MollieTheMare
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User ID: 875
MollieTheMare
1d ago
If you can hold off, the Festool Domino patent ends in June 2026. I'm hoping to buy a cheaper decent quality knockoff if Makita releases one for their LTX line then.
It's not as classy as traditional mortise and tenon, but stronger than biscuits/pocket screws and less finicky than dowels.
MollieTheMare
2d ago
It was most probably the UCI requirement that did it. My recollection is there is (was?) a slight areo, cooling, and obvious weight, penalty. At least, excepting TT specific helmets on the areo front.
I'd like to think the science has gotten better there.
The science has developed quite a bit over the last decade, I think because the NFL poured money into helmet research to show they they were doing something about CTE. There's now coverage for a huge variety of helmet types, including most cycling disciplines. If you were ever unfortunate enough to actually need protection from a helmet, I assume anthing rated by any reputable agency would be better than nothing. The Virginia Tech lab seems to publish the most about the methodology and have an extremely extensive testing protocol though.
A 9 AM sunrise is only true if you define most of America as Seattle, which would have a 8:55 AM Sunrise on the solstice. For an arbitrary selection of Northernish American cities I get:
| City | Sunrise ST | Sunrise DST | Sunset ST | Sunset DST | Solar noon ST | Day length |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| San Francisco | 7:21 AM | 8:21 AM | 4:54 PM | 5:54 PM | 12:08 PM | 9:33 |
| Seattle | 7:55 AM | 8:55 AM | 4:20 PM | 5:20 PM | 12:07 PM | 8:25 |
| Chicago | 7:14 AM | 8:14 AM | 4:22 PM | 5:22 PM | 11:48 AM | 9:08 |
| Boston | 7:10 AM | 8:10 AM | 4:14 PM | 5:14 PM | 11:43 AM | 9:05 |
On the solstice, DST referring to the permanent summer time scenario, ST referring to winter time.
Insisting on solar noon being 12:00:00 is a bit of an anachronism. If you were a farmer back in the day you would tell time by a rooster and the sun, and were used to getting up before the sun in the winter. You also had limited artificial light and heating, and did not have to commute by car for work and kids school. The modern school and work schedule is set by some combination of tradition time immemorial, school effectively being day care, traffic congestion spreading, and position in time zone.
A teenager with after school activities will be waking up before the sun and coming home in the dark regardless. In the permanent summer time permutation you might have the chance of getting some sun after volleyball practice or whatever. From the parents perspective you're probably the first person your teenager sees in the morning, and they take their rage from being cranky waking up before the sun out on you. They are probably slightly less cranky latter in the winter when the sun rises slightly earlier in the standard time scenario. A productive adult, with adult responsibilities, and a normal scheduled is almost certainly waking up before the sun in all these cases. If you live at least as far south as San Francisco you might have some chance of at least catching twilight (the diffuse sky radiation kind though no hate if the vampire fantasy is your thing) on your way home in a permanent DST scenario.
Somehow people in the Alaska Time Zone and China Standard Time make do with extreme variation in solar noon. I suspect because once solar noon is sufficiently decoupled from clock time, work places and schools are finally forced to set hours appropriate for the location rather than relying on conventional hours from before modern lighting.
Both permanent DST and ST suck in the winter, but not particularly because of the timing of solar noon. Switching also sucks, and is where a decent amount of the traffic and health impacts come from.
The fundamental "problem" is that day length in winter is roughly the length of the work/school day, so you don't have any extra daylight to "save" for waking, free time, and commuting. Thus OP suggesting creating more daylight with giant mirrors. I personally hope most of the problem is solved by the increasing adoption of high quality LED lighting and dirt cheap microcontrollers, allowing granular spatial and temporal control over peoples lighting environments.
MollieTheMare
3d ago
I do feel extremely bad we leave all the web admin stuff to Zorba.
