The squabbling process moves the law toward meeting the needs of more people. If a dictator just gets to decide what the law is, they’ll likely be self-serving to the dictator, or even outright harmful to entire categories of people.

ITT: people saying “the US and China both seem bad” and being told that they obviously just want to kiss America square on the lips because China has never done anything bad ever

More specifically, they’re borrowing the more mathematical meaning of variables, where if you say x equals 5, you can’t later say x is 6, and where a statement like “x = x + 1” is nonsense. Using “let” means you’re setting the value once and that’s what it’s going to remain as long as it exists, while “var” variables can be changed later. Functional languages, which are usually made by very math-y people, will often protest the way programmers use operators by saying that = is strictly for equality and variable assignment is := instead of == and = in most C-style languages.

Love a language that doesn’t care if you’re using inputs to get outputs or using outputs to get inputs

They also took away the ability to specify your answer separately from the answer you were looking for from others, so now it’s just “did you say the same thing.” Which doesn’t make any sense for some questions, like “do you prefer a partner that is a) taller than you, b) shorter than you, c) doesn’t matter”, if you both picked A or B, you aren’t a match for this question!

They could organize protests, they could help workers unionize, they could put their necks out and disrupt things, they could do anything besides stand by and say “oh no, this is so bad.” They have a gigantic megaphone and the ears of almost half the country, their power isn’t limited to the votes they have or don’t have. I want them to be making plans that are bold, plans where they feel a need to account for “how do we make sure this doesn’t turn into an outright riot though,” the things you’d do if you actually believed the rhetoric about Trump being a threat to democracy.

Fellow former popes, you mean, by reading this message you hereby excommunicate yourself.

I’m bitterly clinging to my iPhone 13 mini, because I suspect it’s the last phone I’ll ever actively enjoy. I went along with bigger phones when that became the trend and decided I didn’t like them, and the mini line was such a relief to go back to. Once it’s no longer tenable, I’ll probably just buy a series of “the least bad used phone I can find” because I know I’ll be mildly frustrated every time I use it.

It’s the last one, the “wait a day” option and the “pay $20” options aren’t equivalent. If it’s still a day away from viability, it isn’t viable yet, but if it’s $20 away, it is. You may be of the opinion that waiting a day isn’t a big deal, or is only $20 worth of hardship, but that’s not your choice to make for others.

You’d think ending a doomed pregnancy would be a simple matter even for pro-lifers, yes. They often don’t consider the issue, or assume that it’ll always be clear-cut and obvious in every circumstance, or worry that any exception will be used as a loophole.

I can’t believe this word doesn’t seem to have made it into any part of this thread, but I think you’re looking for viability: the point where a fetus can live outside of the womb. This isn’t a hard line, of course, and technology can and has changed where that line can be drawn. Before that point, the fetus is entirely dependent on one specific person’s body, and after that point, there are other options for caring for it. That is typically where pro-choice folks will draw the line for abortion as well; before that point, an abortion ban is forced pregnancy and unacceptable, after that point there can be some negotiation and debate (though that late into a pregnancy, if an abortion is being discussed it’s almost certainly a health crisis, not a change of heart, so imposing restrictions just means more complications for an already difficult and dangerous situation).

“Life without risk of poverty”?! That desperation and fear is the only way I can staff my sweatshops!

Bluesky’s more like an aspirationally decentralized platform, you can keep your own data on your own server and use your own domain name as a user name, but most of the rest of it is “centralized, but we’re designing it in such a way that we can open it up later.” Even then, though, it’s heavily influenced by the original idea of “let’s make something decentralized that Twitter can switch to once it’s worked out” which means that even when they do open things up, it’s likely that a lot of Bluesky will only be practical at “big tech company scale” to run yourself, whereas Mastodon or Lemmy you can just spin up on a server and it’ll be fine until you get a lot of users.

I as a human being have grown up and learned from experience and the experiences of previous humans that were documented or directly communicated to me. I can see no inherent difference with an artificial intelligence learning on the same data.

It’s a massive difference in scale. For one, before you even leave the womb you have millions of years of evolution shaping the initial structure of your brain. Then your “training” begins, but it’s infinitely richer than anything we’re giving to these LLMs. Sights, sounds, smells, feelings, so many that part of what your brain is learning is what it must ignore. You’re also benefitting from the interactivity of your environment, you can experiment with things and get feedback for what happens. As you get older and develop more skills, you can start integrating them together to do even more complex things, and the people around you will use their own incredible intelligence to specifically tailor your training to what you need as you learn and grow.

Meanwhile, an LLM is getting fed words, and learning how to predict the next word. It’s a pale shadow of the complex lives humans live. Words are one of the more powerful things we have for thinking and reasoning, so if you’re going to go all in on one skill, it’s a rich environment for learning and in theory the contents of all of humanity’s writing probably contains all the information necessary to recreate human intelligence, but our current technology doesn’t even come close to wringing every ounce of knowledge from the training sets.

The UN is supposed to be a toothless, executively dysfunctional institution, that’s a feature, not a bug. Its members are nations, whose entire purpose is to govern their regions of the planet. If the UN itself had the power to make nations do things, it wouldn’t be the United Nations, it’d be the One World Government, and its most powerful members absolutely do not want it to be that, so it isn’t.

It’s supposed to be an idealized, nonviolent representation of geopolitics that is always available to nations as a venue for civilized diplomacy. That’s why nuclear powers were given veto power: they effectively have veto power over the question of “should the human race continue existing” and the veto is basically a reflection of that. We want issues to get hashed out with words in the UN if possible, rather than in real life with weapons, and that means it must concede to the power dynamics that exist in real life. The good nations and the bad nations alike have to feel like they get as much control as they deserve, otherwise they take their balls and go home.

