the goal for me is co-operation

I asked a sincere question and you reply with snark. I don’t know why you commented when you weren’t willing to advance the discussion. You failed at your goal.

I don’t care for individual greatness and competition

That’s sweet, but it has nothing to do with the topic. It also doesn’t help you any when you need to punch a Nazi. I was talking about the government paying civilians to work for the common good (irrigation, bridges, etc.) and a population with a high standard of living. For whatever internal reason, it seems you decided to thrust imperialism into the definition of “great” – or redefine the word to mean something outside its definition, like “nice”.

Know what’s great? Great White Sharks are great. They aren’t the whitest or largest, but they are the biggest of the commonly seen ass-kicking sharks. Know what’s not great? The Little Blue Heron – but it is much bluer than the Great Blue Heron.

Well then the Roman Empire could never have been Great, nor the Greek, Persian, Ottoman, Chinese and various dynasties therein. Cleopatra wasn’t Egyptian. She and her lineage of rulers were greek conquerors subjugating the locals, if you want to look at it that way. You are denying all of South America the right to ever claim greatness.

I think I made it clear in my post that we all know there’s a history full of problems, so you seem to be trying to redefine terms without making any argument about the current case. Per the OED there are 85 definitions for “great”. Why skip the intended usage (powerful/eminent) for an informal meaning (good)?

The U.S. used to be known for high literacy, excellent schools k-college, high standard of living, countless innovations in sciences from health care to airplanes, and a presumption that you could improve your position in society rather than being confined to a class. All that sort of stuff combined is what I think of when the idea of U.S. greatness comes up.

I think I covered that with my introductory sentence. The post-war boom had to be from more than isolation or we’d expect Mexico and Canada to be rivaling the U.S. for (now falling) dominance.

This reminds me of a post a year ago about orb weaver Araneus ventricosus also using fireflies as bait. I thought this would be a follow-up, but they’re talking about a different species here.

I see a duck demanding peas. Tasty rolly green peas.

On your advice, I read it. Good essay. Yes, the image is Whatever, but the creative part for this post was the pun, so I still gave it an upvote because I haven’t heard it death.

It has always been strange to me that anyone would think animals don’t have a wide range of emotions. I understand that a scientist can’t ask how an animal is feeling, and must instead record avoidance/seeking behaviors, but it also seems vanishingly improbable that emotions aren’t part of a long and useful evolutionary methodology to get to the next generation. Cows have friends. Sure, it took effort to prove, but why wouldn’t we expect that? We see mothers nurture their offspring, and we could easily call it love and concern. It is good to see we now have proof that it isn’t just the cuddly creatures with emotions, but at least as far down the scale as fish.

Hey, that’s what MY radishes look like. Used to look like. I stopped planting them because of these results. I had great broccoli, tomatoes, dill and basil, but scrawny leeks and bulbless radishes (I know that it isn’t a bulb, but the roots should have a bulbous shape and they didn’t).

I read that as including human interaction as part of the pain point. They already offer bounties, so they’re doing some money management as it is, but the human element becomes very different when you want up-front money from EVERYONE. When an actual human’s report is rejected, that human will resent getting ‘robbed’. It is much easier to get people to goof around for free than to charge THEM to do work for YOU. You might offer a refund on the charge later, but you’ll lose a ton of testers as soon as they have to pay.

That said, the blog’s link to sample AI slop bugs immediately showed how much time humans are being forced to waste on bad reports. I’d burn out fast if I had to examine and reply about all those bogus reports.

These attacks do not have to be reliable to be successful. They only need to work often enough to be cost-effective, and the cost of LLM text generation is cheap and falling. Their sophistication will rise. Link-spam will be augmented by personal posts, images, video, and more subtle, influencer-style recommendations—“Oh my god, you guys, this new electro plug is incredible.” Networks of bots will positively interact with one another, throwing up chaff for moderators. I would not at all be surprised for LLM spambots to contest moderation decisions via email.

I don’t know how to run a community forum in this future. I do not have the time or emotional energy to screen out regular attacks by Large Language Models, with the knowledge that making the wrong decision costs a real human being their connection to a niche community.

