To be frank, this is how you fight an administration/party that follows the rules. What this will likely do is just get TST disqualified as a religion and/or disallowed for some bullshit reason.

Republicans don’t play fair and give fuck-all about rules unless they work in their benefit. That includes Republican politicians, Republican senators, Republican representatives, Republican appointmented judges, and Republican appointed Supreme Court justices.

While I appreciate the game, the rules are whatever is convenient for Republicans. The game has changed.

I’m calling it now. Musk will fund Cuomo or Adams for the Israel America Party’s first candidate, for Mayor of NYC. The current record for election spending in NYC mayoral elections will get doubled. Media will be overwhelmed with racist, reactionary ads highlighting anything Mamdani has ever said, and some things he hasn’t said, about Israel and linking him to Hamas and other terrorist organizations. Chuck Schumer will have no choice but to change parties, for the sake of Israel America and endorse the third party candidate.

I’m sure some minority of the population is misogynistic and wouldn’t vote for a woman. I just don’t think it’s enough misogynists to ruin their chances.

Both suffered from being establishment candidates in an anti-establishment era.

Yes, Biden definitely suffered from this.

Both were only really willing to push to milquetoast progressive policies.

In the primaries, absolutely. However, once Biden won, he took on projects from the progressive wing, likely in exchange for full throated endorsement/support. Green new deal type stuff. Not amazing, but not nothing. A lot of the more progressive goals were wrecked by Democrats’ hopeless naivety, or feigned ignorance, when attempts were made to reach across the aisle and get some consensus from Republicans… who had made it crystal fucking clear that their only goal was obstruction and sabotage. Then other Democrats straight up ruined it themselves. Anyway…

Both followed disappointing democratic presidents that promised a lot and delivered little, often due to their own party sabotaging attempts at major progressive reform.

Biden’s biggest advantage was that he followed Trump. I’m fucking appalled that people had already forgotten the first time. Makes me wonder if it wasn’t rigged by Republicans more thoroughly than had become obvious.

While those are two possible points of data, there are a number of other factors that contributed to each Democratic candidates’ loss vs. Trump.-

• Both suffered from being establishment candidates in an antiestablishment era.
• Both were only really willing to push to milquetoast progressive policies.
• Both followed disappointing democratic presidents that promised a lot and delivered little, often due to their own party sabotaging attempts at major progressive reform.

I truly think that Democrat voters want real, progressive change (even if they find words like “socialism” scary) but most Democrat politicians aren’t willing to anger their wealthy Third Way/Neoliberal/Abundance/whatever-the-fuck-they-want-to-call-themselves donors.

I’ve tried deadlines. I’ve asked for things to be done before our next meeting with the vendor we’re working with. Hell, almost everything I need done is clearly conveyed as “I cannot proceed to move your project forward until you perform X task that I don’t have the rights to perform or make a decision regarding your department’s policy on X.” In fact, I’ve shown up at the meetings with them and the vendor and literally told them the situation - they do everything that’s piled up in like 5-10 minutes and are apologetic. Then two days later I need another small thing and it begins again. So now I call for a meeting to “go over the project days the next vendor meeting.” I really just have a list of shit I can’t work on for the next vendor meeting because ya’ll don’t respond to all my requests otherwise.

Also remember, some of these are directed at my superiors - like the boss of the department I’m working with. It’s their project so it’s not like I’m getting in trouble or missing my deadlines. It just murders my flow state and frustrates me to no end when it can take days or weeks to get a response.

When I started my career I quickly became convinced that meetings are the opposite of work. Now a large part of my career is hosting meetings. 😬

I feel/felt similarly but I am now calling for meetings because it seems to be the easiest way to get my peers and superiors to do their fucking job so that I’m not stuck in limbo waiting for their parts to be finished. It seems like they only respond to slack mentions / emails / task assignments at random which leaves important, unanswered requests/questions just sitting there.

Sorry, this past year I’ve been working with another department for a project that, due to aforementioned woes, has run about 6-12 months more than it needs to.

I’m in the public sector and everyone is very busy and pulled in many directions so I kind of get it… but I want to be done with this thing.

It makes no difference cost wise to save a few cms of wood.

The cost savings is not only in materials. For manufacturing, lower quality materials and larger tolerances. Time to install and repair is lower because of how open the design is. Time to clean is lower because you can just soak the floor and mop without worrying about each stalls’ corners.

Brutal efficiency at the cost of comfort and privacy is what capitalism is all about. The US is just used to it and somehow also incredibly puritanical.

That said, efficiency isn’t a bad thing. There are some countries with some bathrooms that don’t have stalls - legit indoor public bathrooms where you just squat over a hole or urinals that are just one long wide trough. It’s about what you are used to.

Sadly many people have an ideological aversion to prison

The aversion I’m aware of is Punishment vs. Rehabilitation vs. Isolation.

Most crime is a direct result of poverty. Society should do it’s best to make sure we don’t have to weigh the moralality of stealing something you or your family need in order to survive and live a life of dignity. Those things should be provided.

Right now we basically just let those in poverty suffer and punish any of them that extract wealth from others (more accurately those not in poverty) in an “uncivilized” manner (stealing)… while simultaneously revering those who extract wealth from others in a “civilized” manner (wage theft, poverty wages, fraud, deceptive marketing, rent seeking, anticompetitive practices, frivolous lawsuits, etc).

Genuine dangers to society do need to be isolated. However, it’s important to at least try rehabilitation and addressing their needs before determining that someone is a genuine danger to society.

