i meant facebook but yea that thread’s good
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https://twitter.com/JaneMayerNYer/status/1535395303955865601
https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/1535398508827754497
Feels more and more like the ultimate up-from-the-roots answer to the American political landscape is making education more accessible. The more educated people get - and more importantly, the more they learn how to think critically - the less likely it is that they’ll be susceptible to nonsense when they have their political awakening.
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Who’s interest is this in? Is there anyone within 100 miles of the levers of power who would benefit from this?
The idea of DMing a group of PCs acting like Karens sounds absolutely hilarious.
I just imagine a human fighter complaining to the proprietor about how well-kept and the clean the dwarven wenches are at a local tavern and demanding his money back. Just hours and hours of dice rolls, persuasion and barter checks in order to get a few silver pieces back.
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You certainly get credit for self awareness.
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The embedded pdf has the meat of the conversation…and there are definitely some things in there that made me stop and think. Skynet is closer than we thought…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/
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IANAL but I think businesses are required to give tips to employees in most jurisdictions.
My sister gets 6 weeks of maternity leave and that’s considered good by American standards.
Gonna be so fucked up while she’s conducting a therapy session and her water breaking triggers a PTSD episode in their client or some shit like that.
I can’t see the embedded pdf because of the way I defeated the paywall, but I think this article is an example of view-from-nowhere “objective” journalism that does a disservice to its readers. The story here is that Lemoine is a lunatic and LaMDA is a million miles away from sentient AI, but the piece does a bad job at making this clear. A better piece would have explored this in more detail:
But when Mitchell read an abbreviated version of Lemoine’s document, she saw a computer program, not a person. Lemoine’s belief in LaMDA was the sort of thing she and her co-lead, Timnit Gebru, had warned about in a paper about the harms of large language models that got them pushed out of Google.
“Our minds are very, very good at constructing realities that are not necessarily true to a larger set of facts that are being presented to us,” Mitchell said. “I’m really concerned about what it means for people to increasingly be affected by the illusion,” especially now that the illusion has gotten so good.
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Gary Marcus says it’s not. This is him on Sean Carroll’s podcast:
And then there’s natural language understanding and reasoning, and I would say we have not really made progress at all. GPT-3, which we may wanna talk about, gives the illusion of having natural language of understanding, but I don’t really think that it does. And we are nowhere near, for example, an all-purpose general assistant. We’re nowhere near to having the kind of language you would want if you had a domestic robot.
0:09:58.9 GM: I have a cartoon in my book where somebody says, “Put everything in the living room away,” and the robot ends up cutting up with a saw the couch, because it doesn’t understand what it is that we would mean by put everything in the living room. We have no candidate solution for that problem. It’s not just that we made no progress. We don’t even know how to make progress on that.
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Absolutely mind-boggling collapse by USA cricket today to draw against Nepal.
can someone who defines themself as “super far left” please explain to my why people at your far left end of the political spectrum are looping right back around into pure NIMBYism when it comes to housing and the homeless?
When did YIMBYs become “shitlibs” in your eyes? I just don’t get it.
It’s not complicated, YIMBYs believe in capitalism.
This is something of a left-NIMBY manifesto, I guess:
I don’t really know enough about the issue to have an opinion. This contrived example of his about what happens if a new tower is built seems like bullshit, but it might be true that allowing free-market development ends up with undesirable results.
I don’t think I’m going to go so far as cosigning a Nathan J. Robinson article, but I remain extremely unconvinced that allowing property developers to do whatever they want is the solution to anything.
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Large residential developments in cities routinely have affordable housing requirements. However, if there are too many strings attached developers will pass.
The constraint with affordable housing is money. Developers have a lot.
I can confirm that in Toronto allowing developers a lot of freedom to build produced exactly zero affordable housing units and no matter how fast they build new units the cost of housing grows at a pace that everyone describes as unsustainable.
I have a feeling that a genuine solution to affordable housing probably involves SOCIALISM ideas that will be rejected immediately, like having the government build apartment blocks and then rent them to people. “The Projects” is a cultural meme know that stands in for black people and drugs and violence, so that is a total non starter.
The next best thing is simply offering massive incentives to builders to build affordable housing. Instead of saying “You can’t have your permit unless you so X” just go ahead and give them some tax breaks or direct capital to build stuff that will be affordable. But that also is fraught with a lot of boondoggle risk. Ontario is really good at stuff like giving no bid contracts to the Minister’s nephew when they try to do PPP.
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The “offer incentives” strategy is really hard to do well. Inevitably what starts as a good faith attempt by a local government gets turned over to developers and their attorneys/lobbyists for implementation. And that’s in the rare case they didn’t bankroll the campaigns of the entire city council.
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Another trap that Toronto falls into (and I’m sure that this is true in other cities) is that their main revenue source is property tax, which is charged on the assessed value of the property. Affordable housing → less valuable to the owner → less tax to the city. Policies that encourage affordable housing cut into their tax revenue.
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