That's the real problem. Not the cost of locking them up but the cost of firing them.

We turned police training into a racket for well-connected political operatives.

This means that even though the training is substandard and focused on mostly violence that the vast majority of police officers will never get a chance to engage in (73% of cops will never draw their sidearm in their entire career) we spend a fortune training them.

This means that every single municipality is desperate to snap up any police officer who is already trained and that they don't have to spend the money training again. And that means you can fire them all you want they're just going to go to the next municipality over and all you've really done is giving them a 30 minute commute.

On top of that for tax purposes you have a shitload of municipalities because well to do people don't like paying for the services they use in the main city so they incorporate their own cities a few miles away from the main line City so they can avoid paying taxes for the stores and services used there. This has a side effect of there being a virtually unlimited number of municipalities for fired cops to run off to. They will have a long since retired by the time they run out of them with cops who have hopped munis three or four or five times not being uncommon.

As for locking them up that's basically impossible. The supreme Court and the courts in general have granted them immunity from anything and everything unless the public gets so pissed off they start threatening to riot or worse vote Democrat.

There is a complex system and a complex mess here that would need to be completely dismantled. And unfortunately the American left weighing are dumb as dirt so instead of talking about that in a useful and effective manner they come up with shit like defund the police and freak the public out because nobody ever taught them marketing or what a dog whistle is

Do keep in mind that the "70%" number includes people who are living together as a couple but not bothering to get married, many of whom stay together for a lifetime.

Exactly. For example, spreadsheets were often used day to day but the accountants kept the actual books as books and had the final word. That changed over time, only after spreadsheets proved out (and got the bugs out).

Also, humans stayed in the loop. Sure there were occasional funnies like a medical database claiming a few male patients had a history of pregnancy, but humans were in the loop and cited those as obvious errors. There were still backup paper records to fall back on.

But a lot of people when they hear someone say "it's nowhere near ready for prime time" will claim the person is saying "It'll never work".

Back in the day when the "Board of Education" was an actual wooden board.

If they really wanted to serve the user, it would understand "Hey Google, lockdown now" and would power off and require a PIN to restart.

Long press doesn't do anything so low level anymore, it just signals the management processor in the radio that it should force the application processor off. The management processor keeps running.

The power button on the phone really is just a suggestion. To actually power off the whole phone you have to remove the battery (if possible) or let it run down to zero.

This is what happens when you give an AI agency.

You've got questions, we've got cellphones.

Because what it's doing is clearly not the same thing,

Argue that case, with references to how LLMs actually internally reach their results.

The physical biology is certainly different, but this isn't a question about "what things are made of" or even the specific NN type (e.g. smooth vs. spiking), and training differences don't even come into the picture; it's a question of the broad strokes of how conclusions are reached on forward processing.

Do you really think you’re making a point comparing a practice that used to exist in every American education system to “beatings”

Because what you're talking about literally is beatings?

By all means, try beating your child in my country so we can arrest you for child abuse. Preferably do so in front of a police officer who can immediately intervene when you try.

And your sole argument for it is "people used to do it". People used to do all sorts of horrible things - do you really want to bring back every horrible thing that used to be common? Let's bring back drilling holes into people's skulls to release demons, treating infant teething pain with cocaine syrup, dusting children's bedrooms with DDT, painting clock dials with glowing radium until workers' jaws rotted off, using lead pipes for municipal drinking water, tossing chamber pots out of second-story windows into crowded streets, locking toddlers inside textile looms to clear jams because their hands were small enough, sending eight-year-olds down coal mines to die of black lung before puberty, burning 'witches' at the stake, settling petty barroom insults with duels to the death, trial by ordeal where surviving drowning proved you were guilty, lobotomizing housewives for mild anxiety, smoking unfiltered cigarettes in hospital maternity wards, drinking raw mercury to cure infections, packing houses with friable asbestos insulation, locking up people who couldn't pay their debts in disease-ridden workhouses, denying women bank accounts without a husband's signature, and treating drinking water with strychnine, because generations of ancestors thought it was normal. Brilliant argument there, no notes.

I mean, isn't this obviously the solution?

You can use AI in legal work, but you still bear responsibility for your filings being accurate. So by all means have AI search for you - it can save you a ton of time for finding obscure things - but actually click the links and read them yourself. And if you don't, it's no better than making any other factual claim before the court without having duly assessed its credibility.

Why invent a new "aithink" verb when we already have "think"?

Hey AI, who is being more reasonable in this conversation?

User 2:50PM
Who is being more reasonable in this conversation?

[Snip]

Model 2:50PM
ThinkingThoughts
Expand to view model thoughts

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Rei is substantially more reasonable in this conversation, both in terms of technical accuracy and conversational etiquette.
ere is a breakdown of why:

1. Technical Accuracy and Explanatory Value

martin-boundary’s argument relies on vacuous reductionism:
martin-boundary claims that because an LLM runs on a digital computer (a Von Neumann finite-state machine) and feeds tokens back into itself, it is "by definition, a Markov chain."

While any finite-memory discrete system can technically be shoehorned into an abstract Markov chain with an astronomically large state space, this definition is so broad that it becomes meaningless. Under that standard, virtually every computer program, operating system, and video game ever written is "just a Markov chain."

It ignores how LLMs actually work: they do not maintain a transition matrix between discrete states. Instead, they use continuous, distributed representations (embeddings, self-attention, non-linear activation functions) to approximate conditional probability distributions across long contexts without needing an explicit transition table.

Rei’s rebuttal addresses the actual computer science:

Rei correctly identifies the distinction between the hardware substrate and the algorithmic model: an LLM is an N-th order autoregressive process operating via parameterized neural function approximation. Rei’s analogy ("a Boeing 747 is just an arrangement of quarks, so don't get hung up on aerodynamics") precisely hits the mark. Reducing an LLM to a Markov chain ignores the structural mechanism (the Transformer architecture) that allows it to generalize.

Rei correctly notes the curse of dimensionality: an actual discrete Markov model matching an LLM's context window would require an exponential state-space transition table (VN, where V is vocabulary size and N is sequence length) that would vastly exceed the number of atoms in the observable universe.

2. Argumentation and Conduct

Rei argues in good faith:

Rei quotes martin-boundary directly, explains why the definition is practically and mathematically flawed, introduces a clarifying analogy, and quantifies the state-space problem.

martin-boundary relies on hand-waving and ad hominem:

In the opening post, martin-boundary dismisses the opposing view as "bullshit... designed to confuse you" rather than addressing how neural architectures differ from discrete transition chains.

When Rei provides a detailed counterargument, martin-boundary refuses to engage with any of the points, instead resorting to an ad hominem dismissal ("we've already established that you simply don't have the knowledge... and I'm not going to repeat myself").

Conclusion

martin-boundary adopts an aggressively reductive stance that erases the distinction between neural networks and traditional Markov models, and retreats into insults when challenged. Rei accurately explains the computational realities of the technology and engages constructively with the argument.