roystgnr
8hr ago
I felt it didn't do enough to foreshadow/explain the problem at the climax
Problem(s) plural ... I think. It's hard to give a movie a fair watch after reading the book, because you just naturally fill in the blanks yourself, so maybe I'm underestimating what the average movie-only audience would have picked up from the film alone.
roystgnr
1d ago
attempts at relatable humour in impressively dire and panic-inducing situations
I think it's not the direness of the situation that doesn't fit. When a situation is utterly dire, with nothing to be done to escape the worst of it, gallows humor (see the Real Life tab) often kicks in. Later when a dire situation is over, for better or worse, the people who worked on the situation are also often prone to humor: consider the facetious "towing bill" Grumman sent to Rockwell after Apollo 13 for an example of "better", or Giuliani's SNL appearance after 9/11 for "worse". A situation which merely may become dire isn't an exception either; the disastrous explosion on Apollo 13 wasn't the first "bang" the astronauts heard, because Haise thought it was funny that he could futz with the cabin repress valve and his cabin mates would feel "our hearts jump in our mouth".
I think it's the precise timing of the humor where modern writers fail. Loads of people joke about dire situations when they're fine afterward, joke when they've merely survived afterward, and even joke when they're doomed not to survive and there's nothing to be done, but I'm having a hard time finding good examples of people being jokers in the very middle of dire situations in real-life, at the points when every second counts and the outcome is still up in the air ... and yet that's exactly when too many e.g. MCU writers think it's the perfect time to balance out the tension with a quip.
Isn't The Martian's rewatchability something of a victim of it being so plot-heavy? Watney's a good enough character to keep us invested, and the setting is realistic enough to delight space fans while feeling novel to non-space-fans, but the great fun of the story is the series of suspenseful "how's he going to get out of this shit?" and "how much more shit is his hack for the last shit going to get him into?" questions. Once you know all the answers you lose that suspense, and the tiny bit of extra dramatic irony doesn't make up for that.
Still one of my favorite movies and books of all time, but it is what it is.
I also liked the book better than the movie [edit: not sure how I wrote the opposite originally], but that wasn't flawed directing; it's hard to turn a long novel into a short movie and retain as much quality as they did.
roystgnr
3d ago
I'll second the link to http://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/ - there's some reading at https://www.hooktheory.com/books/one that I thought was a good complement, oriented more toward popular than classical music, but their books cost some money (despite them having other free resources) while the former link is free.
If you prefer video (which I normally don't for education, but music is naturally an exception to that rule), the best beginner music theory videos I've seen on several topics come from https://youtube.com/@SignalsMusicStudio, and my favorite videos using music theory to analyze popular songs are from https://youtube.com/@DavidBennettPiano and https://youtube.com/@8bitMusicTheory
roystgnr
4d ago
the guys who saved those kids in the Thai cave
Calling the guy he picked a fight with (Vernon Unsworth) one of "the guys who saved those kids" is a bit of a stretch; he was the first diver at the cave when the kids were reported missing, and he was smart enough to advise calling the British Cave Rescue Council (4/18 of the divers who brought the kids out, 2/2 of the divers who found the kids) rather than making a stupid immediate attempt at solo heroism himself, but after that his reported contributions to the rescue were sticking around as one of 80-odd available-but-unused divers on site and belittling Musk's team's submarine work.
He looked vicious and petty for punching down and had nothing to gain had he won.
If someone punches you first, you can punch back, and Unsworth punched first. If someone punches you along with your employees who are working overtime to try to help save children, you definitely should punch back. Musk's submarine idea might not have helped, but trying to make more options available was a good thing; that's why Unsworth and the other 80-ish divers who didn't end up going on rescue missions were still there too.
This incident still counts as one of Musk's stupid actions, of course. Calling someone a pedophile just for being a frequent tourist in Thailand is viciously stupid in general, is immorally stupid when you're in the middle of trying to cooperate with other Thai visitors and citizens toward an important goal, and is inexcusably stupid when your primary interaction with your insult's target is entirely based around the real reason why they're a frequent tourist in Thailand. But Unsworth definitely had some insults coming; Musk just sucked badly at picking one.
roystgnr
4d ago
Andie MacDowell? Whoa. Groundhog Day was where she turned my young head, but regardless, welcome to the showing-our-age club! Let's just remember to try not to be too creepy about it.
roystgnr
4d ago
it would mean the woke brouhaha about the ad was by no means "crazy" in ascribing hostile intent to the ad
No, it would still be entirely crazy, because the brouhaha was about hostile intent in the sense of white supremacy but the actual intent would have been "hostile" only in the sense of trolling crazy people for viral marketing purposes. Those are very different things.
