domain:cafeamericainmag.com
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
8hr ago
Libertarians are most of the reason I no longer have principles. When I was younger, libertarian principles sound awesome. And it's easy to believe that the world would be a better place if everyone followed them.
Unfortunately, like most belief systems, they splatter against the real world, and my entire adult life libertarians have proven themselves to be among the many ratchets built into the system which paradoxically keeps the boot on my neck. It's not their fault. They simply don't understand the world they live in.
Part of this is that "Left Inc" as I've heard it coined, has done such an amazing job of laundering it's soft and hard power outside of any "bill of rights" framework. So you'll often see libertarians defending Corporations, Universities or NGOs for trampling your rights (It's a private entity, it can do whatever it wants!), while they condemn the government for doing the same. Or they'll be a feckless speed hump against the expansion of the welfare state, and crucial allies for open borders, ensuring we get the worse of both worlds.
Their idiosyncratic principles about the increasingly illusory distinctions between public and private actors in practice have left me at the mercy of people who hate me, and offered no succor or relief, or even a theoretical path. So I have discarded them as worse than useless, more akin to an infohazard.
Now, generally I support the causes FIRE has taken up. They've been fighting the good fight against Title IX overreach. To virtually no effect what so ever I might add though. They've helped students here and there sue for damages, but I've never seen them make a university cave and change policy. It took Trump winning the election and cleaning house at the DOE for that to happen. And wouldn't you know it, now they don't appreciate how Trump has attempted to extirpate DEI language and practices from Universities. It leaves one wondering if they actually want the Title IX policies fixed, and what methods of actually fixing them would be acceptable to them. Because their lawsuits sure and shit did nothing.
But that's libertarians in a nut shell. Their world view is that you can ask nicely for people to stop hurting you, but you aren't allowed to infringe on their "rights" to make them stop.
Corvos
8hr ago
erwgv3g34
8hr ago
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8hr ago
The most locally concerning precedent being set in immigration cases is the requirement that all social media be set to "public". This is essentially leaning towards the abolition of internet anonymity.
I don't see how one classifies "social media" in a way that doesn't include a place like Reddit, TheMotte, or MetalArchives, or my comments on BleedingGreenNation about Nick Sirianni, or the comments from Carolinian politicians on NudeAfrica. No more usernames, everything must be posted publicly.
And while they might only be talking about Facebook or instagram or Twitter initially, and during the visa process they probably won't be extensively cross-referencing non-public information to figure out your anonymous usernames, let alone utilizing stylistic analysis or correlating personal information to doxx you, the catch-22 is potentially really bad: if you lie on your visa application, you have now committed a crime.
And if they want to get rid of you, all they have to do is utilize the various methods available to a government to doxx you, find the comments you made on BloggingTheBoys about how Jerry Jones needs to get his head out of his ass, and boom, they have you.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
8hr ago
But how much do they want that?
Saying “I think St. Thomas was pretty admirable” isn’t the same as putting on the hairshirt yourself.
wayfarer
8hr ago
It's only in WW2 with the infamous polish failures that cavalry was rendered soundly obsolete.
I just want to note that these failures were partially fiction invented by German propaganda.
(also, Wermach being fully mechanized is also a myth, they used far more horses than people know)
wayfarer
8hr ago
WW1 on Eastern front and 1920 war between Poland and Russia had actual cavalry charges with lances and sabers (and guns).
(in the 1920 it worked so well that it contributed both sides to overvaluing cavalry, though neither was planning* to charge tanks with them by the time of WW II)
*or actually charging
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
8hr ago
Just stop with this weakass attempt of Eulering man, you've exposed yourself enough.
what I'm describing is the core functionality of both DeepSeek and Google's flagship products
Your argument, such as there is, hinges on isomorphism of the encoder layer to an LLM. What you're doing is akin to introducing arithmetic and arguing that this "math" thingie cannot answer questions of real analysis, or showing operant conditioning in pigeons and asking "but how would that neuron learning crap allow an animal to perform thought experiments!?" It's not even wrong, it's no way to prove or disprove capabilities of systems which develop composite representations, it's epistemically inept. I've given you an example of a serious study of LLMs as such, do keep up.
