birb_cromble
No bio...
User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
1hr ago
anyone in the data center space running open-loop cooling?
Evaporative cooling still sees extensive use, but in the last eight months many of the hyperscalers have realized that it's not worth the ill-will that it generates. The balance may change over time for the better.
birb_cromble
4hr ago
It seems genuine to me.
You're probably not going to get much buy in to that stance here. Most of the readership skews urban, wealthy, and technocratic. They don't view the negative externalities as real problems.
The Chinese interference theory is a convenient way to avoid having to confront those externalities without asking why nobody's crying out to have Fort Mason Park paved over and converted to a data center using "temporary" gas turbines for power.
It's very similar to the "Russian election interference" narrative from 2016. Sure, you can probably dig and find something, but Sexy Bernie coloring books do not a complete explanation make.
birb_cromble
7hr ago
How would you rate starship troopers?
I don't even think the director read the book. The two pieces really don't share anything but a name. The movie is fun, though.
birb_cromble
7hr ago
How did, say, Hitchhiker's Guide and Princess Bride pull it off whereas other adaptations didn't?
Making a good adaptation is hard. Making a faithful adaptation is hard. Making a good adaptation that is faithful to the source material is a Herculean task.
Faithful adaptations are hard because when you shift medium, you lose tools that are available to the source material. The easiest example is a book written in first person. Even if you try to approximate that experience in film with tools like narration, you lose the immediacy of the written experience. This is why Stephen King film adaptations almost universally suck, for example.
At the same time, making a good adaptation is hard because you run straight into the problems of Hollywood filmmaking. Writing about things is cheap. Putting them on a screen requires money for fim crews, sets, special effects, actors, insurance, and God only knows what else. At the same time there are extensive pressures at every level for people to "put their mark" on the property, which is compounded by industry-wide disrespect for a lot of fiction (see: The Witcher).
To get both, you need a talented, obsessive individual with a ton of industry clout, fuck-you money, and a willingness to put his own ego aside in service to the original property. Good luck finding many of them.
birb_cromble
8hr ago
like the gun rights
Were the gun rights positions normal for the time? I've always understood 1940-1990 to represent the nadir of pro gun stances in the US.
birb_cromble
8hr ago
It's amazing how many problems time can solve.
birb_cromble
8hr ago
Why do you think visual media, specifically adaptions, have declined in quality over the past decade?
I have a vague theory that it's because the writer's room is now part of the establishment.
The 1950s and 60s are generally considered to be the golden age of sci-fi. A lot of the writers during that period were some form of communist at a time when it was not a good idea to publicly be a communist. (I'll get to Heinlein. Take your hands off the keyboard and let me finish.)
Heinlein is an interesting case, because he also had some fairly controversial and unorthodox opinions for the time - just in the other direction.
The 1980s and 1990s are generally considered to the the golden age of syndicated network TV. The writers at the time were disproportionately into gay rights at a time when it was not a good idea to be publicly into gay rights.
There's also the area of literature and film outside of samizdat in Soviet Russia.
In all three of these cases, a large contingent of writers were activists in times when being an activist carried real and significant negative consequences. This had two impacts on writing quality:
- Creativity happens under constraint, and blacklisting was a major constraint.
- Activists who couldn't exercise nuance and write good stories first got weeded out.
These days, the writer's room aligns with the broader mores and taboos of the neoliberal elite. There's no risk, and anybody who has opinions that go against the grain get self-policed before they can produce popular content.
In the absence of risk, the stories don't have selective pressure forcing them to be nuanced and well written, so we get what you describe instead.
birb_cromble
1d ago
In all seriousness, the last time I needed to build muscle for a role, I had to cut my carb intake and up my fats just to get the required calories inside a reasonable volume. How married are you to those macros?
birb_cromble
1d ago
2700 calories is only two pounds of good cheese. What's the problem?
birb_cromble
2d ago
I've had contractors in the past who lose motivation if they already have all the cash.
He also didn't want it all up front for reasons he didn't explain, but I'm not going to fight him on it.
birb_cromble
2d ago
Spending is $2,317.45 lower than this day last year. My contractor is running behind schedule due to the non-stop rain, so we're splitting up payment between now and September. He's happy because he gets some cash up front, and I'm happy because I get to spread out the impact a little.
birb_cromble
3d ago
The reason is somewhat different for both, but both share a disconnected quality compared to the city at large. I'm not a Pittsburgh native, but both neighborhoods stand out for that fact whenever I visit.
Greenfield is fascinating because it's a large residential area, but it doesn't really have much in the way of shops, or services, or public transit. It's almost like the construction of 376 caused the city to forget its existence.
Swisshelm Park only really has one entrance or exit. Bounded as it is by the river and the park, you might forget that the rest of the city is even out there.
birb_cromble
3d ago
Are you planning to cover Swisshelm park and Greenfield at some point?
birb_cromble
3d ago
This would be funny if I hadn't just read the piece on leverage research.
birb_cromble
4d ago
But if you did know and you chose to accept the money anyway and that’s the full extent of your involvement, how guilty are you?
I've only been in a situation where it came up once in my life. I was working for a caterer when a local pillar of the community and upstanding businessman hired the company for a private event. The guy had a reputation for getting handsy with the help. He specifically wanted to hand-pick "the girls" who would be on the floor. I, along with several other members of the crew, refused to work the job. We all got fired for it.
It sucked living on potatoes and cabbage for a month, but I'd do it again.
birb_cromble
4d ago
You’re telling me that having a low Epstein number isn’t all that exclusive a club?
After running those searches, my main takeaways were:
- God damn Epstein really liked AI
- Academics will go to insane lengths to secure funding.
birb_cromble
4d ago
This sort of thing was like catnip for Epstein.
