Mitch Effendi (ميتش أفندي)

I feel like it’s an eventuality that during a forest fire, misinformed hunters will just be firing rifles at firefighters trying to save their land.

checks notes

Wait… That already happened?

For anyone too lazy to read, ChatGPT does have guardrails for this kind of thing, but if you continue a conversation anyway, eventually it will stop giving that information and start just being agreeable. It basically gave the kid instructions, and actively discouraged him from any cries for help, because it might keep him from his goal.

My friends, I understand the notion to use an LLM as a cheap replacement for therapy, I genuinely do. But, please don’t use them for that, they cannot give you good advice, and they usually can’t even remember anything except the 128,000 token window it has open right then. A human therapist takes notes and remembers them.

Dang. That’s nuts but seems right for teenagers lol. I ask because the same thing happened at CMU in like 2002, but it did make the papers. The whole city turned it into a fucking thing.

It wasn’t CMU, was it?

I don’t even understand what is so offensive about flag burning. It’s something teenagers and sheltered young adults do as a feeble form of symbolic rebellion. Genuinely, who cares? It’s not like the flag has some kind of mystical power. It’s not the original version. 9/10, it’s just a cheap copy that was purchased specifically for that demonstration.

I’m a grown man. Why the fuck do I care about teenagers skateboarding in the church parking lot? I got my own problems.

Oh, nice. That covers anyone who leaves a flag out at night without a lamp shining on it. Or anyone flying a flag that has any tattered pieces.

You are correct, but I just want to mention that the guys operating botnets are not usually the smart ones — they’re just the skids who are have the patience to actually do social engineering and phishing, or coming up with clever stuff to hide malware in.

A lot of the time, the operators of these large networks are caught simply because they didn’t think they needed to hide the IP, MAC or Hostname of the orchestrating machine. Sometimes it is as easy as supoening the purchase records for an off-the-shelf VPS. One time, an operator was caught because a text file captured that it was encoded using a very specific country keyboard type.

Isn’t this basically the same sweetheart deal that Epstein got originally? If memory serves, he only had to sleep at the jail; he was free to leave during the day and do whatever.

Might not be what it was designed for, but OpenAI claims their newest model is “PHd-levels” of intelligent. I feel like if that were true, it would do that reliably. Instead, sometimes it ignores the tool it’s programmed to know how to use and just, y’know, wings it.

Which, fair, but that’s my job and it’s taken!

If it turns out anything like Reddit’s attempt, the false-positive rate is going to be astronomical.

I think it’s pretty obvious at this point that Russia is pouring the entire future of its nation-state into keeping Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, so, I think it’s probably inevitable at this point given how little international support Ukraine has by now.

Why wouldn’t you need troops to stand at that border and make sure that Russia can’t just regroup and invade again in 6 years? Wouldn’t you call that ‘Peacekeeping’?

Minnesota is such a land of contrast. Rural parents will accept a gay son no problem but the second someone mentions a non-Christian, it’s World War 3.

so the media doesn’t know where they’re going and report on their treatment or conditions, or, hell, who was even in the groups deported.

i think that these tools will probably be foundational to discovering more about the human mind and how words or images are received, stored, and assembled in the brain, but people like sam altman and elon musk are convinced that there is nothing else to a ‘person’ beyond that.

‘humanity’ is an emergent phenomenon, and that is what makes it special. a few other animals have the beginning of it, but none have all of it like we do. you don’t need a god or any kind of religion to understand this. as far as we know, we might be one of the least likely things to ever happen in the universe, ever.

Congressperson: “Okay, so, let me get this straight. Your company has spent over 20 billion dollars in pursuit of a fully autonomous digital intelligence, and so far, your peak accuracy rate for basic addition and subtraction is… what was it, again?”

Sam Altman: leans into microphone “About 60%, sir.”

[Congress erupts in a sea of ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’, as Sam Altman is carried away on top of the cheering crowd of Congresspeople wearing a crown of roses and a sash reading, “BEST INVESTMENT”]

You still need states to ratify what was passed during the convention anyway, and even then, it has to be ratified in 3/4s of states, and 9 of the top 10 earners in the US economy are solid blue states with strong blue state governments. 🤷

Not a stupid question. Our government is confusing. It’s basically still being carried out verbatim, and the entire thing was built and architected in an era when the fastest anyone could travel is by speed of wind.

In the US, government is generally federalist, meaning, each state is its own independent entity (legally speaking) with the autonomy to describe, create, and manage laws specific to their culture in their state. This boils down even further with municipal zones, which are typically related to city or township governance (covering shit like local police, trash, fire, streets).

Each state has the power to define both its voting districts, as well as the way they vote. For example, states in the West traditionally had fewer people over sparser distances, so traditional paper balloting was foregone in lieu of ‘caucusing,’ which is literally about measuring the amount of bodies or the scale of voices.

In the early 1800s (roughly 40 years after the founding of the country we know now), a man named Eldridge Gerry figured out that it was technically legal under federal law to flip the way districting happens on a per-state basis — instead of people choosing their district, the district chooses its voters.

So, over time, Gerrymandering proved to be one of the only successful ways to gain an edge in a population where conservatism was shrinking and leftism and socialism were building in popularity. It has continued simply because it is a foundation of power in our bicameral (two parties) system.

Just FYI, it is so named “Gerrymandering” after Eldridge Gerry, as well as the fact that his resulting districts looked on a map like a slithering salamander.

Not for nothin’, but there is an entire college discipline dedicated to this called “Conflict Resolution.” People trained in it are the ones who tend to get sent by the UN to an accord meeting to negotiate for peace or for mutual use of a contested resource.

It’s a whole corner of Sociology with journals and everything.

It is beyond disgusting to me that this is the society we want, not just tolerate.

Google Pixel 9 Pofessional. It’s the slightly cheaper version, on account that it got a little burned at the factory.