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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • The town I grew up in is in the middle of a cancer cluster. The largest factory (where most people work) got caught illegally dumping chemicals in the ground. They were just made to pay a relatively small fine. The corporation was threatening to move the plant somewhere else if it became too expensive to operate there, and all lawsuits were dismissed.

    That factory, and most other factories in the area primarily just hire “temp” workers that they keep as temps for years, never actually hire them full time, and pay them near minimum wage with no benefits. Many young people who do end up staying in that area become drug addicts and die in their 20s or 30s.

    There’s a lot of corruption in the local government and police as well. The police harass anybody they don’t like, and they know pretty much who everybody is and what they drive. A few people in government got caught embezzling money. A sheriff tried to frame somebody for murder. Also, I think the people in the courts have some kind of deal with the juvenile detention center, because they give kids very long sentences for minor things (6 months for being 10 minutes late to school while on probation in my case).

    Small towns, in my experience, are shitholes with corrupt and authoritarian local governments, and are exploited by corporations in ways similar to third-world countries.





  • The Earth has carrying capacity limits. I think we’re probably over that, temporarily, mostly because of fossil fuels. We turn fossil fuels into energy and food, degrading that environment and decreasing the Earth’s carrying capacity at the same time. It’s like we’re playing a game of Jinga to push population higher at the expense of our foundation.

    What happens when rich nations become poorer? The world’s current predominant economic system cannot function without growth. What will the elites do to maintain the status quo? Perhaps push for banning abortion, contraceptives, and taking away women’s rights and autonomy?



  • I’ve tried a couple rolling distros (including Arch), and they always “broke” after ~6 months to a year. Both times because an update would mess up something with my proprietary GPU drivers, IIRC. Both times, I would just install a different distro, because it would’ve probably took me longer to figure out what the issue was and fix it. I’m currently just using Debian stable, lol.





  • Trump is currently favored in polls and in betting markets. Few people care about the convictions. People who would vote for him definitely don’t care about impeachments. The far-right has a very effective and expansive propaganda machine (old media, alternative media, and social media) that can counter any negative (“fake”) news. Biden is a very weak candidate because of his physical and mental health, and the Democrats are ineffective at “controlling the narrative” compared to the Republicans. I think it’ll probably be a close election, and if I was forced to bet, I’d bet on Trump winning.


  • A lot of the “elites” (OpenAI board, Thiel, Andreessen, etc) are on the effective-accelerationism grift now. The idea is to disregard all negative effects of pursuing technological “progress,” because techno-capitalism will solve all problems. They support burning fossil fuels as fast as possible because that will enable “progress,” which will solve climate change (through geoengineering, presumably). I’ve seen some accelerationists write that it would be ok if AI destroys humanity, because it would be the next evolution of “intelligence.” I dunno if they’ve fallen for their own grift or not, but it’s obviously a very convenient belief for them.

    Effective-accelerationism was first coined by Nick Land, who appears to be some kind of fascist.





  • We’re close to peak using current NN architectures and methods. All this started with the discovery of transformer architecture in 2017. Advances in architecture and methods have been fairly small and incremental since then. The advancements in performance has mostly just been throwing more data and compute at the models, and diminishing returns have been observed. GPT-3 costed something like $15 million to train. GPT-4 is a little better and costed something like $100 million to train. If the next model costs $1 billion to train, it will likely be a little better.