domain:felipec.substack.com
JarJarJedi
2hr ago
I know nothing about those hospitals and next to nothing about medical financing in general, but I would estimate the likelyhood of blaming hospital closures on whatever Trump just did a week or so ago being a lie as "extremely high". It's too fast to be a sole immediate reason. Could some cuts cause some hospital that has been circling the drain for years to finally pull the plug? Sure. But the "circling the drain for years" needs to be at least as important part of the story as Trump then. If it is not, I think it'd be fair to conclude no objective inquiry of the matter is attempted and the whole story is just another "orange man bad" bullshit.
I don't see it. I don't think this is more of a superstimulus than reading/watching/playing Strawberry 100% in 2002 and imagining you're the generic high school boy they're talking to.
Is there a particular reason why dating sites are more of a superstimuli than speed dating bars? Social media vs. talking to people IRL? Watching porn on VHS vs on your phone? Doomscrolling vs. reading the paper?
For me it's pretty clear - the superstimuli lies in having an interactive agent that actively adapts to your prompts, your life circumstances, etc. Something a scripted story cannot do by definition.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
She doesn't get to say "my competent engineering, which I've worked hard to develop, is the value I offer the world," because the people around her have already decided that her key value is either (a) tits or (b) decorative diversity points,
As far as I can say she does, in fact, get to say this. Literally what is standing in her way? Who will contradict her claim?
I don't see it. I don't think this is more of a superstimulus than reading/watching/playing Strawberry 100% in 2002 and imagining you're the generic high school boy they're talking to. Then streamers and camgirls emerged for the personal touch. This is just a technically impressive but less potent instantiation of what we already have.
Register my prediction as "Society reached the saturation point on pornography and parasocial escapism without AI in the early social media era". The level of social dysfunction will increase because older cohorts are dying and social mores are decaying, but I don't expect Gen Alpha will be any more goonerish than Gen Z because of this technology.
FtSoA
2hr ago
Well, I'd argue "bureaucracy" is an overly narrow conception of what the problem is with "big government."
I don't know how much "revolving door" you think there is, but it's not all that much in my experience in the DoD/IC. Mostly, people leave federal/mil service to become a contractor for more money doing much the same job.
Mostly though, the idea that you can map any given government agency onto a model where it always or by default seeks to maximize its size/budget/power/whatever is empirically false. That is often true, but it's a loose assumption. Or often various subunits of a given agency have ambitious careerists trying to maximize their impact via mission growth, but that is a zero-sum competition by default as the overall agency has a set budget.
Mostly, as someone with a (past) career and professional education in government bureaucracy, I get a bit up in arms about simplistic notions of government bureaucracy because it leads to obvious idiocy like DOGE, instead of actually getting us limited, effective government.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2hr ago
Uh, I haven't specifically been keeping track of most suggestions I'm afraid. I tried to go through my chat history for specific examples, but came up short since it doesn't save conversations more than a week or two old. It did note some flaws that I personally agree with, such as a predilection towards run-on sentences or instances where I'm being unclear. Most of the time, I would have run across and then fixed the flaws myself, but this approach saves me a lot of time. Unlike most authors, I spend far less time editing than writing by default. I should probably be doing more of that, and the LLMs help.
I think I get the most utility when I ask the model to rewrite whole essays for clarity, or to see how some other author would have approached that. This occasionally produced novel (to me) insights, or particular turns of phrase I might feel tempted to steal.
Corvos
2hr ago
That's my understanding. Probably the Americans have 10 or so super-cameras hidden up there but moving the orbits of a geo-stationary satellite regularly to focus on different targets would require unsustainable amounts of propellant - I doubt they monitor anything except the highest value targets.
I imagine the hardest bit with all the low-orbit satellites is collating the data between them properly and adjusting for the differences in perspective or whatever. Night-time imagery isn't a problem I think - you can use black-body (thermal) radiation plus reflected light from human sources plus whatever weird spectra you can find floating around. But yeah, I think you'd be getting every few hours or something.
FtSoA
2hr ago
You can always make a new market with a new deadline.
