The theory behind DEI policies is to formally challenge personal bias (both explicit and subconscious) in hiring and participation. There’s nothing inherently tied to unfairly favoring minority groups other than the fact that they are usually the target of negative bias.

It’s a pretty basic and logical idea that acknowledges human fallibility. I hate that it was rapidly co-opted on all sides as a shorthand for racism and opposition to cis-white-male dominance.

Forget 1914. Try 1905. George Cove’s solar electric generator is remarkably similar to modern solar panels.

Maybe we just didn’t let enough children die… 🤔

Step back everyone, we’ve got an Enlightened Centrist here!

Don’t call for violence, let’s just compromise to allow a little fascism! 🤏

Nobody here is calling for purging wrong-think. There are very obvious and visible threats to our society from an enclave of people tearing it apart. You’re making a strawman to conflate targeting them with targeting freedom of thought

That’s not totally true.

Republicans turned out at slightly higher numbers than Democrats relative to their representation in the U.S. population (8 points vs. 5 points).

And there’s a lot there suggesting a leftward lean from the independent portion (eg. disproportionately non-white, non-Christian and urban)

Edit: If anyone has a counter argument I’d love to hear it. Its just weird to dismiss the entire massive non-voting bloc in a country with a long history of right wing voter suppression and anemic left wing opposition.

Republicans put a ton of effort into voter restrictions, ostensibly to prevent mass voter fraud which study after study proves does not exist. Why do they go through the trouble?

Is that any worse though?

Fascista Leggera ⚖️ Full blown McFascism

Someone needs to make an inverse-xwitter platform. You’re only allowed to tweet if you prove you’ve been banned on X.

I’m sure, but a watch is 1000% more convenient if you don’t need any normal smart phone functionality (social media, games, internet access, media player, etc…). Its simpler to not have the option to use those features at all than to blacklist everything.

On top of that, it’s less likely to get lost or dropped/damaged like a flip phone. Probably has better battery life too. For small form-factor messaging + GPS its the most functional package.

One bad thing doesn’t make a different but also bad thing ok. And in my opinion it is worse, imagine if their world view could only come from 5 second videos. Throw those history books away.

And I don’t know that it’s overstated and it’s not at all perpetual. Look at… everything these days. People “disagree” with fundamental facts and are blindly allowing our planet to be burnt to the ground.

It takes concentrated effort to build and maintain an educated populace. The wide availability of books and increased literacy directly caused the Renaissance, pulling down the status quo and giving us access to modern medicine and literally every right + luxury you enjoy today.

I mean it’s the same use; it’s all literacy. It’s about how much you depend on it and don’t use your own brain. It might be for a mindless email today, but in 20 years the next generation can’t read the news without running it through an LLM. They have no choice but to accept whatever it says because they never develop the skills to challenge it, kind of like simplifying things for a toddler.

The models can never be totally fixed, the underlying technology isn’t built for that. It doesn’t have “knowledge” or “reasoning” at all. It approximates it by weighing your input against a model of how those words connect together and choosing a slightly random extension of them. Depending on the initial conditions, it might even give you a different answer for each run.

It can’t ever accurately convey any more information than you give it, it just guesses details to fill in. If you’re doing something formulaic, then it guesses fairly accurately. But if you tell it “write a book report on Romeo and Juliet”, it can only fill in generic details on what people generally say about the play; it sounds genuine but can’t extract your thoughts.

Not to get too deep into the politics of it but there’s no reason most people couldn’t get there if we invested in their core education. People just work with what they’re given, it’s not a personal failure if they weren’t taught these skills or don’t have access to ways to improve them.

And not everyone has to be hyper-literate, if daily life can be navigated at a 6th grade level that’s perfectly fine. Getting there isn’t an insurmountable task, especially if you flex those cognitive muscles more. The main issue is that current AI doesn’t improve these skills, it atrophies them.

It doesn’t push back or use logical reasoning or seek context. Its specifically made to be quick and easy, the same as fast food. We’ll be having intellectual equivalent of the diabetes epidemic if it gets widespread use.

LLMs work by extrapolation, they can’t output any better than the context you give them. They’re used in completely inappropriate situations because they’re dead easy and give very digestible content.

Your brain is the only thing in the universe that knows the context of what you’re writing and why. At a sixth grade level, you could technically describe almost anything but it would be clunky and hard to read. But you don’t need an LLM to fix that.

We’ve had tools for years that help with the technical details of writing (basic grammar, punctuation, and spelling). There are also already tools to help with phrasing and specifying a concept (“hey Google, define [X]” or “what’s the word for when…”).

This is more time consuming than an LLM, but guarantees that what you write is exactly what you intend to communicate. As a bonus, your reading comprehension gets better. You might remember that definition of [X] when you read it.

If you have access to those tools but can’t/won’t use them then you’ll never be able to effectively write. There’s no magic substitute for literacy.

The reason it feels like that is because it’s addressed to someone who you don’t know personally, even if you know them professionally. You never really know if a specific reference would offend them, if their dog just died, how “this email finds” them, etc…

And in the context of both of you doing your jobs, you shouldn’t care. Its easier to get day-to-day stuff done with niceties even if it’s hollow.

That’s just the tone tho. People trying to insist they give a shit when everyone knows they don’t is what bothers me. If you’re firing someone don’t sugar coat it.

In all of those examples, the user knows exactly what they want and the tool is a way to expedite or enable getting there. This isn’t quite the same thing.

If we were talking a tool like augmented audio to text I’d agree. I’d probably even agree if it was an AI-proofreader style model where you feed it what you have to make sure it’s generally comprehensible.

Writing as a skill is about solidifying and conveying thoughts so they can be understood. The fact that it turns into text is kind of irrelevant. Hand waving that process is just rubber stamping something you kinda-sorta started the process of maybe thinking about.

Thanks for appreciating the struggle, I’ll drink to that 🍻

Even looking strictly at the voting population, Trump got less than 50% of the votes; more people voted “not Trump” than voted for him. That’s before you account for the majority of 90 million non-voters holding left leaning views (studies say irregular voters are as low as 40% republican voters) with either no acceptable candidate to support or living under voter suppression.

Did you know it’s possible to with the presidency with as low as 23% of the popular vote? Guess which color states have a massively oversized impact on the electoral college…

The people getting shot are not Trump voters at this point. More specifically, people that are opposed to absolutely destroying other countries are the first ones targeted.

Even if we all suffered perfectly evenly, only 22% of Americans voted for Trump. Please keep the other 78% in mind.