AFK BRB Chocolate (CA version)

Yep. And some of it’s so obvious. I mean, has anyone forgotten when a bunch of Republican (and only Republican) senators went to Russia for a July 4th visit?

It’s absurd how wildly successful Putin has been.

I honestly don’t think stupidity explains all of Trump’s decisions nearly as well.

Here’s the one conspiracy theory that always sticks with me because it explains everything. Putin’s number one goal for decades has been to destabilize the United States. That’s why Russian troll farms have posted things supporting both sides of decisive issues for ages. He doesn’t care about the issue, just that Americans fight over them. Trump has been mixed up with the Russian Mafia since his real estate days, and Putin has a lot of dirt on him. Since becoming president, Trump has appointed people most likely to disrupt or destroy the organizations they’re in charge of. The person who wants to get rid of the department of education gets put in charge of it. The person who doesn’t believe in science and who believes junk conspiracy theories, gets appointed health and human services. Many more examples. The goal is to make the government fall apart.

So in that context, Hegseth doing this works either way. If he gets the military brass to fall in line and go against the Constitution, Putin wins. If he tries and the military brass goes against the commander in chief, Putin still wins. The goal is destabilizing the country and taking down the government.

I posted this when I first saw them, and people in the comments said they’re like the Mexican hot chocolate, with some cinnamon and spice. Apparently they’re pretty good.

I’m with you! It was surreal. I found myself thinking, “I’m glad my friend was raised in a repressive christian household.” So strange.

A bunch of years ago, a buddy of mine was asking me how I went from devout catholic to atheist. At one point in the story, I said I realized that my beliefs in right and wrong, and how we should treat each other, didn’t depend on the existence of god - that I would live my life the same way if you could prove there was or wasn’t a god. He seemed surprised, so I asked what he’d do differently if it was proven that god didn’t exist. He thought for a minute, then said “Well, I might kill someone.” I truly didn’t know how to process that, especially since the guy was both very kind and gigantic/ripped.

I’m an old fart - I got my degree in CS in 1985, and I’ve been paying attention to the predictions and advancements in AI for a very long time. I have at least as much issue with the way people think and talk about it as the author, but probably less of an issue with it being called AI. Remember that for decades, the informal working definition of AI was “A computer doing anything that usually requires a human.” So for ages, they said we’d have AI if a computer could read a page of printed text out loud in English. That seemed almost unattainable when it was first talked about, but now it’s so trivial that no one would consider it AI.

People have tried to make definitions that are crisper than that, but few if any of those definitions requires anything we’d call “thinking.” The frustrating thing is that the general public talks all the time about AI as if it’s conscious . Even when we’re talking about its flaws, we use words like “hallucinating,” which is something only thinking beings can do.

To me, LLMs are the worst things because to so many people they seem like the are (or could be) thinking entities. They respond to questions in a lifelike manner and can construct (extrapolate?) somewhat novel responses. But they’re also the least useful to us as a society. I’m much more interested in the Machine Learning applications for distilling gobs of data to develop new medicines or identify critical items in images that humans don’t have the mental bandwidth for. But LLMs get all the press.