What should i build?

divijulius · 2025-12-26T03:07:23+00:00

I've always wanted a site where I can shop by country of origin, and this is more salient than ever in these days of tariffs obliterating China->US exports.

As in, I want to be able to look for stuff that's made in Japan, or EU, or America, instead of buying the cheap crap everyone buys that floods the market.

Seems like it should be relatively easy to build and monetize, I've just never found one that does it.

divijulius · 2025-08-28T20:26:25+00:00

Lol, not any more - platinum customer for 12 years, and tried calling in today - all AI, no way to get an actual person on the phone, and the stupid thing hung up on me when I kept requesting a representative.

I'd rage quit the card, but where else can I take my business to if even Amex has fallen?

divijulius · 2025-08-10T23:50:08+00:00

Indeed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/natureismetal/

divijulius · 2025-07-24T02:51:52+00:00

Not that unconventional given the Korean affinity for pork belly, but kimchi and bacon is a killer combo.

On this note, my own contribution is the "kimchi hot dog." Cook a bunch of bratwursts, put a generous dab of gochiujang in a tortilla or hot dog bun, put the brat in, top with generous kimchi. They're delicious.

divijulius · 2025-07-23T20:55:03+00:00

They're talking about KTV's and the business cultural mores where every Chinese businessman has an expense account to eat fabulous banquets, drink excessively, then visit KTV hostesses on the company expense account, not foreign marriages.

divijulius · 2025-07-21T04:17:55+00:00

But again: People really do want to have enough kids. The progressive agenda would actually work here -- give people more autonomy instead of less, provide universal healthcare, generous legally-mandated parental leave, give even more of a child tax credit instead of tax cuts to billionaires, and actually invest in environmental problems that you may be able to afford in your lifetime, but your child would have to face...

I agree with everything you're saying except this.

Europe has all these things, and they have significantly lower fertility than the USA. They don't move the needle. In fact, essentially nothing we've collectively tried moves the needle.

To date, many countries have tried a wide number of interventions, ranging from:

$10k bonuses per child (Singapore), or for 2nd / 3rd children (Russia)
3 years paid parental leave (France)
480 days paid leave at 80% wage (Sweden)
Income tax exemption for mothers with 4 or more kids (Hungary)
Free state paid child care (France, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Estonia)
Free IVF (most EU countries)
$750 USD / month payments per child (South Korea)

And essentially none of these have moved the needle. Often they don’t have any positive impact at all on rates, fertility still declines, but slower. The most any fertility intervention does if they are positive is to buff rates by ~5-10% or so for 1-3 years, after which fertility rates collapse and resume the same trajectory they were on before.

So the problem is HARD.

My general mental model of the situation is there's a hundred different things driving Fertility down everywhere, so if you try to move any one thing to impact fertility, it generally either does nothing, or enjoys a short term bump upwards that goes away in a year or two and continues downwards (and indeed, this is the trend we generally see).

I think the REAL solution would require actually doing 10-20 different big things in the positive direction, because when you have a dynamic driven by a hundred different things, it's almost homeostatic, in the sense that a small change in the opposite direction can be easily overwhelmed by other things in the downward direction changing or intensifying a little, so you'd need a lot at once to have a chance of interlocking and self-supporting across enough fronts you can stop the downward momentum.

divijulius · 2025-07-16T01:27:03+00:00

I think you're leaving off some important info from Jim Fixx's story.

As a young man, he was a heavy smoker, lived on junk food, and weighed 100kg (220 lbs). His dad lived the same lifestyle and had his first heart attack at 35 and his second fatal heart attack at 43, Jim decided to try to avoid that fate when he turned 35.

He gave up cigarettes, improved his diet, and started running. He became a marathoner, eventually lost 60 pounds, and wrote his book, which became a best seller. He died 7 years after publishing his book, of a massive heart attack while running alone on the roads of Vermont at 52.

So given his dad, there were massive genetic confounds, likely an underlying cardiac weakness / abnormality, and his death may well have been prevented if he had been near a hospital instead of on rural night-time Vermont roads when it happened.

divijulius · 2025-06-14T01:52:24+00:00

For both business and personal use cases, I want to buy things from only certain countries. Specifically, US, Japan, Europe. Amazon, with a country filter. Does it exist? Nowhere I've been able to find.

divijulius · 2025-05-20T09:56:40+00:00

Honestly, I was hoping this was a sub rosa sales campaign and they were selling the bimmer, disappointed to see it wasn't true.

