What’s sad is that this is a consequence not just of this admins shittiness but of a long enshittification of our government.

Not only do government jobs pay a mediocre salary until you get really really far in the org, a fact that only gets worse as the idea of a middle class lifestyle gets gutted, but for decades now, working a government job has become less and less prestigious. It used to be that there were always plenty of loonies who found pride in being a “public servant” and thought the best place to use their genius was in government.

Now, as we see, there’s no one in these positions with even cursory knowledge of how these programs work.

And there’s definitely no millennials or zoomers fresh out of tech school that would debase themselves to working in government who would be able see these flaws in two seconds.

The time has come… For two sternly worded letters!

They literally hire people just to make up these scenarios to hire more people to make up contingency plans for them. I feel like once a year an article comes out that’s like “the US has a contingency plan in case Sweden falls to communism and arms itself with nuclear weapons” and it’s like: yeah, ok.

Hot take: but this is going to suck. The tariffs were guaranteed to tank the economy and would be someone that no one who supported trump could staunchly defend. Now we’re going to get a decade of fascists saying “but the tariffs we wanted were never actually instituted so we’ll never know how good they would have been. That’s why I want to do this worse thing.”

Like, I understand that the liberation day tariffs were about to send the US into depression mode and I still kind of think them being blocked is a net good just cause of how bad we would have been fucked.

But God damn it’s going to be exhausting.

Solution? Store 8 booleans in 1 byte.

This is a really interesting paragraph to me because I definitely think these results shouldn’t be published or we’ll only get more of these “whoopsie” experiments.

At the same time though, I think it is desperately important to research the ability of LLMs to persuade people sooner rather than later when they become even more persuasive and natural-sounding. The article mentions that in studies humans already have trouble telling the difference between AI written sentences and human ones.

This is actually very funny and telling. Mike Pence is on the side of the maga Republican elite who thinks Trump is just a misguided megalomaniac like all of them who’s just taking his turn at power and all he’s looking for is a little grease in the wheels to see reason.

What Pence doesn’t realize is that Trump moved on from him long ago after dropping him like a soggy sandwich for crossing him even once.

I think the tp during COVID was kind of a fluke. It could have been anything. Laundry detergent, some food product etc. TP was just what the news hung their hat on so it’s what everyone thought about when they went to the store.

I’m personally buying rice, beans, and lots of spices to make some delicious meals and wait out the price shocks of food.

Besides that, I mean what do you really need need when it comes to this stuff? I can think of a few things but it’s a very short list. Really we’re just going to have to ride it out and hope it doesn’t get bad bad

What’s crazy is that it’s perfect. Getting rid of autistic people is exactly the intellectual purging that fascists want when they get into power.

I know not every autistic person is “an intellectual” but many transgressive artists and radical leftist college professors are autistic.

I honestly don’t even know what to say lol. How do you think anyone forms an identity ever? We have - I was going to type decades - but centuries of case studies and writing about why people get roped into cults of personality and insane belief systems despite looking like lunatics from the outside.

What do you even think is happening to these people? Based on your previous reply the answer is “I have no idea” which should tell you you should look a little deeper into what’s happening.

Maybe they’re too far gone, but you’re talking about impressionable young boys, like 10-16. At those ages we as a society agree that a lot of all childrens personalities aren’t dictated by their own choices since they lack the life experiences and cognitive abilities to function as an adult. Instead they’re highly impressionable, influenced by their social sphere and nowadays their social media feeds.

So sure, maybe you could say they’re fucked from the jump, but understand that they are not taking as active of a role in who’s forming their thought processes like a 25 year old getting hooked on Tate is.

That’s… Their point? Either you misread what they said or you wrote your response wrong.

I’m at the point where I know he won’t face consequences because he’s rich. But an arrest and trial would at least be sanity.

They know we know.

It’s semantics. The difference between an llm and “asking” wikipedia a knowledge question is that the llm will “answer” you with predictive text. Both things contain more knowledge than you do, as in they have answers to more trivia and test questions than you ever will.

I’m sure Elon pays a huge premium for an exclusive, on-call drug dealer.

Some More News had the right take on this: all these companies just dumped (either in investment or development) (hundreds of) billions of dollars into AI development.

The problem is, we’re still 10-15 years away from AI being actually useful in gadgets and stuff. But these companies want to get paid now, so they’re shoving the cheapest, shittiest “functional” AI onto the market just to try and recoup some losses. And it’s painfully apparent it isn’t working.

I mean, lots of “libertarians” are frothing at the mouth to defund our military but agree that the government should at least subsidize healthcare and education with some of those funds. The terms we have are loosey-goosey and most people are incoherent policy to policy. We’ve just been sorted into groups by a century of two-party propaganda.

Yeah it’s a clever lie that’s perpetuated that says progressives have no where to go if they try to break from the Democrats. But secretly a more progressive platform would actually draw over a lot of disaffected libertarians and lite conservatives who only vote conservative because they’ve been convinced that they should only vote in opposition to Democrats instead of in favor of anything.

I mean, you still “cussed”. Switching two letters around doesn’t change the meaning and the original word doesn’t hold any special powers.

I agree it’s not much to make a reply about.

I think the attitude stems from the view that using placeholder words for swear words is often associated with religious/puritanical attitudes since there’s not really a reason to do it so the user reacts as they would to puritanical people invading their community i.e. hostile.

I think that’s not as true today but that’s where the backlash comes from.