antiterra

Maybe where I went wrong is that, even knowing you weren't using a more common meaning of monster, I still made some assumptions based on it, namely: monsters are (or seem) inhuman, irredeemable, undeserving of sympathy, and best removed from society. I also assumed that what made Nathan and Amanda monsters to you is their respective exploitation of others, aka "profiting off of bad behavior."

But, monster is a superlative: there isn't much worse you can be. If you are calling a plurality or majority of people 'the worst kind of human,' does the term not lose utility? Do you use it as a mere stand-in for 'bad person?'

That is why I asked: Is the person who stole someone else's lunch from the fridge at work (an unfathomable act, to me) a monster in the same way that any person in federal prison is?

This may seem less serious than I intend it to be. I do think stealing a colleague's lunch is a sign of severely compromised morality, but I wouldn't default to calling them a monster.

This ultimately matters to me, because I am concerned about the outcome. If we characterize people who do bad things as monsters or 'bad people,' it may follow that they be denied any sympathy, humane treatment in prisons or a path to rehabilitation. None of this is to diminish the harm to victims, whose concerns are a priority. As such, I would posit this is a significant reason that sexual assault in men's prisons is tolerated or accepted as serving justice. The larger and more absolute the category, the more people are subject to that outcome.

I also tend to be a bit hypervigilant about anticipated objections. This may appear as a lack of clarity of opinion when it is intended to be concession for the sake of discussion.

Talking to someone outside of the situation confronts the possible compromising of Nathan's objectivity, and dialog is a common way to process experiences.

I felt it as a break from the intensity and absurdity of the initial half, a lull in the rollercoaster. Then the film reduced Amanda's distance from the subject matter and we were off again.

(I do think the intensity of the first half is partly manufactured by a soundtrack that almost cartoonishly conveys 'unsettling' and 'eerie.' That's probably my main complaint about the film.)

You are responding to things I did not say.

I did not suggest anyone in the film had done a single shred of work towards redemption. Not one person in the film recognizes or admits doing anything wrong, which is a usual first step. Nathan never second-guesses his personal rationalization for making a documentary that financially benefits a subject against his own values. Successfully emerging with clean hands in the end does not fully resolve that.

I did not equate anyone in the film with the lived experience of a gang member. When talking about the categorization of people as good or bad or monster, examples where the dichotomy is extreme are relevant.

And yes, of course, Amanda not having our lived experience is part of why she blends into the film. That's no accident. We are shown her farm, horses and a picture perfect fireside setting. Nathan doesn't need to narrate that "Amanda is comfortable and rich with a farm in the Catskills and a pied-à-terre in Manhattan at one of those buildings where you regularly peek into the courtyard you aren't allowed to enter while you walk past" for the film to make that point.

Whether or not the average person has a different lived experience is still a different question from whether or not the average person is classified as a monster by your measure. And the lived experience of the average HN poster could be closer in relative terms of privilege to that of Nathan and Amanda than to that of the much less privileged, even in the so-called developed world.

I do not believe that the average person would agree with your classification of Nathan and Amanda as monsters. That doesn't invalidate your argument, but it does suggest very broad boundaries, and it becomes unclear what, if anything, prevents a plurality or majority of people being defined as a monster by your worldview. My question was about the utility of the binary classification if it ends up being that overarching.

It really sounds like you would consider most people to be monsters. That is, the vast majority of us participate in exploitation to some degree and rationalize that exploitation as necessary, acceptable, minimal or merely something we cannot change.

That's an arguable position, but the problem with it is that it lacks any kind of gradient. Is the person who stole someone else's lunch from the fridge at work (an unfathomable act, to me) a monster in the same way that any person in federal prison is?

The film is relevant: initially, Amanda felt like a proxy for us, the viewers, someone to point out the abnormality in what we have seen. But then, she showed her unwillingness to even confront the possibility the miniseries was exploitative. She displayed a voyeuristic enthusiasm for more information and involvement. She blended into the film at that point, no longer our proxy as unsullied observer. But, can we really not think of a time we reacted defensively instead of with considered reason? Can we not think of a time we dove into a lurid topic that was fully irrelevant to our lives?

