Photuris

The company I work for is using software sold by palantir.

The software itself is benign, and quite clever and useful, but regardless it feels like we’ve made a deal with the devil to me.

Well, no shit.

I unironically love Latinisation (and Greekification).

“Crabification” would have worked just fine to express this idea, but “carcinisation” sounds so scientific and erudite.

People dog on English, but I think it’s really cool how we have other ancient source languages to pull from to coin “smart” words when needed. And when you dig into the etymology of the “fancy” word, it adds texture, layers, history, and extra context to the whole thing.

Ok, that was a tangent. Carry on.

That’s one (of many) reasons I don’t want to give up remote work.

Bosses say that remote work misses “the human element” and “face to face” time.

Yes, and I couldn’t be more happy about it.

100% we need to switch back to entirely paper ballots, even if it takes months to determine a winner.

Well, they’re certainly not “conservatives.” I see no conserving going on.

So, what do we do?

There are also external AI tools that do this just fine.

But imagine these tools generating summaries of summaries.

No, which is why many of us opposed the Patriot Act during the Bush era.

The question “what about a future administration that could abuse this level of access” wasn’t just a rhetorical one, it was prescient and timely.

The party of small government at it again.

When someone tells you who they are, believe them.

They will be, when it affects them personally.

In other words, typical Republican thinking.

Protestors are adults who understand and accept the risks.

People are going to die defending democracy. And the jackboots will most likely shoot first. We all know this.

War is coming, let’s stop pretending it’s not gonna happen.

Microsoft Outlook started this stupid shit.

Before then, emails (and Usenet posts) were always appended to the bottom, and good netiquette required one to intentionally quote the specific germane lines from the previous message and respond to them inline, point-by-point, for brevity, conciseness, and context, just as God intended.

But the general public (myself included) doesn’t really understand how our own reasoning happens.

Does anyone, really? i.e., am I merely a meat computer that takes in massive amounts of input over a lifetime, builds internal models of the world, tests said models through trial-and-error, and outputs novel combinations of data when said combinations are useful for me in a given context in said world?

Is what I do when I “reason” really all that different from what an LLM does, fundamentally? Do I do more than language prediction when I “think”? And if so, what is it?

Jesus Christ software’s about to get far, far worse innit?

My car CD player had that. And it worked great, until you decided to encode with a variable bitrate (e.g., lame --preset r3mix).

Oh well, 192 will do.

You just unlocked a memory here.

What does your hardware setup look like, if you don’t mind me asking?

I’m thinking of building something, but I don’t want to spend a fortune if I can help it. I run Lllama on a Mac Mini, which works fine, but I’m not able to run the bigger models on that.

Dude, a guy named Constantine literally started this modern Christiandom train rolling with his “Hey guys, I just met Jesus, and he told me I should be in charge now. So, I’m king, ordained by heaven, and we’ll enforce this new order with lots of violence.”

And he and his successors then proceeded to conquer territory, and then mint coins depicting a soldier holding a cross and smashing the head of his enemy under his boot. In hoc signo vinces.

And thus Christian imperialism, conquest, subjugation, and terror has marched along ever since. Lest ye forget the Crusades and the Inquisistion, for example.

Yes, there’s beauty and kindness in the Christian tradition as well. But let’s not pretend that it was all huggy-bunches-of-love until Calvinism showed up.