May the Bridges We Burn Light Our Way Home

LLM's are at this point, trained on all human text that has ever been put to print.

You have read a lot of text, but there are large swathes you have read nothing of (besides language). Claude has read these just as much as you've read tumblr.

Which means LLM's include

scripts that were actually spoken, which is fairly different from how we write

pointless, unreadable, and banal gluck, that was never expected to be read. business presentations, technical manuals for casual users.

More generally, and in a way that's a serious problem for society in general:

I think "being right wing", "having serious concerns/differences, and lack of trust of left-wing facts", and "what is actually, actually true or not" are now somewhat independent from each other.

From the point of view of the right wingers, all that is happening is that left-wingers and their institutions are saying obviously incorrect things, and nobody actually has direct contact with the facts.

And it seems like once upon a time the effects of that were not so pernicious.

“We do not have trade schools,” he said. “We are not investing in educating a next generation of people like my grandfather who had nothing, who built a middle-class life and a future for his family.”

Buddy - your grandfather was probably able to find a job that would teach him what he needed to know in order to do the job.

If FoMoCo offered Promising Earnest Young Persons $120K/year - or even a lot less than that! - to be mechanics, with the promise that you'd provide the needed training, I have very little doubt that you'd fill all your vacancies pretty much immediately.

Option 1: Selfless, empathetic, and cooperative.

Option 2: Selfish and largely driven by individual need.

There’s a certain woman here named Angela Davis. I don’t know if you are familiar with her in this country, but in our country, literally for one whole year, we heard of nothing at all except about Angela Davis. There was only Angela Davis in the whole world and she was suffering. We had our ears stuffed with Angela Davis. Little children in school were told to sign petitions in defense of Angela Davis. Little boys and girls, 8 and 9 years old in schools, were asked to do this. Well, they set her free. Although she didn’t haye a rough time in this country, she came to recuperate in Soviet resorts. Some Soviet dissidents—but more important, a group of Czech dissidents—addressed an appeal to her: “Comrade Davis, you were in prison. You know how unpleasant it is to sit in prison, especially when you consider yourself innocent. You now have such authority. Could you help our Czech prisoners? Could you stand up for these persons in Czechoslovakia who are being persecuted by the state?” Angela Davis answered: “They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison.” That is the face of communism. That’s the heart of communism for you.

There’s lots of talking about police and prison abolition lately, so I wanted to reiterate one thing: the police is bad not because of some magic property that taints the hearts of men being part of the group specifically called “the police” with vile darkness, they are bad because they wield unaccountable power. A rose by any other name, having this power, wuld be just as capable and willing to beat, choke, harass, taze and shoot people for the hell of it. No matter if it’s name is Police, People’s Militia, or whatever euphemism you’re gonna cook up.

"Ambiguously brown" - frankly that's just lazy, that could be anywhere. Just say "brown" if you really have to.

"Ambiguously African" - okay you have a vague guess of a continent

"Ambiguously Central Asian" - plausible to narrow down on sight if you're very familiar with people from around this region

"Ambiguously Baltic" - this mf is either Latvian or Lithuanian, and I am intrigued by the fact that your estimate is this precise but you still aren't confident enough in your assessment to guess which one

Also were the Polish who emigrated to the United States particularly good at slinging sausage (by which I mean literal kielbasa) or is that just a default trait of Poles?