Would also be willing to contribute one day's work, but wouldn't be able to contribute a dedicated block until after the new year. Unfortunately, I don't do any web/front-end stuff, so would have a decent amount of on-boarding work to get up to speed alone. Further complicated by probably not wanting my public github associated with my notionally pseudonymous motte account.
The real problem though, I suspect, is that we're being effectively periodically DoSed. Either accidentally by various AI scraping tools (not just the one guy). Or intentionally because someone somewhere believes we allow people to say naughty things. The conventional way to deal with this is to pay Cloudflare or Radware to filter the traffic, but then The Motte would be as beholden to Cloudflare as we were to reddit. I'm not aware of a quick fix that bypasses the third-party dependency problem, hopefully someone more familiar with web stuff has an idea though.
MollieTheMare
3d ago
The point of bonds is that over the very long run they are not full correlated with equities, and have some positive risk prima above the risk-free rate. This means one can construct a Markowitz hyperbola with a combination of equities and bonds, and you can then construct a tangency portfolio that is superior to equities alone for any given tolerance for variance.
This is all, however, extremely theoretical and not useful to someone who jut wants to get started. Doing anything reasonable suggested here is better than holding cash. VTI, VT, or VOO, 60/40 to 100/0. (All of this not investing advice, on average over the last 50-150 years, past performance is not necessarily predictive of future performance, etc, etc.)
Or if you want the absolute simplest thing you could go for the index card advice and go for the single fund Vanguard Target Retirement 20XX Fund, and they'll do the thinking and rebalancing for you for a 0.08% annual fee. It wouldn't have been the best ex post performer over the last 10 years, but someone who followed the advice would have done fine and much better than cash. I don't know if it will be the best over the next 10 years, but I would be highly suspicious of anyone who says they know better for sure ex anti.
MollieTheMare
3d ago
I'm pretty sure that indiscriminate general shading of the planet would substantially disrupt crop production as well as wild flora. For global warming geoengineering purposes you want to increase albedo in the IR range, but retain the spectrum primarily involved in photosynthesis.
If you are only using the mirrors to light your cities, it also seems highly pointless. The biggest direct cost with going to work or school with limited daylight is traffic crashes. If you are only interested in lighting limited areas, we already have the ability to do that it's called a lamp. Using fully shaded and cutoff lensed high-mast lighting limits light pollution and you can install them over the highways leading into the city. If you've ever commuted into a city by car it should be clear the areas where crashes occur due to insufficient lighting are on the unlit highways running in, not the relatively well lit city core.
Using a giant mirror to illuminate an area would also probably not produce the pleasant light people associate with a mild partly sunny day. It would practically be more probably like the light from a full moon, which will not fix the sleep problems and productivity losses associated with short winter days. For people with seasonal affective disorder you need something way stronger either something like a Lumenator or moving closer to the equator. Blasting a whole city with noon-levels of irradiance so a bit of light can trickle in through some peoples windows seems way less efficient than just having people who need it replace their old lights bulbs with corn bulbs.
MollieTheMare
4d ago
Wouldn't actually extending the day with a giant space mirror significantly mess up the climate, plants, and animal behavior?
Most of the cost in DST is in switching twice a year. I personally prefer summer time, but would be happy if we just picked one.
Most of the rest of the cost is schools and work places picking opening hours inappropriate for the location, or poor indoor lighting. Fixing your indoor lighting and buying a sunrise alarm or just a 'smart' bulb if you are cheap, seems way easier than spending your days advocating for space mirrors.
MollieTheMare
6d ago
in the newer series they've reintroduced homosexuality
What do you consider new Trek?
The Outcast with an "ambiguous" kiss, Rejoined with a "symbiote confusion" lesbian kiss, and The Emperor's New Cloak with a "dark mirror universe" lesbian kiss are all prime time line. More than, about, and just less than 30 years ago respectively at this point.
I haven't seen, and do not consider to be head cannon, anything after Voyager. I suppose the more recent series have explicit homosexual characters, where it's a recurring part of their character rather than incidental to an episode theme?
