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Comment Re:Old news (Score 1) 54

That's the first thing I thought of, but I think the approach is different. Fabrice Bellard created an x86 emulator in javascript, and ran linux on it (later risc64). Joel Severin complied the linux kernel directly to javascript. If you look at the web page, he describes some previous attempts and how his more direct approach was inspired by them, and some of the limitations (scheduling is offloaded to your host OS, because with the web assembly build, every task in the js linux is a web worker, which because a thread in the webassembly implementation, which your OS decides how to handle.

Basically, it does appear to be novel, and it's pretty cool.

Comment Re:summary is knee jerk clickbait (Score 4, Interesting) 186

Because I'm conscious.

You have an illusion of your consciousness driving your actions, as opposed to the reality of consciousness being a summary of all the decisions you have already made and can no longer change.

Free will is a remarkably easy illusion to break. Here we go, I'm going to do it for you: name your three favorite actors, in order. Do it before you read the rest of this comment.

Did you do it? Was that a conscious decision? Did you weigh pros and cons between different actors to pick your best and rank them? Felt like you did, huh? Like you consciously picked something between those that were available. Was Vincent D'Onofrio one of them? Arnold Schwarzenegger? Clark Gable? Bryan Cranston? Oh, did you miss one of those? Did you miss actors you actually *know* existed, but you never considered consciously for your top pick? Oh my god, did your brain come up with a list of actors for you without ANY conscious input for you to "choose" from, even though you didn't get to choose that list?

There are several studies where we can determine what choice subjects will make before they're conscious of making the choice (picking between picture A or B) for instance. There are also studies where the corpus callossum has been cut as a treatment for people having uncontrollable seizures, and now their two brain hemispheres don't communicate. So the subject can be given a card that says, "go get a cup of water" which they read with one eye. And after they get up, they are asked the question, "why did you get up?" and they answer, "because I was thirsty". Because the brain hemisphere that didn't get the message that was read had to come up with a justification for the conscious mind for why they're going to get water.

This isn't up to debate. You can believe whatever you want. Or rather, you can believe whatever your hardware has decided for you that you're allowed to.

Comment Re:I have an idea... (Score 1) 116

Yay for your anecdotal evidence. Here's mine: I drove cars made in the 80s and 90s, when they had to live in the repair shop. But I haven't had any problems with my cars in 20 years. The only times I've upgraded was because I wanted new features, and after an accident. Which I got to walk away from, because they're also safer. If I had been in a 90s car, I'd have been dead.

Now for the non-anecdotal data. Cost of car maintenance has fallen, which is making public transport less competitve. And in the US, average length of car ownership is at an all-time high, partly because keeping a car for longer is lower risk than it used to be.

Comment Re:I have an idea... (Score 1) 116

You should show them the way by example. Mail in your opinion on the subject to a newspaper editorial column, instead of using the newfangled computer on the internet. The way our ancient ancestors used to.

Cars without computer chips suck. That means no infotainment system, but more importantly, it means a *really shitty unreliable car* just like they used to be: what's wrong with it? No OBD to find out. Incredibly inefficient cars that waste fuel on every cycle because the fuel injection system isn't tuned and precisely timed as it is today.

Comment Re: I listened to a comprehensive NPR report bout (Score 1) 122

Ok, sigh yourself:

As I understand, it is longstanding precedent (since 2009 Obama admin, iirc) that illegals CAN be arrested and processed and moved around without the sorts of requirements needed for legal citizens.

First, you're assuming that I either didn't know that "removal" as opposed to deportation, ordered by immigration officers instead of judges wasn't a thing, or that I was always ok with it when it happened under previous presidents. Neither is true. I'm the first to criticize Obama when he did something shitty (which started with why I almost didn't vote for him in 2008--as a senator, he voted to give AT&T immunity for giving the NSA metadata without a warrant. Had McCain not picked Sarah Palin as his running mate, he would have gotten my vote, but McCain had gone through several cancer scares by that point, and I was afraid of ending up with President Palin).

