Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
No bio...
User ID: 123
The idea that GDP is fake is mostly cope (and I say that as an European), but there is a nugget of truth in it as a lot of things rich societies spend money on really is 'fake' in a way:
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Positional goods. Things that only/mostly benefit you if you have better stuff than everybody else. This includes luxuries like fashion, but also much of higher education, and all ways people price out poor people to e.g. not having to live next to them.
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Waste. The government spending a gazillion dollars on a 4-year environmental pre-study for some infrastructure project without any tangible result absolutely counts as GDP but doesn't really benefit society much.
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Paying for results that other people get for free. If you live in a high-crime area and have to spend a bunch of money on replacing stolen goods, security, insurance, fixing vandalism etc. you are contributing to GDP even though somebody living in a low-crime place get that automatically.
This has probably always happened in all societies to some degree or other, but it's just more prevalent in the richer ones that can afford the slack.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
I have two software projects I'm tinkering on.
The first one is a display library for the Zig programming language. You'd use it to get a platform-agnostic way of rendering graphics, so you can make really tiny (a handful of kilobytes!) graphical applications that compile to every platform (well, at least Windows, Mac, and Linux). For fun and bragging rights I'm making it ridiculously backwards-compatible, so it's e.g. supporting Windows all the way back to Windows 95 (not especially hard, the core Windows API hasn't really changed that much since the 90s).
My second projects is a superoptimizer for the 6502 CPU. It takes CPU/memory states as input, and bruteforces all possible assembly instructions until it finds the shortest/fastest* possible program that satisfies some output for each possible input. The 6502 was the CPU used in the Nintendo NES, so the program would be pretty useful for making extremely optimized routines for homebrew games and such (given that the generated code stays below a few bytes). I'm also writing a blog post in parallel where I explain all the little tricks I'm doing to speed up the search, which I'll probably post to Hacker News or something after I'm done.
* Actually it prints all** programs on the speed/size tradeoff frontier, though usually it's just one.
** Up to a configurable cycle limit, I have not actually solved the halting problem.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
Yeah, the question is if Grok is really using that, and if so how much better it is compared to Dev. It could even plausibly be worse if it's simply a bigger variant of Schnell.
It should be noted that the Grok image generation is just a wrapper calling the open "Flux" model behind the scenes: https://x.com/bfl_ml/status/1823614223622062151
Anything Grok can generate for you, you can generate yourself manually on your own computer (given a sufficiently beefy GPU) with zero guardrails since you can give it any text you want.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
Depends on what you mean by "solve", but the implication was that e.g. UBSan does detect many instances of UB at runtime – but not in the sense of it solving the problem in production as in catching and handling it, but solving the problem of easily detecting it during debugging and testing since you get graceful crashes instead of the program potentially loading garbage and continuing.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
3mo ago
Petty programming nitpicks that don't matter, but still:
in C you can't do this because array's do not contain their own length
Arrays do (in compile-time, so if you have the type sizeof will return the actual size), it's just that they decay to pointers if you do anything with them like pass it to a function.
literally would have instant crashed.
Accessing data outside of an array is undefined behaviour and often won't crash if it's just 1 access outside of the end, it'll just fetch garbage instead. You'd have to build the program with an "undefined behavior sanitizer" that detects stuff like that, but I don't know if that's compatible with running in the windows kernel.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
4mo ago
All of this Citizens United stuff kinda rests on the assumption that money in politics actually has much of an effect at all.
From what I've read it doesn't really change the outcomes anyway; e.g. Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) conducted this study where he controlled for the fact that politicians who are more likely to win get more donations in the first place, and concluded that extra campaign spending has an extremely small impact on election outcomes.
Neat.
Apparently the least known word is stotinka, the cent-analogue for the lev (the currency of Bulgaria). The first one I knew was the tenth least known, witenagemot. Helps to have played Crusader Kings I guess.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
4mo ago
Presumably media has policies in place for their low-level employees to only print the exact verifiable events (erring on cautiousness) when there's an important breaking story, and then updating later when all the decision makers have rushed in place. Companies are always gonna be a little slower than individual people that can basically watch events live when it comes to that.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
4mo ago
The problem with genes that increase sociopathy is that if you've got one, your relatives more likely has it too. If you have a gene that causes you to steal resources from your sibling in a significantly negative-sum way, then that gene will on average reduce your own fitness too.
