100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
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User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
19hr ago
I had a feeling you'd reply with some knowledge. Much appreciated.
Un-restricting the TLM and normalized SSPX relations are the two things I've watching for. I believe I'll be watching for some time.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
20hr ago
Not exactly a question, but definitely small-scale (or niche) and probably not a good topic for the main thread:
Pope Leo has granted an exemption for a parish in Texas to continue the Traditional Latin Mass
Early this year, the Diocese of Charlotte, NC issued, then delayed, a reduction in the number of locations for the TLM. The open secret is that the Vatican probably told the Bishop "slow your roll, guy!"
Is this enough evidence, now, to develop some cautious optimism about restrictions on the TLM easing?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
Side note:
Mike Tyson is the greatest SPORTS champion who ever lived ... probably. But we will never know for sure.
After Cus D'Amato died and the Don King organization brain fucked a literal homeless kid from New York, it derailed Tyson's career with no possibility for a comeback in boxing (although his podcast / movie / pot farm career seems to have been, and remained, quite lucrative).
He was a physical freak who also had an insane natural, prodigal understanding of boxing itself. If you watch the 80s videos when he's still pretty much a teenager, his movement is not only fast but anticipatory in ways that usually only come with experience. He sets up sequences before launching them - which is made all the more unstoppable by the fact that his punching power is generally beyond measure.
I've been contemplating the idea of writing a long effortpost on "Did Money Actually Ruin Sports?" and Tyson and boxing would be at the center of it rather than the usual suspects of the Big Four (Football, Basketball, Baseball, Hockey). The primary reason for that is that, with a longer lived Cus D'Amato and the blocking out of Don King et al., I think Tyson would be the absolute consensus pick for "Greatest American Athlete" of all time.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
How long did it take?
Any major financial setbacks along the way? (Medical bills, non-insured damage to the house etc.)
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3d ago
They can be forgiven for wanting to shore up the progressive wing by running a woman of color with progressive tendencies, but not so progressive as to be at odds with the platform.
No, they can't. Because they didn't just run "a woman of color with progressive tendencies."
They ran Kamala Harris. Who was the worst candidate in the history of American Presidential races since WW2 (pre-WW2 Presidential stuff is really a completely different dynamic. It's kind of funny it almost parallels the deadball / liveball demarcation for baseball).
The "meta" of what @FiveHourMarathon wrote can be summarized as Democrats Often Neglect Reality (DONR PARTY). They professional politicos simply ignore the obvious. Not always, necessarily, in favor of something else (i.e. identity politics) but just because acknowledging a harsh reality is often jarring and uncomfortable.
Kamala Harris was bad as a candidate. Her interviews were atrocious. Her stump speeches were too volatile - she'd be doing well in one part of one speech but then nosedive in another part. Her "unrehearsed" interactions with her own voters/fans were awkward and seem bizarrely staged even for American politics. She had an awful laugh (which is something you can modify). This is America in 2024. Social media is understood. In fact, it's a cornerstone of mass communication, including politics. Beyond that, the "5 second clip" has been happening since the 2000s. You either have to be psychopathically on-the-ball sharp 24/7 (and this is why I still think Newsome is in the mix for 2028) or you have to develop a brand wherein gaffes and flubs are kind of part of the deal - this is what Trump has been doing ever since his first word salad speech in 2016.
How in the hell do you run Kamala Harris knowing all of these things? She's a dumpster fire of a candidate. But when you Just Say No (I LOVE YOU, NANCY) to reality ... anything can happen.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14d ago
Style history:
- Special Forces types started wearing them during Iraq / Afghanistan. So a lot of tactical bros started that as well. You can see this all over GunTube and CopTube.
- On the other end of the culture spectrum, "chill dude" vibes since the early 2010s have been facial hair friendly. Everything from a kind of lazy, Seth Rogan three day beard, to weird retro mustaches a la Arthur Shelby from Peaky Blinders.
The underlying reason common to both; growing a beard is a pretty good solution if you have a weak jawline. Some women don't like beards, but some do. The pool is large enough you aren't giving up much if you go for the beard. Very few women will totally overlook a particularly weak jaw line.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
17d ago
Fucking GOAT'ed comment, to use the parlance of our times.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
17d ago
It's amazing how much this bleeds into other genres as well.
