gattsuru
4d ago
(almost) Everyone that gets into Harvard works very hard. Not everyone who works very hard gets into Harvard, or even has a 1% chance of getting into Harvard, or even has a 1% chance of getting into an Ivy. In many cases, the various epicycles for politics mean that many people will have a chance closer to zero, no matter where their test scores or GPA end up.
gattsuru
4d ago
Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
Saying one thing, then saying another, does not actually tie these things to each other. There was an entire and recent court case at SCOTUS specifically about how Harvard does not select the makeup of its student body from mere academic records or test scores, and just like New York's carry permit rates post-Bruen, Harvard has been hard and heavy at defying SFFA.
Sending your kid to put eighteen hours a day into study over their summer vacation will not get them to Harvard. Pushing them to have a hundred very marketable extracurriculars, which is another part of the equation here and goes very overlooked by the Compass, also won't. I think you already know that.
John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
It's a little funny that only 'mathematics' is the only part of that list that overlaps with the modern College Prep Uber Allies approach, and it's becoming an increasingly smaller portion of the focus. That's both the problem, and the kinda damning fault of this sort of rant. There's fair arguments about the tradeoff between the 50% chance of success at a mid-tier college and Mike Roweism, or about tradeoffs between education and work experience (so long as you don't flinch when anyone mentions what post-grad degrees do to total lifetime income). There are some less fair arguments where we compare college grads to non-college graduates and mumble whenever everyone mentions external variables, but are still worth knowing about.
Turning the debate into An Ivy League graduation specifically versus flipping burgers for a summer isn't just putting a thumb on the scales, it's throwing out any pretense of balanced evaluation.
gattsuru
4d ago
Technically, two furry versions, though you have to go into settings for Bad Rudi. Tbf, they're both obnoxiously monofocused and pretty lackluster when it comes to animations or gameification; Rudi on telling 'cool' stories, and Bad Rudi just trying to swear at you (cw: exactly what I said, loud sound).
But, yeah, it probably says a lot of strategic things.
gattsuru
5d ago
I have two. I'm not a good writer, and a lot of my better writing I'm not really comfortable linking under this name, but I think they say something about what could be useful to good writers.
This is the all-audiences one: reviewing the review of the re-view. Not every recommendation here is good or even correct (Grok either can't or doesn't notice that I mention that the "Matryoshka doll" story is explicitly fictional and couldn't be known to be true in Mahaffey's version, and probably doesn't have access to the original book; it also handwaves errors in fatality numbers in an aircraft crash are actually pretty damning), but it does catch errors I didn't notice after multiple rereads ("opposites side") and that I definitely mirrored Mahaffey's approach far more heavily than I'd intended or even recognized, along with a few good style recommendations.
((Uh, and the recommendations about asides, nested parentheticals, and being a pedantic hater might be correct, but not exactly useful given that they're kinda my intentional tone.))
[cw: nsfw text and themes below, though nothing worse than you could put on YouTube]
My other example is from a bi furry piece, albeit an except stripped of the actual bedroom activities. So that may make it unusable for examination. If not...
This isn't perfect. There's a good portion of it that's either blowing smoke up my skirt ('cheeky'), or only finding corrections that are trivial (duplicated words, comma errors) that I or a beta reader would probably have caught on a re-read, or that are amadan's extremely generic your first how to write advice (slow pacing). Some of the tone emphasis between flirty and platonic is arguable or even just, imo, plain wrong, as is one of the comma errors where it recommends a 'fix' that's already in the original text. Others are pretty clear good advice, such as on rising tension and characterization, but probably an artifact of my limited experience as a writer and .
(and, tbf, that this is a small excerpt).
By contrast, the problems with the wristband themes would be very hard to figure out with a beta reader: they're a moderately common convention in bi furry stuff, such that almost anyone who'd want to beta read would be so familiar with it as to take it as a given, but they're not so common that I should have assumed every reader or even every experienced reader would have gotten it.
