birb_cromble
No bio...
User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
2d ago
Stories get to me. I've cried at a majority percentage of the pixar movies
This is interesting. How short does the media have to be to evoke a response? A two hour movie can do it, from what you say above. Conversely, a single frame obviously wouldn't because that's what a painting is. What about a ten minute scene? A ten second clip?
birb_cromble
2d ago
One thing that I keep considering is that "bogey" just means that we don't know what the hell it is.
It doesn't have to be flying saucers.
I prefer to think that it could be space whales.
birb_cromble
2d ago
I appreciate you taking the time to go over that. When people say they like a piece of art, I usually don't care why they like it, so much as they can say why they like it, if that makes sense
birb_cromble
2d ago
It felt like the Wednesday thread was getting a little overloaded and turning into a general grab bag.
If you'd prefer it there I'll gladly accept that.
birb_cromble
3d ago
I mentioned a while ago that I've gotten into fixed income investing.
I'm trying to fill some of the gap between treasuries and equities in my portfolio, and so far that's going alright. Calculating whether a fund is worth the risk premium is tricky, and one where I'm currently striking out a little is JSI.
Since I bought it, I'm up 0.38% on total return because of the distributions, but the share price is down very slightly. In an attempt to understand why, I've been learning about something called "extension risk". Since JSI is mostly mortgage backed securities, it tends to lose value in an environment like this one, where a lot of people are holding onto their mortgages for dear life because refinancing or buying a new home might double their cost of living.
I probably won't increase my holdings in this fund, but I probably won't sell it for now.
birb_cromble
3d ago
@thejdizzler @Sloot @TowardsPanna @FtttG
You ask and I deliver.
only philistines think otherwise
Call me a philistine, I guess? It looks like a beach caricature of a dog skull with floppy tits shoved in the eye sockets.
When I look at a Rembrandt painting, I love how he used the oils in multiple ways to create a sense of light - the pigments, the brush strokes, all of it.
When I look at a Zdzisław Beksiński I'm floored by the scale of his scenes, and how they can still appear sharp when everything is under a cloud.
When I look at a Norman Rockwell painting, I appreciate the way that he's able to capture human movement in a still medium.
I'm not sure if I can pick something about your linked work where I can say the same? Can you elaborate on that a bit?
birb_cromble
3d ago
Has anyone been keeping up on the Iran conflict? I've been seeing some commentary on Iran running out of storage capacity and I don't know if it's bullshit or not, or even how to find out short of going there myself.
birb_cromble
4d ago
That's a good idea. Thanks.
birb_cromble
4d ago
What's the general rule for going to the doctor for a shoulder injury vs waiting to see it it'll heal? Are there any "shut up and go to the doctor" signs? I deal with so much chronic pain that I'm not sure what a reasonable person would do in my shoes.
birb_cromble
4d ago
Friday's already taken sadly.
birb_cromble
4d ago
Spending last month was only 2.6k, which led me to have an almost 30% savings rate!
Congratulations on that. I wonder if there's enough interest in personal finance, investing, and what-have-you for a "Money Monday" thread.
birb_cromble
4d ago
Spending is $990.72 higher than it was at the same time last year. Almost all of this difference is due to the dental bills and home repair/maintenance bills that I've racked up this year.
I do have some additional non-standard spending on top of that:
- I prepaid for my annual pest control bill that keeps my house from getting destroyed by carpenter bees, since the company offers a discount.
- I took my brother and his girlfriend out for a belated birthday lunch.
- I went out with my partner and got us some Mexican.
On the bright side, I negotiated a $10/month discount with my ISP. It's not much, but it's not nothing.
It's frustrating that I can't really get ahead compared to last year, but I'm also glad that I've been making the effort. I'd probably be cashflow negative for a few months already if I hadn't made this resolution.
birb_cromble
5d ago
Trump is constantly claiming about stolen elections and voter fraud, and yet little evidence has ever shown up
That's a pretty bold claim. The evidence is common enough that it has its own Wikipedia page, organized by decade.
birb_cromble
6d ago
I console myself with the (true) fact that I am very, very far from the modal Indian, and that the complaints usually lobbed against them aren't applicable to me
Would you be willing to expand on this a little at some point? I've been grappling with some issues around this personally and some perspective from your side of things might help a lot.
When I was younger, I lived in several places that had notable Indian minorities, and that continued in college due to being in a technical major. Several of my closest friends in those times were first or second generation immigrants. In most cases, they weren't just American, but they felt more American than me. They flew the flag at home, played sports in school, participated in neighborhood cookouts (with mildly weird limits depending on where they came from originally), and did all the things you'd expect from somebody who really liked being in America. One of the best trap shooters I'd ever met hadn't ever fired a gun until he got his citizenship, but he started coming to meets as soon as he could because, in his words, "I'm an American now". Hell, in some ways it was aspirational for somebody like me. I figured that if families from a country as poor as India could manage to live the American dream, maybe a dumb redneck like me could too.
