Lrnu, va ab fvghngvba jbhyq yvar SR vagrefrpg nal bs gur bgure yvarf va gur qvntenz. Guvf vf whfg n snhygl dhrfgvba onfrq ba na reebe va ivfhnyyl ercerfragvat gur ceboyrz.
The fact that line segment AE isn't the same length in the diagram as AB and CD is really throwing me off. I'd like to see what a diagram would look like with that part corrected
One thing I’ve noticed about DeepSeek is how readily it replies in a snarky style, when this is not specifically requested or the style of the question (but the question suits the style).
Examples:
- I was asking about how nineteenth century Penny Dreadfuls might be an influence on Walter White in _Breaking Bad_
- I was asking about buildings that housed historically famous events but now have mundane commercial usage (The Tammanay Hall building in NYC in now a Petco; the Pitt Club in Jesus Lane, Cambridge became a branch of Pizza Express).
Now, admittedly, it is easy to see how you could do a snarky satirical answer on how Walter White is a Penny Dreadful protagonist, or how the Tammanay Hall building now sells squeaky dog toys (that image courtesy of DeepSeek). Deepseek is really good at spitting opportunities to write that kind of reply and going for it.
(The one where I was asking about the development of the SF plot trope where the crew in a long duration space voyage go insane, taking into account the _Space Madness _ episode of _Ren and Stimpy_ and the movie critics reviews of _Pandorum_[*] was rather more obvious about what kind of answer was expected)
* “In space, no-one can hear you snore”—Marc Savlov in The Austin Chronicle.
There's some very in-depth articles on the website, on lots of important topics (identity, money, state tracking, shared realities). They're truly for the intellectuals.
It would be great if people read them and commented.
(I don't want to talk about the protocol here, only the articles.) For protocol discussion, visit our Discord or forums.
Random 2:00 A.M. thought: decimal points are such dumb notation. All you need is a handy diacritic or operator to stand in for the "divide this integer by 10^{number of digits it was written with}" operation and bam, all of a sudden you can just use a plain old garden-variety plus-sign as your separator[1]. Which means you can interchange between {integer} + {decimal part} and {integer} + {non-decimal fraction} perfectly naturally. Heck you can even mix in {fraction} + {fraction} if you're feeling saucy. If you wanted to get really fancy, you could add the convention of writing the "+" sign and similar things small and low, so that it would easy to read for people who grew up on the original.
To make matters worse, a quick skim of Wikipedia tells me that there used to be such things, after a fashion--they were used slightly differently than I envision here:
Just bringing back something like the horizontal bar notation, but with the + between parts and you're good[2]. Point is, there's lots of choices, and some of them are historical.
The trouble, of course, is getting it implemented. I'm sure many people have thought of many reforms to common math notation (there might even be some that wouldn't make me cry) before stopping to think about how the small detail of how to get every human in the entire world to discard the convention they learned since grade school for your new fad. Anyone have a lead on where I can find a time machine, Johannes Gutenberg's (former) home address, a keg or three of really good beer and a gift-shop phrasebook for Middle High German?
[1] If you really insisted, you could even just keep using the decimal place itself. The primary reasons it's a poor choice (IMO) are threefold. First, switching from a very well-known convention to an unknwon and similar-but-not the same one is likely more confusing and error-prone than just switching whole-hog to something that looks different. whole-hog to a new one. Second, that 2+.75 just looks sloppy and bad in a way that 2 + 75 (with a bar over top that won't render on Substack) does not. A last but not least, that the damn decimal can't make up its mind what kind of operator to be, and that's just flatly unacceptable. In 2.75 its a binary operator, fine but not great (better for in-line operators to commute. Looking right at you division). But in .75 it's a unary operator. Which is I guess why the busybodies insist that it should be render as 0.75, because new it's binary again (by way of adding a totally useless operand). What we want is dirt-common binary operator (+) and a new(ish) operator that's defined as unitary and stays that way.
[2] Also helping us banished the abomination that is "mixed numbers" to the lightless void where they belong.
How *is* your version of thr horizontal bar supposed to work? Over the whole decimal part?
I still think the decimal point/comma is already what youre looking for. 2+.75 looks strange as a way to write a number, because why wouldnt you just omit the +, but looks fine a a way to write an actual addition problem. Im very surprised if you think .75 is fine notation, but 2+.75 isnt: inside (long) calculations is the first place youd use a shorthand like that. Our current convention is almost exactly what you want, except youre allowed to omit the + between a nondecimal and pure decimal number. (Its a bit ironic to complain about the "busybodies" who insist on the 0 in light of this.) Keep in mind that decimal seperators are something youll write a lot of; you suggest replacing a dot or one stroke with at least 3 strokes. If you did mean the bar over the whole decimal part, that stroke can be quite long, and would be difficult to deal with even on computers.
Its also just very natural for a place-value system to keep going for sub-1 places. During some arithmetic methods, you just use spacial alignment between the numbers with no marking at all.
The Soviet N1 that exploded July 3, 1969 was probably the biggest and most spectacular. But I can’t find any clean links to video without obnoxious AI voiceover or a long stream of spoken Russian.
Hey, you know what? Even if driving your car off the lot caused a comparable explosion, you *still* wouldn't complain, cuz you'd be a bunch itsy bitsies a-blowin in the wind. So ya can't lose.
"Lotta Butlerian Jihad/Orange Catholic Bible jokes about the new encyclical, which made me realize that Pope Leo is a 70 year old math major from Chicago, so it feels virtually guaranteed he has in fact read Dune, and probably up through God Emperor of Dune."
Theil, then Andreeson because he eats out Thiels' hand and then Musk, more independent, but kind of a jackass on his own terms. Buffet and Gates are okay. Beezos, meh, not so great either.
This guy @HuskIRL has a cool channel. He has voice conversations with AI and gets it to do really dumb things. Very insightful. AI clearly has no model of the real world. This is a real treasure trove, in my opinion.
In some others of these, it's pretty obvious what kinds of answers the guy wants to get out of it, and the AI cooperates. AI is typically very easily able to tell when it's being tested, and often the goal of the test. (Sometimes even guessing the organization performing the test, as happened in Apollo Research's investigations.)
So trying to follow Iran war news is hard. (For so many reasons everyone has their own story to tell.) So I'm just checking oil prices once a day. Here. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/crude-oil
And I think it's getting better. (Is this better than a prediction market?)
The Escalation Trap is a substack by a professor Robert Pape who has spent a lifetime analyzing escalations in wars. Fantastic place to get news and analysis of the war. It's not live breaking news but the analysis is superb.
Interestingly, Pape's first book, Bombing to Win, argues that bombing alone can rarely, if ever, achieve strategic objectives, and definitely does not prompt citizen uprisings. I don't know whether he has subsequently modified his views.
I am mostly familiar with his academic work on political violence. But I would think that his substack is indeed interesting, because (unlike most pundits) he is actually familiar with the relevant academic work.
I've listened to professor Pape on the Breaking Points podcast. I have no problem with his analysis. But he sees it as an escalation trap, that's his story. And sure maybe it's true.
My friend was saying today that Pape seems to have an opinion on too many things that he has no expertise on as well, now that he's getting popular and interviewed in various places. I think there's truth to that.
This new article on the 'missing heritability' issue by genomicist Kevin Bird claims the heritability gap cannot be meaningfully explained by rare variants, and thus the heritability of IQ does not exceed 25%. As someone who is less knowledgable about this, I'm curious if the argument in this article is sound: https://sequencesandconsequences.substack.com/p/is-missing-heritability-actually
I keep running into the idea that is evil to even be curious how valid IQ tests are, and especially to be interested in whether it's true that the black/white IQ difference reflects true genetic differences rather than test bias, effects of negative life circumstances, whatever. I think it's important to push back against the idea that one should feel no interest in the question. Why the hell not? Yes, if someone's sole reason for being curious is in order to try to get all blacks dumped back into Africa, *that* agenda is evil. But being curious is natural and fine. I personally am very curious about the matter. What stops me from looking into it deeply is that there is such a huge volume of research and reasoning about it, and I know much of that stuff is motivated research and reasoning, and it sounds like a huge job to pick my way through it and figure out what the truth is.
I haven't reached the end, so perhaps there will be a paragraph of raving about black IQ's or whatnot, but so far I'm finding this piece enlightening and fascinating. Do you believe there's motivated reasoning in articles like this? For instance, do you think he's try to set up self up as some kind of health-prolonging czar, and will in the future only publish info of a certain kind, the kind that supports his view?
Yeah, there's def. something a bit unbalanced and nutso about him. In comments on his blog, someone asked a question that he had already answered, and he blew up at them. Really startled me.
If you don't get solid answers, you could try posting this in comments on Cremieux's blog. He has some posts specifically about how solid the evidence is that IQ is heritable. He is undoubtedly angrily committed to the idea that blacks are on average 1 standard deviation less intelligent than whites, and that does make one worry about motivated reasoning. On the other hand, he appears to be extremely smart and knowledgable about stats. Another option would be to feed the article in question to GPT, along with all your questions. Request answers that translate statistical processes into language understandable by a bright layman. I have many times fed it a paragraph about a stats test that I did not understand, and asked it to explain to me how it works and why it is valid, and gotten an excellent, clarifying answer.
This feels like it should be a silly question, but here goes:
Does anyone know of a way to track your own comments on Substack, such that you can receive a notification if someone replies to your comment? This seems to be not an obviously available feature of the platform as far as I can tell. Nevertheless I see tons of people having back-and-forth conversations here on ACX, and I suspect they have found a solution that somehow has eluded me.
I always access ACX by going to the site on my computer. Interface is much clearer. Here I get info under the bell icon (upper right of page) of activity, such as people replying to my posts. Mobile version of site is harder to work with, and app is so terrible I refuse to have anything to do with it.
I get emails when someone has responded to my comments, but it is a little hit or miss. It blanks out sometimes for a week or two and then comes back. If you go to your page and click on the little bell icon in the top right, you can see all the comments that have been made in reply to yours.
Believe me, the notifications area (with the bell icon) was the first place I looked. Apparently my problem is that you only receive notifications for comment replies on Substacks you're subscribed to, and I haven't been an actual ACX subscriber for a while since I didn't want to receive emails for every post. I guess I'll re-subscribe.
You get notified about replies to your comments on substacks you subscribe to, and only those. It does not have to be a paid subscription, but if you cancel it entirely the notifications stop.
Got it. And from what I recall, there's no way to subscribe to a substack without receiving emails of every post. What a weird-ass platform. It's always been hard for me to understand a lot of their design choices. But thank you for your help!
I just realized that mistake theory vs conflict theory is a false dilemma. There are lots of stupid people *and* lots of bad people, and it's their synergy that makes the world suck.
It is almost certainly true that any proposed dichotomy is a simplification; the question is whether the model you get from that simplification is helpful for understanding the cases that interest you.
Could you write more about how your observation relates to mistake vs conflict theory? It clearly seems true that my opponents are a mix of stupid and bad (*), but this isn't ruled out by the model.
As an aside on dilemmas, one of powerful strategic tools is to recognize that you are facing a false dilemma and then identify or create alternatives outside of the two you originally saw.
The term for that is babtists and bootleggers, a phrase coined by economist Bruce Yandle. The "baptists" really believe in their policy and work at them out of principle. The bootleggers are bad people who work at it out of self-interest. The term originated in historical cases but you can think of a dozen modern examples off the top of your head. 100s of occupational licensing laws restrict entry into occupations. "Baptists" think they protect the public. "Bootleggers" want to keep out competitors. Zoning laws. Taxi medallions and ride-share restrictions. Rent control. A lot of business and environmental regulation. Etc.
Does anyone have a reference for someone in the tri-state (NY, NJ, CT) area who is open and available to conduct paid biotech research on mice? Very likely but not definitely this person is pursuing their PhD in biology/immunology or related field. It could also be a post-doc, existing researcher, or sufficiently motivated undergrad (with existing murine testing experience). Thank you in advance
Many undergrads are looking for summer internships in their field, especially. the undergrads who are pre-med. Grad students are often broke, and I'll bet you could find one who'd jump at the chance. I suggest trying to access these groups by contacting department heads of Bio Dept (or wharever dept. is the best fit for what you are researching) and letting them know you are hunting. To keep task manageable and improve chance of getting a good employee, start with the 5 or 10 most prestigious universities in that 3-state area. Yale for instance.
Question for people who dislike abstract art in public spaces, put up at public expense: what would you like to see instead?
My understanding of neo-classicist approaches to public art basically amounts to "fountains + lifelike statues", which would get pretty dull if we did it in every city, in every plaza.
If you want something interesting, I'll share the tale of Balticon 60, which occurred just last weekend. (Balticon is the Baltimore Science Fiction Society's yearly SF convention.) Due to some inclement weather and some... managerial shifting happening around the ownership of the Renaissance Hotel in the Inner Harbor, the seventh-floor patio flooded and water found its way into the roofs of floors 5 and 6, which happen to be the main convention space. We of the con staff got up on Friday morning to find alarming puddles of water in multiple places, and notified the hotel at once. The hotel staff couldn't properly drain the large puddle on the 7th floor patio without spending more money than they were authorized (and also probably shutting down the con, which wasn't happening), so in the meantime, they break out the large wastebaskets and park them under the drips. Fortunately, they were all drips. Unfortunately, they were in several very noticeable and inconvenient spots (including CENTER STAGE IN THE BALLROOM - eternal kudos to my friend for improvi-planning several major events around it).
One was in one of the main promenades with thousands of feet of traffic, so the hotel staff quickly arranged for velvet ropes around it to draw the eye to this symbol of the hotel management's shame and instability. Someone on Balticon's staff responded by taping a photo of Lady Cassandra to the side of the wastebasket, complete with the caption "Moisturize me!", and another sign on the velvet ropes:
>> Autographs 10$ // Photos 20$ <<
So, honestly, that's the kind of art I'd appreciate in the public square. Regular people poking some fun at the environment. The catch is that it has to be actually funny, of course, which sets up considerable incentive problems, but occasionally, it does work.
Trees, plants, shrubbery that isn't just distinguished by "minimal care needed" and gets cared for. Then go hide some art in it, of all types, make people find it by accident.
Nah, I like small pieces of random art hidden in “the garden”. If you ever have a layover in or visit Frankfurt/Germany, I’ll show you a nice unpretentious example. The focus is the greenery though, and that’s how it ought to be in my mind.
...you know, I'm suddenly remembering the grocery store in Haifa had a kid's dinosaur out front, but it was memorable because it was covered in trigonometry equations. So, like... do that. Educational Artwork. That the kids can ride.
We used to do it in every city in every plaza (at least in the Western world) and it worked out fine, but I guess people didn't travel as much back then. Nowadays we put random pieces of metal in every plaza and that gets boring too.
I'm sure I've seen a lot of random pieces of public sculpture and few have stuck with me; one that did was the Ehekarussell in Nuremberg, a weird-and-wonderful sculpture I'd never heard of until I stumbled across it. I was surprised to find out it was only 40 years old. A picture doesn't do it justice, here's a video showing the details https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7hjfr2oZb8
It's certainly not the most beautiful sculpture in the world but it's memorable, you could walk past it every day for a year and always notice something new, you could spend hours trying to puzzle out the meaning of everything (it's supposed to be about marriage, which makes me wonder what the sculptor's wife was like...)
Whatever people who live there actually want, they've got far more stake in the matter than random tourists. Public architecture should be *pleasant*, first and foremost - if you want interesting, go to a museum. What would I personally vote for? Probably monumental statues, Prometheus and Lincoln and whatnot.
There's nothing objectively wrong with abstract art, to be clear: it's just not to my taste. If my tastes are weird, so be it, sucks to be me. The problem arises when there's no mechanism to link popular tastes to public art.
This is very well expressed, and matches my own opinions. It's frustrating to see public money spent but with no effective method of consultation regarding what it is spent on.
Too much modern public art entirely skips the 'pleasant' aspect - and I have had very vigorous pushback from the cognoscenti that it should ever be so.
Apparently the prevailing view is that public art should be 'challenging' - ie ugly.
Ideas for decoration in parks and similar, off the top of my head:
Playful things you can interact with. Wishing wells. Little transparent bridges over ponds. Vaguely treelike structures that flex in many areas, and are covered with little windmills that spin, and that catch air and move the main parts around some. Made so that people can spin the windmills themselves and get some motion.
Especially attractive slides, big enough for adults too. Maybe shiny and silvery and spiral. Or with a covered part that's a tube, with cutouts of leaf shapes in the upper part.of the tube, so you slide through leaf shadows.
Whimsical topiary.
Especially appealing mandalas on the ground here and there. Maybe multiple scattered ones of different sizes.
Almost anything with moving water. Waterfalls, water that shoots up, spiralling drains. Water path for the barefoot: You walk on a curving path of 1" deep moving water. It has a rough bottom so is not slippery. Nice on hot days.
Bits of poetry in the pavement or on walls, poetry of a kind most can relate to, poems with rhyme and meter. A bit of Robert Frost? Another, lighter-hearted poet?
Weather-themed benches: One painted and shaped to look like storm clouds, one like dappled sun, one like ligteing, one like pelting rain, one like thickly falling snow.
Lights in the trees that come on at dusk. Need not be as intricate and dense as those used in Central Park during Xmas season. Could be fruit, for instnace. One tree lights up with a dozen big red apple-looking lights, another with golden pears, another with a scattermg of big lavendar flowers.
Bird baths and bird feeders, placed so that public cannot reach them, but has a good view. Maybe a nest high up that's likely to attract some largish species that's especially fun to watch.
All these are celebrations of nature, which seem more appropriate to me foran outdoor public space than statues of fat old blokes anyhow. If the city feels there must be a memorial to the the young stud on horseback who led the bloody defeat of whoever owned the land previously, or the fat old bloke who ruled it once it was established, put them in front of the fucking courthouse or something. Or even the Dept. of Motor Vehicles.
I didn't know what they are. Did a google image and found a zillion prefab ones, little round dishes filled with ugly plastic cartoon creatures and + some plant stalks stuck in the sand. These I thought were ugly as fuck, like everything else at Toys R Us. But maybe you are talking about lovely homemade Victorian ones. Or an entire area of a garden decorated with artificial fairies in the bushes. The first -- the hypothetical lovely Victorian ones -- sound great to me, as do most lovely Victorian things. Decorating a whole part of a park with fairy stuff for kids -- eh, I'd be a bit annoyed by it myself, seems kinda cutesy, but would certainly bring my kids there. When I was 4 or so my family took a trip to a place by the sea where we rode in a glass-bottom boat. I saw what I was sure was a real mermaid sitting on a rock, and was thrilled to my toes. They're real! They're real! I'm sure that was good for me.
Yikes! I should have realized they might be commercialized. Practically every exposure I've had to them have been clearly homebrewed, typically out of local materials, but also often showing a high degree of craftmanship. In one case, it was a competition, and the exhibits were along a walking path in a local wooded park.
I get the premise as: "imagine fairies exist, and that they built shelters out of materials found in these woods, possibly including discarded bits of human activity like bottle caps or lost toys. Being fairies, they don't have an adult human's grasp of the meaning of these things; they just want a place to keep dry and warm, and that looks good by their sylvan standards. Create the homestead they might have built". (I didn't think Victorian; I thought more medieval folk tales.)
It's a fun conceit, especially suited to the childlike mind. And I think it fits the OP's premise: art we might like to see in the public square.
I'm aware of that facet (changelings, etc.). Fairy gardens are intended to convey more whimsy; they're often set up as projects for young children. So no kidnapping, no witches, no wolves eating. No grossly malicious lies, but probably some mild deception, "things are not what they seem", dream states and the like.
Statues don't necessarily have to commemorate eminent human killers and smug entrepreneurs. I should love to suddenly come across larger than life-size bronze statues in the traditional grandiose style depicting fictional characters, preferably animal - for instance, Toad of Toad Hall, or perhaps Rocinante. Some humans and humanoids of that ilk would also make for good statuary, among them Cyrano and Grendel's Mother.
I don't know where you live, but in Central Park in New York City there's a wonderful grouping of statues of characters from Alice in Wonderland. It's quite lovely.
Thanks for that! I didn't know about them, but just found some photos online. Good fun, and it's nice that kids are apparently free to scramble over the artwork.
Very nice! An apartment complex in my old neighborhood had several of these. My family spent a fun afternoon doing an art-based scavenger hunt for them all, organized by a local tourism company.
They don't have to be statues of people. Have a statue of a giant banana slug for all I care. It would be less objectionable than pieces of steel welded together at seemingly arbitrary places, which seems to be a popular instantiation of modern art.
Pieces of steel welded together at seemingly arbitrary places is a rather naive understanding of what constitutes contemporary (not modern, which is different) sculpture. No such examples here: https://themindcircle.com/fascinating-public-sculptures/
That looks like a pretty normal sculpture to me? If you asked me if I wanted that or a giant banana slug, I'd probably lean towards the abstract metal tree.
None of those seem to be put together arbitrarily. As noted in the description, the main piece is meant "to feel as though it was rising up from the earth, and could just keep going," and it does in fact evoke that feeling.
That is not to say that it is necessarily great art. Some might think so, others not. But people here have a tendency to deride (your word) art that they personally dislike, rather than either acknowledging that that dislike might be a matter of taste, or at least criticizing the art on its own terms. One could argue, for example, that "feeling as though it was rising up from the earth, and could just keep going" is not artistically valuable, or that it is, put that this particular work well short of achieving that. But simply claiming that it was put together randomly is the intellectual equivalent of an argument from personal incredulity.
Why is the feeling of something rising up from the earth interesting in any way? Why would anybody ever seek that out?
High entropy art like that, where there is nothing specific (you could alter it in many ways and no one would notice or care), no human connection, no connection to anything grander like history or mythology, and no great skill or amount of work involved, cannot produce awe. It can't produce a feeling of joy, or excitement, or sadness, or regret, or pride, or anger, or triumph, or any interesting feelings at all. It's the most bland, safe, inoffensive, cowardly art you could possibly create.
Before you tell me that it obviously invoked anger in me, yes. But I don't think the creator's intention was to piss people off by wasting space that could have gone to something good like low entropy art or a public restroom. And even then, most of the anger I'm expressing here is incredulity that someone would actually defend this insipid nonsense.
>It can't produce a feeling of joy, or excitement, or sadness, or regret, or pride, or anger, or triumph, or any interesting feelings at all.
A little hard to say that without seeing it in person. See, eg, the Vietnam Memorial in DC. And why cant something that "feel[s] as though it was rising up from the earth, and could just keep going" produce a feeling of hope, or endless possibility, or the like?
More importantly, the issue is not this particular sculpture, but rather abstract sculpture in general. Because some people here would say that this is a slatted chair: https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/5207355805630297/
>incredulity that someone would actually defend this insipid nonsense.
I haven't once defended it. I have criticized the unthinking dismissal of it.
And note that in the very comment you are responding to, I said, "One could argue, for example, that "feeling as though it was rising up from the earth, and could just keep going" is not artistically valuable," yet you somehow think you are refuting me when you say that it isn't artistically valuable?
And, contrast our conversation (minus your last sentence) which is a discussion of what emotions art in general and this piece in particular evokes or should evoke, with the other poster, whose only "argument" is that the elements of the sculpture could be rearranged into a chair. Or OP, whose only argument is that the parts were arbitrarily assembled, which is obviously not true.
I do not think it does. It looks like someone failed spectacularly to build a slatted chair. You could take all that metal and just build a proper bench.
I believe if you asked most people to vote, they would vote for something easier to enjoy than the kind of piece you give as an example, whether such pieces are done randomly or are the product of great depth of processing on the artist's part. Most people like recognizable representations of people, trees, buildings, the world, and respond positively so long as the overall tone of what is represented is positive. I think art in public places should be stuff that the average person finds pleasant, appealing, amusing and interesting, even if from the point of view of serious modern artists what they like is cliche garbage. Public places are for the public. If you want to make it "classier," use older art that is relatable, such as Seurat's pointillist paintings of people in the park.
1. I am not sure how this is relevant to what I said, because I did not argue one way or the other re whether those works should be displayed in public.
2. That being said, here is an alternative argument: Since tastes vary, public art should vary, so that almost everyone gets some works that they like.
>respond positively so long as the overall tone of what is represented is positive.
I don't know why the overall tone must be positive. The Vietnam War Memorial in DC is anything but positive, but it is emotionally powerful. Ditto much post-WWI western art, Guernica, and many classic works.
The two David Černý pieces in there had me look him up; I hadn't realized he was the pink tank guy. Which surfaces my preference for an underrepresented public art category: decommissioned military vehicles as a public canvas for graffiti.
You pretend this shit doesn't exist by giving a few rare counterexamples. Well then, let me give you some countercounterexamples from a small village close to the university I studied at. Here, have some art: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skulpturenweg_Trippstadt-Stelzenberg
In your view, should there not be public plazas at all or should their centers remain empty/rented out?
I read an urban planning op-ed once asserting that if protestors don't have a big plaza to congregate in, they're more likely to occupy parks or block traffic instead.
No particular opinion about plazas per se, but as I find the field of urban planning generally suspect (for "Seeing Like a State" reasons) their advocacy is to me evidence against plazas.
I don't think I would ever get bored of fountains in public spaces. Top them with a neoclassical statue, with abstract art, I don't care; just give me water features everywhere I look
I want to acknowledge that Scott's post, https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ , has a valuable insight, which is that everything has to optimize for survival, and that competition involves trading off other things we might find really valuable.
But it's all mixed up with a bunch of raving about gods and nonsense. The post literally invents/defines a god, and then spends pages raving about it. This stuff: "Moloch, whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch, whose blood is running money!" This is cult behavior. Not even cult-of-personality behavior. This is actual Cthulhu-cultist behavior. Rational people communicate in ways that express real ideas.
I do think it might be worth arguing: personifying abstract hostile forces is probably not going to interact well with human psychology. Humans have lots of skills related to interacting with person-like hostile forces. We use tactics like "try to intimidate it" and "try to bargain with it" and "try to make sure it doesn't know what we're doing so it can't make plans in response." None of these tactics are useful against entities that aren't actually people.
The Moloch stuff felt culty when I first read it, but it felt worse at an NYC Secular Solstice event a few years ago, where -- I swear this actually happened -- a guy dressed up in a black hooded robe, and turned out all the lights, and stood at the podium reciting the Moloch poem. It was the cultiest thing I ever experienced. I assume he was doing it ironically, or something, but I had been hoping to have a "sincerely singing about our hopeful belief for the future" experience and instead I had an "I appear to have stumbled into a literal cult" experience.
This comment was inspired by getting a notification from Substack recently that Scott had done a post, and it was just several hundred words of Moloch-raving. That was the whole post. And I feel bad commenting on Scott's personal whatever to tell him I think he's wrong. But I just -- I really wanted to say that I'm not into this.
I share your sentiment. The original Moloch post is IMO the worst of Scott's popular essays: a single paragraph's worth of useful insight, padded with thousands of words of pretentious waffle. The pseudo-religious framing just further muddies the waters.
I'm honestly failing to model your negative reaction. Let's set aside Scott's recent note as the joke it is (there's no accounting for sense of humor but I'm pretty consistently pleased by Scott's).
I thought the original essay was a great piece of writing. I never got the sense that a literal sentient being was implied.
As far as I can tell, in the development of human language (historically, and in individuals), every abstraction starts off as a metaphorical generalization of something concrete. In my previous life as an academic mathematician, we personified things all the time. "This series wants to converge but is blocked by..." or "This problem is a devilish opponent". These are "figures of speech", but part of their value is in the intellectual hook into anthropomorphism, which can be net-positive in reasonable doses.
Meditations on Moloch is a much deeper, more extended version of this. As you say, there are potential errors coming from "personifying abstract hostile forces", but there can be countervailing advantages, especially if we don't take it literally. For one thing, even bundling a phenomenon under one label can help people think about it. For another things, identifying a force as hostile seems pretty anthropomorphic to me. Finally, MoM does emphasize that this is one of those blind idiot gods that can't be reasoned with.
I also fail to see the problem with a guy in a black robe turning out the lights and doing a dramatic recitation. It's hard for me to see concretely what the harm is supposed to be, and I think maybe I just have very different vibes about it. Sure, it has some of the tropes of religion, and maybe it was really weird (I wasn't there), but this word "culty" seems to have a potency and specificity for you that it lacks for me.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "culty" in this context, and what parts of the cultiness are specifically concerning vs bad vibes?
I think there are lots of situations where "oh, don't worry, we're obviously not being literal" isn't a great excuse.
For example, if you attended a gathering and they were unexpectedly LARPing as literal Nazis, but you knew these people and you knew there was absolutely no way they were actual Nazis, so they _must_ be doing it ironically, but still they seemed to be really getting into the pretense -- you'd still be a little bit uncomfortable, I think.
I also would add that I'm not a fan of apocalyptica, or nonsense, just in general, so it's disconcerting to hit a big chunk of it in a media stream I was expecting to enjoy.
I don't see much of a sinister referent here that we have to be careful of.
I'm still not sure what you mean by culty, and I'm not sure what you mean by apocalyptica (one of this blog's main activities is to raise the alarm about the literal end of humankind, so I assume it's more a question of tone for you).
As for nonsense, it's also an ambiguous word. For example, here's a list of things that have been identified as the threshold for nonsense, ordered from most nonsensical to least according to my opinion:
- "mKuVdQw Gxczj
- "Fare if, is ghost the."
- "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." (from Chomsky)
- Alice in Wonderland
- UNSONG, Scott's novel of Kabbalistic puns
- What the Tortoise Said to Achilles (also by Lewis Carroll)
- God
- "The evening star is the morning star." (Frege's puzzle)
- All private language (lol Wittgenstein)
Seriously though, I'd guess something like 15% of the posts on this blog are nonsense in one of the senses above. It seems utterly harmless to me, and even complementary to Scott's more explicitly rationalist writings. They're all in service of Ṛta.
I may have a very different experience of cults than you. The only cults I've personally been worried about have been political movements. The presence of supernatural tropes is for me mostly orthogonal to the degree of cultiness. I care less about how literal their language is, or how materialist their beliefs system, than about how they respect freedom of conscience.
I think it matters a lot here that Meditations on Moloch is, even if you take it 100% seriously, an anti-Moloch tract, not a paean to Moloch.
To extend your Nazi analogy, if people did an Indiana Jones-themed LARP and it involved the villain team LARPing Nazis because that's famously who Indiana Jones' enemies are, that would not really trigger the alarm bells for me that you're implying it should.
Are you similarly turned off by The Goddess of Everything Else?
I don't know, I see it more as a bunch of metaphors and jokes. The concept of a solstice event does feel slightly culty to me, though. I realize it objectively makes more sense than new year's and Christmas, but treating any date as actually significant feels a little too metaphysical for my taste, so I prefer to just enjoy the arbitrary stupidity of traditional holidays.
>The concept of a solstice event does feel slightly culty to me,
It's not so culty if you're an agrarian society and you don't have any clocks. It's the culmination of a lot of careful observation, and it is significant to your way of living to know when things are going to start changing again. You're being a little hard on it. I'll grant you Christmas and other sort of arbitrary days, but Christmas is near a solstice for a reason.
Right, in many ancient cultures it wouldn't have been weird at all to celebrate the solstice. The cultiness factor mainly comes from celebrating a holiday that your own society by and large doesn't recognize and that you didn't grow up celebrating. It indicates that you reject its worldview and its values, that you don't respect your own people and your own ancestors. At the more objective level it indicates that you might be spending less time with your own immediate family and community, and more with like-minded strangers, often the same type of people who are open to other unconventional ideas, like experimental drug use and polyamory.
Not that that's an entirely bad thing. There's plenty in our society to object to. Actually, there's plenty in my immediate family to object to. I just prefer to raise my objections from inside the tent, if you see what I'm saying, so solstice events are the type of thing I generally avoid.
I am also not a fan on the Moloch essay. I wouldn't go so far as to call it "culty", but the high concept of the essay's style is not to my taste. I acknowledge that I appear to be in the minority here.
Both, but more the style than the content, and I think my main gripe about the content (that I think it over-emphasizes negative competitive pressures relative to positive ones that often keep "Moloch" in check) is partially downstream of the my style complaint.
This is a "version" of the Ginsberg poem where Scott has converted the whole thing into AI slop prose. Note how all the metaphors make no sense. "Moloch whose belly is as if the earth swallows a shout!" what the hell is this supposed to mean? Many of the lines are references to specific cases of AI prose ("whose walk makes benches become men" is from The Serpent in the Grove, a short story that recently won the Commonwealth Prize despite being obvious AI slop). And then in case you missed it, the last line is the most recognizably stereotypical-AI-prose move of all time: "Moloch who isn't a retreat -- it's a revolution!"
Scott is making a literary joke here to make fun of how bad AI prose is, using the Ginsberg poem as a vehicle for doing so.
> Scott is making a literary joke here to make fun of how bad AI prose is, using the Gisberg poem as a vehicle for doing so.
"Wow look at how bad this thing is at prose" and "I bet this thing will turn into a superintelligence very soon" are of course technically consistent positions to hold (because progress is non-linear) but in this sense it could have been said (and in fact was said) at any point in the last 60 years that surely, surely, AGI must be just around the corner. Not sure if there is a lesson in this observation.
It is a little interesting that Scott realizes AI is bad at poetry and realizes the fact that people with terrible taste like it doesn't prove anything, but isn't willing to extrapolate anything from that about the nature of AI or the nature of taste in general.
Re: nature of AI, I think it's already priced in. AI capabilities are spiky, everyone who's paying attention knows they're way better at generating code and okay-ish expository prose than they are at generating literature. AI boosters don't deny that, they just point out that "generating code" is the thing that could lead to recursive self-improvement, so no degree of terribleness-at-poetry will save us. They might end up being wrong about this, but there's no obvious contradiction in these beliefs.
I don't think that is it. AIs are famously "trained" as opposed to "coded" and no amount of code writing in any know paradigma can give you what state-of-the art machine learning can. AFAICT this is not controversial.
"Coming up with a better training algorithm" and "writing code" are not similar skills at all.
My read on "AI boosters" is that they usually believe that the current paradigm can be scaled (with minor tweaks) to "get us there" (cf. Scott's recent post).
The self-improvement positive feedback loop imagines AI as a researcher, not 80s style "self modifying code".
"I don't think that is it. AIs are famously "trained" as opposed to "coded" and no amount of code writing in any know paradigma can give you what state-of-the art machine learning can. "
Both. They are both "trained" and "coded." Human programmers are needed to define the data structures that will become the AI model, their relationships to each other and how they interact with the data. Only once this is done is can the training be useful at all. If you want to appreciate how non-trivial of a task this is, check out how much the big AI companies are paying in salaries for people with machine learning expertise.
"'Coming up with a better training algorithm' and 'writing code' are not similar skills at all."
Excuse me, what? Where on Earth are you getting THAT? "Writing code" is an underspecified phrase that can cover a LOT of different programming tasks, but implementing, refining, testing, tweaking, debugging and improving algorithms are certainly all parts of it at times.
One could argue that the primary work of algorithm design is distinct from "writing code," being more mathematics and less programming--but that would be an actual argument, one that would admit a very non-trivial rebuttal. But first, even if we were to just grant it, it doesn't follow at all that the skills required "not similar at all;" I can tell you from first-hand experience there's quite a lot of overlap. And second, the primary work of algorithm design is far from all the work that's needed to make an algorithm work well in practice; quite a lot of the remainder involves writing actual code, in actual programming languages and (re)running it on physical hardware.
That makes sense, although I was referring more to the "can you tell if this art thumbnail is AI" test, and stuff in that genre. There's a case to be made that AI's advantage in coding is big enough that it will attain recursive self-improvement, but there's also a case to be made that it suffers from the same impairment it does in creative fields, and will therefore end up stuck around the level where it can amaze an amateur but not consistently outperform a true expert.
I don't think either case is obviously correct at this point in time.
Thanks for explaining. Yes, I'm aware that there's a poem and that the original post was quoting from it; no, I hadn't realized that the reason the note was so incoherent was that it was an AI-slop retheming of the original.
I guess I don't see the humor in being deliberately apocalyptic and incoherent.
To go a little deeper into what Scott's doing here:
- One of the most recognizable features of LLM writing when it's trying to be "literary" is using emotionally punchy phrases, metaphors, and comparisons that look really evocative at first glance, but don't hold up to even the slightest scrutiny.
- In that post, Nostalgebraist borrows a phrase to describe this tendency toward overuse of emotionally punchy phrases: "eyeball kick".
- That phrase is, specifically, a quote from Ginsberg. And part 2 of Howl, with its non-stop flow of short, punchy phrases ("spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks!") is, like, the ultimate example of Ginsberg using this technique.
- But when Ginsberg does it, you can tell he's aiming at something. All of his eyeball kicks are kicking the same eyeball; he's critiquing something specific (capitalism as an impersonal engine of destruction). When LLMs do it, they mimic the form but forget to actually say something coherent.
- There's been a recent spate of literary prizes being awarded to works that, on further examination, are clearly just LLMs doing exactly that kind of punchy-but-incoherent litfic-slop. Here, Scott quotes from two of them, The Serpent in the Grove and The Bastion's Shadow, both of which recently won Commonwealth Prizes despite being extremely obvious AI slop.
- So this poem is Scott critiquing AI slop (and the literary establishment's gullibility in falling for AI slop), by combining a bunch of quotes from AI slop stories that recently won literary prizes into a pastiche of Ginsberg's Howl, the all-time O.G. of O.G. eyeball kickers, the greatest exemplar of the exact technique that the LLMs are badly and soullessly mimicking.
The "apocalyptic" part is just a consequence of the fact that he's using Howl as his vehicle for doing this; the original is apocalyptic, so the pastiche is as well. The "incoherent" part is central to the critique being made by the poem; the incoherence of AI attempts to use this technique is the whole thing Scott is making fun of, so the critique wouldn't work without it.
*edit* Having written this, I now notice that it reads a bit like LLM writing, lol. I guess it's hard to pedantically explain a joke without falling into that mode, and I am a Certified Bullet Point Enjoyer. Fuck critics, bullet points are good actually, I don't write like Claude Claude writes like me, etc.
> *edit* Having written this, I now notice that it reads a bit like LLM writing, lol
FWIW I think you wrote this well! My only disagreement is that I suspect the apocalyptic tone is not just a coincidence, but part of the point, given that Scott sees AI in (potentially) apocalyptic terms and, I presume, as a likely agent/manifestation of Moloch. Anyway, I love that this is a place where misunderstanding a joke is rewarded with this kind of thoughtful clarification rather than a million low-effort snide comments.
I admit I would miss the joke, too. (That doesn't mean it's a bad one. Just too much insider joke.) But I also almost missed Scott's note, so I guess it cancels out.
The most pernicious thing about those fragments of meaning is that most of them could make sense in context.
The earth swallowing a shout would fit an activist's funeral. Grady from Practical Engineering could probably wax lyrical about people whose doing is a treacherous bridge. Old WW2 era tank traps could forseeably look like rotten teeth leaning into a road, as could a dark lord's tower; the latter's fingers might even delve goblins from the earth.
It's like reading a poet's notes after they've been torn apart and glued back together by a chimp.
Yeah, that's what I mean. It has jammed two evocative phrases together. Bellies swallowing; the earth swallowing a shout; each makes sense in isolation, but the combination is stupid, and it's even worse when you add Moloch onto the front and surround it with other lines.
Maybe taste has something to do with how likely a work is to disappoint you when you look more closely.
Yes, I agree. When you read it, it seems like a mangling of two metaphorical statements that don't support each other in any real way. I suppose taste really boils down to what we would call discernment.
You are, I hope, aware that the poem is "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg and was written decades before Scott was even born. Its quotation in the essay you referenced was an evocative literary device, not indicative of an actual belief in Moloch.
Brad DeLong just published an interesting article on inherited differences: "Big Trouble in Little Human Genetic Diffence-Worshipper Land." I think you can tell what side of the issue he's on.
Money quote: "Now come Turkheimer and Gusev to summarize the state of play. The science, finally, has finally gotten good enough not to reveal the genetic basis of social inequality, but to show that most of the apparently exciting genetic “signals” for complex social traits all but vanish once you control confounding properly."
No, I think DeLong just wants to call people he doesn't like racist.
You can read Scott's summary of the same research here (1) and the Highlights from the comments here (2), including a long back and forth with Gusev himself. Gusev's example of peanut allergies is particularly instructive. I don't think DeLong comes off terribly well in the comparison.
The most interesting thing is that there's a subtle rephrasing of old genetic arguments here. To quote DeLong:
"Two hundred years of methodological ingenuity, and we are back where Grandpa Darwin would have started: genes and environment both matter in some hard‑to‑untangle way; but attempts to carve out a large, causal, manipulable “main effect” of genes on complex social outcomes keep reducing, on closer inspection, to approximately zero."
"You can still tell a story in which genes matter at the individual level—no one denies that people differ in innate talents, and that those differences have some genetic underpinnings. But the leap from “genes matter somewhat” to “social inequalities are mostly genetic” now runs into two hard walls:"
I don't think these were common sense stories that everyone would have accepted when it came to social outcomes fifteen years ago. Freddie DeBoer has an entire book on how schools operate on "blank slate" logic where all educational outcomes are environmentally determined. The initial argument of the genetic determinists was basically: "educational outcomes/lifetime income/etc are caused by a combination of schooling and an innate IQ factor we call g". They were specifically arguing against the idea that all outcomes were a matter of schooling/environment/etc. Now the goal posts are being shifted to "right-thinking people always believed that life outcomes were a complex mix of education and genetics, they never argued that life outcomes were entirely socially driven, and evil-bad racist people have always argued and only argued that life outcomes are entirely determined by genetics." Which is, like, a big change.
I dunno, my takeaway from this is that Brad DeLong is perfectly willing to change his mind as long as he gets to call his outgroup racist which, okay, cool, I guess we're gonna keep inflating that taboo into nothingness but it's kinda progress.
So what I hear you saying is that this passage you quote: "genes and environment both matter in some hard‑to‑untangle way; but attempts to carve out a large, causal, manipulable “main effect” of genes on complex social outcomes keep reducing, on closer inspection, to approximately zero."
"You can still tell a story in which genes matter at the individual level—no one denies that people differ in innate talents, and that those differences have some genetic underpinnings. But the leap from “genes matter somewhat” to “social inequalities are mostly genetic” now runs into two hard walls:"
Is basically correct, you don't disagree with it. Is this correct?
No, I disagree with it. I think both statements are likely to be proven incorrect as more information and research is done. I also think they're misleading, probably intentionally, because I think he's conflating "direct" with "no environmental factor whatsoever". I'm open to correction but, using Gusev's peanut allergy example, I think it's true that someone genetically born with a peanut allergy (or high peanut sensitivity, whatever) who was raised in an environment with no peanuts and was never exposed to a peanuts will never medically express a peanut allergy. I think DeLong is calling that "direct genetic effect" and that's...incredibly misleading. If we wanted to study a child's mathematical aptitude, say in geometry, I think a lot of that is genetic and yet I can't imagine any part of a child's ability with geometry that wouldn't be influenced by his/her environment of, like, taking a geometry class. That doesn't make the genes irrelevant, certainly not at like 1% or 0.1% of outcomes like DeLong is stating here.
Having said that, DeLong's current position is far more correct than the one I believe he held 15 years ago (to be fair to Amicus, I don't know, I believe) and that a lot of people in education still believe, which is that a child's abilities in geometry are entirely or overwhelmingly determined by education/environment, rather than genetics. Like, I don't think DeLong is right, I think he's less wrong than he was previously or other people currently are.
That's not how I interpret DeLong's statement. I think he is making a distinction between two types of effect: a "Main Effect," which in statistics describes an amount of variance explained in the DV by an IV by itself (in this case genes on behavior), as opposed to a "Hard to untangle way," which can only mean an interaction. What he's arguing against is any attempt to explain a child's academic performance entirely or primarily using genetic effects alone.
In statistics, a general rule is that you cannot interpret a main effect in the presence of a significant interaction. This means that neither genetic nor environmental effects can be interpreted in isolation.
If I'm right then that implies that statement like "Academic performance is X percent genetic and Y percent environmental" are invalid (this regardless of what X or Y are, or which one is greater).
In most fields, we can never entirely disentangle an effect with significant interactions and that's fine. In DeLong's own field of economics we can't disentangle even very straightforward and obvious effects like "if you increase the money supply, inflation will go up" from their environmental circumstances. And DeLong knows this because he argued, very specifically and correctly, in the 2008 recession that massive increases to the money supply, quantitative easing, wouldn't raise inflation because interest rates were at 0, or the zero-lower bound. Yet if I argued that we should ignore the relationship between increasing the money supply and inflation because of environmental interactions, he'd rightly ignore me. He doesn't hold this as a general rule, in his own field or others, but he wants to hold this here because it serves his political purposes and that's bad.
And I want to note I'm talking specifically about DeLong here, not Gusev or Turkheimer's underlying writing. I'm not saying I agree with Gusev or Turkheimer or not, I think that debate requires specialized knowledge I don't have and very few people do. Not like, most people don't know statistics, I mean I've read Gusev's code, it's good, but I'm not qualified to judge why he made the modeling decisions he did because it's incredibly specialized. That's an ongoing debate that I'm interested to see the results of. DeLong isn't doing that, he's making bad arguments to own his outgroup and that's bad.
I'm currently reading the article. I have some background in statistics, so I'll let you know what I think. Meanwhile...
Let's try a thought experiment. Consider the following statement: "the money supply and interest rates both matter in some hard‑to‑untangle way; but attempts to carve out a large, causal, manipulable “main effect” of the money supply on complex economic outcomes keep reducing, on closer inspection, to approximately zero... But the leap from “the money supply matters somewhat” to “inflation is mostly the money supply” now runs into two hard walls:" Defensible, or no?
> Freddie DeBoer has an entire book on how schools operate on "blank slate" logic where all educational outcomes are environmentally determined.... I dunno, my takeaway from this is that Brad DeLong is perfectly willing to change his mind as long as he gets to call his outgroup racist
"Education", as an academic community, is almost uniquely pathological, and DeLong is not its native son. There's a lot he can legitimately be criticized for, he is quick to judgement and contempt, and slow to question his assumptions, and I don't care for his general affect either, but this sort of stuff just smells of generic "everyone lib-coded is the same"-bashing. Trying to equate him and the wokies makes about as much sense as equating Scott and Moldbug.
I don't know how much I disagree with you on this, so let me clarify.
I think DeBoer and DeLong are at opposite ends of a spectrum of belief about what drives educational outcomes, I think DeBoer is far more correct than DeLong, and I don't want to lump them into a pile. I don't want to conflate them and if I did, that's a consequence of my bad writing. My bad.
If the argument is that DeLong is not a bad actor, at least in this case or associated cases, then we probably do have a disagreement. But this is not "all lefty-wokies bad", this is "this specific guy who I'm vaguely familiar with pattern matches to bad lefty-wokie stuff that I dislike."
Belittling people with contrary views on a complex topic well outside his area of expertise is a good sign of humility and objectivity, so I put great stock in it. In all seriousness, I get that there are some pretty rotten people out there that cotton to various flavors of genetic determinism as a means of justifying whatever views they already hold about Group A or Group B, but DeLong seems to be engaged in his own game of confirmation bias.
I am going to ask the same question of you that I asked of WooleyAI: This passage ""genes and environment both matter in some hard‑to‑untangle way; but attempts to carve out a large, causal, manipulable “main effect” of genes on complex social outcomes keep reducing, on closer inspection, to approximately zero." Is basically correct?
I was looking for recent news about lumina probiotic, the company that promised to end cavities by replacing your dental microbes, and noticed their website disapeared and their domain name is up for take. What means?
Did something happen with NimH rechargeable batteries and alkalines? I’m finding most consumer products I try now don’t work with NimH. I thought NimH was supposed to be a nearly 1:1 replacement for alkalines.
What new consumer products are you buying that take primary cells? Almost everything I see marketed these days has internal lithium cells. The only things I've bought in the last few years which accept AA batteries are a couple of camera flash units, which I'm thankful to report work very well with my NiMH cells.
That's interesting. I'm a fan of replaceable secondary cells because it means you aren't limited by the internal battery life, you can just swap in some fresh cells, which was important to me for my flashes. It seems less obviously important for a blood pressure monitor though, but I'm not really familiar with the main use cases for those. I know that my dad kept one in his bedside table for a bit which he used occasionally, but I suppose there are clinical contexts where you want to be able to measure blood pressure on the go, and keep measuring blood pressure all day without needing to plug in?
Could it be something as banal as "this device was approved 25 years ago with 4xAA and it does not make sense to run a new approval process for such a banal change"?
IDK. Medicine in general is a very conservative field.
Oh ok, fine. I used to find that NiMH barely worked, or worked for a very short time, with some low end electronics, whereas good quality stuff was designed to cope with the lower voltage and would actually be capable of using the cells. I'm speculating but perhaps a lot of the more expensive end of the market has moved to lithium cells and a lot of what's left taking AA cells is the cheapo stuff that was never very good with NiMH anyway? In the case of my flashes I specifically went looking for something with replaceable cells from a reputable brand, so it does make sense that they'd be designed to work with NiMH.
It makes sense that they would have done. This is my first lighting kit so I don't know how it was in the old days, but with how expensive they used to be, combined with the fact that they're full of voltage conversion circuitry anyway to boost the voltage up to the tube, I suspect anybody who had tried to make one that only worked with alkalines would probably have found their customers quite dissatisfied. Low end compact digital cameras were the things that didn't like secondary cells when I was a kid, IIRC.
NiMH have slightly lower voltage than "alkalines", NiMH around 1,25V nominal, alkalines 1,5V nominal.
My best guess is that modern consumer products based on standardized integrated circuits might be optimized to work on 3V (two alkaline cells in series) without the tolerance to deal with the approximate 2,5V that a pair of NiMH would provide. Why 3V? Standardization of integrated circuits and compatibility with the now much more prevalent lithium cells that provide 3V and up, I guess?
I don't think this is it, or at least not the whole story. The standard is 3.3v, not 3.0v, so two alkalines without a regulator stepping up the voltage would already be undervolting the circuit. I think stuff like remotes that take 2 AAAs either use lower voltage circuits (2.5v or 1.8v, I think), or something like a buck-boost converter to regulate the voltage, or both.
Also, the nominal voltages are only for fully charged cells. Alkalines decline pretty fast from 1.5v and plateau around 1.3v for most of their charge lives, while NiMHs have flatter curves until they're mostly drained, which is why they could get away with lower nominal voltages.
That said, I think I remember hearing something about alkalines maintaining voltage better under high loads. If that's the case, that seems more likely to be the core issue.
Yesterday I learned about Kanamara Matsuri, penis festival in a part of Japan. No I am not joking. Google image the term. Actually really lifted my spirits. People look friendly and like they're having fun.
I attended this some years ago. Very crowded and hot, small temple ground with lots of stalls selling phallic candy and trinkets. Overall a fun day except for some drunk non-Japanese guy getting mad about something and deliberately smashing his beer bottle on the ground in the crowd, which is the kind of incident that happens often enough to be embarrassing. (Just because they have a sense of humor about it doesn't mean it's not a religious event.)
Theorem: large numbers of average people prefer grey cubes over decoration
Proof:
Assume that Ikea designers are good capitalists. Therefore, they will design things that people want to buy, and the inventory at Ikea stores will reflect public taste. Ikea inventories do not represent a intellectual project by elite designers to comment on Bauhaus or something esoteric like that. As evidence, consider the paintings sold at Ikea: they are never just a red square or other forms of highbrow modern art; Ikea paintings are always easy to interpret and clearly represent something. If Ikea designers were enacting an elite intellectual project, the paintings would be incomprehensible, but they aren't not so it isn't. The same shoppers who want a normal, comprehensible painting of flowers on their wall also want a colorless couch composed entirely of right angles. Apparently, lots of people want buildings and furniture to be greyscale and angular.
I struggle to empathize with the average Ikea shopper, but my best theory is that grey cubes look serious to them. Decorations come accross as kitschy and frivolous. Paintings are tolerable as long as they're framed, at which point the colors and curves have been safely contained in a greyscale rectangle.
In 10,000 years, archeologists will compare an Ikea showroom to Roman houses, with mosaics and frescoes on every surface, and conclude that Rome was the high point of civilization, and that the Plastic Age was dark times indeed.
I have a great deal of IKEA furniture which I find aesthetically pleasant if not transcendantly beautiful, adequate in comfort and workmanship, cheap enough to not worry about its limitations because there's no great loss if I have to replace it, and in no way reminiscent of gray cubes. So I'm not sure where you're going with the "grey cubes" thing.
You're looking at exactly the wrong end of the market, as others have pointed out, Ikea stuff is relentlessly optimised for cheapness.
What you should be looking at is expensive furniture. The expensive furniture bought by rich people for whom price is no object, is that simple or ornate? The answer, of course, is both. With infinite money, some people choose white cubes while others choose neo-Victorian opulence.
Both innate preference and fashion play a role -- back in the 1880s _all_ the rich people had ornate stuff.
Surely preference is degenerate with cost. If it costs 30% more to add decoration to the grey cube furniture, and I'm already spending too much money on my new home's mortgage, property tax, and repairs, I might go for the grey cubes. If most of the other homeowners are not rich, there's not a big market for the 30% more expensive decorated furniture, and so it becomes 2x more expensive instead of just 30% because of economies of scale.
Yes, I quite like a lot of the IKEA furniture styles. It feels like good design. It’s cheap and practical, yet well-built. I feel like a lot of fancier furniture is worse in various ways, until you reach a very different price point.
Furniture, where I live, roughly falls into these categories:
- IKEA (and knockoffs that are invariably worse than the original)
- Wood (as in: the piece of furniture being made out of solid wood is its main property that the owner wants to be impossible to overlook)
- "Designer" (think: the furniture equivalent of fashion in practically every dimension)
- Furniture (no further additions). This is the weird one and the one I am writing about. We culturally treat it as if it were the default (which is a lie, the default in terms of mass is IKEA). In terms of price you will find this between IKEA and "Designer". It is extremely tacky in style and "noisy" to look at if that makes sense. In your words: "[it comes] come accross as kitschy and frivolous."
I thought this might be an interesting datapoint for you coming from someone who actually likes IKEA. I have the reaction to non-IKEA furniture (as described) that you appear to have to IKEA.
A thing that I didn't become aware of until after plenty of IKEA-shopping experiences is that IKEA actually sells plenty of stuff made out of solid wood. The majority of their inventory, and I think the large majority of their sales, is the pressed-fake-wood stuff because it costs less. I have though more than once purchased pieces at IKEA made from solid wood -- basic varieties, generally pine or maple -- which held up fine over some years.
I am aware. The "wood" category above is not that. It is where the fact that it is solid wood is absolutely in your face. IKEA solid wood tends to not do that (to the point that one could plausibly miss that IKEA sells solid wood, as you have mentioned yourself).
The IKEA knockoffs can be incredibly bad. I ordered a bookcase from someone on Amazon and the faux wood had the consistency of compressed wet newspapers. Absolute trash.
I've bought many things at IKEA, and my primary concern was always price. I understand the value of knick knacks in theory, but tend to see them as something I cannot afford and don't really need, rather than some unspeakable Eldritch horror that would drive me insane to look at.
Perhaps Ikea is optimizing for inoffensiveness rather than true preferences? Even if nobody actually likes grey cubes, it seems likely to be the style that the fewest people *hate*.
This and also many people don't have a lot of time, money or mental energy to put into interior design. Inoffensive grey cube is unlikely to clash in style and color with anything else in your room, and when you need to add a new thing you can simply go out and get another generic grey cube anywhere rather than hunt for something that matches a specific color scheme and style.
But why? If IKEA sells something inoffensive that nobody hates, and another company sells ten products to ten groups of people who each like it slightly better than what IKEA sells but the other 90% of people absolutely despise it, who would shop at IKEA? Nobody would like their stuff best.
People who don't care about their furniture aside from its practical use, which seems to be a lot of people.
If you don't care then you're not going to invest the extra mental effort to even look through a catalogue of things you hate to find one you like sligthly more than a featureless gray cube. Even asking yourself "do I like this" takes more than zero effort.
Meanwhile buying gray cubes is frictionless. You need "thing that does X" you know IKEA has those, you go to IKEA and buy it. At no point are you even slightly worried about hating the design and don't even have to think about which design to buy.
"People who don't care about their furniture aside from its practical use, which seems to be a lot of people."
If you modify this description a bit -- add the words "very much" in front of "about their furniture" -- and you've nailed it. That's many millions of households across the developed world including, mine.
We have _some_ interest in having better furniture, e.g. my wife and I have been carrying a slow project to phase out IKEA stuff for a bunch of years now. Getting near that finish line actually, including a key replacement just this past weekend that we're quite pleased with.
But above a certain line which is primarily about functionality, furniture choices are not a _high_ or urgent priority for the tens of millions of us. IKEA stuff is generally above that line, and IKEA makes it easy to shop there, and is priced well, etc. Hence, IKEA's success.
It's more like IKEA sells one to ten things in a category such that they'll make the largest profit in bulk, custom furniture places sell exactly what their clients want but at hugely higher prices with no economy of scale and a far greater time investment from the customer, and everyone else picks somewhere between the two.
The interesting thing about this is that it doesn't require anyone to actually like the furniture at IKEA. It only has to be more acceptable than the alternative. When the marginal cost of adding another product line exceeds the loss from customers walking away due to not liking the existing grey/beige/yellow/green/red/blue/child-friendly-patterned boxes, they add the new line; when it doesn't, they don't.
>Assume that Ikea designers are good capitalists. Therefore, they will design things that people want to buy, and the inventory at Ikea stores will reflect public taste.
This logic would apply to literally any seller of anything, if this logic worked then every store would sell identical things.
Ikea mostly makes *cheap* stuff and sells primarily to college kids and divorced men. They are simplistic and modular to keep costs down.
There are plenty of other stores that sell decorative stuff, and are also successful.
Not really. That logic only applies to bespoke or mass market things. It doesn't apply to niche categories, which, in aggregate, aren't small. But only in aggregate.
So those that specialize in a niche (of a certain size) can grow a business...but with an upper size limit.
There's something going on with smartphones. Companies keep making them too large to fit in a human hand.
It's very easy to find people who complain that they want smaller phones. It's very easy to find people who actually buy smaller phones in preference to giant ones. And yet even when the major companies _do_ start manufacturing hand-sized phones, they quickly stop again.
Whenever I bring this up someone argues that the reason for this phenomenon is that it's cheaper to make phones in one size than it is to make them in two sizes.
I don't find this compelling, because that's true of everything, and yet everything other than smartphones is nevertheless manufactured and sold in a variety of sizes, because it's better to serve some of the market than none of the market. And smartphones are themselves manufactured and sold in "a variety of sizes" if the relevant metric is the number of manufacturing plants required to create the phones. They just aren't sold in "a variety of sizes" that is varied enough to make a difference to usability.
No one has ever attempted to follow up by explaining why this argument applies more to smartphones than it does to every other object in the world, but I'd be interested in theories.
It did get me thinking about something though: as a person working with LLMs on largish software projects, I've recently felt like I am a bit *incentivized* to treat them a bit like a person, in the way I talk to them. I'm talking about little occasional things like choices of language that show an appreciation for its opinions, understanding of ITS current level of understanding, and in one case, having to "share annoyance" at an API we were working with (as a way of showing that I had understood why something bad had happened because of the API rather than because of it, which I had previously thought).
I feel like this is qualitatively different from r/myboyfriendisai, or is arriving at a similar thing from a different angle. I certainly do not go into these software projects expecting this outcome, it feels like it has just happened.
I know one phrase relevant to this, which is Dennett's "intentional stance". In decades of googling I never felt a need to take an intentional stance with respect to google search, but this situation is different. I am willing to argue that taking an intentional stance with respect to coding agents is good practice. And some of the above goes a little beyond that.
My question is, does anyone else feel similarly incentivized to treat LLMs by people, as a result of their work? I'm a moral relativist and don't believe in qualia, so I try to ignore statements relating to either.
There is apparently evidence that being nice produces better results, at least for code. I assume the training data shows people do a better job when treated nice and that preference affects the result.
For me, I feel like Claude code's responses make me feel like I'm collaborating with the AI where as Gemini's responses often feel like I'm talking to the self promoter person on Linkedin so Claude makes me want to be nice more than Gemini.
I agree here that even if I didn’t think LLMs were people (on philosophical grounds such as, e.g., outlined by the Pope) then the way that they work incentives me to treat them as if they are in order to get an answer out of them.
"Here is what this means in practice: I oppose literally almost all AI regulation. I do not think there should be new laws to regulate “algorithmic discrimination” or “algorithmic addiction” or “algorithmic pricing.” I despise the notion of regulating “algorithmic design,” and I especially despise the idea of judges and juries second-guessing the “algorithmic design” choices of others, as seems to be the current direction of U.S. tort law.
I am opposed to efforts by bureaucrats to inject “ethics” or rules against “misinformation” into information technologies. I reject most regulation of AI use by businesses and consumers, believing as I do that existing law—plus the private sector simply “figuring it out”—will resolve most mundane AI governance challenges.
I am also not a “doomer.” I do not believe AI is “going to kill everyone”—or at least, being unable to prove a negative, I am skeptical of “existential risk.” I am opposed to pauses and bans on AI development. I am uncertain about the labor-market impact of AI in the future, but I am skeptical of the notion that AI will destroy human work, and strongly opposed to regulations or taxes designed to remedy the “problem” of AI and labor, since today, there is no problem we can perceive.
In short: I believe that almost every single idea in AI policy is bad, and I disagree with the vast majority of AI policy proposals."
So our friend Dean there probably wouldn't be too happy with Scott's inclinations towards bans or pauses, either. I guess that makes us all on here yet more "myopic preoccupations of the Eurocrat":
"...ghost written by the blob of Western civil society, the same people whose feckless and incoherent preaching we have heard blanketing our media for decades now. ...Like that blob, the encyclical is intellectually flaccid at its core, ...yet another blow to the legitimacy and sanctity of storied Western institutions. As if you needed one more"
Yeah, we sceptics about AI hype are just taking an axe to Western institutions!
*Our Scene: having been gathered into the host of King Leogorn XIII, arriving just in time to turn the tide against the clanker hordes of the Dark Lord Saumron Altman at the Battle of Paloaltannor Fields, our protagonists have followed their leader to a last, desperate attack in front of the Black Gate Xing[1]. A last-minute patch has now completely removed the clankers' weakness to having Jim Kirk style logic paradoxes shouted at them, and our heroes are losing ground fast. The end seems nigh.*
Agrajagagain: "I never thought I'd die fighting side by side with a Catholic."
