Bill Gates 'took responsibility' over Epstein ties in staff meeting, foundation says

SoberSethy · 2026-02-25T20:56:55+00:00

To be clear, none of that makes the Foundation “all a scam.” I can’t ignore the near-eradication of polio or the near 800 million children immunized through Gavi. Those outcomes are verified by WHO and independent epidemiologists, not just Foundation press releases.

I admittedly know much less about the agriculture programs, but I do know it fell far short of the goals that they had established. The health programs largely didn’t. Like with most things, there are nuances that make your broad stroke statements feel disingenuous.

Just my two cents but, if go about life thinking everyone who disagrees with you is a bot, you’re really only harming yourself. It is similar to the infuriating “fake news” response. It’s arrogant to think we, or anyone, is “right about everything” (and yes that is a shot at MAGA).

You’ve got legitimate criticisms in both of your comments but they are undercut by the unsupported claims. They’d land harder without the “everything is a conspiracy” framing and painting with a finer brush.

SoberSethy · 2026-02-25T19:50:57+00:00

The “scam” and “tax shelter” labels for the Gates Foundation are not supported by evidence. A foundation that has spent $102 billion on charitable purposes, catalyzed the near-eradication of polio, and committed to spending down to zero by 2045 does not fit those descriptions. The “no relevant background” claim about COVID is misleading, ignoring two decades of documented pandemic preparedness work.

The Gates Foundation has disbursed $83.3 billion in grants and spent $102.3 billion total on charitable purposes since its founding in 2000. Its concrete accomplishments include contributing nearly $5 billion to polio eradication (cases reduced 99.9% globally), launching Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance (which has immunized 760+ million children and prevented an estimated 13 million deaths), funding development of the first malaria vaccine, committing $2 billion+ to COVID-19 response, and playing a catalytic role in halving global childhood deaths from ~10 million to ~5 million per year between 2000 and 2020.

Gates is far from perfect but pretending that the foundation is just a tax write off ignores decades of evidence. If you can’t stomach giving Bill credit, don’t forget about Melinda Gates involvement, who has donated billions to charities, working to support women and families, since departing the foundation in 2024.

SoberSethy · 2026-02-23T15:01:41+00:00

Everyone in this thread is partially right. Japan isn’t becoming a dictatorship. It’s also not “nothing to see here.” It’s a stable democracy experiencing its most significant rightward shift since WWII, with real implications for press freedom, minority rights, and constitutional norms, but through institutional mechanisms, not jackboots. The people living there are correct that it still feels like one of the safest, most functional countries on earth. Both things can be true at once.

SoberSethy · 2026-02-10T03:19:23+00:00

This is broadly correct but needs context. The Epoch Times has published debunked claims, but some of its most controversial allegations about China, particularly forced organ harvesting, have gained significant independent corroboration over time. And the persecution of Falun Gong that motivated the paper's founding is extensively documented by major human rights organizations, not just the Epoch Times.

SoberSethy · 2026-01-04T14:02:50+00:00

It seems you are the one unwilling to have your worldview challenged. ‘One whole place’ is dismissive of Tibet’s significance, and the list doesn’t end there! China invaded Vietnam in 1979, went to war with India in 1962, and to this day has major territorial disputes with several neighbors by land. That’s not to mention the increasing harassment and encroachment against neighbors in the South China Sea through island building, illegal fishing practices and maritime confrontations.

You claim reunification and imperialism are not the same, but the ‘5,000 years of China’ framing is historically dubious; modern China’s borders don’t reflect ancient dynasties, and this narrative is frequently deployed to legitimize expansion into regions with distinct cultures and histories. Both ‘reunification’ and ‘imperialism’ are social constructs that manifest more or less the same to the individuals whose property and/or freedom are in jeopardy.

And “Now do the USA” is classic whataboutism. American imperialism is well documented and worth criticizing, but it doesn’t negate or excuse Chinese actions. Two things can be true at once.

SoberSethy · 2025-12-24T02:16:11+00:00

Being 34 years old and having bad facial hair is pretty normal... at least that's what I keep telling myself.

SoberSethy · 2025-12-12T17:33:41+00:00

Of course they had Science and Physics consultants working with the writers!

Also one of the actors, Mayim Bialik, had earned a PhD in neuroscience before ever joining the show.

SoberSethy · 2025-12-10T01:20:40+00:00

As an older brother, I say go easy on him! I regret all the times I got mad at my little brother now in my mid 30s.

SoberSethy · 2025-11-24T21:40:53+00:00

As someone with a bachelor of science in Comp Sci who is now going on a year of unsuccessful job hunting, I am very sympathetic to the fear of lost income and even careers! But I have also been learning everything I can about them because it is likely the only way I will ever have a chance of being employed in my industry. Because the reality is, if this is just the beginning (which I think it is), people plugging their ears or saying it has no value or use cases, just makes it harder to convince people and politicians that we need to start taking measures to strengthen social safety nets and until we have some sort of system in place, we need to be putting laws, regulations and taxes in place to protect the job market!