Well, probably for viral marketing purposes. It's not impossible that there might have been someone involved out of principle too. If you want to defeat "the anti-free-speech cancellation machine", you have to defeat its chilling effects, not just its cancellations, and the best way to do so is with occasional metaphorical FONOPs to get the machine whining and show everybody it's impotent now.
roystgnr
5d ago
most forms of testing for jobs that is basically an IQ test are illegal because of civil rights and disparate impact.
In theory hiring based on IQ tests is not necessarily illegal, since if you can prove the IQ test is a "reasonable measure of job performance" then you're in the clear, and a priori the expected correlation is something like "between 0.2 and 0.5 but it's complicated" so that might be doable. But in practice, are you going to run the study to make sure that that correlation really applies to the job you're hiring for, in a way that's not too complicated to explain to a judge? No.
We could get rid of college if every job application had a 10 min IQ test. Instead we do an expensive proxy system for IQ.
It's worse than a proxy for IQ, because it's a proxy for IQ and SES. Employers don't care if you were the sort of person who could take 4 years out of the workforce while your family and/or your creditors paid tuition and room and board for you, but if you want a good college degree that's who you need to be, and the disparate impact of that might be more significant than a test of IQ alone.
Realistically we only need college for engineering, medicine
Ironically the disciplines that are important enough that we really need college for them are also the ones that are important enough that we don't trust college for them; even if you're a straight-A student in one of those fields, you're still going to be taking your PE or USMLE tests.
It would be nice if someday grade inflation just gets so ridiculous that we realize this is a general principle: proper mechanism design concludes that the institutions getting paid to teach you should not be the same institutions in charge of evaluating how well you've been taught. Creating effective and robust general tests is a big problem, but perhaps not as much of a problem as not creating them has been.
roystgnr
5d ago
The resemblance is uncanny!
roystgnr
5d ago
Flonase is a pretty good stopgap fix. The only thing that worked for me long-term was a long series of allergy shots.
roystgnr
5d ago
This one was 2 pages of (somewhat generic) prompt plus an hour of compute:
https://aaronlou.com/jacobian_counterexample_prompt.pdf
I'd like to see more than just the summarized CoT+results though. In this case the agent was instructed not to look for existing results on the conjecture, but did have access to search to find useful lemmas and might have concealed it if it ran across hints to the counterexample. I've recently seen a case like that, where a model's CoT recognized the problem (IIRC old USAMO) it was asked and it had memorized the answer, but the output rederived the answer without ever mentioning that.
roystgnr
5d ago
My best guess: it's the opposite of Resting Bitch Face.
RBF signals "I don't want randos pestering me". Despite the nasty name that certainly isn't a bad desire, but it is naturally off-putting if you're a randy rando and you realize your chances just went from "the worst she can do is say no" to "the best she can do is say no". Safest not to get attracted in the first place.
Silly behavior signals "I'll give anything a shot once". This doesn't actually mean more than a small fraction of randos' shots can land, but not-zero is still infinity percent more than zero, and hope springs eternal.
I'd also guess that many men have experienced and most men have witnessed some women "getting the ick" via social pressure and/or about some stereotypically-male behavior; a woman behaving in a way that's socially daring and stereotypically male looks like a woman who might be immune to those icks, someone around whom you can let your guard down now and again, which can feel more meaningfully attractive than nice hair or hips or whatever.
roystgnr
11d ago
rising food budgets in America specifically are probably much more driven by eating more expensive cuts rather than more meat per se; steak was considered a treat by most people when I was growing up, not something you ate every day.
I'm wondering if @loper's 50% figure is worldwide, since I'm not reading that for the US, but even the US stats I'm finding show a significant increase: over the last 60 years per-capita meat consumption is up by something like 25% if you include seafood or 20% if you don't, but we've shifted a bit away from increasingly-expensive beef and toward increasingly-affordable poultry. Within each category, could we be eating more expensive cuts overall? While it's possible to export or import more or less of different cuts, to a first-order approximation each cow we consume provides one cow's-worth of each cut of steak. It could be that we're trying to eat more expensive cuts, and thereby disproportionately bidding up prices there, but it looks like the opposite has happened: ground beef has become increasingly expensive this century, doubled in inflation-adjusted price over 25 years.
you’re just not going to get working men to cook healthy meals for themselves.
When I was young the answer to this was "steak". Quick and easy to make a good one, gentle learning curve to make a great one, feels manly to cook, pairs with any sides, great for protein+iron.
But although I'm trying to hold back from adding to the "$20 burrito" discourse (with at least two links and a page of ranting), I have to admit that steaks actually are becoming steadily more expensive, even adjusted for wages.
