Yea I just think too many people end up forcing a sanity check before they will answer the question and it tends to make the question askers grumpy.

I’ve just noticed that if I answer their question first and then ask them a sanity check, they will more often engage with my sanity check.

Humans are tribal animals to a great degree, and the older I get the more I just accept that. And so if someone comes and asks me a question and I know they are more likely to accept pointed questions from someone they consider part of their tribe, answering the question first is an easy way to get them to put down their guard and engage.

I think what’s interesting about the ascent of LLMs is that they show that people are hungry for something to just answer their question. So much so that they are willing to deal with getting a completely wrong answer and having to come back and go “that function you suggested doesnt exist” a half dozen times.

I also moderate a couple technical discords and there are always members of the community that want to catalog and organize questions so they never have to answer the same question twice. And I get that impulse, but the thing I realized is that question askers want help.

I made it a point to make a culture around just answering questions and those communities are thriving. We don’t tell people to go search, we don’t tell people to explain themselves. Step one is always, answer their question. Then you are free to ask them why and see if there’s a better approach, but if someone wants to reverse flat map a list, show them how, and then they will be much more receptive to you asking why.

I’ve decided the best way to deal with someone asking an XY question is the following.

1. Answer it. I don’t know what this person is doing, maybe they do really need to do some super weird thing and they are 4 weeks deep into “getting this project to work” and they don’t need me giving them the idea they also immediately thought of and can’t do for a bunch of reasons they are too exhausted to go into.
2. See if this is an XY problem.

I have found this to be infinitely more well received. I think because by answering the question upfront without any annoying back and forth about why exactly they need to OCR a pdf in JavaScript, they are much more likely to be willing to have a dialog if their immediate question has been met.

The only danger is that some noob might stop reading after the answer and not engage with the deeper design issue, but by gatekeeping the answer behind a “you must convince the council of elders that you are doing something reasonable first” all we’ve done is push those people into ChatGPTs cheery answer first even if you have to make it up hands.

Pretty hard form trump to physically kneel and kiss Xi’s ass over the phone.

Fart of the deal

I get sometimes going “I’ll roll the dice”

• Me: I’d like my steak medium rare
• Government: That could expose you to some health risks because it’s not cooked well done.
• Me: Yep, I’d rather enjoy a medium rare steak and take my chances.

What the fuck was the logic on this one though?!

• RFK: I want to swim in sewage
• Government: it’s a bad idea to swim in sewage
• RFK: I LOVE SEWAGE!!!
• Government: you are a Kennedy right? You all dont have a pool?
• RFK: worm in brain need poop, poop in water, yum yum poop

Not to sound like a starry eyed idealist, but it’s both.

It sucks that it’s just a weird mandatory box, but if you don’t cheat your way through college you should better yourself in lots of ways. Learning how to independently organize tasks and time and research and challenging your preconceptions and struggling to really grasp complex ideas.

It should be all those things.

Can you fight them as hard as they fought you

Nope

Filibuster maybe?

Only when there’s nothing pending

Procedural moves that slow them down

Nah

Could you at least not vote to enable them

Votes to enable them silently with intense eye contact

What the fuck can you do?

Pulls out phone, texts you for $20 for their battle fund

Jesus fucking christ

Well that makes more sense than LLMs I suppose. Doesn’t really make a lot of sense why musk would want that given the one thing he doesn’t run is an ad network.

As someone that works in the tech sector though, this idea doesn’t really seem super compelling. The advertisers already have this data, so it just seems like a weird kind of heist to go pull off.

Advertisers already know how much money you make, what illnesses your suffering from (based on things you search for), I mean we live in an unprecedented surveillance states.

Maybe musk wanted his own version of that to sell to people, that’s a somewhat plausible scenario. This just sounds a lot like a conspiracy theory and the rule for a conspiracy theory is “someone has to make money” for the theory to be true.

Is musk a piece of shit, sure. Does the government have data, yep. Does taking the data from the government make musk money, maybe? I guess in the world where it’s a play for him to close the gap on a bunch of demographic information people can already buy from google or X, which he owns.

So I suppose if we see X or xAI offering significantly improved ad targeting or data brokerage that would make this all hang together.

I’m open to the idea it’s for something else. Data to feed into AI is the thing people are willing to pay heaps of money for right now. And musk has an AI company so I thought the thinking was “musk is taking data for his stupid ai company”

If that’s not what he’s doing, then what data and for what purpose?

I loathe musk, but having some trouble connecting the dots.

So if not for feeding into xAI, what data do people think he’s taking and what’s he doing with it?

The thing I’ve never really understood about this is what kind of data would the government have that would be any use to an LLM?

I’m sure that musk wanted that government data, but you all ever work with the government? Every data set is some weird pile of forms encoded in fixed width field, wrapped in json, plopped into the cdata of an xml node. Fucking enjoy parsing that shit and when you do you realize you have a form some guy filled out in 1972 to register a trailer.

Is the government sitting on some treasure trove of data that you could feed into an LLM as training data? Because that’s what would actually be valuable.

But musk is a fucking moron so I wouldn’t put it past him to break into an empty bank vault and then scuttle away like the fucking roach he is.

Universities have often played a role in being where protest movements begin and grow.

There’s a lot of reasons for this, you have a lot of students in one place, most students on scholarships and with loans have time on their hands to discuss issues of the day, most students aren’t constrained by work and family and property that would give others pause from participating in protest.