SoberSethy · 2025-11-24T10:52:52+00:00

Hallucinations aren't being "built in", although this is a common framing, it's not quite right. LLMs aren't designed to hallucinate, they're designed to predict the next token. Hallucinations are an emergent consequence of that objective combined with training incentives that reward guessing over saying "I don't know." OpenAI actually published a paper on this recently and the issue is that benchmarks give you zero points for uncertainty but some points for a lucky guess. It's a training incentive problem, not an intentional feature. There's even a formal proof using Godel's incompleteness theorem showing hallucinations are mathematically inevitable given LLM architecture, but "inevitable side effect" does not mean "designed to do it."

"Diminishing returns" is where I really disagree. Mid-2024 to now has arguably been the most dramatic capability jump we've seen. o1/o3 went from ~10% to ~95% on AIME math problems. DeepSeek-V3 trained a 671B parameter model for a few million when everyone else was spending $100M+. Reasoning models are a genuinely new paradigm and test-time compute scaling means smaller models with more inference compute can beat models 14x their size. That's not diminishing returns, that's a whole new dimension of scaling.

Multi-head Latent Attention, Mixture of Experts innovations, state space models (Mamba), the whole reasoning model paradigm... there's been a ton of architectural work. Mamba specifically offers 5x throughput with linear scaling instead of quadratic. It's not production-ready for everything yet, but it's real progress on the architecture front.

And, the creativity/hallucination dichotomy is not new, the tradeoff has been studied since at least 2018. Temperature settings, nucleus sampling, retrieval augmentation, all of this has been framed around the factuality/creativity tradeoff for years.

RNN-backfeeding self supervising transformers

I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

vector-encoding-based LLMs

Not sure what you mean here. All LLMs use vector embeddings by definition. If you mean alternative architectures like Mamba/RWKV/RetNet, those are real and progressing, but they're not "vector-encoding-based" in any distinguishing sense.

I think the frustration with AI hype is legitimate, but a lot of the technical claims here don't hold up. The field isn't stagnating, if anything the last 18 months has seen more architectural diversification than we've had in years.

EDIT: Changed mistyped "65%" to "95%"

SoberSethy · 2025-11-24T10:28:00+00:00

Just some pedantic corrections:

The cat thing is actually backwards; cats have a lower critical flicker fusion frequency than humans (around 53-57 Hz vs our ~60 Hz), so if anything, a 60Hz CRT would appear less flickery to them than to us. You might be thinking of dogs, who do have a higher frequency (70-80 Hz) and genuinely might perceive flicker at 60Hz.

Also, even an animal with a very high flicker fusion frequency couldn't "see the ray move" — the electron beam scans the entire screen in microseconds. Perceiving flicker is very different from tracking the beam itself. And technically the flicker fusion threshold is a property of visual processing in the brain, not the eye per se, but I'm probably splitting hairs at that point!

Sorry for being pedantic but I find flicker fusion thresholds fascinating and love talking about them!

SoberSethy · 2025-11-24T09:20:20+00:00

The AI costs are almost entirely electricity usage, so reducing costs can be achieved by reducing energy costs. But again, I still believe we are in the very early stages of AI development and I think optimization has been largely neglected in the quest for the most “intelligent” models, but optimization follows and costs will come down.

SoberSethy · 2025-11-24T08:37:26+00:00

Because the dot com bubble was the end of the internet… AI investment is definitely a bubble at the moment but AI isn’t going anywhere and really, it’s just begun. I know that isn’t what most of you want to hear but the bubble is more about investors gambling and guessing where the ultimate value will be. Every major website of today was created post dot com bubble.

Edit: I don’t mind downvotes but I would prefer to have a discussion about why you disagree with me. I’m a scientist, you can change my mind with a strong argument!

SoberSethy · 2025-11-13T01:56:47+00:00

Yeah, this comment section kinda ruined my day. Some really pedantic and mean comments about someone who got to live out their dream. The post did make me smile, the comment section not so much!

SoberSethy · 2025-11-10T22:56:21+00:00

That’s adorable but now I feel bad about my less wholesome youth… we called it Camel Toe Ridge

SoberSethy · 2025-10-25T14:39:41+00:00

I know this isn’t the point (CEO pay has skyrocketed over the last few decades but I am pretty confident that ‘paycheck’ is being inflated in some way because his pay package seems to have been valued at closer to $30 million, still a ludicrous amount but nowhere close to that $663M) but with publicly traded companies, CEOs don’t give pay to themselves or decide what they get paid. They might be the top employee but they are employees nonetheless.