Ouch. I’d never want to tell someone ‘Denied. I think you’re a bot.’ – but I really hate the number of bots already out there. I was fine with the occasional bots that would provide a wiki-link and even the ones who would reply to movie quotes with their own quotes. Those were obvious and you could easily opt to ignore/hide their accounts. As the article states, the particular bot here was also easy to spot once they got in the door, but the initial contact could easily have been human and we can expect bots to continuously seem human as AI improves.

Bots are already driving policy decisions in government by promoting/demoting particular posts and writing their own comments that can redirect conversations. They make it look like there is broad consensus for the views they’re paid to promote, and at least some people will take that as a sign that the view is a valid option (ad populum).

Sometimes it feels like the internet is a crowd of bots all shouting at one another and stifling the humans trying to get a word in. The tricky part is that I WANT actual unpaid humans to tell me what they actually: like/hate/do/avoid. I WANT to hear actual stories from real humans. I don’t want to find out the ‘Am I the A-hole?’ story getting everyone so worked up was an ‘AI-hole’ experiment in manipulating emotions.

I wish I could offer some means to successfully determine human vs. generated content, but the only solutions I’ve come up with require revealing real-world identities to sites, and that feels as awful as having bots. Otherwise, I imagine that identifying bots will be an ever escalating war akin to Search Engine Optimization wars.

ptarmigan

It sounds like the donor had requirements. From The Tribune:

The University of Chicago has received a $100 million gift from an anonymous donor to support free expression, marking what may be the largest-ever single donation to support such values in higher education, the university announced Thursday.

And:

Discussions surrounding the donation have been ongoing for over a year, according to a university spokesperson.

From https://chicago.suntimes.com/education/2024/09/26/university-chicago-donation-free-speech-expression-forum :

The gift was ridiculed by advocates involved in the encampment that highlighted abuses against Palestinians in the Israel-Hamas War and torn down by the university in the spring.

“It’s truly a slap in the face,” said Yousseff Hasweh, a U of C grad who’s diploma was withheld by the university for two months, allegedly for his involvement in the protest.

I’m fine with removing the Audubon name from any group – not because of John Audubon himself, but because the current Audubon Society seems to be an unscrupulous, anti-union, money-grubbing, greenwashing mess.

Any idea what bird that is?

It looks like it was polished by thousands of footsteps and rainstorms.

I used to have ducks. They LOVE eating slugs. Alas, they also love eating gardens. ;-)

Save your egg shells until they are dried out (microwave if you are in a hurry) and give them a quick buzz in the blender or food processor. This should give you a gritty powder that will hurt the slugs, thereby discouraging them from going wherever they find it. Diatomaceous earth would also work (probably better, but that’s be a purchase instead of a freebie). Dust the plants with either and circle them with a large fat ring of the powder.

My grandma would have said to put out beer traps, but my understanding is that such traps need to be situated well enough to drown the slugs because otherwise they will escape.

Edit: here you go! https://www.learningwithexperts.com/gardening/blog/organic-slugs-snails-control

Given that Israel has nuclear weapons, they wouldn’t be ‘sitting ducks’, but I don’t want to see a nuclear war starting in the Middle East. I doubt it would stay contained to the area. I fear that Russia would back Iran and counter – or at least threaten to – with Russian nuclear weapons, which would get the U.S. or our allies back into the mess but escalated to the whole world at risk instead of just a small contested sliver.

I would love to see a workable path to a two-state solution. Experts have spent their lives working towards that goal and it still hasn’t happened. I totally blame the government of Israel for not figuring out a peace with Palestinian residents back in the 1970s, but here we are. Bibbi makes everything worse and his public falls for his ‘strong man’ shtick just like Americans fall for Trump’s version. Sitting in the U.S., the best election choice I can make for the sake of Palestinians is to vote Harris. Beyond the election, there is room for letters, protests, and boycotts, but the problem is mostly with Israel’s government rather than with anyone in the United States.

In terms of who to vote for in the U.S. presidential election, 3rd parties are spoilers. The U.S. voter is wasting their vote if they stay home or vote 3rd party.