MoltenMan

Compared to 99.9% of people in history, it's a king's life, and even today $50k is a top decile income. Of course, the US is more expensive than most countries, so you can move it down a bit, but it's tough to argue that you're not in at least the top 25% of people living today at least.

No, I think the person you're responding to is just saying that they really just are not starving or having trouble getting access to food at all. It's difficult in the US to really not have access to nutritious food.

Another Goodhart's Law casualty...

But the Protestant work ethic is good! There are hard-working people who are still poor, but there are very few situations where you, or anyone else, will be better off being lazy instead of working. (Hard manual labor that harms you permanently in some way, like old coal miners, is probably the biggest exception.)

In the counterfactual, where these hard-working poor people are lazy instead, they aren't suddenly rich or even the same as they are now. They're almost certainly worse off.

I was raised with a strong work ethic. Do I believe that working hard is the only reason I am where I am now? No, of course not. But if I didn't work hard my life would be worse in every way imaginable! Regardless of how lucky or unlucky your life is, having a solid work ethic will always always always make you happier. Work is not inherently 'bad' in some way, and neither is having to work to live and to learn and to have a good life.

I'm ~95% certain that images are tokenized, just like regular text, and fed directly in; that's the 'multimodal' part of these models. Now how this tokenizing works I don't know, and there might be some level of preprocessing, but it's certainly not converting the image into text and feeding it in to a regular LLM.

I've responded to a few people on this but the comment I was responding to was literally about the last 6 years! The context of this entire thread is about MAGA / Trump! I agree that RFK is hurting and has been for a long time, but that is not what this argument is about!

Ok if you want to do this then sure there is an easy solution. I think there are other problems with this though (for example no way this is flying even with the majority of people who are not anti-vax).

I think we live in a different age man. Media nowadays is completely different. Example: I have literally never had cable tv in my house. I've probably watched cable TV around 10 times total, all in a hotel room growing up. My media is all online, uncontrolled and (relatively) decentralized. Contrast that with 60 years ago and hopefully you see the difference.

Also smoking smells and has other negative externalities, which doesn't hurt.

I agree. But to be clear the original comment / context is about MAGA / Trump. I think responding 'No, you're wrong! RFK is the reason' to a thread about Trump and then retreating to RFK's activities over the last 20 years is arguing in bad faith.

The entire reason I made my original comment is because it's important to recognize that this is not a Trump thing, and getting rid of Trump / MAGA will not suddenly convince people that vaccines are good.

Do you believe this? I think it might help a little, but so we're on the same page RFK has only been in charge for 2 years. Why wasn't the previous secretary of health doing this? The measles outbreaks may be relatively new but we've had the vaccination data to see it coming for over a decade.

My personal belief is that there a lot of people who believe stupid things out there (and it's all only amplified by the news and social media), and for anti vaxxers especially I don't think an authority figure saying 'You have to get the measles vaccine!' is going to help much, unfortunate as it is. :(

Perhaps I should've been clearer. And yes they aren't helping.

And yes, we should blame them for the things they do. T But the comment I was responding to was acting as if MAGA was the reason for measles outbreaks, which is false. I'm an incredibly strong believer in the truth. An example of why I think this is an important separation: imagine you tried to fix the measles outbreak and miraculously got every single American to hate Trump and got Trump out of office. The problem would still not be fixed! People would still be dying of measles! The effort would have been almost completely wasted!

Look at the source I linked! Only 20% of cases are under 5!

See my other comments; it is not possible for RFK to have had any effect on this outbreak. If everyone getting measles was 2 or under, it could be possible; they aren't.

The reason I bring up Canada is as counterevidence; if it was Trump or RFK'S fault, Canada should be doing just fine. They had twice the cases last year in 1/10 the population. The truth is this is a problem with people believing stupid things, and it's going to take a lot more than Trump going out of office to fix.

See my other responses. Obviously this is bad. But the current measles outbreak is a symptom of a problem that's been happening over the last 1 or 2 decades. It literally CANNOT be caused by this, neither in the US or Canada.

It's still not too late for anyone who is unvaccinated to get the vaccine! Hopefully the next administration undoes this change, but the really important part is managing to shrink the anti-vax movement (which, if you look at the data in my other comments, you can see has been a problem since before Trump).

See my other responses. Do you really think RFK could possibly have had an effect on vaccinations over the last 2 decades in the US OR Canada?

Since you seem very emotionally opposed to Trump and his administration: I also don't like Trump or RFK! However, to solve a problem, you have to find the root cause of the problem, and pointing at the most recent politician you hate will never help anyone.

Completely agree! I will add though: this is a symptom of a problem that started 10-20 years ago. There's a lot of lag time between parents not giving their babies vaccines and outbreaks actually happening. You can see ages here.(https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html) 5 and under are only 20% of cases.

US: https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html

Canada: https://health-infobase.canada.ca/measles-rubella/archive/20...

They have 10% our population and had twice the cases last year (admittedly, we're starting to catch up). But the truth is that there are huge lag times when it comes to measles / antivax. This is a symptom of a problem that started 10-20 years ago.

