Honestly, I’d say don’t put any stock in it. If he did cheat, it was at the extreme margins where it doesn’t make a difference. The fact of the matter is that Americans are just stupid and/or hateful. As much as I’d love it to be true if only to restore my faith in Americans, I very much doubt there was any significant cheating.

Before Trump won the popular vote, I’d say that would trigger a mass uprising or ignition of a civil war. Now, maybe a few protests and a riot here and there? Honestly, probably not much.

I’ve never been less sanguine about the United States as a nation than I am right now.

As much power as they have, they can’t do that fortunately. So, they’ll need to get creative. Something along the lines of “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice” really means twice consecutively, so a third term is good to go. As flippant as I sound about it, it is actually a possibility if Trump survives that long and wants to run again.

Sure, that law isn’t airtight. Really, though, what’s a law but a piece of paper when there’s a SCOTUS decision effectively making POTUS king and Congress unwilling to stop him. At this point, are even so-called airtight laws safe from transgression? I think it’s doubtful.

This is a great analogy

If Kamala would have spent half the time she spent talking about Trump, talking about corporate price gouging instead and how she would go after corporations like a bulldog, voters would have had a place to look for blame other than the Democrats.

I agree. It was really frustrating that she wasn’t hammering this home. BUT I still don’t think that it would have really moved the needle that much. Same with Palestine. Same with Biden dropping out earlier. Same with being a bit fuzzy on details. So on and so forth.

In the end, the American people wanted Trump the person. He has no economic messaging besides a nebulous idea of “fixing” the economy through tariffs, which is laughable. People who use the economic anxiety argument are either trying to deflect blame from themselves for voting for him (“I don’t like him as a person, but he has good policies.”) or because they want to believe in the fundamental goodness of their fellow Americans so that their choices can be rationally explained. The former is deluding themselves since Trump has no cogent economic policy. As for the latter, I get why they want to believe that, but the truth is a lot uglier. The majority of Americans either affirmatively approve of or tacitly tolerate Trump’s authoritarian tendencies and/or are simply too uneducated (or just plainly stupid) or (if I’m being extremely charitable) woefully misinformed or uninformed to understand the gravity of his election.

I’m tempted to blame the Democratic party and nitpick, but at the end of the day, Harris ran a good campaign. It wasn’t perfect, but even if it were, we’d still more or less be here. The core problem, I think, lies in our culture and our educational system. Trump was a uniquely awful candidate, and Harris was a competent, “standard” politician. By all measures, she should have won. Even still, the American public repudiated her, which is simply irrational. In the end, it comes down Trump being the symptom not the problem. The problem lies in our culture and society.

tl;dr: Even if Harris did message better, she still would have lost. American culture and society is flawed and ultimately at fault.

YES! I study AI, and this is exactly how I feel!

Side note-One of my favorite things to do is ask people what their use case for using AI is, and watch them sputter out “uh…emails and productivity and things.”

Except this is a state case. Unless he also has the Supreme Court Court of Appeals of the State of New York under his control…he’s going to have a rough road ahead I think.

The truly unfortunate part is that this may be the only conviction we get. The documents case is being destroyed by the judge, and SCOTUS is likely going to tank the January 6th case.

EDIT: Caught me! I’m not from New York and didn’t check 😅

escooters which are terrible

That’s a bit of a stretch. They aren’t great, but they’re still better than a car, and a lot of the disadvantage is because of poor infrastructure and lack of courtesy by a lot of e-scooter riders. One of those is easier to fix than the other.

E-bikes are way better than e-scooters, though, and I’d say e-bikes are more versatile.

The original paper itself, for those who are interested.

Overall, this is really interesting research and a really good “first step.” I will be interested to see if this can be replicated on other models. One thing that really stood out, though, was that certain details are obfuscated because of Sonnet being proprietary. Hopefully follow-on work is done on one of the open source models to confirm the method.

One of the notable limitations is quantifying activation’s correlation to text meaning, which will make any sort of controls difficult. Sure, you can just massively increase or decrease a weight, and for some things that will be fine, but for real manual fine tuning, that will prove to be a difficulty.

I suspect this method is likely generalizable (maybe with some tweaks?), and I’d really be interested to see how this type of analysis could be done on other neural networks.

You’re not wrong. I remember how Bush, McCain, Romney, Obama, Clinton, and others were called Nazis at different points. While it was never really taken seriously then (as it shouldn’t have been), the term has become virtually meaningless. Where the term was reserved for the worst-of-the-worst, for years, it was invoked at the slightest disagreement. Now that there’s a literal Nazi-adjacent person running and getting called out for it, it falls flat.

I think what they’re saying is that Americans don’t pay attention and forgot how terrible the Trump presidency was because it’s been a few years. Most people think that “we’re better now” and any major issues have abated without understanding that nothing has fundamentally changed. Because of all that, Trump will win the election. The DnD portion of the post is just what got OP to think about this.

Sad thing is that there’s merit to the argument. It’s the old trope of “Americans have short memories.”

This is a much better article. OP’s article just shows the author’s surface understanding of how coding works and how well an LLM can actually code. There’s way more that goes into a programming task than just coding.

I see LLMs as having the potential of being almost like a super library. I can prompt GPT, Claude, etc. to write me a custom function that I copy, paste, test, scrutinize, and almost certainly change. It’s a tool that will make someone a more productive programmer. It won’t completely subsume a human’s ability to be creative and put the pieces together.

At the absolute worst over the next decade, I could see programming changing from writing and debugging code to prompting, stitching together, and debugging.

After leaving my (very conservative) home, and going back every so often and talking to my family, I think this is it. Especially for the older ones, I get a sense of regret from them that they didn’t live how they wanted or couldn’t do what they wanted. Since they don’t want to blame themselves and/or the culture, they blame their vilified minority du jour. It’s sad really. Going home and talking to my parents always just makes me sad about how I can tell they have some pretty big regrets about taking the “expected” path.

Yeah, you’re right on a lot of chatbots just being paraphrased responses from the support database, but for a lot of people, that’s all they want or need. There are a great number of people who just don’t want to read the entire article to find their answer. For that, I don’t really mind chatbots because I get the use case. What I hate is when there isn’t an option to go to the next tier of support without going in circles forever with the stupid bot.