But this is a subgenre-of-a-subgenre-of-a-subgenre piece. I could believe that grok has enough (mmf) furry smut in its input to avoid being absolutely one-shot! There's not really enough orientation play involving multiple male characters, furry or otherwise, for me to think the stochaistic parrots complaint applies, here. And this particular version of that subgenre focus is defined in no small part by a logical inconsistency. Even in the long-form, grok could 'recognize' it was being 'confused' that the character's self-identifications didn't match up with their behaviors, even if it came up with the 'wrong' response; that's about as good an evidence that you'd need to clarify what's going on as available from human reviewers.
and this is Grok's two-generation-old model.
gattsuru
5d ago
There's a big breakdown here, but my summary take --
Business case:
- Models aren't useful products on their own; there's too much competition, too shallow a moat, and few buyers have the skillset and equipment to use a model themselves. Runtime with effective models is where these businesses expect to make their money, made more convenient by their familiarity with optimal operation and tuning of their own models, and by the giant sack of GPUs that they happen to have sitting available.
- This is especially true where (as now) model creators don't have a good understanding of all or even a large portion of use cases for a model. Where exposing an API, as increasingly many western LLM-makers are doing, limits you to prompt engineering, an open source model can be rapidly tuned or modified in a pretty wide variety of ways. You can't necessarily learn from everything someone else has done with an open-source model, or even what they've done without breaking the license, but you can learn a lot.
- Businesses producing open-source models can attract specialized workers, not just in being skilled, but in having a very specific type of ideology, similar to how linux (or rust) devs tend to be weird in useful ways.
- 'Sticky' open-source licenses have the additional benefits of allowing most innovations by other smart people to filter back in. (In more legally-minded jurisdictions, they also put down beartraps to other developers that would love to borrow a great implementation without complying with the license.)
- (Cynically, they can only succeed with government backing, and open sourcing a model makes them politically indispensable.)
Philosophical arguments:
- Open-sourcing a model is Better for what it allows; interaction with academic communities, rapid iteration, so on. A business that emphasizes these topics might not be the most remunerative, but it'll be better at its actual goal.
- (Optimistically, some devs want to get to the endgame of AGI/ASI as soon as possible, and see the API business model as distracting from that even if it does work.)
Pragmatic argument:
- The final models fit on a single thumb drive. It's not clear any company running this sort of thing can seriously prevent leaks over a long enough time for it to be relevant. There's an argument that China is more vulnerable to this sort of unofficial espionage, but we've also had significant leaks from Llama, Midjourney, etc.
gattsuru
5d ago
It's been possible for a while to use AIgen to go from text to image to 3d model to animated rig to (extremely large) set of animations. Usually struggles a lot the further you get from standard human. Largely workable with most human intervention early in the chain, and would scale a lot better than using aigen (or something like posenet) in realtime, not just in compute resources but required bandwidth.
Dunno if that's what they're doing here, but it's how I'd attack things from a naive perspective. Honestly kinda surprised that it hasn't already been done at scale, but it would have enough repetition -- and especially idle animations for the existing two 'companions' are very repetitive -- that it might be undesirable to a lot of self-driven devs or experimenters.
gattsuru
5d ago
Right now the primary obstacle is that it costs $300 a month to run.
I'm... not sure this is true. I was able to get Companions running for a couple short prompts on my phone without any active subscription. Higher usage is supposed to be locked behind SuperGrok (30 USD/month), and I did get delays on free level. SuperGrok Heavy doesn't advertise any Companion-focused capabilities, instead emphasizing the Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy 'supersmart' LLMs.
((Which makes sense; most workflows I can imagine are closer to a couple nVidia 4090s, rather than the nightmare-mode power that the bigger LLM models can do. It's weird to have text be more expensive than video, for once, but compare WAN local to deepseek local, and maybe it's not as goofy.))
Conversely, I think it's going to be very interestin whether Grok gets booted from the IOS store.
gattsuru
5d ago
You're concerned about what this will do to the psyche of teenage boys, but I'm surprised you haven't thought of the male version (which no doubt will exist). A tall dark sexy boyfriend who will treat you only exactly as roughly as you want to be treated, and will listen to you going on about your problems and your neuroses with endless patience and understanding and affirmation?
