Nathan Vērzemnieks

i think i would honestly find this whole discourse more tolerable if people simply said what they were actually saying, which is that they think the Democratic Party is too associated with femininity (and secondarily, with black people) and that they want to correct this

like, for example, just say political transphobia isn't a deal breaker for you instead of whining about purity tests

I’m putting “purity test” on the big board of bullshit terms right next to “polarized.” Terms that, when you hear them, the odds the person using them is talking bullshit approaches 100%.

Just FYI, here are my personal beliefs on the use of large scale violence.

1. Violence tends to be self-replicating, and so should be avoided as much as possible.

All violence has the potential to entrench itself.

He was wrongfully imprisoned for 43 years. Moments after being released, ICE took him Subramanyam “Subu” Vedam now faces deportation.

After spending 43 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, evidence hidden by the prosecution reversed his conviction. Rather than finally enjoying freedom, ICE abducted him for deportation

Depraved.

www.miamiherald.com/news/local/i...

Comment by Tom Diettrich on a linkedin post reading: "You can't "test-in quality" in engineering; you can't "review-in quality" in research. We need incentives for people to do better research. Our system today assumes that 75% of submitted papers are low quality, and it is probably right (I'll bet it is higher). If this were a manufacturing organization, an 75% defect rate would result in bankruptcy. Imagine a world in which you could have an AI system check the correctness/quality of your paper. If your paper passed that bar, then it could be published (say, on arXiv). Subsequent human review could assess its importance to the field. In such a system, authors would be incentivized to satisfy the AI system. This will lead to searching for exploits in the AI system. A possible solution is to select the AI evaluator at random from a large pool and limit the number of permitted submissions. I imagine our colleagues in mechanism design can improve on this idea." Original: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7381685800549257216/?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A(activity%3A7381685800549257216%2C7382628060044599296)&dashCommentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afsd_comment%3A(7382628060044599296%2Curn%3Ali%3Aactivity%3A7381685800549257216)

Here's a rule of thumb: If "AI" seems like a good solution, you are probably both misjudging what the "AI" can do and misframing the problem.

>>

Douthat: So, just to take a related example, one of the controversies of many that you’ve been mixed up in has to do with slavery, and whether slavery is absolutely forbidden by the Bible, absolutely forbidden to Christians, or whether it is critiqued, but allowed for. Wilson: Right. Douthat: And you think it is critiqued, but allowed for. Wilson: Right. Douthat: On this, on a straightforward reading of the New Testament, I would agree with you. I would say, pretty clearly, there is a pretty clear path from the message of the Bible to the abolition of slavery. But there is no moment in the New Testament when Jesus insists on the manumission of slaves. Wilson: Right.

Doug Wilson co-authored a (plagiarized) book that defended the institution of slavery *as it was practiced in the antebellum South*. This is how Douthat introduced the subject while providing him with the NYT's platform:

Putting aside the question of AI personhood, a slur requires a history of dehumanization.

In order to fuction, the slur has to call into being that history of dehumanization for its injurious force. There is no such history for LLMs, regardless of claims otherwise.

Who Goes Nazi?, by Dorothy Thompson

Every few months now I re-read this "Who Goes Nazi?" piece from 1941 and am blown away by how it captures the people we are dealing with 80 years later.

harpers.org/archive/1941...

ICE are thug trash.

Amazon’s workaround has been to use its LLM models as a kind of translator. It interprets what you say, then hands off the request to deterministic systems — APIs, device controllers, or local Matter connections. The unpredictability of LLMs is a poor fit for smart home control, where reliability and repeatability are crucial. I’ve found this works most of the time, but if the LLM translates a request incorrectly or there’s a gap in the API, it appears that handoff can fail. I assume that’s why my bathroom fan sometimes turns on as requested and why Alexa sometimes insists on creating a routine but then forgets to finish the job.

The essential failure of LLMs in the smart home - where natural language processing should shine - is the best evidence that LLMs as a technology simply may not be able to do the things they’re promised

www.theverge.com/report/78717...

For an odd-length sequence like this, middle * length.

For an even+length one, (left-middle + right-middle) * length / 2.

No one "will" be anything, because this isn't a prescription! It's a work of imagination. And it's obviously too short to be a full exploration of a realistic society. But you seem quite convinced based on a few hundred words of short fiction that the author is an evil person. Wild.

Plenty of human rituals have a moment where a choice is offered, but in practice the choice is only ever made one way. Does the "do you take this person to be your lawfully wedded spouse" in a marriage ritual indicate a desire for people to be left at the altar?

Whereas you seem to be saying that _not_ depicting execution and _not_ describing it as good indicate a desire for executions

You said the story implies "a yearning ror public execution and a belief that they would be good". In the story no executions happen and the story ends by saying - I'm paraphrasing - of course they never would.

There are no public executions in the story, and it is strongly implied that there never would be.

"[My father] nodded his head. EV was rescued from the ocean. When we hold each other in our humanity, what other outcome could there be?"

Adler makes a point: Any game excludes people. Every decision excludes people. The impulse is "exclude no one" but this is wrong, impossible. The question you *should* ask is: Is this game excluding *the same people who every game tends to exclude*? *That* would be wrong.

This point generalizes

And as for writing, don't get me started. Most often, the process of writing is not a laborious business of transcription, but a process of thinking itself. I'm not about to outsource my thinking to a machine.

dear everyone

MOCKING PEOPLE'S APPEARANCE ISN'T HOW YOU BUILD A MORE JUST WORLD

MOCKING ABILITY OR HEALTH MOST *CERTAINTLY* ISN'T

how many times must we cover this

yes this includes "chosen" things like self-tanner FFS it doesn't matter

people's SPEECH & ACTIONS are what matter

GO AFTER THAT

That'd make a heck of a chimera

We will never defeat Trumpism in this country so long as we accept the idea that some kinds of people are not as good as others.

It's liberty and justice for all, all the way, for everyone, without a single asterisk.

Surely the pan-golin is a candidate

Are we taking as given that the blue triangle is isoceles? I don't see how Q₁ is constrained otherwise...

Mine was a TRS-80 Color Computer, a present when I was 8. I'd type in games from magazines. Still vividly remember one time I was in the middle of toggling the power switch when I realized I hadn't saved after hours of typing and debugging. Tried to save one-handed but it was frozen. Such anguish!

Journalists stop prentending that using synthetic text extruding machines to extrude synthetic text is "interviewing" them challenge

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

If your complaint is "people talk about the costs of LLMs but not all these other things" and someone says "actually yes get rid of all these other things too" and you reply "but how???" you have successfully combined whataboutism and moving the goalposts, congrats

I think it's criminal that wealthy people can fly a private jet halfway across the world on a whim, and the ecological cost is my primary reason.

I don't think we should immediately ban all air travel, even though it also has ecological costs.

ICE posted this video. It’s not posted by someone pointing out that masked anonymous federal cops are tearing down speech they don’t like, which is a very bad thing.

It was posted by the anonymous anti-speech secret police themselves!

If you think A.I. will solve your problems, you don't understand technology and you don't understand your problems.