walkabout

5 ms·

1.
by walkabout 11mo ago
> It seems unfair to call out LLMs for "spam, scams, propaganda, and astroturfing." These problems are largely the result of platform optimization for engagement and SEO competition for attention. They didn't create those
2.
by walkabout 11mo ago
> In aggregate, however, I believe in the US presidential elections end up voting for their own best interests, as they see it This is extremely close to one of the early "OK, but maybe there's a reason what we're observin
3.
by walkabout 11mo ago
Spam, scams, propaganda, and astroturfing are easily the largest beneficiaries of LLM automation, so far. LLMs are exactly the 100x rocket-boots their boosters are promising for other areas (without such results outside a few tiny, but some
4.
by walkabout 11mo ago
Yeah, I think you nailed it. A ban on playing against "the house" would do it. Taking a fixed amount from each pot (as at poker tables) for play among patrons would still be allowed, but slot machines wouldn't. Your solution&
5.
by walkabout 11mo ago
> Although, if you believe in that theory, you should reject democracy and aim for some form of aristocracy or monarchy. Not necessarily! It means that the model of the typical voter's behavior (and of the reasons why elections go t
6.
by walkabout 11mo ago
One may smile while sharpening a knife.
7.
by walkabout 11mo ago
We're on track to be a much-richer Russia. Which is a lot better than being like Russia, and also as poor as Russia. But it's a lot worse than being rich and also not like Russia. I expect most of the pain will be from lost potent
8.
by walkabout 11mo ago
Voter behavior and motivation (and knowledge of the issues, and of basic facts about their own government...) is well-studied and has been for decades. Political scientists studied it really heavily for quite a while because early results w
9.
by walkabout 11mo ago
I have seen and enjoyed the first two movies but had somehow never even heard of the third one. It’s now high up my to-watch list, thanks for bringing it to my attention.
10.
by walkabout 11mo ago
Yeah I used to be for it on grounds of liberty but having seen a little of the actual industry it’s just purely corrosive, evil shit. It should be fought. I’d maybe be OK with some kind of well-thought-through thing that still allowed frien
11.
by walkabout 11mo ago
It’s hard to express how frustrating it is to try to allow kids access to tech and the Web (it’s kind of important that they have at least some access! And isn’t a bunch of this allegedly for super-charging learning and exploration of the
12.
by walkabout 11mo ago
It’s far easier to just pirate (nearly all?) GOG games. Like there are torrents with big chunks of their entire store on them, and I’ve seen allusions to an unofficial “store” that just has all(?) their games on it for free. I doubt many pe
13.
by walkabout 11mo ago
> Plus the whole professional CS tournament scene is sponsored by these predatory casinos I once had a glimpse behind the scenes of the online sports gambling industry (only for a few months—turns out that was my limit of how utterly dis
14.
by walkabout 11mo ago
“Democracy” in the sense of “a government with large amounts of citizen participation via voting, strong rule of law, and peaceful transition of power” (this is an entirely fine usage; it’s the main way most political scientists use the t
15.
by walkabout 11mo ago
Oh of course they were dystopias. But at least they were cool and there was a fair amount of competence floating around. My point is exactly that we got the dystopia but also it's not even a little cool, and it's very stupid. We c
16.
by walkabout 11mo ago
It's kind of incredible the news is so crowded with insanity that "minimum two justices are simply taking huge bribes more-or-less openly, and as many as all nine are doing some things that are at least ethically iffy" didn
17.
by walkabout 11mo ago
Dark, yes, but also cool and with a fair amount of competence in play, including among powerful actors, and often lots of competence. We got dark, but also lame and stupid.
18.
by walkabout 11mo ago
The whole idea even accepting the core premise is OK to begin with needs to have a similar analysis applied to it that medical tests do: will there be enough false positives, with enough harm caused by them, that this is actually worse th
19.
by walkabout 11mo ago
I already adjust my clothing choices when flying to account for TSA's security theater make-work bullshit. Wonder how long before I'm doing that when preparing to go to other public places. (I suppose if I attended pro sports game
20.
by walkabout 11mo ago
We got our cyberpunk future, except none of it's cool and everything's extremely stupid.
21.
by walkabout 11mo ago
An enormous proportion of Republican voters were already Trumpers as early as the ‘90s, but didn’t have a candidate yet, so had to settle for “vote Republican to keep the democrats from doing all the bad things Rush says they will”. Repub
22.
by walkabout 11mo ago
They fucked up the design if they didn’t want factions (yes, a common term at the time for what we call parties) and did so in a way that makes it nearly impossible to fix in practice. The electoral college also never functioned the way it
23.
by walkabout 11mo ago
One nice thing about pointless witch hunts that go nowhere despite enormous efforts is that you can be sure a much-quicker process ending with something like actual consequences would ensue if there were real criminality to investigate. I
24.
by walkabout 11mo ago
Say a prosecutor is elected and literally never prosecutes crimes. Any crime. Ever. Despite laws on the books stating they are, in some cases that have in-fact come up, required to. But this prosecutor keeps getting re-elected, and nobody
25.
by walkabout 11mo ago
Can you point to any parts of the constitution that, if ignored, would represent the US state based on that same constitution no longer functioning correctly, or not as a continuation of the same state as before? If so, why those parts but
26.
by walkabout 11mo ago
Not a lot comes to mind that really falls between “basically trivial” and “you’re gonna need to hire a team of PhDs” or “you have accidentally asked me to write a custom distributed file system, and you probably don’t want to pay for that”
27.
by walkabout 11mo ago
It’s also the case that market-ideals tend to become miserable to experience in practice if you approach them too closely. Usually the discussion of that kind of thing revolves around the near-elimination of profit via (hypothetical) too-pe
28.
by walkabout 11mo ago
It’s not exactly working when the executive seizes two core powers of Congress (taxation and spending) and gets away with it for, so far, most of a year, with no end in sight. There’s a difference between disagreement over reasonable inte
29.
by walkabout 11mo ago
What’s crazy is how many people routinely drink the equivalent of two or more bags of skittles with their meals, between enormous to-go drink sizes and frequent, free refills when dining in. Like… ew, friggin’ gross.
30.
by walkabout 11mo ago
Depends on your cooking. Lots of baking, or lots of certain dishes (pastas, stir fries, that call for or benefit from eggs)? You’ll tear through eggs even if nobody eats them scrambled or over-easy for breakfast. One angel food cake or batc

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