From the anti war movement in the 60s to the communist overthrow of China, mass political movements get their starts in universities.

So if you can set a precedent of criminalizing speech and make the punishments as cruel as possible, you make students think twice about protesting.

That’s what this is about, sure America is happy to do Israel’s bidding, but don’t think for one moment they actually give one flying fuck about that. They found a brown person with a foreign enough name that they could destroy for stepping out of line as a not so subtle way to say to every student, “shut up, keep your head down, and we won’t come after you”

It’s the same thing they are doing with Kilmar Abrego Garcia. They don’t care about these two individuals, they don’t have any special interest in harming them (though I’m sure they delight in it) they want to send a message to everyone else.

We have the power, shut up

That’s the message, step out of line and find out. Due process, free speech, that shit is over. You are welcome to pretend it still exists but challenge us and we are one clerical error from you enjoying a lifetime of free room and board at CECOT.

For this to work it has to be punishing, it has to be dehumanizing, it has to be spectacular. The goal is to make you think when you go to resist, “I don’t want to end up like that one guy…”

The point is to make this as visible and memorable as possible so when your personal breaking point is hit and you think to resist there’s a voice in your head that says “no I better not”

There is a death penalty you can actually execute against a corporation, you can dissolve their charter. For some reason this is seen as more extreme than putting a human being to death.

What’s weird is he’s the ceo of replit.

Replit’s product is a website where you can write a snippet of code and run it without having to install anything. An activity that human developers would do to test out something.

So if his prediction comes true, his product will lose all value.

This is why putting money hoarders in charge doesn’t make sense.

They fetishize just building a gigantic pile of money. Governments should be using the taxes they raise to do things.

Brand that old uncool politicians go on tv and beg people to buy.

Good thing American consumers love desperation.

Democracy is not a given.

The framers of the constitution were always concerned about a new autocrat taking root in America. Their solution was to divide power up into 3 co-equal branches. The idea being that if any one branch attempted to subvert the constitution, the other two branches could check their power.

The executive branch is saying loudly “we will not abide by the rulings of the judicial branch, they can not check our power.”

Here are some contemporary examples

• White House ignores court and invokes Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of Venezuelans
• Deported Ivy League doctor Rasha Alawieh will remain in Lebanon as judge hears arguments over Trump ignoring court order

The executive branch is also ignoring the legislative branch (not that the current office holders seem to mind much)

• US Institute of Peace says DOGE broke into its building

The US Institute of Peace is established by black letter law, passed the democratically elected congress. It has been dissolved, not because the law our representatives passed has been rescinded by the legislative branch, not because it was found unconstitutional by the judicial branch, but because the executive branch just said “we are doing this and we have the guns.”

It existing is the democratic will of the people made manifest through our representatives, and now because trump signed an executive order, it’s gone.

They broke into private property and removed people that do not work for the executive branch because the president said so.

The article is worth a read. A lot of Americans don’t realize how much of Nazi Germany ideas had inspiration from and solid support in America.

WW2 provided two incredibly powerful antidotes.

1. The US was one of the only industrialized nations not bombed to shit, giving us an economic advantage never before seen.
2. the victory over the nazis gave us a shared narrative. A clean and easy story of the good of the allies overcoming the evil of the axis.

For a few generations this carried us. But we shouldn’t forget history, Hitler looked to our eugenics programs for inspiration, not the other way round.

I was gonna put an /s on it but I thought it was more fun to leave it ambiguous.

The quotes are not real (except the “we won’t be held hostage by small dollar donors” is a paraphrasing of something that recently came out of some dnc think tank about what to do going forward)

Democratic leadership is coming out swinging on this one, telling their caucus that any member of the party that attempts to block this bill will be primaried.

In these unprecedented times it is an absolute necessity that democrats join with republicans to ensure their agenda moves forward. Americans want a congress that works again. Any member that dares to hold this great nation hostage to score cheap political points will meet with the full fury of the DNC.

When asked if they were at all concerned about the policies they would be enabling they responded

Our donors don’t pay us to worry about policies. We will not be held hostage by small dollar donors any longer. The only thing more dangerous to our democracy than the specter of fascism would be us breaking a single norm or polite convention.

When told that trump recently threatened to round up democratic lawmakers and execute them for the good of the nation leadership had this to say.

While we certainly disagree with their plans, we will hold our heads up high knowing that we had the integrity to pass the spending necessary to keep the gears of government turning.

At that point democratic leadership had to leave with one senior leader saying “I need to get back to dialing for dollars” and another stating that they “had to pressure more members to censure Al Greene for his despicable display of barbarism, shouting out the president, is there no decency anymore”

Why tariffs are stupid in three acts

Act 1

American producers: I can’t compete with that $10 foreign product, I have to sell my product at $12 to turn a razor thin profit.

Politician: ok I’ll slap a $5 tariff on the foreign product to protect you.

Act 2

American producer: awesome so now the foreign product costs $15! I can compete

American consumer: oh well I guess I can spend $12 instead of $10… sucks but America first I guess

Act 3

American producer: no need to leave $3 on the table, let’s sell ours for $14.99, I need more profits because everything I want to buy with my profits is now more expensive for some reason.

American consumer: the foreign one used to cost $10 and the domestic one cost $12… now they cost $15 and $14.99. I guess I’ll buy the American one and skip dinner tonight.

By reducing our labor spend on these spend nothing days and not increasing our labor spends on these days surrounding them, we’ve increased our profits!