Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but motherhood is a fact.
P. J. O'Rourke
16,009 karma · joined April 25, 2013
P. J. O'Rourke
I mean, the book is just over a year old here people. It's not like this is new or out of date stuff.
In case you were being serious ;)
To add to that, the 'gang' also seems to be a human male universal. In that, a gang is the unit of status male humans interact with. The laws and 'honor' of the gang is what matters. These 'gangs/honor bands' can be quite different too, with typical results when they come into conflict with other groups like this (usually violence).
I'm not saying that we need to continue with 3000 years of this. Look at modern medicine, for example. But I am saying that if we are going to tear down this patriarchy system of 'gangs/honor bands' then we have to replace it with something viable for those participants. Right now, it seems to me that most males are desperate for a return to a more tightly held and conforming system than one that we have been making.
On the figure skating angle: My SO is a figure skater too! It's a very interesting place to observe masculinity and status. I'd venture to say it's one of the few places left in western culture that celebrates beauty and grace in the heterosexual male form. Ever since industrialization and Napoleon, the male fashion has outright rejected beauty. Mostly, I think, this is because male fashion follows that of military fashion, and as war industrialized and systematized in set uniforms and the invention of clothes sizes, male fashion then became, well, drab. You might find a bit of color and pattern in homosexual male fashion, but the heteros are just bland by and large. Grace is just wholly left on the road as well.
Figure skating seems to be the one place where grace and beauty are still alive for hetero 'men'. The Raspberry's recent Olympics outfits were decidedly a return to beauty from Chen's mall-ninja shirts and black pants. In fact, I would propose that the media's reaction to Ilia's nerves further cements my point that he must 'prove himself' to regain his 'honor'. Most of the reaction being that he 'has time' still, and not to worry. As if he is now on a quest that he must fulfill like some 5 act plot or movie.
To be clear, I referencing the PhDs that are more concerned with getting you addicted to things, the STEMy ones I guess, not the ones talking about gender and the like, the humanities ones in that dichotomy. But still, great point here.
> The killing blows were from segments of men who doubled down on the most negative aspects of masculinity, and made the rest of the men flee from that image of masculinity to avoid any association. I would rather drop masculinity from my self-perception than be associated with Andrew Tate or Logan Paul or whoever else.
Not knowing those guys personally and looking from the outside in, I'd say that those two are really just broken people with traumatic childhoods and father figures. I won't get too in the weeds there, but their success comes from pain. And to be very clear, they are shitheads that actively choose to make the world worse - they deserve no excuses, the condemn themselves - but they do deserve explanation.
To me, their fame and fortune is a 'right place, right time' phenomenon. Without the systems of addiction and anger that social media creates, we would never had heard of them. The place to set blame is not on the 'influencer' but on the system that created him. Tate is responsible for himself and is damned by his own hand, but Zuck is man (and his ilk) who intentionally created the conditions for Tate to grow.
> I don’t think I know any men that have “modern masculinity” (whatever that would mean) as part of their core identity. They’re either clinging onto a Chuck Norris kind of masculinity, or just don’t have a strong gender component of their self-identity. They’re not feminine, they just don’t do anything to be “manly”. Being “manly” matters to them about as much as whether they’re a Coke or Pepsi person.
Yeah, I don't know what 'modern masculinity' would mean either. It is quite fractured these days. Perhaps that is intentional or a side effect of the 'algorithm'. I'm very much still a novice at 'men's studies', but what I have learned is that being 'a man' is something that males must pursue actively. Unlike with women and menarche, males must continuously prove their manhood (there are very few cultures that do not do this). Man is an active verb, so the saying goes.
Geeze, are we putting a lot of potholes into the road of life for men.
Alcohol, legal weed, illegal drug wars that went no where, prescription drugs that were vastly over-prescribed, schools that were underfunded for decades, the near death of the male teacher, nearly no 'good' male role models, the death of the African-American father, the now near death of any American father, hyper-pornography in your pocket, tinder and the end of dating, and now hyper-gambling, video games infinitely more rewarding than real achievement, the total collapse of male third places, the end of labor jobs that gave men identity and structure without a degree, the school to prison pipeline and the poliece that have to turn routine discipline into criminality, gutting of vocational education, social media optimized for women's social dynamics that leaves most men villainized, the crisis in friendship, the death of male initiation or rites of passage, antidepressant over-prescription, the collapse of religious and fraternal institutions, etc.
