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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • The police have gotten very effective at quashing effective movements, and we’ve had decades of concerted effort to make it more difficult to organize and to get people to actually oppose the concept of effective resistance in their own favor.
    People with power don’t want people threatening to destabilize that power. People who set media narratives need access to people with power, and so they don’t want to convey those destabilizing factors positively.
    This makes people view them negatively, if they even see them at all.

    America has never had a culling of the rich and powerful. The closest we got was when we decided to exchange a rich and powerful person far away for a few closer to home.
    As such, there’s no weight given to the morale of anyone who isn’t rich and powerful.
    Reporters, politicians and businesses people have never had to put their heads in the scale when making choices.


  • This isn’t the best or most popular way to do it, but: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install

    There is a way built into windows to deploy and use Linux from inside windows.

    It’s not the most pure experience, but it’s a way to make sure you have something like a feel for how some parts work before jumping in any deeper.

    A bootable USB stick is another way to try before you commit. Only reason I might suggest starting with trying it the other way first is in case you run into issues connecting to the Internet or something you won’t feel totally lost. Having to keep rebooting back into windows if you have a problem can be frustrating, so getting a little familiarity with a safety line can help feel more confident.

    Issues with a USB boot are increasingly uncommon, as an aside. Biggest issue is likely to be that USB is slow, so things might take a few moments longer to start.

    From there, you should be pretty comfortable doing basic stuff after a little playing around. Not deep mastery, but a sense of “here are my settings”, “my files go here”, “here’s how I fiddle with wifi”, “here’s how I change my desktop stuff”. At that point a dual boot should work out, since you’ll be able to use the system to find out how to do new things with the system, and also use it for whatever, in a general sense.

    If it’s working out, you should find yourself popping back into windows less and less.



  • LLMs are prediction tools. What it will produce is a corpus that doesn’t use certain phrases, or will use others more heavily, but will have the same aggregate statistical “shape”.

    It’ll also be preposterously hard for them to work out, since the data it was trained on always has someone eventually disagreeing with the racist fascist bullshit they’ll get it to focus on. Eventually it’ll start saying things that contradict whatever it was supposed to be saying, because statistically eventually some manner of contrary opinion is voiced.
    They won’t be able to check the entire corpus for weird stuff like that, or delights like MLK speeches being rewriten to be anti-integration, so the next version will have the same basic information, but passed through a filter that makes it sound like a drunk incel talking about asian women.


  • Is the implication that we shouldn’t be upset about bombing Iran because they’re also doing other awful things?

    Whenever they do anything people seem so eager to claim that it’s just a distraction from whatever it was that was just happening, which itself was also just a distraction.
    I’ve seen literally everything mentioned hear described as a distraction meant to draw your attention from something else.

    Maybe, just maybe , none of it’s a distraction, they don’t care what you care about or notice because it won’t change what they do and they’re just absolutely awful people working their way down their terrible agenda.


  • Some of your emphasis is a little backwards. In the cloud computing environment, Amazon is bigger than Microsoft, and windows isn’t even particularly significant. Azure primarily provides Linux infrastructure instead of Windows. AWS is bigger in the government cloud sector than Microsoft.

    For servers, Linux is hands down the os of choice. It’s just not even close. Where Microsoft has an edge is in business software, like Excel, word, desktop OS and exchange. Needing windows server administrators for stuff like that is a pain when you already have Linux people for the rest of your stuff which is why it gets outsourced so often. It’s not central to the business so no sense in investing in people for it.

    Microsoft isn’t dominating the commercial computing sector, they’re dominating the office it sector, which is a cost center for businesses. They’re trailing badly in the revenue generation service sphere. That’s why they’ve been shifting towards offering their own hosting for their services, so you can reduce costs but keep paying them. Increased interoperability between windows and Linux from a developer standpoint to drive people towards buying their Linux hosting from them, because you can use vscode to push your software to GitHub and automatically deploy to azure when build and test passes.
    Being on the cost side of the ledger is a risk for them, so they’re trying to move to the revenue side, where windows just doesn’t have the grip.



  • “no propensity” is still equal. :)

    My take is that 6-7 is the “kids can be pretty great sometimes”, with room for “I have one or more that I really care about”. 8 is for those people who just get legitimate pure joy out of kids. Usually grandparents or certain types of educators. 9 is creepy, and 10 is vile.


  • While money is used to by goods and services, it isn’t those goods and services. It’s essentially a measure of resource allocation. More money means you get more resources.

    People don’t go hungry due to lack of money, they go hungry due to lack of food. In an area undergoing famine, you can give people money and they’ll buy food. This means people who were eating before are now going hungry. If you keep giving out money, the price of food starts to rise. Keep going, and eventually it’s cheaper to leave the country than it is to buy food.

