lagrangian
8d ago
I think some variety of "I'm an idiot" is more likely. I don't see any images. If they're included as hyperlinks, they're not loaded until you click (I think, and ~confirmed by dev tools)
Attached a screenshot of the resource usage breakdown. Largest element is 402kb for the banner, compared to 215kb (fifth place) for what I think is the actual comments (compare to my 414kb estimate - not bad).
Some of the overestimate is from my extensions. Filtering those out, I see 2.0MB (2.3 uncompressed). 1.15 of that is fonts (unclear to me why that needs reloading each time - presumably this could be optimized out.)
Off the top of my head, $50.
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Fermi estimate:
Multiply the following:- 207 "report" ctrl+f matches = comments
- 5 lines/comment
- 20 words/line
- 5 characters/word
- 4 bytes/character
- = 414kb
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Comparing to dev tools, which shows 5.3MB, a factor of 10 I can't account for.
- I'm a backend dev...what's an order of magnitude between friends.
- Using that figure and 24k thread views on the culture war thread so far this week:
- = 127gb/week
- = 210 kilobytes/second
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Let's assume we want to serve a peak traffic of 10x average and don't care enough to set something that automatically scales up and down:
- = 2.1 megabytes/second
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This is... jack shit.
- A 3.5" floppy disk can do 100 kbps, filling the entire 1.44mb in 14.4 seconds.
- I think it could probably be served off a Raspberry Pi.
- If the vyvanse hadn't worn off, I could probably calculate how many threads/Ghz/etc are needed, but I'm pretty comfortable saying "one of any shitty processor can handle this load"
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Google cloud charges for egress:
- Checks notes:
- $0 for up to 200GB/month, then $0.11/GB up to 2TB.
- So
(127 * 4 - 200) * 0.11 = $34. - I am not actually sure if serving traffic is "egress". Best guess: no.
- (This is why startups shouldn't hire FAANG engineers.)
- Checks notes:
-
Worst case:
- Something like $34 for egress and $20 for the VM itself.
- Pretty close to my first number!
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@ZorbaTHut, how'd I do? And would you be willing to share what % of costs you've had donated, vs paid out of pocket? You really shouldn't have to be paying yourself.
- Edit: the patreon is at $140/month, so it looks like this site may be slightly profitable (ignoring the enormous value of the free labor). Nice!
That was all without chatgpt, but here's a transcript from my talking to it afterwards. I think it looks reasonable until maybe the end when I ask about vpn costs. Still comes out to ~$50. It did a decent job analyzing the amount of cpu used (which I skipped in the "jack shit" section).
lagrangian
9d ago
So in comparing, say, this site to Reddit, there's probably some complex code for managing the orders of magnitude greater traffic that themotte just doesn't worry about?
Right. Zorba pays for the site out of pocket, but that is not scalable. The site occasionally goes down - we even lost most of a day of posts not too long ago. That's no big deal at our scale - just ssh in, figure out the bug, deploy something manually, etc.
But at e.g. Google scale, it's $500k/minute of gross revenue on the line in an outage, to say nothing of customers leaving you permanently over the headache. Fractions of a percent of optimization are worth big bucks. Compliance headaches are real. Hardware failures are a continual certainty.
Read about the brilliance behind Spanner, the database a huge amount of Google is built on: their own internet cables, because why choose between C[onsistency] and A[vailability] when you can just not have network P[artitions]?
You need an incredible degree of fault tolerance in large systems. If n pieces in a pipeline each have a probability p of working, the system has p^n - exponential decay.
Plenty of it is feature bloat, that said. You really can serve an astonishing amount of traffic from a single cheap server.
+1. That sounds quite excessive to me.
See e.g. https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohols-effects-health/alcohol-drinking-patterns which defines "heavy drinking" as >=5 drinks on ANY day, or >=15/week. You're at 35-56/week. If you drink it very slowly, it's a little less concerning, but I think you're way past the gray area. A doctor friend told me they start asking questions (but there may not be a problem) at 14 drinks/week.
Or, in calories, that's 100/shot = 3500-5600 calories/week = 1-1.6lb/week. If you're drinking beer or fruity cocktails, multiply by 1.5-3. I'd even be concerned about someone having that many calories of icecream per week. At the same weight, you could replace with healthier foods and your body would be running on much better fuel.
