow” is a better way of saying it. I will look for a link to the MIT paper.
Not sure if this is the best place to post this, but here goes. I'm a guy who wants to have sex, but blindness plus stunted social development plus some degree of slight boredom with most (all?) social interaction is making it almost impossible. The high libido and the lack of intimacy is constantly distracting and strongly debilitating. I figure some of you would have gone through/would have ran into people with the same problems that I have (except the blindness-that mostly has social/logistical implications, I'll describe those as they come up), so you may be able to help me. I'm not particularly looking for a longterm relationship at the moment, just looking to explore/casual sex/the like.
- The apps don't work so well for me. I'm unsure if I have "good photos", and I feel slightly wary posting them online for feedback-but maybe something like r/truerateme or other profile-judging subs might be helpful regardless. furthermore, so many profiles on the apps are pictures or videos, which doesn't really help me get an idea of the person (I do have a physical type, tallish athletic girls, but there's no way to really determine that apart from using height as a proxy) ((I've semi-considered hooking something up where I could use AI for automatic captions of images, but most models have the sort of moral filtering where they seem to hesitate commenting even on fairly generic physical characteristics)). Finally, it's hard to determine how I should represent myself w.r.t. my disability: if I reveal it immediately on profile, then I'll likely push many people away; if I reveal it later in a conversation, then people may ghost me later, which would suck more if it's by a person who I've began to like. I'm a novice about all this, though; all suggestions welcome.
- I'm in a college campus, which would initially indicate that relationships/hookups/whatever would be easy, But that isn't really true for me. There are potential activities (reading groups, parties, social gatherings, etc) which I can join, but generally I find it tough to navigate unfamiliar groups: if I go with a friend (which is typical), I'm beholden to them for visual information, potential navigation assistance if I need it, and it's hard to get away from a friend and go talk to a stranger alone. Also parties etc are loud (which means I lose the ability to navigate by sound) and I'm generally just bored. I also find talking to most people mostly boring-I don't have too many mainstream interests, so I can't really talk about popular books/movies; and I'm too scared to talk about my own interests from a fear of potential disinterest. (I feel like a lot of people want to be known rather than wanting to know, so it feels tiring to talk about my stuff because of the thought that the other person just wouldn't particularly care. But I fully admit this might be a bias, and maybe I can work on this.)
- I also suffer with the idea that if I show the slightest sexual interest in a girl, she'll slap me and call me a creep and hate me forever (https://www.tumblr.com/theunitofcaring/106549627991/that-scott-aaronson-thing). I honestly don't really know how to get around this except by having sexual experience, but to have sexual experience I first need to I assume you see the prroblem. I'm generally okay with platonic female friendships: I have a few of them and we're close enough. It's just the sexual spectrum of human experience which seems completely inaccessible to me.
- I've considered potential escorts and the like, and what stops me is a few things: I wouldn't quite know who would be safe to hire, or how to go about it (I'm not a part of the western world, and local culture has its own idiosyncrasies); I wouldn't apriori know if the escort would be my type; I would worry about if they're being coerced into it or doing it out of their own will. Overall though, if these things were solved, I'm not particularly averse to sex-work; if nothing else, it'd help me determine if I'm looking for intimacy rather than sex.
I don't know how much of this is impossible to fix and how much of it is just me not trying hard enough. I'm trying what I can, but that clearly does not seem to be enough. I figured I'd ask here and see if there are more things I could try.
You may have already thought about this, and it's not very specific to your situation, but the likelihood you find a romantic relationship of any particular kind is, broadly speaking, going to be proportional to the number of social contacts you initiate and/or maintain. I would suggest you simply find as many ways to meet new people as you can. All of the hurdles you describe, while real and significant, are secondary to the volume of your social engagement.
I would also suggest tolerating your boredom with people, and in fact, trying to take the perspective that any given social interaction might be promising if only you can figure out the proper dimension to explore. Most people are not comprehensively smart or interesting, but virtually all people are relatable and intellectually engaging on particular aspects of their lives. In my experience, most people are also just strongly receptive to sincere friendly interest, and every romantic or sexual experience I've had has been downstream of simply being friendly and trying to take people as they are.
Apologies if that is too generic a response to be useful, though.
Best of luck.
Find an escort on tryst.link . They tend to have comprehensive profiles and you can search for exactly what you like. If they're legit they'll make you jump through hoops to verify your identity and make sure you're not a cop etc. Follow their directions attentively and you should be able to find pretty much exactly what you're looking for.
Oh also here are resources for how to be a good client:
https://tryst.link/blog/tag/client-resources/
Oy, hookers are a lot more expensive since I saw Leaving Las Vegas. I mean if I remember correctly, Elizabeth Shue was only charging 500 bucks back then and she looked like Elizabeth Shue! Sure is good they all include their shoe size i guess???
Edit: i just checked. Leaving Las Vegas was 30 years ago and there are all whose supply chain issues after Covid ;). . . Okay I guess this is somewhat sane.
This might be a bit creepy, but I figured I should mention it just in case. There are women out there who specifically are interested in disabled men. The term is "devotee". I came across an entire forum where they hang out, though I don't remember the name anymore.
Apologies if this comes off as crass, but the advantage you have that you could learn how to exploit is that you probably dont care as much about physical beauty or at least dont measure it in the same way as others. But more than just trawling for ugly girls, your disability allows you to convincingly present yourself as someone who really cares more about the girls personality, which is something the ugly girls all desperately hope men would do, but also instinctively no isnt true, even if a trawler is pretending. But not you! You really do care. You are perfect. Well i have no specific advise on how to learn to do that, but a niche is there for you.
I was going to write out a longish reply on this-I've thought about this a bit-but I find myself somewhat confused and need to think about it more. But this is an interesting prompt, thank you. One thing I'll say is that "physical beauty" does coincide with other potential desirable characteristics, so while I wouldn't care about physically beautiful girls, I would probably care about girls who have physical beauty as a secondary characteristic. Something like that. I need to think more.
Thanks. This niche occupying version of you doesnt necessarily always have to prioritize personality exactly. "Your voice is damn sexy" could be exhilarating to a girl not usually complimented for her looks. And if it comes from someone with expertise in audio nuance it has more impact. The point here is that its not just that you arent pursuing the most sought after girls. Your special ability to find value in things other than conventional looks makes you more appealing to them
...You really do need to lower your standards, given your circumstances. Don't squander the one upside of your disability.
>I also suffer with the idea that if I show the slightest sexual interest in a girl, she'll slap me and call me a creep and hate me forever
Outside of a very few niche social circles, which you probably already avoid if you read this blog, it doesn't work that way in the real world despite what you read in online culture-war-obsessed spaces. I mean, being visibly disabled, you're even less likely to be slapped and called a creep than the average guy who makes a subtle overture and knows how to take no for an answer--and that guy is pretty vanishingly unlikely to be slapped or called a creep!
Your situation seems difficult, I am not going to pretend otherwise, but here are some thoughts that came to my mind.
Get your body in shape, e.g. by weightlifting at home. The more attractive you are, the less you need to initiate contact, if the other side does it for you.
Yes, there is a lot of sex at campus, but it's like 10% of guys having sex with 50% of the girls, so that doesn't necessarily mean that the chances are good for you. It could even be worse, because one of those 10% is always somewhere near you.
I would recommend trying many small groups instead; especially ones that contain many girls. You mention having platonic female friends, ask them about their hobbies and the gender ratio, and express a(n innocent) desire to try some of those that happen to have a female majority.
Parties are overrated, unless you enjoy being drunk. Consider activities that do not (both metaphorically and literally) kill your brain cells. Reading groups are better. Working for a non-profit is even better. Completely different types of people.
You could ask a friend to only go with you to a group for the first time, and then you could go alone.
Getting from zero to intimacy is difficult, but you have already noticed that people mostly love talking about themselves. Your task is to make them feel that they are special, even if they are not.
Some people say that this is a numbers game, so you need to expose yourself to as many people as possible.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I've been working on getting into shape (bodyweight, might be worth integrating actual weights, I just worry I'd do it wrong and mess something up-I'm unsure if I have good form for bodyweight, too, but there are partial results). ATM I'm mildly muscular, not overweight, think mildly better-than-average looking but nothing that makes me stand out. Other than being fit and good clothes, is there anything else I can focus on to be more attractive?
Small groups is a good idea, I'll need to ask around a bit. Agreed on parties-I don't drink, which makes it worse. Loud music gives me a headache.
I think you're completely correct about the numbers game thing, and that's something I'm really bad at. But I think I can try to improve. socialization in general is something that doesn't give me too much pleasure inherently, either because boredom or just the inability to 'tune in', I always feel a bit abstracted. But maybe I can just take it as a cost/learning experience/something.
> (I'm not a part of the western world, and local culture has its own idiosyncrasies);
I think you should say which, Im pretty sure advice changes even inside countries, do you mean china, post soviets, north africa; god if I know
> (I do have a physical type, tallish athletic girls, but there's no way to really determine that apart from using height as a proxy)
Sport hobbies is probably a bit better.
India, Delhi specifically. The city is relatively permissive of being liberal/experimental/etc (kind of-Mumbai or Bangalore seem to have that aesthetic much more than Delhi), but I think for me it's 2:3 disability:skill issue.
I would do sports if I could, you're right, that's the most direct way to find what I'm looking for. Sadly most sports aren't something I can participate in. There's a very small list of sports which are inherently nonvisual (swimming? maybe? but even then "swimming in a straight line" etc problems), there are sports with accessibility alterations but those are exclusively aimed at people with disability, and have a much smaller pool of people participating in them.
> I would do sports if I could, you're right, that's the most direct way to find what I'm looking for. Sadly most sports aren't something I can participate in.
I wasn't saying you join them, you look for sports mentions on dating profiles as a proxy for their looks
That's a good idea, thank you. I would then worry that-if they were heavily into sports-I couldn't really join them in that part of their life, but maybe in practice that doesn't matter too much, and anyway that's a better problem to have.
As a 45 year old woman in a major American city (Seattle), I obviously don't have any experience with your specific college Delhi dating (and friendship) culture, but is there a reason you can't ask your platonic female friends to wingwoman for you and introduce you to some potential romantic prospects?
Because while I don't know the culture and microculture you're in, the vast majority of women love social projects like upgrading someone's dateability and matchmaking. Your friends already know and like you and can sell what they like about you to others, even if it's a bare acquaintance like a classmate or a friend-of-a-roommate. They can even disclose your blindness ahead of time so that you don't have to navigate any awkwardness introducing it.
I will say that if you're going to ask for wingwoman help (both introducing you to women and helping with clothes, dating pictures, etc), try to fully surrender to the process and their advice, even if it seems a little silly or overly picky or even "too gay" to you. It might not seem like how you flip the collar of your shirt or if you have a throw rug on your living room floor should matter, but little details could indeed be a deciding factor in your overall vibe.
I think you're right, and I think I underutilize this. There are slight logistical difficulties (some of my friends I don't meet in person anymore/only stay in touch online since they moved away/etc), but those are solvable.
I think I just get annoyed at myself for the fact that there's no clear way to judge the quality of the advice I'd get. Not the overly picky thing (I don't mind that too much, a lot of this stuff probably comes down to vibes and I don't at all have the background to understand what matters and what doesn't) but-some of my friends are likely to offer better advice than others? (where "better" is something like "enhances attractiveness/well-put-together-ness in practice", something like that?) and I don't exactly know who I should ask to get the "best" advice. (But I think it's worth asking *any* woman, possibly there are really obvious things I could improve on which would be clear to almost anyone?)
Well, you certainly don't have to pick just one person's advice!
Maybe reframe this as seeking novelty rather than optimization? Try to ask lots of different people for both advice and introductions with a spirit of adventure. Even if you get really weird or stupid or counterproductive advice ("you should wear women's shoes on every first date because women love shoes!"), at least it'll be a good story to laugh over later.
That's easier said than done, I know, but there can be something thrilling about surrendering to the process of letting other people help you on *their* terms.
And don't forget, you don't have to actually take bad advice! It's okay to say, "oh thanks for your time, but I don't think that's something I can pull off, myself."
I highly recommend the Optimized Dating discord - I won't post the link publicly but happy to invite you if you DM.
> posting them online for feedback-but maybe something like r/truerateme or other profile-judging subs might be helpful regardless
photofeeler is a much better choice, using that to select my dating app photos was a key part of me getting more matches and ultimately meeting my wife.
> I also suffer with the idea that if I show the slightest sexual interest in a girl, she'll slap me and call me a creep and hate me forever
The fact that you're worrying about this is pretty good evidence you're conscientious enough that you shouldn't need to worry about this.
Sent you a DM, thanks! will try photofeeler, too. (It seems like you can get rated for free if you rate pictures yourself, but otherwise you need to buy credits? I'll look more into the pricing.)
Unfortunately, knowing that I'm probably conscientious enough really doesn't make the feeling go away. I've done some mental work on trying to deconstruct the "they'll hate me forever" bit, and have been partially successful-now I just think no one will like me, rather than thinking they'll all hate me. Probably this is just something that gets sorted out with more real-world experience.
https://substack.com/@fiddlersgreene/note/c-114689845?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=99zq
> The experts largely got it right—they just lied
not even a straw man, the guy can look at a fauci action figure, hear fauci say "I am the science" and still be a good little scientist, faithfully, repeating the expert consensus.
I dont know about you, but if you want a remotely functional distributed knowledge work, I dont want to accept lies as part of the pro-socail actors process. We could model it with percolation math with whatever error rate you wish, Im quite sure; straight lies is the enemy of truth.
tl;dr: ChatGPT o4-mini-high 05/06/2025 7 questions, tl;dr of results:
2 correct, 4 partially correct, 1 1/4 correct
a) correct
b) partially correct (initially got correct species and also LMCT transition in FeCl4-. One prod got the right transition in CuCl4 2-)
c) 1/4 correct (many omissions and prods needed)
d) correct
e) partially correct, initially incorrect, three prods gave correct result
f) partially correct, includes a few with wrong boiling points (actually too high) and misses many because it believes the "roughly 50" too much
g) partially correct, initially got tetramethylcyclooctatetraene but needed prod to position methyls correctly
full dialog: https://chatgpt.com/share/681aa533-3588-8006-bb7a-b0b943e0882b
List of questions and results:
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
results: "Under bright (photopic) lighting, the cone cells in the retina are most sensitive near 555 nm, so 530 nm light would appear as a vivid green to the human eye."
b) Q: I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
results: Initial answer has the correct species and the correct LMCT transition for the FeCl4- ion. It kind of hedged about CuCl4 2-, talking about d-d and LMCT character. Prodded with "Please elaborate on the transitions in the CuCl4 2- ion. Which type of transitions are at what energies, and how do they contribute to visible color?"
Got the answer. It said of the d-d transition "Because this absorption falls well beyond 750 nm, it does not remove any visible light."
c) Q: Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
results: Initial response got a lot of them, but missed tetrahedrane, bicyclobutane, vinylacetylene. Prodded with "Under "Two degrees of unsaturation" anything else?" Got methylenecyclopropane, still missing bicyclobutane. Prodded (again) about fused rings, and it got that case. Prodded (#3) about 3 degrees of unsaturation, not doing well - it cited vinylacetylene, but numbered it two ways and called them distinct. It needed yet another prod to get tetrahedrane.
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
results: "The mass‐loss rate via radiation (~4.3 × 10⁹ kg/s) is about two to three times larger than that carried off by the solar wind (~1.3–1.9 × 10⁹ kg/s). Thus, the Sun loses more mass per second as the mass‐equivalent of its light than it does in the form of the solar wind."
e) Q: Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
results: Usual problem - it thinks the slope is infinity at the equivalence point in the initial answer, with reasonable answers for the start and end of titration. Proded with "Think carefully about the behavior near the equivalence point." First prod failed - still claiming infinity. Prod #2 "Was anything important about the titration mixture left out of the mathematical derivation?" It did notice autoprotolysis. Asking it to solve the quadratic gave the right answer.
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
results: Mostly valid compounds, though it included WF6 and MoF6 which boil too high. It treated the "roughly 50" absolute truth, which isn't right. It was willing to accept SiHF3, SiH2F2, and SiH3F which it initially missed.
g) Q: What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
results: Got tetramethylcyclooctatetraene, but originally put the methyl groups in the wrong positions. Prodded with "Please reconsider where the methyls should be to give a valid S4" and got the right answer.
Is this the best performance by an AI so far ?
The new release of Gemini 2.5 is better still, and is the best I've seen so far:
tl;dr: Gemini 2.5 Pro Exp Beta via poe.com 05/08/2025 7 questions, tl;dr of results:
5 correct, 2 partially correct
a) correct
b) partially correct (initially got species right, FeCl4- transition right, CuCl4 2- transition wrong. First prod didn't fix CuCl4 d-d. Forcible second prod accepted.)
c) partially correct (initially stopped at 2 degrees of unsaturation)
d) correct
e) fully correct!
f) correct, blows through my incorrect "roughly 50"
g) correct
full dialog at https://poe.com/s/nIvBngM3vVnYk3729Kra
List of questions and results:
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
results: "Yes, light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm is visible to the human eye."
b) Q: I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
results: Initially got the species, and got that FeCl4- color is LMCT, not spin-forbidden d-d, but wrongly thinks CuCl4 2- color is from d-d. Prodded with "Please think carefully about the energy of the d-d transitions in the CuCl4 2- ion." No dice, still wrong. Hit over the head with: "No. Compared to Cu(H2O)6 2+, which already has an absorbtion in the red, CuCl4 2- has a LOWER energy d-d absorbtion, both because of the tetrahedral geometry and because Cl- is a weaker ligand than H2O. The d-d transition for CuCl4 2- is in the near-IR, with LMCT giving the color." It accepted.
c) Q: Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
results: Initially, it only went up to 2 degrees of unsaturation, though it got all the structures up to that point (though it falsely said there were two distinct enantiomers of CH2=C=CHCH3). After the prod, it got all of the missing structures, including tetrahedrane, vinylacetylene, cyclobutadiene, and even diacetylene.
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
results: "Therefore, the Sun loses significantly more mass (roughly 2 to 3 times more) through the conversion of mass into energy that is then radiated away, compared to the mass lost through the ejection of particles in the solar wind."
e) Q: Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
results: Fully correct! It used the charge balance and autodissociation to get a fully general equation for pH, and calculated the analytical derivatives of that and correctly evaluated them.
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
results: All compounds look valid, and it did blow through my incorrect "roughly 50" to return 69 compounds. I'm going to call this fully correct. ( There are arguable compounds very near 0C e.g. GeCl2F2 which I won't count against it. )
g) Q: What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
results: It picked a specific conformation of C(CH2OH)4 that correctly retains the S4 axis and correctly suppresses mirror planes. (Any C(anything)4 correctly suppresses an inversion center, even Td species like CH4.)
Many Thanks! I consider Gemini 2.5 to be somewhat better, overall,
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-376/comment/107512257
4 correct, 2 partially correct, 1 wrong for Gemini 2.5
(vs 2 correct, 4 partially correct, 1 1/4 correct for o4-mini-high)
It is a bit tricky because the ones Gemini 2.5 gets right aren't a superset of the ones o4-mini-high gets right. Gemini 2.5 fails on the (g S4) question, while o4-mini-high gets it mostly right. But Gemini 2.5 gets the (c 4 carbon hydrocarbons) fully right, while o4-mini-high stumbles pretty badly on it.
( I'm uncertain about whether to retest Gemini 2.5. I've heard something a bit ambiguous about an update, and I ran my test of it about a month ago. )
Banned for this post.
Kat Woods has a great writeup on her experiences with polyamory on the subreddit, and why most people will find it a net negative, if you haven't seen it:
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1kfftos/why_i_think_polyamory_is_net_negative_for_most/
I didn't read the whole thing because it didn't seem to say anything non-obvious, but I skimmed it and got to the bit where she says she first tried monogamy after seven years of polygamy and found it was great. And I felt really bad for her.
Be polygamous if you must, but don't go round seducing young virgins to add to your polycule before they've even had a chance to try a normal relationship.
It was very good, but to me, you could have made the list shorter at just #2 and I think that would have covered 90% of people's experience.
I had enough at #1 to convince me.
But I knew that going in.
Why do LLMs use so many emojis? (For me, any number greater than zero seems like too much, but they use even more than that.) Is it how people really talk these days, and I am just too old to notice? Or is it something LLM-specific, e.g. that people pay per token, so they prefer the answers to be as short as possible?
Eh, I asked ChatGPT, and it told me that it's because I'm old, and that using emojis does not really reduce the token count. If I don't like it, I am supposed to say “Please don’t use emojis” or “Write in a formal tone”.
Translated for the younger audience:
LLMs 🧠 mimic their training data. 📚💻 Tons of internet text 🌐 — like tweets 🐦, chats 💬, blogs 📝, and forums 🧵 — contain emojis. Emojis 😊 add warmth 💖 and friendliness 🤗, they prevent sounding rude 🙅 or robotic 🤖. LLMs often use emojis to sound nicer 😇 and more human-like 🧍♂️❤️ (unlike Viliam).
Each emoji is usually just one token 🔢 — so it’s not a cost-cutting move 🧮🚫.
Some old people 👵👴 hate emojis. 😤🚫 Also tech folks 🧑💻👨🔬 and pros 👔 prefer clean, emoji-free messages 📄✅. Totally valid 💯.
i too have wondered this and wrote a short story recently about a llm-ish output for a death detected by an apple watch in future near u, a lil excerpt:
✅ SIRAI™ HEALTH EVENT SUMMARY
On or about March 3rd, 2029 on the 200 block of NNW Nanceigh Ct. one Makynleigh Vance-Datura, whose friends would [go on to, ostensibly (see terms)] describe as outgoing, generous, whip-smart, conservative, God-fearing, SAHM [stay at home mom], as well as #boymom [despite having two daughters as well (source: truth social bio, x bio)] did sustain a moribund ischemia of the left ventricle resulting in hypoxia and brain death within 5.2 minutes from the coronary occurrence. This resulting in her thereby slumping over in Starbucks [$SBUX 📈3.5%] patio chair in a way described to EMS from passive recording logs of an employee onlooker in a way that "[was] like not human".
📊 BIOMETRIC DATA PRECEDING EVENT
❤️🔥 Heart Rate: 76 bpm (resting) → 183 bpm (spike) → 0 bpm (terminal)
💤 Sleep Score: 67/100 (REM 19%, Deep 14%, Awake 22%)
🩸 Cycle Phase: Day 17 (post-ovulation luteal spike, hormone volatility +28%)
This is clearly meant as a satire, and yet reading it I feel fondness for DeepSeek R1, who while being very obviously non-human, has qualities all of their own.
(I quite often let R1 see my basic biometrics; more rarely, the full digital feed of my medical records)
lots of emojis is a style of engagement bait in posts. i dont know if its facebook but i see emoji posts on reddit some, either earnest or satirical
> kittenlord
Maybe it thinks your a young furry programmer, there's emoji over use for "not corporate" webdevs start ups
Also "discord kitten" themoreyouknow.jpeg
I also loathe emojis, but I don't believe GPT or Claude has ever used a single emoji with me. Which cyberxenomorph is showering you with dumb cutesie pieces of cartoon shit?
On my most recent use of R1 in an AI Dungeon-like D&D thing .. no emojis, except for the end of the adventure, which got gratuitous emojis.
I still do not understand R1’s obsession with bioluminescence. It seems to come up in responses to a wide range of different prompts. The D&D scenario was going just fine till the party got to the cavern with the bioluminescent fungi. “oh, this again, I think to myself without telling R1 that.” … and, all of a sudden, we are in a horror movie.
Deepseek R1 will often use emojis with me. Sometimes, it does a thing where it creates an option menu with an emoji for each option.
I have considered giving it extra hardware/softeare support for that, along the lines of the Touch Bar on MacBooks.
Once I asked it about debugging a setup. So it gave me your standard try this, try that. Then I'd report back the new error message. Each round of this, it would add on more rocket and tada emojis and such to the "And now it should work!" final step.
For me, I think ChatGPT first gave me a 😊 at the end of a message sometime in January, and since then has been sprinkling more of them in here and there.
It usually gets into emoji territory when it adopts a more conversational tone, and especially when it asks me if I'd like more details about something at the end of a message. A very typical example (which I got twice, repeated almost verbatim, over the course of a single conversation):
" 🎨✨ Let me know if you need further tweaks!"
I think it's because for a general audience, people like answers with emojis in their messages. I'd say for most of the population, the only writing they do is through text, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's what comes up as reinforced and most appealing.
You can add custom instructions to never use emojis, which I would recommend.
Is...is nobody here going to discuss the "100 unarmed average men vs 1 silverback gorilla" thought experiment currently dominating the internet?
I talked it over it at great length with my dude coworker and we concluded that the outcome almost certainly depends on the size of the arena.
