I just learned the OECD had a conference around the release of the latest round of PISA scores.
Everyone was giving presentations, talking about reforms and whatnot, and then someone showed my graphs showing America performs well when split by race.
They paused the conference.
It is truly insane that identity politics it ruining juries.
If you want to reliably bring justice down on a woman? Jury of men. Want to reliably bring justice to a Black person? Jury of Whites.
This system is becoming so broken we might have to replace it like Singapore did.
30% of people in their late 20s are on TEMPORARY visas.
Maybe our young people are feeling disconnected and disenfranchised because their peers literally have no connection to the country?
Thanks to @inflectionptswk
we are living through times where everything is becoming fake and gay and you need to understand that this is on purpose
Nolan’s odyssey, the boys finale, the new Ferrari, clavicular.
all symptoms of a fake and gay society
> Born 1978 in Perth Australia
> Joined the army at 18
> Passed SAS selection (90% fail)
> Gave up his rank to start again as a trooper
> Six tours of Afghanistan
> June 2010 his Helicopter gets ambushed
> Roberts-Smith got up
> Sprinted 40 metres across open ground toward the guns
> Destroyed three machine gun positions
> Cleared the village
> The Taliban retreated from the entire district
> Awarded the Victoria Cross (Australia's highest military honour)
> Went back to Afghanistan in 2012
> Led over 50 high-risk operations as patrol commander
> Left the army as the most decorated living soldier in the country
> Named Australian Father of the Year
> Started an MBA. Moved into corporate life
> Face of the Australian War Memorial
> National hero
Free Ben Roberts-Smith!
Three days ago I left autoresearch tuning nanochat for ~2 days on depth=12 model. It found ~20 changes that improved the validation loss. I tested these changes yesterday and all of them were additive and transferred to larger (depth=24) models. Stacking up all of these changes, today I measured that the leaderboard's "Time to GPT-2" drops from 2.02 hours to 1.80 hours (~11% improvement), this will be the new leaderboard entry. So yes, these are real improvements and they make an actual difference. I am mildly surprised that my very first naive attempt already worked this well on top of what I thought was already a fairly manually well-tuned project.
This is a first for me because I am very used to doing the iterative optimization of neural network training manually. You come up with ideas, you implement them, you check if they work (better validation loss), you come up with new ideas based on that, you read some papers for inspiration, etc etc. This is the bread and butter of what I do daily for 2 decades. Seeing the agent do this entire workflow end-to-end and all by itself as it worked through approx. 700 changes autonomously is wild. It really looked at the sequence of results of experiments and used that to plan the next ones. It's not novel, ground-breaking "research" (yet), but all the adjustments are "real", I didn't find them manually previously, and they stack up and actually improved nanochat. Among the bigger things e.g.:
- It noticed an oversight that my parameterless QKnorm didn't have a scaler multiplier attached, so my attention was too diffuse. The agent found multipliers to sharpen it, pointing to future work.
- It found that the Value Embeddings really like regularization and I wasn't applying any (oops).
- It found that my banded attention was too conservative (i forgot to tune it).
- It found that AdamW betas were all messed up.
- It tuned the weight decay schedule.
- It tuned the network initialization.
This is on top of all the tuning I've already done over a good amount of time. The exact commit is here, from this "round 1" of autoresearch. I am going to kick off "round 2", and in parallel I am looking at how multiple agents can collaborate to unlock parallelism.
https://t.co/WAz8aIztKT
All LLM frontier labs will do this. It's the final boss battle. It's a lot more complex at scale of course - you don't just have a single train. py file to tune. But doing it is "just engineering" and it's going to work. You spin up a swarm of agents, you have them collaborate to tune smaller models, you promote the most promising ideas to increasingly larger scales, and humans (optionally) contribute on the edges.
And more generally, *any* metric you care about that is reasonably efficient to evaluate (or that has more efficient proxy metrics such as training a smaller network) can be autoresearched by an agent swarm. It's worth thinking about whether your problem falls into this bucket too.
