fao_

The problem demonstrably still persists ­— run the tests yourself :)

> the pandemic has been over for a while

The pandemic isn't actually over, at least, not for disabled people.

> It's already easy enough to just throw the test material into the LLM and get a bunch of flash cards on relevant content and memorize that

LLM summarisation is broken, so I wouldn't expect them to get very far with this (see this comment on lobste.rs: https://lobste.rs/c/je7ve5 )

Also, memorizing flashcards is actually, to some point, learning the material. There's a reason why Anki is popular for students.

Ultimately, however, this comes down to the 20th+21st century problem of "students learning only for the test", which we can see has critical problems that are well-known:

https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/a/8203

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6lyURyVz7k

> And somehow above doesn't prevent games being released that can scale according to the hardware and aren't tied to a specific hardware generation target.

Until the Steam Deck came out, I had no hope of playing a game like Sekiro. And even then, the machine I built to play Seikro would not then have also played the second Spiderman game, because those are different console generations.

Now, both are targeted in part at the Steam Deck, and it can run both of them. This actually is a huge boon for the industry, and like I said,

> Part of the point and usefulness is having a stable target for developers to aim at, that they can test performance on

Part of the point and usefulness is having a stable target for developers to aim at, that they can test performance on. Also, most phones these days are roughly equivalent from the end-user perspective to ones from 2 or 3 years ago, the only difference is increased waste. So... no, no thank you.

Does anyone want to buy a phone every few years? No, I don't think they do.

In this specific instance the code he built used a non-human lactase-enzyme producing gene, which he states in the retrospective is very likely the reason why his immune cells started attacking. There was also the matter of some of the other coding pieces being non-ideal.

> agentic AI

Yeah I don't want LLMs near anything life or death, where a hallucination can kill, thank you very much.

Spotify doesn't take care of artists, if you knew any artists you'd understand that Spotify is atrocious for people who make music.

That makes it worse, not better. Because for those applications the code was audited and not hallucinated.

You completely missed the point of what I wrote and ignored the majority, just so you could claim that Nazi speech is actually a left-wing issue — which is not a claim I think many people outside of the USA would agree with.

I do not think you understand the optics of how this looks outside of your USA-centric echo-chamber audience.

The problem here is that contextually you are falling into the trap of "talking about committing a terrorist act" as being relevant to "having private communications", and in the process you are conflating the two. This means you are falling into the trap that the UK government intentionally creates to suppress privacy — within a reader's head, now the two are related. This also means you haven't had to develop any arguments other than "muh free speech!" with respect to why having private communication is important.

The second problem is that American conservatives have framed Nazi speech as a free speech issue, so to an onlooker who is not in the USA, when people talk about "free speech", it comes across as someone defending someone's right to say incredibly harmful, violent things about Jewish people, Transgender people, and so on. I think for most people outside of the USA (and, to be honest, most minority populations within the USA) you should consider "free speech" as being an incredibly tainted phrase for that purpose.

The flipside of all of this is that fascism is very, very possible even with freedom of speech (actually it seems to rely on it, given how virulent the spread of outright Nazi rhetoric has been in the USA so far). Freedom of speech is not the sole thing that holds up a democracy and it weakens your arguments for you to rely upon it like this.

The Something Awful Forums got investigated by the FBI after one or two people posted threats about the current president.

So, uh, yes. It's definitely something that the federal authorities take a dim view on.

> Yarwood replied: ‘Head for the hotels housing them and burn them to the ground.’

That's terrorist speech tho. My problem is that everyone can reasonably get on board with banning speech that indicates violent action, and that the reliance on "muh free speech!!!" has been a net negative for actually defending the right of people to have privacy, because people rely on that sans any other (better) arguments.

Wonderful article showing the uselessness of this technology, IMO.

> I just realised the situation is even worse. If I have 35 sentences of circumstance leading up to a single sentence of conclusion, the LLM mechanism will — simply because of how the attention mechanism works with the volume of those 35 — find the ’35’ less relevant sentences more important than the single key one. So, in a case like that it will actively suppress the key sentence.

