fafferlicious

I’ll give this one go just on the off chance you’re being genuine - since you seem to have some sense of rationality to your position.

You’re wrongly underweighting the damage that will get done while the courts correct things. Yes, eventually the courts would restore broadcasting licenses. But there’s appeal after appeal after appeal. That could kill the stations even if ultimately they’d win. And don’t say that the licenses couldn’t be revoked in the first place. They did it to fucking science funding. Funding mandated by Congress just stopped, and Congress did nothing. Sure it’s coming back now. Kind of.

We know how this plays out already. And we can’t even count on the courts. The supreme Court has shown a total disregard for their duty with some of their rulings.

Like the executive order on birthright citizenship. Before the supreme Court the government didn’t even argue the legality. They said nationwide blocking orders were the real problem. The Court agreed.

Or the use of race or language as a cause for ice detention. Blatantly against the forum amendment and the Supreme Court said it’s fine. They’re snatching US citizens for fucks sake.

This is all easily searchable. If you really care about being rational and reasoned, you’ll put in the effort. This isn’t people desperately trying to be wrong. These are people that have seen what is likely to happen. They’ve updated their priors more accurately than you.

People don’t sympathize with their trash when it ends up in landfill.

We all have our hard lines, and I don’t fault yours.

However for the scrollers passing by, they have a lifetime membership of about ~$45 USD. I found it worth it. It was super easy to get used to, and I honestly can’t stand any other launcher now.

I like it a lot and would hate to see it die out, so it was easy to justify for me.

I didn’t make a strawman.

The criticism of “just probability” falls flat as soon as you recognize current expert consensus is that humans minds are… predictive processors…

They’re just like us!

Except…

Where LLMs struggle adapting to things outside of distribution (not in the training data) they do not have a way to actively update their weights and biases as they contextualize the growing novel context.

You wanted to attack LLMs underlying principle of being probabilistic word sequence generators. But that’s it. That’s what they do. They have no understanding outside the context of word order to know that typically if a sentence starts “The quick brown…” the word fox frequently follows that phrase. Therefore, a fox is probably quick and brown. And if something is quick and brown, it might be a fox. LLMs are not intelligent not because they rely on probability.

LLMs are not intelligent because they do not know anything. They repeat patterns in observed data. They do this in an intentionally leaky way to generate new sentences it hasn’t seen before based on context it has seen them in before. Any reference of “thinking” or “learning” is just anthropomorphism or an inaccurate and misleading (though useful) approximation. They have no concept of “correct.” It’s why you can bully them into agreeing with you. They’re dumb.

Look, I’m not going to get any more into this because you used a lot of big, jargony words without any context. Words like “normalize to the tribal opinions”, “RLHF”, “intermodal dissonance”, or the biggest offender “confabulations.” Those would only be used by a person more knowledgeable in the field or a self-fashioned intellectual trying to flex.

If you’re an expert, I offer advice I got in grad school: speak to your target audience. Unfortunately, I can’t engage with most of what you said because I frankly have no fucking clue what you’re saying.

You all are missing the forest for the trees! LLMs are just like us in how we think! We’re all just probability generators! No, they can’t think or reason beyond known data sets. Yes, they fail at extrapolating information which is the basic component of reasoning. But you guys don’t get it! They’re just like us and smart!

The other consideration it has is on net luggage weight. Yeah, they’re still checking bags for “free” but they’re smaller and lighter - saving fuel by increasing efficiency. And that’s also a good thing from a pollution point!

Yeah man. It’s crazy how democrats aren’t all in the streets fighting this shit en masse.

Oh, you just wanted to blame the politicians. K.

Because it’s not. The base architecture of how it works is by probabilistic word suggestion. That isn’t thought.

We have a concept of self. We understand our place. We can interpret and respond to entirely new situations. LLMs routinely fail that. They regularly fall into local minima that keep it on the wrong path, and I’ve personally seen them just… Get lost in the weeds and swing back and forth based on what you tell it.

Give it a protein sequence and tell it to calculate the pI. Then tell it it’s wrong. “Oh my bad yes you’re right it’s {whatever you said it was}.”

