Corvos
44m ago
I knew of both but was never educated on them. My education was during Blair’s tenure and lopsided towards modern (post 1900) history: heavy emphasis on the welfare state and the suffragette movement, plus the rise of Hitler and Stalin to power.
Corvos
23hr ago
Russia and Ukraine are two butch lesbians fighting over a condom
Time for a new flair, methinks.
Corvos
23hr ago
The Empire never came up in my schooling or childhood at all. Part of that was tact, of course, but it was also because the formative events of British identity are broadly:
- 1066 and the Norman conquest
- Magna Carta
- The Hundred Years War with France.
- The Wars of the Roses, the Tudors, the scouring of the monasteries and the creation of the Anglican Church.
- The creation of the labour movement and the welfare state.
- WW1 and 2.
Not only was the Empire not really considered important, but neither were Napoleon, America or the Industrial Revolution. They were just stuff that happened.
Corvos
4d ago
Oh @crushedoranges san, you're so clever and handsome! And I agree with everything you just said!
His character is the admiral of the titular battleship, under huge stress, and releases this stress by very slowly and carefully building a model ship in his rare time. Said model ship is a beautiful and very intricate historical galleon; it appears in pretty much every scene where the admiral is being introspective in his quarters.
Avoiding spoilers, a Bad Thing Happens to the admiral and he loses someone he cares about. Olmos is a rather improvisational actor and completely aces his character's reaction: he roars, takes the ship in his hands, lifts it up, and smashes it to smithereens on his table, the admiral wrecking years of his own work in grief.
The cameras cut, everyone high-fives... and then the director points out that the real-life prop for the model ship was on loan from a national museum. It's very old, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars... and Edward James Olmos has just smashed it to match-sized bits.
Thought you might find it amusing as a case of life imitating art.
Corvos
4d ago
is it not at least sympathetic
No. People have endured far, far worse with more dignity. By the sounds of it this is entirely gratuitous and achieves nothing.
There is also the fact that, when you get right down to it, there are billions and billions of people and very few precious works of art. Yes, most of them are special to someone but if we acted like every person was as precious as their mother/father/brother etc. thinks they are then society would be unable to survive.
(This is an assertion, of course. I can't make an argument for my moral intuitions, I can only describe them.)
On a lighter note, are you aware of the story about Edward James Olmos and the model ship from Battlestar Galactica?
Corvos
5d ago
That doesn’t seem fair. For the world’s biggest rising country and the greatest threat to the American-led world consensus to break with its own economic model and institute effectively a freeport on its own territory seems like big news.
Corvos
5d ago
Globally over the last fifty years it’s obviously female education and careerism, which is why the UN and Western governments used to promote feminist interventions explicitly as fertility reducers.
You seemed to be shifting the conversation to the West since a mild uptick (which I haven’t heard of) since 2005, so I gave a more Western modern factor. Perfectly happy to concede that phones made a big difference too (using one right now) but the negative push factors are a big, big part of the story and did a lot to drive people to phones in the first place.
Did you ever read Scott's essays Radicalizing the Romanceless and Untitled which describe the broad atmosphere of online feminism in the late 2000s/2010s?
Or for that matter Ezra Klein's article on "Yes Means Yes"? The moneymaking quote is:
everyday sexual practices on college campuses need to be upended, and men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter
Many young men including myself blame the modern-day lack of coupling on the fact that that we grew up in the fifteen years where feminists were telling us with absolute sincerity that any interactions with women were potentially sexual assault, and that we needed to be afraid when dealing with women. Men are on the dating apps, hellscape that those are, because men were made to feel unsafe approaching women in any environment except one where women had explicitly opted into being approached. And even that doesn't work, because an awful lot of women in both dating apps and other dating meetups make it very clear that they are not actually there to be approached in any non-theoretical manner. (This is likely the reason for the sudden turndown you were discussing in another post, incidentally).
Yes, a decent number of men had enough female friends and social nous to realise the gap between the rhetoric and the reality, and now have happy dating lives. Good on them. Seriously.
But feminists wanted young men to feel afraid and uncertain when socialising with women in person, and they worked hard and they achieved their aim. And fixing that requires more than an insincere apology (which we haven't had) and even more blame for not being supermen and fighting through the blizzards that they ginned up. The reason that I focus on women is that fixing this requires women to actually be positive and welcoming towards advances by men, which all experiences show only occurs when they need us for something.
Corvos
5d ago
Various third-world countries having China-like development spurts driven by the natives.
I'm very curious about the reactions when it comes to "oh, you expect me to put my money where my mouth is when it comes to having kids
What reaction are you expecting? At least a third of our posters already have kids and regularly comment on how fulfilling they find it, and another third (myself included) are very vocally unhappy that they haven't been able to start a family. We have a few out-and-proud horndogs around but definitely below a third.
At the risk of being provocative, you seem to be very invested in this idea that 'boys only want one thing'. What would it take in terms of evidence to genuinely change your mind?
Corvos
6d ago
Between you, @Pasha and @ChickenOverlord that's a pretty positive response. I guess I have some new tools to learn :)
Corvos
6d ago
Plus those numeric processing packages will almost certainly be using C or C++ under the hood for speed, because base Python is just far too slow when processing primitives.
Corvos
6d ago
It also really depends how you use them - a lot of people open a chat and then ten messages and a bunch of code lookups later they ask for something, then they don't like it so they ask for a correction, the correction is bad and they complain and ask for another correction, etc. So you have 30,000 tokens or more, containing a bunch of broken code that you don't want. Some people use the same chats for days or weeks.
