Democratic Party: yes we know, but is there somehow we can continue doing the bidding of the billionaires and get the working class to support us?

Yea I just think too many people end up forcing a sanity check before they will answer the question and it tends to make the question askers grumpy.

I’ve just noticed that if I answer their question first and then ask them a sanity check, they will more often engage with my sanity check.

Humans are tribal animals to a great degree, and the older I get the more I just accept that. And so if someone comes and asks me a question and I know they are more likely to accept pointed questions from someone they consider part of their tribe, answering the question first is an easy way to get them to put down their guard and engage.

I think what’s interesting about the ascent of LLMs is that they show that people are hungry for something to just answer their question. So much so that they are willing to deal with getting a completely wrong answer and having to come back and go “that function you suggested doesnt exist” a half dozen times.

I also moderate a couple technical discords and there are always members of the community that want to catalog and organize questions so they never have to answer the same question twice. And I get that impulse, but the thing I realized is that question askers want help.

I made it a point to make a culture around just answering questions and those communities are thriving. We don’t tell people to go search, we don’t tell people to explain themselves. Step one is always, answer their question. Then you are free to ask them why and see if there’s a better approach, but if someone wants to reverse flat map a list, show them how, and then they will be much more receptive to you asking why.

I’ve decided the best way to deal with someone asking an XY question is the following.

1. Answer it. I don’t know what this person is doing, maybe they do really need to do some super weird thing and they are 4 weeks deep into “getting this project to work” and they don’t need me giving them the idea they also immediately thought of and can’t do for a bunch of reasons they are too exhausted to go into.
2. See if this is an XY problem.

I have found this to be infinitely more well received. I think because by answering the question upfront without any annoying back and forth about why exactly they need to OCR a pdf in JavaScript, they are much more likely to be willing to have a dialog if their immediate question has been met.

The only danger is that some noob might stop reading after the answer and not engage with the deeper design issue, but by gatekeeping the answer behind a “you must convince the council of elders that you are doing something reasonable first” all we’ve done is push those people into ChatGPTs cheery answer first even if you have to make it up hands.

Pretty hard form trump to physically kneel and kiss Xi’s ass over the phone.

Fart of the deal

Not to sound like a starry eyed idealist, but it’s both.

It sucks that it’s just a weird mandatory box, but if you don’t cheat your way through college you should better yourself in lots of ways. Learning how to independently organize tasks and time and research and challenging your preconceptions and struggling to really grasp complex ideas.

It should be all those things.

Americas relationship with our military is weird.

It’s something we actually have poured tons of resources into so it has impressive stats. You get this kind of weird split brain where you are impressed by the immense scale of what we’ve built, and horrified by the massive expense, but then kinda glad that you have the biggest stick on the playground.

As for conscription, the last time we had a draft it was deeply unpopular. There is a good sense of national pride that we have an all volunteer armed forces. I think most Americans are aware that a draft could be instituted but consider it so unlikely and think that if it really happened it would be because of a serious threat that people are mostly fine with the idea.

All men are theoretically eligible for the draft, but with no draft in a half century and with drafts only ever targeting young men, it’s something you kinda vaguely are aware of for a little bit and then you establish a life and realistically aren’t going to get drafted even if they instituted one.

Especially because there no mandatory service requirement in America, most citizens can pretty safely ignore the possibility of serving.

Growing up in America, at least back when I did, you get taught about America as this mythical thing.

• A shining city on a hill
• Manifest destiny
• Defenders of democracy

And when I was young we were also taught how these were our ideals and how we had failed to live up to them and done horrible things to get them.

I was always pretty happy with my public education, we learned about all the aspects, manifest destiny and the trail of tears and the overall genocide of our native Americans to get the land that god said we could have (he said it in secret to some white people doing the genociding). The blight of slavery, the birth out of compromise, etc.

The message I took away from my education was that America was an idea, one we have failed to live up to but one that we forever strive towards, making slow painful progress towards a more perfect union.

And maybe that was true, maybe that was propaganda. What I know now is that my fellow countrymen largely don’t want to consider the bad parts, wouldn’t it be easier if instead of having to do work to live up to our ideals we actually already had it all figured out. We actually aren’t shit, we are great, but we just let some bad stuff get in the way of our greatness. We don’t need to grow and struggle and grapple with how to solve these problems, we actually are already perfect and the most powerful and the bigliest and all we need to do is get rid of this damn scapegoat that ruined it.

