ignirtoq

Amazon is using their own hosting. AWS stands for Amazon Web Services. Or did I miss the joke?

I would love to see the werewolf play the pompous know-it-all: “Um, actually the idea that the moon causes the change is a superstition. It’s a body cycle that often coincidentally matches up with the full moon. People just remember the times during the full moon because of confirmation bias.”

I honestly couldn’t get very far because his points were not as clear-cut as he was trying to imply and the tone was confrontational. I have a hard time being told I’m wrong on a matter of personal preference that is individually configurable , and where my choices have no impact on others’ experience.

If he’s venting about his own experience, because the most common choices, which are defaults, don’t match his preferences, go right ahead. But don’t phrase it like anyone who disagrees with you can be demonstrated as objectively wrong with a few simple examples.

the preceding anonymous immediately-invoked function that englobes the entire first code block/sample is now off-screen and the code blurb itself is different…

That bothered me a lot. Then I noticed in his second snippet, only function names were highlighted. What if I’m reviewing someone else’s code and I’m looking for magic strings/numbers that should be factored out as constants or parameters? The first block already has literal values a distinct color; does he expect me to change the syntax highlighting settings on my IDE for every task?

I’m American, not British, but every single item mentioned that public perception is wrong about sounds like it skews toward what would be rightwing propaganda here. If the British right is anything like the American right, then appealing to the politicians misrepresenting the numbers to do a better job stating the facts is a fool’s errand. The misinformation is on purpose.

crackdown on legal […] immigration

That’s just blatant manufacturing consent of persecution of immigrants. If they’re in the US legally, what exactly is Trump “cracking down” on?

Handmade arepa with a layer of goat cheese and topped with scrambled eggs with sausage.

While a TLS uses the same key throughout a session, keys within a Signal session constantly evolve.

What are we defining as a “session” for Signal? The vast majority of TLS sessions exist for the duration of pulling down a web page. Dynamically interact with that page? New HTTP request backed by a new TLS session. Sure, there are exceptions like WebSockets, but by and large TLS sessions are often short.

Is a Signal session the duration of sending a single message? An entire conversation? The entire time you have someone in your address book? It doesn’t seem like an apples-to-apples comparison.

It depends on your definition of “can”. Are his actions allowed by law? No. Will anyone stop Trump from doing them anyway? Probably not.

I also want to make clear, these aren’t “Democrat agencies.” There aren’t formally “Democrat” and “Republican” agencies in the federal government. National political parties are formally private organizations, and local political parties are affiliated with national parties with various levels of control able to be exerted on the local parties by the national parties depending on the specific organizations involved and their relationships. It’s all complicated, but the salient point is it’s all non-governmental. The agencies Trump is cutting funding from are governmental agencies that generally have greater approval/support from segments of the voting populace that generally lean more Democrat in their voting behavior. There are Democrats that don’t support these agencies, and there are Republicans that do. There are also likely people in both parties that support the general cause of the agencies but would prefer they would be run differently or have different policies or regulations. Again, in reality it’s complicated and nuanced.

Calling them “Democrat agencies” is Trump applying tribalistic language in his usual divisive way to drum up support from his base. The voting populations that broadly support these agencies generally lean Democrat, but that’s not catchy and won’t get people angry and vocally in support of Trump. So he calls them “Democrat agencies” to paint a picture that, despite the Republicans having control of literally all branches of the federal government, Democrats directly control these federal agencies (which is not true), and that therefore they are acting against the will of the public, who he represents by definition (which is also not true), and therefore they should be shutdown. It’s right out of the fascist playbook, and when the media even just quotes his language, they enable him to define the language of the discussion of his actions, and thus they further help Trump shape the narrative of the shutdown.

Nothing in the shutdown gives him the power to do these things. He was in fact doing all of these things before the shutdown, and he had no legal authority to do any of it then either. He’s able to do it because his regime is authoritarian and does whatever they want, and organizations that stand to benefit from this authoritarian regime have spent the last 50+ years systematically subverting the checks and balances that were built into the federal government to prevent this kind of authoritarianism. Complicit politicians in the legislative branch prevent impeachment and removal from office of anyone in the regime that breaks the law, and complicit Supreme Court judges prevent the judicial branch from delivering injunctions or other judicial relief or safeguards from these actions. There are coordinated (even if it’s just stochastic coordination) bad faith actors at all levels of power in all branches and offices of the US government. It didn’t happen over night, it in fact took decades, but no one stopped it, so here we are.

From the legal definition of “can”, Trump in fact cannot do most of what he’s doing. But in America laws don’t matter anymore, so in practical terms he can do literally anything now.

“I don’t think AI is going to put lawyers out of business, but I think lawyers who use AI will put those who don’t use AI out of business,” he said. “And I think you can say that about every profession.”

