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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • I’ve tried a couple rolling distros (including Arch), and they always “broke” after ~6 months to a year. Both times because an update would mess up something with my proprietary GPU drivers, IIRC. Both times, I would just install a different distro, because it would’ve probably took me longer to figure out what the issue was and fix it. I’m currently just using Debian stable, lol.









  • A lot of the “elites” (OpenAI board, Thiel, Andreessen, etc) are on the effective-accelerationism grift now. The idea is to disregard all negative effects of pursuing technological “progress,” because techno-capitalism will solve all problems. They support burning fossil fuels as fast as possible because that will enable “progress,” which will solve climate change (through geoengineering, presumably). I’ve seen some accelerationists write that it would be ok if AI destroys humanity, because it would be the next evolution of “intelligence.” I dunno if they’ve fallen for their own grift or not, but it’s obviously a very convenient belief for them.

    Effective-accelerationism was first coined by Nick Land, who appears to be some kind of fascist.


  • I listened to a guy on a podcast saying that Clarence Thomas was in the Black Power movement when he was young, and that kinda informs his decisions now. Thomas is very pessimistic about black Americans ever gaining equal power in American politics, and thinks black people should focus on things they can control instead (family, business, etc). I guess it’s kinda like an ethnic/right-wing version of “dual-power.” Also, like a lot of leftists I see on here that seem to have given up on electoral politics.


  • U.S. Libertarians are typically non-authoratarian right-wingers; unless the authority is business.

    U.S. libertarians can be fairly radical (not conservative) in opposing pretty much everything the state does outside of operating a legal framework conducive to business. They support near zero business regulations, and as few laws as possible. A U.S. libertarian would typically be against stuff like bathroom laws, public schools, and the EPA. They typically revere Ayn Rand, and often debate age of consent laws.

    Also, there is now a Mises caucus within the Libertarian party that is fascist (not conservative). They are the ones who invited Trump. TBF, the Republican party is fascist and not conservative anymore either.


  • I don’t think anyone I worked with in 2019 has the same job (they were either promoted or switched jobs). For the people working those jobs now, I’m guessing the businesses needed to raise wages to attract new talent, probably more than the ~30% inflation. In regards to family I know that work service or manufacturing jobs, they either switched jobs for higher pay, got promoted, or their union negotiated decent pay increases. Again, I’m guessing most businesses needed to raise their wages to attract workers to replace those that switched jobs; and from the “help wanted” signs I see, it looks like they raised wages more than inflation.


  • We’re close to peak using current NN architectures and methods. All this started with the discovery of transformer architecture in 2017. Advances in architecture and methods have been fairly small and incremental since then. The advancements in performance has mostly just been throwing more data and compute at the models, and diminishing returns have been observed. GPT-3 costed something like $15 million to train. GPT-4 is a little better and costed something like $100 million to train. If the next model costs $1 billion to train, it will likely be a little better.


  • LLMs do sometimes hallucinate even when giving summaries. I.e. they put things in the summaries that were not in the source material. Bing did this often the last time I tried it. In my experience, LLMs seem to do very poorly when their context is large (e.g. when “reading” large or multiple articles). With ChatGPT, it’s output seems more likely to be factually correct when it just generates “facts” from it’s model instead of “browsing” and adding articles to its context.


  • Statistically, some working mothers will answer the phone and finish the survey. If the survey was done correctly, and sampling bias and all that is accounted for, 1800 respondents is plenty to get a good representative picture of Americans. Surveys can work very well; even when using non-ideal survey methods.

    Anecdotally, this survey seems to align pretty well with the people I know. E.g. people complaining about a pie costing something like 30% more than 5 years ago, while their income doubled or tripled in that same timeframe. Help-wanted signs in my area seem to be advertising wages around 50% more than 2019 as well.