I once saw a headline that someone (I forgot who) said that “AI is weird”. All I could think was, well yeah, he’s been called “Weird Al” all of his professional life …

My bad, the illustration was supposed to be of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, who has been accused of trafficking fentanyl. On the one hand, it seems encouraging that they had to find someone who could more credibly be presented as criminal – hopefully an indication that their claims about the pro-Palestinian students and Argentinians with tattoos they’ve disappeared were not deemed credible enough by the general public.

Still, we only have the allegation of this administration against this person, so it’s quite possible she’s entirely innocent. It’s not like they give a fuck about actual crimes or making our country safer. They just want to be seen as badasses.

When I worked an hourly job on the night shift, we would all clock out to change the time and then clock back in.

You got a link for that? I’m not finding anything online linking Rumeysa Ozturk to anything related to drugs

Upvoting for the concise summary of what the article is about (thanks!); not for the opinion expressed (which appears to conflate Russian developers with the actions of the Russian government – something I find problematic at best).

The original marshmallow experiment is so popular to cite because it is a “just so story” – that is, as typically explained, it presents a moral lesson that seems intuitively obvious. That’s one reason the result stood for so long without attempts to reproduce it.

Such attempts have now been made, and no one can reproduce the reported clarity of the original. One interpretation of this is related to the wealth of the families involved: the original subjects were, after all, children of Stanford University students, and as such came from families of relative wealth.

There are studies which reach the conclusion you’re reporting (likely popularized by this Atlantic article but it’s paywalled so I can’t check), but the way you present this as a “fun fact” is turning the test into a different “just so story”.

The reality is that, while there are some stats gathered from the marshmallow test and followups that could be interpreted that way, the actual data gathered is too messy and inconclusive to draw any definitive conclusions.

Oh, thank the gods. I read about the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” bill and thought – they’re flooding the zone with shit, just like Steve Bannon advised, and just like when you train a puppy, we need to rub their noses in it.

As far as I can tell from the article, the definition of “smarter” was left to the respondents, and “answers as if it knows many things that I don’t know” is certainly a reasonable definition – even if you understand that, technically speaking, an LLM doesn’t know anything.

As an example, I used ChatGPT just now to help me compose this post, and the answer it gave me seemed pretty “smart”:

what’s a good word to describe the people in a poll who answer the questions? I didn’t want to use “subjects” because that could get confused with the topics covered in the poll.

“Respondents” is a good choice. It clearly refers to the people answering the questions without ambiguity.

The poll is interesting for the other stats it provides, but all the snark about these people being dumber than LLMs is just silly.

We have free public school lunches for all our kids here in Minnesota because of Governor Walz. How the fuck is that “blue republican”?

From the article:

“We have to make sure that Americans know it’s not just that Donald Trump is bad but we’re offering them something better,” he continued. “And I think that’s what we need to work on.”

That’s an admission of culpability.

It didn’t help that the New York Times and other media outlets were all in on talking shit about Biden, and that undermined their credibility on the age issue. It was only after Biden’s disastrous showing at his debate with Trump that the average voter had any credible evidence of his decline.

Warren, MICHIGAN. I would like to encourage anyone who posts local news to put clarifying geographical data in the title … I’ve spent so many minutes of my life clicking thru to some local TV station’s story and looking … looking … looking for any sort of clue where the hell they are.

I know they’re unbelievably dense, and they’re getting their bizzaro worldview reinforced by Fox News every day, but at some point it will be obvious to a critical number of them that they’ve been had; used and tricked and made fools of.

The whole mind control apparatus that was supposed to keep them in line was keeping their anger on a hair-trigger to short-circuit their critical reasoning faculties and make them atrophy. It worked for a long time, but the consequence is that, once it becomes obvious (even to them) that they’ve been duped, their carefully groomed anger will overflow … and they’ve got an insane number of assault weapons.

Realizing this investigation has been quietly going on for 4 years now makes me think of all the other ongoing investigations that the incoming Trump administration will kill, so they can focus on fabricating reasons to pursue their political enemies.

That was back when Facebook was actually doing something useful: there were so many huge Bernie rallies posted to Facebook that the MSM was forced to acknowledge him. Now that social media has been “fixed”, we won’t see anything like that again.

neither. 0.0% chance for either candidate.

This level of cynicism is unwarranted. Sure it might be low, but for Harris it’s at least 0.1%.

Weird to use an obscure source to report that Axios (a reasonably well known web presence) reported about this. A moment’s search turned up the original Axios article.

I hear you, but please still get out and vote for Harris/Walz this November. This is about keeping the infrastructure of representative democracy in place so we will be able to work towards those needed changes. If Trump wins, all that is going away, and those of us guilty of thought crimes such as believing in global warming will end up in prison at best.

I don’t know how he would ever have expected anything different from Netanyahu. It’s not like this is the first time he failed to show the “restraint” Biden pleaded for (while simultaneously providing him with an unlimited supply of weapons).

You’ve always got to show up for those school board elections now. Every. Single. Time.