clejack

I was recently wondering why something of this nature hasn't happened long ago. Governments have to be spending so much money on licensing fees.

It seems like you could throw a fraction of that money at open source software, actually make it good and then not be beholden to corporations like Microsoft or Google. Combine this sort push between multiple governments and the world gets good (at least relatively) software for all of the major office and design concerns.

CAD software is the same. I tried freecad recently after a long hiatus and came back to immediately crashing after trying to make a cube from a sketch and also finding out that there's no midpoint constraint (wtf) if I remember correctly.

Are people still experiencing llms getting stuck in knowledge and comprehension loops? I used them but not excessively, and I'm not heavily tracking their performance either.

For example, if you ask an llm a question, and it produces a hallucination then you try to correct it or explain to it that it is incorrect; and it produces a near identical hallucination while implying that it has produced a new, correct result, this suggests that it does not understand its own understanding (or pseudo-understanding if you like).

Without this level of introspection, directing any notion of true understanding, intelligence, or anything similar seems premature.

Llms need to be able to consistently and accurately say, some variation on the phrase "I don't know," or "I'm uncertain." This indicates knowledge of self. It's like a mirror test for minds.

I don't keep up with individuals like Peterson, so I wasn't aware of who he was until I read this article.

After reading some comments from him, mocking is definitely deserved. This man embodies "fools idea of a wiseman."

I'm not sure how anyone can defend the level of bullshit he is generating with a straight face.

This is probably one of the more observant posts I've read. I'm reluctant to accept the idea that things can't be fixed, but when framed with "because they were designed to operate within their current failure mode," I'm compelled to agree at least partially.

It does seem like most meaningful change comes at the failure of a system or when a new clean slate emerges. E.g. the fall of Rome leading to modern Europe or new land (from the euro perspective) leading to the United States of America.

As I'm writing this I'm now realizing that defining the U.S. as a clean slate example is inaccurate because the indigenous system was destroyed in the process.

With that said, meaningful change is possible without collapse, but I'm wondering if this sort of change requires special circumstances that I can't currently describe. The civil rights movement is an example of this.

This article can be summed up with two thoughts for me.

First, perpetual work is hard work, but not all hard work is perpetual. The ground on which she is basing her article on seems to be primarily focused on perpetual work .

Second, violence exists, so hard work will always be required. A society of people who doesn't want to work, is a society of people who are ready to be exploited by an antagonistic actor. The author mentioned the aristocrats and the peasants, but didn't mention the soldiers, unless I missed while skimming through.

For the record, I'm not a fan of hard work. I just accept it is sometimes necessary. Not because of some ruler class conspiracy that has psychologically taken hold of me, but because that is life.

It's sadly buried in the article. They mention the median is ~$200k.

The fact that that they were taking about 20M households in a country with a population of 300M+ was already bad enough.

Come to the U.S. and say something bad about Trump while also being in a compromised position, and you might find yourself in a similar situation. At what level this will end, I can't say; but we know where we were and we know where we currently are. Any average Joe could've talked shit about Biden with impunity. It seems we're getting away from that.

The fact that Europe has some aspects "worse" from your perspective is immaterial. I'm responding to a change in my environment not a change in the European environment. Having the president threatening schools and libraries for having certain books, and organizations for using certain terms when things weren't like that before is a rather jarring change and to pretend that it isn't indicates intellectual dishonesty or a lack of paying attention.

I was just listening to a story about immigrants with student visas being hunted down by ICE while they still have student status (even if you visa expires your legal status is maintained with your student status normally). The fact that this person is trying to immigrate from Europe means he/she may very well have an issue depending on background.

You say you're 19. I take it you don't watch the news or at least not the U.S. news (which is understandable)? I have some bad news for you my aspirational friend. Things are changing very fast.

It seems as if we're quickly losing the freedom to have the wrong ideas. This was certainly a thing when Dems were in office, but now it has been amplified into an Orwellian form. And as far as immigration goes, if you don't have the right aesthetic or your social media doesn't look right, you may have a problem here as well.

Good luck.

The problem with "people who get shit done" lies in the people themselves. Are they level headed and honest? Are the impulsive and deceptive? These things matter.

Also, "getting shit done" doesn't have intrinsic positive value, and infact it is problematic when the shit in question is "really stupid shit".

If a business fails, that is ultimately of little significance in the context of a country or the world. If a country fails, that is very significant in the context of that country and potentially the world.