> I first tried to let ChatGPT one of my key posts (the one about the role convictions play in humans with an addendum about human ‘wetware’). ChatGPT made a total mess of it. What it said had little to do with the original post, and where it did, it said the opposite of what the post said.

> For fun, I asked Gemini as well. Gemini didn’t make a mistake and actually produced something that is a very short summary of the post, but it is extremely short so it leaves most out. So, I asked Gemini to expand a little, but as soon as I did that, it fabricated something that is not in the original article (quite the opposite), i.e.: “It discusses the importance of advisors having strong convictions and being able to communicate them clearly.” Nope. Not there.

Why, after reading something like this, should I think of this technology as useful for this task? It seems like the exact opposite. And this is what I see with most LLM reviews. The author will mention spending hours trying to get the LLM to do a thing, or "it made xyz, but it was so buggy that I found it difficult to edit it after, and contained lots of redundant parts", or "it incorrectly did xyz". And every time I read stuff like that I think — wow, if a junior dev did that the number of times the AI did, they'd be fired on the spot.

See also, something like https://boston.conman.org/2025/12/02.1 where (IIRC) the author comes away with a semi-positive conclusion, but if you look at the list near the end, most of these things are something that any person would get fired for, and are things that are not positive for industrial software engineering and design. LLMs appear to do a "lot", but still confabulates and repeats itself incessantly, making it worthless to depend on for practical purposes unless you want to spend hours chasing your own tail over something it hallucinated. I don't see why this isn't the case. I thought we were trying to reduce the error rate in professional software development, not increase it.

> If the purpose is to get some critical piece of information I need quickly, then no, I'd rather ask an AI questions about a long document than read the entire thing. Documentation, long email threads, etc. all lend themselves nicely to the size of a context window.

And what do you do if the LLM hallucinates? For me, skim-reading still comes out on top because my own mistakes are my own.

> many of us already used machine translation to read some legal agreement in a language we don't know.

Have we? Most of us? Really? When?

Reread what I said.

I really like yep.com, as per https://www.searchenginemap.com/ it's one of only four search engines that run their own web crawlers. Results are slow but incredibly high-quality.

There's whole volumes of academic literature where people debate this topic, it is filed under "communism", "anarchism", and "sociology".

As a minority, I do not hold the same view. I understand your position, however, my personhood is often demonstrably conditional on the speech that other people spread about me and people like me. In the last decade I have seen fascist speech go unpunished and, consequently, the increased spread of the idea that I and people like me are not people, that I am simply an evil and horrible person for my genetic identity, forever tainted, an "undesirable", and a very suitable target for being marginalised and erased (often violently) from society. I have already been victim to these effects, as have my friends, and I have seen others, those with a different skin colour on top of the genetic difference, bear the effects tenfold. I have known of people murdered in the streets for simply having my genetic trait, even if it didn't hit the international news, I saw how people spoke about it online even despite the hate speech acts. That another one of us dead was a good thing.

I have also been witness to the power that physical violence inflicted upon these people has had in silencing that rhetoric and the spread of those ideas. I have seen how fascists go into hiding when they feel they will be the victims of violence, and I have seen how easy it is to break apart these networks by simply restricting the speech of a handful of people, or removing them from the platform.

I very much do feel, that either I am in a concentration camp in the next ten years, or these people are imprisoned. Prison is the lighter sentence for fascist rhetoric, and represent sane and sensible consequences for suggesting that an entire group of people who hold no specific ideology are evil. Remember that a war was fought, and the alternative to imprisonment for fascist rhetoric is letting it grow so large that the only inevitable solution is a war where people are murdered for their fascist rhetoric.

Before comparing the third paragraph with the first, please remember, that these people can simply choose to not say vile things about people with my genetics. If they do not wish to go to prison, maybe they should not make wide fascistic statements about people with my genetics being murderers and pedophiles — both claims that are starkly in opposition to the evidence. I am 60% more likely to be sexually assaulted compared to the baseline, cisgender female population. I cannot change my genetics, nor would I want to if I had the option, and my genetics do not represent my ideology or how I behave or act in public or private.

I think the issue here isn't "freedom of speech", its that people who claim to want "freedom for speech" are either using it as a shield to say vile things to other people, or they feel that "freedom of speech" is the only thing one needs to guard against fascism.