It’s frustrating to see the US or Russia or China vetoing perfectly good resolutions and everyone else just kind of going “eh, what can you do, they have vetoes,” but think through the alternative: everyone has enough and decides “no more veto powers.” The UN starts passing all the good resolutions. But the UN only has the power that member nations give it, so enforcement would have to mean some nations trying to impose their will on the ones that would’ve vetoed. Now we’ve traded bad vetoes in the UN for real-world conflict instead.

What that “get rid of the vetoes so the UN can get things done” impulse is actually driving at is “we should have a one world government that does good things,” which, yeah, that’d be great, but it’s obviously not happening any time soon. Both articles mention issues and reforms that are worthy of consideration, but the fundamental structure of the UN is always going to reflect the flaws of the world because it’s supposed to do that.

It’s all a stupid game. Israel killed some people, so Iran “had to” respond to save face, and then Israel had to do the same. Once everyone is satisfied that everyone knows both countries have very big and girthy missiles, they can finally back down from a war no one wants (hopefully).

Archive Team looked at this about 10 years ago and found it basically impossible. It was around 14 petabytes of information to fetch, organize, and distribute at the time.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK

Do you think electing Trump will be read as “wow, the US is taking a principled stance on Palestinian rights” by the world?

“Lossless” has a specific meaning, that you haven’t lost any data, perceptible or not. The original can be recreated down to the exact 1s and 0s. “Lossy” compression generally means “data is lost but it’s worth it and still does the job” which is what it sounds like you’re looking for.

With images, sometimes if technology has advanced, you can find ways to apply even more compression without any more data loss, but that’s less common in video. People can choose to keep raw photos with all the information that the sensor got when the photo was taken, but a “raw” uncompressed video would be preposterously huge, so video codecs have to throw out a lot more data than photo formats do. It’s fine because videos keep moving, you don’t stare at a single frame for more than a fraction of a second anyway. But that doesn’t leave much room for improvement without throwing out even more, and going from one lossy algorithm to another has the downside of the new algorithm not knowing what’s “good” visual data from the original and what’s just compression noise from the first lossy algorithm, so it will attempt to preserve junk while also adding its own. You can always give it a try and see what happens, of course, but there are limits before it starts looking glitchy and bad.

That’s not how it works at all. If it were as easy as adding a line of code that says “check for integrity” they would’ve done that already. Fundamentally, the way these models all work is you give them some text and they try to guess the next word. It’s ultra autocomplete. If you feed it “I’m going to the grocery store to get some” then it’ll respond “food: 32%, bread: 15%, milk: 13%” and so on.

They get these results by crunching a ton of numbers, and those numbers, called a model, were tuned by training. During training, they collect every scrap of human text they can get their hands on, feed bits of it to the model, then see what the model guesses. They compare the model’s guess to the actual text, tweak the numbers slightly to make the model more likely to give the right answer and less likely to give the wrong answers, then do it again with more text. The tweaking is an automated process, just feeding the model as much text as possible, until eventually it gets shockingly good at predicting. When training is done, the numbers stop getting tweaked, and it will give the same answer to the same prompt every time.

Once you have the model, you can use it to generate responses. Feed it something like “Question: why is the sky blue? Answer:” and if the model has gotten even remotely good at its job of predicting words, the next word should be the start of an answer to the question. Maybe the top prediction is “The”. Well, that’s not much, but you can tack one of the model’s predicted words to the end and do it again. “Question: why is the sky blue? Answer: The” and see what it predicts. Keep repeating until you decide you have enough words, or maybe you’ve trained the model to also be able to predict “end of response” and use that to decide when to stop. You can play with this process, for example, making it more or less random. If you always take the top prediction you’ll get perfectly consistent answers to the same prompt every time, but they’ll be predictable and boring. You can instead pick based on the probabilities you get back from the model and get more variety. You can “increase the temperature” of that and intentionally choose unlikely answers more often than the model expects, which will make the response more varied but will eventually devolve into nonsense if you crank it up too high. Etc, etc. That’s why even though the model is unchanging and gives the same word probabilities to the same input, you can get different answers in the text it gives back.

Note that there’s nothing in here about accuracy, or sources, or thinking, or hallucinations, anything. The model doesn’t know whether it’s saying things that are real or fiction. It’s literally a gigantic unchanging matrix of numbers. It’s not even really “saying” things at all. It’s just tossing out possible words, something else is picking from that list, and then the result is being fed back in for more words. To be clear, it’s really good at this job, and can do some eerily human things, like mixing two concepts together, in a way that computers have never been able to do before. But it was never trained to reason, it wasn’t trained to recognize that it’s saying something untrue, or that it has little knowledge of a subject, or that it is saying something dangerous. It was trained to predict words.

At best, what they do with these things is prepend your questions with instructions, trying to guide the model to respond a certain way. So you’ll type in “how do I make my own fireworks?” but the model will be given “You are a chatbot AI. You are polite and helpful, but you do not give dangerous advice. The user’s question is: how do I make my own fireworks? Your answer:” and hopefully the instructions make the most likely answer something like “that’s dangerous, I’m not discussing it.” It’s still not really thinking, though.

Homophobia and transphobia, when you dig into them a bit, are often based in a fear that they’ll be on the other end of toxic masculinity instead of the one they’re used to.