ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
6hr ago
Bass campaign manager: "The fix is in! We have rigged the vote counting so that Bass has no chance of losing!"
Staffer: "But what if that doesn't work? What if we get caught?"
Campaign manager: "Good point! Call up Akshay at Google, he's our man on the inside, and make sure he updates the satellite views of the Palisades to outdated images to ensure that even if our vote fraud scheme is uncovered, we have a failsafe."
ThenElection
8hr ago
It's possible, though very unlikely. No one would have the permissions to change the prod geo data unilaterally. However, members of the team that owns that part of the system (so, probably a dozen people) can assume privileges that would give them that power. Part of that process to assume privilege is getting permission from another member of the team; you'd need a collaborator, or (more likely) lie about the reason you need the privilege. Also, critically, that escalation of privileges and the actions you take are all logged and auditable; if shit hits the fan with a PR disaster, there will be a very clear trail leading to you, and that would lead to an immediate firing.
It is vanishingly unlikely that anyone would be so motivated to put their career on the line for an obviously ineffectual action (the number of voters who switched their vote from Pratt to Bass based on a mislabeled satellite view of the Palisades is exactly zero). And the population of potential rogue employees who could do that is genuinely very small: it'd have to be someone very stupid and very passionately interested in Bass's electoral prospects who happens to be on the small team who can even assume those privileges.
ThenElection
9hr ago
Okay so make that "and all to trick people looking at Google Maps into thinking the Palisades fires have been fully recovered from and so harm a candidate who will lose by 20% to one who will lose by 20.01%?"
Do you think that's plausible?
ThenElection
9hr ago
I agree that's the motivating factor. But I think it's important to improve people's mental models of how a big corporation actually works, as compared to the dynamics involved in e.g. Wikipedia mod types.
There's another angle I'm more sympathetic of, where stories like this are shit thrown against the wall to pressure corporations to act more in line with their goals. The Left has done a fantastic job of this ("A Google vision classifier identified black people as monkeys, and that's because Google wants us to throw black people into zoos!"). If so, I can't complain too much: Google should be more sensitive to the Right, so have at it. But it should be recognized as what it is: shit being flung, not an actual useful model of reality.
Google "Unburned" the Pacific Palisades restoring the Google Maps and Street View to their pre-fire state, now Google claims this is all a mistake but many, myself included, would like to know how imagery that was clearly pre-fire came to be labeled as having been taken in May of 2026. I might have believed a story about having to restore the servers from an old back-up even if the timing was a bit suspicious, but clearly pre-fire imagery being labeled as having been taken in 2026 would seem to go a step further than just "a glitch".
It is undoubtedly some boring, stupid, arcane bug that would make every critic's eyes glaze over and convince no one. Decent chance it was on the imagery provider's end, serving up stale data which the batch ingestion pipeline saw as new and labeled it as such.
More fundamentally, I don't know what the actual execution and motivation of this scheme would look like. Some rogue individual undermining the logged and audited data controls? A conspiracy from top executives? And all to trick people looking at Google Maps into thinking the Palisades fires didn't happen and and so harm a candidate who will lose by 20% to one who will lose by 20.01%? (As far as conspiracies go, there are much higher impact levers Google has that could make it a loss by 20.1% instead; why Google Maps satellite view?)
ThenElection
2d ago
A closer match (though still much more ambiguous) than the domestic violence red herring:
Old white guy took black guy's dropped money, black guy asks for it back, white guy refuses, eventually reaches out and scratches black guy's face, after which the black guy pushes the old white guy to the ground. Police arrive and arrest the black guy. Security camera recording confirms that sequence of events (though SF Public Defenders office is infamously unreliable in their narrations).
ThenElection
2d ago
IQ studies show much of the population is in competition with Africa for lowest IQ population
Is this largely a caste thing? Are there differences between regions (beyond differences in caste composition)?
ThenElection
3d ago
There will be a ratchet for Roths, gradually dissipating everything nice about them. First distributions will count toward MAGI; then they'll be subject to tax for "millionaires"; until eventually they are basically only the equivalent of a 100k tax shelter.
ThenElection
7d ago
The obvious investment in response to AlphaGo would have been Google. So, although you'd have lucked into it, 10xing your investment over ten years isn't terrible. Maybe you'd also have seen that a fleet of TPUs were used for training and made the jump from that to Nvidia.
I guess the main learning would have to have been "you can convert massive compute into narrow but superhuman performance" and speculated that it could be successfully extended to human language by AIAYN, published the next year.
ThenElection
9d ago
melatonin
Melanin.
HBD-skeptic (at least, relative to the Motte). But melanin does play a role in the nervous system. Not sure neuromelanin and pigment melanin share any biological pathways, but it'd be interesting if an HBD proponent somewhere did believe melanin expression caused low IQ.
ThenElection
13d ago
I think that critique was reasonable even a month ago: most of the novel proofs discovered by LLMs could have been done by a modal grad student in the field, given time and motivation. Still useful, but picking off only mildly interesting results that haven't received much focus isn't world changing.
This particular (dis)proof, however, is quite different. It has received extensive attention. Research Problems in Discrete Geometry called it "possibly the best known (and simplest to explain) problem in combinatorial geometry." Surveys have been written on it. Erdos himself returned to it many times and tried your approach, offering a bounty for solutions.
If some billionaire had dedicated billions of dollars for a resolution of the conjecture, it seems quite possible that nothing would have come of it. Thomas Bloom in the companion remarks has some interesting speculations as to why it resisted human attempts for so long that are relevant, and the other remarks are interesting as well.