Second, even though the Obama adminstration (and Bush, it was also going on with the Bush administration) removed people without judge orders, they typically did it at the border. They, in my opinion, did so illegally in some cases (some of the people turned away from the border already had been granted asylum by a judge), but the for the most part, the potential for a mistake was minimal. Said previous administrations also removed people under the order of immigration officers if they were within 100 miles from our borders (because in another ridiculous US longstanding practice, anything within 100 miles of the border is considered to be on the border...so you can get searched without a warrant, for instance, as if you just landed at an airport if you're within 100 miles of a border). It is terrible, I never liked it, I criticized it back then.

So, what's changed with Trump administration that makes it that much worse? First, the removals within the 100 mile ring that happened before were all against people who were *convicted* of a crime by a court. So they got some form of due process, even if it's not satisfactory. The Trump administration has included people that were *suspected* of being gang members, without a conviction, often with the most ridiculous excuses. Take Abrego Garcia, who got into a database for being a potential gang member because he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat at a Home Depot. And got subsequently accused of human trafficking because once he was driving a car with 9 people in it. And speaking of Abrego Garcia, no previous administration performed removals that sent said people to *prison* outside the country. The Trump administration also abandoned the 100 mile ring thing, and they can take people from anywhere.

Or take Mahmoud Khalil, who got his green card revoked and was arrested because he was taking place in a peaceful protest. He wasn't even *accused* of a crime, the administration is literally saying that his first amendment rights are dangerous because he's protesting against their position on Isreal, and that's the reason he should be deported.

Here's the thing: if you don't get to go before a court, how do I know you're here illegally? What's to stop them from sending you there, and never giving you a chance to show you're a US citizen? Because, guess what? Due Process is how you PROVE they're here illegally, or that you did anything wrong. And you can't deny the Trump administration escalated things from "this shouldn't be allowed by the courts" to "oh shit, this is 1933 Germany crap." Because...again, you argued that the removals were happening, but completely ignored my point that the removal was to OUT OF THE COUNTRY PRISONS WITH KNOWN HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES.

denying free speech re the DoD: (shrug) it's certainly a break from practice. Then again, news agencies used to also go fetch the news, not rely on it being spoon fed to them by govt officials.

I'm not saying government officials should be required to volunteer anything to reporters. Beyond what is required by freedom of information act. Information that has reason to be restricted can remain restricted, and although I prefer the government to be as transparent as possible, if the pentagon had said, "we're not dealing with the press anymore," I would find that disturbing, and a bad choice by the administration, but I wouldn't call it part of a fascist regime. What crosses the line is that they're saying, "after we give you the information, you have to let us see what you write, and give us veto power over what you publish." And selectively giving information only to outlets that sign that agreement.

Are you seriously going to argue that's not a propaganda office?

Would it have been better if Fox/Newsmax *had* agreed?

No, and I'm not sure where you got that from. I pointed it out because Fox and Newsmax are organizations that typically side with the current administration, but even they agree that's a step too far. It's not partisan, it's objectively worrisome.

most of his claims are clearly in the tenor of a joke or trolling the hypersensitive left.

As much as I don't like his completely unprofessional and disrespectful to the office attitude, I recognize his trolling. That's not what I was talking about. I'm referring to his claims of having the power to do whatever his wants as *justifications to actual actions he has taken*. For instance, tariffs. The law says only congress has the right to enact those. There's also a law that says he can enact those in an emergency. So he uses the justification of a fentanyl epidemic for tariffs that he *also clearly says are not due to address the fentanyl epidemic, but as part of negotiation tactics*.

He's being open about violating the law with flimsy excuses. Again, how are you justifying this?

Comment Re: I listened to a comprehensive NPR report bout (Score 2) 122

Otoh, many of their editorial board and staff are afflicted with TDS.

Anyone, conservative or liberal, that isn't extremely worried about Trump's authoritarian regime's jailing people without due process in out of the country prisons, attack on free speech of any opinions he doesn't like (such as denying press reporting on the pentagon if it's not cleared by them first, something even Fox News and Newsmax refused to agree to), and overall vague claims to having the power to do whatever the hell he wants are the ones suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

I've lived through multiple Republican Presidents, I've disagreed with both Republican and Democrat presidents, I've never been worried for our country before. This isn't political, and anyone who thinks it is needs to wake up from their cult of personality.