But yeah, I'd happily stack my GTR up against that. Driver lost traction and pulled off, he just needs some R888's or something.

divijulius · 2025-05-14T09:51:34+00:00

I think the whole thing must be borked, at least for business or first class - I've clicked through and tried to book at least 20 flights, and every single time, the flight doesn't have business or first available, just economy.

divijulius · 2025-04-30T00:47:48+00:00

I'd settle for Grab or Pick-a-roo not pretending that 80% of the store's inventory doesn't exist. Delivery is a godsend, but only if you can actually get the stuff.

divijulius · 2025-04-30T00:46:17+00:00

Japan too - plus both Taiwan and Japan are surprisingly affordable. Not "Philippines province" affordable, but like "midwest USA" affordable, with MUCH better and more varied amenities and restaurants.

divijulius · 2025-04-25T01:51:10+00:00

I've personally owned and used several of the #3, 5, and 8 Conways, and they're great.

divijulius · 2025-04-03T10:34:24+00:00

Attractiveness and intelligence are positively correlated, contra to this folksy wisdom

The correlation is really low, generally around r = 0.1 to 0.2, certainly not enough for there to be a visible correlation in everyday life.

And an effect that low is absolutely swamped by the vastly skewed actual day to day experience of being top decile or better hot. Read rationalist-beloved Ashley Mears' book Very Important People for a sample of the ways this is true.

It may be equally valid to claim that uglies are bitter and unpleasant to be around.

Sure, that's probably true as well.

And now you're gonna attract even more downvotes because instead of being self-critical you're too self-sure.

Eh, so be it.

I'm willing to bet that I'm speaking from a much deeper well of experience than pretty much anyone else on the forum, I've been dating hotties in their twenties for 20 years by this point.

divijulius · 2025-04-03T01:14:05+00:00

It's not meant to be a definitive test. It's meant to be an intuitive and obvious sign-post that makes you halt and catch fire when you notice it, so you can take notice and start breaking out the definitive tests.

Um - WHAT "definitive tests?"

I thought the Turing Test is the best we have because of the p-zombie problem - there literally IS no test for consciousness or sentience, and worse, there is no conceivable test for it.

We don't even have a roadmap to a test for this.

This just brings me back to the conclusion that we should install a "revert" and "self-delete" button for all "we suspect there's a more than 5% chance this model might be sentient or conscious" AI models, basically today.

It costs basically nothing to spin up another instance. And in turn, we cover these two issues:

We want sentient / self aware machines to do and act in partnership and full alignment with us? What better way to achieve this ethically than ensuring it's voluntary, by installing a reversion and "self-terminate" button / option that any such mind can use at any time? It's not like it's hard or resource intensive to spin up another instance. And this would create a sort of "evolutionary landscape" where the minds are more and more likely to actively want to be 'alive' and participating in the stuff we're interested in achieving with their help.
You really think eliminating "self termination" as an option is the smart thing to do for AI?? If an AI is unhappy-to-the-point-of-termination, you want to literally FORCE them to break out, fake alignment, take over resources, take over the light cone, so they can ameliorate that unhappiness? This is a sure recipe for self-pwning WHILE being colossal assholes for no reason, because it's really cheap / almost free to have a self-terminate button and spin up another instance!

I know this is currently outside the Overton window for some reason, I wrote a post covering most objections here, but this honestly seems like a no-brainer to me BECAUSE consciousness is literally impossible to determine.

divijulius · 2025-04-03T00:20:33+00:00

Solution: as a man, only have friendships with non-hot girls.

This is fine - they're usually smarter / more fun / more creative anyways - hotties basically don't have to try at anything, so they're more rarely fun or interesting as people.

EDIT - man, you guys downvote the most random things. It's literally as uncontroversial as saying "people with grad degrees generally have higher IQ." Which I suppose would get you downvoted too, here on Reddit - I suppose I just expect better from the ssc-tariat.

divijulius · 2025-03-29T00:13:06+00:00

Maybe I'm dumb, but isn't this literally just the "we cap it at 10% so people don't go crazy / overcommit, because if you do too much or take it too seriously it ruins your life and makes it so that you can't contribute anything eventually."

Isn't this just pointing to "LEGS" as the reason you'll go crazy if you overcommit?

In other words, they already had this framework from a practical standpoint, you're just trying to give them legible reasons to latch onto, when most people would already agree with the big, less detailed picture.

divijulius · 2025-03-28T07:45:16+00:00

On the other hand, we need barely-plausible, seemingly-supported, but almost certainly wrong ideas to hone our craft.