Important points:
- The competency of even the top LLMs drops off rapidly as the number of tokens in the prompt increases. This include the code it looks up, your messages, the code it's writing for you, etc. Always use a new chat for each problem, and if you are getting problems open a new chat to do the corrections where possible.
- LLMs are better at understanding that X != NOT X but still, anything in the chat will influence the output. If the chat is full of stuff the LLM got wrong, even if you are telling the LLM to fix it, it will encourage the LLM to produce more broken code. This is especially true as the context window gets longer.
- Asking for a plan up-front, preferably with options, reviewing it yourself and then requesting implementation works a lot better to avoid self-owns where the model gets carried away and forgets it's trying to solve a specific problem.
But yeah, sometimes the LLM just derps.
Corvos
7d ago
Demand is mostly consumers, supply is mostly corporations.
People (consumers) really don't like the government telling them they can't do stuff. Corporations are much more used to it, and it's professional so their employees don't care so much.
Corvos
7d ago
I think some of the disagreement around the discernment and snobbery in coffee and other food/drink comes from seeking enjoyment vs getting [active ingredient delivery system].
But also it comes from not wanting to get on a runaway hedonic treadmill. If you refine your tastes to the extent that 70% of the market no longer pleases you, and on average you need to spend 2x to get the same hedons, have you truly benefited?
This is not a straightforward question because there are second order effects here too. For example, raising standards throughout your society may result in better quality stuff at the same or lower prices. But worth considering IMO.
If you allow parsimony to reduce you to a single magisterium, there can be no other way. If you refuse to allow that, well then there's not much I can do to move you.
Yes, this is my point. You have proclaimed that you are right, and therefore that you must be right. Philosophy has been 'solved' for a long time in that if you start off at certain places, you tend to arrive at certain conclusions along reasonably well-trodden paths. It has failed in that in almost every case it is impossible to prove those conclusions to those who don't share them.
Ultimately people tend to cluster philosophically according to their society, their base intuitions and their experience. 'Parsimony' to me means accepting my understanding of the world and myself at broadly face value. I experience agency -> I have agency. I have subjective experience, and we really have no idea of the nature of that 'subject' or how that experience is produced. I find 'free will is an illusion' and 'consciousness is an phenomenon of neuronal voltage shifts' to be motivated reasoning, considerably less parsimonious than accepting the reality of my experience, and proposed broadly because the prospect of two magesteria makes modern people uncomfortable.
That said, I applaud your writing your thoughts down, and I don't want to come across as too salty, but I do think it's wise to consider your conclusions as contingent on certain philosophical choices rather than plain for all to see.
I'll go one further. Every avenue that purports to explore the "hard problem" of consciousness must necessarily smuggle in dualism in just the same way. [...] I simply can't see how any rigorous thinker can go this way.
"Free will" is a popular card [...] a useful fiction
For matter to "choose" to behave differently than physics requires it to would be going right back to dualism again, once again importing that very same separate magisterium - and this time not only in the creative capacity, but in a 'has observable physical consequences' way.
To those who cry out that virtue ethics or deontology or any other framework are needed, hogwash! [...] It's all just fancy window dressing over consequentialist reasoning.
If any deity even could exist, it would be solely one that set the initial condition of the universe and hit go - an entity elsewhere running a simulation that is our universe.
Yes, it is quite possible to airily deny the existence of anything that your theory disagrees with, and therefore prove that your theory is right. It's very popular, and the basis of Scientism. But nevertheless, I am aware that I have a rich inner life, I am aware that I choose to do things and to not do things, and your theory's only response is 'ar har har, of course you don't, it's all an illusion.' Well, I do, and cold realism offers no explanation. Parsimony is a guide, not a master. If I were to psychoanalyse I would say that people are attracted to the feeling of being strong and brave enough to throw away the supposed comforts of lesser men, but it won't work. We're no closer to having a genuine understanding of the human mind than we've ever been, and any claim by neuroscientists otherwise is based on either an incredibly optimistic scaling up of electrode experiments or the naive application of whichever engineering theory is in vogue at the moment. A hundred years ago Karl Lorenz thought that we were switchboards; later we became computer programs and electromagnetic fields, last decade it was Bayes and Temporal Difference Reinforcement Learning and now it's LLMs.
Corvos
8d ago
1 in 20 deaths in Canada is assisted suicide.
Around 96% of recipients identified as white people, who account for about 70% of Canada's population. It is unclear what caused this disparity.
To be fair, it's probably age.
Corvos
9d ago
Pydantic is regularly used, but what about Astra? Are you using astral yourself? Is it in any major open-source projects?
I’ve never seen anyone do package management that wasn’t pip (or conda/apt depending on environment).
Open to it, I’ve just never seen it in the wild.
Corvos
9d ago
I was writing some code to optimise within constraints - basically just a massive pile of nested loops and if statements. It did well so we ported it to production, rewriting everything in C++.
The result was literally hundreds, maybe thousands of times faster. It went from being something that ran with a visible delay to something I could run in real-time.
I think his point is that many Americans are watching China build an extremely impressive society almost from nothing and searching for excuses to explain Chinese achievement away rather than deciding they could learn a thing or two.
(It’s not ‘real’ growth, Chinese can only imitate, what about the consumer sector, etc.)
It is conceivable (though not certain) that the achievements of the West are not a reflection of a better philosophy or system of government but merely a temporary reflection of weakness in our competitors plus luck for us (finding a new continent, the renaissance, etc.). If so, if so, it would behoove us to get our act together and drop our certainty in our own systems ASAP.
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