Terr_

Some may trust those tools

I feel they will fail someday

Might need social graphs

Perhaps the NSA still has too many people in it who got to see the messages and deals key MAGA figures were making with foreign entities 2015-2025.

A fresh agency is easier to stuff with new faces--and partisan loyalists.

Working in HR-tech-land, I'm torn because (A) some of these systems have terrible interfaces and (B) hiring companies are just going to be even more overwhelmed with volume.

> We can never know

By that logic, I can't be totally 100% sure the alleged comment above this wasn't a freak coincidence caused by objects randomly falling off a shelf onto a keyboard! Not reeeealy...

(Or, for the folks who don't do subtext: Pointing out the impossibility of perfect knowledge is facile and unhelpful.)

The problem is that big companies with lots of money demand the situation continue so that they can make more money.

The correctness of that being... well, a whole 'nother debate. Putting that aside for the moment, CFTC has previously gone after people for fraud.

If we assume gambling about the outcome of an election is "futures trading", then fraudulent election polls are the same kind of criminal activity as someone putting out fraudulent corn-harvest reports when trading corn futures.

I think their point is that there's a split between the modeling / mathematical focus versus an imperative algorithm focus.

Kind of like how being good at relational-databases and SQL is different than being good at coding up B-tree implementations.

> the concern here is that the content is accurate and correct, right?

I think there's more, we just take it for granted because it's usually included. Imagine a teacher--perhaps a whimsical one in a Roald Dahl story--who is always very accurate and correct. However, somehow they always present things in a way that cripples students' future progress and understanding.

Most human communication involves some level of simulating the mind you expect was/will-be at the other end. This aspect becomes extra-important when teaching, because teaching about trying to change how that student-mind operates.

So the facts being imparted are secondary, and in many cases carefully incorrect facts must be used before you can introduce better ones.

It's not a matter of geographic jurisdiction, it's a matter of simple ownership.

The vessel is being being purchased by Okaloosa County, Florida. There are many ways for the state government to lean on a county to file some paperwork.

Yeah, the directives are leaking out into the results--just the problem, succinctly.

In a weird way, publishing these things is an entirely new low for disrespecting people over the internet. Back In My day, the author at least put some effort into insulting the audience, now it's just laziness.

> keep your mind exercised

OK, so I'm still very low on the spectrum of "I just command it and sit back", but I think the final toolbox will at least include adversarial questioning of the bot. For example, "Why does that code do A, wouldn't B be better?" or "Would this code break if a C event occurred?"

Sometimes it reveals a bug or a questionable implicit assumption, other times it leads me to see another part of the code, and sometimes the thing just lies at me... But it does help you keep some critical-thinking practice.

Another task might be to find and refactor/rename parts of the code that are just... not easy for humans to grasp. Some readers are thinking: "No, the next edit will be by LLM anyway, leave it so the bot understands", however I think that's short-sighted: Either these things are going to become good-enough that they should cater to human comprehension, or else they've reached a plateau and we'll want something that can resist the chaos-rot.

"Oh no problem, I'll just run it again telling the LLM to not do those 20 things, and then we'll have the right answer." /s-mostly

That depends on (A) verification being very low cost and (B) being able to infer the right answer based on wrong ones.

Those aren't always true. Sometimes it takes a while to see the fatal flaw in an approach, and sometimes having a bunch of failed attempts isn't enough to make the right way obvious, and thinking is still required.

IMO there's an ongoing battle between two very different concepts of what speech means.

1. I speak "X" because I believe X to be true. I am virtuous because I am correct, and honest.

2. I speak "X" because that is is the current signal for demonstrating loyalty in the in-group. I am virtuous because I demonstrate allegiance and membership.

_____

In the first case, you apologize for an error because it's how you get back to a state of being correct. (Or if you don't apologize, it's because you double-down and insist it isn't an error.)

In the second case, you don't apologize because the "error" was merely a strategic misstep of over-triggering the dirty out-group, and anyway caring about them too much is suspicious.

