idk, feels like getting in the good graces of oppressive regimes is a good way to ensure value is protected. Evil value, but the dollar doesn't come with an alignment chart.
a lot of people defended Trump after jan 6 by saying he offered the national guard but was turned down by the mayor. Now he is suddenly able to deploy the national guard regardless of the mayor's input.
It’s just bare motivated reasoning. Their football team had the ball so anything they do is okay. Meanwhile when Reagan started showing dementia symptoms they made him go get evaluated.
Of course I've heard him speak, he does press conferences every single day, sometimes for hours. He takes questions all the time including impromptu ones on Air Force One. He did 3 hour podcasts during the campaign, he's incredibly poised and this has been affirmed by everyone from Jensen Huang to Modi to Tim Cook to Bill Maher.
Biden was kept hidden and carefully managed and his staffers had to cut him off and remind him of the current year. You may not like Trump, but everyone that works with him closely, recognizes he is more intellectual than his public persona would seem to imply.
So why does he sound like an incomprehensible moron? And why are all of his plains straight up broken, like tariffs that would have been appropriate to stop the destruction of American industry twenty years ago, but at this point are just closing the barn door long after the horse moved away? If he's really some wise leader and only rambled incoherent word salad to appeal to the "common man" and get elected, he has now been elected. Shouldn't he be revealing his wise persona, leading, and bringing the skeptical into the fold with some intelligent policies?
Most elderly people are capable of sitting around for hours rambling, especially on political topics. In fact, what's difficult is getting them not to. Occam's says that affirming the emperor is definitely wearing clothes is just the type of politically correct fluffing that happens in every autocracy. Lying to ingratiate yourself with flattery certainly costs less than paying larger bribes.
LOL. Sure he can ramble for hours. But if you read a transcript of any of those conferences, he's literally incomprehensible, can't string more than two logical sentences together. It's just a jumble salad of key trigger words. And when he does present facts, it's either incorrect or an outright lie. It's an embarrassment, frankly.
Used GPT to get the numbers real quick and it came up differently. Definitely should have checked the sources.
Point remains though that 2020 is a statistical outlier election that resulted in a 22 million total vote count increase over 2016.
Joe Biden had signs of dementia in 2020 and barely campaigned publicly. Somehow this old bag with not one inspiring historical speech or rally, riveted voters to turn out in numbers higher than any president in history.
Somehow these same voters that were motivated to stop the orange man in 2020 disappeared in 2024, when orange man runs for a 3rd time.
2012 Obama and 2016 Clinton got roughly the same number of votes (~65M), somehow in 4 years time Biden was able to rally an additional 16 million to the polls, with his sheer intellect and brilliance and inspirational qualities.
And then his VP comes up 7 million short 4 years later against the same "existential threat", despite all the same provisions for mail in ballots etc being in place. It's like Covid restrictions were used as cover for massive voter fraud.
Well, first of all, you've moved the goalposts quite a bit. 14 million down to 7 million cuts the supposed problem in half.
I don't think it's particularly complex, most people vote based on the tangible issues they're experiencing. It shouldn't be surprising that they voted against the incumbents each time. In 2020 they didn't like Trump's handling of COVID so they voted against him. In 2024 they didn't like Biden's handling of inflation so they voted against his VP. Just as some people were motivated to vote for those reasons (among others), many people lost their motivation to vote at all.
Regarding the difference between 2012 Obama and 2020 Biden, Trump also received more votes in 2020 than Obama did -- in fact, he surpassed Obama's vote total in 2024 as well. Trump in 2020 and 2024 even surpassed Obama's vote totals from 2008, even though Obama received 3.5 million more votes in 2008 than in 2012. Really, it's pretty simple, there were 16 million more people in the US in 2020 than 2012. Of course the raw vote numbers went up.
The vote totals aren't a strong point. In 2020 there were 152,320,193 votes cast between the two main candidates; in 2024 there were 155,508,985 votes cast. That is, more people voted in 2024 than in 2020, so claiming that 2020 was some statistical outlier with a bunch of extra votes doesn't really make sense.
i came in here on the side of child independance, but the youngest ages involved were a lot younger than i'm comfortable with. frankly, i think that if a kid is under 4 years old, there should be an adult near-at-hand.
I agree. I for one was riding my bike all around the neighborhood as a kid, going everywhere. I guess starting in 1st grade it was walking around apartment complex and then we got. a house in 2nd grade, and probably 3rd grade we were off on our bikes with "boundaries" our parents said we couldn't go past. A 4 year old, hell even a 6/7 year old I just couldn't trust to make a proper decision, even with older siblings around.
Also, the way this article reads, this lady just seems like a pain in the a* and clearly her neighbors do not like her. The best bet is for them to move...