Or, in dollars, even if you're drinking fairly cheap booze at $1/shot, that's $35-56/week = $1820-$2912/year. Might or might not be a lot of money depending on your job, but that feels nontrivial even from a FAANG salary. Especially since, if you're anything like me, a dollar spent on booze often means several more spent on munchies.
lagrangian
15d ago
The normiest answer is certainly Ubuntu. Go with whichever long term support (LTS) is most recent. There will be the most stability/google results for this approach.
lagrangian
16d ago
Absolute raging bullshit. The chances that the most major breakthrough in physics debateably ever happened without any indication on Arxiv etc is tiny. The chance that furthermore the engineering work to scale up the discovery happened without it being leaked massively is zero.
I am embarrassed that the responses here so far are giving this any credence at all. It's always nice to be reminded of how wrong I must be about areas I know little about given that when people comment on my areas, they're often confidently hilariously wrong.
lagrangian
29d ago
Not sure if you meant ((EA or rat adjacent) and (trading or crypto)), in which case no; or (EA or rat adjacent or crypto or trading) in which case yes. Even if the former, there's occasional discussion of investing, but we're pretty heavily on the "all hail the efficient market hypothesis" side, so not fond of crypto.
Anyway, local discord server, DM if you'd like.
lagrangian
29d ago
From Wikipedia:
Attention has been focused on whether the prevalence of autism is increasing with time. Earlier prevalence estimates were lower, centering at about 0.5 per 1,000 for autism during the 1960s and 1970s and about 1 per 1,000 in the 1980s, as opposed to today's 23 per 1000.[4][33]
So 100x we can at least say isn't just Trump's verbal diarrhea - that's 23/.5 = 46x ~= 100x.
I think the other responses about definitions shifting and such are a lot of it, but I wanted to at least point out that it's nominally pretty close to true.
[Numbers spelled out because Markdown is hard and my multi-paragraph numbers mean the next number restarts it. Send help.]
One. It's pretty great, but does have downsides. Dry eyes, worse best-corrected-possible acuity, earlier nearsightedness with age.
Two. Wow that sucks. I'd be genuinely very sad if Hinge banned me (not that it's stopped me from thinking I'll work on my AI more when the ADHD monkey in my brain decides it's time for that again). I think trying to circumvent, or just contacting them, is worth considering.
Check out Jswipe (Jewish Tinder) or Lox Club (Jewish the League). There are probably also other ethnic apps, but those are the one's I've tried. Not a lot of tall people in any of the above, so that helps, and it's a pool that probably likes smarts and money more than tinder.
Three. If they can't produce results in 3 months, 6 if you're feeling generous, fire them. Let's say you paid them for two half days per week, at $100/hr. That's 10k/3 months, which is not much if I understand your preference model at all. Even if it takes trying four people before someone does anything useful, you're out 40k, and I struggle to imagine you can't find someone useful given that much effort. I imagine you're somewhat blocked psychologically on doing whatever you should do maximize your dating game, but when you make it someone's job, they don't have that guilt/etc, and you've selected them for being at least maybe good at it, so results really are plausible.
Raising the question: how do you find this person? The internet. I've hired a dozen housekeepers over as many years by just posting on craigslist. Sure, you get mostly weirdos, but there are great people out there if you're willing to do some phone screening. Stuff your pride down, write a post about what you want help with, and refresh that inbox. You could almost just use your original motte post.
Four. Nope, not legal. Easily twice as not legal as torrent sites, maybe twice and a half. Seeking Arrangement is the famous one. I don't know much about this, but poke around reddit to see people's experiences.
Five. If you're dedicated enough to lifting that you're doing it reliably/hard enough (e.g. Stronglifts 5x5 worth of effort/three days x 1-1.5 hours/week, with progressive overload) and seeing your numbers go up, trainer can probably be skipped at least until you're past noob gains. If you get to benching your body weight, you're solidly into "you may hurt yourself and/or stop progressing" territory without a trainer, unless you have great proprioception and hit youtube/etc pretty hard.
