This article is old news. It’s passing 350 now.

I wonder if there is any plan to build anything really or if it’s just a way of draining money into a hole.

It doesn’t offset our losses, it uses our money to offset the losses of the grifters who bet on Argentina.

Some of these libertarian types actually believe their own bullshit. Libertarianism is a scam that you play on other people to get them to think less government is better, but if you yourself fall for it then you will inevitably put money in the wrong places and make bad financial decisions.

The problem now is that the idiots in charge are the same idiots who grew up believing the bullshit. They swallowed the bait. To them they don’t really even have the ability to understand why this bet didn’t work out, and now thanks to Trump they don’t ever have to. Because it did work out.

Can you imagine if someone bailed out Cuba or Venezuela? We would still be hearing about it to this fucking day.

Never threaten.

Even if you have the ability to defend yourself against a bully that is motivated by piss and vinegar, that doesn’t mean you want a target on your back or for them to see you coming.

My guess is that many of the people who are willing to resist kinetically aren’t going to say anything or threaten anyone.

One day, a thug kicks down the wrong door and punches his own ticket. The next day the paranoia grips the jackboots and they start passing gun laws in a hurry.

Lots of cold dead hands after that and no one is willing to volunteer to be first in line to kick off that process.

A mile and a half and 14 minutes is a tiny bit faster than a brisk walk. If someone has trouble handling that pace for 14 minutes then they really should not be anywhere near a law enforcement job that requires them to be on their feet.

Some will show up and do things only because they feel the support is out there to act and be seen.

I might make different efforts were I them, but they are at least paddling in the same direction I want to go. I just don’t have the energy to resent how they choose to spend their outrage.

I had a civics teacher that used to say, “You want everyone around you to have rights just like you because when they take away your neighbor’s rights they’ve taken away your neighborhood.”

I don’t think I fully understood that until the ICE thugs started masking up and the world got lonelier.

Without even knowing what he spoke about yet, which I don’t, I can respect the conviction of a person who uses their platform to speak when they have rare access to that platform and there’s plenty to talk about.

Plenty of us are going on marathon posting sessions on social media and it’s to a much smaller audience. I have to empathize a little bit with anybody who feels exhausted or overwhelmed by the absurdity of everything but then gets up to speak for a whole damn day on one of the largest stages in the world

Even if the room is empty the audience is global. It may be grandstanding, but that’s part of the job. Getting attention to things you care about is part of the job. People put you there to bring attention to things that they hope that you care about.

If government’s going to work at all people have to give a shit about it and whatever this dude was talking about it’s clear he gives a shit about it.

I used to feel this way. I remember every weekend I would have conversations with my grandfather and they would cover a lot of ground in politics, business, and literature. We didn’t agree on much but he always took a deep interest in my life. One day he asked me if I had any role models, who they are and why I looked up to them.

I responded to him with some precocious teenager thing about wanting to be myself and not really wanting to be anybody else but then he explained to me what a role model is.

By explaining to me that there were many admirable qualities about my father to be admired despite all of his shortcomings he said that my father can be a role model but that I should not strive to become like him in every way.

He explained to me that he himself has made many mistakes and doesn’t get along with some people that he would like to. He said that he would like to think I would look to him as a role model in some ways but not to try and imitate him or his life.

He taught me the word emulation which I had only ever used for video games and explained that role models can be good and bad.

These guys can be role models for many of the things that they have done. If we find out that they are sex pests or hyper Nazis in secret that shouldn’t diminish the example of the good that we can observe from specific actions they have taken.

We can do the good without the bad.

We should want to do the good without the bad.

When I look for the helpers, I admire that they are helping, and I accept that some of them are secretly terrible people in other ways.

Imagine trying to walk on that path.

Yeah Damar what kind of people give those orders?

The weddings and the first responders who showed up to help. We tried to terrorize them out of trying to help each other.

We are a monstrous country.

I went to 15+ schools before I graduated highschool, and depending on where I was I was either put into “gifted and talented”, the “extended learning program”, “fast path”, or “Accelerated Track”. Every place had a different philosophy of how to deal with kids who already knew how to read and do math.

Sometimes I would end up in a class with a bunch of quiet bookworms who wore church clothes every day and other times I would be surrounded by rambunctious and highly enthusiastic nerds.

Usually we would play computer games or play games designed to make us engage socially, but sometimes we would actually study interesting stuff in a deep way.

Every one of these programs seems to be a totally improvised and locally unique program. Nothing from the words they used for things to the books, brands, or activities seemed to have any consistency. Since I usually moved in the middle of the school year I would often see multiple versions of each grade’s program.

It made me really glad I didn’t grow up in a small town. Those people are getting screwed.

they don’t need a chimney to get in

Mere accusations of being left-leaning and mysterious anonymous money were enough to insert an entire editorial board to filter the news.

They don’t report things that should be important if they are offensive to right-wing politics.

They don’t report on wage theft. They don’t report on health care abuses. They don’t report on lies or incompetence in the Trump administration.

They lick boots and rationalize genocide. They’ve always been a little right leaning in that reporting reality as it is is extremely hostile to right-wing politics so they have to protect people from the truth.

NPR has not been left-wing or even vaguely left of center for a while. They are rapidly homophobic or racist, but they are islamophobic and they will indulge whatever is the right-wing rumor or paranoia of the day.

A whole day to remember the Epstein files? Seems like overkill when they could just release them.

October 14 as “release the Epstein Files day” seems like an odd alternative to simply releasing them.

A lot of people want a good tool that works.

This is not a good tool and it does not work.

Most of them don’t understand that yet.

I am optimistic to think that they will have the opportunity find that out in time to not be walked off a cliff.

I’m optimistically predicting that when people find out how much it actually costs and how shit it is that they will redirect their energies to alternatives if there are still any alternatives left.

A better tool may come along, but it’s not this stuff. Sometimes the future of a solution doesn’t just look like more of the previous solution.

These kinds of questions are strange to me.

A great many people are using them voluntarily, a lot of people are using them because they don’t know how to avoid using them and feel that they have no alternative.

But the implication of the question seems to be that people wouldn’t choose to use something that is worse.

In order to make that assumption you have to first assume that they know qualitatively what is better and what is worse, that they have the appropriate skills or opportunity necessary to choose to opt in or opt out, and that they are making their decision on what tools to use based on which one is better or worse.

I don’t think you can make any of those assumptions. In fact I think you can assume the opposite.

The average person doesn’t know how to evaluate the quality of research information they receive on topics outside of their expertise.

The average person does not have the technical skills necessary to engage with non-AI augmented systems presuming they want to.

The average person does not choose their tools based on what is the most effective at producing the correct truth but instead on which one is the most usable, user friendly, convenient, generally accepted, and relatively inexpensive.

A lot of those things have a business model that relies on putting the competition out of business so you can jack up the price.

Uber broke taxis in a lot of places. It completely broke that industry by simply ignoring the laws. Uber had a thing that it could actually sell that people would buy.

It took years before it started making money, in an industry that already made money.

LLMs Don’t even have a path to profitability unless they can either functionally replace a human job or at least reliably perform a useful task without human intervention.

They’ve burned all these billions and they still don’t even have something that can function as well as the search engines that proceeded them no matter how much they want to force you to use it.

Every particle accelerator that has been built has paid for itself in research value. There’s basically nothing that comes out of AI research except the need for a bigger model.

The comparison is poor. Particle accelerators are science, LLMs do not produce science.

That’s not to say that we couldn’t build LLMS that would be useful for scientific purposes but we’re not. That is not the function or the goal of the people building these things.

I got these for about $200 each