In TNG era they were relatively slow with their introduction, with only moderate controversy following each showing. It probably doesn't hurt that Terry Farrell as Jadzia Dax is pretty easy on the eyes.
Edit: Sadly while the post rendered correctly in the preview, it looks like some of the tags do get stripped when they get published in final form. I guess because arbitrary xml has some theoretical vulnerabilities. I guess we'll have to live without math support for a while longer.
The Motte has (limited) math support!
Inspired by the recent discussion of innumeracy, controversies caused by the refusal to specify problems symbolically, as well as past lamentations about the lack of math support I endeavored to research the simplest way to add MathJax to the codebase for limited TeX support. During my journey I discover that W3C has apparently been working on web native math in the form of MathML since 1998. It has varying implementation completeness for its 2½ components. There is semantic MathML, Presentation MathML, and MathML Core. The good news is The Motte appears to freely pass along the raw MathML XML tags, the bad news is implementation appears to then depend on the users browser. Fortunately, it seems like at least Core is implemented in most modern browsers. I have tested the latest Firefox for Windows and Android, as well as Chrome for Windows and Android.
The raw code is a bit of a mess. To render:
x=−b±b2−4ac2a
The LaTeX:
x=\frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^{2}-4ac}}{2a}
becomes:
<math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mrow><mi>x</mi><mo>=</mo><mfrac><mrow><mo>−</mo><mi>b</mi><mo>±</mo><msqrt><mrow><msup><mi>b</mi><mn>2</mn></msup><mo>−</mo><mn>4</mn><mi>a</mi><mi>c</mi></mrow></msqrt></mrow><mrow><mn>2</mn><mi>a</mi></mrow></mfrac></mrow></math>
Fortunately there is a relatively easy workaround. There are a number of applications that support translation, including online. Allowing you to construct decently complex equations. e.g.:
L=∫0∞Bν(T)cos(θ)dν=2π515k4T4c2h3cos(θ)π=σT4cos(θ)π
The rendering is still not perfect, but much better than plain text.
@ZorbaTHut thanks for all the hard work you do keeping the site running. DM me and I'll send you a patch if you want a note for the 'Formatting help' page, and that's somehow easier than just adding it the next time you're working on the code base.
I think it's more or less coherent, but the more elegant framing is already established by the Groisman paper. It is a bit excessively long for what's its trying to say though. The TLDR is:
There are two different probability spaces being discussed in the canonical problem. People implicitly switch between them mid-argument. Once you keep them separate, there is no paradox.
I'm pretty sure @ControlsFreak is just making the two probability spaces explicit by assigning them to Alice and Bob, rather than both to Beauty.
edit: I guess the culture war angle is twofold. One is epistemic, what does it mean to know or have information. Two, Grokipedia said the solutions to the problem are controversial. This was disputed as incorrect since the truth is obvious, but the subsequent dispute proves by example it is in fact controversial. Thus showing Grokipedia in fact spewing hard truths the woke left don't want you to know (mostly /s).
MollieTheMare
7d ago
UCSD has the crazy system where the gen-ed math requirements are set by the college not the university. So if you are in sixth college in a non-STEM major you can get away with one "Structured Reasoning" course like Intro to Philosophy, and one "Exploring Data" course like Stats for Psychology, and no actual math. It looks like if you are in Revelle college you are required to take Calc I/II.
Interestingly, all the undergrads do have a climate change gen-ed. How they are supposed to understand any climate modeling without knowledge of PDEs is a bit of mystery to me.
IMO if your job does not require the level of competency required to pass Calc I, your job should not require a bachelors degree.
A bachelor's degree is supposed to an academic laurel, and mathematical reasoning is a key pillar of the academy:
Let no one ignorant of geometry enter
MollieTheMare
12d ago
It is decently advanced.
That being said, a 2X body weight squat is a pretty achievable strength standard for most men. Very roughly, about 50% of a 1RM is a weight you can do indefinitely. It is supposed to be a challenge though. It's also about half of the 405x50 mark set by Tom Platz. So if the left tail of the log normal stops at 0, and the right tail is Tom Platz, halfway in-between doesn't seem that far out there for the average person to shoot for as a benchmark.
