aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
6hr ago
How's the insane levels of smog these days?
Seems mostly resolved but I hear there are still bad days. Of course I've only seen the two cities.
I visited before the CCP fully devoured Hong Kong. Are they still doing separate Visa's for Hong Kong and mainland China?
We did not require any kind of HK papers. The immigration desk just gave us a little 90 days pass. I don't think they even looked at the China visa.
aqouta
15hr ago
We're flying there march 31 and leaving the 3rd and could maybe coordinate a meet up. We're staying nearish dotonbori. The guy showing us around had a name for the area that escapes me. Dm me a discord or Twitter name or something.
aqouta
11d ago
A lot of people are jumping on this so I'll give my two cents as a diagnosed dyslexic. Only being privy to the one experience I cannot be totally sure if dyslexia is a real thing or not as I can't directly experience how others interact with words. I will say that I find reading long texts difficult and tedious, frequently needing to reread sections and losing my position while doing so. I never actually used my diagnosis besides getting some side lessons in elementary and middle school. I took the ACT without any help and my lowest section was actually science because I only completed about half of the questions within the time frame despite getting them all right. This probably resulted in getting less scholarships/into less prestigious colleges than I would have otherwise.
I think @blooblyblobl 's sister is probably fine as a doctor, it's not like you literally cannot focus and interpret text or that big proper nouns will get confused with each other. It's that as you try to read faster text gets kind of jumbled and you need to slow down and reread sections. There are plenty of coping mechanisms.
aqouta
15d ago
Right now, the people who are doing that are largely programmers and /g/ gooners, and those are the most likely people to have realistic appraisals of where we are.
I am a programmer who uses LLMs every day at work. I'm aware there are limitations but over just the last few years they've become exceptionally good at writing code. It's at the point where I can be reasonably sure that they will always one shot a well described function and frequently and one shot adding functionality to a screen, complex react CRUD stored procedures and backend functionality.
Yes, if you don't keep starting new sessions to keep your context clean it can run into trouble, but even that is getting much better over time. I can't reiterate enough that reasoning models are months, not years old. There is definitely a whole lot more juice to squeeze out of optimizing that. We have some of the smartest people in the world working on new avenues in a practically green field and they're reliably finding new scaling directions. You could make a better argument about the demise of Moore's law than the end of LLM scaling, at least there are plausibly physical limits to moore's law that we don't know it's possible to overcome. We're aware of low energy thinking machines that compete with LLMs. I really think it's in the pessimist's court to show some kind of actual limiting principle.
aqouta
16d ago
I don't understand people who can see the current state of AI and the trendline and not at least see where things are headed unless we break trend. You guys know a few years ago our state of the art could hardly complete coherent paragraphs right? chain of thought models are literally a couple months old. How could you possibly be this confident we've hit a stumbling block because one developer's somewhat janky implementation has hick ups? And one of the criticism is speed, which is something you can just throw more compute at and scale linearly?
A week ago we went in for our 8 week ultrasound. I watched the screen as the resident OBGYN, a baby doctor baby doctor, manipulated various gels and tools to summon on a screen some queer portal into the feminine realm of creation. My wife is a third year psychiatry resident that had strongly considered going into the specialty of baby doctoring when she was in med school. The two women were more able than myself to divine meaning from the various blobs and sacs that came in and out of view. Maybe they saw a cyst? the big black blob at the top was the bladder. I paid close attention but learned little as the good doctor tapped away measurements. And then after what must have been a few minutes of building suspense the star of the show made its appearance. Among the grayish blobs came a white circle containing what most resembled a sea horse.
It came in and out of focus and several minutes were spent doing some kind of action where a vertical line was drawn on the screen aiming for the center of mass and then a kind of sine graph would appear. The chest of the sea horse noticeably bulged with regularity and it seemed to be this bulge they were targeting. My wife had not so subtly signaled that she knew what was going on and the woman doing the measurements did not explain their purpose. I didn't profane the ritual with a question. From context clues I deduced that they were taking snap shots of the heart rate.
From the question of whether she was sure that she had measured her last period correctly and a somber tone in the room where I had expected excitement I knew something hadn't gone to plan. The resident left and my wife told me that the size was much smaller than was expected and the heart rate was quite low. She had come off an IUD just before this so it was floated that perhaps the gap in period had delayed things and we were simply early, maybe this was a 6 week visit instead of an 8 week visit. I could tell she was not convinced of this.
The superior doctor came in and told us that we hadn't done anything wrong, never a good sign. They said much of what my wife had just said, that the size was off for how far along she should have been and the heart rate is concerning. We were scheduled for a follow up the next week, last Thursday. I called an Uber home and canceled the plans to call the inner circle to first announce the pregnancy. Resisting the urge to announce early showed its prudence. She seemed to have no real hope that it was viable but I resisted. It didn't seem right to give up on them before their hearts stopped beating. If this all worked out how was I going to look at a son or daughter and explain that I'd given up on them when they were fighting for their life? I didn't quite say this, she was protecting herself and I wasn't going to make her feel bad for it.
