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Joined 6 months ago
Cake day: September 29th, 2024
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I’m picturing a bunch of FBI agents with two side-by-side printouts, the list of Epstein’s clients and a list of Trump campaign donors, cross-referencing them in order to make sure “sensitive information” is redacted.
SMART can be used for a couple different things - one is just reading the health values reported by the drive, another is for instructing the drive to run tests of itself and then reporting the results. if you haven’t already, I’d recommend having it run the “long” self-test as that inspects the entire drive. it will often prompt the drive to report problems that it may not have noticed otherwise.
a related thing to keep an eye on, especially with an old netbook like that, is the power & data connectors to the drive. buildup of dust, or corrosion on the contacts, or something like that, could cause symptoms that look like a drive failure, even if the drive itself is perfectly healthy.
the purpose of the 2nd Amendment is so you can protect yourself from violent lunatics who wish to harm you and your family
…wait no not like that
oh, this one’s pretty easy, actually
a normal AI tells you it’s safe to eat one rock per day
an AI agent waits for you to open your mouth, and then throws a rock at your face. but it’s smart enough to only do that once a day.
Casey Newton reviewed OpenAI’s “agent” back in January
he called it “promising but frustrating”…but this is the type of shit he considers “promising”:
My most frustrating experience with Operator was my first one: trying to order groceries. “Help me buy groceries on Instacart,” I said, expecting it to ask me some basic questions. Where do I live? What store do I usually buy groceries from? What kinds of groceries do I want?
It didn’t ask me any of that. Instead, Operator opened Instacart in the browser tab and begin searching for milk in grocery stores located in Des Moines, Iowa.
At that point, I told Operator to buy groceries from my local grocery store in San Francisco. Operator then tried to enter my local grocery store’s address as my delivery address.
After a surreal exchange in which I tried to explain how to use a computer to a computer, Operator asked for help. “It seems the location is still set to Des Moines, and I wasn’t able to access the store,” it told me. “Do you have any specific suggestions or preferences for setting the location to San Francisco to find the store?”
they’re gonna revolutionize the world, it’s gonna evolve into AGI Real Soon Now…but also if you live in San Francisco and tell it to buy you groceries it’ll order them from Iowa.
what was the Tesla wearing?
why was it in such a dangerous neighborhood at that time of night?
I’m not saying it was the Tesla’s fault, or that it deserved to be set on fire, of course…but maybe it should be a little more careful.
click here to pre-order my upcoming book, published by Harvard Business Review, “Don’t Be A Fucking Nazi and Other Secrets To Corporate Success”
definitely good news, although there’s a terrifying aspect of it.
from the article, about Kim Davis’s attorney:
Staver previously told the Lantern that his team’s goal is for the appeal to reach the U.S. Supreme Court and that, should the appeals panel rule against him, he would appeal to the higher court.
The case would then provide the justices an opportunity to re-evaluate Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision that guaranteed same-sex couples marriage rights, on the same grounds that the court in 2022 used to overturn the federal right to abortion, Staver said.
…
“This case underscores why the U.S. Supreme Court should overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, because that decision threatens the religious liberty of many Americans who believe that marriage is a sacred institution between one man and one woman. The First Amendment precludes making the choice between your faith and your livelihood.”
SCOTUS can’t just randomly issue a press release that says “oh btw Obergefell v. Hodges is overturned”. they need a case to be teed up for them in order to do that. with the Dobbs case that overturned Roe v Wade for example, the Supreme Court decision came down in 2022, but it was regarding a Mississippi law that was passed in 2018. that law was a 15-week abortion ban, which clearly violated Roe. the Mississippi legislature had zero reason to pass it other than to provide a case that could work its way up to the Supreme Court and give them an excuse to ban abortion.
Staver is the founder of a group of shitbags who call themselves the “Liberty Counsel”. the writing is on the wall that the Christofascists are gunning for marriage equality, and this case is one of several that give them a possible avenue with which to do it.
their pricing page is here.
I’m paying 10 USD/month for their unlimited plan, there’s also a 5 USD/month tier but I’m sure that I would exceed its 300 searches/month limit.
so it’s not dirt-cheap, but not stupidly expensive either. I can afford it, and I’m happy to pay it because it’s a business model that I would like to see succeed.
in 2024, Biden and then Harris tried their best to move rightward on immigration.
first with a “bipartisan” border security bill that was blocked by Senate Republicans on Trump’s orders.
Among the speakers in Chicago were New York Rep. Tom Suozzi, whose relatively hawkish views on the border helped him win a Congressional special election in a conservative Long Island district earlier this year. The sheriff of a Texas border county who has criticized former President Donald Trump’s stance on the border was also on hand at the United Center.
this was the same DNC that had zero Palestinian-American speakers, because golly you know the schedule was just so packed. but there was plenty of time for two different speakers about how Democrats, not Republicans, are the people you should vote for if you care about the “border crisis”. a Congressman from Long Island, because of course immigration is a hot-button issue on Long Fucking Island. and a sheriff from Texas, appearing in-uniform, to continue the long tradition of Democrats trying to “well, ackshually, we’re the pro-police party”.