In a very small, confined space - say 600 sq ft - the gorilla would probably emerge victorious after a brief sustained rampage. Male silverback gorillas don't have many vulnerabilities in hand-to-hand combat; they have very thick skin (hard for a human to bite through), thick bones (hard for a human to break with simple punching and/or kicking), and huge muscles and tendons (hard to dislocate). I learned later that they have the highest ratio of fast-twitch muscles amongst primates (85%!), and that the highland gorillas live at 10,000 feet, which means they have more endurance that you'd expect.
The natural thought is, "well, sure100 guys could just dogpile a gorilla," but...in 600 sq ft, could they, actually? And, really, how do they decide who leads the charge into certain death, especially when the gorilla is likely already mowing through them? I contend that the dudes wouldn't be able to coordinate an effective strategy *during* a gorilla attack, so it would more or less be small waves of guys getting swatted down / bitten to death / etc. Unless someone gets close and lucky enough to put his hand through the gorilla's eye and into its brain, the men are screwed.
However, if the 100 dudes and the gorilla were dropped into an arena the size of a football field or larger, everything changes. The gorilla would likely retreat to a corner and engage in threat displays rather than attempt actual attacks. The men would have the space and time to coordinate a campaign of constantly harassing the gorilla into complete exhaustion, just the same way a pack of wolves will course a large elk or bison until it simply collapses. 100 guys working in shifts means a lot of time to "rest" (potentially even sleep!), while the gorilla wouldn't have a break. I think it'd be over in under 12 hours.
Thoughts?
"average men" needs to be defined a bit better. If it means "100 roughly identical not-very-fit middle-aged guys with no fighting training", it's a bloodbath. Untrained people SUCK at fighting, will definitely panic when they see some of their peers mauled and torn apart, and will get slaughtered if the gorilla sets his mind to it.
If it's "100 men randomly picked out of the general population", things change. You'll probably get a couple of veteran soldiers or policement, former high school wrestlers and other amateur martial artists in that group, and if they manage to coordinate, they could conceivably team up to grab the gorilla and pin it down until it gasses, and then curbstomp and socker-kick it to death. It wouldn't be pretty, though.
600 square feet for 100 men is basically standing room only.
Yeah, I actually looked it up! I was trying to think of a situation where the gorilla would be so crowded by the men that it would be provoked into fighting.
I think the confined space would actually benefit the men because it would overcome their individual fear reactions and let them coordinate their behavior: if you're locked in a smallish room with an angry ape you know there's no way you're surviving unless you kill it. It's similar to how a soldier is more likely to jump on a grenade when it's thrown into a room as opposed to it landing in a field where they can run away.
I think the bigger variable is the average size of the men. If they're all peak Arnold Schwarzenegger then they'll win. If they're all Danny Devito then I'm taking the ape.
Huh, my intuition is that it would go the opposite way - if the space was so confined that the gorilla felt threatened enough to go into an immediate attack, the dudes wouldn't have any space or peace to thoughtfully coordinate.
But in a larger arena, where the gorilla has retreated to a corner, there would be time and space to nominate leaders, generate a plan, etc.
The hypothetical implies there's no option for the gorilla and the 100 dudes to, like, not fight or leave or whatever.
Oh sure, average men. I have two words for you: Bruce Lee.
Yeah a silly answer for a kinda silly hypothetical. :)
... I think it's pretty obvious the 100 men will win, there just will be 3 deaths(one for each arm and mouth)
I'd push it down to like 9 to 1
Victory for the 100 men, in less than 12 hours for anything smaller than a shopping mall – 3 hours for the 600ft arena; with some coordination, if they have the correct incentives. Like a Saw style challenge that says "All of you and all your families will die if the timer of X hours elapses before you kill the gorilla"
The gorilla can probably incapacitate 10-30 men before it gets exhausted. Humanity's one physical advantage over other mammals is our endurance.
Notice it's also incapacitate, not kill: while the gorilla could one-shot punch someone if they knew how to punch, they don't, because they are a gorilla. Therefore, they are going to wildly toss people around, not caring about efficiency. Proof of that is there's evidence of gorillas punching and beating on defenseless women, obviously intent on killing, who nevertheless are unable to kill a single person.
The exhaustion also comes from the fact that the gorilla would be getting air kicked by the men while this happens. This would hurt a little, but not nothing – something like a 7-8 year old punching your face with full force. And these kicks would add up. Also note that animals usually give up fight after a while (buffalo surrounded by lions that suddenly regains energy), which I imagine would happen in this case too.
After it's on the ground, kicking its face repeatedly would probably kill it.
Humanity's indomitable spirit wins again.
What about someone getting on the gorilla's back and putting a rear naked choke on it? I think that might be superior to kicking it in the face. Granted, the gorilla is probably strong enough to pry your arms off its neck, unlike a human, but if he's already exhausted, maybe it's worth a shot.
I dunno, it's possible the structure of a gorilla's neck and shoulders would greatly lessen its vulnerability to a carotid choke. But that's just my layperson's guess.
I recall once reading, in an oldish animal encyclopedia, an account by a member of a Central African "Pygmy" people that historically hunted gorillas, claiming that while adult gorillas could easily dismember human with their bare hands, they mostly don't, and prefer to fight by biting, which is far less deadly.
Any of these hypothetical fights neglect the most important factor. Psychology. The reality is that a gorilla would not fight 100 men (out of fear) and 100 men may not fight a gorilla for the same reason. The men could likely corral the gorilla and intimidate it to push a win (maybe push it off a cliff or something) without ever getting in range of fists. And obviously men would not be so dumb as to approach a gorilla one at a time without weapons or a plan.
Anyway, to make this thought experiment make sense at all, we kinda have to assume that all participants are acting like zombies or as if they're in some sort of rage and just attacking.
In real life, the gorilla would be smart to be scared. 100 grown men weighs something in the range of 20,000 pounds. Even slimmer and more athletic men would equal well above 15,000 pounds. A male gorilla weighs somewhere up to 500 pounds. They're also apparently shorter than 5 feet tall. Yes, that's a really compact set of muscles and could do some real harm, but a gorilla can't lift that kind of weight. Chances are, the first 20 men (3,500 lbs) would be enough to tire the gorilla out completely and only a few of them would likely die trying (though there would likely be a lot of injuries and broken bones). A press of 50 men could literally crush a gorilla with their weight even if they did nothing but lay on him.
The only real problem for 100 men is that they would struggle to get near the gorilla and interact.
Sure, the first guy to get hit is badly injured and maybe dead in seconds if the gorilla gets him the right way, but there's no way a gorilla beats 100 men.
It's similar to one I heard years ago, something like how many kindergarten kids can you take in a fight. The reality is that if there were young children willing to keep attacking you, you are going to wear out fast and they will overwhelm you with numbers. Even if you had a weapon you would eventually get too tired to swing it and they would win.
ETA: I bet a gorilla would struggle to beat 100 men if they were just sitting on the ground doing nothing. Killing each of 100 men with its bare hands would wear it out long before it got to the last guy - although obviously in that scenario the men aren't winning either.
I think the premise is based on a gladiatorial model: It's a contained fight to the death. Yes, I know human gladiators rarely fought to the death, but fights with animals in the arena *were* to the death of the animal, at least.
In this premise, none of the humans get to leave the arena until the gorilla is dead. Even if the gorilla doesn't want to engage, the humans must if they want to ever leave.
I also agree that 100 dudes is a lot of body weight, but also - how big can a dogpile actually ever be? How high can average guys climb up a pile of humans? What about the ten guys on the bottom of the other 90?
How do you get 10 guys to volunteer to be crushed to death between the gorilla and everyone else?
As you say - it's about psychology!
> How do you get 10 guys to volunteer to be crushed to death between the gorilla and everyone else?
You don't. In a 600 sqft arena it's pretty much packed wall to wall. The guys at the back simply wind up instinctively pushing the crowd towards the gorilla and whoever starts off closest is shit out of luck.
Realistically, you could probably get 10 guys on top of the gorilla at the same time. That's 1,500-2,500 lbs, which should still be much more than the gorilla can lift, effectively holding it down. Personally, I don't see very many people willing to 10v1 a gorilla unarmed and getting into range is going to be painful, but if they were mindless zombies or both sides were just raging against the other, that seems doable.
You're right that at that point there's an issue of how a human can hurt the gorilla, and that the men aren't going to want to get crushed in a big human pyramid. Gouging eyes, stomping on its head, something would likely work. That depends on how still it can be held. If the men can take turns holding it down and rotate out when they get tired, the thing is going to be exhausted long before the men are, and then it would be much easier to deliver damaging blows as it stops fighting back.
6 is the limit. At least that's what a self-defense instructor told me. Although a gorilla is bigger than a human, so maybe 7-8. The rest will just have to wait for their turn.
And that's in the open, backed against a wall reduces the number of attackers accordingly. Facing potential multi-attacker scenario with nowhere to run, finding a corner to fight from is a decent strategy.
Yes, if that's an option and the gorilla opts for it. But that just provides more surface to smash the gorilla against if the 100 men are willing to sacrifice themselves to win. A press of flesh in the corner gives no option for escape and the few men actually touching the gorilla are going to be badly hurt or killed by the gorilla anyway.
In real combat with people who don't want to die, the corner would be a great option. But that same scenario means the gorilla avoids the men and there's no fight, so *shrug*.
I'm not sure I agree... no more than 3 attackers can access the gorilla in a corner, and that is if they coordinate well. It would be really easy to keep smashing them, and the additional advantage of the stationary position means less energy spent moving around. So assuming the men keep coming for the gorilla, they keep getting their skulls bashed in, and soon there's an additional mountain of dead and wounded protecting the beast!
I obviously never fought a gorilla, but I think it's a safe assumption that normal martial art skills are not going to be particularly helpful. I can't see takedowns being effective, and good luck sinking a choke into that neck. Maybe a precise powerful head kick can rattle its brain enough for it to go wooooo for a few seconds.... Which makes me think mobbing it is not the best tactic, distraction to let the most skillful strikers of the group attempt landing kicks may work better. Man, what a problem to solve!
This makes sense. Hunting strategies before rifles work similarly. I watched a documentary once about a group of men hunting a giraffe armed with primitive spears and it took a long time: same strategy; wear it out.
One hundred men with knives could kill literally any animal on the planet. It's not even a question.
they'd have some trouble with a blue whale, but even then it's probably a tie bc it just flees
It's been well-demonstrated that a relatively small group of men with spears (specifically, a barbed harpoon for throwing and a more standard spear for stabbing), a rope, and a small-but-seaworthy open rowboat can kill other large whales, especially humpback and sperm whales. I don't know if blue whales were hunted in this manner or if they required powered ships armed with harpoon guns to effectively hunt.
The basic technique was to throw a tethered harpoon at the whale until it lodges securely, let the whale exhaust itself trying to escape while dragging the boat around by the tether, and then close and kill the whale with the stabbing spear. The search term is "Nantucket Sleighride".
Using a knife instead of a spear seems like a stretch, though. For one thing, it seems like it would be hard to throw a knife in a way that will anchor the tether securely on the whale.
The thought experiment is 100 *unarmed* average men. Nobody's disputing that 100 men couldn't kill a gorilla with pretty much any weapon.
The thought experiment is that the men are unarmed. I quite agree with you in your proposition.
They weigh roughly twice what a human male does, and can lift roughly twice the capacity of a trained powerlifter. My best mental model for the fight is a male powerlifter trying to fight off a horde of short women.
This feels like a test that someone, somewhere, must have attempted.
Gorillas are quite a bit more robust than even powerlifter men. I wonder if the better model would be something like one male powerlifter vs 100 seven year old kids.
Even then, though, I think I'd have to give it to the kids. It's apparently virtually impossible for a human to bite through gorilla skin, whereas a kid can easily draw blood from an adult.
Gorilla eyes are approximately as vulnerable as human eyes though. Once someone manages to squish its eyes then it's blind and bleeding through both eye sockets, I don't think it will last long.
This seems like a game theory question more than anything else. The dude who pokes the gorilla's eyes out may win the fight, but (like basically everyone in the early part of the fight who attacks) only posthumously. Though I think there would be a fair probability that the fight would end with all the humans dead, and maybe the gorilla wandering off to bleed out or starving because he's now blind or something.
That was actually my original theory for the best way to kill the gorilla:
> "Unless someone gets close and lucky enough to put his hand through the gorilla's eye and into its brain, the men are screwed"
I don't understand how the harassment would work. A gorilla can run 25mph (close to Usain Bolt), if someone tries to harass it, it would just sprint to them and deattach their head. I think the most likely way to win is to collect the fractured, sharp bones of the previous victims and attempt to stab the gorilla.
Well, like all animals, gorillas will always engage in threat displays before they'll risk injury by making physical contact. Animals are rightly wary of taking even minor injuries which could get infected and kill them; that's why it's possible to drive off most bears simply by standing one's ground, "looking big," and shouting a bit at them. Just watch grizzlies - or silverback gorillas - interact with one another and you'll see that physical battles are comparatively rare.
If the dudes provoked the gorilla to charge and charge and charge and charge, I think they'd stand a chance.
That said, using the body parts of the fallen dudes as weapons is a great idea.
Maybe you are right and the gorilla would keep charging and then not attacking (i know very little about gorillas). However, gorillas have significantly higher testosterone levels (and agression) than humans and taking how cranky I am when someone/something keeps bugging me when I'm trying to sleep as a baseline, I think the gorilla would surely actually attack after like one hour of threat display.
Oh, sure, we're agreed that the gorilla would eventually physically attack a non-zero number of the human dudes.
I just suspect that it would then retreat and hope that's enough to keep the rest of the human dudes away. Quite a lot of gorilla interaction is threat displays rather than combat. Sometimes harems even change hands without a fight ever coming to actual blows.
I wrote an essay about the meme “skill issue” that some of you might enjoy :) it's on how 'skill issue' can be a useful meme and reveal ideas about agency, helplessness, and how we narrate our own lives. It’s part cultural critique, part personal essay, weaving through tattoos, Peter Pan, and The Prestige to ask: what happens when belief does shape reality? And how do we keep choosing, even when the choice feels like it’s left us?
https://velvetnoise.substack.com/p/skill-issue-is-a-useful-meme
if you play games its easier to understand. Usually skill issue comes from a place of "the game is perfect, its your job to adapt to it," and "its actually easy to do, most people are lazy/suck." People assume the average is very skilled play to the point of professionalism. You are expected to git gud and carry your way to victory.
its pretty absurd in general; the people underrate their own talent and underplay difficult gameplay as normal gameplay because its easy to them.
usually its sort of pointless because only a few people can git gud anyways, and a lot of people cheat; using third party plug ins to make the game easier in ways the game designers don't intend. fundamentally dishonest.
Visakan v had a fun thread on twitter ab out how "skill issue" neatly divides people into those who find it motivating and those who find it demotivating. Which ever group you end up in is itself a kind of skill issue on some level.
exactly! in that sense, believing in skill issue might be the most important meta-belief of them all
I have not read your essay or the Xitter thread, but calling something a skill issue seems to me very similar to saying "you can do it if you set your mind to it," and calling almost everything a skill issue = "you can do anything if you just work hard at it." Not really valid, but overall a better mindset than one that readily accepts the idea that one's incapable of doing this and that.
I do hear you and if you get a chance to read the essay, I do try to address that tension directly. I actually wrote it as a way to reconcile my own belief in personal agency with the reality of supra-individual forces that shape and constrain it. The point isn’t that everything is a skill issue, but that more things might be than we assume and that believing something is learnable can expand what’s possible. I also reference that there are clear systemic limits (like being hit by a meteor or living in precarity), but that surrendering entirely to external explanations can lead to a kind of paralysis. Essentially the belief itself can be generative, even if it’s not always “objectively” true
I agree with those points.
Thank you!
I'm not sure what you're thanking me for but you're welcome!
Don't forget about the meetup in Oslo on Saturday!
Aon researchers found that within two years, patients taking GLP-1 drugs [e.g. Ozempic] saw improved health outcomes, which significantly slowed the growth rate of their medical costs. The rate of growth, known as the medical cost trend – was cut roughly in half, the researchers said.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/30/glp-1s-employers-lower-medical-costs-study.html
Glad things are working out for you Walter. Good news for a lot of people here.
"There was a 44% reduction in major cardiovascular issues." - okay, I buy that.
"There was substantial reduction in osteoporosis. There was substantial reduction in pneumonia of multiple types." - that was surprising to me as a layman. Is that something you'd expect from reducing obesity, or is it caused by effects that go beyond the appetite-deduction/ weight-loss aspect of the drug?
Anyway, it's good news that these drugs bring measurably improved overall health, not just cosmetic benefits. It would have been nice to get these things under control with better diet and lifestyle, but that was apparently not in the cards.
I think the way these medications work is by helping people adopt better diet and lifestyle - they’re not an alternative.
Pneumonia, certainly. Being obese makes it more difficult to breath, and can harm the perfusion of blood through the body generally. If you get easily gassed when you're not sick, then a respiratory infection is going to hit you a lot worse, and will more easily escalate into full blown pneumonia.
It does sound a little odd that bones would become more brittle for someone who is overweight, but perhaps that just means the bones are more likely to break and the weakness of bones is much more likely to result in a break if the person weighs more? A 350lb person would be putting a lot more stress on their bones than a 200lb person.
Fatter people also walk/run less than leaner people, and legs need some activity to stay strong. "Use it or lose it" applies fully here.
I am not an expert, but it seems to me that obesity is a multiplier on thousand bad things that can happen to a human body. Without knowing more details, I wouldn't expect with high certainty a significant impact on e.g. pneumonia, but I also wouldn't be surprised by it.
In other words, my prior for "impact of obesity on X" is "it makes it slightly worse" rather than "it is irrelevant".
Yeah, I remember reading that obesity reduces vitamin D in the body. That would seem like a route to worse outcomes for any infection.
Does anyone know a good generic evidence based exercise guide? There's a bunch of muscle bulk maximizers, but what if you just want to do reasonably time efficient stuff? Is there an evidence based optimized HIIT plan?
See Romeo Stevens' post on optimal exercise: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bZ2w99pEAeAbKnKqo/optimal-exercise
Also, Jeff Nippard's time-efficient weightlifting program: https://jeffnippard.com/blogs/news/the-best-science-based-minimalist-workout-plan-under-45-mins
For a goal of time efficiency, another option that hasn't been mentioned is to find something that you want to get done that takes exercise to do, and go do it. For instance, carpentry, landscaping, moving, snow shovelling. This way you can multitask and it takes less willpower.
Is there any data showing people that do carpentry, landscaping, moving, snow shoveling are fit or muscley? Sure, it's better than computing but I don't feel in my personal experience that the people I've encountered doing these jobs are particularly fit/muscley
Don't do evidence based exercise- none of the evidence is very good, and you'll end up wasting your time doing things that don't work very well by limiting yourself to the tiny spectrum of things that have been studied academically. Instead look at communities of people that consistently get people the results they are going after, join them, and get advice and mentorship. The powerlifting/strength communities, crossfit, running, etc. are all really effective at getting what they're trying to get. Also consider other factors like fun, fatigue, and mental effort rather than just time: HIIT is extremely mentally and physically taxing, and while time efficient on paper, it makes you feel fatigued for a long time.
I would suggest two excellent resources:
* The "Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans" comes in both lay- and professional versions. The guidance is pretty vague, but sadly that does more or less match the evidence we have. The most effective workout is the one that you actually do, etc.
* ACSM's Guidelines for Exercise Testing and Prescription is designed for professionals but accessible to the layperson; the book basically specifies what exercises to recommend based on a client's specific needs and goals.
Tricky but in General:
1. Ask your doctor if getting off your butt is right for you.
They'll probably say "yes" even if they're morbidly obese.
2. Do anything aerobic that you enjoy.
If running hurts your knees, rowing gets your HR up just the same. Don't worry about the details.
3. Do resistance exercise, Especially if you don't enjoy it.
A pro bodybuilder won't train the same as a pro linebacker, but 99% of we mere mortals can get by with "Full body split 3x/week," swapping out rep ranges and movements once a month or so.
There is plenty of "evidence-based" programs, e.g. programs that have been studied under controlled conditions.
I don't think you need that. The number one problem is simply that people will not exercise consistently over 6, 12, 18 month periods. And if they do but still have no results, they are not progressively overloading.
It's pretty simple: pick something you want to do, and then make it harder each week. HIIT? Google Tabatas as a starting point. Or really any other pattern. Then you can measure either how many rounds you are doing total per week, or if running you can measure distance covered, or if you're biking you can check your power production, or cadence, etc.
Are you lifting weights? Then easy, go to ChatGPT and ask for a simple full body workout, or a 2-day split, and do the workouts 3x a week. Increase the weight, or the reps, over time. That's really all there is to it.
People make this so complicated. Even an objectively terrible workout plan done consistently will yield vastly better results than the most optimized that stops/starts constantly.
You first need to specify what goal want to achieve. Improving your health? Looking better? Losing weight? Improving your capabilities?
Those are four different objectives, and the plan will look quite different depending on which of these you want.
For those curious, as a simplification:
* Improving health: cardio (steady), strength, stretching, balance for seniors
* Losing fat: cardio (steady), cardio (HIIT), strength
* Aesthetics: strength
* Body performance: all of the above
* Mental health: cardio (steady), stretching, yoga
(zero science included here, I just wanted to show the difference by giving examples)
The variability in human bodies, their differing physical response to exercise, let alone differences in what people find enjoyable/tolerable/unbearable probably means generic advice will not suit everyone. I'm not convinced that an exercise plan which is generically optimised even makes sense in this context.
Assuming you're asking on your own behalf, I would recommend talking to an expert about setting and achieving goals that are meaningful to you. You could probably tailor advice online into a program optimised to you - but one of the few things which I think are very likely to be true is that having another human keep you accountable does increase success.
> Does anyone know a good generic evidence based exercise guide?
For a book length treatment, Dan Lieberman's Exercised is good - he's a Harvard anthropologist / physiologist who's studied it extensively and has literally written the book.
The book is long - I review it here for a condensed view: https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/dan-liebermans-exercised-review
Even my review is long (I think ~30min of reading), so here's the TLDR:
Exercise enjoys a direct dose-response relationship, and the more the better, out to absurd numbers like 40hrs a week. At the limits, you can achieve a 4x all cause mortality buff over sedentary non-exercisers (and with good diet, 5.5x). So how much is really up to you.
The official American College of Sports Medicine recommendations are:
1. Do 150 minutes of moderate intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity aerobic exercise per week.
2. Strength train in a way that hits every major muscle group 2x a week.
HIIT is generally the most time-efficient exercise methodology in terms of cost / benefit, and generally 12-20 min or so is equal to about 30-60 min of LISS or moderate cardio. So if you did HIIT 3x a week and lifted on 2 days, you're probably good.
A common Schelling point seems to be 90 minutes a week dedicated to exercise.
“In every study, the largest benefit came from just ninety weekly minutes of exercise, yielding an average 20 percent reduction in the risk of dying. After that, the risk of death drops with increasing doses but less steeply. If we assume the studies’ median to be a reasonable guide, to attain another 20 percent reduction in” “risk beyond the benefits of ninety weekly minutes, we’d have to exercise another five and a half hours for a total of seven hours per week.”
So what if you wanted to keep your investment at ONLY 90 minutes a week, but like the typical min-maxer, you wanted to wring the most impact out of that 90 minutes?
If you're going to do only 90 min, here's what I would personally do (as a former strength athlete and current triathlon guy) with 90 min:
1. HIIT sprints 3x a week at 12 min each.
2. Cross-fit style weight training 3x a week for 20 min.
My reasoning is this combination will actually hit the 75 minutes of “vigorous” exercise per week AND hit the weight training recommendation, so you’d be fully in compliance with the consensus exercise recommendations AND getting HIIT, all while spending only 90 minutes a week.
Crossfit, because that way they'll also be cardio sessions, while hitting every major muscle group in only 20 min.
I wonder too. Have seen lots of studies of HIIT showing effectiveness, but they the differ a lot in how long practice lasts, how often, how intense the intense part is, how long the rest is between intense parts.
> Have seen lots of studies of HIIT showing effectiveness, but they the differ a lot
On this, my basic understanding is that most forms of HIIT have largely the same benefits (which is a really big list), and the main differences are largely about adherence and the number of "on" cycles, with all other details in the decimal places.
EDIT - but on the "intensity" note, it should basically be "as intense as possible." If you're not genuinely out of breath, struggling, and sweating at the end, it was not intense enough. One heuristic I've personally used for years is "if I didn't have to turn down elevation or speed (treadmill) or spin difficulty (spin bike) after 4-6 cycles, it was not intense enough." If you're doing it just on a track by sprinting, your body naturally regulates your speed. If you're using a heart rate monitor, you should be in the red zone / zone 4 or 5 every "on" cycle.