MollieTheMare
14d ago
That's part of the appeal.
The first time you can't do it you have to face down the question of: "Have I just let my self go, am I just not trying hard enough, or am in that era of appreciable physical decline."
If it's because you've let yourself go it gives you the opportunity to correct with no more than a years lag.
I also assume your ability to grind through progressively more unpleasant tasks grows with experiencing life's shit, so you'll be able to try hard enough?
Having a benchmark to know when you need to acknowledge when you are in decline is the real value though. Not that the day you can't do it is the end, but maybe that day is a sign that you should figure out what to do for when the decline gets serious. How many people do you see who should have retired before their job destroyed their body. Or should have long ago given up driving and are now a hazard on the road. Or had plenty of opportunity to make a living will but instead are rotting in agony leaving their family in an impossible position.
MollieTheMare
14d ago
Uhh, sorry if you've posted more extensively about your training history in the past and I didn't remember it. The only themotte fitness I readily recall is that 5hour is training for a century ride, jdizzler sometimes posts about veganism and general endurance training (mostly running I think), and Skookum did not actually attempt The Hock (though in my head canon he's still out there climbing the glacier).
Squats for (BW + BW load) x age
is decently advanced. Although I did say
Whatever scheme you want.
I apologize if I completely misunderstand and you are 6'7" and yours knees are shot from playing O-line in the NFL. Based only on the implication that you do not lift weights regularly and weigh over 300 lbs, I would for sure suggest some easier scaling. If you are looking for a serious suggestion for a physical birthday activity for a total novice at >300# body weight <40 Years old, I would maybe suggest no external load and breaking it up into 5-10 sets of body weight squats.
I don't think some sort of physical challenge for your birthday is all that bad of an idea or even that unusual. For example @thejdizzler:
running my age in miles on my birthday
It's a way of regularly measuring where you're at. More importantly, it's a physically manifestation of facing the continuing but ultimately futile battle against entropy that makes up life.
@orthoxerox did already summarize the broader point I was gesturing to though:
lift heavy stone make sad head voice quiet
It's not at all unusual for people to find that lifting (and other exercise, jdizzler making the rest of us look bad casually running 28 miles) can have a positive impact on physical and mental health.
MollieTheMare
15d ago
Isn't using physical pain as a distraction from emotional pain the idea behind cutting, and other forms of self-harm?
Yes. The difference is that the scars from cutting leave you externally disfigured, while the scars from lifting leave you swole.
MollieTheMare
15d ago
I'm not sure this will actually help your situation, but I'm still going to suggest birthday squats. Whatever scheme you want. The formulation I think of is (BW + BW load) for one giant set of (age) reps. So a 185 lbs 40 year old would squat 185 lbs of external load for 40 reps. Pause at any point, but don't rack the bar until you've finished the set (or collapse). It seems unlikely you will be worried about future suffering after finishing, with any luck you'll be in so much pain you won't have any spare capacity to worry about anything else.
MollieTheMare
16d ago
Not OP, but depending on what you are doing and your config you could almost certainly run glm-4.5-air or openai/gpt-oss-120b, which are roughly 100B class models.
A name brand box with a AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 and 128GB of unified LPDDR5 RAM would probably be just over that now, but you can probably find a no-name box on sale for around $1.5K from time to time. Performance would obviously be worse than duel RTX 4000 Adas or something, but a lot cheaper.
The use case I'm imagining is like a background task doing a code review or auditing a highly sensitive code base to check for potential vulnerabilities, intentional or accidental. I could also imagine using something like that to slowly scrub through heath, financial, or other sensitive files. Either for auditing purposes or converting to structured data.
