roystgnr
14hr ago
Lowest non-COVID workforce participation rate in my lifetime, but that just means 62% down from a peak of 67%. Optimistically I'll guess there's just more and more jobs with flexible hours. If the nature of the work allows for it, a smart boss will realize that if you like to eat lunch at 2 that just means you'll be able to get back with less delay and there'll be someone around to handle any emergencies at noon.
roystgnr
14hr ago
My second YouTube search came up with the same top result, and far be it from me to refuse a polite request.
But I'm not making a third search. My kids occasionally use my YouTube account on our living room computer, and at some point I'd worry about the algorithm deciding that my current math/science/art balance needs more "art" and that my "artists" need fewer clothes.
roystgnr
14hr ago
I'd never call myself a "never"-Trumper, because any reading of history will tell you that things can get much worse than him, but if I lived in a swing state I'd probably have held my nose and voted for the other shameless crook in 2016, the other mentally declining old man in 2020, and the other dishonest auto-coup fan in 2024. Maybe that's close enough, practically, even if I'm still not certain that any of those votes would really have been the lesser evil?
I still loved Ron Paul. If we'd made him Emperor he could have been a sufficiently radical (reactionary?) libertarian to throw the country into anarchy, but as a mere President I bet he'd have been great. Remember back when we had the chance to work on fixing a federal debt that was "only" ten trillion dollars? Good times.
roystgnr
15hr ago
I watched one video, and I'm still not sure how much of that is her voice. I know I should have gotten inured to modern over-AutoTuned production over the decades, but 𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮 I really don't think I'm strong enough! 𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮
She's got great taste in underwear, though.
roystgnr
16hr ago
Just look at the original image
Which follow-up joke would you say is even harder to miss: "Okay: 100100101011010101011...", or "I'd love to, but my spacesuit is still in the shop"?
roystgnr
18hr ago
But my small town has multiple comparable parks in easy distance
I assume that what you mean is "comparable quality-per-area", but it's amusing to imagine a little town with like 5000 people, 10% of whom are employed maintaining the 5 square miles of neighboring park/zoo/lake/forest/museum/hiking/garden/ice-skating/boating complexes.
roystgnr
19hr ago
Ooh, I should add this to my list of Goodhart's Law examples.
No, that one is fraud.
There are already around 60 categories on that list. We may need to build a lot more jails.
roystgnr
19hr ago
Google Earth is a thing.
It is! It uses a near-sided perspective projection.
You may have missed the joke.
roystgnr
21hr ago
The sharpest discontinuous decline in show quality in my mind was obviously between seasons 8 and 9; the internet seems to agree. IMDB ratings also seem to agree that "The Principal and the Pauper" (season 9 episode 2) was the most blatant turning point: second-worst-rated episode up to that point, and the only thing that beat it was a clip show. On the other hand, it's still higher rated than the average of basically every season from 17 to 37, so there's something to be said for the power of dull continuous decline too.
If we were to say that the Simpsons was all good in seasons 1-8 except for a few clip shows, then in average ratings it doesn't decline past "mostly good" (where the average episode is at least as good as all those early episodes) until around season 12; if we set our sights higher (yeah, some of those season 1 episodes were meh) then season 10 was the dividing line, and the last good individual episode was probably 2024.
Now I'm curious; I'm going to watch that one.
... wait, it opens by claiming to be the Simpsons Series Finale? Are those ratings just people's way of saying to let the show finally die with dignity?
roystgnr
21hr ago
Use satellite imagery
Sure! I'll just display those images on my flat monitor by ... hmmm ...
roystgnr
21hr ago
you don't know in advance when the last season is. The show might lose funding
I'm still a big Babylon 5 fan, but I can't imagine how much better it would have been if the suits had just said "you need 5 seasons, you get 5 seasons" consistently from the start, rather than saying "we'll probably cancel you after this year" in season 4 (forcing two seasons worth of climax and denouement to be crammed into one) and then "nah, we're still on" for season 5 (which I think turned out okay in the second half, but which had an utterly disappointing first half).
roystgnr
2d ago
I'm confused. "led the National Socialist Party of America" is a direct quote from the indictment, but Wiki claims that literally describes only two guys, neither of whom seems to fit the rest of the description. Did some other organization take the same name after (or before) the first one disbanded? Is this a People's Front of Anti-Judea vs Anti-Judean People's Front thing?