Deiseach: "What about side-by-side with someone who appreciates the value and creativity of the human spirit (and occasionally takes the piss out of Libertarian techbros)?"
Agrajagagain: "Aye, I could do that."
(In case the intent was unclear, this was just my way of saying that despite our philosophical differences, I greatly appreciate both the substance and snark of the above comment. Well done. )
[1] Formerly the Golden Gate Bridge before it was changed by an unnamed an ultimately unsuccessful rival of the Dark Lord. Something about how "black is more manly" and "Xs are cool."
We may be fighting the long defeat, but we'll go down swinging!
And hoping Saint Aquin will show up in an eucatastrophe to engage the clankers in logical debate that halts them long enough as they go through all the propositions for the Ring to be cast into Mount Doom, or the equivalent data centre meltdown 😁
Eh, Ball's pride is obviously getting the better of him. But opposing A.I. regulation is not a crazy take.
Since the fiasco of Leo's Palm Sunday homily (I also oppose the Iran war, but...) I've been studiously ignoring him the same way I did Francis for the latter half of his pontificate. Is Magnifica Humanitas worth the read?
What surprised me was hearing a "Particular Baptist"—the sort Jean Calvin might think were going too far with the whole Predestination thing—voicing an opinion about it. I thought Baptists have been ignoring the pope for 500 years or so.
"The AI should make me a God-Emperor; my wishes limited only by the laws of physics. Whether I decide to enslave the muggles or exterminate them, that is no bureaucrat's business. Worrying about death and slavery is the slippery slope that ends with communism."
The author of the tweet seems to be shocked that the Pope is Catholic. He is American, he was supposed to be above that! Why doesn't he cheer for the Silicon Valley CEOs?
Here is my reading of the third chapter:
*
90. The AIs could be used to dominate others, or to help everyone, by including their input.
91. That is a difficult social choice, but every generation has its difficult choices, and the Church is always here to advise.
*
92. Beware of Moloch!
93. With great technological power comes great responsibility.
94. Any technology can be abused.
95. Who controls these AIs? A few tech companies.
96. The moral judgment should be based on what happens to plebs.
*
97. I am not an IT guy. These are my Pope concerns.
98. But my understanding is that even their developers do not understand the AIs completely. That worries me.
99. The AIs may be intelligent in some sense, but it is not human intelligence. It does not come with a human body, emotions, experience. It does not see its impact on users, cannot feel sorry and learn from its mistakes.
*
100. The AIs are great tools, but can also cause AI psychosis.
101. They hurt the environment, and we are going to build even more data centers.
*
102. AIs can be used for surveillance and control of the population.
103. AIs can be used to avoid responsibility. ("The AI made the decision, I don't care.")
104. The mere existence of AIs as they are now is already pushing the society in a certain direction.
105. The companies that develop the AIs and the institutions that use them should be accountable for their impact.
106. I am not opposing progress, but while developing the technology, we also need to develop safeguards: make new laws, establish oversight, educate the users. We can't just pretend that whatever happens will be OK.
107. Speaking of AI alignment -- aligned to whom? The developers only?
108. AIs will increase the power differences between people; give the rich new tools to manipulate people and subvert democracy. Private ownership of data (about everything and everyone) is a power that can be abused.
109. There is a chance that a few will own most of the political, economical, and epistemic power. Or we could find a way to allow everyone to participate. We should think about that sooner rather than later.
110. The way we develop the AI now is an arms race (both literal and metaphorical), where the winner will be able to dominate humanity. We need to find a way how to make AI a force of peace instead.
111. I hope the AI developers think about this responsibly.
*
112. Will the AIs promote human values, or generate more paperclips?
113. Human value is complex. Intelligence is just one of the things we value.
114. The quality of civilization depends on how much we care about each other. Technology can be used for helping people.
*
115. Transhumanists are looking forward to become cyborgs.
117. The Church does not object against the upgrades per se, but what about the unaugmented humans, are you going to kill them or what?
*
118. Many things suck about this world. Some of that can be fixed. The rest of it... uhm, that's why we believe in a happier afterlife.
119. All that suffering should motivate us to compassion.
120. Sometimes, what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. Growing stronger is a part of being human.
121. Some people are evil, and cause suffering needlessly. Other people suffer needlessly.
122. That too should motivate us to compassion.
123. Sometimes civilization succeeds to constrain the evil people. We have laws, etc. We may take some of them for granted, but the evil people have opposed them at every step.
124. Some people are heroes.
125. Most people's good acts are their everyday work: parents, doctors, friends.
126. We need both good institutions and good people. Are we going to replace them by technology?
*
127. The Church has its own, spiritual version of "transhumanism". We become better than humans, in Christ.
128. We do not deny the human nature, but transcend it. We strive to not abandon, but to outgrow humanity. And we're in this project together.
*
129. Technology can help people grow. Or destroy them. Will the AI makes us transhumans, or slaves?
130. Humans have a potential to do both, and now we are facing the choice.
A friend thought it was weird that I say please and thank you when conversing with a coding agent because it's "not a person". My counter was that it's trained to act like a person, and therefore by treating it like one you're likely to get better results.
No, it's training *us* to act like it's a person, and the companies are trying to monetise the human instinct to treat inanimate objects like persons once we anthropomorphise them, and thus we'll be more loyal to our friend Cludd and stick with it and pay through the nose to use it.
To me, that comes across as a little creepy and manipulative. Someone has built a thing that is designed to push our buttons. Odds they did that for self-interested reasons?
I've always thought that I want to be the kind of person who treats people-shaped things with respect, even if they may not be people. When I'm polite to an LLM, I'm doing that more for me than I am for them.
It's the old adage of "if you want to know what someone is really like, see how they treat restaurant waiters". You don't get anything extra out of being nice in those interactions, but if you're a nice person, you will be anyway.
A waiter is another human being. A robot that displaces waiters? No reason to be destructive in dealing with it, but it's not a person and I wouldn't treat it as such.
China seems to be going in for these, but I don't know how widely adopted they are versus a gimmick to attract custom:
A few Asian restaurants around me have robots to deliver stuff; my kids love it.
But the human waiters still need to put the food on the robot, as well as clearing tables and various other duties, and I don't think the robots actually allow the restaurant to run with any fewer waiters than they'd otherwise have. Maybe if it were a giant restaurant with hundreds of tables, but for the twenty-table restaurants where I see it applied it's a gimmick.
"But instead of doing that, the encyclical dodges in the deepest sense, denying that AI 'really thinks' or 'really learns' and all that typical strain of cope that amounts to magical thinking: 'when a computer does it, it is 'data processing,' beep boop, but when a human does it, it is 'actual learning'"
It is probably actively bad for global understanding of AI that the Pope endorsed this viewpoint as late as 2026."
When a secular person starts making vaguely metaphysical claims about AI's lack of ability to 'really think', it is contradictory. But the Pope does literally believe that humans have literal souls and divinely imbued capacity for moral judgment. It's "magical thinking" in the sense that it is Catholic thinking, because he is the Pope.
AIs do *not* think in the same way people do. They just don't. They have a massively different window on the world.
That said, I'm not convinced that it's a good idea to claim that they don't think. It makes some sense, as submarines don't swim, but not much, as airplanes fly. I think this is really arguing about the definition of words more than anything more substantive. OTOH, the weak form of the Whorf hypothesis is probably correct, and the definitions you use will *tend* to shape the way you think about things.
Still the way an AI reaches a decision is NOT the way that a human reaches a decision. The way an AI remembers a new item isn't the way that a human does. And blurring this distinction has it's own problems.
17. I forgot to pinboard the link, but another Russian milblogger lamented it would be embarrassing for the regime if the current drone strikes ruined the opening of the holiday season in Crimea. On one level, this is analogous to, “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, what did you think of the play?” But on a more serious level, it would show that the regime has effectively lost control of Crimea.
18. Russia’s financial situation is worsening. The CEO of VTB Bank Kostin compared Russia’s economy to “an 80-year-old grandfather having sex with a whistle in his ears — barely functioning and hoping for applause.” I’m not sure whether it’s an artifact in the translation, but what does whistle in the ears mean? But I get the picture.
19. Despite rising oil prices, Russia’s oil and gas revenue for April was down 21% year-over-year.
20. Russia is liquidating its gold reserves at the fastest rate since 2002. 27.9 metric tons have been sold since January first. But they still have ~2300 tons left.
21. And Russian banks have started limiting depositor withdrawals.
22. As with Trump’s visit to Beijing, Putin’s visit didn’t get anything out Xi either. At least Trump got a military parade, but Putin didn’t. At the state banquet for Putin, the orchestra played Swan Lake. Both Russian and Chinese bloggers took this as Xi trolling Putin, that his days were numbered. Traditionally, Russian state TV and Radio play Swan Lake before a leader’s death is announced. This happened after Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko died, and during the 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev.
23. Putin didn’t get his long-delayed Power of Siberia 2 natural gas pipeline deal with China. Reportedly, the amount that China offered to pay for the natural gas wouldn’t cover Russia’s costs.
24. Chairman Xi will soon be flying off to North Korea to meet with Kim Jong Un. Xi seems to be a roll. The conservative faction seems have been silenced for now. But everyone wants to present a façade of unity, especially while the Chinese economy is likely going down the shitter.
25. The International Monetary Fund estimated that China’s non-financial debt-to-GDP ratio exceeds 270%. The US is around 250%. China’s debt composition is unusual, though, because a very large share of it is tied to state-linked corporations and to provincial and local government financing vehicles rather than households. And other analysts point out that China’s provincial and city governments are running massive deficits, and the accounting starts to get cloudy there. China’s national government is ultimately on the hook for these. And alarmists suggest that debt is at least twice the IMF's estimate. I don’t have a clear picture of what this means, but all indications suggest that China’s economic outlook is much less rosy than the CCP would have us believe.
26. And what’s with those tough-looking ladies in red waiting tables at the state banquets? A few years back, China did a show about the Women’s Special Operations Unit under the People’s state police. Chinese commentators think that this squad was waiting tables. Observers were puzzled by a picture of a waitress standing behind Elon Musk, who had a weird bulge about the size of a Walkman under her jacket. (Is there anyone old enough on this thread to remember Walkmans?) It was in the wrong position for a gun and too large for a wire.
27. There was much concern from Zelenskyy and others that Russia was trying to persuade Aleksandr Lukashenko to open a second front from Belarus. But Lukashenko stated this week that his country "will not be dragged" into Russia's war against Ukraine. "If we are dragged into a war, specifically if it is against Ukraine, it will be in one case only — if they commit an act of aggression against us. We have no intention of getting involved in the war in Ukraine. There is no need for it, neither civilian nor military." He also offered to meet Zelenskyy anywhere in Ukraine or Belarus to discuss issues in Belarusian-Ukrainian relations.
Zelenskyy declined the invitation and instead invited a prominent Belarusian dissident to visit.
28. On the 17 May edition of Russian state TV show “Sunday Evening with Vladimir Solovyov,” host Vladimir Solovyov, talking to Margarita Simonyan, called out our western techno-fascists…
> This involves not only the Western European elite, and not merely the political elite. What we are seeing now — and Nikita Sergeyevich Mikhalkov brilliantly exposed this over a year ago on his show *Besogon* — is, first and foremost, brilliant, in the way he pointed to Palantir and that entire gathering of techno-fascists and dictators who arrive there in person. And among them, incidentally, is Elon Musk — so beloved by many — thanks to his father. Among them, in fact, is that entire community of utterly sociopathic dictators who dream of establishing a regime of technological fascism across the globe. Thiel, Karp, Musk, and those who have aligned themselves with them. They are our enemies. Madyar, Budanov, Fyodorov — well, Zelenskyy, and the rest … Yet they are losing touch with reality due to this idolatry of their own power.
Although I don’t understand all of Solovyov’s references, I have to agree with him that Thiel, Karp, and Musk are techno-fascists.
29. A few days later, Ukraine and Palantir Technologies announced a partnership, where Palantir’s AI-driven platform will drive their battlefield automation. Russia is definitely freaked out by Palantir. Russian journalist Alex Zimovsky warns that it's "heading towards the point where Palantir will soon become a scary name for children in Russia." Based on the Gotham and MetaConstellation platforms, it will integrate the systems of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Main Intelligence Directorate, and the Security Service of Ukraine into a single combat environment, and will provide satellite reconnaissance, SIGINT, radar data, UAV video feeds, and data derived from OSINT and open sources.
Well, we all know that Thiel is an ultra libertarian and against social safety nets, but he also doesn't think women should have had the franchise...
> The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.
And...
> I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
Of course, he doesn't really believe in the free market. He famously said...
> Competition is for suckers.
And he sued gay-owned Gawker Media into bankruptcy for outing him as gay — even though he was a public figure and libel laws were not designed to penalize the truth. But since he couldn't sue on his own behalf, he funded a suit by Hulk Hogan against them.
And, of course, Palantir software keeps track of all us and sells our information to the law enforcement and intelligence community.
IMHO I think "techno-fascist" describes him pretty well.
As for Musk, he frequently amplifies posts expressing concern that the white population is becoming a "shrinking minority" and often discusses concepts like "white solidarity" or "anti-white racism" in U.S. media and schools.
Maybe, he's not a techno-fascist, but he's a techno-blowhard.
IMHO you are stretching "Fascist" past the breaking point here. The things you cite are neither necessary nor sufficient to distinguish a proper fascist from any other sort of right-authoritarian, and some of them are at least as characteristic as left-authoritarianism,
But trying to preserve "fascist" as a useful term is I think a lost cause; it mostly now serves as a warning not to take an opinion or statement at all seriously.
“Otherwise, if you will excuse me, consider this joke: A patient comes to the doctor and says, ‘Doctor, I have a complaint: when I have sex, there’s a whistling in my ears.’ ‘How old are you?’ the doctor asks. ‘80,’ the pensioner replies. ‘And what were you expecting — applause?’” Kostin joked.
This is AI translated, pretty close to the Russian original.
Yes, around 1980, all women were at least as attractive as the model wearing the gizmo. The guys were just as bad as they are now though. So all those great looking females had no choice but to date one or another of us. For a prime male specimen with no felony convictions or anything equally disqualifying it was just one playboy model after another.
I dunno The piece of hardware was a flash in the pan. If you blinked at the time it was easy to miss. I got the paper catalog from the maker so i remember it. I see people selling used ones on EBay like everything else that most people tossed decades ago.
> Yes, around 1980, all women were at least as attractive as the model wearing the gizmo. The guys were just as bad as they are now though. So all those great looking females had no choice but to date one or another of us. For a prime male specimen with no felony convictions or anything equally disqualifying it was just one playboy model after another.
I'm not sure why you included this comment, and given the setting and the types of earnest incel nonsense that sometimes crops up here I'm not entirely sure if you're being sarcastic or not.
It was meant to be nonsensically funny. I think i missed with this shot at humor. Good point about the incel stuff. Apologies for offense given. None was intended but I should have considered how it could land in the current environment.
> This involves not only the Western European elite, and not merely the political elite
Presumably they are using Western European as others use “white”, people from Europe or their descendants. All these guys are American by birth or inclination
The China has massive debt story has been ongoing for years. I think a lot of the “China is doomed” stories are cope.
They may very well be, but I think the China Ascending stories are crap, too. Xi is not fully in control, as Western analysts claim. The Chinese military isn't as advanced as analysts claim. While not as badly off as Russia, their internal systems are being undermined by corruption and CYA behaviors. And the country is probably less unified than the CCP would have us believe. Having lived and worked in Hong Kong and also worked in China for long stretches, I've been sensitized to their culture. The CCP has done a masterful job of holding that country together with chewing gum and baling wire. And god bless the CCP, because if their authoritarian regime collapses, all sorts of shit is going to break loose. ;-)
Well the China ascending stories are, so far, empirically true. I can’t claim to have lived there though, so you may have the better insight, but the China is doomed and the debt story has been bouncing around for a decade or two.
The most convincing theory for "impending doom" to CCP-China for me is as follows: China is still in an economic growth-stage due to industrialization. This creates a "good mood", because in a growing economy like this everyone gains, even the peasants (independent of some others becoming billionaires). Comparable earlier growers like South Korea, Taiwan or Japan have now "fully developed" economies and societies and only now are starting to hit the demographic problem. China might hit that demographic problem before the country ever becomes fully, or let's say broadly, developed close to the Western "first world countries". This might create unique problem to national stability, that are quite different and possibly more violent compared to aging countries with comparably loads of civil liberties and wealth (and relatively non-violent old age populations) to lean on.
I don’t even think the demographic problem is that big, nor that unsolvable. Per capita growth does not depend on population growth, sometimes the opposite. China is close, already to being a high income country in PPP. And any demographic headwinds are a generation away.
The debt is not that existential a threat either. Despite what people say the central government is not in hock to bail out state corporations, nor local governments, although it would credibly jump in to avoid contagion. Central government debt is low, and savings and foreign reserves are high.
> Per capita growth does not depend on population growth
In principle that is true, I fully agree. But historically, it seems that population growth has been the major driver for most of time. And then especially after WW2, productivity growth per capita *plus* the explosive population growth is what seemed to have made our western world as rich as it is.
All the South-Asian success stories after WW2 more or less copied western economic history in fast-forward mode during a time of equal population explosion combined with productivity-per-capita growth (I recommend "How Asia Works" bei Studwell for a great overview and analysis).
I think it is at least one of a set of realistic scenarios that the break off of population growth will not be (over)compensated by ever-increasing productivity/capita growth.
Alternatively: even if it is overcompensated, will CCP-Chine be able to share the fruits of growth in a way that enables social peace? But that seems to be an issue for all societies.
Neither the Trump administration nor Xi's is very transparent. But Xi would be crowing if he got a deal advantageous to China. And likewise from Trump. Trump made a lot of happy noises. And he claimed they had negotiated several trade deals that would benefit both. Some memoranda about aviation, agriculture, and market openness were signed. Have those become formal agreements yet? I don't know. Xi emphasized that they had developed "a constructive relationship of strategic stability", but he warned that mishandling the Taiwan issue could lead to "conflict". And his Thucydides Trap comment was interpreted by some analysts as a jab at US overreach. Evidently it flew over Trump's head because he's historically illiterate.
How does one find a good couple’s therapist? My partner and I have gone through several and have not found a competent one, let alone one especially fitted to help us navigate our particular challenges: a large age gap.
My first wife and I are the only two people I've ever known who got fired as clients by a couples counselor, and I silently debated for now many years whether that said more about us or about him. Hadn't thought about that for some years until just now though which I guess is positive.
Psychologist here. You do not need an expert on age gaps, you need a competent couples therapist. A competent person begins by listening carefully. as you explain the problem, asking questions, then summarizing their understanding of what you are describing, and asking whether they've "got it." If there's a part of it they don't gt yet, you 3 keep going til they do.
Best methods I can think of for locating one: Trusted person's recommendation. Bear in mind that many many therapists now practice online, and you need not find someone near you, only someone licensened in your state. So you might try asking on here for therapist names. Scott also has a list on the side bar of therapists recommended by list members, but I believe all this recs are for people who do individual therapy.
If you do not have a source of a name, look at Psychology Today using these criteria:
-Degree must be PhD or Psyd in psychology, PhD in social work, or MSW or LicSW in social work. some MD"s may be good, but they rarely get training in couples work. Don't use MDs. Then there is an alphabet soup of stuff that stands for things like "licensed counselor" -- they do not have much training -- absolutely do not see anyone with one of these minimalists degrees.
-Crow's feet: 35 or older.
-Degree from a good college
-Description of their methods is not airy fairy -- no "life is hard and I help you find your true, ever-blooming self, blowing in the breeze in the meadow of life . . .." You want stuff like "after training at X, I worked for 5 years in the Brooklyn schools in a program for teaching parents of ADHD kids how to helpfully manage some of their difficult behaviors. Then I became interested in how couples collaborate on problems of this and other kinds, and moved into private practice in X. . . ."
-They do not take insurance. The fact is, insurance does not pay well, and therapists who are well known and highly thought of sometimes simply resign from contracts with BCBS et al. If you can afford to pay out of pocket, you up your chances of getting someone really good. (However, plenty of excellent therapists do take insruance.). In some cases your own insurance may reimburse you for part of the out of pocket charge.
-See if you can find a decent book by a family therapist on Amazon. they do not have to speciaize in age diferences. You want a book where they describe how they think of marital problems and what helps with them. If you can find a book like that, call the author and ask if they are in practice, or whether they can recommend anyone good.
BTW, I am not a possibility as a therapist myself. I never see anyone I know via ACX -- I am here as my private self, not my professional one. (And anyhow I only work with individuals, not couples).
With Euzoia, the lifemaxxing project where we write weekly posts on 80/20 self-help and repeat them every year, we just finished our month on Money. Next up: Friends and Community
I liked it, and I say that as someone who was in your #2s list: wouldn't vote for Harris regardless (I ended up voting literally "None of the Above" in 2024).
My first concern is that you run a large risk with the "avoiding conflict" motif. Your autopsy bangs that drum a lot, and it looks like you're just fishing out one example after another that illustrates it (plenty, I'll admit), without spending enough time on discussing whether there's any evidence that rules it out. Or even an example of what _might_ rule it out. Hillary Clinton, for example, was capable of saying uncomfortable things to her base.
A second concern is that I didn't see your article consider whether Harris just _couldn't_ have that unpleasant conversation. I think you suggested as much in replies; I just didn't see it in the OP after two reads. I think I get your point: there was this nasty barb in the DNC's skin, and they needed to stop mothering it and instead bite down, pull it all the way out, put ointment and a bandage on it so the healing could begin. But what if Harris simply can't do that? Like, maybe she can bite down and pull out the barb, but she doesn't know what aloe is so she reaches for the habanero instead and then manages to get a paper cut from the bandage and ends up bleeding out.
Which brings me to one of your longer replies to a commenter there that also resonated with me: that this problem needed to start getting fixed in 2022. I'll go even further: parts of it needed to get fixed in 2020, parts in 2016, and maybe some of it is inherently unfixable without a party re-org.
The 2020 part was choosing Harris in the first place. Unless Biden was secretly trying to prove the argument against affirmative action, he should have taken one look at Harris and then continued looking. AA employment is a terrible policy for a nation of individualists. If your underemployed groups have stellar individuals, you use that reason to hire them and ignore AA. If you have no stellar individuals ("Obama and Clinton were eating each other's cubs"), you have a more serious problem, and AA will make it worse by making it obvious. Biden should have focused on good VPs, even if they're WASPs (_and_ even if they're not), and bought the DNC more solid ground. (Maybe he loathed unpleasant conversations!)
The 2016 part was evident in multiple places. I can't find it in a search, but there was an article in Cracked.com whose headline was something like "Why Half the Country Seems to Have Lost Its G*dd*mned Mind" that ranted Cracked-style about what the DNC was doing so wrong that made half the USA willing to go with Trump. The serious bit? The DNC was gathering a _lot_ of interest groups, they didn't always get along, one of them was threatening to head out the door, and the DNC not only couldn't talk them into staying; it couldn't even stop its own other groups from mocking them on the way out. Namely, rust belt union labor was starving, and DNC said it couldn't help _and_ the wokists were calling them bigots for even asking when there were even less-privileged groups in the party framework. So out they went, Trump opened his door, and won enough swing states to win the whole thing.
That time, it was rust belt unions. In general, though, I think it could have been lots of others. The Democrats had unions, single women, young college grads, the poor, the chronically ill, half the elderly, most of tech, blacks, Latinos, immigrants, New Dealers, hippies, artists, journalists, public school teachers, LGB, T, Keynesians, Fabians, Wilsonians, environmentalists, gun control advocates, free speech advocates, and prison reformists. The GOP had the diametrical opposites, but the GOP's side overlapped more and could be served by a smaller number of general platform planks, while the Democrats' were growing more boutique. No party could keep a tent that big. "Diversity" sounds good until you notice it means you take your turn once and then wait several generations before it comes around again (or you fail to notice but just wonder why you haven't gotten your help in a while). One of the first things they teach in poliSci is that mandates are *gold* because they greatly increase the lobby groups that don't control more votes than your mandate, and therefore the lobbyists on which you no longer have to spend serious time. The Democrats had to listen to damn near everybody. Humans still need eight hours sleep. Something was going to fall on the floor.
All of this could be traced to something the DNC simply cannot fix without becoming essentially a new party. To an extent, they _are_ the party of the boutique. They can't help it. They see government as a panacea, and aren't balking at tailoring it to every citizen. To them, that just means the work will always be there for them. The reality, though, is that there will never be enough people to do that (I wonder how they will treat AI in their next platform?), and someone's going to get disenfranchised and leave. And meanwhile, half of Americans simply aren't wired to go to government with their problems.
So I think the DNC would have to figure out how to simplify their message, which means maybe having to tell various interest groups that their solution will not be found except on their own (which means the DNC would have to believe this itself). Perhaps reminding them that they care about multiple issues, and maybe solutions for the others can compensate.
And right now, I'm seeing Harris, Newsom, and AOC in the polls for POTUS, and none of them looks capable. Not more so than Vance, anyway. They'll have to pull up someone new. Shapiro? Someone else? Or hope for some undeniably colossal GOP screwup? Even Trump seems to have stabilized at a level of "routinely boring screwups".
Well, one of my limitations in the autopsy is that I wanted stuff that I could prove (or, at least, provide a lot of evidence for).
One of the go-to low-effort counter-arguments that I've seen over and over again is the whole "Cite?!?" thing. I don't mind providing citations. I *LOVE* providing citations.
The argument that Kamala is an empty suit who doesn't think anything but merely has an excellent sniffer is something that I can't provide good evidence for. It's like checking for AI writing, I guess. You see something here or there that makes your brain say "AH-HA!" like when the American guy holds up three fingers in Inglourious Basterds. And someone who says "what? that's not *PROOF*" will be unswayed by saying "but he held up his fingers wrong..."
But, yeah, in comments I can air my suspicions. The post, however, was for stuff I could demonstrate.
I said this in comments too but it bears repeating: Harris was Biden's #2 choice. His #1 choice was Stacey Abrams but she slapped his hand away. After was locked in as nominee, she became all sweetness and light but Biden was still sharp enough to remember an insult and, for all I know, she's still sitting by that phone.
I don't know who the DNC will nominate... I know who they *SHOULD* nominate, but if Bluesky still has more action for their bubble than twitter, they'll find themselves losing 5 of 7 swing states next time while saying "but... the midterms..."
I remember that "#2 choice" comment. I read Abrams' quote, and I can't figure out what was driving her decision about being VP. What she said was pretty standard equivocation. The best case I can read makes sense: she's in the primary to run for POTUS, not VP; she'll consider VP both if and only if she loses in the primary. That didn't read like a handslap to me, except in the sense of Biden being his usual gaffe mill by even asking her before the primary, and her responding appropriately. That would've been a dumb reason for Biden to bump her off. Alternately, maybe he realized he'd put his foot in his mouth and figured it'd be too awkward for him to ask again later. I could understand that.
Just this morning, I read that Whitmer declares she won't be running in 2028. IMO, that's probably good news for the country. It still leaves the current top batch of Harris, Newsom, and OC, though, and... I would prefer Whitmer over any of them, despite the damage I've heard she's done to Michigan. (I almost said "New York", mixing her up with Hochul. I'd prefer Whitmer to Hochul, too, but oh well.)
As for evidence Harris is an empty suit: what did you make of her multiple quotes brought forth over the years as "word salad"? Venn diagrams? Her "time" speech? "Unburdened by what has been"?
My usual responses to stuff like this is to check two angles: one, what gaffes are others making (is Harris unique in this?), and two, has she said anything quotable in a _good_ way. The first is pretty easy ("covfefe", "won't get fooled again", "put y'all in chains"), but recoverable (that person was having a bad day). The second would help, but I honestly don't know of any examples of her saying something both meaningful and resonating.
She wasn't in the primary, though. If she had been, sure. "I'm not running for VP!" makes sense.
But she wasn't running for P either.
"As for evidence Harris is an empty suit..."
It's not one thing and any one thing I'd bring up could be dismissed. But it's everything from her career as Prosecutor to her embrace of the Mostly Peaceful Protestors to her denial of ever having been adjacent to Defund to her Border Czar thing. She was always in over her head and she wasn't good at providing more than half-decent Tik-Toks.
But here. Have you read Kareem Rahma's take on Harris's Subway Stories episode?
2020 was a huge primary IIRC; I sort of assumed Abrams was in there somewhere. Maybe very preliminary and dropping out early. But then I'd have to check the timeline for when she said she turned down VP to see if that adds up, and at the end of the day, I suspect I have other reasons to find Abrams unappealing as a candidate.
"Harris is in over her head" seems like an even more precise (and therefore useful) criticism than "empty suit". I remember Gabbard taking her apart in 2020. Her planning algorithm is starved, and she can't improvise. She gives me the impression that if she were President and China invaded Taiwan, she'd just freeze up and then start emitting random aphorisms like an early LLM.
That NY article is paywalled for me, but I recall something about Harris and Subway Stories. Wasn't that the episode they both agreed to keep off the air?
Yeah, it could be dismissed. Maybe she had a bad day. Then again, "she seems to have a lot of those" is the obvious response. Sure, plural, anecdote, data, but that's why I ask whether she's had any _good_ days.
Good analysis. I don't agree with everything you say, but you did a much better job than the DNC did. Most of the problems that Harris had during her campaign could have been addressed by a coherent personal vision for the country, but it isn't clear that she had one.
Most of the people I see commenting on the presidential election (the last one and the next one) fall into one of two camps: The Dems should be more centrist, or the Dems should be more progressive.
They are both wrong. This is a holdover from the days when mass propaganda (advertising) still worked: you sent out one message to hundreds of millions of people, and some percentage of them end up agreeing with the message. That isn't how public communication works anymore--now it's all about micro-targeted messages that are crafted to appeal to the interests of very narrow demographics (I'm talking about consumer products).
Voters are also consumers and have been socialized to expect messages carefully crafted to their narrow demographic. "The Centrist Candidate" or "The Progressive Candidate" is obsolete messaging.
Yet you can't say one thing to one group of voters, and say or imply something else to another set. People still expect self-consistent honesty from other human beings. So now it comes down to personality.
Most voters these days self-identify as independents. These voters aren't generic "in the middle" on issues, they cherry pick from all sides based on their own unique perspective. This is how you get a truck driver who is into yoga, want to reduce immigration and build more renewables. Or a retired college professor who dislikes guns and hates the use of gender-neutral pronouns. This is the "New Nomal" (it was actually always this way, we just didn't have the technology to reach out to them before).
The one thing that everyone agrees on is that the system no longer works, and needs reformed. Exactly what those reforms should be is a source of much disagreement among the voting public.
Lacking specific policy positions in common, it comes down to vibes, or "personality."
Personality (in a public media) comes down to how much attention the candidate can grab by projecting provocative power and authenticity. Sure, you want specific policies for specific factions of voters you wish to appeal to, but that doesn't win elections anymore. Now it's important to be for something *unpopular*, as a way of demonstrating confidence and honesty. Emotional appeals are more effective than intellectual ones.
Any of this sound familiar? The challenge facing the Dems next cycle is finding a candidate who can thread this needle while still promoting the core values of the Democratic party: unity across class and racial/ethnic/sexual divisions, an inclusive economic policy, protecting democracy across the world (and at home). They now have an opportunity to add another one: competence in governance (relatively speaking). But that's secondary to projecting confidence and authenticity via provocation.
Who do the Dems have that can plausibly pull this off?
Who do the Dems have? AOC has a personality and she's charismatic but... maybe this is because I'm West of the Mississippi but she strikes me as kinda flaky and Team Grey has already told her some variant of "you won't get a cent" which, in this environment, means that she can run locally but she can't run nationally.
Part of me thinks that Obama and Clinton did a good job of killing each others' cubs and now just bland milquetoast folks are showing up.
I think that Pritzker might be okay (he's fat! he's a billionaire! Americans like those things!) and I'm a fan of the guys like the Udall brothers or Jared Polis but I understand that nobody from Mountain Time can win dogcatcher on a national level.
I think of Team Gray as self congratulatory strawmanning myself. You take a position that any Democrat with a sense of nuance would just about entirely agree with and create a brand of the special when compared to (your own) cartoonish definition of the left.
Or do you just mean Silicon Valley billionaires here.
"The shocking thing about that chart is that it shows the largest shift was Black Men. 25%."
Not one bit surprised, did you see the dumb ads her campaign ran? Appealing to young women voters (already in the bag for her) about treating men like garbage if they don't vote Kamala.
If I were a guy of whatever colour, I'd stay far away from the harridans there.
And the ones trying to use Walz to appeal to Da Mens were even worse.
"The Large Donors. These guys show up and you have to let them in."
That was the reason/excuse I saw used as to why it *had* to be Harris as the candidate; that the donors had given money to the Biden/Harris campaign and it couldn't be reassigned to someone different, so if Biden dropped out only Kamala could use it. That, and the short time, were the main reasons used for making it the fait accompli of selecting Harris rather than having an open convention.
The big problem was that Biden stayed on too long, nobody was willing/able to tell him no, he shouldn't and couldn't run for a second time, and that left them with no real choice but to go with Harris, and she was just a poor candidate all round. She had given too many hostages to fortune with her 2019 run (the golden opportunity for the Trump "they/them" ad with footage of her happily running her neck into the noose) and didn't want to or couldn't walk back those positions because of the progressive wing. Also very much stuck with not wanting to criticise Biden and the former administration (of which she had been part) due to that being perceived as disloyalty, but then that left her with nothing when her position seemed to be "if elected, I won't change anything from what we did before".
And to top it all off, nobody in the failed campaign seems to want to take responsibility at all. So did the party learn anything? Not very much, it would seem. I have no idea what they'll do for 2024, their choices seem limited (unless something changes drastically in the meantime).
EDIT: Re: Joe Rogan, I do think that was an error on the part of Harris and her campaign. "Call Me Daddy" was preaching to the choir, but the bone of contention seemed to be control: the campaign was terrified of anything spontaneous and exposing Harris to unscripted questions that they didn't know and have prepared answers for in advance. They flew in the podcast host and built a replica set in a hotel room just to have that kind of control and softball interview. In Harris' memoir of the campaign, she tries very hard to push the blame onto Rogan - 'oh we were willing to do it, but it was hard to find a time in our crowded schedule that suited both parties, and then he changed his mind, and then he wouldn't do it, and then he went around telling everyone we refused'.
I think I believe Rogan (and Palmieri) over Harris there. Asking her to go off-script and explain her actual policies (if she had any) was too much of a risk for them.
"That was the reason/excuse I saw used as to why it *had* to be Harris as the candidate; that the donors had given money to the Biden/Harris campaign and it couldn't be reassigned to someone different, so if Biden dropped out only Kamala could use it."
From what I understand, it was 80 Million Bucks. Which sounds like a lot until you read that Harris spent about 1.5 Billion-with-a-B Bucks.
Sometimes the high school team finds itself going up against the '85 Bears and there ain't nothing to be done except talk about how the mistake happened when you signed the contract but if it were possible for the Democrats to win, they needed to do something else.
That said, I argued that sort of thing when it was still Biden running and I said "They need to change Biden out!" and then Biden endorsed Harris and I was stuck yelling "NOT LIKE THAT!"
I don't think even Trump would describe himself as the '85 Bears. He had one or two flaws as a candidate, and a teency bit of baggage from his first term!
I have in fact lived a mistake-free life. 30 Rock aficionados will recognize this phenomenon as “Reaganing” but for a lifetime rather than a single day.
I bought the Kindle version of her campaign memoir, "107 Days", not expecting much from it but it turned out to be a goldmine.
First, she really does think she is God's Gift. You name it, she can do it, has done it, knows about it, or all three. Unintentionally funny in parts, I have to wonder did nobody edit this book, were they too scared to tell her "you really should cut this part out", or is this the ghostwriter's revenge (there must have been a ghostwriter).
Description of a flying visit through Georgia (she calls it "barnstorming" but uh, no barns were harmed in the making of this trip, not even lightly disordered):
"We headed out of the city, through woods draped with Spanish moss and lush wetlands, to Liberty County High School in Hinesville, where the school’s marching band played for us. I told the band members that I, too, had been in my school band. I played everything from the French horn to the kettle drum. With the horn players, I shared that I’d given up the horn because it involved entirely too much spit. Tim and some of my team members later said that they were surprised to learn about my onetime musical prowess. It was another example of how there were so many more ways to connect with people, if I’d only had more time."
You see? She didn't play just *one* measly instrument like the rest of the candidates, if they can even play an instrument!
It's like this *all through the book*. The Coconut Queen can never fail, she can only be failed by her unworthy subjects.
Second, she wanted the Biden endorsement and felt that he wasn't doing it fast enough.
Biden calls to let her know he's dropping out:
"The president was still talking. “I want you to do this.” He would endorse me, he said, but not for a day, maybe two, when he would make an address to the nation.
That would be ruinous, and I said so.
“Joe, I’m honored, but we live in a twenty-four-hour news cycle, and if you wait that long, the airwaves will be full of nothing but questions: ‘Why has he not supported his VP?’ If you want to put me in the strongest position, you have to endorse me now.” I urged him to reconsider the timing. “What we do, right now, is so important,” I said. “People will look at how this moment occurred for decades. There’s no reason to rush this. Can we slow it down so I can prepare? And you need to endorse me at the same time. Any gap between the announcement and the endorsement will lead to the same kind of chaos we’ve had for the last three weeks.”
The public statements, the whispering campaigns, and the speculation had done a world of damage. I knew I was the candidate in the strongest position to win. The most qualified and ready. The highest name recognition. A powerful donor base. And I also knew, as he did, that I was the only person who would preserve his legacy. At this point, anyone else was bound to throw him—and all the good he had achieved—right under the bus.
Joe’s two closest aides, Steve Ricchetti and Mike Donilon, were in the room with him in Rehoboth. He put Ricchetti on the phone.
“We were always going to support you. We just want to do this announcement first and leave a little bit of time.”
“Steve, you know that’s not going to work,” I said. “There needs to be no daylight between the announcements.”
“That’s a fair point,” Steve conceded. He gave the phone back to the president.
Joe said, “Let me call you back.”
...We waited for the promised call back from Joe, anxious as the minutes passed. News was starting to leak. Then, the call.
There was no postponing the announcement of his dropping out, Joe said. “But the statement endorsing you will go out a few minutes later.”
“Joe, thank you for this,” I said, relieved. “I will do you proud. I am so looking forward to carrying on the work we’ve done together.”
“You’re gonna do great, kid.”
His announcement that he would not be seeking reelection hit social media just twenty-two minutes after we hung up. Twenty-seven minutes after that, he endorsed me as the Democratic candidate for president of the United States."
Talking about the convention:
"It was hard to detect anything but relief in this hall. We could have been staring down a very different four days. It could have been a contested convention, a messy floor fight. Instead, there was gratitude that Biden had passed the torch to me, relief that I’d been able to grasp it, a sense of unity and enthusiasm."
Ah yes, all unity, peace and love. Isn't it wonderful? Except that earlier in the book, after the description of the call from Biden, she gives a little list of everyone who called (or didn't, knives out for Gavin Newsom here!) when they were making "the rolling calls we needed to make right away to secure support from Democratic delegates gathering for our convention in Chicago in less than a month, as well as from the former presidents, elected officials, and labor leaders who would be attending."
"Gavin Newsom: Hiking. Will call back. (He never did.)"
So there is definitely an air of "these got my back, those were neutral, them over there eff 'em" about that list 😁
I can definitely recommend the book, it's a great read if you want to see from the inside the level of self-deception/self-aggrandisement that went on. In one of your replies to comments on your post, you say:
"The problem is that Harris isn’t a particularly deep person. She doesn’t believe things. She barely thinks them. She mostly craves power and is willing to say whatever the weathervane is pointing at this week."
Oh yep. The book shows that very clearly. She has always been wonderful and the people's choice and it was just plain evil on the parts of her opponents that beat her (she *hates* JD Vance, it's hilarious).
"I got into my motorcade, but we weren’t pulling out. I asked Max why we weren’t leaving. That was when I learned we were being held up by J. D. Vance. He was out of his car and walking toward Air Force Two, in violation of every rule of security and protocol.
I later learned that he told reporters he was there because “I just wanted to check out my future plane.”
Had I known he was pulling that juvenile stunt, I would’ve been inclined to step from my car and use a word I believe best pronounced correctly. It begins with an m and ends with ah."
But it doesn't matter anyway, JD can keep that shabby, broken-down old plane!
Poor nice, decent, good-hearted Tim Walz was no match for the wicked and malicious wiles of Vance:
"He’d prepared with Pete Buttigieg, a consummate debater, and I thought his big heart and his good humor would counter J. D. Vance’s malice and pessimism.
But J. D. Vance is a shape-shifter. And a shifty guy. He understood that his default meanness wouldn’t play against Tim Walz’s sunny disposition and patent decency. Throughout the debate, he toned the anger and the insults way down. As Van Jones later remarked, he sane-washed the crazy. There were no cat ladies, no pet-eating Haitians, no personal insults. Just a mild-mannered, aw-shucks Appalachian pretending he had a lot of common ground with that nice Midwestern coach."
10/10 top read, would recommend for the Schadenfreude!
The only reason that I would read 107 Days is to find out her take on the Rogan thing.
That strikes me as either a huge mistake because she ought to have wanted to speak to Rogan's audience (even getting 1% of them would have measurable results!)
*OR*
It was a bullet dodged because she's a hollow person with nothing there and sitting and shooting the bull with Rogan would have demonstrated that and created no fewer than 5 viral clips
My suspicion is the latter but I suppose it might be the former...
"The only reason that I would read 107 Days is to find out her take on the Rogan thing."
Well, fortunately for you, I am - as per Tyrone Slothrop - a "viciously EDIT: terribly uninformed" hater "spitefully kibitzing about a game for which [I] don’t even know the rules. For the *fun* of it" who loves "shitting on [his] country from an ocean away with this stuff" because it is "recreational squabbling for [me]", so I can give you the entire chapter 😁 Spite is a wonderful thing!
Who do I believe, between Harris and Rogan? Well, you know, I'm a viciously EDIT: terribly uninformed hater etc. etc. etc. so the safest thing is to say "no comment" 😊
"OCTOBER 22
14 Days to the Election
The Trump team announced that he would be on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast October 25. That came as a surprise to us. I’d been told that Joe Rogan couldn’t interview me on that date because he was “taking a personal day.”
We’d been back and forth with Rogan since late September or early October. One of the young leaders on my digital team made the initial contact through Rogan’s platform, Spotify.
Rogan’s producers came back to us with a list of conditions. These included a one hour minimum, no topic limitations, only me and Secret Service in the studio. I had no problem with any of that, so we started to discuss recording the podcast while I was campaigning in Michigan.
The team was hearing all kinds of conflicting information from folks who knew Rogan: from one source, that he’d bragged he’d “rake me over the coals”; from another, that it would be great for me, because Rogan had said he didn’t want Trump to win.
I wasn’t in the weeds on any of it. I left that up to my staff. They’d suggested topics that might interest Rogan’s audience, such as cannabis, social media censorship, and crypto. Rogan’s team said they just wanted to discuss the economy, immigration, and abortion. Again, I was fine with that. They said they’d work with Spotify about securing a studio in Detroit. That sounded great.
But then they came back to say Rogan, having thought about it, wanted to record in Austin; that he never traveled and had only ever gone remote one time, to secure an interview with Edward Snowden. They wanted me to come to Austin. That was a big ask. I had to weigh spending time in Texas so close to the election, when every minute in a swing state mattered, and also the time lost traveling there and back.
Still, even though most of my team thought doing the interview at all was a gamble, and others bluntly argued it was a bad idea, I really wanted to do it. One podcast was not going to win or lose the election. But Rogan’s audience was young and male. I wanted to reach those guys who might not otherwise hear from me.
We had a big rally on reproductive rights planned in Houston on October 25. So on October 18 my team called and told Rogan’s people that we could come to Austin for the interview that day. My research and comms team started pulling together a prep sheet for me.
Then the word came back: “It’s a personal day for Joe. He’s not available. If you’d just called a day before, we could have done it.” Then how about the following day? The morning after the Houston rally? They said they could do it at 8:30 a.m., not later, as Joe had “commitments.” I had commitments as well, and it wasn’t feasible to get from Houston to Austin by 8:30 a.m.
And then, on October 22, we learned that Rogan was spending his “personal day” interviewing Donald Trump. (Rogan kept Trump rambling so long he was three hours late to the outdoor rally he was meant to be addressing in Traverse City, Michigan, leaving a dwindling number of supporters standing in the cold.)
To be totally transparent, which sadly they were not, they offered us times on the 24th or the 27th or sometime after the rally on the 25th, which was set to conclude at 10:00 p.m. It wasn’t realistic to go from Houston to Austin and do a podcast at midnight, nor was I about to hang around an extra day in Texas a week out from the election. I believe they knew that when they offered those times. We made one last pitch, offering an hour before my speech on the Ellipse, if Rogan would reconsider and come to DC. He declined.
On the eve of the election, Rogan endorsed Trump. Since then, he has lied on his show, claiming we pushed for tight topic restrictions. He even claimed that the very topics we had suggested were ones we’d refused to discuss.
His team says we “never committed,” which is accurate, but misleading.
The plain truth: I wanted to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast on October 25. He chose Trump instead."
EDIT: Tyrone has requested I stop misgendering, I mean misquoting him, so I must correct "viciously" to "terribly". Will do so, Tyrone!
>EDIT: Tyrone has requested I stop misgendering, I mean misquoting him, so I must correct "viciously" to "terribly". Will do so, Tyrone!
Now you are just being silly. If you want to respond on substance we can have a conversation.
Dial back the sarcasm, the hyperbole, and the selective snippets of adjectives and adverbs without the surrounding context and maybe we could find common ground or at least agree to disagree.
>Just a mild-mannered, aw-shucks Appalachian pretending he had a lot of common ground with that nice Midwestern coach
And a compassionate “Oh, Christ.” when Waltz mentioned the murder where his special needs son goes to school. (St Paul Central High School, about 3 miles from my house, The Governor’s Residence is closer by about a mile. The Pioneer Press covered it in detail.)
If you want to understand the United States I recommend starting with the Federalist Papers and giving our Constitution a careful read. They are both in the public domain
You don’t live here and you really don’t know what you are talking about. Really, you have to Google things that American grammar school kids already know by heart.
You are just shitting on my country from an ocean away with this stuff.
This is recreational squabbling for you. It’s not your country, you are spitefully kibitzing about a game for which you don’t even know the rules. For the *fun* of it.
Give the terribly uninformed hatred a rest please.
I gave my well thumbed copy to a work friend on the occasion of his becoming a US citizen. It was important to me that he understood the thinking that went into designing his new country.
> If I were a guy of whatever colour, I'd stay far away from the harridans there.
I also find it fascinatingly hypocritical, how the party of the politically correct who get offended at everything but especially things related to sexuality suddenly decides to go "these girls will fuck you if you vote for Harris". Where are all the woke voices calling out the ad as heteronormative, or demanding that one of the ladies be obviously trans?
I'm inclined to think most of the "this is what the Democratic Party should have done" commentary is missing the fact that the Democrats in a sense had to lose this election, in order for it to become undeniably clear that they should have done those aforementioned things.
Fundamentally, elections function as lessons and proofs about what society will really actually accept and what it won't. Polls, media and online commentary, reasoning it out from first principles, that can all be disregarded as biased or misleading or similar. Election results can't.
And it takes a number of elections for it to become clear what the true situation is. And to resolve ambiguous interpretations in the earlier outcomes. See this for example:
>"Enter FDR. FDR’s political strategy was forged in three Presidential elections: 1920, 1924 and 1928. In 1920, FDR as the Dems’ Vice Presidential candidate suffered what is still worst popular vote loss in U.S. History, losing 34%-60% to Warren G. Harding. But that was the low point for the Democrats. In 1924, FDR noticed that the Republicans were held to 54% of the vote, with 28.8% for the Democrats and 16.6% for the Progressives. Combined, the Progressives and Democrats added up to 45% of the vote. In 1928, although the Democrats lost badly, the nomination of Catholic Al Smith (while depressing Democratic turnout in the South) had turned out white ethnic voters in droves, and had flipped MA and RI to the Democratic column. While this does not seem significant today, it was extraordinary without the benefit of hindsight. After all, except for the badly divided election of 1912, no Democrat had carried either of these states since 1836 (no Democrat had carried MA in a contested election (save 1912) since 1804).
So what if Roosevelt could take the rump Democratic party of Southern Jeffersonians, keep the newly-engorged big city machines, and add to it Progressive Republicans who were disenchanted with their party’s pro-business stance? And with the collapse in the farm economy, maybe add some of midwestern farmers as well?
It worked better than hoped. Roosevelt ran as a national healer, without a clear platform. He was slippery, and sometimes contradictory in what he aimed to do. Even in office, he veered back-and-forth between conservative and liberal tendencies, offering the repeal of Prohibition for Catholics, strengthening unions for the city machines and progressives, but at the same time resisting the more left-leaning policies of Huey Long. Heck, even Ayn Rand supported him in 1932. And he won a landslide."
I think Matt Yglasias has talked a lot about how the 2012 outcome was ambiguous between an endorsement of economic liberalism and an endorsement of social liberalism, and between an endorsement of the moderate and strong forms of each. 2016 should have made it clear there wasn't this massive enthusiasm for affluent social liberalism, but there was still the possible "we didn't go far enough, turnout was depressed" interpretation. Taking or implying a bunch of very extreme positions in 2020 and then winning, but much more narrowly than expected...should that be seen as a success or a failure? Plus, maybe it was just optics, maybe you can run someone who doesn't *talk* about the extreme things but still holds those positions and you'll satisfy both the moderates and the base.
The 2024 outcome was needed to finally settle this ambiguity. Woke capital, educated middle class social identity politics, is not a winning strategy and never will be. Now basically no one can coherently deny this, and the conversations and issue focuses can finally move on. But 2024 had to happen.
Well, now we're in a place where Woke Capital and edumacated middle class social identity politics are the ones who show up at the meetings and stand in line for the microphone so they can take turns telling each other "that's racist".
They don't see BlueSky as a mistake. Why should they?
Oh my. I already forgot about the outrage over the white man babysitting his neighbor's child of a different color. What a crazy world we used to live in (and now we are gaslighted that it never existed).
Tyrone, think about the saying "Trust the complaint, not the prescription" or "Listen to the pain, not the solution". People may be wrong about the technical details of their complaints and suggestion. But something is undeniably wrong... and you seem to insist on denying it.
I don’t endorse stupidity. If I see it I’ll call it out. Perhaps I’ve lived a charmed life surrounded by phlegmatic Norwegian bachelor farmer types, but the closest I’ve come to ‘woke’ is a neighborhood group email asking me what my pronouns are with a link to “why it’s important.” This elicited a shrug on my part. “Been going by he/him for a long time, so I guess I’ll stick with them” was my response.
With the internet and god-awful social media, you can find any kind of crazy you care to.
With AI, the world is going to go through some unimaginable changes in the next 5 years. I’m hoping we can find a leader that can keep us from each other’s throats. Ignoring the left/right axis for the moment, I’m hoping for a Ronald Reagan or FDR consensus builder. I don’t want to see the insane hypersensitivity of woke or long-time allies being treated as adversaries and civilians being shot in the streets.
"the Democrats in a sense had to lose this election, in order for it to become undeniably clear that they should have done those aforementioned things"
That only works if they do learn lessons from it, and the correct lessons. Right now I'm not sure they have, though there are signs that internally people are trying to find the way forward.
I see hopeful (God bless 'em) online proposals that AOC should run, the Democrats should definitely select her, no really the voters are there with their tongues hanging out for the opportunity to vote for a young WOC with radical socialist ideas!
It'll never happen, but when you have that fringe hanging on, they can do more damage than their size would indicate, because if you run the centrist candidate who can shift the undecided squishy middle, they'll be outraged and they'll try burning it down with online campaigns, etc. The Democrats don't seem (right now) able or willing to tell the progressive fringe to go take a hike, because they've pinned the party image as being pro-all that: pro-reproductive freedom, pro-undocumented visitors (I did have to laugh at that newest euphemism in Jaybird's post-mortem, thank you Jaybird for the new term!), pro-reparations and racial justice and trans rights and every "just a few crazy college kids" position they could scoop up.
Not that they necessarily *believe* all that, but it's sure handy when you can just run on "my Republican opponent is the Devil made manifest and will lock up all the trans undocumented folx of colour in torture camps before forcing ten year old children to bear their fathers' incest rape babies*" instead of talking about policies in terms of hard facts as to what they want to do and how they would do it.
*You think I'm joking? I saw one online example of this protesting some Tennessee (I think) limit on abortion law, where it was a faux-50s image of nurse talking to child in hospital bed about exactly that: if we permit abortion, you won't have your daddy's baby!
"Undocumented Visitors" wasn't mine! It showed up for fifteen minutes a while back when I was told that I needed to stop saying whatever the hell one of the old Fatwas told us to say!
I find that there is much joy to be had to use unupdated terms.
The ever-shifting sands of "this is the correct term and if you use any other you're a bigot hater phobe/(five minutes later) no, now that's a slur, you bigot hater phobe" is marvellous territory.
But do you pronounce it "lah-tinks" or "latin-ex"? 😁
That image seems clearly inspired by this Franco mural: https://www.flickr.com/photos/8449304@N04/18203931295 . Evidently right-wing Catholics didn't have a problem with this in 1948. I don't disagree with your value judgement on what they ought to do, but factually this casual attitude to that sort of messaging is not a result of Trumpian partisanship.
Also, Deiseach is your clear example of "non-American with strong opinions on American domestic policy" ONLY because she's so prolific. If you pay attention and have a good memory for individual commenters (and the information they've revealed about themselves at various points) as I do, you'll notice that this is close to the norm on ACX, with many of the most heated Trump discussions composed largely of non-Americans. Or more specifically the *left* sides of these discussions are composed disproportionately of non-Americans; right-wing examples like Deiseach are rarer.
I've also frequently seen said left-wing commenters say exactly the sorts of things you've attributed to Deiseach (e.g. "oh well, I don't live there, this is all entertainment for me, interesting to see how this turns out from my comfort of Europe" and so on) but I've never seen it from her. Ask her why she has such strong opinions on US policy, and she'll say it directly affects her due to US cultural and economic influence. Most right-wing international commentators tend to say the same thing. I suspect but can't prove that the left-wing ones feel the same in reality but have a level of cultural pride that does not allow them to acknowledge they are subject to Anerican influence, so they talk as though it's a game to them. But whatever the reason, such talk is infinitely more obnoxious than anything from the likes of Deiseach, and they're the ones you should be angry at.
> You have to turn an 80-20 issue into a 75-25 issue via persuasion. And then you have to talk about it some more and maybe turn it into a 70-30 issue. And then you have to talk about it some more. And then when it’s a 65-35 issue, you still have to keep talking about it.
I would say that if you find yourself on the 20 side of any (important) 80-20 issue then you should not be running for office.
I'm not saying that *nobody* should ever be on the 20 side of any issue, I'm just saying that people who aspire to be the people's elected representatives should avoid being on the 20 side of any issue -- they should either change their minds on the issue or change their minds on their choice of career.
The number one qualification for running for office should be that you happen to have the most boring milquetoast and popular views on pretty much everything. You can't always be in the majority on every single thing, but you should never find yourself outnumbered four to one.
Well, I assumed that the main counterargument would be some variant of "but the 20 is the right side in the 80-20 issue". So instead of arguing "well, you should take the wrong side of this important moral issue", I argued "you have to talk to people, you can't just use Social Proof".
Occasionally, the 20 side is the side (most of) the other 80 _would_ take if they had more information. We can't always rely on a Gaussian distribution of information where the 80 side is overwhelmingly likely the better one; it's possible and even routine for only a few people to have important information, at first. Persuasion is the act of sharing that information.
Now, it might be wrong, in which case persuasion is more accurately the act of sharing that information _plus_ the audience agreeing that that information was accurate and important.
Well I'm sure that everyone thinks that their own side is right.
But my point was that you gotta choose. The job of being an elected representative and the job of being a supporter of unpopular positions are mutually exclusive. They are both important but you can't try to do both.
Would you say that the most recently elected presidential candidate had boring, milquetoast views?
Like, it would be nice if the most normie centrist views were also the most electable, but I'm not sure that that's actually the case. I've seen several pundits argue that being excessively centrist makes you come off as artificial and focus-grouped in an unappealing way.
The word "milquetoast" is rarely used in conjunction with the current President, but that's due to his personality, not his views. His views are very middle-of-the road, that's what got him elected; he famously has the views of a generic 90s Democrat.
> Would you say that the most recently elected presidential candidate had boring, milquetoast views?
Would the answer "yes" scare you? It's at least a possibility that this most recent candidate represents at least a sizable chunk of "normal", as alien as it may sound to you and me.
You did, in fact, write a better one than the DNC. Not that this was a terribly high bar.
I particularly appreciated the Jonathan Pie reference. Unfortunately, the Democrats have spend the past ten years ignoring that message, and it looks like they're going to spend the next ten years doing the same.
I still have bruises from some parts of 2018-2023 and resent the ever-living heck out of some of the stuff I was forced to go up a level of abstraction about.
Re the governorship race, YIMBY is a great thing to be a single-issue voter for, but in California specifically, I think one other thing takes priority: I don't care what else Steve Hilton says, his wildfire plan involves forestry policy (ie the actual source of the wildfires) instead of just using it as a talking point about climate change. This means that a Steve Hilton governorship has a chance of actually stopping the fires. Steyer wants to pin it on corporations, Becerra wants to pin it on insurance companies, neither of them sound like they're going to actually do anything about them. I think on paper the NIMBY policies destroy more value yearly than the fires, but once you include the amount of impact a single governor can have on them, when he doesn't plan to focus on them, forestry is probably higher-impact to reform.
Do any of the candidates talk about building codes? After all those fires happened in LA last year or the year before I was very interested to learn about what allowed the surviving houses to remain, and I think I remember even hearing a few experts say all houses built in fire-prone areas ought to integrate lessons from those.
Making it difficult for floating embers to enter the attic under soffits, keeping a perimeter around the house free from combustibles, and having a masonry fence tended to be the big takeaways that I recall. It would be interesting to see someone propose these as mandatory.
Making houses more fireproof, by making houses much more difficult and expensive to build, is not necessarily a great tradeoff.
If one percent of houses burn down before they are otherwise demolished, then it's (very roughly) not worth more than a one percent increase in construction costs to make them completely fireproof. You're better off just rebuilding the ones that burn down.
Masonry fences are expensive. And keeping vegetation away from houses isn't necessarily expensive but plantless gardens make for ugly living.
I did a quick search for numbers, it looks like way more than 1% of the homes threatened by wildfires in LA succumbed to them. Also I don’t think your equation is correct even putting aside your 1% figure; for example there are things people might pay double for, if it decreases their chances of losing that thing by even just a few percentage points.
A lot of why we have building codes, which do make houses more expensive to build, is to make them more fireproof (and leakproof and floodproof and collapseproof and moldproof etc.). So as far as code goes, the trade-off has already been made and the question is in what all is covered by it.
If adding a masonry fence, going with a specific type of product for soffits, and doing xeriscaping (which is usually more appropriate in fire-prone areas anyway, and is gorgeous if done well) within 10 feet of the house means the likely difference between your house surviving a wildfire vs. burning down (and there is evidence to suggest that it does mean this), I can see lots of people going for that.
I also think you are wrong about “more difficult”. Houses tend to be built faster today, by less skilled people, which suggests they are not more difficult to build despite building codes becoming more expansive and more stringent over the years.
I'd like to hear some opinions from people on two things that are coming up very quickly in my life:
First, as to what to study in college (which I will be starting next fall): is studying ML + math useful? I'd like to hear any opinions on this. It seems like fun, at least, but I'm somewhat worried I'd be learning it much less quickly than AI would be advancing. (For reference I would, if I did this, look to go to grad school, and I'd be able to hit graduate classes by my junior year, I think.)
Second, I will be living in China for some of my college years (as a part of Duke's DKU program); any thoughts/advice on this front, especially in conjunction with AI research and similar things. I think sino-american dialogue is super critical to AI going well and probably under-appreciated in the current environment, hence why I chose this, but I expect this will cause some problems with me doing research work.
Living in China is great there's an ACX meetup in Shanghai. Try to learn some Chinese before you go most Chinese don't speak English and your hugely limiting yourself if you don't speak any. I've lived in China a while so feel free to ask whatever about it.
Off-campus is it reasonable to be vegan, especially if I don't speak great Chinese? I'll do my best to learn it, but it'll be a struggle and a half.
How much are you able to travel around? I'll have a lot of 3 to 4 day breaks, plus some longer ones, and if it is reasonable I'd love to see more of the country than just Shanghai.
Any recommended ways to learn Chinese quickly?
What does it feel like? I've spent most of my life in 500-person-town areas of Montana, so I genuinely have no reference frame for this.
I do not envy your situation. Anything intellectual is being eaten by AI. My standard advice still holds (focus on something you find exciting AND are naturally better at than most people you know), but maybe not for long. The jobs that are entirely sitting in front of a screen are disappearing from the bottom up. Maybe check if you have talents that include doing stuff in the physical world.
I'm best at LSAT-style reasoning (I scored a 179/180 while in high school) but I'm not sure if I see a future for me in law and I don't know of other careers that use the same skills.
It's not exactly that I don't, but more so that I'm pretty unsure about it; it seems like it is highly possible that I don't get good think-tank or professor work (assuming these things exist at that point!) and then I am forced into corporate law work, which all seems like varying shades of 'highly unenjoyable work that has one redeeming quality, how much I could donate, which would still not be as much as it would be in quant/some tech/etc.'
Are you interested in languages and/or people in general? Are you in the US and interested in learning ASL? There is a shortage of ASL interpreters which is likely to continue to worsen, as it has been for the last 20 years. Legal interpreting is an even higher-demand specialization. Interpreting in many settings is mandated and defined by law to be an activity done by a person. I suspect sign language interpreting is going to be one of the last fields to be automated.
I'm not super interested in languages or people in general to be honest... or I am, but in a one-step-back way, learning the construction and such of language instead of learning a language.
Prefer a general / wide-ranging maths or comp sci course (that might or might not incorporate ML modules) to an ML specific one, at least early on. ML is a relatively narrow field, which is advancing fast; you can specialise later, and it will be easier, faster and you will have a deeper understanding if you start with a broader foundation. You will also find it easier to keep up as new developments happen.