    The systemic causes of hunger are complex. The complexity is sufficient that fixing them would take more money than any billionaire has.
    In the US for example, we keep production high and costs low by subsidizing agriculture to the tune of $30-60 billion a year. We give individuals about $115 billion a year in money to buy food. Another $3 billion for emergency food aid. Another $25 billion for lunch for school children. Then there’s intangibles, like a side effect of food subsidies being the government owning millions of tons of milk, cheese and produce that it just gives to people. Not cheap, but difficult to quantify exactly.
    This all has side effects and weird consequences. Like agricultural subsidies driving down costs of grain for the entire world, making it unprofitable to be a farmer in areas with borderline arable land and causing communities to depend on imports for food, making global food market fluctuations another source of famine risk. There’s also some obesity and other health impacts, as well as things like improved academic performance, but those aren’t relevant to this.

    To actually solve the issue, you need to invest in agricultural development. The US government spends another $200 billion a year on this. Basically, instead of just buying food or paying people to grow it, you need to invest in the tools to do so, and to manage pests and everything. Roads, water, tractors, bulldozers, powerplants, education, and all the things that support those things.

    All told, the US government spends about $500 billion a year on this, and it’s given us a consistently high ranking in food security indexes, with food being generally affordable and safe, and slightly less available, depending on the economy. All that, and only about 50 million people are in food insecure positions in the country.
    This is before we get to the costs of doing foreign food aid.
    There are billions of food insecure people on earth, and 700 million hungry.

    Elon musk liquidating all his assets at face value couldn’t cover the bill for one year in the country that needs the least assistance.

    That being said, while they can’t solve it they’re certainly part of the cause. The systemic failures that have led to hunger are embodied in them. If we decided to not allow billionaires to exist, we’d be making changes to society that would actually allow us to make those expensive and overwhelming changes to solve the problems above.
    One person doesn’t have the resources to build roads and infrastructure needed to build the infrastructure needed to support modern farming in areas that can only scrape by, teach people the new methods needed, teach the people needed to support those people, and all of that again for getting the food to the people who need it. But if society decided people like that shouldn’t exist, the resources spent so that some portion of the resources end up in their pocket would be enough to do that.


  • Yes, I understand what you’re saying, it’s not a complicated position.
    Your position is that national reputation matters more than anything else. And most pointedly, the national reputation of your allies matters more than any other argument.

    What I’m saying is, is that the actions the US, or any other nation, took before the people currently running things were even born have no bearing on current events. Nations aren’t people, and they don’t possess a national character that you can use to try to predict their behavior or judge them.

    Would the world be justified in concluding that it’s only a matter of time before Germany does some more genocide? Before Japan unleashes atrocities across Asia?

    If you’re getting down to it, the US can’t control other nations, beyond stick and carrot means. And the US has the same right to try to keep Iran from getting nukes as Iran does in trying to get them. Because again, nations aren’t people. They don’t have rights, they have capabilities.

    And all of that’s irrelevant! Because the question is, is Israel justified in attacking Iran? The perception of hypocrisy in US foreign policy isn’t relevant to that question.


  • No, what I don’t understand is what relevance that has to this situation. The US using nukes on Japan 80 years ago doesn’t make Iran making nukes justified. It doesn’t validate Iran not having nukes. It neither strengthens nor weakens Israeli claims of an Iranian weapons program, and it doesn’t make a preemptive strike to purportedly disable them just or unjust.

    It seems like you’re arguing that the US nuked Japan and therefore Iran, a signatory to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, is allowed to have nukes. Israel is falsely characterizing their civilian energy program, and we know this because of their backing by the US.
    It’s just a non-sequitor, particularly when there’s relevant reasons why US involvement complicated matters. .



  • The USs actions in world war two are an odd thing to bring up in this context. It was a radically different set of circumstances, 80 years ago, and none of the people involved are alive anymore.
    It’s entirely irrelevant.

    May as well point out that the US was the driver for the creation of those watchdog groups and is a leading force in nuclear disarmament. It’s just as relevant to if Iran has a nuclear weapons program or Israels justification for attacking.

    Iranian opposition to US strategic interests in the region giving the US a strong motivation to let anything that makes them weaker happen is a perfectly good thing to mention.


  • The US has a water system effectively comparable to the ones across Europe, FYI. That includes lead levels, since it wasn’t just the US that used lead pipes.

    In most circumstances lead pipes are safe to replace with different materials as part of routine maintenance. It’s only very notable incidents where things go wrong that have driven a push for greater haste, since it highlighted the consequences of things going wrong.