It almost seems like the only men doing this are into bodybuilding
Right? If you can talk yourself into going all-in on the protein power of lean chicken, that's still affordable and also a decent meat with which to practice cooking skills, but making chicken (at least with a stove top or oven; grilling every day can be a hassle) instead of beef you just don't get the same "primally in touch with my caveman ancestors", "top of the food chain over mammals 5 times my size", "nature red in tooth and claw and steak knife" vibes.
Shrimp have become cheaper over my adult lifetime even in nominal dollars, gone from luxury to staple prices in real terms, but that might be even trickier these days? IMO making fancy scampi for a date feels manly, but for young men self-conscious about their masculinity I'd worry that the "I will not eat the bugs" meme may deter them from literal arthropods.
roystgnr
11d ago
I'd agree with all of this, but the one thing that you omitted that raises my hackles with Pangram is that (at least in all the screenshots I've seen) they output a point estimate rather than a range. You've got a test that inherently is going to have at least a few false positives and a false negatives (they claim 1-in-10k, and report third-party tests that suggest around 1-in-40 false negatives and N-was-too-low-to-find-one false positives), but you can't give us a 95% CI instead of just the mode (mean would never hit 100%) of your estimate, to make it easier for us to be wary when we input a hard-to-classify passage? That does not signal respect for avoiding error.
roystgnr
11d ago
I mostly use LLMs (including Gemini!) for math and software. I think by far the biggest third category of use cases for me is "better search engine":
- Finding any existing name(s) for a concept I describe.
- Finding old quotes, jokes, short stories, TV episodes, or historical events, when I only remember a description but not searchable exact words.
- Finding TTRPG rules and DMing suggestions for tricky situations.
- Locating data for particular statistics
- Getting quick but detailed summaries when I'm curious about music/history/physics/sociology questions
- Checking food safety rules, stain removal tips, musical instrument storage requirements, and injury care and pet care guidelines
- Finding online course options for my kids
- Planning trips
- Locating that one canyon my parents took me to 40 years ago, based on a vague description, so I could take my kids
- Finding fun "little" places to stop on the between-major-attraction legs of road trips that might otherwise be slogs
- Finding hiking trails that match my kids' preferences, or in general searching destination options for amenities that you can't find hard-coded filters for
- Learning "gotchas" about travel destinations ahead of time
- Coming up with packing/prep checklists
- Finding IRS rules based on a vague description of a situation
- Quickly finding information on a list of professors based on a page with just photos
Including "much better reverse-image-search":
- Identifying a foster kitten's skin problem by photo, and another cat's stomach troubles by description.
- Identifying some "volunteer" garden plants by photo, and some animals by photo of their droppings.
- Identifying garden pests by photo and figuring out how to safely get rid of them
- Identifying strange things we saw on vacation, from photos
And some miscellaneous:
- Figuring out how to better use my garden peppers
- As a better thesaurus, refining synonym/antonym lists by ruling out or requiring particular connotations
- Generative tasks
- Making funny pictures and videos with my kids
- Coming up with more interesting quiz problem ideas and game ideas for the math team I was coaching
- Distilling long news pages into short summaries of the most important bits
- For "handyman" problems
- Figuring out how to work around problems with a hydroponics pump wearing out, then how to replace it with a more efficient setup when it finally broke
- Figuring out to fix a broken tub/shower diverter valve
- Figuring out how to fix a broken smartwatch
- Troubleshooting a failing car ignition
- Translating photos of foreign-language signs/instructions/machines, and figuring out how to use some of those machines
YMMV, of course, but there are skill issues for everyone here. One ironic skill issue of my own that only occurs to me belatedly: I probably spent 5 minutes skimming logs and typing up this list by hand, but if I instead give Gemini a 3-sentence prompt and do something else for 15 seconds, I get a list that's arguably a little better despite being more abbreviated.
AFAIK there weren't even minor beatings for my father or his five siblings, but they're not necessary; reportedly "you don't get seconds unless you finish before there's nothing left, and no there are no snacks in the house" worked well enough to get everybody to generally eat what they were served, and quickly.
I don't do this myself and can't recommend this as a parenting style unless you're poor enough that food wastage is serious business, though. It doesn't actually get the kid to internalize healthy eating, and it might be a bit psychologically scarring. For the rest of his life my dad was always first in any line for food, and yet his idea of "vegetables" worth selecting voluntarily never expanded past corn and iceberg lettuce. His grandkids vary but even the pickiest isn't nearly that bad.
roystgnr
12d ago
and bikinis weren’t thé norm
¿Por qué tienes ese acento gráfico?