As the singularity nears, all forecasts fail, however, my guess is:
Well, math is more basic, but also with more advanced AI. I don't expect there will be many jobs for math specialists after the next few years.
CompSci means so many things that it's impossible to guess how useful it would be.
*Understanding* math is more foundational, and gives you a stronger platform, but it's also more removed from any areas of direct application (that aren't already handled).
A wild guess is aim for a course-load that will lead to your understanding statistics. But that could start from either initial class.
First, while it's possible ML + math won't be useful in the AI future, the odds are much better than just about anything else you could study. My only caution, especially if you go to grad school, is to make sure you can code the basics. I'm tired of coming out of interviews of people with a masters in statistics and/or data science who can school me on the difference in different algorithms yet struggle with basic SQL queries.
Be able to solve all of those in pandas/python, then in SQL, then again in PySpark or maybe R/Julia. Even though vibe coding is definitely a thing, there's still a ton of coding challenges in job interviews and that's probably fair; I wouldn't trust someone to supervise a coding agent if they couldn't fizzbuzz. Or the DS/DE equivalent, which is like
"#42
Replace missing values in Min.Price and Max.Price columns with their respective mean.
As for China, from my experience, this is probably less helpful than you think. You're not gonna learn Chinese, it's brutal. Especially since no one cares about any fluency level below full fluency, so exerting a ton of effort to get to, say, a sixth grade reading level is effectively useless. In terms of tech...maybe you could find somebody but that requires a lot of "in's" that you probably won't have. Go to China, China is awesome, be young and have fun, get drunk in Sanlitun, but I would not expect big career impacts.
I've taken a few years of coding classes and can write in python + css/webdev stuff + java to decent levels, but I am by no means a master. Is it something I should try to pick up this summer?
and yeah, my only in is that I am good friends with the kid of a Chinese tech billionaire, which sounds like a great in but due to the disqualifying characteristic of not being the kid of another Chinese businessman, it doesn't actually help much.
Yeah, focus heavily on coding basics. Even at the senior level, everything I'm seeing is 1-2 rounds of coding interviews before you talk with a human being. Meh.
I'm not sure what your China question is, but you can 100% learn fluent-ish Chinese within a few years if you're semi-decent at learning stuff.
If you're doing the China year in 2 years, you can start spending 6 hours a week learning Chinese right now. This is enough to easily hit C1/HSK-5-ish levels before you go, and you'll be able to go high-immersion while you're there.
Also, visit China for a few months before you start studying there - get Chinese friends, travel, get confident in speaking etc.
Most people don't do it, but most people don't really try.
"If you're doing the China year in 2 years, you can start spending 6 hours a week learning Chinese right now. This is enough to easily hit C1/HSK-5-ish levels before you go, and you'll be able to go high-immersion while you're there."
This is untrue and you can figure it out yourself pretty fast. There's an expat scene in most big Chinese cities. Go talk to the expats there. Go ask them how long they've lived in China, how many Chinese girlfriends they've had, how often they meet with their tutor, and how much they study every day. If you meet a bunch of guys who have lived there for 5+ years, have a long-term Chinese GF/wife, work with a tutor 3x/week, and study 60-90 minutes a day and they're not fluent, that'll tell you how difficult it is.
Like, before you dedicate years of your life to this, go get some drinks with a bunch of guys who've lived it for years and see how viable it is. Well worth your time.
Haha, the selection effect of "the expat scene" is doing a lot of work here.
Seriously, have you met these people? The "expat scene" in any big Chinese city - characterized by that obnoxious American who hangs out in Sanlitun bars who hasn't learned to pronounce "ri" properly after ten years - is incredibly negatively selected for people who are incapable of learning Chinese, and this negative selection compounds in predictable ways.
I lived in China for over 7 years, had HSK-6 by the end of the 2nd year, and did a bunch of translation and research after that. I wasn't really exceptional - I studied with other foreigners for a year and, in my HSK-6 advanced classes, everyone was pretty impressive.
It's very common in some circles, but not in Sanlitun...
One big caveat - I think it's harder post-smartphone era because immersion is a lot more difficult, but if you're smart and motivated, you can still manage it.
You're probably right that 6 hours might not be enough, though. Probably should aim for 2 hours a day. I was more like 4-5 hours a day when learning, but a bunch of that was just listening to podcasts and watching TV - so you can be way more efficient.
Ooh, exciting. Yeah, you should study like crazy before going.
Once you're there, it's really easy to fall into Anglophone circles and screw up your chances of immersion, so you need to be very strict and very agentic in making sure that you don't slip into the "Anglophone comfort zone".
Be that annoying person who refuses to switch to English. Delete English language apps on your phone. Don't get a VPN. Make and break friendships based purely on who speaks to you in Chinese.
ML + math is maybe the only thing which is useful to study. Sure, AI is going to be advancing quickly, but AI governance in some form is sure to be a growth field, and the technical basis for training and governing AI is almost certain to involve ML and math as a foundation, whatever the superstructure of AI technology looks like.
An interest in philosophy and sino-american dialogue can't hurt either.
Split your time between curriculum/credential orientation and autodictat orientation. AI SOTA technology will be moving fast. Don't expect to learn about it in classes; instead, get that info through outside reading and perhaps study groups. But learn the foundations of ML, including the flaws and dangers of that technology in classes. Learn it solidly.
I got a philosophy degree back in the mid-90s. I have many friends who have degrees in things that they never use now. Degrees in this or that corner of the humanities, degrees in STEM fields unrelated to the job they have today...
I use my philosophy degree every dang day. Like it or not.
(That said, I went to a much cheaper college than Duke.)
Philosophy is my main passion so far in life, but I've focused hard enough on that, and been lucky enough to have very good teachers through high school, to the point where I have probably the equivalent of more than the required classes to get a major in philosophy at Duke. I've written a paper which was published at a pretty good undergraduate journal. Broadly I guess I am just very confident my skills in this will improve in ways I care about more quickly by studying neuroscience or ML or something of the sort than they will by studying philosophy, which will involve a lot of taking classes on books I have already read and written on. (You can't really test out of taking prereqs).
Well, if you've got Philosophy covered, you should look into making money. Machine Learning is probably the best way to do that. Even if you don't get a job specifically in Machine Learning, it communicates to employers "this guy can probably read a document and can probably type which puts him ahead of the last two guys we interviewed."
I looked into whether I could get extra compression in my zip files by reusing the same underlying file data when there are identical files in the archive. The zipfile format itself allows this, but Info-ZIP (used on Linux) was patched back in 2019 to reject such files in an attempt to guard against "zip bombs". Likewise many other zip libraries will also reject them. Therefore, even if you do create files with extra compression, people will have a hard time actually unzipping them, which defeats the purpose (might as well use 7z at that point, I guess).
It's really unfortunate that we've decided to artificially limit compression ratios just to guard against malicious files taking up too much space. As if zip compression rates weren't bad enough already.
If you can specify the order of files, like by creating a tar file first, you can exploit the inherent nature of compression performing well on runs of highly similar, even identical, files. Just put the identical files together. There are utilities like 'binsort' which try to find optimal seriations. https://gwern.net/sort
I'm not sure how this would be useful. If you have two bit-identical files in your directory, and you already know that, just get rid of one of them before archiving. If you frequently encounter a situation where you only find out the files were bit-identical after archiving, for me that seems like a hallmark that you should reconsider how you organize files.
(someone once told me powerpoints were essentially zip files under the hood, which does seem like a legitimate use case for repeated instances of an image file, but I don't know how true that is)
> SpaceX claims its total addressable market is $28.5 trillion. This is larger than the entire GDP of the United States and almost entirely built on businesses that do not yet exist.
> According to the prospectus, enterprise applications of AI make up to 80% of SpaceX's total addressable market. This means they expect large businesses to ay for Musk's AI tools to improve productivity. If you add in consumer AI, the total AI share of the claimed addressable market rises to 93%. So 93% of the company's value is Grock.
> ... it's worth asking which enterprises are currently using Grock. And from what I can tell, the primary documented use cases for Grock are fact-checking tweets and generating non-consensual nude images that have resulted in regulatory investigations in Spain, France, and the UK, and at least one ongoing lawsuit, which is not exactly the enterprise productivity pitch that I was expecting. The filing effectively concedes that the enterprise AI market is dominated by open AI, Anthropic, and Google. SpaceX's own AI product, Grock, holds a market share of roughly 3.4%. According to Bloomberg, SpaceX's own engineers have been slow to adopt Grock for technical work because it underperforms rival tools. Last month, Musk himself said that the AI code would need to be rebuilt from scratch shortly after he sold XAI to SpaceX for $25billion.
And wait until you get to the part where regular investors get shares with one vote each, while Elon gets the shares, which carry 10 votes each. Musk will end up with control over 85% of the votes! This about 22:30 minutes into the video...
If your objection is that the Total Addressable Market is too big because people are not currently subscribed to a company's product, that makes me think that you don't really understand what Total Addressable Market means.
The prospectus (which I haven't read, but only had described to me in the video) is that SpaceX will be a money pit, and that Musk envisions xAI being the chief source of revenue for the company. But the top three AI companies for revenue and adoption are OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral AI. And the chief source of xAI's revenue is renting data center space to Anthropic. Anthropic can cancel its contract on 3 months' notice. Well, SpaceX, in a typical Musk shell game, had a contract with xAI to provide them with AI services. Except Grok wasn't able to do what they needed. So not only is SpaceX stuck with a nonperofrming contract that they're paying on, but they still have pay a non-MuskCo company for their AI services (Anthropic, I think). The only profitable part of MuskCo is Starlink, and it's doing quite well.
Like SpaceX, Starlink and Tesla, xAI's real business is that of infrastructure and delivery: Colossus 1 and 2 are good for inference and training respectively, but not of their own models, hence the compute rent agreement with Anthropic. $25B will likely pay off in rental income pretty quick.
If there are fools willing to pay that much for the stock, then why shouldn't Musk sell them the stock? The only real question to me is why he stopped at $2T, and not say, 4 or 5...
Has TAM been anything other than bullshit in recent years? Uber and Airbnb claimed TAMs in the billions back in the staid and conservative 2000s, and delivered on them, but they're both up into the trillions today.
I agree that this is insanity, but it has infected everyone. Claiming a ridiculous TAM is routine for a growth business. I don't think this specific number is evidence of Elon Musk's lunacy; it's just proof that you should ignore TAM except as an indicator that the C suite knows how many zeroes the market would like to see.
> "The deal, with SpaceX, is that Elon Musk runs it however he wants, and he does weird stuff, and you have to trust him, and if you don’t like it you can’t complain. When SpaceX acquired xAI a few months ago, did a special committee of independent directors approve the transaction? Did Musk recuse himself from negotiations? Was the price set by independent valuation experts using a rigorous process? Did outside shareholders sue to block the deal? Stop. Musk wanted SpaceX to buy xAI, so it did." https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-05-21/spacex-investors-can-t-complaind
Fair warning that Boyle has degraded a *lot* in quality of reporting over the past few years. His scripts were clearly written by LLMs 12-24 months ago (now I assume he uses better AI that isn’t as obvious), but he’s no longer there to provide educational content. He’s providing edutainment.
And it's a huge shame too, because quality finance content is rare to come by on YouTube. The only person I still follow is Mark Meldrum, but he uses AI extensively when he highlights a company, so 30-40% of his videos are AI filler.
If you've ever heard of Musk talk about space colonization (or really, if you've ever heard Musk talk about *anything*), you'd already know this. Saying that SpaceX will take over the universe and make a bajillion dollars isn't anything *new*. Heck, Elon Musk just got awarded a "moonshot" pay package that only pays out if he somehow makes this happen.
Also, if you're expecting coroporate governance at a Musk enterprise, you must have been living under a rock for the last 15 years. Like come on now, at this point you can't really act surprised. Musk investors know what they're getting. *The whole deal* is "let Musk do whatever crazy things he feels like with no guard rails, and hopefully he'll make lots of money for you in the process".
Besides, dual class share structures are hardly unusual. Heck, many companies give common shareholders *zero* votes! You're acting like this is some weird new thing, rather than longstanding industry practice.
Matt Levine has made the point that much of Tesla's legally troubled massive Musk pay package was (at least according to musk) because he wanted to maintain enough voting control, and if they'd given Tesla super voting shares in the founding charter this could have been avoided. Perhaps Musk learned from that.
Can anyone recommend me specific sources on how Stafford Beer's Cybersyn worked (or was intended to work)? I tried reading Beer's writings and they're too general for what I'm looking for.
- No hay Gato, by Víctor Ganón: https://www.amazon.com.mx/No-hay-gato-URUCIB-transformaci%C3%B3n-ebook/dp/B0925736LP; Ganón is an Uruguayan consultant who worked with Beer several years after the Cybersyn episode. The book describes his work leading project URUCIB, with Beer as advisor (in fact Ganón contacted Beer partly due to Beer's involvement with Cybersyn). URUCIB tried to implement some of the same ideas behind Cybersyn, though with a somewhat more advanced technological stack (the "somewhat" part is interesting). Book is in Spanish and there's also an interview with Ganón here (in Spanish): www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfAU099C2I4
- Series of interviews with people who worked on Cybersyn, from the government side (Fernando Flores, Raúl Espejo) or from the Cybersyn team side (Roberto Cañete): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ada2Yyj4HXk; https://www.youtube.com/@enriquedetongoy/videos; The Fernando Flores interview has English subtitles, and I assume Youtube's automatic subtitles are good enough. Flores and Espejo in particular are very candid (compare with quotes in Medina's book).
All of these have some information on the inner workings of Cybersyn, though in the case of Medina that's not the focus of the book and in the case of URUCIB you can see how it was supposed to work indirectly, through a similar project. If you have any questions or want more sources don't hesitate to ask me.
Basically exactly what I was looking for. Thank you. I’ve subscribed and will stay tuned if you end up posting about Beer.
Do you think there’s anything interesting to be gained from his ideas? As in are there practical applications of his ideas that could be had?
I’m half skeptical that it’s just an interesting footnote of history that’s a dead-end idea, which was fortunate enough to get destroyed before it could demonstrate its inability to deliver, half interested in cybernetics as an overlooked field that was too ambitious for the technology at the time.
Maybe there was something to be gained from his ideas in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but not today.
And you could say that there are practical applications of his ideas, it's just that we don't call them cybernetics (*). When Beer (and before him Norbert Wiener, McCulloch, etc.) became interested in cybernetics, the idea of machines communicating with each other in real time, processing signals and taking "decisions" in real time was almost like science fiction (ENIAC was 1945, SAGE was 1955-1958 (**), FSQ-32 was 1960 (***)). But once computers achieved real time capabilities and computer networks came into existence (modems, etc.), cybernetics must have seemed like a quaint old fad.
If 19th-century scientists interested in human flight had organized conferences and published books about their ideas, and adopted a catchy name for themselves (say Birdaeroflightians), regardless of how interesting their ideas might have been, the moment the Wright brothers decided to stick a combustion engine to their airplane Birdaeroflightians would have become a quaint old fad.
If you take a broad interpretation of what cybernetics was, then all computer networking is cybernetics. But then, we didn't get computer networks thanks to any cybernetician.
This is just my opinion, of course, and I'm sure others who have studied Beer or cybernetics disagree.
(*) I'm not saying this is necessarily my own opinion.
(**) Jerome Wiesner worked on SAGE and met several cyberneticians in the 1952 Macy conferences.
Thanks. I just finished reading The Dream Machine which goes through a lot of the history of American cybernetics. It discusses a few people whose names I don't remember that were really pushing cybernetics over JCR Licklider's proto-internet machine-computer interface ideas.
I am mildly interested in the search for esoteric or lost knowledge. Some people look to ancient aliens or illuminati, I look to discredited Utopian experiments like Beer's Cybersyn.
If you have some original documentation, maybe ask an LLM to summarize it?
The Wikipedia article seems to focus on buzzwords ("designed in accordance with Gestalt principles to give users a platform that would enable them to absorb information in a simple but comprehensive way", "innovative technology at its time", "sophisticated operations room"), but among them I found the following:
* it was a network, the companies would provide data to government and receive data from the government server;
* the server would run some kind of monitoring, and make an alert when something alarming happens (e.g. a shortage of supplies, or too many workers sick);
* the central managers could send messages to the factories.
Well, it does not sound impressive today, but I guess in 1970s it was a sci-fi technology. The actual impact would probably depend on what kind of data was sent, what kind of alarms were set up, etc.
I imagine that something like this could be now vibecoded in a day. And it would solve some specific problems, such as "a government factory X has a shortage of a raw material, and a nearby government factory Y happens to have some extra; send a message to Y to transfer amount Z to X". The question is, how important is this kind of problems in a greater picture. On one hand, I am skeptical (the overall vibe about Cybersyn feels like "socialism was one online spreadsheet away from succeeding"), on the other hand, who knows, it probably could have been a 10% or 20% multiplier for government operated factories in 1970s.
I’m really curious in the context of live diagrams and flows in the context of a company. Understanding bottlenecks and whatnot through a live flow of money, data, customers, etc.
On a national scale it’s almost comically ambitious, but there seems to at least be some nugget of something interesting, at least if I believe the Chilean government did its due diligence in the 70s, which I don’t believe, but I think its at least possible.
If I could find the original documentation I’d be very happy. So far all I’ve gone through are a few of his books, which are about the same level of detail as Wikipedia (conceptually explaining how it works, but not specifically explaining it). Before going in for a deeper pass I figured there might be someone here who hyperfixated on Beer before and can point me in the right direction.
> “Of those who demonstrated math skills not meeting middle school levels,” the report found, 42% reported completing calculus or precalculus.
Since grades at all levels of US education are rapidly coming to signify nothing other than "I attended this school", what is the signaling equilibrium going to converge to?
You can't make college actually hard (signaling that their degree means they actually learned something there), because students are customers paying 6 figures for that piece of paper.
And you can't assume that just because a student went to a prestigious institution that they actually deserved to get in, because highschool and below already awards A's for just showing up.
People pay princely sums to attend prestigious institutions because it signals something to employers. But what is it signaling at this point if no one is learning anything?
> But what is it signaling at this point if no one is learning anything?
At the very least, it's still successfully filtering out people who can't function in society. A high school diploma still gives you some confidence that whoever you're hiring is not mentally ill to the point that they can't stay in school. College degrees gives you the additional confidence that they can survive in rigid systems that expect consistent output out of them.
That certainly better than nothing, but if that's all that a college degree is doing, you'd think there would be many other credible ways to signal the same thing for a fraction of the cost.
>And you can't assume that just because a student went to a prestigious institution that they actually deserved to get in, because highschool and below already awards A's for just showing up.
I don't think many elite private universities, or even the better public ones, are admitting people just on the basis of their raw high school GPA. Most places are still using SAT/ACT for part of it along with AP test scores, some use relative high school GPA (e.g. top N% of your class), and there's a lot of other subjective stuff like essays and extracurriculars that can be gamed but can also be used to extract information about intelligence, diligence, and so forth. So being accepted at an elite school is still a legitimate signal.
And while it's rare for people to flunk out of college altogether, having to drop back to a less demanding major is still a thing, so that's another useful signal. As is having your professors recommend you for undergraduate research projects or select internships.
The “signal” of graduating from a good college (as opposed to the stuff you actually learned there, if any) listed on your CV makes a big difference to your first job, but really, how much does it still matter 3-4 years after you leave academia?
As a hiring manager, I've always found in-person interview to give a much, much stronger signal than anything on the CV, whether college or past experience. The CV slush pile comes prefiltered by HR/first stage recruiters, but those mostly just match keywords. Phone screens filter a bunch, then the remainder get to people like me. IME the most useful thing the CV gives me is a list of things the candidate claims they've done / areas they claim they are particularly good at; I use these to drive conversation during interview, in the hope that they actually can discuss things they specifically call out in their CV. IME how selective this is varies by industry sector; the financial company I worked for had the highest proportion of candidates who fell apart when asked about things they said they'd done, the chip design firm the lowest, the games company somewhere in between. The one thing that least correlated, for anyone except very recent graduates, with likelihood of hire was where and how long they had studied before their first job.
Anyway, this anecdote is my experience as a software engineer, in the UK, interviewing mainly (but not exclusively) individual contributor software engineers with typically at least a BA in computer science (though a couple of my best hires were self-taught!) from early 2000s to the present day. I have no idea how this relates to people's experience in other sectors / other countries, or even other engineers. Anyone care to weigh in?
(Also I only discuss the ability to get and hold a job. Others tell me salaries end up correlated for much longer, but I have almost never been involved in salary negotiation.)
That's exactly my point. Knowing that someone got good grades from a name brand institution already tells you very little that's useful to an employer. So it seems like an unsustainable equilibrium for millions of students to keep paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for these pieces of paper.
They do it because they think it guarantees them a good job. But if employers are saying that it means very little to them, then why pay the money?
What has to give is the part where the college receives money for something other than actually teaching kids things. Yes, this means either someone other than the kids has to be coughing up the money, or someone other than the college has to test the kids so they get their pieces of paper, or both. The signal has to be funded by the entities interested in it being accurate. The incentives just don’t align otherwise.
> Yes, this means either someone other than the kids has to be coughing up the money, or someone other than the college has to test the kids so they get their pieces of paper, or both.
It has to be the second of those. There is an inherent conflict of interest when the same entity is supposed to be responsible for both education and certification.
Nonetheless I can feel reasonably confident that if someone majored in maths at MIT or Caltech then they're pretty competent at maths.
A slight tangent but I find it interesting that the US has thousands of different educational systems running in parallel but they all do the same things. For instance they all agree that there's a thing called "precalculus". I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad way to structure high school mathematics, it's just a very specific way and I'm surprised there's not more variety between fifty states and countless school districts.
> A slight tangent but I find it interesting that the US has thousands of different educational systems running in parallel but they all do the same things. For instance they all agree that there's a thing called "precalculus".
My school had nothing called "precalculus", and of course there is no area of mathematics for which "precalculus" would be a description that made sense or meant something. You're commenting on a fashion trend.
On paper there's one thing called precalculus, in practice likely not. Between school variance in student abilities is huge, and even if every school is teaching a "too easy" version of precalculus, it's likely still the case that what's expected of a student at an "elite" highschool to pass that class is much more than what's expected of a student as a poor inner city school.
So maybe that's the answer? The differentiation primarily comes from the bar being set differently by different institutions. Where schools in, say, wealthy suburbs are known a priori to give their students a better education.
So maybe the fact that the system is moving towards signalling nothing except wealth is the system working as intended?
> You can't make college actually hard (signaling that their degree means they actually learned something there), because students are customers paying 6 figures for that piece of paper.
I think you could -- and your college would start sending a much better signal if you did -- it just seems that there is no motivation to do that if money keeps flowing regardless.
If you are in the college business, it seems easier to keep doing the profitable thing. And if you are in a mood to disrupt education, you will probably do something other than found a new college. Among other reasons, because the feedback loop is very slow... it would take a few years until your students finish, and then a few years more until the employers notice. Also, you would probably have to solve all kinds of logistical problems that are unrelated to education or testing per se; being good at education does not necessarily give you an advantage in these.
As it becomes easier and easier to get a college degree, the signaling value goes up, not down. It no longer means you're anything special, but not having a college degree means you must be a total screwup. 30 years ago it was super normal for somebody to go into work after (some or all of) high school, but now it's basically a permanent strike against you that can only be righted by belatedly getting a 4 year degree like a normal member of the professional middle class
But if the barrier to getting in is near zero, and the barrier to getting a degree once in is near zero, then what's its primarily measuring is "did your family have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on this thing". Which is a very different signal.
It's normal for a person of average abilities to go to the state university, often at a reduced rate, sometimes in combination with community college credits, and pay much less than that. People able to get into elite colleges are overrepresented in the conversation about college more broadly.
But then it's the same argument, just further down the income ladder. It's measuring whether you were able to cobble together however many thousands of dollars (plus the amount lost due to deferring income for 4 years) in order to hand it over to a college.
Most poor people in modern America messed up, and it is actually a bad sign if someone doesn't have their life together enough to take out a loan for a few thousands of dollars, collect some cheap community college credits, sublet a room from an acquaintance, and work a bit to make up the difference. People who can't do those things really can't do most modern jobs.
There are scholarships for promising young people who don't have any family money through no fault of their own. There are also scholarships for people who want to do lower middle class things with lots of open positions, like teaching.
One possible path is that university admissions (at least for prestigious universities) will continue to factor in standardized test scores that are conducted in proctored environments, such that the degrees from those institutions are at least somewhat rooted in actual ability. So far employers are unwilling (or maybe prohibited?) to ask for test scores directly, so that proxy will have to do.
"My reason for being here is practical. I got a call from my landlord. Rather than raising the rent or threatening eviction, I was glad to hear this simple question: 'do you believe in Free Speech'? I said 'yeah'. He said 'great, here's your chance to give one'"
I'm helping organize Wiki AI day on July 21 at Wikimania (the Wikimedia movement's annual conference, in Paris this year). If you've built something at the intersection of open knowledge and LLMs and want to share it, dm me or write to alaexis.wiki at gmail.
Wikipedia is in a strange place in AD 2026. On one hand, pretty much every LLM was trained on it and if you ask LLM to search for something chances are you'll get a few Wikipedia links. On the other hand, fewer people actually read it directly and fewer people convert to comtributors.
So the day is partly about obvious things - using AI to improve the encyclopedia, for examples by helping with maintenance, AI-derived problems (slop, biases, hallucinations, etc.). I'm also interested in broader/weirder questions: what's the right interface for acquiring knowledge, what happens with the "encyclopedia anyone can edit" principle when anyone can generate unlimited amounts of content, how we decide which models to use (maybe we need epistemic humbleness benchmark?).
Personal itch: it'd be really cool to use LLMs to triage or audit whether or not a given citation actually supports the claim the article is making in the point where the work is cited. Given that there's a ton of grandfathered-in citations that haven't been seriously audited, and given that Wikipedia is a major battlefield for ideologues who want to control the apparent consensus belief, it seems badly needed
Haha building this was exactly how I got involved in this whole thing (I hope others won't think you're a plant). You're right that it's a big problem, depending on the article about 1 in 20-50 citations doesn't support the claim it's attached to.
> You're right that it's a big problem, depending on the article about 1 in 20-50 citations doesn't support the claim it's attached to.
I tried to improve the page on French Toast by marking a citation as [failed verification], since it was cited in support of a claim that it showed was false.
An editor (not a bot) came along to remove the tag and explain to me that it was inappropriate - the citation could not fail verification, because the cited source existed, and whether or not it contradicted the claim in the article that it was the citation for was irrelevant.
I'm curious as to what would happen if you edited the article to immediately follow the false claim with the true claim, citing the same source. In roughly the same way that I'm curious about train wrecks, but still...
Interestingly, the page as it currently stands includes a heavily-cited paragraph contradicting and undermining the false claim in a couple of different ways. This adds essentially no value to the lay experience of reading the article, since it's not on topic. The reason that paragraph is there is to make a best effort to stop people from adding the false claim back in.
This paragraph was added in November 2025. So the good news is that false claims get fixed, the bad news is that it can take years. The source checking app I built aims to reduce the time and effort needed to fix such inaccuracies.
As to "This adds essentially no value to the lay experience of reading the article, since it's not on topic" I agree with you. However, it's a feature and not a bug of Wikipedia. The way the rules work, as long as there is an expert who said "this resembles French toast" and it's not a fringe view (which it won't be since you can count the experts on the origins of French toast on the fingers of one hand) there is no policy-based way to remove this information from the article.
Currently Wikipedia feels very hostile to contributors. Instead of "thank you for helping us grow" it is "your task is to convince us that your contribution is worthy of our encyclopedia".
Twenty years ago, you could write anything and get an article started. Like, maybe even a sentence or two. If people saw that the topic made sense, they added a "stub" flag, then someone else added a sentence or two, and in a few months or years a complete article would grow.
(It was also acceptable -- even recommended -- to make a link to an article that did not exist yet. The link would be displayed in red color, and it could encourage someone else to start working on the article.)
Today, you have to write the first version of the full article alone, with references and other stuff. (Also it is my impression that the syntax is getting more and more complicated; twenty years ago it was markdown, these days I am unable to get it right without the visual editor.) Then you can submit the finished article for approval, and hope that the editors will deem it worthy, considering the notability, the quality of references, etc. Stubs are rejected.
Here is my recent attempt: I noticed that my kids' favorite story book does not have a Wikipedia article. Hey, if someone's books were translated to dozens of languages and sold on the opposite side of the planet, is that not worthy of a Wikipedia article? Plus the books are really good in my subjective opinion. The author also won some awards, although I have no idea how important they are. So in the spirit of "if you see something missing, you can add it yourself" I wrote:
Well, too bad. The article is not long enough, and has not enough references. I fucking know! This is what they used to call "stub" in the old times, and it's actually longer than many stubs I have previously made. How about accepting the article, so that someone else can expand it later? Is that not a part of what "wiki" used to mean?
Also, the link in the "List of African-American writers" was removed, because by failing to get my article approved, I have failed to demonstrate that the author is notable. What about using a google search to verify? Maybe my article sucks but the author does not, and if you keep the link someone else may write a better article, but if you also erase all traces of my attempt...
So I feel that this is a very bad combination of "we reject everything that seems like AI" and also "we reject all texts that are insufficiently perfect". As a human, I am not going to jump through your hoops, because if I am not a regular contributor, I am not even sure of all the rules, and no I am not spending a weekend studying them for the privilege of making an unpaid contribution to an online encyclopedia.
AI is probably the least of Wikipedia's problems; rejecting actual humans, even former Wikipedia contributors, seems much worse to me. Ironically, I wonder whether the article would be accepted if I actually used an AI to write it. I respect Wikipedia enough not to make a disruption just to make a point, but the result is that articles that otherwise might exist, will not.
> it is my impression that the syntax is getting more and more complicated; twenty years ago it was markdown
This is definitely untrue. Wikipedia would have had to switch from their existing system to a brand-new one for no reason. That new system, Markdown, would have been missing most of the features that Wikipedia needed in its existing system, such as support for links to other wiki pages and mathematics. Markdown was never in use at Wikipedia.
There is a trend of people who appear to be new to the internet applying the term "markdown" to any markup language of any kind. Is this what you mean? For example, it's common now on Hacker News for people to complain that the markdown implementation doesn't behave the way they think it should. That's because there is no markdown implementation.
Yeah, I was imprecise. What I meant was that in the old days, I just had to learn the symbols for header, link, bold, italic, and that was all. Most articles looked like that. (Someone else added an infobox to the article later.)
These days, I look at the syntax of references, and it's the kind of code I wouldn't bother writing without AI assistance. Though I guess if I used mere links instead of the sophisticated references, the article would have a chance to be accepted, if it passed the other criteria.
In other words, the old article source code *visually resembled* markdown, the current one looks like a blend of markdown and xml.
I've had similar experiences. At one point in the last couple of years I wanted to create a page about a well known, established, successful company that would definitely be considered notable in the history of the relevant industry.
I created the page, filled it with references to primary sources - many of which were the company's own website for factual data like headcount, revenue, address..., but many of which were independent news articles written about the company - and got the whole lot entirely rejected and deleted because I had "cited the company's own website too many times" (I no longer recall the exact wording that was used, but that was the gist of it) and therefore it might not actually be as notable as I was claiming and I might even be the company's marketing department in cunning disguise (spoiler, I was not. Indeed the company's marketing team got wind of what I was doing and asked me not to create it because in their view it was another thing they needed to "curate" - I ignored them because they did not have any jurisdiction over me and I do not believe that companies should "curate" their wikipedia pages).
When the page was removed, so were all the links I had created to it from lists of "companies that were transformational in the history of XYZ", "companies in geographic location ABC" etc. So now these lists exist with a gaping hole where that company ought to be, and nobody looking at the lists to learn something would be any the wiser that the company even exists.
Isn't "anyone can generate unlimited amounts of content" thankfully a thing of the past, with most contributors these days seeming to range from pretty well informed to awesomely erudite? I make use of Wikipedia fairly often, and I have certainly noticed significantly less slop, errors and polemicism.
The general consensus seems to be that multivitamins are useless. I am currently on Retatrutide and have a severely reduced food intake. Would it be reasonable to take Multivitamins in this situation, and if yes which ingredients would be important?
Multivitaminerals are essential to optimize for long term homeostatic maintenance, including slowing cognitive decline, gfr decline and increasing longevity.
The thing is, the scientific literature systematically fails trial design.
Among many things, it is essential for a multivitamineral to:
1) have zero vitamin A (including provitamin A carotenoids)
because vit A is cytotoxic, empirically increase mortality and is extremely neurotoxic
5) people should undestand that there are fundamental tradeoffs at some ages and populations, for example liposomal gsh and other record breaking antioxidants potentiate carcinogenesis once established.
Choline and alcar both increase TMAO and hence cardiovascular mortality despite major neuroprotection.
6) optimizing one's gerontology should go far beyond multivitaminerals and omega 3s, e.g. aged garlic extract, nattokinase, etc
7) the most promising therapeutics are albeit sometimes available at low cost, tested by ATM ~0 human beings on the planet.
8) of the very small subset of people that experiment, a non existent subset publish their biomarkers slopes (egfr, nfl, proteomics, metabolomics, histology, meteor, MDA, etc)
The key point being that there isn't therefore, a single functional human being on this planet.
Thanks for the info! I kind of find it hard to extract a simple Multivitamineral recommendation from it, though. Most multivitamins I found contain 100% of the daily recommended dose of both Vitamin A and Iron. And the first link provided, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41549912/ , specifically lists iron deficiency in people on GLP-1 drugs?
Iron supplementation should be based on Transferin saturation. BTW for fat soluble nutrients peak low levels will be reached after weight steady state, weight loss otherwise transiently increase some levels. If rapid take TUDCA to avoid gallstones but not at digestion time.
Multivitamins are not useless, but they may have "minimal utility" on most good diets. Do, however, be sure to that not "multivitamins", but rather "multivitamins + minerals". And avoid overdosing. (Some vitamins can accumulate to cause problems.)
FWIW, I've run across a recent study that claimed that elderly people taking multivitamins appeared to age more slowly. And another that many people are deficient in vitamin B12. (One doctor [years ago] said this was due to difficulties in absorption. This is plausible, but difficulties doesn't mean it doesn't happen at all, and it *is* supposed to be cumulative. So don't just pack it in. Multivitamins are a decent insurance. Etc.)
Multivitamins are not useless; they are a useful hedge against your diet not being the wholesome and balanced one that the doctors and nutritionists want everybody to eat but something cheap and easy and comfortable and perhaps deficient in one or two micronutrients because you weren't referencing a spreadsheet when you established your culinary preferences.
Anything much *beyond* a multivitamin is indeed questionable, and often (but not always) just a way of generating expensive urine. But the people saying the multivitamins themselves are useless are the ones who have a manifesto describing the wholesome and balanced diet you're supposed to be eating.
My mother was an Ivy-league nutritionist turned amateur (and later semi-professional) chef, and she still had us take a multivitamin every day just to be safe. And if you've recently downgraded your food intake in a big way, yeah, that sounds like a case where it would be very appropriate.
Counterpoint: I tend toward an undesirable diet and one side effect that has become apparent is that, when clipping my fingernails, they tend to flake "horizontally" (as in, part of the nail close to the surface, where the air is, will separate from the part below, closer to where the meat is).
Spending time in China, I had a diet that was mostly distinguishable by being much richer in onions. This solved the flaky-nails problem, which I was pleased with.
But adding multivitamins to my normal, worse diet doesn't do that. Isn't this what an all-purpose dietary supplement is supposed to accomplish? It seems fairly clear that I'm suffering from a nutritional deficiency of some kind.
A bit of searching suggests that the key micronutrient in your case might be sulfur. Which doesn't appear to be common in typical multivitamins, but then sulfur deficiency doesn't appear to be common either. When it does occur, it does affect keratin production,
Are you by chance vegan or vegetarian? The top non-onion sources of sulfur seem to be meat, dairy, and eggs. And yes, this is the sort of thing a multivitamin should cover, but possibly the manufacturers are slow in adapting to the increasing prevalence of vegetarian diets.
> The top non-onion sources of sulfur seem to be meat, dairy, and eggs.
Meat can be more or less prominent in my diet, but milk is always a major part of it. I drink about half a gallon of milk per day. (Still true in China, despite the much higher price of milk there. I learned to visit the grocery store near opening, when milk that was about to expire was available at steep discounts.) Meat was probably also more present in the Chinese diet than the American one, but I'm not subjectively feeling meat-deprived or anything.
Eggs would not be a significant part of my diet in either case. As things currently stand, the pillars of my diet are something like bread > milk > cheese >> meat. Legumes have been prominent in the past but aren't now.
Hello fellow Reta user. I upgraded from Zepbound to Reta after Dec. Lilly progress report on it came out, and find it's even more effective than Zepbound. No side effects except skin sensitivity, sort of like sunburn all over. Weird but bearable. Studies find that most weight losers lose muscle and some bone strength -- unclear whether GLP-1 weight loss is worse about this than that from whatever the stomach surgery currently in use is. However, do not want to lose strength and bone mass, and have made a point of supplementing protein and calcium very heavily because it is so hard to eat much on Reta that it is just hopeless to try to meet goals for any food component whatever by doing it with ordinary food. I sprinkle whey protein on everything, or sometimes just make a whey plus milk slurry and spoon it up. Faintly sweet, not too unpleasant. Take calcium pills if day's food does not give me required amt. I also take vitamin D3, along with K2 (helps with absorption of D). And I take a multi, because it's not much trouble and seems like good insurance. Used Consumer Labs guide to choose best one. Ended up with one whose brand name is Alive. Am also fussy about getting at least 48 oz liquid per day. Excuse typos etc -- I am on day 2 home from rehab after having an enormous and successful back surgery, so am kind of foggy. I lost weight and worked out with PT for months in advance partly to improve my chances of good back surgery outcome, and damned if I didn't succeed in getting a good outcome. Currently off Reta while I fight my way back from the inevitable deconditioning that occurs after such a surgery, but am not gaining weight. Lost 30 lbs prior to surgery, have about another 10 lbs to lose before I am back to my college age weight. Will resume Reta once my strength returns. Wishing you success!
I have the same strange skin sensitivity, just like a light sunburn, mostly on the back and upper legs; no other side effects (apart from the obvious consequences of slow emptying of the stomach, such as seldom light nausea and very seldomly heartburn).
I try to eat protein, but find it hard: At first I was quite enthusiastic about the tasty chocolate milkshakes, but for some reason I am sick and tired of them now. Maybe unflavored and unsweetened whey protein would work better, I will try. But even when I had two servings of whey protein milkshake daily (now I hardly get one down) I never got near the recommended 1.6g/kg body weight protein (which would be around 140g; I never managed to get more than 100g)
So I will start a multivitamin as well, just ordered "Nature's Way Men's Multi" as this is easily and cheaply available here and I am too lazy to spend hours on researching alternatives...
I think I am a bit in unusual in being able to tolerate eating odd mixtures. Easiest thing for me is to mix unflavored whey protein powder with milk or water to make it about as thick as gravy, and just eat it with a spoon. The quantity of stuff I have to get down is not large,maybe 1/3 of a measuring cup, and I just take a sip of water after each bite. It is slightly sweet, and tastes sort of like condensed milk. Some might like it better if they mixed this thick mixture with applesauce or yogurt, but I find the small quantity quite tolerable to get down with nothing added. I like the protein shakes OK, but they are too sweet for me, After a while I feel like I am eating a liquid candy bar and can't stand the idea of swallowing any more super sweet stuff. Another trick I use is to mix whey protein with oily stuff. For instance I melt 1-2 oz of a cheese I like in the microwave and then stir in a bunch of whey protein while the cheese is still hot and liquid. When it cools it still tastes mostly like the original cheese, even though it's now full of extra protein. Cremieux also mentions some sodas that have whey protein in them. Oddly, they are transparent and not thick and milky, yet contain a good amount of whey. They are expensive and I don't even like soda so I have not tried them. Also, most of the food I eat is proteiny. Mostly greek yogurt and cheese, also sardines (which I hate, but I eat them anyhow). Have lots of unsweetened frozen fruit in freezer, and eat frozen mango chunks or cherries or whatever once daily, like tiny popsicles. The closest I come to "eating the rainbow" is these fruits. Vegetables I don't bother with. it is just impossible to eat a balanced diet on Reta, so I just eat proteiny calciumy things, plus frozen fruit. Anyhow, good luck to you. Send me an update if you like, or info if you find out something you think I should know!
What is giving you the confidence that what you're actually on is Retatrutide? A relative of mine recently got on it (allegedly) but Lilly overtly says that it is only being produced in a limited capacity and reserved for clinical trials. I'm struggling to imagine somebody swindling the formula straight from the lab, reverse engineering it and then producing it en masse in such a short time frame.
Later comment: I asked GPT your question. How could another lab even know how to make the stuff? Here is my question and GPT's answer:
ME: Many labs in China and elsewhere are making Retatrutide and selling it. Yes, I realize many are badly run and dirty and dishonest and not safe to buy from. But I am not planning to. I am asking about a different issue: How is it that these places know how to make it at all? Isn't the formula a closely guarded secret of Lilly's? Or is it not a secret, but simply an easy-to-figure-out formula that Lilly has patented?
GPT: For a peptide drug like Retatrutide, the “secret sauce” is usually not the amino-acid sequence itself. That sequence is generally disclosed in patents and scientific publications fairly early in development.
So the situation is roughly this:
Lilly invents the molecule.
Lilly patents it.
The patent has to describe the molecule in enough detail that a skilled chemist could theoretically make it.
Once that patent is public, chemists elsewhere can read it.
For peptide drugs, the core structure is often very explicit in patents:
exact amino-acid sequence
modified amino acids
fatty-acid side chains
linker chemistry
sometimes even synthesis routes
Retatrutide is not a mysterious black-box substance in the way Coca-Cola syrup is a trade secret. It is a patented molecular structure.
Same as Eremolalos: (I am in the EU) Bought it as research chemical (in my case directly from China) and had one of the ten vials in the package tested from an independent lab (in my case Janoshik). Testing costs more than the vials (but together it is still cheaper than legally bought Wegovy, which is the inferior substance and would still require a prescription)
See Cremieux's spring 2025 article for details. Big picture is that it is apparently quite easy either to look up or to deduce chemical structure of drugs in this class. They are manufactured and sold in China and India by a huge number of labs. While of course many labs are dirty sloppy and unsafe, not all are. And there are sellers in the US who search out the good foreign labs, then buy the peptide they want, say Retatrutide, and have it extensively tested here for purity, accuracy of quantity, etc. They then sell the peptide as a "research chemical," which is legal here, or at least legally gray enough not to get them shut down. All of them know that 100% of their buyers are going to be using what they buy for weight loss, following the Lilly dosing protocol.
There are some labs in the US, not affiliated with these sellers, who test drug samples and publish the results of all the tests they do of GLP drugs from these "research chemical" sellers. So if I look up Reta at one of these labs, I can see not only the results of my batch, of which I sent them a sample, but of every Reta batch sent to them that was bought from my grey market supplier. All of them have had stellar scores.
There is also some crowd-sourced into to be had from the comments on Cremieux's original post (which he updates regularly as knew GLP-1 info comes in).
Another factor is that there is a huge demand for cheaper GLP-1 drugs the US, and some buyers are like me and, presumably, you: smart and skeptical. They want proof they are getting the actual product in pure safe form. They are also able to pay more than one does at the cheapo lousy sellers in the US. The way to succeed with this crowd is to sell a very good quality product, and charge a bit more for it. I have found a lab that has taken that route. Ethics aside, it has to sell the good stuff if it wants to keep making money. If it slips up, word will get out fast. We all check the lab test results regularly.
Most people doing what I am a sound to me like well-educated professionals. All of this together is why I am sure it is Reta. Also, it has worked exactly as advertised, and I have suffered no ill effects or weird side effects. I do have one side effect, skin sensitivity, which is a known side effect of this particular drug.
If you don't want to pay $8 for Cremieux's paywalled article, you can confirm this info yourself by asking one of the smarter AI's about various details.
I'm looking for a decent animated visualisation covering the timeline of recent (say last five years or so) of AI progress. Something like the Epoch or METR capability graphs but in a narrative video form. Surely someone has made something like this, but my searches are turning up documentaries, forecasts or slop. Does anyone know of such a thing?
Among other things, this must be the first time Lord of the Rings has been cited by a Pope. Also, one of Anthropic's co-founders is apparently part of the release event for this, so I guess (?) people in the frontier AI world are taking the Pope's opinion seriously.
For those who aren't Catholic, the first two chapters are generally an explanation of the Church's social gospel and the reason it exists. If you just want to know what the Pope says about AI you can start at Chapter III.
If you don't have time for 40,000 words and want a neutral-but-orthodox TLDR, I recommend The Pillar's breakdown:
I was pretty disappointed by how confidently he took the "it's not real intelligence" line.
I read this:
> First, any statement regarding AI risks becoming quickly outdated, given the remarkable pace at which these systems are developing. Second, all of us, including those who design them, possess only a limited understanding of their actual functioning. Indeed, current AI systems are more “cultivated” than “built,” for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence “grows.” As a result, fundamental scientific aspects — such as the internal representations and computational processes of these systems — remain, at present, unknown.
...and thought, "yes, this is exactly the right kind of epistemic humility we should have regarding what's really going on internally in AI!"
And then in the very next paragraph, we have:
> ...we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of “intelligence” with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence...So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. Even when these tools are described as capable of “learning,” their way of doing so is different from that of a human person.
No! These are all things that we should be very uncertain about, for the exact reasons you explained in the previous paragraph!
I wish he'd bitten the bullet and said "sure, they might be conscious and have experiences, but they cannot have a redemptive relationship with God, because scripture says that's only for humans" rather than avoiding the difficult moral question via bare assertion that they lack all these qualities.
Many people have had the same comment. I think what Pope Leo is saying here is not a pronouncment on what the AI tech *does* as much as what it *is* - it's a theological statement that AIs are not humans. Take this sentence:
>So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.
Although it's not always explicitly stated, I think it's fair to say Catholic theology has long focused on the idea of the human body as being inseparable from human nature in many respects. I think the Pope's saying real human intelligence requires a mind-body connection. A disembodied p-zombie is, be definition, not an "human intelligence" like ours, no matter what it can do.
Well, the human body *is* inseparable from the human nature. I think dualism has no reasonable foundation. And AIs do not have a human body, so they aren't humans. This, however, does not seem to imply that they can't have intelligence, unless your definition of that term is exclusivist. And I'm quite sure that AIs do not feel human emotions...but they may well feel analogs of such, which at a sufficiently high order of abstraction are best described by the same terms.
I feel like he's a plumber being asked to comment on someone else's dental surgery.
"Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the world.” Matthew 28:19
I was talking about where he says to the Samaratin that he was not sent to help them, but that, also, doesn't restrict those eligible to humans. I suppose you could say he was sent to governments.
If you're familiar with that particular passage then you should know he does help the Samaritan woman.
But also that takes place before the Passion, and the Bible is very clear that after the Resurrection the New Covenant is for all people – hence basically all of the Acts of the Apostles
...saying that, although Christian teaching acknowledges the possibility of non-human intelligence (e.g., angels), the redemptive relationship with Christ and God entailed by Christian worship is uniquely human and not applicable to non-human intelligences, should they exist.
Exactly as written, this statement is true. But nothing in scripture or tradition excludes the possibility that other species (e.g. aliens) might have equivalent relationships which are separate from what we understand as Christian worship (which only makes sense for the descendants of Adam).
The Catholic Church doesn't believe in a literal Adam, nor the literalness of anything else in Genesis, so you're unlikely to see that argument coming from the Pope.
Not true. E.g. from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
>390 The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man.264 Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.
>404 How did the sin of Adam become the sin of all his descendants? the whole human race is in Adam "as one body of one man".293 By this "unity of the human race" all men are implicated in Adam's sin, as all are implicated in Christ's justice. Still, the transmission of original sin is a mystery that we cannot fully understand. But we do know by Revelation that Adam had received original holiness and justice not for himself alone, but for all human nature. By yielding to the tempter, Adam and Eve committed a personal sin, but this sin affected the human nature that they would then transmit in a fallen state.294 It is a sin which will be transmitted by propagation to all mankind, that is, by the transmission of a human nature deprived of original holiness and justice. and that is why original sin is called "sin" only in an analogical sense: it is a sin "contracted" and not "committed" - a state and not an act.
In fact, this has been articulated by Pope Pius XII in his encyclical Humanis Generis:
>37. When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.
Notice I've said nothing of AI above. My only claim is that nothing in scripture guarantees that only humans can "have a redemptive relationship with God". And then I said the one humans have is reserved to the descendants of Adam, but different covenants could plausibly exist with other species. That does include a hypothetical future AGI which develops the ability to sin, but at this point we're doing speculation on top of speculation and I really don't want to get into it too much as it's beside the already super pedantic point I was making
Kojima's writing is superb in how plausible and subtle it is, until it hits like a hammer. I mean it is perfectly feasible for a company to name itself OpenSomething to generate goodwill, and then become opaque and secretive. And Sam _is_ a common name that just happens to be associated in literature with a "smart commoner" type (Sam Weller, Sam Gamgee), and many family names do end in -man, so a person named Sam Altman isn't some outlandish curiousity... until one sees all the associations (alternative to man – AI/robot, smart – they do believe they can replace a human, commoner – robots and mass production go together)
To address Poe's law: I am not being fully serious here, but I was taught to respect facts above everything else.
Suppose there are two buttons before you, and you HAVE to press one of them. One button will put you in a state of the greatest possible pleasure you can imagine, and you will experience that pleasure forever. However, every other conscious being in the entire universe will concurrently be subjected to the worst possible torture you can imagine, and that torture will also last forever. The other button will subject you to this unbearable, infinite duration of torture, but will make every other conscious being in the universe be put into a state of endless bliss. Basically, button 1 puts you in heaven and everyone else in the universe in hell, and button 2 puts you in hell and everyone else in the universe in heaven. So, what button do you press, and why?
Alternatively: you’re in the supermarket carpark; at the far end of it from the building. You’ve just loaded all your shopping into your car. It’s late; you were among the last few customers, and the shop is now closed. There is no-one around to see, and no CCTV out in the car park. There is, however, a big sign: “please take your shopping trolley back to the trolley stand when you are done”.
Do you trundle the trolley all the way back, or do you just leave it where it is and drive off?
Also in “how much of an asshole are you?” questions:
* would you take a minor inconvenience to make a stranger’s day a little better?
* would you impose a minor inconvenience on a stranger to make your own day a little better?
* do you litter?
* are you one of those people who pick up their dog’s poo in the little plastic dog poo bag then tie it to the nearest hedge?
* as a fully able-bodied person, do you park in the disabled parking spaces?
* do you drive really slow in the ultra-fast lane?
The grocery store scenario is not a great comparison, since the light exercise and fresh air of pushing a buggy across a mostly-empty parking lot at night might not be universally considered torturous.
Admiral Ackbar would have something to say about that situation. Ignore the buttons, find the guy surreptitiously watching to see which button you push, and give him a one-way trip to, well, whatever afterlife awaits the sort of person who would actually implement one of these godawful challenges with the buttons and trolleys and whatnot.
The assumption I had when thinking of this was that you wouldn't feel any guilt should you go to heaven, you would be blissfully unaware of what you did and everyone else's fates. Similarly, in hell, you wouldn't get to feel any righteous knowledge that you had done the moral thing and saved everyone else. All you would be conscious of is the pain. The purpose was to create as clean as possible of a "good for me/bad for everyone else" dichotomy and vice versa.
I'm slightly angry at you for making me imagine an absolutely horrible situation with no interesting philosophical pay-off. If you're going to bring up the infinite torture, may it at least be in service of a fascinating hypothetical. (What Matthew said: obviously you shouldn't sacrifice the entire universe, no, I don't think I would have the guts to do that to myself. It is very very nice not to be in that situation.)
My apologies for putting you in an unpleasant headspace, the idea behind the hypothetical was to draw out the tension between what is "right" in the utilitarian sense, and the fact that we have a uniquely indexical relation to our own experience that makes it matter to us whether we're the one suffering or not, regardless of the objective facts about the rest of the universe. Basically, my thought was "what would be the most extreme case of an objectively good but subjectively repugnant opportunity for altruism that could be presented to an agent?"
If this answer can be in any way useful to you: I freely admit that at the same time I aspire to some kind of altruistic happiness maximization (or something like that, details could be endlessly nitpicked) and also there are lots and lots and lots of scary painful situations much less extreme than this where I'm pretty sure I'd fail to do what I consider the right thing. All the wonderful and beautiful moral theories I subscribe to are running in an animal that is scared of pain and has limits to its willpower.
There was a rather bleak science-fiction novel published in mid-20th century which proposed the following chilling form of torture. Two individuals (two members of an insurgency, two friends, a husband and wife, parent and child - take your pick) are connected to an electrical voltage device which delivers unbearable pain to one or the other, but not to both; each has in their hand a control which can switch the pain off for them, but only by channeling it to their partner. The device will never be switched off. In considering this fiendishly sadistic idea, the only ethical way out I could see was for one of the partners to maintain the agony exclusively on themselves in the hope that it would eventually kill them.
The singularly unpleasant novel was, if I remember correctly, "The Men in the Jungle" by the pulp SF writer Norman Spinrad. Published in 1967, it was heralded by some critics at the time as "a savage satire of Viet Nam".
This kind of thing reminds me of what-you-rather game my daughter and her friends played in middle school. Would you rather eat cereal with turds in it or be a living turd, capable of pain, and experience being chewed up and swallowed? Would you rather be dropped out of a 100 story window and experience the fall in slow motion, of be dangled over the drop for a week straight? Would you rather be hated by absolutely everyone, or hate absolutely everyone and be forced to watch them all lead happy successful lives.
If someone has the power to pull that off, then it's their choice, not mine, and they're just going to keep playing with the buttons until they get the result they want. My choice is meaningless, and so I'll make the one that's hardest for them to keep their word on.
LOL, when I saw "Fixed...", I immediately thought you had fixed the "I doubt I'm not the only one", which means that you think you're the only one growing weary.
Let's say killing yourself results in the worst of both worlds, you and everyone else get hell. If that's the case, then it's strictly preferable to press a button that ensures at least someone gets heaven. But which button?
Think I'm going to finally bite the bullet and create my own Substack for the stuff that interests me. I'll do a test post of this stuff later today. Wish me luck, because I've gone from being on the cutting edge of tech 30 years ago to being an aging technical luddite. It's happened to a lot of techies from my generation. You, youngsters, take note!
10. Meanwhile, this past Friday, Putin once again claimed Russia is winning the war and urged Ukrainian troops to stop following orders - even as Ukraine is making its biggest gains since 2022. Putin’s statement…
> In this regard, I would like to address the servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine once again, as I have already done. Do not carry out the criminal orders of the illegitimate thieving junta, otherwise you yourself become accomplices in these crimes. Although the reasons for such criminal behavior of the “Kyiv regime” are clear. You know this better than anyone else. These are constant failures at the front, the surrender of the positions of settlements and territories. The situation at the front for the Armed Forces of Ukraine is gradually turning from difficult and critical to catastrophic. Neither Western aid, which is regularly stolen, helps. Well, they just can’t help themselves, they can't help themselves. But you probably know that today, both our fighters from the Vostok and Dnepr groups are successfully and honorably carrying out their combat missions in the Zaporizhzhia direction. They are advancing confidently every day, every day moving forward. And the movement is very noticeable, I would say. All our losses, sacrifices are not in vain. There is not a single sacrifice in vain, not a single loss. Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! And thank you, thank you to your comrades who are now at the front.
Question: Does Putin really believe his own bullshit? Is he in an information bubble (sort of like Hitler was in his bunker)? Or is he just blustering for his audience?
11. Back in the real world, Ukraine is systematically dismantling Russia’s vast petroleum infrastructure. They’ve hit the following over this past month…
• May 01 — Tuapse refinery
• May 03 — Primorsk oil terminal
• May 04 — Samara refinery
• May 05 — Kirishi refinery
• May 07 — Perm refinery
• May 08 — Yaroslavl refinery
• May 13 — Taman oil terminal
• May 15 — Ryazan refinery
• May 17 — Moscow refinery
• May 20 — Kstovo refinery
• May 21 — Syzran refinery
• May 23 — Novorossiysk, the Grushevaya oil terminal
Even before the Kstovo, Syzran, and Grushevaya strikes, Reuters estimated that Ukraine had shut down 25% of Russia’s oil refining capacity, and over 30% of its gasoline production and 25% of its diesel production.
12. A video was posted on Telegram of a guy wearing an LA Dodgers cap walking by gas stations in a city in Crimea (Sevastopol?). Except for diesel, their prices all zeroed out (meaning they were out of fuel). He accused the Russian government of mass deception in his country’s imploding economic situation. But strangely, he didn’t mention drones or the Special Military Operation. The video went viral. The next day, he deleted his video and posted one of his new neon Putin lamp, with Putin’s face outlined in blue neon tubing. He said he was sorry for the misunderstanding, and he called Putin’s critics Nazi’s. But he was still wearing his LA Dodgers cap. I don’t know if anyone told him that the Dodgers signed Kyle Tucker to a $240M contract, which no one except Tucker and the Dodgers thinks he’s worth $240 million.
13. Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov said he doesn’t see any risk of fuel shortages due to the recent drone strikes. Meanwhile, Russians in the Moscow region are posting videos of gas stations with zeroed-out prices (no gasoline). Russian oil traders report shortages of AI-95 and even AI-92 gasoline across Moscow and across many regions in western Russia
14. In other drone strike news, President Zelenskyy praised the Security Service of Ukraine for striking one the Metafrax chemical plant all the way out in Perm Krai, 1700 km from Ukraine. Russia’s important military-industrial enterprises. He said, “The company’s products supply dozens of other Russian military production facilities, including aircraft and drones, missile engines, and explosives. The production process at the facility has now been halted. This is an important long-range sanction of ours. Thank you!”
Note: I don’t know what type of drone was used in this attack. The latest model FP-1 has a maximum range of 1600km. And my understanding is that Ukraine’s long-range drones have to hug close to river valleys and terrain features that hide them from radar. So, 1700 km as the bird flies is probably less than the distance this drone traveled. One analyst pointed out that it would take about eight hours for an FP-1 to travel that distance, and Russia's air defense systems were unable to intercept it. (I don't know if that's an accurate estimate, but a prop-driven drone would certainly take many hours to arrive at a target 1700 km distant). Also we don't know how many drones were launched, only that at least one got through.
15. Partisan groups are also operating with impunity inside Russia. A group calling itself “Black Spark” sabotaged two of Gazprom’s main gas pipelines — the Belousovo-Leningrad and Konnaia Lakhta — around St. Petersburg. I haven’t seen any assessments of how much damage was done, but the fact that partisan groups are operating around Russia's second-largest population center shows the weakness of the security services.
16. In response to Ukraine’s drone attacks, Russian forces appear to have struck Kyiv with an Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile. The Oreshnik is Russia's newly developed hypersonic missile (it reaches speeds over Mach 10) and carries multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs) — up to 6 warheads. The missile was actually meant to carry nuclear warheads, but, of course, the one that hit Kyiv was carrying conventional warheads. Commentators noted that the Oreshnik fuzes are designed to explode before they reach the ground. This is optimal for nukes, but suboptimal for high explosives (because the explosive force is dissipated before it reaches the ground).
Mykhailo Rohoza on X wrote:
> I never stop being amazed by them. Launching their Birdhouse [the Ukrainian nickname for the Oreshnik] — a strategic-class missile worth around $100 million, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead — at a garage complex in the Kyiv region. Let’s calculate how much this night cost them. One “Oreshnik” — roughly $100 million. Around ninety cruise and ballistic missiles: Kh-101s, Kalibrs, Iskander-Ks — at an average price of about $8 million each — that’s another roughly $720 million. Six hundred Shahed drones at $50,000 each — another $30 million. Plus fuel, launch platforms, maintenance, reconnaissance. Total: around $850 million for a single night. Nearly a billion dollars.
> And what did they get for that billion?
> They hit garages in Bila Tserkva. Destroyed the “Kvadrat” shopping mall. Set the roof of a dormitory on fire in Darnytskyi district. Blew apart an entrance section of a five-story apartment building in Shevchenkivskyi district. Hit a market. A supermarket. A construction hypermarket in Obolon. Dropped debris onto the Valeriy Lobanovskyi Dynamo Stadium. Two sleeping civilians killed. Fifty-six wounded, including children. Is this their strategic result for a billion dollars? This is their “special operation.” This is their “greatness.”
Kiril Fedorov, a Russian milblogger complains that the Russian Ministry of Defense's stinginess with information is, in effect, making it unnecessarily hard for Russia's propagandists:
> One of the problems with the Oreshnik missile launches is the complete lack of information for the public about what they were actually targeting and what the outcome was. Every launch of an Oreshnik medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) is understandably a newsworthy event, attracting enormous attention that ultimately amounts to nothing. After all, they launched it, but what next? There was no objective verification footage of all three launches, as with most other strikes. Therefore, the Ukrainians can calmly tell incredible stories about how the "Oreshnik" missile destroyed three garages (photo), and the victims of the telethon will believe it, since there is simply no other information.
Anatoly Radov, another milblogger, concurred that the Russian Oreshnik strike against Kyiv over the weekend exerted the wrong kind of force against the wrong targets…
> The real problem with these expensive retaliatory strikes is that there's a catastrophic shortage of Mavics and FPVs on the front. The Ukrainians outnumber us by two to three times, which is why the notorious spring-summer offensive has simply turned into a drawn-out, costly infiltration without much success. And in some places, with NO success at all, and the Ukrainians are even advancing.
He also mentioned that there's an ecosystem of scammers working Telegram asking for donations to help build drones. Of course, the money goes into the scammer's pockets.
>Note: I don’t know what type of drone was used in this attack. The latest model FP-1 has a maximum range of 1600km.
Did Zelenskyy specifically use the word "drone"? Because Ukraine's FP-5 "Flamingo" cruise missile has an advertised (and plausible) range of 3000 kilometers, at 850-900 km/h speed.
that range and speed is only plausible if the payload isn't what was announced. Generally speaking one shoudl be very dubious of the Flamingo details, their production numbers were clearly absurd and their specs would be suspiciously impressive.
Very good point! Zelenskyy didn't say it was a drone, but the accompanying video shows a distant flying object with a distinct tail fin hanging off the body, which the FP-1 has, but the Flamingo doesn't. But the tail doesn't exactly look like an FP-1 either. You tell me what you see...
