Meandering Muse

cause like. apart from the (potential) exception of writing code, there is not really anything useful that a Large Language Model can do.

it imitates patterns in the text that it takes in

that's fundamentally how it works

Yes, haha funny, the AI is bamboozled by spelling, but seriously: I asked Google the same question 5 different times just now, and not only did I get 5 incorrect answers, I got 5 completely different incorrect answers.

The fact that they're different every time demonstrates just how much of an LLM's output is up to random chance. This is how LLMs imitate human language: each stage of constructing the text has built-in randomness, just like how human language has variation and flexibility.

This is my problem with using these things in the workplace. Like, imagine you're using an LLM to fill out a report of an accident that happened, or to write dietary recommendations for a patient, or to give feedback on a paper a student wrote...really anything you can think of.

Even if the LLM-generated text doesn't say anything technically flat-out wrong, the words and details are still randomized instead of being chosen by you for an actual reason.

Zan Zan’s masterclass: A-YAO and his 3 smiling modes

可利用  kě lì yònɡ - lit. available, usable      (maybe, fawning)

可抹杀 kě mǒ shā - obliterating

The Gothic Pool of Landa, Burgos, Spain 

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.

Vie the NYT:

fuck that trick, it's getting sticky in this bitch! // hollanov