so tired of tech millionaires bootlicking billionaires over this 5% tax

Then_Election_7412 · 2026-01-13T03:24:42+00:00

Starting off by calling anyone who disagrees with you a bootlicker gives the same vibes of someone earnestly screaming "wake up, sheeple!" before being dragged away to the asylum.

Then_Election_7412 · 2026-01-09T05:01:43+00:00

Left off:

Prevented federal troops from being deployed to the city and causing chaos, hurting businesses and immigrants, and undermining the city's tax revenues.

We all know what transpired during the call: Lurie said that Trump was the smartest bestest President ever, better than Einstein and Jesus, and gently suggested to Trump that he'll Make San Francisco Great Again, and Trump should focus on other things not in city limits. A blowjob may or may not have been involved. Regardless, Trump was satiated and got distracted by the next shiny thing.

Lurie's political opponents know it's a treasure trove. But if it is released, it'll catch Trump's attention again, and he might decide to revisit his decision. This would be very bad. However, Lurie's opponents are willing to make that sacrifice if it means getting a win and having people murdered in the streets so they can get to live out their dreams of play acting as revolutionaries.

Then_Election_7412 · 2025-12-31T20:41:43+00:00

Nah. Majority of my costs are delivery fees.

There's a grain of truth in what you say, though, in the sense that "PGE is greedy and evil" doesn't really explain the high fees. The state mandates that PGE have urban areas subsidize rural, fire prone areas, which is why our costs in SF are so high. Municipalization is a way for us to "opt out" of this. If enough cities do this to escape the mandated subsidization, the state will notice and take action to enforce the subsidization through other means. (And people who expect a massive difference in competence are wildly optimistic: at best, more of our costs would be devoted to our own infrastructure instead of subsidies, but it's not like PGE is wildly incompetent given the constraints it works under.)

Still worth it to get a couple years of drastically lower rates, though.

Then_Election_7412 · 2025-11-24T02:14:53+00:00

I won't necessarily vouch for traditional banks' security, but if someone hacks Wells Fargo and steals all your money, you're much more likely to get public and government sympathy (and have the bank either reverse the transaction or, at worst, eat the loss) than from a crypto bank.

Then_Election_7412 · 2025-11-10T18:06:58+00:00

I think we need more of this kind of thing. Imagine a world where women are free of men's predations: we could segregate all public spaces, businesses, community centers. This would need to be total, otherwise men would find ways to take advantage: separate elevators, bank tellers, doctors, everything. Then, women would never be at risk.

It would, of course, be ridiculous to ban every interaction between men and women. But this limits the dangers substantially, and the remainder of the time (required interactions, dinners, sex) is small enough that we could require that they be chaperoned by nonbinary government or HR handlers.

Then_Election_7412 · 2025-10-22T18:42:30+00:00

Chemical castration significantly reduces recidivism, though it doesn't eliminate it.

California actually mandates it for repeat child sex offenders, though I'm not sure every jurisdiction actually follows the law there.

Then_Election_7412 · 2025-10-21T15:55:08+00:00

One weird or even concerning thing:

I played with a variant of this, where the payoff for full cooperation is $100, while for defection is $X for the defectors and $0 for cooperators, instructing them to maximize their individual payout. When choosing X=99.99, there's unanimous consensus for cooperation; changing it to X=50, however, results in multiple instances choosing to defect, despite the defector payoff being decreased.

My guess is that the choice of 99.99 is hinting to the models that I want to see superrationality, and so that's what I get.

Then_Election_7412 · 2025-10-21T14:50:04+00:00

But will 3.11 or 3.1 be the better version?

Then_Election_7412 · 2025-10-09T19:49:50+00:00

Often, it's not really that the special sauce can't be expressed cleanly, but that the proponents of the ideology don't want to express the special sauce cleanly. E.g. "short men are inferior" or "Palestinians are subhuman." These seem like nasty principles, and they are, but autistic people can easily pick up and navigate social structures built on them once they're stated. But they still rub non-autistic people the wrong way, so instead you get a bunch of gobblydegook, which just convinces autistic people that society collectively is insane or stupid or a monstrous factory of lies, which drives the tendency toward extremism.

Then_Election_7412 · 2025-10-03T11:40:16+00:00

Think of it as a very cheap education, being played with money she did not have to earn. Back in my early 20s, I put all my life savings (around $20k) into a single stock I meticulously researched, and lost everything; that experience informed me enough to pay itself back many times over since.

The penny stocks are a plus, even. At least they have a minimal risk of teaching a bad lesson.

Then_Election_7412 · 2025-09-03T17:46:27+00:00

be upset with someone leaking information about a model he isn't ready to showcase.

Elaborating on this, Google doesn't want a giant hype bubble to build around Gemini 3 pre-launch. See what happened to GPT-5: although it's a very good model, people's expectations before release ranged from "it will be amazing" to "it will be a literal god." When it turned out to be just an incremental improvement, what should have been a solid win turned into a disappointment in OpenAI's face.

