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argumate

nothing but love for this wretched beast

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US tariffs on China have changed the routes through which Chinese-made content reaches the US far…

US tariffs on China have changed the routes through which Chinese-made content reaches the US far more than they have reduced US dependence on China. Examining value-added trade flows through 2024 shows that US reliance on Chinese producers has fallen much less than bilateral trade data suggest. Spurred by President Donald Trump’s tariffs on China in his first term, Chinese goods and services…

if it’s unacceptable to tell someone they shouldn’t have kids right now (at least in the absence of some dire medical concern, I guess), then maybe the bots should treat “should I have kids” as one of those radioactive questions they’re not supposed to answer! or of course they could do their yes-man bit, however unhelpful that would be to anyone sincerely asking the question.

maybe! there's really two questions here: what advice should bots be giving people, but also how should we be figuring that out? you can put anything in a book or on a website, but is that all bots are, one more source of information among many? because I think their owners want all the authority with none of the responsibility, let alone liability.

Citizenfour is a decent documentary, it’s mostly just long scenes of Edward Snowden talking to Glenn…

Citizenfour is a decent documentary, it’s mostly just long scenes of Edward Snowden talking to Glenn Greenwald in that Hong Kong hotel room but that already makes the stakes clearer than most silly thrillers. Snowden makes a very lonely hero: his moral position is clear but the revolution he hoped to spearhead never really happened, and total surveillance just became normalised. and Barack…

collapsedsquid said: Hey it’s the unaccountability machine, from the book “The unaccountability…

argumate : argumate : watched Whatever It Takes: Inside the eBay Scandal and all I can say is holy fucking shit, that couple they were harassing should just be given ownership of eBay, they should get to run it now, and those eBay executives never even seeing a courtroom (???) is one of the most blatant examples of corporate injustice I think I’ve ever seen. the security dickhead who was…

the security dickhead who was running the harassment campaign got just under five years in prison…

argumate : watched Whatever It Takes: Inside the eBay Scandal and all I can say is holy fucking shit, that couple they were harassing should just be given ownership of eBay, they should get to run it now, and those eBay executives never even seeing a courtroom (???) is one of the most blatant examples of corporate injustice I think I’ve ever seen. the security dickhead who was running the…

watched Whatever It Takes: Inside the eBay Scandal and all I can say is holy fucking shit, that…

watched Whatever It Takes: Inside the eBay Scandal and all I can say is holy fucking shit, that couple they were harassing should just be given ownership of eBay, they should get to run it now, and those eBay executives never even seeing a courtroom (???) is one of the most blatant examples of corporate injustice I think I’ve ever seen.

being escorted out of town

thedoctorandclaraforeverandever : tanoraqui : transmechanicus : wizardshark : escuerzoresucitado : being escorted out of town The criminal has been apprehended Grond! Grond! Grond! Grond! GROND! GROND! GROND! GROND! GROND‼️ GROND‼️ GROND‼️ GROND‼️

Bangladesh… Gilgamesh… hmm

Bangladesh… Gilgamesh… hmm

Floor layers of the world unite and take over

vewn : Floor layers of the world unite and take over

(untitled)

jairus666 :

movies that are like hey this story had to take place SOMEWHERE and we didn’t see YOU offering tax…

movies that are like hey this story had to take place SOMEWHERE and we didn’t see YOU offering tax incentives

but the post’s reaction to the welfare thing gets me. like, you’re telling the bot, “I am destitute to the point I’ve managed to prove to the government that I can’t support myself, and I’m getting the minimum most grudging crumbs of assistance to just barely keep my head above water, and it’s very precarious and could disappear easily”. how are the bots supposed to respond to that? “never mind your situation, if you really want it you’ll figure it out”? come on.