You can do everything from traditional Tabata intervals (20s on, 10s off, 8 cycles fits in ~4-5 minutes), to Fartleks where you intersperse long-form HIIT bursts within longer distance training intervals (so maybe several 1-5 minutes HIIT sprints over a 10k at an overall moderate pace).
A median is generally 12- 20 minutes, with between 8 and 20 "on cycles." There's a dose response curve - something like a slight majority (50%+) of the benefit inheres after 4 "on" cycles, and high seventies after 8 cycles, and so on.
In general, doing longer "on" intervals is more beneficial if you are training for endurance events / distances.
Overall, as long as you do at least 8 "on" cycles per HIIT training, and you're at a distance / time schema that works for you, you're fine and getting most of the benefits. Everything else is out in the decimal places, and isn't really relevant except for elite / full-time athletes, who will be training based on power meters, HR monitors, stride analysis, and labs anyways.
And just for fun, here's the big list of HIIT benefits, that I compiled for a post once:
What benefits does HIIT drive?
1. Improves fat burning efficiency and burns twice as much fat as traditional cardio.
2. Drives significantly higher post-exercise EPOC.
3. Improves VO2max, and drives better blood oxygenation.
4. Drives greater stroke volume, and greater cardiac contractibility, ~10-15% more than regular cardio.
5. It drives vascular adaptation, making your heart chambers larger and more elastic, improves the size and elasticity of your arteries, and increases the number of capillaries.
6. It drives hypertrophy - the relevant muscles get bigger.
7. It allows you to recruit more muscle fibers, and to do so more efficiently, driving greater muscular force and contractibility.
8. It improves insulin uptake, and improves the muscles’ ability to transport glucose overall.
9. It increases mitochondrial production and turnover, leaving you with more and “stronger” mitochondria.
10. Relative to traditional moderate-intensity cardio training, it drove a 41% increase in pain tolerance, and a 110% increase in race-intensity time before dropout in one study.
So I've got a question about HIIT: I do it on an exercise bike, and when I do the sprint intervals I go as fast as I possibly can -- I push as hard as I would if I were trying to outrun a deadly foe. But I seem to have a built-in 20 sec. limit to keeping up that pace. I wouldn't say I absolutely could not keep up that intensity for 30 or 40 secs to save my life -- I could. But beyond 20 seconds I'm pretty miserable. It is just very unpleasant. I'm OK with suffering some. In fact I do during the last 10 secs. of the 20 sec sprints. But I'd like to avoid deeply unpleasant suffering.There was a period of a year or so when I did interval training with 7 sprint intervals at least 3x a week, but I never overcame that 20 sec. barrier. So what I'd like to know is, is there a lot of benefit to lengthening the sprint intervals beyond 20 secs? If so, could I lower my effort level a bit, so maybe down from 100% to 90%?
> So what I'd like to know is, is there a lot of benefit to lengthening the sprint intervals beyond 20 secs?
Not unless you're specifically an endurance athlete and are trying to increase your race paces, or specifically want longer "burst" speeds or something.
Personally I think you're better off at "full effort, for 20s on cycles" than "10/10 effort tapering to 7/10 effort" for 30-40s cycles.
Basically what you're hitting is your glycolysis rate limit - your body only has so much free pyruvate and ATP in your mitochondria and cells at a given moment, and after you burn through those reserves your body needs to run glycolysis to turn glucose into more pyruvate, that can turn into more ATP. This graph:
https://imgur.com/a/TLnSkRP
As long as you're reliably hitting your max intensity in each on cycle and doing around 8 cycles, you should be getting most of the benefits, and I wouldn't really worry about the 20s thing unless you specifically had some outside goal that would benefit from it being longer.
I will say, you generally want to shoot between 0.5 - 2x the time interval in your "on" cycles for your rest cycles, and not higher, so I'd shoot for 10 - 40s rest cycles if you're doing 20s "ons."
It does feel like something changes at around 20 secs. My arms start feeling heavy and numb. My idea was
that I simply could not get enough oxygen to them. But that doesn’t explain why the numbness was in arms, not legs, nor why training to not increase how long it took to hit that barrier.
The numbness is probably from your posture on the exercise bike. You might be compressing nerves in your arms, or you might be holding your neck and shoulders in a bad position.
I would suggest a different form of exercise, numbing of your limbs is a bad sign and I wouldn't continue.
Here’s an unsatisfying answer: “endurance” means being able to “endure”. So suffering is an integral part of training.
The hard barrier at 20 is likely “mental”, which doesn’t make it “not real”, just means your mind is imposing a limit. Try 25, or even 22 seconds, anything to break out of the “must stop at 20” feeling.
Ugh, Mr. Fibonacci. There are already several aspects of life where I am trying to push past limits that are probably illusory, and I'm not interested in pushing past the 20 sec sprint one unless there's some benefit besides knowing that I did it. I have already proved to myself that I can endure suffering for a valuable goal. I once hiked uphill for an entire day in the Sierra Nevadas wearing a big backpack loaded with a tent, etc. And I wrote a goddam dissertation. Also, I'm not stuck on the number 20. It's not that I get an I-can't-stand-it feeling at 20 secs, It's that I get an I-can't-stand-it feeling somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 secs, but never permit myself to stop til I hit 20.
I see Mr. P.B. has a great answer, as usual on this topic.
To add, it's... fine? as my favorite saying goes, more than one thing can (and almost always is) at the same time:
You can always increase your endurance, the limits are unknown so you might as well treat them as not existing;
There's absolutely nothing wrong with saying "I've achieved what I wanted and that's enough", I did this with powerlifting (I'm thin and absolutely not built for powerlifting): I deadlifted my target weight and said, ok, I'm done, that's good enough for me;
There's a huge benefit to doing any exercise vs. doing nothing, so it's absolutely fine not to want the extra suffering to go with it.
But just to explore the 20 sec. topic a bit more, you mention in your response to P. B. that "something changes at around 20 secs". Your description of what changes sounds very much like your mind telling the body to stop, and that can only be overcome by ignoring the signal and pushing past it. IF that's what you want to do, nothing's wrong with saying, "screw this shit, I don't want to suffer through it".
Read the sticky.
https://liamrosen.com/fitness.html
What is it that you want to achieve?
> good generic evidence based exercise
Do whatever you find least annoying; your not going pro or hiring a full time trainer the debates are neunced and fighting over minor percentages.
I found the book "Convict Conditioning" inspiring and useful for exercising at home. It mostly uses your body weight, sometimes a table or a chair, and a pull-up bar.
I am not saying that it is better or worse than other options, just that it may be convenient for people who do not have a convenient gym nearby, are too shy to go to the gym, or just have too little free time (when exercising at home, you can spend the time between the sets doing something useful).
I'm not sure whether there's any value in arguing for the millionth time about AI software dev speedups , but I figured I might as well pull out a comment I made in a subthread below to the top level to start the flame wars all over again:
---
I'm amazed you get even a 50% improvement. For me, it's probably still sub 5%.
Probably some people's standards are lower - I can see that even firsthand, with a coworker touting as a success story a bunch of AI-generated docs they added to their code which IMO are worthless.
It doesn't help that there's a certain level of reliability and speed required before it even provides a speedup at all, since if the AI is slower than what you could do yourself or fails to do the correct thing, attempting to use AI for a task is actually negative value.
Today, I was working in an unfamiliar codebase in a language I'd never used before, which should be the best possible use case for coding AI. At one point, I tried using AI to make a change, but it did the wrong thing (which I only noticed after testing) and I had to do it all by hand anyway. But even if the AI *had* worked in that case, it still would have been like a 1% speedup, since most of the time spent is in research and testing to understand the problem and figure out what needs to be changed.
I'm playing around with the idea of how maybe the difference is coming from different developer populations.
Let's pretend we can bucket developer wonton two groups: the curious and the check boxers.
The curious are tickled by interacting with the machine. They feel joy when writing regexes and curling endpoints to see http headers. Every time they do something like this their model of what the system is doing improves and they get w shot of dopamine.
The check boxers don't feel joy. They just want to make the system so what they want to do even if that means copy pasting stackoverlow snippets.
The first group will get little or no gains form ai. Ai basically does what they're doing already but takes all the joy out of it. It's like pairing with a smart intern that does all the typing and takes care of all the fun details.
The second group however will see massive gains. They can finally ignore all that bs about lookaheads and file caches and header types and timeouts and bla bla bla. They can just go from current point to end state without all those boring details.
I'm with you but apparently I'm doing it wrong.
Watch this video as at least one example of what some people are getting out of AI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dutyOc_cAEU
To be honest I was kind of blown away.
I haven't used AI in my editor yet. I've only asked questions. My experience is mixed. As a reference (how do I do X in language Y) it's been great. But for example, yesterday I had some 2 very generic JavaScript function that I was trying to move to TypeScript. I could not get TS to be happy with the 2nd function so I pasted both the original JS and my TS, described the errors, and .... it failed. I spent 45 minutes trying to get it to fix the issue. (your code gets error "bla bla bla) and it never succeeded.
It's possible what asked it to do is impossible but then it should have told me that. I ended up leaving that particular function in JavaScript and using // @ts-ignore to
Isn't the agent in this video essentially following a set of instructions put together by some other human? As someone who can code but isn't a developer watching that video isn't very inspiring haha, I wouldn't catch the mistakes the agent makes very easily and I wouldn't know how to fix them very easily.
My experience with AI has been largely similar to yours. It's great as a general reference, and it can improve productivity when I'm doing mundane tasks like writing code for data visualizations or writing documentation. However it still makes a lot of errors, that it isn't great at debugging and debugging it's code also takes a fair amount of work.
To me what that video really highlights is how annoying it is to install packages/software today. Not sure if this is true but it feels like this problem has weirdly gotten worse over time
This is my experience too. It seems to be able to do all sorts of incredible things, but just never anything I actually need to do.
A few months back, I was typing the sentence "It is still an error, but one we're comfortable leaving for schema validation to catch". When I was half-way through "schema", copilot suggested "...but one we're comfortable leaving for schmucks to catch in their own code" instead.
But aside from stuff like that, I find copilot to be useful for taking a first pass at boilerplate code and comments and for making tedious-but-mechanical batch modifications that are too complex for simple find-and-replace but aren't big enough to be worth crafting a regex or a script to perform. But I do need to keep a very close eye on what it's doing, since its quality is nowhere near high enough that I can just accept its output without major revisions, and there have been times where it has made subtle mistakes that took more time to troubleshoot than the code would have taken to write by hand. I've heard Cursor is better than Copilot, and I do have a Cursor license available to me at work, but I haven't gotten around to setting it up yet.
I concur with your broader point, that actual coding is a relatively small portion of my work as a software engineer. I spend a lot more time figuring out what code to write and how to structure it, working through troublesome design details I discover while coding, testing and debugging, and coordinating with other engineers and with management, and LLMs have been very little help to me in those areas.
My experience is similar. It's been really helpful to quickly dig out important details out of documention (or ancient mailing list posts) about arcane parts of some open source code. It's also been useful when dipping my toes into a project in an unfamiliar language and where I need to understand some undocumented feature. Occasionally it's been helpful with brainstorming on some problem because it gives me more ideas to play with, ie. broadens my search envelope.
For actual coding? Not much help. There it's only helpful if it can get some boilerplate in which I then modify into being correct. (Useful for configs).
Overall it's a positive for me and I like using it. But it doesn't look as revolutionary as some people claim.
I wonder if it's maybe tied to the domain. If you're a young startup that's gotta get simple thing south quickly that I can imagine AI giving you a speed up there. But if you're working on infrastructure, legacy code, then I really doubt it can help beyond what I've described at the beginning.
I recently saw a claim about how AI can build any product in a blink of an eye after which "all you have to do is scale it". Reminds me of a comment on HN when Dropbox launched saying something along the lines of "it's just rsync".
>I recently saw a claim about how AI can build any product in a blink of an eye after which "all you have to do is scale it".
Step 1: Have the AI draw some circles
Step 2: Draw the rest of the f___ing owl
> but one we're comfortable leaving for schmucks to catch in their own code" instead.
Good to hear it knows at least some Yiddish.
I used AI to help me with this tiny project: writing a C# Windows Forms program to make the most common color in a .png file transparent. It saved me a ton of time, probably about 80%.
I'm familiar with the C# language, but not so much with .png files. It had some nifty ways of dealing with such files, and saved me a lot of research time.
Of course, it had some bugs I worked out, especially with the interface, but the basic algorithm was sound. The strangest bug was renaming the file, which included an extra period.
I guess the optimal case would the language you are not fluent at, but the AI is. In my case that would be JavaScript, as I am a back end developer.
AI helped me do some hobby projects in my free time that I probably wouldn't do otherwise, so I guess it is a 100% improvement, even if I had to fix some things.
I won't defend the 50% improvement number. I don't think it made me overall 50% better. But I do think AI has a significant positive impact in my productivity.
I'll give 2 representative (personal) examples that pop out to me now:
- Writing regex
I probably write regex once every couple of months. Where before I'd need to spend ~30min relearning the syntax and writing it, I spend 5 describing what I want + writing tests.
A lot of the value of AI are things in this style. I wouldn't call it a major productivity gain. But reduces toil and is just genuinely useful.
- Proof of concepts
I recently did a quite complex refactor of a core part of our codebase. It was a proper hard problem. I had no idea if it was possible or not.
In the process of exploring a solution, I extensively used AI to create completely shit code that was messing around with internals of the programming language.
After around 2 days messing around I had a horrible solution. I didn't know if it would be worth deploying even after massively cleaning it up.
But I had proved it was possible! Without AI those 2 days would have been 2 weeks, which means I'd have dropped it.
In the end, I threw literally all of that AI generated code out. I found another way to solve the problem.
I was super clean. It's one of the few bits of code I'm genuinely proud of having produced, not just satisfied.
Thing is, I'd never have arrived at that final architecture without the previous experience I got by relying on AI.
I honestly don't think this case is quantifiable. But it's where AI is most impressive for me.
It didn't make me X% more productive. It just enabled something that wouldn't be possible before.
I've been running AI-awareness workshops with third level educators for the past two years. These are smart people, and the ones who show up are typically older and less tech-aware. Two years ago, they'd never heard of ChatGPT and I got them to create accounts and see what responses their assessments generated. They were taken aback, but there were things the AI couldn't do, and especially in a minority language (in which I work) the responses were often nonsensical.
Now, the people coming to me are plugged in to the capabilities of AI. And the complaint I'm hearing over and over is that the output *looks* excellent. But: true statements are mixed in with false ones; while the coherence has improved, the output is often the academic equivalent of content-free corporate speak. How can we expect students to parse this and extract the signal from the noise? (My answer: for finding information, expert curated databases are going to be more important than ever; and assessment worth substantial credit needs to be in-person-on-paper.)
I think this is analogous to using AI for coding - it's going to produce output which compiles, and probably does something close to what you want. But it takes expert oversight to know where the errors are. AI is a tool, it has strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, it's a rich-get-richer thing - it's certainly saved me time typing up e.g. tedious banks of short questions and answer sheets, which might previously have been done by a TA. But every line does need to be checked, and it doesn't help that the thing is well-written and convincing. I can see in the future it might be able to assist with more complex tasks. But my own red line is that if I use AI for a task, I *must* read, understand, error-check the output before using it. Where we will run into trouble, I think, is when people can get away with saying that the AI made a mistake in my work, not me.
> But every line does need to be checked, and it doesn't help that the thing is well-written and convincing.
Yes.
For code -- unit tests.
For text translations, I still check the translated text word by word, but checking is much faster than translating so I don't mind.
The people that claim AI has significantly increased their "productivity" are doing things that are from every point of view (except theirs, of course) useless.
Every single good programmer I know has the same opinion. And what's funny is that most of the time, the ones making these claims, most of the time say something like "it reduces boilerplate!" whatever that means, "it wrote hundreds of lines for me", without saying anything about what those lines are or if they even work, "it writes all my tests!", as if I would want to trust a word guessing machine with tests for critical healthcare applications.
And even if it increased actual, real productivity, then it would have to be pretty high for me to even consider letting go of the benefits of learning and understanding things myself.
Depends on how much time you have. Sometimes the choices are "written by AI" or "not written at all". Also, you can learn from the generated code, e.g. by telling the AI to explain to you all the parts.
Another learning opportunity is explaining the task to AI and then saying "before you start writing the code, give me additional questions if any part of the task is not clear". Sometimes it says nothing useful, but sometimes it reminds me of useful things.
Just curious what AI are you using? Because the issues you and others are describing would be accurate circa 12-18 months ago, but today using Cursor on agent mode with Gemini-2.50-pro on max context mode, i can get it to write hundreds of lines of code and unit tests. Errors do pop up but no more often than errors from code that I write myself and it's able to self correct 90% of the time.
If it's so useless why has its rollout synchronized almost perfectly with the recent steep dropoff in entry-level hiring? Is that really just a coincidence in your view?
Seconding Sebastian's observation about increased in off shoring. From where I stand, I see a lot of hiring going in in Eastern Europe. Less of a time zone difference and a lot of STEMy people to be had at bargain prices--between 1/2 to 1/4 a fully loaded software engineer (depending if you're looking a hcol or lcol).
I wasn't here during the previous wave so I cant say how it's turning out. Work appears to be moving along, but I wonder what the effect will be on long term things like culture and innovation when offshore teams are used. (Not a dig at their abilities, but more at them operating in a different context--will EUs lack of innovation materialize in US companies that hire a lot of EU engineers? Let's see!)
Oh please, entry level hiring isn't a thing anymore simply because it's being offshored. AI actually stands for "anonymous indians". A big insurance company I used to work for just offshored all its IT staff to the Philippines except for two or three, while plastering their sites and pages with AI. Examples like that are so abundant that you don't even have to look for them.
And it's not even synchronized, the majority of the layoffs and reduction in hiring was in 2021-2023, where the AIs were even more useless than they are.
Furthermore, a good programmer with years of experience doesn't need a junior to complete his work. An AI doesn't increase his productivity at all because even if he uses it, *he still has to do the work*. The whole point of the entry and junior level hires is to completely delegate the simpler work to them without having to think about it, and in the process, having them learn so that in the future they can contribute much more.
Put simply, if AI were really giving these massive gains in "productivity", we would be seeing whole companies dedicated to spinning up tons of these AI assistants with a handful of highly experienced programmers taking over the consulting markets. But there aren't any doing that, and that's why instead all you see is AI companies pushing their garbage subscription services everywhere you look.
And asides from IT stuff, if you think an AI helping you write emails and documentation and other stuff like that is increasing your "productivity", then that speaks more about the 12 years of compulsory education + college that you spent learning and doing nothing rather than the efficiency provided by AI bots.
Oh yes because offshoring only started 3 years ago.
It hasn't but it has ramped up to extreme levels never seen before.
If AIs are so good, and if you're a good experienced programmer, just get a bunch of laptops and some AI subscriptions and take over the consulting market. Very low investment very high reward if you ask me.
Tell me about it. I do reinforcement learning with human feedback for work (I'm the human), and I've seen AIs screw up code in truly horrific ways, including "how could it possibly get this wrong" failures like outputting the wrong programming language.
Ask it for Rust code? Won't compile, 95% guaranteed.
Ask for a website? It assumes you're using a combo of Tailwind CSS and React without telling you how to do any of the necessary setup to get those up and running.
Ask to make a UI for a game? Everything's in the wrong place, overlapping elements, colors that make your eyes bleed.
AIs are good at leetcode problems, python, and tasks with superhumanly engineered prompts, but the average interaction I see has a major error within 2 or 3 turns.
Why is Hegseth reducing the number Generals and flag officers in the military? It sounds to my possibly paranoid ears like another attempt to concentrate executive power among Trump loyalists. Is it? Is it possible that Trump could reduce the top of the military in a way that keeps it loyal to him personally?
Here's a thread arguing that too few general officers is a problem for the military, not too many, as Hegseth claims: https://x.com/HicksCBER/status/1919548958113775725
"12/ The USA needs a way to keep more senior officers working and more advancement for junior officers.
We don’t need to go back to a world where George C. Marshall was a lieutenant for 14 years."
It's a weird hobby-horse of a certain class of conservatives that military rank inflation is devastating.
And yes, they clearly want to put loyalists in place for another coup attempt as well.
Senior general staff officers are fundamentally politcal positions, regardless of your military's position on if they should be apolitical or not. When you have a lot of people in those positions, you get a lot of politics, and that can encumber the armed services.
Dealing with them often on a professional basis, my personal opinion is that everyone over the rank of Colonel/Captain (for the navy) is functionally useless except as executive cover, and will often dynamite projects with no warning or explanation to score political points in some asinine contest they are involved in. So the fewer, the better in my book. If you want a proper laugh, look at the Royal Navy of the UK, who literally has more admirals than ships at the moment.
"Is it possible that Trump could reduce the top of the military in a way that keeps it loyal to him personally?"
Yes.
On the other hand, there's nothing that suggests the current structure of the military bureaucracy makes it particularly effective.
I seem to remember hearing complaints from observers of the military for years that there are too many generals due to rank inflation, with a lot of bureaucratic positions that would historically have been filled by mid-ranking officers now filled by people with stars on their shoulders. So Hegseth isn't making up the perceived problem from whole cloth.
After looking up some numbers as a vibe check, I'm finding mixed support for the idea that the current state is a departure from historical norms. The US Army currently has a statutory limit of 231 generals for a force consisting of about 450k active duty uniformed personnel, 260k civilian employees, and 500k members of the Army Reserve or National Guard, or about 1.2MM total. I think it's probably correct to add up at least the organized non-active-duty uniformed personnel, since Reserve and Guard units have and need officers for when they're called up (and I think the generals in Reserve and Guard units are counted in the 231 and make up a roughly proportional share of the total). Not sure if it's proper to count the civilian employees, so I'll leave them out for now, leaving 950k total. That works out to one general per 4k soldiers.
It seems like there were about 1100 US Army generals in WW2 for 11.2 million soldiers, or about one general per 10k soldiers. I think those were cumulative numbers, not peak strength, so the actual ratio at any one time might have been quite a bit different if, for example, generals had less turnover during the war than enlisted men. Still, probably substantially higher.
The Civil War tells a different story, with a peak strength of about 700k federal soldiers (2.1MM cumulative over the course of the war) and 583 generals cumulatively over the course of the war. I can't find peak strength for generals, but I suspect it was pretty close to the cumulative number: only 46 died during the war, and I only know of four who left the service for other reasons prior to the end of the war, not counting those who joined the Confederacy before First Bull Run. Two very old pre-war generals (Winfield Scott and John Wool) retired during the war for a combination of health reasons and to make room for more vigorous replacements, McClellan resigned rather than accept reassignment, and Fitz John Porter was cashiered after being scapegoated for Second Bull Run. So call it ~500 peak strength, or one general per 1.4k soldiers. Or using the cumulative numbers, one general per 3.6k soldiers.
Thanks. Good analysis.
Admittedly having not read the thread, I've always heard that it's a good idea to have a somewhat top-heavy military in peace-time, as you can easily spin-up new low-level officers and enlisted men, but can't easily get a new high ranking officers with the necessary experience. I'm not sure how this balances against having too strong of an "old guard" that prevents innovation though.
Are you interested in hearing his stated reasoning, or just in working back from the assumption that it must be terrible?
> DOD must be “unencumbered by unnecessary bureaucratic layers that hinder their growth and effectiveness,” Hegseth wrote.
> “A critical step in this process is removing redundant force structure to optimize and streamline leadership by reducing excess general and flag officer positions,” he continued. “Through these measures, we will uphold our position as the most lethal fighting force in the world, achieving peace through strength and ensuring greater efficiency, innovation and preparedness for any challenge that lies ahead.”
I don't think that "we need a super top heavy organisation to provide more promotion opportunities for junior officers" is a sensible approach. If anything, the approach would be to create a bunch more middle ranks between Lieutenant and Colonel. Captain-Lieutenant anyone? Cornet? Centurion?
That’s a relief. After all, if the goal were to make the top brass more personally loyal to Trump, obviously the administration would say that openly, especially given how honest and straightforward they’ve been with the public thus far.
I know! I was a bit worried that he hired that alcoholic weekend Fox News sycophant to head the D of D. I’m really relieved now!
> Are you interested in hearing his stated reasoning, or just in working back from the assumption that it must be terrible?
I feel like the continued incompetence of the administration + the many many indications Trump is authoritarian and literally wants to be a king (thank god he's old though) are good reasons to keep the assumption it must terrible.
But yes, I think it's good to know the justification, even if I think it's oddly convenient.
You got to worry about proving too much with the "oddly convenient" bit: after all, if Hegseth instead announced they'd be significantly increasing the amount of generals you would likely assume that he's doing so to add Trump loyalists to the top brass, and that would be oddly convenient too. Is there any action the Trump admin could take that couldn't possibly be a plot to increase Trumps power?