I’ve spent $100K on “natural clothes” only to realize that they don’t really exist
- Merino wool is all superwashed (coated with plastic fibers)
- Dyes are all toxic (unless it says “plant dyed”)
- The clothing “certifications” are scams (sellers pay once, no regular checks)
- The thread used to stitch “natural clothing” is almost always polyester (or at best non-organic cotton)
- ALL zippers have polyester (ie pants, jacket, etc) - so you have to use buttons instead
- Oh and the buttons are coated with resin, binders or lacquer
- Clothing label/tags are toxic
- Barefoot/wide shoes all have polyester (they name it something cool like “thermocool”) or are extremely uncomfortable/hard to wear (ie hard leather)
- Underwear always has an “elastic” (elastane)
- “Bamboo fabric” is basically polyester (same for modal, lyocell)
- Cotton not only needs to be organic, but without bleaching & formaldehyde resins
- Leather needs to be undyed or vegetable tanned, without anti fungal sprays, or finishes
- Tailors take 4 months to make you something & unless you’re an expert they will put plastic pieces somewhere
- Even the top tier brands (Loro Piana, Gucci, etc) add polyester in a lot of places & don’t care at all
Yes - Over time you can meaningfully remove like 99% of polyester, but your search for clothes will become like
“undyed elastic free 100% organic cotton socks”
and your entire color choice will be gray, brown, light yellow and light pink (UNDYED)
And most natural clothes… tend to break easily. So it will cost you more.
The demand for natural clothes is HUGE - but too many people are easily tricked by sellers hiding the full composition of the clothes.
“100% cotton” sadly sounds good enough for most people.
We need a good brand that actually REFUSES to use artificial dyes and polyester ANYWHERE (even in zippers) and becomes a place to buy people can TRUST.
(Don’t trust any brand here on X, they’re part of the same problem)
insane article
this is documented, systematic racism against an entire generation of white men, written down
said out loud in hiring meetings. "we can't hire the best person", "we need diverse, not white guys" for a fucking decade
what's insane is that it helped no one.
not the institutions (they're collapsing)
not the "beneficiaries" (everyone now knows they got the job while being less competent and they are resented)
not society (trust is gone, competence collapsed, everything got worse)
everyone knew, the people implementing it knew and they did it anyway
and now they're scrubbing the PDFs, pretending it never happened, calling it "benign HR modules"
you destroyed thousands of careers, hollowed out every institution you touched, and made the country measurably worse for nothing. for literally nothing
a decade of moral posturing that everyone involved knew was a lie
there is no forgiveness for this. there shouldn't be
Women entering the workforce has completely destroyed quality of life for Americans
1. Two incomes became the new one income.
Once everyone had to work, employers and banks raised prices. Houses doubled. Families didn’t get ahead. They just ran harder to stay in place.
2. Kids got raised by institutions instead of parents.
Daycare replaces bonding. Schools replace values. Screens replace discipline. Then everyone wonders why kids are anxious and disconnected.
3. Communities disappeared.
If both parents work all day, nobody is home. No neighborhood stability. No local support. Just isolated families worn out from the grind.
4. Stress shot through the roof.
Two commutes, two schedules, no downtime, constant rushing. Marriages crack under nonstop exhaustion.
5. Divorce became the easy option.
Two incomes make it simple to leave instead of fix problems. The family foundation got weaker.
6. Birthrates collapsed.
If both parents are working 50 hours a week, having more than one or two kids is almost impossible. Entire generations are shrinking.
7. Government filled the void.
When no one is home, institutions step in. Schools. Daycare. After school programs. Healthcare systems. Government support. Weak homes create more state dependence.
8. Men lost purpose.
A man’s historical role to build, protect, and provide got diluted. Many men checked out. Society suffers when men have nothing to fight for.
9. Women were sold a false dream.
They were told a career and a boss would make them happier than raising their children or building a family. Now we have record levels of burnout, depression, and regret.
10. Families turned into roommates.
Everyone works. Everyone is tired. No one has energy for each other. The home stopped being a team and became a collection of exhausted individuals.
☢️ NEW: The Nuclear Regulatory Taskforce has submitted a radical plan to fix nuclear policy in Britain. It could save taxpayers billions and cut UK build costs from the world’s highest to cheaper than France and Finland.
It contains example after example of how disproportionate regulation has made it more expensive to build new nuclear plants.
- £700m was spent on fish protection at Hinkley Point C to save a tiny number of fish at a cost of £280,000 per fish
- £60m was spent building a pipe to pump groundwater 500m offshore because naturally-occuring metals in the water breached Environment Agency rules.
- GE-Hitachi had to fight the Office for Nuclear Regulation to avoid being forced to radically change the design of their reactor (despite it operating safely abroad) because it wasn’t like the last plant built in the UK.
- One British vendor waited 241 days to get a license to export something to Norway.
- Sizewell C’s Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) was 44,000 pages long. In the 1980s, four-fifths of EIAs were less than 100 pages long.
