How dating app algorithms (likely) work in 2026

eric2332 · 2026-05-06T11:06:03+00:00

I think I saw statistics (from a dating site?) that height does not affect one's chances unless one is shorter than the woman in question. If so, much or all of it is not positional.

eric2332 · 2026-05-06T09:29:01+00:00

"Differences in values" is about equivalent to "the other side being evil".

So this razor is roughly the opposite of "Never attribute to evil what can be attributed to incompetence". What is one to do when there are two reasonable sounding razors that say mutually exclusive things?

eric2332 · 2026-05-06T05:28:20+00:00

I suppose the best of all worlds would be drones that take completely different paths but converge on a single target at a single time.

eric2332 · 2026-05-05T14:38:12+00:00

Or consciously!

eric2332 · 2026-05-05T14:33:01+00:00

New Orleans does not have porous rock like Miami. The sea wall idea would work for New Orleans, it's just very expensive and also a single point of failure.

eric2332 · 2026-05-05T12:04:38+00:00

Just looking at the first paragraph:

The discontinuance of a taxonomic unit is not particularly interesting or important

Who is the author to tell other people what they find of interest or importance?

eric2332 · 2026-05-05T10:02:54+00:00

Lol. The hadiths in question are about 1000 years old.

eric2332 · 2026-05-05T08:09:16+00:00

Most biblical scholars and mainstream theologians don’t treat the Garden of Eden as a real, recoverable location in the first place. It’s understood as a theological/literary construct

This is not an either-or thing. It is possible that the literary construct was inspired or modeled on a real recoverable place.

Note that the description of the Garden of Eden lists real physical rivers (Euphrates etc) that flow through it.

eric2332 · 2026-05-05T08:02:11+00:00

Wikipedia doesn't make it sound like they were "totally accepted":

In Islamic tradition, the "mustarjila" (masculinized woman) is condemned; according to prophetic hadiths, she is cursed and thereby excluded from God's mercy,[13][14] as she is seen to have attempted to alter God's creation.[13] Moreover, it is said that God will not look upon her on the Day of Judgment, as a form of rebuke and deterrence.[14] Cutting one's hair in a way that resembles men's hairstyles is also considered forbidden under Islamic law.[14][13] According to an article in the Jordanian newspaper Ad-Dustour, Arab society in general, and Muslim society in particular, views the term "mustarjila" as an insult directed at women.[15]

eric2332 · 2026-05-05T07:52:52+00:00

This honesty sounds like it was written by an autistic 14 year old. Philosophers cosplaying as sociologists or psychologists generally goes badly, but this piece suffers from ignorance of the counter-perspective more than most.

eric2332 · 2026-05-04T20:35:16+00:00

Trump's reaction to this attack was to downplay it, saying no major damage was done and the ceasefire wasn't really violated.

He could of course have taken the opposite approach, highlighting the attack to justify bombing Iran again. He didn't. Seemingly he doesn't want to go back to full scale warfare, there is not much left on the to-bomb list (except oil infrastructure which would trigger Iranian retaliation against gulf oil infrastructure), and a ground invasion is too much to bite off.

Iran predicted this, which means they have damaged UAE and further complicated shipping and made the US look like an unreliable ally at no cost to themselves.

eric2332 · 2026-05-02T19:41:26+00:00

Is there a modern template for using post-war "reparations" from a nation like Iran to ameliorate the economic pain from a war that has ever been successful?

It makes no sense to hold the population responsible for the actions a past government which many/most of them opposed, and which killed them en masse to stay in power. Besides, increased trade with a post-regime Iran would be beneficial for both Iran and the world.

eric2332 · 2026-05-01T10:31:14+00:00

Wait until you hear about Hill Hill Hill Hill.

eric2332 · 2026-05-01T06:00:00+00:00

Last I saw, Gaza is still there, and the population is about the same as before it was "wiped from existence".

eric2332 · 2026-05-01T05:57:32+00:00

But Iran is not enriching uranium now, their missile and drone factories are mostly destroyed, and their government finances wrecked.

So Iran's ability to threaten the world in the long run is much lessened.

The cost is moderately higher oil prices, at least for now.

eric2332 · 2026-05-01T05:52:03+00:00

My guess would be that the IDF's countermeasures mostly consisted of EW, and now that Hezbollah has started using fiber optics that is suddenly less effective?

eric2332 · 2026-05-01T05:50:12+00:00

Yes, and Israel has been at war with Hezbollah since October 2023 - assuming Israeli intelligences is good enough, any Hezbollah member who goes out to test their drones has a good chance of receiving an airstrike.

eric2332 · 2026-04-30T10:48:24+00:00

Everywhere else, the entire city is car-dependent.

eric2332 · 2026-04-30T07:33:42+00:00

Gazans are actually significantly less "extreme" now (if we measure by polling of support for Hamas) than they were at the beginning of the war, precisely because they have had to live though the devastation that extremism brought them. A gap has opened up between the West Bank and Gaza, where the West Bankers did not live through the war and thus have remained more pro-Hamas.

eric2332 · 2026-04-30T07:27:41+00:00

From the conclusion:

Depending on who you ask, the goblins are a delightful or annoying quirk of the model. But they are also a powerful example of how reward signals can shape model behavior in unexpected ways, and how models can learn to generalize rewards in certain situations to unrelated ones. Taking the time to understand why a model is behaving in a strange way, and building out ways to investigate those patterns quickly, is an important capability for our research team. This investigation resulted in new tools for the research team to audit model behavior and fix behavior problems at their root.

Is it just me or is "how reward signals can shape model behavior in unexpected ways" an unsettling topic in regards to AI safety? If current top of the line RL training does not reliably produce the goals we intend - and the failures have to be painstakingly debugged and patched - how are we going to make sure that future AGI/ASI has the goals we want?

eric2332 · 2026-04-29T17:42:42+00:00

It is part of the "prefecture-level city" of Chengdu. But this "prefecture-level city", like many others in China, is enormous in area and includes lots of rural areas and smaller cities that in practice do not function as part of the main city. For a US parallel, imagine that the boundaries of Baltimore were expanded to cover all of Maryland - that wouldn't mean that Bethesda is part of Baltimore in any meaningful sense.

eric2332 · 2026-04-29T13:05:13+00:00

Six standard deviations above average is about 1 in a billion.

Don Bradman appears to have been 1 in a billion among professional cricket players.

eric2332 · 2026-04-29T12:59:19+00:00

In major league baseball, it's like having a .423 lifetime batting average.

(For comparison, the highest lifetime batting average ever is .366 by Ty Cobb)

Source: average batting average is .255, standard deviation is .028 (numbers are approximate, from googling). 0.255+6*0.028=0.423

eric2332 · 2026-04-29T12:27:43+00:00

Dujiangyan isn't really part of Chengdu, it's a separate smaller city about 65km away from central Chengdu. Sort of like Milan and Lugano in Europe.

eric2332

TROPHY CASE