I have a penchant for Noir/Neo-noir novels. Think The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley. The story is full of anti-heroes. The whole point of the protagonist is that he's a beat-up, broke private eye who mostly lives to drink and works to support that habit. But there's still a ton of hints at his Vietnam service which gave him the skills to be a decent private eye. His skills were earned through a crucible in the jungle.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
17d ago
Congrats! That "zero to one" of actually getting the damn thing out to customers is the hardest part.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
17d ago
Sorry, I was unclear. I was agreeing with you. Furthermore, I was saying that vibe-coding / AI coding often falls into exactly the trap I quoted.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
18d ago
(From your link)
"It highlights the dangers of engineer overconfidence[2]: 428 after the engineers dismissed user-end reports, leading to severe consequences. "
This is AI-coding in a nutshell.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
18d ago
Is this personal software you build and sell on your own? Or is this part of a corporate / small biz code base.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
18d ago
I feel like I was more productive with them a year ago than I am today.
I don't think this is just you or even a mystery. I've noticed the same thing, but I was talking to a friend and he came up with what I think is an excellent theory.
Through about mid 2024 (this is a rough timeline), the major AI companies were focusing totally on model performance broadly defined. The idea was that whoever could "break out" with the absolute best model would capture a $1 trillion+ market. Then, as open source and/or cheaper models began to not only keep up with the Big Boys but, depending on how you evaluate them, actually surpass some of them, the realization dawned on OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini; model performance is a race to commoditization. Commodity products can't sustain valuation and growth desires for companies with tens of billions in investment.
What's happening now is that they're all re-using their tried and true playbook; build products for customer engagement. The models from the Big AI firms today, I believe, are developed to maximize engagement instead of developed for maximal performance. I don't mean that they intentionally dumb them down or force them to produce knowingly inaccurate responses. I think it's more in the structure of the response. Take software development for instance. A response nowadays for "how do I design an API for my database" comes out in a nice, concise little five step plan. The LLM will conclude by saying "let me know which section you want to dive into first!" It all feels so "on rails." You think, "shit, this might be pretty easy" and you start to whip something up. Flash forward several hours and ... well, you said it.
My memory seems to tell me that asking that same API question last year would've produced a fairly technical blueprint for designing APIs in general. I would've looked at it and thought, "okay, that helps, but it looks like this is still going to be work." And, here's the important part, I may have then gone to a different website to research good API design. I would've disengaged with the LLM.
It's no surprise to me that a lot of the recent hype cycle has been "LLMs are replacing google as the primary means of interacting with information on the internet." Google's cash comes from the fact that most people don't even navigate directly to the URL they're interested in but, pop open google and type "nytimes" and hit go. It is actually "the front page of the internet" (sorry, reddit). If you have that same situation with OpenAI/Anthropic/Gemini where people start at those chatbots everytime they want to do anything on the internet, it will support the user growth and engagement numbers that might be able to support the valuations of these companies (although I have some serious doubts about their unit economics).
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
18d ago
Unfortunately, I think that there are two layers of nonsense compounding on one another in the article.
- The reporter isn't specific in exactly where and how the cuts are being made, much less the reasoning behind them.
- Satya Nadella saying "1/3 of Code is written by AI" is a nothing burger all its own.
First, the obvious question is "what kind of code?" Does he mean boilerplate stuff that, before LLMs, was handled mostly by copying previous projects and re-using the basics? Does he man config files and deployment scripts for infrastructure? This is very much still code, but not in the user-facing, self-contained full product sense.
Looking deeper, the next questions are "so what?" and "how much code can AI actually write?" I am reminded of the classic The Mythical Man Month. Writing code isn't a linear function. 1.5x inputs does not yield a corresponding ratio of 1.5x outputs. The actual writing of code is often a pareto or power law function; you spend 80% of your time on 20% (or less!) of the codebase. Much like the hard part of writing is editing, the real slog in coding comes in debugging and, later, refactoring. Shitting out shitty but "hey it works" code is easy.
Every mid-to-senior level developer, data scientist, and ML engineer I've had discussions with more or less comes to the same conclusion space; AI is really handy, right now, for discrete problems. It's a massive time saver. It's actually extra handy for writing tests. In the not so distant future, it will probably be able to do some real system engineering work.