As the second session started I had come to terms that the odds were dire. The ritual started with only slight variation from the previous. The preamble of measurements seemed like a burying of the lede. Her bladder was more full this time, I confided in her later that it looked like the eyes of a yoshi of ninja turtle with her womb forming the snout. As the star came into view it was the same size as before and the regular pulse had gone. No one said it directly, it was just measurements but I could tell.
After the procedure the doctor laid out our options. We could wait it out or induce it earlier, we were early enough to use chemicals to induce the miscarriage or surgery if we preferred. It seemed like we had skipped a step. No one made an announcement, no one said that my kid was dead. We had all seen it and that was quite enough. We're flying out to China to see her extended family in a couple weeks, no longer bearing the good news we had hoped to share, and couldn't reasonably just wait it out. Not that there was seemingly any upside in doing that. We opted for the chemicals, it was pragmatic, the right option.
After another Uber home I mixed her up an old fashioned, her favorite that she'd been denied for months. The chemicals, which aren't to be taken with alcohol, wouldn't arrive until the next day and I'd grown up with the catholic habit of celebrating both good and bad news with a drink.
Life continued, we both worked yesterday and she took the first of the two types last evening, a few hours ago she had to keep several pills in her cheeks, which I referred to as chipmunk medicine, a phrase she liked. The medicine she liked less, it was reportedly chalky and unpleasant. She's in the other room now, experiencing painful cramping. I do what I can to help, she has a little stuffed bear that you can microwave to warm which helps a bit and I can bring her tea and Tylenol but beyond that there isn't much to do besides write a rambling post on themotte.org.
Spirits are high, we're both of the opinion that this sucks but we'll get 'em next time. In fact unless I try, unless I torture myself with imagining kids that could have been I don't really feel anything at all about this. I think we're both kind of watching out to help the other through what we expect to be a hard thing emotionally but it's just not really happened. Neither of us have really broken up about it.
I don't know if this post has a purpose. I've not told anyone else about this and just wanted to put it down.
aqouta
21d ago
The credit card program allows federal workers to bypass the typical procurement process required to buy goods and services. A 2002 report from the Department of Commerce said that, “by avoiding the formal procurement process, GSA estimates the annual savings to be $1.2 billion.
It's like some kind of Kafkaesque joke that government procurement is reliant on a method to subvert government procurement rules to the point that the establishment is calling foul at removing the exploit. What are we even doing here?
aqouta
23d ago
I don't see how Europe benefits anymore from a MAGA American hegemony than it does from the true Multipolar world that would immediately develop post a crushing US military defeat
What do you actually imagine a multipolar world looks like? You know that free and open shipping lanes aren't present in the state of nature right? Global supply chains are complex and absolute necessities for whatever nation you call home flows through an uncontested sea kept that way by the American navy. At best you now need to to fund a navy to protect these ships coming and going, at worst they stop coming and going and you find out real quick what a boon a free and open global economy is and how dependent you were on it as millions starve.
I don't like what Trump and pals are doing here, but you have no idea how much you're taking for granted to be able to make a statement like this. Europe is no energy independent, what do you think life looks like when you can't keep the lights on without a militarily defended fuel supply?
aqouta
1mo ago
A while ago I got into a debate with some people. I claimed, and thought it was uncontroversial, that monogamy is not most men's ideal relationship arrangement. Of course, neither is full polyamory (which involves knowing your girl is banging other men), but most men would love a relationship where their woman is exclusive to them while they can sleep with other women on the side. I was met with unanimous shock and disagreement. That "I just didn't respect women if I felt this" or accusations that I'm typical minding. But I suspect most men actually do agree with me, and the ones who claim otherwise fall into a two categories 1) Men who are sour graping. That is, they know they couldn't pull off an arrangement like this (which tbf is most men, including me) so pretend they wouldn't want it anyway. 2) Ones who "want" it instinctively but are opposed for religious reasons 3) The few who actually just disagree. Cases like Greene's seem to vindicate me. His girlfriend, Kayla, is an attractive woman (happy to cite my sources) who speaks Korean. Most men, in theory, would be happy to score even a 1st date with a woman like her. And yet he couldn't help but risk his relationship by cheating on her with a clearly unstable sex worker? This is very common pattern among famous/successful men. Maybe all it takes is the knowledge that they can repent and get away with it (she agreed to marry him following all this, after all). But clearly the impulse already had to be there. I remember some Motters experiencing envy at Gaiman's escapades when they were revealed to the press (I still don't know the details of them like I mentioned), so are we dispositionally different than the male population at large or just more honest?
"Me and this other very unusual guy who sleeps with people who have all the qualities of poisonous tree frog have this preference therefore everyone probably does" is not a compelling argument. There's like three layers of selection going on here. I don't think you're really steel manning the opposing view here which is more complex than "I wouldn't even want to have consequence free sex with beautiful women that my wife actively approved of and made our bound closer", which is a very spherical cow way to look at human relationships. I don't think that kind of relationship actually exists, or if it does it would either require a wife that I wouldn't want as a partner or for me to not care about hurting my wife.
aqouta
1mo ago
Not totally sure why we should take ziz seriously. This reads exactly like the kind of thing you'd come up with if you took the poisoned dualist interpretation of why trans people are the way they are and then tried desperately to attach it back to materialism. The whole premise reads more like a fantasy writer's first attempt to build a magic system than anything grounded.
aqouta
1mo ago
Woke feminists want ugly, disabled women in the top tier media, and anti-woke coomers want sexy eye candy. Those desires are mutually exclusive, and so one or the other of them will be disappointed.
