• 5 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • What I don’t get is the bit at the end where it explains that Trump can be the guy they root for even though he is literally a smarmy big city elite who only goes to church for photo ops, doesn’t pay his workers, etc. And the article is like, don’t you root for Tony Stark and left-leaning talk show hosts, because they target the people you don’t like?

    And I’m like, no, honestly, those guys are insufferable. I need someone to explain why anyone likes them.

    Also I grew up in a right-leaning area and I didn’t understand their values any better when I was a kid, honestly. At least as a little kid I was religious, but when I got to high school and started asking tough questions at church it became obvious that our supposed religious leaders didn’t have satisfactory answers to questions like “It would be immoral if I had the power to stop evil and didn’t use it, why isn’t it immoral for God to allow evil to exist?” So then I stopped being religious, too, which pushed me further out of their subculture.

    (I guess some of my actual values aren’t popular almost anywhere; I’m a pacifist anarchist which is fairly uncommon. So there has to be more to why people end up the way they do than where they live.)


  • Smoking proves that you officially Don’t Give a Shit about your long-term health, and Not Giving a Shit is the essence of being cool. I mean, I guess for a long time now “cool” has just meant “good,” but the original “cool” aesthetic was all about acting like you were probably going to die young and looking sexy doing it.

    Edit: And smoking definitely contributes to the sexy part. Smoldering embers. Oral fixation. Taking a long drag and letting it out slowly. Maybe it’s not for you, but it sure pushes my buttons, and I know it’s not just me.








  • Lying requires intent. Currently popular LLMs build responses one token at a time—when it starts writing a sentence, it doesn’t know how it will end, and therefore can’t have an opinion about the truth value of it. (I’d go further and claim it can’t really “have an opinion” about anything, but even if it can, it can neither lie nor tell the truth on purpose.) It can consider its own output (and therefore potentially have an opinion about whether it is true or false) only after it has been generated, when generating the next token.

    “Admitting” that it’s lying only proves that it has been exposed to “admission” as a pattern in its training data.


  • Can we blame this on the engagement era? The first competitive game I got into was Unreal Tournament 2004, and it seemed like every team deathmatch had one or two players who were in a completely different league from everyone else so the result just depended on which team they were on. You can’t blame the matchmaking because it didn’t have any, you just picked a server to connect to and played with whoever was there.

    Edit to add: TDM was the main team game mode where this was a thing; modes with objectives, bigger teams, and vehicles all mitigated the effects of individual player skill.



  • Where are you seeing that she stepped on it? The allegation is that she pressed it with her thumb, and she doesn’t dispute that she pressed it on purpose—she was checking the firmness, which is a weird thing to do to a bun but I don’t think it’s worth chasing her down over. If you really can’t sell it with a dent in it, telling her not to come back seems like a proportionate response. But honestly if I were the owner, I’d probably just eat the dented bun and call it a wash.