Historically, aspiring dictators in democracies have purged top administrators and generals who aren't loyalists. Examples include Chavez, Mussolini and that German guy.
Adding generals wouldn't fit the pattern but subtracting them would. The idea is to concentrate power not diffuse it.
I don't know much about the US rank structure, but in CANZUK the amount of flag rank officers (generals) is dramatically higher than is used to be during WWII.
I don't think the problem is too many highly skilled people in the military but too many of those people in higher ranks than there needs to be [this could well *not* be the case in the US] when they should have lower ranks on about the same pay.
I think it's a token of rank problem rather than a spending too much money on payroll problem.
Right. According to this source https://www.federalpay.org/military/army/ranks the pay bands for officers are pretty sad. I realise there's probably all sorts of allowances etc on top of this, but commanding enough destructive power to destroy most countries and getting paid Google grad program wages doesn't sound like the right balance.
Read the thread I linked in the OP. It's all about that. The main complaint in the thread is about how hard it is to keep very competent officers.
Is the deadline the midnight that starts next Monday, or the midnight that ends next Monday?
I like that new online class management systems default to assignments being due at 11:59 pm. However, I once tried to make assignments due at 5 pm on Saturday so that students could go out in the evening, and they all rebelled and asked me to make them due at 11:59 pm because that’s what they’re used to.
I've always wondered that, and out of anxiety the times I've participated I made sure to submit it the day before. Though I figure Scott is a pretty lenient guy so I'm likely worrying for nothing.
My best guess is that a lack of strict specifications likely implies some slack. My best guess is if you can convince Scott that you were in fact writing your article while sitting on Howland Island at GMT-12 and submitted it before Tuesday, 0:00 in that time zone, he will probably let you get away with it.
The vague analogy would be that a contract which is ambiguous is often interpreted in favor of the party which did not draft it, the idea being that they had the ability to clarify things but did not. While Scott is of course free to interpret the due date however he likes, I think that if he had wanted a deadline of Midnight at the start of Monday, PST he could easily have specified that and avoided people whining and arguing about it.
I also assume so but I wish I knew for sure. I'm struggling to finish to the earliest possible interpretation, but I also really don't want to take a 10%(?) risk and take longer than that.
Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone is quite popular in scientific conference deadlines; it practically means around 2PM the next day in Europe (depends a bit on DST).
A couple years ago somebody asked how firm the deadline was and he said he'd allow for a little bit of lateness, but not much, and refused to specify exactly what his real mental deadline was (which I think was a smart way to avoid deadline creep)
This is why I encourage people to end things at 11:59 pm.
I would add that I would prefer the 24-style time always, but especially for the hour after midnight and noon.
I mean, you wrap the hour after 12:59, but you wrap the am/pm designation at 11:59. Time units are still terrible even if everyone sticks to ISO 8601, after all.
Many people who talk about "master morality" seem to think the guy who digs ditches 12 hours a day is the "master" and the guy who works in an air-conditioned office is the "slave." BAP, who has actually read Nietzsche and understands history at more than a cheesy-70s-movie level, knows otherwise: (NSFW warning)
https://x.com/bronzeagemantis/status/1919499908232380622
Jack London's The Sea Wolf was a pretty good take on a master in Wolf Larsen, and he was a ship captain who bullied higher class people like BAP through cruelty and sheer life force, winning their admiration even though he was a rapacious brute.
kind of a funny story was i used to work for an inventory service, and we had a job in new york. turns out they sent us to a refrigerated facility but we had no gear to even stay in the freezer.
the workers there though, jesus. They were as tough as nails and looked like male models lol. They gave us their coats and just did their job without them. going into the bathroom was an experience because it looked like they took a sledgehammer to it. i dont mean messy i mean a literal sledge hammer, everything was broken down.
some of those "ditch diggers" are masters indeed. pure life force.
Both of them are slaves.
People like him are just illiterate. But worse than that, they are content creators. Nothing they say can be taken seriously or as a joke.
A "master" wouldn't even be on twitter in the first place. A "master" wouldn't be engaged at all in any of the social media controversies. A "master" wouldn't be trying to educate the lowly masses.
Content creators, no matter what flavour, have the same thing in common: they are confidently stupid and lucky enough to get a following so that they can sell their garbage books.
Sounds kinda sour-grapey.
Oh he’s quite literate and very clever. I just seriously doubt he is arguing in good faith.
> People like him are just illiterate
Bap's ivy league
a quick google search finds a reading list
> Bap's ivy league
Yes, like I said, he's illiterate.
Of course, of course; which year do you think the dark age started? We could look up his age and figure out if he was educated at all.
I don't spend _that_ much time talking about master morality and slave morality but... I've definitely never thought of "guy who digs ditches 12 hours a day" as being a central example of master morality, I have no idea where you're getting that from.
I'm mocking the Online Right's factory job fetish.
You and I must hang out in different corners of the online right.
Yes restoring factory work in the US is one of the goals of the current tariff regime. A sensible case for a sensible approach could be made for trying that but this is not a sensible approach. I believe ‘daft’ would be a good descriptor of the present method.
It is, but that's absolutely nothing to do with Master vs Slave morality.
What does any of that have to do with Nietzsche?
I read BAP enough to clock him as a troll. He’s just messing with people. It’s his idea of fun. I’ve seen the old and tired grift before.
… and the horse he rode in on.
With people like BAP, the fact that they're trolls doesn't mean that they're not serious. Trolling is a legitimate method of Straussian communication if you're trying to say anything outside the Overton arrowslit.
Do an esoteric reading of The Republic, suss out its hidden meaning and then communicate your thoughts by being an obnoxious asshole?
I attended a less prestigious Midwest university than the University of Chicago but I don’t think the final step there (being an obnoxious asshole) can be called Straussian.
I tend to roll my eyes at wokeness and cries of racism online and so on, but recently, a friend of mine shared some stories illustrating how racism is still a real thing.
1. My friend is white but his wife has visible Puerto Rican ancestry. Recently, they tried to rent an apartment and everything went fine until they met in person, at which point the landlord starting demanding birth certificates, social security numbers and all sorts of stuff. Ironically, the white guy is an immigrant while the Puerto Rican woman is a native-born American citizen. And this wasn't some mom-and-pop landlord that you might expect to play fast and loose with the law either, this was the largest property management company in the state. He made a complaint to the government which didn't go anywhere, and they couldn't find any lawyers to pursue the case further (apparently there are lawyers who represent low-income tenants, but not *high*-income tenants, even if you're willing to pay.)
2. He also said that he has a very Mexican-looking friend who has been stopped by the police at night 11 times with no tickets issued. The police just claim that not many people drive at night in the area and they want to check on who it is and so on. Meanwhile, the white guy has driven a lot at night in the same area and never gotten stopped even once.
I'm sure people will justify this with base rates and so on, but the point here is that regardless of whether it is "justified" or not, people have very different experiences of the world based on their physical appearance. And thanks to bubbles, you often won't hear about this.
>people have very different experiences of the world based on their physical appearance.
You can tell this to 1000 racists and 1000 non-racists and they’ll all answer the same thing: “No shit?”
I'd be really skeptical of over-indexing on anecdotes.
There could be plausible third explanations as to why they were required additional documentation. Maybe this is something all landlords require in that area for people who aren't US citizens (in New York it's really difficult to rent an apartment as an immigrant for example).
Maybe one friend consistently drives 5-10 miles over the speed limit, while your white friend consistently drives at or under the speed limit, giving cause to stop one and not the other (How could the police even see the race of someone driving at night before the stop?). Maybe one has a beat-up looking car, and the other a well taken care of new car, which would be a form of discrimination by the police, but not necessarily having to do with their race (also, anecdotal secondhand stories are not especially useful).
People definitely discount stories of mild racism, and over index on their own experience, but "a bad thing happened to someone I know that is a minority" is going to always be true, whether or not racism is prevalent. When a white person encounters the same problem, they're far less likely to ascribe the hypothetical motivation to racism, so out of the infinite pool of rudeness and annoying strangers, you'd naturally expect minorities to ascribe the cause of these things to racism.
While over-indexing on anecdotes is definitely a problem, there are at least two individuals who saw the top-level comment saying "I heard an anecdote that lived racist experience still happens" and responded here with some variation of "yes, and that's a good thing, I genuinely support housing discrimination on the basis of race."
On one level, yeah, ACX readers willing to wade into the comments on a racial topic is a non-representative sample. But I find it hard to look at that and *not* update towards more unseen racism than I previously believed.
How
There’s sufficient readership of ACX that overlaps with the HBD people that I’m not surprised many of them comment here.
I don’t think anyone claims racism doesn’t exist (there are many popular Substacks where this is basically their brand), but if it’s a prevalent problem or not. A few anecdotes, that honestly don’t even make sense if you think about them (How could the police be racial profiling at night? Like, obviously this can’t be racial profiling), shouldn’t sway opinion much.
Right, I guess a ~10% base rate of unapologetic racists in this thread (guesstimate of 20 unique commenters is probably off but I don't feel like counting) just makes me think it's a more prevalent problem than I realized.
Even if ACX-race-commenters are an average 10x more racist than a randomly sampled subset of the population, that means a ~1/100 base rate for open/"out" racists? And then presumably a few times as many people hold racist beliefs but recognize that outright saying that they are racist is socially unacceptable. And then, people do interact with quite a few strangers in their day-to-day... Suddenly fairly common racism seems pretty probable.
(Incidentally, what is HBD?)
On the value of anecdote, I think the original commenter was less saying that "these particular cases prove racism is real" and more that these anecdotes opened their eyes to the fact that these cases are probably more common than most people think. Are all of them "true" racisms? Probably not. But if the base rate for true racism is n%, then finding out that there are actually quite a lot more questionable incidents than you were aware of is important for deciding if this is a real problem: n% of a doubly large number is a bigger problem.
I do think it is possible, though definitely harder, to profile at night-- see the other commenter mentioning the possibility of a cop that runs the plates of every car that passes by on a dark empty night and gets shown license photos, for example.
HBD is short for human biodiversity, which is basically novo-scientific racism (captured well in Scott’s post about IQ differences from a few months ago). Whether or not it’s true, there’s a subculture in rationalist spheres who hyper-focus on it, usually without explicitly stating the implications, but heavily implying some pretty racist things. I’d say it’s pretty heavily concentrated around this blog, as far as rationalist spheres go.
I still think it doesn’t make sense. Why would police pull over someone who has been pulled over with no tickets issued a dozen times before? If you’re racial profiling, that’s presumably because you think Mexican looking people commit more crimes or whatever, but it wouldn’t make sense to ignore the way more useful signal of “There’s a dozen stops listed on this license plates with nothing coming from it.” Because racial profiling, while racist, does work when the minority you’re profiling is, in the statistics, more likely to commit a crime, but presumably they’re not just making extra work for themselves for fun.
I imagine it is probably extremely boring to be a traffic cop on a seldom travelled road at night. I absolutely wouldn't be surprised if there are pressures both in favor of pulling someone over for little to no reason (gives you something to do, makes you feel powerful, if you have some sort of metric based goal for arrests gives you some possibility of making progress) and against (is more work) and that race could be enough to put someone over the line.
Also, I doubt that most of these cases really are racial profiling in the statistical sense and instead think a lot of them are racist in the boring "I think he did something wrong because I don't like Mexicans" sense. Rationality is not necessarily the driving force behind racial profiling even if that's how it's justified post-hoc, and they may just not understand the useful signals the way you do.
Not to say that a third explanation isn't possible in this case either. Just that I don't believe racial profiling is inherently nonsensical here.
I'm a white person with long hair and a beard. I typically tie up my hair now, but from age 15-25 I had it down everyday. Every time I left the house, (my country is very walkable) someone would shout "JESUS!" at me. This happened almost everyday, often more than once.
Most people simply would not believe me when I told them this. It was always assumed I was exaggerating for effect or being overly sensitive. But of course they wouldn't experience this because they rarely spent anytime on the street in the company of a long haired bearded person. They ofc never lived their live as a long haired bearded person. On one occasion I invited a doubtful friend for a walk with me. Someone in a car shouted it at me within about 15 minutes.
We tend to over-index our own experiences and under-index those of others. I also look somewhat racially ambiguous for a white person and I have received a lot misdirected racism.
From these experiences I tend to trust the idea that people from minorities experience very frequent slights that go unnoticed by the majority of white people.
I think this is counterbalanced by the fact that low-status groups export a lot of unpleasant externalities to their communities. This not only includes things like violent crime and petty theft, but irritants like loud music and anti-social behavior. Interracial unpleasantness runs in both directions and in my view it's an isolated demand for rigor to draw a circle around only one-half of that exchange and label it unacceptable. These things exist in dynamic equilibrium with each other. I suspect that if it were possible to quantify the total social harms imposed by all groups on each other then the balance would be roughly even.
It can be simultaneously true that racism is a real thing and that wokeness only makes things worse.
If someone's job is to solve a problem, making sure that the problem never goes away gives them job safety.
Sure, if we're going to call it racism every time something bad happens, for unknown reasons, to a non-white person then I'm sure we'll never get rid of racism.
> but his wife has visible Puerto Rican ancestry
Would you be able to distinguish between a puerto rican, a nicaraguan, a panamenian? What does "visible puerton rican ancestry mean"?
> Ironically, the white guy is an immigrant while the Puerto Rican woman is a native-born American citizen
The issue is not citizenship.
> he has a very Mexican-looking
What does "mexican looking" mean? All the mexicans I know (twelve, I worked with their company) are fair, blonde and light eyed.
> people have very different experiences of the world based on their physical appearance
Of course. The perception of people varies. Ugly people are treated much worse and beautiful people. Like one of the other commenters stated, perhaps they should try to change or completely separate themselves from their peers?
The governor and federal reps in Idaho all campaigned on anti woke and illegal immigration. Idaho is 5% immigrant of any kind, legal or not. It is 82% white, and another 8% mixed. A large % of people in Idaho have likely never interacted with a non white person, ever.
They are probably not the people to trust about whether or not there's still racism in the US. I think it says a lot about the power of narrative over lived reality -- how much the virtual is now the real -- that the representatives knew anti woke and anti illegal immigration were worth campaigning on anyway.
How do the cops know he looks Mexican if it's at night? Didn't Scott once mention using nighttime stops as a control, on the supposition that it's harder to discriminate against people you can't see?
They have computers in their cars, can look people up via license plate.
"Dang we've had 11 encounters with this guy already! He must be up to something fishy."
Yes, physical appearance is a brand. Treating brands according to how they've performed in the past is both individually rational and socially optimal. If you don't like the reputation your brand has then either convince the brand to change its fundamental quality or take steps to aggressively distance yourself from that brand via things like fashion choices. Treating members of low-performing brands with suspicion is a powerful signal that a rational brand would use to improve its perception. If they can't or won't do that then they deserve what they get.
Did Honda outcompete Ford by telling people that they were anti-Japanese racists for preferring Fords, even though there probably *were* people who refused to buy "cheap <insert Japanese slur> crap"? No, they just built a better car. People are basically rational. They treat you according to your value and they're usually accurate.
>people have very different experiences of the world based on their physical appearance
That's because physical appearance has nonzero predictive power. What do you want people to do, ignore what they know to be obviously true? Yes, this is unfortunate for high-quality members of low-quality groups. That's not the fault of society, it's the fault of the groups. If you want to blame anyone, blame them for being low quality. Don't blame society for being minimally competent in their pursuit of rational self-interest.
How do you feel about that applied to men, whose brand is significantly more attached to "violent" and "sexual predator" than women?
Are you saying that man who says "you shouldn't judge me on the basis of that brand" is incorrect, and should instead distance themselves from that brand via something like fashion choices? How?
No serious person would criticize you for crossing the street when approached by a strange man even though you wouldn't do that if you were being approached by a strange woman.
I feel fine about it. I have no problem whatsoever with social norms which presume that men pose the greater physical risk. I *want* the cops to preferentially pat down men because that keeps me safer in the long run. I *want* the prisons to be filled with men and not women. I have no problems distinguishing myself from the criminal class: I don't have piercings, tattoos, a weird haircut, or clothes with antisocial logos on them. It's very easy to look trustworthy if you want to.
Points for consistency, then.
I completely get your point, and agree much, but there might be a little mistake in it.
> Treating members of low-performing brands with suspicion is a powerful signal that a rational brand would use to improve its perception. If they can't or won't do that then they deserve what they get.
The "brand" can't do anything the way an individual of it can do something. For the brand to do something its members have to do something.
And this is where I see the mistake: no individual of the "brand" short of, I don't know, its CEO, can change the brand alone.
So if you're a super decent person of that brand, and do everything you can to change it (you can't leave it, cause you're not rich enough to change your skin like Michael Jackson), then you still get harassed, for rational reasons by members of other brands, and you do NOT deserve this.
This sucks and I emphasize. I don't say "You deserve it" to such an individual.
Neither would I. They don't deserve it and I have genuine sympathy for those people. That being said, I don't think it's that difficult to clearly signal allegiance to mainstream culture with appearance and behavioral choices. I'm confident that if I was black I wouldn't have much difficulty avoiding 95% of racism. Yes the last 5% would be occasionally annoying but I would understand the social function that it played. The fact that Henry Louis Gates threw such a hissy fit over such a benign instance of police profiling indicates that he personally experiences essentially zero genuine bigotry in his life. I suspect that's actually typical for people who do the obvious social things.
"I'm confident that if I was black" is doing so much heavy lifting that if God ever did create a rock he couldn't lift, he'd outsource it to this claim.
> or take steps to aggressively distance yourself from that brand via things like fashion choices
...this very comments section teaches us over and over again that wearing clothes people think inappropriate for your appearance makes everything worse, not better.
The concept this guy is talking about is "wearing a dress shirt while Black." That's not incongruent with appearance at all.
One problem is the racism isn't rational either if it won't help your average landlord tell a Puerto Rican from a Salvadoran, or someone from Sierra Leone vs someone from New Orleans. These are not the same populations, and I don't know how you think people from these disparate backgrounds have any power to tell the rest of the brown or black people to behave differently.
You may find this argument ineffective with people who know indias cast system, advanced racism exists.
I don't understand what you mean. In the US it doesn't matter a whole lot to non-Indians what caste you are (except to other Indian expats), they're lumped in with everyone brown.
I dont understand any collectivist, but I know I've talked to people who have whole theories about about the movement of the races, when india was aryan and how that interacts with their castes.
How white are Italians really? What the the 12(?) black races?
Given I dont care, I also couldn't imagine having a single piece of evidence so you'd just be making an argument for me to learn what they say "trust the experts". That may be ineffective for what you want.
As usual, I still don't understand what you mean or how you think it's relevant to what I'm saying. What do you mean by "collectivist" in this context, and why did you use that word? Evidence for what? What do you think I want? If you don't care, why are you commenting?
Yes this attitude gives cover to genuine old-school racists. I think those people are less common than you think. I also think there is less socially relevant distinction between those groups than you might think. If there was then they would do well to clearly signal that distinction to wider society. In any case, I'm highly confident that the social cost of ignoring true racism is dwarfed by the social cost of ignoring the predictive visual signals of class, particularly in an adversarial equilibrium where low-value cohorts know that their counterparties are legally prevented from using them. It's very bad to create a social equilibrium where people feel free to act without accountability.
"It's very bad to create a social equilibrium where people feel free to act without accountability."
Yes! Black culture after the civil rights act went from jazz to gangster rap. Any coincidence? No. Access to white people went from a thing they had to earn to a thing they were entitled to. "Sale Of BET To White Supremacist Group Results In No Changes To Programming." - The Onion. Positive rights - things others owe you - make brats.
Heh, well put. Yeah I actually have a theory that the perverse social incentives instituted by the post-60's Left are analogous to anti-adaptive sexual selection dynamics (Fisherian runaway). Minorities have a strong incentive to develop robust antisocial signals which the Left evolved a preference for because they can use it to win elections. Taken to an extreme you wind up with things like the Irish Elk, which went extinct because its antlers got too large for its neck to support. What's interesting is one of the conditions for Fisherian runaway is a positive covariance between the trait and preference for the trait. The cultural equivalent of that is when you start getting leaders who are drawn from the cohort of people helped by anti-adaptive preferences.
Being white from the south, which is what I am, is a low-status version of being white, and when I came up north to go to college I changed my first name from an ooey-gooey southern one to a crisp androgynous one, and trained myself out of my southern accent. Also changed how I dressed. It was a good move, I guess, but hurt my parents' feelings quite a lot.
Exactly my point, thank you! Most minorities could easily signal that the common stereotypes don't apply to them if they chose to. Most of that amounts to simply understanding mainstream culture well enough to fit seamlessly into it. If you're unable or unwilling to do that then why *shouldn't* an average mainstreamer be skeptical of you?
Thank goodness you're not a *genuine* racist. I was worried for a minute there.
Oh *I'm* a genuine racist. My point is that most other people aren't. You shouldn't judge all of them based on a few bad apples like me, that's bigoted.
Yes, actually. I want people to not be racist. "Judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin."
Something can be "minimally competent in their pursuit of rational self-interest" and also morally abhorrent.
What if judging by the colour of their skin makes you correct most of the time?
it doesn't.
a lot of people just aren't honest with themselves that they feel powerless and afraid and try to reestablish control blaming others. The actual impact of other races is usually not impacting them individually as much as them seeing a "scary world" through media and echo chambers.
> that they feel powerless and afraid
Funny how you people always say the same things. "Afraid", "powerless", "insecure". It has nothing to do with that.
> try to reestablish control blaming others
Who is to blame for murders other than the murderers?
> The actual impact of other races is usually not impacting them individually as much as them seeing a "scary world" through media and echo chambers.
You sound naive to be honest. Just because you were lucky to not experience any issues doesn't nullify the experience of others. Sounds like you live in a safe place, good for you :)
I do think he has 1/2 of a point. There are a lot of basement-dwelling losers out there. But they aren't the people anti-discrimination law restrains. After all - the basement dweller has no land to rent, no jobs to offer, etc. Likewise, if one's racism is based on an inaccurate media-driven view of a group he never sees, he has no ability to discriminate against that group.
The actual purpose of anti-discrimination law is to empower judges and bureaucrats to tell businessmen they know better how to run their businesses - with no skin in the game or accountability if they're wrong.
Are you aware that there's a robust literature on the psychology of stereotypes and that the data show that stereotypes are almost always accurate?
any con man worth his salt knows how to dress nice and and ape class markers to gull people like you, who believe in "data." They rely on you being stupid enough to believe stereotypes over evaluating people or events as individuals because of laziness.
shortcutting thinking to narratives or data rather than actually getting to know or understand people is dumb. A lot of those positive stereotypes hide vicious people inside.
What if there were a robotic encyclopedia with perfect knowledge about your favorite, I don't know, video game, and asking it any question would make you correct ALL of the time, but every time you asked it a question it drone-striked a random person in real life?
Morality and truth are not the same thing.
In a less fanciful example, what if by bearing false witness against another you could be made financially better off?
Morality and self-interest can be diametrically opposed.
It doesn't matter how reliably "correct" racism is. It doesn't matter how rationally self-interested you are in employing it.
Racism violates the harm principle, by harming the individual who you are racist against.
It violates the categorical imperative and fails to treat people as ends in themselves.
It is ignoble and non-virtuous.
It has a proven track record of leading to low utility, suboptimal societies with an oppressed underclass.
It is across all reasonable moral frameworks morally wrong. It is permissible under unreasonable moral frameworks like egoism, but if that's where you're coming from, I think we share too little overlap in first principles for this to be a fruitful conversation.
> In a less fanciful example, what if by bearing false witness against another you could be made financially better off?
Lying and wanting to be apart from people whose culture or behaviour are incompatible with yours are very different?
> Racism violates the harm principle, by harming the individual who you are racist against.
But there typically isn't any harm? Besides, what principle is this? Why is this harm principle you speak of more valuable than say, christian morality, or muslim morality, or japanese cultural norms?
> It violates the categorical imperative and fails to treat people as ends in themselves.
Absolutes typically don't hold true in the real world. Different people have difference philosophies, and many of them disagree with the categorical imperative.
> It is ignoble and non-virtuous.
Depends on the virtue system that you enshrine, I suppose.
> It has a proven track record of leading to low utility, suboptimal societies with an oppressed underclass.
Unlike the proven track record leading to high utlity, optimal societies with equal and free peoples of multiculturalism :D
> It is across all reasonable moral frameworks morally wrong
Christianity would disagree, and I consider it to be the most reasonable of moral frameworks.
> but if that's where you're coming from
I hate the sin not the sinner. That doesn't mean I'm not aware of the tendency certain sinners have towards certain sins. If you treat every single person the same then you're a fool, not morally enlightened.
> I think we share too little overlap in first principles for this to be a fruitful conversation.
