I took your advice and looked it up. It seems to be a work of fiction, originally published as "The Hermit" https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100322754

The bullshit is that anon wouldn't be fsked at all.

If anon actually used ChatGPT to generate some code, memorize it, understand it well enough to explain it to a professor, and get a 90%, congratulations, that's called "studying".

This is why actual AI researchers are so concerned about data quality.

Modern AIs need a ton of data and it needs to be good data. That really shouldn't surprise anyone.

What would your expectations be of a human who had been educated exclusively by internet?

I've found that Colonel Maruks Reisner provides some of the best information available on the war.

https://youtu.be/IDRjughhXMg

He doesn't update frequently but all his analysis are sober, detailed, and realistic. He states his pro-Western, pro-NATO, pro-Ukrainian bias clearly.

If I could sum up the general trend of his presentation it's, "The status quo favors Russia. If we don't get our heads out of our asses and step up Russia will win."

tl;dr I was wrong.

I used to go to a restaurant that I was sure was a front.

Years ago I was walking home from the gym and I got peckish. I was in one of the less fancy areas of Manhattan so I didn't think twice about just walking into the first place I saw.

The second I walked in I decided it was a big mistake. This place looked fancy. Nice place settings, real wood furniture, etc. I was dressed like a bum and probably smelled bad.

But the head waiter came out and treated me like royalty. Fresh baked bread, a sauteed flounder that he filleted right at the table and all around baller service at a very reasonable price. I was the only person there but it was early so I didn't think much of it. I figured that if their food and service was this good when they thought I was a bum this is the place for me. I dropped a 100% tip and decided I'd go once a week and if I ever found a date I'd impress the hell out of her when we roll into a nice restaurant and the head waiter greets me by my first name and treats me like a big shot (aside: the first and only girl I brought there didn't like their vegetarian options but ended up marrying me anyway).

Ever time we went the place was practically empty. This was one of the less fancy areas of Manhattan but they were still paying Manhattan rent. The food was always top notch and did I mention how awesome the service was? Mooci, the waiter once came back from vacation and insisted that I try some of the moonshine from his Sicilian Mother. Constant freebies too.

We decided there's no way they could be turning a profit and assumed it was a mob front. Some older NYers may remember when the story broke that SPQR was a mob front, so it seemed pretty likely.

Well a few years ago we went back after moving out of state. The restaurant was under new management and everything sucked. Crappy place settings, shitty generic food and I didn't recognize anyone there. It turns out they weren't a mob front. They were just great cooks that sucked at running a business and ran out of money :(

“You” is also ungendered. There seems to be a common idea that English is missing a second person plural. We have one, it’s “you”. We just stopped using the second person singular. That’s what all those variations of “thee, thou, thy” etc were.

“Y’all” would be a superpluralization. If that’s still not enough we also have the ultraplural form of, “all y’all”

They fail gloriously at at that too.

Whenever they get tested the red teams manage to smuggle in everything needed to hijiack a plane plus a kitchen sink.

The few times that terrorists tried to board planes, they made it through security and were caught by other passengers.

This situation has me pondering 2 hypotheticals.

1. How long until people start posting the names of individuals perceived as traitors (eg the McSnitch, the journalists shilling for Thomson, the politicians leading the charge against Mangione, etc)?

2. Can he realistically be tried at all? A broad cross section of people are really supportive of Mangione. We're in such a weird timeline that I could potentially imagine groups like Black Block and Proud Boys standing side-by-side on this one.

Every time I see posts like this I remember a frequent argument I had in the early 2000's.

Every time I talked with photography students (I worked at an art school) or a general photography enthusiast, I got the same smug predictions about digital photography. The resolution sucked, the color sucked, the artist doesn't have enough control, etc. They all assured me that digital photography might be nice for casual vacation photos and maybe a few specialty applications but no way, no how, not even when hell freezes over would any serious photographer ever consider digital.

At the time I would think back to my annoying grade school discussions with teachers who assured me that (dot matrix) printers just sucked. Serious writing was done by hand and if you didn't know cursive you might as well be illiterate.

For some reasons people keep forgetting that technology marches on. The dumb glitches that are so easy to make fun of now, will get addressed. There are billions of dollars pouring into AI development. Every major company and country is developing them. The pay rates for AI developer jobs attract huge amounts of people to solve those problems.

When "they used to tell us we couldnt trust Wikipedia" it wasn't in contrast to random websites; it was in contrast to primary sources.

That's still true today. Wikipedia is generally less reliable than encyclopedias are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia.

The people who tell you not to trust Wikipedia aren't saying that you shouldn't use it at all. They're telling you not to stop there. That's exactly what they told us about encylopedias too.