For any present "director of a faction" of some hate group or other, I'd have said opsec might be a mitigating factor here. If the SPLC lists in its "Extremist Files" the leaders of factions A, B, C, and E, then they pretty much have to list their mole in faction D too, or they risk having to list his successor after an untimely murder later. But these indictment entries are saying things like "led", "the Imperial Wizard", and "National President", and they distinguish those from cases like "the former chairman" and "the former director of a faction", which suggests that these were singular-leader roles during the period of the SPLC payments. Even if they've found themselves stuck metaphorically riding a tiger they can't safely dismount, it seems pretty damning to pay someone who's in that position as a mere "field source". "What is your hate group doing tomorrow?" "Same old: whatever I tell them to." At that point at least feed the poor bastard some de-escalatory suggestions.
roystgnr
2d ago
Do you know what the precise charges were? I see news stories saying "assault", which, yeah, he was totally guilty by the dictionary meaning, but laws usually get much more fine-grained than that.
DC does allow juries to convict on a "lesser included offense" when the charge is for a greater offense that necessarily includes the lesser offense, so there's no way for a criminal-friendly or just-stupid DA there to let a criminal walk away free from a misdemeanor assault by mischarging them with felony assault instead.
But it might have mattered to the jury if prosecutors overcharged; jury nullification is so much easier to pull off if the DA pisses off the jury first.
Or ... does DC even define an appropriate level of assault charge? In Texas I think this would be a Class C Misdemeanor Assault, offensive contact without physical injury, but the weakest assault level I can find in DC is "Simple Assault" which requires there to be an attempt "to do injury to the person of another", and it wouldn't be crazy for a jury to decide that a short-range ballistic sandwich just wasn't possibly going to do any injury. Maybe there was no better charge possible than misdemeanor destruction of property, if the mustard stains just wouldn't come out?
(IANAL, IANYL, please don't throw food at anyone anywhere or encourage others to do so, etc.)
roystgnr
2d ago
And to add hilarity, the chief complaint was that my essay could do with a trim
Ironically in this conversation, but seriously: trimming essays may be a great use case for AI. "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter." is one of those quotes that's so popular it's been re-phrased a dozen times and re-attributed to a half dozen later authors, but it's obsolete if we can solve the problem with mostly tokens instead of time. Getting an AI to add words to your prompt is always risky, but hallucinations and stylistic cliches and verbosity aren't issues when you're only getting the AI to subtract words.
roystgnr
2d ago
Which case was this? The first thing that came to my mind was a vague recollection of the recent reported paper-bag-of-bribery-sting-cash video, but the suspect there (despite being first appointed to ICE by Obama) was considered "one of the president's top allies" and it was the Trump DoJ that dropped the case.
roystgnr
2d ago
I think I understand you now. You didn't sell me on "tacked on", though - IMHO as long as stakes are raised steadily that's just a common way of writing in general, not a failing and not specific to TV shows. There are a lot of ways to do it wrong (writers who rely on expanding scope because that's the only way they can raise interest, writers who run out of interesting grand-scope ideas too and then end up with an anticlimax or with no sense of stakes, writers who can't or don't bother to come up with convincing Watsonian reasons for the higher stakes and for their particular protagonists to be critical to them...) but I don't think the writers here made any of the typical errors; I think we just have a difference of taste here. You might be right that following your tastes would have led to a better result overall, or even to a result that I'd think was better.
You definitely did sell me on "arrogant", but
I thought they were somewhat humble about parts of the expanded premise, given their milieu.
And I stand firm on the idea that, despite the arrogance, the fatal flaw here was that the writers weren't brave enough to be arrogant enough:
roystgnr
3d ago
The guy who calls everything retarded has less meaning when they say it vs the guy who barely ever calls anything retarded.
I once debated with a friend who never used "real" profanity/vulgarity. My position at the time was: if you just use "fudge" every time a vulgar person would have used "fuck", you're essentially cursing just as much as they are, you're just using a different but isomorphic language to curse in.
