Oh please. Screeching out a "Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children?" has been the favorite tactic of bullies authoritarians literally for as long as I can remember. "Oh, the nerdy kids are making friends with each other and playing Dungeons and Dragons? Well now, we can't have that. I know, let's tell everyone that D&D turns kids into virgin-sacrificing, blood-drinking satanists so we can ban it!" was followed up only very shortly after by Tipper Gore's crusade against heavy metal (more satanic panic), rap (I really have no idea why. This was before it went all "gangster" in the 1990s. Maybe just because the artists were mostly black?), and Prince (Again, I can't fathom why, other than probably because he was black.). Around this same time there was a similar "Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children?" panic about video arcades being dens of inequity that lured children in to... what, I'm not exactly sure. Then it was MTV (Oh noes! Somebody might think Beavis and Buttheart are supposed to be role models for kids... BAN IT!!!") At some point in the 1990s (It definitely started when I was in high school but was still going on in my college years.) there was a move to ban anime because something something about those degenerate Asians "corrupting our youth." And then John Carmack wrote the first Doom and the Helen Lovejoys (Oh, and speaking of Helen Lovejoy... the Simpsons... yes, THE SIMPSONS... was the subject of a ban-it-for-the-children moral outrage crusade back in the day!) of the world flipped their shit about computer games continuously for most of a decade or so.

I could keep going... 'got about another 25 years I could cover and there's more I could mention from the years I have covered. But really, do I need to? All of this shit that the prigs, scolds, and authoritarian thugs of the world are doing now... the website bans, the social media bans, the book bans, the attacks on cryptography and privacy... it's all just more out the same playbook they've been using my entire life and undoubtedly since well before I was born.

And, suffice it to say, I grew up as a fan, viewer, listener, or participant of all of the above. And I didn't turn out as a blood-drinking satanist, gang-banger, degenerate reprobate, arsonist, psycho killer, or brazen hussy; but as a boring, middle class, middle age, engineer. The same thing's going to happen with "kids these days." They're nowhere near so fragile as the people pushing authoritarianism my pretending to advocate fro them would have you believe.

Well, yes -- the lies and the exaggerations are a problem. But even if you *discount* the lies and exaggerations, they're not *all of the problem*.

I have no reason to believe this particular individual is a liar, so I'm inclined to entertain his argument as being offered in good faith. That doesn't mean I necessarily have to buy into it. I'm also allowed to have *degrees* of belief; while the gentleman has *a* point, that doesn't mean there aren't other points to make.

That's where I am on his point. I think he's absolutely right, that LLMs don't have to be a stepping stone to AGI to be useful. Nor do I doubt they *are* useful. But I don't think we fully understand the consequences of embracing them and replacing so many people with them. The dangers of thoughtless AI adoption arise in that very gap between what LLMs do and what a sound step toward AGI ought to do.

LLMs, as I understand them, generate plausible sounding responses to prompts; in fact with the enormous datasets they have been trained on, they sound plausible to a *superhuman* degree. The gap between "accurately reasoned" and "looks really plausible" is a big, serious gap. To be fair, *humans* do this too -- satisfy their bosses with plausible-sounding but not reasoned responses -- but the fact that these systems are better at bullshitting than humans isn't a good thing.

On top of this, the organizations developing these things aren't in the business of making the world a better place -- or if they are in that business, they'd rather not be. They're making a product, and to make that product attractive their models *clearly* strive to give the user an answer that he will find acceptable, which is also dangerous in a system that generates plausible but not-properly-reasoned responses. Most of them rather transparently flatter their users, which sets my teeth on edge, precisely because it is designed to manipulate my faith in responses which aren't necessarily defensible.

In the hands of people increasingly working in isolation from other humans with differing points of view, systems which don't actually reason but are superhumanly believable are extremely dangaerous in my opinion. LLMs may be the most potent agent of confirmation bias ever devised. Now I do think these dangers can be addressed and mitigated to some degree, but the question is, will they be in a race to capture a new and incalculably value market where decision-makers, both vendors and consumers, aren't necessarily focused on the welfare of humanity?

BTW, the ascii glorp above is a unicode em-dash, proving that I am an LLM and hence not a disinterested party to the discussion. :)

At least that's what I heard skeeted on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/danbi...

And of course this is no surpriseâ"an inconclusive study that can be used to justify a controversial headline is gold in the infotainment biz.

Doesn't ANYBODY but me remember that "Napster" was actually RealNetworks? You know, the old Real.com that was the Internet's first scale, commercial streamer? Real became Rhapsody for several years. Rhapsody had no name recognition, so they bought the Napster name from it's owners... BEST BUY.

It gets weirder. Rhapsody had been Sonos' partner streaming service - and Rhapsody is also... I HEART RADIO. Now the whole Napster lot got dumped in the lap of venture capital vultures.

They need to handle it in some way... any way... that does not involve falsely accusing anyone of imagined (or real) wrongdoing. That is never okay.