Other than reach and better animation, I don't think this is different from the AI companions that have been available for a while.
It's got some other complications going on; even at the free tier, there's a certain level of Animal Crossing going on when you return to the 'companion' mode. I don't think that's devastating yet -- the real place where this goes off the rail isn't going to be when this is more human-like, but when it becomes easier to handle interactions with other humans through it -- but it's a step down a road that has a lot of skulls.
It's possible that there's some classified version we wouldn't know about, but officially geostationary satellites are near-universally focused on satellite communications or maritime telephone, data transfer, and news communications, with a small number of weather satellites that take very low ground resolution images of a third of the globe. If you buy satellite imagery (it's not even that expensive!) you're usually going to buy 'low'-altitude operations from 500km to 1000km, and they'll usually cross their entire overlap area in less than a minute and an orbit in less than two hours.
It's theoretically possible to set a geostat with a telescope looking down, but there's not much advantage and a ton of cost to doing so, and they wouldn't be able to scale to many targets.
That said, there's enough low-orbit satellites that they can image an area pretty regularly. 24/7 coverage isn't plausible and this rounds to only getting an image of a location every hour or two at most, but the bigger flaw would mostly fall for technical reasons due to clouds or nighttime imagery (uh, presuming there's no classified super-nighttime cameras out there). And there's a small business in aerial imaging that can monitor cities for most of a day.
gattsuru
5d ago
No. From the long form:
Community Hospital, the nonprofit that runs the clinic known as the Curtis Medical Center and a couple of other facilities in the region, plunged into the center of that national story when it announced on July 2 — one day before the bill’s passage — that a confluence of factors had made its Curtis outpost unsustainable. It cited years-long financial challenges, inflation and “anticipated federal budget cuts to Medicaid,” the public health insurance program for lower-income and disabled Americans.
I think the underlying op-ed is this piece, which is... not exactly coming across as a neutral evaluation of the facts, or this one, which is better, but still makes it hard for any plausible drop in Medi* use to even be the straw that breaks the camel's back:
In their financial statement for last available financial year (ending June 30, 2024), Community Hospital brought in 6% of their $62 Million in patient service revenue from Medicaid, with about $4.1 Million coming into the hospital from the program. The Hospital operated at a loss of $1.67 Million for that financial year as well. Figures were not available for the most recent financial year (ending June 30, 2025).
In an opinion piece published in the Nebraska Examiner in February, Nebraska Hospital Association President president Jeremy Nordquist said that Medicaid pays for 26% of all emergency room visits in rural hospitals, alongside 33% of all births and 44% of all services to minors. He also said that 54% of rural, independent critical access hospitals are operating at a loss.
A lot of the numbers are coming from that Nebraska Hospital Association, which has been giving worst-case or worse-than-worse-case numbers.
I can certainly believe that the Medicaid changes will have an impact, but Hanania's implication that this was a sole and direct cause that people can't deny only because The Cheetoh has a "spell over them" is about as well-founded as his normal sneers.
gattsuru
5d ago
There's a pretty significant demographic of men (and sometimes even straight men) who get into really heavy parasocial relationships in situations like OnlyFans et all.
gattsuru
5d ago
Otherwise, what is 'wrong' with letting the AI fill in that particular gap?
I gotta finish writing up the "the things we needed to hear, from the people who should have been there to say them" bit and its siblings, but :
Don't be nervous, No, don't be nervous
I'm not like other guys who have a surface,
What you girls really need's a soft, fuzzy man
(An atmospheric man) A shimmering puff of indistinct love
What's better than the vague embrace of a soft, fuzzy man?
Superstimulus is a distraction, here. "Better" is a distraction, here. They don't even have to be that good or that smart to be dangerous! The machines can be everything you want, and more critically nothing you don't.
Imagine what happens when you can snap away every trivial inconvenience you saw in a relationship. I don't think it'll be a critical problem for everyone or even necessarily a majority of people, but the people who don't handle it will be in very bad shape, either when the fugue breaks or because it doesn't.
gattsuru
5d ago
And even if you want to distinguish Stardew Valley from Harvest Moon by SV's combat in the mines, Rune Factory had added it into the series by 2007.
