toadworrier
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User ID: 1151
toadworrier
3mo ago
Both the IRA and PLO were left-wing militias.
toadworrier
3mo ago
This is 9-0 think is actually more impressive than it sounds. The SCOTUS only wants to take a case if it needs to clean up some mess from the lower courts. So imagine you are some very high ranking appellate judge, and you make your decision only to find that every judge on the SCOTUS rules against you. You can't pretend that you made some politically controversial decision.
toadworrier
3mo ago
That's why you have to show up and play the game. "Go fuck yourself" is not a sufficiently legalistic non-answer.
BTW: A lot has happened since this original thread and it's impressive how badly this tactic went for these people. I state again however: this is the standard way to behave in front of such committees. Or at least it is here in Australia.
toadworrier
4mo ago
I wonder what the deeper implications for human cognition are. I don't think there are people who can keep 25k words in their working memory, that seems to be much smaller, but we certainly don't usually forget the start of a novella by the time we reach the end. Is there a lot of caching and summarization going on?
Yes, there is in effect a lot of "caching and summarization" going on -- although that's probably our 2023 ooga-booga, not-quite-wrong way of talking about something else. LLMs really only have their context window and it's feedback as a short-term memory. Which is fine for text translation, but is asinine if you want anything like a thinking engine. Goldfish with a notebook.
We and LLMs can both compress long stories into gists, but the LLMs just forget about it and repeat the work on every iteration. We remember the gists and use them as context on every iteration.
toadworrier
4mo ago
Drive-by tangent.
The University presidents were either woefully unskilled or badly coached on how to handle hostile questions like this. They gave repetitive, legalistic non-answers and declined ...
Repetitive, legalistic non-answers are also what professional civil-servants give in front of such committees too, even though it's their day job. It's probably the least-worst tactic given the situation, and it prevents you getting actually skewered.
toadworrier
4mo ago
police force that’s often taken a less-than-fully-zealous approach to organized crime.
This bit does sound like a historical holdover, since certain respectable political parties both north and south of the border have friends in interesting places.
toadworrier
4mo ago
Third, they are facilely _un_cynical in a way that grates on Irish people - I have yet to get through a conversation with a Brazilian without them telling me about their "dream of Europe" in such a gormless way as would make a beauty pageant contestant squirm.
Do Irish people object to the this because they think the Brazillian is bullshitting, or do they object because they suspect the Brazillian is being honest?
toadworrier
4mo ago
My gut feeling is that this is primarily the work of opportunistic scumbags rioting for the fun of it, for which a fairly small protest which got out of hand was merely the catalyst
Does Ireland's history mean that there's a population of such scumbags who are unusually competent and causing trouble?
toadworrier
4mo ago
Ash, you are among the tiny minority of Australians who work in a situation where some fraction of politicians actually listen to the words you say some fraction of the time. The rest of us have to figure out various wheezes for creating a ruckus that will draw the attention of the Powers. Judicial and quasi-judicial processes like the HRC are one example.
toadworrier
5mo ago
I am always wary of non-profits.
I agree with this, but also remember the original mission. OpenAI got it's initial dose of mind-share, talent and OPM because it was supposed to save the world from centralising AI in the hands of a winner-take-all company.
IMHO that was a dumb strategy for achieving a valid goal from the beginning, but a straight-out for-profit company would have been completely opposite to the mission.
toadworrier
5mo ago
Now that the dust seems to be settling, it looks like a coup by the more nonprofit-focused boardmembers and executives against the guys like Sam and Microsoft who wanted to build a company with real shareholder value.
If true, then this sounds like the board doing it's job. Even if the result of this is to entirely kill OpenAI, that would still be closer to the mission than what had been going on. That said, I'm still waiting to see what the real result will be.
toadworrier
5mo ago
Adversary reveals himself through his accusations
I didn't know this was a common idea? Is there some background reading for it?
toadworrier
6mo ago
One of the reasons we are very immigrant friendly is that we are actually serious about, and effective at, keeping illegal immigrants out. Don't conflate immigration with not enforcing the border.
toadworrier
6mo ago
recent ones found the numbers were more like 59%.