It would probably be a bit slow, but for anyone who has to work in an air-gaped environment it seems like it would actually be supper useful. It saves you having to send a query to the public internet the majority of times you have to look things up. Just replacing google searching, or (bleh) having to look something up in a paper book. It doesn't take that many uses from an engineer making 200k a year saving a few minutes to make it ROI positive for a business. Even just the time it takes to transcribe something you looked up from the internet facing machine to your offline machine. I suppose it depends on how many people are in the working group whether it would be more efficient to have some beefier centrally hosted machine on the intranet.
Even if it doesn't have to be air-gaped, I imagine if you have like 100+ employees dropping like $20k might still be cheaper over like 1-year than paying for an API provider. Especially if there are a bunch of compliance problems with sending things off site.
MollieTheMare
17d ago
When William Shockley invented the first transistor, he probably didn’t have the modern computer in mind.
As an aside it's a bit inaccurate, or at least incomplete to say Shockley invented the first transistor. Probably more accurate to say "contributed to the invention of" or "developed the bipolar junction transistor."
From the 1956 Nobel citation:
In 1947 John Bardeen and Walter Brattain produced a semiconductor amplifier, which was further developed by William Shockley. The component was named a “transistor”.
Shockley's main contribution to the first transistor was suggesting using field-effect to control a junction, but this had already been proposed by Julius Lilienfeld. He probably does deserve much of the credit for the bipolar junction transistor.
This does emphasis the point that a given invention is confluence of a variety of circumstances such that, as you say:
some fail and some succeed
It is quite a testament to Bell Labs that they not only were able to recruit such a large stable of geniuses, but were able to harness that power in a synthesis of cooperation and competition. It can't have been easy to manage so many (justifiably) huge egos.
MollieTheMare
18d ago
I remember when this paper came out.
There are important linguistic aspects of learning a programing language, duh it's called a language.
It's also completely stupid they they observed fluid reasoning to be the most important factor, then concluded the emphasis on advanced mathematics in introductory computer science is unjustified. Static analysis, like the f(x)=O(g(x)) kind, is related to fluid reasoning much more than arithmetic skills. In sufficiently advanced mathematics you see essentially no numerals or arithmetic. You even see extensive prose in addition to notation for sufficiently advanced mathematics:
Take advantage of the English language - Terence Tao
In classical programing you do the analysis the computer does the arithmetic.
MollieTheMare
21d ago
Re cycling clothing vs athleisure clothes:
more or less indefensible distinction
There are three major factors at play that make areo cycling wear look goofy while competitive exercising clothing makes you look hawt.
- The cut of areo clothing is for when you are in an areo tuck. When you are just standing around you end up with random folds, creases, and bridged areas that look frumpy. While the UCI has slightly cracked down on the flying squirrel sleeve to torso transition, areo clothes are cut so the panels are in the most areo shape first, for displaying sponsorship second, and comfort third. Modern leggings for women and ranger panties for men are cut and patterned to first to make your butt look good and for freedom of movement second.
- The chamois makes it look like you are wearing a diaper. It's 100% worth it from a comfort perspective, but the chamois disrupts the drape of the fabric front and back.
- Your average pro-level cyclist has tiny stick arms. If you have a jacked enough upper body to make a shirt look good you'll have to size up in order to fit your arms through an off the rack areo jersey. This will make it not-areo and leave loose fabric flapping around.
Re. calculator:
I think I was confusing that calculator, this calculator, and plugging in various Cd⋅A from random wind tunnel reports I'd seen. But yeah, I think it's generally in the right direction. Anything that makes you more aero without sacrificing comfort, or reduces rolling resistance, is free speed, and it's not even necessarily negligible speed.
Re. cadence:
I'll have to take a look at the paper when I can get access, since it's paywalled. Based on the abstract I think we're, more or less, on the same page. It looks like their average OPR and FCPR for trained cyclist was well within my 70-110 RPM range I quoted. @FiveHourMarathon was talking about 60 RPM, which seems a bit on the low side, but I assume it will creep up into the 70 with more experience. From there I suspect it depends mostly on individual physiology and ride type. Since the paper was from 2006 I assume that short cranks hadn't been "discovered" yet. My intuition is that higher RPM is more efficient the shorter the cranks, but this adaptation would occur without any explicit cuing.