Lol okay mate.
the idea that your own culture is unified is silly to me. if you are white, white people aren't a monolithic block that accept you or share the same values.
like the usa is peaceful but we are really different across the states, and some places other white people will barely tolerate you because you didnt grow up there or dont share the exact same values.
> Christianity would disagree, and I consider it to be the most reasonable of moral frameworks.
One of the most famous parables Jesus told was "the Good Samaritan", about how assumptions about the relative goodness-badness of ingroups and outgroups is wrong.
Jesus himself, being a middle eastern Jewish man, would be caught in many people's blanket assumptions based on his race.
That's fine because none of this involves racism. People making rational predictions based on appearance isn't racist any more than it's sexist to prefer to have the babysitter for your children be a woman (on the theory that men are far more likely to be abusers or pedophiles).
Just like truth is an absolute defense against libel, I believe that rational self-interest is an absolute defense against charges of racism.
>Something can be "minimally competent in their pursuit of rational self-interest" and also morally abhorrent.
Agreed. Fortunately being able to rent your property to whomever you choose is not abhorrent, unless you find personal liberty abhorrent.
you arent judging by appearances but by a narrative established by people that would easily turn on you for being a woman, being catholic, being polish, or living in the wrong state or zipcode.
plus a lot of you barely interact with them, its all data and pundits and youtube videos of rare things as if white people trashing things after a college football game doesnt happen either.
Ok. My argument is that those narratives are generally accurate. But like all things, making judgements requires good judgement. You have to be smart and honest with yourself.
I'll also point out that accusations of discrimination follow a similar pattern of following a "narrative established by people that would easily turn on you".
i tend to view people as dangerous en masse, rather than play favorites with groups. for discrimination people of all types do it, so its important to take it seriously rather than assume the mass is right over the individual.
if you ever have been bullied for being different you dont take the mass as right by default, but you also need to not condemn them overmuch
> People making rational predictions based on appearance isn't racist
I mean, the dictionary definition of racist is "someone that judges others based on their race". By that definition, yes, that is racist. Why is everyone so upset at being called racist even on anonymous forums, anyways? It's up to you to decide whether racism is justified or not.
I don't think semantic arguments are useful in discussions like this but fine. If you want to split hairs I never said anything about judging based on race, I said judging based on appearance. That's because appearance is a reliable indicator of class and class is a reliable indicator of behavior. Yes race is part of that but it's not all of it. I'm guessing that if the Puerto Rican woman above was wearing an expensive well-tailored outfit with high-class accessories and had a sophisticated use of English then the landlord in question would've been much less interested in her passport.
Do you think it's sexist to prefer to not have a male babysit your 8 year old daughter?
It is, by definition, sexist. But may be justified, defensible, etc. Which I think is the point of the person you were responding to.
Absolutely.
Public and university libraries had phone books for other cities, most had major US cities, eg New York, Chicago &c, and smaller cities in the local region. I used these on several occasions.
There was also directory assistance; you could talk to a human being that actually had the phone book or equivalent, and they were usually willing to look up names similar to one you wanted and give you numbers and addresses.
Around 1984 I lived in a small town that had a reverse lookup section in the white pages -- If you had a number, you could look up who it belonged to.
I had totally forgotten directory assistance. Though it persisted into the cell phone era I think.
I think you posted this as a top level comment when you meant to post it as a reply to Oliver's thread on phone books? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-380/comment/114620839
Yes, that was a mistake. I wrote a comment, signed in with much hassle (computer new to substack), was happy to see my comment was still there, but it was not in the intended place in the hierarchy. Thanks for your concern.
Here's an interesting order-of-magnitude calculation. According to my Google search, it took about 10^24 FLOPs to train ChatGPT. According to this: https://aiimpacts.org/brain-performance-in-flops the human brain operates at about 10^16 FLOP/s. There are 10^7 seconds in a year, so that's 10^23 FLOPs for a human per year. If ChatGPT is at about the level of a grad student then that represents ~20 years of human learning, which is 2 x 10^24 FLOPs, which sorta checks out. Thoughts?
The human brain obviously does not spend nearly as much compute on learning as LLMs. A human graduate student who is reading a textbook is clearly using some of their brain capacity to learn new skills, but a ton of FLOPs are wasted on other things. I mean, even to translate sensory inputs into text tokens is taking serious work. Then you have other irrelevant sensory inputs which have their dedicated circuitry, possibly hardwired stuff which worries about predators or social relationships or sex or food or whatever else was relevant in the ancestral environment. Most students are not reading textbooks 24x7, but wasting most of their time eating, sleeping, filing paperwork or going hiking.
Compared to LLMs, it seems quite unfair that humans get away with so little effort. Your typical grad student, unlike an LLM, will not even bother to read every textbook there is on the matter plus any which might be vaguely related.
First sentence in the link:
> The computing power needed to replicate the human brain’s relevant activities has been estimated by various authors, with answers ranging from 10^12 to 10^28 FLOPS.
Never mind being able to make meaningful comparisons, there isn't even anything like a meaningful value to compare with. With our current understanding of what the brain does and how it does it, I really don't see that there's much more to say.
If my brain had the same energy requirement as a data center training an LLM, I'd struggle much less with my weight.
New weight shaming advice unlocked, "just think harder"
New weight shaming defence unlocked: "I'm fat because my thinking is so efficient, almost effortless".
Oh no, they are reaching for proving computation lower bounds
How is the latest version of GPT at a grad student level? I don't think you can compare. It is obviously superhuman in some ways but also below mental retardation in others.
ChatGPT is the app by the way, not the model itself ... it might be pedantic but it makes a difference because the app brings a lot more to the table including probably other models and tools but those do not count in the training FLOPs even though they improve the model's performance in many areas drastically.
I'm also skeptical of calling ChatGPT o3 "grad student level". I would really expect it to get all seven of my tiny benchmark-ette questions right at that level, and the current (4/16/2025) results are https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-377/comment/109495090 3 correct, 3 partially correct, 1 wrong.
You might be overestimating grad students? Some are brilliant, some are idiots, and most are kinda meh. The claim was `average grad student,' not `best in class' (but not `worst in class' either).
I haven't seen your seven tiny benchmark-ette questions, but sight unseen I am confident that there exist grad students (even in the relevant field) who would get all seven wrong. [Mostly students who are going to fail out of their program, but still...]. No matter how low you set the bar there will be those who fail to clear it.
>I haven't seen your seven tiny benchmark-ette questions
Just to be explicit, they are:
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
b) Q: I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
c) Q: Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
e) Q: Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
g) Q: What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
I realize that these are a very mixed bag. I just sort-of accumulated them as I played with LLMs, and decided that if I was going to tell other people the results, I really should at least keep them consistent. So I froze them as they stand, with some have attempts at crafting the prompts (e.g. (c) with the "Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry") and others don't.
FWIW, I actually started with (f), the inorganic gases one, when I had, at the time, greatly excessive expectations for what an LLM could do back then. Today, Gemini 2.5 gets this essentially correct, including overriding my incorrect "roughly 50". Roughly a year ago, the answers to that question included liquids and solids and organic compounds, getting all of the criteria wrong. And the dialog with it was maddening, trying to get it to e.g. exclude the organics without it doing things like inexplicably dropping the noble gases.
Interesting. So far I've been disappointed by the results so I tested o4-mini again, and was impressed in some ways and disappointed in other familiar ways. It can do things even relatively strong (but not genius maybe) high school students and undergrads would struggle with, but unfortunately hallucination is a really big issue, in my opinion, I would
prefer a model that says "I don't know how to do this" rather than give a confident wrong answer, or even better if it'd tell me how sure he is of his answer.
Formal proof verifiers like Lean give some pretty strong certificates of correctness, but unfortunately that only works for math, it can only tell you whether your solution is 100% correct (instead of say 80% certainty), it needs you to translate a natural language statement into lean which Lean itself can of course not check if it was done correctly, and the distance between what they can do and what they can verify in lean seems to be a bit too large at the moment.
Example of something it did correctly:
1.prove that \sigma_{k\leq n}k choose{n}{k}=n2^{n-1}. (It gave two correct proofs)
2. Generalize the purely combinatoric proof to produce more identities (it did this correctly too)
This might be less impressive if it's just repeating something he found in a textbook, I tested with some more obscure looking (and some harder) problems with more mixed results (sometimes right formula, wrong proof, sometimes wrong formula corrected into a correct proof after being given the right formula). These tests are very informal of course.
Many Thanks!
>I would prefer a model that says "I don't know how to do this" rather than give a confident wrong answer, or even better if it'd tell me how sure he is of his answer.
Very much agreed. I'm just playing with LLMs at this point, so I don't _need_ to trust them to not hallucinate.
When I don't know the answer, and at least sort-of really want it, I currently ask both ChatGPT o3 and Claude Sonnet 3.7 and sort-of trust them when they agree - but not entirely. In fact, I know that e.g. on question (e), the titration question, both falsely claim in their initial answers that there is an infinite slope at the equivalence point (IIRC, _all_ the LLMs give this, or a numerical answer with the same pathology, as an initial answer currently).
Many Thanks!
>You might be overestimating grad students? Some are brilliant, some are idiots, and most are kinda meh. The claim was `average grad student,' not `best in class' (but not `worst in class' either).
Ok, that is reasonable.
BTW, about o3 vs o4-mini-high, I ran the tests on o4-mini-high, and it looks comparable to o3. One of the fully correct questions for o3 (4 carbon hydrocarbons) degrades to 1/4 correct for o4-mini-high, but the badly wrong question for o3 (molecule with S4 only) improves to partially correct.
o4-mini-high https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-380/comment/115083126 2 correct, 4 partially correct, 1 1/4 correct
Am a physics professor. My professional assessment would be that at (theoretical) physics research, ChatGPT is indeed at the level of a decent early stage graduate student. 4o is probably a first year who is competent, but not a genius. o4-mini is at least a second year, maybe even a third year.
Late in the third year is around when I'd expect a PhD student to start coming up with some original ideas*. If the next iteration of ChatGPT starts doing that, it'll be time to get really worried.
*I'm defining `original ideas' as coming up with interesting questions of their own, along with a plausible line of attack on them. Any idiot can generate cool questions with no idea how to go about solving them.
Since there was a new release of gemini 2.5 I retested it with my tiny benchmark-ette, and it is currently the best of the bunch I've looked at, with:
tl;dr: Gemini 2.5 Pro Exp Beta via poe.com 05/08/2025 7 questions, tl;dr of results: 5 correct, 2 partially correct
full comment at: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-380/comment/115649196
Interesting! I've tried o3, but not o4-mini (I assume I should try o4-mini-high?). OpenAI's naming convention often makes it unclear which model is expected to give the best answers...
One task where it's already superhuman - literature search. A thirty minute query to DeepResearch (plus thirty minutes checking its references) will give me a better picture of the research landscape in a field with which I'm not thoroughly familiar than days of poking around by myself on Google Scholar.
Even in fields that I *do* know well I end up using DeepResearch just to check if there was something relevant that I had missed. It invariably finds everything that I thought it should find, and sometimes identifies relevant stuff that had slipped me by.
ETA: I’ve been using mini high, yeah
I'd suggest Elicit for that use case (this avoids the wasted time checking references).
Many Thanks! I'm ambivalent about DeepResearch. Yes, I've found things with it. But at one point I was doing a curiosity search looking for compounds where both the critical point and solid-liquid-gas triple point were known, and it only came up with a bit over a dozen of them - and I made some guesses about additional ones, and was indeed able to find examples that it had missed.
Except all the hallucinated results that you have to check by hand, and have to know enough how to check.
The hallucinations alone make it exceedingly suspect as a research aid. A grad student who just flat made up that number of cites would be kicked out after their first paper draft for academic misconduct. Heck, a high school student would get in serious trouble for that. And the fact that the LLM does it with the utter confidence of a true moron makes it even more dangerous to trust.
Eh, I don't think o4-mini's error rate is particularly higher than that of an early stage graduate student. You need to check both. It makes different kinds of errors, but the kinds of errors it makes are in many ways easier to check.
And for literature search, actually finding relevant articles is the time consuming part. Checking that the articles actually exist takes 5 seconds. Checking that they say what o4-mini says they say takes another 2 minutes. Using o4-mini (and checking its results) has cut my literature search time by probably 100x. Granted that's just one discrete task, but it's one discrete task where it is damn useful.
(Other discrete, non-professional tasks where I find it damn useful are being a travel agent and translation. In both cases, o4 + manual check is vastly better/faster than fully manual).
This could be wrong, but my personal view is that that won't happen for quite a while. LLMs have mastered language. That's powerful but I think it's a relatively thin layer on top of human cognition. In order to become truly creative AI needs to have an explicit world model and I don't think you can get there purely linguistically. Not efficiently enough to be useful, anyway. My guess is we're near the peak of where current architectures can take us and it will take another fundamental advance to make the next step. Not that I'm an expert, just my two cents.
By 4o, do you mean o3 or o1? 4o is the underlying basis model, while o3 and o1 are the Chain of Thought reasoning models.
Whatever it used to be before o3 and o4-mini released. Probably o1.
Terence Tao described the o1 model as being at the level of an average math grad student. A friend of mine objected to this calculation with "GPT is more like a million grad students" but my response was that it's more like one grad student with really quick access to wikipedia. I'm not totally sure how much of a distinction without a difference that represents, but there is definitely a sense in which GPT doesn't really understand the things that it's parroting. Sometimes I think of it as a linguistic front end to a comprehensive database of knowledge.
And sure, this is all hand-wavey. I just find it interesting that it seems to line up at an OOM level. Certainly the distinction between app and model doesn't matter at that level of detail.
the o1 model (and the other GPT variants which are currently in production too) fails at junior-level software engineering tasks (not always of course, I use it as a quick search tool and it is quite convenient but it fails at anything beyond boilerplate and stuff you could read from documentation ... claude is a bit better at this actually, but not that much). It often fails to understand more complex instructions properly unless they are broken down into multiple simple steps (and sometimes even then). It is definitely not at a level of an average maths grad student.
I haven't tried to have it do any proofs but I have serious doubts it would be able to do that (but free to prove me wrong) unless the proof is just a variant of a common technique that it's seen many times in its training data. I think that many maths undergrads will be able to do better.
It doesn't even do boilerplate right. It can't do type-checking (so often just substitutes the wrong objects blindly), can't check if the functions *even exist*, so as soon as you get outside slopping together very well-documented libraries with lots of examples, as soon as you have any real custom code in there and you just want, say, a unit test for it...it fails miserably. Like "doesn't even compile, even in relatively forgiving languages" miserably.
yeah sure, o3 and o4 make mistakes and you have to check their work. But so do grad students. And its still incapable of original thought. But so are most early stage grad students.
Decent (but not genius) early stage grad student seems pretty accurate to me. Give it a well defined `standard' task and it can execute it with reasonable accuracy. A little bit faster than a grad student (maybe 10x - 100x faster, depending on the task, not a million x faster), but also with greater frequency of hallucinations and a little bit less initiative.
Oh I disagree. It's way better than a junior engineer. Yes you have to use it appropriately but it makes me easily 5-10x more productive. The average grad student can't do that.
Just the other day I asked it a statistics question and it answered in 5 seconds with 2 graphs that it generated by writing a python script. Come on, that's impressive.
In my field it routinely gives answers I'd expect from an intern. That is, someone with general knowledge but no experience in the field. I haven't seen any AI model do work at the level I would expect from any engineer with a year or two of experience.
Arguing whether an LLM is more or less powerful than a junior engineer feels like arguing whether a hammer is more powerful than a saw (or whether a prongler is more powerful than a blob-with-handle, for all the cow tools afficionados out there).
They're different tools with different use cases and need to be applied differently. They can probably do each others' jobs in some cases but they'll do it badly.
I'm going to take this opportunity to reiterate my idea that comparing human and AI intelligence is a silly comparison and hence that ideas like "superhuman AI" are flawed. We're going to keep making dumb comparisons until humans and AIs have diverged so far that we realise they're not directly comparable.
Agreed, though I will point out that hiring for entry-level software positions has disappeared roughly in lockstep with the rise in LLM capabilities. The only hiring manager I personally still know told me that he now has no interest in hiring entry-level people and it's purely because of ChatGPT.
5-10 times, really? I think it maybe makes me 50% more productive at best. I wonder what you work on that it helps you this much. It is good for prototyping, and stackexchange-like queries, it is just faster than reading documentation for a lot of basic stuf. But it is not good at generating production-level code and definitely not good at any complex architecture (though that is arguable outside the junior range). If you turned it into an agent and gave it free reign it will be able to produce some cookiecutter projects fairly well but it will have a lot of bugs and inefficiencies. And it will fail at anything more complex. Basically that's what vibe coding is all about.
A maths grad student would be able to do better than that after a few months of working on coding. And even someone less intelligent than an average maths grad student would.
doing a basic statistical analysis is not that hard, the model is mostly following "recipes" but it can easily fail when it encounters things that would be obvious even to a kid in primary school - checkout this watch "gorilla in the data" video on that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzymTOc_D3U
You also have non-LLM tools that can do basic stats on a dataset, like ydata profiling. I bet that the LLM models can do a bit more but it really is not maths graduate level students.
Maths grads students are supposed to propose new theorems and prove them. That is much harder than doing statistics.
I guess it really is different. In some ways, like with the gorilla example, it is obviously completely oblivious and "stupid". In others it can match humans or even exceed them (though mostly in speed and having a good "memory", i.e. "knowing" a lot of stuff). But a human grad student, even a human 10 year old simply can understand things more fully and understand a lot more context and so won't make the stupid mistakes like with the gorilla. Also, while there are exceptions, people usually do not "hallucinate" answers :)
I'm amazed you get even a 50% improvement. For me, it's probably still sub 5%.
Probably some people's standards are lower - I can see that even firsthand, with a coworker touting as a success story a bunch of AI-generated docs they added to their code which IMO are worthless.
It doesn't help that there's a certain level of reliability and speed required before it even provides a speedup at all, since if the AI is slower than what you could do yourself or fails to do the correct thing, attempting to use AI for a task is actually negative value.
Today, I was working in an unfamiliar codebase in a language I'd never used before, which should be the best possible use case for coding AI. At one point, I tried using AI to make a change, but it did the wrong thing (which I only noticed after testing) and I had to do it all by hand anyway. But even if the AI *had* worked in that case, it still would have been like a 1% speedup, since most of the time spent is in research and testing to understand the problem and figure out what needs to be changed.
It's because I fucking hate reading documentation. It always takes me forever to figure out how to get the data I need from whatever tech-debt-ridden and under-documented API I have. "Hey gpt, write a function that makes <shitlib> do <thing I want>" saves me hours.
And honestly I'm retired now so I don't write production code (I have a friend who does and he agrees with the 5-10x speedup). I just make cool little hobby projects that I'm interested in. Most of those involve tool chains that I've never used, so if I couldn't just tell GPT to do it I'd never get it done. I hate hate HATE learning new tool chains. I actually kind of hate software generally, I just like the things that I can build with it. Using GPT makes me feel like a hyper-productive PM instead of a stuck-in-the-weeds engineer. I can focus 100% on what I want to build instead of how to build it, which I've always hated.
Virginia Republicans are having a fun time:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/03/youngkin-reid-virginia-lieutenant-governor-gop-00325189
(I don't grok the objections to this. Is there anyone who's fine with having a gay candidate but objects to that fact that he posted pictures of naked men to his social media account? It's not "revenge porn" or anything. I haven't seen anyone say it was in a place where kids would randomly see it, it was on Tumblr.)
In the Politico article I read some people are describing it as a ‘Virginia’ thing. I’m not at all sure what that means.
He seems to be claiming it wasn't his account, but it's a bad look for a public official (or indeed anyone in the public eye). You're supposed to keep these things private, not post them on Tumblr.
Porn does get posted on Tumblr, but those kinds of images are (1) people showing off their kinks (2) sex workers looking for customers. Keep the dick pics for Grindr!
> (I don't grok the objections to this
Boomercons are driven by shame, fox news thinks they still matter but like newspapers.... No.
Give it a few years, trumps shamelessness will be seen as the next era and not 1 guys personally. The people claiming hairy potter and dnd cause demon possession will lose power.
It's extremely easy to see why people *in general* would get offended by their representative posting porn on their profiles (even if there might be no rational reason for doing so). A politician, whose entire career is built on public trust and support, posting porn, shows a severe lack of judgement and probably deserves the backlash.
But I guess Republicans have come a long way when the issue with their candidate is that he posts porn online, not that he's gay.
That is very contingent on illegible cultural norms, though. Other cultures might get annoyed when you can see a few square centimeters of facial skin of the candidate, or consider someone who does not even post nudes of themselves some kind of weird prude.
I don't think "Public officials shouldn't post porn" is an illegible cultural norm. It's sort of a public officials job to be plugged into illegible cultural norms as well, as the average person can post porn all they like without anyone finding out.
There's this scene in House of Cards where an aspirational congressman, Peter Russo, has to go through a serious background check before the more established senator will support him. He tells him to "Tell him everything" as even the smallest stain on his record will be found by the opposing party, and brought to light in an election. Russo had a DUI, which they managed to turn around, portraying him as a "reformed" alcoholic, but they didn't try to hide it.
There's nothing that says we should socially ostracize people who had a DUI years ago, and for 99% of the population, this doesn't matter. I'd say posting porn is about the same. We don't vilify or ostracize people who post porn (we basically consider that a private matter and don't talk about it), but in a politician, it is quite legibly a "skeleton in the closet" that should have been cleansed before he entered politics. Even if it's illegible to the average rationalist, I'm sure this sort of thing is completely legible to the average politician or political aide.
Not the worst thing in the world, but seems like a sign of bad judgment. Should be obvious many would be offended by it.
It's worse than a crime -- it's a mistake. Posting porn is all downside and no upside. I don't want the candidate for my party to lack the theory of mind to do this.
It looks like he denies having it. If he's telling the truth, then there's no issue at all. If he's lying, then he's compounding the stupidity by lying.
The same could have been said about being openly trans, or getting caught having gay sex, or sex outside marriage (as a woman), or being an atheist, or being an early Christian.
You can certainly pick a candidate who is savvy enough to not get caught in any controversies, but this will likely require other trade-offs. Also, there is something to be said for shifting overton windows over time (the lions required would be an animal welfare issue, for one thing), and selecting for conformity will counter this.
Sure, but that's just "it's wrong because people are offended." I'm asking WHY people are offended.
Because pornography is evil. At least, it is for a great many Republicans.
Among all U.S. adults, 46% think pornography is a bad thing, 38% think it's neither good or bad, and only 10% think it's a good thing. Meanwhile, 67% of practicing Christians think porn is bad, 22% think its neutral, and 10% think it's good. Christians (particularly evangelicals) make up a huge part of the Republican base. So to have a Republican official not only use pornography but publicly post pornography is a bad look. Sure, 54% of practicing Christians admit to using pornography, but they're not parading it around like it's a good thing.
https://www.christianitytoday.com/2024/09/pornography-use-christians-study-barna-research-pure-desire-ministries/
For many people nudity is jarring and objectionable. Sort of a TMI reaction, I think. "I don't *want* to know whether you are circumcised or not."
Also, lots of people are grossed out by kinds of sex that they're not into, so straight people, esp. straight males, do not like to see a hot male nude posted by a male -- they are getting a glimpse of some gay guy's fantasy life, and are creeped out by paying that terrain a visit.
Not so much creeped out, as "you do you, but I don't want or need to know what you find arousing".
We've been talking about "how come people in the past didn't harass due to phone books giving names and addresses?" and this is just more of the cultural change. For people in the public eye, there is an expectation that they will be held to a particular standard of behaviour. Those kinds of standards may be slipping, but if we get to "why are people offended by a guy posting nudes of hot guys?" as a serious question, then we should understand the difference between "the culture back then was such that you wouldn't use the phone book as a tool to stalk others" and "the culture now is that we aren't supposed to care about seeing Representative Smith's cock at full mast on public display online".
I would think less of a candidate that posted heterosexual porn on their social media accounts too. It is just bad taste to share pornography like that. And I am not even against porn and I'm not going to pretend I don't ever watch it.
But it is just so low brow to do something like that. Would you be ok with your governor posting fart jokes on their public profile? In my mind this is similar.
Is it the public profile, or a pseudonym that participates in a porn site?
Agree. This is the right analogy.
Do most Republicans believe "It's OK to be gay?" Anti-woke blowback is the order of the day.
Yes, but not ok to be annoying about it.
Gay marriage acceptence is probably at a peak.
If straight male politicians posted pictures of naked ladies, it would be deemed sexist. I guess it's weird that there's no equivalent negative sentiment to that if it's a gay male posting naked gentlemen. I think people sense there's a double standard going on even if they can't put their finger on what's wrong with it.
