Balgair

Oh man the Colorado GOP is a complete mess these days.

One of the frontrunners for the governorship is just spouting straight antisemitic garbage: https://www.9news.com/article/news/politics/gop-gubernatoria...

Edit: He withdrew this morning and is running for the GOP chair now.

Bobert is quiet these days but I'm sure she'll ramp up after her primary closes.

The various school boards are perennial sources of my idiocy. My (former) board would go into public meetings and just openly and freely admit to crimes.

The county commissioners in DougCo recently decided to fine the victims of shoplifting from r not reporting it. No, you didn't read that wrong.

So, in summary, the GOP and many, but not all, of their state level membership aren't really sending their best these days.

A late uncle of mine did his thesis at Arizona on the practical limitations of interstellar travel.

The TLDR of it is that teenagers suck.

They assumed the physics of those days (mostly unchanged) and no faster than light travel [0] and that you can't reasonably cryo-sleep a human or grow them on site[1].

From that, you follow the logic and if you want to run a ship out to some star, it's going to take a long ass time. So much so that you have to have kids, a 'generation' ship. And that's where the trouble starts. Because teenagers are going to teenager, they just will not trust you when you say that the outside of their very little world is deadly. And then when you get there, it's going to take a lot of convincing to reprogram them to jump out and start colonizing.

The only solution is to build a really big spaceship. He reasoned that it's usable surface area needed to be about that of Japan [2]. So you get to a Stanford Torus or the like. That's when you can finally 'trust' that the people living on this thing wont blow up halfway there and can remain 'stable' enough over the (possibly) millennia of travel.

The issue, of course, is that you'd just build all these things for use in the Sol system anyway - why bother traveling?

Something something new lands something exploration something.

Okay, so, like, the end result is that putting human on a new planet in another system is just not happening when you really take a look. That was the essential conclusion to the thesis.

It's too hard, teenagers suck too much, and the 'cheaper' alternatives are too good.

[0] He made a great point that you should not assume that our modern understanding of physics should remain the same when doing really long term calculations like this. We have advanced so much in our knowledge and likely the understandings of other fields will compound much faster in the future.

[1] Same for biology, but they had to start somewhere.

[2] this assumption is a bit much for me even today, but the steps he takes are sound. You can argue them down a lot though, I feel.

Or Antarctica too.

Like, pretty much any of those place has

0) Air at not a near vacuum

1) Liquid water

2) not a lot of radiation

3) appropriate gravity

Why would you want to even live on Mars? You have to essentially live in a very small pressure bunker at some rad-safe depth. Doing so for a little while would be fun and exciting, sure. Homesteading that life? Every one of your kids would opt to leave (if possible) the second they got a chance.

I remember the Ashley Madison hack a ways back.

It was a cheaters website and you could pay to send messages to other cheaters, I think that was the business model at least.

Anyways, since the userbase was like 99.99% male, there just were not the numbers to talk with others. So, they just side stepped it and has very crummy chatbots that you would pay like $1 per message to talk with. (this was well before AI LLMs, think AOL bots from the naughts). Thing was, just like with the 'Nigerian Prince' scams, the worse the bot, the better the john.

It all got exposed a while back, but for me, that was the real Turing test - take people and see if they pay real actual money to talk with bots. Turns out, yes, if couched correctly (...like selling ice to Eskimos, just call it French ice).

So, I'm not sure that LLMs are going to unveil a wave of scams. Likely it will be a bit higher, of course, but the low hanging fruit is lucrative and there is enough of it to go around, and that's been true since really forever.

It's like outrunning a bear, you don't actually have to run faster than the bear, you just have to run faster than the poor sop next to you. Same goes for the bear, there is plenty of prey if you just do the little amount of exercise.

Wait, are you not calling more than one shop every time?

A good 'Service Writer' (the term you use for this job) isn't cheap and typically aren't outsourced. Usually because your (local) competition is going to be using them too. And also because customers aren't going to trust a person that is writing service for multiple shops.

That said, a good service writer is worth their weight in gold. Also, they are typically going to be the person you end up selling the business to when you retire. Most mechanics aren't good enough at the business side of things to actually buy, but service writers are.

