• 0 Posts
  • 642 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 11th, 2023

help-circle

  • A reminder about your rights. If the government can declare you to have an attribute that negates your rights, then you have no rights.

    Any time someone claims that some group of people should have no/reduced due process, I respond essentially the same way: “If you believe that $GROUP shouldn’t have due process then you are a $GROUP_MEMBER. Prove you’re not without any due process.” Before this year, it was mostly people accused of sexual assault, but illegal immigrants are the new target of choice as people who allegedly don’t deserve due process rights.





  • I do agree with your “averaging machine” argument. It makes a lot of sense given how LLMs are trained as essentially massive statistical models.

    For image generation models I think a good analogy is to say it’s not drawing, but rather sculpting - it starts with a big block of white noise and then takes away all the parts that don’t look like the prompt. Iterate a few times until the result is mostly stable (that is it can’t make the input look much more like the prompt than it already does). It’s why you can get radically different images from the same prompt - the starting block of white noise is different, so which parts of that noise look most prompt-like and so get emphasized are going to be different.


  • People shit on Hossenfelder but she has a point. Academia partially brought this on themselves.

    Somehow I briefly got her and Pluckrose reversed in my mind, and was still kinda nodding along.

    If you don’t know who I mean, Pluckrose and two others produced a bunch of hoax papers (likening themselves to the Sokal affair) of which 4 were published and 3 were accepted but hadn’t been published, 4 were told to revise and resubmit and one was under review at the point they were revealed. 9 were rejected, a bit less than half the total (which included both the papers on autoethnography). The idea was to float papers that were either absurd or kinda horrible like a study supporting reducing homophobia and transphobia in straight cis men by pegging them (was published in Sexuality & Culture) or one that was just a rewrite of a section of Mein Kampf as a feminist text (was accepted by Affilia but not yet published when the hoax was revealed).

    My personal favorite of the accepted papers was “When the Joke Is on You: A Feminist Perspective on How Positionality Influences Satire” just because of how ballsy it is to spell out what you are doing so obviously in the title. It was accepted by Hypatia but hadn’t been published yet when the hoax was revealed.








  • He could do that, but it would become very public very quickly and that’s more a problem for your side politically when you do it to a state where your side is in power in general.

    He can threaten Maine and Maines governor like that because they’re a blue state and turning on them doesn’t make his base realize he could do the same to them in the same way because they’re the other team. Doing the same to WV would read as a betrayal to his own followers precisely because they’re solid red and we’re not far enough down the “and then they came for…” list for that to be a safe move politically yet.


  • Our governor might be a GOP dipshit, but he’s…less on the Trump train than some others. I think he got shocked out of it a bit when the whole “stop all payments” thing first started less than 48 hours before the Medicaid disbursement was supposed to hit and he was needing to have emergency “how do we keep Medicaid going” meetings before the injunction against it. He can’t be totally off the Trump train if he wants reelected because this is a hard red safe state in the way it used to be a hard blue safe state before fucking Gore of all people fucked it up.

    I don’t think he’d pardon someone just because Trump asked, barring Trump making a significant threat to force the issue.





  • Haha, Leviathan was certainly the “big bad” in Job.

    To quote a work of fiction I particularly enjoyed, during a discussion between the characters on the Book of Job:

    “You know,” said Bill Dodd, “what is Leviathan, anyway? Like a giant whale or something, right? So God is saying we need to be able to make whales submit to us and serve us and dance for us and stuff? Cause, I’ve been to Sea World. We have totally done that.”

    “Leviathan is a giant sea dinosaur thing,” said Zoe Farr. “Like a plesiosaur. Look, it’s in the next chapter. It says he has scales and a strong neck.”

    “And you don’t think if he really existed, we’d Jurassic Park the sucker?” asked Bill Dodd.

    “It also says he breathes fire,” said Eli Foss.

    “So,” proposed Erica, “if we can find a fire-breathing whale with scales and a neck, and we bring it to Sea World, then we win the Bible?”

    https://unsongbook.com/