As far as I know, both sets of polls are sampling bias all the way down.
Graphs of the vote by locality show that places where you expect Aboriginals to live went pretty heavily "yes". Hard to tell how to translate that into a percentage-of-aboriginals, but 80% wouldn't surprise me. More importantly, this method is disproportionately sensitive to the votes of outback Aboriginals, which means it undercuts the idea that only city-dwelling elite Aboriginals supported the Voice.
toadworrier
6mo ago
I am worried about the "misinformation and lies" narrative they a spruiking here. They have a proposed censors charter which does all the usual things the Europeans are trying, only worse.
The fact that merely disputing Yes narrative is being labelled "misinformation" by exactly the kind of people who likely will man the misinformation bureaucracy is a good example of why speech moderation always gets corrupted. But they government and the Green have no reason to care about that -- they have the numbers in Parliament to pass it, no matter what the rest of society thinks.
toadworrier
8mo ago
Wouldn't it have been nice if all the indictments were like this.
toadworrier
8mo ago
Scott Alexander might be afraid of Taylor Lorenz. But the human race is not made up of Scott Alexanders.
toadworrier
8mo ago
Indeed.
But having once had a female head of state is not a signal of that. It's a signal of jack shit.
toadworrier
8mo ago
South Korea even had a female head-of-state.
So did Pakistan.
toadworrier
8mo ago
And if they don't publicize it, it doesn't matter.
Why not?
toadworrier
9mo ago
I think Australia is a very unusual case, because for us, until Christmas '21, Covid suppression actually worked. This was because we closed the borders fast enough to keep the numbers at a level where test & trace was enough. Although we became lockdown poster-child, we were actually far more open for most of the time because there was simply no Covid around to suppress.
Then came the Delta wave, which we might or might not have got on top of with lockdowns and travel restirctions. But what we definiately did do was ruin Christmas, especially for those of us travelling to Queensland. And at just that time, Omnicron comes along knocking both Delta and Covid suppression sixes-at-will. The whole country just gave up, except for some idiots at the Saturday Paper who thought that politicians overruling public health bureaucrats was "the tail wagging the dog".
In other words, by luck or good management, Australians -- including the decision makers -- supported lockdowns when they worked and gave up on them when they stopped working. In other countries, the lockdowns never worked, but were still enforced (with public support) for at least as long as in Australia.
toadworrier
9mo ago
I agree with all this, but I want to add a caution from the perspective of immigrant Australia.
It's normal common in my immigrant community to:
- Assume any slight by a white person is racism and thus be angry at "this country"
- To have dual citizenship and/or believe a passport is just a piece of paper 2a. The word "patriotic" means "patriotic to the old country"
- To prefer the signs and symbols of the old country (sporting teams, flags, regalia etc).
This combination is far more common than my own eccentric notion of actually being a patriotic Australian.
All of this sounds like it's the polar opposite of what @AshLeal is claiming, but no. The people I'm talking about are perfectly well acculturated and behave well among other Australian folk, work on common projects with each other.
toadworrier
9mo ago
I'm aware the NHS does that, albeit with public pressure often forcing them to accept treatments with terrible returns.
But in practice it is the sin of the American system to overpay for treatments because of what amounts to public pressure (as manipulated by those who stand to profit). The NHS is actually quite good at denying costly treatments, at least by the standards of 1st world healthcare systems.
toadworrier
9mo ago
you better aim to be really sick
But not the sort of really sick where you need a scan to find out that your illness is life threatening.
I have a cousin who only found out about that when she flew back to her 3rd world homeland to get treatment.
Makes sense for a genuine civil liberties organization, because every political faction wants to violate someone's civil rights some of the time and so the civil rights will do well to practice its independence by calling everyone out on their misbehaviour. So I would expect FIRE to do it in the modern age more than the ACLU.
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