Serious question, for people who use AI heavily why do you pay exorbitant amounts to OpenAI/anthropic instead of hosting your own model(s) locally?
Many times I have heard immigrants relate the horrors of the country they came from. Few times have I heard gratitude for the country they came to.
I think it goes beyond the basic human tendency to pay more attention to the negative than the positive, and this seems not to be the attitude we want.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Why isn’t every house a mansion? After all, we have pneumatic nailguns now.
the general consensus seems to be that coding is basically solved.
yet remarkably it doesn’t seem to have produced more than incremental improvements to most of the software we use.
coding is solved, they say, yet we are still using google drive and notion. coding is solved, they say, yet we can think of no better way to coordinate tasks than linear / jira. coding is solved, they say, yet we are still using gmail and outlook. and we still just message each other about everything in slack.
where is the new generation of tools? why is nothing changing?
why are these companies, supposedly in possession of this technology which has ‘solved coding’, hardly producing anything better than what they were creating before?
the great paradox of the moment.
Russia, China, Iran: “how do we build an indomitable civilization and secure the future of our people?”
The West:
I always thought a better heuristic was:
Roughly millions of trillions, potentially billions of trillions of molecular events have to go properly to arrive at a functioning reproductive system. Something like 10 billion cell divisions have to go right.
Because of environmental conditions, this process follows 1 of 2 potential pathways, A and B. If conditions are signaling for A, it not only builds A, it actively suppresses and kills what could lead to B. Some instances of the suppression of B are actually crucial to achieving A.
Our bodies do this extremely complex thing with >99% success.
We can abstract from A and B in all this and say male and female instead. You might not like it, you might want to deconstruct it, but it’s allowed. sorry!
It doesn’t mean intelligent design or that our bodies “know” what they are doing. But the idea that we are like totally epistemically untethered from what our bodies are doing, what it means for our lives & its significance, and how to process when it goes wrong, is downright ignorant. It’s yet another example of pretend not to understand anything > discourse impossible.
It’s not about Clancy or the legality/justice issues at hand (from the perspective of the court system, that is). This and other social contagions are completely extra-judicial by now.
It feels good to be a victim and in their mind Clancy was the ultimate victim. It’s about the intense dose of euphoria that planting the flag of victimhood provides, amplified even further by social media hive minds.
“Same, Lindsay” is like the ultimate badge of victimized heroism. When you’re so tiny, fragile, crushed, feckless, and demoralized (Sibylla, ti theleis?) that a child can oppress you, you’ve won the victim Olympics forever. Forget black trans cripples, postpartum is back on the menu.
Killing the kids was justified because it was an act of liberation by a slave against its oppressor - the highest form of agency (as long as white liberal women approve, of course).
They think “we’re soaring, flying” from high school musical was playing in the background as she strangled them, like a Tarantino movie.
Tragic: someone who is deeply wrong on important issues that aren’t in the news is deeply right on unimportant issues that are in the news
I’ve let my kids stay up late the last two nights so we could play board games. On Saturday we played Scrabble until it was an hour past their bedtime and then I decided that we’d have ice cream and watch TV for a while. They were thrilled. This time I spent with my kids wasn’t a “sacrifice” or a burden I heroically shouldered for their sake. I like hanging out with them. They’re smart and funny and fun to be around. Sure they can be annoying sometimes, but anyone can be annoying. I’ve annoyed countless people in my day. Including my kids.
If you hate being a parent and actively resent your children, it’s either because you categorically refuse to get out of your own head and put in the minimal effort it requires to develop a real relationship with them, or it’s because you’ve done a really crappy job raising them so now they’re hard to be around. Either way, it’s a you problem. It’s your fault. Not theirs. It’s your responsibility, then, to pretend you don’t hate it.
Yes, pretend. Yes, suppress your true feelings. Yes, put on an act. Maintain the facade for your kids, because it’s deeply scarring and unfair to saddle them with your personal issues. And maintain the facade for the public, because frankly we don’t want to have to deal with your narcissistic nonsense either. Your “true self” is unsightly and off putting, and you shouldn’t force anyone to bear witness to it.
So fake it til you make it. Act like the kind of parent you should be, until you actually become that parent. Shoulder the burden of your own narcissism silently and with dignity. If you do that, after a while, and by definition, you will no longer be a narcissist. One day you’ll look up and realize that you’re actually not faking it anymore. You really do enjoy giving your time and yourself to those you love.
At least that’s how it often works. I don’t know if it will for you or not. But either way, whatever you do, don’t take your failures out on your children.
“Without any censorship in the West, fashionable trends of thought and ideas are fastidiously separated from those that are not fashionable, and the latter, without ever being forbidden, have little chance of finding their way into periodicals or books or being heard in colleges. Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad. There is no open violence, as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to accommodate mass standards frequently prevents the most independent-minded persons from contributing to public life and gives rise to dangerous herd instincts that block successful development. In America, I have received letters from highly intelligent persons—maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but the country cannot hear him because the media will not provide him with a forum. This gives birth to strong mass prejudices, to a blindness which is perilous in our dynamic era. An example is the selfdeluding interpretation of the state of affairs in the contemporary world that functions as a sort of a petrified armor around people’s minds, to such a degree that human voices from seventeen countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will be broken only by the inexorable crowbar of events.”
-Solzhenitsyn
It's useless to warn people about something if no one can have a conversation about why it's happening and what must be done to stop it.
