I’d love be as optimistic as you but unless Trump changes his mind the US will get a brainwormed fanatical anti-vaccier in charge of deciding which vaccines are safe to use. Even if the states don’t cooperate with trump’s agenda there are so many long standing federal institutions which till now you’ve never needed to think about that are about to get wrecked.

Multiple regulatory bodies are going to get disbanded. The EPA is unlikely to survive, whole departments of the FDA are about to get gutted. Anything involving industrial safety is going to get its funding cut. Unconstitutional crackdowns on free and independent media is almost certain. Large scale damage to the functions of many government institutions can be expected. Massive economic damage due to reckless deregulation ( that’s even before they start putting tariffs on everything and wind up in multiple simultaneous trade wars). Funding for education and infrastructure maintenance will be reduced to allow tax cuts for the already wealthy. Massive loss of global influence and a massive gain in influence by hostile autocratic nations is also something you can expect.

I could go on and on but even if you were to assume they weren’t serious about project 2025 (if you haven’t read that you should) it’s real bad.

There’s a massive gulf between what progressives say and do and what the alt-right online influencers claim they do. Perhaps the reason you haven’t heard of anything productive progressives have done is that you get all your news from people who do not want them to appear reasonable and so leave out anything reasonable that they do. These days woke is a word used only by those trying to denigrate the progressive left. Because Woke is a strawman. An empty vessel for you to fill with hate. A totem to represent all the ways in which society is changing that you don’t like.

I can think of nothing less productive than putting down a hollow strawman.

This question right here perfectly encapsulates everything wrong with LLMs right now. They could be good tools but the people pushing them have no idea what they even are. LLMs do not make decisions. All the decisions an LLM appears to make were made in the dataset. All those things that an LLM does that make it seem intelligent were done or said by a human somewhere on the internet. It is a statistical model that determines what output is mostly likely to come next. That is it. It is nothing else. It is not smart. It does not and cannot make decisions. It is an algorithm that searches a dataset and when it can’t find something it’ll provide convincing-looking gibberish instead.

Listen think of it like this; a man decides to take exams to become a doctor in France, but for some reason he doesn’t learn either french or medicine. No, no instead he studies every former exam and all the answers to them. He gets very good at regurgitating those answers so much so that he can even pass the exam. But at no point does he understand what any of it means and when asked new and novel questions he provides utter nonsense answers. No matter how good he gets at memorising those answers he will never get any better at medicine. LLMs are as likely to gain sentience as my excel spreadsheets are.

That all depends on where the data set comes from. The code you’ll get out of an LLM is the average code of the data set. If it’s scraped from the internet (which is very likely) the code you’ll get will be an amalgam of concise examples from one website, incorrect examples from another, bits from blogs with all the typos and all the gunk and garbage that’s out there.

Getting LLM code to work well takes an understanding of what the code it gives you actually does and why it’s bad. It will always be bad because it cannot be better than the dataset and in order for a dataset to be big enough to train an LLM it’ll have to have everything they can get including all the trash. But it can be good for providing you a framework to start with. It is however never going to replace actual programming and understanding of programming. The talk of LLMs completely replacing programers is mostly coming from people who do not understand coding or LLMs at all.

I recommend Scavenger SV4 It’s a very unique game where you send a rover down to a planet to grab what alien artifacts you can before your radiation exposure gets past the point it can be treated. You can bolt some of them onto your rover to make it better and send it down again. It also has several hundred different endings that are decided by how much radiation you absorbed and how much loot and what loot you brought back.

The sexual abuse of young boys has been going on for a very, very long time but for most of that time, the church and all its institutions were unassailable and infallible. So most of it went unreported at the time. The attitude that the church and by extension, the priest could do no wrong was especially prevalent here where I grew up. Which is why some truly horrible things were allowed to happen. The church committed some vile acts and they weren’t all sexual abuse and enjoyed the protection of the government all the while. Here have some fun reading.

I have seen so many talks by and interviews with people who claim to have deconverted from evolution. They all claim pretty similar stuff. Sometimes eeriely similar. Often they talk about being angry. Then they’ll go on to claim that they directed that anger at god, that that was why they bought into the ‘lie’ of evolution and that all atheiests are just like they were, angry at god. It’s funny how closely what they talk about resembles the strawman young earth creationists believe about atheiests and secularists and all those things those people wish where true about us.