I have often thought about how computers are significantly faster than they were in the early 2000s, but they are significantly harder to use. Using Linux for the first time in college was a revelation, because it gave me the tools to tell the computer "rename all of the files in this directory, keeping only the important parts of the name."
But instead of iterating on better interfaces to effectively utilize the N thousands of operations per second a computer is capable of, the powers that be behind the industry have decided to invest billions of dollars in GPUs to get a program that seems like it understands language, but is incapable of counting the number of B's in "blueberry."
IDK, I think there is something adorable about taking a system that over trillions of iterations always performs the same operation with the same result, reliability unmatched in all of the universe…
And making it more of “IDK what it answered the way it did, but it might be right!!”
They're not claiming AGI yet, so human intelligence is required to operate an LLM optimally. It's well known that LLMs process tokens rather than characters s, so without space for "reasoning" there's no representation of the letter b in the prompt. Telling it to spell or think about it gives it room to spell it out, and from there it can "see" the letters and it's trivial to count.
So long as I’m teaching the user how to speak to the computer for a specific edge case, which of these burn nearly as much power as your prompt? Maybe we should consider that certain problems are suitable to LLMs and certain ones should be handled differently, even if that means getting the LLM to recognize its own edge cases and run canned routines to produce answers.
Is counting the number of B's vital? Also, I'm pretty sure you can get an LLM to parse text the way you want it, it just doesn't see your text as you do, so that simple operation is not straightforward. Similarly, are you worthless because you seem like you understand language but are incapable of counting the number of octects in "blueberry"?
Let's say I hire a plumber because of his plumbing expertise and he bills me $35 and I pay him with a $50 bill and he gives me back $10 in change. He insists he's right about this.
I am now completely justified in worrying about whether the pipes he just installed were actually made of butter.
> Similarly, are you worthless because you seem like you understand language but are incapable of counting the number of octects in "blueberry"?
Well, I would say that if GP advertised themselves as being able to do so, and confidently gave an incorrect answer, their function as someone who is able to serve their advertised purpose is practically useless.
It is (maybe not directly but very insistently) advertised as taking many jobs soon.
And counting stuff you have in front of yourself is basic skill required everywhere. Counting letters in a word is just a representative task for counting boxes with goods, or money, or kids in a group, or rows on a list on some document, it comes up in all kinds of situations. Of course people insist that AI must do this right. The word bag perhaps can't do it but it can call some better tool, in this case literally one line of python. And that is actually the topic the article touches on.
People always insist that any tool must do things right. They as well insist that people do things right.
Tools are not perfect, people are not perfect.
Thinking that LLMs must do things right, that people find simple, is a common mistake, and it is common because we easily treat the machine as a person, while it only is acting like one.
> Thinking that LLMs must do things right, that people find simple, is a common mistake
Show me any publicly known visible figure that tries to rectify this. Everyone peddles hype, there's no more Babbage as in the "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" anecdote.
People and tools that don't do things right aren't useful. They get replaced. Making do with a shitty tool might make sense economically but not in any other way.
If you follow that reasoning, no person is useful and no tool is useful.
The little box I'm filling now is, compared to a lot of other interfaces, a shitty interface. That doesn't mean it isn't useful. Probably it is getting replaced, only with a slightly better inferface.
The karma system is quite simplistic and far from perfect. I'm sure there are ways to go around it. The moderators make mistakes.
That doesn't mean the karma and moderation are not useful. I hope you get my point but it's fine if we disagree as well.
It is advertised as being able to "analyze data" and "answer complex questions" [0], so I'd hope for them to reliably determine when to use its data-analysis capabilities to answer questions, if nothing else.
As shown by the GPT-5 reaction, a majority of people just have nothing better to ask the models than how many times does the letter "s" appear in "stupid".
I think this is a completely valid thing to do when you have Sam Altman going on the daily shows and describing it as a genius in your pocket and how it's smarter than any human alive. Deflating hype bubbles is an important service.
But the point is, why would you trust it for anything at all, when it can't do an incredibly simple thing reliably at all? (Yes, I understand the tokenizer makes this hard, but still, it's a quick demonstration that it's just bad technology.)
I mean, I think that anyone who understands UTF-8 will know that there are nine octets in blueberry when it is written on a web page. If you wanted to be tricky, you could have thrown a Β in there or something.
It's flagged because flags are crowdsourced, it only takes a few clicks to take down the post, and HN is crawling with MAGA accelerationists who are happy to destroy America.
I would argue the three branches should rarely be aligned with each other. They should follow the Constitution AND keep checks and balances on each other. Neither of the branches should have absolute power over the others. This opinion, although not an expert one, is because of what is currently happening in the US and the lack of wisdom being employed.