DeepSeek's core innovation was simply finding a cheap-ish way to create latent vectors and not store full keys and values for KV cache, which allows to reduce memory access and serve a big MoE with big batch size. This is an implementation detail, completely irrelevant to the fundamentals you talk about; in fact your post does not mention attention at all.
Suit and tie conservatives lost the culture war. The far-right insurgency that won was based around spaces like 4chan, where cutting-edge political theory gets spread by memes and anime porn is the daily bread.
Rov_Scam
8hr ago
I would just keep the money and forward whatever they sent me to whoever the instructions said to send it to. More likely, I'd look at it and give the scoop to a local TV producer I know. That way, in addition to the big story, there will be a sub-drama of how a guy who mostly did sports stories for a station in Pittsburgh managed to break the story of the century.
Because that did still work in the previous wars where automatic weapons were bulky crew served emplacements. During the Franco-Prussian war heavy cavalry still did its intended saber charge role at times using smoke cover and violence of action to make movement and concealment nullify firepower.
The thinking was that the trend would continue with minor adjustments.
A potential analog today is the ever prophetized death of the tank and armored offensives. In the face of top easily available countermeasures. People said the prevalence of ATGMs would sunset the tank and it did not, so now we expect that the prevalence of drones won't, but maybe we are all insane and the future will regard armored offensives by Russia and Ukraine as doomed follies.
My point is, it's hard to judge the past decision makers honestly without tainting it with our knowledge of the outcome.
And sometimes what becomes the conventional wisdom also goes too far. Bayonet charges have in fact decided some battles in the Falklands despite expectations for instance. Despite both belligerents having access to vastly more sophisticated weapons than spears.
bolido_sentimental
8hr ago
I went to a baseball watch party at a brewery in the neighborhood, and she was there. To my surprise there was actually a roughly equal gender ratio. It was easy enough to just chat her up given the shared interest which was the premise of the event.
While I had occasional success when I was a young man with meeting true strangers in public settings ("cold approaches" as this is known), I always did much better with what I guess you might call "warm approaches" - friends of friends, interest groups, mixers, small house parties, and other settings where talking to one another is accepted and expected.
phailyoor
8hr ago
Most of its suggestions were minor stylistic things (using a gerund instead of an infinitive in certain phrases, avoiding repetition of word constructs) which seemed to me to be improvements.
I guess I haven't seen the letter itself, but I think this is solidly covered by my point: By critiquing things that aren’t wrong, learners who follow blindly will lose their voice.
The final edited work may or may not be "objectively better" but it will certainly be more "chatgpt-ish."
rae
8hr ago
This is why as a trans woman I am so glad to be out of the gay dating scene and why the "why don't you just be gay instead?" argument never worked for me. Gay men have all sorts of expectations like having sex on the first date, being OK with unsolicited dick pics (pressuring you to send one back is absolutely real), going from 0-100 sexually, and that whole vibe of sex being more like fun (they literally call it play or fun) than something that requires a deep emotional connection to work. I found straight/bi men are generally more understanding when you make it clear that that's not what you're after (if they're manipulative, it's at least a sign of knowing what you want).
wayfarer
8hr ago
Why Slack? Who is using their company comms or a gaming website to talk about anything I've written??
Slack is used for some like Discord with less stupid name or by people working far more than gaming and exposed to it as a primary real-time chat. Also, some companies have very relaxed policies, that would make USA HR department die on spot.
You can be a software dev in a small 100% male company in Eastern Europe that has a chat channel for sharing porn.
I even saw Localhost:1881 in there, which I strongly suspect shouldn't be sending me any traffic.
maybe someone self-hosts "to read" list?
Why are my posts being shared via the Steam forums?
Why not? You posted that Avatar tech stuff? Seems quite easily linkable to some gaming discussions.
2 from the Brave browser (?).
Appeared in some recommendations shown by browser?
15 from Microsoft Office
link in .doc document I guess
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
8hr ago
Adoption studies.
I am pretty sure temperament is largely genetic, but that shouldn't translate into such a conspicuous stylistic pattern as you get from cultural environment.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
8hr ago
Lynch has always been abstract though. I'll still watch
FIRE's new lawsuit challenging the Trump admin's deportation policies over speech is pretty interesting. The press release is pretty convincing too IMO. It's not the government's job to be deciding what is and isn't "acceptable" speech outside of the obvious dangers like the true threat limitations we already have.
