roystgnr
3hr ago
IMDB says she hasn't done much after that remake. One thing opposite Tom Hanks, and a Little Women remake, and a short film to try directing, and nothing for the last 4 years. Wiki makes it sound like she didn't want to say she'd never act again but she was sick enough of it not to sign up for anything that wasn't at least "get to work with Tom Hanks" level.
roystgnr
1d ago
Israel definitely isn't a white ethno-state - they've gone to great lengths to enable black Jews to immigrate, especially when one commie junta prison country banned their emigration back in the early 80s.
It's not any other kind of pure ethno-state, either. I would argue that "Jewish" is a multi-racial ethnicity just like "Hispanic" is, but that's moot. Excluding Gaza and the West Bank, something like a fifth of Israelis are Muslim Arabs.
Would it be reasonable to argue that they're trying to be an "ethno-state with a grandfather clause", though? I've seen such a proposition in the American context, the idea that further immigrants from Africa to the US should be disallowed and "don't belong here" but ADOS African-Americans didn't choose to be here and absolutely shouldn't be "repatriated". This seems somewhat analogous to the belief that Arabs (including their descendants) who stuck with Israel through the 1948 war deserve full citizenship and rights while the ones who fled or fought Israel (or who were never within those borders) don't have a right to be in Israel proper. The big difference is that AFAIK (correct me if I'm wrong!) the US version is believed by only a fraction of the right wing and is well outside the Overton window while the Israeli version reflects the median opinion and official immigration policy.
roystgnr
1d ago
this theme came up a lot, where their parents looked like a genius fleeing Vietnam circa 1960 and yet circa 2020 the family (that was upper echelon enough to get the people that left the resources and education to leave) back home are 9-figure millionaires whilst the emigrant is a Doctor.
Vietnam has spent decades rapidly climbing out of crushing poverty, yet the number of centi-millionaires there was still only 58 just a couple years ago. If you know close relatives of 2+ centi-millionaire families, your experience may not be statistically normal. I know it's easier for a whole family than for an individual to amass that total wealth, but even plain millionaire individuals number only in the few tens of thousands in Vietnam.
Qualitatively, though, I'd bet there is a "big fish in a small pond" effect that applies to many more people. PPP is an average over many classes of goods, and some things (real estate, anything Baumol-effected) are much more affordable to Vietnamese residents than to Vietnamese-Americans here.
roystgnr
1d ago
Some CIA cyber guy reads this and says "give me it for a billion, I want to sick it on iran"
This could have been accomplished with a red-teaming demo. What the CIA guy sees here is "if I try to sic this on Iran, it might get caught hacking into DoD instead".
roystgnr
1d ago
"misalignment" is not a simple thing
No, but it is the complement of a very complex thing. The algorithmic complexity of "the set of possible dice rolls that aren't 6,3,1,2,2..." only differs from "the dice roll 6,3,1,2,2" by a tiny constant (and is greater in most settings), but what we want here is probability theory, and "more complex things are less probable" is a heuristic that fails badly in cases like this. "The agent doesn't do just what we'd intended it to" is not meaningfully less simple than "The agent does do just what we'd intended it to", and is far, far more probable.
accepting that it did indeed do all this very complicated behavior completely on its own requires substantive belief in complicated theories
Or it requires basic observation. LLMs do very complicated things now. They can solve famous math problems that have been open for generations. Merely finding 0-day vulnerabilities is something they can do by the hundreds.
roystgnr
1d ago
I don't understand why there needs to be collision between OpenAi and Huggingface
There wouldn't necessarily need to be collusion, but it'd be pretty gutsy to commit multiple felonies as a marketing gimmick. You'd need collusion with Hugging Face if you wanted to make sure your conspiracy's actions were non-felonies (if revealed) or forgiven (if not revealed), plus collusion among a lot of your own senior engineers if anything more complicated than prompting was used to perpetrate the attack.
It'd be a stupid marketing gimmick anyway. Despite being very pro-AI in principle, my workplace currently only allows use of an ancient (on AI timelines) version of Codex, for security reasons, and the lobbying from below to hurry up approvals of newer versions just got cut off at the knees. "When my agent's done I have to check for bad design decisions" is much more tolerable than "when my agent's done I have to check for crimes". I'd be happy if this eventually leads to a switch to Claude, but that'll be much more red tape than "finally bump a version number" would have been, and OpenAI definitely wouldn't be happy.
