“The leverage” to do what exactly? Put in someone who will be way worse? How does that help the left accrue power or accomplish our goals? If you think the Democratic Party’s takeaway from the left tanking a major election will be “we need to move left more” I have a bridge to sell you. We are not a majority, which means we need to form coalitions. We can’t do that with a reputation of blowing up everyone’s shit when we don’t get our way. We do it by showing how successful the party is when they listen to us and include us. No, this time we don’t have a particularly left candidate to vote for. Yes, it all sucks. But I have yet to see a concrete explanation of how picking or allowing “far right fascist” over “moderate” has any benefit in the short or long term. To my eyes, it just causes vulnerable people here and around the world to suffer.

The UN is supposed to be a toothless, executively dysfunctional institution, that’s a feature, not a bug. Its members are nations, whose entire purpose is to govern their regions of the planet. If the UN itself had the power to make nations do things, it wouldn’t be the United Nations, it’d be the One World Government, and its most powerful members absolutely do not want it to be that, so it isn’t.

It’s supposed to be an idealized, nonviolent representation of geopolitics that is always available to nations as a venue for civilized diplomacy. That’s why nuclear powers were given veto power: they effectively have veto power over the question of “should the human race continue existing” and the veto is basically a reflection of that. We want issues to get hashed out with words in the UN if possible, rather than in real life with weapons, and that means it must concede to the power dynamics that exist in real life. The good nations and the bad nations alike have to feel like they get as much control as they deserve, otherwise they take their balls and go home.

It’s frustrating to see the US or Russia or China vetoing perfectly good resolutions and everyone else just kind of going “eh, what can you do, they have vetoes,” but think through the alternative: everyone has enough and decides “no more veto powers.” The UN starts passing all the good resolutions. But the UN only has the power that member nations give it, so enforcement would have to mean some nations trying to impose their will on the ones that would’ve vetoed. Now we’ve traded bad vetoes in the UN for real-world conflict instead.

What that “get rid of the vetoes so the UN can get things done” impulse is actually driving at is “we should have a one world government that does good things,” which, yeah, that’d be great, but it’s obviously not happening any time soon. Both articles mention issues and reforms that are worthy of consideration, but the fundamental structure of the UN is always going to reflect the flaws of the world because it’s supposed to do that.

Of course anyone can vote for who they like, or not vote at all, no one’s saying otherwise. It’s Harris’s job to earn your vote, and she clearly hasn’t. But pushing third parties as the solution to any problem is going to do more harm than good until we get a better election system. It may feel better to vote for a party that more clearly aligns with your positions, but if they have no path to actually acquiring any power to make change, you’re doing nothing while feeling like you did something. Changing the policies of a flawed party that actually has power is much harder, and yes, there might be compromise or half-measures, but that’s an infinitely more productive path. (More productive than that is doing direct action outside of the electoral system entirely, but both things can be done at the same time.)

What does this have to do with anything? Yes, the Democratic Party is flawed. That doesn’t change the fact that voting Green will make my political desires slightly less likely, and will make my political fears slightly more likely, compared to voting for a Democrat.

They’re attacking Jill Stein because she’s running a campaign that will have absolutely no impact on the world except for enticing some number of would-be Harris voters to instead throw their votes away. If the Green Party were serious about change, they’d focus on races where they could actually win instead of actively causing harm to the party that is much more likely to actually do the things they say they want. Instead, they’ve basically outright stated that all they care about is hurting the Democrats. It’s a terrible electoral system that needs to be fixed, but until it is, third parties are always going to present a false option that effectively does the opposite of what their voters actually want.

It’s all a stupid game. Israel killed some people, so Iran “had to” respond to save face, and then Israel had to do the same. Once everyone is satisfied that everyone knows both countries have very big and girthy missiles, they can finally back down from a war no one wants (hopefully).

Archive Team looked at this about 10 years ago and found it basically impossible. It was around 14 petabytes of information to fetch, organize, and distribute at the time.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK

Do you think electing Trump will be read as “wow, the US is taking a principled stance on Palestinian rights” by the world?

That’s not how it works at all. If it were as easy as adding a line of code that says “check for integrity” they would’ve done that already. Fundamentally, the way these models all work is you give them some text and they try to guess the next word. It’s ultra autocomplete. If you feed it “I’m going to the grocery store to get some” then it’ll respond “food: 32%, bread: 15%, milk: 13%” and so on.

They get these results by crunching a ton of numbers, and those numbers, called a model, were tuned by training. During training, they collect every scrap of human text they can get their hands on, feed bits of it to the model, then see what the model guesses. They compare the model’s guess to the actual text, tweak the numbers slightly to make the model more likely to give the right answer and less likely to give the wrong answers, then do it again with more text. The tweaking is an automated process, just feeding the model as much text as possible, until eventually it gets shockingly good at predicting. When training is done, the numbers stop getting tweaked, and it will give the same answer to the same prompt every time.

