Part of keeping an open mind is realizing when you were wrong. Most recently, I have realized that liberalism, at least as practiced in the USA has no future, no possible way to defeat the rise of far right politics, and no real plan to even try. It’s an inherently unstable system that only worked because of the post-World War 2 economic boom and the ripple effects of that boom. Now that things are evening out again, American liberals are just sticking their heads in the sand imagining that it’s the 1990s and that all things can be fixed with a healthy stock market, when that wasn’t even really the case back then and it’s becoming more and more obviously false as time goes on.

We need something drastic to change and fast, or we’re just completely fucked with Trumpism. Socialists and other left-leaning groups are the only ones that realize we need to fight hard and fight now, and establish alternative centers of power to corporations and the government, instead of just hoping that the corporations will be good or that the government will stop itself from doing bad things. I don’t even think a fully socialist economy will even work at least in the short term(not opposed to it in principle, I just think we need hybrid economies short term to ease into it), but if I have to pick between that and whatever the fuck the Trumpists are trying to make, it’s an easy choice.

I was super in favor of capital punishment until we had to do an essay on a controversial topic in my senior year of high school and as I was researching for it I was like “wait a minute this actually sucks ass.” Capital punishment kind of only “works” if your underlying assumption is that the justice system gets it right every time, which is not true at all. It also isn’t even a good deterrent- it makes no difference on capital crime rates whether the death penalty is a possibility or not. So the only reason to have it is that your own sense of “justice” requires criminals to be killed, even if it doesn’t actually help anything and even if it doesn’t prevent more crimes. And again, that denies any possibility that the justice system ever gets things wrong and wrongfully convicts someone.

My high school in a semi rural part of the Southern US had a Chinese language class that you could choose to take for your foreign language credit back in the early 2010s. I think it’s a false premise to say that it’s not taught in the US, most kids just choose to take easier languages like German, French, or Spanish

This is not surprising if you’ve studied anything on machine learning or even just basic statistics. Consider if you are trying to find out the optimal amount of a thickener to add to a paint formulation to get it to flow the amount you want. If you add it at 5%, then 5.1%, then 5.2%, it will he hard to see how much of the difference between those batches is due to randomness or measurement uncertainty than if you see what it does at 0%, then 25% then 50%. This is a principle called Design of Experiments (DoE) in traditional statistics, and a similar effect happens when you are training machine learning models- datapoints far outside the norm increase the ability of the model to predict within the entire model space (there is some nuance here, because they can become over-represented if care isn’t taken). In this case, 4chan shows the edges of the English language and human psychology, like adding 0% or 50% of the paint additives rather than staying around 5%.

At least that’s my theory. I haven’t read the paper but plan to read it tonight when I have time. At first glance I’m not surprised. When I’ve worked with industrial ML applications, processes that have a lot of problems produce better training data than well controlled processes, and I have read papers on this subject where people have improved performance of their models by introducing (controlled) randomness into their control setpoints to get more training data outside of the tight control regime.

Great writeup! I did want to mention that “Shrinkflation” is not the right term for the phenomenon of the 1970s, that is “stagflation” (“stagnation” + “inflation”). “Shrinkflation” is when the size of products shrinks while the price remains unchanged to hide the impacts of inflation. The reason it was so hard on the economy is that there is typically a positive correlation between inflation and economic growth. As inflation increases, the economy grows faster, and as it decreases, the economy shrinks. Stagflation, when the economy shrinks and inflation increases, removes a lever that the central bank typically has to get the country out of a recession because they can’t increase inflation to encourage economic growth. The reasons that usually works are complicated and beyond the scope of a random Lemmy comment.

"The woke media wants to fill you with toxins instead of Testosterone boosting minerals found in natural water sources. Boiling is woke and weakens your immune system and filtration removes T boosting minerals from the water. Real alphas only drink untreated, unfiltered water straight from natural streams and rivers. It doesn’t matter if they have been polluted, the minerals in natural flowing water counteract any pollution. "

This is a non-trivial problem. The best thing for the environment is for all of us to stop buying so much shit we don’t need, but that would require a dramatic shift in how society works and the cultural values of pretty much everyone. Cookies coming in metal tins again would be way worse for the environment than plastic, but you also have to remember that when cookies came in metal tins, they were luxury items people would buy for holidays and special occasions. The only way to meaningfully improve things for the environment in terms of packaging is for all of us to buy less pre-packaged food in general.

Expanding access to goods is both good and bad, and plastic containers are a big part of that process. I think it’s completely unrealistic to replace all single-use plastics with non-plastic alternatives, and I think that efforts to do so have largely backfired in unexpected ways. This problem is best solved by reducing the amount of useless shit we buy but in the meantime I think biodegradable polymers are a good bridge technology. We actually already know about a lot of biodegradable polymers because the earliest polymers were based on biopolymers such as cellulose, resin, and rubber, and these have remained commercially important enough to maintain a high degree of knowledge of their chemistries.