The reason there are measles cases is because a decent percentage of people aren't getting vaccinated anymore. If all of the cases were 2 year olds or younger (when RFK was put in charge) then possibly. But not only are they older (https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html), this is also happening in Canada. I don't see how it could possibly be RFK's fault.

I'm not a trump fan, but the antivax train has nothing to do with him. (Evidence: Canada is doing even worse then us when it comes to measles). If we want to fix this problem (we do), the first step is to recognize the actual problem, not to play the blame game on whichever politician you currently don't like!

Man, this takes me back! I made a Minecraft clone called Mindacraft in Java using LWJGL (the same framework Minecraft uses) about 6 or 7 years ago using this tutorial. I vividly remember this tutorial being the most useful resource for OpenGL by an order of magnitude, and that was with it being written in a language that actually had pointers and buffers! (Using OpenGL in Java is very weird because you have to use pointers and buffers through a bunch of wrapper classes, and it makes things a lot weirder. It's like using unsafe in Rust if unsafe wasn't even in Rust).

I have been to Tokyo, and I agree with you; perhaps I should have been clearer, but my point was that in American cities you DO need cars (this is a given, however unfortunate it is), and so you are going to already have a car and the costs that go along with it, and as such you are not going to use public transit even when you could because you already have a car. If I had had a car when I was in Tokyo I certainly would have used it! Public transit takes half an hour to go a couple miles, and cost wise gas is cheaper! In the scenario where you already have a car, it doesn't make sense to use public transit 90% of the time. Does that make sense?

The only point I was trying to make here was that cost isn't the reason public transit doesn't work in American cities, and making public transit free will in fact make it worse rather than better. I want good public transit too, don't worry!

Why do you need free public transit for this? Why not just cheap public transit? Cars certainly aren't free, but people drive them because cars are just far better in most ways; you get to listen to your own music, they can be fun to drive, are incredibly flexible (can go anywhere), don't have the last mile problem, take like half the time unless it's rush hour, etc. Cost just isn't the reason people aren't using public transit. People buy cars because you NEED cars for many other reasons (most of them mentioned), and then once you have a car and pay for insurance and everything it's simply nicer and faster than public transit (rarely cheaper, even only factoring in gas and per mile depreciation, although the BART is so expensive it comes close). (FTR: I'm not sure where I stand on public transit subsidization; I think some is definitely good, but not sure how much I think is optimal).

Safe is a tougher problem, and especially when you consider that in most American cities with subways, the exact cities we're talking about right now, generally NO, there are many areas where it is not safe to walk! While I agree public transportation safety and public safety in general are incredibly important, they're also (clearly, given how we're failing at them) also difficult endeavors.

I also think this is relatively orthogonal to cost; cost is nice because it helps keep the people you don't want in the train (crazy people with knives, people smoking weed in the train, people who yell at everyone on the train and make them feel unsafe, etc.), but it's also important to create at least a small barrier so that people don't 'waste' the transit system! In general, when things are completely free, they will be taken advantage of; even a very small tax / friction helps stop this. If the subway is completely free, there's no reason to not just sit on it all day (taking up space and making it worse for everyone). I think subsidizing the subway is net beneficial given that we subsidize cars and things already with road upkeep and such, but free is not what you want.

Yep. I'm already not a huge fan of reading AI writing, and adding an obviously false disclaimer at the top is ridiculous.

Calling LLMs 'next token predictors' is completely reductive and disingenuous; it's true that technically that is what they're doing, but so are you! What people generally mean by this though is that they're just 'predicting the next token of their training [i.e. the internet]'. If you were talking about the raw models, this would actually be true; but the models are post trained, so even this description isn't true at all anymore! Saying they aren't 'intelligent' is both not useful and (imo) wrong. Who cares if it matches your definition of 'intelligent'; it still gets impressive stuff done, much more impressive stuff than you seem to be implying.

And is Claude the one that got frustrated arguing with people? If not, why is Claude the one writing this?

The problem is that this is an incredibly niche / small issue (i.e. <<1% of users, let alone prompts, need this clarification), and if you add a section for every single small thing like this, you end up with a massively bloated prompt. Notice that every single user of Claude is paying for this paragraph now! This single paragraph is going to legitimately cost anthropic at least 4, maybe 5 digits.

At some point you just have to accept that llm's, like people, make mistakes, and that's ok!

The subtitle specifically says 'the lower rungs of middle class have shrunk'? This seems a little ridiculous to just say. As trendy as it is to hate on modern day life and talk about how awful it is, in material terms it's pretty clearly better than it's ever been.

But being 'conscious' of something is being aware of it; your 'subconscious' is the part of your brain 'below' your awareness (although it is true that it's also below your consciousness! So perhaps both would work)

...no? It's the same as when you say you'd 'die for somebody'. I don't want to die, but if I had to die to save my family I would. That's not being suicidal. Similarly, if space is important enough to you to take this risk (which realistically is a pretty low risk!) I wouldn't call that suicidal either. I take the risk of death driving in my car every day; that's the nature of life.