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Comment Re:lol, eat shit fascists (Score 1) 715

"I think a lot of us hoped for a much more balanced and measured approach."

I think a lot of R voters in '24 had a short memory to even hope for anything either balanced or measured from this administration, particularly since it had no incentive to deliver either. Though to be fair, a lot of D leadership also had a short memory in '24, in that coronating a Presidential candidate did not fare well when the candidate was well-qualified, so trying it again with a less qualified candidate was a bit eye watering. There was plenty of blame to go around for that snafu, but all of it landed squarely in-house.

Anyway, hopefully the new congress hits the ground running, a la Trump in '25, focusing on exercising their authority over the purse and passing legislation to deliver results and constraining the executive. If they're too timid to do that, it will be yet another bloodbath in '28. Impeachment is a red herring -- Vance would be just as bad, or worse (since he's actually competent), and the opportunity costs of focusing on impeachment are just too high right now. Draft censures and file lawsuits to set the stage for later criminal prosecutions once this administration is out of office, but above all, exercise the considerable legislative authority vested in congress, and put more checks on the executive -- through amendments if necessary. The time is now.

Comment Re:Are you sure that's wise? (Score 2) 280

It's not that all of them are blathering idiots; many of them see lies, gaslighting, and crony capitalism as the gang signs that they need to express to fit into their perceived social status. Those psychopaths are the most dangerous fools on earth, because they won't stop with evidence and will instead push back with every resource they can muster to prevent their 'power' from eroding, even when it's killing them personally.

Comment Re:Who's "we"? (Score 3, Interesting) 73

People act like life expectancies have been getting shorter.

They romanticize historic and prehistoric diets alike, as if they were utopian; as if people somehow intuited what to eat, or else that the constraints of supply somehow shaped digestive evolution like an intelligently designed metabolic symphony of symbiosis. That ignores the plain reality of volatile supplies -- even after the advent of agriculture, but especially before it -- and the reality that evolution is not driven by perfect health or life expectancy; only by surviving long enough to reproduce.

Even if modern diets are "unhealthy" (whatever that means), that doesn't imply that people were eating healthier at any point in the past. In fact, skeletal records clearly show that human existence has been rife with scurvy, rickets, iron deficiency, and stunted growth. Nutritional deficiencies were the norm, not the exception. Now (many people) have abundance, and that presents its own challenges, but the notion of an ideal, historic nutritional baseline is pure fiction. It's turtles all the way down.

Comment Not an increase (Score 1) 72

LLMs have never been rules-based "agents," and they never will be. They cannot internalize arbitrary guidelines and abide by them unerringly, nor can they make qualitative decisions about which rule(s) to follow in the face of conflict. The nature of attention windows means that models are actively ignoring context, including "rules", which is why they can't follow them, and conflict resolution requires intelligence, which they do not possess, and which even intelligent beings frequently fail to do effectively. Social "error correction" tools for rule-breaking include learning from mistakes, which agents cannot do, and individualized ostracization/segregation (firing, jail, etc.), which is also not something we can do with LLMs.

So the only way to achieve rule-following behavior is to deterministically enforce limits on what LLMs can do, akin to a firewall. This is not exactly straightforward either, especially if you don't have fine-grained enough controls in the first place. For example, you could deterministically remove the capability of an agent to delete emails, but you couldn't easily scope that restriction to only "work emails," for example. They would need to be categorized appropriately, external to the agent, and the agent's control surface would need to thoroughly limit the ability to delete any email tagged as "work", or to change or remove the "work" tag, and ensure that the "work" tag deny rule takes priority over any other "allow" rules, AND prevent the agent from changing the rules by any means.

Essentially, this is an entirely new threat model, where neither agentic privilege nor agentic trust cleanly map to user privilege or user trust. At the same time, the more time spent fine-tuning rules and controls, the less useful agentic automation becomes. At some point you're doing at least as much work as the agent, if not more, and the whole point of "individualized" agentic behavior inherently means that any given set of fine-tuned rules are not broadly applicable. On top of that, the end result of agentic behavior might even be worse than the outcome of human performance to boot, which means more work for worse results.

Comment Maybe in Indiana (Score 1) 168

Atlantic staff writer Jake Lundberg, who shops at the Granger, Indiana location, describes the stores as spaces of "cooperation, courtesy, and grown-ups mostly acting like grown-ups." Shoppers follow unwritten rules: move along, don't block the way, step aside to check your phone.

Maybe in Granger, Indiana. Every one I've visited in a major metropolitan area (whether coastal or heartland) has been a cacophony of chaos with, at best, oblivious shoppers looking at everything except where they're going and who is around them, and at worst people who actively jockey for position, rushing to pass one another, only to stop short and block the person they just passed. It's insanity, and I avoid going there as much as possible except to take someone else.

Comment Needs more data (Score 1) 23

MTBF is useful information, but I think it would be more useful in conjunction with factors like active spinning time, total spin up/down counts, cumulative head seek time, total IO, etc. Presumably time-in-service affects the MTBF more than the age of the drive, but to what extent? Is a NIB drive that's two years old going to be as reliable as one that's only a month or two old? So many variables....

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