• 7 Posts
  • 77 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I have two main thoughts on this

    1. LLMs are not at this time reliable sources of factual information. The user may be getting something that was skimmed from factual information, but the output can often be incorrect since the machine can’t “understand” the information it’s outputting.

    2. This could potentially be an excellent way to do real research for people who were not provided research skills by their education. Conspiracy theorists often start off as curious but undisciplined before they fall into the identity aspects of the theories. If a machine using human-like language is able to report factual information quickly, reliably, and without judgement to those who wouldn’t be able to find that info on their own, this could actually be a very useful tool.



  • I think you’re making a similar mistake that I have made many times, which is to assume that others are putting more thought into their decisions and beliefs than they actually do.

    Among the conservatives, there are a handful of bad actors who are aware of the grift and are deliberately lying to promote themselves and their scam enterprises. The rest of the conservatives are using the cultural practice derived from a religious and/or nationalistic upbringing to uncritically have “faith” in whatever the party line is. Regardless of intelligence, if someone is vulnerable to group dynamics like this (also existing in other cults), it is more important to conform and receive validation from the group than it is to pointlessly research whether or not the group’s belief is true and risk ostracisation.







  • I am getting very, very sick of the trend of Democrats spending more time trying to appeal to bigoted conservatives than trying to actually represent their own constituents or help the people they ostensibly care about.

    Clinton made it ok, Obama made it cool, and since 2016 it’s been tradition for the Democrats. Citizens United made our elections into a bidding war and the Democrats are often pretty frank that courting billionaires is about not getting outspent by Republicans. As long as they represent the cause of the problem most leftists are concerned about by accepting bribes, they figure they might as well go for conservatives since they seem easier to convince of things.

    The mistake they’re making of course is that conservatives don’t get convinced by rhetoric or appeals, they get convinced by the strong looking one who promises to defend them from all the scapegoats. They can’t out scapegoat the Republicans about the border wall and it’s a little insulting that they thought they could, but it’s better to them than risking their funding by being ethical in our hopelessly corrupt system.




  • I just tested out the classic “She working” vs “She be working,” and the machine got it backwards. It can’t translate to AAVE, but it probably can appear to be well enough for people who wouldn’t know the difference. In terms of available written materials just by population and historical access it seems like there would be way more incorrect white imitations of AAVE to draw from than its correct usage. Like a lot of LLM issues, it’s been a problem for a loooong time but is now being put into overdrive by being automated.


  • It’s a classic trolley problem. For many American voters it’s a choice between their family members being murdered or more of their family members being murdered. Pull the lever to set the trolley on track to kill fewer of your family members.

    The thing about the trolley problem is that it is far from unanimous how people react to being put in that position. There are many people who will not pull the lever to deliberately endorse the murder of their family members even if it means that more of their family will be killed. It is more for politicians to react to the sensibilities of their constituents than it is for constituents to conform to the desires of their politicians. It’s Kamala’s election to lose. Fortunately and unfortunately she’s very flexible and reacts to pressure. Never let up.




  • I misunderstood you, I thought you were questioning the subject of the news story. Although this particular article only used “ethnic cleansing” as a description of what the secular state of Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza you are correct to say the article assumes the reader is already aware of the ethnic cleansing occurring in Gaza and doesn’t make that specific argument here.

    If you are interested in why it is accurate to describe the actions of the Likud-lead state of Israel against Palestinian civilians as ethnic cleansing, this application for court proceedings does an excellent job establishing the legal case for genocide including support for the claim of ethnic cleansing. Legally, in a preliminary ruling the International Court of Justice has found that the charge of genocide is plausible and the case will move forward.