Balgair

Somehow this reminds me of the old adage in finance :"The optimal amount of fraud is not 0"

Meaning that you could of course come up with a system in your accounting or banking or stocks or whatever that is totally 100% fraud proof.

But that system would be so onerous that none would use it. They'd go back to a more fraudulent system that is easier. Like, 15 retinal scans, a blood draw, and a bank approved minder just to buy a taco isn't workable, duh.

I'd say the same here too. You can of course use AIs and LLMs to figure out exactly how much work a person is doing and try to optimize them down to the second. Amazon is currently doing this in their warehouses. Any given month comes up with yet another instance of a worker dying on the floor and people having to continue working around the literal corpse.

And Amazon then has to run through communities, one after another, trying to hire people to work in that system. Their SEC filings note, incredibly, that population exhaustion is a real threat to the workforce.

Thus, the optimal amount of surveillance for an evil megacorp is not 100%.

Draconian, sure. But Amazon is already over the balance point and is trying to squeegee back towards the optimum. So far, it seems to be a lot further back than we thought.

No offense here, but I mean, they are in college. They are there to be asked a lot of. That's kinda the point.

Just greping for 'Israel' or 'Palestine' gives 13 incidents, the latest occurring in 2000.

It's a quite large share of the hijackings on the list, much more so that I'd have imagined de novo.

Reading through a few of them, most of the hijackers had a fair bit of mental instability (duh?). So, I could totally see them naming a bluetooth something crazy if they had them those days.

Also, most of the incidents ended up being fairly well handled and there weren't many casualties. But if I were a pilot and I were getting paid regardless of turning the plane around or dealing with a possibly fatal multi-day saga, I'd likely just turn the plane around too.

Under the 1960 California Master Plan, the top 12.5% of California high school graduates have automatic entry into the UC system.

That is no longer quite the case though. Nowadays, under the Eligibility in the Local Context (ELC) system, the top 9% of high school graduates are guaranteed a spot in the UC system, regardless of rejection to school. That said, you will commonly hear about the Master Plan in conversations here without the nuance.

In practice, this is typically UC-Merced or UC-Riverside as the UCs of last resort.

That said, about 32% of all UC entrants are in the ELC system. So, I'd assume that around 32% of incoming UCSD (the UC in question in the article) entrants are ELC.

The University of California Office of the President (UCOP) found that ~80% of ELC entrants came from below average schools.

So, assuming nothing special here, 0.8*0.32 = ~0.25, or ~25% of incoming UCSD students came from an 'bad' high school.

> Statewide, 37.3% of students meet math learning standards in the grades that are tested.

Look, there are a lot of complicated stats and math that I just do not have the coffee for here. But a 'failing' 25% of incoming entrants is in the right ball park.

The University of Texas system has a similar matriculation standard too.

TLDR: Failing high schools are the root cause here. UC professors should get out of the ivory tower more. None of this is surprising.

The way I knew that I was not going to work there is they had a net $72,000 401k matching - the maximum allowed.[0]

Suffice to say, if that is what they have to do to keep folks on, it's gotta be some really crazy stuff going on in there.

[0] I remember it being 25% at the time, but the IRS says that it's a set dollar amount these days, so I will go with that.

For the curious, above is how Crassus died.

TLDR: Got over his skis and mad with power and money. Decides to invade Parthia. Gets wrecked by horse archers. That ends up being typical for Romans, but this was the first-ish time that happened. Some of those captured legionaries may have ended up in China, though it is unlikely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liqian#Lost_Romans_myth

This is a bit dated, but I think the message out of UW is right.

To your point on bosses: Turns out, you can very much bullshit a bullshitter.

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” ― Fred Rogers

Not in a 'oh the rich don't so they control the media and so we don't' sorta way. But like in a 'lets educate people on the pluses and minuses, debate a while, and then come to an informed conclusion' sorta way.

Like, deep down, does the average person actually want a stable economy? Because it seems to me that there is an even split historically between the folks that want stability and a little patch of land and weekly rhythms, and the folks that just want to drunkenly burn couches in the street every full moon, or some such thing.

Not to be glib here at all. I like, would actually like to know the answer. Sorry if this comes off the cuff seeming.

Carcinisation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation)

The same seems to be true for trees too (arborescence).

There is also the practice of not using anesthesia on infants when undergoing medical surgery.

Anesthesia is hard to do even on adults, harder on children, and very difficult on infants. Not accidentally killing one is quite hard.

So, for a long time we just didn't. I think some countries still don't, but can't remember.

The idea really gets back all the way to philosophy. If you can't remember if you were in pain, did you get hurt? And then you add in the medical problem itself, the duty to do no harm, the difficulties, etc. The conclusion was to just not use pain meds.

Thanks for this. We really need this kind of crazy and levity and whimsy more on the internet.