Democrats campaigning as Diet Republicans does not fucking work
but the central tenet of the Democratic Party is never learning a lesson about anything, ever, and so they haven’t learned that lesson.
that fucking animatronic wig is dead to me. if he’s the Democratic nominee in 2028 (it seems pretty transparent that’s the real motivation* behind starting his stupid little podcast), I’m not voting for him. I don’t care if he’s the VP pick behind someone I like better like AOC. crossing into anti-trans bullshit is an absolute dealbreaker for me.
* though this news is making me suspect that Newsom is realistic about not having a chance of winning the Democratic nomination, and instead he’s making a feint towards it so that he is positioned to run as a “centrist” independent spoiler candidate in the event someone “too far left” gets the nomination. that should be a pretty decent fundraising grift regardless of whether he goes through with it or not.
I’ve been using Kagi for ~2 months, after a friend gave me a similar invite code. this news from Google affirmed my decision to pay for Kagi once the 3-month trial is over, instead of going back to Google.
Tay any% speedrun
although I suppose “only one day after launch” doesn’t break the record:
It caused subsequent controversy when the bot began to post inflammatory and offensive tweets through its Twitter account, causing Microsoft to shut down the service only 16 hours after its launch.
but it’s great that the billionaire owner of the LA Times is trying. this sort of innovation is why billionaires like him are so important.
putting nukes into space is quite unlikely, even taking into account the current clusterfuck of the US government.
it’s been thoroughly studied since the 1950s, for obvious reasons. the practical considerations put it somewhere between “not feasible” and “gigantic pain in the ass”.
nuclear weapons need maintenance and upkeep, which the US military is already not terribly good at. a large part of this is that during the Cold War, maintaining nukes was seen as an important job within the military. in the past few decades, if you want career advancement in the military, you’d want to go to Iraq or Afghanistan for actual combat. working with nukes has become somewhat of a dead-end, career-wise.
satellites in LEO have a finite lifespan - the tiny bits of atmospheric drag mean they need to spend a bit of fuel to maintain altitude. after the fuel runs out they’re de-orbited, usually into the south Pacific (one of the most believable theories about the purpose of the X-37 space plane is refueling CIA spy satellites). doing that with nukes would be extremely expensive, as well as environmentally catastrophic (though of course the current government would only really care about the former)
and on top of all that…the US simply doesn’t need nukes in space. there is the “nuclear triad” of land-based ICBMs, nuclear-armed bombers, and nuclear-armed submarines. that was established during the Cold War to ensure the US had the ability to strike back at Russia, even if Russia devastated the US with a first strike.
the more realistic scenario in my mind is Kessler syndrome - a satellite-on-satellite collision creates debris, and that debris takes quite a while to fall out of orbit. in the meantime, it can create a chain reaction by colliding with other satellites. space is big, but LEO is much more crowded than it used to be, particularly with Starlink satellites, and those are cheaply manufactured and don’t always have reliable thrusters to allow them to move out of the way of any debris.
if it did happen, Kessler syndrome wouldn’t have much of an immediate impact, but instead a longer, slower-burning one. launches of new satellites into LEO would become less frequent due to the increased risk, and higher orbits (GPS and geosynchronous satellites) would be more risky as well because they would need to pass through the debris cloud. so existing satellites would continue to work, but as they aged out and needed replacement, those replacements would be less likely to happen.
someone with Photoshop skills, please take that “see someone shoplifting food? no you didn’t” meme and update it for 2025
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_archaeology#The_Search_for_Atlantis
In their search to prove the superiority of the Aryan race, the Nazi party began searching the world for archeological evidence that would prove to the rest of the “inferior” world that the German people were not only a superior race, but that they transcended traditional human standards. One archeological exploit made popular by the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark was the search for the Ark of the Covenant. Another, perhaps less known, exploit was their attempt to discover the lost island of Atlantis.
yeah, it’s a real mystery why Rogan is surrounded by people who believe in Atlantis.
a salary that guarantees $1 million a year post-tax
to keep the mind-boggling numbers in perspective:
you’re paid $1 million/year post-tax, like you said.
and say you have no expenses to speak of - you take all your meals in the Google cafeteria, take the Google shuttle to work, and live with your parents or in some other form of housing that doesn’t cost you anything. this means you can put that entire $1 million/year into a savings account.
even in that contrived scenario, you would need to work 1000 years to accumulate one billion dollars.
at which point, you would have 1/145th of Sergey Brin’s current wealth. if you wanted to match it, you would need to work 145,000 years.
