RIP slaveRat’s computer/phone

Wasn’t that interested before but it does give it a certain allure now to be sure.

Woah wtf?

In many ways he’s a unique figure. When he entered the political scene in his first campaign. The establishment republicans and conservatives didn’t appear to think he’d really become a serious force. They were wrong. His ideological opponents also seemed to think he was too silly, and too extreme to be taken seriously and his domination of the right, albeit surprising, was anomalous and would never translate to electoral victory. They were also wrong. He seemed not to know how to play the game properly and was too foolish even to realise it. He probably wouldn’t have been the first whack job to fail to heed his advisors and PR team and would surely fail like all of them. Viewed in that light his somehow successful manoeuvres could seem only baffling than inspired, like watching someone win at roulette by just always betting one colour. This gives his rising successes a spooky and uncanny air and not something his rivals or opponents could simply emulate themselves because when a normal person does this they just lose.

If he’d had that final Big Mac attack in 2015 or maybe even as late as 2016, his brand of politics and the movement it seems to have inspired might have died with him but sadly it looks like now, plenty of proteges will be there to pick up the reigns. For all that can be said of the man, it appears he tapped in to and unleashed something that was waiting for its time and it’s unlikely even his death will put that genie back in its bottle. The next in line might be a shrewd and clever cynic, who’s studied the MAGA playbook and will exploit it to the hilt to grasp power for their own ends with no belief in the irrational or fantastical elements of this new orthodoxy. It might be an actual true believer, straight from the ranks of the deranged and mentally disturbed that Trump previously manipulated, now believing they’re seeing the many real and imagined prophecies Trump used to rile them coming true. Maybe it’ll be something in between, someone more like Trump himself with what seems to be more of an instinctive knack for playing these emboldened fanatics rather than a geniusly thought out strategy, they’ll sometimes believe what they’re saying sometimes not, a value system infinitely malleable, but reliably selfish. Either way Trump being dead will be a relief for little more than a day and after that you can either look forward to an heir apparent who’ll keep it all going or a dangerous power struggle between dangerous people happy to expend lives and treasure to pick up the mantle.

Do you know that they didn’t?

Sure, great, but HOW? At the moment at least when a desire is held to profit from written work generated by AI, that desire and motivation comes from a human being. If the Authors Guild wants to confirm that a human being wrote something by basically communicating with that human about the work then they have no way to reliably determine if the human they’re talking to generated it by writing down their thoughts or instructing an LLM.

If the quality level from AI work is similar enough to a traditionally written work that the text on its own doesn’t clearly indicate machine authorship then the fact of the submission process and the communication between a human being and the Authors Guild could really be the only means by which this is done. So basically, charm them enough and now your AI generated text output could gain extra legitimacy courtesy the Authors Guild because it’s now not just you implying you wrote it, it’s the respected Authors Guild outright stating it isn’t AI.

It also puts in to question some assumptions about this whole endeavour as well. If it’s not a quality guarantee, only provenance, as in it can be bad writing but the Authors Guild attests it’s bad human writing, then assumptions like “One cannot relate to a bot that does not have its own lived experiences to share” are undermined since that will only hold true on the basis of knowledge the reader has about the text, rather than the text itself resonating with the reader because human generated writing is inherently superior. If that knowledge can be so easily corrupted, it’s worthless or at least only a couple of scandals away from being made so. It also gets very messy with things like the example they gave of KC Crowne whose book accidentally included some of the conversation they had evidently had with an LLM while writing the book. It is a hilarious smoking gun that the author used AI tools in the process of their writing, but funny as that is, the mistakenly included text shows that they’re at least directing the output and seem to be using the AI to help them refine and make changes to their own writing. They’re at least engaging in some form of process beyond simply commanding the machine to generate a book and then selling the result. Defence of ‘AI artists’ along similar lines to what I just laid out has been sharply criticised and that’s pretty justified, right now at least, few would call this idea of directing the output of an LLM, this ‘prompt engineering’, the same thing as writing, but then again is this a question of degree? Or an absolute? Does the degree to which the author has apparently leaned on this tool affect how much value it has lost to a reader? If the mistakenly included prompt indicates that the author constructed their entire story through prompting, the illusion that the author created this work by synthesising and relating their own experiences is shattered but if it just indicates that they sometimes used it to work through problems while they wrote, is the connection to the author just as sullied, or now only partially? Or not at all? If the Authors Guild accept a submission and put their stamp attesting to its human provenance and later find out that for portions of the text the author consulted with chatGPT to help them work through ideas and test out other approaches are they going to revoke the inclusion in their database? Or is that only if its completely AI generated? In any case whatever answer they have for that can only apply to cases where they know exactly how or if any of the widely available AI tools were used.

This seems like it makes sense on at least 2 levels, either because he’s saying he at some point had the ‘woke mind virus’ and deleted it, or more likely he’s saying this is what people need to do to ‘free’ themselves of the ‘woke mind virus’.

You don’t have to endorse it to understand it. I don’t really understand Hazel’s confusion.

