Ehhh..I agree with you on many points - K&P was great, Colbert is a professional, and Colbert Report was hilarious, but the long downward spiral of his talk show is enough to give one pause. I’m sure he didn’t write it all but no doubt directed the material, and how could he not see the shift away from actually trying to be funny? We have enough sources to turn to for political adversaries, and what struck me was there always seemed a clear hilarious and non-partisan way to make fun of whatever Trump was doing, but it was also clear to everyone what they put out was incensed political opposition with god-awful attempts at humor taped on top. Let’s not pretend a lot of writers haven’t used major IP avenues to preach their own version of what they believe, rather than what is entertaining. Let’s hope it doesn’t go this route.

I actually agree. Art is important and like many artists, this guy is hilariously delusional. We also should give a lot of artists a break for their batshit beliefs and not throw out the baby with the bath water as so many modern “progressives” are prone to do.

This guy makes highly public, widely reported, and politically charged visuals as his art form. That’s cool, it is valid and meaningful art, maybe especially if you don’t agree with it. But there is a person behind what is being created. He’s demanding attention to his art and message. There are infinite ways, even with continuing to make his art, for people to not give a shit who you are. He knows what they are.

This sounds more like lashing out about your own capabilities and training rather than reality. Congrats on recognizing your own limitations I guess, even if it’s subconscious and manifests as such.

Change, and advancement in automation and technology, have been constantly altering the specific work and roles of humans for all of history. Shouldn’t we be used to that by now? I have humility in the sense I don’t believe myself to be intelligent- which funny enough is perhaps my greatest intellectual gift. But objectively my multiple science degrees would say otherwise. Point is, if you knew what I did day-to-day in my high paying job you’d say you’d say I was going the way of the horse buggy. I’m not worried at all. This has happened multiple times in my career. It’s always been ridiculously clear as to where I need to shift myself in the value chain.

Intelligence is not a gift, it is a skill and a motivation. We all possess a human brain capable of mostly the same things. AI has simply exposed the group of people working in knowledge industries who learned one ability (programming?) but have been faking it that they actually exercise their brain and understand concepts. They can see the writing on the wall and are lashing out on the tech that WILL replace the one thing they do.

Note I say programming since anyone in the field with the right critical mindset will agree with me here - writing code is but one but one small skillset in a much larger concept of systems and how those interact with people and organizations. The guy who spends his whole day thinking yo write one line of code should not be worried today or ever. The guy who understands little outside of the code he hammers out all day? He should probably start learning to be a plumber or electrician to replace that income.

As neat as the theoretical possibilities are, we have to learn to say no to these ideas at the start, it’s just knowing reality. The Canadian govt has never been able to implement a large scale application project without massive cost overruns and near-complete failure. No different from most other govts and even private companies. ArriveCan, Phoenix pay system, even the simply shit-canned gun registry database, it’s endless failures. We need to accept by now such a project proposal, as insanely valuable and possible it potentially is, will become nothing more than a conduit for crafty, scum-of-the-earth Ottawa lobbyist contractors to fleece the huge allocated budget then disappear. The requirements will be overrun with divisive political interests void of any intelligence. Just look at the ruling government and its ministers for the last decade, do you believe any of them competent enough to deliver anything let alone a massive IT system?

If anyone wants a funny (sad if Canadian) read, check out the ArriveCan entry in Wikipedia for a short summary. $60M (identified, true cost higher) for a simple phone app a few years ago that literally collects a few form fields before arriving at our border. Two real cozy buddies of the Liberal ministers started a fly-by-night corp and took it all baby. This is literally how every IT project Canada will ever attempt will turn out. So let’s just save our tax money now.

As a Canadian I think this is a very stupid idea for many reasons, but the general dismissive attitude of LLM technology here on Slashdot is shocking though not surprising. Since the start of my career in IT 25 years ago I noticed this intense cynicism of new technology from those in the field. They’ve lost all excitement and imagination for things except perhaps some personal niche interests. Some of it is earned of course, we’ve all seen vapourware and snake oil, but the instinctive behaviour is to shit on and dismiss everything. Calling today’s advanced LLMs “sentence generators” is perhaps the perfect example of this stupidity. Yeah, they generate sentences, and we all know how they function (hopefully) and their limitations, but this view of the technology is pure idiotic garbage.

