pbmonster
6d ago
But none of what you're describing would have been unknown, to either party, even at the start of the relationship.
That doesn't make a difference, does it? A professor dating his student is an obvious power imbalance, no matter how aware both of them are at the start.
just sounds like they're both giving something up (money or choice of where to live) and both getting a lot out of the relationship.
Sure, still different than a couple graduating together and deciding where to move together - who then also get a lot (but often different things) out of the relationship.
Can you define this for me? What does "power differential" mean in the Western context?
There's only very few 10+ year age gap relationships in my extended bubble, but those I can think of have clear power differentials: the guy already owned a house and was established in his career when she left grad school. This means, once she decided to enter that relationship, he got to choose the city they would live in. She's also, by not pushing for it in a prenup, not on the title of the house.
At some point, his pension scheme is going to allow him to retire, maybe even retire early. Whether she will continue to work or retire extremely early herself - together with him - will probably not feel like her choice.
She could have pushed against all that, but by being older, a lot of the default choices were already locked in by him. It would have taken a lot of effort to change some of those defaults, and realistically, the relationship would not have survived that effort.
Oh the other hand: free rent, lots of disposable income, friends in similar situations, a network to boost her own career... certainly nice perks, but I bet she wonders how much of that would survive a divorce.
pbmonster
7d ago
That's the thing, I haven't notice the frequency of incorrect output to go down significantly! It just gets more and more difficult to detect the errors.
If you enjoy history, I can recommend the Asian Civilisations Museum. One of the better ones I've visited, specifically it is orders of magnitude better than every single anthropological/historical museum I've visited in Japan. The National Museum is more about Singapore itself, but I also found it well done. If anything, the museums are air-conditioned, which will make them very much appealing once you're exploring the streets. The city also has a nice selection of different styles of temples, I decided to visit all the major ones just as a mission to see many different parts of the city on foot.
If you like Asian food, I've had some of the best Chinese and Indian food of my life in Singapore, both street food and fancy restaurants. Selecting restaurants beforehand is probably worth it.
When I asked Singaporean people what they like to do, they suggested going to one of the mega-malls, with the cable cars to Sentosa Island and (of course) to Marina Bay. The two former I flat out hated, they are not worth doing, unless you really have time to kill or need photos for Instagram - they look much better in photos than in real life. No matter what, absolutely do not go swimming at the beach at Sentosa, that must be just about the worst touristic beach in Asia. Marina Bay (the towers, the gardens, the indoor jungle, the supertrees at night, and the area around it) are more or less obligatory for tourism in Singapore, but just like the main Botanical Gardens and the Zoo I found all that just extremely... mid. Unless you like park design and architecture, it won't even fill a full day.
Two weeks is a lot of time for a "young" city like Singapore. I would strongly recommend long excursions into Malaysia instead of staying in the city, and I regret not leaving for trips sooner.
pbmonster
7d ago
Seriously, compare gpt-4 and gpt-3 output, this is not something that can really be disputed by any thinking person.
I dispute it. Both suffer exactly the same problem: the output they produce is frequently wrong in subtle and insidious ways. This makes both equally useless for work that requires correctness, especially correctness you can't write unit tests for.
pbmonster
11d ago
Just a question of energy pricing. Zero liquid discharge is possible for desalination plants, it just takes more energy and more CAPEX. And really, all the environmentalist want is that concentrated brine isn't dumped into the ecosystem.
pbmonster
11d ago
Yeah, I can see it for municipal water supply. For farming the central valley? Never going to be economical.
Speaking of economical, building reservoirs would certainly be cheaper than building desalination facilities and the power infrastructure they require. But desalination works even when the reservoirs don't get refilled much anymore because of climate change, so maybe they're the right choice anyway.
pbmonster
12d ago
Define "worthwhile". If you get around the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, you could dam several major northern rivers: Klamath, Trinity, Smith, and Eel each could support several reservoirs (there are old plans to build "dam ladders" up those rivers). But that's unpopular, for ecological, indigenous and financial reasons.
You could also just add capacity to existing reservoirs by upgrading the dams. There's many candidates. Again, expensive and unpopular.
Why is there only one good contemporary example? If it's such a great and effective strategy, we should see it more. It's like with evolution, we don't have to theorize about what works in nature, we can simply see what exists and know that must be pretty good by the very fact it exists and is succeeding.
It's more complicated than that, right? By that logic, you could pick 1985 and argue that communism was better for Eastern Germany than centralized monarchy and market economy. Which is wrong, in my opinion - even a bumbling idiot as the King of Prussia would have done his people better than the commies ever did. Same for Belgian Congo - just because they don't have a King and his Governor anymore doesn't mean that... whatever the fuck it is they are doing there today is better for the Congolese than monarchy was (not saying that the monarchy was working out particularly well for the Congolese, either, but life was certainly better in the '50s than it is today). Just because you can destroy something doesn't mean what comes after is actually necessarily working better. And sure, eventually the commies failed in Eastern Germany and something more effective took over. But that doesn't just happen automatically.
Exactly, they lost. There was a real world test and they lost it.
