I have never understood how Israel fails to recognize the parallels between their treatment of Palestinians to the WWII Germany treatment of Jews. Kick people off their property (legally), force them into ghettos (legally), deny them basic needs (can’t let weapons in), and now we’re at the starvation phase. Does Israel want to be vilified? Cuz this is how and why you get vilified. I know there’s more nuance, but the people who are going to hate on all Jewish people for the actions of the Israeli government are not the people listening to nuance or reasons.

Conceptually, yes, Israel has a right to exist, but by international standards, no government is ‘allowed’ commit genocide. Were it any other country, we’d expect U.N. troops in there (sorry Rwanda, we let you down).

Read the title. Thought this was going to be about people spraying Roundup on their lawns. How dare you trick me into reading an interesting piece on perverse market forces?!

What happens when there’s a risk a crop could fail? “It puts pressure on me to consider cheating, because I’m not so profitable that I can afford to lose even one.”

I didn’t realize the growers operated on such thin margins.

For each batch tested, the lab issues a certificate of analysis (CoA) with contaminant testing results and details about the product’s chemical composition. Products that fail may be remediated — moldy cannabis might be treated with ultraviolet light to kill the microbes, for example — or destroyed.

The fatal flaw in this system is that cannabis labs are paid by the producers, which creates a financial incentive for labs to falsify results

That’s the same issue we have with bonds getting triple-A ratings.

But following the rules often means losing a client, he said. “They’re just going to go to another lab who will do exactly what they want, even if they charge double the price.”

So, as in with bonds ratings, honest and scrupulous labs will go broke, leaving us with labs that give reassuring results for high THC potency or low pesticide contamination.

For example, surveys have found that 25 percent to 37 percent of Parkinson’s patients use cannabis to reduce symptoms such as tremor, stiffness, and pain. But research suggests that organophosphate pesticides, which are common contaminants in cannabis, may be linked to the onset or faster progression of Parkinson’s disease.

Well why aren’t their stricter rules?

Recently, state legislators killed a proposal to expand the list of pesticides that labs must test for from 13 to 60.

Dammit. I blame the stupid rhetoric on how ‘regulation stifles industry!’ for letting such bozos govern. We could have a government that didn’t allow businesses to poison their customers, but nooooo, the U.S. thinks poison is fine if it gets us fewer laws and less government. I want to hear people saying, “Regulations are written in blood. They exist because people were injured and killed without them.”

I like the positive note about Maryland towards the end , but it shouldn’t be so hard to get decent information.

I read that as including human interaction as part of the pain point. They already offer bounties, so they’re doing some money management as it is, but the human element becomes very different when you want up-front money from EVERYONE. When an actual human’s report is rejected, that human will resent getting ‘robbed’. It is much easier to get people to goof around for free than to charge THEM to do work for YOU. You might offer a refund on the charge later, but you’ll lose a ton of testers as soon as they have to pay.

That said, the blog’s link to sample AI slop bugs immediately showed how much time humans are being forced to waste on bad reports. I’d burn out fast if I had to examine and reply about all those bogus reports.

The Army has 236 horses, mules and donkeys, reports Task & Purpose’s Nicholas Slayton. Of those, 141 will be given away.

Good. The article brings up some serious care issues ranging from malnutrition to death. If we no longer have the means or interest in properly caring for the animals, I see no point in forcing them to stay in our military service.

These attacks do not have to be reliable to be successful. They only need to work often enough to be cost-effective, and the cost of LLM text generation is cheap and falling. Their sophistication will rise. Link-spam will be augmented by personal posts, images, video, and more subtle, influencer-style recommendations—“Oh my god, you guys, this new electro plug is incredible.” Networks of bots will positively interact with one another, throwing up chaff for moderators. I would not at all be surprised for LLM spambots to contest moderation decisions via email.

I don’t know how to run a community forum in this future. I do not have the time or emotional energy to screen out regular attacks by Large Language Models, with the knowledge that making the wrong decision costs a real human being their connection to a niche community.

Ouch. I’d never want to tell someone ‘Denied. I think you’re a bot.’ – but I really hate the number of bots already out there. I was fine with the occasional bots that would provide a wiki-link and even the ones who would reply to movie quotes with their own quotes. Those were obvious and you could easily opt to ignore/hide their accounts. As the article states, the particular bot here was also easy to spot once they got in the door, but the initial contact could easily have been human and we can expect bots to continuously seem human as AI improves.

Bots are already driving policy decisions in government by promoting/demoting particular posts and writing their own comments that can redirect conversations. They make it look like there is broad consensus for the views they’re paid to promote, and at least some people will take that as a sign that the view is a valid option (ad populum).

Sometimes it feels like the internet is a crowd of bots all shouting at one another and stifling the humans trying to get a word in. The tricky part is that I WANT actual unpaid humans to tell me what they actually: like/hate/do/avoid. I WANT to hear actual stories from real humans. I don’t want to find out the ‘Am I the A-hole?’ story getting everyone so worked up was an ‘AI-hole’ experiment in manipulating emotions.

I wish I could offer some means to successfully determine human vs. generated content, but the only solutions I’ve come up with require revealing real-world identities to sites, and that feels as awful as having bots. Otherwise, I imagine that identifying bots will be an ever escalating war akin to Search Engine Optimization wars.

There’s a lot of news and programming on the radio and TV I would not have seen in the 70s and 80s without networks using satellites to bounce signals across continents and oceans. I’m pretty sure there were phone calls I could not have made in those decades without satellites.

I’m not sure if we have enough intercontinental cables across the seafloors to handle all the traffic if satellites didn’t exist – heck, I’m not even sure if networks like BBC or NBC still use satellites to send their tv/radio signals to distant lands. The thing is they used to and I’m sure it mattered to me in ways I didn’t particularly notice at the time.

A quick search didn’t find great references (so many links on current satellite tech that the old tech seems buried) , but see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstar#In_service and maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelsat_I

Edit: comm satellite firsts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_communications_satellite_firsts

Sweet! I like the idea of allowing for demos to have their own page instead of being part of the full/finished game page. Not sure if demos should have reviews. That seems kinda beside the point.