It's actually kinda interesting to think about why it worked so well. It's an improvement in nearly every way from the A-gamer productions, even the ones that avoided handheld hell, but I dunno which one I'd point to as to what actually mattered in sales.
gattsuru
6d ago
That's fair. I'm one of the weirdos that likes fishing minigames, but still has seen times where it goes too far. And the multiplayer for Len's works well enough that I could see it as a fun family thing.
gattsuru
6d ago
Yeah. There's been air crash analysis where they've done some absolute magic in sound analysis, up to and including detecting locations of explosions based on sound triangulation from one cockpit mic to another. I'm just not feeling very optimistic about where they could point, given:
In the cockpit voice recording, one of the pilots is heard asking the other why did he cutoff. The other pilot responded that he did not do so.
gattsuru
8d ago
What was your take on Kamela Harris cackling about the mere idea that the Second Amendment might not allow broad confiscation of lawfully owned guns?
The WSJ reports:
Preliminary findings indicate that switches controlling fuel flow to the jet’s two engines were turned off, leading to an apparent loss of thrust shortly after takeoff, the people said. Pilots use the switches to start the jet’s engines, shut them down, or reset them in certain emergencies.
The switches would normally be on during flight, and it is unclear how or why they were turned off, these people said. The people also said it was unclear whether the move was accidental or intentional, or whether there was an attempt to turn them back on.
This is preliminary and unofficial, so this isn't necessarily the real cause; no small part of the Boeing MAX scandal was because original 'leaks' heavily emphasized pilot error over the technical faults.
But if true, this is staggering. NA255 and other takeoff misconfiguration disasters have happened, and typically reflect a long series of systemic failures in addition to pilot misconduct, but each individual step is recognizable and understandable until it was too late. By contrast, the aircraft here could not have taxi'd, or run up, or gotten down the runway with fuel cut off to both engines; they're designed so that neither one could be hit accidentally. There is no failure that would cause pilots to turn them off mid-takeoff, and not even some bizarre reason to want to try.
Which... does not leave a lot of options, and they're all bad.
EDIT: official preliminary report here:
The aircraft achieved the maximum recorded airspeed of 180 Knots IAS at about 08:08:42 UTC and immediately thereafter, the Engine 1 and Engine 2 fuel cutoff switches transitioned from RUN to CUTOFF position one after another with a time gap of 01 sec. The Engine N1 and N2 began to decrease from their take-off values as the fuel supply to the engines was cut off...
As per the EAFR, the Engine 1 fuel cutoff switch transitioned from CUTOFF to RUN at about 08:08:52 UTC. The APU Inlet Door began opening at about 08:08:54 UTC, consistent with the APU Auto Start logic. Thereafter at 08:08:56 UTC the Engine 2 fuel cutoff switch also transitions from CUTOFF to RUN.
I don't think there's any plausible solely-electrical or mechanical explanation that would explain these recordings.
gattsuru
9d ago
Supposedly at least some of the attackers were John Brown Gun Club nuts. Which isn't evidence against the feds being involved, but JBGCs are also pretty famously prone to collecting mall ninjas with expensive or goofy gear.
gattsuru
9d ago
[Previous discussion here and here]
Mackey's a putz, but the trial and government arguments here were an absolute mess, and the court punting on both the constitutional and statutory construction issues is going to allow those messes to turn into a massive 'process is the punishment'-style problem at length. It's kinda funny that I called the appeals court doing so, but to be fair the long delay (15 months from oral args to decision!) makes me think that the court neutered a broader decision to keep out a dissent.
gattsuru
9d ago
Yeah, this seems mostly reasonable, and matches my understanding.
I'll caveat that there's also a little bit of messiness from a res judicata perspective. Overlapping or succeeding mass tort lawsuits are a complicated mess I won't pretend to grok, but from what I've read there are very few exceptions to the rule that, once you are bound to a class, you're stuck with the results of a case, win or lose. It's not just that an injury might only get an award from a far-earlier case, but an injury could potentially get no award because whoever brought the class-action lawsuit to start with was a nutjob. But this is already common in class-actions that only seek injunctive relief, since they don't (always?) require opt-out notifications.
