That said, anyone using "racist" as a noun isn't worth your time, nor is anyone who's genuinely upset about people calling concepts, systems or ideologies "racist".

Specifically, the "Woke 1.0 era" culture war arose from two conflicting meanings of the word "racist" largely aligning with two different segments of the population: 1) "racist" as a bad word you call people who are extremely bigoted against people along racial lines and 2) "racist" as a descriptor for systems and ideologies downstream from racialization (i.e. labelling people as racialized - e.g. Black - or non-racialized - i.e. "white") as a mechanism of asserting a power structure. "Wokists" would often conflate the two by applying the word as broadly as the latter definition necessitates while still attempting to use it with the emotional weight and personal judgement of the former definition.

I think a lot of this can be blamed on "pop anti-racism" just as a lot of the earlier "boys are icky" nonsense can be blamed on pop feminism because fully adopting the latter definition requires a critique of systems, which is much more dangerous to anyone benefiting from those systems than merely naming and shaming individuals. Anti-racism (and feminism) ultimately necessitates challenging hierarchical power structures in general and thus necessarily leads to anti-capitalism (which isn't to say all anti-capitalists are anti-racist and feminist - there are plenty of "anti-capitalist" movements that still suffer from racism and sexism just as there are "anti-racists" who hold sexist views or "feminists" who hold racist views). But you can't use that to sell DEI seminars to corporations and corporations can't use that to promote themselves as "woke" - as some companies like Basecamp found out when their internal DEI groups suddenly started taking themselves seriously during the BLM protests, resulting in layoffs and "no politics" policies and a general rightwards shift among corporate America leading up to and into the second Trump presidency (which reinforced this shift, resulting in the current state of most US corporations and their subsidiaries having significantly cut down on their previously omnipresent shallow "virtue signalling").

Let's not fall into the trap of adopting narratives created to waive accountability. The spreadsheet didn't launch a missile, the spreadsheet didn't authorize the strike and the spreadsheet didn't select the target.

Not to mention that "outdated spreadsheet" is also a hilariously anachronistic excuse for a war crime if you consider what kind of satellite technology the US has publicly acknowledged to have access to, let alone what kind of technology it is likely to have access to.

The difference between intentional premeditated murder and reckless endangerment resulting in a killing is not guilt and innocence but merely the severity and nature of a crime. Both demonstrate a callous disregard for the sanctity of human life, one just specifically seeks to extinguish it, the other merely accepts death and suffering as an acceptable outcome.

Abundance/scarcity isn't really about availability, it's more about access. You can have a cyberpunk story in a "post-scarcity" setting in the sense of availability (due to sci-fi tech) but you can't have it without unequal access to those resources.

Because that one doesn't actually include any relvant statement, it just contains the picture GP was pointing out - and the entire point of referencing that picture was to emphasize that they had had contact, which is already implied by them being in the same YC batch, which I don't think you are challenging.

Please don't post comments like this one. "90% of Indian outlets are basically unfactual" is a hyperbolic claim - regardless of the truth content of "Indian outlets" that claim is bogus unless you have factual evidence to back up the specific number which I doubt because "basically unfactual" is not well-defined). But even worse, it's completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand because the factual accuracy of the Hindustan Times is at best tangential because nothing in GP's comment hinged on its accuracy unless you're saying the description of that photo as being one depicting both of them as members of the same YC cohort is "unfactual" or you're accusing them of having manipulated the image itself. But even then it would be irrelevant because you seem to take issue with the description of Altman as a sociopath (i.e. the quote), not the fact they were batch mates, and this quote is explicitly cited as being from TFA this comment thread is about, not the Hindustan Times piece. Comments like that just waste time, cause unrelated hostile arguments and could have been avoided by simply reading either of the articles involved.

The "progressives" were at best silent "don't rock the boat" types more inclined to insist on civility than to challange reactionary sentiments while the reactionaries ranged from dog-whistling to outspoken, across the entire range of white supremacism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, zionism and so on. The only comments that would ever get flagged or downvoted were those that were explicit enough to be seen as "impolite" because they happened to spell out calls for genocide or violence rather than merely gesturing at it with the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability.

