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bondarchukon What's the best way to learn a new language?

I cannot find anything on google nor on google scholar under "core sight set" that has anything to do with language.

In fact the term does not appear to exist at all.

bondarchukon My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza

I think GP is making a subtler point, not that listening to audio books is worse than reading books with your eyes, but that it's telling that people who listen to audio books themselves go out of their way to emphasize that it's equivalent to reading, thus betraying that in their own value system they put a higher value on (actual) reading.

bondarchukon AI makes you boring

It's not about having to put in effort for the sake of it, the point is that building something by hand you will gain insight into the problem, which insight then becomes a valuable contribution.

bondarchukon How often do full-body MRIs find cancer?

They were not talking about MRI, there is a significant difference (purported).

bondarchukon How often do full-body MRIs find cancer?

They were not talking about MRI, there is a significant difference.

bondarchukon Hear the "Amati King Cello", the Oldest Known Cello in Existence

No, I am not talking about aura at all, I'm just saying that the physical, measurable sound that an instrument produces in response to being played, physically and measurably, could have more subtle effects on artistic performance (as a consequence of the physical vibrations of the object and the way those vibrations respond to the player and vice versa) than those that could be elided in an afternoon of A/B-testing under the banner of "stradivarius myth DEBUNKED".

bondarchukon America's pensions can't beat Vanguard but they can close a hospital

Everything is on the table if people vote for it.

bondarchukon Hear the "Amati King Cello", the Oldest Known Cello in Existence

>whether there are any real, noticeable physical differences between the sound produced by a Strad and that produced by expert modern luthiers.

Isn't this trivially true? I'm sure if you hook up both cellos to a bowing robot using many permutations of contact point, fingering, speed, pressure and angle, and record the sound, it would be possible to consistently discern them through spectral analysis or something. Is the claim that if an expert modern luthier reproduces a stradivarius he can get it so close as to measure identically?

edit: by the way

>I agree with everything you've said. It's also completely irrelevant to the question at hand, which is whether there are any real, noticeable physical differences between the sound produced by a Strad and that produced by expert modern luthiers.

I don't know why you would say my post is irrelevant to that question. You said "people should be able to hear the difference in that sound in blind tests", and I'm saying that the difference between two cellos could be more complicated than just listening to one after the other for some minutes and filling in a questionnaire.

bondarchukon America's pensions can't beat Vanguard but they can close a hospital

The student loan system is fucked up, so what should happen is an acknowledgement that it's fucked up, forgiving the fucked up loans, and also changing the system to be less fucked up so it won't have to happen again.

bondarchukon Hear the "Amati King Cello", the Oldest Known Cello in Existence

But a cello is not a machine on which you press one button and then one sound comes out. You can't just press the button on both machines and then check which makes the better sound. Playing a cello is a feedback loop between the instrument, musculature, nerves/brains, emotions, culture.... It's not unthinkable to me that something like that would take a couple decades of work by highly skilled people to lead to an extraordinary outcome.

bondarchukon Ring owners are returning their cameras

He does leverage the risk that others take, but those others are also the people who collectively build society so as to require taking that risk. It's kind of tit-for-tat in a way.

>How can I take his advocacy seriously

You could just listen to what he has to say and consider whether or not it's true. His personal behaviour at the end of the day has little bearing on that. "He doesn't even do XYZ therefore I won't believe him" feels more like a rationalization one comes up with because one doesn't want to believe him in the first place.

bondarchukon How to make a living as an artist

Post your work

bondarchukon MIT Technology Review has confirmed that posts on Moltbook were fake

Previously sharing compressed and encrypted text was always done between humans. When autonomous intelligences start doing it it could be a different matter.

bondarchukon Grindr trials premium $500 per month plan to become 'AI-first' app

Sortition, you get to date with other people who also have 500 bucks to spare. Any features you get are just window dressing.

bondarchukon Billing can be bypassed using a combo of subagents with an agent definition

The world would not actually be improved by having 1000s of customer service reps genuinely authentically feel sorry. You're literally demanding real people to experience real negative emotions over some IT problem you have.

bondarchukon TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

I don't know man. It all reminds me very much of people trying to ban rock n roll back in the day.

bondarchukon TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

There's billions of dollars of psychology research behind mass entertainment for decades, too.

