screye (u/screye) - Readit News

screye commented on MIT professor shot at his Massachusetts home dies bbc.com/news/articles/cly... · Posted by u/mosura

Other possibility; a disgruntled investor who poured millions into dead-end fusion research and now wishes they had invested in AI research instead? Blames the professor for persuading them to invest in fusion.

It's a tough one to find a motive for...

screye · a day ago

Can you quote 1 other example of a disgruntled investor that has killed an American academic over the last 50 years ?

screye commented on MIT professor shot at his Massachusetts home dies bbc.com/news/articles/cly... · Posted by u/mosura

JuniperMesos · 2 days ago

My prediction is that it was a random home invasion robbery committed by someone with multiple previous felonies who had no idea that the person living in the house they were trying to rob was a MIT professor.

But I have no more information than anyone else does, I'm making a low-confidence educated guess, and at some point in the near future it's very likely that the professionals whose job it is to investigate serious crimes will have a better idea of what actually happened than anyone posting in this thread.

screye · 2 days ago

Unlikely. He was killed in the foyer [1] of his building in an exceedingly safe city (Brookline, MA).

In a neighborhood with mixed SFHs and condos, it makes little sense to target a condo. Makes even less sense for someone to break in, but to shoot the victim outside, in the foyer.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmbmBNre5SQ

screye commented on The World Happiness Report is beset with methodological problems yaschamounk.substack.com/... · Posted by u/thatoneengineer

screye · 2 days ago

There are no material conditions that would convince me to live in a cold, dark and culturally introverted place. Anecdotally, my tropical peers agree with this opinion. Seasonal affective disorder plays an outsized role in my ability to like a place. On the flip side, I've heard many people describe living in warm & humid weather as torture.

My point is, aggregating factors for happiness to find the best country is like aggregating people's favorite colors to find the best color. Each individual's needs and circumstances are unique, and what will make them happy will vary widely as those needs and circumstances vary.

Some interesting (suspect?) findings from the quoted 2023 paper: (2008 - 2017 data)

* Somaliland had the 4th least worries

* Russians were the 7th least angry

* Chinese were the 8th best rested

* Icelanders did great on every metric, but felt very tired (rank 190)

* Venezuelans smiled the 12th most (Panama, Paraguay, Costa Rica did even better)

* Laotians smile the 3rd most, but are also among the angriest (202) !!?

screye commented on A new AI winter is coming? taranis.ie/llms-are-a-fai... · Posted by u/voxleone

screye · 17 days ago

> This means that they should never be used in medicine, for evaluation in school or college, for law enforcement, for tax assessment, or a myriad of other similar cases.

If AI models can deliver measurably better accuracy than doctors, clearer evaluations than professors and fairer prosecutions than courts, then it should be adopted. Waymo has already shown a measurable decrease in loss of life by eliminating humans from driving.

I believe, technically, moderns LLMs are sufficiently advanced to meaningfully disrupt the aforementioned professions as Waymo has done for taxis. Waymo's success relies on 2 non-llm factors that we've yet to see for other professions. First is exhaustive collection and labelling of in-domain high quality data. Second is the destruction of the pro-human regulatory lobby (thanks to work done by Uber in the Zirp era that came before).

To me, an AI winter isn't a concern, because AI is not the bottleneck. It is regulatory opposition and sourcing human experts who will train their own replacements. Both are significantly harder to get around for high-status white collar work. The great-AI-replacement may still fail, but it won't be because of the limitations of LLMs.

> My advice: unwind as much exposure as possible you might have to a forthcoming AI bubble crash.

Hedging when you have much at stake is always a good idea. Bubble or no bubble.

screye commented on Crews claim Boring Company failed to pay workers and snubbed OSHA concerns nashvillebanner.com/2025/... · Posted by u/breve

alexose · 22 days ago

The original stated goal was to 10x the speed of existing tunnel boring machines by bringing up the cutting head RPMs, automating liner installation, and speeding up spoil removal with electric sleds. Which would seem like a good bet, except that there are a million other bottlenecks to the process. On top of that, it doesn't seem like they even solved their core problems.

It would be cool if they'd post a postmortem or something, but I get the impression that reporting bad news is a good way to get fired in an Elon-run organization.

screye · 22 days ago

Much like the Hyperloop before it, the core assumption of the Boring company is ill-conceived. Tunnel boring isn't a bottleneck.

