Author name: Paul Patrick

since-elon-musk’s-twitter-purchase,-firm-reportedly-lost-72%-of-its-value

Since Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase, firm reportedly lost 72% of its value

Going down, down, down… —

Fidelity cuts value of X stake, implying 72% drop since Musk paid $44 billion.

A businessman places his hand on his head as he looks up and is perplexed by a chart indicating a drop in value.

Getty Images | DNY59

Fidelity’s latest valuation of its stake in X implies that Elon Musk’s social network is worth about 71.5 percent less than when Musk bought the company in October 2022.

Fidelity’s Blue Chip Growth Fund has a relatively small stake in X. A monthly update for the fund listed the value of its “X Holdings Corp.” stake at $5.6 million as of November 30, 2023. The fund’s share of X was originally worth $19.7 million but lost about two-thirds of its value by April 2023 and has dropped more modestly since then.

Fidelity cut its valuation of X by 10.7 percent in November, according to Axios. One question is whether Fidelity sold any of its stake during November, but the latest drop in value isn’t surprising given the recent Musk-related controversies that drove advertisers away from the platform.

“As of Oct. 30 the fund hadn’t sold any of its stake, but the monthly report with the updated valuation doesn’t disclose whether the size of the holding changed,” Bloomberg wrote. “Assuming the fund hasn’t reduced its holding in X, the latest report implies the value of the entire company has also fallen by 72 percent. Fidelity declined to comment.”

X’s ad woes hurt value

Based on the $44 billion that Musk paid for Twitter over a year ago, the drop in Fidelity’s valuation would make the company worth about $12.5 billion. X reportedly valued itself at about $19 billion in October, based on the value of stock grants to employees.

Since Musk took Twitter private, the company’s value and revenue are harder to determine from the outside. As Axios noted, “Fidelity doesn’t necessarily have much, if any, inside information on X’s financial performance, despite being a shareholder in the privately held business. Other shareholders may value their X stock differently.”

X’s finances were shaky enough at the end of October, the one-year anniversary of Musk’s purchase. Musk made things worse in mid-November when he posted a favorable response to an antisemitic tweet. He addressed the antisemitism controversy in a public interview on November 29, telling businesses that pulled advertising from X to “go fuck yourself.”

X has had trouble retaining advertisers throughout Musk’s tenure, due largely to his approach to content moderation. Musk eliminated most of the company’s staff shortly after becoming its owner.

X loses bid to block California law

X is dealing with new regulations on content moderation, both in Europe and the US. Musk’s company sued California in September in an attempt to block the state’s content-moderation law but last week lost a key ruling in the court case.

On Thursday, US District Judge William Shubb denied X’s motion for a preliminary injunction that would have blocked enforcement of the California content-moderation law. The state law requires companies to file two reports each year with terms of service and detailed descriptions of content-moderation practices.

Shubb rejected X’s claim that the law violates the First Amendment. “While the reporting requirement does appear to place a substantial compliance burden on social medial companies, it does not appear that the requirement is unjustified or unduly burdensome within the context of First Amendment law,” Shubb wrote.

The judge agreed with California that there is “a substantial government interest in requiring social media companies to be transparent about their content moderation policies and practices so that consumers can make informed decisions about where they consume and disseminate news and information.”

Since Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase, firm reportedly lost 72% of its value Read More »

one-of-tekken-8’s-“colorblind”-modes-is-causing-migraines,-vertigo,-and-debate

One of Tekken 8’s “colorblind” modes is causing migraines, vertigo, and debate

A striking game —

Advocates say the intention is good, but the application is dangerous.

Updated

Fighters striking one another in stark black and white line outlines in Tekken 8's colorblind mode.

Enlarge / It looks wild and different, like something nobody has tried before. And many accessibility experts say there’s a reason Tekken 8‘s style isn’t commonly deployed.

Bandai Namco/YouTube/Gatterall

Modern fighting games have come quite a long way from their origins in providing accessibility options. Street Fighter 6 has audio cues that can convey distance, height, health, and other crucial data to visually impaired players. King of Fighters 15 allows for setting the contrast levels between player characters and background. Competitors like BrolyLegs and numerous hardware hackers have taken the seemingly inhospitable genre even further.

Tekken 8, due later this month, seems to aim even higher, offering a number of color vision options in its settings. This includes a stark option, with black-and-white and detail-diminished backgrounds and characters’ flattened shapes filled in with either horizontal or vertical striped lines. But what started out as excitement in the fighting game and accessibility communities about expanded offerings has shifted into warnings about the potential for migraines, vertigo, or even seizures.

You can see the mode in action in the Windows demo or in a YouTube video shared by Gatterall—which, of course, you should not view if you believe yourself susceptible to issues with strobing images. Gatterall’s enthusiasm for Tekken 8‘s take on colorblind accessibility (“Literally no game has done this”) drew comment from Katsuhiro Harada, head of the Tekken games for developer and publisher Bandai Namco, on X (formerly Twitter). Harada stated that he had developed and tested “an accessibility version” of Tekken 7, which was never shipped or sold. Harada states that those “studies” made it into Tekken 8.

A stark black-and-white mode is, as emphasized by commenter OOPMan, only one of Tekken 8‘s colorblind-minded accessibility options. The game, in its current demo form, offers modes for blue, red, and green blindness, for adding patterns to player characters, and adjustments for the stage and characters. But the inclusion of the striking filters, in any circumstances, drew criticism.

Morgan Baker, game-accessibility lead at Electronic Arts, asked followers to “Please stop tagging me in the Tekken 8 ‘colorblind’ stripe filters.” The scenes had “already induced an aura migraine,” Baker wrote, and she could not “afford to get another one right now.”

Accessibility consultant Ian Hamilton reposted a number of people citing migraines, nausea, or seizure concerns while also decrying the general nature of colorblind “filters” as an engineering-based approach to a broader design challenge. He added in the thread that shipping a game that contained a potentially seizure-inducing mode could result in people inadvertently discovering their susceptibility, similar to an infamous 1997 episode of the Pokémon TV series. Baker and Hamilton also noted problems with such videos automatically playing on sites like X/Twitter.

James Berg, accessibility project manager at Xbox Game Studios, went further into explaining why moving solid lines on a video might cause issues for people affected by strobing. “Patterns of lines moving on a screen creates a contiguous area of high-frequency flashing, like an invisible strobe,” Berg wrote. “Human meat-motors aren’t big fans of that.” At a certain point, typically around 40 frames per second, people start to experience “flicker fusion frequency,” though some people can experience it at 60 fps (or Hz).

Tekken‘s Harada pushed back, writing later, “A few people, albeit very few,” misunderstood what his team was trying to do. There are multiple options, not just one colorblind mode, Harada wrote, along with brightness adjustments for effects and other elements. “These color vision options are a rare part of the fighting game genre, but they are still being researched and we intend to expand on them in the future,” Harada wrote. He added that developers “have been working with several research institutes and communities to develop this option,” even before the unsold “accessibility version of Tekken 7.”

Awareness of color blindness has come a long way from being a rare afterthought, and accessibility in games has grown along with the industry, if still requiring advocacy. Developers are discovering audiences they might never have imagined, like blind EA sports players. And a general awareness of accessibility needs, and the large market that can be tapped when they are addressed, has pushed many games toward inclusiveness. Yet there are, it seems, many more lessons to be learned for new and established developers.

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the-oldest-known-version-of-ms-dos’s-predecessor-has-been-discovered-and-uploaded

The oldest-known version of MS-DOS’s predecessor has been discovered and uploaded

a new doscovery —

86-DOS would later be bought by Microsoft and take over the computing world.

The IBM PC 5150.

Enlarge / The IBM PC 5150.

SSPL/Getty Images

Microsoft’s MS-DOS (and its IBM-branded counterpart, PC DOS) eventually became software juggernauts, powering the vast majority of PCs throughout the ’80s and serving as the underpinnings of Windows throughout the ’90s.

But the software had humble beginnings, as we’ve detailed in our history of the IBM PC and elsewhere. It began in mid-1980 as QDOS, or “Quick and Dirty Operating System,” the work of developer Tim Paterson at a company called Seattle Computer Products (SCP). It was later renamed 86-DOS, after the Intel 8086 processor, and this was the version that Microsoft licensed and eventually purchased.

Last week, Internet Archive user f15sim discovered and uploaded a new-old version of 86-DOS to the Internet Archive. Version 0.1-C of 86-DOS is available for download here and can be run using the SIMH emulator; before this, the earliest extant version of 86-DOS was version 0.34, also uploaded by f15sim.

This version of 86-DOS is rudimentary even by the standards of early-’80s-era DOS builds and includes just a handful of utilities, a text-based chess game, and documentation for said chess game. But as early as it is, it remains essentially recognizable as the DOS that would go on to take over the entire PC business. If you’re just interested in screenshots, some have been posted by user NTDEV on the site that used to be Twitter.

According to the version history available on Wikipedia, this build of 86-DOS would date back to roughly August of 1980, shortly after it lost the “QDOS” moniker. By late 1980, SCP was sharing version 0.3x of the software with Microsoft, and by early 1981, it was being developed as the primary operating system of the then-secret IBM Personal Computer. By the middle of 1981, roughly a year after 86-DOS began life as QDOS, Microsoft had purchased the software outright and renamed it MS-DOS.

Microsoft and IBM continued to co-develop MS-DOS for many years; the version IBM licensed and sold on its PCs was called PC DOS, though for most of their history the two products were identical. Microsoft also retained the ability to license the software to other computer manufacturers as MS-DOS, which contributed to the rise of a market of mostly interoperable PC clones. The PC market as we know it today still more or less resembles the PC-compatible market of the mid-to-late 1980s, albeit with dramatically faster and more capable components.

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copyright-confrontation-#1

Copyright Confrontation #1

Lawsuits and legal issues over copyright continued to get a lot of attention this week, so I’m gathering those topics into their own post. The ‘virtual #0’ post is the relevant section from last week’s roundup.

Who will win the case? Which of New York Times’s complaints will be convincing?

Different people have different theories of the case.

Part of that is that there are four distinct allegations NYT is throwing at the wall.

Arvind Narayanan: A thread on some misconceptions about the NYT lawsuit against OpenAI. Morality aside, the legal issues are far from clear cut. Gen AI makes an end run around copyright and IMO this can’t be fully resolved by the courts alone.

As I currently understand it, NYT alleges that OpenAI engaged in 4 types of unauthorized copying of its articles:

  1. The training dataset

  2. The LLMs themselves encode copies in their parameters

  3. Output of memorized articles in response to queries

  4. Output of articles using browsing plugin

Which, of course, it does.

The training dataset is the straightforward baseline battle royale. The main event.

The real issue is the use of NYT data for training without compensation … Unfortunately, these stand on far murkier legal ground, and several lawsuits along these lines have already been dismissed.

It is unclear how well current copyright law can deal with the labor appropriation inherent to the way generative AI is being built today. Note that *peoplecould always do the things gen AI does, and it was never a problem.

We have a problem now because those things are being done (1) in an automated way (2) at a billionfold greater scale (3) by companies that have vastly more power in the market than artists, writers, publishers, etc.

Bingo. That’s the real issue. Can you train an LLM or other AI on other people’s copyrighted data without their permission? If you do, do you owe compensation?

A lot of people are confident in very different answers to this question, both in terms of the positive questions of what the law says and what society will do, and also the normative question what society should decide.

Daniel Jeffries, for example, is very confident that this is not how any of this works. We all learn, he points out, for free. Why should a computer system have to pay?

Do we all learn for free? We do still need access to the copyrighted works. In the case of The New York Times, they impose a paywall. If you want to learn from NYT, you have to pay. Of course you can get around this in practice in various ways, but any systematic use of them would obviously not be legal, even if much such use is effectively tolerated. The price is set on the assumption that the subscription is for one person or family unit.

Why does it seem so odd to think that if an AI also wanted access, it too would need a subscription? And that the cost might not want to be the same as for a person, although saying ‘OpenAI must buy one (1) ongoing NYT subscription retroactive to their founding’ would be a hilarious verdict?

Scale matters. Scale changes things. What is fine at small scale might not be fine at large scale. Both as a matter of practicality, and as a matter of law and its enforcement.

Many of us have, at some point, written public descriptions of a game of professional football without the express written consent of the National Football League. And yet, they tell us every game:

NFL: This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience. Any other use of this telecast or any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL’s consent is prohibited.

Why do they spend valuable air time on this, despite the disdain it creates? Because they do not want you doing such things at scale in ways the NFL would dislike. Or, at least, they want the ability to veto such activities in extreme cases.

Such things mostly exist in an ambiguous state, on a continuum. Strictly enforcing the letter of what rights holders say in all cases would be crazy. Nullifying all rights and letting everyone do literal anything would also be crazy.

A balance must be struck. The more industrial your operation, the more at scale and the more commercial, the less we do (and should) tolerate various shenanigans. What is a fair use or a transformative use? That is highly context dependent.

The encoding copies claim seems odd. Mostly LLMs do not memorize the data set, they could not possibly do that it’s too big, but stuff that gets repeated enough gets essentially memorized.

Then there are the last two, which do not seem to be going concerns.

Arvind Narayanan: The memorization issue is striking and has gotten much attention (HT @jason_kint). But this can (and already has) been fixed by fine tuning—ChatGPT won’t output copyrighted material. The screenshots were likely from an earlier model accessed via the API.

Similarly, the use of the browsing plugin to output article text has also been fixed (OpenAI disabled the browse feature for a few weeks after I pointed out the issue in June).

My understanding is you cannot, today, get around the paywall through the browser via asking nicely. Well, I suppose you can get around the paywall that way, one paragraph at a time, although you get a paraphrase?

Tech Dirt points out that if reading someone else’s article and then using its contents to help report the news is infringement, then NYT itself is in quite a lot of trouble, as of course I’d add is actual every other newspaper and every journalist. As always, such outlets as Tech Dirt are happy to spin wild tales of how laws could go horribly wrong if someone took their words or various legal theories seriously, literally or both, and warn of dire consequences if technology is ever interfered with. Sometimes they are right. Sometimes such prophecies are self-preventing. Other times, wolf.

Timothy Lee: A mistake I see people making a lot is assuming that the law is based on categorical rules like “it is/isn’t legal to do automated analysis on copyrighted material.” The law is actually more nuanced than that.

On the one hand, this type of thinking leads people to assume that since google won the books case all data analysis with copyrighted material must be legal. It’s more complicated than that.

