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Earw0rm

1,383 karma · joined August 9, 2021

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Earw0rm··on Data does not speak to you
I agree re the "Scandi" label, my point is that the stereotype isn't the reality. The weather and food might be similar, and peoples' physical appearance to some extent, but socially not really.

Conservative is maybe not the most useful definition here either as it covers too many unrelated things - a lot of US Conservatives (in terms of their declared moral attitude to abortion, homosexuality and so on) are also highly individualistic and quite selfish people. And in the UK you've the reverse, where the avowedly progressive, pro-trans Green party is also supported by culturally conservative Muslims, who are relatively unbothered either way by the trans rights movement.

So for example Germany, you've got Catholic traditional-conservatives in the South, and AfD nationalist-conservatives in the former East, both of whom are obviously big-C conservative in different ways, whereas for the Danes there's a specific kind of communitarian, tradition-centric national pride which is conservative (small "c") without being overtly religious or economically right-wing.

Earw0rm··on Data does not speak to you
It's a shame the author falls a little foul of the very thing he criticizes - out of a wish, perhaps, to needle individualist liberals with UnHerd-style communitarian-conservative talking points.

But let's ask some more questions.

The positive correlation between income and number of children, within education bands, is intriguing - and yet doesn't explain why policies intended to be pro-birth - generous financial support for young families, for example, seem to be ineffective. Even accepting that education does suppress the birth rate relative to income, increasing income ought to fix that.. but doesn't.

Perhaps there's a different story here, that income and number of children within a given education bracket isn't causal - that a third factor is behind both - or even that the causal arrow points the other way: if you've got lots of kids, you _have_ to take that higher-paying job, because you need to keep them fed and housed.

And there's an unspoken assumption that education = individualism, and that these are antonyms to communitarian-conservatism. Which isn't exactly true, and we can look at societies which sustain relatively high levels of both.

Denmark being a case in point. Its international reputation may be free-living liberal-Scandi, but it's communitarian, place-based and in many ways conservative. Not in the obvious way along Islamic or shouty Evangelical lines - morals around sex and alcohol are relatively relaxed - but in most other respects it's a distinct, cohesive and traditionalist culture, one which places more value on faith and nation than many.

They've high income, strong child support policy, and their birth rate is.. not much better than avowedly secular-liberal countries nearby. And a disproportionate number of kids are born to immigrants, which of course upsets the traditionalists.

But again, look for third factors. Do immigrants have more children because they're from "that kind of culture", or does the sort of innate drive which motivates somebody to pack their bags for a new life in a new country (by no means the easy path) also motivate them to have a family?

Or, flip that around, is there a "drag" factor affecting people who don't emigrate/immigrate, and that's suppressing "native" births? I certainly know more than a few people for whom that appears to be a thing, they're just kind of lightly anesthetized to life.

But I've also heard it said that some folks have always been that way, and that what's driving lower birth rates is more that on one hand fewer unplanned kids are being born (because contraception, and vastly lower teen pregnancy rates), and on the other, the women who do have kids (which has never been anywhere near "all") are often having one or two less than they'd ideally like for economic reasons.

Earw0rm··on The Brand Age
Yep. I'm in a European city, most of the people driving Mercedes and BMW cars are, if not outright poor, low-status, low-education, low long-term wealth.

The old money drives beat-up cars (often Swedish made, US imports for enthusiasts, or old-style 4x4s for outdoor pursuits) and are more likely to take taxis. Young, highly-educated BoBo types walk, take transit or cycle.

Just-above-poor neighbourhoods have a much higher proportion of flash cars than rich ones.

Earw0rm··on Overall, the colorectal cancer story is encouraging
True, although how many celebrities do?
Earw0rm··on Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
Oysters and other bivalves too...
Earw0rm··on Dinosaur Food: 100M year old foods we still eat today (2022)
Molluscs? Snails have been around a very long time in one form or another.
Earw0rm··on The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory
We used to live lifestyles that didn't require driving every day and flying eight times a year...
Earw0rm··on Where did all the starships go?
Starships were mostly an analogy for WW2-style global naval operations. In some cases explicitly so, in some ways implicit.