And no matter how they rename it, it would eventually become an obnoxious and impossible to disable animated UI element... like a neon-colored Charlie Tuna wearing a windows-blue pilot's uniform asking you: "You appear to be trying to contact emergency services after eating some dodgy fugu. Would you like me to help you compose a complaint email to the chef?"

Yea...

Except for Black Widow and Love & Thunder I just haven't been able to conjure or sustain much interest in Marvel post-Endgame. That seems to be the consensus of most of my friends who also like the genre. I don't know if we all underestimated just how much Chris Evans and RDJ were the "heart" of the franchise, or if the story just felt done after Endgame, or if there's just no way the bar set by Endgame will be topped anytime soon. But Marvel seems to be in "And oh, a bunch of this miscellaneous other stuff also happened." mode without much in the way of direction.

They definitely need to swap things up. Maybe Blade can breathe some life back into Marvel... if it can avoid too much Disneyfication.

CPB and the government have been collected data directly from the airlines ever since the aftermath of 9/11 through a number of programs, for example to check passengers against watch lists and to verify the identity of travelers on international flights.

What has changed is that by buying data from a commerical broker instead of a a congressionally instituted program, it bypasses judicial review and limits set by Congress on data collected through those programs -- for example it can track passengers on domestic flights even if they're not on a watch list.

Fascism isn't an ideology; it's more like a disease of ideology. The main characteristic of fascist leaders is that they're unprincipled; they use ideology to control others, they're not bound by it themselves. It's not just that some fascists are left-wing and others are right-wing. Any given fascist leader is left-wing when it suits his purposes and right-wing when that works better for him. The Nazis were socialists until they got their hands on power and into bed with industry leaders, but it wasn't a turn to the right. The wealthy industrialists thought they were using Hitler, but it was the other way around. The same with Mussolini. He was socialist when he was a nobody but turned away from that when he lost his job at a socialist newspaper for advocating militarism and nationalism.

In any case, you should read Umberto Eco's essay on "Ur-Fascism", which tackles the extreme difficulties in characterizing fascism as an ideology (which as I stated I don't think it is). He actually lived under Mussolini.

How would an LLM accurately determine which cases were "easy"? They don't reason, you know. What they do is useful and interesting, but it's essentially channeling: what is in its giant language model is the raw material, and the prompt is what starts the channeling. Because its dataset is so large, the channeling can be remarkably accurate, as long as the answer is already in some sense known and represented in the dataset.

But if it's not, then the answer is just going to be wrong. And even if it is, whether the answer comes out as something useful is chancy, because what it's doing is not synthesis—it's prediction based on a dataset. This can look a lot like synthesis, but it's really not.

I was hoping for football fields, but no luck. :(

I think people expect commercial social media networks to be something they can't be -- a kind of commons where you are exposed to the range of views that exist in your community. But that's not what makes social networks money, what makes them money is engagement, and consuming a variety of opinions is tiresome for users and bad for profits. When did you ever see social media trying to engage you with opinions you don't agree with or inform you about the breadth of opinion out there? It has never done that.

The old management of Twitter had a strategy of making it a big tent, comfortable for centrist views and centrist-adjacent views. This enabled it to function as a kind of limited town common for people who either weren't interested in politics, like authors or celebrities promoting their work, or who wanted to reach a large number of mainly apolitical people. This meant drawing lines on both sides of the political spectrum, and naturally people near the line on either side were continually furious with them.

It was an unnatural and unstable situation. As soon as Musk tried to broaden one side of the tent, polarization was inevitable. This means neither X nor Bluesky can be what Twitter was for advertisers and public figures looking for a broad audience.

At present I'm using Mastodon. For users of old Twitter, it must seem like an empty wasteland, but it's a non-commercial network, it has no business imperative to suck up every last free moment of my attention. I follow major news organizations who dutifully post major stories. I follow some interest groups which are active to a modest degree, some local groups who post on local issues, and a few celebrities like George Takei. *Everybody's* not on it, but that's OK; I don't want to spend more than a few minutes a day on the thing so I don't have time to follow everyone I might be interested in. Oh, and moderation is on a per-server basis, so you can choose a server where the admins have a policy you're OK with.

No, there are all kinds of information the government has that are legitimately not available. Sensitive data on private citizens, for example, which is why people are worried about unvetted DOGE employees getting unfettered access to federal systems. Information that would put witnesses in ongoing criminal investigations at risk. Military operations in progress and intelligence assets in use.

The problem is ever since there has been a legal means to keep that information secret, it's also been used to cover up government mistake and misconduct. It's perfectly reasonable for a government to keep things from its citizens *if there is a specific and articulable justification* that can withstand critical examination.

And sometimes those justifications are overridden by public interest concerns -- specifically when officials really want to bury something like the Pentagon Papers because they are embarrassing to the government. "Embarrassing to the government" should be an argument against secrecy, because of the public interest in knowing the government is doing embarrassing things. In the end, the embarrassment caused by the Pentagon Papers was *good* for the country.

All you need to know about RFK's fitness for office is out in public for everyone to see.