How do you find this person? So many trainers on the internet. See #3, but easier and less awkward. Any gym has trainers. Unless you are very advanced or have a medical problem, a mediocre trainer is going to be drastically better than no trainer. Try a few until you like someone.
lagrangian
1mo ago
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Lasik is great, independently of the rest of it. I did PRK despite qualifying for Lasik, because it's better and how bad could the pain be for a week or two? Excruciating, as it turns out, but worth it to not have a flap in my eye
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How'd you get banned from Hinge?
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Could you literally hire someone to be your full time dating assistant/coach/fashion coordinator?
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My career is going well enough that I would definitely be willing to spend ~$50,000 in a single night if it would guarantee me sex
Well that one's definitely doable. In all seriousness, maybe a sugar baby? In addition to achieving the proximal goal, it could help you build confidence.
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If you don't have a trainer, get one. Ideally get one who doubles as good practice interacting with women, if a lack thereof is part of your problem.
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If your company is hiring remote employees, uh, DM me (faanger)
lagrangian
1mo ago
lagrangian
1mo ago
+1. 50% CFR is a rather extraordinary claim. Data varies, but I am seeing 60% CFR for ebola.
lagrangian
1mo ago
Do you have older data as well? This is just trump + biden data, and it's almost consistent with "Trump deprioritized recalls" as a sole explanation. If it was <100 consistently pre-Trump, that's more interesting.
lagrangian
1mo ago
"ABCDEFish", or if you prefer: things that are approximately ABCDEF, or the points near ABCDEF in concept-space?
lagrangian
1mo ago
My dad's theory of gifts has long been that the best gifts are something you'd want, but would never buy for yourself because you wouldn't spend the money.
I take a similar approach: buy a nicer version of something than they would buy, or even have already bought. E.g. they may have a couple $10 knives - buy a $100 knife.
lagrangian
1mo ago
Alright, I've tried to ignore you. I've blocked you, but still see the threads you generate, which was somehow even more annoying. At this point, I'm going to burn some social capital, or take the downvotes, or eat a ban, but by god I'm gonna say it - and I'll wager I'm not alone in the sentiment:
I dislike your weird, pathetic, whiney presence on this board, and I'd dearly love if you left.
lagrangian
2mo ago
- I doubt I will outsource, I find that part easy and almost enjoyable. That said, the AI is better than you'd think at it. I think if I gave it enough information about me, it'd be fine. I figure the formula is roughly: respond to what she said, ask followup questions, tie in something about yourself. 1/2 are very AI friendly; 3, moderately.
\3. Interesting, I think saving it for the first date might be a good call. I think it's a good story at any time, but probably more useful there.
Goal is love for sure. If I just wanted to get laid, the algorithm would not need the "is very smart" filter, and even the "not very fat" filter could be relaxed...
Side note: I fucking love that you did this for many reasons. Congrats!
Thanks, I've wanted to do it for a while. I really thought it would be harder. I'm curious to try about o1-preview as well, although it's 3-4x the cost. GPT-4o-mini was not adequate for sure.
lagrangian
2mo ago
It's plenty good. The prompt basically just says not to be too enthusiastic, and to keep it short. I've been writing down my manual messages to prompt it with as examples, but am not even using that yet.
E.g. the match was responding to a picture of a woman standing in front of a field of sunflowers, captioned "My happy place": "Sunflowers might just be the happiest flower there is. What's your favorite outdoor place to relax?" A little extra, but it shows "I" looked at the picture, makes it about her, is easy to answer/start a conversation with - not bad imo.
If messaging is your bottleneck, you can use basic chat interfaces for response ideas. I would not overestimate how much the specific message matters - I'm pretty sure it's more of a rule-out than a rule-in kind of thing. Just don't be a creep basically.
I'm automating Hinge. Android emulator, pyautogui, PIL, GPT-4o. It's almost too easy.
The flow is:
- pyautogui: take a screen shot. With a 1:8 aspect ratio on the emulator this gets the whole screen. Earlier versions scrolled and stitched together, which mostly worked, but boy do I feel stupid not thinking of it sooner.
- AI: prompt to extract information from the info section (height, job, age, education, etc), an assessment of personality (nerdy, travel loving, high fashion, etc), and a physical description (weight, race, hair color), and an overall assessment of if she's my personality/physical type. (Note: the goal is nerdy but hates travel and isn't high fashion!)