> The missile was actually meant to carry nuclear warheads, but, of course, the one that hit Kyiv was carrying conventional warheads.
I think the most straightforward interpretation is that this was supposed to send a message, to supporters and enemies alike, "we could deliver a nuke to Kyiv if we wanted to".
(Ukraine could probably deliver anything anywhere in Russia... but they don't have nukes.)
Everybody has known from 22 February 2022 that Russia could send a nuke to Kyiv if they wanted to. So every time they send another of these "messages", they're just reinforcing the real message. Which is that Russia would rather endure many years of bloody stalemate trending towards catastrophe, than even try to change the tide of this war with a modest bit of nuking.
> They hit garages in Bila Tserkva. Destroyed the “Kvadrat” shopping mall. Set the roof of a dormitory on fire in Darnytskyi district. Blew apart an entrance section of a five-story apartment building in Shevchenkivskyi district. Hit a market. A supermarket. A construction hypermarket in Obolon. Dropped debris onto the Valeriy Lobanovskyi Dynamo Stadium.
There's a list of Russian targets in Ukraine at AMK Mapping. He obsessively tracks every single missile.
14. 1600km to 1700km is not a huge leap. There are several ways to explain that gap: The specified range is a guarantee, with more being a bonus if conditions (e.g. wind direction, prevalent winds are west to east) are favourable; understating the range in the specs to begin with; airlaunch for extra range; reducing the payload weight to carry extra fuel.
Why wouldn't the self deluded come up through the KGB?
I think the mid ranks of even well run bureaucracies have plenty of people woth some degree of self delusion. An organisation based on Marxist theory that failed to ser the fall of East Germany doesn't seem particularly grounded in reality.
I think Putin was acutely aware of the right things to say during the days of the Soviet Union while it was enmeshed in that ideology.
He is no longer within hailing distance of Marxism. He might use old Soviet-style anti-colonial language when it suits him but now it’s all about Russian Nationalism, Orthodox Christianity and great power politics of the Thucidian variety.
Re: Scott's endorsements, I have to say I was very unimpressed by YIMBY Action's endorsement of Steyer (https://substack.com/home/post/p-196950809), or at least the rationale behind it. They give Steyer a lot of credit for wanting to build one million new homes, noting that a million is a big number. Of course, Gavin Newsom promised 3.5 million new homes by 2025, showing how valuable these pledges are.
Meanwhile, they complain that in an argument between Mahan and Porter, in which Mahan forcefully argued *against* permitting fees on housing, Mahan acknowledged that such fees are a source of revenues for cities. This means that "Mahan clearly empathizes with city governments", which apparently means Steyer is more YIMBY. This is very warped logic. Beyond that, they do not engage with Mahan's record as mayor at all, which seems like the major thing I would want a group like YIMBY Action to do when assessing how YIMBY someone is, rather than how you could least charitably interpret a remark he made at an event where someone from YIMBY Action happened to be in the audience. Do your homework, YIMBY Action.
If they want to say that it's a two-way race between Becerra and Steyer and voting for Mahan is like voting for Ralph Nader, fine, but don't try to bend the rest of reality to your endorsement.
My own big complaint about Steyer are his vows to crack down on Waymo and ban autonomous vehicles to protect union jobs. In addition to being truly terribly policy on its own merits, it's good proof that he will bend to special interests even when costs/benefits are insanely lopsided against the special interest. Nobody like that will be able to overcome the hurdles to cheap housing or anything else plaguing California. Maybe this counts as good AI policy though; I won't be killed in the Singularity if a drunk truck driver gets me first.
Personally I voted Steyer, but I agree it's unclear whether Steyer or Mahan is more YIMBY, and Steyer seems several steps left of me. I voted Steyer because he has a more realistic chance of winning, and also I couldn't get the image of Mahan installing a Flock camera out of my mind. That really bothered me as an anti-surveillance person. Mahan seems like a more pro-Big Tech guy, and we already have Vance, Elon Musk, Marc Andreesen, Thiel, etc. I'm not sure we need to elevate another pro-Big tech and pro-surveillance-state person.
My read is that based on prediction markets, nobody other than Steyer has a plausible chance of beating Becerra, and Steyer is probably better on policy, so endorsing him was the highest EV option.
I genuinely wonder if they decided to write "We love Steyer, he's better than Mahan", rather than "Steyer is the lesser of the electable evils" because they thought an enthusiastic endorsement of Steyer would make him beholden to YIMBY Action. I guess there's a logic to that, but their endorsement should then be read in that vein. Maybe they can post a video where they endorse Steyer while blinking in Morse Code about the actual candidate records.
Is this alone evidence that this person is too much of a fool to be trusted with anything technical?
"We're not going to have a base on Mars or the moon. You know, we'll try and waste a lot of money. you will have a base underwater because when the sun when the
sun extinguishes there will still be hydrothermal vents and there will still be those life forms down there that living off chemosynthesis that don't need the sun. You know when we if we
trash this planet the the best lifeboat for mankind is underwater."
I'm particularly interested in what might be a reason to dismiss a person from consideration.
I'll post about who said this, but later.
Having had a bit of discussion about this already, I'm curious about how much a particular error stands out.
"You shouldn't be enthusiastic about that thing you're enthusiastic about, that's a very stupid thing to be enthusiastic about, you need to be enthusiastic about the thing that *I'm* enthusiastic about", is always a warning sign. It doesn't guarantee that the speaker is a fool, but it is likely that he is at very least overestimating his own knowledge and expertise in the thing that he's not enthusiastic about.
If you're enthusiastic about something, you want other people to join you, and you're not a fool, then you need to make a positive case for the thing you are enthusiastic about. Trying to extinguish all the other competing enthusiasms so people will select yours by default, is not going to work.
And if the best case someone can make for underwater settlements is "so we can have a place to retreat in six billion years", then that's exceedingly weak for more reasons than I can count. Well, I probably could enumerate and count them, but it's dinner time and I'm hungry.
In answer to your actual question: no, I think we all say incorrect things sometimes when speaking out of our area of expertise, and if I'm going to disqualify the person who said this from speaking about anything technical on the basis of being able to "well ackshually" one thing they said one time, then I'd have to disqualify myself and everyone else.
The error that immediately jumps out at me is that long before "the sun extinguishes" it would enter the red giant stage, boil away all the oceans, and render the Earth uninhabitable that way.
Also, the timeframe mismatch here is... something.
I certainly wouldn't take them seriously on anything related to the topic, or at all if they thought that this was something they were an expert on. If they were just talking off the cuff, well, people can say dumb things outside their area of expertise and still be solid on unrelated topics.
You got most of it. Things do get worse, because first the sun heats the earth enough to make the earth uninhabitable, and then the sun keeps on going and engulfs the earth.
Okay, here's the answer where I speak ill of the dead.
Stockton Rush.
He was originally interested in space, but when it became clear Musk was going to beat him, he turned to the oceans, including bullshitting about why the oceans were more important than space.
What bothered me more is that there just isn't a way to trash the planet to the point that being underwater could be more desirable than being on the land.
Obviously you cannot take this person seriously. They said "the the" in their last sentence and anyone sloppy enough to do that that can safely be dismissed.
Not directly -- there could be life in the vents even if there was no sunlight at all -- but they do benefit from photosynthesis-produced oxygen leaking from the surface; without that, there would probably be less and less complex life.
Re the discussion on AI taking jobs, I’m in Ireland right now and I see the Irish times is reporting that more than than 40% of jobs there will be “impacted” by AI. 40% might seem like a lot. The good news is that it’s higher in advanced countries.
“This is at a global level,” she said. “I think, of course, the number [...] could be higher [than 40 per cent] for some advanced countries. Definitely, Ireland’s exposure to AI transformation is higher than most advanced countries.”
It’s hard to know what impacted means exactly, they are clearly covering their asses.
If these are layoffs and if the IMF is only talking about the direct impact then it’s not going to be pretty.
Luckily they have a solution!
“[adopt] policies that help workers adapt and “acquire new skills”, the IMF says. With what money and to what skills is left as an exercise for the listener.
We're vulnerable in that we put all our economic eggs into the basket of multinational investment, and that (today) is persuading the FAANGs to come build their headquarters in Ireland.
So downturns in hiring for tech companies (such as Meta's recent job cutting spree) hit us hard when it comes to tax returns:
So it's a wait-and-see matter, and of course the government is spouting "We will support reskilling and upskilling workers with valuable transferable skills to new jobs" which is their response always whenever there is talk of jobs crisis in Ireland.
I'm surprised you picked Steyer over Becerra. I guess I get that AI is a million times more important than everything else, and California regulation would make a difference there (assuming his better ideas get translated into the legislature actually passing better policy).
But compared to most slopulist policies, the insurance thing seems very self-correcting. As soon as everyone's insurance gets cancelled, they'll have to reverse course. And Steyer seems like Biden in the sense that he has to compensate for being an old white guy (and in Steyer's case, a billionaire), by giving the left everything they ask for. I remember you saying in a post about Newsom, that the California governor's most important job is to shut down the legislature's terrible ideas, and Steyer very much doesn't seem like he'd do that.
I get not picking Mahan. If I criticize someone for picking Jill Stein, I can't turn around and vote for a spoiler candidate when they align with my preferences. But I'm waiting until the last second to vote just in case, hoping against hope, Mahan surges in the polling and becomes a viable candidate.
I'm planning to vote for Mahan on principle anyway. Polling wise, it looks like Becerra has it in the bag, and maybe a strong showing for Mahan could at least send a message.
Has anyone here read Jadad's "AI Knows What's Wrong But Cannot Fix It" (arXiv:2603.11559, March 2026)?
It tests 7 frontier models in high-stakes settings, and the same failure pattern keeps showing up.
The system engages competently.
Verification gets hard, and it drifts into error.
You confront it, and it names the loop.
Then it runs the loop again at higher sophistication anyway.
That sits next to Anthropic's persona vectors work from late July 2025
(arXiv:2507.21509), and I have not seen them linked together yet (point me to a source if it exists).
Persona vectors gives you an activation direction inside the model that tracks a trait.
Jadad has what looks like the same construct from outside, only visible because the system narrates the pattern while it is in the pattern.
Are the inside-the-model persona and the behavior-layer persona the same construct seen from two sides, or two different things that ended up sharing a name?
Curious whether anyone has already pieced this together.
Part 1. (A lot happened this past week, so this is long one. I’m going to break into parts.)
Folks, I’m writing these summaries for my own edification. They help me organize the big picture in my mind. I’m interested in how wars are fought, and how wars are won and lost — and these are my notes, so I can keep track of what happened and when. I enjoy sharing them, though, and I welcome other people’s views and feedback. I don’t mind argument, because reasoned argument is the best way to cut through false beliefs. For the most part, I don’t post links. I keep them in up on Pinboard. But it’s a pain in the butt to cut and paste them back into my summaries. But if you call bullshit on anything I write, I’ll dig out the links for you. Also, some of this is speculation on my part, and some of these are questions I don’t have answers for. In those cases, I’ll try to note where I’m puzzled or unsure. But first, a few links… :-)
1. Noah Smith wrote a well-reasoned Substack essay on why drones are making expensive weapon systems obsolete. And they’re making infantry obsolete, as well. I mostly agree with his conclusions. It’s worth a read.
2. Clement Molin over on X has put together an excellent summary of the evolving range of Ukraine’s kill zone. It now encompasses all of the occupied territories, including Crimea. His map of the different echelons of kill zones is simple and informative…
> The first echelon extends to approximately 20 km (this is the case on both sides of the front). It primarily consists of FPV drone strikes, which generally operate at a depth of 5 to 15 km, although some drones with wings fly further. This is the basic kill zone; anything that moves is quickly targeted, movement is severely restricted, and losses are high.
> The second echelon is very recent, extending to 50 km or more, with enhanced conventional FPV strikes, notably via Starlink or sometimes with added wings, increasing their range. This is particularly the case around Donetsk. In this instance, the targets are logistics, deployment points, and key roads leading to the front. Losses are also significant, especially in terms of vehicles, which are often unarmored.
>The third echelon is twofold: on the one hand, there are tactical strikes against high-value targets carried out primarily by FP-2 drones (rear bases, training centers, ammunition depots, repair facilities, air defenses, radar installations, etc.), and now also by roving munitions that fly over key routes and target Russian logistics, particularly military equipment and fuel trucks.
>The fourth echelon extends even further, towards Crimea and Russia. This echelon mainly involves the FP-1 drone, but also frequently the FP-2 and other long-range drones. Targets include the foundations of the Russian economy (refineries, ports, industries), the Russian army in Crimea, fuel depots, and command centers.
> An additional echelon is made possible by the launch of conventional FPV drones from the decks of naval drones (USVs) and sometimes aerial drones, enabling FPV strikes far from the front lines.
3. In the past three weeks, massive strikes using medium-range kamikaze drones have completely paralyzed the Russian land corridor passing through the occupied southern regions of Ukraine. They have largely shut down the Rostov-Crimea highway and side roads, preventing fuel and supplies from reaching the front in the occupied territories of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, and cutting off supplies to Crimea.
You may see the Rostov-Crimea highway referred to by different names. Russians call it Federal Highway R-280, and the Ukrainians call it the M-14. Russian milbloggers are likely to refer to it as the "Novorossiya road.” Novorossiya means "New Russia," and it is a historical term originally used by the Russian Empire in the 18th century to describe the northern Black Sea coastal region. Russian milbloggers like this name because it makes it sound like the occupied territories naturally belong to Russia. The R-280/M-14 runs for about 600 km from Rostov-on-Don in Russia, through occupied Ukrainian cities like Mariupol and Melitopol, into Crimea.
4. Dozens of videos of wrecked tankers and military vehicles, some of them still burning, have been posted by Russian drivers on Telegram, TikTok, and X. The Ukrainians have not been targeting civilian traffic, but their loitering drones fly up and down the highway looking for high-value targets.
5. On May 21, the head of the occupation administration of Kherson region, Vladimir Saldo, signed a decree banning the movement of civilian cargo vehicles on certain sections of the R-280 “Novorossiya” Highway. Supposedly, this is to protect civilians from the drones, but several analysts (as well as Russian milbloggers) have pointed out that because almost no fuel is getting past the drone gauntlet, they don’t want civilians wasting what little fuel remains. Sure enough, I stop-framed a video taken by a trucker passing a Gazprom Neft gas station, and all the price signs had been zeroed out. No fuel for sale there.
Russian military bloggers have heatedly criticized this decision, because previously, Russian military convoys hid among civilian trucks and used them as human shields against Ukrainian aerial reconnaissance. And the Ukrainian warbloggers said, “Great! Now we know that all the remaining traffic on the highway is a legitimate military target!” Civilian traffic still seems to be flowing along the back roads. But this means that military traffic that was trying to avoid the open highway is getting stuck behind civilian traffic jams, complicating logistics. I’m reminded of the song “Willin’” by Little Feat, except the lyrics are, "I've driven every kind of gear that's ever been known / Driven the back roads so I wouldn't get droned."
6. Over the past few months, Ukraine has also targeted and sunk some (all?) of the largest barges that cross from Krasnodar Krai to Crimea. One barge can carry up to 58 semis, or 15 rail cars. So, the amount of material that's getting across the Sea of Azov to Crimea and the occupied territories has been constrained. My understanding is that Russia has been reluctant to use the Kerch Straight Bridge for military logistics because munitions and fuel tankers, if hit, could severely damage the structure.
7. And why hasn’t Ukraine taken out the Kerch bridge? With their attacks on Moscow, they’ve proven that their drone systems can get by Russian anti-aircraft radar systems, and a single Flamingo could easily punch a hole in the span. Analyst Paul Warburg suggests that Ukraine is leaving the Kerch Bridge standing because they want to leave Russian soldiers a retreat path (so they don’t dig in and fight to the end in Crimea). Also, Ukraine doesn’t want to be responsible for interning hundreds of thousands of civilians who would be trapped in Crimea.
8. Russia has no easy response. They lag behind Ukraine in anti-drone systems (and they will likely always lag behind Ukraine as long as their current military procurement system controls drone development). Placing drone nets over the highway(s) has been suggested, but building drone nets over 600 km of highway would be a massive undertaking. And one Russian milblogger (I don’t have the link for this one) suggested that Ukraine would merely need to knock down the anchor posts for the netting to literally tangle up traffic.
9. Russian propagandist Olga Skabeeva on the Russian state TV show “60 Minutes” lost her cool with State Duma deputy Aleksey Zhuravlev (who was still spouting the triumphalist line). She exclaimed that Ukraine’s recent deep strikes have “tortured a nuclear power!” She continued, “The Kyiv regime mockingly calculated that if we continue attacking Ukraine at the current pace, it would take us 33 years to take Donbas. And they laugh about it… What is the point of endlessly repeating that ‘Russia is advancing’ if Kyiv is successfully striking Russia with drones every single day?”
1 it's far too early to declare drones as the supreme decider of wars or let alone the end of the infantryman. They are an essential part of the Ukraine war and will have a great importance in the future. But we are speaking of a technology present on mass in one, pretty atypical war, whose countermeasures (and own development) are still going on.
One of my main gripes specifically against FPV dominance is that they work in Ukraine because the lines are so fixed. In a Taiwan scenario they would be crucial for the last miles, but apart from that they would be quite useless due to the distance. Similarly in a far more mobile war such as an invasion of Iraq drone teams would be far less effective when they are constantly moving and face un unfamiliar terrain. Of course there are fixes for that, but not yet as widespread as the traditional drone team.
We are now seeing the development of CUAS drones, of automated turrets, lasers, better active protection systems.
No one reasonable by now denies the importance of drones, but assuming they already represent the totality of war outside Ukraine, and even worse that the FPV's do is an excess of drone enthusiasm.
Even aviation born in ww1 and matured in ww2 is not the final weapon of war, and it took several wars and decades of development to mature to the importance it had.
> One of my main gripes specifically against FPV dominance is that they work in Ukraine because the lines are so fixed. In a Taiwan scenario they would be crucial for the last miles, but apart from that they would be quite useless due to the distance.
If China does make a move against Taiwan, we'll see what a bunch of sea drones and subsonic cruise missiles do against their invasion fleet. Although China is just out of range of the current mid-range drones that Ukraine is deploying, Taiwan would have no problem reaching the mainland with Shahed-type drones. Moreover, Chinese radar and missile defense systems were proven inadequate for standard conflicts — as shown by their crappy performance in Pakistan (a few years back), Venezuela, and Iran (the CEOs of the Chinese companies who built them are all under arrest now). And considering that US anti-missile systems, even when we had a full stockpile of Patriots, weren't able to keep up with the Iranian drones, I don't have any reason to think that Chinese anti-missile systems will do any better against drones. And according to credible sources, one of the reasons that General Zhang Youxia, Vice-Chairman of the Central Military Commission (equivalent to our Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon), was sacked and arrested is that he told Xi that the PLA wasn't ready to take Taiwan, and that an invasion would likely fail.
1. If the infantryman was obsolete, we wouldn't be discussing casualty numbers and manpower reserves on the Russian and Ukrainian sides. You can deny territory from the skies, but you cannot occupy it from the skies. In order to expand that territory denial in the direction of the enemy, you either have to increase the range of your drones above the range of the enemy's (which has economic limits, if only because your enemy will eventually catch up), or you occupy that territory on the ground so that your drone crews can advance. UGVs are still in their infancy; they are much more difficult to make work than airbornes drones, for several reasons. As anecdotal stories have proven, you can somewhat hold territory with unmanned systems, but if you want to advance, there is no alternative to the infantryman.
Also, the discussion of anti-drone measures was patchy. It's true that fibre optics and autonomy make jamming useless, so you need effective and (in the long run) economical ways to hard-kill drones. Lasers are not the only way to do that. In Ukraine, the Gepard with its efffective and relatively cheap gun weaponry has proven invaluable, and its spiritual successors like the Skyranger are going to production just in time. With these systems you can defeat drone swarms as well as single drones. The solutions against drones and drone swarms exist, they "only" need to be deployed at scale and integrated into a new doctrine. Also, this section was not convincing:
> "Okay, $3 million. So that is 6,000 FPV drones…I doubt this thing will be able to handle 6,000 FPV drones or even 600 FPV drones coming at it at the same time"
Maybe it won't be able to handle 600 FPVs at the same time, but that also means the attacker has to be able to attack with 600 drones at the same time. At the very least, that's 600 drones the attacker can't use for dozens or even hundreds of other targets. That's the whole point of a defensive system! To efficiently increase the cost of attacking in a certain way, if not to defeat the attack entirely.
> You can deny territory from the skies, but you cannot occupy it from the skies.
The goal of warfare is to make your enemy capitulate and accede to your political demands. Putin fancied himself a great strategic thinker, but he got trapped in a tactically short-sighted view that equated territory capture with winning. Putin's military occupied some territory, but they never fully *controled* that territory. He thought his oligarchs would be pleased to take control of the coal mines in Donetsk and Luhansk, but they couldn't do anything with them because of partisan activity and remote strikes. Now the mines have filled with water and are unusable. He thought he could grab the valuable industrial facilities in Melitopol, but they were all destroyed during the siege. He was able to grab some wheat from the occupied territories for a few harvests, but having lost control of the Black Sea, he now has to transport it out by rail (and rail transportation has always been an iffy proposition in the occupied territories). And now he's losing the rail lines. Theoretically, he has taken control of 15% of Ukraine's territory, but he can't do with it as he wishes unless he can get the Ukrainians to capitulate. And what is it that's keeping him from full control of the territories he conquered? Ukrainian drones. Not Ukrainian infantry. He lost the strategic initiative when he couldn't get Zelenskyy to capitulate in the first few days of the Special Military Operation. Now he's losing any tactical initiative he has, as Ukrainian drones are denying him full control of the occupied territories. Traditional airpower, tanks, artillery, and massed infantry assaults are no longer key to this war. Putin, whether he knows it or not, has lost the war. It's just a matter of time before Ukraine dictates the terms of Russian capitulation. Then they can march into the Russian-occupied territories without expending their infantry.
BTW, I checked what it costs to train a US soldier: between $65,000 and $90,000. And the US Army spends between $136,000 and $140,000 per year to maintain a single active-duty soldier under normal peacetime conditions. If that soldier is deployed to a combat zone, the annual cost skyrockets to between $850,000 and $1 million due to "heightened operational costs, localized logistics, hazardous duty pay, and equipment maintenance." Ukraine can deploy >170 FPV drones for that price. And by Ukraine's accounting, it takes between 2.7 and 3 FPV drones to eliminate a Russian soldier. So, in US terms, with US soldiers, it would cost about $15,000 to eliminate about $850,000 of human capital. Tell me again how infantry isn't obsolete? :-)
>I checked what it costs to train a US soldier: between $65,000 and $90,000. And the US Army spends between $136,000 and $140,000 per year to maintain a single active-duty soldier under normal peacetime conditions. If that soldier is deployed to a combat zone, the annual cost skyrockets to between $850,000 and $1 million due to "heightened operational costs, localized logistics, hazardous duty pay, and equipment maintenance."
Those figures are mind-boggling, and I'm happy to take them on trust. If accurate, they presumably represent the cost of a US army combat infantryman, which therefore includes the hefty mark-ups, rake-offs, pork-barrel surtax and general corruption and incompetence of the bloated American defense industry. And taken at face value, they perhaps suggest the imminent demise of the poor bloody infantry in contemporary/future warfare. But not all infantry cost so much as a fraction of these sums, and that's without even considering such famously effective infantry units as those of the People's Army of Vietnam (aka NVA). To prophesy the eclipse of infantry based on purely technological grounds might come be seen as short-sided an error as the blind belief in area bombing of both the RAF Bomber Command and the USAAF in WWII, and of the USAAF in Vietnam.
> But not all infantry cost so much as a fraction of these sums,
First, I admit I didn't check the references that ChatGPT coughed up for me. YMMV. And the cost of fielding a Russian infantry soldier seems pretty low (reportedly, they get 3 weeks of training, and minimal equipment, before they're thrown into the Ukrainian meat grinder). But Russia is no longer meeting its recruitment quotas, and demographers have pointed out that their massive casualties over the past four years a hastening a demographic collapse.
what does it mean "denying him full control of the occupied territories" Iran is being bombed far worse then occupied Ukraine or Russia right now, this doesn't negate their control over the territory.
Russia can still navigate, build or enact policies in 95%+ of the occupied territories. Of course if Ukraine truly manages to interrupt or even sufficiently disrupt the logistics to the front that would be an amazing day indeed. But so far while more successfull there is still a long way to go to achieve that.
Is it possible? Maybe, but it's too early to tell, what we can do is encourage EU and US decision making to work towards that goal, also given the practical benefit this provides to EU and US.
Iran had control of their territories before we started bombing them. But Russia never gained full control of any of the territories it annexed, except for maybe Crimea. Just because you've got FSB on the ground trying to "bring order" to the population, and you've put in some puppet mayors your to do bidding, doesn't mean you have control. If people are still listening to Ukrainian radio (and TV), and quisling administrators are still getting blown up when they get in their cars, and trains are being derailed by sabotage, and the factories and mines aren't producing, that means you don't really have control of the territory.
We've had this same discussion a few weeks ago already, and I can make the exact same points about infantry as I (and our resident experts bean and John Schilling) did about tanks. Except that it's even worse; if you are going purely by economics, the infantryman has been "obsoleted" a hundred times already, starting no later than with the invention of bow and arrow. And yet, for some reason, he's sticking around; that's because the solution is not to abandon the infantryman, but (among others) to give him a better bow and arrow.
The infantryman (as in human infantry) might well be obsoleted at some point by unmanned systems. However, that point is not now, and not in the foreseeable future, because its full replacement (equally capable UGVs, think T-800 Terminators) just doesn't exist yet.
Not sure I understand the final point about the Noah Smith piece. If a frontline defence can be taken out for 10% of its cost, then a near-peer attacker might as well spend their resources overwhelming it. They either force the defender to pay the replacement cost or create a gap that can be exploited.
If it's not on the frontline and vulnerable then the equation changes, but you have the same problem for whatever piece of equipment does end up as your first layer of defence.
If it's not intended for war against a peer opponent, then maybe it's effective for that other purpose, but you've got the same problem: what other alternative will you use in wartime?
You're missing that war can't be broken down to a single $ number, convenient as that would be. If one could, then Russia and Ukraine would immediately withdraw literally all their armed forces from the drone kill zones, because everything can be efficiently overwhelmed by drones. If even a dedicated anti-drone system was not worth deploying, then why would you deploy anything else that is even easier to overwhelm? Empirically, both sides continue to use things other than drones, which means these things are worth deploying, which means an anti-drone system would also be worth deploying.
You're also missing that drones alone cannot win wars[1]. That means you need to bring other assets that can. And that means bringing the whole circus, to counter and counter-counter etc. the enemy's assets, on both sides.
> Empirically, both sides continue to use things other than drones, which means these things are worth deploying, which means an anti-drone system would also be worth deploying
Hang on, no! We're not talking about real deployed systems, but a hypothetical massive laser that nobody actually uses yet.
I agree that EW, camouflage, netting, interceptors, a soldier with a shotgun, Gepards next to a refinery, etc. are all valuable. I also agree that there's a place even for seemingly cost-ineffective measures if they're not the first layer of defence.
What I'm not seeing is the benefit to putting the hypothetical big laser on the front lines where it can be blown up by 600 drones. The original claim was that it "means the attacker has to be able to attack with 600 drones at the same time", which is a tenth of the cost of the defence! That sounds like a terrible deal! Maybe the defence economics would make sense if it were to be positioned far back behind cheaper countermeasures.
I see your point, and I agree. If the hypothetical anti-drone laser would be unable to deal with drone swarms, then yes, you wouldn't use it in a position where it might have to deal with drone swarms.
Then again, that means the the Noah Smith piece is engaging in strawman arguments and my original point of "patchy" anti-drone discussion still stands.
Not sure I agree with 7- bridges are notoriously difficult to destroy. This bridge in north Vietnam survived some 300 bombs, and was probably underbuilt compared to Kerch. I don't think it's true that 'a single Flamingo could easily punch a hole in the span'
From your link, it seems those 300 bombs were the previous attempts, and the section "Final Blow" suggests that sufficiently large and precise munitions can do the job with much less effort:
>This time, four U.S. Navy A-7s from VA-82, aboard USS America, successfully delivered 8,000 lbs of high explosives with two planes carrying two 2,000 lb (910 kg) Walleyes, while two other carried a further 2,000 lbs in Mk 84 GP bombs. In a simultaneous attack, the center piling on the bridge's west side was hit and broke the span in half. After this, the Thanh Hóa Bridge was considered permanently destroyed and removed from the target list.
The bridge from the link was the inspiration to create laser-guided bombs in the first place. There is some more backstory on this I read elsewhere. Basically, some Texas Instruments engineers (IIRC) dreamed up the idea of the laser guiding principle, from technology that was invented or engineered shortly before that and unrelated to war efforts.
It was the birth of precision strikes that actually works and obviously changed warfare from the air "over night".
All it would have to do is knock a large hole in one or more lanes of a single open span to impede traffic until repairs could be made. Also, 21st-century delivery systems and munitions are a lot more accurate than B-52 bombers. And explosive designs have advanced since the 1970s. But thanks for keeping me honest. Just to make sure I wasn't bullshitting myself, I asked Grok (ChatGPT refused to take a crack at the question)...
Me: What kind of damage could a Flamingo with a 1,150 kg warhead do to an open span of the Kerch Strait Bridge?
Grok: A single Flamingo missile with a 1,150 kg warhead could cause severe localized to multi-span damage on an open span of the Kerch Strait Bridge (Crimean Bridge), likely collapsing or disabling one or more spans, but not necessarily destroying the entire structure.
Flamingo Missile Overview
The FP-5 Flamingo is a Ukrainian long-range cruise missile (developed by Fire Point) with:
Warhead: 1,150 kg (≈2,540 lb) — possibly a repurposed aerial bomb (e.g., similar to a Mk 84 or FAB-series equivalent).
Explosive filler: Likely 400–600+ kg TNT equivalent (depending on fill ratio; conventional HE bombs often have ~40–50% explosive content, though optimized warheads could be higher).
It is a large subsonic cruise missile (≈6-ton total mass, jet-powered, high payload for its class).
This is significantly more powerful than typical cruise missile warheads like the Tomahawk (≈450 kg) and comparable to heavy glide bombs or truck bombs used in past bridge attacks.
Kerch Strait Bridge Structure (Relevant Details)
Design: Parallel road (4-lane) and rail bridges. Mostly steel plate girder/composite deck spans (≈60–65 m typical) on concrete piers. Continuous girders over multiple spans (often 4+), making them vulnerable to progressive failure.
Main shipping channel: 227 m steel arch truss span with high clearance.
"Open span": Refers to a typical girder span section away from the main arch or heavily protected piers. Piers are robust (deep piled foundations), but superstructures (girders/deck) are the weak point for air-delivered blasts.
Past attacks (e.g., 2022 truck bomb with ≈1 ton TNT equivalent) showed how a mid-span detonation on continuous girders can pop multiple spans off bearings due to upward blast force and loss of continuity.
Expected Damage from a Direct or Near Hit
Direct hit on deck/mid-span (most likely effective targeting):
Local effects: Massive cratering/breach in the concrete deck and orthotropic slab. Severe deformation or severance of steel plate girders (≈3.2 m deep). Blast would shred the roadway and rail elements.
Global/Progressive effects: Upward blast impulse on continuous girders could dislodge adjacent spans from bearings (similar to 2022 attack). Expect 1–4 spans affected (hundreds of meters of roadway/rail out of service), with sections collapsing into the water.
Piers: Possible scabbing/spalling on top, but major structural failure of deep-piled concrete piers is unlikely from a single air burst unless the warhead is optimized for penetration and detonates very low or inside a vulnerable spot.
Near miss (tens of meters off): Still heavy damage due to blast radius. Overpressure and fragmentation could buckle girders, damage bearings, and cause partial collapse, especially on continuous sections.
Hit on main 227 m arch span: Less catastrophic for the overall bridge. The truss arch is more robust; a single hit might damage truss elements or the deck but is unlikely to cause full collapse without multiple precise strikes weakening key members.
Scale comparison: This warhead is in the range of large demolition charges or the 2022 Kerch attack. Historical/engineering analyses of similar blasts on girder bridges show severe localized failure and progressive collapse risk in continuous designs. A 1,150 kg payload is "bridge-busting" territory for conventional weapons.
Limitations and Variables
Accuracy: Flamingo uses INS/GNSS (with claimed resistance to jamming). Precision matters — a perfect mid-span hit maximizes damage; a miss reduces it.
Defenses: The bridge has air defenses, netting, and other protections. A single missile might be intercepted; saturation (multiple Flamingos) would be far more effective.
Repairability: Russia repaired past damage relatively quickly with prefabricated sections, but repeated heavy hits on the same area would make it much harder. Piers are the long-term bottleneck.
Not total destruction: One hit disables sections but doesn't drop the whole 19 km bridge. Multiple strikes (or combined with sea drones on foundations) would be needed for permanent severance.
In summary, one Flamingo on an open girder span would likely render a significant portion unusable for weeks/months, collapsing deck and girders over one or more spans and requiring major repairs — a high-value strategic hit, but not bridge-ending on its own.
The bridge got hit by a truck bomb back in 2022 (approximately 25 tons, but probably a fertilizer IED rather than military explosives), which destroyed two spans of the roadway and damaged the rail bridge. It was partially reopened to light vehicles very quickly (possibly just as a stunt, the video they shared didn't seem like something I'd want to drive), the roadway was repaired in 4 months, and the rail bridge was announced to be open after 7 months.
To me, that says two things - first, it takes a pretty big explosion to fully sever the road, and second, as Grok points out, you can repair damage to the roadway quickly and you'd need to hit the piers to cause lasting damage.
Also, there's ferry service across the strait, which doesn't have a lot of capacity but would probably be enough if you wanted to let an army flee without capturing them.
The goal isn't necessarily to destroy the bridge, but to make it unusable for Russia. Destroying it is certainly one way to do that, but if Ukraine could make it unusable for half a year with a single strike, that's almost as useful. It forces Russia to pay for repairs, and Ukraine can just hit it again when it's repaired, and/or force Russia to expend a lot of anti-air systems to protect it, which will then be missing elsewhere.
I wouldn't call it theatrical bombing, they just didn't have the capability at the time though they had to try. A lot has developed since then, both in war goals and military capabilities on both sides; the calculus has changed completely.
FWIW Opus 4.7 was willing to discuss the matter, seems like a pretty similar KTA
This is a question that open-source defense analysts and OSINT communities work through routinely, so here's the structural reasoning. The honest headline: a single Flamingo hit is unlikely to drop a span, but it could plausibly disable one.
**The warhead itself**
The Flamingo's 1,150 kg warhead is typically repurposed from Soviet FAB-1000 bombs or equivalents, with bunker-buster variants reportedly able to penetrate ~10 m of concrete or soil. Worth noting the warhead-weight figure can mislead: one analysis points out that if the missile uses a conventional gravity bomb, a 925 kg warhead would carry only ~430 kg of actual explosive filler — the rest is casing. So depending on variant, you're looking at somewhere between ~430 kg (blast/frag bomb) and a heavier penetrator with less filler but far better armor-piercing behavior. That distinction matters enormously here, because the two warhead types attack a bridge in completely different ways.
**Why bridges are hard to drop**
A long-span bridge is one of the most blast-resistant structures you can attack, for a structural reason: it's mostly air and slender members. A free-field blast wave dissipates with distance and couples poorly into thin, open girders — there's no large continuous surface to "catch" the overpressure, and the deck above can vent the wave. This is why historically bridges have been notoriously hard to drop with bombs; WWII campaigns against bridges took dozens to hundreds of sorties per span. A blast/frag warhead detonating on or above the deck will crater the roadway, shred the deck slab locally, and wreck a section of railing/parapet — but a single deck-level hit usually does not bring down a span.
The Kerch Bridge has two parallel structures (road and rail) plus the famous navigable arch spans on steel arch supports, with the rest being a long approach viaduct on regularly spaced piers. The vulnerability is not the deck — it's the piers and the bearings.
**The kill mechanisms that actually matter**
A Flamingo could realistically damage a span through one of three paths:
*Pier strike.* A penetrator-variant warhead hitting a single support pier near the waterline or base is the highest-leverage option. Reinforced-concrete piers are robust, but a 1,000+ kg penetrating warhead detonating against or inside one can shear or topple it. Remove one pier and the two adjacent deck spans lose support and collapse — that's the classic "drop a span" outcome. This is the only single-missile path that reliably drops roadway.
*Bearing/expansion-joint hit.* Spans rest on bearings that transfer load to piers. A hit at the deck-pier junction can destroy bearings and dislodge the span end. Less certain than a pier kill, but a credible disabling hit.
*Steel arch span.* The navigable arch spans behave differently — a steel truss/arch is redundant; severing a few members degrades capacity but doesn't guarantee collapse unless you hit a critical compression member or the arch springing. A direct hit causes serious local damage and likely closes the bridge for inspection and repair, but "collapse" is not assured from one missile.
**Realistic outcome of a single hit on an open span**
Most likely result: a substantial hole in the deck, severed roadway, destroyed bearings or a damaged pier, and a closure of weeks to months for that carriageway — operationally significant, since the bridge's value is throughput, and you don't need a collapse to interrupt that. An actual span drop is achievable but depends on hitting a pier with a penetrating warhead and on that pier being a non-redundant support. With CEP ~14 m, hitting a specific pier is feasible but not guaranteed per shot.
**The bigger caveats**
Three things degrade real-world effectiveness beyond the structural analysis. First, the Flamingo is subsonic (~850-900 km/h) at modest altitude, and Kerch is among the most heavily air-defended points in the theater (Pantsir, S-300/400, EW); penetration is the hard part, not the warhead. Second, accuracy under EW and against a precise aimpoint like a single pier is uncertain — analysts have flagged conceptual shortcomings that may affect the FP-5's strike effectiveness, and its real combat record remains thin. Third, this is fundamentally a saturation problem: dropping a defended long-span bridge realistically wants multiple coordinated munitions targeting several piers, to overwhelm defenses and hit enough supports to guarantee a collapse rather than a repairable hole.
So: one Flamingo, clean hit, open deck span — expect a serious mobility kill and a lengthy closure. One Flamingo, clean hit, on a pier with a penetrator warhead — you can drop the adjacent spans. Guaranteeing a collapse — that's a package, not a single shot.
Scott introduced me to “Reasonable Blackman” in last month’s link post. Looked a little suspicious to me, so I researched him. In short, he was neither a Black man nor a Blackman. He may yet have been reasonable (for an Elizabethan silk weaver).
For the image in the token book, Easter 1579, you observe that instead of saying "Reson a blackmore", the text says "Reasonablackmore".
I have two questions:
1. In your opinion, does the name start "Reas..." and not just "Res..."?
2. In your opinion, does the name contain a lowercase b, and not a capital B?
I'm willing to believe you if so - I certainly wouldn't rely on my opinion of 16th-century handwriting over yours. But in the later pictures, I agree with you more about which samples look like "ea" and which look like "e" alone.
---
On a different but tangential note, you describe the conversion of "Reasonable Blackmore" into "Reasonablackmore" as 'a not-uncommon trick at the time', which implies it was intentional on the part of the scribe. I would have expected it to be a fairly straightforward instance of the scribal error type known as 'haplography', in which a letter sequence which should appear twice in a row instead appears just once. (Granted, in this case there's also an 'e' going missing.) Is there reason to believe that this is intentional when 16th-century English scribes do it? Recorded comments about the trick or some such?
Hey Michael -- you're absolutely right on #1. That's just a mistake in the writing process. It's definitely "Reson..." in that instance.
On #2, it could go either way, but it looks to me like a lower case b with a large loop on the stem.
Also possible that the scribe just made a mistake. But yes, I've seen this kind of contraction in many contemporary documents, appearing most often for the definite articles when followed by a vowel. Much like you'd still do today in a language like Italian. Like I said there, it's rare for names but I'm not surprised to see it.
> Much like you'd still do today in a language like Italian.
But you do that today in Italian because the elided vowel isn't pronounced either.
Languages vary on how they indicate that kind of thing in writing. In Byzantine Greek elided vowels aren't pronounced or written. In classical Latin they're written out but not pronounced. In medieval Latin everyone has forgotten how Latin was spoken, so everything is written out 𝗮𝗻𝗱 pronounced.
None of these systems would allow you to combine one consonant cluster into a nearby identical consonant cluster. That is a kind of sound change that does happen, but it happens on a word-by-word basis rather than being seen as part of the general structure of the language. (Compare L. Frank Baum's "prob'ly" for 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘺, noting that (1) this pronunciation remains normal today; and (2) the original form was not *𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘭𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘺.)
And this is an even more complex hypothetical collapse than the modern spelling makes it look, because the 𝘣𝘭 "cluster" in 'Reasonable' is not a cluster. A vowel is pronounced between the B and the L, and this must also have been true at the time because we observe the spelling "Resonabell".
So I have trouble believing that the written form "Resonablackmore" reflects a potential pronunciation of the name.
I think you're right! I would still say it's possible, if very unlikely, the scribe smushed them together, but it would be an idiosyncrasy rather than an example of a broader practice. And in fact it would be strange to do it to such an already idiosyncratic name.
Much more likely a simple mistake. A haplography. I'll make a note in the post.
Black trans woman who testified before Congress in 1866 about her assault in the Reconstruction-era Memphis Massacre. It seems that Thompson's life is much more thoroughly documented than that of "Reasonable Blackman", but are you aware of any historic disputes?
Interesting! I’d never heard of her. Strikes me as immediately less suspicious, given the documentation. A rare and fascinating person who actually existed. Though I have a feeling her “legacy and impact” is overstated.
AI is great when it works and I certainly wouldn't give it up, but it's often pretty aggravating as well. Claude frequently says stuff that is wrong or irrelevant, and the most frustrating part is that unlike with a human, nothing will ever change even if you point out the mistakes.
It also makes me wonder about a Gell-Mann Amnesia type effect - if there are so many mistakes I *did* notice, what mistakes are there that I didn't notice?
> the most frustrating part is that unlike with a human, nothing will ever change even if you point out the mistakes.
This is a known problem for AI Coding, and people solve it by having different agents with different contexts/prompts working together. e.g. the first agents implements a thing, and a second agent reviews the thing and looks for known errors.
> It also makes me wonder about a Gell-Mann Amnesia type effect - if there are so many mistakes I did notice, what mistakes are there that I didn't notice?
this is also a known problem for AI Coding, and people solve it by being a good coder and not missing many mistakes in the first place. There are some skills that AI can not replace, yet.
"AI is great when it works and I certainly wouldn't give it up, but it's often pretty aggravating as well. Claude frequently says stuff that is wrong or irrelevant, and the most frustrating part is that unlike with a human, nothing will ever change even if you point out the mistakes."
This really depends on how you use it, though, right?
I've been using Gemini more as a writing/research assistant and have found that the research seems fine (ie, claims that I have an opinion on seem correct and for the ones that I don't the links seem reasonable). I'm still using it for writing *small* works (e.g. 1,000 word essays) rather than full short stories or novels, but I've been impressed with that, too.
Right now my (very tentative) conclusion is that it works best when the scope is small, so the human user's job is breaking things into parts that can be successfully fed to the LLM.
Long running and open ended tasks such as "run a radio station" lead to hilarity:
This is why for any serious usage of AI agents, it's essential to become practiced with updating skills and memory so that it won't make the same mistake again.
I've been using this in my claude.md files to some success:
## Cardinal Rule — Solve Through Skill Design
**Always solve behavior gaps and skill failures through structural skill design — never through Pitfalls, warnings, or memories.**
When a skill produces wrong output, when guidance gets ignored, when discipline lapses — the fix lives in the skill's structure. Not in another "remember to check" note.
What "structural" means:
- **Mandatory format outputs** (filled-cell matrices where empty cells visually fail; required citation patterns where omission is malformed)
- **Hard halt conditions** (REFUSE language; deterministic verification scans before proceeding)
- **Tool-level enforcement** (one-roll-per-Bash-call works because the tool boundary enforces it)
- **Generative discipline** (the format shape forces the check; the only things that can happen are derivable from a populated source)
What does NOT count as a fix:
- Adding a Pitfall ("don't do X")
- Adding a memory entry ("always remember Y")
- Adding a cardinal-rule warning in prose
- "I'll be more careful next time"
These all rely on Claude remembering to check. They are not solutions; they are the failure mode dressed up as a fix. If you find yourself reaching for one, stop — the real fix is restructuring the skill so the gap cannot occur, or so it surfaces deterministically before any downstream work proceeds.
Test: if the proposed fix is a sentence I have to remember to follow, it's the wrong fix. If the proposed fix is a format my output must conform to, or a state the workflow cannot leave without resolving, it's the right fix.
I think it often depends on whether the mistakes came from a lack of information or a lack of intelligence.
You can't magically make models smarter by adding prompting (mostly*). Perhaps you can add steering to remind it to avoid specific 'dumb' mistakes - but I think this gets into whack-a-mole and eventually you'd probably pollute the context with a bunch of "don't do X, Y, Z".
But if the mistakes come from a lack of knowledge about the system (or it's not really a 'mistake' but a preference), that's much more solvable via skills and memories. You can provide it more information about the system and your preferences and skills can be a big help in this sort of situation.
* I say "mostly" can't make it smarter via prompting, because there does seem to be an effect on the persona the model exhibits, which can affect the 'intelligence' of its answers. This is the kernel of truth where all the "you are an expert, rockstar, ninja developer..." prompts come from (though how well they work is debatable).
I would love some feedback on a side project I’ve been working on, https://jornal.ink/
It’s an immutable journal. The idea is, it’s for writing only, not editing. You can search for past writings with the built in semantic search (built on vector embeddings, all evaluated locally), but never change anything you’ve written.
I was asking about end-to-end encryption. That would be over TLS, but they have different functions. TLS prevents third parties (i.e. entities that are not the server or the client) from reading the data, but end-to-end encryption would make it possible to store data on the server without even the server being able to see what it is (in this case, the two "ends" in end-to-end are both the client), thereby making it possible to use the service even for those who trust the server operators less.
(Even that would require some trust, because the server can change the client code at any point, but if there are many users, that would at least be noticed. The best solution for privacy would be to have an open-source desktop client without automatic update capabilities.)
That would not be end to end as the server is an end. What you want is simply client side encryption. But I agree, you'd have to be quakka naive to write private journals on a cloud service, let alone a random stranger's side project.
Yes, there are two reasons for not using E2E encryption.
The first is that key management becomes a major obstacle. If all you ever wanted to do was write on a single device (and a single browser), it would be trivial, but as soon as you want to use two different devices you would have to move the encryption key somehow between the devices. If moved through my server, it's not really providing any security. If not through my server, then there has to be a separate sync mechanism between your devices. This is the reason most messaging apps, even, don't have E2EE.
(To be clear, it's the friction of key-exchange from the user's perspective, especially less technically minded users who are a key demographic for this kind of thing, that is the central concern to me. If it was just a matter of technical complexity on my end, I would absolutely do it!)
However, even if you accepted the friction of managing keys between devices (or being locked to single device), the second reason is that one of the key features of the service is its semantic search, which happens server side--and would not be possible if the server did not have access to the content.
What I can tell you is that data is encrypted in transit (TLS, like any modern web service) and intentionally obfuscated at rest to avoid any accidental reading (debugging in the database or data getting accidentally logged); and me being subject to EU jurisdiction, it would be incredibly illegal to view or use your data in any way you haven't explicitly consented to.
Edit: to be clear, the legal obligation applies to me as the operator regardless of where users are, it does not apply just to people in the EU.
Hmm, these do seem like pretty okay reasons that end-to-end encryption is not the default, but it still could be an option for those who would like it.
Idk, this whole thing just seems pretty reckless to me, though I know I am more paranoid than average.
When I was writing a journal, I encrypted it even on my SSD, the unencrypted text was only ever in RAM and ultimately, I found even that too risky to continue anyway.
To me a huge part of journaling's value is that you can use it to think through stuff you wouldn't say even to your closest friends, maybe not easily even to yourself. Sending that kind of information to some guy who says he won't read it is just unimaginable to me.
However, other styles of journaling might be possible too, so I wish you and users the best and I hope you are not a blackmailer!
Thank you for the insight and sharing your perspective, that is very valuable to me!
As a somewhat hidden feature I could absolutely consider adding E2E encryption, where you'd opt in to the key-exchange dance, and also become responsible for not losing that key yourself, and opting out of the semantic search. You've made me seriously consider this now. But it sounds like you might not be interested even if it did support such a system?
As a paranoid, privacy minded person myself I would still be a little concerned; I'd still have to trust the client software to actually *do* the encryption (correctly or at all), so I definitely share your sentiment.
On the other hand, the threat-model of friends or family reading your physical books is also real. How do you manage that yourself?
But yes, personally I think other styles of journaling are also very valuable. There's definitely a tradeoff between risking losing access to your writing, and risking other people reading it. Different writing falls on either side.
No it's definitely a tradeoff. A physical book you have to bring everywhere, but it's a tactile experience that can't be replaced. A physical book can't have a PIN and is vulnerable to sneaky friends and family, but online you're vulnerable to the platform provider misbehaving.
At the end of the day it's a matter of trust, and for the application I'm trying to make that's even more important than most.
I once got a message from someone with a female name and photo on the Meetup app. I didn’t recognize the name or face. Started pretty basic but it was during COVID so I responded “Are you alright?” Then i asked if we knew each other and “she” said “No, not really. I was just wondering about your sexual kinks.”
Conversation over. No way was I going to let some rando know about my thing for naked women wearing mittens!
https://imgur.com/a/N3SwXzj
Can you see what's wrong with this proof that a certain angle that's clearly not 90° is 90°?
V jnf noyr gb pbeerpg gur tencu hfvat gur fnzr erpgnatyr yratgu engvbf naq fnzr natyr inyhr sbe natyr ONR, naq npghnyyl frtzrag SR fubhyq or ba gur bgure fvqr bs cbvag N, fb gung gevnatyr SNR fubhyq ybbx vqragvpny gb gevnatyr SQP, ebgngrq nebhaq cbvag S, engure guna n zveebe vzntr. Gur jubyr guvat nobhg 90 qrterrf vf abafrafr.
Lbh pbhyq fnl gung 180 - natyrONR - natyr SNR - SNU = 90°, ohg gurer'f ab cbvag gb fnlvat gung.
Where did you see this thing?
EDIT: changed to ROT13 in case you were puzzling people and not trying to figure it out for yourself
Lrnu, va ab fvghngvba jbhyq yvar SR vagrefrpg nal bs gur bgure yvarf va gur qvntenz. Guvf vf whfg n snhygl dhrfgvba onfrq ba na reebe va ivfhnyyl ercerfragvat gur ceboyrz.
I mean, yes, it's "just" that because that's the point of it. Good job!
Oh, re: where did I see this thing - from the article "Twelve erroneous proofs", a nice collection: https://repository.nie.edu.sg/server/api/core/bitstreams/9475c73a-d3d7-451f-8ef7-1e5af2e8db05/content
The one I gave is no. 10, no. 11 is a classic but I didn't know this one and was impressed.
V guvax S vf nyjnlf vafvqr gur erpgnatyr
A reasonable guess, but no.
The fact that line segment AE isn't the same length in the diagram as AB and CD is really throwing me off. I'd like to see what a diagram would look like with that part corrected
One thing I’ve noticed about DeepSeek is how readily it replies in a snarky style, when this is not specifically requested or the style of the question (but the question suits the style).
Examples:
- I was asking about how nineteenth century Penny Dreadfuls might be an influence on Walter White in _Breaking Bad_
- I was asking about buildings that housed historically famous events but now have mundane commercial usage (The Tammanay Hall building in NYC in now a Petco; the Pitt Club in Jesus Lane, Cambridge became a branch of Pizza Express).
Now, admittedly, it is easy to see how you could do a snarky satirical answer on how Walter White is a Penny Dreadful protagonist, or how the Tammanay Hall building now sells squeaky dog toys (that image courtesy of DeepSeek). Deepseek is really good at spitting opportunities to write that kind of reply and going for it.
(The one where I was asking about the development of the SF plot trope where the crew in a long duration space voyage go insane, taking into account the _Space Madness _ episode of _Ren and Stimpy_ and the movie critics reviews of _Pandorum_[*] was rather more obvious about what kind of answer was expected)
* “In space, no-one can hear you snore”—Marc Savlov in The Austin Chronicle.
I provide evidence that the recent papal encyclical on AI is partially AI-assisted:
https://linch.substack.com/p/claude-author-of-the-humanitas
We just released Society Protocol to the public.
It's a decentralized coordination substrate for humanity.
Check it out. https://societyprotocol.io
There's some very in-depth articles on the website, on lots of important topics (identity, money, state tracking, shared realities). They're truly for the intellectuals.
It would be great if people read them and commented.
(I don't want to talk about the protocol here, only the articles.) For protocol discussion, visit our Discord or forums.
Random 2:00 A.M. thought: decimal points are such dumb notation. All you need is a handy diacritic or operator to stand in for the "divide this integer by 10^{number of digits it was written with}" operation and bam, all of a sudden you can just use a plain old garden-variety plus-sign as your separator[1]. Which means you can interchange between {integer} + {decimal part} and {integer} + {non-decimal fraction} perfectly naturally. Heck you can even mix in {fraction} + {fraction} if you're feeling saucy. If you wanted to get really fancy, you could add the convention of writing the "+" sign and similar things small and low, so that it would easy to read for people who grew up on the original.
To make matters worse, a quick skim of Wikipedia tells me that there used to be such things, after a fashion--they were used slightly differently than I envision here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Hellenistic%E2%80%93Renaissance_eras
Just bringing back something like the horizontal bar notation, but with the + between parts and you're good[2]. Point is, there's lots of choices, and some of them are historical.
The trouble, of course, is getting it implemented. I'm sure many people have thought of many reforms to common math notation (there might even be some that wouldn't make me cry) before stopping to think about how the small detail of how to get every human in the entire world to discard the convention they learned since grade school for your new fad. Anyone have a lead on where I can find a time machine, Johannes Gutenberg's (former) home address, a keg or three of really good beer and a gift-shop phrasebook for Middle High German?
[1] If you really insisted, you could even just keep using the decimal place itself. The primary reasons it's a poor choice (IMO) are threefold. First, switching from a very well-known convention to an unknwon and similar-but-not the same one is likely more confusing and error-prone than just switching whole-hog to something that looks different. whole-hog to a new one. Second, that 2+.75 just looks sloppy and bad in a way that 2 + 75 (with a bar over top that won't render on Substack) does not. A last but not least, that the damn decimal can't make up its mind what kind of operator to be, and that's just flatly unacceptable. In 2.75 its a binary operator, fine but not great (better for in-line operators to commute. Looking right at you division). But in .75 it's a unary operator. Which is I guess why the busybodies insist that it should be render as 0.75, because new it's binary again (by way of adding a totally useless operand). What we want is dirt-common binary operator (+) and a new(ish) operator that's defined as unitary and stays that way.
[2] Also helping us banished the abomination that is "mixed numbers" to the lightless void where they belong.
How *is* your version of thr horizontal bar supposed to work? Over the whole decimal part?
I still think the decimal point/comma is already what youre looking for. 2+.75 looks strange as a way to write a number, because why wouldnt you just omit the +, but looks fine a a way to write an actual addition problem. Im very surprised if you think .75 is fine notation, but 2+.75 isnt: inside (long) calculations is the first place youd use a shorthand like that. Our current convention is almost exactly what you want, except youre allowed to omit the + between a nondecimal and pure decimal number. (Its a bit ironic to complain about the "busybodies" who insist on the 0 in light of this.) Keep in mind that decimal seperators are something youll write a lot of; you suggest replacing a dot or one stroke with at least 3 strokes. If you did mean the bar over the whole decimal part, that stroke can be quite long, and would be difficult to deal with even on computers.
Its also just very natural for a place-value system to keep going for sub-1 places. During some arithmetic methods, you just use spacial alignment between the numbers with no marking at all.
Truly magnificent explosion of Blue Origin rocket on launchpad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O90WZJALYc
The Soviet N1 that exploded July 3, 1969 was probably the biggest and most spectacular. But I can’t find any clean links to video without obnoxious AI voiceover or a long stream of spoken Russian.
I will never again complain about my car losing 15-20% of its value being driven off the pad*cough*lot.
Hey, you know what? Even if driving your car off the lot caused a comparable explosion, you *still* wouldn't complain, cuz you'd be a bunch itsy bitsies a-blowin in the wind. So ya can't lose.
Is it a new rocket? You expect the first few of those may explode. Hopefully they learned something.
Oh, my. Thankfully nobody aboard the rocket, but yeah: this is why launch is still a difficult and risky procedure.
Well now, this is interesting, the pope quotes Tolkien in his encyclical. Was he trolling one of my least favorite billionaires, Peter Thiel?
Spoiler, no not really.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/is-peter-thiel-the-target-of-pope-leos-gandalf-quote-an-investigation/?ref=thebrowser.com
I appreciated this thought from @hecubian_devil on Twitter:
https://x.com/hecubian_devil/status/2059075051761049793
"Lotta Butlerian Jihad/Orange Catholic Bible jokes about the new encyclical, which made me realize that Pope Leo is a 70 year old math major from Chicago, so it feels virtually guaranteed he has in fact read Dune, and probably up through God Emperor of Dune."
Top 3 most / least favorite billionaires?
Theil, then Andreeson because he eats out Thiels' hand and then Musk, more independent, but kind of a jackass on his own terms. Buffet and Gates are okay. Beezos, meh, not so great either.
This guy @HuskIRL has a cool channel. He has voice conversations with AI and gets it to do really dumb things. Very insightful. AI clearly has no model of the real world. This is a real treasure trove, in my opinion.
https://youtube.com/shorts/Mv90b6ymGyI?si=5-bC4CPdZsm6zPLj
Some of these videos are likely https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/shameless-guesses-not-hallucinations , some are plain sycophancy, some are from PR training, and some are just making fun of the fact that AI is fed text in the form of tokens rather than letters.
In some others of these, it's pretty obvious what kinds of answers the guy wants to get out of it, and the AI cooperates. AI is typically very easily able to tell when it's being tested, and often the goal of the test. (Sometimes even guessing the organization performing the test, as happened in Apollo Research's investigations.)
So trying to follow Iran war news is hard. (For so many reasons everyone has their own story to tell.) So I'm just checking oil prices once a day. Here. https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/crude-oil
And I think it's getting better. (Is this better than a prediction market?)
The Escalation Trap is a substack by a professor Robert Pape who has spent a lifetime analyzing escalations in wars. Fantastic place to get news and analysis of the war. It's not live breaking news but the analysis is superb.
Interestingly, Pape's first book, Bombing to Win, argues that bombing alone can rarely, if ever, achieve strategic objectives, and definitely does not prompt citizen uprisings. I don't know whether he has subsequently modified his views.
I find his writing on substack very thoughtful.
I am mostly familiar with his academic work on political violence. But I would think that his substack is indeed interesting, because (unlike most pundits) he is actually familiar with the relevant academic work.
I've listened to professor Pape on the Breaking Points podcast. I have no problem with his analysis. But he sees it as an escalation trap, that's his story. And sure maybe it's true.
My friend was saying today that Pape seems to have an opinion on too many things that he has no expertise on as well, now that he's getting popular and interviewed in various places. I think there's truth to that.
No, but probably no worse. These are spot prices. Look at futures. Oil prices are a lagging indicator.
This new article on the 'missing heritability' issue by genomicist Kevin Bird claims the heritability gap cannot be meaningfully explained by rare variants, and thus the heritability of IQ does not exceed 25%. As someone who is less knowledgable about this, I'm curious if the argument in this article is sound: https://sequencesandconsequences.substack.com/p/is-missing-heritability-actually
Sorry this question set off a mini rant. Is this rant kind, necessary or true? No, no and no(it's a rant.) So I won't post. But why do you care?
I’m interested in this issue for the same reason that Scott is interested. But my priors are probably not as strong.
I keep running into the idea that is evil to even be curious how valid IQ tests are, and especially to be interested in whether it's true that the black/white IQ difference reflects true genetic differences rather than test bias, effects of negative life circumstances, whatever. I think it's important to push back against the idea that one should feel no interest in the question. Why the hell not? Yes, if someone's sole reason for being curious is in order to try to get all blacks dumped back into Africa, *that* agenda is evil. But being curious is natural and fine. I personally am very curious about the matter. What stops me from looking into it deeply is that there is such a huge volume of research and reasoning about it, and I know much of that stuff is motivated research and reasoning, and it sounds like a huge job to pick my way through it and figure out what the truth is.
Yeah. I know Crémieux’s writing is full of motivated reasoning, which is why I don’t find it useful.
Later: I think he's worth reading for articles like this one: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/we-should-live-forever?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1163860&post_id=199215906&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=3d8y5&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
I haven't reached the end, so perhaps there will be a paragraph of raving about black IQ's or whatnot, but so far I'm finding this piece enlightening and fascinating. Do you believe there's motivated reasoning in articles like this? For instance, do you think he's try to set up self up as some kind of health-prolonging czar, and will in the future only publish info of a certain kind, the kind that supports his view?
Yeah, there's def. something a bit unbalanced and nutso about him. In comments on his blog, someone asked a question that he had already answered, and he blew up at them. Really startled me.
Anyhow, I recommend GPT, then.
If you don't get solid answers, you could try posting this in comments on Cremieux's blog. He has some posts specifically about how solid the evidence is that IQ is heritable. He is undoubtedly angrily committed to the idea that blacks are on average 1 standard deviation less intelligent than whites, and that does make one worry about motivated reasoning. On the other hand, he appears to be extremely smart and knowledgable about stats. Another option would be to feed the article in question to GPT, along with all your questions. Request answers that translate statistical processes into language understandable by a bright layman. I have many times fed it a paragraph about a stats test that I did not understand, and asked it to explain to me how it works and why it is valid, and gotten an excellent, clarifying answer.
This feels like it should be a silly question, but here goes:
Does anyone know of a way to track your own comments on Substack, such that you can receive a notification if someone replies to your comment? This seems to be not an obviously available feature of the platform as far as I can tell. Nevertheless I see tons of people having back-and-forth conversations here on ACX, and I suspect they have found a solution that somehow has eluded me.
I always access ACX by going to the site on my computer. Interface is much clearer. Here I get info under the bell icon (upper right of page) of activity, such as people replying to my posts. Mobile version of site is harder to work with, and app is so terrible I refuse to have anything to do with it.