I'm not a fan of single shot experiments. Wilhelm II was an idiot. Run the story again with Bismark as emperor, and western civilization might be speaking German for the next 400 years. And of course, democracy doesn't automatically select for the most effective leaders for the majority of voters. American voters elected and reelected G.W. Bush, which arguably was both unnecessary and a strict loss for the majority of Americans.
If democracy is so bad and monarchy/empires are so good, then why are pretty much all the dictatorships shitholes while the democracies are rich and powerful? The only meaningful counter example is Singapore and that's more of a blend between dictatorship and democracy.
The only contemporary counter example. Both the German Empire and Imperial Japan performed respectably in the late 18th and early 19th century, both economically and militarily.
The German Empire doubled GDP per capita between 1870 and 1914, surpassing (democratic) France and slowly closing the gap towards both the (also democratic) British Empire and the US - and they did that without having access to a vast colonial empire or an entire continent absolutely full of natural resources, respectively. The details are a bit more complicated, of course, because the Emperor was kept in check by a democratically elected parliament, but they really didn't have all that much power (mostly some fiscal control, but the Emperor chose the Chancellor and could disband parliament at any time, which he frequently threatened). Also, Wilhelm II was a bumbling idiot mostly ineffective ruler.
Imperial Japan went through the Meiji Restoration during the same period, industrializing even faster than Germany and successfully using its new industrial might to absolutely crush China and Russia on the battlefield. Again, a centralized monarchy with power concentrated mostly in the Emperor, but some checks (council of elder statesmen doing some heavy advising - but nobody said a dictator couldn't have some competent experts to make some decisions). And yes, both monarchies extensively relied on market economies - with a lot of guiding industrial policy from their Emperors.
Would have been interesting how far those centralized monarchies could have taken their people (in absentia of a catastrophic loss in a World War they started putting an end to the experiment) - or if the monarchy would have been abolished/disempowered/constitutionalized by the people anyway, even without the wars.
Overflight of the zone above 18k feet is legal, which makes jumping to the "someone-lost-a-MANPADS-in-Juarez"-theory the obvious choice. Both the Stinger and the Verba have an effective ceiling a little under 18k feet. The interesting questions is how hard do you have to kick the cartels for them to fire one at everything that flies?
The other option would be counter-drone operations in that airspace, probably also against the cartels and their drone activity. But stranding tens of expensive commercial aircraft for 10 days would be a little absurd for something that should be easy to plan...
pbmonster
19d ago
I'm not sure the people in the Snow Crash burbs actually share much community, but I guess I can see the splintering into smaller units - even if many of those are just franchises of some anarcho-capitalist mega-corp that collectively hires armed security. Sounded more like a thought experiment to me, along the lines of "what if every American suburb was a gated community that had cyborg pitbulls mauling tresspassers?" And American suburbs famously don't have that much actual social community going for them.
Also, absolutely read Anathem next, if you haven't already. It's by far his best work, and the one that actually has an (extremely utopian) solution to exactly that problem!
pbmonster
21d ago
Been reading my third Neal Stephenson novel lately
Which ones? I guess Diamond Age has that theme between the lines, but which others do?
pbmonster
21d ago
It's certainly both. If your grant success rate in 2025 is 16%, you just have to write 6 times as many grant proposals. Does that additional labor lead to progress? No, on the contrary.
But on the other hand it is absolutely true that the low hanging fruit are gone. Look at the first Nobel in physics: X-rays. Even in the late 19th century, a single motivated human could just go and make a cathode tube from scratch. Glass blowing, vacuum pumps, high voltage source, some simple metal work, silver bromide coated plates. It's far from trivial, but really, you could do it entirely on your own, and fast. Stuff like that is mostly gone now. You need hundreds of thousands of dollars just for the experimental equipment - because for 100 years, legions of people have tried doing frontier work with little money, and they still do inside no-name university labs all over the world. The frontier now needs hundreds of hours of work from an army of expert technicians across a dozen specialized companies just to do the first test setup. And someone needs to pay for that.
Or do you have another explanation? The reward for cheap and effective science would be enormous. If it were possible, somebody somewhere would be doing it, right?
pbmonster
21d ago
Exactly. If you train at a gym, that might mean first finding the right one. Some gyms thrive on full contact and the camaraderie of butting heads no-holds-barred, others are 50% women and half the time is spend on speed/coordination games like "find a partner and try to tap their knee or shoulder". Both ends of the spectrum might not (exclusively) be what you need.
The "up to" might be doing a lot of the work here. Some (many) weeks, those people spend all their days just writing grant proposals, writing/editing research papers, peer-reviewing other papers, preparing teaching, and answering emails. On those tasks, you could have an LLM do 90% of the writing. Still going to involve lots of prompting, rejecting output and prompting again. You can also have it do 90% of your literature surveys. It is better at search than the old tools are, after all.
The question is if this "up to 90%" is actually what "drives scientific discovery". Because when a grad student shows up with interesting measurement results, the LLM will do 0% of the thinking of what that means, what the updated hypothesis is, what direction the research is going to go in, and what potential papers this might result in and what other measurements are now necessary to test the current hypotheses.
