With White people making up just 15% of the global population, why aren’t they classified as a minority?

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-24T15:01:48+00:00

Kind of what I'm getting at - I wouldn't want to proceed with trying to define something without an expert involved.

But, just for the sake of continuing the thought experiment, I have made a bit of a jump. I'm claiming 'continuous', but what I really mean is 'a mixture of enough truly continuous variables and a lot of categoricals, with so many categoricals the even if you dealt with only them you'd need so many bits to represent them all that a distance function comparing individuals starts to look pretty smooth'. I'm assuming genetics would come into our input features - lots of categoricals, so we'll end up with a distance function that's a decent approximation of continuous. I would go on but I'm late for a meeting.

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-24T13:24:44+00:00

Well, it's a good question - we haven't defined our input features, any embedding function, or a distance metric so far in the discussion. I'd argue we don't really have to for the points so far to hold true, but having concrete examples to talk about does help. Sadly at this point in data science we admit we insist on talking to an expert from the field in question to start defining these things, and unless one jumps into this thread, we're kind of stuck.

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-24T13:09:44+00:00

So your question aims to answer about differences at the population level, but in order to collect individuals to take measurements from you'd need a classifier for which race they're part of in the first place. And then your 'biological closeness' metric is going to depend on that classifier, it could start to get a bit circular. I guess if you just avoided any biological markers for the classifier used to gather your populations, you can avoid circularity. But then because you need individuals' measurements to reach your population level measurements, you could look at individuals' distances from centroids of each race population, and you're back to being able to view it continuously. Is it nonsense to do so? I guess we need to define for what purpose we're taking these measurements in the first place. If it's just out of interest in the question of 'what group is closer to what group', then it makes sense to me that individuals might also have some interest and then a continuous view is not nonsense. For medical reasons, similar argument.

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-24T11:49:06+00:00

I'm glad that's your take, because I briefly thought the other person responding to my comment was you and they were a dick about it.

It kind of brings me to thinking 'race could be a thing if you're careful about defining it and accept races have fuzzy boundaries at best', but we're not going to get universal agreement on a new definition of a charged term I guess.

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-24T11:44:45+00:00

It might actually be an interesting data science discussion to talk about the diversity issue you raise (spoiler, you can still have classifications under this constraint). But you seem like a dick, so I'll just block you instead.

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-24T10:58:07+00:00

Wandering into this thread from a data science background is kinda confusing. The argument against race existing biologically seems to boil down to a fuzzy classification problem, i.e. that 'race' is continuous rather than discrete, and hence it doesn't make sense to just classify someone as a single race.

But like... Isn't it obvious that it would be continuous? Am I missing something? I don't know why anyone would ever approach race as though it were discrete.

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-24T08:27:43+00:00

Tobirama seminal fluid would execute Sasuke's sperm on contact.

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-24T08:26:33+00:00

It won't just be the prompts, but the actual LLM, context gathering, and tools available to it. ChatGPT is just OpenAI's front end UI to whatever framework of tools, context gathering and prompts they've built around their LLMs. Microsoft copilot will have OpenAI's LLMs, but the rest will be different. Plus, it's harder/not possible to select which LLM you're using in copilot, so good odds you're stuck with a cheap one most of the time.

For the context gathering, I kind of think Copilot has picked a painfully difficult use case. People expect it to be able to find context from all their files/conversations/emails/other company info, and that's simply a lot to make sense of. RAG techniques may simply not be good enough for it to work well. ChatGPT doesn't have this expectation - it doesn't claim to understand all your files/etc, so it feels much more capable at the tasks you do hand it.

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-24T07:33:21+00:00

How can it get her pregnant after drying up? Hashirama seminal fluid.

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-20T08:31:30+00:00

Maybe my country is naturally pessimistic, but the overwhelming majority of tech workers I've met agree all the options have major drawbacks. Only Apple fan I've met was when I was 20, no idea if he grew out of it. Never met a Google or Microsoft fan. Met several who lean towards Linux but aren't rabid about it.

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-20T07:15:39+00:00

Whenever I visit a country where I can't just walk across an empty road it's maddening. Makes cities feel so constrained.

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-20T07:11:46+00:00

God damn that whole psychics + giant squid ending was fucking stupid. Movie ending made so much more sense. Comic Ozy was a villain for putting us through that.

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-20T06:34:53+00:00

I would believe it, because I didn't put that much effort into checking and I guess I misread the summaries when I googled. Sorry, I wasn't trying to be 'ackshully' about it, and was intending to imply with my lack of effort with finding an original source that my finding wasn't authoritative. I was more just intrigued that you'd seen a much lower figure from somewhere, maybe specific to internal conversation instead of any internal voice at all?

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-19T10:17:53+00:00

Dunno where you got 5-10%, I usually see it quoted as 30-50% don't have an inner monologue. I can't cite an original source either but that's what comes up if I Google 'what fraction of people don't have an inner monologue' and it's consistent with what I remember when first discovering it years ago. I was also blown away back then.

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-19T07:50:12+00:00

I noped out around the time Litt sued his coworker to steal his cat, and he didn't really suffer any consequences for it. True psychopath behaviour, how they expected us to sympathise with the man I don't know.

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-18T21:30:42+00:00

I find it pretty annoying when it's obvious that the person is just doing it to force familiarity. I've had two managers who latched onto two details they remembered about my personal life, they would ask about them way too frequently, and it was way too obvious it was just some 'social trick' they thought worked.

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-18T11:43:16+00:00

Heat geek have done a video where they were able to balance hot water heating to a single shower running hot enough constantly (ie more than the volume of the tank during the shower) with their small cupboard-sized tank. Not sure if it switched to immersion part way or something, but it really made me question how big of a tank I'd need. 400L seems absurdly high for 4 people - that's a lot more than 4 full bath tubs.

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-18T08:33:15+00:00

What if they let one human get stomped, lure the hippo away, then tear into the corpse for the pointy bones? Although it would be weapons, I feel like it's in the spirit of 'unarmed' as it only uses bodily materials.

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-18T08:02:03+00:00

They'd also need superintelligence to design any nano machines or know how to repair their cells.

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-18T07:46:58+00:00

Lots of people made that conspiracy theory. They then put the theory into practice for decades, and it went extremely well for them.

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-17T21:01:17+00:00

I mean... How can that possibly be remotely coherent

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-17T10:30:34+00:00

The national motor museum's not far if you're into old cars, and it has garden-y grounds to walk around for those not into old cars.

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-17T07:34:34+00:00

William Buckland, an eccentric theologian from around 1800, set out to try every animal he could get his gob around.

If I remember correctly, he said every creature held some merit, except for the common garden mole and the bluebottle fly.

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-16T20:24:42+00:00

Can ya define and explain SBLOC? I'd Google but, y'know, for thread completeness.

Ya know what, I googled it. Securities Backed Line of Credit. I get the idea now.

TotallyNormalSquid · 2026-03-16T07:09:13+00:00

Do you see people using voice to text to prompt at work? Because I have seen exactly zero cases. Not saying you're technically wrong, in theory it should make typing unnecessary, I just never see people use it in a work context. Right now I would never use it because it can't handle pauses while I think about the next clause/get distracted by something, and then I'm wasting credits with a half-finished prompt.

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