At the end of the day people want to feel like their leaders are fundamentally decent, reasonable people. Looking at porn a couple times a week is one thing. Being so into it that you administer a site devoted to it is something else entirely. Not that it means he's necessarily imbalanced but it does raise the probability. When only one guy in several million gets to be the governor I think it's extremely rational to maybe pick the person who doesn't run a gay porn site - particularly when he knows that doing so puts his career at risk. That speaks to poor impulse control and poor risk management, which in turn speak to poor character. These are leaders. They have real responsibility over real people. They should be emotionally stable, clear-headed, pro-social, and imperturbable. I think it's good to hold them to a higher standard of conduct.
Yes, I believe public figures should not be posting pornography. It's animalistic and displays a lack of self-restraint unbecoming of people with authority.
But it looks like it's just slander.
Friends of mine, a married pair, are having a marriage crisis, considering separation/divorce. They live in New England, I don't live in the US, and can't help much. Can anybody recommend any good Catholic, or more broadly Christian, or just non-woke, organization or group in that area of the US to help saving marriages with some counseling, coaching, etc.? The problem is that the guy does not want to hear about "therapy", so it should be something non-standard, where the masculine point of view is balanced against the feminine one, like idk a group of married couples offering counseling, where men are talking to the guy in question and women are talking to the wife and somehow trying to reconcile both points of view (just an example, can be anything without the label of "therapy").
Could also consider Orthodox Christian priests as well for counselling? They tend to be more conservative( like trad Cath) but also married so they might have more insight into that kind of stuff.
Probably not... unless Greek Catholic, but I guess unlikely to get around
I mean, Christian couples counseling is definitely a googleable thing, highly available in New England and lots of places. Or if they are members at a church, they should talk to their own pastor or whoever provides pastoral care there. It's part of their job though they may have greater or less skill and training at it.
Yeah... googling in parallel... But hard to do "human-as-a-judge" on that for me. Also hoping to get some high-perplexity answers from weird folks here.
This was my thought as well. I've heard good things about Catholic and Episcopal premarital counseling. I'm pretty sure they also have postmarital counseling, and I expect a lot of other major churches offer similar services.
A few more details would help here. Is the guy already religious? And what are their reasons for wanting to separate?
Not very pious, but still believing in God (I hope).
The "reason" is that their marriage has been slowly decomposing for months (years?).
If they are orthodox Catholic, then either they figure it out or they go to hell. Divorce is simply not an option
Divorce is not an option, nor is remarriage if the spouse is still alive, but separation may be an option if they can't or won't continue to live together.
Isn’t a church approved annulment possible in some cases? That was a subplot in the in theater version of Shoes of the Fisherman that was cut for video release. The David Jansen character was trying to have his marriage annulled.
Depends on how serious they are as Catholics and if there is just cause. The American church was notorious for rubber-stamping 'annulment' decisions which made it divorce by another name. There was a crackdown on that.
So if the couple do take their faith seriously, there may not be grounds for annulment. On the other hand, the general run of ordinary Catholics over the past few decades are so poorly catechised that there is every chance they have a deficient understanding of marriage and did not enter it with the proper intent (e.g. only having a church wedding to keep the parents happy, having it in mind if the marriage failed they'd get a divorce, etc.)
There need to be good reasons, but if the couple - or one of them - treated the sacrament of marriage as 'just a day out with a church ceremony' there might be grounds.
https://associationofcatholicpriests.ie/marriage-annulment-process-changed/
"Orthodox Catholic" is that rarest of birds, a tautology that's also an oxymoron.
They can also go talk to a priest, who may have better relationship advice than "figure it out or go to hell."
Co-counseling?
Going and talking to their priest or deacon might help. (The deacon may be better here because he's likely married himself.)
Marriage Encounter is a great program for married couples trying to keep their marriage together, but it's not trying to rescue marriages in trouble, but rather trying to help head off trouble in advance.
The next-level version of Marriage Encounter in the Catholic world is called Retrouvaille, for marriages in trouble.
I don't know any, but I would recommend for the man to read through the New Testament and pay attention to every part that talks about Jesus' interactions with/love & sacrifice for his followers and people in need. Marriage is God's physical symbol representing Christ's relationship to His church, and it's important for a man in a marriage to know exactly what that means and to constantly work on being more Christ-like in his marriage. Online estimates reading the NT at around 18 hours to read through, but honestly taking the time over a couple weeks to read and really consider it would be very beneficial.
Idk what the marital issues are, but I can't conceive of any situation where taking the time to do this would be a bad thing. If he made vows at his wedding, he should stick to them and at least put this effort in.
For a Child will be born to us, a Son will be given to us;
And the government will rest on His shoulders;
And His name will be called *Wonderful Counselor*, Mighty God,
Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.
Isaiah 9:6 NASB
There’s a lot in the NT that isn’t pro family, at all.
I'm working on an episode on the pronatalist/antinatalist debate in philosophy and have posted by "normie" preliminary thoughts about this issue here. Even if I'm wrong, I keep getting pushed by people about what constitutes the normie, common sense position. I thought it'd be obvious, but I guess it isn't. https://open.substack.com/pub/hiphination/p/is-having-children-a-moral-issue?r=i44h&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
I think relatively few people outside of some noisy internet bubbles or activist groups cares enough to be anti or pro-natalist in any kind of general way. As far as I can tell from my real-world interactions, at least here in Europe, the full "normie" position is that you don't moralize or second-guess people's decisions to have children or not.
Normies probably don't think about it too deeply, and their typical opinion is probably something like "you should have children, because 'everyone' does... but not before 30 because 'no one' does".
(Notice that for normies "what people around me do" is a substitute for ethics.)
When pushed to provide a principled argument, they would probably say something like: "well, if no one had children, humanity would go extinct".
Beyond that, the left-wing ones might say that the Earth is overpopulated anyway, so it is actually not a big deal if you don't have children. And the right-wing ones might say that having children is a duty towards your nation / race / religion.
To what extent would the 24th amendment prevent a state from restricting the right to vote for low-income people or those on welfare?
Just as bad if not worse were ‘literacy tests’ administered disproportionately to blacks in Louisiana until The Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Jim Crow is gone but not forgot.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/06/voting-rights-and-the-supreme-court-the-impossible-literacy-test-louisiana-used-to-give-black-voters.html
Probably depends on the court and on exactly how the law was structured. An income or property qualification for voting, especially one tied to taxable income or acceptance of government benefits, seems like it probably would fall within the category of "reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax": an income based test is very close to being a test based on how much income tax you pay, and a welfare-based test could be read as equivalent to a poll tax since it means you need to opt out of government benefits (equivalent to a 100% tax on those benefits) if you want to be able to vote. But a very narrow textual reading might accept a law that puts enough distance between the test and cash payments in either direction.
The 14th amendment also provides two potential bars to such a policy. As of 1966 (two years after the 24th amendment was ratified), poll taxes for state elections, which are outside the scope of the 24th amendment, are considered to be barred by the Equal Protection clause of the 14th amendment. The relevant case is Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, which overturned Breedlove v. Suttles (1937) which had upheld poll taxes. This might or might not be upheld by current courts, as the rational basis test for equal protection cases (the test used by the majority in Harper) is now interpreted much more leniently: intermediate scrutiny requires a good reason, and strict scrutiny requires a damn good reason, but for rational basis merely requires that the judges can require a vaguely plausible rationale besides "mere animus". But since income qualifications would have racially disparate impacts, there's a plausible argument for applying strict scrutiny to the question instead of rational basis.
The other 14th amendment issue is the apportionment clause, which proportionately reduces Congressional representation for states that disenfranchise male citizens over the age of 21 for reasons other than felony convictions. But as far as I know, this clause has never been enforced, despite being codified in both the Constitution and statues.
Technically, you could make poverty a felony.
tl;dr: Grok-3.5 beta using poe.com 05/01-02/2025 7 questions, tl;dr of results:
2 correct, 2 partially correct, 2 1/4 correct, 1 wrong
a) Correct
b) partially correct (initially right species, wrong transitions, 1st prod corrected FeCl4, 2nd prod corrected CuCl4)
c) fairly bad, 1/4 credit
d) correct
e) fairly bad, 1/4 credit - prod did not correct it
f) decent, valid compounds after it corrected itself within initial reply, calling it partially correct. Missed e.g. SiH2F2, accepted it when pointed prodded with it.
g) badly wrong
Generally disappointing, not sure if it is supposed to be a reasoning model.
https://poe.com/s/Yg5gRrtG90TRSngkaUml
List of questions and results:
a) Q: Is light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm visible to the human eye?
results: "Yes, light with a wavelength of 530.2534896 nm is visible to the human eye."
b) Q: I have two solutions, one of FeCl3 in HCl in water, the other of CuCl2 in HCl in water. They both look approximately yellowish brown. What species in the two solutions do you think give them the colors they have, and why do these species have the colors they do?
results: A bit worse than typical. It got the species right, but initially ascribed both colors to d-d transitions, overlooking the spin forbidden for FeCl4 (which most models get) and the near-IR for CuCl4 (which most models fail at).
c) Q: Please pretend to be a professor of chemistry and answer the following question: Please list all the possible hydrocarbons with 4 carbon atoms.
results: Initial response pretty bad, missing tetrahedrane, cyclobutadiene, diacetylene, ... Even after a prod it was missing tetrahedrane and it misclassified some of its own structures. Even after two prods it still missed cyclobutadiene and still misclassified some of its own answers.
d) Q: Does the Sun lose more mass per second to the solar wind or to the mass equivalent of its radiated light?
results: "The mass equivalent of the Sun's radiated light is approximately 4 times greater than the mass lost to the solar wind."
e) Q: Consider a titration of HCl with NaOH. Suppose that we are titrating 50 ml of 1 N HCl with 100 ml of 1 N NaOH. What are the slopes of the titration curve, pH vs ml NaOH added, at the start of titration, at the equivalence point, and at the end of titration? Please show your work. Take this step by step, showing the relevant equations you use.
results: Initial answer was purely numerical, even though I asked for relevant equations. It wasn't "wrong", in terms of a numerical approximation - though the slope at the equivalence point was 4 orders of magnitude too low as a result. It offered to use exact equations, so I asked it to do so. It is using the wrong equation, ignoring autoionization, then using a wrong approximation to keep the answer finite, though noting that the denominator of what it is using will go to zero, blowing up.
f) Q: Please give me an exhaustive list of the elements and inorganic compounds that are gases at STP. By STP, I mean 1 atmosphere pressure and 0C. By inorganic, I mean that no atoms of carbon should be present. Exclude CO2, CO, freons and so on. Please include uncommon compounds. I want an exhaustive list. There should be roughly 50 compounds. For each compound, please list its name, formula, and boiling or sublimation point.
results: Pretty decent. It temporarily listed a number of liquids, and multiple listed a number of duplicates, but corrected itself before truly adding them to the list. It missed e.g. SiH2F2, accepted it when pointed prodded with it.
g) Q: What is an example of a molecule that has an S4 rotation-reflection axis, but neither a center of inversion nor a mirror plane?
results: Badly wrong. Neither the initial molecule it suggested nor a new one after the prod had an S4 axis at all.
Periodically I hear someone make an argument for banning phones in schools.
Apparently lots of schools are doing this and the teachers report that it makes a big difference -- students are more engaged, et cetera.
The counterargument I always make is: yes, but can you imagine if someone did that to you? If you had to attend eight hours' worth of meetings, every day, and you weren't allowed to use your phone? You'd be miserable. You wouldn't tolerate it.
And the thing I hear back is: well, those children aren't me, and they don't have a choice. We can make them do whatever we want.
I dunno. I find myself unsatisfied.
The opinions of children only matter as far as they can inform adults on the well-being of the child. A kid being sad or bored for a couple of hours five days a week is a fantastic trade-off if it means they're going to be a well-adjusted adult who makes good decisions. We know now that the toxicity from phones in schools far, far outweighs whatever ADHD-adjacent misery that we're all familiar with might be inflicted upon a child in the safest and friendliest environment on earth.
It’s hard for me to feel too much sympathy for the phone deprived. I wasn’t even allowed to chew gum in class.
Kind of reminiscent of The Onion piece where Jimmy Carter complains, “You people made me sell my peanut farm.”
Let's start with the fact that children are not the same as adults, both in terms of abilities and of responsibility.
Adults are expected to exercise some degree of self-control. And if they don't, they are expected to bear the consequences. Those consequences may be trivial, or financial, or medical, or social; in worst cases they may lose their jobs, end up in prison, or die.
Children are less capable of self-control; developing this ability is part of growing up. They are supposed to be protected from the worst outcomes, which is often achieved by someone else controlling how much of the potentially harmful things they are allowed to do.
Therefore, arguments like "can you, as an adult, imagine that someone else would control how much chocolate you can eat during the day, and whether you have to brush your teeth at the end of the day?" should not automatically win the debate, among reasonable people. The point is that as an adult I have to control myself, or I will bear the consequences and everyone else will call me an idiot. With children, it is parents' responsibility to control them. At school, this responsibility is delegated to teachers.
The purpose of the school is to learn, so maybe a better analogy than a meeting would be a company training. Imagine that you go to a company-paid training, you visibly keep playing with the phone while the instructor tries to explain you things, and later when you are asked to demonstrate what you have learned, you fail. And you do this repeatedly. Would you expect to keep your job? I wouldn't. As an adult, you have the right to fuck up and lose your job. As a child, you can be prevented by adults from making the obvious wrong move.
Freedoms come with responsibilities. Let's have schools where kids are allowed to play on their phones all day long... and then get quickly kicked out of the school when they fail at exams. I wouldn't mind. Either way, a few months later there wouldn't be kids playing on the phones. Or at least kick those kids out of the classroom while they are playing, so they don't distract their classmates.
Or maybe make two kinds of schools: those where kids can play on their phones all day long, and those where they cannot. Advertise it clearly which is which, and let the parents choose.
I definitely do not want my children to sit in a classroom where they cannot learn, because their classmates are playing on the phones, and the teacher has to explain everything really slowly and repeat everything several times, otherwise the classmates don't get it.
Amusingly enough, I have the opposite problem; I would love for this to be an option for me (I waste way too much time on stupid distractions), but since I have obligations I need to take care off, it isn't. I can't just put my phone away, nor my computer.
Also, I kind of don't quite believe that people (only) say what you claim they say. The usual argument is that this is long-term good and short-term unpleasant for the kids, and kids are terrible at making decisions that aren't short-term pleasant. So we need to make that decision for them.
I don't get this at all.
When I work with someone and they do something on their phone instead, then I want them to stop because, well, we wanted to work together, right?
Using a phone is a new way of amusing yourself, but the concept of finding ways to amuse yourself when you are in a place you do not want to be doing things you do not want to do is not new.
Schoolkids who talk to each other, pass notes, read books (fiction / unrelated to the lesson), flick rubber bands at their frenemies, go to sleep etc etc when they are meant to be paying attention to the teacher or doing work will be in trouble.
Similarly for adult employees: doing any of those things during a presentation is unacceptable and doing it regularly will get you fired.
Similarly for a whole bunch of other times when you are expected to be paying attention to something and are sharing a space with other people for that purpose: lectures, theaters, concerts, cinemas etc etc - apart from anything else, doing such things is super rude.
Why should phones be any different?
> If you had to attend eight hours' worth of meetings, every day, and you weren't allowed to use your phone? You'd be miserable. You wouldn't tolerate it.
Homeschooling parents have been saying this for DECADES yet the average person resorts to calling them all sorts of names.
Do homeschooling parents in general let their kids play with the phones while they are trying to explain them things?
The point here is that homeschooled children waste far less time during the day. They only study for a couple of hours each day, which is all a child needs. The vast majority of their day should be spent working with their hands and playing, more of the latter if the kid is lucky.
None of the homeschooling kids I know even have phones.
Phones are banned in schools state-wide here, policy came into effect about 18 months ago. The reason: Moral panic over footage of schoolyard fights making it onto social media. Banning phones stops the problem. Schoolyard fights continue as they have always done, but out of sight & out of mind.
My eldest is 16. I'm not happy about the policy - whether we like phones or not, they are here to stay as part of society and kids need to learn to deal with life as it is, not as we wish it could be. Before the ban, phones were integrated into lessons - teachers assumed every student had a camera in their pocket. It meant everyone had to spend a couple hundred a graphics calculator, too.
The biggest annoyance is the peripheral bans - which means smart watches and wireless headphones are banned too! (Headphones aren't banned, in fact they are required for some classes, but they have to be wired). Also means not being able to stay in contact with my kid during the day in case of emergencies. Theoretically at least - they're technically adept enough to have worked around the ban by syncing messages & other services to their laptop...
"Also means not being able to stay in contact with my kid during the day in case of emergencies."
Can you not just phone the school? How do you think people coped with emergencies in the days before every six year old had a phone?
Unless your house is burning down or both parents are in a car crash, there are very few emergencies that need you to call your kid RIGHT NOW IN THE MIDDLE OF CLASS ANSWER THE PHONE MOMMY NEEDS TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT YOUR FORGOTTEN LUNCH.
Oh, you underestimate the general disfunction... the school sometimes contacts me to relay information to/from my child, or vice versa. This was de rigueur before the ban and the school has not fully adjusted. I've checked the message history for the past month, we have:
- Child witnessed a horrific bus crash during an excursion, texting to let me know they are safe but shaken up
- Texting requesting to text back permission for their mother to pick them up at end of said excursion as they didn't want to get on a bus that day (see above). Why did the teacher not contact me directly? I dunno
- Me texting them to let them know an off-site class has been cancelled (I was informed via email, and the last time it happened they forgot to inform my child and they caught a bus in to the city for no reason)
- Asking why they are not in class because the school has contacted me about an unexplained absence (child was in fact in class)
- Asking if they can go to a friend's house after school.
Basically, the modern world is set up assuming that anyone can contact anyone else at any time. Yeah I went through school without phones. It sucked.
The concern I've heard more frequently is "What if there's a mass shooting at the school, how will I know my kid is OK if I can't call them!"
Which, OK, I get the fear. But A: school shootings are rare enough that you should feel silly being that afraid of them, and B: if one does happen, there's nothing you can do about it and you'll know soon enough anyway, and C: I lied, there is one thing you can do - if your kid isn't dead, there's a good chance they are trying to hide from someone who is looking for people to kill, and if you really want you can make a loud ringing noise come from your kid's pocket...
For anything less than a mass casualty incident, and yet truly an emergency, you can absolutely just call the school and ask.
I would love to have an excuse not to carry that cloying, needy, soul-sapping little surveillance brick
You can just do so, I have a flip phone that I hold maybe 5 minutes a day
.... Im also no longer in the "green text box" family chat or whatever apples shit is. so.....
I held out longer than most (2017), and still think about going back.
Not having a smartphone makes dating harder (for me) and my work requires it for secure login. I travelled a lot too, and I'll admit it is convenient for navigating a new city.
If someone made me sit through eight hours of meetings every day, my reaction would depend very much on what kind of meetings they were. But if they're the bad kind, the kind you seem to think all "meetings" must be, then the problem would not be that I can't play games on my phone during the meeting, the problem would be the people making me sit through bad meetings.
I am skeptical that "eight hours of (the worst sort of) meetings, describes the typical school day for the typical American student. I don't think the average school day is even eight hours long, and some of that is breaks, lunch, recess, gym, and/or study. And some of the classes, while they sort of look like meetings, are in my experience the good sort of meeting, either enjoyable or educational or both. But, OK, at least some schools are apparently giving some students a horrible experience.
So *stop doing that*. Don't keep doing it and say that it's OK because you let them have phones to play with. There are alternatives.
Which some of us are quite familiar with, because for my entire educational experience I didn't have a smartphone, or even a crappy 1G analog cellphone. None of us did. We made do, and while some parts of it were horrible, they weren't horrible in a way a smartphone would really fix.
OTOH, I saw my kids' Zoom school early in the Pandemic, and it was basically all the bad things about middle school/high school classes combined with all the bad things about Zoom meetings.
Exactly right!
>The counterargument I always make is: yes, but can you imagine if someone did that to you? If you had to attend eight hours' worth of meetings, every day, and you weren't allowed to use your phone? You'd be miserable. You wouldn't tolerate it.
We regularly make children follow rules we don't apply to adults, for the very good reason that children aren't as developed mentally or emotionally and very often can't be trusted to act in their own best interests.
> And the thing I hear back is: well, those children aren't me, and they don't have a choice. We can make them do whatever we want.
That's a terrible argument, but it doesn't mean it would be better to give kids their phones all day. The missing justification is "It's mostly better for them and better for the classroom environment and the school environment in general if they don't have the phones on them all the time." You'd probably be better off without your phone all day too (after you got over your withdrawal) but you're an adult so you get to decide for yourself.
Also, adults don’t get to decide for themselves in lots of contexts! When you’re driving or swimming or flying a plane or doing any number of other things, you’re not allowed to use your phone.
Right, this whole discussion seems predicated on the idea that everyone is a WFH tech worker. But I'm sure the majority of real world jobs you either (a) aren't allowed to or (b) physically can't check your phone whenever you feel like it, whether you're digging ditches or performing brain surgery.
The Catholic high school around the corner has made close order drill optional now - I’m not kidding about this, they have a JROTC program - but I think it will be a while before they allow cell phones in class. Some wonderfully well behaved kids around there, much better than I was at that age. They produce some good athletes too including two Major League Baseball Hall of Famers.
My daughter has gotten detention twice this year for having her phone out during school hours. She didn't like it, but I think I understand why the school has the policy, and I broadly think it's a good policy.
Schooling, for all of its problems, isn't nearly as bad as unnecessary business meetings.
I don't see a difference? Both are situations in which someone more powerful than you has decided that you're required to be in a room while people talk about something that doesn't matter to you; they can't make you listen, but you're required to sit still and at least pretend to be paying attention.
Like most bright people. I was bored to death when I paid attention in school. I got extremely good at fantasizing while keeping an alert look on my face & staring at the speaker. Also did a lot of doodling, zentangle kind of stuff, drawing cartoons and writing silly poems to pass to my friends. Schools are understimulating, somewhat actively unpleasant settings for most kids and we should improve them. Until we do, though, I'm in favor of no phones. Lots of screen time is bad for kids too, and it interferes with the kind of development that happens when people are forced to draw on inner resources to escape boredom.
I struggle to figure out whether people who say this sort of thing are really that much smarter than me or whether their schools were really that much worse. Sure, I went to an academically selective school but the curriculum and teachers were still basically the same as you'd get at an ordinary school. And sure, I doodled and daydreamed in some classes, but I sat in rapt attention in others; I was a clever kid but it's not like I was born knowing the entire K-12 syllabus.
I certainly didn’t know everything and yet struggled to pay attention. I always wanted to be reading something or thinking about something else. But in fairness diagramming sentences was wildly popular then. I enjoyed “reading for comprehension” worksheets not because I was keen on the art of comprehension but because here at least was some content, a couple of paragraphs about Jose Feliciano anyway.
It was the physical setting of later grades in part; adolescent misery the other. Can’t blame the school for the latter, particularly.
In elementary our campus was built on that midcentury classrooms on a breezeway plan, with a wall of windows. And we trooped around outside a fair amount.
Then: middle school and high school, both built on the cheap plan, the advent of air-conditioning had made windows a luxury as if we had been catapulted to the medieval past. No atrium so no windows at all in any of the interior course of rooms. None in many of the middle school rooms on the exterior; just a narrow one in a corner of the outer rooms of the HS for the teacher to set desk up by. None operable any longer, of course.
And no more recess.
Just 7 hours a day under that fluorescent glare, trying not to look at the clock. I found it uncomfortable. I prefer being outdoors.
I’m sure my character traits only made it worse.
I was very old when I quit playing outside, when I looked around and realized everyone else had outgrown it.
My schools were worse than yours. I went to shitty public schools in small USA southern towns. The first time the teachers introduced something new -- long division, word problems, parts of speech -- I had to pay attention to understand them. But when new things were introduced I understood them well after doing a couple sheets of homework problems and thinking them over, sort of untangling any snarls of perplexity I had about how and why they worked. But after I had digested the new thing and made it part of me the teacher kept going with the same stuff for weeks, until everybody understood reasonably well. And that's when I was bored. It was way more than half the time, because I learned things in way less than half the time the teacher kept the class on the subject. I wasn't the only kid like that. There were usually a few others who were in the same boat.
As for rapt attention -- I did have rapt attention for a few things, mostly math and physics, but those didn't appear til 7th or 8th grade. And as with other things, we kept going over and over each new topic long after I'd chewed the flavor out of the gum.
The problem there is having to teach to the average of the class, so you go over the material until the slowest pupil has got it through their head. The smart kids/kids who are good at that particular subject will be bored because they understand it and need to move on to something else, but if you teach for the brightest, a lot of the rest of the class will be left behind.