Years later, she was speaking about something upsetting enough to say "fuck", for the first and only time ever in my presence. Her language was not isomorphic to mine after all. Mine has an f-word corresponding to her "fudge", but it does not have any single word that can instantly both convey and provide evidence for "this is the worst thing I've ever spoken about in my life". That's actually kind of a powerful thing to have in your vocabulary.
It's weird that our "violate social norms" words are often so bad at that etymologically, though. I'm old enough that it sounds silly to me that "retarded", a word chosen out of kindness for its clinical sound and gentle literal meaning of "slowed down a little", is now on society's Top Ten No-No Words list. I wonder if "fuck you" sounded even more confusing to old fogies at some point centuries ago. "Yes, I will have sex soon; thank ye for the well-wishes?" I hope to live long enough to someday accidentally tell my grandkids that something "challenged" me and then get dragged into a 10 minute long Get Off My Lawn digression about how I'm not being insensitive toward the physically and mentally challenged ("Ohhh! You said it again, grandpa!") and how back in my day that wasn't even "the C word" yet.
roystgnr
3d ago
Imo The Good Place dragged out far too much,
Nah. In particular, they went in to Season 2 with a perfect excuse to write an arbitrarily long, very episodic stretch of filler material, and they basically ignored that, time skipped as necessary, and kept the show pacing tight anyway.
but I also greatly disliked the direction it went into later for other reasons that are arguably subjective
And yet this time I won't argue, for a sufficiently narrow definition of "later". I thought the ending (by which I mean roughly the last episode and a half) was decent, but I was still disappointed. The rest of the show was great, not just decent. It also felt like there were multiple different ways they could have made the ending great instead, yet they didn't. They weren't smart enough to handle a better-in-nerdy-ways ending (in the second big block of spoilered text here), and they either weren't brave enough or truly broad-minded enough to handle a better-in-obvious-ways ending (in the final block there).
roystgnr
4d ago
So, is there a series that has the final season that doesn't feel either rushed or drawn out
(sobs in Firefly)
that finishes exactly how and when it should?
Okay, never mind.
It's a kids' show, but: Gravity Falls.
Andor's second season started slow (like its first) but more than made up for that by the end.
Bojack Horseman.
Wow, you'd think it would be easy to come up with more examples, wouldn't you? But even if I consider very episodic shows, where there's no arc-plot to be rushed or drawn out, it feels like most of the great long-running shows were only ended a year or more after they'd started running low on ideas, and most of the great short-running shows were killed too soon, and there are even some shows that somehow managed to do both, being first killed in their prime and then resurrected in inferior form. There are still a lot in each of those categories that are great overall despite pacing flaws, but they're not what you asked for.
roystgnr
4d ago
To my mind, this was rather astonishing and shocking.
How so? Written descriptions basically are the closest thing that an LLM has to short-term memory. If the written description is just a move list, then for each new Nth move it makes it has to reconstruct the state of the board through all ~2N previous moves from scratch to determine what subsequent options are valid. If the written description includes previous states of the board then it just has to reconstruct the state of the board by adding 2 moves to the previous state. Try playing chess yourself without looking at the board, only at a list of moves, and see if you can "learn pretty quickly how to play perfect chess" under such conditions. There are people who do even better, who play "blindfold chess" well, but it's not nearly as easy as playing when you can just look at the board at any time.
In the last thread, my opinion was that LLMs are missing something essential. And I still think that, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if LLMs required very little theoretical augmentation to reach AGI.
You're updating your beliefs remarkably fast. (for a human - ironically, the LLMs I've used started to get good at "thoughtfully" reconsidering disagreement about a year ago, though they were torn between stubborn gaslighting vs worthless sycophancy before then) Or maybe I'm flattering myself here, because "Not effectively AGI yet, but will probably be a component of it after a little more augmentation" is about where I am right now, and I'm a tiny bit worried that a big chunk of the "augmentation" may turn out to be as simple as working out the kinks in multimodal models. We don't need much visual short-term memory as humans to consider ourself generally intelligent (though even people with total aphantasia will use scratch paper), but it does seem to be important, and I would be very surprised if the state-of-the-art in LLM visual memory remains "a mix of written descriptions and/or ASCII art" for very long.
