Anybody who’s interested in Ukraine should follow Tim Mak and his news site Counteroffensive

I’m not sure if he’s Canadian or American. He’s a graduate of McGill in Canada, but apparently served as a medic in the US Army. He used to work for The Daily Beast and Politico, then for NPR for 5 years. Now he’s running his own news organization out of Ukraine. He and his team are reporting on the ground in Ukraine, living through all the drone attacks, then going out to talk to Ukrainians in person. He also covers military issues between China and Taiwan.

Some of the stories he’s covered are things like the drone attacks deep inside Russia that destroyed their bombers, but also things you won’t get elsewhere like secret apartment concerts in Ukraine.

And if that doesn’t convince you, he signs off all his dispatches with his dog of war pics of puppies he and his team run across while reporting on the war.

deleted by creator

Also the search parameters are undocumented internal things that can change or be disabled at any time.

Except that may have been a fluke:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-019-09528-x

And when it did it also altered the results, making them worse, because it was trying to satisfy “fuck” as part of your search.

Worse is Google that insists on shoving a terrible AI-based result in your face every time you do a search, with no way to turn it off.

I’m not telling these systems to generate images of cow-like girls, but I’m getting AI shoved in my face all the time whether I want it or not. (I don’t).

I’m betting crocs.

I try too, but it’s frustrating. I just wish I knew of a good technique that didn’t involve out-and-out lying. Because it’s hard to compete when someone’s being spoon-fed misinformation and disinformation that’s carefully crafted to bypass all their filters, and you have to try to fight for the truth by being honest and using facts.

It can happen, but often you can predict when someone will be utterly unwilling to change their mind, despite mountains of evidence.

If it’s something that someone doesn’t really have a stake in, they’re likely to follow the evidence.

But, it’s different when something is a big part of someone’s identity. Take an American gun nut: Someone who spends a lot of free time on gun-related forums. Someone who goes shooting sometimes with buddies. Someone who listens to podcasts about guns, and has a gun safe filled with favourites. That’s the kind of person who is never going to be swayed by rational arguments about guns.

Too much of their self-identity and too many of their social connections are gun-related. Changing their mind wouldn’t just mean adopting a new set of facts, it would mean potential conflicts with all their friends. It would mean leaving a social group where they spend a lot of their free time. They’d not only have to accept that they’re wrong, but that all their friends are wrong too.

Of course, there are ways to change the minds of people who are in a situation like that. Unfortunately, it mostly happens due to tragedy. Like, a gun nut will change their mind, but only when a family member kills themselves with a gun, either on purpose or accidentally. That new, and incredibly personal data point is enough to compensate for all the social difficulties related to changing your mind.

If you’d like to abandon society and escape into nature

Where, exactly, can you do that? There’s really no unclaimed nature out there anymore, at least none that can let a person survive on their own. And if you’re not surviving on your own, you’re part of a society.

Do they show shoes or do they show sandals?

Normally not a big difference, footwear is footwear. But, if we’re talking about socks, then the difference becomes relevant again.

How to spot Americans on topics not related to America.

And, while it’s good to challenge dumb social constructs, you should pick your battles. Nobody can fight all dumb social constructs at the same time. Is wearing socks really where you want to focus your energy?

For some of them it’s “if you don’t want to risk your life in the armed forces, but really, really want other people to go and murder children and steal land so you can benefit, go study the Talmud”.

It’s about as narrowly targeted a chant as you can get.

It’s not about jews. It’s not about israelis. It’s specifically the army of israel. If that’s not narrowly targeted enough, what’s acceptable? “Down with the members of the IDF who intentionally target civilians but not those members of the IDF who are willing to risk a court martial to make sure that they only attack valid military targets?” Doesn’t make a very good chant.

AFAIK you can also not join the IDF by simply being extremely religious.

The other thing that most people don’t focus on is how we train LLMs.

We’re basically building something like a spider tailed viper. A spider tailed viper is a kind of snake that has a growth on its tail that looks a lot like a spider. It wiggles it around so it looks like a spider, convincing birds they’ve found a snack, and when the bird gets close enough the snake strikes and eats the bird.

Now, I’m not saying we’re building something that is designed to kill us. But, I am saying that we’re putting enormous effort into building something that can fool us into thinking it’s intelligent. We’re not trying to build something that can do something intelligent. We’re instead trying to build something that mimics intelligence.

What we’re effectively doing is looking at this thing that mimics a spider, and trying harder and harder to tweak its design so that it looks more and more realistic. What’s crazy about that is that we’re not building this to fool a predator so that we’re not in danger. We’re not doing it to fool prey, so we can catch and eat them more easily. We’re doing it so we can fool ourselves.

It’s like if, instead of a spider-tailed snake, a snake evolved a bird-like tail, and evolution kept tweaking the design so that the tail was more and more likely to fool the snake so it would bite its own tail. Except, evolution doesn’t work like that because a snake that ignored actual prey and instead insisted on attacking its own tail would be an evolutionary dead end. Only a truly stupid species like humans would intentionally design something that wasn’t intelligent but mimicked intelligence well enough that other humans preferred it to actual information and knowledge.

What a weird looking guy.

And if he does step down as CEO and sell his shares, the stock will tank anyhow. The only reason it’s currently about 100x over its realistic value is that people bought into the idea that Elon was this genius who was going to… well who knows. Nothing he could have done would have justified that valuation.

Yeah, even an established creator is going to have a hard time moving their audience.

If YouTube weren’t a near monopoly it would be different. Then other companies would be competing for creators.

Making it worse is section 1201 of the DMCA. It makes it a crime to circumvent access controls. In the past, Facebook was able to grow by providing tools to interface with MySpace. People didn’t have to abandon their MySpace friends, they could communicate with them through Facebook, and Facebook could ensure that messages sent on its platform arrived to people still on MySpace. But, if you tried that today Facebook has access controls in place that make that a crime. The same applies to YouTube. Nobody can build a seamless “migrate away from YouTube” experience because YouTube will use the DMCA to block them.

The governments of the world need to bring back antitrust with teeth and force interoperability.