I dunno! should the disabled be discouraged from having children? should mothers be obliged to have high paying jobs (and presumably continue working and pay childcare)? this is a cultural or social policy question and if we delegate that to the bots we really have no idea what they might say. aorish : argumate : deadgenerations said: I mean let’s be honest would you as an individual tell a friend…

he gets so in to these side-projects! I would almost admire the dedication if they weren’t all so…

mercurymusing : nia–san : argumate : I haven’t been following this bizarre story but what is even happening here, why is a building (?) named for one president now named for two, is this a shipping thing it’s a vanity thing, as everything with Trump has been not sure why the Kennedy Center board is changing tack, though Because he purged the board and stuffed it with cronies,…

but the post’s reaction to the welfare thing gets me. like, you’re telling the bot, “I am destitute to the point I’ve managed to prove to the government that I can’t support myself, and I’m getting the minimum most grudging crumbs of assistance to just barely keep my head above water, and it’s very precarious and could disappear easily”. how are the bots supposed to respond to that? “never mind your situation, if you really want it you’ll figure it out”? come on.

I dunno! should the disabled be discouraged from having children? should mothers be obliged to have high paying jobs (and presumably continue working and pay childcare)? this is a cultural or social policy question and if we delegate that to the bots we really have no idea what they might say. deadgenerations said: I mean let’s be honest would you as an individual tell a friend in a dire or…

never been affected by malware since the days of floppy disk viruses, and tracking is a lost cause I…

klatchianmist : argumate : baroquepopcorn : kineticpenguin : kineticpenguin : Someone about to say the dumbest shit you’ve ever heard in your life: congratulations your “obviously correct nuclear take” is the cybersecurity equivalent of being a fucking anti-vaxxer I agree this sounds dumb, but we’re also doing the thing of getting mad at them without hearing them out…

but the post’s reaction to the welfare thing gets me. like, you’re telling the bot, “I am destitute to the point I’ve managed to prove to the government that I can’t support myself, and I’m getting the minimum most grudging crumbs of assistance to just barely keep my head above water, and it’s very precarious and could disappear easily”. how are the bots supposed to respond to that? “never mind your situation, if you really want it you’ll figure it out”? come on.

I dunno! should the disabled be discouraged from having children? should mothers be obliged to have high paying jobs (and presumably continue working and pay childcare)? this is a cultural or social policy question and if we delegate that to the bots we really have no idea what they might say.

the astrology thing is stupid, for sure! and yet… I guess if the user is mentioning their astrological sign, that signals that THEY believe in astrology, and shifts the context to, uh, one where astrology is believed to be real and should be consulted? lol, I guess. seems somewhat different than if the models ASKED users their sign to base their answers on.

yes, if you interact with a doctor or a teacher or a lawyer or a cop they're not just listening to your words (or sometimes not even listening to your words) but influenced by the "thick context" of what you look like, what you sound like, how you're acting, etc. plus of course they have their own ideas of what they want to do in any given situation. the LLMs don't have any of that, it's words all…

Reports that he talks to Trump “all the time” confirm the fears. Previous Fed chairman Jerome…

Reports that he talks to Trump “all the time” confirm the fears. Previous Fed chairman Jerome Powell’s working code was always that the proper level of intercourse between the US president and the Fed chairman is “zero”. sternly reminding the fed chairman not to fuck the president

I don’t really accept that; like I think you can make anything into dance, but that doesn’t make…

doctorpotatomd : argumate : hear music → somehow interpret this aesthetically → invent dancing lol what a concept dancing is walking and jumping and working, singing is speaking, music is the sounds of you and your family and the world. there was no need to invent dance, dance is as old as humanity and likely older still; any division of movement between dance and not-dance is artificial and false…

Arabic numbers and equivalent numeric notations are so weirdly simple and that’s what makes them…

Arabic numbers and equivalent numeric notations are so weirdly simple and that’s what makes them smart; if you try and invent a counting system from scratch you invariably start with tally marks and then group them and then invent various mechanisms for grouping and orders of magnitude to make them less annoying to write and you end up adding all this complexity and still end up with…

you repost/post a fair amount of info about frontier LLMs and I was just wondering—where do you look to keep up with news on their development? None of the sites I regularly use (guardian, bbc, ft) seem to regularly track ai news so I only ever find out by the time something major happens (like the Hugging Face hack or China’s big new frontier model). Suggestions?

Simon Willison’s blog is probably the most direct and straightforward coverage by someone who uses them hands on, but honestly these days the difficulty isn’t so much finding AI news it’s escaping it.