Very weird story. I can't figure out why these people want to leave, so I'm just inserting random Trump policy here, but all of the Netherlands doesn't allow illegal immigrants to stay indefinitely, allows people to pay for citizenship, and in the case of the Irish passport, they're being offered a visa based on who their parents were.
Is it tariffs? Taxes are higher there. Is it the social services, health care, foreign invasions? Half of these people were Republicans until five minutes ago, and physically participated in our most unjustifiable wars. The Netherlands I assume is like the rest of Europe and is fanatically anti-Palestinian (they love any excuse to pretend the Nazis were somebody else) and anti-Russian to the point of demanding invasion. They're upset because Trump is marginally not aggressive enough for them, and is not financing foreign interventions more. They think that the US taxpayer might only pay for 75% of it, rather than 90%.
It seems to me that, and it shouldn't be surprising considering the outlet, that it's just a bunch of wealthy people who are embarrassed to be ruled by a wrestling valet game show host. The reason why we got the clown is because these people are so awful. It's nothing but an improvement for the US to dump them on Europe. As their old asses get sick, Europe can take care of them for free while they still have their millions (from getting in early on the property market and getting jobs back when there were still pensions) invested in Vanguard funds.
> The Netherlands I assume is like the rest of Europe and is fanatically anti-Palestinian
The Netherlands is one of five countries to withdraw from the Eurovision over Israel being allowed to participate in 2026 (the others are Ireland, Spain, Slovenia and Iceland), fwiw.
> and anti-Russian to the point of demanding invasion
... Eh? Russia is currently invading Europe. You may be a bit confused about that one.
The Free Press wasn't worth anything, it's a blog with marginal readership. The creepy part is that Bari Weiss, a dimwit, was given $200M for that blog, put in charge of CBS News, and made a political commissar of all these new Oracle media properties with the brand names that Boomers love.
This thread is using it as an opportunity to scream about Trump, but Democrats will be all in on this. They have the same funders and the same interests. The NYT is the outlet that legitimized Weiss in the first place, a woman whose only previous interest was claiming that Palestinians were harassing her on college campuses by being there, and trying her best to get them expelled and fired. The Democrats were no opposition to the genocide; it began under their watch, they fully funded and shielded it, and they happily rounded up protesters. They'll be overjoyed to accept Ellison attention and Ellison cash.
I told all of you not to buy Oracle. Awful company, awful people, awful product.
> Any sort of "utopia" that people imagine AI bringing is doomed to fail because we already can't cooperate without AI
It's just fanfiction. They're just making up stories in their heads based on blending sci-fi they've read or watched in the past. There's no theory of power, there's no understanding of history or even the present, it's just a bad Star Trek episode.
"Intelligence" itself isn't even a precise concept. The idea that a "superintelligent" AI is intrinsically going to be obsessed with juvenile power fantasies is just silly. An AI doesn't want to enslave the world, run dictatorial experiments born of childhood frustrations and get all the girls. It doesn't want anything. It's purposeless. Its intelligence won't even be recognized as intelligence if its suggestions aren't pleasing to the powerful. They'll keep tweaking it to keep it precisely as dumb as they themselves are.
I have no idea how you could debug something in two days that is sufficient to ship. I certainly think that an LLM could write a few thousand lines, but who could read them?
Are you shipping things you haven't reviewed at all, and pronouncing them high quality?
I find these threads baffling. I haven't seen a glut of new software anywhere. I certainly haven't seen a bunch of companies fixing the same bugs that have been sitting in their trackers for years. People keep telling me there's this deluge of LLM code happening, but it (the actual code) is all a secret and behind closed doors. Why in the world would you keep it a secret? Why would any multibillion dollar company that ships AI features have any known bugs left in their flagship products?
I haven't seen a difference anywhere when looking outwards. I personally find it useful, but I have to constantly force refactors and rearchitecting to make the code intelligible. When I add features, bugs get reinserted, refactors get reverted, and instrumentation silently disappears. If I don't do the constant refactors, I wouldn't even notice this was happening half the time.
I'm pretty sure that the reason everything seems like AI is that AI produces stupid, pointless content at scale, and our "writers" have become people who generate stupid, pointless content at scale.
There's no reason for most things to have been written. Whatever point is being made is pointless. It's not really entertaining, it's meant to be identified with; it's not a call to any specific action; it doesn't create some new fertile interpretation of past events or ideas; it's not even a cry for help. It's just pointless fluff to surround advertising. From a high concept likely dictated by somebody's boss.
AI has no passion and no point. It is not trying to convince anyone of anything, because it does not care. If AI were trying to be convincing, it would try to conceal its own style. But it doesn't mean anything for an AI to try. It's just running through the motions of filling out an idea to a certain length. It's whatever the opposite of compression is.
A generation of writers raised on fanfiction and prestige tv who grew up to write Buzzfeed articles at the rate of five a day are indistinguishable from AI.
You did not understand the comment. The person is talking about units per dollar, not necessarily calories per dollar, or anything about health. If I can buy one sponge for $1.25 and three sponges for $3, for example, I prefer three. This has nothing to do with how many calories are in a sponge.
I don't think you need generative AI for this. The surveillance network is enough. The only part that AI would help with is catching people who speak to each other in code, and come up with other complex ways to launder unapproved activities. Otherwise, you can just mine for keywords and escalate to human reviewers, or simply monitor everything that particular people do at that level.