ThenElection
13d ago
You may be interested in Beren Millidge's take on Mythos (i.e. it's all RLVR):
ThenElection
13d ago
ThenElection
14d ago
I am very interested to see the outcomes of Palantir's Meritocracy Fellowship. Recruit people directly out of high school; use SATs and high school experience as proxies for g and conscientiousness; hire them if they succeed.
ThenElection
14d ago
I've lightly experimented with things such as leveraged fixed income on the side, but once the yield curve flattened I didn't think that would work so I exited and haven't returned to it (yet).
TMF was the bane of my portfolio, sigh.
How much leverage do you target for your whole portfolio? Mostly LETFs, or other instruments as well?
ThenElection
14d ago
you're underselling how radical the typical redditor is these days
Perhaps; I spend as little time on it as possible (and am pretty sure I have a shadowban anyway, for unclear reasons).
In lieu of a Redditor, how about a poster from rDrama running as a Democrat in Michigan?
ThenElection
15d ago
People who think Newsom's IQ is sub 1000 SAT equivalent just have not interacted much at all with that actual level of intelligence. No one would confuse him for bright, but he's well above average.
ThenElection
15d ago
He sounds like... A Redditor. Of the stupidpol variety, but nothing too exceptional (didn't look through his profile--I wonder if he was on stupidpol). I think you're treating mood affiliation rhetoric as actual ideology. In terms of how he'd actually vote, it wouldn't be dissimilar to any other Democrat who would run in a Senate primary would vote; to the extent he didn't, it'd just be on votes that either had no chance of passing or no chance of failing, as a dispensation granted him by leadership.
It's really just an aesthetic choice: slimeball in a suit vs erratic disordered rebel. I'm sure neither is what is actually optimal, but the latter wins over the former. A large group of Democrats are enraged at the status quo (say what you will about their prescriptions for moving away from the status quo, but the sentiment is genuine) and will be thrilled by the aesthetics he brings, and the ones who actually are happy with things but want to be the ones running the country will fall in line.
ThenElection
16d ago
As best as I can tell, school administrations have tried to address the problem by telling professors really really hard over the last 20 years, and it has resulted in things only getting worse.
A friend of mine was working as a graduate TA of a freshman physics class a couple years ago at a prestige university, and they had a fairly reasonable initial grade distribution. School administrators yelled at the professor and told him he had to give more As.
Professors generally respect intellectual effort and accomplishment and want grades to reflect that. But when admins, students, parents (sigh) are all on the opposite side pushing for inflation, the easiest path is to lower standards.
ThenElection
17d ago
there's still constant pushback and struggles in implementing it.
And yet it's still implemented, eagerly and enforced by state violence against men by governments who are typically hyper-sensitive to the barest hint of coercion. Natural state of the world, I guess. While "birth conscription" is so far outside the Overton window that I can't say I've ever heard it seriously argued for. Scoffing loudly at the idea of something being a double standard doesn't make it not a double standard.
ThenElection
17d ago
Their education should be masculine, STEM oriented, and in co-ed settings.
That gets things entirely wrong. It's not that women have been masculinized and gone into masculine roles; it's that institutions have been feminized, offering roles that are much less competitive and much more about your social standing. Universities now are scared to grade on a curve that might imply some people perform better than others; you turn up, and you get an A. It's much more about consistency and the kind of conscientiousness that women excel at.
ThenElection
17d ago
It will sort itself out, eventually. But for a period of a couple decades, things will be really rough. Since I'll be living and retired for those decades (and my kids will live through it!), I'm very concerned. Best case scenario, we take the iceberg approach to the elderly for the interregnum; worst case, we tax the kids to take the large majority of their income so the elderly can have a dedicated ass wiper.
That choice is kind of baked in at this point (unless AI saves us all), but maybe we can make it a bit less painful.
There is the risk of death that you're leaving out. IIRC for a conscriptee to Vietnam it was around 1 in 40; the risk for women dying of pregnancy related complications is at least an order of magnitude lower, so in terms of QALYs, military conscription probably outweighs it.
That said, we will never conscript again, so conscription seems like a kind of fake issue to me: if it were abolished tomorrow, pretty much no one complaining about male gender roles would change their tune, because it's not really a primary or even secondary issue motivating people in their day-to-day lives.
ThenElection
17d ago
There is no mechanism available to "extend the social contract obligations to women, and all that entails." The male gender role is primarily constructed by social pressures, not through any kind of law or policy (hypothetical conscription notwithstanding). And the role that women collectively imagine for men forms something much more strongly coherent than the role men collectively imagine for women. Both can turn down their respective roles in an instant merely by choosing to; men face far more social consequence from that choice, though, so they choose not to and learn either to shut up and accept their role or to celebrate it.
Accounting for demographics, California's heavy Democratic tilt is entirely unsurprising. There's no need to postulate vote fraud (against Republicans, at least), because they're going to lose anyway because of demographic headwinds. You need some other hypothesis to create space for vote fraud, e.g.:
Each of California's demographics are more conservative than the country as a whole, and to get observed California results you need vote fraud to counteract California's demographics' conservative lean.
The country as a whole has levels of vote fraud similar to California, across demographics.
I don't know of anyone who'd argue 1. As for 2, you'd get people arguing for it, but it doesn't make sense then to focus on California; Republicans should instead focus first on states they have any actual power in.
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