domain:arjunpanickssery.substack.com
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
10hr ago
I mean it’s not for everyone because it requires major lifestyle changes. But for the right set of individuals, major lifestyle changes are possible. People do it all the time. Immigrants leave their homes and businesses and families behind and move to places with alien cultures. People join the military which is a huge change from civilian life. Such major changes aren’t for everyone, but even modest changes can be accessible to most people. It’s harder than most people think, but it’s perfectly doable.
Folamh3
11hr ago
If Joe Rogan followed all those rules his listenership would probably be a tenth of what it is now.
Folamh3
11hr ago
as was suggested as a possibility in the Dobbs decision
Drop the passive voice. Who suggested it?
Folamh3
11hr ago
the far right wants to delay transition until adulthood
Isn't it ironic how Democrats are constantly singing the praises of the European (specifically Scandinavian) ways of doing things? But when progressive European countries across the board are hitting pause on youth gender transition, Democrats stick their fingers in the ear and say that only the far-right wants to do that?
Folamh3
11hr ago
During his 2016 campaign he explicitly stated that Caitlyn Jenner can use any bathroom in the Trump Tower that she pleases.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
11hr ago
No amount of increase in productivity can eliminate scarcity because:
- some forms of scarcity aren't material in nature
- demand is infinite given time
- supply is finite regardless of the productivity modifier applied to it
I believe that's the point Neil Stephenson successfully makes with The Diamond Age.
It was very silly of Liberalism to promise total equality given those parameters. And at some point it must have seemed really possible that we could make the differences negligible. But it looks like it's not going to ever happen. And I think that's fine.
2rafa
11hr ago
There are people who’ve joined the Amish, they tend to already be mennonites (and there are Mennonite groups that are easier to join / open to concerts), then they move to Amish country, slowly integrate themselves with the community, and are then part of it within a couple of generations.
More density nearly always results in higher property valuations and therefore higher tax revenue; density dominates building quality: a very nice single family home will still be significantly less valuable than however many mediocre townhouses you can squeeze onto the same plot of land. I guess the non-obvious part is how the cost of infrastructure like roads (cheaper per household with higher density) compares to the cost of services like schools (which should approximately scale proportional to the number of students.
Side note to that point: cities have slowly been figuring out the exact math on that - which is why many new low density suburban developments necessarily come with a HOA, and the cities forces the HOA to take on road maintenance for the new development. Otherwise, fancy suburban neighborhoods can be so low density that they become a net loss for a city once the infrastructure starts to show its age and the city is forced to re-invest in the neighborhood.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12hr ago
https://www.pcworld.com/article/1364477/nvidia-rtx-4090-vs-nvidia-rtx-3090.html
The GeForce RTX 4090’s $1,599 MSRP is significantly less than the $1,999 whopper of a price that the RTX 3090 Ti launched with. It’s also $100 more than the original RTX 3090’s debut $1499 price. Good news, however – the RTX 3090 Ti has dropped to a much lower $1099 for the Founders Edition, and sometimes can be found for less. The 3090 can often be found for under $900, and even closer to $700 if you’re OK with a used graphics card.
The 3090 price fell precisely because of the 4090, due to market forces. Today, the 4090 seems to be back up to around 2000 USD due to the AI boom and sanctions/sanctionsbusting. But anyone would rather have a 4090 for $2000 than a 3090 TI for $2000. In theory, you could get a 4090 for $1600 compared to a 3090 TI for $2000, which is a very good deal. Progress continues.
When the 5000 series emerges, the 4090 will fall to the $1000-1500 range too.
Secular falls in GPU prices (and heightened price/performance) are being suppressed by high demand but they're still observable.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
12hr ago
Why? They don't need converts, their communities are growing just fine on their own, incorporating an outsider would be a pain-in-the-ass years-long process with a huge dropout rate, and taking them in would expose them to the possibility of having hostile values smuggled in, either deliberately or subconsciously. Literally, what would be the upside for them?
TIRM
13hr ago
I listened to a bunch of recent episodes and they are unusually thoughtful and smug DNC parrots. They are cheerleader partisans, not bold innovators.
I haven't listened very much and maybe I'm missing some older contrarian episodes. Without bothering to listen you already know their views: median Democratic consensus.