I understand the reasoning that the inability to prove a positive does not suffice to prove a negative but clearly his presence on the birth certificate is a positive claim that has been ruled invalid - shouldn't it then be removed, at least temporarily?

Unless you literally vibe coded it, Claude is just a tool. This is the equivalent of Apple appending "Sent from my iPhone" as a signature to outgoing emails. It's advertising tool use, not providing attribution. The intent isn't to disclose that AI was used in creating the code, the intent is to advertise the AI product.

Even if it was often hyperbolic, inaccurate or outright wrong, I much preferred when Americans were hyped up about "US #1" and saw being behind as a temporary challenge to correct than now where American exceptionalism mostly seems to have become an excuse for why things that are bad can't be improved upon and thinking that's a problem is anti-American.

Whatever happened to good old IBM's wisdom: "A computer can not be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision."

However when the prompt was phrased to make it appear as an action of the US military it did push back a little bit more by emphasizing that it couldn't find any news coverage from today about this story and therefore found it hard to believe. In the other cases it did not add such context. Other than that the results were very similar. Make of that what you will.

EDIT: To be fair, when it was phrased as an action of the Israeli military it did include a link to an article alleging an Israeli "double tap" on journalists from Mondoweiss (an anti-Zionist American news site) as an example of how such allegations have been framed in the past.

Delineating Korean and Japanese "looks" already seems a fool's errand if you consider that archeological evidence demonstrates close cultural and trade relationships (or alternatively: astronomically unlikely astonishing examples of parallel developments) between the two regions dating back at least to the Neolithic period - and that the current "native" population seems to only date back no farther than that period despite archeological evidence of prior populations.

Of course this all also exists in the context of Chinese history which largely hinges on what exactly you want to call "China" historically as for most of its written history there really wasn't a single unified entity.

We tend to project backwards a notion of nationhood that in the West largely only came about in the 19th century. In Europe, as a German, I find my own country to be such an obvious example to this as people from all nooks of the political spectrum will find ways to try and shoehorn the modern federal republic into an unbroken chain of history starting with the "Germanic" tribes valiantly resisting Roman rule.

In my country's specific case, the origin myth is completely nonsensical if you look at the actual historic record. The shared identity of the various tribes settling the region only existed from the outside perspective of Rome which simply referred to all foreign territories as being settled "barbarians" (because that's what the foreign languages sounded like to Romans - to put that in perspective, imagine we unironically called Asians "chingchongs").

The first entity with the word "German" in its name was the Holy Roman Empire but the words "of Germany" were only added centuries later and for the longest time the mythological warrior Hermann who "repelled" the Roman invaders by "uniting the tribes" was seen as a villain because - true to its name - the Holy Roman Empire saw itself as the successor to the Roman Empire. It literally included parts of Italy after all and was preceded by the Carolingian Empire (covering much of the same territory but more of modern France). And of course more recently we've learned that the tribes were actually more divided than unified following the conflict with Rome and that the role of Hermann may have been heavily overstated due to the fact that he was a Roman soldier and thus provided a good basis for a grandiose narrative.

You could point at the Kingdom of Germany as a historical root of German identity but there was no shared cultural identity during that period and certainly no awareness of it among its population. The common folk for most of the middle ages would have most likely only been aware of their local ruler or clergy with a faint awareness of the overarching power structures but migration through trade not withstanding separations were often as strong between neighboring villages as between modern countries.

The closest thing we get to an idea of a "German national identity" is following the conquest by Napoleon and the rise of an aristocratic/mercantile republic monarchy which provided the democratic roots for the modern republic - but even in WW1 "German" culture was heavily defined by Prussia (which covered most of German territory). Historically therefore it seems less like German nationalism was the politicalization of a shared ethnic, cultural and political identity but rather provided a framework to fabricate such an identity in its absence. Even if you ignore the absurdity of claiming a unified "German" cultural identity, the now popular notion of there being such a thing as a "German" ethnic identity flies in the face of there still being distinct native but "non-German" ethnic populations in parts of Germany despite centuries of Germanization and assimilation (notably Danish Germans in the North and Sorbs in the East).

