Schadrach

The truck owners I know, myself included, use them all the time for towing and like the added utility having the bed as as secondary feature.

Then you put it beside a truck from 30 years ago that’s a quarter the overall size but has the same bed capacity and towing power along with much better visibility instead of not being able to see the child you’re about to run over. And then you understand what people mean when they say massive trucks - giant ridiculously unnecessary things that are all about being a status symbol and dodging regulations rather than practicality.

You underestimate the number of people you wouldn’t class as intelligent. If no one wanted massive trucks, they would have disappeared off the market within a couple of years because they wouldn’t sell. They’re ridiculous, inefficient hulks that basically no one really needs but they sell, so they continue being made.

It’s not “fine”, but it’s also not him acting outside his authority. Fuck, who was the last president that didn’t bomb anywhere without Congress declaring war? Who was the last president to even get Congressional approval before all bombings? I’ll give you a hint, it wasn’t in the last 25 years.

“Trump does thing that other presidents, both Democrat and Republican have done without issue in the past” is poor grounds for an impeachment.

Again, read the rest of the comment. Wikipedia very much repeats the views of reliable sources on notable topics - most of the fuckery is in deciding what counts as “reliable” and “notable”.

that he just wants a propaganda bot that regurgitates all of the right wing talking points.

Then he has utterly failed with Grok. One of my new favorite pastimes is watching right wingers get angry that Grok won’t support their most obviously counterfactual bullshit and then proceed to try to argue it into saying something they can declare a win from.

More like 0.7056 IQ move.

Wikipedia is not a trustworthy source of information for anything regarding contemporary politics or economics.

Wikipedia presents the views of reliable sources on notable topics. The trick is what sources are considered “reliable” and what topics are “notable”, which is why it’s such a poor source of information for things like contemporary politics in particular.

I mean, it’s being a mail carrier in a world that is maximum Kojima.

I’ve noticed a lot of videos give me a still ad and make me click “skip” at the very start of videos through my ad blockers.

The individuals at the company are the problem. The internet tends to comment like they don’t get this.

You make it sound like if you make and sell a thing, people are required to buy it. If you tried to sell me an AI bed that would not function without an active internet connection, I’d laugh at you.

The thing is this was the first of its kind election for this district, so where did those estimates even come from? If you give a number it’s got to be from somewhere right?

So, this board has never since it’s creation had to have an actual election? It’s always been someone running unopposed?

The fourth is catnip. Always the 'nip.

Once my mom asked me to clear out a planter box that had become overgrown because she wanted to plant tomatoes. I pulled up this 3ft tall stalk plant with little purplish flowers, and as soon as I shoved it in the trash bag, the cat came running from the other side of the house and dove face first in the bag. After a minute or so, it was backing out of the bag with the stalk between his teeth dragging it out of the bag and once it was out of the bag started nibbling on it and rolling around on the plant. Looked up what the plant was and apparently I had just pulled up his catnip grow operation. When he came down, he was mad at me for a few days.

If you really wanted to be security minded, you could go a step further - have the ballot printing machines keep a per-machine count of ballots they’ve done and print a ballot with human readable votes and a barcode detailing the same. Have a second machine scan those ballots and drop them into a locked box. None of them are connected to a network or have an accessible open port anywhere on them. There is however a locked access panel on the back of each machine where an SD card is inserted. As ballots are printed and scanned each machine’s SD card records what happens. The two types of machines are made by different manufacturers and validated by a third party.

At close of polls, all the machines are asked to report their results. If there is a discrepancy between what the ballot printers report and what the ballot scanners report, it’s time for a manual recount of that polling location. Then the SD cards are pulled from all the machines and shipped to the relevant election board to check the contents against the reports. Also manual recount 5% of polling locations (minimum one) selected at random. If discrepancies show up in more than a 1% of polling locations, manual recount the entire election. For all these manual recounts, the human readable portion of the paper ballot is the final authority.

I could see low expectations from the registrar of voters for turnout, but 60 people in the entire city? And they just didn’t have any kind of plans if more showed up?

This is the kind of election where usually only people who specifically are invested in the thing bother, I wouldn’t be surprised if the last time one of these happened they literally did average about 20 votes per polling place, and their plan if more showed up was supplying 15x more ballots than they needed last time, just in case. Which wasn’t remotely enough.

A lot of writing code is relatively standard patterns and variations on them. For most but the really interesting parts, you could probably write a sufficiently detailed description and get an LLM to produce functional code that does the thing.

Basically for a bunch of common structures and use cases, the logic already exists and is well known and replicated by enough people in enough places in enough languages that an LLM can replicate it well enough, like literally anyone else who has ever written anything in that language.

So they are both masters of troll chess then?

See: King of the Bridge

The more I see him in the real world the more very upset I become that I genuinely really liked his story. HPMOR is a banger, possibly one of my favorite pieces of amateur literature in existence.

If you enjoy ratfic, I suppose I have to point you at the standard other fare that tends to be enjoyed by fans of HPMOR, like Ra by qntm, Yud’s other works like Three Worlds Collide, and the assorted works of Scott Alexander especially but not limited to UNSONG (an utter masterpiece of foreshadowing), Sort By Controversial (one of the most realistic horror stories ever), Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person (which alternates between nonsense poetry and the narrator trying to convince the entities in his DMT trip to prove they are real by solving a math problem, complete with explaining enlightenment with a car analogy) and Samsara (about the last unenlightened man being driven to enlightenment by sufficiently stubborn refusal of it).

Going away from the ratfic standards, there’s also some overlap between fans of those and the works of Wildbow/J.C. McCrae. Wildbow is a fantastic author, but wouldn’t understand the value of brevity if asked to write something to hit him over the head with repeatedly. If you want to try his stuff and like superheroes and deconstructions thereof, start with Worm. If you prefer biopunk, try Twig. If you prefer urban fantasy, then either Pact or Pale. He’s also got Claw and Seek, which I haven’t yet read myself.

I didn’t know the author was a wanker at the time of reading, and now that I do, I want to make myself retroactively un-like his work, but I can’t.

He was so good at HP fanfic that he managed to illicit a similar response as many have to the JK’s original.

One of the key things to enjoying it is realizing that Harry is very often wrong about astoundingly obvious things because he’s not half as bright as he thinks he is and has massive, glaring blind spots. Rather like watching someone with a PhD who thinks that means they know much about things wildly far away from their specialty.

Specifically it will only be real if it becomes real and you didn’t support it becoming real.

It’s like the inverse of the notion that the proof of God’s omnipotence is that he doesn’t need to exist in order to save you - the whole idea of Roko’s Basilisk is that if the AI super-intelligence machine God comes to be, it might decide to punish everyone who worked against it coming to be, as an incentive for people to help it come to be in the first place. For exactly the right kind of host, this is an effective memetic infohazard, despite essentially being “God will be angry if he don’t assist in his apotheosis”.

He’s best known for a blog on rationality called LessWrong, Harry Potter fan-fiction written as a vehicle for his notions on rationality called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and being more than a little obsessed with AI risk and being behind the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He’s also written some other fiction that’s broadly not bad, including a piece about first contact called Three Worlds Collide and an isekai Japanese-style light novel called A Girl Corrupted By the Internet Is the Summoned Hero?!. He once wrote an April fools post where he claimed to be from an alternate universe and for a one off April fools bit contained a surprising amount of world building.

None of the above implies he is actually human, let alone is familiar with where common human foods grow from. I could totally see him being exactly clueless enough to assume that since holy fuck are a lot of foods technically cultivars of wild mustard, that potatoes and apples are similarly related.