That's one of the arguments in favor of class actions over universal injunctions -- The Groups can't just keep bringing forward the same claim with a slightly different plaintiff in every single jurisdiction in the country until they get a friendly-enough judge or SCOTUS specifically slaps down that one theory -- but it does have ways it could get ugly. In theory, class action certification is supposed to depend on having competent enough representation, and issue and claim preclusion don't entirely block things under every circumstance, but even in the more constrained domain of previous class-action lawsuits things like cy pres abuse or outright collaborative lawsuits intended to negate serious liability already get through the gates.
On the gripping hand, it's kinda how caselaw works anyway, just less formally; Rahimi or Miller might be less strictly binding on anyone else's attempts to appeal its class of prohibition, but such a third-party plaintiff would have no more ability to control the legal claims brought than someone who didn't exist for them, and I wasn't born when Miller was decided.
Len's Island is interesting: it's a technically well-executed game with a lot of effort put into it, that's also just painfully shallow. Lootless-Diablo-clone could work even if it wasn't unique or groundbreaking, there's just not enough meat on the structure. I finished the third dungeon a couple days ago, and there's only been six normal mook types (+3 reskins) so far, one unique boss per major dungeon, and most 'mini-bosses' just consist of rooms with a ton of mook-spawner cocoons. You can beat the first major dungeons just by dodge-rolling and spamming normal timed hits, the second starts to force you to use a shield and/or weapon skills, but there's only a couple skills per weapon, and that seems to be about as deep as combat gets. In theory, build variety around the enchantment system or skill point system should drive a lot, but they're pretty easily solved, too, and there's not a ton of choice economy around what items you'll upgrade in what order or how you focus on getting specific gear. There's several weapons, but most of them suck for the mook-heavy fights, and of those that do work there's not really enough difference to justify enchanting multiple. It wouldn't matter as much if the rest of the game was really compelling -- I love Vintage Story after all -- but so much of Len's Island focuses on combat or dungeon splunking that it's pretty frustrating, not just a chore, but a boring chore.
((Also, struggling with the UI. Why is the inventory and the build menu tied so closely together that you can switch from one to the other by mouse-click, but if you use the build button you can't interact with world items and if you use the inventory menu you can't place a structure?))
Maybe a slightly more complex combo system, or changeable special skills, or more reason to hotswap weapons, or cheap area denial combat potions? There's a lot of set pieces in the dungeons, maybe make them matter more than just being 'don't fall into this lava'? The devs are allegedly still working on the game, so maybe it'll change down the road.
The SO's gotten back into ARK, with Survival Ascended's Ragnarok release, so I've been pulled a bit into that when I can. The game is and always has fallen into the 'great idea, awful execution' from day one, both on the technical side and on the game philosophy one, and it still shows now. ASA and the new map release are better than ASE: gone are the fifteen-plus minute load-times, the frustratingly bad building system, and there's been at least a little effort to avoid the numerous outright glitches. ASE's Ragnarok was never really completed, and while there's a few missing critters in ASA's Ragnarok, it at least doesn't have whole biomes that were stapled on without being populated. Other parts aren't improved; whistle commands are still painful to use without a long keybinding session, combat is very floaty and weightless and depends on gameish stats that often don't make sense. I'm not as opposed as some to stat sticks, but if you're going to let a solo direwolf easily take down a pack of five carnos that each individually outweigh her, I need some way to actually tell that's going to happen other than jumping in and hoping, or memorizing a breakdown of how a critter's stats tie to their levels. And some parts are outright worse: the devkit is an astounding 1TB, which manages to break my record for 'western game developer was here', the new engine is very GPU-intensive even at its lowest settings, support for unofficial servers manages to be worse(!) probably downstream of the new owners partnering with a server provider, and ASA's Ragnarok manages to have more mesh errors than the already-notorious ASE version. There's a bunch of more interesting taming options than the old 'hit it with a club/tranq arrow and shove food up them', but a some of them suck, and a lot of the better modded solutions to the taming dilemma haven't been ported from ASE. Running a small dedicated server with wildly tweaked rates gets away from mandatory no-lifer play while still making most tames weighty enough to be meaningful... and it's still more commitment than I can really put into it.