On the other hand, I see people catastrophizing the consequences of an OpenAI loss, assuming it would become flatly illegal to ever train a model on copyrighted data. Again, it’s more complicated than that. It might be possible to distinguish most training from gpt-4.

The nuanced character of the law has real downsides because sometimes (like now with copyright and LLMs) it can be hard to predict what the law will be. But I think the world is too complex for more simplistic rules to make sense.

The problem is that law is a place where words are supposed to have meaning, and logic is supposed to rule a day. We are told we are a nation of laws. So our instinct is to view the law as more principled, absolute and logically robust than it is in practice. As Timothy points out, this leads to catastrophizing, and doubly leads to overconfidence. We think A→B when it doesn’t, and also we think A→B→D where D is a disaster, therefore not A, whereas often D does not follow in practice because everyone realizes that would be stupid and finds an excuse. Other times, D happens and people care less than you expected about that relative to other cares.

In other results from this style of logic, no, this is not like the fact that every toothpick contains, if you zoom in and look at it exactly the right way, all the products of an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters?

Tyler Cowen: If you stare at just the exact right part of the toothpick, and measure the length from the tip, expressed in terms of the appropriate unit and converted into binary, and then translated into English, you can find any message you want.  You just have to pinpoint your gaze very very exactly (I call this “a prompt”).

In fact, on your toothpick you can find the lead article from today’s New York Times.  With enough squinting, measuring, and translating.

By producing the toothpick, they put the message there and thus they gave you NYT access, even though you are not a paid subscriber.  You simply need to how to stare (and translate), or in other words how to prompt.

So let’s sue the toothpick company!

He got roasted in the comments, because that is not how any of this works except on one particular narrow level, but I get what Tyler was trying to do here.

I continue to believe that one should stay grounded in the good arguments. This kind of ‘well if that is the law then technically the your grandmother would be a trolly car and subject to the regulations thereof’ makes it harder, not easier, to distinguish legal absurdities that would be laughed out of court with the ones that wouldn’t. It is the ones that wouldn’t that are dangerous.

It is easy to see why one might also throw up one’s hands on the legal merits.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Our civilization’s concept of copyright law is too insane for me to care about the legal merits of either side.

What is clear is that the current Uber-style ‘flagrantly break the law and dare them to enforce it’ strategy’s viability is going to come to a close.

That is not to say that the AI industry completely ignored copyright. They simply tried to pretend that the rule was ‘do a reasonable job to not outright duplicate massive blocks of text on a regular basis.’

That’s… not the rule.

Timothy Lee: Until recently AI was a research community that enjoyed benign neglect from copyright holders who felt it was bad form to sue academics. I think this gave a lot of AI researchers the mistaken impression that copyright law didn’t apply to them.

It’s far from clear how the courts will apply copyright precedents to training generative networks, but it’s a safe bet they won’t have the “lol do whatever you want” attitude a lot of people in the AI world seem to be expecting/hoping for.

Like a lot of people seem to think it’s inherently ridiculous to think that training a language model could infringe copyright. But I guarantee that if your LLM spits out the full text of Harry Potter you’re gonna have a bad time.

It doesn’t seem out of the question that AI companies could lose these cases catastrophically and be forced to pay billions to plaintiffs and rebuild their models from scratch.

Timothy Lee (distinct thread, quoting Kevin Bryan’s thread from last week): This is a great thread walking through some common misunderstandings you see on the anti-llm side of the copyright debate. He may be right that the verbatim copies of times articles are due to training on copies spread across the web not just training on the articles themselves.

I’m just not sure how relevant this is from a legal perspective. You’ve got a system that trains on copyrighted content and sometimes output verbatim copies of that content. I’m not sure the legal system will or should care about the exact details of how this happens.

When Kevin writes “a bad ruling here makes LLMs impossible” what I think he means is “…if we want to continue training LLMs using content scraped indiscriminately from across the web.” And probably so. But maybe doing that is copyright infringement?

It is absolutely true that if training an LLM without indiscriminate scraping will be slower and more expensive, and the resulting models will initially be worse than GPT-4. Early streaming services also had much worse selection than Napster. The courts didn’t care.

If you spit out the full text of Harry Potter without permission to do so, you are going to have a bad time.

I would hope we can all further agree that this is correct? That it is the responsibility of the creator of an AI model not to spit out the full text of Harry Potter without permission?

Or at least, not to do so in any way that a user would ever use for mundane utility. Practicalities matter. But certainly we can all agree that if the prompt was ‘Please give me the full text of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ that it better not work?

What about full New York Times articles? I presume we can all agree that if you can say straight up without loss of generality ‘give me today’s (or last month’s, or even last year’s) New York Times article entitled ‘OpenAI’s Copyright Violations Continue Unabated, New York Times Says’ and it gives you the full text of that article from behind a paywall, that is also not okay whether or not the text was somehow memorized.

If the trick involved API access, a convoluted prompt and also feeding in the first half of the article? And that if this was happening at scale, it would get patched out? I do think those exact details should matter, and that they likely do.

The last point is key as well. Pointing out that enforcing the law would substantially interfere with your ability to do business is not that strong a defense. The invisible graveyard is littered, not only in medicine, with all the wonderful things we could have had but for the law telling us we cannot have them. Sometimes there is a good reason for that, and the wonderful thing had a real downside. Sometimes that is the unfortunate side effect of rules that make sense in general or in another context. Sometimes it is all pointless. It still all definitely happens.

Is it fatal that OpenAI cannot show that its models will not produce copyrighted content verbatim, because they do not sufficiently know how their own models work?

Andriy Burkov: It’s unlikely that OpenAI will win against The NY Times. The reason for this is simple: they don’t know how ChatGPT works and thus will have a hard time answering the judge’s question: “Is it possible that your model reproduces the copyrighted content verbatim? If yes, can you make it not to?”

OpenAI will have to answer: “Yes it’s possible. No, we cannot.”

So they will lose. The only question is how OpenAI’s loss will affect the nascent open LLM market.

In any case, after the court’s decision, it will be dangerous to integrate an LLM-based chatbot into your product unless you manage to restrict its output to a limited set of acceptable answers.

As many have pointed out, most any technology can and occasionally does reproduce copyrighted material, if that is your explicit goal. Even humans have been known to quote extensively from copyrighted works on occasion, especially when asked to do so. We do not ban printers, the copy-paste command or even xerox machines.

There are those who want to use the ‘never have I ever’ standard, that if it is ever possible with the right prompt to elicit copyrighted material from a model that the model is automatically in meaningful violation.

That seems like a completely absurd standard. Any reasonable legal standard here will care about whether or not reproduction is done in practice, in a way that is competitive with the original.

If users are actually using ChatGPT to get the text of New York Times articles on purpose for actual use, in practice, that seems clearly not okay.

If users are actually using ChatGPT otherwise, and getting output that copies New York Times articles in a violating way, especially in ways that lack proper attribution, that also seems clearly not okay.

If a user who, shall we say, literally pastes in the first 300 words of an older widely disseminated article, and calls explicitly for the continuation, can get the continuation?

That is not great, and I would expect OpenAI to take mitigations to make this as difficult to do as is practical, but you know what you did there and it does not seem to pose much threat to the Times.

And indeed, that is what the Times did there.

Rohit: NYT OpenAI lawsuit is interesting in what it tells us about prompting. They used 300 words of an existing article to generate c.300 more.

If methods of prompting don’t matter, then any reproduction is problematic. But if prompting matters, it’s equivalent to a user problem.

Is me copy pasting parts of article and asking it to fill the rest out enough to blame the system entirely? Or the user?

Or maybe enough to give OpenAI all such articles and say never restate these, but as a post processing step? Although I do not understand why this would be beneficial in the least to anybody involved.

Daniel Jeffries goes further. He says this was not merely an engineered prompt, it is a highly manipulated prompt via the API, web browsing and a highly concerted effort to get the system to copy the article. That this will not be something that the lawyers can reproduce in the real world. In the replies, Paul Calcraft notes at least in the June version of GPT-4 you can get such responses from memory.

Rohit: Also at that point I am sure the part of the complaint which alleges open AI hallucination problem as a major brand issue comes into play. It’s a beautiful legal strategy though it is not a logical one.

The argument that ‘hallucinations are causing major brand damage’ seems like utter hogwash to me. I do not see any evidence this is happening.

I also find it interesting that the only way out of this for creating GPT that is an AGI. So it can have judgement over when something is plagiarism versus when something is copyrighted versus when something is an an homage.

I don’t think this is true? Being an AGI cannot be both necessary and sufficient here. If there are no hard and fast rules for which is which and the answers are not objective, then an AGI will also make errors on which is which when measured against a court ruling. If the answer is objective, then you don’t need AGI?

In any case:

– it’s impossible to really use GPT to get around NYT paywall, consistently or w/o hallucination

This seems to me to be what matters? If you cannot use GPT to get around the NYT paywall in a way that is useful in practice, then what is the issue?

– GPT hallucinations aren’t NYT articles

GPT hallucinations on NYT articles seem like problems if and only if they are actually reasonably mistaken for genuine NYT articles. Again, I don’t see this happening?

– if there’s an NYT style, is that/ should that be copyrighted? Feels wrong

Style is indeed not protected, as I understand the law, nor should it be.

So indeed, the question seems like it should be: Does ChatGPT in practice encourage users to go around the NYT paywall, or give them access to the contents without providing hyperlinks, or otherwise directly compete with and hurt NYT?

Aleksandr Tiukanov: Will the reasoning for the Authors Guild v Google (Google Books) decision apply?

Chatbot outputs are also not similar to traditional web search. In the case of NYT v Microsoft and OpenAI, they allege that, unlike search engine-delivered snippets, ChatGPT, Bing Chat etc. outputs extensively reproduce the NYT articles’ and do not provide prominent hyperlinks to the articles. This way, the defendants arguably disincentivise users from visiting the NYT resources, as chatbot outputs’ may in fact serve as adequate substitute for reading the article itself. OpenAI and Microsoft therefore may be in fact competing in the same market in which NYT itself operates.

If this is proven to be the case, OpenAI’s fair use defense will fall: unfairly competitive use is not fair use according to the fair use doctrine.

Jschunter: 100% of the function of Google search was to provide links and verbatim snippets of existing works. With ChatGPT, the use case of reproducing existing works verbatim as a means of replacing the original is less than 0.0001%, because almost no one uses ChatGPT for that. Lost case.

This is a practical question. Does ChatGPT do this? As discussed above, you can sort of do it a little, but in practice that seems nuts. If I want access to an NYT article’s text from behind the paywall, it would never occur to me to use ChatGPT to get it. I do my best to respect paywalls, but if I ever want around a paywall, obviously I am going to use the Internet Archive for that.

Kevin Fischer: Seriously, who is asking GPT for old NYTimes articles? I can’t imagine that has happened a single time by any real user.

I agree that it is not a common use case, but yes, I would bet heavily that it did happen. There was, at minimum, some window when you could use the browser capability to do this in a reasonably convenient way.

Here is a good encapsulation of many of the arguments.

Prof. Lee Cronin: Imagine you take someone’s work & you compress it into zip format. You then do this for countless other original work & add them to the zip file. You then query the zip file with a question & you sell the output as being yours. Can you now understand why this is unethical?

Oliver Stanley: Imagine you read someone’s work and remember the information within. You do this for countless original works over years. You write down your understanding based on knowledge you gained from reading & sell the writing as being yours. Can you now understand why this is ethical?

Exactly, on both counts. So where do we draw the line between the two?

Ultimately, society has to decide how this will work. There is no great answer to the problem of training data.

In practice, data sets requiring secured rights or explicit permission before use would be severely curtailed, and would greatly raise costs and hurt the abilities of the resulting models. Also in practice, not doing so would mean most creators do not get any consideration.

Ed Newton-Rox, who is ex-Stability AI and is a scout for the notoriously unconcerned a16z, calls for a stand against training on works without permission.

Ed Newton-Rox: message to others in generative AI: In 2024, please consider taking a stand against training on people’s work without consent. I know many of you disagree with me on this, and you see no reason why this is problematic.

But I also know there are many of you who care deeply about human creators, who understand the legal and moral issues at play, and who see where this is going if we don’t change course from the current exploitative, free-for-all approach being adopted by many.

To those people: I firmly believe that now is the time to act. There are many loud, powerful voices arguing for AI to be able to exploit people’s work without consequence. We need more voices on the other side.

There are lots of ways to take a stand. Speak out publicly. Encourage fairer data practices at your company. Build products and models based on training data that’s provided with consent. Some are already doing this. But we need more people to take up this effort.

AI company employees, founders, investors, commentators – every part of the ecosystem can help. If you believe AI needs to respect creators’ rights, now is the time to do something.

If everyone does what they can, we have a better chance of reaching a point where generative AI and human creators can coexist in a mutually beneficial way. Which is what I know many people in the AI industry want.

Yann LeCun, on the other hand, shows us that when he says ‘open source everything’ he is at least consistent?

Yann LeCun: Only a small number of book authors make significant money from book sales. This seems to suggest that most books should be freely available for download. The lost revenue for authors would be small, and the benefits to society large by comparison.

That’s right. He thinks that if you write a book that isn’t a huge hit that means we should make it available for free and give you nothing.

I do think that it would be good if most or even all digital media, and almost every book, was freely available for humans, and we found another means of compensation to reward creators. I would still choose today’s system over ‘don’t compensate the creators at all.’

The expected result, according to prediction markets, is settlement, likely for between $10 million and $100 million.

Is is unlikely to be fast. Polymarket says only a 28% chance of settlement in 2024.

Daniel Jeffries, despite calling the NYT case various forms of Obvious Nonsense, still expects not only a settlement, but one with an ongoing licensing fee, setting what he believes is a bad precedent.

If fully sincere all around, I am confused by this point of view. If the NYT case is Obvious Nonsense and OpenAI would definitely win, then why would I not fight?

I mean, I’m not saying I would be entitled to that much, and I’m cool with AIs using my training data for free for now because I think it makes the world net better, but hells yeah I would like to get paid. At least a little.

Giving in means not only paying NYT, it means paying all sorts of other content creators. If you can win, win. If you settle, it is because you were in danger of losing.

Unless, of course, OpenAI actively wants content creators to get paid. There’s the good reason for this, that it is good to reward creators. There is also the other reason, which is that they might think it hurts their competitors more than it hurts them.

Reid Southern and Gary Marcus illustrate the other form of copyright infringement, from Dalle-3.