Getting rid of pennies/nickels sure, but where does the gold standard come in?

You want to tie the economy to a material that doesn't capture economic growth and which also has its remaining stores in areas of the world not owned by your nation?

If Google wasn't lying to me with its response, the current USA gdp is over $20 trillion, and the US owns around $200 billion in gold.

Wouldn't tying gold to the current economy either devalue the dollar or inflate the current value of gold before locking the country into a state of economic stagnation?

I began to roll my eyes while reading this. For anyone that does any composing and has understanding of arpeggios and scales, you'll know that there are thousands of works including your own using these musical devices to create "peaks and valleys."

After actually seeing the midi structure, I have to say that it is pretty cool. Mystical, probably not, but certainly interesting.

I didn't work for Mazda, but I did work for a large auto manufacturer, and I can tell you we did incentivize dealers to complete sign up for connected services for the reasons most of you would probably expect.

We wanted to collect your data to sell it, utilize it for maintenance, or for general product improvement. I.e. wanted it so we could make or save money. No surprise there I hope.

The dealer incentive was literally a payment when a customer signs up because the money we'd make with customer data outweighs the dealer kickback.

There's some grim humor in the fact that the poster reflects on his sister's use of chatgpt, and just ends on that point. I have to wonder if he decided to talk to her or his parents about the situation. I didn't see anything in the post to suggest it, just a "this next generation is cooked."

Who cooked them is the question? Children won't raise themselves generally.

Wow, what a connection you've made here. I never made this connection, but you're right.

I've occasionally thought to myself "once an idea is created it wants to be free," but in the back of my mind I've always had some sympathy for artist of any medium trying to profit off their talents or anyone trying to create anything and profit from their efforts.

The library comparison is notable, but a library has a limited, physical nature. They can only hold a finite amount of books, while anything digital can be replicated indefinitely.

Is "getting Luigi'd" becoming a thing?

For the most part, I'm not in the loop as cultural phrases come into being, and I'm often not aware of the references. I'm conflicted by the fact that I find this phrase both tragic and funny as hell. I can't get Nintendo's Luigi out of my mind.

Instead of trying to disprove the dead Internet theory, try asking your friend about it. Ask why they believe it. Ask why it matters. Ask why it matters in the context of the real world with its real, living people. You probably won't be able to walk them back with evidence, but you might be able to walk them back by unraveling them with their own thought process.

See if you can take a walk at the park with this person and just observe the world. The Internet came to be not very long ago, the idea of allowing yourself to fall apart due to its decayed state is silly.

"The obvious argument for the existence of a creator is that we have no other explanations...[so] it is only reasonable to accept the only one that we do have to be true ... [but] if a creator created us, who then created our own creator?

Given that we can only operate based on knowledge that exists within our own world, it is hard, and maybe impossible to answer that question. And it is maybe possible that we come to develop very good theories about that the more we understand about our own world in the future."

This morning I woke up thinking about human behavior as it relates to various beliefs we hold. I was mainly focused on the more irrational ones like religion, and I've come to believe that it is not always a lack of raw intelligence that undoes us (though that is certainly an issue), but it is a lack of consistency that harms us the most.

The opinion expressed at the end of the quoted message undoes the entire blog post, and it begs the question, if you can acknowledge that there are simply things that we do not currently know and that we may discover in the future, why not take that view when thinking about God?

The simple fact is we do not know regardless of any hypothesis we come up with because we don't have a good test currently.

The author's reasoning is inductive in nature. I.e. it takes specific facts and tries to make a general rule from it. This type of reasoning is strong in certain mathematical context, but it's weak in many real life applications.

I'll give you an example with 3 sequences of numbers. The first two will be easy. Guess the next number.

Sequence 1: 5,5,5,5,5

If you guessed 5, you are correct.

Sequence 2: 1,2,3,4,5

If you guessed 6, I would tell you that I lied earlier. There is no 3rd sequence and the lesson is here at the second. The above sequence is an infinite loop of the sequence "1,2,3,4,5," and the number 6 is your "rational" conclusion on God. If you honestly guessed the sequence was a loop, you have a strange mind, but hopefully at this point you can see the answer was arbitrary and subject to my whims.

I could have come up with multiple answers.

We collectively have no more insight into the workings of universe, than any of you have into the workings of my mind. A simple "I don't know" will suffice sometimes.