Another problem, of course, is that most people don’t actually want truly biodegradable polymers. You don’t want a ketchup bottle that starts breaking down while you’re still using it or impacts the taste of the ketchup, but you also don’t want to buy it in a thick, non-squeezable glass bottle. So from an engineering perspective we have to devise plastics that are biodegradable, but only when we want them to be. There are a lot of advancements in this field, but it’s still not enough on its own to fix things. This issue also applies to paper, since almost all “paper” packaging products also include polymers as sealants to improve performance precisely because paper has all the same issues without it.

Everyone does that all the time though. I can’t remember the last time I bought something online that wasn’t supposedly either the last one in stock or one of like 5 left. It’s obviously bullshit and everyone is doing it.

Wikipedia articles are already quite simplified down overviews for most topics. I really don’t like the direction of the world where people are reading summaries of summaries and mistaking that for knowledge. The only time I have ever found AI summaries useful is for complex legal documents and low-importance articles where it is clear the author’s main goal was SEO rather than concise and clear information transfer.

AI is way older than the public release of ChatGPT. GPT-1, OpenAI’s first version of what would become ChatGPT, was released in 2018, for example, and OpenAI itself was founded in 2015, DeepMind was founded 2010, and IBM Watson competed on Jeopardy! in 2011. Furthermore, Alan Turing wrote about a lot of the ideas that are now being used in AI research in the 1940s, fuzzy logic and natural language processing were developed in the 1960s, and so on. This stuff didn’t come out of nowhere, you just didn’t know about it before ChatGPT.

Idk. I’ve been reading about Bitcoin since the very beginning and while I don’t think it’s necessarily a “scam” the whole project was based on a flawed hyper-libertarian economic theory that inflationary currency is inherently evil and that the ideal currency has a fixed quantity, requires effort to produce, and becomes rarer over time. From that standpoint, I feel like Bitcoin has failed in its original mission. You simply cannot use it as a day to day currency and everyone is just using it to gamble essentially. I do agree that if crypto had been an outright scam from the beginning, Satoshi would have rugpulled already, though.

“Researchers” did a thing I did the first day I was actually able to ChatGPT and came to a conclusion that is in the disclaimers on the ChatGPT website. Can I get paid to do this kind of “research?” If you’ve even read a cursory article about how LLMs work you’d know that asking them what their reasoning is for anything doesn’t work because the answer would just always be an explanation of how LLMs work generally.

These have been a thing for a while but it wasn’t an LLM it was a video analyzer. I did exactly one interview like that 5 years ago and gave up halfway through the second video they wanted me to send in because the job sucked ass anyway in a shitty part of the country and I realized I was going to be miserable working there even if I got the job degrading myself like that. I ask terrified of getting laid off and having to enter the job market right now and deal with all these new ways companies are coming up with to degrade potential hires and waste their time

I don’t understand why some people are so obsessed with this and why they make comments like this. Like what’s the point? To be smug and act like you’re better because you know that it wasn’t actually Kool-Aid used in Jonestown? Do you think it’s actually a public service? Do you have some vested interest in Kool-Aid and feel the need to defend their good name? Let me let you in on a little secret- most people know it wasn’t actually Kool-Aid but was a competitor’s product. However, it doesn’t fucking matter because that’s not the saying. If you say “Oh Jim isn’t using toothpaste because he drank the flavor aid and thinks fluoride is government mind control” the person you’re talking to will just look at you weird. It’s like getting pissed off at someone saying “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” by saying “uhuh well actshually the birds have the same monetary value regardless of whether they are located in a bush or in someone’s hand I am very smart”

I’m waiting for the day we get the Black Mirror technology where the ad stops playing when you look away and doesn’t start again until you look back at it, forcing you to watch the entire ad all the way through

I don’t know what your situation is but the existence of someone fatter than you doesn’t preclude you from being obese.

People in 2025 don’t really do ‘super advanced technology’. Like they’ve got super powerful handheld computers on them at all times and all of human knowledge accessible at all times and planes and shit, but they don’t treat it like high-tech stuff, they treat it like we treat carriages and books.

This was super common in the 1960s and 70s when hippies where the ones writing sci fi and the thought was that technological advancement would also come along with spiritual advancement to the point of supernatural powers. Star Wars, Dune, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and many others freely blend the supernatural with the technological. Sure it’s not D&D magic with fireballs and shit but it’s still magic. Further, if you want to look at a modern IP with this vibe look at World of Warcraft, where there are aliens from space with spaceships and shit with one of the most stereotypical fantasy settings you can imagine.

I often use “Milwaukee statehood” as a rhetorical tool for any argument about states rights or why we should have 10 tiny population states. Milwaukee has about as many people in it as all of Wyoming, and yet Milwaukee doesn’t get two senators

“I just take scientists out and give them a bunch of funding for their research, and they always give me the results I want. Now of course they could always say no, but they won’t because of the implication. You know, that if they produced results that disagreed with me, that I would refuse to fund future studies. Of course I would never do that, but they don’t know that. So they give positive results for me. You know, because of the implication.”