But it can't replace all the devs because, at some point, using more LLMs in your development will actually cause the project to take longer (again, reference The Mythical Man Month). If you look at the "thinking" output of Chain Of Thought models, you can see how it flirts with recursion loops. It tells itself to think about x but also to make sure it considers y too and, oh yeah, definitely make sure z is in there too. And that's for simple chat based prompts. If you have an LLM read a detailed system design plan and then hit the "do it" button, my worry isn't that it would output broken, non-internally consistent code, but that it would never actually output anything functional. Instead, I imagine millions of lions of incomplete functions with a lot of extraneous documentation and the wholesale swapping in and out of design patterns. Spaghetti code, but without even a "fuck it, it works" level of functionality.
Immediately piqued my interest with the combination of the title and the obvious pseudonym of the author.
a PDF of this book is immediately available on a first page DuckDuckGo search. It is the homepage of Kevin MacDonald who wrote the forward of the book so thats ... interesting ... if Corey / MacDonald are trying to make money.
Anyway - how seriously researched and planned out is it? Or is this a "should've been a blog post" style reactionary writing a la Jim's Blog?
LOL. This is very online "it's da joos!" conspiracy theory midwittery.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
24d ago
Can you actually point to any societies that collapsed as a result of, say, not exerting "sufficient intrasocietal controls on male avarice and female caprice"?
I think you can point to a lot of societies that absolutely failed to flourish because they didn't do this. I remembering reading the goofy book "Sex at Dawn" some years ago. It purported to show that monogamy and marriage was unnatural and that, akshually, tons of totally fine societies had practiced various forms of poly-like relationships.
Except all of its examples were undeveloped hunter-gatherer tribes that are still mostly existing in the stone age. Lots of sub-saharan examples and even a few from Papua New Guinea, aka the actual murder capital of the world.
When life is a constant battle against starvation, you don't have the luxury of resources to have to think long term. You live that beautiful, simple, horrifyingly savage life of "one day at a time." Once you figure our larger scale agriculture, you start to have more stuff and then you upgrade to the perennial problem of how to organize society. Every society that's flourished has settled on long-term pair bonding and marriage-til-death. Some have carve outs for lawful divorce, but the intent is clear.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
24d ago
I'll take a Jersey Mike's over most of the other sub shops, especially the execrable Subway.
But, much like @FiveHourMarathon, I identify as a Wawa Hypernationalist. When one factors in value in calories-per-dollar, Wawa is even more of the clear choice.
Now, if we're talking about ultra-premium sandwiches from traditional Italian joints, we have to confront the truth that the meats are secondary for overall quality to the bread itself and the freshness of the veggies, red wine vinegar, and olive oil. Tony Soprano ate his "gabagool" raw, or dipped directly into a mustard jar. Tony Soprano was a trash goblin from New Jersey who lived a caricature of his own life. This is not who you model your sandwich rubric on.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
28d ago
I hate to use the cop-out, but it's so obvious here;
Physical beauty is inherent and always subjective, no? A higher level of body fat, for instance, has objective downsides compared to being within a more normal range, but there are people, both male and female, who viscerally and immutably prefer it. So, even if a full head of hair is objectively a better marker of virility, vitality etc. it can also be subjectively worse. And the whole genesis of this thread was obviously around female sexual interest (or lack thereof) in balding or bald men.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
30d ago
The fact that a bullshit e-commerce company that profits off of male insecurity took the time to say "bald is sexy" makes me seriously question your unsubstantiated assertion.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
30d ago
Respectful but enthusiastic request for more anecdotes from your experience.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
30d ago
WHOOOAAAAA WHAT?
You're going to pair "tweedle-dee-tweedle-dum municipal incompetence" with serial kid impregnator? Damn, homie.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
30d ago
Serious and genuine question:
Why not just shave your head? I ask because I've been balding since 26-27. I took the "plunge" and shaved it at 28 and ... everyone says I look better, I don't stress about going bald whatsoever, and I can get a dirtcheap haircut from anywhere because nobody can fuck up a zero buzz cut.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
I'll put this here because I've never put it anywhere else and this has been a week of extreme not good for me.
One of my best High School buddies killed himself in November of 2022. There was a group of about five of us who were inseparable all of junior and senior year. College did college things and we start to drift apart, but would sometimes still catch up when people tended to come back to the hometown for Christmas or Thanksgiving. After I learned of "Dane's" (not his real name) suicide, it fell to me, for various reasons, to contact his High School girlfriend. She was also part of this friend group and everyone had bet money that she and Dane were going to get married. They really were a loving couple.