It recommends big changes:
- Nuclear plant builders could pay £1m per acre to fund nature recovery and avoid the requirement to build expensive nature mitigations like ‘fish discos’
- Major reform of As Low as Reasonably Practicable (ALARP), the key Health and Safety principle that has led to over-regulation of nuclear, including abolition of the concept of ‘gross disproportion’.
- Re-assessing the levels of radiation exposure regulators target to bring them in line with other risks.
- Raising the Aarhus Cost Caps, which allow NIMBYs to delay nuclear projects with JR and special measures to tackle the rise of ‘crowdfunded lawsuits’.
- Fixing planning so fleets of SMRs do not have to constantly re-assess settled matters.
- Changing outdated siting rules so nuclear plants can be built in more places like ex-coal plants.
- Reverse legal judgements like the Finch ruling for low-carbon tech to avoid pointless bureaucracy and legal risk.
- A new nuclear commission that sets above regulators and resolves disputes so disagreements can’t delay projects.
This is the best Government-commissioned report I’ve ever read.
The Chancellor will respond to it on Wednesday. She should implement it in full. And she should keep the team together and tell them to figure out what the hell went wrong with HS2 next.
In loving memory of Charlie Kirk, a fearless patriot & man of unwavering faith who dedicated his life to America.
"It's bigger than you, I want you to remember that... It's bigger than me - you are here to make somebody else's life better, the pursuit of liberty & freedom."❤️
Imagine a game of baseball.
The players are in uniforms. They're all trained and skilled. The field is mowed, the bases are clean and white. The other team shows up, the game is played, the rules are followed, the calls are made. The game ends with a winner, end everyone goes home.
Now imagine a new team appears. They have no uniforms. They have no stadium. They don't show up on time. They don't stand at the plate and wait for the pitch. The home team is preparing to start the game, and one member of the other team rushes the pitcher with a bat and beats him to death.
"You can't do that!" the home team says. "You're just a sore loser!" the visiting team replies. They pick up the bases and carry them off the field.
The home team says "you can't do that!" and blows whistles and calls for the referee to do something, but they bat the referee to death too.
"We won!" the visitors say, and they write it up in their score books.
"We'll just play a better game next time," says what remains of the home team.
Another team challenges the home team, and again the home team lines up their new pitcher, their new referee, their new bases... and again the visiting "team" attacks them, kills a few, and steals everything they can carry.
At what point do you admit that you're not playing baseball anymore? At what point do you admit that these new teams can't or won't play by the rules and should not be in the stadium?
Maybe you think to yourself "I would never let that happen." Really? What if you tried to stop it and the audience called you names? "Racist! Bigot! They have their own rules! Respect all team cultures!" What if you interrupted an attack on a teammate, and the referee removed you from the game? After all, you broke THEIR rules. And all rules are valid. Except yours.
How long do you go along with that before you have no choice but to beat them at their own game? How long do you stick to your "principles" and keep playing the game of baseball, when that's clearly no longer what it is?
How have the rules of the game you're playing changed? Are you still playing by the old rules? When will you let go?
Now we've got another one of these charts.
Evidently the U.K. won't be shoring up their fiscal situation with migrants if they keep allowing in low-skilled ones.
Those cost some £200,000 each by retirement!
Also known as "self-interested" cultures, or "shithole countries."
When I did life coaching, I coached a few people from these cultures and it was very jarring to hear them not understand AT ALL that "you have to get the girl to like you."
They would ask me, like, "what clothes do I wear and how do I change my profile to get laid more?" and I would say "what are you talking about on the date?" and they'd go "what does it matter?"
One guy, I had to explain it to him like this. I asked him a few questions about himself and he answered. And then I said "do you see how you feel like you know me more and more, like we're closer?" and he goes "yeah." And I go "you have to do that with the girls."
And he breathed in deep and went "eeeuuuugghhhh."
To him, the idea of "do action to get laid" was real but "the girl is a person who has to like you" was not.
A friend of mine also dated a guy from one of these cultures, and he did something immoral, and she said "why did you do that?" and he said "it's OK, no one caught me" and she said "but if everyone did that, what would things be like?" and the guy seriously had to say "you mean people just DON'T try to get away with things here?" and she said yes, and he looked off into the distance like it was a deep revelation. He had just never heard of "don't cheat people" before.
A lot of Westerners don't really understand that MOST of the world is like this, and they DO NOT want to change.