The fighters and capital ships combat setup makes no sense in space.

Earw0rm··on How does misalignment scale with model intelligence and task complexity?
They make connections but lack the critical thinking skills to weed out the bad/wrong ones.

Which is why, just occasionally, they're right, but mostly by accident.

Earw0rm··on How does misalignment scale with model intelligence and task complexity?
That's also a hallmark of some mental/psychological illnesses (paranoid schizophrenia family) and use of certain drugs, particularly hallucinogens.

The hallmark of intelligence in this scenario is not just being able to make the connections, but being able to pick the right ones.

Earw0rm··on There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
Right, but there's ground and there's ground.

Geological strata vs shallow landfill sitting above aquifers and subject to near-term erosion.

Disposing of this stuff in deep mines seems like it'd be fine, unfortunately we haven't yet, at a society/economy level, found the discipline to do so. Presumably after a few mya of heat and pressure it'll be indistinguishable from other petrochemicals (which aren't particularly nice to begin with).

Earw0rm··on Scott Adams has died
They can, but they're competing with assholes, you can figure out the odds.

Like there's an Olympics where everyone's on drugs but a few good folks decide to compete clean.

Want to win fair? Sure, same here. Now here come the whispers, you can just ignore them, sure, but now your girlfriend's pregnant and your bank account is looking a little thin. Good luck.

Earw0rm··on There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
It's the habit, not the high.

Kind of odd because the withdrawal is, physically, less taxing than caffeine (never mind opiates...), and yet the brain rewiring to chase the hit is somehow far more pernicious.

Earw0rm··on There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
Sort of. "Single use disposables" were banned, but the companies switched immediately to a two-part unit which, AFAICT, is still used and thrown away in exactly the same fashion.
Earw0rm··on There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
Go on, give us some numbers.

Because 7Bn people multiplied by a few kg/year doesn't seem trivial to me, but sounds like you can prove it.

Earw0rm··on There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape
If people had to pay the true cost of their decisions up-front, we'd make a lot of different decisions.

That said, I got quite into this stuff a few years back, and determining "true" cost can be harder than it sounds. Externalities, positive or negative, have to be measured against a baseline, and deciding on where that sits is subject to opinion and bias.

Earw0rm··on Network of Scottish X accounts go dark amid Iran blackout
Networks were full of this stuff before the bot armies were a glimmer in whoever's eye.

I don't doubt bots are a factor in the sheer volume of it, but human nature on network debates was bad when it was only fairly smart, educated people, and it only got worse as the AOL-to-Facebook pipeline demographic became politicised.

Glinner isn't a bot, just to pick one example of somebody who - irrespective of the merit or not of his argument - simply behaves like an asshole, constantly.

Earw0rm··on Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15
Would explain why the Venn of flash-car dudes, and dudes likely to respond with extreme violence to any implication of gayness, can be described as cos^2t + sin^2t = 1.

(I'm not talking here about actual car _enthusiasts_, people who restore, customize, tweak or otherwise nerd out on performance or driving skills.. the assholes who buy something performance-ish but can't actually drive it well).

IDK though, think it's mostly just lack of critical thinking skill. They see a Mercedes in some music video, assume it's a symbol of wealth and that chicks will dig that, without realising that most women see straight through it.

Earw0rm··on Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15
Truly rural Brits - Northumbria, the Devon uplands, Yorkshire Moors, the remoter parts of Scotland & Wales, sure.

Thing with England is that, being a small, flat and largely well-connected country, there's lots of places that identify strongly as rural but are, economically and culturally, more like outer-suburbia in a US context. That's where you'll find the Defender and F-150 crowd.

Earw0rm··on Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15
I must have missed a memo, because every situation in which I've ever wanted to "impress a chick" has taken place indoors, or at least far from roads.

And yet lots of guys seem to spend an extra $30k or more on their vehicle for no additional utility beyond that. Literally who is impressed?

Then again, these are probably dudes who get their dating advice from the Tate brothers. /shrug

Earw0rm··on Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15
Citroen Berlingo is basically that.
Earw0rm··on Do not mistake a resilient global economy for populist success
Depends if you look at Spain in isolation.

