sohois
2yr ago
Google hires dozens of people from the business program I did every year (which might sound like nothing but it's just one program) to essentially be sales development and account managers for ads.
sohois
2yr ago
The responses below have already explained the scandals that brought Boris down, but another point is that Boris failed to get any credit in the bank; after the Brexit deal, his government basically achieved nothing despite a large majority.
There were plenty of external factors that Boris had no control over, for which he was pretty unlucky. Covid, of course. Even if Boris had stuck to the original plan of "let it rip" and herd immunity, the rest of the world is still going to lockdown, destroying supply chains and driving inflationary forces. British borrowing would be in a better place at least, but that wouldn't stave off inflation and a recession.
The invasion of Ukraine is probably still happening. In fact the response to this was one of Boris's few successes, so if it didn't happen he wouldn't be better off. And even if he had immediately commissioned a dozen nuclear power plants after the GE, there is nothing he could have done about the energy crisis which engulfed Europe, due to the blunders of Germany.
But there is plenty he could have done. Immigration was a major driver of Brexit, with voters eager for reductions to both legal and illegal migration. Yet the Tories responded to heavy reductions in EU immigration by massively expanding visa numbers to other nations. And they have seemingly done nothing for waves of English channel crossings that have occupied papers day after day.
Another big promise was "leveling up", spreading economic benefits to left-behind areas of the country that had switched to the Tories and reducing the dependence on London. Other than the continued lumbering forward of the HS2 rail line, I can't recall a single policy that might have done anything about this.
sohois
2yr ago
There's actually a far more interesting example than Boris: Kwasi Kwarteng, the recently departed chancellor.
Kwarteng has a double first & a PhD from Cambridge, and was a Kennedy scholar at Harvard. Unlike Boris and most other politicians, his degrees weren't in PPE and other broad subjects, but in economics, so he should have been primed for a position as chancellor. He even had relevant experience in hedge funds, rather than just being a former journalist, again like so many other politicians.
Kwarteng might well have the most impressive academic achievements of anyone in the House of Parliament today. And yet he blundered terribly with his mini-budget, seemingly unaware that the markets would not look kindly to low-tax and high-spend in the middle of major economic turbulence.
How exactly did someone who is probably top 1% in intelligence and in a relevant area for his skillset perform so poorly? At least with someone like Robert McNamara you can point to the Vietnam war being a very complex and difficult issue.
sohois
2yr ago
The original comment suggests that the US playerbase for LoL is higher than other nations. I would imagine that Chess also has the largest number of players coming from the US compared to other nations. Both are different from football, in which the US playerbase is dwarfed by other nations
sohois
2yr ago
LoL doesn't involve any physical exertion, nor does it rely on reaction time or fast twitch movements like many other competitive video games. There is 'micro' involved, but all the top players will have equivalent skills, meaning everything comes down to macro gameplay. Just because it is a childish game with a toxic reputation shouldn't blind you to the fact that being good at it requires mental skill more than anything else.
sohois
2yr ago
The ChinaTalk substack is a pretty big one for Chinese news
https://www.chinatalk.media/
It's more of a general China politics/culture substack than just translations, but it does contain plenty of translated articles and interviews as well
also, while the language stuff probably isn't of interest, you may enjoy Slow Chinese. It's an advanced Mandarin blog, but perfectly readable for English readers who just want insights into current events
sohois
2yr ago
I just cannot believe any studio would be so careless as to commit such a serious misfire.
How so? The history of production studios is littered with big bets that turned into disasters. Streaming services especially have had hundreds of hyped failures in their recent pasts. Plus, it is not as though RoP is actually a Waterworld or Heaven's Gate or similar; as you say, the perspective is that it isn't a "ground breaking masterpiece".
And how hard is it to make a ground breaking masterpiece? If we again look into film and TV history, the only thing we see from massive budgets is a tendency for productions to look expensive. There has never really been a way to guarantee high quality just from pumping money into something.
The so-called Golden age of TV appears to largely be creator driven if anything. But that's not really a guarantee either. Assuming that you could even convince a David Milch or Matthew Weiner to come and spend years on your Lotr indulgence instead of something they find interesting, there aren't really safe bets there. Both the above had recent flops, Weiner for Amazon Studios in fact. Even if you made the argument they could just hire Peter Jackson, one only needs to look at the Hobbit films.
I believe there was an article linked here which spoke of one of the big issues in current TV - not enough show runners. Streaming has become so voracious that everyone who has the skills to make TV is already locked into contracts. So maybe the relative no-names that Amazon hired were simply the best available? I'm sure there was a stringent enough interview process for them. Perhaps they hoped that they would grow into the role, and it didn't work out?
sohois
2yr ago
Maybe I'm missing your point, but I'd imagine all the people worrying about AI art are not thinking of GPT-3 and stable diffusion. They are thinking of GPT-4/5 and stable diffusion 2. With the rates at which the models have been improving in recent years, it hardly seems fanciful that the next generation of these language models and image generators will be human or super-human level, not sub-human.
sohois
2yr ago
I feel this is a bit harsh on Cummings; certainly reports on his time at No.10 suggested he largely left matters of the economy to Sunak and his team. And he has always emphasised investments in productivity through science funding, education, etc. His focus is on the civil service because that's where his specialism is, where he can actually influence things.
sohois
2yr ago
That's just the subreddit though. ACX isn't mentioned anywhere, though I'm sure that the open threads contain plenty of things that could be deemed objectionable
sohois
2yr ago
This is probably too "boo outgroup", but given the direct relation I felt it was probably worth sharing.
Our once and former (?) moderator TracingWoodgrains has been called out as "a sociopathic troll" who exists to create anti-transgender drama. This is according to transgendermap.com, a pro-trans website which has built a list of communities toxic to the transgender movement.
The focus on Trace comes from their look at Blocked and Reported, and includes a list of ideologically affiliated subreddits, including:
“Rationalist”/libertarian:
CultureWarRoundUp
theschism
TheMotte
slatestarcodex
It seems that the move came at the right time, since if we weren't particularly noticeable before, we likely are now.
sohois
2yr ago
You can see the name of the poster being replied to the right of the user name, and it appears to last even beyond deletion.
sohois
2yr ago
I am subscribed for the occasional interesting insight or amusing find, but ultimately the vast majority of posters there are just a bit dim. It's like sifting through shit to find a nugget of gold. I think, as with SSC itself, it has suffered from growth because you used to find much better arguments a few years ago
sohois
2yr ago
I think reddit style discussion works much better when discussions are very large, with many participants. Forums are much better when it's smaller in scale, and you're not constantly producing these monstrous chained quotes. If you get rid of the megathread approach, small scale discussions would dominate I believe
sohois
2yr ago
At that point, why even bother with a reddit-like design? We might as well have migrated to DSL and just become a regular old forum
sohois
2yr ago
I think if there is any sign of growing anti-monarchy sentiment, Charles will step aside.
sohois
2yr ago
Kiwifarms has posted extremely convincing evidence of Keffals being at best a dangerous person for children but much more likely a paedophile. And it had no effect at all.
I can't imagine a tactic of burying them under annoyances would help much at all
sohois
2yr ago
I'm not sure if this is a bug or even something that can be fixed, but when typing a comment yesterday I clicked Formatting Help since I'd forgotten how to post links. I was promptly redirected, and lost my entire comment when I came back. Very irritating. I guess I just expected it to work like reddit, a drop down box and not a redirect
Rationalism has a big overlap with EA, but EA does not have a big overlap with rationalism. EA has grown significantly beyond its origins in rat-spheres
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