We’ve figured out how to get a computer to converse with humans in natural language for fucks same. That is amazing. This was a holy grail problem in computer science just a few years ago. You know we invented programming languages, and all concise input devices (mice, keyboards, etc) just to bridge this gap? Yes LLMs don’t yet replace the specificity of those, but I for one have been BLOWN AWAY by the advancement in this field. I studied NLP in univ and since GPT v1 dropped I’ve been astounded at just what these systems are able to do. Yes it was easy to trip them up and identify shortcomings, but the relentless focus on just that is stupidity.

LLMs through their training ingestion are brilliant repositories of a vast amount of human knowledge and ideas, and we can now query those in our own language, and receive responses in a nuanced and “insightful” way. It is not sentence generation or regurgitation. It is undeniable to me I can craft questions where it puts together words and concepts in a unique and “creative” way. The fact it is a (debatably) deterministic computer program and current power issues are irrelevant. We’ve clearly cracked a brilliant understanding of how words and sentences relate to concepts and ideas (all it takes is attention right?) and I’ve constantly found the potential applications of this to be profound in a good way.

I’m actually not a heavy LLM user, but I hit it up for interest sake when I’m grinding my brain on something, and it’s getting more frequent. Just in the last short while, I had it deeply analyze my thoughts on our network operations and specific strategies and steps for improvement (admittedly not exciting). I also had a deep conversation about my 20 years journey learning to play guitar and my specific struggles and frustrations. The answers blew me away and and are immediately making me better. Nothing short of a game changer. Calling that a sentence generator.. sorry bud your mind is just spare parts. Societies that take advantage of LLMs will be smarter, more insightful, better trained, more creative, and far more powerful than those who do not.

Trump’s power is the same it has always been. People like you spend every waking moment thinking and talking about him.

No! How can people be so opposite of insightful through these comments? I’ve worked through the ultimate of corporate BS talk-chains, and as the jokes show, everyone knows it. No, it’s quite simply these people have VERY well paying jobs and will do whatever they need to protect that, because of all the obligations they have built around that income. Full stop.

Oh right, this is why they had built enrichment facilities far underground in hidden regions, because that’s what totally peaceful nations do for totally peaceful reasons. Idiot.

Obviously terrible for a school to be hit, but the satellite picture shown here makes it clear what likely happened. Now, why the hell was a girl's school inside of a Revolutionary Guard Corp naval base and missile launch site?

Yeah, I get it, I spent years running a software dev team that rebuilt LOB abomination built in Excel. That said, if you can spend 15 mins prompting an AI and it builds a ticketing or CRM system for you that just works and meets your needs, isn't that a valid choice over the insane costs of the available third party systems?

Just for reference here, most recent annual revenue for Amazon, MS, and Nvidia is approx. 718B, 280B, and 215B respectively. Yes that’s revenue, but a piddly few $B loss would be mostly reclaimed in tax advantages when writing it off. It is absolutely nothing for these companies to toss those amounts around on any bet good or bad.

I know it sounds crazy when talking about billions of dollars, but is nonetheless true: those companies are so massive now (worth trillions) a loss of $5-10B would barely be a blip on a single quarters earnings report. You’re a handful of years out of date with just how massive the tech titans have become.

I think the recent slaughter of protesters actually made it clear what they needed to do. Any government that would not hesitate to kill its own citizens in such a fashion makes it pretty clear they wouldn’t hesitate to do the same to foreigners, and will do anything to stay in power and achieve their twisted goals.

You are correct it was done to finally end the nuclear threat from Iran, but holy smokes you have to be naive to believe the JCPOA was anything but a stupid idea. Iran never did or would have curtailed their enrichment program, it was their clear attempt to hoodwink those countries and I can’t believe Obama was foolish enough to ever take that route (to be fair before talking to them before using force was needed). A muderous regime hellbent on destruction is never going to be a rational player in negotiation. Trump just acknowledged and did the obvious.

Agree with a general non-interventionist approach. Without trying to come to some complex moral judgement on human suffering there are definitely times foreign intervention makes sense simply for security of your home country. It’s good to know what’s going on in the world and what needs to be dealt with before it becomes a huge problem back home. Joining the fight against the Nazis was a clear right choice, and I’d argue keeping the regime in Iran from even having nuclear weapons was also wise.

I think it’s hard for folks to accept the US doing the right thing because they spent so many decades intervening in horrendous ways for ideological reasons, eg fighting communism. Then again, every country that adopted it has seemed to slide down the same path.