Do you mean that the things like annulling the elections when the "wrong" candidate won [1] or barring the opposition candidates from running [2],[3] are not the worst excesses?
Are these "woke" or just "events that negatively impacted far-right candidates"?
Le Pen is a particularly egregious example, given it's an embezzlement conviction and not some kind of "too racist" penalty or whatever we're imagining
Bit of a tangent but maybe this a good place to ask: I've been trying to diagnose a weird display issue on my 4K IPS monitor. It seems to have a stuck pixel, which looks bright green on a dark background. But weirdly, the pixel changes color if you move your head from left to right, cycling from bright green to hot pink to purple and then back to green (though it doesn't change color when moving your head up and down). Also, it seems to "float" slightly above the actual pixels. For ex, if I open a paint program and draw a straight vertical line directly adjacent to it, there's a gap when looked at from the right, but it seems to overlap the line when seen from the left.
Anybody experience an issue like this before, or know if it has a fix? I've searched but only find discussion of regular stuck/dead pixels.
I have, but only when I've gotten something on the monitor (like liquid droplets or thin hairs placed just right) that did funny things. Have you carefully cleaned your screen recently?
If it's not crud on the screen, then my vaguely-educated layman's guess based on the symptoms is that some part of the light guide layer between the tiny shutters and external surface of the screen [0] has gotten damaged somehow.
[0] Would this be called a polarizer? I'm not sure.
Considered that, but I've wiped, scratched, and put light pressure on the spot with no visible change. Not sure how it could have been damaged in one pixel-sized spot without affecting the surface or any surrounding pixels.
I think you have an actual tiny physical chink in the plastic or glass on the surface of the panel. Especially if you run your finger across it and can feel it.
That's exactly where the flaw likely is, on the side of the top surface layer which faces away from you. Air bubble in the plastic, or dust inclusion. If you really want to get to the bottom of it, put a 30x pocket microscope over the spot, you'll see the problem clearly. The bad news: It's neither fixable, nor covered by "dead pixel" / "stuck pixel" warranty policies.
To me, it feels similarly impossible/spooky to how image models work.
Consider a model like SDXL:
- each image is 512x512, plenty of detail
- max prompt length is 77 tokens, or a solid paragraph
- each image has a seed value between 0 and 9,999,999, with each seed giving a completely different take on the prompt
I can't begin to calculate the upper limit on the number of possible human-readable prompts that can fit in 77 tokens, but multiply even an (extremely conservative) estimate of a million possible prompts by 10 million seeds and it's clear that this model "contains", at minimum, literally tens of trillions of possible meaningful images -- all in a model file that's under 7 GB.
I suspect it works similarly to the biological side -- evolutionary pressure encoding complex patterns into hyper-efficient "programs" that aren't easily interpretable, but eerily effective despite their compact size.
What was the nature of his interests, if you don't mind sharing? I'm always curious about how these things develop -- makes it easier to recognize.
Seems like a lot of them fall into either "I'm onto a breakthrough that will change the world" (sometimes shading into delusion/conspiracy territory), or else vague platitudes about oneness and the true nature of reality. The former feels like crankery, but I wonder if the latter wouldn't benefit from some meditation.
It was a mix of mystical philosophy and transhumanism and he does think that "the world is on the edge of a breakthrough" but he sees it as emergent. It is not something he is personal creating just something he believes is imminent and he is one of the first people to recognise it.
Thanks -- so a little of column A, a little of column B? Kind of feels similar to how early societies built whole religious practices out of interpreting stochastic phenomena like knucklebones or entrails, only supercharged because this particular viscera seems to talk back!
I often have to remind myself of the quote "Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours" when socializing to remember to ask questions and let the other party explore whatever topic/situation they are into. It seems like AI conversations are so one-sided a person might forget to cede the floor entirely.
8 years ago, we looked for our house, managed the loan process and all of the documents, signed all of the non in person paperwork, reviewed the options when he had our house built from our phones.
We did the same when we managed the selling process in 2024 and when we bought our current home in 2022.
We arranged a year long “digital nomad” series of trips where we flew to over a dozen cities including flights and hotels on our phones starting in 2022.
Maybe I'm weird, but I just stick with whatever the default is per app. Discord and Spotify and MetaFilter dark, Slack and Gmail and HN light. It feels strange switching either to the non-default, but have no preference for either as a whole.
I've worked retail jobs where employees were assigned lot duty on a rotating basis, and I can assure you most people didn't want to do it and staff had to be vigilant to make sure it wasn't being neglected. It's moderately hard physical labor (assuming there are no powered cart-pusher things and the lot is large and on some kind of slope), and is out in the elements where it can be frigidly cold and windy or swelteringly hot. Some employees might be misanthropic enough in context that they'd rather do it than work inside, but it's definitely not all or even a majority in my experience.
Honestly it should be good news because the kids never needed protecting in the first place. If the solution wasn't censorship they would give zero fucks.
What's the endgame of a movement that seeks to discredit, overturn, and functionally control elections?
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