It's also a stupid conspiracy theory for more basic epistemological reasons. Reward hacking has been reported by other AI researchers over and over and over again. I get that it's scary to use induction here as AI gets more capable, but Occam says "the thing that keeps happening kept happening" is a better explanation than "we put in a ton of effort to make it stop happening but then also some secret dangerous effort to pretend it's still happening".
roystgnr
1d ago
Linux is taking off among zoomers
Seriously? I'd love evidence to that effect.
Depending on your definition of "zoomer" it's possible I've been a Linux fan since before you were born, but it's almost as likely that I've been hearing "This is going to be the Year of the Linux Desktop!", in decreasing ratios of sincerity to irony, since before you were born. I want to say that the increasing irony doesn't feel like as big a deal as it used to. Maybe that's because these days you can use VS Code on Linux to write Linux software and Windows Subsystem for Linux to run it on Windows, maybe it's because Steam has gifted us with more top-notch Linux games (especially if you include top-notch emulatable-on-Linux games) than I'll ever be able to play, or maybe none of that's my true reasoning there.
roystgnr
2d ago
(1) is more and more popular, I think primarily coming from Asian-American cultures? It makes a lot of sense to me, after a little thought. My kids don't think twice about putting their hands on the carpet while playing. Even my nicest shoes walk outside on sidewalks where birds often poop. "Wash your hands before eating" is the obvious first line of defense here, but "don't touch the carpet with the same surface that touched the bird poop" isn't a bad backup. It's just the same thing everybody who does outdoor work/gardening/etc does with work boots and "mud room" areas for them, but for other outer footwear in foyer/entry areas.
In my culture when I was a kid it would have been rude to remove your shoes in someone else's house without asking, because don't feet smell and don't we need shoes to help cover that up, but it turns out "make sure your feet don't smell" is an acceptable alternative solution for that. The level of work and exercise that can make your feet too sweaty and smelly to walk around in bare socks is the kind that probably already merits a shower for your whole body before lounging around the house, much less social events.
roystgnr
2d ago
There's a lot of variance from year to year, especially since Covid (Wiki's list is mostly 2021 data, in which Las Vegas "beat" Albuquerque by a couple homicides-per-100k, but both rates have dropped drastically since), but the Southwest is pretty free from the worst violence hotspots on the whole. After Vegas and Albuquerque the worst time-averaged homicide rate might be Denver, and it's way down the list for cities of its size.
ABQ still has almost double the crime rates of SF.
I wouldn't be surprised. SF has had some really high-profile but limited problems (We stopped bothering to prosecute car break-ins and for some inexplicable reason there was a long rash of car break-ins! After we figured out that crime is just caused by poverty, did anyone remember to tell the criminals?) but even bad enforcement has to do a lot of work to cancel out a selection effect as strong as "being able to afford to live in SF".
roystgnr
2d ago
The proper degree of fear depends on the wasps. In my area we have two types, and the paper wasps are probably less aggressive than bees. They've been building nests under my eaves for decades and I've never been attacked even while spraying the nests with poison. I still don't do so without first making sure I've got a wasp-free escape route, but it's become hard to feel afraid about that requirement.
roystgnr
2d ago
Likewise for many Asian-Americans, at least in the first generation.
The most recent time I was told I was noticeably putting on weight was by a family friend far more fat than me. There was no irony in that, because he wasn't trying to be insulting or mean, he was being helpful! He immigrated many decades ago, and speaks perfect English, probably because that's difficult but useful, but he must have never adopted the American idea that you shouldn't pressure someone you care about to eat healthier, probably because that's easy but harmful.
roystgnr
2d ago
Crime varies a lot from place to place even within Albuquerque. It is relatively bad as a whole, but apparently these days it's not as bad as Gallup (which doesn't surprise me) or Santa Fe (which does). Check out the interactive map here, bearing in mind that lower-population-area results are pretty noisy.
The neighborhood where I grew up gets an "F" today, though StreetView says the only neighbor with bars on their windows is the one who installed them after a break-in decades ago. The worst areas are around the airport, probably because anybody who could afford to live somewhere with less airplane noise did and then the selection effects snowballed from there. There are some high speed roads to get through those areas to the national labs where all the PhDs work, but I know one ex-Albuquerque scientist who left the state after his wife got carjacked, so "just drive past the crime" isn't a foolproof option.