In any case this would only apply if children with more resources go on to have more children than those with less resources. That was probably true back when America was colonized, but not so much today.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
4mo ago
Just the general twitter algorithm being crappy I'd guess. I recently made the mistake of liking/interacting with a math puzzle tweet, and now I get tons of these retarded "99% can't solve this: 100/5(4-2)" engagement bait questions.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
4mo ago
Yeah, on Twitter it's necessary to cut down on the garbage.
The internet isn't like real life where disowning a person means you lose all benefits you'd get from associating with them. Blocking a below-average quality user is simply a straightforward improvement when it gets replaced by somebody of average quality from the endless pool.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
4mo ago
I have never really used a mac, but the reason it and my OS of choice (Linux) is better for me than Microsoft is probably value-alignment.
If you go and buy a chocolate bar, you can expect it to taste good. This is because the company that makes the chocolate is interested in making money, and must satisfy the preferences of their customers for them to keep buying it. Thus the design of the chocolate is two steps removed from being aligned with you: to the degree that your tastes align with the tastes of the average customer, and the degree that the amount the average customer spends aligns with the taste of the chocolate. These steps are likely pretty small – your tastes probably don't differ massively from the general public, and buying candy is a pretty straightforward transaction with lots of competition.
For software (and especially massive ones like operating systems), the situation is entirely different. The consumers are diverse, with some being interested in video games, some in office work, some in servers, and so on. You are probably not very close to the center here; Microsoft makes most of its money from hosting and cloud services, not OS sales. The second step is really bad as well; operating system sales suffer from practices like vendor lock-in, OEM-preinstallations, sunk costs, piracy, and painful friction from switching systems. This results in a system that doesn't do what you want, because "what you want" is pretty different from the incentives that Microsoft has.
Apple makes most of its money from selling actual products where the quality is strongly connected to the amount they sell. Moreover, they are targeted at consumers and professionals like you!
Linux is even more extreme. The modal user is a meganerd like myself, and the second step doesn't even exist – a whole lot of the development is done by people solving their own problems, which is by definition perfectly aligned with their needs. This results in a ecosystem that can compete in quality for their users even if there is significantly less resources involved than the other two.
(You can incidentally do the same analysis for any other domain. If your tastes don't strongly align with the general public and the general public buys whatever the company puts out, then it's a pretty safe bet that the product will be terrible.)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
5mo ago
This is called acquiescence bias.
From a cursory googling I found this study comparing a few variables with how much acquiescence bias people from 20 European countries have. Age didn't affect the result much, but "respondents with a low degree of conservatism and with a lower level of educational attainment exhibited a higher tendency toward acquiescent responding"*.
* Though I am a little confused here - the table above that quote in the study has "education" negatively correlated with acquiescent responding, but "conservatism" positive. Was there an error here or am I not reading something correctly...?
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
5mo ago
The office where I work has installed new a new Bluetooth access system, and it's sufficiently annoying to make me reevaluate The Industrial Society and Its Future.
Before, you had a little NFC tag you'd beep at the door, and it opened pretty much instantly. Now I have to:
- Get my phone out
- Unlock the phone
- Go into settings, enable Bluetooth
- Start the door app, wait for it to load
- Wait for it to slowly scan for nearby doors
- Scroll through the list of doors until I find the one I'm standing in front of (there are no signs, you need to memorize all the door names. This is especially annoying for the lab doors that people felt it was funny to label as emojis)
- Press it
- Wait for the app to tell the door to unlock (this takes a while)
- Exit the app
- Go into settings, disable Bluetooth
- Enter (though by this point somebody on the other side will generally have noticed and taken pity on you by opening the door manually)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
6mo ago
Presumably if one could have reported the experience without naming the perpetrator (or making it obvious who it was), but chose not to.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
6mo ago
Regarding the evidence standards in the first point - how is this not constantly abused by police?
If a policeman commits a crime when looking for evidence he'll potentially be charged with misconduct (in addition to whatever else he did, like battery or burglary). A particularly egregious case from the top of my head was this one where the policeman was later convicted, fined, and fired.
the wholesale trade of fundamental liberty.
I think the idea here is that if the government ignores the constitution, then any law you have to address it can just be ignored as well and it's up to the citizens to fix it by whatever means are necessary. The important thing here is if this actually works, or in practice results in constant low-level constitutional violations that people ignore; personally I don't think so. I helps a bit that the Swedish constitution isn't as hairy as the American one – the exception being freedom of expression where boundaries can be unclear / debated, which is indeed the parts that do have legal systems in place to decide that.
(Another fun legal thing I forgot to mention is that the king (or regent) is immune from prosecution. This question comes up from time to time as the king pretty frequently gets caught speeding and potentially drunk driving, but the police always has to just let him go.)