When I called her and relayed the news, her reaction was pretty predictable. Though they had split finally over 10 years prior, she was still quite upset though still in control of herself. After the initial shock had subsided she do the normal thing and asked me how I was feeling about it.
And that's when I exploded. I didn't break down. I didn't sob. I got intensely angry. Not at her, but at Dane. Because I saw that a saying I had heard before was true; suicide doesn't end pain, it just distributes it out. Here was a woman who had shared her first love with Dane and then gone about her life peacefully. Gutted. A friend group of four other dudes who perhaps lament the fact that we've fallen out of contact with each other is now brought back into contact via tragedy. The family opted for a family only funeral, so the four of us got on a Zoom with the intent of meeting up somewhere for an irish wake for Dane. But, 15 minutes in, we kind of looked at each other and collectively decided, "No, we don't actually want to fly to see each other like this." Dane's dead, and it's hard for me not to remember that with some anger.
I think the circumstances surrounding your cousin are much different. I was only adding a perspective on suicide that I think goes unsaid sometimes. It's a tragedy, of course. I don't know enough about the last two years of Dane's life to know what he was going through. There's some mystery, in fact, about the final few days, but that's for the family to know. Still, the fact remains that that final act wasn't final. All of the hurt is still out there floating in the corners of the hearts of so many other people now.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
1mo ago
Not the commenter you were responding to, but I'll bite:
First, re-create high social penalties for promiscuity for both men and women. I'm not the first to say this but the sexual revolution of the 1960s can be accurately viewed as the fight to let women behave in the same ways as the absolute worst of men. Being a "cad" or a "cocksman" should be socially treated the exact same as being a homewrecker. Dating is fine, but it should be used to figure out if there is an alignment of values and a shared vision for the future.
But, but, consenting adults! Who cares if two people just want to f*ck! Well, everyone, judging by this thread and many others like it. You have the situation now where promiscuity is not only tolerated, but lauded as some sort of expression of personal discovery, autonomy, and that most meaningless of words, _"empowering." Leaving aside the fact that this isn't true, the circumstances create a situation where the most antisocial of people can hit "defect" a million times and benefit greatly from it while those who are looking to cooperate are in a constant state of paranoid suspicion about any sort of medium length relationship they may find themselves in.
Second, get rid of no fault divorce. I know this is politically untenable, but I'm offering what I think is a correct solution. Marriage has to be meaningful and a real commitment, or else it's just a temporary tax arrangement with unbalanced incentives for the two people in it. Because of the history of marriage and family law in the US, women are usually the one's with the counter-incentive to staying in a marriage long term.
Much like @Amadan, I'm not actually that worried about following marriage rates because 1) I think most marriages today are shams anyway and 2) We're approaching a situation where 1/3 to nearly 1/5 of children are born out of wedlock. Marriage is so hollow now that policy positions that try to nudge people toward it aren't really serious about solving the problem.
I also agree with @Amadan in another way - blackpilling is not only (by its own definition) futile, I think it's just wrong. Once you pair secular materialism with battle-of-the-sexes blackpilling, the question has to be asked; why not just blow it all out in a cocaine-and-hookers weekend and then end it with a 9mm breakfast? Usually, the responses I hear are along the lines of, "I don't want to take such a cowardly way out", "I still want my life to mean something", "You should still try to be a good person." Hmmm, interesting how that kind of sounds like there's actually a higher level moral and ethical framework in play. Maybe these hardcore secular materialists really are trying to both fill and not acknowledge the God Shaped Hole.
Not to blow the scope of this comment into the stratosphere, but I do often think that we might be living through an inflection point in human history on par with the invention of writing, if not even moreso. The technological and political change over the last 100 years (which is a single long lifetime or about 1.5 - 2 "standard" lifetimes) is truly a phase change when compared to all of human history before. We've mostly outpaced our cognitive hard-wiring. So we see the effects of that across nearly every facet of life. I don't doubt that in 1000 years, it's likely some humans, looking at our times, will say "lolol, they totally had no idea wtf was going on during pre-Nuke early-AI." But this is no excuse to smash the like button on fuckItAll.mpeg. Do the best you can and try to find genuine happiness where you can. Even better do the "right" thing, so long as what you define as the right thing is a self-contained and demanding moral framework.
Suggestion:
Phrase your replies as prompts for Grok or any of the image generators.
For example, @FiveHourMarathon would obviously be:
an anthropomorphized wawa sandwich that lifts a lot of heavy barbells, Graffiti art style.More options
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