The resulting difficulty is that the former is demonstrably true, and the former is demonstrably false.

My wife in the USA had semi-anonymous texts send to her personal over a course of 2 years. They included her home address, her mother's home address with a picture of the home, and they stated that they would kill her and anyone she loved.

She never saw justice for it. The police said there was nothing they could do, despite having the phone number it came from, because it was across state lines.

The texts stop, and we suspect that it coincided with a specific person who went to jail for a year or so for unrelated offences around the time that the texts stopped.

That person is still out there.

Why do you want to voice or otherwise condone voicing Nazism?

Based on those descriptions... it sounds like he was pretty clearly racist? From the article:

> Sentencing Thompson, Judge Temperley had said of the zero tolerance approach being taken by courts:

> “This offence, I’m afraid, has to be viewed in the context of the current civil unrest up and down this country. And I’ve no doubt at all that your post is connected to that wider picture.

> “I don’t accept that your comments and the emojis that you posted were directed at the police. I’ve read in the case summary of the comments you made on arrest which clearly demonstrate to me that there was a racial element to the messaging and the posting of these emojis.

> “That has to be reflected in the sentence...there to be a deterrent element in the sentence that I impose, because this sort of behaviour has to stop.

> “It encourages others to behave in a similar way and ultimately it leads to the sorts of problems on the streets that we’ve been seeing in so many places up and down this country. This offence is serious enough for custody.”

So the actual news here is "man jailed for sharing memes that Asian people are invading the UK and coming to murder you".

"offensive" actually has a relatively solid definition based on how judges have ruled on it in the past. This includes hate-mongering against protected characteristics, which I see a lot of from the USA right now.

The first example was "man arrested for wearing the exact same outfit as a man who intentionally blew himself up, killing 22 people". It's not "he was wearing the same chequered shirt!" either. As a UK citizen... I don't see how that fits under "free speech", lol

Even with "freedom of speech", you do not have "freedom from fascism" built into that, case in point, Wikipedia has multiple pages documenting both the current US administration's attitude towards trans people (that, in Charlie Kirk's words, we are "abominations unto god" that should be "taken care of" "as in the 50s/60s", which can only be taken to mean lynching), as well as the attitude of the US presidency towards democracy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_transgender_peo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeting_of_political_opponen...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14290 (were PBS and NPR "biased"?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding_in_the_...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/25/transg...

One of the best ways to practice this is just throwing a towel on a chair, sitting down opposite it, and sketching it

And this is why regulation exists, QED lol

> It's a possibility space of pure potential, the scale of which is limited only by one's own wonder, industriousness, and curiosity.

Did you use an LLM to write this comment?

> Communism is controlled by political influence and those who rise up don’t come down, even when they stop functioning in favor of the body.

Is this not the case with capitalism, right now? Except with political influence being led with money? The people with power, control, and political influence right now are absolutely not functioning in favour of the body.

> Still, as an organ you are only wanted when you are useful. If you are too young to be useful or too old, the system may shed you, unless you have fat deposits.

I'm so glad that you're equating me, and people like me, who the system repeatedly failed over and over, and who could be functional if I was able to afford even a minimum of help and support for my situation, to cells being shed in a body. This doesn't feel dehumanising at all.

The fact of the matter is that there is a very Gattaca-like system that exists right now in the world. It brands you valid or invalid based on values like inherited wealth, social class, race, mental health, etc. People who are branded as "invalid" are an underclass who could be functional, and contribute to society, and perhaps already are contributing to society in ways that are not accounted for in pure economic value (For example, I have talked a great many number of people out of suicide over the last ten years), and yet none of the support given to "valids" is given, and when it is, it is a bureaucratic fight to get it (I personally am thinking about a friend who is currently working as a graphic designer, who had a long period of disability and had to fight for support through the court system. Not because it was an abnormal case, but because the disability support system is set up to automatically deny support, and the system (as any caseworker will tell you) relies on the vast majority either dying or giving up, rather than suing them).

To put it mildly, this feels like a leaky metaphor. I won't say the rest of what came into my mind, to keep things civil.