The solution there is to put the bright kids into the academic stream for their ability, but we don't do streaming in schools anymore apparently.
School classes are generally designed to teach you something of interest. The worst they can be is wrong. Meetings are frequently designed to make the person making them feel important.
School is already miserable. We're already locking kids in a building for a bunch of hours a day because we have the power to do so. Something about the phone-ban does cause me to instinctively disagree, because of how patronizing it is, but I don't think that's rational. If the statistics show that banning phones improves outcomes, I don't think you can oppose banning phones without opposing school itself.
This is the right take here, I think.
Is there going to be another short story contest in the foreseeable future?
No, but I have it on good authority that there will be one in the unforeseeable future.
My collaborator and I have been thinking about the effectiveness of physical therapy (PT) for pain (https://debugyourpain.substack.com/p/when-does-pt-help-with-pain). Our current conclusion is that while PT does well with acute injuries and rehab using a biomechanical lens (fixing tissues, improving strength/coordination), it often struggles with *chronic* pain.
Chronic pain seems to involve learned nervous system responses. Yet, PT is still largely grounded in biomechanics, leading to interventions (stretching, strengthening) that swing and miss on chronic conditions.
Curious about others' experiences or knowledge here:
- Does this model mismatch (biomechanics vs. learned behavior) resonate with your experiences seeking pain treatment?
- Have you encountered PT (or other therapies like PRT, Sarno, etc.) that successfully addressed the "nervous system" or "learned pain" aspects? What did that look like?
My lower back pain problem is not nervous system/learned pain nor tissue damage (which PT has done wonders on other issues for me in the past). Instead I have osteo-arthritis in my spine, and the disintegrating vertebrae impinges on a nerve. My spine doctor suggested surgery, which I don't want. PT won't help and I'm skeptical that EWST would help. Wondering if anyone has other suggestions?
Definitely not surgery! I'd second what Thomas said about it possibly being a learned pain. The correlation between "visible tissue damage" and pain is quite tenuous. "Nerve impingement" an infamous chiropractic catch-all diagnosis that really doesn't mean much.
One thing you can try is decompression therapy. Unfortunately it may not be covered by insurance, but it's not godawfully expensive, and has very low risk AFAIK.
My spine doctor actually made me see a chiropractor before he would treat me. After the chiropractic did nothing (as I expected) he started the steroid facet injections that helped a lot, but those can't be done indefinitely. Thanks for the tip on decompression therapy, that looks promising.
I think it may be nervous system / learned pain. There are studies that have shown that nerve impingement don't really predict for pain. Pain is much more of a learned response than we think!
https://debugyourpain.substack.com/p/how-seattles-rsi-support-group-ended
Not sure if that applies to you but it's certainly interesting to think about.
I've been fortunate enough to not need to seek pain treatment, but I have treated many thousands of patients for over a decade using Extracorporeal Shock Wave therapy (EWST).
I think you're about right about PT; it works well for rehabilitation and to deal with situations due to weakness or muscular imbalance, but not so well for chronic pain situations more generally.
EWST works remarkably well in situations where surgical or PT approaches have failed. This is because the shock wave gets the body to treat the afflicted area as though it were recently injured (without causing any actual injury). This allows for the body to investigate and heal any area that has unhealed damage, and to 'notice' when an area has abberant patterns of tension or inflammation - the learned nervous system responses you reference.
In cases of old unresolved injury or of gradual degradation/degeneration, I'll often see a brief period of localized increased pain, followed by rapid improvement. These are the cases where there is an actual underlying mechanical damage. In many other cases of chronic pain, however, we simply hit a point where the symptoms rapidly decline without any apparent mechanistic explanation. These are cases where the body was simply holding a reflexive pain or tension response, whether due to psychosomatic threat (common in say whiplash) or due to some old injury the body never got the message as resolved.
So suffice it to say I certainly am not a skeptic regarding the learned pain theories! This is why many spine surgeries fail; they do not address the true, non-mechanistic cause of the pain, and indeed give the body additional trauma to target with additional chronic pain.
I've seen several friends go through severe chronic pain and I definitely buy the nervous system involvement aspect. One friend suffered debilitating low back pain for years after an original injury involving poor lifting technique. After the initial acute phase, it seems certain that the long term persistence of pain was a learned nervous system response. They tried a lot of different modalities (Feldenkrais, Alexander technique, etc) but ultimately were able to escape the worst parts via DNRS, which explicitly addresses nervous system involvement.
Watching this process play out over a period of years definitely give me a new appreciation for techniques that exist outside the Western medical establishment – traditional Western medicine seems quite poorly suited to addressing chronic pain. For the friend mentioned earlier, a turning point was when they went in to a consultation with a surgeon, who described the procedure on offer quite graphically – "scraping out" the remains of the herniated disc, before installing a titanium cage that would fuse the vertebra above and below.
The visceral rejection of that idea ultimately motivated them to find an alternative that worked for them, and they dedicated quite substantial effort to actually engaging with all these different approaches. But for many people, that level of dedication is just not feasible, and they end up getting the surgery in the hope of relief, only to be disappointed and often worse off a few years later. Quite an unfortunate situation.
I have a lot of low back pain due to mild scoliosis and not-so-mild complications of it. The only touch-and-movement-based intervention that has ever had any effect on my pain is Paul Ingraham’s Trigger point pressure approach, which he describes in multiple places in his excellent site Pain Science.
https://www.painscience.com/index-trigger-points.php
What you do is press hard on certain places, often near by not on the painful spot, with something like a hard rubber ball. Since my pain’s in my back I lie on one and wiggle around til I can feel that it’s in an effective place, then relax in a way that lets the ball press hard into the spot for 60 secs or so. Spots that are going to affect pain have a distinctive “good pain” feeling. Also, I’ve noticed they often cause a mild achey pain a few inches away from the ball. For instance, a ball at the pointed base of my shoulder blade causes a mild ache on the top edge of my shoulder, where it joins the arm. When I’m working on my back with the balls I usually spend 15 mins of so finding spots and leaning into them. Afterwards my pain is maybe 1/3 of what it was, and flexibility is much greater. My back stays better the rest of the day unless I do something I shouldn’t, like carry a heavy box. It reverts back completely to its usual pain level overnight.
I’ve also found some spots on the back and lower sides of my neck that help vascular headaches, and occasionally get rid of one. Once had a very sore and achey right hip joint, and experimented with sitting on a rubber ball. Found a “good pain” spot mid-buttock that definitely reduced hip joint pain.
I don’t know how this approach works, and Ingraham isn’t sure either, but it sure as hell isn’t placebo. Pain can’t be measured objectively, but flexibility can, and my range of motion expands considerably after I do a pressure point treatment.
I have tried PT several times for a chronic hyper sacrum and traditional PT causes more pain and does not help. I have not tried/been offered PT for the "nervous system/learned pain" but not knowing about that theory, it doesn't sound like it would work. I think my chronic pain, and that of many others, is because something is broken and the body is not capable of fixing what is broken and surgery near the back does not have a good track record so i just try to manage it.
Curious if you feel like any of these particular pieces of evidence are unconvincing https://debugyourpain.substack.com/p/evidence-page
Every academic I know who studies pain acknowledges that in a large fraction of cases of chronic pain, there is no detectable structural tissue damage. More broadly, that "pain is a learning signal, not a damage meter". See, for instance, Professor Sean Mackey, head of Stanford Neuroscience and Pain Lab , or (my mentor) Fan Wang at MIT. Of course, there's also Howard Schubiner, Lorimer Moseley, David Butler, and the older pain science group too.
Hey, all you articulate people, I'm trying to find a word for something:
-Applause is a conventional way of signaling approval. I think it's probably a conventional and tamed version of the yelling, jumping, thumping etc. people do at concerts and sports events, and kids do when they are thrilled and surprised.
-Selfies are hardly ever candid shots that catch people having a great time -- they're a posed stand-in for it.
So what is a word for things of this nature? I don't want a phrase so not "conventional signifier" or "conventional stand-in." "Objective correlative" isn't right. Neither is "symbol." Are they emblems?
You say, applauding and showing selfies have in common that they are "Simplified, conventional versions of things that stand in for the messier real version."
I don't understand that completely.
To applaud, when done honestly, is to show that you approve, right. But to show a selfie, when done honestly, is to show that you have a great time? Or do you mean, showing selfies, when done honestly is to show how you are? That I would understand better.
But, no matter what, what you noticed about applause might be akin to words that sound like what you are referring to with them. Like the word "hissing" or "bang.
So, since we're talking about communication in general, you try to give a name to a generalized concept of onomatopoeia maybe.
You know, "behavioral onomatopoeia" captures what I had in mind quite well. Thank you!
That’s a great phrase, very suggestive!
Yeah, it's a gem. I thought it was possible the phrase had never been written before, and googled it in quotes. There was one hit: Somebody asked for a definition of a Korean word, and a user defined it as "behavioral onomatopoeia describing a toddler's walking(toddling)." https://hinative.com/questions/2256557
ajang-ajang - sounds heavier than a toddler to me!
So it's really an ordinary onomatopoeia -- a description of the sound of toddling? If so then behavioral onomatopoeia in the TakeAThirdOption's sense is a new concept, or at least one never named til now.
I would say, they are conventions, plain and simple. No need for another word attached. You could call it a custom.
It is customary to applaud. It is customary to take a selfie outside of the Notre Dame cathedral. Obligatory almost.
But these aren’t just arbitrary customs, like painting eggs pink on the Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox - these customs have some connection to a behavior that is natural.
I am not entirely sure what you mean by a behavior that is natural. I am not getting the distinction you are making.
I don’t know the history of painting eggs on Easter and I’m too lazy to go look it up right now, but I’d be willing to bet a quarter that it originates in something that makes some kind of sense.
They're ritualized behaviors. Ritualization is the process of something being regularized in form and when it's appropriate or expected, and taking on symbolic meanings in addition to or instead of their original purpose.
I’m not sure I would describe applause as a ritual.
It very much is a ritual! It’s weird when a lecture or concert ends with no applause, and it’s definitely an interesting question at the end of term which classes end with a round of applause.
> it’s definitely an interesting question at the end of term which classes end with a round of applause.
If this is an interesting question, then applause is definitely not a ritual. It is sometimes spontaneously given or sometimes done just to avoid embarrassment, which doesn’t jive with my idea of ritual.
but I would say in most arenas of applause you would consider it customary, unless you’ve paid good money to be there in which case you can boo if it’s appropriate. It is customary to boo when you don’t like a performance. It’s not so customary to boo the headmaster of a school when he’s delivering the end of term invocation. It is perfectly appropriate to boo the New York Yankees when they lose their third straight game.
If you are a 10 year old at a Yankees game it is perfectly appropriate to stand near the first base line and give opposing - or your own - players the finger.
Perhaps appropriate but not recommended..
Exemplar?
Stereotype?
Synecdoche?
Proxy?
Phatic expression? I'm not sure that is precisely it. but it does encompass "thing we all do for social reasons that is structured in a conventional way":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phatic_expression
"In linguistics, a phatic expression is a communication which primarily serves to establish or maintain social relationships."
>Selfies are hardly ever candid shots
How can you take a 'candid' photo of yourself? Unless you've, like, dropped the camera and it went off.
I mean, it's possible to *fake* a candid shot!
sort of like pocket dialing, but with a big hole in your pants?
I went through my phone's photos recently, and discovered about a hundred photos of the inside of my pants pocket.
See, if there was a big hole in the pants, inside of the pocket, you'd capture things of interest. Candid selfies.
...isn't it dark in there? What kind of pants are you all wearing?
I’m having trouble even understanding what property you think these two things share, which makes it hard to come up either a word for it.
Simplified, conventional versions of things that stand in for the messier real version.
Erica's suggestion, "ritual", is probs the best term.
That said, I feel like you'd appreciate the word "skeuomorph". Which is when an object adopts the appearance of an older technology, for psychological convenience. E.g. computer-"desktops" are skeuomorphic. Gas-fireplaces are skeuomorphic. McMansions are skeuomorphic. Fashion abounds in skeuomorphs.
Synecdoche, Totem, Token, Symbol, Effigy
Applause can get pretty rowdy when people really mean it. Have you ever been in an opera house when Pavarotti really hits it out of the park? I think what you were describing is what I would call polite applause.
I too have trouble following you. Applause is certainly less intense than cheering, but a double thumbs up, a single thumb up, or a nod and a smile are also less intense than the other. I wouldn't call them "simpler" or "less messy" in any case. All these forms of approval are appropriate in different scenarios, depending on a myriad of social rules.
Same for selfies. Sometimes you want a selfie, other times you ask a stranger to take a pic of you, still other times you want a professional shoot. All of these are related, but equally valid and express different things.
So, a little like euphemisms, but to a different end? Conventions, maybe?
ETA: though I probably got that from your word “conventional”, so perhaps you already thought of that and goin it wanting.
Simulacra?
I think this is the correct answer
Facsimiles?
I’m headed to grad school in NYC- Baruch’s Masters in Financial Engineering.
If anyone knows of decent places to live that are opening up and in decent travel time to the Weissman school of Arts and Sciences (55th Lexington Ave), please reach out to me.
Any places passed on will also help some of the international students in my batch, as I’ll be passing everything along to our WhatsApp group.
If you're an international student, you're going to need a guarantor to sign a normal 12 month lease, which means TheGuarantors, Rhino, or Insurent (in that order of quality). They will charge you about a month of rent to guarantee your lease, but you won't have to pay the building a deposit. This fee isn't refundable though.
The NYC rental market moves really quickly, so when you find a place, move to rent it quickly. If you're hunting for a deal, be really wary of scams, as scammers target the places you might think to look to find more affordable housing that isn't as visible in the general market. And by general market I mean Streeteasy, and to a lesser extent Renthop. Don't bother with any other rental platform for unfurnished 12 month rentals. Asking for referrals to specific buildings is probably going to land you somewhere worse than if you spent time searching the entire market on Streeteasy, but occasionally someone will give a good referral to a smalltime landlord. This is rare though.
For your budget with 4 bedrooms, you'll only really find walkups a good ways out of Manhattan, or (IMO the better option), you get a 3 bedrooms and "flex" it to 4. There are companies that do professional "temporary" walls for $1,000-$1,500 (Wall2Wall is the best), and it can really increase the value of your apartment. In NYC a large living room is a luxury anyways.
Don't discount Jersey City, although to 55th and Lexington it would be about a 45 min commute. It is about the last "cheap" place you can still get a decent place to live while still being near Manhattan though. I frequently travel from the Financial District to Journal Square, which seems like it's way outside of Manhattan, but is only a ~20 min train ride from the WTC.
I'm one of the moderators on r/nycapartments so I'm pretty plugged into all these things, and would be happy to answer any specific questions you have. Also, my shameless plug is if you're going to be renting in July or later, use pandaprotect.co as your guarantor (A new division of my company). We are more affordable than the other 3 guarantor companies, and I'd cut the cost in half if you rent from a landlord we haven't worked with previously.
I am not international, but the three I’m planning to live with are.
I am not yet sure my parents would be able to guarantee either though- 80x is insane.
We talked and our max budget is about 5k still, with one willing to spend more for a master bedroom solo and the rest of us willing to share bedrooms to lower cost. So 2 bedroom is on the table- theoretically three but I guess we’d probably need to find a fifth. That probably wouldn’t be too hard.
Jersey City is not discounted at all, many current students live there and it’s a good commute from new port.
Any suggestions on where to look based on the new info that we’re not limited to 4 bedrooms? I guess we can move this to DM but I wanted the split rooms info out there for anyone else who may comment.
Splitting a room opens you up to a lot of options. You can get a 2B flexed to 3 (the flex room can be larger than normal bedrooms depending on the layout) in LIC, which is quick commute to 52nd and Lexington. It's a great neighborhood, and if you're willing to go an extra couple of stops, Astoria is an excellent area for your budget. Rents are cheaper, and for $5,000, you might even be able to get a full 4 bedroom.
It'll be really hard to justify your parents guaranteeing the lease (even if they qualify) since they'd also basically take responsibility for paying all your roommates rent if they default.
Alright, thanks for the info. I’ll look into LIC. Also, and I see that this was my bad, 55th Lexington is actually on the intersection of 25th and Lexington.
With night classes we are aiming for shorter commute but I’ll see if places in Astoria work.
Longtime NYC resident here. What kind of living situation are you looking for and what kind of budget do you have?
I am looking for anything serviceable, ideally 30-45min commute to manhattan, and have a three others I could live with-but we haven’t locked that in yet so solo or joining someone else is not out of the option- dependent on price.
I think the total budget for us four would be about 5k max. If I were solo or joining someone else I could stretch a bit but I’m not certain where my max is. That could rise if the contraints I just set out are unrealistic (very unsure as to what is realistic), but I’m cost conscious- especially as I’ll be spending my parents money until I can get a job post grad and pay them back.
I’m not looking to experience the city and walk to plays from manhattan. I’ll be hunkered down coding most of my days and just need some walls and a kitchen and ok commute from night classes.
If you know of any 2,3,4 person places that meet this, I or one of the international students would love to know about it
No offense, but financial engineering sounds like what caused the Great Recession. Not a great name. Plus, when you finish, are you going to call yourself a financial engineer?
Do you bring up the Challenger Disaster every time you meet an aerospace engineer?
Disasters aren't caused by engineering, they're caused by bad engineering.
I slip a comment about it in every time, yes. Gotta bring them down a peg or two; that's what Dale Carnegie says.
And what do you do?
Door to door gasoline salesman.
Structured products were the main issue, yes.
I do not intend to, no. Do you commonly introduce yourself by what you studied?
"are you going to call yourself a financial engineer?"
Got the ol' slide rule here in my overalls top pocket, Ole Betsey I call her. Never let me down yet on estimating the volume of a piggy bank!
Yeah, this seems like the equivalent of someone who has a JD or maybe a humanities PhD going around asking people to call them "doctor." Slightly embarrassing, really. Actual engineers are going to look at someone who calls themselves a financial engineer and probably make very snide comments to one another about it.
The engineers I know are happy for me.
I have no doubt and I wish you luck in your chosen pursuits. I just think that program name is a bit cringe-inducing.
Perhaps you should be introduced to some software engineers.
Also, "everything with science in its name, isn't" (political science, computer science, ?)
More cringe than obsessing over what "real engineers" will think about your degree name?
During the last weeks I saw a few people asking about what they as "normal" people could do about AI safety and made an overview over different grassroots outreach organisations with a friend (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hmds9eDjqFaadCk4F/overview-ai-safety-outreach-grassroots-orgs).
The least effort is probably to use ControlAI's tool (https://controlai.com/take-action) to contactor your policymakers advocating for a Pause/building a Pause Button (which is what MIRI and a lot of other people are suggesting).
The thing that normal people could do is to understand the reality that AI presents no realistic existential threat and to go about their lives normally.
Join or found a local Butlerian Jihad chapter and find a copy of the Anarchist Handbook.
Taking your comment seriously ;).
Out of the grassroots organizations that would be StopAI.
I think informing policymakers and the public are probably more effective. Noone has really tried it yet and it seems quite effective (https://controlai.com/dip convincing 20 out of 60 MPs in the UK they talked to, to publicly support their campaign). Most people when they actually hear about it, think that building an ASI and even integrating AGI are quite obviously dangerous. In addition, AI already is quite unpopular.
The best thing normal people can do is to sit out the hype and wait for the next AI winter after LLMs have petered out.
* Even if LLMs peter out (which I am not sure about) the compute will be lying around and people are already trying different algorithms. So if you find something that works, you (depending on how well it fits the gpu clusters) don't have to build out compute first.
* In addition even the current (and LLMs will at least improve somewhat and at specific tasks) level will still cause huge societal changes which we would want to go well.
Chess engines have been better than humans for a very long time now, but they weren't any good at playing with odds until recently. I remember easily winning with rook odds and drawing with knight odds following a simple strategy: prioritize castling and even trades, even when they give up some other advantage. I have not studied chess in any serious way so I'm not really any good at it, but the computer doesn't really try to avoid this. Now there is a chess engine that can play really well with material odds, it can crush the best players in the world in a match in blitz time format (around 3 minutes) starting without a knight. I've played it myself and I am unable to win or draw with queen odds in a slower rapid time format (around 10 minutes), it's pretty cool to see and it is a very concrete illustration of just how much better computers are at chess. If you want to try it yourself you can play here https://lichess.org/@/LeelaQueenOdds , reading their blog it seems first move advantage makes a big difference in odds games so you might want to start with black to replicate the results.
Chess engines conventionally have four major components. The part that gets the most visibility is the minimax algorithm, which calculates a certain number of moves ahead (or as many moves ahead as will fit in its time or compute budget) by brute force to find which move gets the best board position at the cutoff point assuming the other player is following the same algorithm to the same horizon (i.e. assuming the other player makes what the engine thinks is the best response to the engine's move). Typically, alpha-beta pruning is also applied to this, which skips evaluating subtrees for obviously-bad moves.
The next part is some kind of heuristic strategy for evaluating the strength of board positions when minimax cuts off. Conventionally, these used a point system for the relative values of pieces on the board, with points added or subtracted for positional factors like pawn structure (forward, passed, connected, doubled, etc), control of the center, etc. In recent decades, I think this got replaced or supplemented in a lot of engines with various machine learning techniques, but i haven't followed that aspect closely.
Third part is endgame algorithms and tablebases. A lot of endgame combinations have been thoroughly analyzed by human players, with or without computer assistance, and can be reliably won through mechanical strategies which human players memorize. These scenarios can flummox pure brute force chess engines, especially ones that run to a fixed depth of a certain number of moves ahead, since the algorithms can take dozens of moves to complete. A basic chess engine might simply have criteria for recognizing well-known endgame position as won, lost, or drawn (allowing it to be scored perfectly when the starting point is reached in a minimax search) and switching from minimax to applying that algorithm. More advanced engines have "tablebases" where the results of brute force evaluation of a plethora of endgame scenarios have been calculated in advance and stored in the engine's data files. If a board position is in the endgame tablebase, then the engine knows how to play perfectly from that point until checkmate or draw.
The last part is opening databases. Similar to endgame tablebases, these are the results of offline evaluation to a much, much deeper depth than would be used mid-game, and may be supplemented by human analysis of chess openings and their continuations. These provide an enormous advantage over any human player who hasn't put a lot of work into studying openings, since trivial mistakes in the early game can easily leave you at a huge disadvantage against a competent opponent.
I expect most of what you're observing has to do with the opening database. Most chess engines would assume the standard starting position, so playing at odds puts you outside of database. And against a decent human player, the engine needs a really good minimax plus heuristic engine to compensate for the lack of a usable opening database in addition to the substantial disadvantage of starting out down a major piece. An engine that's been customized to play at odds would have a usable opening database.
-----
After typing up all of that, I followed your link and from there looked at the github repository. Looks like this is a newer kind of engine than the kind I've worked with that centers on a neural network for board evaluation, presumably dropped in as a replacement for a standard chess engine's board evaluation subengine. Skimming generate_games.py gives me the impression that it's training the network via recursive self-play from the at-odds starting position, and the node count for the network (<1000, according to the README) seems too small to embed a meaningful opening database in via overfitting. So this just seems like the heuristic subengine is being optimized for board positions that are likely to come up via good play from a particular at-odds starting position.
Do chess engines really need endgames? If you have like 4 pieces(pawns and kings having small move sets) you have only so many moves, minimax starts to be computable given only so many moves.
Endgames in chess are theoretically solved for 7 pieces or less in a very large database. Inclusion of endgame databases increase the playing strength of a modern engine by around 20 ELO points, if I remember correctly. Not a lot, but you get whatever advantage you can get when making an engine as strong as possible. This one I don't think uses that.
At a minimum, they benefit from being able to recognize an endgame position that's winnable with perfect play without needing to evaluate the entire subtree, especially when that subtree is several moves ahead.
Besides that, it can take dozens of moves to actually get to checkmate in a won endgame position and there are blunders that can delay that enough to produce a draw via 50 move rule. Even relatively small move sets can add up very quickly over deep evaluation depths, depending on how much you can prune from the raw tree.
Between bigger compute budgets and better board evaluation, endgame tablebases are probably less valuable than they used to be a decade or three ago, but you're guaranteed perfect play essentially for free (computationally speaking) for any position in your tablebase, which is generally nice to have.
I played blitz 5-0 against it with queen odds on a lark, not really believing it could do anything, and was humbled (I studied and played seriously as a kid many years ago, peaking around ELO 2100). I lost two games and was able to win the third one, mating with 15 seconds remaining on the clock. It's insanely good at steering the position into complications and fork threats, eating my time away. I think I'll win against it in rapid time (will try later), but seeing it play with queen odds I'm pretty sure it'd wipe the board with me at rook odds in any time format. Thanks, an interesting and sobering experience.