Usually how it goes for me:

1. Make post

2. See typo

3. Edit the post to fix it

4. Introduce new mistake

5. See another typo

6. GOTO 3

This has been a lifelong habit for me and something I respect and appreciate and think virtuous in others, but I’m starting to think I should train myself out of it. Saying “I think”, or “to the best of my knowledge” frequently seems to broadcast “I’m just guessing at random without thought” or with some people it seems to convey “I’m wrong about…”. It also very often seems to encode “it’s best not to listen to the remaining words of this sentence in case my wrongness is contagious”.

As frustrated as I sound by this, I kind of get it I suppose. I thought I was indicating humility and a willingness to change the opinions or ideas I express if the conversation partner has reason to challenge them, however it seems in many cases it just indicates a lack of confidence in my statements. They perhaps might argue that they never thought I was arrogant or lacking in humility to begin with and of course I could be wrong, but everyone could so specifically bringing it up or alluding to it unnecessarily like that just suggests you’re trying to mask that you have no idea what you’re talking about. I suppose one might also say that the willingness to change your opinion in light of a challenge to it is supposed to be a given so there’s no point trying to show that either. I don’t know if anyone really thinks any of this, but there’s probably something like that operating subconsciously.

Well I mean I probably would have traded it for a PS2 as well admittedly.

I don’t know man, I mean, it would have been a pretty crappy gift for you personally but I think all the rest of us might have appreciated it if you hadn’t taken back world peace.

If potato masher and cheese grater got together we’d never open another drawer again.

Ooooh. I definitely didn’t get that implication and thought the same as the commenter above. Couldn’t figure out how that’d be understandable lol.

See this is why everyone hates Hornets, first the bullshit with the not making any honey and then this shit. They’re so aggressive.

Is it actually non-deterministic or just too many variables and too much sensitivity to initial conditions influencing the scheduler’s decisions for the programmer to reasonably be able to predict?

I actually had similar theories though in the end I concluded that a person definitely couldn’t be doing it, but I did used to rack my brains how the machine did it so fast. I had to do a project on how TV worked and was invented when I was in the 6th grade and it didn’t help at all, the whole electron gun thing didn’t explain it to me at all because I was imagining the gun like, drawing objects like trees and buildings and people and none of the boring confusing stuff I read helped me understand how this gun knew what to draw and could do it so quickly.

I am presumably a lot less qualified to speak on matters of economics than an economics teacher (assuming they became one through a background or qualification in economics), I’m also not even from the US. That disclosure aside, given you put this question to the masses and to the world here’s my take.

I can’t figure out how your teacher could have come to this conclusion with intellectual honesty. If my amateur’s understanding is correct, this forgiveness program is achieved by the US government paying for the loans, so it’s difficult to say on a basic level how any theft can have occurred. This is especially plain given the program is limited specifically to loans issued by US government in the first place as Federal student loans. If I loan you money and then tell you not to worry about paying it back after all because I’ve decided to forgive the loan I can’t find a way to frame that as theft. Who’s been stolen from?

If I really stretch I could see people who paid their own loans in full before this happened feeling like it was pretty unfair, but they weren’t stolen from, just unlucky in timing. Some people will say of taxes generally, that they feel like the money taken from them by the government in taxes is theft, but in that case this specific instance of government expenditure is no more theft then the latest batch of F35 fighter jets bought by the military or the wages paid to the local garbage collector to take out your garbage or any government spending at all, since that money all comes from taxes. Maybe your teacher is trying to tie the potential economic costs of the policy in to a narrative of stealing from US taxpayers. Maybe the costs of the program could theoretically mean taxes have to be raised at some point, but again though, you already have to pay taxes and how much, more taxes or less, is up to the administration in charge at any given time based on what they think is necessary. This is how the US or any country has a government at all which is generally considered necessary by most. When the government operates and uses taxes to do so, the citizens essentially pay for a service, that service involves the government making decisions on your behalf on what to do with the taxes you paid them. If most of the taxpayers don’t like the decisions and think they were bad choices they change their government and lobby representatives, it doesn’t make the decisions themselves theft if you just don’t like them.

That’s about all I can think of in the absence of your teacher’s justification, for how the loan forgiveness can be called theft, trying to be as fair as possible to those potential reasons, I still can’t find a way to make the statement true.

What happened there? I followed the link but it looks mods removed whatever the offending poster had done.

Australia and NZ, different kind of Cornwell, with an ‘e’ unlike the country in the UK with an ‘a’. Not sure what Cornwell the sauce manufacturer is referring to, I guess someone’s name a long time ago?

Plum sauce in general is pretty nice but oddly enough, other than this one obscure discontinued brand it actually isn’t usually that good on Mac and cheese. I was disappointed to discover this. Growing up I’d only ever had that on Mac and cheese and I assumed that that was what plum sauce generally tasted like. As it turns out I was wrong because there’s lots of styles, but the one thing they have in common is not being like the one I miss. They’re probably good with various Asian foods but only that Cornwell’s stuff worked with the Mac. :(