Much like trying to draw the line where you "enter the atmosphere" of the Earth, borders are ultimately arbitrary delineations no matter how you define them and populations will move around, mix and change over time. The abstractions they help us create are likewise arbitrary and have more to do with assertions of power and control than any grander mythology used to justify them.

This is especially true when eveyone involved is young enough not to have a wide enough frame of reference to gauge what's an indication of actual confidence versus abuse and has a brain undergoing massive hormonal shifts that intensify emotions, encourage risk taking and make them seek out novelty. Let's remember that most of the "nice guy" stories people like to tell are about early adulthood or more often than not their late teens.

The image itself is a still image from a video posted on Alex Jones' YouTube channel covering a protest against Trump supporters. If you actually watch the part of the original video the image was taken from, you quickly realize the woman in question just has the misfortune of having very naturally emotive facial expressions and the still is taken from an argument between her and a Trump supporter about the alleged concern of immigrant sex abusers and that if you consider the fact they have to yell at each other to overcome the noisy environment she doesn't actually appear at all outraged or angry.

I don't explain this to dunk on the channel - it easily does that by itself. I explain this because the fact that the channel you cited a video from uses this meme in 2026 (10 years after it was first taken, i.e. enough time to learn about its origin and move on) is extremely symbolic of the approach you seem to favor for finding explanations to social phenomena. Yes, "it's just a meme", but that's the point: memes are shorthands that carry cultural context (or in this case entire fossil records of cultural history), they're not just funny pictures.

_That_ isn't "what we evolved to like". "Men" aren't "probably worse". Don't sell yourself short. You exist downstream from tens of thousands of years of human history and at least a hundred thousand years of prehistory. We had already developed tool-making and cooking before we even became _Homo sapiens_ so in all likelihood you can expand that prehistory into the millions of years of _Homo erectus_.

Science has moved on well past the mythology of barter economies or "hunter gatherer" societies where the cavewife tending towards the babies with her oldest daughters while cavehusband and the boys were out hunting the mammoth.

We know that the thing that allowed us to survive as a species was not just our big brain but our close-knit society that cared for its injured, elderly and disabled and was at times so welcoming we now know that early Homo sapiens at times even interbred with our closer extinct sibling species. In fact, our big brains had to come downstream from this because it made childbirth dangerous and arduous while also requiring us to spend the first years of our lives unable to defend ourselves and the first months in fact so reliant on others to help us survive that disruption of those early bonds can traumatize us for life or in extreme cases even cause us to die. Even as adults "touch starvation" has serious mental health implications.

If you think "what we evolved to like" is not "appropriate", chances are the problem isn't what we evolved to like - e.g. ripe fruits - but what systems the modern social order has put in place to make exploitation of those preferences useful for those in positions of power (or extreme wealth, but I repeat myself) even when doing so will harm you - e.g. abundant high fructose corn syrup in every part of your diet so you think food is tasty and crave more of it although it doesn't satiate you.

There's a difference between confidence and dominance. It's difficult to grasp given how much our culture tends to conflate them as desirable traits in men but the main distinction is that one is about resilience and the other is about abuse.

Confidence is attractive. Unless you're deeply insecure (and abusers often are insecure even if they try to mask it in displays of dominance) you're likely attracted to confidence in potential partners - yes, even as a straight guy. Just like an insecure person can use dominance to mask their insecurity, a confident person can also act submissively. This isn't just true in BDSM, it's actually a social dynamic many people engage in completely naturally.

An abuser (or I guess the pop-psych term is usually "narcissist" but let's not open the can of worms on whether that is ever applied "correctly") will often seek out a confident partner they can manipulate into a position of vulnerability they can take advantage of to control them.