- python: ignore literally all of #2 except the job and education. If either matches a whitelist of terms that signal smarts, proceed.
- PIL: split the screenshot into sections, using the like buttons.
- AI: transcribe (for prompts) or describe (for images) each section (separately) and provide a response. (My favorite part: I have it refer to her as The Candidate, which is how we have to write interview feedback at work.)
- AI: given all the transcriptions/responses, pick the best one.
- pyautogui: click heart button, type response, send.
Costs me about $0.04 to reject, $0.10 to message. I think I can get that down some. I only ran it for one batch, and it got a match faster than I normally do. Small sample size, but I am optimistic.
As to why #3 is so simple - I initially had a hand written weighted average of all the things, but looking at the actual behavior realized that:
- Really all I care is that she's smart and not terribly fat
- GPT-4o is not good at telling me if she's fat, so far.
Favorite kerfuffle: it messaged a woman, shown in a photo by a giant 10ft novelty planted pot: "is that enormous, or are you tiny"? It...was certainly not the latter.
This raises some questions for me:
- Do I let it do more than the first message? Probably not - it's just the endless swiping/messaging into the void I dislike. Conversion rate match -> date is tolerable.
- Could I let it literally do everything up to and including putting a calendar event on my calendar? Probably so - I'd say it'd cut my conversion rate in half.
- Do I admit I'm doing this? n=1, but I did, immediately, and it went well for me.
lagrangian
2mo ago
Wouldn't "we killed the patient through inaction" also leave them vulnerable to prosecution/malpractice claims? If I show up to the ER with a gunshot wound and they say they think it's illegal to treat me, go away, I imagine I have an easy lawsuit to win.
lagrangian
2mo ago
Is it a crippling fear of 🤓 emoji?
I'm old. What does this mean?
lagrangian
2mo ago
96% to win, 92% to win popular vote. How is that strong a conclusion possible after all the last minute surprises last year? There are huge amounts of uncounted votes in swing states.
Context: I strongly do not think there was a material amount of fraud last time around, and I don't expect there will be this time either
finalized tomorrow
Oh man, I wish. Back in the good old days, I think (?) we used to get same day election results, but not anymore.
Even barring the real possibility that this gets tied up in the courts for weeks, or even months, I don't expect a same day result. Last election was held on Tuesday November 3, but results were not confidently projected until November 7, and not called until November 19. Per Wikipedia:
The general election was held on November 3, with voters directly selecting their state's members to the U.S. Electoral College. On November 7, most national media organizations projected that Biden had clinched enough electoral votes to be named the U.S. president-elect
More detailed timeline from 2020:
| State | Electoral votes |
AP race projection | First votes reported |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arizona | 11 | Nov. 4 at 2:51 am | Nov. 3 at 10:02 pm |
| Georgia | 16 | Nov. 19 at 7:58 pm | Nov. 3 at 7:20 pm |
| Michigan | 16 | Nov. 4 at 5:58 pm | Nov. 3 at 8:08 pm |
| North Carolina | 15 | Nov. 13 at 3:49 pm | Nov. 3 at 7:42 pm |
| Nevada | 6 | Nov. 7 at 12:13 pm | Nov. 3 at 11:41 pm |
| Pennsylvania | 20 | Nov. 7 at 11:25 am | Nov. 3 at 8:09 pm |
| Wisconsin | 10 | Nov. 4 at 2:16 pm | Nov. 3 at 9:07 pm |
lagrangian
2mo ago
A comparison I haven't seen posed: Kamala vs Hillary. I think the comparison points to a Donald victory. Since he beat Hillary, he'll beat Kamala. (Meta: why is it that Trump is rarely referred to by first name?)
Hillary has the stronger resume: U.S. senator (2001–09) and secretary of state (2009–13) for Obama. Compare to Kamala: attorney general of California (2011–17), U.S. Senate (2017–21), VP (21-). Or, maybe it's a tie, if you're somehow impressed by her time as VP.
Criticism of Hillary's demeanor is around being elitist and robotic, which beats Harris's positionless word salad.
Trump 2016 was much scarier: as a total unknown, it was at least a little more credible he'd do, uh, much more than be in office while three Supreme Court judges died.
Electrolyte pills will have more quantity and types of electrolytes than a gatorade, without the sugar. I have taken this brand.
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