What is the justification for this statement? There is no rigorous evidence that AI improves productivity or quality, and there are now multiple rigorous studies showing decreased productivity and quality with use of AI. Without supporting evidence, this kind of a statement really makes me think this guy has no idea what he’s talking about.

“Users accustomed to receiving confident answers to virtually any question would likely abandon such systems rapidly,” the researcher wrote.

While there are “established methods for quantifying uncertainty,” AI models could end up requiring “significantly more computation than today’s approach,” he argued, “as they must evaluate multiple possible responses and estimate confidence levels.”

“For a system processing millions of queries daily, this translates to dramatically higher operational costs,” Xing wrote.

1. They already require substantially more computation than search engines.
2. They already cost substantially more than search engines.
3. Their hallucinations make them unusable for any application beyond novelty.

If removing hallucinations means Joe Shmoe isn’t interested in asking it questions a search engine could already answer, but it brings even 1% of the capability promised by all the hype, they would finally actually have a product. The good long-term business move is absolutely to remove hallucinations and add uncertainty. Let’s see if any of then actually do it.

1. Tankie
2. Conservative
3. Tankie
4. Conservative
5. Tankie

As far as I’ve ever been paying attention, conservatives only argue in bad faith. It’s always been about elevating their own speech and suppressing speech that counters theirs. They just couch it in terms that sound vaguely reasonable or logical in the moment if you don’t know their history and don’t think about it more deeply than very surface-level.

Before, platforms were suppressing their speech, so they were promoters of free speech. Now platforms are not suppressing speech counter to them, so it’s all about content moderation to protect the children, or whatever. But their policies always belie their true motive: they never implement what research shows supports their claimed position of the moment. They always create policies that hurt their out-groups and may sometimes help their in-groups (helping people is optional).

To be fair to Sheppard, “puddle jumper” is a term for very small, manned aircraft. “Ship” has always implied to me something large; small watercraft are more “boats,” which I wouldn’t call any spacecraft. So puddle jumper fits better to me than gateship.

Can we be so sure such a stock market dip is due to the ongoing daytime TV drama that is AI?

There’s also the undercurrent of the Trump administration steamrolling over decades- or century-old precedents daily, putting our country, and thus the economy, in new territory. Basic assumptions about the foundations of our economy are crumbling, and the only thing keeping it from collapsing outright is inertia. But inertia will only last so long. This is affecting every aspect of the real economy, goods and services that are moving around right now, as opposed to the speculative facets like the AI bubble.

I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop and for Wall Street to realize Trump has really screwed over vast swaths of supply chains all across the economy.

Granted. A joint team of seismologists and linguists announce they have discovered that recent earthquakes have patterns that seem to match complex language. They have translated it. Apparently the planet Earth itself has gained sentience, and it’s pissed at humanity.

They had the goodwill of the community when they decided to develop an open source browser engine to keep the likes of Microsoft from taking over the Internet and dictating the rules

That’s some revisionist history if I’ve ever read any. From what I can find, the first version of Chrome was released in 2008. In the 4 years from 2004 to 2008, Internet Explorer market share dropped from 90% to 70%, with Firefox making up most of that difference at 20% market share and still rising. Microsoft dominance was already solidly in decline to an open source competitor.

Yes, Firefox was far from perfect, hence why Chrome adoption shot up and quickly over took Firefox and then Microsoft products, but to say stopping Microsoft’s stranglehold of the Internet was the reason Chrome was created is a complete fabrication. Google wanted to harvest your data from day one of the Chrome release. That’s always been the primary goal.

Good discussion of the rationalization of a fascist play. Only one criticism:

But this investigation will become part of the pattern and practice of this administration filled with aspiring fascists.

They’re not aspiring. They’ve sent in the military to take over a city from civilian control under a completely fabricated pretext with an underlying entirely political true purpose. That’s not aspiring fascism, that is fascism.

Yet some disturbed YouTubers say it gives their content a subtle and unwelcome AI-generated feeling.

I wonder if this is an attempt at smoothing out the differences between authentic video and AI-generated video from the other side. Secretly pass authentic videos through an AI filter not to improve them in any way, but to give them AI-generated characteristics. Then when purely AI-generated videos start to show up side-by-side on the platform, it becomes harder to differentiate from human-created content.

My understanding of why digital computers rose to dominance was not any superiority in capability but basically just error tolerance. When the intended values can only be “on” or “off,” your circuit can be really poor due to age, wear, or other factors, but if it’s within 40% of the expected “on” or “off” state, it will function basically the same as perfect. Analog computers don’t have anywhere near tolerances like that, which makes them more fragile, expensive, and harder to scale production.

I’m really curious if the researchers address any of those considerations.