And that conversation is something that the tech elite are totally unprepared to have, because the solution will hit them directly in the pocketbook.
I can tell you how to fix the fertility crisis in three words.
But I can't actually fix the fertility crisis with those words, because y'all are not ready to do what's necessary. You think you are, but you're not. And you'll understand why I say you're not when I tell you the three words:
Stop. Hiring. Women.
Now do you get it?
A moment ago, you thought you were willing to do anything to fix this existential threat to every part of the world that matters.
Now, you want to ask me if there isn't, possibly, some gentler way that doesn't involve any nasty shocks to our nice, peaceful, tolerant, inclusive liberal way of life.
Or you're just calling me a big meanie.
Doesn't matter. When you argue with the point I am making here, you are arguing with Mother Nature, and I promise that Mother Nature cannot hear you, and she does not care.
Women already have a job, a job they evolved for. A job that is so demanding that they have to 100% specialized for it.
Women's job is making humans.
And there's only 15 years between the age when it's a felony to make a human with them, and the age when the stuff they need to make humans starts to not work so well.
If they are filling the role of men during that time period, they cannot do their own full-time, maximum effort job, and you get no new humans.
This is precisely why Mother Nature designed women to only mate with men who are wealthier and more powerful than they are. Because a woman, who is working full time at making humans, needs to be supported.
A baby human is an investment in the future. You can't make investments in the future without someone else supporting you in the present.
If men cannot do this, women won't have babies with those men.
This is why every single high-tech civilization has the fertility crisis.
Because every time a civilization gets high-tech, the elites, who buy labor, have a bright idea. Let's start educating the women, they say. That way, we can hire them and double the supply of labor. Which is totally good for society, and the fact that we, personally, will benefit most from this is a total coincidence, and not in any way the whole reason that Wall Street loves feminism.
Everyone knows that there's a near-perfect correlation between female education and the fertility crisis.
But very few people have truly understood why. It's not the education. It's what the women are being educated for.
If you just wanted to teach them matters animal, vegetable, and mineral, along with many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse, there would be no problem at all.
But women are not being educated so they can be interesting conversationalists, or well-rounded human beings. They are being educated so they can sit in a cubicle eight hours a day between the ages of 20 and 35, and answer emails or design marketing campaigns.
That leaves them neither the time nor the resources nor the inclination to make humans, because men aren't any more powerful than they are. Which gives them the ick.
And, of course, they're miserable, because they are genetically programmed to be happy when they do their real job, which is making and refining little humans. Not emails or spreadsheets or marketing campaigns.
But no one is ready for this conversation, because it would involve admitting that every change in Western values after WW2 was a huge mistake.
@elonmusk isn't going to stop hiring women. Hell, it's not even legal to stop hiring women. You can get sued into oblivion for that.
But woman can't make little humans unless the other responsibilities of life are somebody else's problem.
And she doesn't want to make little humans with any man who cannot shield her from all those extra duties.
The bar for being able to do that used to be "reasonably successful tradesman". Now it's actual serious wealth.
We can't IVF our way out of this problem. And we can't just sit around posting "have more babies" on twitter. We have to address the real obstacles that prevent women from having kids.
And the biggest of those is that we have, in effect, demanded that they share every single adult male responsibility from career-building to voting to military service.
All of these responsibilities and burdens were sold to women as opportunities. But nothing is an opportunity if you can't opt out. Just try being 18 years old and finding a man who will 100 percent support and take care of you while you bear his children and do a little light housework.
It's possible, but you had better be exceptionally beautiful, with a sunny personality to match, and social access to the right set of men.
Because the average man can't offer you that deal anymore.
Not won't. Can't.
And there aren't enough rich men to go around.
It’s funny how a small number of fallacies fuel a huge amount of fruitless/meaningless online discourse. Big ones I see related to like and unlike that people need to learn:
-similarity in part doesn’t guarantee sameness in whole.
-category identification is not instance identification.
-similar effects emerge from wildly different causes
I guess what I’m saying is - argument by reference is so weak that it’s incredible how much people rely on it.
What I appreciate most about the bible/christianity is that it used to provide food for thought at every level of analysis. It’s open to all IQ levels and everyone can chew on it to their mind’s content.
I theorize that in our post-Christian society, absence of this shared center of gravity is why the high iq operate in an entirely different context than the more simple among us, and the gap is widening.
This centrifugal force has always existed but I think in the West, Christianity was counteracting it.
Because the economy rewards IQ, nothing prevents sorting on the economic level either - accelerating this spiritual sorting.
It’s sad because high IQ people immediately pattern match you as low IQ if you talk about Christianity, and people who want to talk about Christianity are mostly only left with low IQ people to talk with.
I think this explains why the brilliant scientists, rationalists, and mathematicians of Western history also produced significant works of philsophy and theology, while the opposite is true today.
floaty p retweeted
> hear about being high agency
> ask Cate Hall if it’s decisive risk-taking or exploiting high-trust norms
> she doesn’t understand
> pull out illustrated diagram explaining positive-sum games & the commons
> she laughs and says “it’s a good virtue sir”
> look inside
> it’s exploiting high-trust norms
I'm 65% of the way through @catehall 's book 'You Can Just Do Things' and there's something bothering me
I think it's this: She's advocating for you to take more shortcuts. A bunch of those shortcuts put costs onto other people. /1