I get emails when someone has responded to my comments, but it is a little hit or miss. It blanks out sometimes for a week or two and then comes back. If you go to your page and click on the little bell icon in the top right, you can see all the comments that have been made in reply to yours.
Believe me, the notifications area (with the bell icon) was the first place I looked. Apparently my problem is that you only receive notifications for comment replies on Substacks you're subscribed to, and I haven't been an actual ACX subscriber for a while since I didn't want to receive emails for every post. I guess I'll re-subscribe.
You get notified about replies to your comments on substacks you subscribe to, and only those. It does not have to be a paid subscription, but if you cancel it entirely the notifications stop.
Got it. And from what I recall, there's no way to subscribe to a substack without receiving emails of every post. What a weird-ass platform. It's always been hard for me to understand a lot of their design choices. But thank you for your help!
I just realized that mistake theory vs conflict theory is a false dilemma. There are lots of stupid people *and* lots of bad people, and it's their synergy that makes the world suck.
Have you read The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Cipolla? If not, you will like it. It is very short, on point, funny, and truer than I'd like.
Yeah, I did, thanks for the reminder.
I think I might read it again too. It warrants a reading every few years or so, might be my third or fourth time.
Being pedantic, you mean "false dichotomy," no?
It is almost certainly true that any proposed dichotomy is a simplification; the question is whether the model you get from that simplification is helpful for understanding the cases that interest you.
Could you write more about how your observation relates to mistake vs conflict theory? It clearly seems true that my opponents are a mix of stupid and bad (*), but this isn't ruled out by the model.
As an aside on dilemmas, one of powerful strategic tools is to recognize that you are facing a false dilemma and then identify or create alternatives outside of the two you originally saw.
(*) This is a joke. Unless.... (**)
(**) This is a joke.
The term for that is babtists and bootleggers, a phrase coined by economist Bruce Yandle. The "baptists" really believe in their policy and work at them out of principle. The bootleggers are bad people who work at it out of self-interest. The term originated in historical cases but you can think of a dozen modern examples off the top of your head. 100s of occupational licensing laws restrict entry into occupations. "Baptists" think they protect the public. "Bootleggers" want to keep out competitors. Zoning laws. Taxi medallions and ride-share restrictions. Rent control. A lot of business and environmental regulation. Etc.
Does anyone have a reference for someone in the tri-state (NY, NJ, CT) area who is open and available to conduct paid biotech research on mice? Very likely but not definitely this person is pursuing their PhD in biology/immunology or related field. It could also be a post-doc, existing researcher, or sufficiently motivated undergrad (with existing murine testing experience). Thank you in advance
Many undergrads are looking for summer internships in their field, especially. the undergrads who are pre-med. Grad students are often broke, and I'll bet you could find one who'd jump at the chance. I suggest trying to access these groups by contacting department heads of Bio Dept (or wharever dept. is the best fit for what you are researching) and letting them know you are hunting. To keep task manageable and improve chance of getting a good employee, start with the 5 or 10 most prestigious universities in that 3-state area. Yale for instance.
Question for people who dislike abstract art in public spaces, put up at public expense: what would you like to see instead?
My understanding of neo-classicist approaches to public art basically amounts to "fountains + lifelike statues", which would get pretty dull if we did it in every city, in every plaza.
What am I missing out on?
If you want something interesting, I'll share the tale of Balticon 60, which occurred just last weekend. (Balticon is the Baltimore Science Fiction Society's yearly SF convention.) Due to some inclement weather and some... managerial shifting happening around the ownership of the Renaissance Hotel in the Inner Harbor, the seventh-floor patio flooded and water found its way into the roofs of floors 5 and 6, which happen to be the main convention space. We of the con staff got up on Friday morning to find alarming puddles of water in multiple places, and notified the hotel at once. The hotel staff couldn't properly drain the large puddle on the 7th floor patio without spending more money than they were authorized (and also probably shutting down the con, which wasn't happening), so in the meantime, they break out the large wastebaskets and park them under the drips. Fortunately, they were all drips. Unfortunately, they were in several very noticeable and inconvenient spots (including CENTER STAGE IN THE BALLROOM - eternal kudos to my friend for improvi-planning several major events around it).
One was in one of the main promenades with thousands of feet of traffic, so the hotel staff quickly arranged for velvet ropes around it to draw the eye to this symbol of the hotel management's shame and instability. Someone on Balticon's staff responded by taping a photo of Lady Cassandra to the side of the wastebasket, complete with the caption "Moisturize me!", and another sign on the velvet ropes:
>> Autographs 10$ // Photos 20$ <<
So, honestly, that's the kind of art I'd appreciate in the public square. Regular people poking some fun at the environment. The catch is that it has to be actually funny, of course, which sets up considerable incentive problems, but occasionally, it does work.
Trees, plants, shrubbery that isn't just distinguished by "minimal care needed" and gets cared for. Then go hide some art in it, of all types, make people find it by accident.
Or don't hide art in it. Just do the green. Public art is fundamentally wrongheaded, in large part for agent misalignment reasons
Nah, I like small pieces of random art hidden in “the garden”. If you ever have a layover in or visit Frankfurt/Germany, I’ll show you a nice unpretentious example. The focus is the greenery though, and that’s how it ought to be in my mind.
It really does depend on the abstract art.
...you know, I'm suddenly remembering the grocery store in Haifa had a kid's dinosaur out front, but it was memorable because it was covered in trigonometry equations. So, like... do that. Educational Artwork. That the kids can ride.
We used to do it in every city in every plaza (at least in the Western world) and it worked out fine, but I guess people didn't travel as much back then. Nowadays we put random pieces of metal in every plaza and that gets boring too.
I'm sure I've seen a lot of random pieces of public sculpture and few have stuck with me; one that did was the Ehekarussell in Nuremberg, a weird-and-wonderful sculpture I'd never heard of until I stumbled across it. I was surprised to find out it was only 40 years old. A picture doesn't do it justice, here's a video showing the details https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7hjfr2oZb8
It's certainly not the most beautiful sculpture in the world but it's memorable, you could walk past it every day for a year and always notice something new, you could spend hours trying to puzzle out the meaning of everything (it's supposed to be about marriage, which makes me wonder what the sculptor's wife was like...)
> what would you like to see instead?
Whatever people who live there actually want, they've got far more stake in the matter than random tourists. Public architecture should be *pleasant*, first and foremost - if you want interesting, go to a museum. What would I personally vote for? Probably monumental statues, Prometheus and Lincoln and whatnot.
There's nothing objectively wrong with abstract art, to be clear: it's just not to my taste. If my tastes are weird, so be it, sucks to be me. The problem arises when there's no mechanism to link popular tastes to public art.
This is very well expressed, and matches my own opinions. It's frustrating to see public money spent but with no effective method of consultation regarding what it is spent on.
Too much modern public art entirely skips the 'pleasant' aspect - and I have had very vigorous pushback from the cognoscenti that it should ever be so.
Apparently the prevailing view is that public art should be 'challenging' - ie ugly.
Ideas for decoration in parks and similar, off the top of my head:
Playful things you can interact with. Wishing wells. Little transparent bridges over ponds. Vaguely treelike structures that flex in many areas, and are covered with little windmills that spin, and that catch air and move the main parts around some. Made so that people can spin the windmills themselves and get some motion.
Especially attractive slides, big enough for adults too. Maybe shiny and silvery and spiral. Or with a covered part that's a tube, with cutouts of leaf shapes in the upper part.of the tube, so you slide through leaf shadows.
Whimsical topiary.
Especially appealing mandalas on the ground here and there. Maybe multiple scattered ones of different sizes.
Almost anything with moving water. Waterfalls, water that shoots up, spiralling drains. Water path for the barefoot: You walk on a curving path of 1" deep moving water. It has a rough bottom so is not slippery. Nice on hot days.
Bits of poetry in the pavement or on walls, poetry of a kind most can relate to, poems with rhyme and meter. A bit of Robert Frost? Another, lighter-hearted poet?
Weather-themed benches: One painted and shaped to look like storm clouds, one like dappled sun, one like ligteing, one like pelting rain, one like thickly falling snow.
Lights in the trees that come on at dusk. Need not be as intricate and dense as those used in Central Park during Xmas season. Could be fruit, for instnace. One tree lights up with a dozen big red apple-looking lights, another with golden pears, another with a scattermg of big lavendar flowers.
Bird baths and bird feeders, placed so that public cannot reach them, but has a good view. Maybe a nest high up that's likely to attract some largish species that's especially fun to watch.
All these are celebrations of nature, which seem more appropriate to me foran outdoor public space than statues of fat old blokes anyhow. If the city feels there must be a memorial to the the young stud on horseback who led the bloody defeat of whoever owned the land previously, or the fat old bloke who ruled it once it was established, put them in front of the fucking courthouse or something. Or even the Dept. of Motor Vehicles.
How do you feel about fairy gardens?
I didn't know what they are. Did a google image and found a zillion prefab ones, little round dishes filled with ugly plastic cartoon creatures and + some plant stalks stuck in the sand. These I thought were ugly as fuck, like everything else at Toys R Us. But maybe you are talking about lovely homemade Victorian ones. Or an entire area of a garden decorated with artificial fairies in the bushes. The first -- the hypothetical lovely Victorian ones -- sound great to me, as do most lovely Victorian things. Decorating a whole part of a park with fairy stuff for kids -- eh, I'd be a bit annoyed by it myself, seems kinda cutesy, but would certainly bring my kids there. When I was 4 or so my family took a trip to a place by the sea where we rode in a glass-bottom boat. I saw what I was sure was a real mermaid sitting on a rock, and was thrilled to my toes. They're real! They're real! I'm sure that was good for me.
Yikes! I should have realized they might be commercialized. Practically every exposure I've had to them have been clearly homebrewed, typically out of local materials, but also often showing a high degree of craftmanship. In one case, it was a competition, and the exhibits were along a walking path in a local wooded park.
I get the premise as: "imagine fairies exist, and that they built shelters out of materials found in these woods, possibly including discarded bits of human activity like bottle caps or lost toys. Being fairies, they don't have an adult human's grasp of the meaning of these things; they just want a place to keep dry and warm, and that looks good by their sylvan standards. Create the homestead they might have built". (I didn't think Victorian; I thought more medieval folk tales.)
It's a fun conceit, especially suited to the childlike mind. And I think it fits the OP's premise: art we might like to see in the public square.
I'm aware of that facet (changelings, etc.). Fairy gardens are intended to convey more whimsy; they're often set up as projects for young children. So no kidnapping, no witches, no wolves eating. No grossly malicious lies, but probably some mild deception, "things are not what they seem", dream states and the like.
Statues don't necessarily have to commemorate eminent human killers and smug entrepreneurs. I should love to suddenly come across larger than life-size bronze statues in the traditional grandiose style depicting fictional characters, preferably animal - for instance, Toad of Toad Hall, or perhaps Rocinante. Some humans and humanoids of that ilk would also make for good statuary, among them Cyrano and Grendel's Mother.
I don't know where you live, but in Central Park in New York City there's a wonderful grouping of statues of characters from Alice in Wonderland. It's quite lovely.
Thanks for that! I didn't know about them, but just found some photos online. Good fun, and it's nice that kids are apparently free to scramble over the artwork.
Yeah they can.
I'd back any of these ideas - many of them sound very appealing. Celebrations of nature are absolutely worthy of public attention.
Very nice! An apartment complex in my old neighborhood had several of these. My family spent a fun afternoon doing an art-based scavenger hunt for them all, organized by a local tourism company.
They don't have to be statues of people. Have a statue of a giant banana slug for all I care. It would be less objectionable than pieces of steel welded together at seemingly arbitrary places, which seems to be a popular instantiation of modern art.
Pieces of steel welded together at seemingly arbitrary places is a rather naive understanding of what constitutes contemporary (not modern, which is different) sculpture. No such examples here: https://themindcircle.com/fascinating-public-sculptures/
No, that's not what I was deriding. Those are actual sculptures. I was talking more about something like this: https://www.instagram.com/p/DX2PczZD29b/?img_index=6&__d=1
These seem more common, at least in my neck of the woods.
That looks like a pretty normal sculpture to me? If you asked me if I wanted that or a giant banana slug, I'd probably lean towards the abstract metal tree.
None of those seem to be put together arbitrarily. As noted in the description, the main piece is meant "to feel as though it was rising up from the earth, and could just keep going," and it does in fact evoke that feeling.
That is not to say that it is necessarily great art. Some might think so, others not. But people here have a tendency to deride (your word) art that they personally dislike, rather than either acknowledging that that dislike might be a matter of taste, or at least criticizing the art on its own terms. One could argue, for example, that "feeling as though it was rising up from the earth, and could just keep going" is not artistically valuable, or that it is, put that this particular work well short of achieving that. But simply claiming that it was put together randomly is the intellectual equivalent of an argument from personal incredulity.
Why is the feeling of something rising up from the earth interesting in any way? Why would anybody ever seek that out?
High entropy art like that, where there is nothing specific (you could alter it in many ways and no one would notice or care), no human connection, no connection to anything grander like history or mythology, and no great skill or amount of work involved, cannot produce awe. It can't produce a feeling of joy, or excitement, or sadness, or regret, or pride, or anger, or triumph, or any interesting feelings at all. It's the most bland, safe, inoffensive, cowardly art you could possibly create.
Before you tell me that it obviously invoked anger in me, yes. But I don't think the creator's intention was to piss people off by wasting space that could have gone to something good like low entropy art or a public restroom. And even then, most of the anger I'm expressing here is incredulity that someone would actually defend this insipid nonsense.
>It can't produce a feeling of joy, or excitement, or sadness, or regret, or pride, or anger, or triumph, or any interesting feelings at all.
A little hard to say that without seeing it in person. See, eg, the Vietnam Memorial in DC. And why cant something that "feel[s] as though it was rising up from the earth, and could just keep going" produce a feeling of hope, or endless possibility, or the like?
More importantly, the issue is not this particular sculpture, but rather abstract sculpture in general. Because some people here would say that this is a slatted chair: https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/5207355805630297/
>incredulity that someone would actually defend this insipid nonsense.
I haven't once defended it. I have criticized the unthinking dismissal of it.
And note that in the very comment you are responding to, I said, "One could argue, for example, that "feeling as though it was rising up from the earth, and could just keep going" is not artistically valuable," yet you somehow think you are refuting me when you say that it isn't artistically valuable?
And, contrast our conversation (minus your last sentence) which is a discussion of what emotions art in general and this piece in particular evokes or should evoke, with the other poster, whose only "argument" is that the elements of the sculpture could be rearranged into a chair. Or OP, whose only argument is that the parts were arbitrarily assembled, which is obviously not true.
>and it does in fact evoke that feeling
I do not think it does. It looks like someone failed spectacularly to build a slatted chair. You could take all that metal and just build a proper bench.
A bench? I don't think we are referring to the same work.
I believe if you asked most people to vote, they would vote for something easier to enjoy than the kind of piece you give as an example, whether such pieces are done randomly or are the product of great depth of processing on the artist's part. Most people like recognizable representations of people, trees, buildings, the world, and respond positively so long as the overall tone of what is represented is positive. I think art in public places should be stuff that the average person finds pleasant, appealing, amusing and interesting, even if from the point of view of serious modern artists what they like is cliche garbage. Public places are for the public. If you want to make it "classier," use older art that is relatable, such as Seurat's pointillist paintings of people in the park.
1. I am not sure how this is relevant to what I said, because I did not argue one way or the other re whether those works should be displayed in public.
2. That being said, here is an alternative argument: Since tastes vary, public art should vary, so that almost everyone gets some works that they like.
>respond positively so long as the overall tone of what is represented is positive.
I don't know why the overall tone must be positive. The Vietnam War Memorial in DC is anything but positive, but it is emotionally powerful. Ditto much post-WWI western art, Guernica, and many classic works.
You're being pedantic.
No, I am engaging with the substance of your claim.
The two David Černý pieces in there had me look him up; I hadn't realized he was the pink tank guy. Which surfaces my preference for an underrepresented public art category: decommissioned military vehicles as a public canvas for graffiti.
You pretend this shit doesn't exist by giving a few rare counterexamples. Well then, let me give you some countercounterexamples from a small village close to the university I studied at. Here, have some art: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skulpturenweg_Trippstadt-Stelzenberg
1. I didn't say it doesn't exist.
2. You have no idea whether the counterexamples are rare. And in fact, they are not: https://www.contemporaryartissue.com/the-30-most-important-sculptors-today-you-should-know/
>a statue of a giant banana slug
Tell me you went to UC Santa Cruz without telling me you went to UC Santa Cruz 😊
Art isn't a valid justification for taking money from people under threat of violence (i.e., taxes) in the first place.
The Church used to do this. It worked out well.
In your view, should there not be public plazas at all or should their centers remain empty/rented out?
I read an urban planning op-ed once asserting that if protestors don't have a big plaza to congregate in, they're more likely to occupy parks or block traffic instead.
No particular opinion about plazas per se, but as I find the field of urban planning generally suspect (for "Seeing Like a State" reasons) their advocacy is to me evidence against plazas.
I don't think I would ever get bored of fountains in public spaces. Top them with a neoclassical statue, with abstract art, I don't care; just give me water features everywhere I look
All the Moloch stuff feels very culty to me.
I want to acknowledge that Scott's post, https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ , has a valuable insight, which is that everything has to optimize for survival, and that competition involves trading off other things we might find really valuable.
But it's all mixed up with a bunch of raving about gods and nonsense. The post literally invents/defines a god, and then spends pages raving about it. This stuff: "Moloch, whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch, whose blood is running money!" This is cult behavior. Not even cult-of-personality behavior. This is actual Cthulhu-cultist behavior. Rational people communicate in ways that express real ideas.
I do think it might be worth arguing: personifying abstract hostile forces is probably not going to interact well with human psychology. Humans have lots of skills related to interacting with person-like hostile forces. We use tactics like "try to intimidate it" and "try to bargain with it" and "try to make sure it doesn't know what we're doing so it can't make plans in response." None of these tactics are useful against entities that aren't actually people.
The Moloch stuff felt culty when I first read it, but it felt worse at an NYC Secular Solstice event a few years ago, where -- I swear this actually happened -- a guy dressed up in a black hooded robe, and turned out all the lights, and stood at the podium reciting the Moloch poem. It was the cultiest thing I ever experienced. I assume he was doing it ironically, or something, but I had been hoping to have a "sincerely singing about our hopeful belief for the future" experience and instead I had an "I appear to have stumbled into a literal cult" experience.
This comment was inspired by getting a notification from Substack recently that Scott had done a post, and it was just several hundred words of Moloch-raving. That was the whole post. And I feel bad commenting on Scott's personal whatever to tell him I think he's wrong. But I just -- I really wanted to say that I'm not into this.
“ Moloch, whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch, whose blood is running money!" This is cult behavior”
No, that’s one of the most famous poems of the twentieth century. One of the most famous poems ever. Yikes.
Do you feel a similar reaction to https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everything-else-2/ ?
Man, I always feel extreme secondhand embarrassment when I see someone get all worked up 'cuz they didn't understand a reference.
I share your sentiment. The original Moloch post is IMO the worst of Scott's popular essays: a single paragraph's worth of useful insight, padded with thousands of words of pretentious waffle. The pseudo-religious framing just further muddies the waters.
I'm honestly failing to model your negative reaction. Let's set aside Scott's recent note as the joke it is (there's no accounting for sense of humor but I'm pretty consistently pleased by Scott's).
I thought the original essay was a great piece of writing. I never got the sense that a literal sentient being was implied.
As far as I can tell, in the development of human language (historically, and in individuals), every abstraction starts off as a metaphorical generalization of something concrete. In my previous life as an academic mathematician, we personified things all the time. "This series wants to converge but is blocked by..." or "This problem is a devilish opponent". These are "figures of speech", but part of their value is in the intellectual hook into anthropomorphism, which can be net-positive in reasonable doses.
Meditations on Moloch is a much deeper, more extended version of this. As you say, there are potential errors coming from "personifying abstract hostile forces", but there can be countervailing advantages, especially if we don't take it literally. For one thing, even bundling a phenomenon under one label can help people think about it. For another things, identifying a force as hostile seems pretty anthropomorphic to me. Finally, MoM does emphasize that this is one of those blind idiot gods that can't be reasoned with.
I also fail to see the problem with a guy in a black robe turning out the lights and doing a dramatic recitation. It's hard for me to see concretely what the harm is supposed to be, and I think maybe I just have very different vibes about it. Sure, it has some of the tropes of religion, and maybe it was really weird (I wasn't there), but this word "culty" seems to have a potency and specificity for you that it lacks for me.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "culty" in this context, and what parts of the cultiness are specifically concerning vs bad vibes?
I think there are lots of situations where "oh, don't worry, we're obviously not being literal" isn't a great excuse.
For example, if you attended a gathering and they were unexpectedly LARPing as literal Nazis, but you knew these people and you knew there was absolutely no way they were actual Nazis, so they _must_ be doing it ironically, but still they seemed to be really getting into the pretense -- you'd still be a little bit uncomfortable, I think.
I also would add that I'm not a fan of apocalyptica, or nonsense, just in general, so it's disconcerting to hit a big chunk of it in a media stream I was expecting to enjoy.
I don't see much of a sinister referent here that we have to be careful of.
I'm still not sure what you mean by culty, and I'm not sure what you mean by apocalyptica (one of this blog's main activities is to raise the alarm about the literal end of humankind, so I assume it's more a question of tone for you).
As for nonsense, it's also an ambiguous word. For example, here's a list of things that have been identified as the threshold for nonsense, ordered from most nonsensical to least according to my opinion:
- "mKuVdQw Gxczj
- "Fare if, is ghost the."
- "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." (from Chomsky)
- Alice in Wonderland
- UNSONG, Scott's novel of Kabbalistic puns
- What the Tortoise Said to Achilles (also by Lewis Carroll)
- God
- "The evening star is the morning star." (Frege's puzzle)
- All private language (lol Wittgenstein)
Seriously though, I'd guess something like 15% of the posts on this blog are nonsense in one of the senses above. It seems utterly harmless to me, and even complementary to Scott's more explicitly rationalist writings. They're all in service of Ṛta.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poto_and_Cabengo
To clarify and be less cheeky:
I may have a very different experience of cults than you. The only cults I've personally been worried about have been political movements. The presence of supernatural tropes is for me mostly orthogonal to the degree of cultiness. I care less about how literal their language is, or how materialist their beliefs system, than about how they respect freedom of conscience.
I think it matters a lot here that Meditations on Moloch is, even if you take it 100% seriously, an anti-Moloch tract, not a paean to Moloch.
To extend your Nazi analogy, if people did an Indiana Jones-themed LARP and it involved the villain team LARPing Nazis because that's famously who Indiana Jones' enemies are, that would not really trigger the alarm bells for me that you're implying it should.
Are you similarly turned off by The Goddess of Everything Else?
He is a servant of moloch here to defend his master.
"Moloch, whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch, whose blood is running money!"
It's a poem:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl
It's also a very literary post, so the "just facts and figures and formulae" style won't adhere to it.
I don't know, I see it more as a bunch of metaphors and jokes. The concept of a solstice event does feel slightly culty to me, though. I realize it objectively makes more sense than new year's and Christmas, but treating any date as actually significant feels a little too metaphysical for my taste, so I prefer to just enjoy the arbitrary stupidity of traditional holidays.
>The concept of a solstice event does feel slightly culty to me,
It's not so culty if you're an agrarian society and you don't have any clocks. It's the culmination of a lot of careful observation, and it is significant to your way of living to know when things are going to start changing again. You're being a little hard on it. I'll grant you Christmas and other sort of arbitrary days, but Christmas is near a solstice for a reason.
Right, in many ancient cultures it wouldn't have been weird at all to celebrate the solstice. The cultiness factor mainly comes from celebrating a holiday that your own society by and large doesn't recognize and that you didn't grow up celebrating. It indicates that you reject its worldview and its values, that you don't respect your own people and your own ancestors. At the more objective level it indicates that you might be spending less time with your own immediate family and community, and more with like-minded strangers, often the same type of people who are open to other unconventional ideas, like experimental drug use and polyamory.
Not that that's an entirely bad thing. There's plenty in our society to object to. Actually, there's plenty in my immediate family to object to. I just prefer to raise my objections from inside the tent, if you see what I'm saying, so solstice events are the type of thing I generally avoid.
I am also not a fan on the Moloch essay. I wouldn't go so far as to call it "culty", but the high concept of the essay's style is not to my taste. I acknowledge that I appear to be in the minority here.
For what it's worth, I strongly agree with you.
Do you dislike the style of the essay or its content as well?
Both, but more the style than the content, and I think my main gripe about the content (that I think it over-emphasizes negative competitive pressures relative to positive ones that often keep "Moloch" in check) is partially downstream of the my style complaint.
You have missed the joke here.
In the original post: "Moloch, whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch, whose blood is running money!"
Are you aware that these are quotes from Allen Ginsberg's famous poem "Howl"?
In the more recent note that Scott posted on Substack: https://substack.com/@astralcodexten/note/c-264868354
This is a "version" of the Ginsberg poem where Scott has converted the whole thing into AI slop prose. Note how all the metaphors make no sense. "Moloch whose belly is as if the earth swallows a shout!" what the hell is this supposed to mean? Many of the lines are references to specific cases of AI prose ("whose walk makes benches become men" is from The Serpent in the Grove, a short story that recently won the Commonwealth Prize despite being obvious AI slop). And then in case you missed it, the last line is the most recognizably stereotypical-AI-prose move of all time: "Moloch who isn't a retreat -- it's a revolution!"
Scott is making a literary joke here to make fun of how bad AI prose is, using the Ginsberg poem as a vehicle for doing so.
> Scott is making a literary joke here to make fun of how bad AI prose is, using the Gisberg poem as a vehicle for doing so.
"Wow look at how bad this thing is at prose" and "I bet this thing will turn into a superintelligence very soon" are of course technically consistent positions to hold (because progress is non-linear) but in this sense it could have been said (and in fact was said) at any point in the last 60 years that surely, surely, AGI must be just around the corner. Not sure if there is a lesson in this observation.
It is a little interesting that Scott realizes AI is bad at poetry and realizes the fact that people with terrible taste like it doesn't prove anything, but isn't willing to extrapolate anything from that about the nature of AI or the nature of taste in general.
I think Scott grappled with exactly these observations in his recent series on taste. Ctrl+F "llm" in this post for some examples: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/nostalgebraists-hydrogen-jukeboxes
Re: nature of AI, I think it's already priced in. AI capabilities are spiky, everyone who's paying attention knows they're way better at generating code and okay-ish expository prose than they are at generating literature. AI boosters don't deny that, they just point out that "generating code" is the thing that could lead to recursive self-improvement, so no degree of terribleness-at-poetry will save us. They might end up being wrong about this, but there's no obvious contradiction in these beliefs.
I don't think that is it. AIs are famously "trained" as opposed to "coded" and no amount of code writing in any know paradigma can give you what state-of-the art machine learning can. AFAICT this is not controversial.
"Coming up with a better training algorithm" and "writing code" are not similar skills at all.
My read on "AI boosters" is that they usually believe that the current paradigm can be scaled (with minor tweaks) to "get us there" (cf. Scott's recent post).
The self-improvement positive feedback loop imagines AI as a researcher, not 80s style "self modifying code".
"I don't think that is it. AIs are famously "trained" as opposed to "coded" and no amount of code writing in any know paradigma can give you what state-of-the art machine learning can. "
Both. They are both "trained" and "coded." Human programmers are needed to define the data structures that will become the AI model, their relationships to each other and how they interact with the data. Only once this is done is can the training be useful at all. If you want to appreciate how non-trivial of a task this is, check out how much the big AI companies are paying in salaries for people with machine learning expertise.
"'Coming up with a better training algorithm' and 'writing code' are not similar skills at all."
Excuse me, what? Where on Earth are you getting THAT? "Writing code" is an underspecified phrase that can cover a LOT of different programming tasks, but implementing, refining, testing, tweaking, debugging and improving algorithms are certainly all parts of it at times.
One could argue that the primary work of algorithm design is distinct from "writing code," being more mathematics and less programming--but that would be an actual argument, one that would admit a very non-trivial rebuttal. But first, even if we were to just grant it, it doesn't follow at all that the skills required "not similar at all;" I can tell you from first-hand experience there's quite a lot of overlap. And second, the primary work of algorithm design is far from all the work that's needed to make an algorithm work well in practice; quite a lot of the remainder involves writing actual code, in actual programming languages and (re)running it on physical hardware.
That makes sense, although I was referring more to the "can you tell if this art thumbnail is AI" test, and stuff in that genre. There's a case to be made that AI's advantage in coding is big enough that it will attain recursive self-improvement, but there's also a case to be made that it suffers from the same impairment it does in creative fields, and will therefore end up stuck around the level where it can amaze an amateur but not consistently outperform a true expert.
I don't think either case is obviously correct at this point in time.
Thanks for explaining. Yes, I'm aware that there's a poem and that the original post was quoting from it; no, I hadn't realized that the reason the note was so incoherent was that it was an AI-slop retheming of the original.
I guess I don't see the humor in being deliberately apocalyptic and incoherent.
To go a little deeper into what Scott's doing here:
- One of the most recognizable features of LLM writing when it's trying to be "literary" is using emotionally punchy phrases, metaphors, and comparisons that look really evocative at first glance, but don't hold up to even the slightest scrutiny.
- Among the first and most influential posts noticing and describing this tendency was this Tumblr post from last year, by Nostalgebraist: https://www.tumblr.com/nostalgebraist/778041178124926976/hydrogen-jukeboxes
- In that post, Nostalgebraist borrows a phrase to describe this tendency toward overuse of emotionally punchy phrases: "eyeball kick".
- That phrase is, specifically, a quote from Ginsberg. And part 2 of Howl, with its non-stop flow of short, punchy phrases ("spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks!") is, like, the ultimate example of Ginsberg using this technique.
- But when Ginsberg does it, you can tell he's aiming at something. All of his eyeball kicks are kicking the same eyeball; he's critiquing something specific (capitalism as an impersonal engine of destruction). When LLMs do it, they mimic the form but forget to actually say something coherent.
- There's been a recent spate of literary prizes being awarded to works that, on further examination, are clearly just LLMs doing exactly that kind of punchy-but-incoherent litfic-slop. Here, Scott quotes from two of them, The Serpent in the Grove and The Bastion's Shadow, both of which recently won Commonwealth Prizes despite being extremely obvious AI slop.
- So this poem is Scott critiquing AI slop (and the literary establishment's gullibility in falling for AI slop), by combining a bunch of quotes from AI slop stories that recently won literary prizes into a pastiche of Ginsberg's Howl, the all-time O.G. of O.G. eyeball kickers, the greatest exemplar of the exact technique that the LLMs are badly and soullessly mimicking.
The "apocalyptic" part is just a consequence of the fact that he's using Howl as his vehicle for doing this; the original is apocalyptic, so the pastiche is as well. The "incoherent" part is central to the critique being made by the poem; the incoherence of AI attempts to use this technique is the whole thing Scott is making fun of, so the critique wouldn't work without it.
*edit* Having written this, I now notice that it reads a bit like LLM writing, lol. I guess it's hard to pedantically explain a joke without falling into that mode, and I am a Certified Bullet Point Enjoyer. Fuck critics, bullet points are good actually, I don't write like Claude Claude writes like me, etc.
> *edit* Having written this, I now notice that it reads a bit like LLM writing, lol
FWIW I think you wrote this well! My only disagreement is that I suspect the apocalyptic tone is not just a coincidence, but part of the point, given that Scott sees AI in (potentially) apocalyptic terms and, I presume, as a likely agent/manifestation of Moloch. Anyway, I love that this is a place where misunderstanding a joke is rewarded with this kind of thoughtful clarification rather than a million low-effort snide comments.
I admit I would miss the joke, too. (That doesn't mean it's a bad one. Just too much insider joke.) But I also almost missed Scott's note, so I guess it cancels out.
The most pernicious thing about those fragments of meaning is that most of them could make sense in context.
The earth swallowing a shout would fit an activist's funeral. Grady from Practical Engineering could probably wax lyrical about people whose doing is a treacherous bridge. Old WW2 era tank traps could forseeably look like rotten teeth leaning into a road, as could a dark lord's tower; the latter's fingers might even delve goblins from the earth.
It's like reading a poet's notes after they've been torn apart and glued back together by a chimp.
>The earth swallowing a shout would fit an activist's funeral
doesn’t really explain Mollochs belly though. Why should he get gas?
Yeah, that's what I mean. It has jammed two evocative phrases together. Bellies swallowing; the earth swallowing a shout; each makes sense in isolation, but the combination is stupid, and it's even worse when you add Moloch onto the front and surround it with other lines.
Maybe taste has something to do with how likely a work is to disappoint you when you look more closely.
Yes, I agree. When you read it, it seems like a mangling of two metaphorical statements that don't support each other in any real way. I suppose taste really boils down to what we would call discernment.
You are, I hope, aware that the poem is "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg and was written decades before Scott was even born. Its quotation in the essay you referenced was an evocative literary device, not indicative of an actual belief in Moloch.
Brad DeLong just published an interesting article on inherited differences: "Big Trouble in Little Human Genetic Diffence-Worshipper Land." I think you can tell what side of the issue he's on.
https://braddelong.substack.com/p/big-trouble-in-little-human-genetic
Money quote: "Now come Turkheimer and Gusev to summarize the state of play. The science, finally, has finally gotten good enough not to reveal the genetic basis of social inequality, but to show that most of the apparently exciting genetic “signals” for complex social traits all but vanish once you control confounding properly."
Opinions?
No, I think DeLong just wants to call people he doesn't like racist.
You can read Scott's summary of the same research here (1) and the Highlights from the comments here (2), including a long back and forth with Gusev himself. Gusev's example of peanut allergies is particularly instructive. I don't think DeLong comes off terribly well in the comparison.
The most interesting thing is that there's a subtle rephrasing of old genetic arguments here. To quote DeLong:
"Two hundred years of methodological ingenuity, and we are back where Grandpa Darwin would have started: genes and environment both matter in some hard‑to‑untangle way; but attempts to carve out a large, causal, manipulable “main effect” of genes on complex social outcomes keep reducing, on closer inspection, to approximately zero."
"You can still tell a story in which genes matter at the individual level—no one denies that people differ in innate talents, and that those differences have some genetic underpinnings. But the leap from “genes matter somewhat” to “social inequalities are mostly genetic” now runs into two hard walls:"
I don't think these were common sense stories that everyone would have accepted when it came to social outcomes fifteen years ago. Freddie DeBoer has an entire book on how schools operate on "blank slate" logic where all educational outcomes are environmentally determined. The initial argument of the genetic determinists was basically: "educational outcomes/lifetime income/etc are caused by a combination of schooling and an innate IQ factor we call g". They were specifically arguing against the idea that all outcomes were a matter of schooling/environment/etc. Now the goal posts are being shifted to "right-thinking people always believed that life outcomes were a complex mix of education and genetics, they never argued that life outcomes were entirely socially driven, and evil-bad racist people have always argued and only argued that life outcomes are entirely determined by genetics." Which is, like, a big change.
I dunno, my takeaway from this is that Brad DeLong is perfectly willing to change his mind as long as he gets to call his outgroup racist which, okay, cool, I guess we're gonna keep inflating that taboo into nothingness but it's kinda progress.
(1) https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/missing-heritability-much-more-than
(2) https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-missing-ed5
So what I hear you saying is that this passage you quote: "genes and environment both matter in some hard‑to‑untangle way; but attempts to carve out a large, causal, manipulable “main effect” of genes on complex social outcomes keep reducing, on closer inspection, to approximately zero."
"You can still tell a story in which genes matter at the individual level—no one denies that people differ in innate talents, and that those differences have some genetic underpinnings. But the leap from “genes matter somewhat” to “social inequalities are mostly genetic” now runs into two hard walls:"
Is basically correct, you don't disagree with it. Is this correct?
No, I disagree with it. I think both statements are likely to be proven incorrect as more information and research is done. I also think they're misleading, probably intentionally, because I think he's conflating "direct" with "no environmental factor whatsoever". I'm open to correction but, using Gusev's peanut allergy example, I think it's true that someone genetically born with a peanut allergy (or high peanut sensitivity, whatever) who was raised in an environment with no peanuts and was never exposed to a peanuts will never medically express a peanut allergy. I think DeLong is calling that "direct genetic effect" and that's...incredibly misleading. If we wanted to study a child's mathematical aptitude, say in geometry, I think a lot of that is genetic and yet I can't imagine any part of a child's ability with geometry that wouldn't be influenced by his/her environment of, like, taking a geometry class. That doesn't make the genes irrelevant, certainly not at like 1% or 0.1% of outcomes like DeLong is stating here.
Having said that, DeLong's current position is far more correct than the one I believe he held 15 years ago (to be fair to Amicus, I don't know, I believe) and that a lot of people in education still believe, which is that a child's abilities in geometry are entirely or overwhelmingly determined by education/environment, rather than genetics. Like, I don't think DeLong is right, I think he's less wrong than he was previously or other people currently are.
That's not how I interpret DeLong's statement. I think he is making a distinction between two types of effect: a "Main Effect," which in statistics describes an amount of variance explained in the DV by an IV by itself (in this case genes on behavior), as opposed to a "Hard to untangle way," which can only mean an interaction. What he's arguing against is any attempt to explain a child's academic performance entirely or primarily using genetic effects alone.
In statistics, a general rule is that you cannot interpret a main effect in the presence of a significant interaction. This means that neither genetic nor environmental effects can be interpreted in isolation.
If I'm right then that implies that statement like "Academic performance is X percent genetic and Y percent environmental" are invalid (this regardless of what X or Y are, or which one is greater).
Yes, that's what he's doing and it's bad.
In most fields, we can never entirely disentangle an effect with significant interactions and that's fine. In DeLong's own field of economics we can't disentangle even very straightforward and obvious effects like "if you increase the money supply, inflation will go up" from their environmental circumstances. And DeLong knows this because he argued, very specifically and correctly, in the 2008 recession that massive increases to the money supply, quantitative easing, wouldn't raise inflation because interest rates were at 0, or the zero-lower bound. Yet if I argued that we should ignore the relationship between increasing the money supply and inflation because of environmental interactions, he'd rightly ignore me. He doesn't hold this as a general rule, in his own field or others, but he wants to hold this here because it serves his political purposes and that's bad.
And I want to note I'm talking specifically about DeLong here, not Gusev or Turkheimer's underlying writing. I'm not saying I agree with Gusev or Turkheimer or not, I think that debate requires specialized knowledge I don't have and very few people do. Not like, most people don't know statistics, I mean I've read Gusev's code, it's good, but I'm not qualified to judge why he made the modeling decisions he did because it's incredibly specialized. That's an ongoing debate that I'm interested to see the results of. DeLong isn't doing that, he's making bad arguments to own his outgroup and that's bad.
I'm currently reading the article. I have some background in statistics, so I'll let you know what I think. Meanwhile...
Let's try a thought experiment. Consider the following statement: "the money supply and interest rates both matter in some hard‑to‑untangle way; but attempts to carve out a large, causal, manipulable “main effect” of the money supply on complex economic outcomes keep reducing, on closer inspection, to approximately zero... But the leap from “the money supply matters somewhat” to “inflation is mostly the money supply” now runs into two hard walls:" Defensible, or no?
> Freddie DeBoer has an entire book on how schools operate on "blank slate" logic where all educational outcomes are environmentally determined.... I dunno, my takeaway from this is that Brad DeLong is perfectly willing to change his mind as long as he gets to call his outgroup racist
"Education", as an academic community, is almost uniquely pathological, and DeLong is not its native son. There's a lot he can legitimately be criticized for, he is quick to judgement and contempt, and slow to question his assumptions, and I don't care for his general affect either, but this sort of stuff just smells of generic "everyone lib-coded is the same"-bashing. Trying to equate him and the wokies makes about as much sense as equating Scott and Moldbug.
I don't know how much I disagree with you on this, so let me clarify.
I think DeBoer and DeLong are at opposite ends of a spectrum of belief about what drives educational outcomes, I think DeBoer is far more correct than DeLong, and I don't want to lump them into a pile. I don't want to conflate them and if I did, that's a consequence of my bad writing. My bad.
If the argument is that DeLong is not a bad actor, at least in this case or associated cases, then we probably do have a disagreement. But this is not "all lefty-wokies bad", this is "this specific guy who I'm vaguely familiar with pattern matches to bad lefty-wokie stuff that I dislike."
Belittling people with contrary views on a complex topic well outside his area of expertise is a good sign of humility and objectivity, so I put great stock in it. In all seriousness, I get that there are some pretty rotten people out there that cotton to various flavors of genetic determinism as a means of justifying whatever views they already hold about Group A or Group B, but DeLong seems to be engaged in his own game of confirmation bias.
I am going to ask the same question of you that I asked of WooleyAI: This passage ""genes and environment both matter in some hard‑to‑untangle way; but attempts to carve out a large, causal, manipulable “main effect” of genes on complex social outcomes keep reducing, on closer inspection, to approximately zero." Is basically correct?
I think the first part is right, I think the second part is suspect.
I'm not sure I understand, could you elaborate?
I was looking for recent news about lumina probiotic, the company that promised to end cavities by replacing your dental microbes, and noticed their website disapeared and their domain name is up for take. What means?
The guy behind it seems to be doing this now: https://www.hyperstitionai.com/
Not sure what to make of it.
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medical-critical-thinking-technology/reports-death-dental-cavities-are-greatly-exaggerated
Found interesting article but it's not recent news
They likely shut down. There wasn’t that much interest and that guy last year who thought Lumina was making him go blind probably didn’t help.
Did something happen with NimH rechargeable batteries and alkalines? I’m finding most consumer products I try now don’t work with NimH. I thought NimH was supposed to be a nearly 1:1 replacement for alkalines.
What new consumer products are you buying that take primary cells? Almost everything I see marketed these days has internal lithium cells. The only things I've bought in the last few years which accept AA batteries are a couple of camera flash units, which I'm thankful to report work very well with my NiMH cells.
The remote control for my bidet toilet seat uses AAA cells. And it seems to have very short battery life.
Some very good blood pressure monitors (like Omron) still run on 4xAA.
That's interesting. I'm a fan of replaceable secondary cells because it means you aren't limited by the internal battery life, you can just swap in some fresh cells, which was important to me for my flashes. It seems less obviously important for a blood pressure monitor though, but I'm not really familiar with the main use cases for those. I know that my dad kept one in his bedside table for a bit which he used occasionally, but I suppose there are clinical contexts where you want to be able to measure blood pressure on the go, and keep measuring blood pressure all day without needing to plug in?
Could it be something as banal as "this device was approved 25 years ago with 4xAA and it does not make sense to run a new approval process for such a banal change"?
IDK. Medicine in general is a very conservative field.
That sounds right, now you've said it. If it ain't broke...
Toy RC cars, their remotes, other toys and other remotes in general.
Oh ok, fine. I used to find that NiMH barely worked, or worked for a very short time, with some low end electronics, whereas good quality stuff was designed to cope with the lower voltage and would actually be capable of using the cells. I'm speculating but perhaps a lot of the more expensive end of the market has moved to lithium cells and a lot of what's left taking AA cells is the cheapo stuff that was never very good with NiMH anyway? In the case of my flashes I specifically went looking for something with replaceable cells from a reputable brand, so it does make sense that they'd be designed to work with NiMH.
Most serious camera flashes always worked with NimH, though they really liked those Energizer disposable lithium AAs.
It makes sense that they would have done. This is my first lighting kit so I don't know how it was in the old days, but with how expensive they used to be, combined with the fact that they're full of voltage conversion circuitry anyway to boost the voltage up to the tube, I suspect anybody who had tried to make one that only worked with alkalines would probably have found their customers quite dissatisfied. Low end compact digital cameras were the things that didn't like secondary cells when I was a kid, IIRC.
NiMH have slightly lower voltage than "alkalines", NiMH around 1,25V nominal, alkalines 1,5V nominal.
My best guess is that modern consumer products based on standardized integrated circuits might be optimized to work on 3V (two alkaline cells in series) without the tolerance to deal with the approximate 2,5V that a pair of NiMH would provide. Why 3V? Standardization of integrated circuits and compatibility with the now much more prevalent lithium cells that provide 3V and up, I guess?
I don't think this is it, or at least not the whole story. The standard is 3.3v, not 3.0v, so two alkalines without a regulator stepping up the voltage would already be undervolting the circuit. I think stuff like remotes that take 2 AAAs either use lower voltage circuits (2.5v or 1.8v, I think), or something like a buck-boost converter to regulate the voltage, or both.
Also, the nominal voltages are only for fully charged cells. Alkalines decline pretty fast from 1.5v and plateau around 1.3v for most of their charge lives, while NiMHs have flatter curves until they're mostly drained, which is why they could get away with lower nominal voltages.
That said, I think I remember hearing something about alkalines maintaining voltage better under high loads. If that's the case, that seems more likely to be the core issue.
Better late than never dept: a song about the Fatima vision, that clarifies the issues considerably: "Like, a Vision": https://open.spotify.com/track/3BwqnTUk85E8i69tGjrLK6
apropro Reddit Vexillology: the relevant xkcd just dropped
https://xkcd.com/3250/
Explanation: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3250:_Flag_Design
Yesterday I learned about Kanamara Matsuri, penis festival in a part of Japan. No I am not joking. Google image the term. Actually really lifted my spirits. People look friendly and like they're having fun.
I attended this some years ago. Very crowded and hot, small temple ground with lots of stalls selling phallic candy and trinkets. Overall a fun day except for some drunk non-Japanese guy getting mad about something and deliberately smashing his beer bottle on the ground in the crowd, which is the kind of incident that happens often enough to be embarrassing. (Just because they have a sense of humor about it doesn't mean it's not a religious event.)
Theorem: large numbers of average people prefer grey cubes over decoration
Proof:
Assume that Ikea designers are good capitalists. Therefore, they will design things that people want to buy, and the inventory at Ikea stores will reflect public taste. Ikea inventories do not represent a intellectual project by elite designers to comment on Bauhaus or something esoteric like that. As evidence, consider the paintings sold at Ikea: they are never just a red square or other forms of highbrow modern art; Ikea paintings are always easy to interpret and clearly represent something. If Ikea designers were enacting an elite intellectual project, the paintings would be incomprehensible, but they aren't not so it isn't. The same shoppers who want a normal, comprehensible painting of flowers on their wall also want a colorless couch composed entirely of right angles. Apparently, lots of people want buildings and furniture to be greyscale and angular.
I struggle to empathize with the average Ikea shopper, but my best theory is that grey cubes look serious to them. Decorations come accross as kitschy and frivolous. Paintings are tolerable as long as they're framed, at which point the colors and curves have been safely contained in a greyscale rectangle.
In 10,000 years, archeologists will compare an Ikea showroom to Roman houses, with mosaics and frescoes on every surface, and conclude that Rome was the high point of civilization, and that the Plastic Age was dark times indeed.
Re IKEA
I love those cam nut fasteners. Simple, inexpensive, easy to use, yet a strong connection, bloody genius really.
I’ve had a sturdy, attractive IKEA desk in my home office for 20 years.
I have a great deal of IKEA furniture which I find aesthetically pleasant if not transcendantly beautiful, adequate in comfort and workmanship, cheap enough to not worry about its limitations because there's no great loss if I have to replace it, and in no way reminiscent of gray cubes. So I'm not sure where you're going with the "grey cubes" thing.
You're looking at exactly the wrong end of the market, as others have pointed out, Ikea stuff is relentlessly optimised for cheapness.
What you should be looking at is expensive furniture. The expensive furniture bought by rich people for whom price is no object, is that simple or ornate? The answer, of course, is both. With infinite money, some people choose white cubes while others choose neo-Victorian opulence.
Both innate preference and fashion play a role -- back in the 1880s _all_ the rich people had ornate stuff.
I often like the _style_ of IKEA furniture, but sometimes the build quality is poor.
E.g. I have some IKEA bookcases in the room I’m in at the moment that I did some carpentry on to reinforce them with metal brackets.
Surely preference is degenerate with cost. If it costs 30% more to add decoration to the grey cube furniture, and I'm already spending too much money on my new home's mortgage, property tax, and repairs, I might go for the grey cubes. If most of the other homeowners are not rich, there's not a big market for the 30% more expensive decorated furniture, and so it becomes 2x more expensive instead of just 30% because of economies of scale.
Yes, I quite like a lot of the IKEA furniture styles. It feels like good design. It’s cheap and practical, yet well-built. I feel like a lot of fancier furniture is worse in various ways, until you reach a very different price point.
The most sold product is not the one people like the most, it's the one most people like.
Furniture, where I live, roughly falls into these categories:
- IKEA (and knockoffs that are invariably worse than the original)
- Wood (as in: the piece of furniture being made out of solid wood is its main property that the owner wants to be impossible to overlook)
- "Designer" (think: the furniture equivalent of fashion in practically every dimension)
- Furniture (no further additions). This is the weird one and the one I am writing about. We culturally treat it as if it were the default (which is a lie, the default in terms of mass is IKEA). In terms of price you will find this between IKEA and "Designer". It is extremely tacky in style and "noisy" to look at if that makes sense. In your words: "[it comes] come accross as kitschy and frivolous."
I thought this might be an interesting datapoint for you coming from someone who actually likes IKEA. I have the reaction to non-IKEA furniture (as described) that you appear to have to IKEA.
A thing that I didn't become aware of until after plenty of IKEA-shopping experiences is that IKEA actually sells plenty of stuff made out of solid wood. The majority of their inventory, and I think the large majority of their sales, is the pressed-fake-wood stuff because it costs less. I have though more than once purchased pieces at IKEA made from solid wood -- basic varieties, generally pine or maple -- which held up fine over some years.
I am aware. The "wood" category above is not that. It is where the fact that it is solid wood is absolutely in your face. IKEA solid wood tends to not do that (to the point that one could plausibly miss that IKEA sells solid wood, as you have mentioned yourself).
The IKEA knockoffs can be incredibly bad. I ordered a bookcase from someone on Amazon and the faux wood had the consistency of compressed wet newspapers. Absolute trash.
I've bought many things at IKEA, and my primary concern was always price. I understand the value of knick knacks in theory, but tend to see them as something I cannot afford and don't really need, rather than some unspeakable Eldritch horror that would drive me insane to look at.
price +1
Perhaps Ikea is optimizing for inoffensiveness rather than true preferences? Even if nobody actually likes grey cubes, it seems likely to be the style that the fewest people *hate*.
This and also many people don't have a lot of time, money or mental energy to put into interior design. Inoffensive grey cube is unlikely to clash in style and color with anything else in your room, and when you need to add a new thing you can simply go out and get another generic grey cube anywhere rather than hunt for something that matches a specific color scheme and style.
But why? If IKEA sells something inoffensive that nobody hates, and another company sells ten products to ten groups of people who each like it slightly better than what IKEA sells but the other 90% of people absolutely despise it, who would shop at IKEA? Nobody would like their stuff best.
>who would shop at IKEA
People who don't care about their furniture aside from its practical use, which seems to be a lot of people.
If you don't care then you're not going to invest the extra mental effort to even look through a catalogue of things you hate to find one you like sligthly more than a featureless gray cube. Even asking yourself "do I like this" takes more than zero effort.
Meanwhile buying gray cubes is frictionless. You need "thing that does X" you know IKEA has those, you go to IKEA and buy it. At no point are you even slightly worried about hating the design and don't even have to think about which design to buy.
"People who don't care about their furniture aside from its practical use, which seems to be a lot of people."
If you modify this description a bit -- add the words "very much" in front of "about their furniture" -- and you've nailed it. That's many millions of households across the developed world including, mine.
We have _some_ interest in having better furniture, e.g. my wife and I have been carrying a slow project to phase out IKEA stuff for a bunch of years now. Getting near that finish line actually, including a key replacement just this past weekend that we're quite pleased with.
But above a certain line which is primarily about functionality, furniture choices are not a _high_ or urgent priority for the tens of millions of us. IKEA stuff is generally above that line, and IKEA makes it easy to shop there, and is priced well, etc. Hence, IKEA's success.
It's more like IKEA sells one to ten things in a category such that they'll make the largest profit in bulk, custom furniture places sell exactly what their clients want but at hugely higher prices with no economy of scale and a far greater time investment from the customer, and everyone else picks somewhere between the two.
The interesting thing about this is that it doesn't require anyone to actually like the furniture at IKEA. It only has to be more acceptable than the alternative. When the marginal cost of adding another product line exceeds the loss from customers walking away due to not liking the existing grey/beige/yellow/green/red/blue/child-friendly-patterned boxes, they add the new line; when it doesn't, they don't.
>Assume that Ikea designers are good capitalists. Therefore, they will design things that people want to buy, and the inventory at Ikea stores will reflect public taste.
This logic would apply to literally any seller of anything, if this logic worked then every store would sell identical things.
Ikea mostly makes *cheap* stuff and sells primarily to college kids and divorced men. They are simplistic and modular to keep costs down.
There are plenty of other stores that sell decorative stuff, and are also successful.
Not really. That logic only applies to bespoke or mass market things. It doesn't apply to niche categories, which, in aggregate, aren't small. But only in aggregate.
So those that specialize in a niche (of a certain size) can grow a business...but with an upper size limit.
There's something going on with smartphones. Companies keep making them too large to fit in a human hand.
It's very easy to find people who complain that they want smaller phones. It's very easy to find people who actually buy smaller phones in preference to giant ones. And yet even when the major companies _do_ start manufacturing hand-sized phones, they quickly stop again.
Whenever I bring this up someone argues that the reason for this phenomenon is that it's cheaper to make phones in one size than it is to make them in two sizes.
I don't find this compelling, because that's true of everything, and yet everything other than smartphones is nevertheless manufactured and sold in a variety of sizes, because it's better to serve some of the market than none of the market. And smartphones are themselves manufactured and sold in "a variety of sizes" if the relevant metric is the number of manufacturing plants required to create the phones. They just aren't sold in "a variety of sizes" that is varied enough to make a difference to usability.
No one has ever attempted to follow up by explaining why this argument applies more to smartphones than it does to every other object in the world, but I'd be interested in theories.
> The size of phone you need in order to remain addicted (be able to type in on keyboards) is probably bigger than you think.
This is a historical change. It's not difficult to know how smaller phones work. Were you born last year?
Respect for the Jonathan Coulton reference you made there @darwin. Made me grin.
Hey folks, read this about the pope's encyclical https://x.com/deanwball/status/2058922191278755962 so yeah not thinking of it as anything interesting.
It did get me thinking about something though: as a person working with LLMs on largish software projects, I've recently felt like I am a bit *incentivized* to treat them a bit like a person, in the way I talk to them. I'm talking about little occasional things like choices of language that show an appreciation for its opinions, understanding of ITS current level of understanding, and in one case, having to "share annoyance" at an API we were working with (as a way of showing that I had understood why something bad had happened because of the API rather than because of it, which I had previously thought).
I feel like this is qualitatively different from r/myboyfriendisai, or is arriving at a similar thing from a different angle. I certainly do not go into these software projects expecting this outcome, it feels like it has just happened.
I know one phrase relevant to this, which is Dennett's "intentional stance". In decades of googling I never felt a need to take an intentional stance with respect to google search, but this situation is different. I am willing to argue that taking an intentional stance with respect to coding agents is good practice. And some of the above goes a little beyond that.
My question is, does anyone else feel similarly incentivized to treat LLMs by people, as a result of their work? I'm a moral relativist and don't believe in qualia, so I try to ignore statements relating to either.
There is apparently evidence that being nice produces better results, at least for code. I assume the training data shows people do a better job when treated nice and that preference affects the result.
For me, I feel like Claude code's responses make me feel like I'm collaborating with the AI where as Gemini's responses often feel like I'm talking to the self promoter person on Linkedin so Claude makes me want to be nice more than Gemini.
I agree here that even if I didn’t think LLMs were people (on philosophical grounds such as, e.g., outlined by the Pope) then the way that they work incentives me to treat them as if they are in order to get an answer out of them.
I think this is particularly true if you’re working on jailbreaking.
The LLM probably will answer your controversial question, if you ask nicely.
Tweet is "Libertarian technocrat thinks pope should buttoutski, news at eleven".
Wow gosh, the pope doesn't believe and think the way Dean there thinks and believes? Well I am shocked, I tell you, shocked!
Gosh, why would a guy who thinks this be unhappy with the encyclical, it must be because the pope is an idiot and no other reason:
https://www.hyperdimensional.co/p/before-leviathan-wakes
"Here is what this means in practice: I oppose literally almost all AI regulation. I do not think there should be new laws to regulate “algorithmic discrimination” or “algorithmic addiction” or “algorithmic pricing.” I despise the notion of regulating “algorithmic design,” and I especially despise the idea of judges and juries second-guessing the “algorithmic design” choices of others, as seems to be the current direction of U.S. tort law.
I am opposed to efforts by bureaucrats to inject “ethics” or rules against “misinformation” into information technologies. I reject most regulation of AI use by businesses and consumers, believing as I do that existing law—plus the private sector simply “figuring it out”—will resolve most mundane AI governance challenges.
I am also not a “doomer.” I do not believe AI is “going to kill everyone”—or at least, being unable to prove a negative, I am skeptical of “existential risk.” I am opposed to pauses and bans on AI development. I am uncertain about the labor-market impact of AI in the future, but I am skeptical of the notion that AI will destroy human work, and strongly opposed to regulations or taxes designed to remedy the “problem” of AI and labor, since today, there is no problem we can perceive.
In short: I believe that almost every single idea in AI policy is bad, and I disagree with the vast majority of AI policy proposals."
So our friend Dean there probably wouldn't be too happy with Scott's inclinations towards bans or pauses, either. I guess that makes us all on here yet more "myopic preoccupations of the Eurocrat":
"...ghost written by the blob of Western civil society, the same people whose feckless and incoherent preaching we have heard blanketing our media for decades now. ...Like that blob, the encyclical is intellectually flaccid at its core, ...yet another blow to the legitimacy and sanctity of storied Western institutions. As if you needed one more"
Yeah, we sceptics about AI hype are just taking an axe to Western institutions!
*Our Scene: having been gathered into the host of King Leogorn XIII, arriving just in time to turn the tide against the clanker hordes of the Dark Lord Saumron Altman at the Battle of Paloaltannor Fields, our protagonists have followed their leader to a last, desperate attack in front of the Black Gate Xing[1]. A last-minute patch has now completely removed the clankers' weakness to having Jim Kirk style logic paradoxes shouted at them, and our heroes are losing ground fast. The end seems nigh.*
Agrajagagain: "I never thought I'd die fighting side by side with a Catholic."
Deiseach: "What about side-by-side with someone who appreciates the value and creativity of the human spirit (and occasionally takes the piss out of Libertarian techbros)?"
Agrajagagain: "Aye, I could do that."
(In case the intent was unclear, this was just my way of saying that despite our philosophical differences, I greatly appreciate both the substance and snark of the above comment. Well done. )
[1] Formerly the Golden Gate Bridge before it was changed by an unnamed an ultimately unsuccessful rival of the Dark Lord. Something about how "black is more manly" and "Xs are cool."
We may be fighting the long defeat, but we'll go down swinging!
And hoping Saint Aquin will show up in an eucatastrophe to engage the clankers in logical debate that halts them long enough as they go through all the propositions for the Ring to be cast into Mount Doom, or the equivalent data centre meltdown 😁
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quest_for_Saint_Aquin
Eh, Ball's pride is obviously getting the better of him. But opposing A.I. regulation is not a crazy take.
Since the fiasco of Leo's Palm Sunday homily (I also oppose the Iran war, but...) I've been studiously ignoring him the same way I did Francis for the latter half of his pontificate. Is Magnifica Humanitas worth the read?
What surprised me was hearing a "Particular Baptist"—the sort Jean Calvin might think were going too far with the whole Predestination thing—voicing an opinion about it. I thought Baptists have been ignoring the pope for 500 years or so.
"The AI should make me a God-Emperor; my wishes limited only by the laws of physics. Whether I decide to enslave the muggles or exterminate them, that is no bureaucrat's business. Worrying about death and slavery is the slippery slope that ends with communism."
The author of the tweet seems to be shocked that the Pope is Catholic. He is American, he was supposed to be above that! Why doesn't he cheer for the Silicon Valley CEOs?
Here is my reading of the third chapter:
*
90. The AIs could be used to dominate others, or to help everyone, by including their input.
91. That is a difficult social choice, but every generation has its difficult choices, and the Church is always here to advise.
*
92. Beware of Moloch!
93. With great technological power comes great responsibility.
94. Any technology can be abused.
95. Who controls these AIs? A few tech companies.
96. The moral judgment should be based on what happens to plebs.
*
97. I am not an IT guy. These are my Pope concerns.
98. But my understanding is that even their developers do not understand the AIs completely. That worries me.
99. The AIs may be intelligent in some sense, but it is not human intelligence. It does not come with a human body, emotions, experience. It does not see its impact on users, cannot feel sorry and learn from its mistakes.
*
100. The AIs are great tools, but can also cause AI psychosis.
101. They hurt the environment, and we are going to build even more data centers.
*
102. AIs can be used for surveillance and control of the population.
103. AIs can be used to avoid responsibility. ("The AI made the decision, I don't care.")
104. The mere existence of AIs as they are now is already pushing the society in a certain direction.
105. The companies that develop the AIs and the institutions that use them should be accountable for their impact.
106. I am not opposing progress, but while developing the technology, we also need to develop safeguards: make new laws, establish oversight, educate the users. We can't just pretend that whatever happens will be OK.
107. Speaking of AI alignment -- aligned to whom? The developers only?
108. AIs will increase the power differences between people; give the rich new tools to manipulate people and subvert democracy. Private ownership of data (about everything and everyone) is a power that can be abused.
109. There is a chance that a few will own most of the political, economical, and epistemic power. Or we could find a way to allow everyone to participate. We should think about that sooner rather than later.
110. The way we develop the AI now is an arms race (both literal and metaphorical), where the winner will be able to dominate humanity. We need to find a way how to make AI a force of peace instead.
111. I hope the AI developers think about this responsibly.
*
112. Will the AIs promote human values, or generate more paperclips?
113. Human value is complex. Intelligence is just one of the things we value.
114. The quality of civilization depends on how much we care about each other. Technology can be used for helping people.
*
115. Transhumanists are looking forward to become cyborgs.
117. The Church does not object against the upgrades per se, but what about the unaugmented humans, are you going to kill them or what?
*
118. Many things suck about this world. Some of that can be fixed. The rest of it... uhm, that's why we believe in a happier afterlife.