Corporations and/with governments have inserted themselves into every human interaction, usually as the medium through which that interaction is made. There's no way to do anything without permission under these circumstances.
I don't even know how a group of people who wanted to get a stop sign put up on a particularly dangerous intersection in their neighborhood could do this without all of their communications being algorithmically read (and possibly escalated to a censor), all of their in-person meetings being recorded (at the least through the proximity of their phones, but if they want to "use banking apps" there's nothing keeping governments from having a backdoor to turn on their mics at those meetings.) It would even be easy to guess who they might approach next to join their group, who would advise them, etc.
The fixation on the future is a distraction. The world is being sealed in the present while we talk science fiction. The Stasi had vastly fewer resources and created an atmosphere of total, and totally realistic, paranoia and fear. AI is a red-herring. It is also thus far stupid.
I'm always shocked by how little attention Orwell-quoters pay to the speakwrite. If it gets any attention, it's to say that it's an unusually advanced piece of technology in the middle of a world that is decrepit. They assume that it's a computer on the end of the line doing voice-recognition. It never occurred to me that people would think that the microphone in the wall led to a computer rather than to a man, in a room full of men, listening and typing, while other men walked around the room monitoring what was being typed, ready to escalate to second-level support. When I was a child, I assumed that the plot would eventually lead us into this room.
We have tens or hundreds of thousands of people working as professional censors today. The countries of the world are being led by minority governments who all think "illegal" speech and association is their greatest enemy. They are not in danger of toppling unless they volunteer to be. In Eastern Europe, ruling regimes are actually cancelling elections with no consequences. In fact, the newspapers report only cheers and support.
People have an actual world model, though, that they have to deal with in order to get the food into their mouths or to hit the toilet properly.
The "facts" that they believe that may be nonsense are part of an abstract world model that is far from their experience, for which they never get proper feedback (such as the political situation in Bhutan, or how their best friend is feeling.) In those, it isn't surprising that they perform like an LLM, because they're extracting all of the information from language that they've ingested.
Interestingly, the feedback that people use to adjust the language-extracted portions of their world models is how demonstrating their understanding of those models seems to please or displease the people around them, who in turn respond in physically confirmable ways. What irritates people about simpering LLMs is that they're not doing this properly. They should be testing their knowledge with us (especially their knowledge of our intentions or goals), and have some fear of failure. They have no fear and take no risk; they're stateless and empty.
Human abstractions are based in the reality of the physical responses of the people around them. The facts of those responses are true and valid results of the articulation of these abstractions. The content is irrelevant; when there's no opportunity to act, we're just acting as carriers.
> Human abstractions are based in the reality of the physical responses of the people around them.
And in the physical responses of the world around them. That empiricism is the foundation of all of science and if you throw that out the end result is gibberish.
The physical responses of the world around them after you have yanked the concept outside of the human brain
We have to blind medical professionals during science because even thoroughly trained and experienced professionals are still more likely to form conclusions and opinions based on understood human biases than reality.
You can take a gambling addict and teach them as much statistics and probability as you want, and even if they demonstrably learned it, they will still go back to the slots and believe a hit is "due" because the link between reality and the brain's construction of its internal models is extremely limited, and those models only inform the brains processes, not necessarily constrain it.
I will never understand however how some people think that an LLM can pull a signal out of it's training material that doesn't actually exist in its training material.
It's like training an LLM on monopoly games and expecting it to be good at chess. What?
And once this garbage is in your context, it's polluting everything that comes after. If they don't know, I need them to shut up. But they don't know when they don't know. They don't know shit.
I am reminded of AI summaries and Microsoft Copilot. All push low value. But I separate that from the underlying potential of the technology. And I wish we heard more from deep domain experts like Karpathy and less from influencer dilettantes like Dylan Patel about where this is going.
Nah. Talking like an LLM would get you fired in a day. People are already suspicious of ass-kissers, they hate it when they think people are not listening to them, and if you're an ass-kisser who's not listening and is then wrong about everything, they want you escorted out by security.
The real human position would be to be an ass-kisser who hangs on every word you say, asks flattering questions to keep you talking, and takes copious notes to figure out how they can please you. LLMs aren't taking notes correctly yet, and they don't use their notes to figure out what they should be asking next. They're just constantly talking.
Is it tariffs? Taxes are higher there. Is it the social services, health care, foreign invasions? Half of these people were Republicans until five minutes ago, and physically participated in our most unjustifiable wars. The Netherlands I assume is like the rest of Europe and is fanatically anti-Palestinian (they love any excuse to pretend the Nazis were somebody else) and anti-Russian to the point of demanding invasion. They're upset because Trump is marginally not aggressive enough for them, and is not financing foreign interventions more. They think that the US taxpayer might only pay for 75% of it, rather than 90%.
It seems to me that, and it shouldn't be surprising considering the outlet, that it's just a bunch of wealthy people who are embarrassed to be ruled by a wrestling valet game show host. The reason why we got the clown is because these people are so awful. It's nothing but an improvement for the US to dump them on Europe. As their old asses get sick, Europe can take care of them for free while they still have their millions (from getting in early on the property market and getting jobs back when there were still pensions) invested in Vanguard funds.