Once you have the model, you can use it to generate responses. Feed it something like “Question: why is the sky blue? Answer:” and if the model has gotten even remotely good at its job of predicting words, the next word should be the start of an answer to the question. Maybe the top prediction is “The”. Well, that’s not much, but you can tack one of the model’s predicted words to the end and do it again. “Question: why is the sky blue? Answer: The” and see what it predicts. Keep repeating until you decide you have enough words, or maybe you’ve trained the model to also be able to predict “end of response” and use that to decide when to stop. You can play with this process, for example, making it more or less random. If you always take the top prediction you’ll get perfectly consistent answers to the same prompt every time, but they’ll be predictable and boring. You can instead pick based on the probabilities you get back from the model and get more variety. You can “increase the temperature” of that and intentionally choose unlikely answers more often than the model expects, which will make the response more varied but will eventually devolve into nonsense if you crank it up too high. Etc, etc. That’s why even though the model is unchanging and gives the same word probabilities to the same input, you can get different answers in the text it gives back.

Note that there’s nothing in here about accuracy, or sources, or thinking, or hallucinations, anything. The model doesn’t know whether it’s saying things that are real or fiction. It’s literally a gigantic unchanging matrix of numbers. It’s not even really “saying” things at all. It’s just tossing out possible words, something else is picking from that list, and then the result is being fed back in for more words. To be clear, it’s really good at this job, and can do some eerily human things, like mixing two concepts together, in a way that computers have never been able to do before. But it was never trained to reason, it wasn’t trained to recognize that it’s saying something untrue, or that it has little knowledge of a subject, or that it is saying something dangerous. It was trained to predict words.

At best, what they do with these things is prepend your questions with instructions, trying to guide the model to respond a certain way. So you’ll type in “how do I make my own fireworks?” but the model will be given “You are a chatbot AI. You are polite and helpful, but you do not give dangerous advice. The user’s question is: how do I make my own fireworks? Your answer:” and hopefully the instructions make the most likely answer something like “that’s dangerous, I’m not discussing it.” It’s still not really thinking, though.

Archive Team often uses the Internet Archive to share the things they save and obviously they have a shared goal of saving a copy of everything ever made, but they aren’t the same people. The Archive Team is a vigilante white hat hacker group (well, maybe a little bit grey), and running a Warrior basically means you’re volunteering to be part of their botnet. When a website is going to be shut down, they’ll whip together a script and push it out to the botnet to try to grab as much of the dying site as they can, and when there’s more downtime they have some other projects, like trying to brute force all those awful link shorteners so that when they inevitably die, people can still figure out where it should’ve pointed to.

This, and see also “minmaxing,” the process of optimizing something (usually your character in a game) to get minimum penalty and/or maximum benefit, usually ignoring anything like realism or storytelling and focusing entirely on the stats and numbers.

The .bin and .cue file are the parts of the actual game disc that you want. The .bin file contains almost all of the data and the .cue file contains some extra information about the structure of the CD. All the rest is Internet Archive stuff (and an image of the game cover of course).

To open it, you can convert it to a .iso disk image instead, which any Linux distribution can open as if it were a real CD. This blog post talks about how to do that. The last paragraph about mount you can probably replace with double-clicking the .iso file in the GUI I would guess.

No. The headsets are disabled when the play starts or when the play clock goes below 15 seconds.

It’s a new model this year, as Nate Silver took his with him when he left 538. The new one seems to put a lot of emphasis on “the fundamentals” this far out, that is, it “thinks” that the general environment and economy and such is pretty good for the incumbent and that the polls might move in that direction by the time election day comes along. And since it’s fitted to historical data, it’s also implicitly assuming that this election will be similar to past elections (like, say, including a competent campaign by a candidate who can get out there and effectively communicate accomplishments and a plan for their term).

I personally think those assumptions are pretty clearly wrong this year and so I’m more inclined to base my perception of the race on pure polling averages, which are looking quite bad for Biden.

“The US President might be in cognitive decline” is a massive news story, as is “The only opponent to a fascist is one more bad night away from his campaign completely imploding,” and also “the President’s own party says behind closed doors that he’s in massive trouble, but is sticking with him in public.”

If a minority group is being oppressed or is otherwise motivated to create change and is voting in large numbers, but the majority is apathetic and not bothering to vote, then this system would prevent the minority from changing their representation as “punishment” for something they’re not doing.