There are a number of cases where people involved in monstrous gang violence appear to show genuine rehabilitation. They devote significant effort toward encouraging others to avoid the mistakes they made. Do they do that because they are no longer monsters, or do they do it because it's one of the few acceptable choices available to someone in their position? I'm not sure we can reliably know.

I think it’s incredibly bad faith to knee-jerk respond that people unwilling to reveal the surprises that made the film enjoyable to them are LLMs or shills.

That said, this contains a decent spoiler-included summary of what happens in the film, if you can tolerate or filter the ads: https://www.slashfilm.com/2287438/you-can-see-everything-end...

I don’t think an accusation of ‘apologia’ is justified here. If some particular cognitive process generates deception genuine to the deceiver, that does not make the deception acceptable.

There’s a story in the movie about a magician performing a trick, but where there is no trick. The magician really does the thing he appears to do. I think that’s more where GP’s question lies, i.e.: Is her unusual processing of the world an elaborate conscious construction, or is it automatic, and to what degree?

That isn’t a direct determination about her merit or culpability.

We had some iconic mass market paperbacks with >400k words. The 1990+ version of The Stand, and Cryptonomicon come to mind, though Gone With the Wind and Shogun probably sold more.

I routinely run into Claude Opus and Fable making basic mistakes like misunderstanding a simple negation, which would be on top of whatever reliability issues there are with a source. I think that means it is functionally very different.

While your assessment may be true, I don’t think the mere ratification of the amendment makes the argument. It’s much more complicated.

The passing of the 18th was done through a highly organized and motivated cross-party political bloc that would throw an election to punish anyone that did not align with the dry agenda. This stacked the representative government in their favor, even if it did not match actual sentiment in their state.

The repeal of the amendment however, was by vote and 73% of voters favored the repeal.

Wait, did you actually claim that most work at FAANGs doesn’t require an NDA and that was evidence to support your accusation?

They used to sell one that was much closer, the Horizon Kompact, that is reasonably available used (https://shop.lomography.com/us/horizon-kompakt)

Looks to be an AI summary of:

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/behavioral-neuroscience...

Scienceblog.com is an extremely low quality site. Looks like an old content farm ‘splog’ that upgraded from markov chain nonsense to LLMs.

No. Something genuine has been lost.

I used to be able to curate my feed and pay attention to people I knew. I could see the photo projects my friends were working on, hear about life updates from past acquaintances, or reach out if someone was having a rough time.

Now, all cohorts, from recent coworkers to childhood friends I made before the first web browser, routinely spew paragraphs of LLM slop to shill a career coaching podcast. It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Social networks are only a small part of it. It’s email, mailing lists, billboards, sheets of paper stapled to utility poles, newspaper articles, dentist office phone lines, jigsaw puzzles, home furnishings, homework assigned to grade schoolers, birthday cards and on and on.

Absolutely, I had that in my draft but chopped it out along with a digression into black body radiation.

This is conflating two kinds of pink. The pink made from combining ends of the spectrum is most commonly termed ‘hot pink.’

The other, very often just ‘pink,’ is predominantly a light red. A quick and sloppy way to describe this is a light grey with a raised red component.

Also, you can make hot pink without needing to use spectral violet (the ‘end’ of the spectrum) since there are combinations of blue and red that are ‘metameric,’ creating a perceptually matching response in our eyes.

I'm not a hardware expert here but this strikes me as inaccurate, though the actual performance can be scenario dependent.

The Jetson hardware is targeted to low power robotics implementations.

The Jetson Orin is currently marketed as prototyping platform, and I believe it does not generally challenge recent Apple Silicon for inference performance, even considering prefill.

In the latest Blackwell based Jetson Thor, the key advantage over Apple Silicon is its capable FP4 tensor cores, which do indeed help with prefill. However, it also has half the memory bandwidth of an M4 Max, so this puts a big bottleneck on token generation with large context. If your use case did some kind of RAG lookup with very short responses then you might come out ahead using an optimized model, but for straightforward inference you are likely to lag behind Apple Silicon.