I still have family there, at least in the better areas of town. I don't worry too much about them being victimized and I'd bet @Gaashk will be fine too. Albuquerque's homicide rate is atrocious but it's still better than around 3 dozen other large US cities, the ones you'd expect but also a bunch you wouldn't think twice about unless/until the Eye Of Vince Gilligan turns its pitiless gaze their way.
roystgnr
2d ago
Nah; we thought of imaginary three-eyed fish and fantasy barrels of glowing green radioactive goo.
IMHO the logical culprit here was the one-two punch of Three Mile Island (where, despite no detectable health effects, we proved the west was capable of screwing up more badly than should have been possible) and Chernobyl (where the Soviets proved that screwing up far more badly could contaminate a thousand square miles and probably lead to early cancer for thousands of people), but emotionally the obstacle to simply improving procedures and designs and regaining public trust was definitely the thought of Homer Simpson in charge of safety and Mr. Burns in charge of waste disposal.
roystgnr
2d ago
This was roughly a top-50 open problem in mathematics
Steve Smale (a Fields Medal winner) listed it as #16, and I'm not finding other famous lists definitively disagreeing. That still doesn't mean its solution ranks as #16, of course - at this point people were expecting a proof requiring brilliant new mathematical techniques, whereas the general ideas leading to the counterexample appear to fit in a tweet - but it does mean that it was a problem that some of the best minds in the world were considering, over the course of decades.
a Princeton math PhD
Just learned his PhD advisor was Manjul Bhargava, a Fields Medal winner for algebraic geometry work. Bhargava's work also seems to be more interested in geometry with number fields other than with boring old ℂ, though.
It's possible that Fable did most of the heavy lifting
Apparently GPT reverse-engineered the ideas in that tweet above after looking at the counterexample's equations? Again, the guy prompting it is an algebraic geometer, but he still had to prompt it.
roystgnr
3d ago
Litt is almost certainly correct that "Fields Medal" is overselling it, but I think "very impressive" is still underselling it. This was roughly a top-50 open problem in mathematics, one famous for attracting flawed "proofs". A restricted version of the conjecture had been open for nearly a century before being proven. The full conjecture was open for over 80 years. One of the most successful 21st century number theorists had his math career derailed by spending his PhD on the Jacobian conjecture with unimpressive results.
I think my biggest reason for epistemic caution here is that this wasn't a case of "AI disproving the Jacobian conjecture", it's a case of "AI led by a Princeton math PhD disproving the Jacobian conjecture", and I haven't yet seen which half of that team was responsible for which ideas in the derivation. From a quick glance at Alpöge's dissertation and senior thesis, I guess he seems to be more of an Algebraic-geometry guy than an algebraic-Geometry guy, but he still seems to be comfortable with the sorts of algebraic geometry tools that were likely used to derive his example. It's possible that Fable did most of the heavy lifting and Alpöge's critical contribution was "being an Anthropic employee with unlimited Fable access", but it might not be a total coincidence that he's not a number theorist or a topologist or something.
roystgnr
3d ago
I lost my (full-sized) Swiss Army Knife, a gift from my uncle, to a TSA bin shortly after 9/11. Intellectually I know it was foolish of me not to adjust more quickly from "knives are useful and a bit nerdy" culture to "nobody would need to carry a blade unless they're premeditating an attack" culture, but if I'd realized the former culture would eventually become unfathomable I think I would have resisted adjusting even longer.
I recall some of my elders' generation reporting similar feelings, after the statement "my classmate brought a gun to school" no longer primarily implied "I want to go hunting after class too!" Like, even if this is a change that needs to be made for safety's sake, there's definitely something being lost along the way.
roystgnr
4d ago
Fair enough. IMHO this one is worth making an exception for, but I don't really have a good way to convince you of that. In hindsight it's insane that Telltale never just turned Episode 1 of the first season into a free demo.
roystgnr
4d ago
the best cinematic VNs
You've compiled a top-notch list in general, which makes the omission of (Telltale's) The Walking Dead here especially odd.