Are you sure you're speaking the same language?

Recently two friends of mine were speaking and one of them said "it's too woke now" in reference to something in media. While his words were not explicit, I understood that he was speaking about the tendency of certain media to insert dialogue or scenes that reference the current liberal social zeitgeist in a meaningless way. He was ultimately saying something like "it's annoying, but in a specifically liberal way."

The other friend said "Dude come on. Don't say that. Therein lies the path of darkness."

I suspect you and my second friend look at the pejorative use of woke as a conservative dog whistle. This conservative whistle warns us of anything related to non-white social issues and non-male gender issues, and it marks these topics as bad.

I tend to agree with my first friend and use the word as he did. I use it to describe situations in which liberal ideals on social issues are being raised, but there's no actual meaningful action or thought involved. It's just a tool to bludgeon people with. "You can't say that. You're bad." "You can't think that. You're bad."

What does it mean to you exactly? What do you feel is festering?

If we're letting young men down, I think it's by assuming that they are too stupid to form an opinion and too terrible to not be intrinsically wicked. You see a super villain origin. I see an opportunity to ask the author "what do you mean by woke?" Given the tone of the article, I suspect he has yet another definition. Probably something related to the suppression of the edginess and dark humor associated with "weird people."

I think the parent poster has the right idea. This is not just anthropomorphization; it's an analogy.

They take away is contained in the first and last sentences.

Derivation is key.

Copyright protects original expressions, and copying means to reproduce (read and write) something. The analogy OP made is focused on the reading and writing done by humans and the reading and writing done by an algorithm.

Algos like stable diffusion are reading, and their user is controlling what is written.

If the user produces a work that is unique, but uses the style of a particular artist, that seems like it should be valid, since style is simply a process. It's how to create art, but it is not art, and processes are not subject to copyright based on copyright.gov.

With all that said legality isn't morality, and I sympathize with the artist.

You can sell a put at a strike price you believe is reasonable and collect the premium for guaranteed.

If the strike is hit, you've bought in at what you believed was a reasonable price at the time of your contract creation. You may technically show a "loss," but you're getting something you wanted at the price you wanted.

If you buy a put instead you're effectively saying you strongly believe that the stock will fall to $x, and in this case, the fall to x will generate more money than the cost of the premium.

The second scenario is hard to get right because the option already has the statistical behavior of the stock priced into the premium. Your knowledge needs to be better than the collective knowledge of the market to make this viable

Unfortunately, the notion of bullshit jobs extends beyond jobs that are simply low value within a company. Whole organizations within a company or entire companies can be considered bullshit.

Many of us on this site are most likely contributors to bullshit. How many of us work on something that is tracking and spying on people with the purpose of selling or using that data to manipulate them later?

The context is the next sentence.

"do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret."

It's just hyperbolic/poetic language. It's not possible to do something in such a way that your right hand doesn't know what your left hand is doing, because they are both connected centrally (and they can't know anything to begin with).

"Be so secretive that your resting hand doesn't know what your charitable hand is doing."

In a past post, I mentioned that I thought the city was the appropriate area of division for this country--i.e. city's rights not states' rights.

It may not ever happen, but I think it addresses your first concern since, as you mentioned, the divide is urban vs rural which is a good proxy for city boundaries.

What I don't understand is the economic implication of such a split. Is there a way to keep the economic stability of the country while having more cultural freedom?

I suppose one of the problems with this sort of split is that some cities can leverage agriculture, heavy industry, business activity, or tourism; but some cities probably exists that don't have any means to generating income beyond taxing citizens.

No need to reverse the thought or come to the conclusion you reached. Rights, fair, equal, etc. These are all valuations we make on the fly. They aren't built into the fabric of reality.

The simple fact of the matter is within a capitalist framework, money is not distributed evenly (not suggesting it should be), and not everyone starts with the same hand, so "fair" doesn't really have any significance.

The relationship between the wealthy and the poor of today is similar to the relationship between the brutes and the weaklings of the past.

The difference is the activity of the wealthy gets socially categorized as civilized or fair, but the activities of brutes are classified as savage.

What's the difference between me forcing you to move from a place by threatening to kill you and forcing you to move by changing the environment (cost of living, rules of living, compensation, etc.) so you can't stay?