It’s also a bit of a “the beatings will continue until morale improves” solution to the problem, if it even is actually a problem. Low turnout is bad, but not because it’s inherently bad not to vote. It’s a symptom of the fact that people don’t think it matters, or that it will change anything, and unfortunately they’re not exactly wrong much of the time. Instead of putting effort into punishing people for not being engaged enough, it’d be better to make systemic changes that empower people and make the government more representative of their interests.

Okay, after watching the video twice I think I know what the fuck he’s talking about. He thinks that you’ll request a mail in ballot, go to the polls, they’ll say you already voted, and then you triumphantly show the world that you didn’t vote, you still have the blank ballot, and obviously they’ve put in a vote for Joe Brandon under your name, is what they’ve done, those bastards. He has done a terrible job of explaining his plan, aside from it also being a bad plan.

As a former election judge in Minnesota, I can tell you exactly how this would go in real life in that state (where, to brag a bit, we have a very progressive voting system that makes it very easy to vote, all the things Republicans hate). You’d get your mail in ballot, then show up to your polling place with your blank ballot. Then when you ask to vote, they’ll say “yep, sure, come on in” and you can just go in and vote as normal.

(The rule is that even if you request an absentee ballot, you can still cast a vote as normal, and even if you have mailed it in, either they have already counted it and then the registration system will bar you from voting in person, or if you get there before it gets processed and vote in person instead, they’ll toss it out when they get to it.)

Worst case scenario, the election judges see that you’re carrying around an absentee ballot, and they’ll ask you to get rid of it because no one wants ballots floating around a polling place that aren’t valid. That’s the only thing I can think of that would be cause for a Republican to make a ruckus, but… like… yeah, you can’t just bring extra ballots to the polling place. And they won’t scan into the machine because they’re the wrong type. I really, really want to see videos of these people trying to catch the evil Democrats and then just, like, being treated normally though. (Even better if they raised a ruckus and then didn’t actually vote.)

OPML files really aren’t much more than a list of the feeds you’re subscribed to. Individual posts or articles aren’t in there. I would expect that importing a second OPML file would just add more subscriptions, but it’d be up to the reader app to decide what it does.

I think that joke’s been around for a while, but there is the Terry Pratchett line about how if you had a button with a sign next to it saying “pressing this button will end the world, do not touch,” the ink wouldn’t even have time to dry.

If you ask an LLM to help you with a legal brief, it’ll come up with a bunch of stuff for you, and some of it might even be right. But it’ll very likely do things like make up a case that doesn’t exist, or misrepresent a real case, and as has happened multiple times now, if you submit that work to a judge without a real lawyer checking it first, you’re going to have a bad time.

There’s a reason LLMs make stuff up like that, and it’s because they have been very, very narrowly trained when compared to a human. The training process is almost entirely getting good at predicting what words follow what other words, but humans get that and so much more. Babies aren’t just associating the sounds they hear, they’re also associating the things they see, the things they feel, and the signals their body is sending them. Babies are highly motivated to learn and predict the behavior of the humans around them, and as they get older and more advanced, they get rewarded for creating accurate models of the mental state of others, mastering abstract concepts, and doing things like make art or sing songs. Their brains are many times bigger than even the biggest LLM, their initial state has been primed for success by millions of years of evolution, and the training set is every moment of human life.

LLMs aren’t nearly at that level. That’s not to say what they do isn’t impressive, because it really is. They can also synthesize unrelated concepts together in a stunningly human way, even things that they’ve never been trained on specifically. They’ve picked up a lot of surprising nuance just from the text they’ve been fed, and it’s convincing enough to think that something magical is going on. But ultimately, they’ve been optimized to predict words, and that’s what they’re good at, and although they’ve clearly developed some impressive skills to accomplish that task, it’s not even close to human level. They spit out a bunch of nonsense when what they should be saying is “I have no idea how to write a legal document, you need a lawyer for that”, but that would require them to have a sense of their own capabilities, a sense of what they know and why they know it and where it all came from, knowledge of the consequences of their actions and a desire to avoid causing harm, and they don’t have that. And how could they? Their training didn’t include any of that, it was mostly about words.

One of the reasons LLMs seem so impressive is that human words are a reflection of the rich inner life of the person you’re talking to. You say something to a person, and your ideas are broken down and manipulated in an abstract manner in their head, then turned back into words forming a response which they say back to you. LLMs are piggybacking off of that a bit, by getting good at mimicking language they are able to hide that their heads are relatively empty. Spitting out a statistically likely answer to the question “as an AI, do you want to take over the world?” is very different from considering the ideas, forming an opinion about them, and responding with that opinion. LLMs aren’t just doing statistics, but you don’t have to go too far down that spectrum before the answers start seeming thoughtful.