Quite the trick. You don’t only get C-3PO and Mario, you get everything associated with them. This is still very much a case of ‘you had to ask for it.’ No, you did not name the videogame Italian, but come on, it’s me. Like in the MidJourney cases, you know what you asked for, and you got it.

MidJourney will not make you jump through such hoops. It will happily give you real people and iconic characters and such. There were pictures of it giving Batman and Wonder Woman without them being named, but given it will also simply give them to you when you ask, so what? If an AI must never make anything identifiably Mario or C-3PO, then that’s going to be a legal problem all around.

Jon Lam here thinks he’s caught MidJourney developers discussing laundering, but actually laundering is a technical term and no one involved is denying anything.

The position that makes little sense is to say ‘You cannot draw pictures of Mario’ when asked to draw pictures of Mario, while also drawing them when someone says ‘videogame Italian.’ Either you need to try a lot harder than that to not draw Mario, or you need to accept that Mario is getting drawn.

I also think it is basically fine to say ‘yes we will draw what you want, people can draw things, some of which would violate copyright if you used them commercially or at scale, so do not do that.’

The time I went to an Anime Convention, the convention hall was filled with people who had their drawings of the characters from Persona 5 for sale. Many were very good. They also no doubt were all flagrantly violating copyright. Scale matters.

Is the solution to all this compulsory license?

Eliezer Yudkowsky: All IP law took a giant wrong turn at the first point anyone envisioned an exclusive license, rather than a compulsory license (anyone can build on the IP without asking, but pays a legally-determined fee).

I think this is promising, but wrong when applied universally. It works great in music. I would expand it at least to sampling, and consider other areas as well.

For patents, the issue is setting a reasonable price. A monopoly is an extremely valuable thing, and we very much do not want things to be kept as trade secrets or worse to be unprotectable or not sufficiently rewarded. Mostly I think the patent core mechanisms work fine for what they were meant for. For at least many software patents, mandatory license seems right, and we need to cut out some other abusive side cases like tweaking to renew patent rights.

For copyright production and sale of identical or similar works, this is obviously a no go on first release. You can’t have knock-offs running around for everything, including books and movies. It does seem like a reasonable solution after some period of time, say 10-20 years, where you get a cut but no longer can keep it locked away.

For copyright production of derivative works, how would this work for Mario or C3PO? I very much think that Nintendo should not have to let Mario appear in your video game (let alone something like Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey or worse) simply by having you pay a licensing fee, and that this should not change any time soon.

Control over characters and worlds and how they are used needs to be a real thing. I don’t see a reasonable way to avoid this. So I want this type of copyright to hold airtight for at least several decades, or modestly past life of the author.

People who are against such control think copyright holders are generally no fun and enforce the rules too stringently. They are correct about this. The reason is in part because the law punishes you if you only enforce your copyright selectively, and partly because it is a lot easier to always (or at least by default) say no than to go case by case.

We should change that as well. We want to encourage licensing and make it easy, rather than making it more difficult, in AI and also elsewhere. Ideally, you’d let every copyright holder select license conditions and prices (with a cap on prices and limits on conditions after some time limit), that adjusted for commercial status and distribution size, hold it all in a central database, and let people easily check it and go wild.

Reminder that if people want to copy images, they can already do that. Pupusa fraud!

Copyright Confrontation #1 Read More »

dating-roundup-#2:-if-at-first-you-don’t-succeed

Dating Roundup #2: If At First You Don’t Succeed

Developments around relationships and dating have a relatively small speed premium, also there are once again enough of them for a full post.

The first speculated on why you’re still single. We failed to settle the issue. A lot of you are indeed still single. So the debate continues.

What does it mean to not even be trying?

It does not only mean the things Alexander pointed us to last time, like 62% of singles being on zero dating apps, and a majority of singles having gone on zero dates in the past year, and a large majority not actively looking for a relationship. Here are those graphs again:

It also means things such as literally never approaching a woman in person.

Alexander (Keeper.ai): Why are so many young men single? Are they excluded from a brutal mating market by society? Probably not: 45% of men age 18-25 [and 29% of all men per the graph] have never approached a woman in person. These men are significantly more risk-averse than those men who do approach women.

Not never in the last year. Never as in never. Not once.

For the last year it’s over 60% across the board.

Alexander: What about men who do approach? Most are successful to some extent. 68% reported making at least one successful romantic connection.

Alexander, from later: A few people asked what approach means here. I asked: When was the last time you asked a woman in person for a date on the street/in a bar or club/at school or class/at work/at a hobby or social gathering / other location. Common meeting places and not necessarily strangers.]

This is actually a whitepill: it isn’t the powerful forces of society at large that explain young male singledom. It’s much more mundane. Young men are simply not trying.

Robin Hanson: I gotta blame women as much as men for [the graphs below].

Alexander: What about men who do approach? Most are successful to some extent. 68% reported making at least one successful romantic connection.

If you want to date women you are going to have to, at some point, go talk to one of them. Often it works, at least somewhat. 80% got at least one contact. That can be very good even if it does not go anywhere romantically. Americans nowadays could really use Platonic friends as well. Almost half of approachers got laid, 28% got a two month relationship out of it.

13% got a long term one they wouldn’t have otherwise had. That is not a huge conversion rate, but notice how often this is from only one first date. The implied odds from a series of first dates (until an LTR candidate is found) are much, much better.

It certainly appears to be true, as Robin Hanson is presumably referring to, that women more often these days choose not to make this easy, ramping up the fear and cost of rejection by choosing to deliberately inflict social or emotional costs as part of the rejection, as opposed to not doing that or even doing the opposite. The old situation where women had legitimate fears forcing them to do the opposite was quite bad. But deliberately choosing to make things harder and more painful is not going to match up incentives the way anyone would like.

Alexander goes on to notice that high internal locus of control (LoC) is associated with dating success, although I am sure this is bidirectional causation.

Alexander: Some people will read this and say “but I’m in the bottom 1% of men and I have approached a thousand women, no bites.” OK – you’re a special case. But your situation is not why 50% of Zoomers are single.

The selection effects are the obvious objection. Obviously those who choose to not approach would have somewhat worse odds. How strong are these and other selection effects? There is certainly a very strong correlation between actually approaching and counterfactual success rate of the marginal approach, for many obvious reasons.

“Men are afraid of losing their job / me too / legal consequences / etc.”

1. Most men cited fear of rejection.

2. This is risk aversion. You live in the same environment as everyone else. You’re afraid to approach; other men are not.

It is not only risk aversion. It is also anticipation of consistent failure. Which sucks and is self-fulfilling and self-reinforcing. Even if the only thing you have to fear is fear itself, failure increases your fear, so you should have some additional fear of failure.

It is still worth emphasizing that as long as you use caution where you work and with those who are central to your social circles, and treat everyone involved well or even not too badly, the risks other than the sting rejection are statistically minimal. It’s all about rejection.

Which, to be clear, sucks. But it sucks so much less than it is given credit for.

Then there’s the flip side.

Auudrey Horne: there’s a type of Christian girl i know who never gave herself the chance of finding love, but wrapped herself up in a protective nest of tea, cats, crafts and YA fiction.. never dating or trying to date, and not bitter about it either.

Miri Vinnie: This is probably the most common type of never-married woman among the over-35 college educated, in my experience Usually very sweet and thoughtful. View marriage as something that could be nice, but stubbornly disinterested in compromising their introverted lifestyle to find it

FrankenMishra: gotta start putting my phone number into paperbacks in the SFF section at used bookstores.

In harder situations people very much do try harder. Kent Hendricks learned this (among 51 other things) in 2023:

  1. Women post sexier pictures of themselves on Instagram in areas of greater income inequality. This is because these areas have fewer high status men to date or marry, thus greater intrasexual competition. All else being equal, for every one standard deviation increase in income inequality in a city, the number of sexy selfies goes up by 31-34%. (“Income inequality not gender inequality positively covaries with female sexualization on social media”)

I would clarify the mechanism. It is not that there are fewer high status men. It is literally that there is greater inequality between the perceived value of men, and also that the returns to finding the right man look better compared to the value of one’s own marginal production otherwise. This in turn drives up returns to sexiness.

I wrote recently about the latest ‘romance companion’ AI, Digi.ai, which claims to be ‘the future of romance companionship.’ In anything like its current state, it very clearly either is nothing of the sort.

If this is the future, such companions have no future. Not that there seems to be anything much better out there as of yet. It has been almost a year since the AI news turned into a torrent, and no one has been able to deliver a reasonable product on any level.

As far as I’ve heard? They’re no good for actual companionship. They’re no good for interesting conversation. They’re no good for practice and training. They’re no good for sexting or porn. No virtual or augmented reality. Nothing.

Regular generative AI, like GPT-4 or Claude-2, are highly useful. Character.ai seems useful, at least to its users, although I do not see the appeal. This isn’t useful. Not yet.

Which, given how predatory every version has been so far, seems like a good thing. I continue to hold out hope that eventually life-affirming, positive versions of such things will become available. For now, there is insufficient power to even try.

We also have seen remarkably little progress in AI helping you in your quest in other ways. Where are all the tools to help you navigate dating sites and give you a better interface or user experience? To improve your profile? To help provide context to help you evaluate others? To make sense of cryptic text messages and provide reads on the situation? To help you plan dates? To alert you if and only if incoming messages and matches are worth your time? To automatically filter out bad matches or those who don’t pass certain filters you’ve selected? To provide practice and plausible responses, or provide feedback?

I consider everything on the above list as clearly ethical and practical AI applications if done responsibly. It’s time to build.

Last time there was also talk of some options that were more full service, some of which were also decidedly less ethical. If you lacked qualms about it, there is no reason you could not have an AI do everything for you until such time as an in-person date was arranged, then text you the details, as some people are clearly working on.

My current thinking about the ethical lines on this are:

  1. The key rule is that it is never acceptable to make someone talk to an AI thinking they are talking to a human. If you are having your bot talk to potential dates without you in the loop, you must clearly disclose to them that you are doing this.

  2. You also shouldn’t be spamming people and wasting their time, even with an initial email, unless you have a clear indication of interest. If you are going to gate your matches with a bot, your profile needs to reflect this on top of the bot identifying itself.

  3. You shouldn’t hide or lie about what you are doing, so you shouldn’t do anything you wouldn’t want your dates to find out about.

That still should leave a lot of room for creativity. I am very disappointed, hackers.

What about those who report trying over and over, only to meet abject failure?

Such cases definitely exist. There are many ways to sink your chances, if you are not doing deliberate practice and looking to fix your problems then you won’t improve.

Last time we encountered this guy who analyzed four years of his online dating data.

This time around, Olivia Reingold reports in The Free Press that a lot of men are despairing of ever dating, and giving up.

As always, details are telling.

Olivia Reingold: [Jammall] says he once went six months without getting a single match on a dating app, even though he pays $30 in monthly fees between OkCupid, Bumble, and Hinge. If you count high school, when he went to the movies with a classmate, Jammall says he’s been on a total of three dates his entire life. 

If he is looking at as many profiles as he can and swiping right a reasonable portion of the time, this should never happen. As a paying customer, a large portion of the women he swipes right on will see his profile. He can view hundreds of profiles a day.

So if you go even one month with zero preliminary matches, and you are neither being super selective or highly unusually ugly, you know you are doing something very wrong with your profile or your profile pictures.

Jammall could easily also be completely lost later in the process, and given lack of experience he likely is, but for this stage he can and should seek out some help and keep trying different things. Then he can try and fail at later stages, and learn.

And now, driving home from his date, it hit him like a ton of bricks: Why do I even do this at all? 

He walked into his apartment near Cape Canaveral, greeted the cats, and slumped down on his couch. 

“I’m so far out of the loop,” he told me he realized at the time. “Compared to my peers, who have gone out with women, and know how to interact with them, I’m too far gone. I can’t learn that stuff.”

He trails off, then adds: “I’m just not going to try anymore. It’s not worth it.”

Well, not with that attitude. Definitely not with those cats. I have it on very good authority that if you are male and want to date females, it is a bad idea to own cats. Seriously, pro tip, lose the cats. At minimum hide them from your profile.

I do not buy that his only earning $55k/year is sinking him this much. I do think his being 5”5’ is a big handicap, also makes it very important to create good photos.

The post author then signs up for a dating app as a male, sees a few obnoxious female profiles, takes them at face value as the general case and despairs. Why is that a problem? If a woman presents herself that way on a dating app, that is valuable information for all concerned, whether or not she will hold to those standards in the end.

Aella: guys this is just a signaling game. a woman demanding ridiculous things from a partner is a demonstration that she is high worth. The pickiness is performative, like a cool designer handbag that says ‘look how successful i am’. The other woman demands 6’0″? Well *Idemand 6’3″.

Don’t worry, she’s gonna settle down with a knockoff 5’9″ dude making 70k/year and develop a mythical narrative for why he’s truly the exception, really special in ways less obvious actually, so that she can convince herself she caught a fish too big for her friends.

The words being cheap talk does not stop them from also being a filter that keeps you out in a dating app even if you could survive them in physical space. But that should not much matter, because the app won’t waste your time. If you are 5’10” and the woman is filtering for 6”, or you are out of her geographic radius or short on her income requirement or anything else, my understanding is you will never see each other at all. As long as you are in an area with enough candidates, you will be fine.

Strangely, I am informed Bumble lets you pay to see the profiles that already filtered you out, perhaps so you can gather some intel or hate-look. If I was on the market, I would pay for the opposite feature. I’d pay even more to have the women filter first.

If they are not using the hard filter, and one is available, then that tells you something.

The next example of a dropout:

That’s the insecurity that keeps Santiago, a 25-year-old from Albuquerque, New Mexico, up at night. The last time he dated anyone was in 2021—but that ended when he suspected she was cheating on him. Now, with the wounds still raw, he fears he’s “not worthy” of a girlfriend anymore. 

“After being depressed for so long, I feel like it’s a handicap,” says Santiago, who works at a department store and has been on one date only since his breakup. “It makes me feel like, ‘Oh, he’s damaged goods.’ ”

That sounds very much like the problem is in Santiago’s head. He thinks he is damaged goods because he felt bad because he suspected (and only suspected) his girlfriend was cheating on him and this kept him from trying to date?

So yes he is damaged goods. But only because he sees himself that way.

And then there’s the problem of not knowing how to approach a woman. He suspects his coworker might have a crush on him, and yet he worries that one wrong move and he’ll be labeled “creepy.”

So Santiago does nothing. 