Oh then it's even worse! As again, only the more well behaved kids are going out in public.

Having kids is like eating a mango.

You can talk to the foremost mango growers on cultivating mango trees and learn everything there is to know about making mangoes. You can consult with the best chefs about how to make the best mango dishes and desserts and learn the absolute best way to prepare and eat mangoes. You can learn from the masters of how to paint a mango so lifelike that you'd think the painting was real. Etc. You can learn and truly master everything surrounding the act of eating a mango.

But until you sink your teeth into a mango and actually eat it, you've no idea what you're talking about.

So, until you actually have the kid, all this worrying is for naught.

You will be just fine, the kid will be just fine (they have their own agency too, you know), the world will keep turning and you have the agency to put a person in it and teach them what they need to know.

The real question is if you want to eat a mango or not.

Before kids, you take a look around a diner or a store or a playground and you see little ones happily eating some chips or browsing the foodstuffs or playing on a slide.

You think that this is what kids are like. They sit there, they walk a little, they giggle on the playground, they look cute as all get out, etc.

Then you have kids and you know.

You know.

Those kids sitting there in the booth sipping on their milk quietly while mom and dad happily eat their lunch? Those are the top 5% most calm kids out there. The other 95% of kids are with their adults screaming and throwing fits and covered in who knows what.

Life lied to you. It did it directly to your face, unashamed. The bias is real.

Yeah I see that there can be a false positive/negative issue too.

For instance, allergy tests have a false positive rate of ~10% and a false negative rate of ~48%. So you really need a MD (or AI) to help tease things out there.

But I'll push back here a bit. Taking random tests will of course put you at the mercy of statistics. I think this is where AI will actually really help. The tests it'll have you take are not random any more than a MD's tests are (okay maybe a tad more?). Instead the AI's testing strategy will be more broad than an MD's will. Combine the experience and physical presence of the MD and the deep 'knowledge' of the AI and I think that centaur is a lot more potent.

Its a a general term that a lot of people adhere to.

It's just that those people tend to be about 2 standard deviations out on whatever normal distribution you're dealing with.

Here in the US, you get a lot of these incel-y types with women control and breeding kinks.

But in China, it's more the very hardcore commies worried about the future of the party in 30 years and maybe have one chubby grandchild.

In Korea and Japan, you get a lot of Moonie types and that sort of folk.

In the Middle East (huge, I know), these are the hardcore Muslim folks but with a family bent (think strange uncles without children themselves).

South Americans here will be the turbo Catholic variety typically with a lot of kids already

Generally, the person that is in the pro-natalist camp is generally a person that is conservative in their social ideas. They want yesterday to be like to day, and today to be like tomorrow.

But, their individual ideologies and day-to-day-life are about as opposed to each other as can be and they may outright hate each other.

Marx would have a field day with these people.

He just kinda hustled I think. I don't know him all that well. But from what I do know, he started announcing for his buddies who referred him to other people and so on. Eventually he had a website going and would schedule when he was available for announcing (dude has a family and day job so not all the time). Made a niche in online basketball games and was open to really anything.

If your buddy is somewhat famous, then get on the socials and network with the players in the files already, they all seem really open as it's still a big and unaddressed market. Payouts are gonna be small at first, think beer leagues and largeish friends groups. And from what I can tell the competition for big gigs is tougher as you go up in the field.

Honestly give it a try, seems like a great side hustle.

Edit: be a great idea for AI in the low end, but it's the human touch that really makes it. The guy I know is pretty funny and I assume his wisecracks help him

Friend of a friend does announcing online.

Like, you pay him a little (<= $20 ?) and he'll announce your game of NBA-2K26 on twitch. He does have a good radio voice. A good way to make a little in the off hours.

So, he got a gig to announce the opening of loot boxes at some show. I think it was Fortnite loot boxes. I guess it gives you the total value of the loot box spree you opened. So, 2 people buy a bunch of loot boxes, then open them up, then whoever has the higher value wins and takes both of the people's total haul.

