ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
10d ago
Agreed that casual marijuana use is widely accepted. But being a stoner is stigmatized. I know one couple who sent their teenage son to a ritzy rehab for it.
ThenElection
11d ago
No one in the left elite professional classes supports alcoholism or drug abuse among themselves, no more than they want their daughters to go into sex work. It's still considered a personal failing, which at the very least needs to be covered up.
ThenElection
11d ago
I had an interviewer laugh at me when I turned up to my first tech job interview in a suit.
ThenElection
13d ago
It seems like certain psychedelics are doing just a reroll on your neural wiring. Ego death. Good if you're suffering from debilitating PTSD, risky if you're above average functional.
ThenElection
13d ago
Caroline Ellison’s Tumblr
I missed this. Any choice juicy bits? Or just reminiscing on drug-filled orgies?
ThenElection
13d ago
Escape with nobody having any clue what either of you looks like.
Drones have serial numbers, and their components have serial numbers. There's probably a dozen different identifiers baked into flight controller board.
So maybe no face information, but all the interactions involved in the purchase of the drone would be available. Maybe if you stole the drone, but even that would give away a fair amount of information about who you are. Or if you recovered the drone post assassination, but that's adding yet another possible failure point.
ThenElection
17d ago
That's a really insightful observation about different approaches to tree pruning!... That's a really interesting hybrid approach! It makes a lot of sense... That's a brilliant analogy! It really captures the interplay... I agree about... That's a profound observation... [Your idea] is fascinating
RLAIF is the next frontier in DL.
Challenge: get Claude to say any idea is stupid or off base.
ThenElection
18d ago
Crimes are real, and people in high places commit them. But prosecuting them is reactive, and prosecutorial discretion lends itself to petty political witch hunts. Trump supporters, of all people, should realize this.
What would be gutsy and genuinely salutatory would be for Biden to offer broad, blanket pardons of controversial figures on both sides. And it would be helpful for Democrats: they wouldn't spend the next four years chasing down crimes, real or imagined, that don't really matter (compared to other issues) and that don't help them win elections.
ThenElection
18d ago
Back in the 19th century, it wasn't uncommon for a black person, or especially a mixed person, to try to pass as white.
There's also the classic Eddie Murphy SNL skit where he goes about a day of his life in whiteface (White Like Me), though viewers seeing it as absurdist might be taken as a sign that it wasn't common.
ThenElection
21d ago
Kamala was potentially an ideal candidate for this kind of narrative. In San Francisco, she was on the "Right," a prosecutor who actually prosecuted and got criminals off the street. She also has her race and gender: she had much more space to jettison the more extreme ideologues without getting called racist and misogynist.
The issue comes down to intra-Democratic culture. The type of person to succeed isn't the type of person who embraces personal agency and is willing to take risks. Success in the Democratic Party (particularly, the CA state party) isn't something that comes to those who are willing to rock the boat, but to those who are team players. This selects for people who can excel at following the rules of a controlled system but doesn't produce individuals who are constitutionally capable of competing in open systems.
ThenElection
25d ago
Just out of curiosity, I wanted to calculate the wealth Gini coefficient that comes from your life-cycle only model, and got numbers around 0.35. Interesting.
ThenElection
25d ago
Look up your company's 401(k) plan information; I assure you, even if you're not chosing to invest in ESG funds, your money is still going there.
Can you elaborate? My 401k tracks SPY almost perfectly.
ThenElection
26d ago
It does. It seems orthodontics are less invasive than those options, though I acknowledge that it might just be familiarity bias.
My dentist says they make it easier to brush, floss etc, but not sure how much I believe her.
ThenElection
27d ago
Not quite a suicide and more "nothing to see here, just bad luck," but the crash of the airplane carrying Lin Biao.
The official story: Lin Biao was planning a coup against Mao, but once he realized it was going to fail, he hopped on a plane with his family to flee to the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, he forgot to put any fuel in it, so it ran out of fuel early on and crashed in Mongolia.