If you're researching a new topic, Wikipedia is a great place for an initial overview. If you actually care about facts, you should double check claims independently. That means following their sources until you get to primary sources. If you've ever done this exercise it becomes obvious why you shouldn't trust Wikipedia. Some sources are dead links, some are not publicly accessible and many aren't primary sources. In egregious cases the "sources" are just opinion pieces.

Sometimes it seems like most of these AI articles are written by AIs with bad prompts.

Human journalists would hopefully do a little research. A quick search would reveal that researches have been publishing about this for over a year so there's no need to sensationalize it. Perhaps the human journalist could have spent a little time talking about why LLMs are bad at chess and how researchers are approaching the problem.

LLMs on the other hand, are very good at producing clickbait articles with low information content.

Is it just Gen Z?

Most movie sex scenes are terrible. They fail as both pornography and as literary devices.

When you put a sex scene, or any other scene in a movie it has to serve some purpose. It can move the plot along, it can show the characters emotions or it can just be there for titillation. If it's just there because someone thinks that the main characters are supposed to smash, it's dumb.

I remember that when we rented "Basic Instinct" you knew how often people re-watched the interrogation scene because the old VHS tapes would get worn at that spot and you could see the screen artifacts.

Two things made that worth watching. The whole movie was about sex so it made sense, both in the movie and for the character. The way to get porn at the time was to walk into a store and buy a magazine. And Sharon Stone was hot, OK 3 reasons.

There absolutely are movies where the sex scenes make sense and are important. David Kronenberg's "Crash" and Kimberly Peirce's "Boys Don't Cry", would have been weird if they didn't include the sex scenes or just left them implied.
The sex scene in, "Team America: World Police", worked because it was a satire of sex scenes in movies.
Pornhub works because their scenes are very explicit.

When you have a boring, unironic, semi-artistic sex scene in a movie that's not otherwise about sex, it's just a distraction.

They could have left out, "for LGBTQ+ people" and it would have been just as accurate.

They’re pretty clear about what they’re asking the DNC to do. It’s in the first paragraph of the article.

Before the election, people were told not to protest so the DNC wouldn’t lose power. Is there any time when are people allowed to tell their leaders that the party has lost its way?

Things will only have useful size metrics when the buyers want useful size metrics.

Men's pants come with useful size metrics because they're useful and we attach very little meaning to the measurement of men's pants.

Women's pants come with stupid size metrics because we attach a lot of meaning to the measurement of women's pants.

It's the same reason condoms sizes are all on the spectrum of large to extra large without actually providing a length and diameter.

I remember this as, "Europeans think 100 miles is far away, Americans think 100 years is a long time."

We used to see these "good old days" posts from boomers. They mostly seem to have stopped since they mostly learned that this was a fantasy not shared by most people. It also ignores that most people today don't actually want to live under the conditions above. In 1960 only about half of all households had washing machines. This idyllic fantasy ignores that some lucky ladies were making this possibly with hours of hard domestic labor per day. It also ignores that huge economic boost the US got after WWII for being the only country that still had intact industry.

edit: typo

That's one of many many plot holes in Harry Potter.

There's really no depth to the world building beyond, "What if British public schools taught magic?"

It doesn't make sense in any context beyond that because the author never considered it from any context beyond that. Whenever you run into some crazy crap in HP and wonder, "Why TF would anyone do it that way?" The answer is almost always, "Because that's how they do it in British public schools.

There's a much bigger story here.
Think about how hard it was to discover this access point. Even after it was reported and there was a known wi-fi network and the access point was known to be on a single ship, it took the Navy months to find it.

Starlink devices are cheap and it will be nearly impossible to detect them at scale. That means that anyone can get around censors. If the user turns off wi-fi, they'll be nearly impossible to detect. If they leave wi-fi on in an area with a lot of wi-fi networks it will also be nearly impossible to detect. A random farmer could have Starlink in their hut. A dissident (of any nation) could hide the dish behind their toilet.

As competing networks are launched, users will be able to choose from the least restricted network for any given topic.

It's silly to talk about a "pundit class". It's not like they're a group with any coherent ideas, much less any sort of persistent group loyalty. They're just people with opinions and a platform.

This article tries to make it sound like he's a really popular candidate and there's some shady group of kingmakers trying to block him.

The main reason that people are pushing for him to step aside is that they don't believe he can beat Trump. It's not that people were grumpy about a raspy voice. There was already a lot of suspicion that he's going senile. He got the benefit of the doubt and the debate was his chance to prove the doubters wrong. Instead he confirmed their deepest fears. Since then, he's provided a steady stream of examples of his diminishing mental capacity.

A formal cognitive assessment might lay those fears to rest but, at this point, it's unlikely. For many people, the conclusion is clear; the evidence is in and he forgets what he's talking about mid-sentence. Many people look at the polling numbers around that just want someone who has a chance of beating Trump.