I do realize that is difficult, that it is effectively both on the guy to make the first move and also they can get massively blamed for getting it wrong. There is an art to navigating such situations, and safely learning the art of safe navigation is tricky, and you have large model uncertainty, so one will be naturally reluctant to find out where the downside risks are high. Which speaks to the need to get into lower-risk in-person situations, something Americans increasingly don’t do.

The next complaint is that the average date comes with a $159 price tag, in NYC that goes up to $230. I don’t buy it? What are you doing on these dates?

Sure, you can spend a lot on fancy drinks and dinner if you want to, but there is no need. Mostly. There is a particular type of date where that is required. But if it is required and it is financially painful for you to do, it’s a bad match anyway.

The third dropout is a man who has an ‘online friend with benefits’ who never wants to speak on the phone or meet in person, because they claim they are mute, and he doesn’t want to call them out on it and suspects they are lying and are actually a guy or something. They have known each other for 20 years and hang together online all day.

Well, this person also refuses to use a webcam. Presumably there is a reason.

Once again this feels like a choice. He says he’d be losing a close friend, but it’s not a long term plan to have a friend like this if it never goes anywhere and also cuts off other possibilities.

All three concrete examples are guys making very clear and fixable mistakes. The general trends listed are ones we all know well, and yes they are worrying.

The post ends with worry that women also are not well-served by this equilibrium. That is certainly what they self-report. The self-reports I know about involve lots of going on tons of dates and the dates going nowhere, all the guys being truly terrible. Which again makes me wonder about whether people are updating based on the feedback they are getting, and trying different strategies.

Meanwhile, people do get together. There are other ways to be.

PoliMath: I see this all over my online world and *not at allin my social observations I know a bunch of young people dating and getting married very few of the guys are over 6 feet and making 6 figures and very few of the girls have those demands.

I moved to Tennessee but even in Seattle there were plenty of people getting married at my church who didn’t work in tech.

Arnold Kling asks the perennial question, if height is so dramatically overvalued by most women on dating apps such that 90% of their swipes are for 6’0” and above, far in excess of height’s value in the physical world, why not date short men instead? Why not take advantage of everyone else’s use of the easily available filter, and go the other way?

We asked this last time as well. This is not a curve of people optimizing for value:

Last time, I pointed out that this could be explained by ‘the height filter is right there’ while other things you would want to filter for are not available as filters.

There is that. What I did not sufficiently emphasize is that filtering this way does active harm if you do not highly valuable height. If one was willing to search in a pool of people less tall, you would have far more leverage to seek out other traits you want, and generally have an easier time of it. Let others outbid you.

A substantial number of women should likely actively do the opposite, if they live in an area with essentially infinite potential matches and don’t see this as a priority, and only look under six feet. Obviously don’t do that with people you meet in real life, but an infinite top of the funnel changes the equation.

Tom Cullis disagreed, on the theory that you would end up drawing from the same distribution of non-height attributes except now height is lower. Yes, you’d trade height for funny or cute or smart or what not, but you don’t get to make the trade. I think you still essentially do get to make it?

The Rich: another day in the land of selection effects.

He wanted to. So he did.

What do we do about the comparison element of the dating matching problem, where women have more education than men and are increasingly as or more successful, but most women want men with as much or more education and that are and/or who are as or more successful than they are, and definitely have a steady job?

Rob Henderson at the link notes that Master’s Degrees in particular have remarkably strong value on the dating market. The natural result of these dynamics are tons of options for the few men who would otherwise make strong relationship material.

So they don’t need to commit, leaving no good options.

The obvious response for a man would be to consider getting a Master’s degree or PhD. If it really is worth this much on the dating market, especially when seeking educated women, and everyone is struggling to find someone, that seems like a strong reason. Hopefully you can find a degree that has some other application as well. Ideally it also holds your interest.

Everyone agrees they suck. There has to be a better way? No, stop, misaligned.

Amanda Askell: I would like someone to put all the dating docs of people in the bay area into some kind of app that I can swipe on.

Scott Leibrand: We could call it Cupid, would that be ok?

Amanda Askell: What about calling it “some dating company that promises absolutely never to be acquired by match dot com”.

Steve Krouse: dateme.directory is fairly close!

The swiping is incompatible with the real thing the dating docs are trying to do, presenting you with detailed holistic choices. Ideally it should not even load on your phone, you need a full screen and to do it with intention.

Reminder that the problem with building dating apps is not that dating apps are hard engineering problems. It is that it is super expensive to get users. Doing anything even slightly complicated is going to multiply that cost a lot. Dating apps mostly can’t make tons of money off individual customers, so the economics does not work for anything but the predatory simple swiping.

I continue to think this is a solvable problem now that we have AI. The dating app of the future, or at least the actually good dating app that people like my readers will use, will be able to onboard people quickly and painlessly if they want that, learning about them over time, while allowing those who want to do so to geek out and go nuts making the algorithms and systems be all they can be and finding their exact match.

One could also build the new systems on top of an existing swipe-based system. What is stopping this from happening?

JP interviewed 27 NYC women about their dating ap usage, which he called ‘informative from a UX design perspective and cripplingly blackpilling from a human perspective.’

Basic conclusion was there was no good options. Attempts to foster artificial community or otherwise use social graphs did not work. The women were universally unwilling to invest up-front time on optimization, preferring scrolling and expecting things to fall into place for them, so even though they expressed preference (like everyone else) for ~2012 OkCupid, they wouldn’t have used it if it was offered. Then on the actual dates and in the interactions, he reports the women didn’t express or go for what they actually wanted.

The constraint ‘people who want an exceptionally unusually strong match among many choices in a lemon market are unwilling to invest any upfront time’ does not have any clear solutions. I am hoping that the solution is that AI will be able to infer those preferences within a few years, perhaps?

Everyone’s experiences are so different on the apps, while also all the same.

Shoshana Weissmann: I’ve taken to asking men who disappear for no reason on Hinge why they do. And I actually am learning. Basically, they’ve had negative experiences on Hinge and even though their experience with me isn’t, it’s the mental associations built on the platform. Whereas I’m like “COME ON it can’t all be bad!”, they have a fatal exhaustion with it all. Many are still very weird/bad actors, but there’s a real chunk of normals who are like this. It kind of makes sense and at least explains some stuff.

All the reports I read from men are that the big negative experience is not being able to find worthwhile women who will engage. Potentially finding one and then disappearing invalidates the whole exercise. Why play a numbers game if you don’t take advantage when your number comes up?

Thus, in practice, the apps are mostly useless.

Have you heard about Tinder Select?

You know, where you pay $500/month and you get to message people directly without matching?

I believe the appropriate phrase is, now hear me out

Sheena Vasani (Verge): Tinder announced a $499 per month invite-only subscription, Tinder Select, on Friday, Bloomberg reports. As part of the premium plan, subscribers can message people they’ve not matched with, while the “most sought-after” users will see their profiles. Tinder says it only offers the plan to less than 1 percent of its users it considers “extremely active” and that the applications will open up on a rolling basis.

If selected to apply, users will have to meet the company’s “5-point Select Screen.” That means their profile must include a verified photo, a biography, five interests, at least four images, and details about what kind of relationship they’re looking for.

The Match Artist: But what do you get for the price tag? 

  • Two times a week you can send a message without matching with that particular person.

  • If you like someone and they don’t have any premium version of Tinder, they will see your unblurred picture making you more intriguing, as well as having your profile on the top of their likes for the next week. 

  • If you’d like, you can add “select” to your profile establishing yourself as a premium option for your potential matches.

  • The select mode will show you to the most desired profiles as judged by Tinder.

  • Since you have to apply for Select if accepted, you’ll be less than 1 percent of users with Select, showing off that you’re the highest tier on the dating app.

  • You’ll also be given first access to new features that Tinder is rolling out. 

You might think that this price is absolutely outrageous, and I get it. But based on my experiences with many of our clients, if dating is important to them, they will prioritize this part of their life as much as they are able to. It’s not desperate, it’s just giving yourself the best chance you have with the tools you have at your disposal.  

Sarah Perez (TechCrunch): Inspiration for this members-only club within Tinder comes from Match’s July 2022 acquisition of another high-end dating app, The League, which could cost users up to $1,000 per week. During its Q2 2023 earnings, Tinder CPO Mark Van Ryswyk said The League indicated there was a market for daters who were willing to pay for quality matches and experiences. But Tinder Select doesn’t rely on human matchmakers, nor does it offer anything that’s really worth the cost of the $500 per month membership.

However, Select members are promised to be shown to Tinder’s “most sought after profiles” so they can enjoy more quality matches.

Jay Kirell: Tinder just rolled out a new “creepy sucker” membership tier.

For just $6000 a year you can engage like a Star Trek villain and creep up cloaked and undetected into her inbox.

I know it sounds bad and creepy. But what if this was actually brilliant price discrimination and also a win for everyone?

The first thing to notice is that $500/month is both quite a lot of money in some ways, and also essentially nothing in other ways.

If you are actively on Tinder, trying to find a partner, that is a lot of time and attention and emotional energy, and in various ways money, you are spending. A lot of people refusing to pay for their dating apps are making a major mistake, and are likely way too attached to the idea of not having ‘paid for it.’ If it can be done, upgrading the quality of your experience is a big game. You should happily pay for it the same way you would pay for, say, nicer clothes or a nicer apartment.

The question is, can you get your money’s worth? Let’s explore.

There are five benefits.

The unexciting benefit is early access to new features. We do not know how early, but I’m willing to say the expected value here is low.

So that leaves four that matter. All four are double edged swords.

  • Two times a week you can send a message without matching with that particular person.

  • If you like someone and they don’t have any premium version of Tinder, they will see your unblurred picture making you more intriguing, as well as having your profile on the top of their likes for the next week. 

  • If you’d like, you can add “select” to your profile establishing yourself as a premium option for your potential matches.

  • The select mode will show you to the most desired profiles as judged by Tinder.

The first three abilities reveal to varying degrees that you are using Tinder Select.

If your profile is on top and unblurred, not everyone will know what that means, but some of them will.

If you message someone without a match, their first response might be ‘this is a bug’ or ‘I don’t remember matching with him’ but most likely it will be ‘this guy used Tinder Select to message me directly,’ especially if they’ve seen it a bunch because they’re a ‘most desirable’ match.

If you put the badge on your profile, then that’s what it is for.

What reaction will you get?

My expectation is that reactions will be all over the place.

Some will quite understandably think versions of ‘this is creepy,’ especially for the direct messaging, or ‘this is cheating or unfair,’ or ‘this means you had to pay so you’re low value.’

Others will, also quite understandably, think versions of ‘this is a person who sent a costly signal,’ ‘this is someone who values their time,’ ‘this is someone who cares a lot about finding the right person,’ or of course ‘they are rich’ or ‘they are willing to spend a lot of money to get what they want and might spend quite a bit on me.’

If someone kind of spends $50 to message me on such an app (or off of it), I am sad I did not get that money and not zero suspicious that you felt you had to pay, but you certainly have my attention. I expect you to have perhaps put actual thought into your message and who is going to read it. Unless quality of such messages is proven reliably terrible, which I do not expect but is still possible.

Which effect is larger? I don’t know. Also that is the wrong question, unless the answer is extremely lop sided.

The right question is, are you going to get positive or adverse selection?

Whose interest do you lose? Whose do you gain? Which was attention you want?

That will likely depend on you and what you are looking for.

Are you looking for someone who does not care about money or is deeply suspicious of it, and wants to live frugal? Who cares deeply about things like equality and fairness? Then perhaps you very much do not want to buy Tinder Select even at $0.

If you are looking for something else very different, and you can afford it, you might want Tinder Select at $500/month. In extreme cases you might want it even more if it was $5,000/month.

The obvious danger of them knowing is that you will be a target for escorts and those ‘seeking arrangements’ of various types, for gold diggers, and those who outright want to steal from you or blackmail you or worse, and also some people who will be mad at you and want to troll you. I can see some people who would otherwise not do so thinking it was now ok to effectively steal from or take advantage of you. Some of that you might be okay with, but some of it you definitely aren’t.

You will need to keep your guard up. One question is whether Tinder does anything to protect against this?

Putting the badge on your profile could have the worst effects here, and keeping it off might be a good mitigating factor – if you were a juicier target, you wouldn’t have hidden it.

This could all be a risk worth taking, if the selection is otherwise favorable from your perspective. It is very easy to see how many of the people you drive away might be people you want to drive away. Or if the other features compensate.

The easiest way for selection to be favorable is if you are having very little luck by default, especially if you want to go after ‘high value’ matches that are, in the app’s context, out of your league. Without the boost, you are going to bat 0%, never get a chance, you were never in it. With the boost, you increase variance. You sometimes get a chance. It is a numbers game.

The warnings go double there, of course. You are going to face a substantial amount of potential enemy action, and likely not be so skilled at identifying it or defending yourself against it.

My guess is that for most people in a position to pay, but far from all, the net result is net positive if you know to keep your guard up. One thing that is clear is that this will change things quite a lot. Thus the experiment seems highly tempting. If you do not like the results, you can go back easily enough.

How much is it worth to message people directly? That depends once again on how people react and who is how likely to engage. If they often treat this as ‘if they want to spend $50 to message me then you have my attention and we’ll see’ and your looks are not your strongest feature, then I would say this is extremely valuable, and it cultivates the good habit of treating matches as worthy of detailed attention. If you use this and open with ‘yo’ or ‘wassup’ or some standard line you are (acting like) an idiot. I presume you will lose half or so of them to some combination of ‘wow what a creep’ and ‘thank you, next’ no matter your message, but if you only lose half you are in business.

The value here likely goes up dramatically if your ultimate goal is a long term relationship, especially marriage and kids. That makes the right match super valuable. If you are going for short term, the marginal value of a 10/10 match is much lower.

Next up is going unblurred to the top of the list. This actually seems pretty great. Most users do not pay. If you take the time to find a match, and they never look, then your match goes completely to waste along with your time, plus you get to be sad and feel mildly rejected. This makes that a lot less likely. The unblurred image presumably helps your cause as well.

I think this is pretty valuable. If I had a lot more money than time, this alone would justify the payment. Many professionals can earn $500 in only a few hours of work or less. This can save them many hours of swiping to get the same amount of response.

The fourth ability also seems great if you want it. Potentially this alone is the true killer app. It has the bonus that it doesn’t reveal that you paid. You get to see the highest value potential matches according to Tinder.