Speaking of sponsoring, what is the best way to get into contact with them? I'm not really in the market, but I know of some church bake-sales that might be (no joke).

Keep going!

Obligative sapience is only know to have evolved in humans. Obligative means we cannot survive without sapience. We must learn and use tools and whatever to live and continue evolution.

While facultative sapience seems to be a broadly used survival strategy across the animal kingdom - from crows to spiders to cuttlefish. Facultative sapients are able to survive without their learned behaviors, using them instead to augment their evolution.

Viewing these issues from the point of evolution and actually having a comparison, I feel, helps ground the discussion better.

Even more so from the very strange point of view of speculative biology. The creator of the 'Neotectons' gives a very strange viewpoint on the debate too, with good reasoning though not bulletproof by any means. As with any model, you can make it tapdance if you mess with the parameters enough. But I think that more efforts into speculative arenas would be helpful. Gedankenexperiments for sophonts and not just elevators and cosmology.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@Biblaridion

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dGZju583QA

I've worked with mammals from gerbils to dogs fro research. And, yeah, it is really hard to get a mammal to not to want to reproduce (you can go snip-snip, of course). Humans are not like other mammals, of course, we have 'reason' and the like, but still.

I think that little quote is really doing a lot of load bearing in the fertility crisis debates.

Humans, as I am sure we are all aware, really really like reproducing. The other things that come with it are, of course, the issue that stop us from completing the 'job'. But, even things like access to contraception do nothing to the falling birthrate. It's not the prophylactics, it's the participants.

We talk here about the cost of a kid, and rebuttals about Norway abound. The cultural conditions, and then someone mentions Mongolia or Israel. The support afterwards, and then you talk about Sweden. This structure, that structure, this exception, that exception. How we need a recipe not a single policy to fix the birthrate. And still nothing works.

Suffice to say: We are being really badly abused.

Want to fix the birthrate? It's a whole-ass thing where you have to change the whole-ass culture so much that people actually want to just have kids. I know that seems tautological, but like, it's just true. We just have gotta stop hurting each other.

Tahrir Square, 2011 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahrir_Square)

The singularity framing is really tough here, right? It comes from black hole physics. Essentially, at the event horizon, the way we know how to do physics stops working, and we rightly conclude that we can't currently say anything about the other side of the event horizon. It is not saying that nothing is occurring there. Matter, time, space, energy, whatever, that still is there (maaaaybe?) and is still undergoing something. It's just that we don't know what that is.

The same is true with using these tech singularity arguments. Like, in the age of superintelligence (if that happens), there will still be thing happening, the dawn will still come every day and the dusk will still too. It's just that we say our current ideas about that new day aren't that applicable to that new age (God, this sounds like a hippie).

However, unlike with black hole physics where we aren't even sure time can exist like we know, we are likely all going to be there in that new superintelligence age. We're still going to be making coffee and remembering bad cartoons from our youth. Like, the analogy to black hole physics breaks down here and maybe does a disservice to us. It's not a stark boundary at the Schwartzchild radius, it is a continuous thing, a messy thing, a volatile thing, and very importantly for the HN userbase, a thing that we control and have the choice to participate in.

We are not passively falling into the AGI world like the gnawing grinding gravity of a black hole.

This is a timeless entry. It's aimed at humanities, but every STEMy person I have shown it to agrees with it.

TLDR: Only get a PhD under 2 conditions:

1 - You are rich and otherwise very bored.

2 - If by Christmas in your first year in grad school, you are absolutely certain that you and your PI get along so well that nothing could hold you back from carrying that coffin at their funeral.

If either condition is not met stringently, you're wasting yours and everyone else's time.

Then I sat in LA traffic all day long in early September in 100+ heat, and I looked over and saw some old bitty in a very nice Bentley. Not a drop of sweat on her, couldn't hear a horn honking if she tried, music was probably perfect quality, seat was probably massaging her the whole ride home.

That's when I finally got it. It's not the engine that mattered to her.

But, I think it gets to a deeper issue with education.

Like, the cynic in me will say that the student learned a new tactic, one that got rewarded, and they are likely to repeat it over and over.

But the teacher, the hopeful part of me, the one that wants growth and striving, that part of me says that the student learned a lesson and is unlikely to repeat that hack. That they got dragged about, told a lot of very tough stories, saw the consequences, and then saw the light, and they will never do it again. And that experience taught them more than the class ever could about life - a much more valuable lesson in the end.

I hope that is what occurred. I think that's probably what the many admins told themself what would happen. I have worked with Princeton grads though, and it is much more likely that nothing of the sort occurred.

