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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The only opinion that should matter is that of the people the artifacts belong to.

    Which people? The government? So in Afghanistan it’s up to the Taliban? If you don’t trust that the government of a country represents the will of the people, then how do you determine what the people want?

    And, again, which people? Is a totem pole in a museum in Canada the property of the Canadian people? Or is it something that belongs to the Haida people, and it doesn’t matter what other Canadians want? If it is up to the Haida, it is up to the Council of the Haida Nation, or is it up to the band the original artist belonged to?

    What about a Tatar artifact found in Donetsk? Who gets control over that? Is it the Russians since they occupy Donetsk? The Ukrainians because they used to occupy it? Do you have to study the blood of various Ukrainian people to figure out who has the most surviving Tatar DNA?


  • if a museum feels under threat

    If you run a museum in Afghanistan and are afraid that the Taliban is going to execute you unless you destroy some blasphemous statue, are you going to risk your life to send the artifact to the British Museum, or are you just going to destroy it? Yeah, some heroes will definitely risk their lives, but most won’t.


  • Clearly Iran sees Israel and the US as enemy and they’ll use anyone will to weaken their enemies

    Clearly that isn’t true. You seem to have an overly simplistic view of geopolitics, and no idea what’s happening in the middle east. The enemy of my enemy isn’t my friend or my ally. They may also be my enemy.

    In this case, Iran is a Shia theocracy. That means they support Shia groups and use those groups to try to fight against Sunni groups.

    For example, Al-Ashtar Brigades is a Shia group that is fighting to overthrow the Sunni monarchy of Bahrain. Hezbollah is a Shia group backed by Iran. Al Qaeda is a Sunni group. IS/ISIS/ISIL are Sunni groups. All these groups are anti-American, but what’s much more important to them is the Shia / Sunni divide.



  • The whole civil war in Syria was an example. Assad was being backed by Iran, Syria’s current president Ahmed al-Sharaa started as an al Qaeda fighter because al Qaeda was aligned against the government, whereas Hezbollah backed it.

    You can’t understand the middle east unless you understand the Shia and Sunni groups and their hostility towards each-other. Pretending Iran supports anybody that says “death to America” means you’re about as knowledgeable about middle east politics as George W. Bush who tried to explain everything with “they hate us for our freedoms”.










  • I hope it goes beyond social media. You have the “richest” guy on the planet going against the “most powerful” guy on the planet.

    Musk could use his wealth to go after Trump’s. Buying up his debts and calling them in. Manipulating his memecoin and crashing it, etc. Trump could retaliate by sending government departments after all of Musk’s businesses. There’s so much potential for two awful people to destroy each-other here.


  • What’s interesting is that almost all the people involved with Epstein are people who suck, but probably most of them weren’t really aware of the child sex trafficking. Epstein’s “day job” was basically being the guy who introduced people to each-other. Rich and powerful people wanted to be part of his social circle so they could be introduced to other rich and powerful people. Because Epstein introduced people, he knew about deals early, which let him make money from them.

    Sure, Epstein had young-looking women around him, but that’s always true of rich guys. I’m sure he vetted the people he introduced to the really young ones carefully because he didn’t want the whole thing to blow up.

    Now, most people assume that everybody who had anything to do with Epstein is a pedophile. So, they’re hating the right people for the wrong reasons… and I can live with that.



  • I think “I don’t know” might sometimes be found in the training data. But, I’m sure they optimize the meta-prompts so that it never shows up in a response to people. While it might be the “honest” answer a lot of the time, the makers of these LLMs seem to believe that people would prefer confident bullshit that’s wrong over “I don’t know”.


  • No, I’m sure you’re wrong. There’s a certain cheerful confidence that you get from every LLM response. It’s this upbeat “can do attitude” brimming with confidence mixed with subservience that is definitely not the standard way people communicate on the Internet, let alone Stack Overflow. Sure, sometimes people answering questions are overconfident, but it’s often an arrogant kind of confidence, not a subservient kind of confidence you get from LLMs.

    I don’t think an LLM can sound like it lacks in confidence for the right reasons, but it can definitely pull off lack of confidence if it’s prompted correctly. To actually lack confidence it would have to have an understanding of the situation. But, to imitate lack of confidence all it would need to do is draw on all the training data it has where the response to a question is one where someone lacks confidence.

    Similarly, it’s not like it actually has confidence normally. It’s just been trained / meta-prompted to emit an answer in a style that mimics confidence.



  • In addition, think about how it was trained to act as though it can think. It wasn’t trained on practical real-world problems where someone typed up the situation and typed out how the situation was handled. It was trained on TV shows, movies, fanfic, letters to the editor, surprising news stories, made up bullshit that someone told as a story, etc.

    Of course it isn’t going to do simple business things like order replacement goods and stock warehouses. It’s going to borrow from movies, TV and crazy news stories to write its own similar stories.