In my experience, the fun thing about many people who overconfidently believe total nonsense are also overconfident that they will be proven right in short order (for current events). You'll see!
So inasmuch as Epstein Fans believe this whole case is gonna get blown wide open they also might believe it's likely the Reddit account issue will be definitively resolved in their favor.
FtSoA
2hr ago
The Foreign Service is who runs State (leaving aside the whole appointee issue). I don't know what the downsizing breakdown was. But that's not what we've been arguing.
You need to understand that monetary comp is but one thing people look for in their careers. And that many ambitious and highly capable people optimize for something other than wealth in their utility function. The IQ -> Income correlation is positive, but weaker than merely "smart people do things to make more money." Salespeople, for example, can be talented and wealthy from hard work and charisma, more than being "very capable" in the same dimensions as a biologist making far less money researching some fly.
Inasmuch as the FSOT is g-loaded at all you're getting pretty smart people into the Foreign Service. But you're also getting ideologically self-selected people. Same general issue as much of academia and teaching and government at large.
You don't want 90th percentile, you want 99.9th percentile people for your important diplomatic roles.
The funny thing about this is how much of US diplomacy is not carried out by career diplomats. Dang appointees.
Terracotta
2hr ago
What are you "transcending", and how? How do you not already have the "dignity of self-authorship"? What are you talking about? Well, let's start with the objective facts of the matter. Women can already "self-author" themselves into essentially anything. Vice President (admittedly not President of the United States yet, but there's no reason we couldn't get there in short order), professor or artist, blue collar laborer, criminal, and anything else above, below, or in between.
I don't know, she seemed pretty clear to me. Here's the key passage that answers your specific question:
Today, women are invited to succeed, but only as women; to claim rights, but only through the vocabulary of identity.
Regardless of norms in the family or on dates, earlier-wave feminists wanted to not be judged by their gender in the marketplace, in professional and political life. The idea was, as you correctly identify, for a female engineer to be perceived by her colleagues as an engineer first and not "hey, tits!... oh yeah, and I guess it's an engineer too or sth."
The author seems to be arguing that the modern left has replaced that interaction with "hey, diversity points!... oh yeah, and I guess it's an engineer too or sth." Either way, the individual woman is reduced to a passive carrier of purely instrumental value for somebody else, and (critically) not in ways she herself chosen. She doesn't get to say "my competent engineering, which I've worked hard to develop, is the value I offer the world," because the people around her have already decided that her key value is either (a) tits or (b) decorative diversity points, neither of which redound to her personal credit or are in her control. That's what I take to be her point about self-authorship still being out of reach.
Because the male body has little to no intrinsic value, it's easier for men to become a "blank slate".
Yes, this matches how I read her argument. Although re: the intrinsic value of the male body... this is something I never quite understood about the whole female-privilege "men have to be human doings, women get to be human beings" meme. If a man longs to be passively valued for the fuckable parts of his body, by people he doesn't especially want to fuck, it seems like that should be trivially achievable by hanging out in more gay men's spaces. I'd imagine a comparable range of male body types would be admired there, and pretty young men could get nearly the same mileage a pretty young woman could get. Maybe the target audience is not quite as large, but there are easily identified locales where you'd have solid odds of finding someone appreciative. In complete seriousness, when guys complain that it would be so nice to have a body with intrinsic value in others' eyes, why do they not explore the many places where this is already true?
gattsuru
2hr 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.
guajalote
2hr ago
I am skeptical of using LLMs to critique your writing if you are already a good writer. LLMs are not good writers in my experience, and I have a hard time imagining their critiques will be helpful if you're not making basic mistakes. Can you give any examples of truly useful writing feedback you've received?
Tiber727
3hr ago
Trans activists turn this on its head by actively reifying the ancillary gender roles and arbitrary social expectations, particularly those assigned to female people. Rather than claiming "you are a woman, therefore you have to wear skirts and pink clothing", they claim "I like wearing skirts and pink clothing, therefore I am a woman". They thereby reduce the status of "woman" to the ancillary, contingent gender role, the very thing the radical feminists are seeking to abolish. Radical feminists want to deprecate the ancillary, contingent gender roles altogether; trans activists want to elevate them above all else. Perhaps these goals aren't quite antithetical but they certainly aren't aligned with one another.
