It is truly wild how insightful Turing's original Imitation Game paper was. I've taken to just quoting Turing's own words to people talking about the 'Turing Test' w/r/t LLMs in the past few months:

"The original question, 'Can machines think?' I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion"

Why are the letters reject fortune cookies?

You were going to be my long-shot celebrity invite to a ballyhoo this weekend, but I guess now I have to send this hand-made card to John Darnielle instead...

I hiked Hadrian's Wall a couple of years ago and my favorite fact I learned is that the reason the wall is most visible in the most remote places (e.g. on top of the Great Whin Sill) is that it was too annoying for post-Roman folks to hike up there and pull stones off of it to make houses out of.

I want to get this engraved on a desk plaque. I work in cybersecurity. I only have a career because code that runs usually runs in undesirable ways. (Also, I've become convinced that LLMs are going to give me another decade or two of easy job security.)

They'll have to toss a copy of a long-out-of-print operator's manual for an obscure mainframe into the cylinder like putting a treat at the back of a cat's cage to get it to go to the vet.

Rest well and thank you for all the light you've shed.

I think they're a negative for infrastructure (they interrupt meaningful local communities which could share infrastructure) and that statistics are a red herring. The need for statistics at a fixed level of abstraction is just an expression of the government demand for legibility over everything.

Out of curiosity, is there double-counting if someone has both prior convictions and pending charges? Or do they specifically place them into one bucket or the other?

I'm a Graeber defender generally, but in this case the defense is easy. Graeber actually cites to the research and evidence for a factual basis and works from there. Reasonable people can disagree with his interpretation of that evidentiary record, but he cites to it. Harari seems not to do that.

I mean, I'm an anarchist, so I think complete border abolition is a more sensible notion.

But on a practical level, abolishing structures like the US senate that primarily grants power to land rather than people.

Lol, I just realized that Seattle has more people than Alaska. What is this stupid country they've stapled together?

They imagine that just leaving jobs posted is a good way to accomplish this. They are, of course, deeply mistaken.

The reasons I've seen for it first hand are, if anything, stupider and more petty. Often times, particular managers don't have headcount, but they hope to have some in the future. When this headcount does appear, they want a pipeline of candidates all ready to go.

As the saying goes, "you're not a real anarchist until another anarchist has told you that you're not a real anarchist."