In addition to the sexual harassment finding that led to his resignation
yet another data point that “cancel culture” doesn’t really exist. people who are “canceled” simply spend a few years out of the public eye, and then return as if nothing ever happened.
the allegations are so numerous that Cuomo’s main wikipedia page can’t cover them all, it links to a separate Andrew Cuomo sexual harassment allegations page:
The entire New York congressional delegation, including New York’s two United States Senators, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, and over 120 New York State legislators called for Cuomo’s resignation, as did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, and Eric Adams, the Brooklyn Borough President and Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York City. President Joe Biden stated his support for Attorney General James’s independent investigation; he later called on Cuomo to resign after the investigatory report was released. On August 10, Cuomo announced that he would step down from office in 14 days, making his resignation effective on August 24.
On January 4, 2022, Albany County District Attorney David Soares dropped a criminal complaint against Cuomo and also announced that Cuomo would not face any other charges related to other groping allegations, citing lack of evidence. Three days later, a judge dropped the criminal charge against Cuomo. On January 31, 2022, the last of five criminal cases that had been pursued against Cuomo were dismissed.
a lesson that I would really like the legal system to learn (including DAs like David Soares who is supposedly a Democrat) is that if an elected official commits crimes, and then as a result of those crimes is forced to resign, or loses re-election, or is impeached and removed from office, that is not an excuse to say “well, surely he’s suffered enough, it would be kicking him while he’s down to continue prosecuting him for the crimes he committed”
(see also: Ford pardoning Nixon, Donald Trump, the former mayor here in Seattle, and so on)
right-wing hypocrisy is so common that pointing it out is a cliche, but I still think it’s important to highlight here
in 2020, the NYT published an op-ed from Tom Cotton saying Trump should send in the military against the protests after George Floyd’s murder
it caused a huge and predictable backlash, and the editorial editor published a defense of why they did it
We published Cotton’s argument in part because we’ve committed to Times readers to provide a debate on important questions like this. It would undermine the integrity and independence of The New York Times if we only published views that editors like me agreed with, and it would betray what I think of as our fundamental purpose — not to tell you what to think, but to help you think for yourself.
this was always the excuse for platforming the right-wing in supposedly “liberal” newspapers. we need to listen to different viewpoints. have the debate. teach the controversy. marketplace of ideas. if you don’t like it, then you’re “close-minded” or live in an “echo chamber” or whatever.
(the NYT’s long history of publishing transphobic bullshit comes to mind as well)
but then the ratchet clicks one notch tighter, and you have Bezos announcing that they will only publish op-eds that are in favor of “personal liberties and free markets”. they won’t publish competing viewpoints, because you can always find those elsewhere on the internet.
this argument would have applied equally in 2020, of course. Tom Cotton was a sitting Senator. he can publish his opinions on his Senate website, he can easily hold press conferences, etc. there was no need for the NYT to publish it.
when it’s a supposedly “liberal” newspaper, they claim they have an obligation to also publish the “respectable” conservative voices. but when a paper decides to be explicitly right-wing, they don’t even pay lip service to claiming they’re publishing “both sides”.
here is the original source of the article, published on a site called Futurism: https://futurism.com/microsoft-ceo-ai-generating-no-value
it got syndicated by Yahoo News because Yahoo does a ton of that in a increasingly desperate attempt to be relevant
judging by the “more top stories” on Futurism’s home page right now, they lean pretty heavily on clickbait:
Trump White House Tells Elon He’s Stepped Over the Line
Microsoft Backing Out of Expensive New Data Centers After Its CEO Expressed Doubt About AI Value
Shark Steals Camera, Capturing Amazing Footage From Inside Its Mighty Jaws
here is the primary source that the article is based on: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/satya-nadella
there’s a transcript that I suspect is almost certainly AI-generated, so some of these quotes may not be completely accurate:
Satya, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. So just in a second, we’re going to get to the two breakthroughs that Microsoft has just made. And congratulations, same day in nature. Majorana Zero chip, which we have in front of us right here, and also the world human action models.
right off the bat, we have the context that this is a friendly interview for Nadella to promote some new “breakthroughs” that Microsoft has. this may be explicit spon-con or just “regular” access journalism, it’s hard to say.
around 15 minutes in, the host asks:
You recently reported that your yearly revenue from AI is $13 billion. But if you look at your year-on-year growth on that, in like four years, it’ll be 10x that. You’ll have $130 billion in revenue from AI if the trend continues. If it does, what do you anticipate… we’re doing with all that intelligence?