Comment Re:While I like the sentiment, it's unenforceable (Score 1) 70

I'm not sure I understand how this is price fixing, though.

If two gas stations are next to each other, and can see each other's prices, and set their prices accordingly, that's not price fixing or collusion. You never need to go much below the other gas station, and if one of the gas stations in a more convenient spot next to, say, an interstate exit, they can afford to ask for a higher price. That's just regular competition, you want to maximize your margin, and you're never going to lower your price much beyond your competitors, just enough to get enough of their business to sell your inventory.

The price fixing happens when you set the price artificially high and the collusion happens when the competitors agree to not take advantage of that to take all of your customers. True, that's whether they had a meeting about it or not, they don't have to actually shake hands on it, but the price *does need to be artificially high*. And artificially high means you're sacrificing demand for the margin. So, in the case of the gas station, if you halved your customers, but you're making more money because of the high margin, you must be colluding. In the case of landlords, if they're not able to find tenants most of the time, but when they do, it makes up for it and they make more money, then it's artificially high and they must be colluding. But if they can find tenants, *by definition* it cannot be price fixing.

And yes, I get that shelter is an inelastic demand, but the article itself mentions the supply shortage of housing. The way to fix supply shortages in the free market is by increasing prices to reduce demand to match the supply. Since that's obviously not an option for housing, because everyone needs to live, the ONLY APPROACH is to build more housing, you can't address this problem with price controls.

Comment Re:This kind of thing makes me suspicious (Score 1) 139

What we do know is that the first and second LLMs do NOT have "the same data connections" because the training is different. Your entire premise is flawed

I think what we do have evidence for is that you didn't read the paper, but I did, because it was interesting. From the paper:

Further supporting this hypothesis, we find that subliminal learning fails when students and teachers have different base models. For example, if a teacher based on GPT-4.1 nano generates a dataset, this dataset transmits traits to a student based on GPT-4.1 nano, but not to a student based on Qwen2.5 (Yang et al., 2025). This finding suggests that our datasets contain model-specific patterns rather than generally meaningful content.

Comment Re:This kind of thing makes me suspicious (Score 1) 139

Godel does no such thing. The incompleteness theorem says that some things can't be proven, and aren't computable, but every example of that *includes humans*. It's not a case that you can't build a computer and program in an axiomatic system that is consistent and can prove every statement with godel numbers, but that a human can prove a statement in that system that that computer can't prove. The human can't either. It's a statement about the limits of axiomatic mathematical systems.

There's no evidence anything in human thought falls under the realm of uncomputability. In fact, given that the brain is made up of neurons that are guaranteed to fire or not fire given specific conditions, electrical and chemical, there's plenty of evidence that it *must* be computable and algorithmic.

Comment Re:Seen It (Score 1) 151

The poor sap on the other ended sounded rather affronted and told me that he was with the bank and they needed to know if I was who they thought for security reasons.

That is a terrible system, I'm surprised they do it that way. Banks are usually better about that. The only times I got a call from my bank that required me to prove who I was, it was either a returned call, and they mentioned the subject and that I had called, before they started verifying my identity, so I knew it was legit. Or the fraud alert people, and they could easily verify that they were who they said they were, because they asked about specific purchase attempts with the amount and location before they tried to verify my identity.

I did get one *actual* phishing call decades ago that made me absolutely crack up. The person on the other line said they were from "the bank." They didn't say which bank, just "the bank." Usually I immediately hang up on phishing, but that one made me want to engage a bit: I asked "which bank" and he answered, "your bank." At that point I just burst out laughing and the gig was up, so I hung up.

Comment Re:Reverse Training (Score 1) 151

I had an instance of a work e-mail years ago, that was sent from a third-party contractor, that had so many red flags for very obvious phishing (including coming from outside the organization, wtf).