There are some conspiracy theorists who find this suspicious.
For a second I was thinking maybe it was warped because of the risk of no longer existing if you win the bet (is there a name for that? Not quite counterparty risk), but that would cause mispricing in the opposite direction.
It seems the Yes side is whale dominant. A nuclear test explosion would also cause it to resolve to Yes; the big Yes whale could well be some Russian or North Korean general with insider knowledge of an upcoming test hoping to make some side money.
ETA: the Yes whale has also bet on Iran getting a nuclear weapon before the end of 2024, so I guess that's his theory.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Perhaps it's too soon to say? Potentially, this is a precursor campaign to a wider conflict between democratic and revisionist states, and if you take those blocs as the relevant units of analysis, the ledger is less clear. The American public increasingly has less commitment to maintaining the existing order, and the Ukraine war has set a precedent and provided an example for other states to learn from. If those end up causing a wider conflict to resolve favorably to the revisionist powers, ideologues in Moscow will be patting themselves on the back for putting an end to the looming Atlanticist threat etc.
On the other hand, Russia becoming a poorer farming and resource extraction vassal for a foreign power isn't quite what I'd call a glorious victory for the Russian nation, but I guess everyone has their own goals and values.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I don't think it's enough to say they were in economically dire straits, but in the Half-Blood Prince, Narcissa is portrayed trying to sell some trinkets.
I'd have liked an angle where the Malfoys turn to Voldemort out of economic desperation.
ThenElection
1mo ago
False stereotype: beautiful people are dumb and evil, ugly people are smart and have hearts of gold.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I don't know why the election has triggered a renewed gender war. The gender gap remained the same, or even decreased : https://www.nbcwashington.com/decision-2024/2024-voter-turnout-election-demographics-trump-harris/3762138/
Even if you think there's new evidence that says it makes sense to use sex as a carrot to convince men to vote Democratic, isn't going full Lysistrata a bad idea? If Democratic women go on an absolute intimacy strike while Republican women are still happy to form relationships etc., for men who would be swayed by such things, it just creates an incentive to become Republican.
Lastly, it seems self limiting: as women drop out of the relationship market, the women who choose to remain in it move up in terms of the quality of the men they can get.
All of this is probably overthinking things, though, as it seems mostly like a temper tantrum of the overly online set.
ThenElection
1mo ago
San Francisco seems surprisingly chill as well; I've only gotten a single unsolicited political text from a friend, and it was from an Asian, SF native tradesman, ecstatic about the results.
The group chat of my high school friends from $FLYOVER_STATE, on the other hand, is sounding pretty similar to 2016.
Interesting divergence.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I unironically think probably the best way to get people to drop the histrionics and making politics their primary identity is to just lead a happy life and flamboyantly feign ignorance of anything political. Oh, I didn't vote. Or, I voted Trump, because Biden banned abortion.
You can't reason people out of something they didn't reason themselves into.
ThenElection
1mo ago
You can even feign ignorance if that's more up your alley.
Who's this Donald Trump guy? Wasn't he on the Apprentice or something?
ThenElection
1mo ago
Howard is a solid guess. Throw in a book deal, lucrative speaking engagements with audiences who don't really care what she has to say, maybe some corporate board. She'll be well taken care of. Not for any particular affection anyone has toward her, but to signify to others that they'll be well taken care of.
ThenElection
1mo ago
That indicates that Democrats are weak when it comes to earned media. That's a massive issue, but it's a separate one from "I have a giant bag of money and need to spend it." The latter is a good problem to have, even if you're chasing after increasingly marginal edges with each additional dollar.
An amazing accomplishment by OAI.
On the economic level, they spent roughly $1M to run a benchmark and got a result that any STEM student could surpass.
Is that yawnworthy? No: it shows that you can solve human-style reasoning problems by throwing compute at it. If there was a wall, it has fallen, at least for the next year or so. Compute will become cheaper, and that's everything.
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