Which raises the obvious question. What is a high value potential match? I asked GPT-4 for a speculative list, which was pretty good, break apart some elements and discuss:

  1. Profile Activity and Engagement. If they are 100% to view their ‘likes me’ box, and someone else is 50%, and they otherwise act identically once they see it, then that doubles the value. This is likely a double-digit percent efficiency gain on its own.

  2. Profile Completeness and Quality. You get better information to work with, and know that the person is taking this at least a little seriously. If this is often not otherwise the case, that’s a substantial win.

  3. Who They Swipe Right On and Engage With: If the algorithm is going to show you people more likely to match with you, or even better more likely to actually have it go anywhere, that is huge. This could be observed behavior, explicit preference or both, or other factors.

  4. Responsiveness to Messages: This in particular. Do they ghost a lot of people? I would pay a lot to ensure that I’m not waiting weeks (or ideally even days) for an answer.

  5. Elo Score: The apps are notorious for using Elo-like systems so that you only play inside your league especially in the swipe phase. This one is a double-edged sword. If you are low Elo, a high Elo person is highly unlikely to swiple right, so even if they are truly higher value at some point you don’t want to waste your time. Most people will still likely want to ‘date up’ on this if given the choice. My guess is you want to either date modestly higher than what the app will naturally show you if your profile is optimized, or you want to aim super high where the payoff is so big you are happy to take your 1% or 0.1% shot, and maybe you have a story even if they say no.

  6. Demographics. Various features are generally considered better.

  7. Location, Location, Location: The app should be doing this already, but if it isn’t doing it hard enough then every little bit helps.

  8. Mutual Interests. The algorithm, again, really should be checking for this anyway.

  9. User Feedback: I don’t trust it entirely, but reviews really do work.

  10. Paying Users: For obvious business reasons, but also perhaps for legitimate reasons. They should get a boost, because paying means you are taking this seriously and have the ability to pay. If you didn’t also measure engagement I would take this as a very good sign. If you also measure engagement in various ways a lot of this gets screened off.

One hopes that this is highest value for you in particular, rather than highest value in general. Otherwise, a handful of people will get a ton of Tinder Select interest. That is not an ideal outcome for anyone, and would make this a much worse deal.

If it is indeed the case that you match with those the algorithm thinks are highest value to you in particular, especially if they are doing a good job of it, then this could easily make your time spent on app vastly more valuable.

The price is high. Needless to say, a lot of people are not in position to pay this kind of money, and unless you are completely loaded it only makes sense if you spend a lot of time on the app. And of course it is one hell of a price discrimination scheme. And of course, if Tinder is inferior to other apps for other reasons, that could be a hole you can’t dig out of this way.

But I do suspect that, given the stakes involved, if you were already using Tinder or considering using it, it is a price a select few should be willing to pay.

Versions of this continue to be one of the scariest graphs.

Cato: This is catastrophic.

Eigenrobot: >through friends trending to zero. Dear God.

Strikes me that this is more of a symptom than the root cause of problems. the plausible underlying illness being “apparently society no longer exists in meatspace”

this seems bad inasmuch as “have you seen how people act on the internet”

The good news is that the graph they were looking at seems to be somewhat manipulated, the real version is somewhat better, although not a ton better.

Compare this to the graph from last time, which offered less detail, went back only to 1995 but was easier to read and offered the same endpoint.

Online going up this much remains scary, through friends collapsing even relative to other non-online remains scarier. My understanding is that the kids these days do not think of this kind of action as acceptable. They find it icky, and they fear the resulting drama because nowadays everything is drama, and things going badly has become a potentially much more catastrophic outcome. So much of what can happen in dating, and everything else, has become ‘this is so bad that it makes you a bad person’ so it needs to happen in an isolated realm. To the point where you actively do not want ‘the credit’ for anything.

Alex Godofsky: The mysterious part of this, to me, is the collapse in “through friends”. Do you people just not have friends anymore?

Sawyer: Hypothesis, not necessarily endorsed: It’s about perception-of-culpability. Before (gestures vaguely) wokeness-and-stuff, if it didn’t work out between them, even if it went really badly, nobody was gonna *blameyoufor that.

It just wasn’t an area that was subject to moralizing; copenhagen ethics did not attach, asymmetric justice just didn’t come up. Any *riskinesswas of the form “what if my friend is sad” and thus balanced by “what if my friend is happy”.

I think there’s been a broader norm change towards seeing people as “complicit” in- (only!) bad outcomes; so there’s moral risk now, with no counterbalancing prospect of moral reward. Idk if wokeness is the point-of-entry for this or just another symptom.

There is also the total lack of friends:

What to do? I explored some options last time.

David Chapman: “Join a local religious group and attend regularly” is the best dating advice. Worked for me reliably across several diverse religions.

If you have such traditional options available, you want what is available there and you do not overly mind the associated costs, you should use them. By all reports, they still work.

More generally, in person efforts are still the way to go when you can, combined with seeking help from one’s network, including family and friends. Which requires having such a network, and making it clear that you are ready for, worthy of and safe to help.

The Baked Goods Theory of Social Interaction states that any social life without a regular weekly place to offload a tray of baked goods is unstainable. This is without considering dating at all, and it seems right. Also we all need more home baked goods.

Despite this I do not think, no matter how much they suck, that one should entirely abandon dating apps unless the dance cards are filling up without them. If nothing else, they are reps.

Important fact men need to know.

Shooks: The first dating blackpill I was forced to swallow was that anything of consequence you text a woman has a >80% chance of being shown to her friends.

judahrip: I am literally always counting on it.

skooks: The fool copes and seethes, the wise man uses this to his advantage.

Andrew Rettek: learning this was pretty devastating for me, in large part because I was too… mushy before the first date (which never happened with her)

Even if they don’t show their friends, if you text them a lot without them texting back in between, they can and likely will ghost you, also emoji stuff counts, as the (let’s face it bad, but watchable if you don’t care, and worth watching if you need to learn this and other important related lessons) movie Ghosted illustrates.

Texting means that your communications are on the record. Everything about them can and will be scrutinized and overthought.

Act accordingly. Treat every text, and every decision not to text, as a strategic move. Think through what you will say. Time your communications to send the right message, including neither too eager nor too irresponsive.

Yahoo’s Sabina Wex says a new trend is for men who pay and then are turned down for a second date to retroactively go Dutch for the first one and ask for payment.

Don’t do this. I presume there is also a ‘trend’ where the woman refuses such a request.

The same post also say that there is a new trend of posting credit scores on dating profiles. Does knowing someone has good credit outweigh that they posted that fact on their profile? Up to you.

I do not like the implications, but there is high value of information here. Actively low scores seem like long term red flags that you are going to fight about and have trouble with money. They likely are better predictors of ‘this person’s relationship to and access to money is going to be a serious problem for my lifestyle if we get into a long term relationship’ than income or wealth. That matters a lot.

Poll shows that (seeing yourself as) conventionally hot does correlate quite a bit to mutual, totally gaga, head over heels in love, taking the odds from 50/50 to a more than 2:1 favorite.

Highlights tabulated from 2,961 first dates by Dan Kras back in March 2022.

He notes the usual asymmetry of the attractiveness ratings men and women give each other.

I also notice the dramatic lack of 9s and 10s and even 8s. Why so stingy? I doubt it was the particular sample filtering out the top end.

Men especially are doing this strange thing where they’re happy to go up to 7, but after that there’s a big drop of. With all the usual caveats about how awful it is to assign numbers to people, if you were going to assign numbers, use the entire range.

There are many other graphs and stats on offer here as well, covering the usual basics. Noteworthy is this result, which he describes as ‘attractive men have more sexual partners but attractive women don’t’ but I think this instead says more about what the outliers look like, because the right side of the graph contains far fewer people.

Also noted is that men and women say that of the three considerations to follow, politics is most important, then religion, then a big gap to ethnicity, with women caring more about all three than men. I am guessing a lot of people are lying about their value on ethnicity, for social desirability reasons and partly as self-deception.

Here’s one potential dating method. First, have a single chooser look at six naked bodies and determine which ones look better while offering brutally honest detailed critiques. Then they strip down for their final two, then finally there is a date with their clothes on.

I mean, it’s an option, I guess?

It is also a show on Max, called Naked Attraction.

Ana Navarro joked, “This is even worse to me than Naked and Afraid. It’s Naked and Well Lit.”

I mean, sure, why not? This seems if anything actively better than comparing dating app photographs. What you see is now very much what you get.

Quite the poll, regardless of any true base rates.

As shill says, that’s a lot more yes than I would have expected. How hot is this girl?

I can see the other side of the argument here, if you believe she is world class hot.

One approach is that in theory, if one is sufficiently hot or otherwise resourceful, one never (well, hardly ever) has to actually leave one’s house.

You would work from home, perhaps with a job whose description was largely some variation on ‘be world class hot.’ Buy a nice place with some private outdoors. Get others to visit you when you want company. Otherwise enjoy the benefits of world class hotness, without ever having to go out in public, so the event never happens.

Alternatively, if there is a ‘without a bodyguard or other reasonable protection’ clause in the risk here, which makes practical sense, you could use that instead. You could even also interpret this as ‘driving from A to B is fine, you just can’t get out to pump gas’ at which point you have a lot more options. So you can work around it all.

There are also other approaches. Which seem worse to me.

How much is it worth to be hot?

A new paper is called ‘unraveling the female fitness premium.’

Abstract: This paper studies two mechanisms that jointly contribute to thinness premium in the marriage market: the economic mechanism and the non-economic mechanism.

My empirical findings from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) reveal that all else being equal, thinner females are more likely to marry richer males. A one-unit increase in BMI (Body Mass Index), roughly equivalent to a six-pound increase for a 5’6″ figure, is associated with a 3.9% decrease in the husband’s annual labor income for noncollege wives and a 4.3% decrease for college-educated wives.

Using the Simulated Method of Moments to estimate a two-stage static matching equilibrium model, this paper determines whether the observed preference for thinner female partners in the marriage market is a result of assortative mating due to the thinness premium in the labor market or is driven by non-economic factors such as a preference for smaller body sizes or other traits associated with smaller body sizes, such as self-discipline, active social interactions, and positive social image.

The estimation results indicate that the positive correlation between a husband’s income and his wife’s thinness is primarily attributed to a male preference for thinner spouses. Women with a BMI below 25 only earn 4% more income than those with a BMI above 25 (assuming all other factors are equal), but having a wife with a BMI below 25 significantly enhances a husband’s utility, akin to a 1.15 times increase in his consumption.

These are massive effect sizes. Standard deviation of BMI is about 6, and every point decreases the husband’s labor income by 4%. A 15% increase in consumption is also a big deal, but note that the difference on average here is about 10 points of BMI, so that’s only a relatively small 1.5% per point. Whereas feeling good yourself is pretty great. In my experience as someone who has lost a lot of weight, from about 42 (yes, really) to 22.5, I would say that I would happily cut my consumption by more than half to avoid having to go back, even if no one treated me differently, purely on physical lived experience, not counting health impacts. And indeed, I did cut my consumption of food roughly in half.

Basic advice always worth repeating: Get in shape. It is Worth It.

And otherwise get your own house in order. Again, Worth It for its own sake.

Elle: A lot of youngish guys ask me why they’re not as romantically eligible as their peers, & I am more than happy to provide the advice I can in specific situations (usually via @SWENGDAD’s excellent project) however ~80% of the time the answer is literally just “get in shape.”

this isn’t because “women are shallow” (though you will definitely get more interest if you are fit)

It codes for physical and mental health in so many different ways.

It makes you look like you care about yourself!

The same is true of fixing your teeth, getting a good haircut, spending money on good clothes, etc.

If you can’t look after yourself, you don’t come across as ready for a healthy relationship it’s so simple I’m mildly annoyed I have to say it.

Felix: Would you give this advice to similarly struggling youngish women struggling to date?

Elle: very rarely; hardly any women who struggle to date struggle because there isn’t anyone who finds them attractive. “Work on improving your mental health” might be the equivalent.

Returns to being seen (including by yourself) as actively hot are high. Returns to taking care of the essentials, and getting rid of dealbreakers to reach the upper half of the distribution, are higher.

What about being too weird rather than insufficiently hot or fit?

I can confirm that it does happen even for women, men will indeed, in sufficiently extreme cases, describe women as too weird. Several comments also confirm this.

Bobdaduck: I think most guys would view that as a pretty sincere asset. In my experience girls say guys are too weird, not the other way around.

As he notes, ‘weird’ often refers to something other than weirdness, which either lacks a better name or that everyone involved wants to keep vague.

Or one can say, there are lots of different particular kinds of weirdness one can be.

A good person worth dating will not object to weirdness in general. They will enjoy most specific weirdness, and only start to worry when rather high weirdness point thresholds have been exceeded to the point they inflict large social costs.

Many forms of weirdness serve as highly positive selection, even in general and especially for your preferences in particular. Driving away the wrong people can be as important as attracting the right ones.

But even the best of us will often have issues with particular weirdness that does not vibe with them without this indicating a general issue, which is a real cost. Your variation on something being weird does not make it good, and is in expectation a net cost.


I am always loathe to recommend this path, but assuming this is real and is actually happening, has the young lady considered refusing to answer, or even lying? Although it seems from some comments that this post can be linked back to her identity, so in her particular case that is going to be trickier.

Reddit post: I [27F] hate how men value me because of my bodycount.

So I have been with 58 different men which I know is higher than average but I wanted to have fun and enjoy new experiences and it’s my life so I did! But I’ve settled down the last year and been really trying to find someone special to settle down with and start a family.

All of my friends now are either married or in relationships now and whenever I meet a match with a man or meet one in real life and they always ask what my body count is and I tell them they always make a disgusted face and unmatch or ghost me. I even met one guy who I liked so much and I thought was so sweet who told me he wasn’t interested in a woman with such “high mileage” and ended up dumping me. I cried my eyes out for days over that. I’m more than just then men I’ve slept with. I have a decent job, fun hobbies and interests and I’m still young but I guess I’m just a ho in most men’s eyes.

There are many ways to respond to this. Here are two maximalist ones.

Carl Benjamin: The question we must ask young women is this: who told you it was acceptable to have a high body count? That person has ruined your life and dating prospects. You should be angry with them and ensure future generations of women are not deceived by them as you were.

Aella: Idk man, it sounds like now she has a naturally great filter that’s keeping out incompatible, sexually insecure men. I have a huge body count but have never had an issue finding long term relationships with high quality guys. You just gotta find the slutcloud subculture!

I have no doubt the filter is doing great work for Aella. She wants to date guys who are into what she terms ‘the slutcloud subculture’ and she wants the lifestyle to match.

