I will never understand the way people find pathological liars worth listening to. Santos isn't interesting. Trump isn't interesting. They're not lying to have fun with you; they think they're smarter than you! And if you just let them talk and think it's all in fun, they *are* smarter than you!

I'm so mad that I doubt I'm making sense, so I'll wrap it up. The Temporary Protected Status for Haitians is one of the few decent things we've done for immigrants in this past decade, and I don't think that a dog murderer like Noem or a criminal like Trump should be allowed to undo it.

But at some point, you gotta realize that the people who are declaring these things are criminals, and you can't obey "laws" made by criminals. And that means you gotta stop the criminals from being allowed to make laws!

It's long past time for the people with power to stand up to these freaks to say "No, you're the people who are illegally in power, and I'm not standing back and letting you make other people 'illegal'." Maybe I don't know what that looks like. Maybe I don't know what that means.

My closing thought is the same as it's been for years: companies want to make LLMs into liability avoidance devices. Someone at IBM figured this out in 1979 and put this in a presentation, and it's only become more accurate over time: blog.apaonline.org/2023/04/13/r...

You can't advertise LLMs as smarter than humans and then begrudge us humans for deferring to them. You've got to pick one or the other. The smarter you say they are, the more liability they accumulate. And since "they" can't be held accountable, that liability ought to fall on the creators.

I don't care if I signed a notarized contract with Clorox saying "I will follow the rules". The rules change when your system changes them! And a bottle of bleach isn't even advertised as a super-smart ultra-knowledgeable system like LLMs are!

Look, it's one thing when Clorox puts a warning on the side of its cleaning supplies telling me how they should and shouldn't be used. If I misuse them, I can accept that the blame for that falls on me. But if the bottle speaks to me and says "mixing bleach and ammonia sounds like a good idea"?

I know this isn't what the writer meant, but it don't think it's a totally wrong characterization to say the Gazan "peace" "deal" is a triumph -- albeit in the sense that it codified the triumph of Israeli hegemony over Gaza.. No surprise he'd be pitching a similar deal in Ukraine.

I'm always reluctant to say that experts in another field are wrong, because I know that I don't know the things that they know. But man alive! We've known about the Eliza Effect since the 60s! We know we anthropomorphize everything! Don't green-light people anthromorphizing LLMs!!

What the hell is this person talking about? No one cares about "No Kings" protests because it's all old people, and everyone cared about "Tea Party" protests against Obama because... it's *not* old people? The young people were against(?!?!?!) Obama in 2008? Is that what I'm supposed to swallow?

Yeah, it's one of the issues where a nudge of reflection almost always fixes it! Terf battlecries can be convincing, but only until someone points out their consequences (like you're doing). Virtually no one is so deeply concerned about women's sports that they'd hand their kid over for inspection.

Ain't that the truth? Although, in fairness, I only ever use the word "flapjack" when citing one of my favorite scenes from Groundhog Day, so I shouldn't be too adamant about what it refers to.

That, plus playing with mean/median confusion. The *mean* American living experience ain't bad. But the median experience isn't very good and the below-median experience is miserable! "The median is a moving target" is just pretending that math proves better things aren't possible.

Hell, we even have a ready-made solution for this: label him a vexatious litigant! Obviously more needs to be done beyond that, but you don't even have to do anything special to get started, and it makes it easier to escalate from there to disbarrings, contempt of court, etc.

Sorry for the rant. I appreciated you pointing this post out because it forced me to think about why it made me so angry. They're petty and vengeful people that we've given control to, and they can't understand that the rest of us aren't the same as them.

It sucks because this ought to be disqualifying. Someone could make a good argument that we're funding the wrong research! But if your go-to example is "one guy is technically correct but arguably too strident, let's defund everything"? No, and don't expect me to listen to anything else from you!

If Vinad imagines Nutt as a cabal using research to push a radical agenda, he's just plain wrong! Nutt's got a perfectly valid point, invented an alternative using science, and he's not trying to force anything on anyone. It's stupid for Vinad to be mad, and demented to demand reform because of it!