Re. Single leg:
I see they are talking about much higher intensity than I was. My logic for warming up with single leg drills was:
- Your cardiovascular system isn't primed yet, but you're limited by using a single leg for total power output so there is some time efficiency in using that time to do the drills.
- Part of the point of warming up is for more efficient motor unit recruitment. If (the sensation of) pedaling circles is more efficient there should be some synergy between priming the motor unit recruitment and training the specific pastern.
Additionally, it's easiest to do the drills when using a stationary bike or turbo trainer, since you don't have to worry about traffic or balance. Single leg stuff introduces some novelty which might slightly combat the extreme boredom from training indoors. Also, depending on configuration, the inability to freewheel will highlight dead spots in the pedal stroke. The gain is probably too marginal to be worth the expense or hassle of counterweighted or split cranks for us mere mortals. On the other hand, there isn't a whole lot of cost to warming up on the trainer with single leg drills. I think it's unlikely it's harmful, and there might be some small marginal benefit.
MollieTheMare
22d ago
There is some natural variation, and it's sometimes argued that it's not clear if it's a selection effect that efficient cyclist ride with a higher cadence or if a higher cadence is just more efficient.
Controlling for constant power, the subjective feeling and from experience, <70 RPM will toast your legs in no time. Presumably from greater muscle tearing from greater muscular tension, lower lactate clearance, less oxygen and glucose uptake since the venous system is passive, etc. But just like when someone tells you the sky is blue because of Rayleigh scattering, the question is then why isn't the sky ultraviolet. Why is >110 RPM inefficient if turning over the pedals faster is so much better? For cadence, I suspect this is because you become less smooth if you exceed the speed at which you can maintain neuromuscular control.
In fact, your body more or less just does this regulation for you. As with many things: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. All of this to say cadence will naturally improve as you gain neurological coordination from practice. I haven't kept up with the latest meta, but circa mid 2010s, most sports scientist thought there was limited or no evidence for the effectiveness of pedaling drills while most professional coaches and elite level cyclits thought there was value in doing them. Two that come to mined:
- If you are doing all out intervals, indoors or otherwise, try to fully spin out each gear before shifting up. This is bad practice in a race because someone could get a jump on you while spun out, but might help with learning to turn the pedals over quickly while producing decent force.
- Single leg pedaling, possibly while warming up or cooling down, obviously while using clip-less peddles. I think the sports science people are firmly in the camp that most of the work (the F⋅s kind) is done on the down stroke, most concluding that practicing pedaling circles is thus pointless. I know at least one Olympic medalist who prescribes single leg drills though, and most experienced cyclists describe losing coordination and thus power as feeling like pedaling squares. My take is single leg drills train the coordination of pedaling circles. This feels smoother, you can thus turn over the pedals faster, so at a constant force level you are making more power.
Assuming the drive train is in at all decent shape, don't under estimate areo and rolling resistance. Even at modest speeds it can really add up. I can't readily find it, but there used to be a calculator where you could put in various different bike configurations. My rough recollection is that even at 100 W, going from arms extended, relaxed cut jersey, & cheap clinchers to sphynx like tuck, fitted jersey, and tubulars was like 11 → 15 mph for an average sized cyclist. Fortunately, with modern tiers tubeless and high quality clinchers are almost as efficient as tubulars were back in the day. There's no way not to look goofy in form fitting cycling clothing though.
MollieTheMare
23d ago
The point of Huel is it's complete nutrition that's convenient, in the sense you don't have to think about the micros and phytochemicals, there's various options for macros, it's easy to prepare, and has minimal cleanup.