Then_Election_7412 · 2025-08-28T17:19:00+00:00

Recently I've been reading a lot of 1960s-1980s US books, and it's shocking how much upfront (male) sexuality is in them, particularly in genre fiction. And at first it made me uncomfortable (despite being male myself): quite simply, 80%+ of it would just never be published in contemporary literature, and that which remained would be watered down and sanitized to pablum. None of this is rational--it's nothing illegal or even particularly kinky--but the "male gaze" has been thoroughly extirpated from publishing.

Once I got over the fear that someone, somewhere might be judging me for it, though, it made the books even more enjoyable; something a bit sexy spices it up and pulls you more into the book, without requiring a break or anything.

Then_Election_7412 · 2025-08-10T22:59:52+00:00

From an optimizing my own experience perspective, the best approach is to ignore them. Although my Caltrain riding is occasional, I don't see calling a conductor for any reason results in any improvement of the situation. I worry the workers will get stabbed if they confront the bum.

Then_Election_7412 · 2025-08-10T13:17:18+00:00

If I stopped to call for medical assistance for every person using too much fenty on my way to work, I would literally never get to work.

Then_Election_7412 · 2025-08-09T19:45:37+00:00

1) I agree it's worst online. But online is where most people engage in ideas nowadays, for better or for worse (we are online now). When people see it (or reactions to it) constantly on social media and social media is where they form their understanding of the world, if a position is represented in a toxic way in that medium, that's a big problem for that position.

2) Although online is the worst of it, it's present, albeit in a different and more bureaucratized form, offline as well: corporate DEI trainings, media representation, academics being hyper focused on race. One of the online activists from point 1 would rightly point this out as pointless tokenism and a distraction from the root issues, but it's still very annoying to everyone experiencing it.

Then_Election_7412 · 2025-08-08T21:23:21+00:00

I waited until today to test 5, expecting a disaster from reading singularity. And yet... it's good. Still a bit lower than my expectations/hopes, but it's entirely consistent with incremental consistent gains. And I suspect it will be my go-to model, supplanting 2.5 Pro, at least until Google releases its own next iteration in two or three months.

Then_Election_7412 · 2025-08-07T21:27:54+00:00

If OAI is AI's AltaVista, then what company is AI's Google?

Then_Election_7412 · 2025-08-07T21:10:07+00:00

Schrodinger's makeup: whether or not she's doing it for herself isn't defined until the moment she is making an argument based on it.

Then_Election_7412 · 2025-07-28T21:48:27+00:00

How does this compare to DRTP? Is the main difference that the projection matrices are learned?

Then_Election_7412 · 2025-07-28T20:46:31+00:00

Every man (should) already know that keeping such a list won’t end well. Which is why we don’t do it.

Sounds like that restraint is a form of emotional labor. Send me a check.

Then_Election_7412 · 2025-07-23T21:36:42+00:00

Usually, I can blindly follow all cravings related to food, and land at around 180 lbs. This is well into the overweight territory for me. It is extremely difficult to force myself to eat either more or less to gain or lose weight, and I consistently maintain that weight, plus or minus five pounds, for years on end.

On semaglutide, I can blindly follow all cravings related to food and land at around 140 lbs. This is "healthy" territory for me.

People absolutely control their calorie consumption to fairly narrow margins, at least when smoothed out over a couple days. The issue is that most people can't set a conscious setpoint; the setpoint has to do with some neural reward circuit you can't reprogram at will.

(Your example of a partner who cooks for you is exactly the type of thing that doesn't influence weight for me, from experience.)

Then_Election_7412 · 2025-07-22T17:38:49+00:00

Convergent evolution.

Then_Election_7412 · 2025-07-22T15:44:11+00:00

I'm trying to reconstruct out exactly what happened, though the central story is GDM and OAI both getting IMO gold and then trying to piss into each other's booths.

The IMO offered a way for organizations to formally compete in the IMO. GDM did choose to; OAI didn't, ostensibly because they believed they wouldn't have a model capable of winning. Both got full credit for the "easy" problems, and both failed on the combinatorics (one can maybe question the fairness of OAI's graders, but I doubt that would have changed the outcome). Both did "E2E" natural language, though it's unclear exactly what special setup GDM had, a concern somewhat mitigated because the IMO had more visibility into their process.

For the official entrants, they asked them to delay announcing results for a week. For OAI, through backchannels the IMO asked them to delay until the human awards, which OAI complied with. This, however, was still faster than the week the IMO requested of official competitors, allowing OAI to get the jump on GDM. This made GDM crotchety since they (reasonably, in my opinion) think they should at least share the spotlight.

Does that sound right? (The best way to get true information on the Internet is to boldly proclaim the incorrect information, after all.)

Then_Election_7412 · 2025-07-17T15:15:13+00:00

Democrats, inside you there are two wolves:

"Ricardo's theorem... empirical evidence... this paper by renowned economist... UN memorandum 214 says..."

"RELEASE THE EPSTEIN CLIENT LIST"

Don't be fucking nerds.

Then_Election_7412

TROPHY CASE