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More: All politics are identity politics. Republicans have long mocked this notion, treating the very concept of "identity politics" as a left-wing fixation. In reality, the GOP's success is entirely due to the cheapest form of identity politics: For decades, but especially now, they have worked to distract voters from the party's ruinous policies with appeals to their identity as white, provincial and, most importantly, Christian. This campaign has been enormously successful. White evangelicals have been the backbone of the GOP for decades not because they love tax cuts for the rich and environmental degradation, but because they have been told, repeatedly, that Democrats are demonic and there is no such thing as a liberal Christian.

This is why there's a growing panic in the Republican ranks over the campaign of James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in Texas, and it's not just fear that he could beat Ken Paxton, the state's Republican attorney general. Win or lose, Talarico " a seminary student-turned-politician " embodies an existential threat to the right's long-standing myth that to be Christian must necessarily mean voting Republican.

"As a young evangelical we were taught repeatedly and clearly: It is not possible to be a Christian and a Democrat," Brad Onishi, a research associate at the University of California, Berkeley and co-host of the "Straight White American Jesus" podcast, told me. "But candidates like Talarico are changing that. His theological acumen and keen ability to use the language of the New Testament to disarm bad-faith religious attacks is showing a new way forward."


This just another way of saying you compressed the algorithm after a data center did all the heavy lifting, right?
#25 | Posted by sentinel at 2026-09-20 09:04 PM | Reply

No.
#33 | POSTED BY SITZKRIEG
Its called transfer learning, and the biggest version of RNFM so far is training on UH Carya Cluster which is very powerful but definitely not data center scale.

#34 | POSTED BY SITZKRIEG

Somewhat confusing. You describe distilling in #22, then call it transfer learning which is different, typically a little model size increase, distillation is part of the techniques use to compress and optimize models. Similar processes different inputs.

This is your datacenter -> near edge (1st tier)-> far edge pipeline (2nd tier).

Typically you start with a large model distill it, the use the distillation to create similar or transfer models from the "teacher".

Its fair to call Carya Cluster is a data center and distillation as compression.


While recursive self-improvement trapped inside a closed silicon loop inevitably plateaus, bringing humans into the loop changes the equation. Human-AI collaboration injects outside perspective, physical agency, and unstructured intuition into the system, directly tackling the core bottlenecks.

At a theoretical level all of this takes time to happen. Think of how long it takes a human to accomplish what it knows/learns. It requires feedback and often alot of it over a long period of time. Continual learning systems are very prone catastrophic forgetting, there's an architectural issue that needs to be addressed for this to be corrected. The problem currently is we don't understand how LLMS do what they do. How they compress information, and how the decompression occurs we just know its efficient.

Here's a great introduction to the idea of compression as intelligences.
youtu.be

Eb,

Your warehouse example explains why an Amazon warehouse worker doesn't automatically make more than a warehouse worker at a locally owned business.

But it doesn't explain why CEO compensation went from around 40 times worker pay to more than 300 times worker pay.

You are right. Companies became larger. The economy became more global. Consolidation created some enormous corporations.

But none of that explains why a CEO suddenly became worth hundreds of times more than the typical worker.

Think big picture.

The article is talking about the overall change in CEO compensation compared to the workforce over a span of decades.

And something else changed about the same time CEOs were only paid about 40 times the labor force worker.

The top marginal income tax rate fell dramatically. It had been around 70 percent and by the late 1980s it had fallen to 28 percent. That greatly increased the after-tax benefit of ever-larger compensation packages.

Society was changing too.

There used to be considerably more shame attached to being blatantly greedy and openly flaunting wealth. During the late 1980s and 1990s, attitudes toward money, wealth and what was considered acceptable behavior changed. Society as a whole was changing what it considered "right" and "wrong" in a lot of areas.

I lived through it and watched it happen.

I even saw it in the large conservative evangelical church I attended for about 20 years.

At one Sunday school get-together at someone's house, the host herded the entire class into a room and gave us an Amway presentation. He had a captive audience.

And increasingly you heard religious messages that wealth itself was evidence of being blessed and that God wanted people to prosper financially. You were "blessed" with wealth, naturally in conjunction with giving to the church.

That may seem unrelated to CEO compensation, but it was part of a much larger cultural change. What people considered excessive, embarrassing or simply greedy was changing.

CEOs aren't simply paid for what their position is worth. CEOs are also paid based on how much power they have and how much they can negotiate. As attitudes toward wealth changed, CEOs became more willing to use that power aggressively and push for larger compensation packages.

And corporate size certainly doesn't explain everything.

Companies could perform poorly, lose money or lay off thousands of workers while executives still received enormous and ever-expanding compensation packages.

Bigger corporations are part of the story, but are not the whole story.

Why did CEO compensation grow so enormously compared with the compensation of the ordinary worker?

That's the issue the article is illustrating.

I am suggesting greed, tax incentives and a major cultural change in attitudes toward wealth played major roles in the changes we've seen over the past several decades.

John Demos' The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story From Early America (www.amazon.com) provides an account of a colonial captive who chose to remain with her captors.

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