PorterBHall

Baseball used to be America’s premier sport, but it’s been declining in cultural relevance for decades. As a lifelong baseball fan, this saddens me. Not there’s a strike looming that threatens next season.

Let’s call it a collaboration

To Hell with paperclips. This is now our plan.

Should you care that your heart surgeon is a necrophiliac? Probably. Should you care that some AI researchers are in a sex cult? No.

Nearly half of all US high school students are below average in reading.

“News is what someone doesn’t want you to know. The rest is just advertising.” Variously attributed to George Orwell and William Randolph Hearst.

I tip for service I’ve already received and I’ll tip in advance if I’m using the space. E.g. if I go to a coffee shop to work, I’ll buy something and leave a tip. I’ll tip if you make something for me, like a cappuccino.

I don’t tip at point of sale simply because it isn’t fair. I don’t tip at grocery checkout. Why would I tip for a drip coffee?

If you put more effort into this comment—-like explaining how “this tip thingy” is rooted in racism—-I might have left you a tip.

This is the kind of level-headed advice I wish I got from my older brothers.

I use a podcast manager to listen to all of my podcasts. Do you have a feature that would allow me to syndicate a feed to my podcast app?

Nailed it.

> Though the window of opinions you can express publicly has narrowed in the last decade, it's still much wider than it was a few hundred years ago. The problem is the derivative. Up till about 1985 the window had been growing ever wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would have expected freedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it has decreased.

Let’s apply his heresy test. Is his statement true?

It might be, but I don’t know how one could confirm it. What is apparently true is that the amount of expression has greatly increased since then because internet. So that’s the denominator. The numerator of “fired for speech” would have to expand beyond the proportion of the growth of communication for this to be true.

Do you know anyone fired for their outré opinion in the last few years? Do you know _many_? I’ve read stories of it happening in business, universities, government but I don’t know anyone who has gotten the sack for expressing an opinion. Maybe that means I’m a conventional mind safely surrounded by the same.

When I hear about “cancel culture,” I picture a speaker who wants to say something and not face the social disapproval which said things triggers. But that disapproval almost always comes back at them as speech (I think infrequently as a pink slip). So those claims ring as “Free speech for me, not for thee.”

What saddens me about this topic is the large amount of hatred coming at cyclists from drivers in the opinion page of the local newspaper (Seattle Times). Why not have some gratitude they are not contributing to traffic, not taking up parking, not polluting, etc. It comes across as pure madness.

I’m in the middle of this right now. They detail a scenario that starts off pretty convincing but takes a turn into a sci-fi feel when this fictional model starts strategizing on how to escape its containment.

The core argument is that these models aren’t crafted as much as they’re grown. They show examples where models display not desires but preferences (e.g. lying and cheating to testers) and that the AI companies aren’t able to control it even interpret those preferences.

If LLMs get to a super intelligence phase (big if there), the gap between its capabilities and our understanding of it grows even larger.

Is it the end of the world or just Davos?