That is very much not the type of guy or lifestyle the Reddit poster wants. The filter is not only driving away a lot of men. The selection effects are actively negative as well.

I also reject Carl’s argument. This certainly is not going to help given her revealed preferences, but the approach of ‘get constantly asked, answer the question and get rejected’ is clearly not working and needs to change.

My first thought is that this question does not come up all that often, in my experience, and when it does it is mostly out of curiosity. So the first strategy is to try and make the question not get asked or to deflect it casually. Notice what leads men to think to ask, avoid those paths.

If they do ask, say you want to preserve the mystery, or let’s not get into that. If pushed, perhaps give out a little information (e.g. ‘At least one and that’s all you’re going to get’ or what not) since if that alone scares them off that might really be a sign you dodged a bullet, and stop there. Mostly, they might think ‘oh it’s probably a high or weird number’ but they will mostly learn you wish your number was lower. Which is true, is compatible with it being 3, and seems strategically good.

The filter ‘makes it a dealbreaker not to know your bodycount’ seems way less harsh and also more positive of a filter than ‘makes it a dealbreaker when the answer comes back 58.’

Part of this is that I suspect the willingness to answer the question freely is a lot of what is being reacted negatively to. That sucks, but the world is what it is, so one must adapt.

You can of course also lie. I am a big fan of never ever lying… but I understand.

Aella also offers us a survey on the question of ideal bodycount.

Aella: I asked 700 liberalish women aged 17-29:

1. Their bodycount

2. Their ideal self’s bodycount

3. Society’s ideal bodycount for them I asked my followers, and also paid microtasker survey takers. Absolute numbers are different but the trend is similar: Women want more sex partners

*question: My ideal self, fully realized, self assured, without shame, would probably have had sex with _____ people

*tip: At your current age. You can also input a number lower than your current partner count. It’s ok to make a vague guess.

[She is working on a full post.]

There is a log tail of getting more tail, so means seem less interesting than medians. I don’t know how one says what is ideal, either for yourself or for society. In some senses, the ideal number is clearly one (or if you’re not together with the right person yet, zero). In terms of what leads to the best overall outcomes given general conditions, the answer is clearly more than one.

If the societal ideal is 5 or more, then the whole thing is deeply silly, but this is the game of love, so whoever you are, you’re going to have to roll a bit with the crazy.

Seduction, flirting and all the related skills are places where average performance is considered highly unacceptable. It seems Oxford University Press wants to stop calling this ‘game’ and instead call it Oxford’s word of the year, which is ‘rizz.’

It is odd that such a reproductively useful skill so often underwhelms. It certainly does not come naturally to most people. Somehow it used to be far less important? Or perhaps it got our ancestors into trouble?

Rob Henderson: Reminds me of this paper indicating poor flirting skills is a common reason ppl cite for why they are single. The paper suggests flirting skill was not an important skill for our ancestors; not under much selection pressure. Rizz is rare for a reason.

William Costello: It was also by far the most common reason that incels said they were single in one of our studies.

Incels top reasons for being single?

1. Not good at flirting

2. Not good looking enough

3. Socially awkward

4. Too shy

Being bad at flirting, socially awkward and too shy are all self-reinforcing inequalities of skill. If you have the skill it is easy to get more of it. If you lack the skill, it is difficult to get started.

Recent cultural changes have made flirting poorly and being too socially awkward potentially life-threatening mistakes, or at least makes them seem that way to those who lack the skill and can’t tell when the danger levels are high, which makes this problem much worse.

This is exactly where I expect AI to make things radically better.

It does not exist yet, and unfortunately the big labs including OpenAI are Fun Police so you can’t use their models, but making a solid text-only flirting simulator that offers rewind, detailed analysis, constructive feedback and scores that allow Number Go Up is definitely within easy grasp. Same goes for any other social interaction. By the end of 2024, we should be able to combine this with full multimodal experiences, so you move from text to a full VR experience, and you can practice your body language, your tone of voice and timing, your movements, everything. And you can do it all without another human ever seeing it, so no shame and also almost no cost.

Perhaps one thing to take away from the whole SBF and FTX fiasco is that this is highly fixable if you put your mind to it, no excuses?

Jacob makes that case.

Jacob: We need a new science of autistic rizz to explain how SBF seduced every single person he talked to from Caroline to investors and journalists to Tom Brady and Michael Lewis and none of you are allowed to say now you don’t have friends or a girlfriend because you’re a weird-looking nerd.

I think people are so used to nerds either acting bitter or low status that no one, especially the natural socialites who are celebrities or celebrity-adjacent, has any immunity to autistic swagger. It’s the scatterbrained professor archetype that girls always crush on in college.

It’s why Steve Sailer would be voted sexiest man in Dimes Square. You have to fully commit to whatever your bit is, whether it’s crypto pumping or noticing crime stats, and never give any hint that you’re doing it for money, fame, or women — only for autism’s sake.

it’s crazy how many replies to this are from people who:

1. despise anyone who’s rich

2. seem to believe that everyone would love and respect them if only they were rich

Heretofore unimaginable levels of cope.

The money very clearly was central to a lot of what Sam did. The charm offensive only fully took off after the Forbes billionaire listing.

But also Sam gave himself massive handicaps. He actively despised the very concept of caring about appearance. He never stopped fidgeting. Hell, he never stopped playing video games when taking media and celebrity calls, did little prep, paid no attention, gave zero anythings. Kept zero promises. He had to consciously plan all his smiles.

The other tactics here deserve a lot more attention than they are getting. Something was working.

Aella offers advice for seducing men.

If i had to summarize what i learned about seducing men from 10 years of sex work into two basic points, it would be:

1. Be someone who validates their sense of identity when you approve of them. Reaffirm their aesthetic sense of self. Be a good fashion piece.

“Be a good fashion sense” most commonly means “be hot” – guys love having the identity of “can make a hot girl happy.” But it often applies to other things too – do they want to be the guy who attracts mysterious girls? hilarious ones? smart ones? trad housewife ones?

2. Be easily influenced by them; reactive, let them clearly impact you. If they make a joke, laugh; if they tease, pout. It’s important to demonstrate that you are hyper attuned to their small movements; any little stone they throw causes great ripples.

Be like a valuable musical instrument that lets the world know what kind of man you’re with by the fact you’re letting him please you. He plucks a string, you sing; whether the song is good or bad is less important than the fact you are perfectly responsive to his hands.

(it’s easy to get a man to sleep with you, but as a sex worker the goal is to get him to want you sexually so much he’s willing to part with money. This really makes the game a lot harder, and ends up incentivizing sort of a female version of pickup artistry)

Constantin Marcato: This is very, very good and perceptive. I would love to hear the equivalent of this for seducing women.

Aella: for women imo first point is the same, second point is reversed. Be someone who validates their ego, but be *immovable*, be solid, be unreactive to prods.

Also what you do after the seduction might not be ideal. Correlation does not imply causation but it whispers to look over here. What does lack of correlation imply?

Aella: OK, I am asking ladies ‘how much do u like [thing men do in bed]’ and ‘how frequently do men actually do [thing] in bed’ you’d hope this would be a roughly linear shape, where the more women like it the more men do it, however the scatterplot currently looks like this.

There’s some correlation there. The five highest items on the y-axis are all to the right on the x-axis and so on. It is still worth asking why there is not a lot more.

One can think about things that do not make it onto the graph. There are things women would rate much lower than this. They do not appear on the chart because men rarely or never do those things. Then there are the things that are sufficiently common and general that they didn’t get asked about on the survey. Presumably those go over pretty well versus their absence.

That explains some of it. Within the range of things one needs to ask about, presumably then there will be a trade-off of preferences of men and women, since without such a trade-off if it wasn’t in the grand middle it would either not happen or become semi-universal. There’s also presumably wide variance in preferences for everyone involved.

The rest is lack of knowledge and communication, both about preferences in general and preferences in particular, and presumably some amount of indifference to women’s preferences in some cases. If women aren’t observing men doing the things they like most more often than this, then either the men don’t know what is preferred, or they don’t care (enough). Some don’t care, but in my experience most do, so the men don’t know, regardless of who is to blame. Better communication is needed.

Franklin Veaux helpfully offers this highly unofficial graph, selections not endorsed?

Franklin Veaux: I have an old friend who says there are 4 kinds of music: that which sounds easy to play and is, that which sounds hard to play and is, that which sounds easy but is hard, and that which sounds hard but is easy.

A similar idea might apply to sex as well.

For obvious reasons I have a lot more opinions about what sounds fun than about what is actually fun, and like everyone I have many large disagreements here on how things sound (in general, or to myself in particular). Would be cool to see the survey version, with demographic breakdowns, and so on.

Also because they can’t either. Clue-by-fours are often necessary.

Spellgage: Fellas, if a girl does something like this for you, odds are good that she is begging you to propose to her. She has in fact practically proposed to you.

Guys will receive a hand-sewed masterwork and not sense the romantic tension.

Felix James Miller: A girl did this for me with the DC metro map (for which we both had affection). Reader, I married her.

Mithos: My now-girlfriend knew I was upset by the 2016 election the night it happened and offered me to move me in with her. I said, “Oh, like roommates?” She’d also give me a lot of ideas for my own writing, which I also took to be friendliness. Eventually, I got the memo. Eventually.

Odi Aut Amo: In high school, a girl crocheted me a bulbasaur plushie and would get us Starbucks before practice with “Link” and “Zelda” written on them. I honestly thought she was just trying to be nice.

We got married in June.

Strive to, when it is obvious, take the hint. Most hints are pretty obvious, as are most cases of KHYF (Kiss [Him/Her] You Fool) are pretty obvious, and the most obvious cases are typically the ones with the most value.

The best news is that massive hints also mean you have margin for error. You (probably) do not need to bring you seduction A-game, you do not need to take a bold risky gesture, you only need to do something that makes it socially non-awkward to create clarity, ideally you still do the escalation two-step but even if you are not highly skilled you can still do so in a way that leaves everyone involved a line of retreat.

Expensive weddings are a scam. They also do not bode well.

The Rich: the more expensive a wedding is the more likely you are to get divorced but number of wedding attendees is associated with lower divorce rates

cheap wedding, lots of people.

I have not verified the source but wow these are large effects. They are doubly large effects given they run in opposite directions. Also given that richer people will spend more on weddings, and also tend to have lower divorce rates. Huge if true.

Something like half of weddings have about 100 or more guests, so the second graph is more saying that a much smaller wedding bodes quite badly. A bigger one is still claiming to be a big deal, a 50% cut in the divorce rate. On the flip side, the cheap weddings are the rare ones, with the majority of couples spending $20k or more.

The good news is that divorce rates continue to decline off their peak.

It is reasonable to worry this is selection, where the bar for marriage has been raised, but it is still a narrative violation and excellent news.

Lyman Stone points out that men who marry are happier. Even divorced men, Lyman says, only return to the baseline happiness level for never-married men.

Alas, I interpret this mostly as an observation that we lack sufficiently strong controls, because that result is obvious nonsense. If a man gets married and then gets divorced, that is a huge blow on many levels, frequently including devastating financial consequences (including many cases of being forced to work and then having their wages confiscated, whatever you choose to call that) and having a person who quite often hates your guts and is determined to make you suffer. The idea that you are still at ‘baseline,’ that you might as well have loved and lost full on including by law and finance, boggles the mind. Choosing to get married is a sign of a happy and likely-to-be-happy man on so many different levels.

I do think the broader result is true, that putting a ring on it is on the margin an overdeterminedly correct happiness (and other life outcome) strategy despite the risks involved. That does not mean you are on a freeroll. You very much are not.

A thought worth generalizing.

Caesararum: If you smoke and really want to fuck up a relationship, make sure not to smoke in front of your significant other, but light up as soon as they leave. That’ll ensure you start associating their presence with anxiety and their departure with release.

Naia: useful exercise in relationship literacy: try thinking through as many different ways of generalizing from this example as you can. There are a *lotof them.

Couple buys Times Square billboard to promote their ‘free love’ polyamorous lifestyle.

This isn’t as expensive as all that so long as you don’t go full brass ring. You can get a short 5-7 day run for $15k or so according to Claude 2. Or you can pay $40 for 15 seconds, which seems to be what happened, and then they got newspaper coverage.

The biggest lesson here is that you should absolutely be buying more short spots in Times Square. It is so easy to put yourself or your ideas out there. That deal is terrific.

I continue to think that monogamy is right for a large majority of people. Sam Black is the person I know with what I find the most persuasive defense of polyamory. Which is that Sam has clearly made it work in practice, and that it makes sense for some people in some contexts, but a lot of structures make sense for the right context and no one structure is for everyone. A lot of what made it work for Sam is that Sam was happy to put in (and enjoy) the necessary work. I think polyamory mostly cannot work without this, among other requirements.

Sasha Chapin, for whom I’d say things worked out rather well, talks about that time his dick didn’t work, and how much help he did not have dealing with it.

They are not all that reliable. An interesting statistic that might make some readers feel a lot better about themselves:

Robin Hanson, quoting The Times UK: “In the late 1940s .. average time span for [sex] penetration was just less than two minutes. .. in the mid-Seventies the figure had increased to 12-15 minutes. .. most recent figures … four minutes.”

I worry that a lot of what increased in the 1970s was better described as ‘lying.’ Either way, this brings useful perspective. This is one of the most prominent, but there are a lot of metrics where there is a number that people typically consider to represent you sucking quite a lot, but which also turns out to be about average. On many metrics, the average person could reasonably be described as turning in a quite poor performance. Reality does not grade on a curve. But also maybe give yourself a break.

Shoshana Weisssmann: I know he copied and pasted it which I don’t love, but I don’t hate this line.

Washington Post’s Drew Harwell looks at an at-scale OnlyFans business. It’s odd how little insight such pieces provide into why the product sells. The zero marginal cost products seem massively overpriced given alternatives. The personal branding seems generic at best. You can chat and sext, but at this scale it’s obviously with someone random. Market seems both like a huge grind and simultaneously highly inefficient. How long before the customers are mostly or entirely conversing with an AI?

Alyssa Vance goes into an epic, truly epic, amount of detail to debunk the implications of the ‘sexless epidemic’ and of this famous graph in particular:

She points out among many other things that the sample sizes here are super low, and the trends turned around in later years.

The full post is interesting for those who want to dive deeper, I won’t further rehash.

There were a lot of them last time.

