josephinesotherman
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User ID: 1389
josephinesotherman
4mo ago
I think that if we're judging by generally unreleased, highly expensive tech demos then virtually every company releasing frontier models could pony up more impressive analogues.
The only benchmark I care about when it comes to LLMs is LMArena, nothing else really matters to me if people cannot judge with their own eyes with some level of blinding, there's just too much fitting to the training data going on, or use of cash to fudge benchmarks with economically unviable models.
josephinesotherman
4mo ago
By my own estimate, around 0.15% of Executive Branch staff is hired directly or indirectly by the President. The remaining 99.85% is permanent staff of the bureaucracy. The president in all cases has received more votes than the bureaucracy, which has received 0 votes.
I don't really know how you can possibly pay any lip service to "our democracy" in light of those facts--the modern US system is much more like a technocratic oligarchy than anything resembling a republic (even calling it a democracy is a common mistake).
I think it's really funny how neoliberals define an utterly narrow range of acceptable policy for prosperity, look down upon and fight against any experimentation outside of that range, then claim vacuous truth of an "economic disaster" if any of that policy actually might be implemented. The "consensus order" is disturbed precisely because the Trump administration has figured out how much the bureaus sit in the way of any meaningful change.
My back of hand calculations for the percentage above:
- Roughly ~4K presidential employees between senate confirmed appointees, appointees, schedule C, non-career senior executives.
- Roughly 2.4MM executive branch career civil employees.
I'm sure we could bikeshed over the exact numbers, but I think it's quite clear that the bureaus massively outweigh political staff.
josephinesotherman
10mo ago
Tulsi Gabbard, a former US congresswoman and presidential candidate, revealed that she and her husband were placed on a terror watch list and followed by government agents under the "Quiet Skies" program, almost completely uncovered in US media:
https://www.racket.news/p/american-stasi-tulsi-gabbard-confirms
josephinesotherman
11mo ago
If he was lucid enough to write that letter he’s lucid enough to jump on TV for a couple of minutes.
For the future, you can get 300mcg pills from Nootropics Depot.
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