But it's very much the only effortful game of its kind, with maybe Palworld as competitors. Nightengale devolves into a dungeon spelunker and the pet system is a joke, and a lot of the few others in the genre either don't exist or work even worse. I have some hopes for Amiino -- Palworld meets Hi-Fi Rush-style combat is a match made in heaven, even if the music integration ends up more muzak -- which when you're looking at Chinese gatcha f2p for innovation is a worrying sign, and that's eta 2026.
gattsuru
10d ago
I'll second the fear bit. I'm a child of divorce, my current significant other is a child of divorce. My workplace is small and not hugely representative, but I've seen more divorces happen among people working here than marriages or childbirths combined. From the numbers, just under one in three children will watch their parents divorce before they reach adulthood; one in five of all adults are divorcees.
It'd be a different matter if most of these divorces were the advert model where a deadbed room and some court hearings lead to a couple parting ways, and 'amiable' divorces do presumably exist. But I've seen maybe one, and those close I've heard about are pretty far removed.
((I haven't actually seen the weekend prison stay, though I'll admit that's probably an artifact of class-and-culture stuff. I have seen everything from 'announcing divorce with a bulk withdrawal from a shared bank account' to 'left photographic evidence of infidelity in space with the teenage kids' to 'clearly false allegations to get the significant other fired', and those are just the claims that I'm extremely confident on. Nor, to be clear, is all the bad behavior coming from women, or even relationships involving women, even in this list.))
And that's the unofficial side of things. Amadan can critique the hypothetical worst-case scenarios, and does so with cause. Alimony is rare (although I'm skeptical of the 10% number that's going around, which seems to be cited from a Marquette University game-of-telephone from a study that was hilariously limited, page 75), income-limited to (often well-)under half of income, and usually time-limited. Child support is much more common -- though not strictly tied to marriage -- but it has caps too and depends on the existence of a child. The extremely rare cases where these combine to exceed half of income usually reflect either unusual changes in employment immediate around the divorce or bizarre situations.
But the official rules, while not as bad as the hypotheticals, are still absolutely terrifying, and they often break down badly at the edges.
There's a fair argument that these are controlled (if not _well-_controlled) detonations of a relationship that was already ticking, and I've watched a few where the divorce, ugly as it was, wouldn't have been as bad as a continued marriage: in addition to the classical physical abuse or addiction, there's the schizophrenic break, the propositions to an older child, the embezzlement. Yet I've also seen a number of cases that should have fallen into the 'amicable' divorce setting, falling apart over short-term infidelity or incompatibility or differing goals, and they've included many of the worst results. I don't have to talk about what the divorcees would have done in a counterfactual or with a time machine, here; at least a couple were Borderer enough to say if their partner was gonna cheat on them they wish they could have just exchanged some hall passes... months before the divorce proceedings plummeted into child service calls and severe drug addiction, respectively. Yes, revealed preferences and all, but it's still Not Great Bob.
It's not the only cause for the collapse of relationships, or even the only cause for fear of marriage specifically, but it marrs the matter heavily.
gattsuru
11d ago
I haven't seen Romulus, yet, and can only judge Prometheus and Covenant. Covenant wasn't as bad as Prometheus from an idiot ball perspective, though it had its stinkers, but if anything it managed to be worse about characterization. It's bad enough in Prometheus where the original 'androids can be asshole because they get bad or contradictory orders' had merged into just 'all androids are assholes', but in Covenant several of the demonstrated-by-five-seconds-later-gore human characters also seem like bizarre robots for all their reactions or motivations are shown.
gattsuru
11d ago
To be fair, Mackey's appeal was successful last week, and his case has been directed back to trial courts with orders to dismiss the case.
(Albeit for technical reasons related to trial proof, rather than the obvious first amendment problems.)
I'm a big fan of noticing that he's against most books. The man's a distillation of every criticism of 'elite human capital' that isn't.
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