Most 'elite' grads think they pulled it over on the school, like they always have, that they were cleverer, somehow. That they 'won', when they really lost and learned worse than nothing, they learned the wrong thing. And then they get out into the real world and they get a successful bigjob and a nice little manageable coke habit and a not as manageable addiction or two. Then a spouse when that time comes and that other line says something no-one really wants, but not with a person they respect or that respects them. And by the time the second kid is done teething, the divorce is done and they think they are 'free' again. So they dive off a cliff in some azure water as the grandkids aren't well taken care of by expensive as hell help.

The ayahuasca vomit dries on the corner of their mouth as they check their actually-personal account for the half dozen 39th birthday wishes, they wonder where it all went wrong. They decide that it was others, not themselves, surely, that can't be true, because Dad was an asshole and Mom really wasn't ever 'there'-there when you think about it.

Because they are still trying to pull one over, to be cleverer, to be the 'good' one at whatever life is in their mind: A long fucking ladder covered in degrees and accolades and tears and jackasses. They live in the derivative.

So, look, don't be butthurt about a jackass undergrad that is too blind and treadmilled to ruin their own life.

But do be butthurt that the system is too fucking tired and old to really deeply care anymore about the young and not just hurting their 'future' - as if that could ever be measured by only a GPA.

https://www.amazon.com/Waging-Good-War-Military-1954-1968/dp...

Ricks kinda beats a dead horse as he goes over and over again that non-violence is not unaggressive. It is typically quite militant when done well.

Non violence is a tactic, one that is typically better at achieving results than violence, as it tends to change the other side that is violent to adjust down to non violence as well. Like getting a drunk to be quieter by whispering to them (Note: that is a poor analogy).

Rick's book is just so very good and my poor internet comment can't possibly do it justice. He convinced me that the Civil Rights movement is so big because it gave the US a brand new tool in conflicts. It's not just violence or submission anymore.

She generally separates out the internal state of the protagonist from their external state.

She has 3 arc types: positive, flat, and negative.

Positive arcs are the typical Hero's journey (along with the other 5 archetypes of the title). The protagonist comes back changed in a good way and the story world is better in gestalt. Her concepts of the Truth, the Lie, the Ghost, the Need, and the Want are all intertwined here and are developed in other books and on her website. Positive change arc are 'comedies' in the classical Greek sense.

Flat arcs have the protagonist already in possession of the Truth and mostly have them affecting the story world with that Truth. Sounds boring, but they tend to be the most memorable characters for audiences.

Negative arcs come in 3 varieties that I won't bore you with. Generally, the protagonist rejects the Truth and embraces the Lie. These are 'tragedies' in the classical Greek sense.

Her overall structure is on a 11 beat framework that fits nicely with 3, 4, or 5 act structure (she has a lot to say about that).

I would highly recommend her work for deep dives into narrative and story structure.

John Yorke's Into the Woods is also a great read:

https://www.amazon.com/Into-Woods-Five-Act-Journey-Story/dp/...

He dives more into the 'why' when it comes to the reason we tell stories at all.

Both he and Weiland (among others) have convinced me that 'story' is one of the more powerful things in our world.

First, it's hard to read, it needs a white background with black text and larger font.

Second, I know this is aimed at English speaking south Asian/Indian readers, so it's like stepping into a strange new world for me. I do a lot of story structure work and it's really fun to learn about this totally new universe of story structure. I wonder what the cross over will be like when you do 'western' film and media.

Third, have you tried translating these monosyllable words (ga, ma, pa, etc) into English? I know that it may not be really possible, as I think you're borrowing from Indian musical traditions that evolved totally separately. But it would be nice to a westerner (eventually!) to have something to work from to try to understand it all.

Fourth, it's really dense reading here too. You might want to have a way to tie this to something that the user has already seen as an intro. Just loading us up with data and reading is hard. Maybe try to dissect a film or show or book first? Like maybe have a little button there that we can use to click into something and see what is going on in like a really popular Bollywood film (I have no idea about south Asian media, sorry!)? Then walk the user through how you're dissecting that film. Maybe have some diagrams too.

Fifth, why do this? I'm interested in why you all wanted to do this project at all. Is there an 'About' page or something?

Great work!

https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Archetypal-Character-Arcs-Jou...

She has it all online for free here too, with a good comments section:

https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/how-to-write-arc...

The work ends up being a bit pop-psych in a strange but interesting way. A lot to learn there and take home, not ust for story writers.

I'm totally at a loss as to any of the content itself, or the method, or the results. And I've never really heard of any of the films either. But I'm just looking at it and I can 'smell' that there is something here. Man, I really hope this is not a hallucination or some AI slop.

Think things like TrackMeNot but just in a little notepad or excel or IDE file that you fill up with believable noise all day long.

For reference: https://www.trackmenot.io/

I take his quote to mean that motherhood is more difficult than fatherhood, especially back in the time he was active. The quote should, I feel, not be observed as a factual statement, but rather in the vein of his politically based humor. Largely, it was a simpler time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._J._O%27Rourke