Not totally related to the thrust of your point but this isn't even true. Skin packs already exist. Very little of the games cost is actually making a few extra models. There really could be a woke and non-woke addition of any AAA game. Hell, this is already done in practice for some international copies that remove LGBT flags or less radioactively the chinese version of WoW that gave a bone dragon flesh because of Chinese sensibilities around exposed skeletons.
aqouta
1mo ago
If I were arguing for using the popular vote instead of the electoral college you might have a point but that's not my position. Neither is it my position that Chicago should be allowed to impose its culture and rules on wider Illinoisans. The capital of Illinois isn't even Chicago as a concession to this idea that the wider state ought not be totally dominated. What voting rule specifically do you even advocate here? That the ~20% of Illinoisans who don't live in Chicago but own a great deal of much cheaper land outside of the metropolitan area should dominate? It's going to be a hard sell to say that farmers are treated poorly by the federal government given how large farm subsidies are.
aqouta
1mo ago
I do not believe I am any more kind or empathetic than my brothers, my father, my boyfriend, his friends, my male coworkers, my cousins, my uncles and my grandfather because of how I was born.
Wait, does this only apply across gender lines? Do you agree that some people are more empathetic or kind than others on an individual level? If no then that's wild, please expand. If yes then why would you expect these variable traits to be equally distributed between groups that have wildly different hormonal profiles which cause behavioral differences in a very straightforward manner?
aqouta
1mo ago
If it's purely self charging then why are there retribution tariffs? Obviously when you raise the price of a good when produced by foreigners such that you give your internal market an advantage it is bad for those foreigners. They need to pass the cost to the consumer but that would make them uncompetitive. The winner of tariffs is special local interests, the loser are general internal interests and foreign competitors. The only interests influential in foreign states are the foreign competitors thus foreign states oppose it.
aqouta
1mo ago
Yes, by land area the US is more red, but deciding that land area is what matters is even more ridiculous than the people who think the popular vote is all that should matter. Chicago dominates Illinois because the population of Illinois is under 13 million people and the population of chicago and its suburbs is almost 10 million people.
aqouta
1mo ago
My view basically is that the left and right need each other, although a mature society should be able to recognize this dynamic and avoid these procedural outcome manipulation type shenanigans. We have both a defective left and a defective right.
aqouta
1mo ago
This is the natural outcome of weaponizing moralism. The pictures of crying refugees being turned away to shame anyone who would deny a sympathetic person entrance leaves the person who demands a border of any kind to either harden their hearts or concede. Because concessions would dissolve the nation hearts have been hardened, it could never have been any other way. I think this is the bedrock of Cthulhu swimming left, there is no actual solid ground between hard hearted conservatism and ruin but every step towards ruin is rose scented, every resistance to it mired in cruelty. Left leaning people will say that of course we can still have a border and laws but they can't believe it because every argument they make to move one step left has no limiting principle, it will take us all the way to borderlessness and lawlessness. They rely on the pull back from conservatives to keep them from the abyss and resent the pullback at the same time.
aqouta
1mo ago
It's at least usually tempered by human unwillingness to spend time writing it out. This really was more egregiously so than nearly any human comment on this forum in my opinion.
aqouta
1mo ago
I think it's fine to use llms in the writing process but you really really need to take on the role of an editor. This is the same like 3 points repeated a half dozen times and should have be edited down substantially. I do think that the credit system as it exists now is suboptimal but at the same time we do need some system for determining credit worthiness. Part of the problem is how very regulated financial markets are and credit scores are a hack for lenders to use to discriminate without fear of capricious state sanction.
aqouta
1mo ago
Do you think the Palestinians or surrounding Arab nations would accept this if it was actually offered?
As I said, if they raise up the machine god, or I guess this is just getting us past the need for physical labor, then they've won. But it's this generation in the next decade and not a generational project.
aqouta
1mo ago
As the bulge of population retires that elderly care problem becomes more difficult, the ratio of working aged people to dependents becomes much worse. That's before even factoring in burning the other end of the candle by trying to increase birthrates to something sustainable at the same time. If not solved you have a population that at best halves every generation and I suspect would actually spiral even further downwards.
aqouta
1mo ago
as the marginal people who stay in China help to build the kind of economy that persuades an ever-wider margin of young people to stay in China.
What young people? China has a TFR of around 1.2 if you trust the Chinese data, which you maybe shouldn't. If China is able to use the last gasp of their civilization to birth the machine god then perhaps they'll be on top but this is not a generational project.
I may have been unclear. I think it was Nanjing street we walked through on our way to the bund.
The family did call it yu park at first but I think some signage at least in English had the redundant spelling.
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