Actually, that's not totally true, since some tasks have exponential or even combinatorial time complexity.
It's also worth distinguishing between NP tasks where we don't actually care about getting the exact right answer (e.g. imperfect solutions to the Traveling Salesman problem still save shipping companies billions of dollars) and those where we do (... maybe just cryptography?). AGI could become superhuman at coming up with heuristics for approximations even in cases where it might need practical quantum computing first (or worse cases where it might need to discover that actually P=NP in a practical way) to get exact answers.
roystgnr
5d ago
This is getting a bit comical, don't you think?
Seen on X:
"As the Earth is being disassembled:
"Guys, stop over-reacting! The concept of a Dyson Sphere was already in the training data!"
roystgnr
10d ago
Citation needed.
"Are sexual relations between two adults of the same sex not wrong at all?" is not exactly the same question as "should same-sex marriage be legal" in logical terms, but the societal changes track pretty well, and we have a longer history of finer-grained data on the former via the General Social Survey. Figure 1(a) here gives some estimates of the magnitudes of intra-cohort changes. Before around 1990 there was no trend at all; afterwards every cohort who were adults in 1990 but still young enough to have a complete sample by 2005 shows some upswing; the ones still adults with a large sample size past 2020 show roughly 40% swings. That's a clear supermajority of the roughly 50% swing for the country as a whole. Each cohort usually starts out with more "not wrong at all" responses than their next-nearest-age peers, but by a few percent, not a few tens of percent.
Very likely, there's a cohort effect kernel driving the change, with smaller period effects following as a result of mimesis dragging everyone closer to the new cohort mean.
You mean the new total mean? "50 year olds' opinions are changing to better match the opinions of 50 year olds" wouldn't have any effect.
But the total mean can't be affecting everyone - 35-49 year olds have been tracking right around the mean, and 18-34 year olds have been steadily moving away from it.
How do you come up with "very likely"? The data seems to match "peoples opinions are all being affected by their environment, but the older you are the farther back your environment goes" just as well.
I can't rule out that 50-year-olds are trying to mimic 25-year-olds' views specifically, except by anecdote (does the phrase "kids these days" sound like it's going somewhere positive, or somewhere negative?), but I'll note that even if this were true, it isn't what people generally mean by "cohort effects"; it would be something much more strange and interesting.
roystgnr
10d ago
For gay marriage?
In legal terms, in the USA, kinda. A dozen-ish states had already made gay marriage legal by legislation or referendum before Obergefell, and dozens more had already legalized it based on state court or lower federal court rulings, but Obergefell did cover a third of the country in one swoop.
In terms of core moral principles, no. Support for gay marriage in America went from 27% in the 1996 up to 60% right before Obergefell, and it kept going up along basically the same linear trend with no significant disruption one way or the other for 6 or 7 years afterward, before leveling off or declining a bit in the last few years.
roystgnr
10d ago
Mostly cohort effects, meaning new people and not existing people changing.
The rate of "should be valid" answers to the question "Do you think marriages between same-sex couples should or should not be recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages?" went steadily from 27% in 1996 to 70% in 2021, faster than the old "one funeral at a time" method of changing people's minds would allow. Although the results vary with age in the direction you'd expect, the 50-64 and 65+ groups are still at around 60%. The difference between retirees and young adults today is lower than the difference between Republicans and Democrats.
Iraqi, Pashtun, and Vietnamese moral intuitions are contra Anglo people's democracy.
Views toward America in Vietnam were 84% favorable vs 11% unfavorable in the latest large-scale survey I could find; 84% was higher than in any of the other 36 countries being polled. Part of this is probably that they weren't as disappointed by Trump as most, but the favorable/unfavorable margin for America there was still nearly double their margin on confidence in Trump. 69% specifically said they like "American ideas about democracy", higher than any other country polled except South Korea.
Gemini with memory on seems to make reasonable guesses about the reasons why I ask a question, which so far is only a little useful for me, but which could possibly make it a better source of answers than I often am for some of the sorts of XY-Problem questions I sometimes get from others.
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