At this stage, professional inference solutions ideally use discrete GPUs that are far more capable than either, but those are a different class of monetary expense.

The story as told may be inaccurate but it wasn’t simply ‘what we had at the time’ either.

The 74 minute length resulted from Sony rejecting the Philips 60 minute 11.5cm diameter “Pinkeltje” disc size in favor of a 12cm diameter.

It’s quite possible that Sony’s Norio Ohga simply argued that the 9th symphony or various operas fitting would be enough of an advantage for the slight size increase without meaningfully decreasing portability.

I read Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind when I was younger. It suggested quantum processes as a last ditch effort for a non-deterministic brain. At the time, I thought it was a fascinating prediction of how our minds might work and that reading it made me a smarter person.

I have since come to view it more as an interesting lesson in the pitfalls of hypothesis formation, popular non-fiction, and vanity.

Even so, as a layperson, it's entirely understandable to perk up whenever someone discovers 'tubules' in the brain, even if none of that sufficiently supports any of the collapse requirements of the Penrose/Hammeroff quantum microtubes.

More like, “Gary has a new novel coming out in July”

I made no assertions as to whether or not this was an appropriate trade-off.

The issue at hand, however, is not about any particular media content being censored but about the manipulation of how that media is presented or suppressed by a foreign source. I think people should be given the freedom to choose what to view, but I am also not naive enough to think that we as a whole are not susceptible to influence, often without even being aware of how we are influenced.

To the end that the US has a national security interest here: We have other laws on foreign political influence like FARA and the Logan Act that have similar tradeoffs around free speech and free association, but these elicit much less controversy. There’s a fundamental question: should the ideals of free speech be allowed to undermine the framework that allows that free speech to exist? To some, saying yes to that question is like arguing the US Constitution is a death pact.

Simple exposure to culture, propaganda and points of view is child’s play compared to the modern strategy of inciting discord by amplifying existing differences and mass scale disinformation.

Don’t forget that part of the reason there’s a compartmentalization between Douyin and Tiktok is China’s own concerns about their nationals being exposed to outside influence in a manner far greater than what the US dictates the other way.

I really enjoyed TikTok and will miss it, but it’s hard to argue that it didn’t at least provide the potential for the CCP to more directly have an intentionally negative influence on western audiences.

If the only place nearby to kick a ball around with friends is on an incline, turns to mud half the year, filled with dog droppings, pocked by holes in the ground, peppered with fire ants, lined with poison ivy behind the lopsided structures that stand in for goals, and you utterly hate it-- you might spend a lot of time there anyway.

AT&T was broken up based on location, hence the term Regional Bell Operating Companies.

I’m not sure how the relative straightforwardness of that approach maps to a company that basically has two main supply chains (737 in Renton and everything else in Everett with North Charleston as a satellite.)

Regarding the similarities between Hawaiian and Japanese: There are theories among linguists that there is a connection between Austronesian languages and Japanese. These theories don’t seem to be infeasible, but are currently lacking sufficient supporting evidence.

So, it’s still no. They sell to a third-party company and forget about it.

You can buy Target return/overstock pallets at auction, and a deals account likely just resells that. Target doesn’t have to deal with it on an item level at that point.

From my experience you just weren’t actually billed until they were done, it could be many hours after you left the store.

I think “Nothing Gold Can Stay” fits the mold. It’s a heartbreaking poem of beautiful construction and depth that is dismissed because it has been heavily cited by popular culture. It doesn’t help that what it has to say, at first glance, appears to be cut short by its title:

Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Early versions of the poem show meandering sequential steps of revision that suddenly give way to a less intuitive flourish that anchors it.

This contains the best description of the revisions I have found online- https://poemshape.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/the-making-of-rob...

> truly a leap that I’m not sure many at the time were prepared to take.

I mean, at least one other company took the leap a few years before Ikea did: Sauder.

Yeah it’s much closer to if Jony Ive worked at Suzuki or something.