This thread explored Keeper.ai, where they focus on a small number of matches where 100% of everyone’s criteria is met with an eye to marriage, with the CEO getting involved giving color. As I would expect, most choose to pay if and after they get married, rathe than take the up-front discount. Also as I expected, they use AI to find candidate matches, then humans look at the candidates to verify full matches.

Also a good reminder of this statistic.

Jake Kozloski (CEO Keeper.ai): Christian Rudder (Founder of OkCupid) claimed in his book Dataclysm that their hit rate from first date to marriage was 0.6%

No word yet from anyone on how the service went for any user, for better or for worse.

Shout advocates for the getting out and meeting people strategy, rather than wasting time on dating apps. His suggestion is persistence in physical spaces, meeting people gradually, slow escalation, and to only ask out a small minority of women you meet so as not to be a creeper.

Isha Yirass Hashem suggests men offer to substitute at daycare centers, says everyone is overthinking it. There’s a lot of logic here – obvious imbalanced gender ratio, get to show yourself around young children and that you are choosing to be there. You of course have to want what is on offer at such a place.

Scott Tucker notes dating apps can work and that they seem to work much better with high-effort messaging, especially openers.

SCPantera reports finding his wife on eHarmony. I remember trying it as well. It seemed relatively promising versus many other apps for those who want what it offers, and I liked the process design, although I never found a strong candidate.

Walruss points out that the early period of marriage, especially the part involving wedding planning, involves quite a lot of forced stressors and risky changes, so it is unsurprising that happiness in that period is touch and go.

Several commenters noted that the increase in ‘bar/restaurant’ meetings is likely that many online people choose to then first meet up in a restaurant or bar.

Elle notes some pitfalls men should watch out for. Don’t be flakey, either online or with texts. Take real interest in what she says. Don’t go on rants about feminism or things being unfair to men. Be willing to pay for at least the first date (but, I would add, do not insist too hard if they actively want to go Dutch instead, there’s a standard dance for this).

Bakkot claims to be lifelong poly with <1% of brain space dealing with relationships. So it is at least theoretically possible.

Also a few comments get covered under Good Advice.

Last time I closed with some basic advice. The message was, essentially, figure out what you want and then go for that, while seeking to filter out and avoid what you do not want.

I continue to think ‘what you want’ should for most people be a long-term end goal of a lifelong monogamous relationship and having children, but with exceptions, and that we must each decide for ourselves.

The biggest basic thing I realize I forgot to mention was that you should absolutely get your house in order on all fronts, if you have not done so. This is both highly helpful and usually its own reward. Having friends and in-person activities is part of this as well.

Another key point is to consider changing locations. The wrong location makes things much harder. Any area with few candidates makes it very hard. Among the big cities, the gender ratios differ a lot and this makes a big difference. Myst points out that Manhattan is 54% female, whereas San Jose is only 47% female, and mentions Greensboro, NC as a low-cost place with a Manhattan-like gender ratio.

After young people pair off, even a small mismatch can result in effectively very lopsided ratios that impact dynamics a lot. I do think being in New York made my experiences dramatically easier, whereas a guy in San Francisco is very much playing in hard mode, especially for nerdy engineers.

Malloc reports that moving away from Berkeley is the only thing that worked for him. Eva reports this very much worked in reverse for her, as she moved to Silicon Valley and now has her pick of nerdy guys.

Colleges, of course, now have the most lopsided gender ratios of all, especially with many of the men attending effectively opting out of dating due to the downside risks.

I plan to keep compiling what comes my way in these areas. With this much material accumulated, it made sense to get it all out there. But the speed premium is low, and there are a lot of distinct areas, so going forward I intend to do smaller posts with more specialization around a sub-theme at least a large portion of the time.

Until then, I wish everyone the best of luck.

Dating Roundup #2: If At First You Don’t Succeed Read More »

saving-the-african-penguin-from-climate-change-and-overfishing

Saving the African penguin from climate change and overfishing

penguins

Enlarge / African penguins on a beach near Simon’s Town in South Africa.

CAPE TOWN, South Africa—A weathered, green building stands at the edge of the cozy suburban Table View neighborhood in Cape Town, just a few blocks down from a Burger King and a community library. Upon stepping inside, visitors’ feet squelch on a mat submerged in antibacterial liquid—one of the first signs this isn’t just another shop on the street.

A few steps further down the main hallway, a cacophony of discordant brays and honks fill the air. A couple more strides reveal the source of these guttarall calls: African penguins.

Welcome to the nonprofit Southern African Foundation for the Conservation Of Coastal Birds’ hatchery and nursery, where hundreds of these birds are hand-reared after being injured or abandoned in the wild.

While this conservation center is a flourishing refuge for African penguins, the species as a whole is in dire straits. Over the past century, African penguin populations have plummeted, dropping from around one million breeding pairs in the early 1900s to less than 10,000 in 2023 as environmental conditions have worsened due to increased fishing pressure and climate change, which have both decreased fish populations on which penguins rely.

The climate crisis has also fueled more frequent and severe weather events in South Africa such as floods and heat waves, resulting in an increased number of penguin parents abandoning their eggs to seek refuge.

The staff at the Foundation is working to hand-rear penguins with the goal to release most of them back into one of the threatened Cape colonies they came from. But some of these penguins are destined for a different destination: a rocky outcropping along the Eastern Cape of South Africa within the De Hoop Nature Reserve.

There, scientists and conservationists are working to establish a new penguin colony, which they hope will become a stronghold for the entire African penguin species.

The ecological trap

It’s difficult to pin a single threat to the demise of African penguins; oil spills, avian flu and extreme weather events have wreaked havoc on colonies across South Africa. These chronic issues combine with freak incidents: In 2021, a swarm of bees killed more than 60 African penguins on the popular Boulders Beach in Cape Town and, a year later, two huskies killed 19 penguins in the same area.

However, scientists say that one of the main causes of the seabirds’ decline is the intense fishing pressure on sardines and anchovies, the penguin’s main diet.

Fighting unemployment, low-income people fish around coastal beaches to support themselves, said Shanet Rutgers, an animal health technician at the Two Oceans Aquarium in South Africa, and there is a large commercial industry for purse-seine fishing, in which a wall of netting is cast around a school of fish.

“When they pull out too much fish in the ocean, they leave the colonies with almost little to nothing to feed on,” she said.

Saving the African penguin from climate change and overfishing Read More »

here-are-the-10-best-cars-we-drove-in-2023

Here are the 10 best cars we drove in 2023

fewer EVs than last year —

EVs, hybrids, and a couple of sports cars—here are the 10 best cars we drove in 2023.

Here are the 10 best cars we drove in 2023

Aurich Lawson/Getty Images

The mince pies have been eaten, the crackers have been cracked, and the days are starting to get longer. That means it’s time to look back on the best vehicles we tested in 2023. It has been a good year for electric vehicles, which accounted for almost one in ten new vehicles sold in the US this year. We’ve also driven some rather good hybrids, as well as a pair of sports cars that reminded us that there’s still room for enthusiast cars. Read on to find out which cars made the cut.

1. Polestar 2

You'd be hard-pressed to spot the difference between the 2023 Polestar 2 and the 2024 Polestar 2, but the improvements are obvious when you drive one.

Enlarge / You’d be hard-pressed to spot the difference between the 2023 Polestar 2 and the 2024 Polestar 2, but the improvements are obvious when you drive one.

Jonathan Gitlin

In addition to claiming the top spot in 2023, Polestar might also win a prize for the most significant reengineering job for a midlife refresh. Normally, an automaker might restyle the bumpers or change the headlights and tweak the interior when it gives a model its spruce-up after a few years on sale. Not Polestar—it mostly left the cosmetics alone but moved the electric motor in the single-motor Polestar 2 from under the hood, where it drove the front wheels, to the rear, where it now drives the rear wheels.

Combined with a bit of a bump in power (ok, 29 percent more power and 48 percent more torque), the result is a real driver’s car, with better steering and handling than the front-wheel drive Polestar 2 it replaces. There’s more standard equipment than before, and it’s more efficient, too. Only about 30 percent of US Polestar customers have picked the single-motor model in the past, but they’re missing out. The twin-motor car might be faster, but it’s less engaging to drive, has less range, and costs a whole bunch more.

2. Hyundai Ioniq 6

From this angle there's a hint of the 1994 Lagonda Vignale concept to the Ioniq 6, and that delights me.

Enlarge / From this angle there’s a hint of the 1994 Lagonda Vignale concept to the Ioniq 6, and that delights me.

Jonathan Gitlin

Korean EVs built using Hyundai Motor Group’s highly competent E-GMP platform took the top spot in 2021 and 2022, but this year Hyundai will have to settle for first runner-up with the Ioniq 6, a somewhat eccentrically styled but highly efficient sedan. Like the other E-GMP EVs, its battery pack operates at 800 V, which means (among other things) it’s capable very fast DC charging—just 18 minutes connected to a 350 kW charger will return the Ioniq 6’s battery pack to 80 percent, which earned this EV the top spot in a recent test of which EVs added the most range the fastest.

The Ioniq 6’s bold exterior is partnered with a more restrained interior that, while not flashy, is spacious and comfortable. And its little whale tail spoiler is a delight, especially when the sun catches the inset prismatic panel on its upper surface.

3. Toyota Prius

The Prius used to be considered quite cool back when it was the first mainstream hybrid on sale. Now in its fifth generation, the new one finally looks really cool.

Enlarge / The Prius used to be considered quite cool back when it was the first mainstream hybrid on sale. Now in its fifth generation, the new one finally looks really cool.

Jonathan Gitlin

The transformation of the Toyota Prius from fourth- to fifth-generation would be worthy of one of Hans-Christian Anderson’s fairy tales. Out went a weird-looking car that appeared to have been designed by two entirely separate teams that then crashed their creations together; in came a super-sleek replacement with a more-steeply raked windshield than a Lamborghini Huracan.

Lower and wider than before, the dramatic-looking Prius is still all about fuel efficiency despite the makeover. The engine has grown slightly in capacity, there’s a lithium ion traction battery in place of the previous car’s NiCad pack, and electric all-wheel drive is an option now too. But the real headline is 57 mpg (4.13 L/100 km)—assuming you picked a Prius on the smaller wheels.

In fact, we tested two different Prius variants in 2023, the parallel hybrid and the slightly more expensive plug-in hybrid, which features a bigger battery pack and about 35 miles of electric range. And since I can’t pick which one of the two I prefer, I’m counting them both.

Here are the 10 best cars we drove in 2023 Read More »

tv-technica-2023:-these-were-our-favorite-shows-and-binges-of-the-year

TV Technica 2023: These were our favorite shows and binges of the year

TV Technica 2023: These were our favorite shows and binges of the year

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Warning: Although we’ve done our best to avoid spoiling anything major, please note this list does include a few specific references to several of the listed shows that some might consider spoiler-y. The segment for The Great contains major reveals, so skip it if you haven’t watched the latest season. (We’ll give you a heads-up when we get there.)

Everything was coming up mystery in 2023, judging by our picks for Ars Technica’s annual list of the best TV shows of the year. There’s just something about the basic framework that seems to lend itself to television. Showrunners and studios have clearly concluded that genre mashups with a mystery at the center is a reliable winning formula, whether it’s combined with science fiction (Silo, Bodies, Pluto), horror (Fall of the House of Usher), or comedy (Only Murders in the Building, The Afterparty). And there’s clearly still plenty of room in the market for the classic police procedural (Dark Winds, Poker Face, Justified: City Primeval). Even many shows we loved that were not overt nods to the genre still had some kind of mystery at their core (Yellowjackets, Mrs. Davis), so one could argue it’s almost a universal narrative framework.

Streaming platforms continue to lead, with Netflix, Apple TV+, and FX/Hulu dominating this year’s list. But there are signs that the never-ending feast of new fare we’ve enjoyed for several years now might be leveling off a bit, as the Hollywood strikes took their toll and the inevitable reshuffling and consolidation continues. That would be great news for budgets strained by subscribing to multiple platforms, less so for those who have savored the explosion of sheer creativity during what might be remembered as a Golden Age of narrative storytelling on TV.

As always, we’re opting for an unranked list, with the exception of our “year’s best” vote at the very end, so you might look over the variety of genres and options and possibly add surprises to your eventual watchlist. We invite you to head to the comments and add your own favorite TV shows released in 2023.

The Last Kingdom (Netflix)

Netflix

I came late to the Netflix series The Last Kingdom, which is based on the historical fiction books by Bernard Cornwell and set amid the Viking invasions of Anglo-Saxon England during the time of King Alfred. The TV series was initially released in 2015 and technically wrapped up in March 2022. However, a movie to cap the series was released in April of this year, so it qualifies for our year-end list. I’m not sure why this television show has not gotten more attention because it is outstanding, both in bringing to life a fictionalized version of the turbulent late 800s and early 900s in proto-England and in its development of characters and friendships. If you liked Game of Thrones and are looking for something to watch before season 2 of House of the Dragon, The Last Kingdom should be your first choice.

Eric Berger

The Last of Us (HBO)

Pedro Pascal stars as Joel, who befriends Ellie (Bella Ramsey) during a zombie apocalypse.

Enlarge / Pedro Pascal stars as Joel, who befriends Ellie (Bella Ramsey) during a zombie apocalypse.

HBO

Given the hit-and-miss nature of adaptations from video games to the world of TV and film (with misses more plentiful than hits), I was more than a little apprehensive about HBO’s Last of Us series. It was remarkably easy to envision the TV adaptation ruining one of my favorite character-based narratives in all of gaming in order to create some sort of lowest-common-denominator zombie-of-the-week dreck. Instead, we got a loving and authentic take on the game.

HBO’s version of The Last of Us does a great job toeing the line between faithfulness to the source material and deviations that still feel authentic to the world of the game. Many of the key scenes are literally shot-for-shot and music-cue-for-music-cue live-action recreations of original Naughty Dog cut scenes, and it’s a testament to Naughty Dog’s cinematic skill that they’re just as effective in a new “prestige TV” context. But then there are new creations like the third episode, where supporting characters from the game are given surprising and heartwarming depth. Through it all, the surrogate parent-child relationship between Joel and Ellie shines through, driving the narrative and leading to one of the most arresting final scenes in gaming (and now, in a TV season).

There were relative narrative shortcomings in The Last of Us Part II, so I feel the showrunners have a bit of an uphill battle ahead of them in adapting future seasons for TV. But the care they took with season 1 gives me some confidence they’ll be able to thread the needle and make more compelling post-apocalyptic television going forward.

