Do they have control over that? I assumed that was handled by feds

Here is the thing about equality, everyone’s equal when they’re dead! — Gavroche Adam Smith

Someone needs to make an inverse-xwitter platform. You’re only allowed to tweet if you prove you’ve been banned on X.

Eh, I feel like every day there’s a new story of Tesla’s being torched. That’s a pretty directed and forceful form of protest that gets no credit.

Also, it’s not like America never has large scale protests. Hundreds of thousands of people fill the National Mall pretty regularly, skimming Wikipedia I counted 14+ since 1950 of over 200,000.

Just 5 years ago 15m-26m people participated in some especially roudy protests across all 50 states, but no credit for that either.

Large protests that get even slightly out of line in the USA usually end with:

• well armed, paramilitary police violently dispersing everyone
• the CIA assassinating protest leaders
• and/or the 6 media conglomerates suppressing coverage at the behest of the ~15 people that own them

If you’re criticizing Americans for anything, it should be for their response to that and not their ability to organize and orchestrate protests.

But I was told a judge could stop any bad guy if he banged his gavel hard enough! He has a magic asset freeze gun that cripples fascists! Now you’re telling me the people in charge of the treasury can do literally whatever they want?

shocked_pikachu.mp4

One bad thing doesn’t make a different but also bad thing ok. And in my opinion it is worse, imagine if their world view could only come from 5 second videos. Throw those history books away.

And I don’t know that it’s overstated and it’s not at all perpetual. Look at… everything these days. People “disagree” with fundamental facts and are blindly allowing our planet to be burnt to the ground.

It takes concentrated effort to build and maintain an educated populace. The wide availability of books and increased literacy directly caused the Renaissance, pulling down the status quo and giving us access to modern medicine and literally every right + luxury you enjoy today.

I mean it’s the same use; it’s all literacy. It’s about how much you depend on it and don’t use your own brain. It might be for a mindless email today, but in 20 years the next generation can’t read the news without running it through an LLM. They have no choice but to accept whatever it says because they never develop the skills to challenge it, kind of like simplifying things for a toddler.

The models can never be totally fixed, the underlying technology isn’t built for that. It doesn’t have “knowledge” or “reasoning” at all. It approximates it by weighing your input against a model of how those words connect together and choosing a slightly random extension of them. Depending on the initial conditions, it might even give you a different answer for each run.

It can’t ever accurately convey any more information than you give it, it just guesses details to fill in. If you’re doing something formulaic, then it guesses fairly accurately. But if you tell it “write a book report on Romeo and Juliet”, it can only fill in generic details on what people generally say about the play; it sounds genuine but can’t extract your thoughts.

Not to get too deep into the politics of it but there’s no reason most people couldn’t get there if we invested in their core education. People just work with what they’re given, it’s not a personal failure if they weren’t taught these skills or don’t have access to ways to improve them.

And not everyone has to be hyper-literate, if daily life can be navigated at a 6th grade level that’s perfectly fine. Getting there isn’t an insurmountable task, especially if you flex those cognitive muscles more. The main issue is that current AI doesn’t improve these skills, it atrophies them.

It doesn’t push back or use logical reasoning or seek context. Its specifically made to be quick and easy, the same as fast food. We’ll be having intellectual equivalent of the diabetes epidemic if it gets widespread use.

LLMs work by extrapolation, they can’t output any better than the context you give them. They’re used in completely inappropriate situations because they’re dead easy and give very digestible content.

Your brain is the only thing in the universe that knows the context of what you’re writing and why. At a sixth grade level, you could technically describe almost anything but it would be clunky and hard to read. But you don’t need an LLM to fix that.

We’ve had tools for years that help with the technical details of writing (basic grammar, punctuation, and spelling). There are also already tools to help with phrasing and specifying a concept (“hey Google, define [X]” or “what’s the word for when…”).

This is more time consuming than an LLM, but guarantees that what you write is exactly what you intend to communicate. As a bonus, your reading comprehension gets better. You might remember that definition of [X] when you read it.

