Yep! Exactly!

I always thought that Felix modeled the hologram Vic off of a friend of his named Vic Fontaine. So, in the Mirror Universe, the Vic we see is the original friend.

Yes and no. Yes, we should explain actual policy stances without saying “this is single-payer healthcare” or “wealth redistribution” or whatever phrase causes conservatives to shutdown. However, there still needs to be a name for shorthand purposes. It’s like a pronoun in language. It gets tiring fast to keep using a person’s name rather than saying “she/he/they/etc.” and that causes its own issues.

Ultimately, the outline of a solution I can see is to advocate for “common sense” reforms and explain them (first at a high level so anyone can get an idea and then at finer detail later on). Call the policy something ‘Murica-esque that any truck driving, gun totin’, farmer from Texas would get behind. Then stay as far away from what the rest of the universe calls the policy and deny that it’s what the policy is. Those who know, will know and not care or roll their eyes, and the disengaged will go for it. For example, “This isn’t socialized medicine! It’s my own idea! The American Patriots Help Each Other Be Healthy policy!”

Because they legitimately don’t know what they’re saying. They’re just saying “them big college-soundin’ words” without any clue to their meaning.

This has been my biggest takeaway of the past ten years. The electorate wants more social democratic policies, but they are afraid of the name. Fox News has made the mention of “social” anything or “liberal” anything toxic to a not-insignificant portion of the US population, and calling these policies by their generally agreed upon designations (be it from political science, philosophy, or academia), that group will just shut it down because those words just trip something in their brains.

Anecdotal as it may be, I got my MAGA mother to agree that a single payer healthcare system was better explaining in small words what “a common sense, good system” would look like. She was totally on board. Will she vote for “Medicare for All,” now? No, because “that’s socialism!!!1!1!!1,” but an identical program that got explained was “just common sense.”

In the end, I’ve found that MAGA people fall into three camps: bigots, idiots, and the selfish. Bigots will never be reasoned with; they’re there to hurt people. The selfish are too rich to benefit from any good policies. Idiots, though, can be reasoned with, but you have to reason with them in the language of a 10 year old. It sounds condescending (and to a degree it is), but it’s the only way to get through to them.

It seems insane from an outsider’s perspective, but I think that we could get some European-esque policies passed in the US if instead of using “normal” terms, we use super mega-deluxe 'Murican cowboy names and just play into the quirks of American culture.

LLMs don’t. There are tools that can fetch new information and then gets fed into the model as more tokens, but that’s just a special case of what kescusay is saying about injecting text.

Oh God I feel this in my bones.

Do they do these regularly? How far in advance was this planned?

Not as far as I know. There was language in the 2025 NDAA to revamp the SSS, and there was reporting about automatic registration earlier this year. I’d suspect it’s just related to the NDAA. If you’ve ever worked in government, it takes forever to plan and execute anything, so I’d bet this was in planning for months (if fast) to years (if normal).

When was the last one?

The last one was probably when we actually used the SSS for Vietnam, where it didn’t exactly work super well. But the US went to an all-volunteer force after that (primarily due to the inherent issues with conscription as a method of force generation), so fixing the issues weren’t practical.

Since 2022, there has been renewed talk in government and military analysis circles about the specter of a new world war, especially given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Europe is preparing the most for it. In fact, several European countries have provided guidance on how to prepare for large scale conflict. And even earlier, as GWOT was winding down in the late '10s, “Great Power Competition” was making large scale societal preparation more in vogue.

So, given all that, I wouldn’t worry about mass conscription. It’s pretty widely known to be a terrible method of force generation. The US also doesn’t need to conscript, even with the war in Iran. The economy is making recruitment much easier (retainment of experienced personnel is a different story), and quotas are being met.

Eh, I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Having worked in the federal government near the DoD, this is just trying to stress test the system. The timing isn’t great given everything that’s going on. SSS is already a break-glass option; it’s no one’s first choice, even the idiots in charge.

This is really great! I love these small illustrations from a common soldier’s POV. It really shows common humanity regardless of ethnicity, government, etc., as well as the suffering we all inflict on each other.

My new supervisor, the day I met him, was talking about how space data centers are a great idea (“because it’s so cold up there!”) and will be amazing when they’re online. That’s the moment I realized he was breathtakingly stupid. He may not believe in thermodynamics, but thermodynamics believes in him.

I guess I shouldn’t have expected much given that he has a degree in finance and has worked in consulting for 10 years.