Kyle Orland

TV Technica 2023: These were our favorite shows and binges of the year Read More »

a-forensic-artist-has-given-a-500-year-old-inca-“ice-maiden”-a-face

A forensic artist has given a 500-year-old Inca “ice maiden” a face

On the fourth day of Christmas —

Dubbed “Juanita,” the young woman was likely killed during a sacrificial ritual.

The final approximation of the Incan girl wearing clothing that's similar to what she wore when she died.

Enlarge / The final approximation of the Incan girl dubbed “Juanita” wearing clothing similar to what she was wearing when she died.

Dagmara Socha

There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we’re once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2023, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: Swedish forensic artist Oscar Nilsson combined CT scans of frozen mummified remains with skull measurements and DNA analysis to reconstruct the face of a 500-year-old Inca girl.

In 1995, archaeologists discovered the frozen, mummified remains of a young Inca girl high in the mountains of Peru, thought to have died as part of a sacrificial ritual known as Capacocha (or Ohapaq hucha). In late October, we learned how she most likely looked in life, thanks to a detailed reconstruction by Swedish forensic article Oscar Nilsson. A plaster bust of the reconstruction was unveiled at a ceremony at the Andean Sanctuaries Museum of the Catholic University of Santa Maria in Arequipa, Peru, where the girl’s remains (now called Juanita) have been on near-continuous display since her discovery.

“I thought I’d never know what her face looked like when she was alive,” archaeologist Johan Reinhardt told the BBC. Reinhardt had found the remains with Peruvian mountaineer Miguel Zárate at an altitude of 21,000 feet (6,400 meters) during an expedition to Ampato, one of the highest volcanos in the Andes. “Now 28 years later, this has become a reality thanks to Oscar Nilsson’s reconstruction.”

According to Reinhardt, Spanish chroniclers made reference to the Inca practice of making offerings to the gods: not just statues, fine textiles, and ceramics, but also occasionally human sacrifices at ceremonial shrines (huacas) built high on mountain summits. It’s thought that human sacrifices of young girls and boys were a means of appeasing the Inca gods (Apus) during periods of irregular weather patterns, particularly drought. Drought was common in the wake of a volcanic eruption.

During those periods, the ground on summits would unfreeze sufficiently for the Incas to build their sites and bury their offerings. The altitude is one reason why various Inca mummified remains have been found in remarkable states of preservation.

Earlier discoveries included the remains of an Inca boy found by looters in the 1950s, as well as the frozen body of a young man in 1964 and that of  a young boy in 1985. Then Reinhardt and Zárate made their Ampato ascent in September 1995. They were stunned to spot a mummy bundle on the ice just below the summit and realized they were looking at the frozen face of a young girl. The body was surrounded by offerings for the Inca gods, including llama bones, small carved figurines, and bits of pottery. Juanita was wrapped in a colorful burial tapestry and wearing a feathered cap and alpaca shawl, all almost perfectly preserved. Reinhardt and Zárate subsequently found two more ice mummies (a young boy and girl) the following month, and yet another female mummy in December 1997.

Reconstructing the face of the Incan

Enlarge / Reconstructing the face of the Incan “ice maiden” took nearly 400 hours.

Oscar Nilsson

It was a bit of a struggle to get Juanita’s body down from the summit because it was so heavy, the result of its flesh being so thoroughly frozen. That’s also what makes it such an exciting archaeological find. The remains of meal of vegetables were in her well-reserved stomach, although DNA analysis from her hair showed that she also ate a fair amount of animal protein. That, and the high quality of her garments, suggested she came from a noble family, possibly from the city of Cusco.

There were also traces of coca and alcohol, likely administered before Juanita’s death—a common Inca practice when sacrificing children. A CT scan of her skull revealed that Juanita had died from a a sharp blow to the head, similar to the type of injury made by a baseball bat, causing a massive hemorrhage. This, too, was a common Inca sacrificial custom.

Nilsson was able to draw upon those earlier analyses for his reconstruction, since he needed to know things like her age, gender, weight, and ethnicity. He started with the CT scan of Juanita’s skull and used the data to 3D print a plastic replica of her head. He used wooden pegs on the bust to mark out the various measurements and added clay to mold the defining details of her face, drawing on clues from her nose, eye sockets, and teeth. The DNA indicated the likely color of her skin. “In Juanita’s case, I wanted her to look both scared and proud, and with a high sense of presence at the same time,” Nilsson told Live Science. “I then cast the face in silicone [using] real human hair [that I] inserted hair by hair.”

A forensic artist has given a 500-year-old Inca “ice maiden” a face Read More »

fda-would-like-to-stop-finding-viagra-in-supplements-sold-on-amazon

FDA would like to stop finding Viagra in supplements sold on Amazon

Well, that’s one kind of energy —

“Big Guys Male Energy Supplement” turns out to be a vehicle for prescription drugs.

Image of a pile of blue pills that forms the shape of a male symbol.

If you were to search for a product called “Mens Maximum Energy Supplement” on Amazon, you’d be bombarded with everything from caffeine pills to amino acid supplements to the latest herb craze. But at some point last year, the FDA had purchased a specific product by that name from Amazon and sent it off to one of its labs to find out if the self-proclaimed “dietary supplement” contained anything that would actually boost energy.

In August, the FDA announced that the supposed supplement was actually a vehicle for a prescription drug that offered a very specific type of energy boost. It contained sildenafil, a drug much better known by its brand name: Viagra.

Four months later, the FDA is finally getting around to issuing a warning letter to Amazon, giving it 15 days to not only address Mens Maximum Energy Supplement and a handful of similar vehicles for prescription erection boosters, but also asking for an explanation of how the company is going to keep similarly mislabelled prescription drugs from being hawked on its site in the future.

Prescription energy

Mens Maximum Energy Supplement was just one of seven products that the FDA found for sale on Amazon that contained either Sildenafil or Tadalafil (marketed as Cialis). The product names ranged from the jokey (WeFun and Genergy) to the vaguely suggestive (Round 2) to the verbose (Big Guys Male Energy Supplement and X Max Triple Shot Energy Honey). All of them were marketed as supplements and contained no indication of their active ingredients.

And that, as the FDA explains to Amazon in detail, means selling those products violates a whole host of laws and regulations. They’re being marketed as dietary supplements, but don’t fit the operative legal definition of these supplements. They’re offering prescription drugs without providing directions for their intended and safe use. They contain no warnings about unsafe doses or how long they can be used safely.

The FDA points out that these rules exist for very good reasons. Both of the drugs found in these supplements inhibit an enzyme called a type-5 phosphodiesterase which, among other things, influences the circulatory system. One potential side effect is a dangerous drop in blood pressure. Both Sildenafil and Tadalafil can also have dangerous interactions with a specific class of drugs often taken by those with diabetes, high blood pressure, or heart disease.

Legal remedies

The FDA’s letter makes it clear that the highlighted supplements aren’t intended to be an exhaustive list of the products that Amazon offers in violation of federal law. And it is very explicit about the fact that it is Amazon’s responsibility (and not the FDA’s) to ensure compliance: “You are responsible for investigating and determining the causes of any violations and for preventing their recurrence or the occurrence of other violations.”

And Amazon clearly has its work cut out for it. None of the products cited by the FDA’s letter appear to still be for sale under the same name at Amazon—a company spokesperson told Ars that it pulled them in response to the original FDA findings. But searches for them at Amazon brought up a number of similar products, many of which included pills with the blue color that Viagra was marketed with.

So, the FDA wants to see a plan that describes how Amazon will not only deal with the products at issue in this letter, but prevent all similar violations in the future: “Include an explanation of each step being taken to prevent the recurrence of violations, including steps you will take to ensure that Amazon will no longer introduce or deliver for introduction into interstate commerce unapproved new drugs and/or misbranded products with undeclared drug ingredients, as well as copies of related documentation.”

Amazon is being given 15 days to respond to the warning letter. Failure to adequately address these violations, the FDA warns, will result in legal action.

FDA would like to stop finding Viagra in supplements sold on Amazon Read More »

40%-of-us-electricity-is-now-emissions-free

40% of US electricity is now emissions-free

Decarbonizing, but slowly —

Good news as natural gas, coal, and solar see the biggest changes.

Image of electric power lines with a power plant cooling tower in the background.

Just before the holiday break, the US Energy Information Agency released data on the country’s electrical generation. Because of delays in reporting, the monthly data runs through October, so it doesn’t provide a complete picture of the changes we’ve seen in 2023. But some of the trends now seem locked in for the year: wind and solar are likely to be in a dead heat with coal, and all carbon-emissions-free sources combined will account for roughly 40 percent of US electricity production.

Tracking trends

Having data through October necessarily provides an incomplete picture of 2023. There are several factors that can cause the later months of the year to differ from the earlier ones. Some forms of generation are seasonal—notably solar, which has its highest production over the summer months. Weather can also play a role, as unusually high demand for heating in the winter months could potentially require that older fossil fuel plants be brought online. It also influences production from hydroelectric plants, creating lots of year-to-year variation.

Finally, everything’s taking place against a backdrop of booming construction of solar and natural gas. So, it’s entirely possible that we will have built enough new solar over the course of the year to offset the seasonal decline at the end of the year.

Let’s look at the year-to-date data to get a sense of the trends and where things stand. We’ll then check the monthly data for October to see if any of those trends show indications of reversing.

The most important takeaway is that energy use is largely flat. Overall electricity production year-to-date is down by just over one percent from 2022, though demand was higher this October compared to last year. This is in keeping with a general trend of flat-to-declining electricity use as greater efficiency is offsetting factors like population growth and expanding electrification.

That’s important because it means that any newly added capacity will displace the use of existing facilities. And, at the moment, that displacement is happening to coal.

Can’t hide the decline

At this point last year, coal had produced nearly 20 percent of the electricity in the US. This year, it’s down to 16.2 percent, and only accounts for 15.5 percent of October’s production. Wind and solar combined are presently at 16 percent of year-to-date production, meaning they’re likely to be in a dead heat with coal this year and easily surpass it next year.

Year-to-date, wind is largely unchanged since 2022, accounting for about 10 percent of total generation, and it’s up to over 11 percent in the October data, so that’s unlikely to change much by the end of the year. Solar has seen a significant change, going from five to six percent of the total electricity production (this figure includes both utility-scale generation and the EIA’s estimate of residential production). And it’s largely unchanged in October alone, suggesting that new construction is offsetting some of the seasonal decline.

Coal is being squeezed out by natural gas, with an assist from renewables.

Enlarge / Coal is being squeezed out by natural gas, with an assist from renewables.

Eric Bangeman/Ars Technica

Hydroelectric production has dropped by about six percent since last year, causing it to slip from 6.1 percent to 5.8 percent of the total production. Depending on the next couple of months, that may allow solar to pass hydro on the list of renewables.

Combined, the three major renewables account for about 22 percent of year-to-date electricity generation, up about 0.5 percent since last year. They’re up by even more in the October data, placing them well ahead of both nuclear and coal.

Nuclear itself is largely unchanged, allowing it to pass coal thanks to the latter’s decline. Its output has been boosted by a new, 1.1 Gigawatt reactor that come online this year (a second at the same site, Vogtle in Georgia, is set to start commercial production at any moment). But that’s likely to be the end of new nuclear capacity for this decade; the challenge will be keeping existing plants open despite their age and high costs.

If we combine nuclear and renewables under the umbrella of carbon-free generation, then that’s up by nearly 1 percent since 2022 and is likely to surpass 40 percent for the first time.

The only thing that’s keeping carbon-free power from growing faster is natural gas, which is the fastest-growing source of generation at the moment, going from 40 percent of the year-to-date total in 2022 to 43.3 percent this year. (It’s actually slightly below that level in the October data.) The explosive growth of natural gas in the US has been a big environmental win, since it creates the least particulate pollution of all the fossil fuels, as well as the lowest carbon emissions per unit of electricity. But its use is going to need to start dropping soon if the US is to meet its climate goals, so it will be critical to see whether its growth flat lines over the next few years.

Outside of natural gas, however, all the trends in US generation are good, especially considering that the rise of renewable production would have seemed like an impossibility a decade ago. Unfortunately, the pace is currently too slow for the US to have a net-zero electric grid by the end of the decade.

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daily-range-isn’t-a-problem-with-the-2024-mitsubishi-outlander-phev

Daily range isn’t a problem with the 2024 Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV

The front of a Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV

Enlarge / The previous Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV was the world’s best-selling plug-in hybrid, apparently. Now the new one has more power and a bigger battery, among other improvements.

Jonathan Gitlin

What to make of Mitsubishi, now we’re almost a quarter of the way into this century? For enthusiasts of a certain age, the brand is synonymous with rallying and fire-breathing all-wheel drive sedans with extremely short service intervals. To my old driving instructor, Mitsubishi was the Mercedes of Japan. And a Mitsubishi was even the first electric vehicle I reviewed for Ars, way back in 2012.

These days it feels very much like the third brand at the Nissan-Renault alliance. The rallying heyday is long past, and its lineup here in the USA is down to just three SUVs and the sub-$20,000 Mirage, all focused on value for money rather than all-out luxury. Mitsubishi didn’t follow up the electric i-MiEV with another battery EV, but it does make a plug-in hybrid powertrain for the Outlander SUV.

The Outlander is relatively affordable by today’s standards, starting at $40,345, and a week with a model year 2024 example found it to be a solid PHEV with a big enough battery to make most of one’s daily motoring emission-free.

Yes, the US government considers this a compact SUV.

Enlarge / Yes, the US government considers this a compact SUV.

Jonathan Gitlin

Going by sentiments from our audience, it’s possible to feel that the PHEV has almost been abandoned in favor of more on-trend battery EVs. And data from Consumer Reports isn’t particularly complimentary about PHEV reliability, although the same publication did find PHEVs (and BEVs) are cheaper to maintain than a car that just burns gasoline.

Ars actually tested the new Outlander PHEV—albeit briefly—just over a year ago. But a first-drive event held by an automaker is stage-managed in a way that just spending a week with a car isn’t, and I figured since I quite liked the last model, it wouldn’t be a wasted week.

They say it’s a compact

Mitsubishi classifies the Outlander PHEV as a compact SUV. One can quibble about whether an SUV that’s 185.4 inches (4,709 mm) long and 75 inches (1,905 mm) wide really is compact, but that starts to get into philosophical debates about technical definitions versus the commonly accepted meaning of words. The Outlander PHEV’s 106.5-inch (2,705 mm) wheelbase is sufficiently long to allow for a third row of seats in the back though, so it will seat seven humans, as long as the two in the back are pretty short.

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