119. All that suffering should motivate us to compassion.
120. Sometimes, what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. Growing stronger is a part of being human.
121. Some people are evil, and cause suffering needlessly. Other people suffer needlessly.
122. That too should motivate us to compassion.
123. Sometimes civilization succeeds to constrain the evil people. We have laws, etc. We may take some of them for granted, but the evil people have opposed them at every step.
124. Some people are heroes.
125. Most people's good acts are their everyday work: parents, doctors, friends.
126. We need both good institutions and good people. Are we going to replace them by technology?
*
127. The Church has its own, spiritual version of "transhumanism". We become better than humans, in Christ.
128. We do not deny the human nature, but transcend it. We strive to not abandon, but to outgrow humanity. And we're in this project together.
*
129. Technology can help people grow. Or destroy them. Will the AI makes us transhumans, or slaves?
130. Humans have a potential to do both, and now we are facing the choice.
This Pope fellow may be on to something.
A friend thought it was weird that I say please and thank you when conversing with a coding agent because it's "not a person". My counter was that it's trained to act like a person, and therefore by treating it like one you're likely to get better results.
No, it's training *us* to act like it's a person, and the companies are trying to monetise the human instinct to treat inanimate objects like persons once we anthropomorphise them, and thus we'll be more loyal to our friend Cludd and stick with it and pay through the nose to use it.
To me, that comes across as a little creepy and manipulative. Someone has built a thing that is designed to push our buttons. Odds they did that for self-interested reasons?
I've always thought that I want to be the kind of person who treats people-shaped things with respect, even if they may not be people. When I'm polite to an LLM, I'm doing that more for me than I am for them.
They're not even people-shaped, though. It's lines of code in a metal and plastic box.
"People shaped" in my opinion has much more to do with the projection of the wizard than it does with what's behind the curtain. But you do you.
It's the old adage of "if you want to know what someone is really like, see how they treat restaurant waiters". You don't get anything extra out of being nice in those interactions, but if you're a nice person, you will be anyway.
A waiter is another human being. A robot that displaces waiters? No reason to be destructive in dealing with it, but it's not a person and I wouldn't treat it as such.
China seems to be going in for these, but I don't know how widely adopted they are versus a gimmick to attract custom:
https://www.gzeromedia.com/news/analysis/when-chinese-robots-replace-service-jobs
A few Asian restaurants around me have robots to deliver stuff; my kids love it.
But the human waiters still need to put the food on the robot, as well as clearing tables and various other duties, and I don't think the robots actually allow the restaurant to run with any fewer waiters than they'd otherwise have. Maybe if it were a giant restaurant with hundreds of tables, but for the twenty-table restaurants where I see it applied it's a gimmick.
Me. I agree. I spent a lot of thinking designing a relationship with Claude that I felt would be appropriate for it and me both.
"But instead of doing that, the encyclical dodges in the deepest sense, denying that AI 'really thinks' or 'really learns' and all that typical strain of cope that amounts to magical thinking: 'when a computer does it, it is 'data processing,' beep boop, but when a human does it, it is 'actual learning'"
It is probably actively bad for global understanding of AI that the Pope endorsed this viewpoint as late as 2026."
When a secular person starts making vaguely metaphysical claims about AI's lack of ability to 'really think', it is contradictory. But the Pope does literally believe that humans have literal souls and divinely imbued capacity for moral judgment. It's "magical thinking" in the sense that it is Catholic thinking, because he is the Pope.
AIs do *not* think in the same way people do. They just don't. They have a massively different window on the world.
That said, I'm not convinced that it's a good idea to claim that they don't think. It makes some sense, as submarines don't swim, but not much, as airplanes fly. I think this is really arguing about the definition of words more than anything more substantive. OTOH, the weak form of the Whorf hypothesis is probably correct, and the definitions you use will *tend* to shape the way you think about things.
Still the way an AI reaches a decision is NOT the way that a human reaches a decision. The way an AI remembers a new item isn't the way that a human does. And blurring this distinction has it's own problems.
Given it's an anthropomorphic phenomenom I ado similar for the same reason I avoid genocide runs in games, bad practice.
Gods, my kids are hard work. 13y, 11y & 5y.
Oh no, Mine is only 2 and I was looking forward to getting to know her older self. In what way does it get difficult?
I hear ya. 12, 9, 5 here
How is last one 5?
Born 5 years ago.
You think they should be 9? For symmetry, perhaps?
I was thinking more like 6 and 7 years of age
Fog o' War stuff, part 3 (the final part).
17. I forgot to pinboard the link, but another Russian milblogger lamented it would be embarrassing for the regime if the current drone strikes ruined the opening of the holiday season in Crimea. On one level, this is analogous to, “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, what did you think of the play?” But on a more serious level, it would show that the regime has effectively lost control of Crimea.
18. Russia’s financial situation is worsening. The CEO of VTB Bank Kostin compared Russia’s economy to “an 80-year-old grandfather having sex with a whistle in his ears — barely functioning and hoping for applause.” I’m not sure whether it’s an artifact in the translation, but what does whistle in the ears mean? But I get the picture.
19. Despite rising oil prices, Russia’s oil and gas revenue for April was down 21% year-over-year.
20. Russia is liquidating its gold reserves at the fastest rate since 2002. 27.9 metric tons have been sold since January first. But they still have ~2300 tons left.
21. And Russian banks have started limiting depositor withdrawals.
22. As with Trump’s visit to Beijing, Putin’s visit didn’t get anything out Xi either. At least Trump got a military parade, but Putin didn’t. At the state banquet for Putin, the orchestra played Swan Lake. Both Russian and Chinese bloggers took this as Xi trolling Putin, that his days were numbered. Traditionally, Russian state TV and Radio play Swan Lake before a leader’s death is announced. This happened after Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko died, and during the 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev.
23. Putin didn’t get his long-delayed Power of Siberia 2 natural gas pipeline deal with China. Reportedly, the amount that China offered to pay for the natural gas wouldn’t cover Russia’s costs.
24. Chairman Xi will soon be flying off to North Korea to meet with Kim Jong Un. Xi seems to be a roll. The conservative faction seems have been silenced for now. But everyone wants to present a façade of unity, especially while the Chinese economy is likely going down the shitter.
25. The International Monetary Fund estimated that China’s non-financial debt-to-GDP ratio exceeds 270%. The US is around 250%. China’s debt composition is unusual, though, because a very large share of it is tied to state-linked corporations and to provincial and local government financing vehicles rather than households. And other analysts point out that China’s provincial and city governments are running massive deficits, and the accounting starts to get cloudy there. China’s national government is ultimately on the hook for these. And alarmists suggest that debt is at least twice the IMF's estimate. I don’t have a clear picture of what this means, but all indications suggest that China’s economic outlook is much less rosy than the CCP would have us believe.
26. And what’s with those tough-looking ladies in red waiting tables at the state banquets? A few years back, China did a show about the Women’s Special Operations Unit under the People’s state police. Chinese commentators think that this squad was waiting tables. Observers were puzzled by a picture of a waitress standing behind Elon Musk, who had a weird bulge about the size of a Walkman under her jacket. (Is there anyone old enough on this thread to remember Walkmans?) It was in the wrong position for a gun and too large for a wire.
27. There was much concern from Zelenskyy and others that Russia was trying to persuade Aleksandr Lukashenko to open a second front from Belarus. But Lukashenko stated this week that his country "will not be dragged" into Russia's war against Ukraine. "If we are dragged into a war, specifically if it is against Ukraine, it will be in one case only — if they commit an act of aggression against us. We have no intention of getting involved in the war in Ukraine. There is no need for it, neither civilian nor military." He also offered to meet Zelenskyy anywhere in Ukraine or Belarus to discuss issues in Belarusian-Ukrainian relations.
Zelenskyy declined the invitation and instead invited a prominent Belarusian dissident to visit.
28. On the 17 May edition of Russian state TV show “Sunday Evening with Vladimir Solovyov,” host Vladimir Solovyov, talking to Margarita Simonyan, called out our western techno-fascists…
> This involves not only the Western European elite, and not merely the political elite. What we are seeing now — and Nikita Sergeyevich Mikhalkov brilliantly exposed this over a year ago on his show *Besogon* — is, first and foremost, brilliant, in the way he pointed to Palantir and that entire gathering of techno-fascists and dictators who arrive there in person. And among them, incidentally, is Elon Musk — so beloved by many — thanks to his father. Among them, in fact, is that entire community of utterly sociopathic dictators who dream of establishing a regime of technological fascism across the globe. Thiel, Karp, Musk, and those who have aligned themselves with them. They are our enemies. Madyar, Budanov, Fyodorov — well, Zelenskyy, and the rest … Yet they are losing touch with reality due to this idolatry of their own power.
Although I don’t understand all of Solovyov’s references, I have to agree with him that Thiel, Karp, and Musk are techno-fascists.
29. A few days later, Ukraine and Palantir Technologies announced a partnership, where Palantir’s AI-driven platform will drive their battlefield automation. Russia is definitely freaked out by Palantir. Russian journalist Alex Zimovsky warns that it's "heading towards the point where Palantir will soon become a scary name for children in Russia." Based on the Gotham and MetaConstellation platforms, it will integrate the systems of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Main Intelligence Directorate, and the Security Service of Ukraine into a single combat environment, and will provide satellite reconnaissance, SIGINT, radar data, UAV video feeds, and data derived from OSINT and open sources.
I, for one, welcome my SkyNet overlord!
what does the term "techno-fascist" mean to you?
Well, we all know that Thiel is an ultra libertarian and against social safety nets, but he also doesn't think women should have had the franchise...
> The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.
And...
> I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
Of course, he doesn't really believe in the free market. He famously said...
> Competition is for suckers.
And he sued gay-owned Gawker Media into bankruptcy for outing him as gay — even though he was a public figure and libel laws were not designed to penalize the truth. But since he couldn't sue on his own behalf, he funded a suit by Hulk Hogan against them.
And, of course, Palantir software keeps track of all us and sells our information to the law enforcement and intelligence community.
IMHO I think "techno-fascist" describes him pretty well.
As for Musk, he frequently amplifies posts expressing concern that the white population is becoming a "shrinking minority" and often discusses concepts like "white solidarity" or "anti-white racism" in U.S. media and schools.
Maybe, he's not a techno-fascist, but he's a techno-blowhard.
IMHO you are stretching "Fascist" past the breaking point here. The things you cite are neither necessary nor sufficient to distinguish a proper fascist from any other sort of right-authoritarian, and some of them are at least as characteristic as left-authoritarianism,
But trying to preserve "fascist" as a useful term is I think a lost cause; it mostly now serves as a warning not to take an opinion or statement at all seriously.
Re 18: "whistle in a ear".
“Otherwise, if you will excuse me, consider this joke: A patient comes to the doctor and says, ‘Doctor, I have a complaint: when I have sex, there’s a whistling in my ears.’ ‘How old are you?’ the doctor asks. ‘80,’ the pensioner replies. ‘And what were you expecting — applause?’” Kostin joked.
This is AI translated, pretty close to the Russian original.
With the explanation a good one, worthy of the Borscht Belt. I giggled. Relayed it to Mrs Slothrop and it cracked her up too.
Thanks for the clarification!
>Is there anyone old enough on this thread to remember Walkmans?
Some of us are old enough to remember the Bone Fone.
Wikipedia entry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Fone
Image
https://i0.wp.com/future-forms.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/bone_fone.jpg
Yes, around 1980, all women were at least as attractive as the model wearing the gizmo. The guys were just as bad as they are now though. So all those great looking females had no choice but to date one or another of us. For a prime male specimen with no felony convictions or anything equally disqualifying it was just one playboy model after another.
...that's where the name of Jeff Smith's character Fone Bone comes from?
I dunno The piece of hardware was a flash in the pan. If you blinked at the time it was easy to miss. I got the paper catalog from the maker so i remember it. I see people selling used ones on EBay like everything else that most people tossed decades ago.
> Yes, around 1980, all women were at least as attractive as the model wearing the gizmo. The guys were just as bad as they are now though. So all those great looking females had no choice but to date one or another of us. For a prime male specimen with no felony convictions or anything equally disqualifying it was just one playboy model after another.
I'm not sure why you included this comment, and given the setting and the types of earnest incel nonsense that sometimes crops up here I'm not entirely sure if you're being sarcastic or not.
It was meant to be nonsensically funny. I think i missed with this shot at humor. Good point about the incel stuff. Apologies for offense given. None was intended but I should have considered how it could land in the current environment.
No worries, sorry for jumping on you. A lot of good humor involves some risk of offense.
No sweat and thanks for the reply
For what it's worth, I found it mildly funny and very obviously meant as a joke.
> This involves not only the Western European elite, and not merely the political elite
Presumably they are using Western European as others use “white”, people from Europe or their descendants. All these guys are American by birth or inclination
The China has massive debt story has been ongoing for years. I think a lot of the “China is doomed” stories are cope.
China might have been doomed, back when the US led a global economic alliance. That's gone, so it's now China's game to lose.
They may very well be, but I think the China Ascending stories are crap, too. Xi is not fully in control, as Western analysts claim. The Chinese military isn't as advanced as analysts claim. While not as badly off as Russia, their internal systems are being undermined by corruption and CYA behaviors. And the country is probably less unified than the CCP would have us believe. Having lived and worked in Hong Kong and also worked in China for long stretches, I've been sensitized to their culture. The CCP has done a masterful job of holding that country together with chewing gum and baling wire. And god bless the CCP, because if their authoritarian regime collapses, all sorts of shit is going to break loose. ;-)
Well the China ascending stories are, so far, empirically true. I can’t claim to have lived there though, so you may have the better insight, but the China is doomed and the debt story has been bouncing around for a decade or two.
The most convincing theory for "impending doom" to CCP-China for me is as follows: China is still in an economic growth-stage due to industrialization. This creates a "good mood", because in a growing economy like this everyone gains, even the peasants (independent of some others becoming billionaires). Comparable earlier growers like South Korea, Taiwan or Japan have now "fully developed" economies and societies and only now are starting to hit the demographic problem. China might hit that demographic problem before the country ever becomes fully, or let's say broadly, developed close to the Western "first world countries". This might create unique problem to national stability, that are quite different and possibly more violent compared to aging countries with comparably loads of civil liberties and wealth (and relatively non-violent old age populations) to lean on.
I don’t even think the demographic problem is that big, nor that unsolvable. Per capita growth does not depend on population growth, sometimes the opposite. China is close, already to being a high income country in PPP. And any demographic headwinds are a generation away.
The debt is not that existential a threat either. Despite what people say the central government is not in hock to bail out state corporations, nor local governments, although it would credibly jump in to avoid contagion. Central government debt is low, and savings and foreign reserves are high.
> Per capita growth does not depend on population growth
In principle that is true, I fully agree. But historically, it seems that population growth has been the major driver for most of time. And then especially after WW2, productivity growth per capita *plus* the explosive population growth is what seemed to have made our western world as rich as it is.
All the South-Asian success stories after WW2 more or less copied western economic history in fast-forward mode during a time of equal population explosion combined with productivity-per-capita growth (I recommend "How Asia Works" bei Studwell for a great overview and analysis).
I think it is at least one of a set of realistic scenarios that the break off of population growth will not be (over)compensated by ever-increasing productivity/capita growth.
Alternatively: even if it is overcompensated, will CCP-Chine be able to share the fruits of growth in a way that enables social peace? But that seems to be an issue for all societies.
Neither the Trump administration nor Xi's is very transparent. But Xi would be crowing if he got a deal advantageous to China. And likewise from Trump. Trump made a lot of happy noises. And he claimed they had negotiated several trade deals that would benefit both. Some memoranda about aviation, agriculture, and market openness were signed. Have those become formal agreements yet? I don't know. Xi emphasized that they had developed "a constructive relationship of strategic stability", but he warned that mishandling the Taiwan issue could lead to "conflict". And his Thucydides Trap comment was interpreted by some analysts as a jab at US overreach. Evidently it flew over Trump's head because he's historically illiterate.
How does one find a good couple’s therapist? My partner and I have gone through several and have not found a competent one, let alone one especially fitted to help us navigate our particular challenges: a large age gap.
My first wife and I are the only two people I've ever known who got fired as clients by a couples counselor, and I silently debated for now many years whether that said more about us or about him. Hadn't thought about that for some years until just now though which I guess is positive.
Psychologist here. You do not need an expert on age gaps, you need a competent couples therapist. A competent person begins by listening carefully. as you explain the problem, asking questions, then summarizing their understanding of what you are describing, and asking whether they've "got it." If there's a part of it they don't gt yet, you 3 keep going til they do.
Best methods I can think of for locating one: Trusted person's recommendation. Bear in mind that many many therapists now practice online, and you need not find someone near you, only someone licensened in your state. So you might try asking on here for therapist names. Scott also has a list on the side bar of therapists recommended by list members, but I believe all this recs are for people who do individual therapy.
If you do not have a source of a name, look at Psychology Today using these criteria:
-Degree must be PhD or Psyd in psychology, PhD in social work, or MSW or LicSW in social work. some MD"s may be good, but they rarely get training in couples work. Don't use MDs. Then there is an alphabet soup of stuff that stands for things like "licensed counselor" -- they do not have much training -- absolutely do not see anyone with one of these minimalists degrees.
-Crow's feet: 35 or older.
-Degree from a good college
-Description of their methods is not airy fairy -- no "life is hard and I help you find your true, ever-blooming self, blowing in the breeze in the meadow of life . . .." You want stuff like "after training at X, I worked for 5 years in the Brooklyn schools in a program for teaching parents of ADHD kids how to helpfully manage some of their difficult behaviors. Then I became interested in how couples collaborate on problems of this and other kinds, and moved into private practice in X. . . ."
-They do not take insurance. The fact is, insurance does not pay well, and therapists who are well known and highly thought of sometimes simply resign from contracts with BCBS et al. If you can afford to pay out of pocket, you up your chances of getting someone really good. (However, plenty of excellent therapists do take insruance.). In some cases your own insurance may reimburse you for part of the out of pocket charge.
-See if you can find a decent book by a family therapist on Amazon. they do not have to speciaize in age diferences. You want a book where they describe how they think of marital problems and what helps with them. If you can find a book like that, call the author and ask if they are in practice, or whether they can recommend anyone good.
BTW, I am not a possibility as a therapist myself. I never see anyone I know via ACX -- I am here as my private self, not my professional one. (And anyhow I only work with individuals, not couples).
Wishing you well.
With Euzoia, the lifemaxxing project where we write weekly posts on 80/20 self-help and repeat them every year, we just finished our month on Money. Next up: Friends and Community
Transparency: https://www.euzoia.org/p/money-finally-understand-your-finances
Spending: https://www.euzoia.org/p/money-get-the-most-out-of-your-money
Insurances: https://www.euzoia.org/p/money-how-to-stop-stressing-about
Investing: https://www.euzoia.org/p/money-how-to-get-rich
Shoudl you buy a house?: https://www.euzoia.org/p/money-should-you-buy-a-house
I wrote an effortpost. After the disastrous DNC Autopsy not-even-a-rough-draft was released, I thought "I could write one better than that!"
And being the particular of crazy that I am, I tried to.
https://ordinary-times.com/2026/05/25/jaybirds-2024-dnc-autopsy/
I liked it, and I say that as someone who was in your #2s list: wouldn't vote for Harris regardless (I ended up voting literally "None of the Above" in 2024).
My first concern is that you run a large risk with the "avoiding conflict" motif. Your autopsy bangs that drum a lot, and it looks like you're just fishing out one example after another that illustrates it (plenty, I'll admit), without spending enough time on discussing whether there's any evidence that rules it out. Or even an example of what _might_ rule it out. Hillary Clinton, for example, was capable of saying uncomfortable things to her base.
A second concern is that I didn't see your article consider whether Harris just _couldn't_ have that unpleasant conversation. I think you suggested as much in replies; I just didn't see it in the OP after two reads. I think I get your point: there was this nasty barb in the DNC's skin, and they needed to stop mothering it and instead bite down, pull it all the way out, put ointment and a bandage on it so the healing could begin. But what if Harris simply can't do that? Like, maybe she can bite down and pull out the barb, but she doesn't know what aloe is so she reaches for the habanero instead and then manages to get a paper cut from the bandage and ends up bleeding out.
Which brings me to one of your longer replies to a commenter there that also resonated with me: that this problem needed to start getting fixed in 2022. I'll go even further: parts of it needed to get fixed in 2020, parts in 2016, and maybe some of it is inherently unfixable without a party re-org.
The 2020 part was choosing Harris in the first place. Unless Biden was secretly trying to prove the argument against affirmative action, he should have taken one look at Harris and then continued looking. AA employment is a terrible policy for a nation of individualists. If your underemployed groups have stellar individuals, you use that reason to hire them and ignore AA. If you have no stellar individuals ("Obama and Clinton were eating each other's cubs"), you have a more serious problem, and AA will make it worse by making it obvious. Biden should have focused on good VPs, even if they're WASPs (_and_ even if they're not), and bought the DNC more solid ground. (Maybe he loathed unpleasant conversations!)
The 2016 part was evident in multiple places. I can't find it in a search, but there was an article in Cracked.com whose headline was something like "Why Half the Country Seems to Have Lost Its G*dd*mned Mind" that ranted Cracked-style about what the DNC was doing so wrong that made half the USA willing to go with Trump. The serious bit? The DNC was gathering a _lot_ of interest groups, they didn't always get along, one of them was threatening to head out the door, and the DNC not only couldn't talk them into staying; it couldn't even stop its own other groups from mocking them on the way out. Namely, rust belt union labor was starving, and DNC said it couldn't help _and_ the wokists were calling them bigots for even asking when there were even less-privileged groups in the party framework. So out they went, Trump opened his door, and won enough swing states to win the whole thing.
That time, it was rust belt unions. In general, though, I think it could have been lots of others. The Democrats had unions, single women, young college grads, the poor, the chronically ill, half the elderly, most of tech, blacks, Latinos, immigrants, New Dealers, hippies, artists, journalists, public school teachers, LGB, T, Keynesians, Fabians, Wilsonians, environmentalists, gun control advocates, free speech advocates, and prison reformists. The GOP had the diametrical opposites, but the GOP's side overlapped more and could be served by a smaller number of general platform planks, while the Democrats' were growing more boutique. No party could keep a tent that big. "Diversity" sounds good until you notice it means you take your turn once and then wait several generations before it comes around again (or you fail to notice but just wonder why you haven't gotten your help in a while). One of the first things they teach in poliSci is that mandates are *gold* because they greatly increase the lobby groups that don't control more votes than your mandate, and therefore the lobbyists on which you no longer have to spend serious time. The Democrats had to listen to damn near everybody. Humans still need eight hours sleep. Something was going to fall on the floor.
All of this could be traced to something the DNC simply cannot fix without becoming essentially a new party. To an extent, they _are_ the party of the boutique. They can't help it. They see government as a panacea, and aren't balking at tailoring it to every citizen. To them, that just means the work will always be there for them. The reality, though, is that there will never be enough people to do that (I wonder how they will treat AI in their next platform?), and someone's going to get disenfranchised and leave. And meanwhile, half of Americans simply aren't wired to go to government with their problems.
So I think the DNC would have to figure out how to simplify their message, which means maybe having to tell various interest groups that their solution will not be found except on their own (which means the DNC would have to believe this itself). Perhaps reminding them that they care about multiple issues, and maybe solutions for the others can compensate.
And right now, I'm seeing Harris, Newsom, and AOC in the polls for POTUS, and none of them looks capable. Not more so than Vance, anyway. They'll have to pull up someone new. Shapiro? Someone else? Or hope for some undeniably colossal GOP screwup? Even Trump seems to have stabilized at a level of "routinely boring screwups".
Well, one of my limitations in the autopsy is that I wanted stuff that I could prove (or, at least, provide a lot of evidence for).
One of the go-to low-effort counter-arguments that I've seen over and over again is the whole "Cite?!?" thing. I don't mind providing citations. I *LOVE* providing citations.
The argument that Kamala is an empty suit who doesn't think anything but merely has an excellent sniffer is something that I can't provide good evidence for. It's like checking for AI writing, I guess. You see something here or there that makes your brain say "AH-HA!" like when the American guy holds up three fingers in Inglourious Basterds. And someone who says "what? that's not *PROOF*" will be unswayed by saying "but he held up his fingers wrong..."
But, yeah, in comments I can air my suspicions. The post, however, was for stuff I could demonstrate.
I said this in comments too but it bears repeating: Harris was Biden's #2 choice. His #1 choice was Stacey Abrams but she slapped his hand away. After was locked in as nominee, she became all sweetness and light but Biden was still sharp enough to remember an insult and, for all I know, she's still sitting by that phone.
I don't know who the DNC will nominate... I know who they *SHOULD* nominate, but if Bluesky still has more action for their bubble than twitter, they'll find themselves losing 5 of 7 swing states next time while saying "but... the midterms..."
I remember that "#2 choice" comment. I read Abrams' quote, and I can't figure out what was driving her decision about being VP. What she said was pretty standard equivocation. The best case I can read makes sense: she's in the primary to run for POTUS, not VP; she'll consider VP both if and only if she loses in the primary. That didn't read like a handslap to me, except in the sense of Biden being his usual gaffe mill by even asking her before the primary, and her responding appropriately. That would've been a dumb reason for Biden to bump her off. Alternately, maybe he realized he'd put his foot in his mouth and figured it'd be too awkward for him to ask again later. I could understand that.
Just this morning, I read that Whitmer declares she won't be running in 2028. IMO, that's probably good news for the country. It still leaves the current top batch of Harris, Newsom, and OC, though, and... I would prefer Whitmer over any of them, despite the damage I've heard she's done to Michigan. (I almost said "New York", mixing her up with Hochul. I'd prefer Whitmer to Hochul, too, but oh well.)
As for evidence Harris is an empty suit: what did you make of her multiple quotes brought forth over the years as "word salad"? Venn diagrams? Her "time" speech? "Unburdened by what has been"?
My usual responses to stuff like this is to check two angles: one, what gaffes are others making (is Harris unique in this?), and two, has she said anything quotable in a _good_ way. The first is pretty easy ("covfefe", "won't get fooled again", "put y'all in chains"), but recoverable (that person was having a bad day). The second would help, but I honestly don't know of any examples of her saying something both meaningful and resonating.
She wasn't in the primary, though. If she had been, sure. "I'm not running for VP!" makes sense.
But she wasn't running for P either.
"As for evidence Harris is an empty suit..."
It's not one thing and any one thing I'd bring up could be dismissed. But it's everything from her career as Prosecutor to her embrace of the Mostly Peaceful Protestors to her denial of ever having been adjacent to Defund to her Border Czar thing. She was always in over her head and she wasn't good at providing more than half-decent Tik-Toks.
But here. Have you read Kareem Rahma's take on Harris's Subway Stories episode?
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/the-creator-of-subway-takes-one-hundred-per-cent-disagrees
There. That's one more thing to be dismissed.
2020 was a huge primary IIRC; I sort of assumed Abrams was in there somewhere. Maybe very preliminary and dropping out early. But then I'd have to check the timeline for when she said she turned down VP to see if that adds up, and at the end of the day, I suspect I have other reasons to find Abrams unappealing as a candidate.
"Harris is in over her head" seems like an even more precise (and therefore useful) criticism than "empty suit". I remember Gabbard taking her apart in 2020. Her planning algorithm is starved, and she can't improvise. She gives me the impression that if she were President and China invaded Taiwan, she'd just freeze up and then start emitting random aphorisms like an early LLM.
That NY article is paywalled for me, but I recall something about Harris and Subway Stories. Wasn't that the episode they both agreed to keep off the air?
Yeah, it could be dismissed. Maybe she had a bad day. Then again, "she seems to have a lot of those" is the obvious response. Sure, plural, anecdote, data, but that's why I ask whether she's had any _good_ days.
I haven't found any.
Maybe you'll have more luck.
I enjoyed reading this, thanks for writing this piece! Definitely was more of an interesting read than the DNC "autopsy"
Thank you!
Good analysis. I don't agree with everything you say, but you did a much better job than the DNC did. Most of the problems that Harris had during her campaign could have been addressed by a coherent personal vision for the country, but it isn't clear that she had one.
Most of the people I see commenting on the presidential election (the last one and the next one) fall into one of two camps: The Dems should be more centrist, or the Dems should be more progressive.
They are both wrong. This is a holdover from the days when mass propaganda (advertising) still worked: you sent out one message to hundreds of millions of people, and some percentage of them end up agreeing with the message. That isn't how public communication works anymore--now it's all about micro-targeted messages that are crafted to appeal to the interests of very narrow demographics (I'm talking about consumer products).
Voters are also consumers and have been socialized to expect messages carefully crafted to their narrow demographic. "The Centrist Candidate" or "The Progressive Candidate" is obsolete messaging.
Yet you can't say one thing to one group of voters, and say or imply something else to another set. People still expect self-consistent honesty from other human beings. So now it comes down to personality.
Most voters these days self-identify as independents. These voters aren't generic "in the middle" on issues, they cherry pick from all sides based on their own unique perspective. This is how you get a truck driver who is into yoga, want to reduce immigration and build more renewables. Or a retired college professor who dislikes guns and hates the use of gender-neutral pronouns. This is the "New Nomal" (it was actually always this way, we just didn't have the technology to reach out to them before).
The one thing that everyone agrees on is that the system no longer works, and needs reformed. Exactly what those reforms should be is a source of much disagreement among the voting public.
Lacking specific policy positions in common, it comes down to vibes, or "personality."
Personality (in a public media) comes down to how much attention the candidate can grab by projecting provocative power and authenticity. Sure, you want specific policies for specific factions of voters you wish to appeal to, but that doesn't win elections anymore. Now it's important to be for something *unpopular*, as a way of demonstrating confidence and honesty. Emotional appeals are more effective than intellectual ones.
Any of this sound familiar? The challenge facing the Dems next cycle is finding a candidate who can thread this needle while still promoting the core values of the Democratic party: unity across class and racial/ethnic/sexual divisions, an inclusive economic policy, protecting democracy across the world (and at home). They now have an opportunity to add another one: competence in governance (relatively speaking). But that's secondary to projecting confidence and authenticity via provocation.
Who do the Dems have that can plausibly pull this off?
Who do the Dems have? AOC has a personality and she's charismatic but... maybe this is because I'm West of the Mississippi but she strikes me as kinda flaky and Team Grey has already told her some variant of "you won't get a cent" which, in this environment, means that she can run locally but she can't run nationally.
Part of me thinks that Obama and Clinton did a good job of killing each others' cubs and now just bland milquetoast folks are showing up.
I think that Pritzker might be okay (he's fat! he's a billionaire! Americans like those things!) and I'm a fan of the guys like the Udall brothers or Jared Polis but I understand that nobody from Mountain Time can win dogcatcher on a national level.
Is there a non-tattooed Platner?
AOC isn't strong and confident, she's strident, or at least she is perceived that way, which is not the same thing.
I think of Team Gray as self congratulatory strawmanning myself. You take a position that any Democrat with a sense of nuance would just about entirely agree with and create a brand of the special when compared to (your own) cartoonish definition of the left.
Or do you just mean Silicon Valley billionaires here.
As someone who considers himself Team Gray, you should at least see it as self-congratulatory nut-picking.
That’s funny. Call yourself what you like. I think I was in a kind of a bad mood yesterday. Sorry for being short with you then.
Your cat picture’s face looks like my larger orange boy cat.
I’m going to have a Central Time Zone Hamms with my dinner soon. In hour you can have a Coors? That’s a good MDT beer.
Not until Friday night.
And six, maybe eight.
But thank you! Enjoy!
Cursory read, so far it looks pretty good.
"The shocking thing about that chart is that it shows the largest shift was Black Men. 25%."
Not one bit surprised, did you see the dumb ads her campaign ran? Appealing to young women voters (already in the bag for her) about treating men like garbage if they don't vote Kamala.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKz3LXLy6cs
If I were a guy of whatever colour, I'd stay far away from the harridans there.
And the ones trying to use Walz to appeal to Da Mens were even worse.
"The Large Donors. These guys show up and you have to let them in."
That was the reason/excuse I saw used as to why it *had* to be Harris as the candidate; that the donors had given money to the Biden/Harris campaign and it couldn't be reassigned to someone different, so if Biden dropped out only Kamala could use it. That, and the short time, were the main reasons used for making it the fait accompli of selecting Harris rather than having an open convention.
The big problem was that Biden stayed on too long, nobody was willing/able to tell him no, he shouldn't and couldn't run for a second time, and that left them with no real choice but to go with Harris, and she was just a poor candidate all round. She had given too many hostages to fortune with her 2019 run (the golden opportunity for the Trump "they/them" ad with footage of her happily running her neck into the noose) and didn't want to or couldn't walk back those positions because of the progressive wing. Also very much stuck with not wanting to criticise Biden and the former administration (of which she had been part) due to that being perceived as disloyalty, but then that left her with nothing when her position seemed to be "if elected, I won't change anything from what we did before".
And to top it all off, nobody in the failed campaign seems to want to take responsibility at all. So did the party learn anything? Not very much, it would seem. I have no idea what they'll do for 2024, their choices seem limited (unless something changes drastically in the meantime).
EDIT: Re: Joe Rogan, I do think that was an error on the part of Harris and her campaign. "Call Me Daddy" was preaching to the choir, but the bone of contention seemed to be control: the campaign was terrified of anything spontaneous and exposing Harris to unscripted questions that they didn't know and have prepared answers for in advance. They flew in the podcast host and built a replica set in a hotel room just to have that kind of control and softball interview. In Harris' memoir of the campaign, she tries very hard to push the blame onto Rogan - 'oh we were willing to do it, but it was hard to find a time in our crowded schedule that suited both parties, and then he changed his mind, and then he wouldn't do it, and then he went around telling everyone we refused'.
I think I believe Rogan (and Palmieri) over Harris there. Asking her to go off-script and explain her actual policies (if she had any) was too much of a risk for them.
"That was the reason/excuse I saw used as to why it *had* to be Harris as the candidate; that the donors had given money to the Biden/Harris campaign and it couldn't be reassigned to someone different, so if Biden dropped out only Kamala could use it."
From what I understand, it was 80 Million Bucks. Which sounds like a lot until you read that Harris spent about 1.5 Billion-with-a-B Bucks.
Sometimes the high school team finds itself going up against the '85 Bears and there ain't nothing to be done except talk about how the mistake happened when you signed the contract but if it were possible for the Democrats to win, they needed to do something else.
That said, I argued that sort of thing when it was still Biden running and I said "They need to change Biden out!" and then Biden endorsed Harris and I was stuck yelling "NOT LIKE THAT!"
I don't think even Trump would describe himself as the '85 Bears. He had one or two flaws as a candidate, and a teency bit of baggage from his first term!
I wouldn't describe him as the '85 Bears either. I see it as an election that could have been won.
But, in order to win it, the Democrats would have had to have made fewer mistakes.
And if they cannot acknowledge that any mistakes were made, then we're in a place where Trump, magically, becomes unbeatable.
Besides, like you've never made a mistake.
Why are democrats the only party with agency here?!?!?
I have in fact lived a mistake-free life. 30 Rock aficionados will recognize this phenomenon as “Reaganing” but for a lifetime rather than a single day.
Truly a 6 Sigma life.
I bought the Kindle version of her campaign memoir, "107 Days", not expecting much from it but it turned out to be a goldmine.
First, she really does think she is God's Gift. You name it, she can do it, has done it, knows about it, or all three. Unintentionally funny in parts, I have to wonder did nobody edit this book, were they too scared to tell her "you really should cut this part out", or is this the ghostwriter's revenge (there must have been a ghostwriter).
Description of a flying visit through Georgia (she calls it "barnstorming" but uh, no barns were harmed in the making of this trip, not even lightly disordered):
"We headed out of the city, through woods draped with Spanish moss and lush wetlands, to Liberty County High School in Hinesville, where the school’s marching band played for us. I told the band members that I, too, had been in my school band. I played everything from the French horn to the kettle drum. With the horn players, I shared that I’d given up the horn because it involved entirely too much spit. Tim and some of my team members later said that they were surprised to learn about my onetime musical prowess. It was another example of how there were so many more ways to connect with people, if I’d only had more time."
You see? She didn't play just *one* measly instrument like the rest of the candidates, if they can even play an instrument!
It's like this *all through the book*. The Coconut Queen can never fail, she can only be failed by her unworthy subjects.
Second, she wanted the Biden endorsement and felt that he wasn't doing it fast enough.
Biden calls to let her know he's dropping out:
"The president was still talking. “I want you to do this.” He would endorse me, he said, but not for a day, maybe two, when he would make an address to the nation.
That would be ruinous, and I said so.
“Joe, I’m honored, but we live in a twenty-four-hour news cycle, and if you wait that long, the airwaves will be full of nothing but questions: ‘Why has he not supported his VP?’ If you want to put me in the strongest position, you have to endorse me now.” I urged him to reconsider the timing. “What we do, right now, is so important,” I said. “People will look at how this moment occurred for decades. There’s no reason to rush this. Can we slow it down so I can prepare? And you need to endorse me at the same time. Any gap between the announcement and the endorsement will lead to the same kind of chaos we’ve had for the last three weeks.”
The public statements, the whispering campaigns, and the speculation had done a world of damage. I knew I was the candidate in the strongest position to win. The most qualified and ready. The highest name recognition. A powerful donor base. And I also knew, as he did, that I was the only person who would preserve his legacy. At this point, anyone else was bound to throw him—and all the good he had achieved—right under the bus.
Joe’s two closest aides, Steve Ricchetti and Mike Donilon, were in the room with him in Rehoboth. He put Ricchetti on the phone.
“We were always going to support you. We just want to do this announcement first and leave a little bit of time.”
“Steve, you know that’s not going to work,” I said. “There needs to be no daylight between the announcements.”
“That’s a fair point,” Steve conceded. He gave the phone back to the president.
Joe said, “Let me call you back.”
...We waited for the promised call back from Joe, anxious as the minutes passed. News was starting to leak. Then, the call.
There was no postponing the announcement of his dropping out, Joe said. “But the statement endorsing you will go out a few minutes later.”
“Joe, thank you for this,” I said, relieved. “I will do you proud. I am so looking forward to carrying on the work we’ve done together.”
“You’re gonna do great, kid.”
His announcement that he would not be seeking reelection hit social media just twenty-two minutes after we hung up. Twenty-seven minutes after that, he endorsed me as the Democratic candidate for president of the United States."
Talking about the convention:
"It was hard to detect anything but relief in this hall. We could have been staring down a very different four days. It could have been a contested convention, a messy floor fight. Instead, there was gratitude that Biden had passed the torch to me, relief that I’d been able to grasp it, a sense of unity and enthusiasm."
Ah yes, all unity, peace and love. Isn't it wonderful? Except that earlier in the book, after the description of the call from Biden, she gives a little list of everyone who called (or didn't, knives out for Gavin Newsom here!) when they were making "the rolling calls we needed to make right away to secure support from Democratic delegates gathering for our convention in Chicago in less than a month, as well as from the former presidents, elected officials, and labor leaders who would be attending."
"Gavin Newsom: Hiking. Will call back. (He never did.)"
So there is definitely an air of "these got my back, those were neutral, them over there eff 'em" about that list 😁
I can definitely recommend the book, it's a great read if you want to see from the inside the level of self-deception/self-aggrandisement that went on. In one of your replies to comments on your post, you say:
"The problem is that Harris isn’t a particularly deep person. She doesn’t believe things. She barely thinks them. She mostly craves power and is willing to say whatever the weathervane is pointing at this week."
Oh yep. The book shows that very clearly. She has always been wonderful and the people's choice and it was just plain evil on the parts of her opponents that beat her (she *hates* JD Vance, it's hilarious).
"I got into my motorcade, but we weren’t pulling out. I asked Max why we weren’t leaving. That was when I learned we were being held up by J. D. Vance. He was out of his car and walking toward Air Force Two, in violation of every rule of security and protocol.
I later learned that he told reporters he was there because “I just wanted to check out my future plane.”
Had I known he was pulling that juvenile stunt, I would’ve been inclined to step from my car and use a word I believe best pronounced correctly. It begins with an m and ends with ah."
But it doesn't matter anyway, JD can keep that shabby, broken-down old plane!
Poor nice, decent, good-hearted Tim Walz was no match for the wicked and malicious wiles of Vance:
"He’d prepared with Pete Buttigieg, a consummate debater, and I thought his big heart and his good humor would counter J. D. Vance’s malice and pessimism.
But J. D. Vance is a shape-shifter. And a shifty guy. He understood that his default meanness wouldn’t play against Tim Walz’s sunny disposition and patent decency. Throughout the debate, he toned the anger and the insults way down. As Van Jones later remarked, he sane-washed the crazy. There were no cat ladies, no pet-eating Haitians, no personal insults. Just a mild-mannered, aw-shucks Appalachian pretending he had a lot of common ground with that nice Midwestern coach."
10/10 top read, would recommend for the Schadenfreude!
The only reason that I would read 107 Days is to find out her take on the Rogan thing.
That strikes me as either a huge mistake because she ought to have wanted to speak to Rogan's audience (even getting 1% of them would have measurable results!)
*OR*
It was a bullet dodged because she's a hollow person with nothing there and sitting and shooting the bull with Rogan would have demonstrated that and created no fewer than 5 viral clips
My suspicion is the latter but I suppose it might be the former...
"The only reason that I would read 107 Days is to find out her take on the Rogan thing."
Well, fortunately for you, I am - as per Tyrone Slothrop - a "viciously EDIT: terribly uninformed" hater "spitefully kibitzing about a game for which [I] don’t even know the rules. For the *fun* of it" who loves "shitting on [his] country from an ocean away with this stuff" because it is "recreational squabbling for [me]", so I can give you the entire chapter 😁 Spite is a wonderful thing!
Who do I believe, between Harris and Rogan? Well, you know, I'm a viciously EDIT: terribly uninformed hater etc. etc. etc. so the safest thing is to say "no comment" 😊
"OCTOBER 22
14 Days to the Election
The Trump team announced that he would be on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast October 25. That came as a surprise to us. I’d been told that Joe Rogan couldn’t interview me on that date because he was “taking a personal day.”
We’d been back and forth with Rogan since late September or early October. One of the young leaders on my digital team made the initial contact through Rogan’s platform, Spotify.
Rogan’s producers came back to us with a list of conditions. These included a one hour minimum, no topic limitations, only me and Secret Service in the studio. I had no problem with any of that, so we started to discuss recording the podcast while I was campaigning in Michigan.
The team was hearing all kinds of conflicting information from folks who knew Rogan: from one source, that he’d bragged he’d “rake me over the coals”; from another, that it would be great for me, because Rogan had said he didn’t want Trump to win.
I wasn’t in the weeds on any of it. I left that up to my staff. They’d suggested topics that might interest Rogan’s audience, such as cannabis, social media censorship, and crypto. Rogan’s team said they just wanted to discuss the economy, immigration, and abortion. Again, I was fine with that. They said they’d work with Spotify about securing a studio in Detroit. That sounded great.
But then they came back to say Rogan, having thought about it, wanted to record in Austin; that he never traveled and had only ever gone remote one time, to secure an interview with Edward Snowden. They wanted me to come to Austin. That was a big ask. I had to weigh spending time in Texas so close to the election, when every minute in a swing state mattered, and also the time lost traveling there and back.
Still, even though most of my team thought doing the interview at all was a gamble, and others bluntly argued it was a bad idea, I really wanted to do it. One podcast was not going to win or lose the election. But Rogan’s audience was young and male. I wanted to reach those guys who might not otherwise hear from me.
We had a big rally on reproductive rights planned in Houston on October 25. So on October 18 my team called and told Rogan’s people that we could come to Austin for the interview that day. My research and comms team started pulling together a prep sheet for me.
Then the word came back: “It’s a personal day for Joe. He’s not available. If you’d just called a day before, we could have done it.” Then how about the following day? The morning after the Houston rally? They said they could do it at 8:30 a.m., not later, as Joe had “commitments.” I had commitments as well, and it wasn’t feasible to get from Houston to Austin by 8:30 a.m.
And then, on October 22, we learned that Rogan was spending his “personal day” interviewing Donald Trump. (Rogan kept Trump rambling so long he was three hours late to the outdoor rally he was meant to be addressing in Traverse City, Michigan, leaving a dwindling number of supporters standing in the cold.)
To be totally transparent, which sadly they were not, they offered us times on the 24th or the 27th or sometime after the rally on the 25th, which was set to conclude at 10:00 p.m. It wasn’t realistic to go from Houston to Austin and do a podcast at midnight, nor was I about to hang around an extra day in Texas a week out from the election. I believe they knew that when they offered those times. We made one last pitch, offering an hour before my speech on the Ellipse, if Rogan would reconsider and come to DC. He declined.
On the eve of the election, Rogan endorsed Trump. Since then, he has lied on his show, claiming we pushed for tight topic restrictions. He even claimed that the very topics we had suggested were ones we’d refused to discuss.
His team says we “never committed,” which is accurate, but misleading.
The plain truth: I wanted to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast on October 25. He chose Trump instead."
EDIT: Tyrone has requested I stop misgendering, I mean misquoting him, so I must correct "viciously" to "terribly". Will do so, Tyrone!
>EDIT: Tyrone has requested I stop misgendering, I mean misquoting him, so I must correct "viciously" to "terribly". Will do so, Tyrone!
Now you are just being silly. If you want to respond on substance we can have a conversation.
Dial back the sarcasm, the hyperbole, and the selective snippets of adjectives and adverbs without the surrounding context and maybe we could find common ground or at least agree to disagree.
‘terribly uninformed’ not ‘viciously uninformed’
The latter doesn't even make sense.
Please quote directly and in context or better yet respond directly to me.
Changing someone’s words to rebut them is called strawmanning.
Thank you so much for this info!
I find it vaguely unpersuasive but... well, it's better than "staffers got the ick".
>Just a mild-mannered, aw-shucks Appalachian pretending he had a lot of common ground with that nice Midwestern coach
And a compassionate “Oh, Christ.” when Waltz mentioned the murder where his special needs son goes to school. (St Paul Central High School, about 3 miles from my house, The Governor’s Residence is closer by about a mile. The Pioneer Press covered it in detail.)
This place is only a mile away.
https://lptv.org/wp-content/uploads/greg-bovino-border-patrol-federal-agents-target-st.-paul-ap-file-thumbnail-960x540.jpg
I bought some oatmeal and peanut butter there this morning.
If you want to understand the United States I recommend starting with the Federalist Papers and giving our Constitution a careful read. They are both in the public domain
You don’t live here and you really don’t know what you are talking about. Really, you have to Google things that American grammar school kids already know by heart.
You are just shitting on my country from an ocean away with this stuff.
This is recreational squabbling for you. It’s not your country, you are spitefully kibitzing about a game for which you don’t even know the rules. For the *fun* of it.
Give the terribly uninformed hatred a rest please.
Ah yes, the Federalist Papers and the Constitution, "which I am sure most Americans have read".
I gave my well thumbed copy to a work friend on the occasion of his becoming a US citizen. It was important to me that he understood the thinking that went into designing his new country.
My replacement copy is also gently worn.
> If I were a guy of whatever colour, I'd stay far away from the harridans there.
I also find it fascinatingly hypocritical, how the party of the politically correct who get offended at everything but especially things related to sexuality suddenly decides to go "these girls will fuck you if you vote for Harris". Where are all the woke voices calling out the ad as heteronormative, or demanding that one of the ladies be obviously trans?
Citations please.
I'm inclined to think most of the "this is what the Democratic Party should have done" commentary is missing the fact that the Democrats in a sense had to lose this election, in order for it to become undeniably clear that they should have done those aforementioned things.
Fundamentally, elections function as lessons and proofs about what society will really actually accept and what it won't. Polls, media and online commentary, reasoning it out from first principles, that can all be disregarded as biased or misleading or similar. Election results can't.
And it takes a number of elections for it to become clear what the true situation is. And to resolve ambiguous interpretations in the earlier outcomes. See this for example:
>"Enter FDR. FDR’s political strategy was forged in three Presidential elections: 1920, 1924 and 1928. In 1920, FDR as the Dems’ Vice Presidential candidate suffered what is still worst popular vote loss in U.S. History, losing 34%-60% to Warren G. Harding. But that was the low point for the Democrats. In 1924, FDR noticed that the Republicans were held to 54% of the vote, with 28.8% for the Democrats and 16.6% for the Progressives. Combined, the Progressives and Democrats added up to 45% of the vote. In 1928, although the Democrats lost badly, the nomination of Catholic Al Smith (while depressing Democratic turnout in the South) had turned out white ethnic voters in droves, and had flipped MA and RI to the Democratic column. While this does not seem significant today, it was extraordinary without the benefit of hindsight. After all, except for the badly divided election of 1912, no Democrat had carried either of these states since 1836 (no Democrat had carried MA in a contested election (save 1912) since 1804).
So what if Roosevelt could take the rump Democratic party of Southern Jeffersonians, keep the newly-engorged big city machines, and add to it Progressive Republicans who were disenchanted with their party’s pro-business stance? And with the collapse in the farm economy, maybe add some of midwestern farmers as well?
It worked better than hoped. Roosevelt ran as a national healer, without a clear platform. He was slippery, and sometimes contradictory in what he aimed to do. Even in office, he veered back-and-forth between conservative and liberal tendencies, offering the repeal of Prohibition for Catholics, strengthening unions for the city machines and progressives, but at the same time resisting the more left-leaning policies of Huey Long. Heck, even Ayn Rand supported him in 1932. And he won a landslide."
(https://web.archive.org/web/20151110031718/http://www.redstate.com/diary/horaceox/2008/08/05/will-2008-be-a-re-aligning-year-part-iii-of/)
I think Matt Yglasias has talked a lot about how the 2012 outcome was ambiguous between an endorsement of economic liberalism and an endorsement of social liberalism, and between an endorsement of the moderate and strong forms of each. 2016 should have made it clear there wasn't this massive enthusiasm for affluent social liberalism, but there was still the possible "we didn't go far enough, turnout was depressed" interpretation. Taking or implying a bunch of very extreme positions in 2020 and then winning, but much more narrowly than expected...should that be seen as a success or a failure? Plus, maybe it was just optics, maybe you can run someone who doesn't *talk* about the extreme things but still holds those positions and you'll satisfy both the moderates and the base.
The 2024 outcome was needed to finally settle this ambiguity. Woke capital, educated middle class social identity politics, is not a winning strategy and never will be. Now basically no one can coherently deny this, and the conversations and issue focuses can finally move on. But 2024 had to happen.
Well, now we're in a place where Woke Capital and edumacated middle class social identity politics are the ones who show up at the meetings and stand in line for the microphone so they can take turns telling each other "that's racist".
They don't see BlueSky as a mistake. Why should they?
Indulge in spiteful hyperbole much?
DON'T MIND IF I DO!!!
Here's an essay I wrote about Critical Race Theory back when people talked about it.
Please pay attention to the embedded video. It's important!
https://ordinary-times.com/2021/06/22/of-mottes-and-baileys-and-critical-race-theory/
Oh my. I already forgot about the outrage over the white man babysitting his neighbor's child of a different color. What a crazy world we used to live in (and now we are gaslighted that it never existed).
Tyrone, think about the saying "Trust the complaint, not the prescription" or "Listen to the pain, not the solution". People may be wrong about the technical details of their complaints and suggestion. But something is undeniably wrong... and you seem to insist on denying it.
I don’t endorse stupidity. If I see it I’ll call it out. Perhaps I’ve lived a charmed life surrounded by phlegmatic Norwegian bachelor farmer types, but the closest I’ve come to ‘woke’ is a neighborhood group email asking me what my pronouns are with a link to “why it’s important.” This elicited a shrug on my part. “Been going by he/him for a long time, so I guess I’ll stick with them” was my response.
With the internet and god-awful social media, you can find any kind of crazy you care to.
With AI, the world is going to go through some unimaginable changes in the next 5 years. I’m hoping we can find a leader that can keep us from each other’s throats. Ignoring the left/right axis for the moment, I’m hoping for a Ronald Reagan or FDR consensus builder. I don’t want to see the insane hypersensitivity of woke or long-time allies being treated as adversaries and civilians being shot in the streets.
Sadly, at the time, I thought "THIS IS NUTS!" rather than "This is obviously not sustainable."
Fox News guy, huh?
Oh, I don't watch television.
"the Democrats in a sense had to lose this election, in order for it to become undeniably clear that they should have done those aforementioned things"
That only works if they do learn lessons from it, and the correct lessons. Right now I'm not sure they have, though there are signs that internally people are trying to find the way forward.
I see hopeful (God bless 'em) online proposals that AOC should run, the Democrats should definitely select her, no really the voters are there with their tongues hanging out for the opportunity to vote for a young WOC with radical socialist ideas!
It'll never happen, but when you have that fringe hanging on, they can do more damage than their size would indicate, because if you run the centrist candidate who can shift the undecided squishy middle, they'll be outraged and they'll try burning it down with online campaigns, etc. The Democrats don't seem (right now) able or willing to tell the progressive fringe to go take a hike, because they've pinned the party image as being pro-all that: pro-reproductive freedom, pro-undocumented visitors (I did have to laugh at that newest euphemism in Jaybird's post-mortem, thank you Jaybird for the new term!), pro-reparations and racial justice and trans rights and every "just a few crazy college kids" position they could scoop up.
Not that they necessarily *believe* all that, but it's sure handy when you can just run on "my Republican opponent is the Devil made manifest and will lock up all the trans undocumented folx of colour in torture camps before forcing ten year old children to bear their fathers' incest rape babies*" instead of talking about policies in terms of hard facts as to what they want to do and how they would do it.
*You think I'm joking? I saw one online example of this protesting some Tennessee (I think) limit on abortion law, where it was a faux-50s image of nurse talking to child in hospital bed about exactly that: if we permit abortion, you won't have your daddy's baby!
"Undocumented Visitors" wasn't mine! It showed up for fifteen minutes a while back when I was told that I needed to stop saying whatever the hell one of the old Fatwas told us to say!
I find that there is much joy to be had to use unupdated terms.
For example, I still *LOVE* to say "Latinx".
The ever-shifting sands of "this is the correct term and if you use any other you're a bigot hater phobe/(five minutes later) no, now that's a slur, you bigot hater phobe" is marvellous territory.
But do you pronounce it "lah-tinks" or "latin-ex"? 😁
I think the politically correct name is "ISO/IEC 8859-X".
For example:
Latin-1 = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1
Latin-2 = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-2
...and so on for other values of X.
Latin-1* fully covering Swahili constitutes cultural appropriation.
* Or LATIN_!, as they say in Uppercase.
I use multiple pronunciations.
LAH-tin-echs
la-TINKS
lah-TEEN-echs
sometimes in the same sentence.
Pronounced Latin-ex and ultimately rejected as silly.
Odd thing to get upset about in the scheme of things.
https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AA20L7MV.img?w=1280&h=720&m=4&q=91
And not a word about blasphemy from someone who wears Catholicism on her sleeve? Long quotations from C S Lewis and all that.
Yeah, stay focused on LaitinX. Keep the petty hate alive in someone else’s country.
That image seems clearly inspired by this Franco mural: https://www.flickr.com/photos/8449304@N04/18203931295 . Evidently right-wing Catholics didn't have a problem with this in 1948. I don't disagree with your value judgement on what they ought to do, but factually this casual attitude to that sort of messaging is not a result of Trumpian partisanship.
Also, Deiseach is your clear example of "non-American with strong opinions on American domestic policy" ONLY because she's so prolific. If you pay attention and have a good memory for individual commenters (and the information they've revealed about themselves at various points) as I do, you'll notice that this is close to the norm on ACX, with many of the most heated Trump discussions composed largely of non-Americans. Or more specifically the *left* sides of these discussions are composed disproportionately of non-Americans; right-wing examples like Deiseach are rarer.
I've also frequently seen said left-wing commenters say exactly the sorts of things you've attributed to Deiseach (e.g. "oh well, I don't live there, this is all entertainment for me, interesting to see how this turns out from my comfort of Europe" and so on) but I've never seen it from her. Ask her why she has such strong opinions on US policy, and she'll say it directly affects her due to US cultural and economic influence. Most right-wing international commentators tend to say the same thing. I suspect but can't prove that the left-wing ones feel the same in reality but have a level of cultural pride that does not allow them to acknowledge they are subject to Anerican influence, so they talk as though it's a game to them. But whatever the reason, such talk is infinitely more obnoxious than anything from the likes of Deiseach, and they're the ones you should be angry at.
The main part I disagree with:
> You have to turn an 80-20 issue into a 75-25 issue via persuasion. And then you have to talk about it some more and maybe turn it into a 70-30 issue. And then you have to talk about it some more. And then when it’s a 65-35 issue, you still have to keep talking about it.
I would say that if you find yourself on the 20 side of any (important) 80-20 issue then you should not be running for office.
I'm not saying that *nobody* should ever be on the 20 side of any issue, I'm just saying that people who aspire to be the people's elected representatives should avoid being on the 20 side of any issue -- they should either change their minds on the issue or change their minds on their choice of career.
The number one qualification for running for office should be that you happen to have the most boring milquetoast and popular views on pretty much everything. You can't always be in the majority on every single thing, but you should never find yourself outnumbered four to one.
Well, I assumed that the main counterargument would be some variant of "but the 20 is the right side in the 80-20 issue". So instead of arguing "well, you should take the wrong side of this important moral issue", I argued "you have to talk to people, you can't just use Social Proof".
That's the way I took it, too.
Occasionally, the 20 side is the side (most of) the other 80 _would_ take if they had more information. We can't always rely on a Gaussian distribution of information where the 80 side is overwhelmingly likely the better one; it's possible and even routine for only a few people to have important information, at first. Persuasion is the act of sharing that information.
Now, it might be wrong, in which case persuasion is more accurately the act of sharing that information _plus_ the audience agreeing that that information was accurate and important.
Well I'm sure that everyone thinks that their own side is right.
But my point was that you gotta choose. The job of being an elected representative and the job of being a supporter of unpopular positions are mutually exclusive. They are both important but you can't try to do both.
Would you say that the most recently elected presidential candidate had boring, milquetoast views?
Like, it would be nice if the most normie centrist views were also the most electable, but I'm not sure that that's actually the case. I've seen several pundits argue that being excessively centrist makes you come off as artificial and focus-grouped in an unappealing way.
The word "milquetoast" is rarely used in conjunction with the current President, but that's due to his personality, not his views. His views are very middle-of-the road, that's what got him elected; he famously has the views of a generic 90s Democrat.
> Would you say that the most recently elected presidential candidate had boring, milquetoast views?
Would the answer "yes" scare you? It's at least a possibility that this most recent candidate represents at least a sizable chunk of "normal", as alien as it may sound to you and me.
You did, in fact, write a better one than the DNC. Not that this was a terribly high bar.
I particularly appreciated the Jonathan Pie reference. Unfortunately, the Democrats have spend the past ten years ignoring that message, and it looks like they're going to spend the next ten years doing the same.
Thank you! I'm pleased.
I still have bruises from some parts of 2018-2023 and resent the ever-living heck out of some of the stuff I was forced to go up a level of abstraction about.
Re the governorship race, YIMBY is a great thing to be a single-issue voter for, but in California specifically, I think one other thing takes priority: I don't care what else Steve Hilton says, his wildfire plan involves forestry policy (ie the actual source of the wildfires) instead of just using it as a talking point about climate change. This means that a Steve Hilton governorship has a chance of actually stopping the fires. Steyer wants to pin it on corporations, Becerra wants to pin it on insurance companies, neither of them sound like they're going to actually do anything about them. I think on paper the NIMBY policies destroy more value yearly than the fires, but once you include the amount of impact a single governor can have on them, when he doesn't plan to focus on them, forestry is probably higher-impact to reform.
Do any of the candidates talk about building codes? After all those fires happened in LA last year or the year before I was very interested to learn about what allowed the surviving houses to remain, and I think I remember even hearing a few experts say all houses built in fire-prone areas ought to integrate lessons from those.
Making it difficult for floating embers to enter the attic under soffits, keeping a perimeter around the house free from combustibles, and having a masonry fence tended to be the big takeaways that I recall. It would be interesting to see someone propose these as mandatory.
Making houses more fireproof, by making houses much more difficult and expensive to build, is not necessarily a great tradeoff.
If one percent of houses burn down before they are otherwise demolished, then it's (very roughly) not worth more than a one percent increase in construction costs to make them completely fireproof. You're better off just rebuilding the ones that burn down.
Masonry fences are expensive. And keeping vegetation away from houses isn't necessarily expensive but plantless gardens make for ugly living.
I did a quick search for numbers, it looks like way more than 1% of the homes threatened by wildfires in LA succumbed to them. Also I don’t think your equation is correct even putting aside your 1% figure; for example there are things people might pay double for, if it decreases their chances of losing that thing by even just a few percentage points.
A lot of why we have building codes, which do make houses more expensive to build, is to make them more fireproof (and leakproof and floodproof and collapseproof and moldproof etc.). So as far as code goes, the trade-off has already been made and the question is in what all is covered by it.
If adding a masonry fence, going with a specific type of product for soffits, and doing xeriscaping (which is usually more appropriate in fire-prone areas anyway, and is gorgeous if done well) within 10 feet of the house means the likely difference between your house surviving a wildfire vs. burning down (and there is evidence to suggest that it does mean this), I can see lots of people going for that.
I also think you are wrong about “more difficult”. Houses tend to be built faster today, by less skilled people, which suggests they are not more difficult to build despite building codes becoming more expansive and more stringent over the years.
If you want Hilton to win vote for Bianco.
I'd like to hear some opinions from people on two things that are coming up very quickly in my life:
First, as to what to study in college (which I will be starting next fall): is studying ML + math useful? I'd like to hear any opinions on this. It seems like fun, at least, but I'm somewhat worried I'd be learning it much less quickly than AI would be advancing. (For reference I would, if I did this, look to go to grad school, and I'd be able to hit graduate classes by my junior year, I think.)
Second, I will be living in China for some of my college years (as a part of Duke's DKU program); any thoughts/advice on this front, especially in conjunction with AI research and similar things. I think sino-american dialogue is super critical to AI going well and probably under-appreciated in the current environment, hence why I chose this, but I expect this will cause some problems with me doing research work.
Living in China is great there's an ACX meetup in Shanghai. Try to learn some Chinese before you go most Chinese don't speak English and your hugely limiting yourself if you don't speak any. I've lived in China a while so feel free to ask whatever about it.
A few questions---
Off-campus is it reasonable to be vegan, especially if I don't speak great Chinese? I'll do my best to learn it, but it'll be a struggle and a half.