The costs of surveys, hvac, seismic research and maintenance required to keep a deep-underground tunnel going are much higher than cut-and-cover. So, even if tunnel boring was free, it still wouldn't make sense to prefer it over other options. There are very scenarios where deep-tunneling makes sense (dense cities, across rivers when bridges are infeasible), but they're the minority.

In most transit projects, cut-and-over is blocked not because it's a bad technical option. It's because NIMBYs refuse to permit on-the-ground disruptions or noise of any type. San Jose is the canonical example. It's a political problem, not a technical one.

screye commented on Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world axios.com/2025/11/24/jaka... · Posted by u/skx001

aruggirello · 23 days ago

It seems things are improving for Christians in Indonesia in 2025 - or is the data missing?

https://www.opendoors.org/en-US/persecution/countries/

screye · 22 days ago

I would treat these rankings with suspicion.

I checked them for a few nations where I had solid on-the-ground knowledge, and the ranks and full-profile descriptions are straight up false. Usually propaganda involves lying by omission or hyperbole. In this case, it is just wrong.

screye commented on Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world axios.com/2025/11/24/jaka... · Posted by u/skx001

Froztnova · 23 days ago

Mostly just that it's easy for an American (or at least, myself circa several years ago) to assume that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Muslims live in middle eastern countries, and when I first learned that Indonesia was the world's largest Muslim majority country it proved that mental heuristic to be entirely inaccurate.

I suppose it shouldn't be too surprising though, I mean Christianity sure as hell got around too.

screye · 22 days ago

There no middle-eastern countries among the top 5 muslim countries by population.

It goes: Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh & Nigeria, in that order.

screye commented on Claude Opus 4.5 anthropic.com/news/claude... · Posted by u/adocomplete

827a · 24 days ago

I've played around with Gemini 3 Pro in Cursor, and honestly: I find it to be significantly worse than Sonnet 4.5. I've also had some problems that only Claude Code has been able to really solve; Sonnet 4.5 in there consistently performs better than Sonnet 4.5 anywhere else.

I think Anthropic is making the right decisions with their models. Given that software engineering is probably one of the very few domains of AI usage that is driving real, serious revenue: I have far better feelings about Anthropic going into 2026 than any other foundation model. Excited to put Opus 4.5 through its paces.

screye · 24 days ago

Gemini being terrible in Cursor is a well known problem.

Unfortunately, for all its engineers, Google seems the most incompetent at product work.

screye commented on What happens when even college students can't do math anymore? theatlantic.com/ideas/202... · Posted by u/fortran77

Aurornis · a month ago

The war on admissions testing is one of the worst education trends. I couldn’t believe it when it was first proposed, but I was even more shocked when the trend started to spread.

It does appear to be reversing a little bit in some places as schools realize they were fooled by people pushing ideology over data and results, but it’s going to take a while.

For those who aren’t in the loop: There’s an ideological push to eliminate testing, aptitude tests, and even to eliminate different educational tracks (accelerated learning programs, AP classes, advanced math tracts) in the name of pursuing equality for everyone. The idea of testing people for aptitude or allowing some students to go into more advanced classes than others is not allowed by some ideologically-driven people who think all students must be given strictly equal education at every grade level.

screye · a month ago

It goes deeper. The problem lies at the source.

> people pushing ideology

University Education programs and as a result teaching bodies have been taken over by ideology.

I believe it is in part because all the teaching low hanging fruit has been established for centuries. So the only 'novel' things the programs can do is talk about discrimination, disparate outcomes and hand-wavey ideas about improving education. The departments have some of the lowest bars for academic professorship and as a result, the quality of research is similarly bad -> terrible.

The war on phonics is the canonical example.

The fault doesn't lie with 'people'. The above mentioned institutions are squarely at fault for making education ideological, and they should explicitly be blamed for the deterioration in student performance.

screye commented on Europeans recognize Zohran Mamdani's policies as 'normal' theguardian.com/us-news/2... · Posted by u/mykowebhn

clydethefrog · a month ago

>Abundance

Economic historian Trevor Jackson engaged with Abundance (together with eco-radical book Overshoot) in the September issue of the American left-ish publication NYRB, if you're curious about an earnest essay [0].

