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Cake day: April 4th, 2025

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  • American evangelicals when the government suggests getting a vaccine for a deadly virus- “IT’S THE MARK OF THE BEAST DON’T GET IT OR YOU’LL GO TO HELL”

    American evangelicals when people they voted for say you need to wear something on your wrist to participate in society - “This is fine”

    A wearable computer is much more similar in form to what is described in the Book of Revelation than a vaccine is, but these dumbasses don’t see that because they’re not operating on logic but instead are just doing what they’re told.


  • Driving is culturally specific, even. The way rules are followed and practiced is often regionally different

    This is one of the problems driving automation solves trivially when applied at scale. Machines will follow the same rules regardless of where they are which is better for everyone

    The ethics of putting automation in control of potentially life threatening machines is also relevant

    You’d shit yourself if you knew how many life threatening machines are already controlled by computers far simpler than anything in a self driving car. Industrially, we have learned the lesson that computers, even ones running on extremely simple logic, just completely outclass humans on safety because they do the same thing every time. There are giant chemical manufacturing facilities that are run by a couple guys in a control room that watch a screen because 99% of it is already automated. I’m talking thousands of gallons an hour of hazardous, poisonous, flammable materials running through a system run on 20 year old computers. Water chemical additions at your local water treatment plant that could kill thousands of people if done wrong, all controlled by machines because we know they’re more reliable than humans

    With humans we can attribute cause and attempted improvement, with automation its different.

    A machine can’t drink a handle of vodka and get behind the wheel, nor can it drive home sobbing after a rough breakup and be unable to process information properly. You can also update all of them all at once instead of dealing with PSA canpaigns telling people not to do something that got someone killed. Self driving car makes a mistake? You don’t have to guess what was going through its head, it has a log. Figure out how to fix it? Guess what, they’re all fixed with the same software update. If a human makes that mistake, thousands of people will keep making that same mistake until cars or roads are redesigned and those changes have a way to filter through all of society.

    I just don’t see a need for this at all. I think investing in public transportation more than reproduces all the benefits of automated cars without nearly as many of the dangers and risks.

    This is a valid point, but this doesn’t have to be either/or. Cars have a great utility even in a system with public transit. People and freight have to get from the rail station or port to wherever they need to go somehow, even in a utopia with a perfect public transit system. We can do both, we’re just choosing not to in America, and it’s not like self driving cars are intrinsically opposed to public transit just by existing.


  • While I agree focusing on public transport is a better idea, it’s completely absurd to say machines can never possibly drive as well as humans. It’s like saying a soul is required or other superstitious nonsense like that. Imagine the hypothetical case in which a supercomputer that perfectly emulates a human brain is what we are trying to teach to drive. Do you think that couldn’t drive? If so, you’re saying a soul is what allows a human to drive, and may as well be saying that God hath uniquely imbued us with the ability to drive. If you do think that could drive, then surely a slightly less powerful computer could. And maybe one less powerful than that. So somewhere between a casio solar calculator and an emulated human brain must be able to learn to drive. Maybe that’s beyond where we’re at now (I don’t necessarily think it is) but it’s certainly not impossible just out of principle. Ultimately, you are a computer at the end of the day.



  • This is not surprising if you’ve studied anything on machine learning or even just basic statistics. Consider if you are trying to find out the optimal amount of a thickener to add to a paint formulation to get it to flow the amount you want. If you add it at 5%, then 5.1%, then 5.2%, it will he hard to see how much of the difference between those batches is due to randomness or measurement uncertainty than if you see what it does at 0%, then 25% then 50%. This is a principle called Design of Experiments (DoE) in traditional statistics, and a similar effect happens when you are training machine learning models- datapoints far outside the norm increase the ability of the model to predict within the entire model space (there is some nuance here, because they can become over-represented if care isn’t taken). In this case, 4chan shows the edges of the English language and human psychology, like adding 0% or 50% of the paint additives rather than staying around 5%.

    At least that’s my theory. I haven’t read the paper but plan to read it tonight when I have time. At first glance I’m not surprised. When I’ve worked with industrial ML applications, processes that have a lot of problems produce better training data than well controlled processes, and I have read papers on this subject where people have improved performance of their models by introducing (controlled) randomness into their control setpoints to get more training data outside of the tight control regime.







  • These have been a thing for a while but it wasn’t an LLM it was a video analyzer. I did exactly one interview like that 5 years ago and gave up halfway through the second video they wanted me to send in because the job sucked ass anyway in a shitty part of the country and I realized I was going to be miserable working there even if I got the job degrading myself like that. I ask terrified of getting laid off and having to enter the job market right now and deal with all these new ways companies are coming up with to degrade potential hires and waste their time


  • I don’t understand why some people are so obsessed with this and why they make comments like this. Like what’s the point? To be smug and act like you’re better because you know that it wasn’t actually Kool-Aid used in Jonestown? Do you think it’s actually a public service? Do you have some vested interest in Kool-Aid and feel the need to defend their good name? Let me let you in on a little secret- most people know it wasn’t actually Kool-Aid but was a competitor’s product. However, it doesn’t fucking matter because that’s not the saying. If you say “Oh Jim isn’t using toothpaste because he drank the flavor aid and thinks fluoride is government mind control” the person you’re talking to will just look at you weird. It’s like getting pissed off at someone saying “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” by saying “uhuh well actshually the birds have the same monetary value regardless of whether they are located in a bush or in someone’s hand I am very smart”






  • I stopped using mainstream social media in 2019 but my accounts are still active so I can snoop on random people I went to college with and holy shit every time I get on Facebook it’s so much worse on ways I don’t even understand. Most recently I got on to look at something and my feed was completely unrecognizable because it was all AI generated slop from pages I have never heard of and not any updates from people I know. It’s crazy what people will accept if it’s done slowly enough I guess. I legitimately don’t understand why anyone would use Facebook as it exists today. At least when I quit I could at least understand why people used it.