And the scapegoat can be anything you like, trans people, Mexicans, an unfair trade deal with Canada. Don’t worry, no one is going to really think too hard about what these things are or how they ruined our perfect greatness, we can just say “hey it’s bad and if we get rid of it we will be great” and that’s just how it is now.

I always thought America’s true greatness, if it ever had any, came from our willingness to confront our problems and strive towards our ideals. All around me I see cowards now that are afraid of the real world and retreating into a fantasy. I loathe them.

Do not forgot this betrayal. My fellow countrymen, a large amount at least, are unmoored by reality, unbothered by reality, living out an infantile fantasy. People like that will hurt others to keep their make believe world going. You should not trust us, for your own sake you must not.

As an American that still has love in my heart for my Canadian neighbors, protect yourself from us. Protect your nation from becoming what we have become. The forces that broke our people will try to break yours too. Stay strong Canada, elbows up.

Being an American right now is so consistently embarrassing.

I worked hard my whole life, went to school, volunteered to help my fellow man, love my wife, support my family, voted against this fascist.

Now I have to listen to every moron that asked in school “teacher when will I ever use fractions in the real world!?” opine about their take on global economic theories.

Canada has been our stalwart ally, good neighbor, and economic partner since that little dust up when you burned the White House down a couple centuries back. And we are blowing it all up for fucking nothing.

We are a stupid nation, don’t bother trying to salvage this relationship. Take the time you have now to shift trade away from this fucking dumpster fire.

Can you fight them as hard as they fought you

Nope

Filibuster maybe?

Only when there’s nothing pending

Procedural moves that slow them down

Nah

Could you at least not vote to enable them

Votes to enable them silently with intense eye contact

What the fuck can you do?

Pulls out phone, texts you for $20 for their battle fund

Jesus fucking christ

Well that makes more sense than LLMs I suppose. Doesn’t really make a lot of sense why musk would want that given the one thing he doesn’t run is an ad network.

As someone that works in the tech sector though, this idea doesn’t really seem super compelling. The advertisers already have this data, so it just seems like a weird kind of heist to go pull off.

Advertisers already know how much money you make, what illnesses your suffering from (based on things you search for), I mean we live in an unprecedented surveillance states.

Maybe musk wanted his own version of that to sell to people, that’s a somewhat plausible scenario. This just sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory and the rule for a conspiracy theory is “someone has to make money” for the theory to be true.

Is musk a piece of shit, sure. Does the government have data, yep. Does taking the data from the government make musk money, maybe? I guess in the world where it’s a play for him to close the gap on a bunch of demographic information people can already buy from google or X, which he owns.

So I suppose if we see X or xAI offering significantly improved ad targeting or data brokerage that would make this all hang together.

I’m open to the idea it’s for something else. Data to feed into AI is the thing people are willing to pay heaps of money for right now. And musk has an AI company so I thought the thinking was “musk is taking data for his stupid ai company”

If that’s not what he’s doing, then what data and for what purpose?

I loathe musk, but having some trouble connecting the dots.

So if not for feeding into xAI, what data do people think he’s taking and what’s he doing with it?

The thing I’ve never really understood about this is what kind of data would the government have that would be any use to an LLM?

I’m sure that musk wanted that government data, but you all ever work with the government? Every data set is some weird pile of forms encoded in fixed width field, wrapped in json, plopped into the cdata of an xml node. Fucking enjoy parsing that shit and when you do you realize you have a form some guy filled out in 1972 to register a trailer.

Is the government sitting on some treasure trove of data that you could feed into an LLM as training data? Because that’s what would actually be valuable.

But musk is a fucking moron so I wouldn’t put it past him to break into an empty bank vault and then scuttle away like the fucking roach he is.

Do it Canadian maga people, split the right vote between PP and trump, give Carney a massive win!

I think the comment you are replying to is not about the unordered list — but your use of em dash.

See the above sentence for an example

Universities have often played a role in being where protest movements begin and grow.

There’s a lot of reasons for this, you have a lot of students in one place, most students on scholarships and with loans have time on their hands to discuss issues of the day, most students aren’t constrained by work and family and property that would give others pause from participating in protest.

From the anti war movement in the 60s to the communist overthrow of China, mass political movements get their starts in universities.

So if you can set a precedent of criminalizing speech and make the punishments as cruel as possible, you make students think twice about protesting.