The point of checks and balances is not obstruction for the sake of obstruction. It is that no branch should be subservient or overly deferential to the other branches.
For example, Congress should not do everything the president wants just because he's the president as is happening now.
Congresspeople have said out loud that the job of Congress is to ask "how high" when the president says "jump". Congress last year backtracked on immigration reform because the Republican candidate demanded it. Congress just took vacation early because the president needs a break from the stress of being on a sex traffickers contact list. Congress has allowed the executive to destroy congressionally mandated departments without challenge.
Each body of government should be protective of their own power and responsibility and fight against other branches illegally usurping it.
I recommend reading Federalist 51, and perhaps 53 and 76. Also John Adams "Thoughts on Government".
I don't think they're doing it just because he says so, they're doing it because they are aligned with him. 40% of the country also agrees with him and 15% don't care either way.
Ultimately, this is the government the people have chosen, those of us in the other 45% have waning political power and cultural influence. Not really much can be done at this point besides hang on for dear life and hope the pendulum remains functional enough to swing back the other way.
What you're describing is the least of your problems with Trump. In a Westminster system, the leader of the party in power is basically the head of government, the head of state, and the leader of the legislature all rolled into one. And it works without destroying democracy. I genuinely believe that good can come out of American political parties becoming single leader parties. The democrats should do the same, honestly. The fact that Trump has completely eliminated any internal distinction within his party, and deemed it vital that his R-mates have to do exactly what he says, is not what concerns me with Trump.
Well, we don't have a parliamentary system, and our executive has more power than a UK prime Minister, I believe. What you're advocating for is a vestigial legislature to do the will of the king (in the US system).
Between a two party system, a gerrymandered House and a useless Senate, the last thing we need is an absolute ruler.
The British PM isn't "basically" or in any way the head of state or of the legislature. The monarch and the House of Lords still exist and the latter should and very much do assert their power.
You believe that the monarch has any vestigial power?? If the PM calls the King to prorogue Parliament, they HAVE to do it. And the House of Lords has given its authority to the House of Commons.
A British Prime Minister has more power than an American President.
> You believe that the monarch has any vestigial power??
I believe they are the head of state and that they carry out the functions of the head of state in a way that is consistent with comparable states such as Ireland or The Netherlands.
> And the House of Lords has given its authority to the House of Commons.
No they have not. The 1911 Act is alive and well. It is occasionally called into question but the Lords have retained their authority. And all of this is to say nothing of the courts etc.
> A British Prime Minister has more power than an American President.
This is neither here nor there in regards to the claim made above. They are not "basically" the legislature...
If you believe the British Monarch has the leeway of the elected Irish President, oh boy, you have drank the kool-aid of the monarchists who are adamant the monarch is needed.
The reality is the British monarch acts, and only acts, under recommandation of their Prime Minister. The King could not deny the letter of credence to a nation without advice from a PM, or accept letters of credence without advice as well.
That means the PM effectively controls the Head of State, and when you control the Head of State, you are exercising their power.
> oh boy, you have drank the kool-aid of the monarchists who are adamant the monarch is needed.
I have to say before anything else that this comes across as extremely condescending and not at all in keeping with the site guidelines. It's unlikely that I will give a further response after this.
> The reality is the British monarch acts, and only acts, under recommandation of their Prime Minister.
You mean similarly to how the president acts under recommendation from the Taoiseach?
> The King could not deny the letter of credence to a nation without advice from a PM, or accept letters of credence without advice as well.
You think the president could do this in the ROI?
> That means the PM effectively controls the Head of State
Ok? There is more to being head of state than your cherry picked examples. In nether case are they the same role and to reiterate: the House of Lords and the British court system are very much not without authority.
edit for clarity: My point is that faux-witty slights at communities to suggest nothing is wrong with a government is intellectually shallow and appeals to authority without making any point itself.
You misunderstand what an argument from authority is if this is your justification for it. It's not "authority" meaning they can tell you what to do but instead meaning they are an expert on the subject matter. It is valid when a consensus of experts all say the same thing but if there is not an expert consensus then it starts to become more questionable.
In this context, if many independent legal experts and scholars are looking at the decisions being made by the three branches of government and saying there could be bad ramifications, the argument from authority falls flat; there is another authority saying the first authority is wrong.
Or they'll cover it and say how this is a win for the American public because they no longer need to use a socialist government website to file their taxes.
1. People have demonstrated they aren't really willing to pay enough for independent media, aside from one or two person shops.
2. The current media is incentivized to collect ad revenue. Currently, the best known scheme is to outrage or scare readers so they keep refreshing the page. So, in that respect, the current media is doing great business.