I hadn't considered it from that angle. I could see how that would create a self-reinforcing loop in the research community.
Guy says lofty things --> Some dude named Jeff shows up and showers him with money.
A lot of rationally self interested people would, at that point, start considering if they should wax philosophical.
birb_cromble
4d ago
It feels like a targeted hit piece. I'm a cynical man, and my gut feeling is that it's a shot at pulling Amodei out of the big chair at Anthropic.
I specifically call this out.
birb_cromble
4d ago
If your rumored to be Mossads number 1 spy then I guess I should return your emails?
My understanding is that Maxwell was mossad's number one spy, and Epstein was mossad's number one receptionist for mossad's number one spy.
birb_cromble
4d ago
In fact, Minsky died before the transformer paper was even published.
Minsky and Epstein were in communication with each other before the transformer paper was published. I'm not sure what the thrust of your argument is? Is it that any discussion of AI before 2017 is irrelevant?
birb_cromble
4d ago
I hesitate to post this one, but I'm doing so because it hits a near-perfect intersection of the hobby horses of something like 70% of the regular posters here. It turns out that Dario Amodei's wife is in the Epstein files, after his public conviction for sex offenses.
A year later, she reached back out to Epstein. At first he didn’t remember her. She replied that they had been introduced by John Brockman a year earlier. “We have the free luxury porn company. Does that ring a bell?”
Epstein replied: “Yes, a loud gong.”
Clark joked back. “Haha, I was going to say, you would be the first person that didn’t remember us.”
She pitched him on investing in her company, saying they had just hired someone from Oprah Winfrey’s company and Ashton Kutcher’s Katalyst, the media company behind shows like “Punk’d.” “Are you still interested?”
Epstein, then a registered sex offender, replied, “Can’t do sex TV.”
There's a lot to unpack here.
First, Epstein really was balls-deep in AI research. Marvin Minsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Joscha Bach was in direct communication with Epstein. Elon Musk was in direct communication with Epstein. Eliezar Yudkowsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Noam Chomsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Overall, Epstein's emails are a who's-who of AI research. Prior to this, Amodei had no known links to Epstein, and now he has one at one remove.
While the headline story is salacious and amusing (and probably a targeted hit job on Amodei), I wand to use it as a springboard for a few other topics.
A brief, non-rigorous analysis of the files suggests that AI researchers are over represented in the files after 2011, both in frequency and in message length. A charitable person could argue that it's because the average AI researcher didn't know that Epstein was a convicted sex offender after his public trial and conviction in 2011, but I don't buy that. I was a dumb 20-something in 2011 and I knew about it. It was in the newspapers. It was on the news on the TVs at the gym. These people are allegedly smarter and more plugged-in than I am. Most of them were involved in fundraising that, if done competently, involved a due diligence component. So either they were incompetent, or chose to interact with the publicly convicted sex offender anyway.
I think it's the latter. The AI research community is deeply entwined with both rationalism and Effective Altruism, and the latter is a rehash of utilitarianism with a peculiar utility function. Artificial super intelligence, if correctly formed, presents infinite utility. If that is true, then literally anything can be justified if it moves the future toward that end.
Over the last few decades, utilitarianism really seems to have taken over popular discussions of ethics. Sometimes I wonder if that doesn't represent a failure of ethics in itself. As far as ethical systems go, Utilitarianism is easy to hack. Ignoring second order effects, choosing peculiar utility functions, using unrealistic time scales - it's all wrapped up together.
Moving on from that, I'd always known that bay area tech is pretty incestuous, but I don't think I'd realized how small, insular, and weird it was until recently. Clark having a personal relationship with Eric Schmidt and parlaying that into funding later was a surprise. Is that just how SF business gets done out there?
Overall, I'm not sure what to think about this. It feels like a targeted hit piece. I'm a cynical man, and my gut feeling is that it's a shot at pulling Amodei out of the big chair at Anthropic. I have no proof of that, but the timing relative to their alleged IPO is interesting, and coincidences are hard to believe when the players are all so tightly coupled as they are in the AI industry. If it is true, though, it makes me wonder who could be involved.
birb_cromble
6d ago
In some personal good news, TransUnion has decided that I have a credit card again, with no changes in behavior on my part. The entire saga was baffling. My credit rating is about ~6 points lower than it was when this whole saga started, but at this point I'm not going to fight it.
I'm more global news, 30 year Treasury yields are getting bonkers
A $25bn Treasury auction of 30-year bonds on Thursday drew yields as high as 5.22 per cent, according to the US Treasury department. It marked the highest yield since the 5.52 per cent paid in August 2001, after which 30-year auctions were suspended for almost five years.
I wasn't seriously investing in 2001 outside buying an S&P 500 mutual fund. Does anybody here remember what the Feds's rationale was at the time for suspending 30 year auctions?
birb_cromble
7d ago
Check out musictheory.pugetsound.edu
birb_cromble
7d ago
How highly regarded are you?
On a scale from "can read sheet music" to "can't always tell two notes apart", what's your current ability level?
It's the most visible specifically because it's the weakest argument. It's a specialized variant of nutpicking. It's the same reason that people constantly (and intentionally) conflated marginal conspiracy theories with reasonable ones during COVID. If you're dunking on 5g graphene mind control arguments, you don't have to look too hard at the lab leak hypothesis. If you're dunking on a math error from Empire of AI, you don't have to talk about the noise, or the utility costs, or the municipal NDAs and corruption, or the blatant disregard for zoning and environmental laws, or anything else that's going on right now. You can just call that person "low IQ" and move on.
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