Anyway, anyone who remembers bikinis being normalized isn't middle-aged anymore; that mostly happened in the 1960s. The famous old-fashioned-style song, about even shy girls getting used to bikinis, hit #1 on the charts! Of the subsequent wave of 60s' "beach party movies" only a large minority had bikini in the title but most of the rest at least had bikini-clad characters, usually on the movie posters too. Bikinis weren't the norm in the sense that more than 50% of women wore them, but they still aren't: most women wear one-piece swimsuits still, and most of the rest wear tankinis.
Social media and Hollywood might be accelerating cultural change today, perhaps even relative to the 60s, but nobody's making their multi-billion-dollar datacenter investments because they need extra servers for Instagram clips or renderfarms for Disney movies, they're doing it because they really think better-trained bots can take a lot of jobs and/or immanentize the eschaton. If rural people think otherwise (citation needed?), I guess that's less of a stretch than the water use panic, but it's still kind of missing the point.
roystgnr
12d ago
an open letter [...] the letter [...] it
You'd think these phrases would be grammatically correct, but one mildly interesting bit of this story that your summary underemphasized is that technically they're not; "the letter" here doesn't describe a singular thing but rather a plural. The Good Law Project made a couple stealth edits to "the" letter after publishing and getting hundreds of online signatures with the first version of it. "Both conducted thorough investigations and found no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing." (already with 600+ signatures in that archive snapshot) became "Investigations have found no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing.", and then in addition to removing Professor Uchegbu's name entirely from the principal signatories they've deleted Lord Simon Wooley's affiliation with Cambridge for some reason, despite leaving it for three other Cambridge names there.
roystgnr
12d ago
This is good news for the Republican Party, and the primary reason I supported him.
Ah, yes, the "Pied Piper strategy". Still popular on the other side of the aisle too, arguably with some success, but I'd personally still try to steer clear of a strategy that's got an obvious and already-demonstrated failure mode for its users: sometimes even when you're sure the median voter will hate a guy as much as you do he simply wins anyway.
roystgnr
12d ago
My expectations for activities engaged in by arbitrary people are looser than my expectations for my friends', which are looser than my expectations for my wife's and kids', which are looser than my expectations for things I do together with my kids or my friends, which are looser than my expectations for things I do with my wife. None of these distinctions is a contradiction; they're the proper liberal way to thread the needle between "nobody should care about my preferences" self-abnegation versus "everybody should care about my preferences all the time" totalitarian attitudes.
It's totally reasonable to say that it's fine for a show to be made, either fine or not fine for your SO to want to watch it themselves, and yet not fine for your SO to pick it for the both of you to watch together. My wife likes phở bò with tripe and I like sushi with wasabi, and that's all great, but neither of us would ever order our favorite for the other one too, and if we did make a similar mistake out of ignorance then we'd talk about it, not to say that one of us thinks the other is gross, but to clarify what about the food we think is gross to us (e.g. I still like phở without tripe, she still likes seared tuna without wasabi) so a similar mistake doesn't happen again.
roystgnr
13d ago
Spoiler warnings! I've tried to read Project Lawful a few times now, and although I keep failing (IMHO it would be awesome with a skilled and bloodthirsty editor, but it'll never get one) I make it another 20+% through each time, and I'm still hoping to finish it someday without cracking and asking an LLM to take that editing job first.
roystgnr
13d ago
In the best set of current benchmarks I could quickly find, there are only four with leaderboard results for both Grok and Gemini, but Gemini is leading in 3 out of 4... which is definitely an underestimate; there are no leaderboards with Grok results but no Gemini results, and spot checking shows there's at least some Gemini leaderboard results where Grok was tested but no version made the leaderboard.
Gemini is not as competitive versus GPT (7 out of 17) or Claude (5 out of 16) though.
Subjectively it's pretty nice. I use Gemini to "self-" study advanced math (I'm a PhD, but applied math that leaned heavily into analysis, so my topology is weaker and my abstract algebra is pathetic), and even with its moderate/default setting I catch it in errors only about as often as it catches me, and its errors are probably technicalities more often than mine are. The other day I had it actually make an embarrassing error and double down, the first time it's done either since I started using it, but even then I just had to turn on "advanced reasoning" and retry for it to see its mistake.
"It's not the crime, it's the coverup" would have applied here, no? The sex crimes were too numerous to cover up entirely, and any half-successful attempt at a cover-up would have required a bunch of meddling that would have made "but his partner's dad!" look like a lot more than a conspiracy theory.
Plus don't forget the distinction between "asset" and "agent". Epstein being a Mossad agent seems implausible to me, but any major spy agency to whom he wasn't an asset should be ashamed of that. There's a publicly-known creep who's hosted ex-Presidents and future-Presidents and ex-prime-ministers and princes and billionaires and physics geniuses and so on and so on, and you couldn't even get your hands on copies of a few of his incriminating video discs before they mysteriously disappeared? What are you even getting paid for?
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