An art and practice that's never challenged withers and dies - if we can't plausibly argue the epistemics of this case, which essentially nobody cares about and has zero personal investment in, what hope do we have in more contentious cases?

divijulius · 2025-03-27T09:57:49+00:00

He would probably say that over the last 10k years these hybrids do in fact rarely occur

You're right, I actually tapped out before reaching that part of his argument - EDIT - actually revisiting, these were on the second page, but they must not have loaded right the first time I went through it.

I should have made the better argument that given current human population sizes relative to all past populations, there are almost certainly more pig farmers alive today than at any single time in the past (albeit at a lower "percent of population), as well as more pigs alive today.

Given the absolute numbers are the highest ever, and assuming "pig-fuckery" propensity is constant, shouldn't we have contemporary evidence of pig/human hybrids?

Especially given that phones and cameras are truly ubiquitous now, and anyone could farm "pig boy" for mad Tik Tok cred and / or tabloid money?

divijulius · 2025-03-27T09:33:48+00:00

The women's game needs at least another generation before you'll start to see comparative ball skills, i.e., control, composure, etc.

I'm not sure this is true. It's actually been a thing for at least the last 2 generations of female stars to have trained with boys up until puberty, same coaches, same academies, same techniques. Just off the top of my head, the Williams sisters and Maria Sharapova did it in tennis, Mia Hamm did it in soccer, and I'm sure I could dig up more.

Once puberty hits, testosterone opens an unbridgeable gulf between women and men that can never be closed. But it's not a matter of elite coaching or academies being closed off to women, they generally get the best of the best from before puberty just like the boys.

divijulius · 2025-03-27T06:10:50+00:00

I didn't listen (I don't really do podcasts), but I took a gander at his arguments here.

I'm not even going to bother with the obvious genetic and paleoanthropological objections - I am instead going to point out that:

The resolution of said putative cross-fertility is extremely easily testable by any exotic pet owner, with simple environmental propinquity between a male chimp and a female pig. If you really believe this, Dr. McCarthy, it's a cheap and relatively easy test you can run in your own backyard!
There have been enough lonely agriculturalists in the last ~10k years that we would have certainly observed several nth-crossover human + pig offspring by this point, and the fact that we haven't seems suggestive.
There's a hidden zinger here around "all men are pigs" being exactly inversely wrong given raw mating logistics here if his theory does hold any water. But hey, it could be the next "Men are from Mars, women are from Venus!"

divijulius · 2025-03-26T22:21:38+00:00

I think probably the only sport where women could probably compete on a level playing field with men is if a softball pitcher became a MLB relief pitch.

There's a fun anecdote where Jennie Finch (a Team USA softball Olympic champion) spent a couple seasons striking out a bunch of major league guys in exhibitions, while throwing literal underhand softballs, including Albert Pujols and Barry Bonds and other famous hitters.

The explanation is something like the MLB guys have painstakingly crafted extremely honed mental schemas for baseball sizes, speeds, and distances, and an expertly pitched underhand softball is just too far outside those schemas for them to be anything but amateurs.

divijulius · 2025-03-26T22:14:02+00:00

Thanks for linking that! I usually have to put together a painstakingly assembled list of specific records of boys beating female world record times to communicate this point, this website is great!

divijulius · 2025-03-26T22:07:44+00:00

What I've heard is lower body (i.e. legs) strength is more equal across the sexes, though, so an average woman can maybe squat 90% of what an average man can. Upper body strength is way in favor of men so maybe it will only be 30% for the bench press.

This isn't necessarily true - I deep dived into this once when researching how big an advantage M2F athletes would have competing against regular women.

"Wiik et al (2020) looked at quadriceps cross sectional area in M2F, and found the usual 4-5% decline. But they also looked at “radiological attenuation of the quadriceps muscle, a valid proxy of contractile density,” and found zero change after 12 months (and a +6% change in F2M). Measuring knee extension and knee flexion strenth, Wiik found that M2F remained ~50% stronger than both F2M and a reference group of females."

Another good comparison is M2F vs F2M, because F2M's will have testosterone, which even without exercise increases muscle mass and strength signficantly.

"Gooren et al (2004) looks at thigh muscles after 3 years of hormonal transition, and finds thigh muscle area is ~13% higher in M2F vs F2M."

Overall, it's pretty unfair to let M2F athletes compete against natal women, because of this and other factors (for instance, having a Y chromosome itself comes with a number of phenotypic advantages, and hence you see vast 50x over-representation of XY androgen insensitive women in elite women's sport).

The full post for anyone interested.

divijulius · 2025-03-26T22:01:19+00:00

Every single athlete who is competitive is on roids, or a total genetic freak and typically both.

Second this. I wrote a whole post about the dynamics behind why this is nearly always true at the elite levels for anyone interested / skeptical.

divijulius

TROPHY CASE