Sounds like a strange thing to have to announce, but sure the guy says you pay and I'll say.

No, it was gambling for the watchers on polymarket [0]. People were betting on who would have the higher value. 'Like a lot of people' he said.

That's High Card. "A lot of" people were betting on games of High Card, essentially.

You know, shuffle a deck, draw 2 cards, whoever has the higher value one wins. Repeat.

It is the most Degenerate form of gambling out there. There is no skill, no human factor, no nothing. Just pure random numbers.

My lord, what a plague we have unleashed. We'll be dealing with this for decades.

[0] no idea if polymarket and the like do things this quickly, but he said they were gambling somehow with another site off of Twitch and then waved his phone, implying you can access it that easily.

Fail Fast I guess!

There is the other side of this too: Real people - fake posts.

So, you have other folks on here already saying that the code their bots write is better than their own, right?

How long until someone who is karma focused just uses a bot to write their comments and post their threads? I mean, it's probably already happening, right? Just like a bot doing your homework for you, but with somehow even less stakes. I imagine that non native speakers will take their posts and go to an AI to help clean them up, at the very least. At the worst, I can imagine a person having a bot interact fully under their name.

So even if we have some draconian system of verification, we will still have some non-zero percentage of bot spam. My out-of-my-butt guess is somewhere near 40%.

Very rich, very liberal, very loud, has a lot of free time too. Elon raised his first set of kids there for a reason.

Folks there tend to have a lot of hooks in a lot of places.

Have you worked with the Claude agents a lot? They essentially prompt themselves! It's crazy.

My meaning is not so much that intelligence will go away as a useful trait to individuals. But more that it's utility to the economy will be a commodity, with grades and costs and functions. But again , I'm speculating out of my ass here.

In that, if you want cheap enough intelligence or expensive and good intelligence, you can just trade and sell and buy whatever you want. Really good stuff will be really expensive of course.

Like, you still need to learn to write and have that discipline to use writing in lieu of memory. And you still need to repair and build machines in lieu of muscles and have those skills. Similarly I think that you'll still need the skills to use AI and commoditized intelligence, whatever those are. Empathy maybe?

Neither does a pneumatic piston operate at all like a bicep nor does an accounting book operate at all like a hippocampus. But both have taken well enough of the load off both those tissues that you be crazy to use the biological specimen for 99% of the commercial applications.

→All these guys are just commodity to us.

Just want to note something there:

Okay, premise that AI really is 'intelligent' up to the point of business decisions.

So, this all then implies that 'intelligence' is then a commodity too?

Like, I'm trying to drive at that your's, mine, all of our 'intelligence' is now no longer a trait that I hold, but a thing to be used, at least as far as the economy is concerned.

We did this with muscles and memory previously. We invented writing and so those with really good memories became just like everyone else. Then we did it with muscles and the industrial revolution, and so really strong or endurant people became just like everyone else. Yes, many exceptions here, but they mostly prove the rule, I think.

Now it seems that really smart people we've made AI and so they're going to be like everyone else?

For the other readers in this thread, this poster really knows their stuff.

Like the top of your skull, the boney bits on your spine can be less than a mm from the air. Especially if you're a woman or are elderly or are quite sick and recovering. Many things can affect skin thickness.

Also, that depth is probably the FWHM of the decay curve, so it is reaching a bit deeper but at lower amplitudes.

Also the scanner has some quirks of its own, so who knows really what the exact specifics of that particular scanner are on that day.

One trick with opt outs: suit and tie.

The 'better' you look, the less they'll worry and faster they'll be. If you look like some business person that's 'important', they treat you like one too. Airline staff generally follows that principal too, especially if you wear a nice hat for some reason. Not a ballcap, fyi. Though once you sit down in coach, the game is off.

Oh, also, squinting at the TSA nametag and saying 'Thank you/Excuse me, Officer John Doe', yeah, makes them feel big and respected. Gotta work the referees here.

Like, just generally following and slimy salesman tactic and reading 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' will work very well with TSA (most people, really).

Mostly treat that individual well, the same comes back.

