mozz

Yeah, I sure jumped to conclusions here. I didn't even talk to you at length and hear you out and explain what I was thinking, or give you a chance to respond. Must just suck as a person, I guess.

The fuck do you mean "should this strain become a threat"

It's jumped to like 15 mammal species so far and decimated a bunch of them when it did

It's jumped to humans many times

Workers are working next to infected cattle right now every day with this sort of "idk wear a mask try not to get anything on you good luck" safety measure

The recent case fatality rate in humans is 30%

The fuck do you mean "should this strain become a threat"

IDK whether it's going to cause an apocalypse in humans like it did in a bunch of other species, anything could happen

But IDK what you're waiting for before you decide it's a threat. What, once it's spreading human to human and people are dying by the thousands and it's too late to do anything but try to limit the damage, then it's going to become "a threat"?

I am.

I had just reached the conclusion that maybe it was hasty to decide you're a troll. IDK, it's hard to tell these things over the internet.

Deciding whether or not to vote for Joe Biden should be based on analyzing what he's done in the time he's in office. Going back 4 years before he was in power, trying to get in the heads of the people that were voting for him even though there's no possible way to do that, and then trying to draw a conclusion from that that would inform in any way the decision about what to do in this general election, is totally bizarre bordering on unhinged. I think you are doing it on purpose to distract from the straight concept of "what will Biden probably do, what will Trump probably do, and which one do I want" (the answer to which is pretty clear after like 5-10 seconds of thought... which is why I suspect you're trying so hard not to analyze in those terms, because to you the "right answer" is not-Biden.)

Hope you're being paid well, at least. It can't be a super fun job.

Dude Al Jazeera's fuckin fantastic

It is quite literally the only news I'm aware of which is (1) fairly big and professional, competent (2) not automatically pro-Western on everything (3) not run by some government, and filled with stories about how that government's great and any bad stories about it are evil lies

What a fascinatingly straightforward, natural, and organic train of logic.

If the carbon credits actually produced a reduction in carbon emissions equal to 50% of what they were claiming, then these are some solid gold carbon credits, and they should keep doing what they're doing and get some kind of award.

I think for most carbon credits the percentage is pretty close to 0.

Friends of mine who are not news watchers asked me about this when Trump was first elected -- their question was more or less: People seem like they're freaking out about this. Is this actually a big deal? Is this actually going to impact my life in any way?

I thought about it a little bit, and said that I thought there was about a 30% chance that Trump was going to fuck something up in such a dramatic fashion that it would actually impact their lives in an unavoidable way. I mean, the 70% doesn't mean he has no impact (someone getting a job or not, or the pay for the job, or the rent they pay, can be impacted very substantially by this indirect process that actually does root back to "the government" -- but it takes a while, and there are a lot of local and personal factors too, and "the government" is a lot bigger and more complex than just who is president, etc). But you can kind of ignore all of that and continue with your life, and the amount of time and energy it would take to get involved (as opposed to just taking what comes) is maybe pretty significant.

In retrospect I think the 30% was a pretty good prediction. For all the impact he may have had on people somewhere else in the world, he made it about 70% of the way through his term before Covid hit, and then the way he fucked up the response definitely impacted our lives on an individual level. I know people whose family members died. It's hard to say that they wouldn't have if Trump hadn't been in office, but his "let's all keep going to work, it'll probably blow over, feel free to punch anyone who wants you to wear a mask" response definitely increased the death toll significantly.

I think the chance this time around that Trump would have no individual-level impact is close to 0%. I know someone who's deep in the conservative rabbit hole, get all his news and picture of the world from TikTok, who's deeply confused about what's going on in the country and real angry about the picture that all the little video reels have created in his mind. He's bought himself a handgun now.

Just my opinion:

"Politics" impacts a huge amount of what happens in our lives. It used to be possible to have a single-income family living in a nice house from working a 40-hour job, take vacations, have a nice retirement. The process that got us that was definitely a stressful and unpleasant time (TL;DR unions). The reason it all stopped being that way was "politics" (TL;DR Reagan).

