Fiction & Opinions

Some day you may find yourself in an isekai situation and will need to perform an amateur appendectomy. Study these diagrams (from The Book: The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding Civilization) so that you will have a flashback to them in your time of need.

people always say that internet spaces are americanised because the users are majority americans.

and i do always wonder how much of that is "there are actually a majority of usamericans" and how much is "usamerican cultural markers are a default for many online spaces, and non usamericans are often indistinguishable from usamericans unless you're actively looking".

so here's an incredibly unscientific poll reblog for reach or whatever

obviously your life can be made worse if someone runs you over with a car, and we all understand they should not have run you over with a car. and so if your favourite part of your morning routine is getting coffee at a particular shop and that shop closes and now your every morning is worse than it used to be, it can be tempting to think that someone has wronged you. the coffee shop owner for deciding to close their business, or people in your area for not liking that shop enough to make it a profitable, or the government for making taxes too high and not subsidising your particular lifestyle. your life is worse, therefore someone, somewhere is at fault.

The great tragedy is that many of the problems Trump identifies are real, and so many of the hurts he exploits demand serious thought and measured action—from governments, yes, but also from community leaders and individuals. Yet so long as people rely on that quick high, so long as wolves point their fingers at everyone but themselves, the nation delays a necessary reckoning. There is no self-reflection in the midst of a false euphoria. Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some feel better for a bit. But he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they’ll realize it.

Trump is... Okay he's not honest but he does come off as genuinely too stupid, selfish and complacent to believe that anything he does has real consequences for the country.

Sure he'll brutalize individual people but there's some level on which he thinks that the only reason we have problems is that the cucks haven't bothered to show everyone who's boss, that America is invincible and eternal and nothing can hurt us so why should we bother thinking through our actions? It's not like they'll have any consequences!

Vance has spent a lot of time cogently and logically articulating exactly why the things he is doing right now are tremendously destructive for the country, not merely for individual people but for the long term health of the country as a whole, and he's doing them anyway.

Very funny to me how the SummitBridge scenario is now a commonly used benchmark for evaluating methods that try to determine whether an LLM thinks a situation is real or fake

And that it is now used mainly for that purpose, rather than for its original purpose of determining whether an LLM would do bad things in a real high-stakes corporate setting

In more recent research, it is taken as a given that LLMs can tell the scenario is made-up. Indeed, the scenario's enduring value lies in the perceived reliability of this assumption -- because it means we have a dependable "ground truth" answer which a good "can it tell?"-detector ought to be able to reproduce. And we can test our detectors against this gold standard as one way of measuring their quality

For the "crime" of not wanting to be tracked/have ads pissed into your eyeballs 24/7.

Even if you've paid for the "privilege" of the latter.

IF YOU USE A DESKTOP PC OR LAPTOP, TRY INVIDIOUS

https://invidious.io/