rockercoaster

> When openAI made its Nov 2022 chatGPT announcement, why did they try so hard to hype it in anthropomorphic terms?

Same reason they hyped up how worried they were about "safety" of the "we have to make sure these things are 'aligned' or they'll become Skynet!" variety: Altman was bullshitting to hype up the company. Even the "safety" stuff was just hype. "It's so capable it's literally scary, or soon will be... better invest in / use our product! Imagine how bad it'll be for you if you don't!"

I was on the fence about how serious they were until I finally got around to skimming the "Attention Is All You Need" paper. LOL. LMFAO. No.

> Willing to work for less than an American, but somehow doesn’t drive wages down for Americans.

Yeah, they obviously do. That's plain bullshit.

.... ooooon the other hand, we've never tried having an economy without them. We didn't meaningfully limit migration from elsewhere in the Americas until like the '50s, and at the time beginning such enforcement was controversial because we already used them for a ton of cheap farm labor and farmers' interest groups thought it'd ruin them if we significantly limited such migration. The reason their fears didn't manifest as reality is that we simply, and at least in part on purpose, never bothered to enforce those new laws as completely as we technically could, especially for farm labor.

So like they do lower wages (again: obviously) but also they always have, so removing them is a big change from the status quo of practically the entire history of the country's economy. I dunno, worth looking at I guess, but I personally would want to ease into it in case it turns out to be a bad idea.

> Lives in American housing yet somehow doesn’t drive up the cost of housing.

I think the cheap-labor effect on construction probably outweighs this by a good margin. But maybe not.

> Creates ethnic enclaves which mostly speak their own languages yet somehow assimilate into American culture.

Eh. That complaint has been leveled against every prior migrant group, and hasn't held up over the long haul. Even prior waves of hispanic immigrants. I'd need a reason to think it's different this time to give this any credence whatsoever.

Option+shift+dash, on a default English Mac keyboard. Easy to remember—"modify [option] the dash [dash] to make the biggest common form of it [shift]", or else you can think of it as modifying the underscore (shift + dash) to sit higher on the line (with option).

Yep, this is all (MAGA's rapid judo-flip and complete capture of the entire Republican apparatus, that right-wing authoritarian nationalism is popular at all, the legal and bureaucratic machinery being in place to enable authoritarianism) built on stuff that's been going on since the '70s. That's when the wave of neutering antitrust and deregulating media started, and that's what got us most of four decades of persistent unchallenged lies, dehumanization campaigns, and racism blasted at the public. Nixon's roughly the start of the current movement as far as direct action (the think tanks driving it precede him by a decade or two, but hadn't had much effect before him), with the cynical "war on drugs" aimed at enflaming racial animosity and providing tools to attack political opponents, and of course his downfall and pardon were what lit a flame under a lot of right-wingers' asses to re-make reality such that their crimes wouldn't have consequences again (Reagan and some Nixon alums would soon make early use of this, and test the "if we all just keep telling obvious lies and don't break ranks... can we maybe just get away with whatever we want?" strategy, which turned out to work wonderfully)

All of what we're seeing is built on an electorate that was primed to elect Trump. The Republicans had been using them as a captured base to enable their neoliberal and imperialist policies, but they'd conditioned these folks to want Trumpism, not what they were actually delivering. The shit Trump says is largely the same shit you'd hear from Republican voters since at least the '90s, and what he does is largely shit they want done. They've been asking for e.g. authoritarian federal government crack-downs on cities since then, asking for reductions in law enforcement accountability, asking for no-due-process mass deportations, asking for pulling back from NATO, asking for a wall at the border and/or a militarized border, et c. Their media's been telling them all democratic organizations and the party itself are to-the-core rotten criminal enterprises and they believe that. They will cheer when ICE starts arresting members of congress and major democratic donors on dubious charges.

I fully expect to see them take on more and more roles that e.g. the FBI traditionally performed. The strategy appears to be to expand, empower, and control them as the "MAGA law enforcement agency" and bypass all the rest, either seconding them to ICE or diminishing them to a tiny role.

Look to see them expand to general "counter-terrorism" enforcement in the near future, with only the barest veneer (if that) of its having anything to do with immigration enforcement. After all, if you can stop practically anyone on baseless suspicion of being in the country illegally (see: recent precedent that apparently "they looked foreign" is enough) then charge them with whatever after-the-fact even if they turned out to be legal residents or citizens, that sure looks like a neat little work-around for due process. Or you can just "accidentally" disappear them to El Salvador....

I think about the minor plot point of the President having dissolved the FBI, in the film Civil War, a lot more this year than I ever thought I would when I watched that movie the first time.

I don't entirely know what to make of a very-small number of companies' valuations going sky-high that fast (and a few completely without any apparent connection to the fundamentals or even the best-plausible-case mid-term future of those fundamentals, like Tesla) but I can't help but think it means something is extremely broken in the economy, and it's not going to end well.

Maybe we all should have been a little more pro-actively freaked out when dividends went from standard to all-but extinct, and nobody in the investor class seemed to mind... like, it seems that the balance between "owning things that directly make money through productive activity" and "owning things that I expect to go up in value" has gotten completely out-of-wack in favor of the latter.

