In poll land Brexit never happened, which set the stage for an uneventful 4-year Clinton presidency mostly famous for an iconic photo-op pres Clinton took with the zoo animal, Harambe, following a G20 summit where Xi boasted of negotiating Putin off a suicidal scheme to invade Kyiv, and also of successfully preventing a near-miss that would have led Wuhan to become the epicenter of a global health disaster. With me stranded here on the other side at the Berenstain universe, excuse me if I don’t get ahead of myself celebrating this poll.

Obviously, yes, but at that level of knowledge as a user, you either don’t know about that or don’t feel comfortable enough to deal with it.

Debian – I just wasn’t ready for it. Got told “oh you’re using Mint? That’s nice but you should try out Debian it’s the Real Deal™” but the reason I was using Mint back then in the first place was that it was my first step out of the Windows ecosystem, I was scared shitless and didn’t understand anything. What do you mean I don’t get a huge pretty start menu?! How am I supposed to find stuff then?!

Back in high school we played a game of this on the occasional Thursday night, as well as one long term game that took months and had its own dedicated wiki. It got pretty surreal pretty quick. The one set day a month you got penalized for each time you used a foreign loanword was brutal.

the peak of your civilization

I really hoped we would get a PS6 with a built-in stern cartoon Xi blocking the buy button in the PS store, pointing his finger and shouting “No! Finish your backlog first!” but I guess you can’t have everything in life

The only outcome I can imagine is the brigade closing this write-up as a duplicate and dragging off the author kicking and screaming, never to be seen again, like what happens to the vtuber protagonist in The Waldo Moment. The idea has grown too powerful for even him to contain it anymore.

Even the bluest and whitest Israeli apologist, convinced that the Israelis are the good guys in this conflict will – if they’re being honest – tell you: “Hamas started a war and is hiding behind these civilians as human shields, so this is what happens, do not expect us to stay our hand to prevent it, or to take responsibility for it, what if it was your country in this position, you would change your tune real quick”, etc etc etc. In essence, welcome to the real world, where this sort of thing can just happen and we do not have the ethical tools or framework to make it not happen. This is depressing as fuck.

A lot of Israelis imagine that in the aftermath of all of this Gaza will lose the capacity to launch another 7/10 and ‘learn its lesson’ which in itself will magically lead to a bright and peaceful future for the region. Somehow I am not so optimistic. Pragmatically speaking the Israelis themselves are in no position to say “now that we’ve bombed you, let us uplift you” but egads, someone should do something. The knowledge that even after Israel decides it has done enough and winds down its Gaza operation apparently no sane governing body wants to take responsibility for Gaza saddens me to no end. These people just deserved better, I don’t care how much they cheered for 7/10 or whatever. There can be no justice or peace without compassion

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The beautiful modern internet! Where one can in one breath complain about the post-truth era, then proceed to get 30 upvotes for making the absurd, maximalist claim that no one excused the Oct 7 terrorist acts – when Iran called those attacks Palestinian self-defence and Students for Justice in Palestine called it “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” (those are Reuters links, hopefully we can agree they don’t invent news wholecloth). So what now, are we going to move the goal posts and say that calling something “a win” and “self-defense” is not excusing it?

There are enough valid pro-Palestinian arguments: denying water to a civilian population of nearly two million is a war crime, that’s certainly a valid argument. These attacks didn’t happen in a vacuum, and need to be seen in the context of the impossible conditions in the Gaza strip: also certainly a valid argumnent. But this stuff, this blatant misrepresentation of reality, is what makes it to the top of the comment section instead.

Propaganda is not there to make you agree with it, it is there to tell you that you are powerless against it

Red Ed Redemption 2

After Liz Truss’ 50-day tenure I truly believe anything is possible

These concerns sound exaggerated. There is no way that simply being infected with microplastics can force a change in behavior like that. In fact, it is my personal opinion that we should manufacture as many microplastics as possible, and disseminate them to the environment where they can reach more biological systems and provide their many medical benefits to as many people as possible. helphelphelphelphelp This title is simply fear mongering.

Reading this comment section is so strange. Skepticism about generative AI seems to have become some kind of professional sport on the internet.

Consensus in our group is that generative AI is a great tool. Maybe not perfect, but the comparison to the metaverse is absurd: no one asked for the metaverse or needed it for anything, as opposed to several cases where GPT has literally bailed us out of a difficult situation. e.g. some proof of concept needed to be written in a programming language that no one in the group had enough experience with. With no GPT, this could have easily cost someone a week. With GPT assistance – proof of concept ready in less than a day.

Generative AI does suffer from a host of problems. Hallucinations, jailbreaks, injections, reality 101 failures, believe me I’ve encountered all these intimately as I’ve had to utilize GPT for some of my day job tasks, often against its own better judgment and despite its own woefully lacking capacity to deal with the task. What I think is interesting is a candid discussion: why do these issues persist? What have we tried? What techniques can we try next? Are these issues intractable in some profound sense, and constitute a hard ceiling for where generative AI can go? Is there an “impossibility theorem for putting AI on autopilot”? Or are these limitations just artifacts we can engineer away and route around?

It seems like instead of having this discussion, it’s become in vogue to wave around the issues triumphantly and implicitly declare the field successfully dunked on, and the discussion over. That’s, to be blunt, reductive. Smartphones had issues, the early internet had issues. Sure, “they also laughed at Bozo the clown” and all that, but without a serious discussion of the landscape right now, of how far away we are from mitigating these issues and why, a lot of this “ha ha suck it AI” discourse strikes me as deeply performative. Like, suppose a year from now OpenAI solves hallucinations. The issue is just gone. Do all the cool kids who sneered at the invented legal precedents, crafted their image as knowing better than the OpenAI dweebs, elegantly implied how hallucinations are a cornerstone in how the entire field is a stupid useless dead end – do they lose any face? I think they don’t. I think this is why this sneering has become such a lucrative online professional sport.

The intellectual obsession with logical fallacies was a mistake, and you are a living proof why. People are not perfectly objective robots with infinite capacity for information processing, attention and critical thought. Caring about bad actors, and taking everything they post in the context of them being bad actors, is not an intellectual deficiency. It is a precondition for sanity.

Just because I’m calling it “hype” doesn’t mean I’m bashing the game,

Motte and bailey

If you take Putin seriously he is saying he backs an interest rate hike. As a point of comparison, in Israel they just had an interest rate hike this year, and when people started struggling with loans and mortgages the auth-right government immediately blamed the central bank’s monetary policy.

Auth-right governments can never really fail at anything: economic troubles are the fault of the central bank, military troubles – the fault of the military, and so on. The sort of people who back these governments are very thirsty for this kool-aid, Putin is just meeting the high demand with supply.

How are we even having this discussion in a world where Cosmic Star Heroine exists…

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