There is also the free will argument - arguing that people are who they are, free will is an illusion, and punishment is pointless - but it honestly just comes to the same general conclusions. If you can modify the behavior of a person so that they are able to coexist in society then work to do so. If rehabilitation is not possible, keep the public safe from that person and deal with that person as humanely as possible.

The reality is that he’s setting into motion a confluence of events that will leave a critical mass of people with nothing left to lose and no alternative but to overthrow him.

The reality is he’s setting the stage to enact martial law and end democracy in the United States. He’s hoping for it. Escalate conflict with the public and as soon as they get violent it’s the perfect rationalization for deploying federal forces en masse.

Clearly the author doesn’t understand how capitalism works. If Apple can pick you up by the neck, turn you upside down, and shake whatever extra money it can from you then it absolutely will do so.

The problem is that one indie developer doesn’t have any power over Apple… so they can go fuck themselves. The developer is granted the opportunity to grovel at the feet of their betters (richers) and pray that they are allowed to keep enough of their own crop to survive the winter. If they don’t survive… then some other dev will probably jump at the chance to take part in the “free market” and demonstrate their worth.

More than enough people who claim to know how it works think it might be “evolving” into a sentient being inside it’s little black box. Example from a conversation I gave up on… https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18759960

Hi 👋 I’m your AI news assistant, trained on Apple Valley News! Have any questions about this story? Tap a prompt below or ask me about anything!

And a terrible reminder of how things are going for us humans…

The Constitution is conservative toilet paper unless they are referencing it for their own gain. They define reality in the moment as what is most convenient for them. Also, if you disagree with them you hate America, obviously.

I think the word “learning”, and even “training”, is an approximation from a human perspective. MLs “learn” by adjusting parameters when processing data. At least as far as I know, the base algorithm and hyperparameters for the model are set in stone.

The base algorithm for “living” things is basically only limited by chemistry/physics and evolution. I doubt anyone could create an algorithm that advanced any time soon. We don’t even understand the brain or physics at the quantum level that well. Hell, we are using ML to create new molecules because we don’t understand it well.

I think you’re either being a little dismissive of the potential complexity of the “thinking” capability of LLMs or at least a little generous if not mystical in your imagination of what the purely physical electrical signals in our heads are actually doing to learn how to interpret all these little shapes we see on screens.

I don’t think I’m doing either of those things. I respect the scale and speed of the models and I am well aware that I’m little more than a machine made of meat.

Babies start out mimicking. The thing is, they learn.

Humans learn so much more before they start communicating. They start learning reason, logic, etc as they develop their vocabulary.

The difference is that, as I understand it, these models are often “trained” on very, very large sets of data. They have built a massive network of the way words are used in communication - likely built from more texts than a human could process in several lifetimes. They come out the gate with an enormous vocabulary and understanding of how to mimic, replicate it’s use. If they had been trained on just as much data, but data unrelated to communication, would you still think it capable of reasoning without the ability to “sound” human? They have the “vocabulary” and references to mimic a deep understanding but because we lack the ability to understand the final algorithm it seems like an enormous leap to presume actual reasoning is taking place.

Frankly, I see no reason for models like LLMs at this stage. I’m fine putting the breaks on this shit - even if we disagree on the reasons why. ML can and has been employed to achieve far more practical goals. Use it alongside humans for a while until it is verifiably more reliable at some task - recognizing cancer in imaging or generating molecules likely of achieving a desired goal. LLMs are just a lazy shortcut to look impressive and sell investors on the technology.

Maybe I am failing to see reality - maybe I don’t understand the latest “AI” well enough to give my two cents. That’s fine. I just think it’s being hyped because these companies desperately need VC money to stay afloat.

It works because humans have an insatiable desire to see agency everywhere they look. Spirits, monsters, ghosts, gods, and now “AI.”

Yes, both systems - the human brain and an LLM - assimilate and organize human written languages in order to use it for communication. An LLM is very little else beyond this. It is then given rules (using those written languages) and then designed to create more related words when given input. I just don’t find it convincing that an ML algorithm designed explicitly to mimic human written communication in response to given input “understands” anything. No matter *how convincingly" an algorithm might reproduce a human voice - perfectly matching intonation and inflexion when given text to read - if I knew it was an algorithm designed to do it as convincingly as possible I wouldn’t say it was capable of the feeling it is able to express.

The only thing in favor of sentience is that the ML algorithms modify themselves and end up being a black box - so complex with no way to represent them that they are impossible for humans to comprehend. Could it somehow have achieved sentience? Technically, yes, because we don’t understand how they work. We are just meat machines, after all.

LLMs (Large Language Modles, like Claude) are not AGIs (Artificial General Intelligence). LLMs generate convincing text by mapping the relationships between words scraped from their training data. Even if they are given “tools” that give them interfaces to reference new data or output data into other systems, they still don’t really learn, understand, comprehend, gain actual awareness, or feel… they just mimic their training data.

I’m giving up.

Judging by most of their comments, they aren’t interested in anything other than feeling right and upsetting anyone who disagrees.

Ah, yes, terrorist. I can see now. I envy you and your simple, nuance free worldview. Just use that magic word and it all makes sense. No need to consider any other factors - they are terrorists so obviously you just kill them, right?

Is there a problem with taking out Houthis?

You know the pirates shooting at commercial shipping?

Ah yes, because pirates blow shit up instead of taking it and selling it for personal gain.

Also, pretending like the Houthis situation is 100% independent of the Genocide in Gaza is disingenuous.

Israel has been an antagonist in the region for much of its existence. I’m sure the Houthis would take any excuse to fuck with Israel. However, their official line recently is basically “We’re going to fuck with shipping until you lift the blockade on Gaza.”