Tell it you lied and that the number you said was wrong, and it turns up saying “Yes, you’re correct, the pI is {original value}” - that is objectively false.

That is not the behavior of something that thinks. That’s the behavior of a simple probability model updating priors and weighting things differently by the most recent information you gave it.

LLMs are soulless, brainless, thoughtless word generators. And they have some uses.

I think you’re confusing cause and effect. Pensions have been done for a while before people really embrace jumping ship constantly because it’s the only way to grow your wage.

If I was offered a pension, I’d be way less likely to jump ship every 3-4 years because management assholes only ever give a COLA 1-2% over inflation.

Why does everyone take statements about a population and then try to use a specific example to disprove it?

I’m talking about generalities. Look at who the majority of boomers vote for. Spoiler, it’s not democrats. I don’t know your grandpa. I don’t know what anyone’s grandpa did. But collectively, generally speaking, the stats say our grandpa’s share blame for voting R for decades and at the very least, for voting for corpo neolibs every primary.

Because hey, guess what, it’s not the new generations that have the highest participation in primary votes.

The boomers have held the levers of power longer than any other generation, at least in America. It is their fault because they run the companies and they run the government.

don’t upload it to the internet!

or use a smart phone

or corporate searches that track you

or go to any website with ads - they track you

hell don’t even search the internet! your ISP tracks dns requests

or use a modern tv that tracks what is on your screen

or you can do custom phone from - just unlock the bootloader, root it, and install! then just setup pihole/adguard/self-host everything

it’s simple, for privacy just go live in a yurt in the woods to not be tracked 24/7

You’ve definitely given me something to think about - evaluate if even 110 million would have prevented or given us another decade before we hit +1.5c.

However, your Bangladesh stat is absolutely meaningless and misleading. It seems impressive at first glance, but it’s not. The proper context is global CO2 production. In 2014, 35,000 million (or 35 billion) tons of CO2 were produced. And that’s just fossil fuels. And that’s more than a decade ago. I don’t have the numbers, but I suspect it’s even more.

110 million / 35,000 million = 0.3% reduction

“The Truth” is not self-revelatory nor is it self-reinforcing, particularly for a lay person.

It is not self-revelatory, but there are objective truths. If a lay person lacks the expertise to understand, they should defer to experts - not politicians or pundits.

Falling for propaganda is a reason, but it is not an excuse. The electorate has a responsibility to be informed.

You have to ask, you haven’t bothered to look.

I’m incredibly proud of what has been happening in my home city of LA. That’s what we fucking need everywhere. Burn cities down until things change.

But fair point! I was being more rhetorical and less literal. But that’s my miscommunication error. My question wasn’t to say they don’t exist or haven’t happened. I asked it to highlight that it isn’t enough. That for the magnitude of what is happening and its importance, the response is impotent and not proportional.

The world is increasingly on fire (almost literally). I’m living in a downtown metropolitan area minutes from city hall and protests are not daily.

I don’t believe an entire generational cohort is irredeemably stupid.

Nor do I. I never said that. I said I blame them for their willful ignorance and their decision not to prioritize climate change politically.

My position is simple. More could have been done, and because of that, we share blame and responsibility - however small. This is why I also blame myself.

Anyway, I think we’ve kind of hit a natural end. I appreciated our conversation, and it’s given me some things to mull over.

Thank you❤️

Yeah, people were absolutely lied to - insidiously and exhaustively. That necessarily shapes their world views.

Yes, but people also see the truth. The information is there. Some people choose to believe the lies because it’s convenient. They don’t want to look into it. They don’t want to listen to scientists, and instead choose to listen to politicians and companies.

Voters are systematically gerrymandered and disenfranchised. Popular candidates are smeared, removed from ballots, denied access to debates, and outright prosecuted.

Where are the riots? Where were the protests as Republicans red mapped? Why did they stop? Where was the blowback when Florida didn’t give felons their right to vote back? Where are the riots when Republicans vote to remove the ability of citizens to add initiatives to the ballot?

What do you say to the 60-80% of the population with no material representation in government?