The throughline is that nearly every structure that gave boys meaning, community, accountability, and identity has either collapsed or is being actively dismantled by buildings full of PhDs.
I hear the the young women say 'Men Suck' and are just doing away with them.
They should, it makes total sense.
And we're at fault.
The UKs threat from adversarys is nuclear, nearly nothing else.
Now the threats to the UKs interests abroad are larger and may necessitate a large military, of course.
I mentioned that I really felt how a space marine feels some days: https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Daily_rituals_of_a_Space_Ma...
Mostly in the short sleep period, but also in the 'free time' too. I tend to get about 30 minutes at the end of the day, after all have (finally) gone to sleep, but still.
However I have a rather large confound: Kids.
I'm sure that if I was drinking regularly still that I would feel much worse than I do today. But the effects of children are powerful enough to my system that they overrule any positive effects of this forced sobriety.
(To be clear: I'll have a drink every blue moon or so, but it's quite rare I get enough time off to enjoy anything like a buzz these days)
I have UV filters on my glasses and things really changed when I took them on of off. I was much greener with the UV filtering glasses on. I guess my eyes are not picking up on things somehow.
Always thought that his best podcasts are with Sarah Paine, and the data agrees. Yet she only gets one passing reference in a 20 min article?! I know that it goes against the angle the piece is going for, but shame all the same.
That said, after the AI buzz dies down, he's got an easy transition into international relations.
Also, to be clear, I think Dwarkesh is one of the best interviewers out there. Him, Russ Roberts, and Brett McKay are the only podcast interviews that I know of that actually read the books and do the homework before the interview. So many other outfits out there just go into the interview like Larry King, with no homework done and no prep.
Donny also goes back on his word constantly. Look at all the trade agreements that he signed before 'liberation day'. Look at really everything afterwards too.
Even if Iran wanted to sign something, they can't. It will mean nothing. They know that.
We've tried to internally pitch many ideas to the larger organization before but mostly got nothing back.
Finally, one of the various board members talked to my boss and told them that, essentially, it has to be top line growth, not bottom line savings.
We looked this up and it came down to some MBA mumbo-jumbo about how X% of growth is better than that same X% of savings once you run the math (?). Look, I know, that's not how percentages work and I know that savings actually do matter. But in 'I have an MBA-land' the mantra is topline > bottomline.
So, then we started to pitch ideas around growth (new lines, more customer sales, more customers, etc). Which went ... nowhere ... again.
Time goes by again, and another helpful person reaches out and tells us that our ideas are 'not worth considering' as they 'don't meaningfully impact revenue targets'. Again, essentially, just to justify the salary-time that these internal boards spend, the idea has to be net positive. Then it we learned that, no, it has to impact the revenue to 1%. For our BigCo that in the ~$10M ballpark. We do have the customer base to support that, but it is in the revenue ballpark of Atari or the Hypixel servers.
Look, either way, the run-around that I get told is that for AI projects that we pitch internally: 1) Top line growth only 2) ~1% increase in revenue (~$10M).
Now, why anyone would not just go take that ~$10M idea and not just make a company themselves is beyond me, but I don't get paid the big bucks, so who knows.
Still, that is what these BigCos are looking for: Growth in the ~$1-10M range.
A classic triangle trade ala the sugar, rum, and slave markets in the North Atlantic in the 17-1800s.
1) With vibe coding being so effective, Meta employees have easy ways to poison the data set in <30 min of work.
2) What could they possibly want or create that would justify the bad press and employee disengagement from work devices? Better spam bot detection? They have to have some of the best already.
3) No really, Meta employees have the opportunity to really mess with the data in quite humorous ways without any pushback (see 0)
"War isn't Hell. War is war and Hell is hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse"
"How do you figure that Hawkeye?"
"Easy Father, tell me, who goes to Hell?"
"Hmm, sinners, I believe"
"Exactly, there are no innocent bystanders in Hell. But war is shot full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for a few of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander"
LA has kinda a dual legal system that it inherited from the French and Spanish codified law system out of Napoleon (yes that one), and ultimately from Roman law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Louisiana
Just the first paragraph there is a confusing mess and the rest of the article doesn't get any better (to me at least).
Suffice to say, having to pass the bar is tough enough, but having to do it while 'speaking two languages' in terms of law systems is so much more harder.