Since it's behind a paywall and the Overshoot book also gets reviewed, I picked out the most substantive quotes to highlight the actual critique:

> The evidentiary core of each chapter consists of a summary of the academic work of a few experts, usually economists, with frequent and lengthy quotations, as well as the occasional interview, whose conclusions are repeated uncritically. (To take one example, they quote without scrutiny the claim of Zoom CEO Eric Yuan that he is requiring employees to work in person in order to foster trust, rather than to impose discipline or to recoup the costs of commercial real estate.) They give no sense of the unruly literatures on their subjects, the ranges of disagreement, the difficult problems and mutually exclusive solutions. They claim to set an agenda for a new liberal political order, but what they have done is read some economists and argue, again, for deregulation.

> Klein and Thompson are opposed to redistribution, which they refer to as “parceling out the present” and which they claim is “not enough,” and instead of imagining “social insurance programs,” they propose that we make “technological advances.” [...] Klein and Thompson do not seem to realize that their proposals would also entail large-scale redistribution and that the ills they seek to cure are the result of inequality rather than regulation, because they do not seem to understand how prices and property work in capitalism. Translating higher profits to shorter workweeks would require a scale of redistribution that far outstrips anything Bernie Sanders has proposed. Claiming that profits will be shared because they are based on “the collective knowledge of humanity” opens up a wider set of imperatives than they realize. Most profit, labor, and technology is in some way built on the collective knowledge of humanity, in the sense that education, work, and knowledge are shared, social, and cumulative, and all workers are the result of collective social reproduction.

> They devote no serious thought to the basic political problem that homeowners are a large and powerful constituency, especially at the local level, who are likely to oppose (or already do oppose) the reforms Klein and Thompson suggest because driving down the cost of housing will drive down the value of homes. That constituency has produced undeniably regressive politics—which is a political fact to be reckoned with. So must the fact that homeowners organize to protect their asset prices because decades of American policy have used mortgages to substitute for the welfare state and wage growth. Any plausible agenda to drive down the cost of housing is going to require things like social housing, rent controls, and some mechanism to keep Blackstone and other private equity giants from buying up all the new housing and holding it empty until prices rise. Housing abundance calls for redistribution, in other words, as well as an aggressive state willing to confront property owners ranging from homeowner coalitions to asset managers.

> Klein and Thompson likewise seem unaware that technologies are owned by people. Despite an entire chapter on the problems of scaling technologies to mass consumption, they do not pause to consider that the self-driving cars, the lab-grown meat, and the solar electricity of their imagined future will be property, whose owners will have an interest in higher profits, higher rents, and higher prices. Klein and Thompson’s agenda is predicated on avoiding distributional conflicts by increasing supply so as to lower prices, yet they do not address the problem that lower prices are good for buyers but bad for sellers, and therefore are themselves a kind of distributional conflict, though one mediated through markets instead of politics. Their faith in markets is axiomatic. In passing, they describe “modern liberal politics” as an effort to “make universal” a set of “products and services.” Not justice, equality, dignity, or freedom, but products and services. This is the vision of the future that has attracted millions of dollars to remake the Democratic Party.

> Klein and Thompson do not cite but bring to mind John Maynard Keynes’s 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” which also imagined a future of abundance and shorter workweeks. Keynes predicted future GDP almost perfectly, but he thought economic growth would be widely shared, and his future included a solution to technological unemployment as well as the end of the accumulation of wealth as a source of social importance. Klein and Thompson do not consider why this future was superseded, and now, ninety-five years later, they set out to imagine it again, believing the past is a long trajectory of technological progress temporarily held back by regulation and social protections enacted by procedural liberals. For them, the relation of the past to the future is part of a story of overcoming, not a tragedy of lost possibilities. They are right that much of the blame for our current predicaments can be traced to the forms of liberal governance since the 1970s, but they are mistaken to blame, more specifically, its predilection for environmental regulation and building codes. Rather, it is the way liberal politicians have either acquiesced to or actively encouraged the rise of an unaccountable tech and finance oligarchy that now threatens the continued existence of democracy itself and that claims a monopoly on the capacity to imagine and create the future.

[0] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2025/09/25/how-to-blow-up-a...

screye · a month ago

Thanks for the link. I'll give it a read.