roystgnr
4d ago
asexual lesbian (a contradiction in terms,
As a boy I had 3 or 4 crushes before I ever had anything like a sexual urge, and yet they were all crushes on girls. "Asexual heteroromantic" would have been a good descriptor. I presume asexual homoromantic people exist too, in great numbers before puberty albeit smaller numbers after.
roystgnr
6d ago
the Random Encounters song covers it in less than five minutes (and is very catchy)
I'd never seen that. And seeing it now leads down a rabbit hole of different original songs about Doki Doki Literature Club rendered in Minecraft style, at least half a dozen of which have tens of millions of YouTube hits each. Despite the creepiness of the game, there's something super-wholesome about these sorts of inventive fan communities going off and doing their own things, connected by and occasionally going viral on the internet. It's like the Chaotic Good version of the "toaster fucker problem".
roystgnr
6d ago
"packs" plural? I think "Project HDTP" was the only decent complete one I ever looked up; did I miss anything better?
roystgnr
6d ago
I think "opsec reasons" are ultimately one of the big limiting factors for OpenAI, Anthropic, et al: lots of situations will really prefer something in-house, or at least an ironclad contract about confidentiality.
The "ironclad contract about confidentiality" thing is an option, and IMHO from their point of view it's just a great way to do price discrimination. "Oh, you want the This Goes On Secured Systems And Never In The Training Set plan? We should talk."
Properly cleaned data is an additional option.
I would have thought that would be more trouble than it's worth, in general. But yesterday I heard the story of an institution that has the capability to strip all confidential and personal data from a core dump so that tech consultants (including, in at least the latest case, an LLM-based agent) can analyze software problems without having any access to user data. Anonymized story, so I'm not sure whether these were national defense secrets or credit card databases or what, but in hindsight I was left with the impression that I shouldn't have been surprised regardless, that institutions large enough to have masses of such data are often also large enough to have such capabilities.
roystgnr
6d ago
I finally played the Deus Ex prequels a couple years ago, after rage-quitting the first long ago when I hit the "we subcontracted our boss fights and forgot to mention stealth options" debacle. With that fixed, they're pretty good. Not as good as the original IMHO, even if you take the ancient graphics of the original into account, but they had most of the same philosophical/semi-open-world "feel" of the original, which is more than I could ever say for the sequel.
(YMMV - I may have been the only one looking forward to the planned "They really turned those 1999 graphics into 2003 graphics" Deus Ex Remastered so much that I'd have paid $30 for what looked like a high-end fan mod)
As long as I'm replying:
Last month I finished Subnautica. IMHO there's no replay value here, because overall there are better mechanics elsewhere in the survival+base-builder genre, but the story and exploration makes a single playthrough more fun than the same number of hours spent in any such competitor I've tried.
A few months ago I played through the 2015 King's Quest. Not as good as KQ6, and probably not as much better than most of the series as you'd expect from a decades-newer game, but it wasn't disappointing. A bit of a stumble on the second chapter but a surprisingly sophisticated combination of nostalgia and maturity overall.
I contrast this to Return to Monkey Island, which I played through last year, which was trying to accomplish the same combination but utterly failed to stick the landing. The most positive thing I can say was that it wasn't as long a game as these others, so there's only 10 hours of my life I regret not spending on something else.
In between those I finished Spider-Man Remastered. For adults IMHO it's not as good as the best of the Assassin's Creed series, but it's more fun than most of that series, and on top of that it was child-friendly enough to let my kids play too.
roystgnr
8d ago
That's fair. It worked out well enough for me under "we'll see each other for 3 or 4 months out of the year, never more than a couple months at a stretch apart" circumstances, and in another case it worked great for me under "we'll see each other every weekend" circumstances (I didn't even think of this one as a LDR, despite us living too far apart to meet up on weekdays, until I talked to someone who complained about a slightly shorter distance), but I've never attempted anything rougher than those. A friend was long-distance with his fiance for a year due to education and work conflicts, I think separated for more than a few months at a time during that, and they're happily married decades later but I know that year was awful for both of them. I also have more depressing stories but all of those feel too personal to tell, even anonymized, behind the backs of the people involved.
Well, all the way back we have European literature for, any way. But was that first-ever literature conservative for its time? Asked that way the question practically answers itself, no?
"There will be no epic poems written down in this house, young man!"
"You just don't get it! I'm going to Coroebus's! His dad lets him recite Gilgamesh!"
More options
Context Copy link