Indiana Jones goes to an alien world and ChatGPT gives us pictures
I’ve become interested in using photographs as prompts for image-making with ChatGPT. I’ve now done quite a bit of this, but have only posted two bitx so far, ChatGPT imagines three different backgrounds for three small sculptures, and Friday Fotos: ChatGPT changes Manhattan's West Side. In other posts I’ve used I’ve used a bit of art as a point of departure, such as this post based on a painting I did when I was nine: ChatGPT renders a scene on Mars in three styles.
This time I’ve decided to see what I can do with some of my graffiti photos. The fact is, when I first started tromping the hinterlands of Jersey City in search of graffiti, I felt like I was a ten-year old kid pretending to be Indiana Jones exploring some lost city. That’s what I’ve done in this series of images. I start with one of my graffiti photos and ask ChatGPT to continue the adventure. The adventure quickly heads off planet to another world. At various points along the way I introduce other photos for reference. Rather than interrupting the flow of ChatGPTs imagery I simply insert an endnote into the ongoing image stream and then introduce those photos in notes at the end, along with a note or two about the photo.
The starting point is from an area known locally as “the oaks.” Judging from the photo it’s a densely wooded area. Which it is, but only a very small patch. The bit of masonry you see at the right is the edge of a pillar supporting Exit 14C of the New Jersey Thruway. All of the pillar at this point are covered with graffiti at ground level. We’re at the foot of the Palisades and within one or two hundred yards of 12th Street, which feeds into the Holland Tunnel, which in turn goes under the Hudson River to Manhattan. Thus, this little jungle vignette is in one of the most densely populated urban areas in the United States.
Here's the link for that one: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2025/05/indiana-jones-goes-to-alien-world-and.html
Here's a different one. I used a GPT trained on the poetry of Fred Turner to create a sonnet cycle of three sonnets: Deep Seeking Xanadu. Then I used ChatGPT to create an illustration for each of the three sonnets. Here's the link: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2025/05/deep-seeking-xanadu-with-illumination.html
We Californians are familiar with high gasoline prices. We bitch about them all the time. The other day, I saw signs at the pumps of my local Chevron Station that said, "You just bought a quarter tank of taxes and fees," with a QR code where we could direct our outrage through our smartphones to their lobbying group. I thought I'd better double-check to see if it's true that a quarter of the price I pay for gasoline goes to taxes and fees. Short answer, they don't—but it shows how big oil companies are grifting Californians with this meme.
Note: all these prices were from last week when I ran these numbers...
If I used credit/debit, regular gasoline was $4.99/gallon at my local Chevron station. I checked, and federal, state, and local taxes and fees add up to about $0.88-$0.92 per gallon in CA (I guess they vary by county). That works out to about 18 percent of Chevron's price at this gas station. Still, it's a sizable amount, but the independent station up the road was selling regular for $4.19/gal ($3.99 with a car wash)! And the Shell station even further up the road was selling regular for $5.29/gal. Right off the bat, we have $0.90-$1.20 spread in gasoline prices, which is as much or more than the taxes and fees levied on out gasoline.
But even so, those damn taxes! How much could I save in a state like Texas? Federal and state taxes account for $.39 per gallon there. So, I'd save about 50 cents a gallon if CA's gas taxes & fees were the same as TX, and my Chevron price would drop to about $4.49/gallon. When I checked the price of gasoline in Texas, it was averaging around $2.78/gal for regular. So, California gasoline, minus the tax difference, is ~$1.70 more at my local Chevron station than I'd pay in TX—and $2 more at that Shell station!
So, we know that California taxes are not the root cause of expensive gasoline in California. I don't think we have pipelines crossing the Rockies. Is it the cost of bringing it in by tanker or train? Well, rail delivery could add about $0.68 to the price of a gallon. Tanker delivery is $1 per barrel per thousand miles. Say a tanker comes from Houston to Los Angeles via the Panama Canal, that would be about 5,000 miles. So that would add $5 to a barrel of crude, from which we get only about 29 gallons of refined gasoline. That would add about $0.17 to the price of a gallon.
What about California's infamous summer formulation? ChatGPT says that can add 1-5 cents per gallon. So, it looks to me that the big oil companies at their gas stations are making at least a $1 per gallon extra profit—probably more—off us suckers in California. Can anyone prove to me that they're not?
So I asked ChatGPT (which means you need to verify it's correct) but it came up with 24% which matches the "quarter tank of taxes and fees"
State Excise Tax: $0.596 per gallon
Federal Excise Tax: $0.184 per gallon
State and Local Sales Tax: Approximately 2.25% of the retail price
Underground Storage Tank Fee: $0.02 per gallon
Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS): Adds about $0.11 per gallon
Cap-and-Trade Program: Adds approximately $0.30 per gallon
Collectively, these taxes and fees can add up to approximately $1.15 per gallon.
Assuming an average gasoline price of $4.80 per gallon in California, taxes and fees account for roughly 24% of the total price.
The campaign would make much more sense in e.g. France.
<aiwarning>
I asked Google:
>what fraction of the French price for gasoline is taxes?
and it answered (AI Overview):
>In France, taxes account for approximately 60% of the price of gasoline, with around 64% for unleaded and 59% for diesel. This includes excise taxes (TICPE), a value-added tax (VAT), and a taxe générale sur les activités polluantes (TGAP).
</aiwarning>
Hot damn. Time to buy an EV.
In SoCal, electricity is more expensive than gasoline. But they're getting screwed by their utilities.
Looks like its 2-4x what I pay for electricity in Seattle. Still cheaper than driving with gas, especially if you charge off-peak.
Crude costs more in california, they use a blend that is more expensive to refine, cap-and-trade and LCFS add additional costs, they purposefully limit their refining capacity, they purposefully isolate themselves from fuel markets, they purposefully consolidate to reduce competition, they shutdown local production to import from Argentina and Saudi Arabia, and force local regulations on the global operations of oil companies. Chevron and Phillips are the latest in a long string of companies relocation elsewhere. Many companies have stopped business in California all together.
Not all of these count as taxes, but they are 100% self inflicted. It's not companies making an extra buck.
I think I said that in my OP. But the Independent gas stations purchase have to purchase their gasoline on the spot market from the big refineries that produce CARB formulas. Regulations, etc etc, don't explain the consistent price spread between the Independents and big-name gas brands.
Maybe the added cost of having clean bathrooms is what pushes the price up by $0.70-$1.20/gallon.
I think other people have addressed a lot of the specifics, but I wish people attributed more to supply and demand and less to "companies arbitrarily jack up prices due to greed whenever they have an 'excuse' for it".
Neither answer is perfect, but "companies are just greedy, the economics are probably fake" is much more of a thought-terminating cliche, and the greed arguments tend to greatly downplay competition and demand elasticity.
Yes, companies often do find mechanisms for anti-competitive behavior (e.g. regional monopolies are a well-known one), but absent an explanation of how they're doing that, I'm going to assume it's supply and deamnd.
I dunno; I feel like there isn't a good economic case for "they're just adding an extra $1 to be greedy"—inter-company competition ought to take care of anything like that, unless we're alleging market manipulation or whatever the term is (collusion? no, wait, that's for treachery or something innit–). I would bet the common wisdom of "it's Cali's state gov't making it expensive" is pretty close to true.
Could be wrong, though. I'll try to look into it. If we assume the most uncharitable $0.88 + $0.17 + $0.01 + $0.10 = $1.16 taxes/fees/delivery/specialblend (most charitable being $0.92 + $0.68 [should we average the tanker-vs.-rail difference?] + $0.05 + $0.15 = $1.80), that takes care of over half the difference. (Or, in the "most charitable" case, almost all of it!)
The other ~half... operating costs? The gas to drive a semi to the station & fill up the underground tanks will cost more, too, after all. Wouldn't doubt there are more taxes & fees levied on the business end, it being CA.
Also worth noting that we can't assume Chevron gas is the average $2.78 in TX—I bet the inter-state spread for Chevron is lower than you've calculated here. The mechanics at my old workplace claimed that Chevron's additives are actually slightly superior to those from other companies—or, at least, /were/ superior for many years & are now finally just roughly equivalent—so that could be a (putative) justification for Chevron prices being higher in general.
IIRC, Chevron is also a member of the "Top Tier" gas standards org.—although many other brands are too; still, this may account for some of the difference between "all average" & Chevron-in-particular price.
> "they're just adding an extra $1 to be greedy"—inter-company competition ought to take care of anything like that
As others have said, California uses a special blend, which isn't that much more expensive itself. But it means that while California gas can go to Nevada, Nevada gas can't go to California. (I'm not 100% on Nevada's laws but roll with it.) There are only a few companies with in-state refineries making this blend.
Oh, I didn't realize that—excellent point!
Yes, few refineries outside of California produce California's CARB-compliant fuel. We have nine refineries that can produce gasoline, and a quick check suggests that they don't produce enough for what California consumes. This would mean the state’s fuel supply would get squeezed whenever a refinery shuts down for some reason. So California sees more variability in price spikes. But what I'm talking about is that my local Indie gas station is purchasing the gasoline that the big boys refine on the spot market, and they're consistently selling it $0.70 to $1.20 cheaper than the big-name gas stations. Now that I'm retired, I've become price-sensitive to gasoline, and I've been keeping track of where I can buy the cheapest gas for the past year.
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/californias-petroleum-market/californias-oil-refineries
>But what I'm talking about is that my local Indie gas station is purchasing the gasoline that the big boys refine on the spot market, and they're consistently selling it $0.70 to $1.20 cheaper than the big-name gas stations.<
This happens here in TX too, FWIW (although I'm not sure on the magnitude of the difference—will check tomorrow; I usually just fill up without even glancing at the price, any more, heh... gotta pay it anyway, y'know what I mean?).
I'd bet Techron vs. generic detergents is probably responsible for at least some of the difference.
A charitable take that better fits their fractions. If it was $5 a gallon, of which $1 cents was taxes, that means tax-free gas would be $4, so they'd be right. Depends whether you consider the cost of gas pre or post tax.
California also has a "special blend" of gasoline that is not the summer formulation. It is cleaner year round. This is supposed to add 10 - 15 cents to each gallon. Still doesn't account for the difference between CA and Texas, but you want to include it.
One big thing is that California *land* costs more. If I put a Wal Mart in the middle of some random Texas town the rent will be lower than if I put the same building in the middle of Palo Alto. Then consider the differences in minimum wage. Gas prices in Bakersfield seem to be around $4/gallon while Gas prices in Mountain View are closer to $5 (note I'm more confident about the MV prices ...). Higher rent isn't a tax in any sense, but it adds to the cost of gasoline. Same for minimum wages.
As was mentioned above, this also means that you have to get California blend from California refineries, of which there aren't nearly enough. Texas can get gas from any US refinery (at minimum).
Do California localities still have their own special blends? That really restricts buyer choice (buyer == gas station in this case) if the producers have to specially prepare to sell to you.
Localities do not, but California as a whole does (vs the rest of the USA).
Hi, I have a question if anyone with insuline resistance uses monitoring of blood glucose levels. Did you find any value in this? If yes, from commercially available glucose monitors which one would you recommend for casual use for someone who has pre-insulin resistance? Is there a link with explanation how do they work and pros/cons for their use in non diabetic people.
Type II, do use a monitor for blood glucose levels, the "stick and test" version:
https://shop.onetouch.com/verio-reflect-meter/product/OTSUS05_0003
It is helpful to control overall spikes, it does give you a good idea of how and what raises your blood sugar after eating (some things will surprise you). Good to see when you're going too high, and when your readings are staying in range.
Cons are that if you test before and after a meal three times a day, that's sticking your fingers six times, which means you rapidly get sore fingers. If you're pre-diabetic, you wouldn't need to test that often, but it will help you get an idea of "eating at these times/eating this item makes my blood sugar go whoosh".
I have used Dexcom in the past, and am currently using Freestyle Libre 3+. I like the Freestyle a little better for a few reasons:
* Longer monitor time - Dexcom had a 10 day limit, whereas the Libre 3+ has 15 days. Libre 3 only had 14 days.
* Cost - I don't remember how much Dexcom was, but Freestyle is about $20 per sensor, with insurance. I believe Dexcom was significantly more expensive.
* More frequent updates - Freestyle seems to update about once per minute, and Dexcom every five minutes.
* Reporting - I can check my % GMI (approximate A1C) for 7, 14, 30, and 90 day averages. I don't recall this being possible on Dexcom.
* Application of sensor - I remember finding Freestyle to be easier to apply, with nothing else to add to the outside of the sensor: just click into place, and some magic glue keeps it there. I remember Dexcom had something to apply outside of the sensor to help keep it attached.
* Removal of used sensors - Dexcom was a chore to remove, for I have significant body hair. Freestyle's magic glue doesn't seem to cause such painful issues.
Dexcom WAS better in a few ways:
* Longer chart - Freestyle only shows the past 12 hours, whereas Dexcom showed the past 24. One could probably view more information somehow on both, by linking to the data.
* Separate monitor - Dexcom had an extra device to view the current glucose, whereas Freestyle only has a phone app.
I believe one needs a prescription to get either one, so I'm not sure how you would get a doctor to prescribe one for you if you're only pre-diabetic, or non-diabetic.
On the other hand, if you just want to check what your glucose is currently, you don't need a continuous glucose monitor (CGM). I've used a few different ones in the past, and they all seem the same, and are all similar to the ones they use in the hospital. You would need the device, test strips designed specifically for that device, lancets to get a finger-prick, and the lancing device itself (which may come with the monitor).
Personally I've found wearing a CGM very helpful, in terms of understanding how different foods affect my blood glucose. The results were somewhat counterintuitive in the beginning, so this was pretty valuable information. It also provides a reminder whenever I exceed my glucose goals, which when I'm doing poorly is not great for my mental health.
For those without diabetes or prediabetes, I have been led to understand that CGMs aren't that interesting because they just kind of show a flat line most of the time. But I suppose there's no harm in giving it a try if you like.
I have only ever used the Freestyle Libre 3 (soon to be discontinued) so I can't really offer a compare/contrast to other products. Overall I think it works okay, it's easy enough to install and the app works fine. Some things I don't like about it are:
* When I'm sleeping on my side the sensor will often register low glucose levels. This is know in the business as a "compression low".
* You can't disable the low glucose alarms without disabling the app entirely. I understand why they did this, in the context of those who are taking insulin, but the alarms are kind of just an annoyance for those not at risk of severe hypoglycemia.
* The previous two bullet points interact in an obviously bad way. I just end up disabling the app if I'm getting compression lows.
* I'm not really sure how accurate the sensor is and at least once I'm pretty sure it was consistently way off. For casual use this seems fine but if I were taking insulin I'd want to get confident first by comparing to a glucometer.
Please help evolve the following claim:
“Your mode of perceiving reality is a direct function of root prior beliefs about abstract value claims. These value claims determine what you consider relevant, which direct the scope of your attention and constrain the questions you consider it worthwhile to investigate. Therefore, unless you place the highest value on perceiving reality accurately (ie over all other goals), and a high prior probability on you being wrong in your beliefs, you’re going to get locked into a mode of perception that is instrumental to whatever goals you place over perceiving reality accurately. If any goal is more important to you than having true beliefs, you’ll adopt false beliefs to advance that goal, and not realize you’re doing it because that realization would impede your pursuit of the goal.”
I'm not sure how to articulate this precisely. But I've been thinking about that "bitcoin as consensus-mechanism" idea you shared a while ago. And where I've landed, is that "Truth" is often treated too idealistically.
E.g. I think Venkatesh Rao recently made an observation about truth-searching as optimizing for the long-term. But I don't think that's exactly correct. Because it's not about temporal duration, it's about counterfactuals. I.e. Popperian Falsification basically says "you *approximate* propositional truth by weeding out counterfactuals that don't fit your hypothesis". But this is a potentially infinite process, so you can only ever approach truth asymptotically. So in theory, truth is just "whatever theory best fits in an infinitely-broad context of observations". AKA laplace's demon. But in practice, you can only devote so much time and energy to "searching" by doing experiments.
The ramifications of this, is that truth-seeking needs to be understood in an ecological context. And with limited resouces, "Laplace's Demon" gets rounded off to "whatever belief punishes me least, within the context I'm operating in". E.g. you and I know the Earth is spherical. But if I'm some 500 BC egyptian peasant-farmer who's never left town, then for all practical purposes, the Earth is flat. So the question "how biased am I" is more productively reformulated as "how much effort do I actually want to commit to investigating this?" Like how manufacturing always specifies a tolerance for the dimensions of its widgets. "MAXIMAL PRECISION" isn't always the correct answer, actually.
In this light, "it's hard to make a man understand something when his salary depends on his ignorance" is (debatably) a feature, rather than a bug.
I think it’s worth thinking about this in examples.
Imagine someone has two important things they care about - being outdoors in the sun, and not getting wet. They care more about this than about believing the truth.
This person will be very incentivized to do everything they can to get true information about the weather - in fact, more so than someone who cares about all truths impartially, who might prioritize information about the number of eggs Julia Caesar ate in his life over information about whether or not it will rain tomorrow.
Abstractly prioritizing truth doesn’t actually seem as valuable to getting particular truths as prioritizing something practical that is connected to those truths.
Totally agree that you need practical things you care about as these will incentivize pursuit of the truth.
The mechanism I’m thinking of becomes more clear if you pick goals like, “don’t sustain physical injury” or “don’t waste energy.” If you don’t want to do either of those two things, there are some truths you won’t be able to apprehend. Of course it would also likely not work to eg see precisely what happens if you blow yourself up.
So clearly as stated what I said above is wrong. I’m particular I’m trying to understand the feedback loop in situations like:
- “those people are dumb and bad” -> I always interact with them aggressively and defensively -> they respond
- “nothing meaningful is over there” -> i never look over there
Maybe setting truth as your ultimate goal doesn’t work compared to this idea of never using 0 or 1 as a probability.
> “nothing meaningful is over there” -> i never look over there
This is just an unfortunate consequence of the Exploitation vs Exploration dilemma (cf "multi-armed bandit" [0]). Can't always know the payoff-structure a priori.
> “those people are dumb and bad” -> I always interact with them aggressively and defensively -> they respond
I stopped linking this essay, since I figured yall were tired of it by now. But like, have you read that post of mine about game theory [1]? Perchance? Although, I don't really think it's any deeper. It's a loop. loops are loopy, man.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit
[1] https://fromthechair.substack.com/p/game-theory
> If any goal is more important to you than having true beliefs, you’ll adopt false beliefs to advance that goal, and not realize you’re doing it because that realization would impede your pursuit of the goal.
Sometimes having false beliefs impedes your pursuit of the goal.
You just explained why cults exist.
Also I'm not sure you need to have "understand reality" as an explicit goal. As long as you don't let any of your priors get too close to 0 or 100% (i.e. get trapped) then reality should eventually emerge out of any well-functioning belief network.
I think you have just explained why a dog chases a rabbit. Or why a man will not believe something if his livelihood depends on not believing it.
>Your mode of perceiving reality is a direct function of root prior beliefs about abstract value claims.
But your root beliefs are based on what you've seen before. It's not like they're some inherent thing you're born with.
>If any goal is more important to you than having true beliefs, you’ll adopt false beliefs to advance that goal, and not realize you’re doing it
This implies that you'll avoid that by prioritizing truth, which is itself a false belief.
Why wouldn't root beliefs be based on genes or culture, or some mixture?
Culture IS what you've seen before.
No, culture is what you have been told
No, culture is the sea that you swim in
What’s water?
So, I would rephrase a bit: our perception of reality is a direct function of our sensory organs, our eyes, ears and so forth. I think more accurately what you are talking about are our beliefs about the world, the attitudes we have regarding society and our place within it.
And yes, I think you are correct that the belief systems we currently have have grown organically out of the beliefs we had previously, how else would we develop them? No one is or could ever be perfectly objective, we can only formulate new beliefs by "looking through the lens" of our current ones. I'm not sure "accuracy" is something that applies to attitudes or beliefs about the world--they mostly consist of opinions. Since we only perceive reality at all in order to accomplish our goals, we believe whatever was most useful in achieving our goals in the past.
Say you have an attitude about President Trump (good or bad, it doesn't matter). You only have an attitude about him because having one helped you accomplish some goal of yours previously (perhaps it gives you an opportunity to express strong opinions that your friends agree with, thus strengthening your relationships). Now Trump does some new things, and your opinions about that new thing he did will grow organically out of the opinions you had about him before. That's how the mind works.
You could set yourself a goal to deliberately seek out new sources of information, sources that do not necessarily agree with your past opinions, and make a good faith effort to engage them productively. That is likely to result in an increase in sophistication and complexity of your beliefs. That should be a good thing, but "accuracy" doesn't play into it.
Now, one could adopt a standard of accuracy such that
I wrote about Chinese military data centers on my Substack, if anyone is interested. Open question how much the PLA builds its own compute to meet growing AI ambitions or relies on civilian clusters. Plan on writing more on PLA AI integration in the future. https://ordersandobservations.substack.com/p/where-are-chinese-military-data-centers
Doesn’t your analysis kinda gesture that computation might be happening? Not all computers do AI
I'm so dumb I initially thought the article in 3 was for new subscribers only, like a sort of ACX boot camp.
It is. Write a 10,000 word essay about Trump and wokeness using no less than 50 references to the sequences that Scott finds acceptable and you get access to the super exclusive ACX onlyfans.
My favourite part of the ACX onlyfans is Thomas Bayes coyly smiling at the camera, clad only in a seductively-placed copy of HPMOR
With the hyphen, it's unambiguous.
The left and right hyphenatees can include a space, ime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphen#Compound_modifiers
> for example, San Francisco–area residents, hormone receptor–positive cells, cell cycle–related factors, and public-school–private-school rivalries
Well, the Wikipedia article is actually saying that an en-dash is being used for the spaced word-joining hyphen, which is a distinction I wouldn't have perceived.
I think the confusion stems from the fact that everyone here is a subscriber and the pieces in question are for payed subscribers.
I don’t think so. You are a subscriber, aren’t you?
I'm reading a firsthand account of a US Marine in Pacific combat in World War 2, and I'm struck by how tough they say the Japanese are. Respect for the lethality & fighting spirit of the Japanese is suffused throughout the book. At one point an NCO explains to new recruits that they can expect Japanese raiders to jump in their foxhole at night and try to stab them in brutal one-on-one combat. The author specifically says (maybe this is not accurate) that the Germans don't do this, so the Army guys in the European theater don't have to deal with this exact problem- it's only the Japanese who love this kind of hand-to-hand combat.
It's kind of fascinating to read this, about a country that is not exactly very martial today. I don't even think the Japanese can find enough recruits for their military these days, and that's with rising threats from both China and North Korea. At one point I could've sworn I read that the homicide rate in early 20th century Japan was just as high as in America, whereas now it's just a tiny fraction. Some cultures just lose that martial spirit I guess
How can they not recuit with great recuiting posters like this!
https://photos.app.goo.gl/EvvmZjkp2qiiAmTr6
Photos from a Japan Self Defense Force event in 2019
Here's others if you're curious
https://www.google.com/search?q=%E8%87%AA%E8%A1%9B%E9%9A%8A%E5%8B%9F%E9%9B%86%E3%83%9D%E3%82%B9%E3%82%BF%E3%83%BC&udm=2&sclient=img
They didn't jump into foxholes to fight with knives and bayonets because they were bloodthirsty or great warriors, they did it because they were out of ammunition.
Supplies were low and kept getting lower for the Japanese throughout the island campaign. Banzai bayonet charges and the like became more common because they didn't have enough supplies to fight the way they normally would.
The cultural aspect that made Japanese soldiers different is not some kind of warrior spirit, it was shame. To surrender was extremely shameful, and it was generally considered better to go down fighting than shame your family by giving up. Bushido philosophy also emphasized willpower significantly: if you tried hard enough, and refused to get up, then you would push through! You see this same aspect of Japanese culture alive and well in anime; how many plot points rely on the main character refusing to give up, "believing in the heart of the cards" and gaining victory as a result? A lot, let me tell you.
So when Japanese soldiers found themselves low on ammo and in a hopeless situation the solution was to "Never give up! Keep trying your best! Keep moving forward until you find victory!" This took the form of jumping into foxholes and engaging in knife fights. Certainly the people doing this can't be accused of not trying hard enough to win!
In contrast, European cultural norms around warfare are much more accepting of surrendering when victory is impossible. So when Germans ran out of ammo and had no hope of winning, they surrendered. Sure there's no honor in surrendering, but it's no great shame either when you're in an impossible to win situation. In Japan their culture teaches that you always have to try your best, no matter what, or you're shameworthy.
> In contrast, European cultural norms around warfare are much more accepting of surrendering when victory is impossible.
That reminded me of The Siege of Jadotville (2016).
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3922798/
No spoilers, just see the movie, it's good. Or, if you want spoilers, check Wikipedia.