Glassnoser
13hr ago
Really? I assumed that they would.
haroldbkny
13hr ago
This change is really weird to me, as someone from the heart of “you guys” territory. I had a lot of progressive friends in school who always said “you guys.” They didn’t think of it, it was just what people said, not something anyone needed to police.
Yeah, I don't think it's universally agreed upon. Some left-leaning people are okay with "you guys", and some think it's another example that is masculine-normative, that's excluding women. From what I've seen, I guess I see hardcore leftist-of-the-left radical feminists be most against it in terms of calling people out, followed by the older token progressives who are looking for a way to contribute and/or signal their allegiance and/or keep the eye off Sauron off themselves. Like, advocating against "you guys" is the sort of thing that I've seen corporate boards and their lackeys do and recommend. It's enough to scare me, though, so I end up being a lackey, too, in the interests of not letting anything get between me and my ability to provide for my family.
TIRM
13hr ago
I'll copy my unrelated comment from yesterday:
I listened to Pod Save America after the election and they were saying this election shows us that we need to get money out of politics. I immediately thought they were talking nonsense since they are the side that spends the most by far. These are smart, informed, experienced Democratic operatives mindlessly parroting "money in politics" talking points when the exact opposite is clearly true.
They're reflective, thoughtful, capable of decoupling and also blind partisans shutting off their brains and reciting approved party phrases when they need to. Which is much better than the norm. If you want to hear the smuggest Obama staffers cheerlead for Democrats, this is the peak experience. They are really quite full of themselves Some partisan brainrot comes with the package.
Rosencrantz2
13hr ago
I'm torn! In this thought experiment the dictatorship still has a majority population that is bent on genocide and they may get their way in time (else the dictator may have to genocide them to maintain power). But anyway, you can't go from 'prefers a benevolent dictatorship to a genocidal democracy' to 'doesn't care about democracy at all'. I didn't say democracy was the ultimate and only value I have, I just don't agree that no one cares about it.
TIRM
13hr ago
Okay. I was thinking about "the Jewish question" in the historical sense. As in: "Clearly Jews are not going to be allowed to exist moving forward. So, shall we integrate them so that they are no longer Jews, or just dispose of them like vermin?"
As best I know modern people who seek answers to the Jewish Question are not wondering how much more integration would improve Jews.
If Butlerian meant a broad reasonable question about their commitment to Israel, I didn't notice it in the historical reference to the Jewish Question.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
13hr ago
This is an interesting analogy and lends itself to more elaboration.
In aviation, there have been autopilots for many years. But always the human pilot is in command, and uses the autopilot as a tool that has to be managed and overseen. Autonomous vehicles, at least in some companies' visions, have no way to control them manually. An airplane pilot enters waypoints into the navigation system to plan out a route; an autonomous car routes itself. The biggest difference is in who is responsible for the vehicle; is it the human operator or the vehicle's manufacturer?
I could see a kind of autonomous vehicle that works more like an airplane autopilot - you wouldn't necessarily need a steering wheel, but if you had control over the different high-level choices in route planning and execution (do I try to make this yellow light? Should I play chicken at this merge or play it safe?) then the human could be considered responsible in a way that a fully autonomous, sit-back-and-relax mode doesn't allow.
I am revolted by the idea of relying on a company akin to an airline for my day-to-day mobility. There are too many failure modes that leave one stuck. What if there's a natural disaster and all the phone networks are down? Or the car company has a de facto local monopoly, but then withdraws from this market or goes out of business? What if the company starts blacklisting customers for things that shouldn't be related to transportation, like their political affiliation or their credit score?
crushedoranges
14hr ago
I think the big benefit of autonomous cars is that they are both a taxi and a valet service in one. Your car drives you to your desired place of work (for simplicity we assume the hypothetical person works in the downtown core.) It then shuttles itself off into a place where space is cheap, to charge itself. Perhaps in an old industrial zone. When its owner gets off work, it dutifully begins to make its way ahead of time, travelling in packs of five or ten.
Because there is no need for a steering column, the interior of a autonomous vehicle can be structured in a radically different fashion. The interior can be made much more luxurious, especially if it is for a single occupant! Since it's going to have an internet connection anyway, there's no reason not to do it up like a office, or put in a bed if desired. And when it drops off its occupant, it goes to another warehouse to charge. The convenience factor of not having to negotiate two permanent parking spots in a major metropolitan area is extremely high.