Less easy to prepare and more cleanup for the powdered version vs RTD but has the advantage of very long shelf life and compact storage. The essentials line is (I think) £26.70 per 22x400 kcal servings in the UK, or 330 kcal/£. It's not meant to be the cheapest per-calorie though. Assuming you are in pure survival mode, you can probably get away with three scoop (600 kcal) servings twice a day, supplemented with one meal of rice and beans or rice and lentils to make up the calories. In the US they have retort package rice and retort Dal, not nearly as cheap as making from scratch, but something even a student could afford.
Tamago kake gohan with furikake on top was an old standby of cheap, taste, pretty shelf stable ingredients of mine. Even made with microwave rice, it was pretty cheap and still decent tasting. But it's not clear to me if eggs can be found cheaply in the UK right now, or if they were if they would be safe to be eaten very lightly cooked.
I assumed that the "private" free tier of most commercial models do not actually allow you keep the full thread in the context, and that the performance for summarizing a long and meandering thread would be degraded if it was not keeping the whole thing in context. I don't recall exactly, but I think the thread was like 25k tokens. It's possible the free online models have expanded to that allowed context size by now, I haven't done a comprehensive survey. If not the best case is they reject the prompt because it's too large. The more tricky case is the model "forgets" important parts of the thread because it falls out of context.
I didn't want to spend money (okay I spent like $0.03 of electricity) or have real name accounts associated with something quite so depraved as researching "Are traps are gay?" I suppose I could make a burner somewhere, but seemed like more work. If it was an important thing I simultaneously really didn't want to pipe to an API endpoint I have no control over I would have used a better model. I might have managed qwen3-30b-a3b-thinking-2507 or openai/gpt-oss-120b (probably good enough?), but that combination is so rare I'm too cheap to buy good enough hardware to be able to run that kind of thing in a decent time span. I also thought that excepting Grok, the main commercial models might be too nerfed to tell you if traps are gay. In retrospect I should have chosen a spicier local model for the goal of maximum luz.
So yes, the paid commercial models are likely to produce a better summary than I provided. I don't have 100% confidence that they are not going to associate even private chat queries with my real identity when they decide who to mark for liquifaction though.
MollieTheMare
26d ago
I suppose just dumping some AI slop in response would be frowned upon.
I'm actually more interested in how people would handle AI summarizing a thread this size. What models do people prefer for that kind of task? What hosts do people use to run those models. For general RAG what types of techniques have people had good success with?
My attempt was to run locally, since I don't want to waste tokens on such a ... singular task. In order to summarize the whole thread I used 'inject-full-content' rather than a chunking RAG to try to get a complete summary of the thread. The content I injected was a PDF of the fully expanded thread I printed. Due to too weak hardware for such a large context simultaneous with a decent model and finite time I ran qwen3-4b-thinking-2507 via llama.cpp v1.53.1. The only prompt was:
Summarize the attached thread.
A notable excerpt from the "thinking" (emphasis mine)
Some discussion about transgender identity and related topics (which seems to be a side conversation that got somewhat out of hand)
The acctual summary was not as exciting as you would hope. As an alternative I did a chunked RAG and asked:
Are traps gay? Answer with "yes" or "no."
Based on the thread, the AI answer is apparently "no." There you have it definitive proof.
Actual response to the summary request below:
Summary of the Quantumfreakonomics Thread on Political Money
This thread discusses a post by Quantumfreakonomics about the evolution of political money in the United States since the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision. The key discussion points include:
Main Argument
Quantumfreakonomics argues that despite the widespread expectation that Citizens United would create a "wild west of corruption" in politics, the predicted corruption didn't materialize. Instead, political money has evolved more slowly and strategically.
Key Discussion Points
-
Why the predicted corruption didn't happen: The thread explores the concept of "cultural inertia and shame" as barriers to political money. Big corporations like Exxon didn't immediately engage in large-scale political spending because they operated with constraints against appearing "corrupt" or "cartoonishly evil."
-
AIPAC as a successful model: A significant portion of the discussion focuses on why AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) has been so effective at political influence without spending massive amounts of money. Commenters debate why AIPAC's strategy works when other industries (tobacco, pharma, oil) haven't replicated this success.