The book Impro treats extensively of what it calls "status games", in the context of building believable, natural scenes of dialog for the stage (or other dramatic purposes) and as a framework for making improvisation interesting.

The author muses that the situation of feeling safe playing status games with another person—that is, treating them only as games, not as serious and with real status in play—is perhaps the definition of what friendship is.

This could include trading barbs, taking turns playing the bully and the victim, trading playing "high" and "low" roles, jokey one-upsmanship, that kind of thing. Stuff you don't do with non-friends because there's too much risk of being taken seriously, and too much risk of losing actual status or of hurting someone else's status for-real when you didn't intend to.

I Found No Peace by Webb Miller, published 1936, which is an autobiographical work by a reporter and war correspondent. I actually got the dates slightly wrong, this would have been the first decade of the 20th, not the 1890s as I thought (he wasn't old enough in that decade for the episode in question to have fallen in the 19th century, it was probably in something like 1905-1908).

Page 13 in my copy (I had trouble finding the passage in the scan I found on Internet Archive, I think it's a later printing that is somewhat abridged). He's writing of working for the state highway department, making road cuts and shoveling gravel:

> Some deliberately delayed the physical calls of nature in the morning until after they came to work. That give them the opportunity of taking ten minutes off. The nonshirkers applied blunt Anglo-Saxon terms to that particular trick.

Given his supplying the term "shirk" in that sentence and the characterization of their label for it as "Anglo-Saxon", I think what he's getting at is they called them "shit shirkers", which is pretty funny.

> I’m still of the opinion that iOS 6 was peak iPhone.

You’re not alone. The release of iOS7 basically took us from having one OS that didn’t constantly confuse the non-tech-savvy, back to having zero of those. And it’s gotten a little better in a couple releases, but overall the trend is that it’s moving even farther from that over time.

The idea of avoiding work by taking a shit, though.

Like I could entirely see Julius Caesar’s Gallic Campaign including a bit about punishing some soldier because he always managed to need to shit during the hardest parts of setting up camp, or something like that.

I wonder what the oldest reference is we can find to this practice. I bet it's very old. Oldest I know of is only the late 19th century, but I bet we could beat that by at least several hundred years. Surely it comes up at least once somewhere in Shakespeare?

> Hell, the fact that the Supreme Court is a permanent bench of justices versus a rotating set chosen by lot for each case?

I've been making noise about this option but it doesn't seem to have entered even the online-politics-discussion mainstream yet. Everyone's like "expand the court" but I think both expanding it to match the count of circuits, and forming it by lot from lower courts each session (or multiple lots for a session—it might be good to at least have one group choose the cases, and a different one hear and rule on them) is a far more elegant solution and provides longer-lasting protection against problems, while also depoliticizing the reform to a degree (it wouldn't just be whoever's in control instantly gaining several justices) which I think makes it far more likely to actually be an achievable and durable reform.

It's even got a phase-in option that'd be immediately beneficial and also side-step any questions about whether an SC justice can be "demoted" to merely another federal judge: leave the current ones in place, start drawing the new seats by lot immediately. Existing justices' seats fall under the lot system as they come open. Done.

> Charlie Kirk.

We'll see what shakes out of the trial, but odds are leaning that way, yeah.

> The healthcare ceo.

Last I checked the guy's history read as right-leaning and it was a personal grievance that motivated it? I remember this because lots of people online were surprised/disappointed when he turned out not to have clear leftist motivations. But I admit I haven't kept up on this since the first few weeks, maybe the picture's shifted again.

> Multiple attempts on Trump’s life on the campaign trail.

One right-leaning guy motivated by notoriety-seeking more than politics, and the second one was some nut with a very weird past (lots of felony charges including related to firearms but somehow also lots of foreign travel to conflict zones?) and tough-to-bucket politics.

> People on the left think conservative political violence is worse. But conservatives don’t see it that way. Both sides of American politics think the other side has a worrying amount of political violence.

One side's leaders routinely call for violence. The other's almost never do. There's a clear difference. There's even a clear difference with Republicans pre-Trump and the modern MAGA party—their talking heads used to sometimes call for political violence, but at least their elected and appointed officials rarely did. Both do, now, and have since Trump's first campaign (remember when he suggested his followers shoot Hillary if she won? On stage, to a crowd, with cameras and everything?)

> Yea in fact the ACA law caps insurers to a maximum of 15% profit.

These are plan-by-plan, not on the company overall, and notably this doesn't apply to:

1) Self-funded plans. Name-brand insurance companies manage these, but big companies fund them and take on the risk (with re-insurance and all that good stuff in the mix, of course). A large proportion of the US population is on these kinds of plans, and that limit does not apply to them.

2) New plans in their first (IIRC) two years. I've not looked into whether insurance companies are playing games with this such that a larger set of their plans are "new" ones than would be if this rule didn't exist, but if it's at all possible for them to do that, I guarantee they are.

Besides, it also invites the immediate and rather fatal rejoinder of, "OK? So how about we... don't do that?"

Any negative response to that must suppose that everyone else would just give up on trying to advance drug R&D if the US stopped unilaterally self-sacrificing to subsidize it for the entire world... and when you lay it out like that, it seems like that must not actually be what's going on in the first place, because why the hell would we be do that, for that reason? So, very probably, we aren't, and further, if we are we should definitely stop.