That’s what this is about, sure America is happy to do Israel’s bidding, but don’t think for one moment they actually give one flying fuck about that. They found a brown person with a foreign enough name that they could destroy for stepping out of line as a not so subtle way to say to every student, “shut up, keep your head down, and we won’t come after you”

It’s the same thing they are doing with Kilmar Abrego Garcia. They don’t care about these two individuals, they don’t have any special interest in harming them (though I’m sure they delight in it) they want to send a message to everyone else.

We have the power, shut up

That’s the message, step out of line and find out. Due process, free speech, that shit is over. You are welcome to pretend it still exists but challenge us and we are one clerical error from you enjoying a lifetime of free room and board at CECOT.

For this to work it has to be punishing, it has to be dehumanizing, it has to be spectacular. The goal is to make you think when you go to resist, “I don’t want to end up like that one guy…”

The point is to make this as visible and memorable as possible so when your personal breaking point is hit and you think to resist there’s a voice in your head that says “no I better not”

The absolute best life hack I have is the 5 minute rule.

If I see something that needs doing I ask one question, “can I do this in less than 5 minutes?” If the answer is yes, I do it.

Over time I’ve realized how many things I used to put off and let pile up because I didn’t have the time and how many of those things take less than 5 minutes, less than 2 minutes.

It’s amazing how many things you can do in basically no time. I used to put off so much, I won’t empty the dishwasher because it “takes too long” takes about 2 minutes. I won’t load the dishwasher because it “takes too long” takes about 2 minutes. The counter is messy but it would take forever to clean it, nope, 3 minutes.

I think it’s a good hack though because it works in 3 different dimensions

• First, and most obvious, you do whatever thing you’ve identified will take less than 5 minutes.
• Second, and less obvious, once you start doing this you find the number of times you need to stop and clean all afternoon going down greatly. It just changes the relationship you have with cleaning (or at least I had with cleaning). Cleaning time used to be this block I would set aside and dread, but now even when I need to stop and do the things that take more than 5 minutes there aren’t 100 5 minus tasks also piled up in the way.
• Third, and maybe least obvious, it helps you really gauge how much work stuff is. I don’t know why I thought unloading the dishwasher was some big ordeal, it takes 2 minutes tops. The longer I use the 5 minute rule the more things I’ve thought to try to see if I can do in 5 minutes. And it’s not like I’m speed running these chores. A lot of the things I put off and let pile up just aren’t that much work if you do them when they need doing.

So that’s my cleaning life hack. It has completely changed the way I think about cleaning. It’s not something I stop and do and dread Saturday because I’ve got to do a big clean of the kitchen. My kitchen is always pretty clean now and on Sunday I spend 30-60 minutes mopping and spraying everything down for a nice squeaky clean.

Living in a nice clean place also rules.

Every suspension of due process seems to have the same contours.

Pick a person that you can tell your followers is “obviously bad.”

Now, because they are so obviously bad it seems like it should be no bother at all to go prove that to a court. But your followers didn’t get into this cult for the critical thinking skills workshops.

And now you’ve got your due process loophole, everything is all nice and legalish. The followers will never find themselves caught in that loophole, no sir, they aren’t “obviously bad.” Oh a follower of the cult just got caught in the loophole, well they must have not been a real follower, they are retroactively obviously bad.

What do you mean I’m obvious bad, no I’m not?! I can prove I’m not bad, I have evidence that I said the right things, I thought the right thoughts, I hated the right people!!! When’s my day in court, I can’t believe the things they are saying about me!!!

What do you mean get on the plane to CECOT?! I’m not a terrorist, I’m not in MS13, this is preposterous. You are only supposed to use this on people who are obviously bad…

As an American so far woke has meant for us.

• due process under law
• the global trade system
• our ability to retire

Just a word of caution before you get rid of those things too

Neat, I appreciate your insight. Upvote from me and today I learned.

Yea I tend to think than when someone identifies as a Libertarian they almost certainly don’t mean a civil libertarian, which is how the aclu actually identifies themselves.

We have grown from a roomful of civil libertarians to more than 4 million members, activists, and supporters across the country. The ACLU is now a nationwide organization with a 50-state network of staffed affiliate offices filing cases in both state and federal courts. We appear before the Supreme Court more than any other organization except the Department of Justice.

This is literally the only time the word libertarian appears in their own history https://www.aclu.org/about/aclu-history