IDK if any particular outwards manifestation is or isn't productive but I definitely wouldn't look at the whole endeavor as unmeaningful. I think a lot of what comes through TV and social media is partisan and engineered to produce an emotional response, which is draining. I get that. If that's what you're talking about then maybe just ignoring it is honestly a better response because a lot of it is just noise and nonsense. But disengaging from the whole thing doesn't seem like the right way either.

BLM produced a lot of positive changes to policing, neoliberal economic policies produced a lot of unnecessary not-having-enough-money after decades of people getting jaded about "getting political" in the union-drive sense and just showing up to vote every few years and thinking that'll be enough. To me what's happening now actually feels hopeful - like people are starting to care again, because things are getting so bad that it's unavoidable that things need to change. IDK if any particular stressful thinking is going to produce change (probably not, if it's coming from consuming media) but I definitely would say that people caring about politics and government and what public policy looks like seems like a good thing (instead of just leaving it on rich-person-in-Washington autopilot and hoping that the result from that is gonna be good.)

I think the Palestinians people are mostly concerned about the deaths of, no one at all is arming. They're just starving to death, unarmed, in quiet desperation, in their homes or in the places they went to when their homes were destroyed.

I've never worked (recently) at a shop that didn't do some level of automated testing. In terms of having a bunch of people working on a big codebase without stuff being randomly broken most of the time, I'd say it's an absolute requirement to do it to at least some passable level.

In my experience it's, if anything, sometimes the opposite way -- like they insist on having testing even when the value of it the way it's being implemented is a little debatable. But yes I think it's important enough in terms of keeping things productive and detecting when something is totally-broken that you need to.

(Especially now when you can literally just paste a module into GPT and ask it to generate some sorta-stupid-but-maybe-good-enough test cases for it and with minimal tweaking you can get the whole thing in in like 10 minutes.)

Hell I can hardly find anyone who admits to voting for Joe Biden in the 2020 primaries on here.

Dude why are you so hell bent on the 2020 primaries?

If they exist here of all places then I speculate (I'm not trying to make some scientific claim here) there are a good number of them.

Yeah probably so, I can agree with that. Looks to me like about 38% of Democrats support Israel more than Palestine. To me it's absolutely crazy that it's that high, but I think (for no particular reason) that that's a product of how bad the news coverage is, and how much it goes out of its way to present the situation with this criminally pro-Israel spin.

I think if they fully understood the situation they'd be on Team Palestine and the big changes lately have been mostly due to them understanding it more and more, as the "war" continues and what's happening gets more and more obvious and harder to justify, so there's this new narrative being presented that wasn't in the mainstream news before. But I have no real reason for thinking that, it's just my guesswork about what's going on. It'd be interesting to find a poll that was analyzing how people understand the situation and what they think is going on, not just asking about the final bottom-line answer they're coming up with.

Yeah. That was more or less the conclusion I came to -- it's too hard for the LLM to follow the flow of conversation well enough to really determine if someone's "acting in good faith" or whatever, and it's way too easy for it to interpret someone making a joke as being serious, that kind of thing. (Or, maybe GPT-4 can do it if you want to pay for that for API access for every user that wants to post, but I don't want to do that).

But it seems even a cheap LLM is pretty capable of distilling down, what are the things that people are claiming (or implying as an assumption), and did someone challenge them on it, and then did they respond substantively / respond combatively / change the subject / never respond. That seems like it works and you can do it kinda cheaply. And, it means that someone who puts out 50 messages a day (which isn't hard to do) would then have to respond to 50 messages a day coming back asking questions, which is a lot more demanding, and creates a lot more room for an opinion that doesn't hold up if you examine it to get exposed as such. But, it wouldn't really weigh in on what's the "right answer" to come to, and it wouldn't censor from participating anyone who wanted to be there and participate in the discussion.

IDK. Because you asked I dusted off the code I had from before just now, and I was reminded of how not-happy-with-it-yet I was 🙂. I think there's a good idea somewhere in there though.