Like this industrial scale use, is it going to be like through office? Is it going to be you deploying it for others to host? Is it going to be, you got to have the AGIs to have 130 billion in revenue? What does it look like?
and Nadella responds:
Yeah. I see the way I come at it, Dworkish, is it’s a great question because at some level, if you’re going to have this sort of explosion, abundance, whatever commodity of intelligence available, the first thing we have to observe is GDP growth, right? Before I get to what Microsoft’s sort of revenue will look like, I mean, there’s only one governor in all of this, right? Which is, this is where a little bit of, we get ahead of ourselves with all this AGI hype, which is, hey, you know what? Let’s first see if, let’s say develop, I mean, like, remember, like, the developed world is what? 2% growth, and if you adjust for inflation, it’s zero? That, like, so in 2025, as we sit here, I’m not an economist. At least I look at it and say, man, we have a real growth challenge. So the first thing that we all have to do is let, and when we say, oh, this is like the industrial revolution, blah, blah, blah. Oh, let’s have that industrial revolution type of growth. That means to me, 10%. 7%, developed world, inflation adjusted, growing at 5%. That’s the real marker, right? So it’s not just, it can’t just be supply side, right? It has to be, in fact, that’s the thing, right?
I think there’s a lot of people are writing about it. I’m glad they are, which is the big winners here are not going to be tech companies. The winners are going to be the broader industry that uses this commodity that, by the way, is abundant. Suddenly, productivity goes up and the economy is growing at a faster rate.
When that happens, We’ll be fine as an industry. But that’s, to me, the moment, right? So it costs self-claiming some AGI milestone. That’s just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. The real benchmark is, is the world growing at 10%.
that word salad is a lot of things, but I don’t think it lives up to the “generating basically no value” hype that Futurism tried to give it.
also, I like that the transcript includes the seamless ad transition…which is of course for an AI product:
A quick word from our sponsor, Scale AI. Publicly available data is running out, so major labs like Meta and Google DeepMind and OpenAI all partner with Scale to push the boundaries of what’s possible. Through Scale’s data foundry, major labs get access to high-quality data to fuel post-training, including advanced reasoning capabilities.
As AI races forward, we must also strengthen human sovereignty. SCALE’s research team, SEAL, provides practical AI safety frameworks, evaluates frontier AI system safety via public leaderboards, and creates foundations for integrating advanced AI into society. Most recently, in collaboration with the Center for AI Safety, SCALE published Humanity’s Last Exam, a groundbreaking new AI benchmark for evaluating AI systems’ expert level knowledge and reasoning across a wide range of fields. If you’re an AI researcher or engineer and you want to learn more about how SCALE’s data foundry and research team can help you go beyond the current frontier of capabilities, go to scale.com slash Dwarkesh.
did these fucking dweebs seriously name their AI research team the “SEAL team”?
One dose of MMR vaccine is 93% effective against measles
Two doses of MMR vaccine are 97% effective against measles
…
About 3 out of 100 people who get two doses of MMR vaccine will get measles if exposed to the virus. However, they are more likely to have a milder illness, and are also less likely to spread the disease to other people.
if you have your vaccination records, it’d be good to double-check to make sure that you got both doses. if you missed the 2nd dose, or are missing the records and unsure, you can get a booster at any pharmacy, usually without an appointment, and covered 100% by insurance thanks to the Affordable Care Act.
the vaccine being “only” 97% effective is one of the reasons why herd immunity is so important, especially with a virus like measles that is extremely infectious (R_0 of 12-18 - meaning without any vaccines, 1 infected person would on average spread it to more than a dozen other people)
here’s an interview with her, from last year in Current Affairs: Kat Abughazaleh on How Right-Wing Propaganda Works
the right-wing media ecosystem she covers is inherently video-based. Fox News has text articles on their website but they probably get next to nothing in views compared to video clips on their website or their actual TV news shows.
and so media criticism of that right-wing ecosystem is also going to be inherently video-heavy. maybe you could have a text article interspersed with video clips, but that’s pretty unwieldy.
I’m also “old man yells at cloud” about TikTok…but you probably remember the original, early-2000s Daily Show with Jon Stewart, right? how they’d show video clips of a politician saying something, and 5 years earlier saying the opposite, etc? and how, for its time, that was a breath of fresh air? that wasn’t text-based, but it was still “serious reporting”, right? journalism is speaking truth to power. you can do that in any medium.
I’m not on TikTok, but I’ve seen enough clips shared on other platforms to know that TikTok has everything. if there wasn’t someone doing left-leaning journalism on TikTok, someone would step in to fill the void.
and it’s not necessarily all shortform video - here’s an hour-long video on her YouTube channel: The Dangerous Reality of White Christian Nationalism
but for better or worse, shortform video seems to be what gets actually watched. the video above has 82k views. meanwhile, 4 minutes on Why Conservatives Hate Being Called “Weird” has 116k (and that’s just YouTube, I suspect Instagram and TikTok views of the shorter videos are significantly higher)