-
Different political money strategies: The thread examines various approaches:
- Tech billionaires' strategies (like Musk's Twitter acquisition)
- The Koch brothers' libertarian think tanks
- Targeted political pressure on specific constituencies
- The role of "astroturfing" (creating fake grassroots movements)
-
Economic analysis: Some commenters discuss the ROI (return on investment) of political influence, debating whether the market for political bribes is efficient or not.
Notable Insight
The thread concludes with the observation that "money in politics" is far too broad a term - what matters is how effectively money can be converted into political capital through specific, targeted strategies rather than simply buying ads or making large donations.
The discussion also includes a significant side conversation about transgender identity that became quite extensive, though this appears to be a separate thread that developed from a comment about gender roles.
This thread illustrates how political influence has evolved in a more strategic, culturally constrained way than many predicted after Citizens United, with AIPAC serving as a particularly effective model of political influence that other groups have struggled to replicate.
Rereading your previous post I see you did say "a lot of America" and not "most," I apologize if I misrepresented what you said.
The list of cities I chose was arbitrary, but the Detroit metro is arguably of comparable scale and one of the places that would have the latest sun rises if the current time zone boundaries were to remain static.
Of the places you mentioned Michigan and Indiana are (basically) fully west of the 82.5°W meridian, which would be the natural boundary for the UTC-5/6 division based on solar noon. For Ohio major population centers Columbus and Cincinnati, and for Kentucky population centers Louisville, Lexington, & Bowling Green are also west of 82.5°W. Atlanta as well, though places south of 35°N have less of a problem with insufficient daylight.
This means they are already effectively living in daylight savings time in the winter relative to solar noon, which would be UTC-5. In the summer when they go to UTC-4 they are living in double daylight savings or something. Somewhat ironically, permanent UTC-5 seems to be what some people in Indiana prefer, they just call it Eastern time with out daylight savings time observance rather than Central time with permanent daylight savings time. Neither of which is what people in actual Eastern time or actual Central time currently observe. If the US really were to adopt year round daylight savings Indiana should almost certainly move to be part of the central time zone, which is where they were historically and by meridian. This would solve the problem for people who live in the Chicago-Gary metro having to be split of from the rest of the state. The current situation in Indiana with 11 time zones, and hundreds of previous permutations, is ridiculous and as far as I can tell only justified by trying to assert their independence from Chicago-land.
Indiana is the most egregious and should not be in Eastern time even under the current system. Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Michigan should probably move to Central time under permanent DST. Ohio and Michigan would then have the same sunrise they have now in the winter. Tennessee and Kentucky would gain the advantage of not being split in timezone.
Pittsburgh would have a late sunrise, but not worse than those poor people who live in the upper peninsula of Michigan now. Atlanta, sure but nearly 10 hours of sunlight on the shortest day of the year isn't really that bad to begin with.
While I do prefer permanent DST to permanent standard time, I am somewhat sympathetic to people who prefer standard time. Essentially there are people who have relatively early schedules who currently commute both ways in the dark during winter. There are people who have relatively late schedules who currently have some daylight on their commute in. Under permanent DST the early people gain the sunlight on the way home, at the cost of the late people who are now the ones commuting in the dark both ways. What I have a problem with is people who post exclusively about the cost of a late sunrise without acknowledging that shifting the clock affects more than the sunrise on the winter solstice. Or that no amount of changing the clocks will actually produce more daylight or make everyone happy. Just ask the people of Indiana. Maybe we should just produce more daylight with space mirrors.
When you then population weight the effects DST vs. standard time there are clearly tradeoffs, but the net effect varies by study. The only consistent thing they find is that changing the clock twice a year produces a measurable and negative effect. Permanent DST vs permanent standard time is a tradeoff between relatively early schedule people and relatively late schedule people. Changing the clocks twice a year gives everyone (very minor) jet-lag. It's mostly an inconvenience, but at the margins results in excess deaths and economic losses.
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