Regardless of the location, there's editorial cartoon/headline grist in it, e.g.: "As Trump does $VERB this weekend, the United States will sink to its doom."

I would not be surprised if Ron DeSantis (Florida governor, Republican) somehow abuses his position to force a rename of the ship at the last moment, purely to avoid snarky headlines.

> Not for wiretapping.

Part of the problem is (uninformed, false) "consent" being buried in a lengthy and silently-mutating Terms of Service.

Y'all remember the Energy Star logo on computers?

Maybe it's time for something like that, a shared baseline standard of "this thing won't spy on you", with massive financial penalties for companies caught lying about it. Prime adoption by making it a requirement for anything bought by the government.

Then consumers can reliably comparison-shop for a "TV" that doesn't turn into a traitorous 1984 telescreen the moment it breaks out of the LAN or you fail to click "maybe later" on its incessant dark pattern pop-ups.

So in 1829 a comedian presented it as a rhyming translation in their satirical book, but (AFAICT) they never told anyone what the original Roman text was?

I'm suspicious whether the original actually ever existed.

14 days ago 38 points, 64 comments (though some threads were... questionable.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50038640

All human communication is based on simulating the presumed mind on the other end, mostly subconsciously.

When you try that with output from an LLM, it doesn't fit because it doesn't come from a mind. (Or at least not good enough to sustain the illusion.) It's subtly but persistently wrong, and all those little warning flags are tiring.

It's like some absurd event where a plastic animal is put out and real ones try to mate with it, because it meets just enough of the instinctual requirements.

That implies the far-right would have otherwise just sat peacefully at home doing crossword puzzles, until triggered into acting.

I don't think that's ever been true.

To save others a couple clicks:

> [Auto-Translated] The Sleeping Giants Brazil report analyzes 300 Reels of 30 Instagram profiles to investigate evidence of algorithmic favoring to federal deputy Nikolas Ferreira (PL-MG). Its ten videos totaled 410.5 million views, nearly three times the total of the 90 videos of the other nine MPs analyzed. In views by follower, its performance was 17.2 times the typical value of these deputies, 29.3 times that of the largest Brazilian profiles and 33.7 times that of the largest profiles in the world. His average viewing was behind only Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, surpassing celebrities such as Selena Gomez, Beyoncé and Justin Bieber. The study documents a persistent disparity that requires more transparency from the Meta, although public data does not allow it to determine its causes.

That is a real reason I can't summon the interest to subscribe to any of them: Whatever I pick, I'll be dissatisfied, so I put it off for another day...

Agreed, possibly because it's spectrum distribution is a lot closer to natural sounds, like flowing water.

Equilibrium seems like the odd-one-out to me.

Sure, we've got rising authoritarianism (and hypocritical elites) but there are much better movies for that. (For example, Brazil (1985) does that with Idiocracy overlap.)

Unlike Equilibrium, nobody's being imprisoned for doing art or music per se, but rather because their specific message offended the authoritarians that seek to end freedom-of-speech. First they came for the comedians...

Right, there's this implied old bargain, and then there's this new stuff which tries to get consumers to pretend nothing changed while violating the old rules willy-nilly.

But what digital ad-agency will agree to carry those ads? :P

I think we'd be remiss not to consider general changes in the security landscape: E-mails are not encrypted the same way HTTPS visits are, and from a compliance standpoint it's easier to argue that you did your due-diligence, only showing the information to the authorized person.

In other words, I'd expect the trend to happen regardless of whether Google (or any other company) started spying on customer data for a competitive advantage.

> I've switched over to giving out an address on a domain I own

Recently some Discord channel started using some other weird "verifier" bot plugin thing and they refuse, claiming my long-time personal domain is "high risk" for no discernible reason.

I'm scared of a future where you have to be in the positively good graces of 4-6 email/SSO monopolies to avoid becoming a digital nonperson.

That's on my someday-list. Immich through its rootless-docker configuration impressed me, but I've still gotta get around to figuring how I can provide access to family members. (I mean, I could buy some suitable hardware that isn't my desktop, but prices these days, amirite?)