The increase in commute time could be greatly mitigated by the comfort factor, in my opinion.
crushedoranges
14hr ago
I apologize, I wasn't making an argument of 'the most effective thing to do.' I agree, making a martyr of him would be grossly unproductive for the people on the left. But you can't peacefully transfer power to Hitler. You can't peacefully protest a Hitler. Leftist rhetoric is begging for armed resistance that can never happen. They made such a big deal out of it. Now they look like so very weak and shrill.
Their self-perceived Hitler arose, and they are unable to stop him. What a pathetic display.
phailyoor
14hr ago
Speaking from a totally American perspective, transit mode share is already so small as to be irrelevant to the issue of congestion. The only way that self driving cars will increase congestion is through increased trips taken because the cost of driving is lowered. And considering how most people currently own a car and prepay most of the cost of ownership in financing and insurance, I don't see trips increasing that much. Being able to watch tiktok in the car instead of being stuck listening to the radio while driving probably won't increase trips all that much either.
In fact, self driving cars should save urbanism by getting rid of all those horrid parking lots and parking garages. Infill replacing surface parking will bring up density and also close the gap between existing businesses that are surrounded by seas of parking.
So let's go through the video's specific braindead arguments.
If you don't have to pay attention to the road, you can do other things while in transit. This lowers the effective cost of traveling a given distance. As a consequence, there will be more demand for road space, increasing congestion.
Transit share is so low that you could delete buses from every city in the USA and not notice a difference in congestion. You can even look at the EIR statements of transit megaprojects (subways and shit) in California and see that they're projected to do literally nothing to congestion. Transit is a service to increase accessibility for the car-free, not a tool to reduce congestion.
Because autonomous cars are so technology-laden, the market will favor a few large companies that offer a subscription model. There are several consequences of this, which can be summarized as: laws will favor the companies rather than the public.
So what? This doesn't affect urbanism directly. Laws about who can sue when someone gets flattened by an idiot driver don't usually factor into people's everyday decisionmaking. The feeling of safety based on design is what matters.
Getting into doomer territory, car makers might succeed in banning human drivers and pedestrians from most roadways, and increase speed limits to ridiculous levels, causing noise pollution and other problems. They might also get public transit banned (I'm not sure how this would happen but that's the argument).
It would take a monumental stretch to delete sidewalks and crosswalks. Nobody is going to call a self driving car to cross the street, and nobody sane would mandate that. The fact that (granted, inadequate) crosswalks exist in even the most mind-numbingly car-dependent, zero-transit suburbs means that we as a society understand the need for these things even when almost nobody uses them. Regarding noise pollution, nimbys exist, and will obviously be able to limit vehicle speeds for the sake of noise.
erwgv3g34
14hr ago
Charitably, he's asking where they stand on Jewish controversies that are dividing the current left, such as Israel-Palestine or whether Jews count as Whites for the purposes of affirmative action.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
15hr ago
But that is so far outside the realm of probability that it isn't worth discussing.
See, I don't think it is. Particularly since I think people overestimate the ability of elected officials to control the permanent bureaucracy, and that many of the powers for doing so set in the Constitution — and civics textbooks — don't actually exist anymore, and that enforcement mechanisms against the various agencies are weak — particularly against the agencies used to do the enforcing. If the FBI stops following presidential orders, to whom does the president turn to compel their obedience? If Congress orders something "defunded," but the Treasury Department keeps issuing them funds anyway, what can they do about it?
Yeah, it's pretty hard to want to listen to a DNC podcast. It's like reading Pravda circa 1985. It feels almost impossible to have a fresh take within the rubric of a dying Orthodoxy.
But I'm willing to be proven wrong! @doglatine What surprising new ideas are these hot young Dems coming up with?
On the other hand, we have both Dario Amodei from Anthropic and Altman from OAI extolling the virtues of test-time compute in the vein of o1 (as the article acknowledges).
Personally, while I find the recent relative stagnation in LLMs to be annoying, it's only been what, two years since GPT-4? There are open source models that beat the OG GPT-4 while being much smaller (Llama 405B versus likely a trillion for 4), and models like Sonnet 3.5 are a small but appreciable improvement. I'm not going to call scaling out until we've spent either another year or a hundred billion USD on it, and we'll have to see how test time compute pans out.
Besides, even Ilya says they're working on their own secret sauce solution. We'll see when we see, it's far far too early to call AGI out of the cards.
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