You don’t need a vote to effect meaningful political change. Women couldn’t vote. Until they could - through collective action.

Everyone chooses how to react and interface with the world. All the distortions in American democracy didn’t materialize overnight.

People formed unions despite being murdered by pinkertons. Just because the system is fighting against us, doesn’t absolve us of our responsibilities.

The modern moment is historically overdetermined. It’s hubristic to pretend you have any control over it.

Correct my misunderstanding, but this tells me you have given up and think that nothing could have been done unless those with real power suddenly became altruistic in the past 3 decades.

And on that point, we may fundamentally disagree. I have to believe that citizens can effect change individually or collectively despite everything stacked against them. If I admit that the power differential is intractable and hopeless, then our only hope is a sudden wave of noblesse oblige to overcome people’s greed, and we are truly fucked. Hubristic or not, I have to believe we have agency.

It is a con from the perspective that it will have a meaningful impact at this time.

Time and focus are finite resources. Yeah, people can make green sacrifices AND protest to lobby for big changes. But if they only could do one because of time, which would you say would have the largest impact?

All the stuff you said or blocking ports to grind economies to a halt?

We had the opportunity to engage in long term moderate and sustainable use, but squandered it in the name of short term consumer-driven profits.

But, again, this wasn’t a decision made by a mass of proles, democratically. It was dictated from corporate boards and corrupt Congressional legislatures and Pentagon war rooms.

I think, ultimately, we agree. The main difference is I don’t think “but, but, they were lied to” is an effective excuse to remove blame. In a democracy, however dysfunctional, the people share responsibility for the government the people elect.

Voter participation since the 70s is garbage. We’re just now breaking the high water mark of the 60’s - 65% presidential ; 50% midterm.

I am not saying it is their fault. Just that they are at fault. I’m at fault. I could have protested, but I believed too strongly that we’d get there. I never conceived we’d go backwards. I just thought if I kept voting right, we’d get there - slowly.

That is my shame and blame to carry. And I won’t give others a pass for their inaction or choices.

No, I won’t give them the out. This isn’t them simply being outgunned on messaging or outmaneuvered by corporate interests.

Theirs is a story of objective dereliction of duty.

Previous generations leveraged the future of their descendants to improve their wealth and economic growth. Those same generations and wealthy twats are now vying for global control as right-wing governments take power.

Yeah, there was corporate propaganda at play. That does not negate the duty of the electorate to stay informed. They could have looked into it, but they didn’t because it was an inconvenient truth.

We’ve had strong indication that CO2 was going to fuck us since 1896 from research by Svante Arrhenius. And if you want to go waaaaayyy back, the idea that a small percentage of atmospheric gases could absorb infrared radiation was 1859 by John Tyndall. Oh, or maybe we can start the clock at 1824 when Joseph Fourier (yes that Fourier) first proposed the idea of greenhouse gases.

So after 200 fucking years of knowing about this, we’ve still done fuck all.

So yes. Many of our parents were willfully ignorant and didn’t prioritize this issue because … The Mexicans are coming across the border and we can’t have that even if we’d really like to kick off a green energy revolution. AREGGHHHH! IF ONLY IT WEREN’T FOR THOSE DAMN ILLEGALS THEY WOULD’VE SOLVED THIS!

The responsibility of the individual to curb climate change and resource management is a con. Yes, it should be part of the shared burden; however, until the primary drivers of resource overconsumption and climate change (I. E. Corporations and mega-rich) are held to the fire, there’s no point.

Like, why do people think the answers to systemic problems are through individual actions and responsibility? Like what. The most impactful change we can take as individuals is to vote, protest, and push for changes to the system.

Who the fuck cares if someone’s got their heater set to 85 in the winter if the energy is coming from geothermal, solar, wind, and heat pumps?

Please explain to me how personal (urban) use could ever produce substantive changes in resource management and climate change. I’d love to see it.

Let’s use California water as a case study. In a dry year, urban use is 11 % and agriculture use is 61%. Explain to me how collective action by all the urbanites to reduce water consumption by 90% would meaningfully move the needle on water management.