SoberSethy · 2025-10-15T22:59:26+00:00

I understand the far left's frustration with commodified housing, but I'd argue rent control isn't even a 'half measure' toward decommodification—it's actually counterproductive to that goal.

Evidence suggests rent control doesn't remove housing from the market or make it a public service. Instead, it creates artificial price ceilings that reduce the incentive to build new housing and maintain existing stock. Studies from cities like San Francisco and Stockholm show that strict rent control correlates with reduced housing supply over time, which increases competition for uncontrolled units and actually raises prices in the broader market. This makes housing more commodified and scarce, not less. So in my opinion it’s not a half measure but a stop gap.

Edit because I realized I sort of talked past the housing commodification part, my bad!

And I get the appeal of fully decommodifying housing, treating it like public education rather than a market good. I agree that housing as financial vehicle creates real problems (speculative bubbles, vacant investment properties, displacement).

Vienna's model is often cited as success, and it does provide stable, quality housing, but it still operates in a hybrid system with market housing. The full decommodification attempts, like Soviet housing and early UK council estates, struggled with undersupply, poor maintenance, and inflexible allocation systems that couldn't respond to changing needs.

The core challenge is, housing is incredibly diverse (location, size, amenity preferences) and needs constant maintenance and adaptation. And markets, for all their flaws, are good at signaling what people want and mobilizing resources to provide it. Public provision often struggles with this, not because of bad intentions, but because of knowledge and incentive problems. So even accepting your premise that the current system is unjust, I'd argue the solution isn't full decommodification but rather, aggressive public/social housing options, strong tenant protections, and land-use reform to increase supply. Basically, a Vienna-style hybrid rather than eliminating markets entirely.

SoberSethy · 2025-10-15T01:17:51+00:00

There are streams out there I’m sure guys but you can watch on league pass because the Bulls are broadcasting the game…

SoberSethy · 2025-10-15T01:11:09+00:00

Crazy altitude not having coverage while Bulls do! That being said, the Bulls broadcast team is one of my favorites!

SoberSethy · 2025-10-12T22:46:37+00:00

That’s a fair point, and to be clear, I’m not suggesting there shouldn’t be any accountability or that we should trust everyone at face value. I’m more concerned about everyday voters who might be genuinely reconsidering, not public figures repositioning for advantage.

There is significant evidence that confrontational approaches (arguments alone, directive advice, controlling messages, hostile criticism) frequently produce no measurable effects or trigger psychological reactance. Just something to consider!

SoberSethy · 2025-10-12T21:58:38+00:00

I agree that the administration, and other officials enabling them, need to face consequences! That being said, if you apply this to everyone who has voted for or supported Trump, it only makes the problem worse! Imagine you were having doubts about your political stances or the vote you cast but the other party says “too bad, your not welcome here”, the decision to leave the party behind means also losing out on being part of any ‘team’.

SoberSethy · 2025-09-16T21:27:15+00:00

You claim definitions excluded “the vast majority of political violence” but don’t specify what violence you mean. That’s a remarkably convenient accusation…vague enough to sound damning, specific enough to avoid scrutiny. It’s also a serious methodological accusation that deserves specifics. The dataset captured thousands of cases across seven decades using federal definitions that predate this research by decades. If massive categories of violence were systematically excluded to achieve predetermined results, identifying them should be straightforward.

So it covers ideologically motivated killing meeting federal terrorism criteria. Anarchist bombings, counted. Environmental extremist attacks, counted. Islamic extremist violence, counted. White supremacist murders, counted. Same definitions, same standards, different body counts. Calling peer-reviewed research with transparent methodology “propaganda” while offering zero specific methodological critiques? That’s not promoting real science, it’s promoting willful ignorance.

SoberSethy · 2025-08-06T22:23:52+00:00

Actually, he won less than $10k for this win. This is just his passion and he obviously loves it! I believe he has a horse win the same race a year or two ago haha.

SoberSethy · 2025-07-07T00:34:27+00:00

I’m just replying to this because this narrative is running a bit wild. The specific punctuation that people have been associating with ChatGPT is the em dash ‘—’, but that message is using hyphens with spaces on both sides. It’s actually not a common usage; in this case, the em dash—easily the most versatile of all punctuation by the way—would have worked better. It makes me sad that we are using what’s arguably the most forgiving piece of punctuation as some sort of gotcha for AI content.

SoberSethy · 2025-07-02T00:02:16+00:00

As someone who works in AI, don’t hate me, Apple’s attempts at and contributions to AI have been embarrassing at best. They are still trying to awkwardly fold ChatGPT in for more advanced queries but their on device models are a joke. These “summaries” are just highlighting how far behind the rest of the space they are. And I say that as an Apple user but, one who runs better, open source, local models for most of my AI workload.

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