Schadrach

To an engineer, pi is 3

No, to an engineer pi is 22/7, 355/113 if your tolerances are really tight. 3 is pi to a theologist, because that’s what the Bible uses.

No. Or any other kind of break.

I thought there was a federal requirement for shifts over a certain length to get a break of a certain minimum length? It’s not much, it’s not remotely good, but I’m pretty sure it exists.

Got clips? I’m assuming one is the bit about Elon being “good” with vote counting computers and that’s how they won Pennsylvania in a landslide, but I’m not familiar with the other time he he stated on camera that the election was rigged in his favor.

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.

Specifically to have that conversation - there is no connection whatsoever between “earned their money” and “has views I agree with” or even “has non-harmful views.” At least Notch doesn’t do worse than occasionally tweet what he thinks.

You grossly underestimate just how shitty people can be. Which is wild given what’s going on in gestures wildly.

I mean there is a difference between “earned their money rather than being born into it” and “has all the correct politics”.

I have witnessed not one single rich person earn fucking shit!

I mean there are a handful that created some kind of creative work that became wildly popular and their wealth is ultimately derived primarily from that creation that you could argue earned it. Like Notch or JK Rowling.

Any random 9-digit number can be a valid SSN.

Not true - there are whole ranges that specifically aren’t in use (mostly specific values for the first three digits that are intentionally not used). Outside those ranges though, yeah, basically any 9 digit number. Add one to the last digit of your SSN and if you were born before 2014 you likely get someone born in the same hospital on the same day.

That’s Maine, Maine is a blue state and it costs him and his little electoral capital to attack a Dem politician in a blue state.

WV is red, extremely red. Trying to fuck with WV like that is attacking a strongly red state, and risks making the other red states realize that maybe, just maybe the leopard might eat their faces too. We’re not far enough down the “and then they came for…” list for that to be a safe move, yet.

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.

I always find the people here with Confederate flags claiming it’s about heritage to be the most ridiculous. The state was founded during the Civil War and is the part of Virginia that stayed with the Union, how in the everloving fuck is a Confederate flag part of our heritage?

You should have paid attention to the timeline. In the Star Trek timeline we should expect world war 3 to start next year and go for thirty years. The first warp flight and first contact is after that, and it’s only after that that the “better for us” even starts happening.

For an analog clock the reason for 12 hour time is that twelve divides evenly into 60 and 24 does not. Get rid of the whole 60 min/hour and 60 sec/min that make dividing a clock dial into 60 segments extremely useful and then we can talk about why there are twelve hours on it.

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/

An LLM is roughly as smart as the corpus it is summarizing is accurate for the topic, because at their best they are good at creating natural language summarizers. Most of the main ones basically do an internet search and summarize the top couple of results, which means they are as good as the search engine backing them. Which is good enough for a lot of topics, but…not so much for the rest.

That being said, open discourse and actual conversation seems more prevalent and easier to come by here then on reddit which is very nice.

A result of decentralization. There absolutely are instances full of insufferable whatevers for many varieties of whatever, but being decentralized makes it a lot harder for them to utterly own all discussion on a topic in the way that often happens on Reddit.

Don’t you know that vaccines are made out of mercury

Some childhood vaccines contained thimerosal which is a mercury compound as a preservative prior to 2001, some other drugs still use it and it’s very probably harmless but technically any drug containing thimerosal contains mercury.

and dead babies?

Is the common measles vaccine in the US one of the ones that is developed using a cell line originated from an aborted fetus? Like it doesn’t contain any fetal cells in the final product, but technically it wouldn’t be entirely a lie to say it’s made from a dead baby (without getting clinical and drawing a developmental line before which it’s not a “baby” per se), since the media it is grown it is a cell line descended from one…

Kind of like how there are skin treatments made from circumcised foreskins - it doesn’t actually contain foreskin, but it contains a compound extracted from cell lines produced from infant foreskin removed during circumcision, because that’s the easiest way to legally get baby skin. Usually they’ll refer to containing CTFG or epidermal growth factors or something along those lines.