>* The logical endpoint of optimizing AI for viewer retention is something that you literally cannot look away from. *

Sure, but this was always already the logical endpoint of entertainment media. Infinite Jest was written in the 90s, no tiktok needed.

bondarchukon TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

"Hijack our brains" - exactly what I mean by pretending people don't have agency. Who gets to decide what counts as hijacking and what is just normal culture? Anything is "hijacking" to some extent - boy bands hijack teen girl brains, the BBC created Teletubbies to hijack toddler brains, heck any artistic representation is a hijack to the extent that it is interpreted by your brain at least partially as something other than what it really is i.e. some colours on a flat surface. The point is a new form of culture, communication and coordination is emerging and the old powers are shitting their pants.

(Fully agree on the Portugal approach though. The difficult to accept answer is that if people are choosing a shit life of scrolling 10 hours a day maybe we should do the actual hard work of improving the kind of life open to them.)

bondarchukon TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

> * even if you don't use it you're forced to live in a dumbed down society where wealth and power is becoming concentrated in the hands of those [...] *

Exactly the same applies to TV but where is all the handwringing about that? Remember those stats about people watching 7 hours of TV a day? Those people need some serious help too. What's happening is clearly just the old mass-media-supported order refusing to yield power to new media used by younger people. Governments couldn't care one bit about false information[1], nor about zoomers getting brainrot, it's all about controlling the flow of information.

[1] ("disinformation", another nice example of framing which ignores the fact that people have agency)

edit: the system is escaping my asterisks automatically now, anyone know how to get italics now?

bondarchukon TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

I fundamentally don't think governments should do a careful cost-benefit analysis of everything in society and then ban it if it falls on the wrong side. Just on basic principles of personal freedom. That's why the "addiction" framing is so important, because it implies that citizens don't have agency, and so justifies the authoritarian intervention.

PS if we apply your analysis to video games they surely would have been banned too.

Edit: by the way I remember back in the day we searched for "addicting flash games" and it was seen as a positive ;p

bondarchukon TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

This is generational warfare. Imagine if we said boomers cannot watch TV anymore...

bondarchukon TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

It's also very much an exercise in framing, though. Making your media as engaging as possible is the basic imperative of any media company. But choosing to call this specific instance of it "addictive" has everyone up in arms.

bondarchukon A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

That's six channels actually.

bondarchukon Spain to ban social media access for under-16s, PM Sanchez says

Needing ID to buy a sim card was a big deal, though. Didn't seem like it because it seemed like we still had the internet for anonymous communication. That will be gone soon by the looks of it. Frog status: boiled.

bondarchukon Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/engineering-at-microsoft/welc...

"Microsoft has over 100,000 software engineers working on software projects of all sizes."

So that would mean 100 000 000 000 (100 billion) lines of code per month. Frightening.

bondarchukon My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

Over here it feels like there is a taboo among doctors to just tell people "you are fat and unhealthy, fix it", I guess since the idea is that this would discourage people from going to the doctor in the first place...

bondarchukon My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)

>Is it impossible for highly advanced societies like ours to pay more for people to get trained as doctors, nurses or whatever is missing? Or to convince them to choose a profession that deals with other humans instead of UBI?

This is the point where it becomes important to distinguish two senses of "advanced", i.e. advanced in technological sense on the one hand and advanced in social/societal and especially large-group-long-time-horizon coordination terms on the other. In the former we are quite advanced, in the latter quite primitive and regressing by the day, it feels like. (But sorry to end on a doomer note, take it with a grain of salt.)

bondarchukon A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks

>the city gets destroyed

vs.

>a company goes bankrupt or pivots

I can see a few differences.

bondarchukon First, make me care

So basically TL;DR :)

bondarchukon First, make me care

I don't know. It's almost universally assumed to be true that "making someone want to read on" is inherently good but IMO it's not. Why is it good to be "more motivated to jump into it"? If a plain description and some context does not motivate you, it would be better to spend your time elsewhere.