The First Amendment trumps the statutes that the government is abusing to deport people for speech alone
This lawsuit seeks a landmark ruling that the First Amendment forbids the government from deporting lawfully present noncitizens for constitutionally protected speech
FIRE attorney: ‘In a free country, you shouldn’t have to show your papers to voice your opinion’
One thing that also concerns me when it comes to censorship efforts from the government is the chilling effect it places on speech and voiced opinions. People here legally can agree with the Government Approved Viewpoint all they want, but you're screwed if you dissent.
“There’s real fear on campus and it reaches into the newsroom,” said Greta Reich, editor-in-chief of The Stanford Daily. “I’ve had reporters turn down assignments, request the removal of some of their articles, and even quit the paper because they fear deportation for being associated with speaking on political topics, even in a journalistic capacity. The Daily is losing the voices of a significant portion of our student population.”
This is especially concerning when American politics can shift so much. Government Approved Viewpoints in the Trump admin might not be the same Government Approved Viewpoints from the next president. Criticize Israel today? Bad speech. But maybe the next administration says praising Israel is the bad speech instead. At this point you might as well be saying that you simply don't get to have or voice an opinion of any kind in the country, even if you're a lawful resident who doesn't commit any crimes.
And there are lots of great people who are lawful residents/vistors to the US. Even many celebrities! People like Keanu Reeves, Celine Dion, Ryan Gosling, Hugh Jackman all essentially told to not have any opinion on anything ever in case a future admin decides their opinion was a bad opinion.
Also FIRE so far has also been an interesting insight into what principled beliefs look like. Often on the internet I'll see from both left and right wingers an excuse that it's ok to violate their claimed principles because "the other side did it first" (even though interestingly enough they often can't seem to agree which side did it first, reminds me of something else), but at that point it's hard to say it's a principle if it's abandoned so readily.
Meanwhile FIRE has been pretty consistent in criticizing both the left and right, and even defending their opponents right to speech. It's like the early ACLU protecting the rights of KKK. There are times where I think they overreach on their criticism, I believe that strong free association rights of private individuals and groups are just as fundamental to free speech as the speech itself and restrict more to government actions but even then I still respect that they're consistent.
Crowstep
8hr ago
Anti-recommend The Return, I thought it was pretentious arthouse nonsense.
Fire Walk with Me is the sequel that Twin Peaks deserved.
TowardsPanna
8hr ago
That appears to be a hypothetical strat of buying the market as a whole/index when it dips. I don't think index fund investing should be combined with market timing. That's a waste.
FlailingAce
8hr ago
Suicidal, no. Willing to sacrifice for a higher good, potentially to the point of giving your own life? That's what every society has tried to inculcate, typically in the military but often in other areas too.
Anyway, the question to ask is - altruistic towards whom? Depending on how you want to define it, 'true altruism' might require equal altruism towards all humans, or even towards all animals/living things/etc. You can always be more even-handed and unbiased in your charity. Or, alternatively, maybe it's more altruistic to help those you hate or who are different from you. Either way you define it, though, the concept seems meaningless to me because you can always be more 'true', so asking whether 'true altruism' exists is just a game of drawing arbitrary lines.
In reality, charity begins at home - and this is psychologically sensible, generally beneficial to societies, corresponds to our conceptions of responsibility and duty, and therefore is what we actually teach people.
Might be the best anything cinematic, I don't appreciate his work as much as academics I can still sense he's amazing. Talking about lynch here.
It has a lot of cool melodrama.
I have seen Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet, I'll get through season 2 lol.
I love the murder mystery melodrama oddly enough. Not the abstract part, for now at least.
rae
8hr ago
"Is your 'AI Assistant' smarter than an Orangutan? A practical engineering assessment"
I'm disappointed this was selected as a quality contribution due to the litany of easily-verifiable falsehoods from the author and his refusal to correct or acknowledge them. Strangely enough, I am more upset by this than any hot-button culture war issue I've read on here. I suppose if someone's political opinion differs from mine, I can dismiss it as a matter of opinion, but when someone tells complete falsehoods about the area you work in, doubles down, and is highlighted as a quality contributor, it feels worse.
I remember giving someone the definition of rationalist as someone who thinks they're smarter and more logical than other people.
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