Your Review: The Russo-Ukrainian War - Astral Codex Ten:
One day as I was being lectured by a female HR representative for leaving my (cloth, non-medical) mask off for too long during lunch, I could barely hear what she was saying. All I could think of were the uncounted men across untold generations who had lived and died as warriors, with all the honor and pain that entailed. I thought of how men in Ukraine right now lived a modern version of that, while I allowed myself to be subject to the feminized safteyist ideology of everyday civilization.
The spiritual offensiveness of this contrast hit me like a ton of bricks, more vividly than ever. At that moment I silently made my final decision. I wasn’t going to wait around to hear back from the Ukrainian Government. It was time, in the immortal words of an ISIS recruiter on Twitter to “put down the chicken wings n come to jihad, bro”.
The entire non-book review contest at Astral Codex Ten has been fantastic.
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Like most people, I’ve noticed that time seems to speed up as one gets older. I moved to California in 2017, and the past 8 years seemed to pass by very quickly. I feel like time is moving twice as fast as when I was 35. Even as a 16-year old high school student I had already noticed that those “long summer vacations” seemed to pass by at twice the speed as when I was only 8 years old.
In mathematical terms, subjective time seems roughly proportional to the inverse of one’s age. (At least since age 3 or 4, before that I recall nothing.) At age N, each lived year represents 1/nth of our life. If this is true, then this has some fairly startling implications.
21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties:
Let me repeat that: Parties are a public service, you’re doing people a favor by throwing them. Someone might meet their new best friend or future lover at your gathering. In the short term, lovely people may feel less lonely, and that's thanks to you. In the long term, whole new children may ultimately exist in the world because you bothered to throw a party. Throwing parties is stressful for most people, but a great kindness to the community, so genuinely pat yourself on the back for doing this.
Not so much facts, as very good opinions, but still.
New data on social media (MR):
It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out for the FT by the digital audience insights company GWI. And this is not just the unwinding of a bump in screen time during pandemic lockdowns — usage has traced a smooth curve up and down over the past decade-plus.
Societies, generations tend to develop immunity from toxic trends over time.
Do LLMs favor outputs created by themselves? (MR)
It has gone largely unnoticed that time spent on social media peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, according to an analysis of the online habits of 250,000 adults in more than 50 countries carried out for the FT by the digital audience insights company GWI. And this is not just the unwinding of a bump in screen time during pandemic lockdowns — usage has traced a smooth curve up and down over the past decade-plus.
Is it surprising that a system trained on human output is tribal, favoring in-group over out-group?
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Please expect a very high rate of change from us; it reminds me of the early days of ChatGPT. We will make some good decisions and some missteps, but we will take feedback and try to fix the missteps very quickly. We plan to do our iteration on different approaches in Sora, but then apply it consistently across our products.