Now, this also seems like a calculable problem. Other posters mention seasonal lag and other effects.
Guys, we have computers, we can compute this, it should be straightforward?
Grab a few data sets like rainfall, temp, solar, etc, get a map from like Google Earth or whatever, combine them and have it spit out the seasons, right?
Now, I'm not a tropical person (as in I don't live in between the tropic lines on the map), so I've no idea what the seasons are like there (summer, just always summer?), or what it is like in the Sahara or in Sweden, so I don't know if you'd then need to just come up with entirely new seasons. That would be a very local thing to name, I'd imagine. But I think that you'd be able to mostly just compute all this, right?
Like, in Latin, the verb is at the end. In that, it's structured like how Yoda speaks.
So, especially with Cato, you kinda get lost pretty easy along the way with a sentence. The 'not's will very much get forgotten as you're waiting for the verb.
I've found that 'not'[0] isn't something that LLMs can really understand.
Like, with us humans, we know that if you use a 'not', then all that comes after the negation is modified in that way. This is a really strong signal to humans as we can use logic to construct meaning.
But with all the matrix math that LLMs use, the 'not' gets kinda lost in all the other information.
I think this is because with a modern LLM you're dealing with billions of dimensions, and the 'not' dimension [1] is just one of many. So when you try to do the math on these huge vectors in this space, things like the 'not' get just kinda washed out.
This to me is why using a 'not' in a small little prompt and token sequence is just fine. But as you add in more words/tokens, then the LLM gets confused again. And none of that happens at a clear point, frustrating the user. It seems to act in really strange ways.
[0] Really any kind of negation
[1] yeah, negation is probably not just one single dimension, but likely a composite vector in this bazillion dimensional space, I know.
We should not make fun of both of these lying cheating idiots in charge of either faction.
Look, it's really easy to dunk on them, like super easy. This is a very dumb war and will continue to be so, we all can see that.
But both sides are in a escalate-to-deescalate trap. Neither wants to back down in order to save face. So they can only make things worse.
And things can get a lot worse.
Lots of people legitimately thought that Tehran was going to be a glowing hole by the time you are reading this. That would have been ~17 million lives wiped out. A ground war is a generation in each country that is just decimated like Ukraine is seeing. Already there has been far too much death and destruction, too many children that are now without parents, too many parents now without children.
If avoiding that means not dunking on these barbarous morons for a little while, so be it, a small price.
I know that some random internet comments are about as important as the fly on a horse's ass is to a hurricane, but it has to start somewhere.
I'm not saying we should not hold them to account. No, this mess is maybe something that will snap everyone out of it, it's already so dumb and bad. They deserve, like we all do, the best justice we can give them. And it will not be kind to either side, we all know that.
But, let them have this win. Do the best we can to encourage others to let both sides walk away from this horrible trap. If the do so scot free, hey, that's a win in all of our books.
Let Donny strut about, walk away. Stop it with the TACO nonsense. Let him feel like a big man, a winner, whatever his little pudding brain needs.
Just let the war end before it gets even more out of hand.
Before even more babies have only pictures and stories to know their father by.
The scene in the book is just so familiar to the lines in Ukraine these days, nearly a hundred years later. Instead of spotter planes near the dawn of aviation, we have satellites and drones (similarly quite new in the role). Instead of just shells and fuzing experts, we have FPV drones and much more sophisticated shells. Instead of buddies from the same towns all huddled together in cold muddy holes, we have deracinated units spread far and wide in laying in fear of thermal imaging. This results in a no mans land again, but a dozen kilometers wide instead of a few hundred meters wide, and somehow more psychologically damaging.
My point is that absent any tech that will miraculously be invented and deployed widely in the new few weeks, the Iran war, if it should be a ground one, is going to be just like Ukraine is today, which is somehow a worse version of trench warfare.
Even casual Victoria II players know that WW1 is essentially the final boss of the game. And the 'lesson' of Vicky II is essentialy: Do not fight WW1, it ruins Everything.
To be clear: The US is choosing to fight a worse version of WW1 without even a stated (or likely even known) condition of victory. We're about to send many thousands boys to suffer and die for not 'literally nothing', but actually literally nothing.
No.
Dodobrains on r/wallstreetbets?
The basement has never been so salty.
Honestly, it's all clickbait in the end. 'Real' investors are still quietly just plugging their weekly contribution into their 401k week after week without even remembering it.