I find this very strange because with such large numbers involved on both sides there should , purely statisticly speaking, be a reasonably decent pool of converts each way just down to chance and circumstance. Yet they keep resorting to pushing people who don’t remotely understand the mindset of the groups they claimed they once were part of. Despite that they keep troting them out like they’re a prized bull.

I have seen incel channels full of interviews with random people on the street where they were pushing a narrative of rampent misandry. Interview after interview of women chippily admiting to very hateful stuff about men on camera without an ounce of shame. But of course they wouldn’t have shame they were answering very carefully crafted hypotheticals that they thought were asked in good faith. A few decptive edits to remove their reasonable response’s context and all of a sudden the incels have justification for their anger. The interviews get shared around and around by people who have already decided where they stand but want vindication for their bigotry. ‘Look how common that hate for men is’ they cry, clearly showing how rarely they talk to other people.

I have listened to talks by people who have claimed to have seen the edge of the world or have claimed to have the alien corpses kept at Roswell. I have read statements by someone claiming that they went to a cancer ward, convinced the doctors to inject all the patients with their essential oils which cured everyone of their cancer. I have listened to interviews with anti vaxers claiming to have personally seen wards full of ‘vaccine causalties’ that’s being covered up somehow.

Have some people switched from accepting evolution to young earth creationism? It has to have happened at some point. Are their some misandrists out there? There has to be. Are they anywhere near as prevelant as either of those two groups pretend? Absolutely not. They have a vested interest in pushing the idea that both those things are far more common than they are. Interviews are just ancedotes and no matter how many ancedotes you horde they will never coalesce into evidence.

Do some transgender people regret transitioning? It has to have happened at least once just based off numbers alone Are there a lot? No there aren’t. To an actually surprising degree. But that surprising degree shouldn’t actually be that surprsining; You see before all the irreversible medical procedures there is a bunch of indepth psychological evaluations aimed at filtering out people who would regret it later. We’ve actually gotten pretty good at that. Not that it’s that hard there tends to be some strong and obvious indicators. So I will pose a hypothetical of my own; Even if there was a lot of regretful trangender folk is the answer to ban trans health care altogether or invest in better evaluations and better understanding of it?

Christianity exists. Religions don’t tend to spring up from nowhere. Every myth has its nugget of truth. Was there a preacher back then whose followers later spread around the world? Almost certainly. Where else could Christianity have come from?

Was he the son of god though? Was he capable of all the miracles the bible claims? Is the god he preached even real? There is no evidence that the answer to these three questions is anything but no I’m afraid.

Yup, flushable wipes should be avoided

That’s part of it another is that the right offers some easy answers to some very complex questions. They aren’t the right answers but they’re easier to wrap your head around. As prosperity drops, the time, effort and resources the average person can commit to understanding the complex problems facing their country also drop. This means the easy answers take root easier, and spread further and faster because the less informed are less resilient to them.

No, no it doesn’t. Suicide is a sin but Christianity absolutely glorifies self-sacrifice for the religion. I mean you’ve heard of martyrs right? It became a core tenant of the religion in the early roman days that dying for the faith gets you straight into heaven. Glorifying dying for the faith is a massive part of Christianity too. In Islam committing suicide is a sin unless you’re self-sacrificing yourself for the faith and dying for the faith also gets you straight into heaven. Just like in Christianity. They’re both Abrahamic faiths and have a lot of the same roots.

So yeah what the fuck are you talking about? They are no more self-sacrificing than anyone else. They’re just fucking people. They’re all just people. Why can’t we just treat them like people?

It’s a shame their definition of Hamas includes all Palestinians.

I should really proofread my comments before I post them but then again you don’t strike me as worth the effort. I am well aware eastern Ukraine speaks Russian and has for a long time, I was talking exclusively about the rebels coming from nowhere.

Oh the Russian speaking population that sprang up in rebellion from nowhere in pretty much a single day with a clear and organised command structure from day one, with matching gear, uniforms and weapons and a bizarrely poor understanding of the local geography despite supposedly being locals. You know they attacked a movie theatre because they thought it was a local government center? Those rebels? The ones the locals didn’t recognise? The ones whose casualty numbers had a weird correlation with Russian servicemen dying from unexplained causes? Those rebels?

Now I normally don’t call ‘Russian bot/troll’ too often but Russian propaganda about this is so poor I have a hard time coming to any other conclusion.

Given that the speed of light is the upper limit for changes to propagate through the universe; if you had a four light-year long indestructible rod and you move one end of the rod how long until the other end moves?

It makes them upset that there are any caualties