Same goes for peer-review. The LLM can write the boilerplate "this is garbage unfit for this kind of journal". The decision that the paper sounds fishy and the data looks unconvincing is not coming from the LLM.
It’s exceptionally good for your brain as well; there’s whole layers of strategy and meta strategy involved.
Unless you get into full contact sparing. That's not good for your brain, at all.
I did kickboxing for a while, and spared with a boxing helmet. Still got rocked badly, and declined ever going to competitions just of because how bad sparing could get. But then again, I was a superheavyweight, and those have absurd KO rates in amateur competitions. Also, the head kicks make it worse, of course. So your mileage might vary.
But yes, just the exercise is so good. It has everything: speed, power, mobility, cardio, technique, tactics and strategy. And friendly sparing is tons of fun.
pbmonster
21d ago
Basically, the real world would turn into what you see in most MMOs – almost all women would stay women, but a significant minority of men would choose to become women as well.
I have always assumed the reason for that not to be trans-curiosity, but the well-known fact that men like visual stimulation. "If I'm going to spend hours staring at a wizard's backside, she might as well be leggy and plump. And if I'm going to have to worry about which amour to play dress-up with, there better be cleavage."
So, unsurprisingly, my estimate for the magic button pressing would have been 1%. 25% is unfathomable, even if the button also magically turns you 16. Because if it doesn't (which we have to assume, since age was never part of the discussion), the button would just trade sweet testosterone for a few short years of menstruation and then the horrors of menopause for a significant fraction of "all men", without any of the perks all those guys fantasize about.
pbmonster
25d ago
If you know the counterparty's strategy you can do better, and sadly if you know it's "Always Defect", the best you can do is to match it.
Well, yes, trivially.
The best strategy when playing a counterparty with an unknown strategy is not the best strategy against every possible strategy.
I think I don't get it. What's the difference? Is your point that "every possible strategy" contains some really dumb strategies and "a counterparty with an unknown strategy" must be assumed to be somewhat optimized?
pbmonster
26d ago
If the opponent's strategy is "Always Cooperate" or "Always Defect", the best strategy is the same for total payoff, and "Always Defect" for their own payoff.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but if we're actually playing iterative prisoner's dilemma against a variety of competing strategies (and we can't know what any given opponent is going to play), the "permanent retaliation strategy" (also called "tit for tat without forgiveness" - you cooperate until your opponent defects a single time, then you always defect no matter what) is optimal, both for individual and collective gain.
But yes, the "permanent defector" is not far off in points for individual payoff.
Berufsschulen are vocational schools. Around 50% of German students attend those schools after finishing high school for a few days a week while doing an formal 3 year apprenticeship with a company. Classically, all trades have vocational schools, but also careers that would attend college in the US (nursing, accounting, system administrators, ect.) have vocational schools in Germany.
Civil servants is another classically German thing. It's a large class of government employees that enjoy extreme protections (absurdly difficult to fire, must be allowed to work part time if requested, ect.) and benefits (very nice pension, child benefits, ect.) - often in exchange for working a job where you cannot easily find equivalent work outside of government service. So examples are police, judges, firefighters, district attorneys, building inspectors, tax inspectors, head administrative staff at the city/state/federal government, ect. And, somewhat controversially, public school teachers.
pbmonster
27d ago
Well, where are you going to live? Renting is infeasible (by design). Are you going to buy a different house that also has a fake and gay high price?
For many boomers, the answer to that question is "an assisted living facility/a retirement home". This facility then will charge both rent and service fees that are so absurdly fake and gay high, that it will be able to transfer the entire value of the sold house into the hands of private equity firms and the medical industry in just a few years. Just in time before anybody can inherit anything.
It's almost as if they designed the entire system in a way that explicitly allows private equity to drain trillions of dollars from the middle class.
pbmonster
27d ago
my pay will be substantially lower for a long while, AFAIK much more than 2 years
You probably have all the university credits necessary, so you're missing 1.5 years of accompanied teaching (with the seminar lessons running in parallel) and a few education science credit points. The latter can sometimes be gotten at the seminar itself, or you get them on the side at a PH or from a remote university. After that, you should directly qualify for civil service (if you're healthy, ect.). But most of those details vary a lot by state, so you need to do a lot of research anyway.
the job market for teachers here locally doesn't appear all that great, especially not for getting into the Gymnasium
Yeah, math should still be somewhat in demand, biology not so much. If you can somehow convince them into accepting your data science/programming/math experience as credits for computer science, you're home safe.
If you really want to teach, you can keep an eye on Berufsschulen. They also need math teachers and have way lower/different requirements.
That doesn't make much sense. Being aware of, and agreeing to, a power imbalance doesn't make it go away.
And I agree, every couple should have those discussions. But going into the discussion with a younger man would obviously change the stakes, and the style. There would be, on average, more room for compromise. And sure, if both actually want the exact same thing in every aspect of life, that doesn't matter. But most relationships don't have a 100% match, so compromising is important.
Same with the threat of divorce. As long as one party is significantly more fucked by separating, there is a power differential. Agreeing to it doesn't make it vanish.
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