Lately, I've been interacting with the Indian diaspora in the US again and it feels completely different. It's mercenary and extractive. They all seem to want to make bank and go home, or terraform the surrounding area into India-but-not-in-India. The families don't try to integrate or assimilate at all. Kids keep their own cliques in school or go to private schools. Community events are almost entirely held within the diaspora.
Do you have any idea what's going on? It's caused a measure of cultural whiplash for me. I can't tell if it's a change in culture in India, or different social classes and subcultures immigrating, or changing views towards America, or what, but fuck me if it's not a noticeable difference.
birb_cromble
7d ago
In my case, theater was a lifeline. I do better socializing in structured environments, and after graduating college and having my then-fiancee leave me, I went into a pretty terrible spiral that caused me to withdraw from society.
Theater gave me an environment where everyone was there for the same reason, and I didn't have it in me to be social, I could just privately run lines or something. At the same time, the nature of being on stage forced me to interact. I made a bunch of lifelong friends that way, and it gave me a real chance to crawl out of the hole I was in.
birb_cromble
7d ago
It depends on the company, really. When I worked in the pharmaceutical industry, the answer was "be somebody's nephew" or "be a hot co-ed".
If you can't manage that, my best advice is to "show leadership". Find projects that might improve revenue or reduce costs, find out why they haven't been done yet, and write up a proposal to your internal mentor if the reasons don't torpedo any solution you might have.
birb_cromble
7d ago
Not tonight. My usual sourdough takes two days to make and it all went to my family this weekend. My dad finished his chemo so we celebrated a little.
birb_cromble
7d ago
what resources you're using to explore this part of investing.
I actually ran into JAAA in an argument on the bogleheads forum, of all places. They're one of the few places left that hasn't gone all in on long degeneracy.
birb_cromble
7d ago
Didn't he do some fairly important stuff around epigenetics with respect to methylation?
birb_cromble
7d ago
Emails indicate Dawkins, a former Oxford professor known for his atheist views, was aware Epstein had been jailed but dined with him at a gala dinner at a conference in Arizona in April 2014. Dawkins also wrote to his agent that he had heard “his case is not as black as painted”
https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/richard-dawkins-epstein-emails-sx82lwsbz
Before I get into the consciousness question, I have to ask, is this the first known instance of Nobel Disease developing in someone who didn't win a Nobel prize? He's an eminent and decorated scientist, who, later in life, has started pontificating well outside his field in an area that is potentially crank-adjacent. I'm not an expert on this sort of thing, but I can also recognize that his skills in evolutionary biology don't necessarily transfer to neuroscience and psychology.
Disclaimer: I'm just a guy who thinks about stuff when he's out fishing. Don't take me seriously.
Moving on from that, the question of LLM consciousness is a hard problem, and one that fascinated me as a layman. My understanding from reading papers on the topic is that there's still a lot of debate over what consciousness even is, and most of the attempts at defining it smuggle in assumptions that the entity under test is embodied and subjected to a continuous stream of stimulus in a way that's hard to apply to an LLM.
Most definitions of consciousness assume introspection. You can do something that looks a lot like introspection on the output side via reasoning. Does that count?
Most definitions of consciousness include awareness of the environment. For LLMs, which essentially only have one sensory organ (the token input stream), how does that even work? Furthermore, what is the environment for something that only exists as a program on a computational substrate? It's hard to model that.
A lot of models of consciousness seem to imply volition or intentionality as well. How does that work with an LLM? They're inert unless something is passed into them as input. A human that didn't do anything unless prodded wouldn't be considered conscious (unless he were a teenager). You could argue that being embodied means that humans are always subjected to stimulus in ways that LLMs aren't (eg: hunger, thirst, temperature), but that seems like a cop out
I think a lot of this discussion obscures the fact that everyone assumed that intelligence and consciousness would (or will) arrive as a package deal. This causes a lot of people to argue past each other.
"The LLM is intelligent!"
"But it can't be intelligent because it's not conscious!"
It seems like Dawkins is trying to square this by claiming it's both.
Back to Dawkins - looking over a little bit of the interchange between Dawkins and the LLM, I wonder if he would have reached the same conclusion if the LLM told him that his books were a middlebrow rehash of Calvinism in biological drag. I've noticed the people in my personal life who go hardest on LLMs being intelligent, conscious, or both tend to make that turn after the LLM starts unceasingly praising them.
birb_cromble
8d ago
A simple stew made with a ham that was on sale for $1.50/lb, cabbage, onions, the last of the garlic from last year's harvest, and some paprika and black pepper.
birb_cromble
8d ago
If you're willing to manage it yourself you can get a few basis points over a fund.
It's not worth much, but I wanted to know how it worked
Shit. It's Friday and not Saturday, isn't it?
I feel like a dumbass now.
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