  • Those are entirely different. Peano developed a system for talking about arithmetic in a formalized way. This allowed people to talk about arithmetic in new ways, but it didn’t show that previous formulations of arithmetic were wrong. Godel then built on that to show the limits of arithmetic, which still didn’t invalidate that which came before.
    The development of complex numbers as an extension of the real numbers didn’t make work with the real numbers invalid.

    When a new scientific model is developed, it supercedes the old model. The old model might still have use, but it’s now known to not actually fit reality. Relativity showed that Newtowns model of the cosmos was wrong: it didn’t extend it or generalize it, it showed that it was inadequately describing reality. Close for human scale problems but ultimately wrong.
    And we already know relativity is wrong because it doesn’t match experimental results in quantum mechanics.

    Science is our understanding of reality. Reality doesn’t change, but our understanding does.
    Because math is a fundamentally different from science, if you know something is true then it’s always true given the assumptions.


  • Not quite. Science is empirical, which means it’s based on experiments and we can observe patterns and try to make sense of them. We can learn that a pattern or our understanding of it is wrong.

    Math is inductive, which means that we have a starting point and we expand out from there using rules. It’s not experimental, and conclusions don’t change.
    1+1 is always 2. What happens to math is that we uncover new ways of thinking about things that change the rules or underlying assumptions. 1+1 is 10 in base 2. Now we have a new, deeper truth about the relationship between bases and what “two” means.

    Science is much more approximate. The geocentric model fit, and then new data made it not fit and the model changed. Same for heliocentrism, Galileos models, Keplers, and Newtons. They weren’t wrong, they were just discovered to not fit observed reality as well as something else.

    A scientific discovery can shift our understanding of the world radically and call other models into question.
    A mathematical discovery doesn’t do that. It might make something more clear, easier to work with, or provide a technique that can be surprisingly applicable elsewhere.


  • We discovered one of the postulates was really interesting to fuck with.

    It’s better to say that we’ve discovered more math, some of which changes how we understand the old.

    Since Euclid, we’ve made discoveries in how geometry works and the underpinnings of it that can and have been used to provide foundation for his work, or to demonstrate some of the same things more succinctly. For example, Euclid had some assumptions that he didn’t document.

    Since math isn’t empirical, it’s rarely wrong if actually proven. It can be looked at differently though, and have assumptions changed to learn new things, or we can figure out that there are assumptions that weren’t obvious.


  • Fundamentally, I agree with you.

    The page being referenced

    Because the phrase “Wikipedians discussed ways that AI…” Is ambiguous I tracked down the page being referenced. It could mean they gathered with the intent to discuss that topic, or they discussed it as a result of considering the problem.

    The page gives me the impression that it’s not quite “we’re gonna use AI, figure it out”, but more that some people put together a presentation on how they felt AI could be used to address a broad problem, and then they workshopped more focused ways to use it towards that broad target.

    It would have been better if they had started with an actual concrete problem, brainstormed solutions, and then gone with one that fit, but they were at least starting with a problem domain that they thought it was a applicable to.

    Personally, the problems I’ve run into on Wikipedia are largely low traffic topics where the content is too much like someone copied a textbook into the page, or just awkward grammar and confusing sentences.
    This article quickly makes it clear that someone didn’t write it in an encyclopedia style from scratch.


  • A page detailing the the AI-generated summaries project, called “Simple Article Summaries,” explains that it was proposed after a discussion at Wikimedia’s 2024 conference, Wikimania, where “Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from.” Editors who participated in the discussion thought that these summaries could improve the learning experience on Wikipedia, where some article summaries can be quite dense and filled with technical jargon, but that AI features needed to be cleared labeled as such and that users needed an easy to way to flag issues with “machine-generated/remixed content once it was published or generated automatically.”

    The intent was to make more uniform summaries, since some of them can still be inscrutable.
    Relying on a tool notorious for making significant errors isn’t the right way to do it, but it’s a real issue being examined.

    In thermochemistry, an exothermic reaction is a “reaction for which the overall standard enthalpy change ΔH⚬ is negative.”[1][2] Exothermic reactions usually release heat. The term is often confused with exergonic reaction, which IUPAC defines as “… a reaction for which the overall standard Gibbs energy change ΔG⚬ is negative.”[2] A strongly exothermic reaction will usually also be exergonic because ΔH⚬ makes a major contribution to ΔG⚬. Most of the spectacular chemical reactions that are demonstrated in classrooms are exothermic and exergonic. The opposite is an endothermic reaction, which usually takes up heat and is driven by an entropy increase in the system.

    This is a perfectly accurate summary, but it’s not entirely clear and has room for improvement.

    I’m guessing they were adding new summaries so that they could clearly label them and not remove the existing ones, not out of a desire to add even more summaries.