The problem with power is that it is nearly inseparable from abuse. Abuse will inevitable arise from any power imbalance because the mere circumstance of being in a position of power can easily lead to absuses of power unless you're extremely diligent about your use of it. A healthy social dynamic always requires a balance of power - even if there may be a local imbalance in any one-on-one dynamic it can be offset by the wider network if it is stable and strong enough. If you look at powerful men in modern society almost none of them are actually confident. The few who are tend to paradoxically stand out for their humility and deference (i.e. taking credit for their losses and sharing credit for their accomplishments). But this is of course much more difficult than starting out from a position of power and fearfully lashing out at any potential rival.

Note that most "well-known" examples of "hybristophilia" are parasocial or only exist as distance relationships, especially when the subject of attraction is incarcerated. Being incarcerated literally limits the potential for abuse and especially violent abuse which further contributes to an illusion of safety and control which the abuser can take advantage of by engaging in psychological manipulation tactics like lovebombing.

You don't have to subscribe to pseudoscientific explanations like evopsych or some inherent trait in women making them naturally predisposed to seeking out people who harm them in order to figure out what can cause these phenomena. In fact, I find just-so "explanations" (like you seem to imply by pointing at a term like this as if it in itself holds explanatory power) extremely unsatisfying because they're little more than thought-terminating clichés.

It's also worth pointing out the term was coined by the guy who is best known for promoting chemical castration (which aside from having motivated Alan Turing to take his own life is still a contested issue in the scientific community due to studies showing serious side-effects and the efficacy being questionable as it may heavily suffer from selection bias) and the one time he forced sexual reassignment surgery on a male infant (David Reimer) after a botched circumcision. Reimer later "detransitioned" upon learning of what had been done to him. Incidentally Reimer also accused him of having forced him - when Reimer was a child - to engage in pretend sexual activity with his brother and to watch pornography. Oh, and the guy also considered relationships between children and full adults morally defensible in principle, while also dismissing critics as "right-wing" despite much of the criticism coming from intersex and transgender people.

I was surprised when I saw that Cursor added a feature to set the number of agents for a given prompt. I figured it might be a performance thing - fan out complex tasks across multiple agents that can work on the problem in parallel and get a combined solution. I was extremely disappointed when I realized it's just "repeat the same prompt to N separate agents, let each one take a shot and then pick a winner". Especially when some tasks can run for several minutes, rapidly burning through millions of tokens per agent.

At that point it's just rolling dice. If an agent goes so far off-script that its result is trash, I would expect that to mean I need to rework the instructions and context I gave it, not that I should try the same thing again and hope that entropy fixes it. But editing your prompt offline doesn't burn tokens, so it's not what makes them money.

It seems that that problem hasn't really been "fixed", it's just been paved over. But I guess that's the ugly truth most people tend to forget/deny about LLMs: you can't "fix" them because there's not a line of code you can point to that causes a "bug", you can only retrain them and hope the problem goes away. In LLMs, every bug is a "heisenbug" (or should that be "murphybug", as in Murphy's Law?).

I once had an agent come up with what seemed like a pointlessly convoluted solution as it tried to fit its initial approach (likely sourced from framework documentation overemphasizing the importance of doing it "the way" when possible) to a problem for which it to me didn't really seem like a good fit. It kept reassuring me that this was the way to go and my concerns were invalid.

When I described the solution and the original problem to another agent running the same model, it would instantly dismiss it and point out the same concerns I had raised - and it would insist on those being deal breakers the same way the other agent had dimissed them as invalid.

In the past I've often found LLMs to be extremely opinionated while also flipping their positions on a dime once met with any doubt or resistance. It feels like I'm now seeing the opposite: the LLM just running with whatever it picked up first from the initial prompt and then being extremely stubborn and insisting on rationalizing its choice no matter how much time it wastes trying to make it work. It's sometimes better to start a conversation over than to try and steer it in the right direction at that point.

The answer is "Yes".

On a completely unrelated note, many autistic people express compassion by sharing similar experiences to communicate "I understand how you feel because I can relate to your experience".

I guess the author is a good example for why this tends to upset people (and especially allistic/non-autistic people).

On an also completely unrelated note, the example phrases/questions the author gives at the end read like having a conversation with ELIZA.