On its own? Sure. (Although to be fair to Spain, they've invested heavily in solar and high-value agriculture in recent years).

But seen as part of a system with Germany and perhaps the UK (no longer part of the EU, but was better for both when they were), it's a valuable part of quality-of-life in the overall economic bloc.

Where would you rather live? Spain, easy.

Who would win in a war? Russia, easy.

Some will read this as an argument against the Spanish lifestyle. On balance I prefer to read it as an argument against war.

Earw0rm··on Why I left iNaturalist
> But that's just how it works in typical normal hierarchy. The normal hierarchy just makes it easier to "pick a target" you need to please

It means that the org has been intentionally designed with that in mind, so those running it will be aware that this is an operational factor.

> For the idea to work you not only need culture where that won't be shunned by some manager coz it made him miss their KPIs, but also having each worker be competent enough to know where to use the power

And a culture which allows the worker to possess whatever information and context they need in order to exercise that competence effectively. Hiring and training is part of it, sufficiently open information-flow is the other key.

Earw0rm··on Why I left iNaturalist
The difference in a hierarchical org is that the structure is laid out on paper for everyone to see. The power dynamic is explicit rather than implicit.

(At least, it's supposed to be. You do get weird inversions from time to time, when a weak manager is put in charge of a domineering empire-builder, but it's rare - and even in that case, the rest of the org can see the anomaly - as they have a frame of reference to measure it against.)

"Humans are complicated" => that is my uncertainty caveat. We're not absolute-hierarchical nor absolute-flat, in much the same way as we're neither exactly chimp-like nor gorilla-like in terms of monogamy. My observation though (and hardly an original one) is that when we build organisations which try to deny hierarchy, it has a habit of sneaking in thru the back door.

Earw0rm··on Why I left iNaturalist
Am sure you're already aware, but for others in the thread:

Absence of titles does not mean absence of hierarchy. Absence of formal hierarchy doesn't mean absence of social power.

At their best, flat hierarchies do as described.

At their worst, they take on all the worst aspects of cults together with all the worst aspects of high school. Endless manoeuvring for influence, currying favour, autocratic fiefdoms emerging without people having the mental framework to even identify that they exist.

Humans are complicated, and we do seem to have a certain amount of low-level social wiring for hierarchy and pecking order, even if it's far from absolute.

I don't know how this applies in the context of Toyota, but there are plenty of places where pushing the Stop button - while formally permitted - has a social cost such that only a certain few are effectively given permission to do so; large amounts of energy are expended either attempting to belong to that few, or currying favour with them. Power tends to accrue to those most inclined to seize it.

Whereas in a more formal org, people with "manager" in their title are at least subject to a minimum amount of vetting, training and oversight.

TLDR, flat hierarchy can be better than rigid hierarchy, but nominally "flat" hierarchy with power-gradient characteristics can be the worst of both worlds.

Earw0rm··on Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%
Weather forecasts are a best-effort.

CEOs should have a reasonable grasp of what's possible for their team on a given short/medium timeline.

It won't be perfect but should be ballpark.

Elon and those like him make these statements with no reference to realistic project delivery timelines, business capacity or anything else - despite having all of that information readily available.

That's not a best guess, it's making shit up.

Earw0rm··on SIMD City: Auto-Vectorisation
That's very much an issue with SIMD, especially where floating point numbers are concerned.

Matt Godbolt wrote about it recently.

https://xania.org/202512/21-vectorising-floats

TLDR, math notation and language specify particular orders in which floating point operations happen, and precision limits of IEEE float representation mean those have to be honoured by default.

Allowing compilers to reorder things in breach of that contract is an option, but it comes with risks.

Earw0rm··on SIMD City: Auto-Vectorisation
How's it going in the other direction - LLMs as disassemblers?

I tried it a year or so back and was sorta disappointed at the results beyond simple cases, but it feels like an area that could improve rapidly.

Earw0rm··on AI will make our children stupid
Couple of upper-class schoolteachers dissing the Green Party for "stupid".

Move along, nothing to see here.

Earw0rm··on Italian bears living near villages have evolved to be smaller and less agressive
We already did. Most of us, anyway. Unfortunately it only takes a few percent to spoil it for all the rest.
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