How much are you able to travel around? I'll have a lot of 3 to 4 day breaks, plus some longer ones, and if it is reasonable I'd love to see more of the country than just Shanghai.
Any recommended ways to learn Chinese quickly?
What does it feel like? I've spent most of my life in 500-person-town areas of Montana, so I genuinely have no reference frame for this.
I do not envy your situation. Anything intellectual is being eaten by AI. My standard advice still holds (focus on something you find exciting AND are naturally better at than most people you know), but maybe not for long. The jobs that are entirely sitting in front of a screen are disappearing from the bottom up. Maybe check if you have talents that include doing stuff in the physical world.
I'm best at LSAT-style reasoning (I scored a 179/180 while in high school) but I'm not sure if I see a future for me in law and I don't know of other careers that use the same skills.
I'm curious why you don't see yourself with a future in law.
It's not exactly that I don't, but more so that I'm pretty unsure about it; it seems like it is highly possible that I don't get good think-tank or professor work (assuming these things exist at that point!) and then I am forced into corporate law work, which all seems like varying shades of 'highly unenjoyable work that has one redeeming quality, how much I could donate, which would still not be as much as it would be in quant/some tech/etc.'
There are plenty of options other than corporate law and think tank or law professor work. https://www.americanbar.org/groups/
There are, but I haven't seen any that look fantastic
Susman Godfrey looks like fun but it is hard as hell to get a spot in as far as I know.
Are you interested in languages and/or people in general? Are you in the US and interested in learning ASL? There is a shortage of ASL interpreters which is likely to continue to worsen, as it has been for the last 20 years. Legal interpreting is an even higher-demand specialization. Interpreting in many settings is mandated and defined by law to be an activity done by a person. I suspect sign language interpreting is going to be one of the last fields to be automated.
I'm not super interested in languages or people in general to be honest... or I am, but in a one-step-back way, learning the construction and such of language instead of learning a language.
Prefer a general / wide-ranging maths or comp sci course (that might or might not incorporate ML modules) to an ML specific one, at least early on. ML is a relatively narrow field, which is advancing fast; you can specialise later, and it will be easier, faster and you will have a deeper understanding if you start with a broader foundation. You will also find it easier to keep up as new developments happen.
courses are just comp sci and math, I just mean I'd lean ML on research/etc.
As the singularity nears, all forecasts fail, however, my guess is:
Well, math is more basic, but also with more advanced AI. I don't expect there will be many jobs for math specialists after the next few years.
CompSci means so many things that it's impossible to guess how useful it would be.
*Understanding* math is more foundational, and gives you a stronger platform, but it's also more removed from any areas of direct application (that aren't already handled).
A wild guess is aim for a course-load that will lead to your understanding statistics. But that could start from either initial class.
First, while it's possible ML + math won't be useful in the AI future, the odds are much better than just about anything else you could study. My only caution, especially if you go to grad school, is to make sure you can code the basics. I'm tired of coming out of interviews of people with a masters in statistics and/or data science who can school me on the difference in different algorithms yet struggle with basic SQL queries.
Go read this: https://machinelearningplus.com/python/101-pandas-exercises-python/
Be able to solve all of those in pandas/python, then in SQL, then again in PySpark or maybe R/Julia. Even though vibe coding is definitely a thing, there's still a ton of coding challenges in job interviews and that's probably fair; I wouldn't trust someone to supervise a coding agent if they couldn't fizzbuzz. Or the DS/DE equivalent, which is like
"#42
Replace missing values in Min.Price and Max.Price columns with their respective mean.
df=pd.read_csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/selva86/datasets/master/Cars93_miss.csv')
"
As for China, from my experience, this is probably less helpful than you think. You're not gonna learn Chinese, it's brutal. Especially since no one cares about any fluency level below full fluency, so exerting a ton of effort to get to, say, a sixth grade reading level is effectively useless. In terms of tech...maybe you could find somebody but that requires a lot of "in's" that you probably won't have. Go to China, China is awesome, be young and have fun, get drunk in Sanlitun, but I would not expect big career impacts.
I've taken a few years of coding classes and can write in python + css/webdev stuff + java to decent levels, but I am by no means a master. Is it something I should try to pick up this summer?
and yeah, my only in is that I am good friends with the kid of a Chinese tech billionaire, which sounds like a great in but due to the disqualifying characteristic of not being the kid of another Chinese businessman, it doesn't actually help much.
Yeah, focus heavily on coding basics. Even at the senior level, everything I'm seeing is 1-2 rounds of coding interviews before you talk with a human being. Meh.
Bleh. At least I'll have a few years before I need to worry about job interviews.
I'm not sure what your China question is, but you can 100% learn fluent-ish Chinese within a few years if you're semi-decent at learning stuff.
If you're doing the China year in 2 years, you can start spending 6 hours a week learning Chinese right now. This is enough to easily hit C1/HSK-5-ish levels before you go, and you'll be able to go high-immersion while you're there.
Also, visit China for a few months before you start studying there - get Chinese friends, travel, get confident in speaking etc.
Most people don't do it, but most people don't really try.
"If you're doing the China year in 2 years, you can start spending 6 hours a week learning Chinese right now. This is enough to easily hit C1/HSK-5-ish levels before you go, and you'll be able to go high-immersion while you're there."
This is untrue and you can figure it out yourself pretty fast. There's an expat scene in most big Chinese cities. Go talk to the expats there. Go ask them how long they've lived in China, how many Chinese girlfriends they've had, how often they meet with their tutor, and how much they study every day. If you meet a bunch of guys who have lived there for 5+ years, have a long-term Chinese GF/wife, work with a tutor 3x/week, and study 60-90 minutes a day and they're not fluent, that'll tell you how difficult it is.
Like, before you dedicate years of your life to this, go get some drinks with a bunch of guys who've lived it for years and see how viable it is. Well worth your time.
Haha, the selection effect of "the expat scene" is doing a lot of work here.
Seriously, have you met these people? The "expat scene" in any big Chinese city - characterized by that obnoxious American who hangs out in Sanlitun bars who hasn't learned to pronounce "ri" properly after ten years - is incredibly negatively selected for people who are incapable of learning Chinese, and this negative selection compounds in predictable ways.
I lived in China for over 7 years, had HSK-6 by the end of the 2nd year, and did a bunch of translation and research after that. I wasn't really exceptional - I studied with other foreigners for a year and, in my HSK-6 advanced classes, everyone was pretty impressive.
It's very common in some circles, but not in Sanlitun...
One big caveat - I think it's harder post-smartphone era because immersion is a lot more difficult, but if you're smart and motivated, you can still manage it.
You're probably right that 6 hours might not be enough, though. Probably should aim for 2 hours a day. I was more like 4-5 hours a day when learning, but a bunch of that was just listening to podcasts and watching TV - so you can be way more efficient.
I'm doing the full DKU thing, so it is flipped; junior year in durham + 3 years near Shanghai... I have this summer before I arrive.
Ooh, exciting. Yeah, you should study like crazy before going.
Once you're there, it's really easy to fall into Anglophone circles and screw up your chances of immersion, so you need to be very strict and very agentic in making sure that you don't slip into the "Anglophone comfort zone".
Be that annoying person who refuses to switch to English. Delete English language apps on your phone. Don't get a VPN. Make and break friendships based purely on who speaks to you in Chinese.
I believe in you.
all classes + work (other than my mandarin class) will be in English, so total immersion will not be possible, but I'll do my best
I got like 50 mandarin philosophy books to try and fail to read from a friend :)
ML + math is maybe the only thing which is useful to study. Sure, AI is going to be advancing quickly, but AI governance in some form is sure to be a growth field, and the technical basis for training and governing AI is almost certain to involve ML and math as a foundation, whatever the superstructure of AI technology looks like.
An interest in philosophy and sino-american dialogue can't hurt either.
Split your time between curriculum/credential orientation and autodictat orientation. AI SOTA technology will be moving fast. Don't expect to learn about it in classes; instead, get that info through outside reading and perhaps study groups. But learn the foundations of ML, including the flaws and dangers of that technology in classes. Learn it solidly.
I got a philosophy degree back in the mid-90s. I have many friends who have degrees in things that they never use now. Degrees in this or that corner of the humanities, degrees in STEM fields unrelated to the job they have today...
I use my philosophy degree every dang day. Like it or not.
(That said, I went to a much cheaper college than Duke.)
Philosophy is my main passion so far in life, but I've focused hard enough on that, and been lucky enough to have very good teachers through high school, to the point where I have probably the equivalent of more than the required classes to get a major in philosophy at Duke. I've written a paper which was published at a pretty good undergraduate journal. Broadly I guess I am just very confident my skills in this will improve in ways I care about more quickly by studying neuroscience or ML or something of the sort than they will by studying philosophy, which will involve a lot of taking classes on books I have already read and written on. (You can't really test out of taking prereqs).
Well, if you've got Philosophy covered, you should look into making money. Machine Learning is probably the best way to do that. Even if you don't get a job specifically in Machine Learning, it communicates to employers "this guy can probably read a document and can probably type which puts him ahead of the last two guys we interviewed."
I looked into whether I could get extra compression in my zip files by reusing the same underlying file data when there are identical files in the archive. The zipfile format itself allows this, but Info-ZIP (used on Linux) was patched back in 2019 to reject such files in an attempt to guard against "zip bombs". Likewise many other zip libraries will also reject them. Therefore, even if you do create files with extra compression, people will have a hard time actually unzipping them, which defeats the purpose (might as well use 7z at that point, I guess).
It's really unfortunate that we've decided to artificially limit compression ratios just to guard against malicious files taking up too much space. As if zip compression rates weren't bad enough already.
If you can specify the order of files, like by creating a tar file first, you can exploit the inherent nature of compression performing well on runs of highly similar, even identical, files. Just put the identical files together. There are utilities like 'binsort' which try to find optimal seriations. https://gwern.net/sort
I'm not sure how this would be useful. If you have two bit-identical files in your directory, and you already know that, just get rid of one of them before archiving. If you frequently encounter a situation where you only find out the files were bit-identical after archiving, for me that seems like a hallmark that you should reconsider how you organize files.
(someone once told me powerpoints were essentially zip files under the hood, which does seem like a legitimate use case for repeated instances of an image file, but I don't know how true that is)
It's true. All the office formats, both ODF and OOXML, are zip files containing a primary xml file and supplementary resources in a variety of for.
Patrick Boyle wades through the SpaceX IPO prospectus. This reinforces my belief that Musk is a loon...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHD8BDFYyGI
> SpaceX claims its total addressable market is $28.5 trillion. This is larger than the entire GDP of the United States and almost entirely built on businesses that do not yet exist.
> According to the prospectus, enterprise applications of AI make up to 80% of SpaceX's total addressable market. This means they expect large businesses to ay for Musk's AI tools to improve productivity. If you add in consumer AI, the total AI share of the claimed addressable market rises to 93%. So 93% of the company's value is Grock.
> ... it's worth asking which enterprises are currently using Grock. And from what I can tell, the primary documented use cases for Grock are fact-checking tweets and generating non-consensual nude images that have resulted in regulatory investigations in Spain, France, and the UK, and at least one ongoing lawsuit, which is not exactly the enterprise productivity pitch that I was expecting. The filing effectively concedes that the enterprise AI market is dominated by open AI, Anthropic, and Google. SpaceX's own AI product, Grock, holds a market share of roughly 3.4%. According to Bloomberg, SpaceX's own engineers have been slow to adopt Grock for technical work because it underperforms rival tools. Last month, Musk himself said that the AI code would need to be rebuilt from scratch shortly after he sold XAI to SpaceX for $25billion.
And wait until you get to the part where regular investors get shares with one vote each, while Elon gets the shares, which carry 10 votes each. Musk will end up with control over 85% of the votes! This about 22:30 minutes into the video...
If your objection is that the Total Addressable Market is too big because people are not currently subscribed to a company's product, that makes me think that you don't really understand what Total Addressable Market means.
The prospectus (which I haven't read, but only had described to me in the video) is that SpaceX will be a money pit, and that Musk envisions xAI being the chief source of revenue for the company. But the top three AI companies for revenue and adoption are OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral AI. And the chief source of xAI's revenue is renting data center space to Anthropic. Anthropic can cancel its contract on 3 months' notice. Well, SpaceX, in a typical Musk shell game, had a contract with xAI to provide them with AI services. Except Grok wasn't able to do what they needed. So not only is SpaceX stuck with a nonperofrming contract that they're paying on, but they still have pay a non-MuskCo company for their AI services (Anthropic, I think). The only profitable part of MuskCo is Starlink, and it's doing quite well.
So I say adressible shmessible.
Like SpaceX, Starlink and Tesla, xAI's real business is that of infrastructure and delivery: Colossus 1 and 2 are good for inference and training respectively, but not of their own models, hence the compute rent agreement with Anthropic. $25B will likely pay off in rental income pretty quick.
If there are fools willing to pay that much for the stock, then why shouldn't Musk sell them the stock? The only real question to me is why he stopped at $2T, and not say, 4 or 5...
Has TAM been anything other than bullshit in recent years? Uber and Airbnb claimed TAMs in the billions back in the staid and conservative 2000s, and delivered on them, but they're both up into the trillions today.
I agree that this is insanity, but it has infected everyone. Claiming a ridiculous TAM is routine for a growth business. I don't think this specific number is evidence of Elon Musk's lunacy; it's just proof that you should ignore TAM except as an indicator that the C suite knows how many zeroes the market would like to see.
Matt Levine has the correct take:
> "The deal, with SpaceX, is that Elon Musk runs it however he wants, and he does weird stuff, and you have to trust him, and if you don’t like it you can’t complain. When SpaceX acquired xAI a few months ago, did a special committee of independent directors approve the transaction? Did Musk recuse himself from negotiations? Was the price set by independent valuation experts using a rigorous process? Did outside shareholders sue to block the deal? Stop. Musk wanted SpaceX to buy xAI, so it did." https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-05-21/spacex-investors-can-t-complaind
Fair warning that Boyle has degraded a *lot* in quality of reporting over the past few years. His scripts were clearly written by LLMs 12-24 months ago (now I assume he uses better AI that isn’t as obvious), but he’s no longer there to provide educational content. He’s providing edutainment.
And it's a huge shame too, because quality finance content is rare to come by on YouTube. The only person I still follow is Mark Meldrum, but he uses AI extensively when he highlights a company, so 30-40% of his videos are AI filler.
If you've ever heard of Musk talk about space colonization (or really, if you've ever heard Musk talk about *anything*), you'd already know this. Saying that SpaceX will take over the universe and make a bajillion dollars isn't anything *new*. Heck, Elon Musk just got awarded a "moonshot" pay package that only pays out if he somehow makes this happen.
Also, if you're expecting coroporate governance at a Musk enterprise, you must have been living under a rock for the last 15 years. Like come on now, at this point you can't really act surprised. Musk investors know what they're getting. *The whole deal* is "let Musk do whatever crazy things he feels like with no guard rails, and hopefully he'll make lots of money for you in the process".
Besides, dual class share structures are hardly unusual. Heck, many companies give common shareholders *zero* votes! You're acting like this is some weird new thing, rather than longstanding industry practice.
Matt Levine has made the point that much of Tesla's legally troubled massive Musk pay package was (at least according to musk) because he wanted to maintain enough voting control, and if they'd given Tesla super voting shares in the founding charter this could have been avoided. Perhaps Musk learned from that.
Can anyone recommend me specific sources on how Stafford Beer's Cybersyn worked (or was intended to work)? I tried reading Beer's writings and they're too general for what I'm looking for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
I've been working on and off on a piece about Beer for some time. From my notes:
- The main source on Cybersyn is the book Cybernetic Revolutionaries, by Eden Medina: https://www.amazon.com/Cybernetic-Revolutionaries-Technology-Politics-Allendes/dp/0262525968; Author has a clear bias, but the book is very thorough.
- No hay Gato, by Víctor Ganón: https://www.amazon.com.mx/No-hay-gato-URUCIB-transformaci%C3%B3n-ebook/dp/B0925736LP; Ganón is an Uruguayan consultant who worked with Beer several years after the Cybersyn episode. The book describes his work leading project URUCIB, with Beer as advisor (in fact Ganón contacted Beer partly due to Beer's involvement with Cybersyn). URUCIB tried to implement some of the same ideas behind Cybersyn, though with a somewhat more advanced technological stack (the "somewhat" part is interesting). Book is in Spanish and there's also an interview with Ganón here (in Spanish): www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfAU099C2I4
- Series of interviews with people who worked on Cybersyn, from the government side (Fernando Flores, Raúl Espejo) or from the Cybersyn team side (Roberto Cañete): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ada2Yyj4HXk; https://www.youtube.com/@enriquedetongoy/videos; The Fernando Flores interview has English subtitles, and I assume Youtube's automatic subtitles are good enough. Flores and Espejo in particular are very candid (compare with quotes in Medina's book).
All of these have some information on the inner workings of Cybersyn, though in the case of Medina that's not the focus of the book and in the case of URUCIB you can see how it was supposed to work indirectly, through a similar project. If you have any questions or want more sources don't hesitate to ask me.
Basically exactly what I was looking for. Thank you. I’ve subscribed and will stay tuned if you end up posting about Beer.
Do you think there’s anything interesting to be gained from his ideas? As in are there practical applications of his ideas that could be had?
I’m half skeptical that it’s just an interesting footnote of history that’s a dead-end idea, which was fortunate enough to get destroyed before it could demonstrate its inability to deliver, half interested in cybernetics as an overlooked field that was too ambitious for the technology at the time.
Maybe there was something to be gained from his ideas in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but not today.
And you could say that there are practical applications of his ideas, it's just that we don't call them cybernetics (*). When Beer (and before him Norbert Wiener, McCulloch, etc.) became interested in cybernetics, the idea of machines communicating with each other in real time, processing signals and taking "decisions" in real time was almost like science fiction (ENIAC was 1945, SAGE was 1955-1958 (**), FSQ-32 was 1960 (***)). But once computers achieved real time capabilities and computer networks came into existence (modems, etc.), cybernetics must have seemed like a quaint old fad.
If 19th-century scientists interested in human flight had organized conferences and published books about their ideas, and adopted a catchy name for themselves (say Birdaeroflightians), regardless of how interesting their ideas might have been, the moment the Wright brothers decided to stick a combustion engine to their airplane Birdaeroflightians would have become a quaint old fad.
If you take a broad interpretation of what cybernetics was, then all computer networking is cybernetics. But then, we didn't get computer networks thanks to any cybernetician.
This is just my opinion, of course, and I'm sure others who have studied Beer or cybernetics disagree.
(*) I'm not saying this is necessarily my own opinion.
(**) Jerome Wiesner worked on SAGE and met several cyberneticians in the 1952 Macy conferences.
(***) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/FSQ-32#Computer_network
Thanks. I just finished reading The Dream Machine which goes through a lot of the history of American cybernetics. It discusses a few people whose names I don't remember that were really pushing cybernetics over JCR Licklider's proto-internet machine-computer interface ideas.
I am mildly interested in the search for esoteric or lost knowledge. Some people look to ancient aliens or illuminati, I look to discredited Utopian experiments like Beer's Cybersyn.
I'd like to know, too.
If you have some original documentation, maybe ask an LLM to summarize it?
The Wikipedia article seems to focus on buzzwords ("designed in accordance with Gestalt principles to give users a platform that would enable them to absorb information in a simple but comprehensive way", "innovative technology at its time", "sophisticated operations room"), but among them I found the following:
* it was a network, the companies would provide data to government and receive data from the government server;
* the server would run some kind of monitoring, and make an alert when something alarming happens (e.g. a shortage of supplies, or too many workers sick);
* the central managers could send messages to the factories.
Well, it does not sound impressive today, but I guess in 1970s it was a sci-fi technology. The actual impact would probably depend on what kind of data was sent, what kind of alarms were set up, etc.
I imagine that something like this could be now vibecoded in a day. And it would solve some specific problems, such as "a government factory X has a shortage of a raw material, and a nearby government factory Y happens to have some extra; send a message to Y to transfer amount Z to X". The question is, how important is this kind of problems in a greater picture. On one hand, I am skeptical (the overall vibe about Cybersyn feels like "socialism was one online spreadsheet away from succeeding"), on the other hand, who knows, it probably could have been a 10% or 20% multiplier for government operated factories in 1970s.
See my comment above.
I’m really curious in the context of live diagrams and flows in the context of a company. Understanding bottlenecks and whatnot through a live flow of money, data, customers, etc.
On a national scale it’s almost comically ambitious, but there seems to at least be some nugget of something interesting, at least if I believe the Chilean government did its due diligence in the 70s, which I don’t believe, but I think its at least possible.
If I could find the original documentation I’d be very happy. So far all I’ve gone through are a few of his books, which are about the same level of detail as Wikipedia (conceptually explaining how it works, but not specifically explaining it). Before going in for a deeper pass I figured there might be someone here who hyperfixated on Beer before and can point me in the right direction.
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/childhood-and-education-18-do-the includes horrifying statistics like:
> “Of those who demonstrated math skills not meeting middle school levels,” the report found, 42% reported completing calculus or precalculus.
Since grades at all levels of US education are rapidly coming to signify nothing other than "I attended this school", what is the signaling equilibrium going to converge to?
You can't make college actually hard (signaling that their degree means they actually learned something there), because students are customers paying 6 figures for that piece of paper.
And you can't assume that just because a student went to a prestigious institution that they actually deserved to get in, because highschool and below already awards A's for just showing up.
People pay princely sums to attend prestigious institutions because it signals something to employers. But what is it signaling at this point if no one is learning anything?
> But what is it signaling at this point if no one is learning anything?
At the very least, it's still successfully filtering out people who can't function in society. A high school diploma still gives you some confidence that whoever you're hiring is not mentally ill to the point that they can't stay in school. College degrees gives you the additional confidence that they can survive in rigid systems that expect consistent output out of them.
That certainly better than nothing, but if that's all that a college degree is doing, you'd think there would be many other credible ways to signal the same thing for a fraction of the cost.
>And you can't assume that just because a student went to a prestigious institution that they actually deserved to get in, because highschool and below already awards A's for just showing up.
I don't think many elite private universities, or even the better public ones, are admitting people just on the basis of their raw high school GPA. Most places are still using SAT/ACT for part of it along with AP test scores, some use relative high school GPA (e.g. top N% of your class), and there's a lot of other subjective stuff like essays and extracurriculars that can be gamed but can also be used to extract information about intelligence, diligence, and so forth. So being accepted at an elite school is still a legitimate signal.
And while it's rare for people to flunk out of college altogether, having to drop back to a less demanding major is still a thing, so that's another useful signal. As is having your professors recommend you for undergraduate research projects or select internships.
The “signal” of graduating from a good college (as opposed to the stuff you actually learned there, if any) listed on your CV makes a big difference to your first job, but really, how much does it still matter 3-4 years after you leave academia?
As a hiring manager, I've always found in-person interview to give a much, much stronger signal than anything on the CV, whether college or past experience. The CV slush pile comes prefiltered by HR/first stage recruiters, but those mostly just match keywords. Phone screens filter a bunch, then the remainder get to people like me. IME the most useful thing the CV gives me is a list of things the candidate claims they've done / areas they claim they are particularly good at; I use these to drive conversation during interview, in the hope that they actually can discuss things they specifically call out in their CV. IME how selective this is varies by industry sector; the financial company I worked for had the highest proportion of candidates who fell apart when asked about things they said they'd done, the chip design firm the lowest, the games company somewhere in between. The one thing that least correlated, for anyone except very recent graduates, with likelihood of hire was where and how long they had studied before their first job.
Anyway, this anecdote is my experience as a software engineer, in the UK, interviewing mainly (but not exclusively) individual contributor software engineers with typically at least a BA in computer science (though a couple of my best hires were self-taught!) from early 2000s to the present day. I have no idea how this relates to people's experience in other sectors / other countries, or even other engineers. Anyone care to weigh in?
(Also I only discuss the ability to get and hold a job. Others tell me salaries end up correlated for much longer, but I have almost never been involved in salary negotiation.)
That's exactly my point. Knowing that someone got good grades from a name brand institution already tells you very little that's useful to an employer. So it seems like an unsustainable equilibrium for millions of students to keep paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for these pieces of paper.
They do it because they think it guarantees them a good job. But if employers are saying that it means very little to them, then why pay the money?
How do you get that first job, though, without?
What has to give is the part where the college receives money for something other than actually teaching kids things. Yes, this means either someone other than the kids has to be coughing up the money, or someone other than the college has to test the kids so they get their pieces of paper, or both. The signal has to be funded by the entities interested in it being accurate. The incentives just don’t align otherwise.
> Yes, this means either someone other than the kids has to be coughing up the money, or someone other than the college has to test the kids so they get their pieces of paper, or both.
It has to be the second of those. There is an inherent conflict of interest when the same entity is supposed to be responsible for both education and certification.
Nonetheless I can feel reasonably confident that if someone majored in maths at MIT or Caltech then they're pretty competent at maths.
A slight tangent but I find it interesting that the US has thousands of different educational systems running in parallel but they all do the same things. For instance they all agree that there's a thing called "precalculus". I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad way to structure high school mathematics, it's just a very specific way and I'm surprised there's not more variety between fifty states and countless school districts.
> A slight tangent but I find it interesting that the US has thousands of different educational systems running in parallel but they all do the same things. For instance they all agree that there's a thing called "precalculus".
My school had nothing called "precalculus", and of course there is no area of mathematics for which "precalculus" would be a description that made sense or meant something. You're commenting on a fashion trend.
On paper there's one thing called precalculus, in practice likely not. Between school variance in student abilities is huge, and even if every school is teaching a "too easy" version of precalculus, it's likely still the case that what's expected of a student at an "elite" highschool to pass that class is much more than what's expected of a student as a poor inner city school.
So maybe that's the answer? The differentiation primarily comes from the bar being set differently by different institutions. Where schools in, say, wealthy suburbs are known a priori to give their students a better education.
So maybe the fact that the system is moving towards signalling nothing except wealth is the system working as intended?
> You can't make college actually hard (signaling that their degree means they actually learned something there), because students are customers paying 6 figures for that piece of paper.
I think you could -- and your college would start sending a much better signal if you did -- it just seems that there is no motivation to do that if money keeps flowing regardless.
If you are in the college business, it seems easier to keep doing the profitable thing. And if you are in a mood to disrupt education, you will probably do something other than found a new college. Among other reasons, because the feedback loop is very slow... it would take a few years until your students finish, and then a few years more until the employers notice. Also, you would probably have to solve all kinds of logistical problems that are unrelated to education or testing per se; being good at education does not necessarily give you an advantage in these.
As it becomes easier and easier to get a college degree, the signaling value goes up, not down. It no longer means you're anything special, but not having a college degree means you must be a total screwup. 30 years ago it was super normal for somebody to go into work after (some or all of) high school, but now it's basically a permanent strike against you that can only be righted by belatedly getting a 4 year degree like a normal member of the professional middle class
But if the barrier to getting in is near zero, and the barrier to getting a degree once in is near zero, then what's its primarily measuring is "did your family have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on this thing". Which is a very different signal.
It's normal for a person of average abilities to go to the state university, often at a reduced rate, sometimes in combination with community college credits, and pay much less than that. People able to get into elite colleges are overrepresented in the conversation about college more broadly.
But then it's the same argument, just further down the income ladder. It's measuring whether you were able to cobble together however many thousands of dollars (plus the amount lost due to deferring income for 4 years) in order to hand it over to a college.
Most poor people in modern America messed up, and it is actually a bad sign if someone doesn't have their life together enough to take out a loan for a few thousands of dollars, collect some cheap community college credits, sublet a room from an acquaintance, and work a bit to make up the difference. People who can't do those things really can't do most modern jobs.
There are scholarships for promising young people who don't have any family money through no fault of their own. There are also scholarships for people who want to do lower middle class things with lots of open positions, like teaching.
It was possible to work your way through college at a state university and get a degree in the olden days of 30 years ago. Not so easy now.
Annual undergraduate tuition & fees at University of Minnesota-Twin Cities is $17,214 for Minnesota residents and $38,362 for out-of-state students.
Good luck stumbling into an inexpensive sublet too, a studio apartment in Mpls runs a thousand bucks a month on average.
One possible path is that university admissions (at least for prestigious universities) will continue to factor in standardized test scores that are conducted in proctored environments, such that the degrees from those institutions are at least somewhat rooted in actual ability. So far employers are unwilling (or maybe prohibited?) to ask for test scores directly, so that proxy will have to do.
George W Bush commencement address at Yale 2001.
“To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say, well done.
And to the C students, I say: you too can be President of the United States.”
Remember self deprecating presidents?
I like his opening joke, too:
"My reason for being here is practical. I got a call from my landlord. Rather than raising the rent or threatening eviction, I was glad to hear this simple question: 'do you believe in Free Speech'? I said 'yeah'. He said 'great, here's your chance to give one'"
(Though I guess this was from SMU - maybe he reused the C-students joke at Yale - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpDJb3ZQu0Y)
Yeah, he probably reused the gag. It’s a good one.
I'm helping organize Wiki AI day on July 21 at Wikimania (the Wikimedia movement's annual conference, in Paris this year). If you've built something at the intersection of open knowledge and LLMs and want to share it, dm me or write to alaexis.wiki at gmail.
Wikipedia is in a strange place in AD 2026. On one hand, pretty much every LLM was trained on it and if you ask LLM to search for something chances are you'll get a few Wikipedia links. On the other hand, fewer people actually read it directly and fewer people convert to comtributors.
So the day is partly about obvious things - using AI to improve the encyclopedia, for examples by helping with maintenance, AI-derived problems (slop, biases, hallucinations, etc.). I'm also interested in broader/weirder questions: what's the right interface for acquiring knowledge, what happens with the "encyclopedia anyone can edit" principle when anyone can generate unlimited amounts of content, how we decide which models to use (maybe we need epistemic humbleness benchmark?).
Personal itch: it'd be really cool to use LLMs to triage or audit whether or not a given citation actually supports the claim the article is making in the point where the work is cited. Given that there's a ton of grandfathered-in citations that haven't been seriously audited, and given that Wikipedia is a major battlefield for ideologues who want to control the apparent consensus belief, it seems badly needed
Haha building this was exactly how I got involved in this whole thing (I hope others won't think you're a plant). You're right that it's a big problem, depending on the article about 1 in 20-50 citations doesn't support the claim it's attached to.
There are actually two versions
* A user script for Wikipedia editors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alaexis/AI_Source_Verification - sees some usage and actively maintained https://github.com/alex-o-748/citation-checker-script
* A standalone app for anyone https://wiki-verifiqator.pages.dev/ - not maintained but still functional.
> You're right that it's a big problem, depending on the article about 1 in 20-50 citations doesn't support the claim it's attached to.
I tried to improve the page on French Toast by marking a citation as [failed verification], since it was cited in support of a claim that it showed was false.
An editor (not a bot) came along to remove the tag and explain to me that it was inappropriate - the citation could not fail verification, because the cited source existed, and whether or not it contradicted the claim in the article that it was the citation for was irrelevant.
The problem with the Encyclopedia that anyone can edit is that anyone can also claim to be enforcing some rule or standard that doesnt really exist.
I'm curious as to what would happen if you edited the article to immediately follow the false claim with the true claim, citing the same source. In roughly the same way that I'm curious about train wrecks, but still...
Interestingly, the page as it currently stands includes a heavily-cited paragraph contradicting and undermining the false claim in a couple of different ways. This adds essentially no value to the lay experience of reading the article, since it's not on topic. The reason that paragraph is there is to make a best effort to stop people from adding the false claim back in.
This paragraph was added in November 2025. So the good news is that false claims get fixed, the bad news is that it can take years. The source checking app I built aims to reduce the time and effort needed to fix such inaccuracies.
As to "This adds essentially no value to the lay experience of reading the article, since it's not on topic" I agree with you. However, it's a feature and not a bug of Wikipedia. The way the rules work, as long as there is an expert who said "this resembles French toast" and it's not a fringe view (which it won't be since you can count the experts on the origins of French toast on the fingers of one hand) there is no policy-based way to remove this information from the article.
> fewer people convert to contributors
Currently Wikipedia feels very hostile to contributors. Instead of "thank you for helping us grow" it is "your task is to convince us that your contribution is worthy of our encyclopedia".
Twenty years ago, you could write anything and get an article started. Like, maybe even a sentence or two. If people saw that the topic made sense, they added a "stub" flag, then someone else added a sentence or two, and in a few months or years a complete article would grow.
(It was also acceptable -- even recommended -- to make a link to an article that did not exist yet. The link would be displayed in red color, and it could encourage someone else to start working on the article.)
Today, you have to write the first version of the full article alone, with references and other stuff. (Also it is my impression that the syntax is getting more and more complicated; twenty years ago it was markdown, these days I am unable to get it right without the visual editor.) Then you can submit the finished article for approval, and hope that the editors will deem it worthy, considering the notability, the quality of references, etc. Stubs are rejected.
Here is my recent attempt: I noticed that my kids' favorite story book does not have a Wikipedia article. Hey, if someone's books were translated to dozens of languages and sold on the opposite side of the planet, is that not worthy of a Wikipedia article? Plus the books are really good in my subjective opinion. The author also won some awards, although I have no idea how important they are. So in the spirit of "if you see something missing, you can add it yourself" I wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:B._B._Alston
Well, too bad. The article is not long enough, and has not enough references. I fucking know! This is what they used to call "stub" in the old times, and it's actually longer than many stubs I have previously made. How about accepting the article, so that someone else can expand it later? Is that not a part of what "wiki" used to mean?
Also, the link in the "List of African-American writers" was removed, because by failing to get my article approved, I have failed to demonstrate that the author is notable. What about using a google search to verify? Maybe my article sucks but the author does not, and if you keep the link someone else may write a better article, but if you also erase all traces of my attempt...
So I feel that this is a very bad combination of "we reject everything that seems like AI" and also "we reject all texts that are insufficiently perfect". As a human, I am not going to jump through your hoops, because if I am not a regular contributor, I am not even sure of all the rules, and no I am not spending a weekend studying them for the privilege of making an unpaid contribution to an online encyclopedia.
AI is probably the least of Wikipedia's problems; rejecting actual humans, even former Wikipedia contributors, seems much worse to me. Ironically, I wonder whether the article would be accepted if I actually used an AI to write it. I respect Wikipedia enough not to make a disruption just to make a point, but the result is that articles that otherwise might exist, will not.
> it is my impression that the syntax is getting more and more complicated; twenty years ago it was markdown
This is definitely untrue. Wikipedia would have had to switch from their existing system to a brand-new one for no reason. That new system, Markdown, would have been missing most of the features that Wikipedia needed in its existing system, such as support for links to other wiki pages and mathematics. Markdown was never in use at Wikipedia.
There is a trend of people who appear to be new to the internet applying the term "markdown" to any markup language of any kind. Is this what you mean? For example, it's common now on Hacker News for people to complain that the markdown implementation doesn't behave the way they think it should. That's because there is no markdown implementation.
Yeah, I was imprecise. What I meant was that in the old days, I just had to learn the symbols for header, link, bold, italic, and that was all. Most articles looked like that. (Someone else added an infobox to the article later.)
These days, I look at the syntax of references, and it's the kind of code I wouldn't bother writing without AI assistance. Though I guess if I used mere links instead of the sophisticated references, the article would have a chance to be accepted, if it passed the other criteria.
In other words, the old article source code *visually resembled* markdown, the current one looks like a blend of markdown and xml.
I find it depends on whether the article is contentious, mid, or esoteric.
I've had similar experiences. At one point in the last couple of years I wanted to create a page about a well known, established, successful company that would definitely be considered notable in the history of the relevant industry.
I created the page, filled it with references to primary sources - many of which were the company's own website for factual data like headcount, revenue, address..., but many of which were independent news articles written about the company - and got the whole lot entirely rejected and deleted because I had "cited the company's own website too many times" (I no longer recall the exact wording that was used, but that was the gist of it) and therefore it might not actually be as notable as I was claiming and I might even be the company's marketing department in cunning disguise (spoiler, I was not. Indeed the company's marketing team got wind of what I was doing and asked me not to create it because in their view it was another thing they needed to "curate" - I ignored them because they did not have any jurisdiction over me and I do not believe that companies should "curate" their wikipedia pages).
When the page was removed, so were all the links I had created to it from lists of "companies that were transformational in the history of XYZ", "companies in geographic location ABC" etc. So now these lists exist with a gaping hole where that company ought to be, and nobody looking at the lists to learn something would be any the wiser that the company even exists.
Thank you for sharing that! Do you mind if I dm you? We might have a session on helping new editors so this kind of feedback is valuable
Sure, go ahead.
Isn't "anyone can generate unlimited amounts of content" thankfully a thing of the past, with most contributors these days seeming to range from pretty well informed to awesomely erudite? I make use of Wikipedia fairly often, and I have certainly noticed significantly less slop, errors and polemicism.
I meant that anyone with an LLM can create as much text as they like on any given topic. Glad to hear you're seeing an improvement!
The general consensus seems to be that multivitamins are useless. I am currently on Retatrutide and have a severely reduced food intake. Would it be reasonable to take Multivitamins in this situation, and if yes which ingredients would be important?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41549912/
Multivitaminerals are essential to optimize for long term homeostatic maintenance, including slowing cognitive decline, gfr decline and increasing longevity.
The thing is, the scientific literature systematically fails trial design.
Among many things, it is essential for a multivitamineral to:
1) have zero vitamin A (including provitamin A carotenoids)
because vit A is cytotoxic, empirically increase mortality and is extremely neurotoxic
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38892696/
it also suppress SELENO P production
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0955286325003043
2) have zero iron as iron increase mortality (fenton reaction, siderophores, etc) nor copper
3) doses of each nutrients should be tuned to maximize lifespan and healthspan (usually a inverted U curve), for example selenium.
4) it should contains selenium, coq10 at a pharmacokinetically maximal dose, and N acetyl cysteine / liposomal glutathione.
Indeed selenium + coq10 cause one of the most potent cardiovascular mortality reduction ever reached
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29641571/
5) people should undestand that there are fundamental tradeoffs at some ages and populations, for example liposomal gsh and other record breaking antioxidants potentiate carcinogenesis once established.
Choline and alcar both increase TMAO and hence cardiovascular mortality despite major neuroprotection.
6) optimizing one's gerontology should go far beyond multivitaminerals and omega 3s, e.g. aged garlic extract, nattokinase, etc
7) the most promising therapeutics are albeit sometimes available at low cost, tested by ATM ~0 human beings on the planet.
8) of the very small subset of people that experiment, a non existent subset publish their biomarkers slopes (egfr, nfl, proteomics, metabolomics, histology, meteor, MDA, etc)
The key point being that there isn't therefore, a single functional human being on this planet.
Thanks for the info! I kind of find it hard to extract a simple Multivitamineral recommendation from it, though. Most multivitamins I found contain 100% of the daily recommended dose of both Vitamin A and Iron. And the first link provided, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41549912/ , specifically lists iron deficiency in people on GLP-1 drugs?
Iron supplementation should be based on Transferin saturation. BTW for fat soluble nutrients peak low levels will be reached after weight steady state, weight loss otherwise transiently increase some levels. If rapid take TUDCA to avoid gallstones but not at digestion time.
Multivitamins are not useless, but they may have "minimal utility" on most good diets. Do, however, be sure to that not "multivitamins", but rather "multivitamins + minerals". And avoid overdosing. (Some vitamins can accumulate to cause problems.)
FWIW, I've run across a recent study that claimed that elderly people taking multivitamins appeared to age more slowly. And another that many people are deficient in vitamin B12. (One doctor [years ago] said this was due to difficulties in absorption. This is plausible, but difficulties doesn't mean it doesn't happen at all, and it *is* supposed to be cumulative. So don't just pack it in. Multivitamins are a decent insurance. Etc.)
Multivitamins are not useless; they are a useful hedge against your diet not being the wholesome and balanced one that the doctors and nutritionists want everybody to eat but something cheap and easy and comfortable and perhaps deficient in one or two micronutrients because you weren't referencing a spreadsheet when you established your culinary preferences.
Anything much *beyond* a multivitamin is indeed questionable, and often (but not always) just a way of generating expensive urine. But the people saying the multivitamins themselves are useless are the ones who have a manifesto describing the wholesome and balanced diet you're supposed to be eating.
My mother was an Ivy-league nutritionist turned amateur (and later semi-professional) chef, and she still had us take a multivitamin every day just to be safe. And if you've recently downgraded your food intake in a big way, yeah, that sounds like a case where it would be very appropriate.
Counterpoint: I tend toward an undesirable diet and one side effect that has become apparent is that, when clipping my fingernails, they tend to flake "horizontally" (as in, part of the nail close to the surface, where the air is, will separate from the part below, closer to where the meat is).
Spending time in China, I had a diet that was mostly distinguishable by being much richer in onions. This solved the flaky-nails problem, which I was pleased with.
But adding multivitamins to my normal, worse diet doesn't do that. Isn't this what an all-purpose dietary supplement is supposed to accomplish? It seems fairly clear that I'm suffering from a nutritional deficiency of some kind.
A bit of searching suggests that the key micronutrient in your case might be sulfur. Which doesn't appear to be common in typical multivitamins, but then sulfur deficiency doesn't appear to be common either. When it does occur, it does affect keratin production,
Are you by chance vegan or vegetarian? The top non-onion sources of sulfur seem to be meat, dairy, and eggs. And yes, this is the sort of thing a multivitamin should cover, but possibly the manufacturers are slow in adapting to the increasing prevalence of vegetarian diets.
> The top non-onion sources of sulfur seem to be meat, dairy, and eggs.
Meat can be more or less prominent in my diet, but milk is always a major part of it. I drink about half a gallon of milk per day. (Still true in China, despite the much higher price of milk there. I learned to visit the grocery store near opening, when milk that was about to expire was available at steep discounts.) Meat was probably also more present in the Chinese diet than the American one, but I'm not subjectively feeling meat-deprived or anything.
Eggs would not be a significant part of my diet in either case. As things currently stand, the pillars of my diet are something like bread > milk > cheese >> meat. Legumes have been prominent in the past but aren't now.
Hello fellow Reta user. I upgraded from Zepbound to Reta after Dec. Lilly progress report on it came out, and find it's even more effective than Zepbound. No side effects except skin sensitivity, sort of like sunburn all over. Weird but bearable. Studies find that most weight losers lose muscle and some bone strength -- unclear whether GLP-1 weight loss is worse about this than that from whatever the stomach surgery currently in use is. However, do not want to lose strength and bone mass, and have made a point of supplementing protein and calcium very heavily because it is so hard to eat much on Reta that it is just hopeless to try to meet goals for any food component whatever by doing it with ordinary food. I sprinkle whey protein on everything, or sometimes just make a whey plus milk slurry and spoon it up. Faintly sweet, not too unpleasant. Take calcium pills if day's food does not give me required amt. I also take vitamin D3, along with K2 (helps with absorption of D). And I take a multi, because it's not much trouble and seems like good insurance. Used Consumer Labs guide to choose best one. Ended up with one whose brand name is Alive. Am also fussy about getting at least 48 oz liquid per day. Excuse typos etc -- I am on day 2 home from rehab after having an enormous and successful back surgery, so am kind of foggy. I lost weight and worked out with PT for months in advance partly to improve my chances of good back surgery outcome, and damned if I didn't succeed in getting a good outcome. Currently off Reta while I fight my way back from the inevitable deconditioning that occurs after such a surgery, but am not gaining weight. Lost 30 lbs prior to surgery, have about another 10 lbs to lose before I am back to my college age weight. Will resume Reta once my strength returns. Wishing you success!
Thanks!
I have the same strange skin sensitivity, just like a light sunburn, mostly on the back and upper legs; no other side effects (apart from the obvious consequences of slow emptying of the stomach, such as seldom light nausea and very seldomly heartburn).
I try to eat protein, but find it hard: At first I was quite enthusiastic about the tasty chocolate milkshakes, but for some reason I am sick and tired of them now. Maybe unflavored and unsweetened whey protein would work better, I will try. But even when I had two servings of whey protein milkshake daily (now I hardly get one down) I never got near the recommended 1.6g/kg body weight protein (which would be around 140g; I never managed to get more than 100g)
So I will start a multivitamin as well, just ordered "Nature's Way Men's Multi" as this is easily and cheaply available here and I am too lazy to spend hours on researching alternatives...
Speedy recovery from your surgery!
I think I am a bit in unusual in being able to tolerate eating odd mixtures. Easiest thing for me is to mix unflavored whey protein powder with milk or water to make it about as thick as gravy, and just eat it with a spoon. The quantity of stuff I have to get down is not large,maybe 1/3 of a measuring cup, and I just take a sip of water after each bite. It is slightly sweet, and tastes sort of like condensed milk. Some might like it better if they mixed this thick mixture with applesauce or yogurt, but I find the small quantity quite tolerable to get down with nothing added. I like the protein shakes OK, but they are too sweet for me, After a while I feel like I am eating a liquid candy bar and can't stand the idea of swallowing any more super sweet stuff. Another trick I use is to mix whey protein with oily stuff. For instance I melt 1-2 oz of a cheese I like in the microwave and then stir in a bunch of whey protein while the cheese is still hot and liquid. When it cools it still tastes mostly like the original cheese, even though it's now full of extra protein. Cremieux also mentions some sodas that have whey protein in them. Oddly, they are transparent and not thick and milky, yet contain a good amount of whey. They are expensive and I don't even like soda so I have not tried them. Also, most of the food I eat is proteiny. Mostly greek yogurt and cheese, also sardines (which I hate, but I eat them anyhow). Have lots of unsweetened frozen fruit in freezer, and eat frozen mango chunks or cherries or whatever once daily, like tiny popsicles. The closest I come to "eating the rainbow" is these fruits. Vegetables I don't bother with. it is just impossible to eat a balanced diet on Reta, so I just eat proteiny calciumy things, plus frozen fruit. Anyhow, good luck to you. Send me an update if you like, or info if you find out something you think I should know!
What is giving you the confidence that what you're actually on is Retatrutide? A relative of mine recently got on it (allegedly) but Lilly overtly says that it is only being produced in a limited capacity and reserved for clinical trials. I'm struggling to imagine somebody swindling the formula straight from the lab, reverse engineering it and then producing it en masse in such a short time frame.
Later comment: I asked GPT your question. How could another lab even know how to make the stuff? Here is my question and GPT's answer:
ME: Many labs in China and elsewhere are making Retatrutide and selling it. Yes, I realize many are badly run and dirty and dishonest and not safe to buy from. But I am not planning to. I am asking about a different issue: How is it that these places know how to make it at all? Isn't the formula a closely guarded secret of Lilly's? Or is it not a secret, but simply an easy-to-figure-out formula that Lilly has patented?
GPT: For a peptide drug like Retatrutide, the “secret sauce” is usually not the amino-acid sequence itself. That sequence is generally disclosed in patents and scientific publications fairly early in development.
So the situation is roughly this:
Lilly invents the molecule.
Lilly patents it.
The patent has to describe the molecule in enough detail that a skilled chemist could theoretically make it.
Once that patent is public, chemists elsewhere can read it.
For peptide drugs, the core structure is often very explicit in patents:
exact amino-acid sequence
modified amino acids
fatty-acid side chains
linker chemistry
sometimes even synthesis routes
Retatrutide is not a mysterious black-box substance in the way Coca-Cola syrup is a trade secret. It is a patented molecular structure.
Same as Eremolalos: (I am in the EU) Bought it as research chemical (in my case directly from China) and had one of the ten vials in the package tested from an independent lab (in my case Janoshik). Testing costs more than the vials (but together it is still cheaper than legally bought Wegovy, which is the inferior substance and would still require a prescription)
See Cremieux's spring 2025 article for details. Big picture is that it is apparently quite easy either to look up or to deduce chemical structure of drugs in this class. They are manufactured and sold in China and India by a huge number of labs. While of course many labs are dirty sloppy and unsafe, not all are. And there are sellers in the US who search out the good foreign labs, then buy the peptide they want, say Retatrutide, and have it extensively tested here for purity, accuracy of quantity, etc. They then sell the peptide as a "research chemical," which is legal here, or at least legally gray enough not to get them shut down. All of them know that 100% of their buyers are going to be using what they buy for weight loss, following the Lilly dosing protocol.
There are some labs in the US, not affiliated with these sellers, who test drug samples and publish the results of all the tests they do of GLP drugs from these "research chemical" sellers. So if I look up Reta at one of these labs, I can see not only the results of my batch, of which I sent them a sample, but of every Reta batch sent to them that was bought from my grey market supplier. All of them have had stellar scores.
There is also some crowd-sourced into to be had from the comments on Cremieux's original post (which he updates regularly as knew GLP-1 info comes in).
Another factor is that there is a huge demand for cheaper GLP-1 drugs the US, and some buyers are like me and, presumably, you: smart and skeptical. They want proof they are getting the actual product in pure safe form. They are also able to pay more than one does at the cheapo lousy sellers in the US. The way to succeed with this crowd is to sell a very good quality product, and charge a bit more for it. I have found a lab that has taken that route. Ethics aside, it has to sell the good stuff if it wants to keep making money. If it slips up, word will get out fast. We all check the lab test results regularly.
Most people doing what I am a sound to me like well-educated professionals. All of this together is why I am sure it is Reta. Also, it has worked exactly as advertised, and I have suffered no ill effects or weird side effects. I do have one side effect, skin sensitivity, which is a known side effect of this particular drug.
If you don't want to pay $8 for Cremieux's paywalled article, you can confirm this info yourself by asking one of the smarter AI's about various details.
Useless *if* one's diet is already on point, a condition that I suspect is under-emphasized relative to how uncommon it likely is to be satisfied.
If you really want to know, get a blood test done after a few months.
Otherwise, B12 and C seem like a safe choice. (But I am not an expert.)
I'm looking for a decent animated visualisation covering the timeline of recent (say last five years or so) of AI progress. Something like the Epoch or METR capability graphs but in a narrative video form. Surely someone has made something like this, but my searches are turning up documentaries, forecasts or slop. Does anyone know of such a thing?
There was exactly one of these in the movie "The AI Doc". (And lots of other illuminating animations as well.)
Pope Leo has published Magnifica Humanitas, his long-awaited encyclical on AI.
https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html
Among other things, this must be the first time Lord of the Rings has been cited by a Pope. Also, one of Anthropic's co-founders is apparently part of the release event for this, so I guess (?) people in the frontier AI world are taking the Pope's opinion seriously.
For those who aren't Catholic, the first two chapters are generally an explanation of the Church's social gospel and the reason it exists. If you just want to know what the Pope says about AI you can start at Chapter III.
If you don't have time for 40,000 words and want a neutral-but-orthodox TLDR, I recommend The Pillar's breakdown:
https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/magnifica-humanitas-a-readers-guide
I was pretty disappointed by how confidently he took the "it's not real intelligence" line.
I read this:
> First, any statement regarding AI risks becoming quickly outdated, given the remarkable pace at which these systems are developing. Second, all of us, including those who design them, possess only a limited understanding of their actual functioning. Indeed, current AI systems are more “cultivated” than “built,” for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence “grows.” As a result, fundamental scientific aspects — such as the internal representations and computational processes of these systems — remain, at present, unknown.
...and thought, "yes, this is exactly the right kind of epistemic humility we should have regarding what's really going on internally in AI!"
And then in the very next paragraph, we have:
> ...we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of “intelligence” with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence...So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. Even when these tools are described as capable of “learning,” their way of doing so is different from that of a human person.
No! These are all things that we should be very uncertain about, for the exact reasons you explained in the previous paragraph!
I wish he'd bitten the bullet and said "sure, they might be conscious and have experiences, but they cannot have a redemptive relationship with God, because scripture says that's only for humans" rather than avoiding the difficult moral question via bare assertion that they lack all these qualities.
The Catholic Church went all-in on Aristotelian metaphysics centuries ago. Physicalist functionalism is ideologically ruled-out.
Many people have had the same comment. I think what Pope Leo is saying here is not a pronouncment on what the AI tech *does* as much as what it *is* - it's a theological statement that AIs are not humans. Take this sentence:
>So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.
Although it's not always explicitly stated, I think it's fair to say Catholic theology has long focused on the idea of the human body as being inseparable from human nature in many respects. I think the Pope's saying real human intelligence requires a mind-body connection. A disembodied p-zombie is, be definition, not an "human intelligence" like ours, no matter what it can do.
Well, the human body *is* inseparable from the human nature. I think dualism has no reasonable foundation. And AIs do not have a human body, so they aren't humans. This, however, does not seem to imply that they can't have intelligence, unless your definition of that term is exclusivist. And I'm quite sure that AIs do not feel human emotions...but they may well feel analogs of such, which at a sufficiently high order of abstraction are best described by the same terms.
I feel like he's a plumber being asked to comment on someone else's dental surgery.
> unless your definition of that term is exclusivist.
It is, we're Catholic.
> I feel like he's a plumber being asked to comment on someone else's dental surgery.
He's a theologian expressing theological views about emerging technology.
Scripture doesn't explicitly say that's only for humans though.
But also, he's not saying it can't ever be real intelligence, right? Only that it's not yet
Well, actually scripture says that Christianity is only for the Jews. (A comment made to a Samaritan.) And that would let out any AIs that I know of.
"Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the world.” Matthew 28:19
I was talking about where he says to the Samaratin that he was not sent to help them, but that, also, doesn't restrict those eligible to humans. I suppose you could say he was sent to governments.
If you're familiar with that particular passage then you should know he does help the Samaritan woman.
But also that takes place before the Passion, and the Bible is very clear that after the Resurrection the New Covenant is for all people – hence basically all of the Acts of the Apostles
I'm not an expert on this. I've previously encountered claims like the ones in this post:
https://justinkuiper.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the
...saying that, although Christian teaching acknowledges the possibility of non-human intelligence (e.g., angels), the redemptive relationship with Christ and God entailed by Christian worship is uniquely human and not applicable to non-human intelligences, should they exist.
Exactly as written, this statement is true. But nothing in scripture or tradition excludes the possibility that other species (e.g. aliens) might have equivalent relationships which are separate from what we understand as Christian worship (which only makes sense for the descendants of Adam).
The Catholic Church doesn't believe in a literal Adam, nor the literalness of anything else in Genesis, so you're unlikely to see that argument coming from the Pope.
Not true. E.g. from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
>390 The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man.264 Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.
>404 How did the sin of Adam become the sin of all his descendants? the whole human race is in Adam "as one body of one man".293 By this "unity of the human race" all men are implicated in Adam's sin, as all are implicated in Christ's justice. Still, the transmission of original sin is a mystery that we cannot fully understand. But we do know by Revelation that Adam had received original holiness and justice not for himself alone, but for all human nature. By yielding to the tempter, Adam and Eve committed a personal sin, but this sin affected the human nature that they would then transmit in a fallen state.294 It is a sin which will be transmitted by propagation to all mankind, that is, by the transmission of a human nature deprived of original holiness and justice. and that is why original sin is called "sin" only in an analogical sense: it is a sin "contracted" and not "committed" - a state and not an act.
In fact, this has been articulated by Pope Pius XII in his encyclical Humanis Generis:
>37. When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.
Theoretically, at least, aliens could also be descended from Adam. AI by definition cannot be descended from Adam. We made it.
We also make other humans though.
Notice I've said nothing of AI above. My only claim is that nothing in scripture guarantees that only humans can "have a redemptive relationship with God". And then I said the one humans have is reserved to the descendants of Adam, but different covenants could plausibly exist with other species. That does include a hypothetical future AGI which develops the ability to sin, but at this point we're doing speculation on top of speculation and I really don't want to get into it too much as it's beside the already super pedantic point I was making
> Scripture doesn't explicitly say that's only for humans though.
Huh?
See above
> If you don't have time for 40,000 words
Sir, this is ACX. All we need is to imagine that this is the first chapter of Unsong's sequel.
Winning book reviews are sometimes in the territory of 40,000 words. Last time I put a link to one into a word count app it weighed in at 38,000.
Ooh, thanks for reminding me! I was aware the new encyclical was due out but not the date.
Interesting to see the Augustinian point of view, after the previous Jesuit pope.
I googled "Christian Guy", and yes, that person is real. I am sure I am living in Hideo Kojima's game by now.
Christian is quite a common name in Germany and perhaps some other countries. So maybe that's where it's coming from
Kojima's writing is superb in how plausible and subtle it is, until it hits like a hammer. I mean it is perfectly feasible for a company to name itself OpenSomething to generate goodwill, and then become opaque and secretive. And Sam _is_ a common name that just happens to be associated in literature with a "smart commoner" type (Sam Weller, Sam Gamgee), and many family names do end in -man, so a person named Sam Altman isn't some outlandish curiousity... until one sees all the associations (alternative to man – AI/robot, smart – they do believe they can replace a human, commoner – robots and mass production go together)
To address Poe's law: I am not being fully serious here, but I was taught to respect facts above everything else.
Suppose there are two buttons before you, and you HAVE to press one of them. One button will put you in a state of the greatest possible pleasure you can imagine, and you will experience that pleasure forever. However, every other conscious being in the entire universe will concurrently be subjected to the worst possible torture you can imagine, and that torture will also last forever. The other button will subject you to this unbearable, infinite duration of torture, but will make every other conscious being in the universe be put into a state of endless bliss. Basically, button 1 puts you in heaven and everyone else in the universe in hell, and button 2 puts you in hell and everyone else in the universe in heaven. So, what button do you press, and why?
This is Omelas, except you're asking someone to voluntarily choose to be the child in the torture room.
Alternatively: you’re in the supermarket carpark; at the far end of it from the building. You’ve just loaded all your shopping into your car. It’s late; you were among the last few customers, and the shop is now closed. There is no-one around to see, and no CCTV out in the car park. There is, however, a big sign: “please take your shopping trolley back to the trolley stand when you are done”.
Do you trundle the trolley all the way back, or do you just leave it where it is and drive off?
Also in “how much of an asshole are you?” questions:
* would you take a minor inconvenience to make a stranger’s day a little better?
* would you impose a minor inconvenience on a stranger to make your own day a little better?
* do you litter?
* are you one of those people who pick up their dog’s poo in the little plastic dog poo bag then tie it to the nearest hedge?
* as a fully able-bodied person, do you park in the disabled parking spaces?
* do you drive really slow in the ultra-fast lane?
The grocery store scenario is not a great comparison, since the light exercise and fresh air of pushing a buggy across a mostly-empty parking lot at night might not be universally considered torturous.
Admiral Ackbar would have something to say about that situation. Ignore the buttons, find the guy surreptitiously watching to see which button you push, and give him a one-way trip to, well, whatever afterlife awaits the sort of person who would actually implement one of these godawful challenges with the buttons and trolleys and whatnot.
> One button will put you in a state of the greatest possible pleasure you can imagine, and you will experience that pleasure forever.
Except with all the guilt, as everybody you know is getting tortured. Along with people you don’t know.
The assumption I had when thinking of this was that you wouldn't feel any guilt should you go to heaven, you would be blissfully unaware of what you did and everyone else's fates. Similarly, in hell, you wouldn't get to feel any righteous knowledge that you had done the moral thing and saved everyone else. All you would be conscious of is the pain. The purpose was to create as clean as possible of a "good for me/bad for everyone else" dichotomy and vice versa.
Who’s the asshole behind this game?
Button 1, because I'm an asshole.
Many such cases. Including, I'll bet, many of you, though you won't put it in a comment. ;)
I'm slightly angry at you for making me imagine an absolutely horrible situation with no interesting philosophical pay-off. If you're going to bring up the infinite torture, may it at least be in service of a fascinating hypothetical. (What Matthew said: obviously you shouldn't sacrifice the entire universe, no, I don't think I would have the guts to do that to myself. It is very very nice not to be in that situation.)
My apologies for putting you in an unpleasant headspace, the idea behind the hypothetical was to draw out the tension between what is "right" in the utilitarian sense, and the fact that we have a uniquely indexical relation to our own experience that makes it matter to us whether we're the one suffering or not, regardless of the objective facts about the rest of the universe. Basically, my thought was "what would be the most extreme case of an objectively good but subjectively repugnant opportunity for altruism that could be presented to an agent?"
If this answer can be in any way useful to you: I freely admit that at the same time I aspire to some kind of altruistic happiness maximization (or something like that, details could be endlessly nitpicked) and also there are lots and lots and lots of scary painful situations much less extreme than this where I'm pretty sure I'd fail to do what I consider the right thing. All the wonderful and beautiful moral theories I subscribe to are running in an animal that is scared of pain and has limits to its willpower.
The ethical position is, obviously, to send everyone else to heaven.
However, I'm probably not moral enough to make that kind of sacrifice. :(
There was a rather bleak science-fiction novel published in mid-20th century which proposed the following chilling form of torture. Two individuals (two members of an insurgency, two friends, a husband and wife, parent and child - take your pick) are connected to an electrical voltage device which delivers unbearable pain to one or the other, but not to both; each has in their hand a control which can switch the pain off for them, but only by channeling it to their partner. The device will never be switched off. In considering this fiendishly sadistic idea, the only ethical way out I could see was for one of the partners to maintain the agony exclusively on themselves in the hope that it would eventually kill them.
The singularly unpleasant novel was, if I remember correctly, "The Men in the Jungle" by the pulp SF writer Norman Spinrad. Published in 1967, it was heralded by some critics at the time as "a savage satire of Viet Nam".
This kind of thing reminds me of what-you-rather game my daughter and her friends played in middle school. Would you rather eat cereal with turds in it or be a living turd, capable of pain, and experience being chewed up and swallowed? Would you rather be dropped out of a 100 story window and experience the fall in slow motion, of be dangled over the drop for a week straight? Would you rather be hated by absolutely everyone, or hate absolutely everyone and be forced to watch them all lead happy successful lives.
You know what ? Fuck that game.
I'm always going to associate that game with Taskmaster now, where the second option was always "or would you rather have ten pounds cash?"
Button 2. For the obvious and uncomplicated reason, I care about the well-being of others, particularly some close family members etc.
What happens if two different people press the buttons?
You're the only one who has the forced choice of pressing the button, everyone else is subject to your choice.
If someone has the power to pull that off, then it's their choice, not mine, and they're just going to keep playing with the buttons until they get the result they want. My choice is meaningless, and so I'll make the one that's hardest for them to keep their word on.
I doubt I’m the only one growing weary of these hypothetical ‘buttons’.
You are not alone, my man,
Believe it or not, I've had this moral dilemma knocking around in my head since long before the recent red button/blue button trend on social media.
Fixed a typo. Autocomplete put hypocritical where i meant hypothetical.