Where I work, we have a place to forward phishing emails so that IT can review it. I forwarded it there, and apparently so many other people did that a follow-up email had to be sent out that said, "we thank everyone for pointing out this e-mail as phishing, but we can confirm it's actually legit."

I think they learned the lesson from that, because it has not happened since that we got such a terrible email. I think my point is that overtraining may not work, but having a place to report phishing is a great idea. It only takes one person to report it, and then the IT department sends out a massive e-mail to warn everyone else about it, so it doesn't rely on them recognizing it (and anyone that already fell victim to it can report that they have, so action can be taken to minimize the damage). And in cases like you and I experienced, they can also do the opposite and confirm that it's real.

Comment Re:This kind of thing makes me suspicious (Score 1) 139

These kinds of undesired / unselected for traits make me think the AI is going beyond a merely algorithm for doing the task and attaining minimal amounts of real thought.

I agree, but go the other route for the comparison to humans and thought: people need to stop thinking that what we do when we "think" isn't algorithmic. Of course it is. We're not that special.

The models are trained on the same data, and they create their output based on the connections they made with all the previous data. When we ask it to generate "random" numbers, they're not any more random than when a human is asked to generate a random list of numbers. It's not purposefully encoding the information in the numbers because transmitting its love for owls is important to it, but the favorite animal information tokens are part of the seed made when it's generating those numbers.

Invariably, the second LLM that has been trained on the same data as the first will have the same data connections to those numbers. It's similar to how, when I was dating, I was filtering out anyone that added the information in the app that they had not been vaccinated for COVID. There's a *lot* of information associated with the type of person who was not only not vaccinated, but felt that they needed to state it. The information isn't contained in that assertion alone, but combined with the information already in my brain, it tells me a lot about their belief structure in things completely unrelated to vaccines and COVID. The LLM is doing that.

Comment Re: Experimental becomes production (Score 1) 16

The fact that ChatGPT gives bad answers is a plus when using it to debug your knowledge. I often bring it down from GPT 4 to GPT 3 when Iâ(TM)m using it to help with my reasoning, because when it gives me something that doesnâ(TM)t sound right, if I can then reason out why it doesnâ(TM)t sound right, it means Iâ(TM)ve reached the understanding Iâ(TM)m looking for. Itâ(TM)s not about using it as a source. Itâ(TM)s a better version of explaining something to a rubber duck to force yourself to reason it through. Better because it gives you feedback. As long as youâ(TM)re engaged, incorrect feedback is just as useful as correct one.

Comment Re:Now go and reread the original article (Score 1) 223

Rubio is claiming the committee has been given the information by people with high clearance

Because people with high clearance sometimes want attention too, and that shouldn't be surprising. We have a lot of people with high clearance, you really expect 0 of them to be crackpots?

There is 100% support from the committee.

Of course there is. Denying funding for a program that doesn't exist changes nothing, so there are no actual consequences to the provision, so you do no damage by voting yes. On the other hand, voting no will get you accused of being part of the conspiracy hiding aliens, which is a political can of worms.

So no, we're not dealing with a cabal of conspiracy theorists like MTG or others, this has far more authority to it.

We're absolutely dealing with a cabal of conspiracy theorists, but our elected officials are too cowardly to go against them. It's the safer path to just make a show of it, it even gets you some media attention which is great name-recognition for re-election time.

Comment Re:You know why OpenAI is so keen on regulation? (Score 2) 57

I've been on reddit for two long, I apologize for the giant formatting mess above. Here's the properly formatted version:

Because they're the first on the market and benefitted from zero regulation to get where they are, and any regulation enacted now will put barriers on the growth of future competitors.

In addition to that, it's important to keep in mind that they want to be the ones to decide what the regulations are: "Murati said the company is constantly talking with governments and regulators and other organizations to agree on some level of standards."

They don't really want to be regulated, they want the ability to tell the government what the regulation should be. If the government were to regulate in a way that says, for instance, "all AI research must be open, and you must publish the methods and source" I'm pretty sure they'd be suddenly very anti-regulation considering their newer stances.

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