You could say "living vs. dying is the difference," but that's not true from the perspective of the powerful. If I hold the power in this hypothetical, from my perspective I had a goal of forcing you to move; and I achieved it.

With all of that said, and the veil of fairness thrown away, only one question remains. Would you be ok with being forced to move from your home because a billionaire decided he likes your neighborhood? Assume you aren't compensated for the move.

I'm not against abortion, so I could have used anything there, but I stuck with abortion to keep the topic consistent. The key take away is that the morality of the subject is evaluated by humans. One groups wants to control another group, to an extent that is unreasonable.

Sure, I think the fairest solution at the scale of adults is to let the individual choose whether to get an abortion or not, but from a conservative perspective, you're dealing with two equivalent people, and perception is reality unfortunately.

I appreciate your sentiment, but I think you fall into the very trap that leads to the current state of the world.

I'm not one to promote doom and gloom, but we have to face reality and acknowledge the circumstances we find ourselves in. They are a bit doomy and a bit gloomy. I acknowledge that any action can have unintended consequences, but inaction and repetitive action will only lead to the same outcomes.

The outcome I hope for is this: people will be forced to face the consequence of their political decisions. They will no longer be able to hide behind the complexity of the world.

Right now a conservative can look at his state or the U.S. at large and blame any flaw on liberal ideology. "Things wouldn't be so bad if we could just control the liberals." "Things wouldn't be, so bad if my vote actually counted for something." The same is true for Liberals.

You could argue that these people should educate themselves and be active participants in democracy, but "should" doesn't count for much; and their perception is not entirely unreasonable. To reiterate, your suggestions is to save them from themselves. They don't know any better--we have to bring them "dignified lives." Is it so hard to understand why people would take increasingly inflexible positions when on the opposite end of their desire, stands someone like you with such a holier-than-thou mindset?

As an alternative to your suggestion, I wonder this: If you vote for a conservative, and 90% of the people around you vote for a conservative, and your mayor is conservative, and that mayor implements conservative policies, and you find that your life still isn't improving. Who do you have to blame now?

You can't save people that don't want to be saved, and sometimes you can't save people that do want to be saved. Sometimes there is no value in trying because the results of a given sequence of actions create a foregone conclusion.

I listen to conservative politicians talking about outlawing leaving a state to get an abortion. People freaked out over this joke of a coup (from an organizational standpoint) that happened not long ago, but you're not freaked out by this Orwellian garbage?

With this at the forefront, I'd rather have small nodes of madness and sanity and give everyone a more realistic chance of reaching their idea of a sane space, than have state wide nodes of insanity for the vast majority of the country.

I think we would be better off taking the notion of 'state's rights', expanding it to 'city's rights', doing away with governors, and modifying Congress to compensate.

Target federal power at concerns that cross cities and maintenance of current rights. Guarantee free travel across city lines and free engagement in legal activities in whatever city a person is standing in, and people will be free to choose their own destiny so to speak.

The issue is not simply choice of candidates, it is that certain groups within the population have fundamental political differences that can't be compromised away. The political extremist see it as their objective to save everyone from themselves.

See conservatives wanting to stop people from traveling to get abortions. See liberals insisting that abortion be available even where large parts of the population have religious beliefs that are against them.

Doing this at the scale of cities makes it easier for individuals to escape from areas that they find objectionable while still not having to travel so far that it's difficult to maintain their current jobs and relationships.

Don't want to deal with primitive conservative ideology? Move to the city. Don't want to deal with liberal snowflakes? Move out of the city. I'm sure independent areas will crop up as well.

For the last few years, a similar thought has been bugging me. You mention the technology sector specifically, but I think your thought could be applied to almost anything.

Waking hours in the day, mental stamina, physical stamina, life span, external resources (food, shelter, etc.). All of these things are finite, and they are all required by humans.

Most businesses cater towards growth or profit to be more specific. This desire does not have any upper bounds.

If the desire for profit exceeds the ability of the current local population, what happens? It seems natural that everything will implode at some point. For the time being everyone puts their heads in the sand and hope that future tech will improve efficiency.

How did the banana experiment go?

I would expect it to be bad, but the fact that you didn't go into details has me curious.

I didn't have a stroke earlier, but I did type with my phone. I'm not sure how I missed the auto correct issue.

The first sentence should read:

"We communicate with the most detail using words, but body language, facial expressions, touch and other [actions] act as [forms] of communication as well."