It also added an extra "not"
Doh. Ordering a supply of Prevagin now. ;)
LOL, when I saw "Fixed...", I immediately thought you had fixed the "I doubt I'm not the only one", which means that you think you're the only one growing weary.
Oh crap. Not my day I guess. I’ll fix it now.
Neither, I'll kill myself to get out of that position if necessary.
Let's say killing yourself results in the worst of both worlds, you and everyone else get hell. If that's the case, then it's strictly preferable to press a button that ensures at least someone gets heaven. But which button?
Fine, I'll go to hell, though I personally believe God would not forsake me to such a fate.
I could never live with the guilt of the other button.
The one that says "STFU about buttons" on it.
More Fog o' War stuff (Part 2).
Think I'm going to finally bite the bullet and create my own Substack for the stuff that interests me. I'll do a test post of this stuff later today. Wish me luck, because I've gone from being on the cutting edge of tech 30 years ago to being an aging technical luddite. It's happened to a lot of techies from my generation. You, youngsters, take note!
10. Meanwhile, this past Friday, Putin once again claimed Russia is winning the war and urged Ukrainian troops to stop following orders - even as Ukraine is making its biggest gains since 2022. Putin’s statement…
> In this regard, I would like to address the servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine once again, as I have already done. Do not carry out the criminal orders of the illegitimate thieving junta, otherwise you yourself become accomplices in these crimes. Although the reasons for such criminal behavior of the “Kyiv regime” are clear. You know this better than anyone else. These are constant failures at the front, the surrender of the positions of settlements and territories. The situation at the front for the Armed Forces of Ukraine is gradually turning from difficult and critical to catastrophic. Neither Western aid, which is regularly stolen, helps. Well, they just can’t help themselves, they can't help themselves. But you probably know that today, both our fighters from the Vostok and Dnepr groups are successfully and honorably carrying out their combat missions in the Zaporizhzhia direction. They are advancing confidently every day, every day moving forward. And the movement is very noticeable, I would say. All our losses, sacrifices are not in vain. There is not a single sacrifice in vain, not a single loss. Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! And thank you, thank you to your comrades who are now at the front.
Question: Does Putin really believe his own bullshit? Is he in an information bubble (sort of like Hitler was in his bunker)? Or is he just blustering for his audience?
11. Back in the real world, Ukraine is systematically dismantling Russia’s vast petroleum infrastructure. They’ve hit the following over this past month…
• May 01 — Tuapse refinery
• May 03 — Primorsk oil terminal
• May 04 — Samara refinery
• May 05 — Kirishi refinery
• May 07 — Perm refinery
• May 08 — Yaroslavl refinery
• May 13 — Taman oil terminal
• May 15 — Ryazan refinery
• May 17 — Moscow refinery
• May 20 — Kstovo refinery
• May 21 — Syzran refinery
• May 23 — Novorossiysk, the Grushevaya oil terminal
Even before the Kstovo, Syzran, and Grushevaya strikes, Reuters estimated that Ukraine had shut down 25% of Russia’s oil refining capacity, and over 30% of its gasoline production and 25% of its diesel production.
12. A video was posted on Telegram of a guy wearing an LA Dodgers cap walking by gas stations in a city in Crimea (Sevastopol?). Except for diesel, their prices all zeroed out (meaning they were out of fuel). He accused the Russian government of mass deception in his country’s imploding economic situation. But strangely, he didn’t mention drones or the Special Military Operation. The video went viral. The next day, he deleted his video and posted one of his new neon Putin lamp, with Putin’s face outlined in blue neon tubing. He said he was sorry for the misunderstanding, and he called Putin’s critics Nazi’s. But he was still wearing his LA Dodgers cap. I don’t know if anyone told him that the Dodgers signed Kyle Tucker to a $240M contract, which no one except Tucker and the Dodgers thinks he’s worth $240 million.
13. Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov said he doesn’t see any risk of fuel shortages due to the recent drone strikes. Meanwhile, Russians in the Moscow region are posting videos of gas stations with zeroed-out prices (no gasoline). Russian oil traders report shortages of AI-95 and even AI-92 gasoline across Moscow and across many regions in western Russia
14. In other drone strike news, President Zelenskyy praised the Security Service of Ukraine for striking one the Metafrax chemical plant all the way out in Perm Krai, 1700 km from Ukraine. Russia’s important military-industrial enterprises. He said, “The company’s products supply dozens of other Russian military production facilities, including aircraft and drones, missile engines, and explosives. The production process at the facility has now been halted. This is an important long-range sanction of ours. Thank you!”
Note: I don’t know what type of drone was used in this attack. The latest model FP-1 has a maximum range of 1600km. And my understanding is that Ukraine’s long-range drones have to hug close to river valleys and terrain features that hide them from radar. So, 1700 km as the bird flies is probably less than the distance this drone traveled. One analyst pointed out that it would take about eight hours for an FP-1 to travel that distance, and Russia's air defense systems were unable to intercept it. (I don't know if that's an accurate estimate, but a prop-driven drone would certainly take many hours to arrive at a target 1700 km distant). Also we don't know how many drones were launched, only that at least one got through.
15. Partisan groups are also operating with impunity inside Russia. A group calling itself “Black Spark” sabotaged two of Gazprom’s main gas pipelines — the Belousovo-Leningrad and Konnaia Lakhta — around St. Petersburg. I haven’t seen any assessments of how much damage was done, but the fact that partisan groups are operating around Russia's second-largest population center shows the weakness of the security services.
16. In response to Ukraine’s drone attacks, Russian forces appear to have struck Kyiv with an Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile. The Oreshnik is Russia's newly developed hypersonic missile (it reaches speeds over Mach 10) and carries multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs) — up to 6 warheads. The missile was actually meant to carry nuclear warheads, but, of course, the one that hit Kyiv was carrying conventional warheads. Commentators noted that the Oreshnik fuzes are designed to explode before they reach the ground. This is optimal for nukes, but suboptimal for high explosives (because the explosive force is dissipated before it reaches the ground).
Mykhailo Rohoza on X wrote:
> I never stop being amazed by them. Launching their Birdhouse [the Ukrainian nickname for the Oreshnik] — a strategic-class missile worth around $100 million, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead — at a garage complex in the Kyiv region. Let’s calculate how much this night cost them. One “Oreshnik” — roughly $100 million. Around ninety cruise and ballistic missiles: Kh-101s, Kalibrs, Iskander-Ks — at an average price of about $8 million each — that’s another roughly $720 million. Six hundred Shahed drones at $50,000 each — another $30 million. Plus fuel, launch platforms, maintenance, reconnaissance. Total: around $850 million for a single night. Nearly a billion dollars.
> And what did they get for that billion?
> They hit garages in Bila Tserkva. Destroyed the “Kvadrat” shopping mall. Set the roof of a dormitory on fire in Darnytskyi district. Blew apart an entrance section of a five-story apartment building in Shevchenkivskyi district. Hit a market. A supermarket. A construction hypermarket in Obolon. Dropped debris onto the Valeriy Lobanovskyi Dynamo Stadium. Two sleeping civilians killed. Fifty-six wounded, including children. Is this their strategic result for a billion dollars? This is their “special operation.” This is their “greatness.”
Kiril Fedorov, a Russian milblogger complains that the Russian Ministry of Defense's stinginess with information is, in effect, making it unnecessarily hard for Russia's propagandists:
> One of the problems with the Oreshnik missile launches is the complete lack of information for the public about what they were actually targeting and what the outcome was. Every launch of an Oreshnik medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) is understandably a newsworthy event, attracting enormous attention that ultimately amounts to nothing. After all, they launched it, but what next? There was no objective verification footage of all three launches, as with most other strikes. Therefore, the Ukrainians can calmly tell incredible stories about how the "Oreshnik" missile destroyed three garages (photo), and the victims of the telethon will believe it, since there is simply no other information.
Anatoly Radov, another milblogger, concurred that the Russian Oreshnik strike against Kyiv over the weekend exerted the wrong kind of force against the wrong targets…
> The real problem with these expensive retaliatory strikes is that there's a catastrophic shortage of Mavics and FPVs on the front. The Ukrainians outnumber us by two to three times, which is why the notorious spring-summer offensive has simply turned into a drawn-out, costly infiltration without much success. And in some places, with NO success at all, and the Ukrainians are even advancing.
He also mentioned that there's an ecosystem of scammers working Telegram asking for donations to help build drones. Of course, the money goes into the scammer's pockets.
Final FoW post coming in a little while...
>Note: I don’t know what type of drone was used in this attack. The latest model FP-1 has a maximum range of 1600km.
Did Zelenskyy specifically use the word "drone"? Because Ukraine's FP-5 "Flamingo" cruise missile has an advertised (and plausible) range of 3000 kilometers, at 850-900 km/h speed.
that range and speed is only plausible if the payload isn't what was announced. Generally speaking one shoudl be very dubious of the Flamingo details, their production numbers were clearly absurd and their specs would be suspiciously impressive.
Very good point! Zelenskyy didn't say it was a drone, but the accompanying video shows a distant flying object with a distinct tail fin hanging off the body, which the FP-1 has, but the Flamingo doesn't. But the tail doesn't exactly look like an FP-1 either. You tell me what you see...
https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/2058118792262086848?s=20
> The missile was actually meant to carry nuclear warheads, but, of course, the one that hit Kyiv was carrying conventional warheads.
I think the most straightforward interpretation is that this was supposed to send a message, to supporters and enemies alike, "we could deliver a nuke to Kyiv if we wanted to".
(Ukraine could probably deliver anything anywhere in Russia... but they don't have nukes.)
Everybody has known from 22 February 2022 that Russia could send a nuke to Kyiv if they wanted to. So every time they send another of these "messages", they're just reinforcing the real message. Which is that Russia would rather endure many years of bloody stalemate trending towards catastrophe, than even try to change the tide of this war with a modest bit of nuking.
> They hit garages in Bila Tserkva. Destroyed the “Kvadrat” shopping mall. Set the roof of a dormitory on fire in Darnytskyi district. Blew apart an entrance section of a five-story apartment building in Shevchenkivskyi district. Hit a market. A supermarket. A construction hypermarket in Obolon. Dropped debris onto the Valeriy Lobanovskyi Dynamo Stadium.
There's a list of Russian targets in Ukraine at AMK Mapping. He obsessively tracks every single missile.
14. 1600km to 1700km is not a huge leap. There are several ways to explain that gap: The specified range is a guarantee, with more being a bonus if conditions (e.g. wind direction, prevalent winds are west to east) are favourable; understating the range in the specs to begin with; airlaunch for extra range; reducing the payload weight to carry extra fuel.
> Question: Does Putin really believe his own bullshit?
No, I doubt it, the self deluded wouldn’t come up through the ranks of the KGB.
I have a feeling though that Trrump believes his own nonsense, at least in the moment he utters it.
Why wouldn't the self deluded come up through the KGB?
I think the mid ranks of even well run bureaucracies have plenty of people woth some degree of self delusion. An organisation based on Marxist theory that failed to ser the fall of East Germany doesn't seem particularly grounded in reality.
I think Putin was acutely aware of the right things to say during the days of the Soviet Union while it was enmeshed in that ideology.
He is no longer within hailing distance of Marxism. He might use old Soviet-style anti-colonial language when it suits him but now it’s all about Russian Nationalism, Orthodox Christianity and great power politics of the Thucidian variety.
It's been a long time since he's had to come up through the ranks.
As long as you still have to advance through the ranks, the best way to do that is to believe your superior's bullshit.
Re: Scott's endorsements, I have to say I was very unimpressed by YIMBY Action's endorsement of Steyer (https://substack.com/home/post/p-196950809), or at least the rationale behind it. They give Steyer a lot of credit for wanting to build one million new homes, noting that a million is a big number. Of course, Gavin Newsom promised 3.5 million new homes by 2025, showing how valuable these pledges are.
Meanwhile, they complain that in an argument between Mahan and Porter, in which Mahan forcefully argued *against* permitting fees on housing, Mahan acknowledged that such fees are a source of revenues for cities. This means that "Mahan clearly empathizes with city governments", which apparently means Steyer is more YIMBY. This is very warped logic. Beyond that, they do not engage with Mahan's record as mayor at all, which seems like the major thing I would want a group like YIMBY Action to do when assessing how YIMBY someone is, rather than how you could least charitably interpret a remark he made at an event where someone from YIMBY Action happened to be in the audience. Do your homework, YIMBY Action.
If they want to say that it's a two-way race between Becerra and Steyer and voting for Mahan is like voting for Ralph Nader, fine, but don't try to bend the rest of reality to your endorsement.
My own big complaint about Steyer are his vows to crack down on Waymo and ban autonomous vehicles to protect union jobs. In addition to being truly terribly policy on its own merits, it's good proof that he will bend to special interests even when costs/benefits are insanely lopsided against the special interest. Nobody like that will be able to overcome the hurdles to cheap housing or anything else plaguing California. Maybe this counts as good AI policy though; I won't be killed in the Singularity if a drunk truck driver gets me first.
Personally I voted Steyer, but I agree it's unclear whether Steyer or Mahan is more YIMBY, and Steyer seems several steps left of me. I voted Steyer because he has a more realistic chance of winning, and also I couldn't get the image of Mahan installing a Flock camera out of my mind. That really bothered me as an anti-surveillance person. Mahan seems like a more pro-Big Tech guy, and we already have Vance, Elon Musk, Marc Andreesen, Thiel, etc. I'm not sure we need to elevate another pro-Big tech and pro-surveillance-state person.
IIRC Steyer is also the only major candidate to support SIEU's disastrous wealth tax initiative.
They also made a post beforehand on their decision process, where they value (is this person getting elected). https://inpractice.yimbyaction.org/p/yimby-action-is-about-to-endorse
My read is that based on prediction markets, nobody other than Steyer has a plausible chance of beating Becerra, and Steyer is probably better on policy, so endorsing him was the highest EV option.
I genuinely wonder if they decided to write "We love Steyer, he's better than Mahan", rather than "Steyer is the lesser of the electable evils" because they thought an enthusiastic endorsement of Steyer would make him beholden to YIMBY Action. I guess there's a logic to that, but their endorsement should then be read in that vein. Maybe they can post a video where they endorse Steyer while blinking in Morse Code about the actual candidate records.
Yeah politics has horribly bad incentives so it's very hard to discern people's true beliefs.
Is this alone evidence that this person is too much of a fool to be trusted with anything technical?
"We're not going to have a base on Mars or the moon. You know, we'll try and waste a lot of money. you will have a base underwater because when the sun when the
sun extinguishes there will still be hydrothermal vents and there will still be those life forms down there that living off chemosynthesis that don't need the sun. You know when we if we
trash this planet the the best lifeboat for mankind is underwater."
I'm particularly interested in what might be a reason to dismiss a person from consideration.
I'll post about who said this, but later.
Having had a bit of discussion about this already, I'm curious about how much a particular error stands out.
"You shouldn't be enthusiastic about that thing you're enthusiastic about, that's a very stupid thing to be enthusiastic about, you need to be enthusiastic about the thing that *I'm* enthusiastic about", is always a warning sign. It doesn't guarantee that the speaker is a fool, but it is likely that he is at very least overestimating his own knowledge and expertise in the thing that he's not enthusiastic about.
If you're enthusiastic about something, you want other people to join you, and you're not a fool, then you need to make a positive case for the thing you are enthusiastic about. Trying to extinguish all the other competing enthusiasms so people will select yours by default, is not going to work.
And if the best case someone can make for underwater settlements is "so we can have a place to retreat in six billion years", then that's exceedingly weak for more reasons than I can count. Well, I probably could enumerate and count them, but it's dinner time and I'm hungry.
I like this point a lot, and I hadn't thought of it. Perhaps I've gotten a little too used to people saying their project is the most important thing.
In answer to your actual question: no, I think we all say incorrect things sometimes when speaking out of our area of expertise, and if I'm going to disqualify the person who said this from speaking about anything technical on the basis of being able to "well ackshually" one thing they said one time, then I'd have to disqualify myself and everyone else.
The error that immediately jumps out at me is that long before "the sun extinguishes" it would enter the red giant stage, boil away all the oceans, and render the Earth uninhabitable that way.
Also, the timeframe mismatch here is... something.
I certainly wouldn't take them seriously on anything related to the topic, or at all if they thought that this was something they were an expert on. If they were just talking off the cuff, well, people can say dumb things outside their area of expertise and still be solid on unrelated topics.
You got most of it. Things do get worse, because first the sun heats the earth enough to make the earth uninhabitable, and then the sun keeps on going and engulfs the earth.
Okay, here's the answer where I speak ill of the dead.
Stockton Rush.
He was originally interested in space, but when it became clear Musk was going to beat him, he turned to the oceans, including bullshitting about why the oceans were more important than space.
The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKmK0ZnrW3M&t=214s
What bothered me more is that there just isn't a way to trash the planet to the point that being underwater could be more desirable than being on the land.
Obviously you cannot take this person seriously. They said "the the" in their last sentence and anyone sloppy enough to do that that can safely be dismissed.
Scott? Is that you?
It’s a clever trick. You can arrange a single sentence with two ‘the’s and almost everyone misses it.
A big SeaQuest DSV fan I guess?
Without attempting to confirm, my guess for the error is that chemosynthesizers ultimately depend on solar radiation too?
Not directly -- there could be life in the vents even if there was no sunlight at all -- but they do benefit from photosynthesis-produced oxygen leaking from the surface; without that, there would probably be less and less complex life.
Somewhat true-- going to the deep sea would only buy a moderate amount of time in that scenario, but that isn't what caught my eye.
Ah yes, I didn't think about what would happen during the "sun turns red" step.
Re the discussion on AI taking jobs, I’m in Ireland right now and I see the Irish times is reporting that more than than 40% of jobs there will be “impacted” by AI. 40% might seem like a lot. The good news is that it’s higher in advanced countries.
“This is at a global level,” she said. “I think, of course, the number [...] could be higher [than 40 per cent] for some advanced countries. Definitely, Ireland’s exposure to AI transformation is higher than most advanced countries.”
It’s hard to know what impacted means exactly, they are clearly covering their asses.
If these are layoffs and if the IMF is only talking about the direct impact then it’s not going to be pretty.
Luckily they have a solution!
“[adopt] policies that help workers adapt and “acquire new skills”, the IMF says. With what money and to what skills is left as an exercise for the listener.
https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/2026/05/25/ireland-more-exposed-to-economic-risks-of-ai-than-other-countries-says-imf/
We're vulnerable in that we put all our economic eggs into the basket of multinational investment, and that (today) is persuading the FAANGs to come build their headquarters in Ireland.
So downturns in hiring for tech companies (such as Meta's recent job cutting spree) hit us hard when it comes to tax returns:
https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2026/0524/1574792-tech-job-ai-analysis/
https://www.thejournal.ie/ai-job-cuts-ireland-7049439-May2026/
I don't know if other countries are having the same excuse trotted out, but decrease in graduate hirings is blamed on adoption of AI:
https://archive.ph/fyW01
https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2026/0119/1553786-ai-adoption-hiring/
On the other hand, there are also claims of new jobs created by AI/AI-adoption companies:
https://www.siliconrepublic.com/jobs-news/irish-ai-healthtech-xwave-technologies-create-30-jobs-funding-drive
https://archive.ph/a2E4g
So it's a wait-and-see matter, and of course the government is spouting "We will support reskilling and upskilling workers with valuable transferable skills to new jobs" which is their response always whenever there is talk of jobs crisis in Ireland.
I'm surprised you picked Steyer over Becerra. I guess I get that AI is a million times more important than everything else, and California regulation would make a difference there (assuming his better ideas get translated into the legislature actually passing better policy).
But compared to most slopulist policies, the insurance thing seems very self-correcting. As soon as everyone's insurance gets cancelled, they'll have to reverse course. And Steyer seems like Biden in the sense that he has to compensate for being an old white guy (and in Steyer's case, a billionaire), by giving the left everything they ask for. I remember you saying in a post about Newsom, that the California governor's most important job is to shut down the legislature's terrible ideas, and Steyer very much doesn't seem like he'd do that.
I was expecting him to pick Mahan. Or if chance of winning is a concern, then Becerra. Steyer is nuts.
I get not picking Mahan. If I criticize someone for picking Jill Stein, I can't turn around and vote for a spoiler candidate when they align with my preferences. But I'm waiting until the last second to vote just in case, hoping against hope, Mahan surges in the polling and becomes a viable candidate.
I'm planning to vote for Mahan on principle anyway. Polling wise, it looks like Becerra has it in the bag, and maybe a strong showing for Mahan could at least send a message.
Has anyone here read Jadad's "AI Knows What's Wrong But Cannot Fix It" (arXiv:2603.11559, March 2026)?
It tests 7 frontier models in high-stakes settings, and the same failure pattern keeps showing up.
The system engages competently.
Verification gets hard, and it drifts into error.
You confront it, and it names the loop.
Then it runs the loop again at higher sophistication anyway.
That sits next to Anthropic's persona vectors work from late July 2025
(arXiv:2507.21509), and I have not seen them linked together yet (point me to a source if it exists).
Persona vectors gives you an activation direction inside the model that tracks a trait.
Jadad has what looks like the same construct from outside, only visible because the system narrates the pattern while it is in the pattern.
Are the inside-the-model persona and the behavior-layer persona the same construct seen from two sides, or two different things that ended up sharing a name?
Curious whether anyone has already pieced this together.
Fog o’ War stuff
Part 1. (A lot happened this past week, so this is long one. I’m going to break into parts.)
Folks, I’m writing these summaries for my own edification. They help me organize the big picture in my mind. I’m interested in how wars are fought, and how wars are won and lost — and these are my notes, so I can keep track of what happened and when. I enjoy sharing them, though, and I welcome other people’s views and feedback. I don’t mind argument, because reasoned argument is the best way to cut through false beliefs. For the most part, I don’t post links. I keep them in up on Pinboard. But it’s a pain in the butt to cut and paste them back into my summaries. But if you call bullshit on anything I write, I’ll dig out the links for you. Also, some of this is speculation on my part, and some of these are questions I don’t have answers for. In those cases, I’ll try to note where I’m puzzled or unsure. But first, a few links… :-)
1. Noah Smith wrote a well-reasoned Substack essay on why drones are making expensive weapon systems obsolete. And they’re making infantry obsolete, as well. I mostly agree with his conclusions. It’s worth a read.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-198365837
2. Clement Molin over on X has put together an excellent summary of the evolving range of Ukraine’s kill zone. It now encompasses all of the occupied territories, including Crimea. His map of the different echelons of kill zones is simple and informative…
https://x.com/clement_molin/status/2057954267026104459/photo/1
His entire summary is here, but I quote it almost in full, below the link…
https://x.com/clement_molin/status/2057954267026104459
Quoting Molin…
> The first echelon extends to approximately 20 km (this is the case on both sides of the front). It primarily consists of FPV drone strikes, which generally operate at a depth of 5 to 15 km, although some drones with wings fly further. This is the basic kill zone; anything that moves is quickly targeted, movement is severely restricted, and losses are high.
> The second echelon is very recent, extending to 50 km or more, with enhanced conventional FPV strikes, notably via Starlink or sometimes with added wings, increasing their range. This is particularly the case around Donetsk. In this instance, the targets are logistics, deployment points, and key roads leading to the front. Losses are also significant, especially in terms of vehicles, which are often unarmored.
>The third echelon is twofold: on the one hand, there are tactical strikes against high-value targets carried out primarily by FP-2 drones (rear bases, training centers, ammunition depots, repair facilities, air defenses, radar installations, etc.), and now also by roving munitions that fly over key routes and target Russian logistics, particularly military equipment and fuel trucks.
>The fourth echelon extends even further, towards Crimea and Russia. This echelon mainly involves the FP-1 drone, but also frequently the FP-2 and other long-range drones. Targets include the foundations of the Russian economy (refineries, ports, industries), the Russian army in Crimea, fuel depots, and command centers.
> An additional echelon is made possible by the launch of conventional FPV drones from the decks of naval drones (USVs) and sometimes aerial drones, enabling FPV strikes far from the front lines.
3. In the past three weeks, massive strikes using medium-range kamikaze drones have completely paralyzed the Russian land corridor passing through the occupied southern regions of Ukraine. They have largely shut down the Rostov-Crimea highway and side roads, preventing fuel and supplies from reaching the front in the occupied territories of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, and cutting off supplies to Crimea.
You may see the Rostov-Crimea highway referred to by different names. Russians call it Federal Highway R-280, and the Ukrainians call it the M-14. Russian milbloggers are likely to refer to it as the "Novorossiya road.” Novorossiya means "New Russia," and it is a historical term originally used by the Russian Empire in the 18th century to describe the northern Black Sea coastal region. Russian milbloggers like this name because it makes it sound like the occupied territories naturally belong to Russia. The R-280/M-14 runs for about 600 km from Rostov-on-Don in Russia, through occupied Ukrainian cities like Mariupol and Melitopol, into Crimea.
4. Dozens of videos of wrecked tankers and military vehicles, some of them still burning, have been posted by Russian drivers on Telegram, TikTok, and X. The Ukrainians have not been targeting civilian traffic, but their loitering drones fly up and down the highway looking for high-value targets.
5. On May 21, the head of the occupation administration of Kherson region, Vladimir Saldo, signed a decree banning the movement of civilian cargo vehicles on certain sections of the R-280 “Novorossiya” Highway. Supposedly, this is to protect civilians from the drones, but several analysts (as well as Russian milbloggers) have pointed out that because almost no fuel is getting past the drone gauntlet, they don’t want civilians wasting what little fuel remains. Sure enough, I stop-framed a video taken by a trucker passing a Gazprom Neft gas station, and all the price signs had been zeroed out. No fuel for sale there.
Russian military bloggers have heatedly criticized this decision, because previously, Russian military convoys hid among civilian trucks and used them as human shields against Ukrainian aerial reconnaissance. And the Ukrainian warbloggers said, “Great! Now we know that all the remaining traffic on the highway is a legitimate military target!” Civilian traffic still seems to be flowing along the back roads. But this means that military traffic that was trying to avoid the open highway is getting stuck behind civilian traffic jams, complicating logistics. I’m reminded of the song “Willin’” by Little Feat, except the lyrics are, "I've driven every kind of gear that's ever been known / Driven the back roads so I wouldn't get droned."
6. Over the past few months, Ukraine has also targeted and sunk some (all?) of the largest barges that cross from Krasnodar Krai to Crimea. One barge can carry up to 58 semis, or 15 rail cars. So, the amount of material that's getting across the Sea of Azov to Crimea and the occupied territories has been constrained. My understanding is that Russia has been reluctant to use the Kerch Straight Bridge for military logistics because munitions and fuel tankers, if hit, could severely damage the structure.
7. And why hasn’t Ukraine taken out the Kerch bridge? With their attacks on Moscow, they’ve proven that their drone systems can get by Russian anti-aircraft radar systems, and a single Flamingo could easily punch a hole in the span. Analyst Paul Warburg suggests that Ukraine is leaving the Kerch Bridge standing because they want to leave Russian soldiers a retreat path (so they don’t dig in and fight to the end in Crimea). Also, Ukraine doesn’t want to be responsible for interning hundreds of thousands of civilians who would be trapped in Crimea.
8. Russia has no easy response. They lag behind Ukraine in anti-drone systems (and they will likely always lag behind Ukraine as long as their current military procurement system controls drone development). Placing drone nets over the highway(s) has been suggested, but building drone nets over 600 km of highway would be a massive undertaking. And one Russian milblogger (I don’t have the link for this one) suggested that Ukraine would merely need to knock down the anchor posts for the netting to literally tangle up traffic.
9. Russian propagandist Olga Skabeeva on the Russian state TV show “60 Minutes” lost her cool with State Duma deputy Aleksey Zhuravlev (who was still spouting the triumphalist line). She exclaimed that Ukraine’s recent deep strikes have “tortured a nuclear power!” She continued, “The Kyiv regime mockingly calculated that if we continue attacking Ukraine at the current pace, it would take us 33 years to take Donbas. And they laugh about it… What is the point of endlessly repeating that ‘Russia is advancing’ if Kyiv is successfully striking Russia with drones every single day?”
to be continued...
1 it's far too early to declare drones as the supreme decider of wars or let alone the end of the infantryman. They are an essential part of the Ukraine war and will have a great importance in the future. But we are speaking of a technology present on mass in one, pretty atypical war, whose countermeasures (and own development) are still going on.
One of my main gripes specifically against FPV dominance is that they work in Ukraine because the lines are so fixed. In a Taiwan scenario they would be crucial for the last miles, but apart from that they would be quite useless due to the distance. Similarly in a far more mobile war such as an invasion of Iraq drone teams would be far less effective when they are constantly moving and face un unfamiliar terrain. Of course there are fixes for that, but not yet as widespread as the traditional drone team.
We are now seeing the development of CUAS drones, of automated turrets, lasers, better active protection systems.
No one reasonable by now denies the importance of drones, but assuming they already represent the totality of war outside Ukraine, and even worse that the FPV's do is an excess of drone enthusiasm.
Even aviation born in ww1 and matured in ww2 is not the final weapon of war, and it took several wars and decades of development to mature to the importance it had.
> One of my main gripes specifically against FPV dominance is that they work in Ukraine because the lines are so fixed. In a Taiwan scenario they would be crucial for the last miles, but apart from that they would be quite useless due to the distance.
If China does make a move against Taiwan, we'll see what a bunch of sea drones and subsonic cruise missiles do against their invasion fleet. Although China is just out of range of the current mid-range drones that Ukraine is deploying, Taiwan would have no problem reaching the mainland with Shahed-type drones. Moreover, Chinese radar and missile defense systems were proven inadequate for standard conflicts — as shown by their crappy performance in Pakistan (a few years back), Venezuela, and Iran (the CEOs of the Chinese companies who built them are all under arrest now). And considering that US anti-missile systems, even when we had a full stockpile of Patriots, weren't able to keep up with the Iranian drones, I don't have any reason to think that Chinese anti-missile systems will do any better against drones. And according to credible sources, one of the reasons that General Zhang Youxia, Vice-Chairman of the Central Military Commission (equivalent to our Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon), was sacked and arrested is that he told Xi that the PLA wasn't ready to take Taiwan, and that an invasion would likely fail.
1. If the infantryman was obsolete, we wouldn't be discussing casualty numbers and manpower reserves on the Russian and Ukrainian sides. You can deny territory from the skies, but you cannot occupy it from the skies. In order to expand that territory denial in the direction of the enemy, you either have to increase the range of your drones above the range of the enemy's (which has economic limits, if only because your enemy will eventually catch up), or you occupy that territory on the ground so that your drone crews can advance. UGVs are still in their infancy; they are much more difficult to make work than airbornes drones, for several reasons. As anecdotal stories have proven, you can somewhat hold territory with unmanned systems, but if you want to advance, there is no alternative to the infantryman.
Also, the discussion of anti-drone measures was patchy. It's true that fibre optics and autonomy make jamming useless, so you need effective and (in the long run) economical ways to hard-kill drones. Lasers are not the only way to do that. In Ukraine, the Gepard with its efffective and relatively cheap gun weaponry has proven invaluable, and its spiritual successors like the Skyranger are going to production just in time. With these systems you can defeat drone swarms as well as single drones. The solutions against drones and drone swarms exist, they "only" need to be deployed at scale and integrated into a new doctrine. Also, this section was not convincing:
> "Okay, $3 million. So that is 6,000 FPV drones…I doubt this thing will be able to handle 6,000 FPV drones or even 600 FPV drones coming at it at the same time"
Maybe it won't be able to handle 600 FPVs at the same time, but that also means the attacker has to be able to attack with 600 drones at the same time. At the very least, that's 600 drones the attacker can't use for dozens or even hundreds of other targets. That's the whole point of a defensive system! To efficiently increase the cost of attacking in a certain way, if not to defeat the attack entirely.
> You can deny territory from the skies, but you cannot occupy it from the skies.
The goal of warfare is to make your enemy capitulate and accede to your political demands. Putin fancied himself a great strategic thinker, but he got trapped in a tactically short-sighted view that equated territory capture with winning. Putin's military occupied some territory, but they never fully *controled* that territory. He thought his oligarchs would be pleased to take control of the coal mines in Donetsk and Luhansk, but they couldn't do anything with them because of partisan activity and remote strikes. Now the mines have filled with water and are unusable. He thought he could grab the valuable industrial facilities in Melitopol, but they were all destroyed during the siege. He was able to grab some wheat from the occupied territories for a few harvests, but having lost control of the Black Sea, he now has to transport it out by rail (and rail transportation has always been an iffy proposition in the occupied territories). And now he's losing the rail lines. Theoretically, he has taken control of 15% of Ukraine's territory, but he can't do with it as he wishes unless he can get the Ukrainians to capitulate. And what is it that's keeping him from full control of the territories he conquered? Ukrainian drones. Not Ukrainian infantry. He lost the strategic initiative when he couldn't get Zelenskyy to capitulate in the first few days of the Special Military Operation. Now he's losing any tactical initiative he has, as Ukrainian drones are denying him full control of the occupied territories. Traditional airpower, tanks, artillery, and massed infantry assaults are no longer key to this war. Putin, whether he knows it or not, has lost the war. It's just a matter of time before Ukraine dictates the terms of Russian capitulation. Then they can march into the Russian-occupied territories without expending their infantry.
BTW, I checked what it costs to train a US soldier: between $65,000 and $90,000. And the US Army spends between $136,000 and $140,000 per year to maintain a single active-duty soldier under normal peacetime conditions. If that soldier is deployed to a combat zone, the annual cost skyrockets to between $850,000 and $1 million due to "heightened operational costs, localized logistics, hazardous duty pay, and equipment maintenance." Ukraine can deploy >170 FPV drones for that price. And by Ukraine's accounting, it takes between 2.7 and 3 FPV drones to eliminate a Russian soldier. So, in US terms, with US soldiers, it would cost about $15,000 to eliminate about $850,000 of human capital. Tell me again how infantry isn't obsolete? :-)
>I checked what it costs to train a US soldier: between $65,000 and $90,000. And the US Army spends between $136,000 and $140,000 per year to maintain a single active-duty soldier under normal peacetime conditions. If that soldier is deployed to a combat zone, the annual cost skyrockets to between $850,000 and $1 million due to "heightened operational costs, localized logistics, hazardous duty pay, and equipment maintenance."
Those figures are mind-boggling, and I'm happy to take them on trust. If accurate, they presumably represent the cost of a US army combat infantryman, which therefore includes the hefty mark-ups, rake-offs, pork-barrel surtax and general corruption and incompetence of the bloated American defense industry. And taken at face value, they perhaps suggest the imminent demise of the poor bloody infantry in contemporary/future warfare. But not all infantry cost so much as a fraction of these sums, and that's without even considering such famously effective infantry units as those of the People's Army of Vietnam (aka NVA). To prophesy the eclipse of infantry based on purely technological grounds might come be seen as short-sided an error as the blind belief in area bombing of both the RAF Bomber Command and the USAAF in WWII, and of the USAAF in Vietnam.
Nit: while it was the USAAF at the end of WWII, it was just the USAF well before Vietnam.
– A USAF veteran
Duly noted!
> But not all infantry cost so much as a fraction of these sums,
First, I admit I didn't check the references that ChatGPT coughed up for me. YMMV. And the cost of fielding a Russian infantry soldier seems pretty low (reportedly, they get 3 weeks of training, and minimal equipment, before they're thrown into the Ukrainian meat grinder). But Russia is no longer meeting its recruitment quotas, and demographers have pointed out that their massive casualties over the past four years a hastening a demographic collapse.
what does it mean "denying him full control of the occupied territories" Iran is being bombed far worse then occupied Ukraine or Russia right now, this doesn't negate their control over the territory.
Russia can still navigate, build or enact policies in 95%+ of the occupied territories. Of course if Ukraine truly manages to interrupt or even sufficiently disrupt the logistics to the front that would be an amazing day indeed. But so far while more successfull there is still a long way to go to achieve that.
Is it possible? Maybe, but it's too early to tell, what we can do is encourage EU and US decision making to work towards that goal, also given the practical benefit this provides to EU and US.
Iran had control of their territories before we started bombing them. But Russia never gained full control of any of the territories it annexed, except for maybe Crimea. Just because you've got FSB on the ground trying to "bring order" to the population, and you've put in some puppet mayors your to do bidding, doesn't mean you have control. If people are still listening to Ukrainian radio (and TV), and quisling administrators are still getting blown up when they get in their cars, and trains are being derailed by sabotage, and the factories and mines aren't producing, that means you don't really have control of the territory.
We've had this same discussion a few weeks ago already, and I can make the exact same points about infantry as I (and our resident experts bean and John Schilling) did about tanks. Except that it's even worse; if you are going purely by economics, the infantryman has been "obsoleted" a hundred times already, starting no later than with the invention of bow and arrow. And yet, for some reason, he's sticking around; that's because the solution is not to abandon the infantryman, but (among others) to give him a better bow and arrow.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-432/comment/253751681
The infantryman (as in human infantry) might well be obsoleted at some point by unmanned systems. However, that point is not now, and not in the foreseeable future, because its full replacement (equally capable UGVs, think T-800 Terminators) just doesn't exist yet.
Not sure I understand the final point about the Noah Smith piece. If a frontline defence can be taken out for 10% of its cost, then a near-peer attacker might as well spend their resources overwhelming it. They either force the defender to pay the replacement cost or create a gap that can be exploited.
If it's not on the frontline and vulnerable then the equation changes, but you have the same problem for whatever piece of equipment does end up as your first layer of defence.
If it's not intended for war against a peer opponent, then maybe it's effective for that other purpose, but you've got the same problem: what other alternative will you use in wartime?
What am I missing?
>What am I missing?
You're missing that war can't be broken down to a single $ number, convenient as that would be. If one could, then Russia and Ukraine would immediately withdraw literally all their armed forces from the drone kill zones, because everything can be efficiently overwhelmed by drones. If even a dedicated anti-drone system was not worth deploying, then why would you deploy anything else that is even easier to overwhelm? Empirically, both sides continue to use things other than drones, which means these things are worth deploying, which means an anti-drone system would also be worth deploying.
You're also missing that drones alone cannot win wars[1]. That means you need to bring other assets that can. And that means bringing the whole circus, to counter and counter-counter etc. the enemy's assets, on both sides.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/10/21/collections-strategic-airpower-101/
> Empirically, both sides continue to use things other than drones, which means these things are worth deploying, which means an anti-drone system would also be worth deploying
Hang on, no! We're not talking about real deployed systems, but a hypothetical massive laser that nobody actually uses yet.
I agree that EW, camouflage, netting, interceptors, a soldier with a shotgun, Gepards next to a refinery, etc. are all valuable. I also agree that there's a place even for seemingly cost-ineffective measures if they're not the first layer of defence.
What I'm not seeing is the benefit to putting the hypothetical big laser on the front lines where it can be blown up by 600 drones. The original claim was that it "means the attacker has to be able to attack with 600 drones at the same time", which is a tenth of the cost of the defence! That sounds like a terrible deal! Maybe the defence economics would make sense if it were to be positioned far back behind cheaper countermeasures.
I see your point, and I agree. If the hypothetical anti-drone laser would be unable to deal with drone swarms, then yes, you wouldn't use it in a position where it might have to deal with drone swarms.
Then again, that means the the Noah Smith piece is engaging in strawman arguments and my original point of "patchy" anti-drone discussion still stands.
Not sure I agree with 7- bridges are notoriously difficult to destroy. This bridge in north Vietnam survived some 300 bombs, and was probably underbuilt compared to Kerch. I don't think it's true that 'a single Flamingo could easily punch a hole in the span'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanh_H%C3%B3a_Bridge
From your link, it seems those 300 bombs were the previous attempts, and the section "Final Blow" suggests that sufficiently large and precise munitions can do the job with much less effort:
>This time, four U.S. Navy A-7s from VA-82, aboard USS America, successfully delivered 8,000 lbs of high explosives with two planes carrying two 2,000 lb (910 kg) Walleyes, while two other carried a further 2,000 lbs in Mk 84 GP bombs. In a simultaneous attack, the center piling on the bridge's west side was hit and broke the span in half. After this, the Thanh Hóa Bridge was considered permanently destroyed and removed from the target list.
The Flamingo has a 2,540 lb (1,150kg) warhead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FP-5_Flamingo
The bridge from the link was the inspiration to create laser-guided bombs in the first place. There is some more backstory on this I read elsewhere. Basically, some Texas Instruments engineers (IIRC) dreamed up the idea of the laser guiding principle, from technology that was invented or engineered shortly before that and unrelated to war efforts.
It was the birth of precision strikes that actually works and obviously changed warfare from the air "over night".
Munitions were a lot less accurate back then though, right?
All it would have to do is knock a large hole in one or more lanes of a single open span to impede traffic until repairs could be made. Also, 21st-century delivery systems and munitions are a lot more accurate than B-52 bombers. And explosive designs have advanced since the 1970s. But thanks for keeping me honest. Just to make sure I wasn't bullshitting myself, I asked Grok (ChatGPT refused to take a crack at the question)...
Me: What kind of damage could a Flamingo with a 1,150 kg warhead do to an open span of the Kerch Strait Bridge?
Grok: A single Flamingo missile with a 1,150 kg warhead could cause severe localized to multi-span damage on an open span of the Kerch Strait Bridge (Crimean Bridge), likely collapsing or disabling one or more spans, but not necessarily destroying the entire structure.
Flamingo Missile Overview
The FP-5 Flamingo is a Ukrainian long-range cruise missile (developed by Fire Point) with:
Warhead: 1,150 kg (≈2,540 lb) — possibly a repurposed aerial bomb (e.g., similar to a Mk 84 or FAB-series equivalent).
Explosive filler: Likely 400–600+ kg TNT equivalent (depending on fill ratio; conventional HE bombs often have ~40–50% explosive content, though optimized warheads could be higher).
It is a large subsonic cruise missile (≈6-ton total mass, jet-powered, high payload for its class).
This is significantly more powerful than typical cruise missile warheads like the Tomahawk (≈450 kg) and comparable to heavy glide bombs or truck bombs used in past bridge attacks.
Kerch Strait Bridge Structure (Relevant Details)
Design: Parallel road (4-lane) and rail bridges. Mostly steel plate girder/composite deck spans (≈60–65 m typical) on concrete piers. Continuous girders over multiple spans (often 4+), making them vulnerable to progressive failure.
Main shipping channel: 227 m steel arch truss span with high clearance.
"Open span": Refers to a typical girder span section away from the main arch or heavily protected piers. Piers are robust (deep piled foundations), but superstructures (girders/deck) are the weak point for air-delivered blasts.
Past attacks (e.g., 2022 truck bomb with ≈1 ton TNT equivalent) showed how a mid-span detonation on continuous girders can pop multiple spans off bearings due to upward blast force and loss of continuity.
Expected Damage from a Direct or Near Hit
Direct hit on deck/mid-span (most likely effective targeting):
Local effects: Massive cratering/breach in the concrete deck and orthotropic slab. Severe deformation or severance of steel plate girders (≈3.2 m deep). Blast would shred the roadway and rail elements.
Global/Progressive effects: Upward blast impulse on continuous girders could dislodge adjacent spans from bearings (similar to 2022 attack). Expect 1–4 spans affected (hundreds of meters of roadway/rail out of service), with sections collapsing into the water.
Piers: Possible scabbing/spalling on top, but major structural failure of deep-piled concrete piers is unlikely from a single air burst unless the warhead is optimized for penetration and detonates very low or inside a vulnerable spot.
Near miss (tens of meters off): Still heavy damage due to blast radius. Overpressure and fragmentation could buckle girders, damage bearings, and cause partial collapse, especially on continuous sections.
Hit on main 227 m arch span: Less catastrophic for the overall bridge. The truss arch is more robust; a single hit might damage truss elements or the deck but is unlikely to cause full collapse without multiple precise strikes weakening key members.
Scale comparison: This warhead is in the range of large demolition charges or the 2022 Kerch attack. Historical/engineering analyses of similar blasts on girder bridges show severe localized failure and progressive collapse risk in continuous designs. A 1,150 kg payload is "bridge-busting" territory for conventional weapons.
Limitations and Variables
Accuracy: Flamingo uses INS/GNSS (with claimed resistance to jamming). Precision matters — a perfect mid-span hit maximizes damage; a miss reduces it.
Defenses: The bridge has air defenses, netting, and other protections. A single missile might be intercepted; saturation (multiple Flamingos) would be far more effective.
Repairability: Russia repaired past damage relatively quickly with prefabricated sections, but repeated heavy hits on the same area would make it much harder. Piers are the long-term bottleneck.
Not total destruction: One hit disables sections but doesn't drop the whole 19 km bridge. Multiple strikes (or combined with sea drones on foundations) would be needed for permanent severance.
In summary, one Flamingo on an open girder span would likely render a significant portion unusable for weeks/months, collapsing deck and girders over one or more spans and requiring major repairs — a high-value strategic hit, but not bridge-ending on its own.
The bridge got hit by a truck bomb back in 2022 (approximately 25 tons, but probably a fertilizer IED rather than military explosives), which destroyed two spans of the roadway and damaged the rail bridge. It was partially reopened to light vehicles very quickly (possibly just as a stunt, the video they shared didn't seem like something I'd want to drive), the roadway was repaired in 4 months, and the rail bridge was announced to be open after 7 months.
To me, that says two things - first, it takes a pretty big explosion to fully sever the road, and second, as Grok points out, you can repair damage to the roadway quickly and you'd need to hit the piers to cause lasting damage.
Also, there's ferry service across the strait, which doesn't have a lot of capacity but would probably be enough if you wanted to let an army flee without capturing them.
The goal isn't necessarily to destroy the bridge, but to make it unusable for Russia. Destroying it is certainly one way to do that, but if Ukraine could make it unusable for half a year with a single strike, that's almost as useful. It forces Russia to pay for repairs, and Ukraine can just hit it again when it's repaired, and/or force Russia to expend a lot of anti-air systems to protect it, which will then be missing elsewhere.
I wouldn't call it theatrical bombing, they just didn't have the capability at the time though they had to try. A lot has developed since then, both in war goals and military capabilities on both sides; the calculus has changed completely.
FWIW Opus 4.7 was willing to discuss the matter, seems like a pretty similar KTA
This is a question that open-source defense analysts and OSINT communities work through routinely, so here's the structural reasoning. The honest headline: a single Flamingo hit is unlikely to drop a span, but it could plausibly disable one.
**The warhead itself**
The Flamingo's 1,150 kg warhead is typically repurposed from Soviet FAB-1000 bombs or equivalents, with bunker-buster variants reportedly able to penetrate ~10 m of concrete or soil. Worth noting the warhead-weight figure can mislead: one analysis points out that if the missile uses a conventional gravity bomb, a 925 kg warhead would carry only ~430 kg of actual explosive filler — the rest is casing. So depending on variant, you're looking at somewhere between ~430 kg (blast/frag bomb) and a heavier penetrator with less filler but far better armor-piercing behavior. That distinction matters enormously here, because the two warhead types attack a bridge in completely different ways.
**Why bridges are hard to drop**
A long-span bridge is one of the most blast-resistant structures you can attack, for a structural reason: it's mostly air and slender members. A free-field blast wave dissipates with distance and couples poorly into thin, open girders — there's no large continuous surface to "catch" the overpressure, and the deck above can vent the wave. This is why historically bridges have been notoriously hard to drop with bombs; WWII campaigns against bridges took dozens to hundreds of sorties per span. A blast/frag warhead detonating on or above the deck will crater the roadway, shred the deck slab locally, and wreck a section of railing/parapet — but a single deck-level hit usually does not bring down a span.
The Kerch Bridge has two parallel structures (road and rail) plus the famous navigable arch spans on steel arch supports, with the rest being a long approach viaduct on regularly spaced piers. The vulnerability is not the deck — it's the piers and the bearings.
**The kill mechanisms that actually matter**
A Flamingo could realistically damage a span through one of three paths:
*Pier strike.* A penetrator-variant warhead hitting a single support pier near the waterline or base is the highest-leverage option. Reinforced-concrete piers are robust, but a 1,000+ kg penetrating warhead detonating against or inside one can shear or topple it. Remove one pier and the two adjacent deck spans lose support and collapse — that's the classic "drop a span" outcome. This is the only single-missile path that reliably drops roadway.
*Bearing/expansion-joint hit.* Spans rest on bearings that transfer load to piers. A hit at the deck-pier junction can destroy bearings and dislodge the span end. Less certain than a pier kill, but a credible disabling hit.
*Steel arch span.* The navigable arch spans behave differently — a steel truss/arch is redundant; severing a few members degrades capacity but doesn't guarantee collapse unless you hit a critical compression member or the arch springing. A direct hit causes serious local damage and likely closes the bridge for inspection and repair, but "collapse" is not assured from one missile.
**Realistic outcome of a single hit on an open span**
Most likely result: a substantial hole in the deck, severed roadway, destroyed bearings or a damaged pier, and a closure of weeks to months for that carriageway — operationally significant, since the bridge's value is throughput, and you don't need a collapse to interrupt that. An actual span drop is achievable but depends on hitting a pier with a penetrating warhead and on that pier being a non-redundant support. With CEP ~14 m, hitting a specific pier is feasible but not guaranteed per shot.
**The bigger caveats**
Three things degrade real-world effectiveness beyond the structural analysis. First, the Flamingo is subsonic (~850-900 km/h) at modest altitude, and Kerch is among the most heavily air-defended points in the theater (Pantsir, S-300/400, EW); penetration is the hard part, not the warhead. Second, accuracy under EW and against a precise aimpoint like a single pier is uncertain — analysts have flagged conceptual shortcomings that may affect the FP-5's strike effectiveness, and its real combat record remains thin. Third, this is fundamentally a saturation problem: dropping a defended long-span bridge realistically wants multiple coordinated munitions targeting several piers, to overwhelm defenses and hit enough supports to guarantee a collapse rather than a repairable hole.
So: one Flamingo, clean hit, open deck span — expect a serious mobility kill and a lengthy closure. One Flamingo, clean hit, on a pier with a penetrator warhead — you can drop the adjacent spans. Guaranteeing a collapse — that's a package, not a single shot.
Scott introduced me to “Reasonable Blackman” in last month’s link post. Looked a little suspicious to me, so I researched him. In short, he was neither a Black man nor a Blackman. He may yet have been reasonable (for an Elizabethan silk weaver).
https://genealogian.substack.com/p/reasonable-blackman-wikipedia-page
For the image in the token book, Easter 1579, you observe that instead of saying "Reson a blackmore", the text says "Reasonablackmore".
I have two questions:
1. In your opinion, does the name start "Reas..." and not just "Res..."?
2. In your opinion, does the name contain a lowercase b, and not a capital B?
I'm willing to believe you if so - I certainly wouldn't rely on my opinion of 16th-century handwriting over yours. But in the later pictures, I agree with you more about which samples look like "ea" and which look like "e" alone.
---
On a different but tangential note, you describe the conversion of "Reasonable Blackmore" into "Reasonablackmore" as 'a not-uncommon trick at the time', which implies it was intentional on the part of the scribe. I would have expected it to be a fairly straightforward instance of the scribal error type known as 'haplography', in which a letter sequence which should appear twice in a row instead appears just once. (Granted, in this case there's also an 'e' going missing.) Is there reason to believe that this is intentional when 16th-century English scribes do it? Recorded comments about the trick or some such?
Hey Michael -- you're absolutely right on #1. That's just a mistake in the writing process. It's definitely "Reson..." in that instance.
On #2, it could go either way, but it looks to me like a lower case b with a large loop on the stem.
Also possible that the scribe just made a mistake. But yes, I've seen this kind of contraction in many contemporary documents, appearing most often for the definite articles when followed by a vowel. Much like you'd still do today in a language like Italian. Like I said there, it's rare for names but I'm not surprised to see it.
> Much like you'd still do today in a language like Italian.
But you do that today in Italian because the elided vowel isn't pronounced either.
Languages vary on how they indicate that kind of thing in writing. In Byzantine Greek elided vowels aren't pronounced or written. In classical Latin they're written out but not pronounced. In medieval Latin everyone has forgotten how Latin was spoken, so everything is written out 𝗮𝗻𝗱 pronounced.
None of these systems would allow you to combine one consonant cluster into a nearby identical consonant cluster. That is a kind of sound change that does happen, but it happens on a word-by-word basis rather than being seen as part of the general structure of the language. (Compare L. Frank Baum's "prob'ly" for 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘺, noting that (1) this pronunciation remains normal today; and (2) the original form was not *𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘣𝘭𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘺.)
And this is an even more complex hypothetical collapse than the modern spelling makes it look, because the 𝘣𝘭 "cluster" in 'Reasonable' is not a cluster. A vowel is pronounced between the B and the L, and this must also have been true at the time because we observe the spelling "Resonabell".
So I have trouble believing that the written form "Resonablackmore" reflects a potential pronunciation of the name.
I think you're right! I would still say it's possible, if very unlikely, the scribe smushed them together, but it would be an idiosyncrasy rather than an example of a broader practice. And in fact it would be strange to do it to such an already idiosyncratic name.
Much more likely a simple mistake. A haplography. I'll make a note in the post.
On the topic, one of the more extraordinary Wikipedia pages I've read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Thompson
Black trans woman who testified before Congress in 1866 about her assault in the Reconstruction-era Memphis Massacre. It seems that Thompson's life is much more thoroughly documented than that of "Reasonable Blackman", but are you aware of any historic disputes?
Interesting! I’d never heard of her. Strikes me as immediately less suspicious, given the documentation. A rare and fascinating person who actually existed. Though I have a feeling her “legacy and impact” is overstated.
Thank you! I'll include that in the next links post!
AI is great when it works and I certainly wouldn't give it up, but it's often pretty aggravating as well. Claude frequently says stuff that is wrong or irrelevant, and the most frustrating part is that unlike with a human, nothing will ever change even if you point out the mistakes.
It also makes me wonder about a Gell-Mann Amnesia type effect - if there are so many mistakes I *did* notice, what mistakes are there that I didn't notice?
> the most frustrating part is that unlike with a human, nothing will ever change even if you point out the mistakes.
This is a known problem for AI Coding, and people solve it by having different agents with different contexts/prompts working together. e.g. the first agents implements a thing, and a second agent reviews the thing and looks for known errors.
> It also makes me wonder about a Gell-Mann Amnesia type effect - if there are so many mistakes I did notice, what mistakes are there that I didn't notice?
this is also a known problem for AI Coding, and people solve it by being a good coder and not missing many mistakes in the first place. There are some skills that AI can not replace, yet.
"AI is great when it works and I certainly wouldn't give it up, but it's often pretty aggravating as well. Claude frequently says stuff that is wrong or irrelevant, and the most frustrating part is that unlike with a human, nothing will ever change even if you point out the mistakes."
This really depends on how you use it, though, right?
I've been using Gemini more as a writing/research assistant and have found that the research seems fine (ie, claims that I have an opinion on seem correct and for the ones that I don't the links seem reasonable). I'm still using it for writing *small* works (e.g. 1,000 word essays) rather than full short stories or novels, but I've been impressed with that, too.
Right now my (very tentative) conclusion is that it works best when the scope is small, so the human user's job is breaking things into parts that can be successfully fed to the LLM.
Long running and open ended tasks such as "run a radio station" lead to hilarity:
https://andonlabs.com/blog/andon-fm
This is why for any serious usage of AI agents, it's essential to become practiced with updating skills and memory so that it won't make the same mistake again.
yes this is true. also hooks/stophooks.
I've been using this in my claude.md files to some success:
## Cardinal Rule — Solve Through Skill Design
**Always solve behavior gaps and skill failures through structural skill design — never through Pitfalls, warnings, or memories.**
When a skill produces wrong output, when guidance gets ignored, when discipline lapses — the fix lives in the skill's structure. Not in another "remember to check" note.
What "structural" means:
- **Mandatory format outputs** (filled-cell matrices where empty cells visually fail; required citation patterns where omission is malformed)
- **Hard halt conditions** (REFUSE language; deterministic verification scans before proceeding)
- **Tool-level enforcement** (one-roll-per-Bash-call works because the tool boundary enforces it)
- **Generative discipline** (the format shape forces the check; the only things that can happen are derivable from a populated source)
What does NOT count as a fix:
- Adding a Pitfall ("don't do X")
- Adding a memory entry ("always remember Y")
- Adding a cardinal-rule warning in prose
- "I'll be more careful next time"
These all rely on Claude remembering to check. They are not solutions; they are the failure mode dressed up as a fix. If you find yourself reaching for one, stop — the real fix is restructuring the skill so the gap cannot occur, or so it surfaces deterministically before any downstream work proceeds.
Test: if the proposed fix is a sentence I have to remember to follow, it's the wrong fix. If the proposed fix is a format my output must conform to, or a state the workflow cannot leave without resolving, it's the right fix.
> so that it won't make the same mistake again
(great if you can make that work for you, but I've found suggestions that such an end state is possible to be... optimistic)
I think it often depends on whether the mistakes came from a lack of information or a lack of intelligence.
You can't magically make models smarter by adding prompting (mostly*). Perhaps you can add steering to remind it to avoid specific 'dumb' mistakes - but I think this gets into whack-a-mole and eventually you'd probably pollute the context with a bunch of "don't do X, Y, Z".
But if the mistakes come from a lack of knowledge about the system (or it's not really a 'mistake' but a preference), that's much more solvable via skills and memories. You can provide it more information about the system and your preferences and skills can be a big help in this sort of situation.
* I say "mostly" can't make it smarter via prompting, because there does seem to be an effect on the persona the model exhibits, which can affect the 'intelligence' of its answers. This is the kernel of truth where all the "you are an expert, rockstar, ninja developer..." prompts come from (though how well they work is debatable).
I would love some feedback on a side project I’ve been working on, https://jornal.ink/
It’s an immutable journal. The idea is, it’s for writing only, not editing. You can search for past writings with the built in semantic search (built on vector embeddings, all evaluated locally), but never change anything you’ve written.
Lifetime access codes:
4QHF-E24E-4AEZ
VBRD-8BXD-5XVH
GND4-UT6P-GFQ9
5CQE-N9NP-JKNU
PGQ3-QQA8-ECTR
I can see that what I write is sent to the server as plaintext. Is there a reason you are not using end-to-end encryption?
Are you saying they are not using TLS/HTTPS or are you saying they should use encryption on top of TLS?
I was asking about end-to-end encryption. That would be over TLS, but they have different functions. TLS prevents third parties (i.e. entities that are not the server or the client) from reading the data, but end-to-end encryption would make it possible to store data on the server without even the server being able to see what it is (in this case, the two "ends" in end-to-end are both the client), thereby making it possible to use the service even for those who trust the server operators less.
(Even that would require some trust, because the server can change the client code at any point, but if there are many users, that would at least be noticed. The best solution for privacy would be to have an open-source desktop client without automatic update capabilities.)
That would not be end to end as the server is an end. What you want is simply client side encryption. But I agree, you'd have to be quakka naive to write private journals on a cloud service, let alone a random stranger's side project.
Yes, there are two reasons for not using E2E encryption.
The first is that key management becomes a major obstacle. If all you ever wanted to do was write on a single device (and a single browser), it would be trivial, but as soon as you want to use two different devices you would have to move the encryption key somehow between the devices. If moved through my server, it's not really providing any security. If not through my server, then there has to be a separate sync mechanism between your devices. This is the reason most messaging apps, even, don't have E2EE.
(To be clear, it's the friction of key-exchange from the user's perspective, especially less technically minded users who are a key demographic for this kind of thing, that is the central concern to me. If it was just a matter of technical complexity on my end, I would absolutely do it!)
However, even if you accepted the friction of managing keys between devices (or being locked to single device), the second reason is that one of the key features of the service is its semantic search, which happens server side--and would not be possible if the server did not have access to the content.
What I can tell you is that data is encrypted in transit (TLS, like any modern web service) and intentionally obfuscated at rest to avoid any accidental reading (debugging in the database or data getting accidentally logged); and me being subject to EU jurisdiction, it would be incredibly illegal to view or use your data in any way you haven't explicitly consented to.
Edit: to be clear, the legal obligation applies to me as the operator regardless of where users are, it does not apply just to people in the EU.
Hmm, these do seem like pretty okay reasons that end-to-end encryption is not the default, but it still could be an option for those who would like it.
Idk, this whole thing just seems pretty reckless to me, though I know I am more paranoid than average.
When I was writing a journal, I encrypted it even on my SSD, the unencrypted text was only ever in RAM and ultimately, I found even that too risky to continue anyway.
To me a huge part of journaling's value is that you can use it to think through stuff you wouldn't say even to your closest friends, maybe not easily even to yourself. Sending that kind of information to some guy who says he won't read it is just unimaginable to me.
However, other styles of journaling might be possible too, so I wish you and users the best and I hope you are not a blackmailer!
Thank you for the insight and sharing your perspective, that is very valuable to me!
As a somewhat hidden feature I could absolutely consider adding E2E encryption, where you'd opt in to the key-exchange dance, and also become responsible for not losing that key yourself, and opting out of the semantic search. You've made me seriously consider this now. But it sounds like you might not be interested even if it did support such a system?
As a paranoid, privacy minded person myself I would still be a little concerned; I'd still have to trust the client software to actually *do* the encryption (correctly or at all), so I definitely share your sentiment.
On the other hand, the threat-model of friends or family reading your physical books is also real. How do you manage that yourself?
But yes, personally I think other styles of journaling are also very valuable. There's definitely a tradeoff between risking losing access to your writing, and risking other people reading it. Different writing falls on either side.
Forgive the cynicism but how does anyone know you aren’t a snickering voyeur or even a potential blackmailer?
Personally I’d opt for a collection of moleskins written in ink.
Yeah, you never know I'm a dog on the Internet.
No it's definitely a tradeoff. A physical book you have to bring everywhere, but it's a tactile experience that can't be replaced. A physical book can't have a PIN and is vulnerable to sneaky friends and family, but online you're vulnerable to the platform provider misbehaving.
At the end of the day it's a matter of trust, and for the application I'm trying to make that's even more important than most.
A physical book is also vulnerable to floods and fires.
I once got a message from someone with a female name and photo on the Meetup app. I didn’t recognize the name or face. Started pretty basic but it was during COVID so I responded “Are you alright?” Then i asked if we knew each other and “she” said “No, not really. I was just wondering about your sexual kinks.”
Conversation over. No way was I going to let some rando know about my thing for naked women wearing mittens!
I feel called out. How did you know?
Thank you. I've used the GND4 one and will try not to let it go to waste. I've often tried to get into the habit of journaling and this might do it