howunfortunate

This is a historical misconception.

The "cushiness" of jobs such as fewer work hours, more benefits, etc. preceded the formation of unions and then slowed down (overall) once unions became popular.

It has little to do with union pressure and a LOT to do with economics, in particular the demand for labor. Jobs get nice when employers are competing over the same pool of employees.

Unions are nice for those in them and bad for everyone else. They are (quite literally) cartels, in an economic sense.

This is not necessarily true, you could have contracts rather than money down

> grow humans and human parts

uhhhh

VR birdwatching it is then

This is the plot of one of the stories in I, Robot.

AI oracles are the central economic planners. But after years of perfection they have made a couple unusual "mistakes" and a human is trying to discover why.

Here are a couple examples of initially neutral or moderate organizations that became left wing bastions:

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists

Writers Guild of America

Directors Guild of America

National Education Association

American Federation of Teachers

American Psychological Association

American Sociological Association

Modern Language Association

American Historical Association

Association of American Universities

Columbia University

Harvard University

Yale University

University of California, Berkeley

Oberlin College

Reed College

NPR

PBS

The New York Times

The Washington Post

The Guardian

Human Rights Campaign

GLAAD

Good luck finding examples of the opposite direction.

O'Sullivan's First Law: "Any organization not explicitly right-wing will eventually become left-wing"

> The swing to extreme right politics cannot be seen separate from internet interference

Correct, specifically, Elon removed widespread (and thoroughly documented) left wing interference on Twitter.

Unfortunately he did eventually add back his own (in the form of boosting his own account), but it's much freer than it was, and for whatever reason Zuck decided to follow suit.

I do agree with you, but I do think you're also making the classic "curse of knowledge" mistake.

You have to know the right words to ask the LLM to make and train a classifier. You and I already know the words. But they are not actually that trivial to learn for an average joe, and people are lazy.

The reason I say this is that I suspect many people are reflexively upvoting the title without reading the article. If they read the article they would realize the evidence is flimsy and not really worth reading.

I will not flag it because the post is fine, it's the voters who I believe are acting poorly.

I'm sorry but as an MLE this is not a remotely useful article, and does not belong on the front page.

It's comparing a fine-tuned CNN to general purpose models on a tiny dataset.

> The public has been told a beautiful fairy tale about technology

He typed, from a tiny device in his hand, from a bed in an air-conditioned apartment millions of miles away. Or perhaps from a jet sailing through the sky, via a satellite in space

I'm struggling with the right analogy but the "waste" is more like...idk, hundreds of those giant crates they go through on antique shows.

The contents are actually extremely valuable, it's better to have them then not, but it still takes nontrivial expert work to sort and parse them.

Google tells me there are about 4.3k FDIC insured banks that operate in the US.

At what number would you consider this to be more than "very little competition"?

People must just be pickier than me. I see this comment on everything AI from the worst to the best.

I took a glance through and everything looks perfectly fine to me.

I figured more than 60 minutes might take up a lot of disk space. But maybe compression solves that.

Add a custom song `AAAAAAA` that's just 60 minutes of silence?

Another small credit to Google - their developer registration (which unlocks all of this) is CHEAP.

Apple's is a scam in comparison and must be repaid every year.

One of the reasons I left academia: in a different context my colleagues would all know to shout "correlation not causation!", "conditioning on a collider", and "no true control group!"

But if they saw this they'd immediately like, subscribe, and share broadly with positive commentary.

I get all my best political information from popular fiction!

Bioshock -> Libertarians bad

Handmaid's Tale -> Christians bad

The Boys & Marvel -> Corporations and governments are all secret Nazis

Everything else -> Nazis bad

That's all you need, really

Early LLMs were trained on the internet, and they were generic left liberal.

Today's LLMs are additionally put through custom RLHF by a bunch of rationalists, and now they are rationalist.

Honestly, this seems like a good sign for alignment? They don't seem to be gaining their own robot ideals.

Stolen valor!

Ironically, the "new evidence" that emerged was in fact "old evidence" that was suppressed.

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/media/reps/new-doc-drop-slack-m...

https://oversight.house.gov/release/classified-state-departm...

It's been a long time that I've had an engagement with someone with such bad faith. It's really disappointing to see it on Hacker News.

These "always on" agents seem popular but I have yet to find a use case for one.

Anyone care to give your top 5 use cases for which these are better than an on-demand agent?

Certain misinformation "works", but censorship also "works", so unless you can detect false information with 0.0% bias, that puts the platform's finger on the scale.

I'd much rather deal with information assymetries from individuals within the community than information assymetries from whoever happens to have control over the platforms, and is willing to use censorship.

I'd also like to add that a lot of these misinformation studies ironically wound up using information now accepted to be true or likely (such as that COVID most likely originated from a Chinese lab) as their "misinformation" - so in a way I'm glad that countering with "true" information didn't unilaterally work.

> conservatives don't like being told that their ideas, while legally allowed, are not welcome in polite company

As long as there are a litany of people like you who are totally comfortable with a double standard like this, the only option for conservatives is to exercise power and forcefully shove the shoe on the other foot until you change your mind.

I hate that, but I don't really see another way we'll ever get a culture of free speech, because people like you are completely comfortable exercising power towards a culture of, ironically, "free speech for me but not for thee"

The part I disagree with is that ""misinformation"" is ever a valid reason for censorship, period.

Even if some speech is known to be false (insofar as your epistemology allows), it should be criticized and proven to be false by more speech, not silenced through censorship.

In any case, I'm still baffled by how you think you've articulated logic that can supports that they "didn't put their finger on the scale". Obviously they did, obviously they knew they did. What other reason could they have for doing it? If your principle were instead "they should put their finger on the scale when opposing actors intentionally spreading false information" at least you'd be consistent.

Though then the irony of this whole thing is that the story was true the whole time.

Sorry, I'm getting distracted by this:

> The goal of a responsible platform should be to not put its thumb (as a platform) on the scales of an election.

You earnestly believe censoring the laptop story was congruent with this principle?

I'm sorry but I just cannot believe that you are a real person. *Obviously* putting their thumb on the scale was the entire point of the censorship! I'm in serious disbelief that you wrote this and posted it.

That's an absurd and frankly offensive standard, and I fear that you already know that.

The same standard could be used to trivially censor literally any information from any outlet. Conservatives could censor all NYTimes articles because they have compelling evidence the NYTimes newsroom is taking money from foreign sources (they are), has a history of releasing false information (they do, all news outlets eventually do), and being biased against conservatives.

In fact, your standard would censor precisely the MOST important stories, because these are the most likely to influence elections.