Odd stuff I find interesting in the Swedish legal system:
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We have something called "free sifting of evidence". This means courts can use evidence no matter how it was gathered; even if the police themselves commit crimes or had no reasonable suspicion whatsoever this is a separate matter and won't get the evidence "thrown out" or the like.
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The Swedish "jury" (in district courts) consists of three lay judges appointed by the political parties (generally old people with nothing better to do). They can acquit the accused person if two of them disagree with the real judge, and convict if all three disagree. This almost never happens, so there's a longstanding debate to get rid of the entire system. It mostly results in somewhat regular scandals where the jury acquits people for really flimsy reasons when two of them happen to be ideologues or confused oddballs that never should have been appointed in the first place.
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Defamation cases do not take the truth into account. It is e.g. illegal to write that somebody is a murderer if you're doing it to damage his reputation; that he actually happens to be recently convicted of first-degree murder is irrelevant. This absolutely gets weaponized by both the left and right; there's organizations on both sides of the culture war (e.g. "Näthatsgranskaren", "Förtalsombudsmannen"...) that specialize in more or less mass-reporting their enemies to the police when they see potentially "defamatory" stuff on the internet. It also had a pretty significant chilling effect around the time of the #metoo stuff, as women who wrote online about their experiences were slapped with significant fines if the person they wrote about was identifiable, regardless of the truth of the accusation.
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Except for cases concerning freedom of expression, the government violating the constitution is not actually a crime and there is no official mechanism like having the supreme court address violations. The citizens are simply supposed to punish the government in the next general election.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
7mo ago
Much better than I anticipated!
I've figured that Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" could work as a Sabaton song, and it's indeed not bad.
(Also in Motown form, or 80's synth)
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
7mo ago
How about Cargoes, by John Masefield?
It has, I think, two interpretations. The first one is fairly boring – taking it "seriously" as a romantic look back at history, where he is describing two past ages filled with fanciful wonders and contrasting it with the dreary modern world
The Straussian reading is IMO vastly superior. Take the first verse, describing a ship in antiquity filled with "ivory, and apes and peacocks, sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine". It's all luxury goods; pure consumption, skimming from the top without improving anything in the long run. It represents a society unwilling (or worse, unable) to reinvest its surplus wealth into growth, to actually improve itself, instead opting to spend it on awful signalling games among the elites that will lead nowhere.
The second verse is similar, but about a cargo of gemstones during the ~17th century. The same critique applies to it – it's all still signalling, with no real productivity involved.
When we get to the third verse about the modern world there is an abrupt change in mood, now ostensibly negative. What are the items the ship is carrying however? "Tyne coal, road-rails, pig-lead, firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays". No more useless bullshit, this is goods from a society that is actually getting its shit together. It symbolizes reinvestment, growth, and actual strength, the kind of strength that will save billions from crippling poverty, eliminate famine, cure diseases plaguing humanity for millennia and bring education to everyone.
The third verse is so overwhelmingly good that it completely destroys the veneer of negative sentiment that it's described with. Consider if the poem instead was about people and not societies: The first describing an extremely rich man hosting an opulent party, and the third about a poor boy studying and working hard to improve his life. Wouldn't it then be completely obvious who you were supposed to think was better, even if the boy was described as dirty and hungry?
What's more is that the Industrial Revolution was real. How many boats in antiquity actually carried things like "apes and peacocks"? It's certainly not representative, and the places mentioned doesn't even make sense (Nineveh wasn't coastal, a Quinquereme is Hellenistic and from the wrong period, and even so you're going to have a hard time rowing it from Iraq to Palestine!). The second verse is more "real" in that there really were treasure galleons, but again not very representative. If you want an actual cargo you'd have to describe tobacco, sugar, or, you know, slaves.
In contrast, in the third verse there really were tons of ships carrying coal and road-rail! Not only is it enormously better, it actually happened.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
9mo ago
The "moral" arc of history bends toward whatever options technology provides.
The obvious extension to this is that vegetarianism/veganism will become much more popular if or when tasty and cheap cultured meat becomes available. It's the only (at least somewhat) likely path to "vegan cultural victory" I can see, and if they were strategic they'd invest as much money and clout as possible to make it happen.
Aransentin
p ≥ 0.05 zombie
10mo ago
Better than never having existed at all, surely! There's also similar things like British boarding schools that we already accept, so it doesn't seem too beyond the pale?
A lot of this is surely just random accidents that gets blamed on Israel right now due to paranoia.
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