If you have access to those tools but can’t/won’t use them then you’ll never be able to effectively write. There’s no magic substitute for literacy.

The reason it feels like that is because it’s addressed to someone who you don’t know personally, even if you know them professionally. You never really know if a specific reference would offend them, if their dog just died, how “this email finds” them, etc…

And in the context of both of you doing your jobs, you shouldn’t care. Its easier to get day-to-day stuff done with niceties even if it’s hollow.

That’s just the tone tho. People trying to insist they give a shit when everyone knows they don’t is what bothers me. If you’re firing someone don’t sugar coat it.

In all of those examples, the user knows exactly what they want and the tool is a way to expedite or enable getting there. This isn’t quite the same thing.

If we were talking a tool like augmented audio to text I’d agree. I’d probably even agree if it was an AI-proofreader style model where you feed it what you have to make sure it’s generally comprehensible.

Writing as a skill is about solidifying and conveying thoughts so they can be understood. The fact that it turns into text is kind of irrelevant. Hand waving that process is just rubber stamping something you kinda-sorta started the process of maybe thinking about.

Fuck that, keep all private enterprise out of space. Polluting our orbit with useless satellites was bad enough.

Do we need to push our unsustainable growth onto lifeless celestial bodies? Why burn our limited resources on astronaut-cosplay rollercoasters for billionaires? Can’t they just go die in a submarine like normal people?

The problem runs deeper than 5 years ago. For example, imagine if the de facto official retirement plan wasn’t siphoning public tax money to be locked into the private stock market. Uncle Sam doesn’t get to touch those tax deferred contributions for decades.

So instead of having that money to decrease the deficit or invest in programs that would reduce the financial burden of retirees (training nurses, preventative healthcare, etc…), they only get their cut at the end of the line. That money explicitly does no public good during those years, that would run counter to the profit motive of their private pool of shareholders.

There are dozens of examples like this, look at the banks and automakers we bail out with no public equity. We leverage our public good on the promise of private growth making up the difference later. Turns out, it doesn’t work so well…

The economic theory that “cutting” critical services (ie: privatizing or starving the beast) is more expensive than just paying for what’s needed. The only cheap form of government is no government at all, and I don’t think many people would like that in practice.

So let’s get this straight, social services are wasteful and don’t help the poor. So let’s cut them AND raise taxes on the poor while we cut taxes for the rich? Even in that framework it doesn’t make any sense.

I don’t know for a fact that any of the US spending is all that corrupt at the federal level, don’t presume that we agree there. The straws they grasp at as “wasteful” are pennies.

Notice how they don’t touch military, social security or medicare. The latter two paper over social issues that could be addressed but conservatives can’t cut them because it would be massively unpopular. No amount of “simplified spending” can fix the fundamental flaws in these programs. So in the structure of government spending we’re allowed to have, it’s not wasteful. It’s literally all PR and conservative talking points.

OH THANK GOD they finally stopped exploiting me. Let me just catch my breath here and oh GOD OH FU–

Total collapse might not be required for real, tangible change. Collective action is a unifying force, and it would remind everyone top to bottom that the house of cards is in fact collapsible and not an inevitable behemoth under its own inertia.

You could argue that even with reforms the underpinning economic system remains as problematic as ever. But building that collective support, reminding poor voters that they’re not temporarily embarrassed billionaires, adds more opposition to it than support.

After a long enough period of striking it begins to have repercussions beyond the individual budget.

If the flow of money slowed to a crawl for an extended period, companies don’t have the funds to pay workers. Enough job loss leads to further reduced spending, thus impacting stock value, thus impacting employment, etc…

A month would have a noticeable impact, but a full fiscal quarter would be the first cliff where the big corporations would really sweat. But generally I agree, an economic strike with an end date is like an overnight hunger strike

These people have the memory of a goldfish. Resignations were the main way he got the vacancies to fill with collaborators in his first term