This is somewhat right, but misses that there's a weird way they are able to internally square the circle, even though it's externally baffling. And that is that gender has a near-infinite number of possible meanings and takes on whichever actual meaning it needs to at the moment. Skirts and liking pink are part of the female gender role, but not necessarily because not all women like them, and some men like them. Wanting to cut off your dick is a sign that you are trans, but not all trans people want to change their body. I've even brought up the point that "if sex is your body and gender is your mind, why is getting surgery called "gender affirmation surgery" if it's changing your body?" and was told that breasts are "gendered." Which is ironic when you consider that they often complain that "woke" means too many things.
There's gender identity, gender identity, gender performance, etc. and new permutations will be added as needed. Simply put, they want society to not impose patterns onto people. They want people to be able to choose any number of these and impose society to engage with these in whatever way the individual wants, and without any of the negative impositions.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
Dogs aren’t really like a human child. They can’t talk, for one.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
3hr ago
Or American. It's not an ethnicity, and even Native Americans can be ambiguous.
gattsuru
3hr 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.
The more clear-headed I think just don't think that the actions needed to stop the boats, and the fight with the blob that it would require, are worth it.
This requires indigenous young men to go out and shoot the people on the boats. They'll stop coming once they know it's a death sentence.
Europe isn't capable of doing that; its old men, old women, and (to an extent) its young women are all in agreement that indigenous young men should be replaced for [whatever reason]. They'll do anything to avoid raising their station in life because they believe they'll revolt as soon as it does, which is not an unreasonable thing to fear given that's when regime change generally happens.
(Well, Eastern Europe still can, but Eastern Europe is poor enough that the migrants won't stay in the country anyway, so it realistically still falls to the Western Europeans to start stacking bodies if they don't want to be invaded.)
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
At the same time, they're not exactly keen on having tens of thousands of young men who are, at best, drains on the welfare state and, at worse, serious criminals, coming to the country. Especially with the papers carefully documenting every landing.
What's the evidence for this?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3hr ago
Out of curiosity, what was your opinion on similarly extremely online and extremely vain billionaire Bill Ackman buying his way into a tennis tournament, playing doubles with a guy he hired against real pros.
He got murdered and people were upset about it.
I thought it was great. The tennis tour get money, the guys playing got attention, and nobody got hurt.
Buying your way into being cool, whether by playing the impressario to a sports team or arts scene, or you build a submarine or a rocket ship to make yourself into an explorer; sometimes you win tournaments by paying everyone to pretend you're good at things.
Hell, in BJJ we have goofy-ass categories in tournaments, where they have such narrow weightclasses and belt levels and age ranges where guys get "medals" because there are only 3 people competing. (Anthony Bourdain won "silver" in a BJJ tournament, which sounds really cool if you don't realize this)
This is just a new version of that, isn't it?
This seems like a great example of vibes based thinking from both ends.
The change is made because it has some slight vibes of being woke (since the column is called gender) so that's good enough to score an easy win. And it's without much effort, which a lot of them seem to be really lazy and uncaring with this work given how they've messed up multiple times this same way with the Enola Gay or that Army Corp biologist page that included fish gender. I'm not even kidding
Nobody wants to do an in-depth investigation or look through data because that's boring and the only benefit is that you might have to say "sorry boss I looked at it and I didn't find woke" when you can instead go and say "Boss we removed 200k instances of woke"
And then people online are upset without even knowing the details because it has the vibes of being against the Trump admin despite it most likely not being any data deletion and just a change in header.
So, from each of your named examples, you see one rapidly increased at the expense of the other.
Do you expect OnlyFans, Pornhub, VTubers, Twitch, etc to start suffering big time because a more stimulating version of the same thing has emerged? The decline should be observable within a few years. I on the other hand expect that all those will continue to do just fine, because they're more or equally stimulating to Grok AI companions.
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