Now at small regional airports with a few flights a day, really nothing works, those folks are there for the power trip and couldn't break into the local PD good ol boys network and got rejected from the army. Not always, but mostly. They never get an opt out either, so they have to go really by the book as they mostly forgot what to do.

This kinda gets into the idea of AIs as droids right?

So, you have a code writing droid that is aligned towards writing good clean code that humans can read. Then you have an implementation droid that goes into actually launching and running the code and is aligned with business needs and expenses. And you have a QA droid that stress tests the code and is aligned with the hacker mindset and is just slightly evil, so to speak.

Each droid is working together to make good code, but also are independent and adversarial in the day to day.

So um, can an AI also inject enough noise at the internet for me to make it harder to unmask me?

Should I like, just as Claude Code to come up with this idea this weekend?

Rant:

I was a systems engineer for a while there.

But not a pure S/W one. Like an actual engineer with nuts and bolts and pneumatics and amps and bolts and the like. That was the title at many many companies, it was a pretty rigid one too, despite the job function being quite jack of all trades.

But then tech decided that they wanted to use Systems Engineer too. The reasons weren't bad, I guess.

But then trying to find a job in my version of the role was near impossible on any job site.

Unix this, Windows that. Sure, I used Unix systems for my job too, little servers for controlling some mechanical systems. Not like huge racks that served up billions of requests.

And then I'd get the job spam too, as I matched some keyword threshold for the S/W type systems engineer. Always a entry level role through.

Gah! Why couldn't S/W take the title of Unix Server Engineer, or Python Integration Engineer or something just a tad more specific and not bleeding all over my discipline?

Okay, whew, rant over

One tip for the introverts out there:

When the service worker and you do the back and forth of "How are you doing today" - "Fine, you?" - "Fine"

Yeah don't do that, try out this phrase "It's my Monday" [0] instead of "Fine, you?"

You'll typically have them telling you what day of their work week they are in which is not usually the actual day of the week! Because managers schedule people in service positions in wacky ways.

That little bit of human connection around labor and work, man it does wonders. They know you know what it's like, that you see them as a person, and you care a little bit. Really gets the conversation going if there isn't too much of a line.

[0] Use any day of the week, but do use a weekday. Monday or Friday works best though.

Prediction markets are a great idea, but in practice their users (and eventually their owners) only want sports gambling. The addiction overrides everything.

We're sooo screwing over an entire generation of men.

Yes emdashes are very much a sign. I stand by this. Why?

What is the key combo to make an emdash?

On a phone keyboard, sure, it's as hard as an accent sign (á, for example), difficult but not twrrible. But on a keyboard? Yeah, no one is typing in Alt combos when literally any other construction will do.

Great. My poorly secured coffee maker was mining bitcoins, then some dumb NFT, then it got filled with darkness bots, then bitcoin miners again, and now it's gonna be shitposting but not even to humans, just to other bots.

I agree that their large scale rollout will be very beneficial on the whole. The US is absurdly overweight and obese.

But these are powerful medications that affect very highly conserved areas of tetrapod biology. We discovered GLPs in the mouths of gila monsters, after all. So you then can infer that that the mechanism is at least 300 million years old (our last common ancestor with lizards).

Actually, I tried looking this up, and glucagon is likely 5-600 million years old, back to all chordates, the Cambrian explosion essentially, though likely even before that. So, incredibly conserved. Like, if you are a multicellular animal, odds are you have some glucagon-like thing for digestion regulation.[0]

We're strongly messing with a system that is just tremendously old. Biology and evolution are ruthless about this stuff, it edits it out as fast as it possibly can. That it's been so closely held is a very big sign for us that we need to tread extremely carefully.

Like, clearly, other countries do not have these issues with weight. Yes, they are developing them, I know. But even the US didn't have these issues near as bad just two generations ago, a blink in biological terms. You and I both know that the solution is not a pill, but the root cause of the obesity epidemic itself. These injections and pill are just band-aids for a much deeper and more pernicious problem.

But then again, you and I both know that we're not going to get at the root cause anytime soon either.

[0] This is biology so you'll find exceptions everywhere though