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EULAs are part of the reason I almost exclusively use FOSS or just spin my own software (if time permitting).

The first time I encountered one was as a small child (like 5 or 6) when I was trying to install some game. The EULA came up, and I started reading it. Of course, I only understood a fraction of the legalese, but seeing some clauses that seemed to a child supremely unfair, caused me to hit “Do Not Agree.” Who would agree to such non-sense without having a full understanding or seeing crazy stipulations? The window closed, and I couldn’t understand why, so I asked my parents. They said that although you should read and understand any agreement, EULAs were different because if you don’t agree, then you can’t use the software.

It’s crazy to me that even as a kid, I could see how one-sided EULAs were. These companies aren’t even hiding their malicious intent, and we as a society have just decided to go along with it. I’m part of the problem, too (much as I try not to be). There have certainly been times that I hit accept even knowing that the EULA was taking advantage of me in some way, but I needed to use the software.

Anyway, there’s not much of a point of writing all this. Companies’ EULAs screw us over, and there is little we can really do about it, especially if the software is necessary in some way.

Please read the citations. I’ve found Claude (and a slightly lesser extend GPT) to be right more often than not, but the leading LLMs do get things wrong with enough frequency that it’s worth checking.

Also, to be clear, I’m not fervently anti-LLM, but I do know how it works (as much as anyone who has read the academic literature). “Thinking” is at best a misnomer and at worst a marketing term. It’s just an ouroboros; the LLM more-or-less feeds its output back into itself to “check” it and “think.” It works surprisingly well, but it’s not actual thinking.

Something along these lines is why I’ve always loved Star Trek and didn’t get into other shows/movies as much (like Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel, etc.), especially as a kid. The crew of the Enterprise were just regular people, albeit hyper-competent, but still just people at the end of the day. They would combine their diversity of skills and overcome crazy situations. There was no savior or chosen-one, just people with skills and their own interests. It feels achievable for anyone to be an officer on the Enterprise if they put in the effort to be there. Not everyone can be a Jedi or a super hero. That’s not to say those other stories are bad, but I always felt that’s what made Star Trek special, and Picard’s humility, I think, really showcases it. It feels like he would say, “I’m just a guy doing a job.”

I’m glad I’m not the only one who has this thought when I use that sauce

THANK YOU! I studied AI in school, and it always bothers me when people think that LLMs are the only facet of AI. Between 2022-2024, I had a knee jerk reaction of explaining that AI is more than LLMs and that LLMs are really a small subset of the entire universe of AI, yadda yadda yadda. Now I’ve given up and roll my eyes as someone tries to tell me about the cool new Claude skill they built.

What’s funnier is people think I hate LLMs. That couldn’t be further from the truth; they are a fantastically interesting and innovative technology! “Attention is All You Need” is a great paper, and super impactful. I just hate that people are outsourcing their thinking to a chatbot and neglect the rest of my field of study.

Jennifer Griffin phrased this really poorly. (Fox News isn’t really known for intelligence…) Three ships were fired on, and they returned fire with retaliatory strikes, per USCENTCOM. https://www.centcom.mil/MEDIA/PRESS-RELEASES/Press-Release-View/Article/4480437/centcom-protects-us-warships-transiting-strait-of-hormuz/

So, the war isn’t back on, but it’s not off either. For a cease fire, there’s been a lot of firing going on. The US never should have kicked this hornet’s nest.

The only one that I can think of is research or clinical settings. It could be really useful for various social or psychological research or monitoring patient status. That’s not how it will be used for the most part but that is a place it could be useful. Like any tool, it can be used for good things and bad (how revelatory…)

The problem with the AI industry (and modern, unregulated capitalism in general) is that as soon as someone has a potentially useful tool, they look everywhere for every possible use with no regard for societal consequences. Thinking about the ramifications of using a tool doesn’t increase shareholder value. In fact, trying to only have your tool be used in a positive way actively harms shareholder value. Greed perverts all that is good.

It depends. I’d say it’s a scale of fairly easy to very easy depending on how you have everything set up and documented. Essentially, back everything up and install the new distro then put it all back. It will take some time, though. The first time I distro-hopped, I forgot to take a list of my installed packages, which made for some unwelcome surprises when I couldn’t find certain programs. That’s not hard to overcome, just keep a list of your installed packages. Even if you don’t, it’s easy to just reinstall them.