I’ve spent enough time in Turkey over the last several years that I don’t think everything I’ve observed can be dismissed as isolated bad encounters. There are serious structural problems: uneven education, patronage and clientelism, corruption, economic instability, and institutions that often seem to reward connections more reliably than competence or individual initiative. These problems reinforce one another until mediocrity starts becoming normalized.
Then there is the everyday culture I’ve repeatedly encountered: the erkek/kek archetype, endless cigarettes and tea, people spending enormous amounts of time sitting around talking about nothing and complaining, gossiping, terrible customer service coupled with strangely inflated egos, and surprisingly little interest in acquiring skills that would obviously improve someone’s prospects. English is the simplest example. In a country so dependent on tourism and international commerce, I’m continually amazed by young people in customer-facing jobs who cannot communicate even basic English and sometimes seem completely unbothered by that limitation. And I don’t think “Muslim culture” adequately explains it. Compare the service culture and standards of Qatar or the UAE with Turkey, or Qatar Airways and Emirates with Turkish Airlines. These are all societies shaped substantially by Islam, yet they can produce dramatically different institutional and commercial cultures. Obviously none of this describes every Turk, but after years of seeing the same patterns, it’s difficult to explain everything as individual incompetence.
And the further I zoom out, the more provocative my conclusion becomes. Sometimes Turkey feels like a society more comfortable with hierarchy than individual responsibility, almost as though people are waiting either for a king to impose order or for someone else to tell them what to do. I don’t think Turks are inherently destined to serve, nor that authoritarianism is therefore desirable. The more interesting possibility is that weak institutions, economic insecurity, patronage and low trust have taught people that individual agency simply doesn’t pay.
That creates a paradox: weak institutions increase the appeal of strong rulers, while dependence on strong rulers can prevent independent institutions and individual initiative from developing. Eventually hierarchy begins to feel more natural than agency. What looks from the outside like laziness or submissiveness may therefore be partly an adaptation to an environment that has repeatedly failed to reward initiative.
@temmuz1919 Senin ben 80IQ algi calismalarini sikim dumuzi. Seni memur yapip, icerden 1-2 bilgiyi kamuya ulasmadan önce sana veren abilerini sikim. Cikarci satilik picler. Apo abinizin elini ayagini iyi öpünde tadi damagnizda kalsin
@temmuz1919 Senin ben 80IQ algi calismalarini sikim dumuzi. Seni memur yapip, icerden 1-2 bilgiyi kamuya ulasmadan önce sana veren abilerini sikim. Cikarci satilik picler. Apo abinizin elini ayagini iyi öpünde tadi damagnizda kalsin
🔴 Kaşif Kozinoğlu soruşturmasında yeni bir detay ortaya çıktı.
Cezaevinde rahatsızlanan Kozinoğlu’na Hasan Atilla Uğur’un bir hap verdiği, Kozinoğlu’nun da bu ilacı kullandığı belirlendi.
I think the plan is to get researchers to start using their AI with a limited compute budget, then once they have all the academic data, they’ll basically steal all their ideas from underneath them and run the research internally with their unlimited compute budget!
drama summary for those confused:
- Aug 15th: Tristan Buckmaster & Levent Alpöge make progress on a few important math problems
- they do NOT have a proof for the $1,000,000 Millenium Prize problem. BUT, they do claim to have a proof for a similar (non-Millenium) Navier Stokes problem that could help lead the way there
- Levent works at Anthropic, but this research was independent of his work there, with a mix of GPT and Claude models. Tristan is not related to Anthropic.
- Early Sep: Rumor spreads to OpenAI that Anthropic has solved a major problem. Tristan emails OpenAI to clarify. without revealing the problem they solved or how they did it.
- After hearing of the rumor, OpenAI started researching Navier Stokes with a new internal model.
- Sep 6th: OpenAI's Sebastien Bubeck tells Tristan that they solved the $1,000,000 Millenium Prize Navier Stokes problem. The approach is very similar to Tristan & Levent's approach to the non-Millenium problem.
- Tristan is suspicious of the timing, as only few others were trying this approach. OpenAI says the model didn't access his user data directly, but leaves unanswered whether Tristan's chat conversations were part of the training.
- OpenAI says they would partially credit Tristan for the $1,000,000 discovery (even though Tristan did not solve the $1,000,000 problem) — but only if they remove Levent as an author, as he works for Anthropic.
- Sep 8th: Tristan refuses to remove Levent, and rushes to publish their results independently.
Currently unclear is whether Anthropic had a separate solution for the $1,000,000 problem, or whether the rumor was about Tristan & Levent's independent research.