I misremembered it as being about Iran back then too, but yeah. It’s the War on Terror excuse all over again.

Iran

having nukes

Experts disagree

Man, where have I heard this one before?

Interesting. I feel like the headline is still bad though. I get why they ran with it, at least — “ChatGPT finds kernel exploit” is more interesting and gets more clicks than “Monkey finally writes Shakespeare.”

but this proved that it could be used as a useful tool for helping to detect vulnerabilities.

I think “could” is doing some heavy lifting there.

The company has also warned Microsoft that if its “move fast and break things” ideology impacts the foundation of privacy-preserving apps like Signal, the app may drop support for Windows altogether in the future.

Ooo-hoo-hoo! Now that’s spicy. I like it.

Probably worth mentioning here that this upgrade removed my 2FA, so everybody may want to check and reapply theirs. The 2FA support appears to be less awful this time, at least.

Edited headline stating accusation as if it were fact, linking to a tabloid instead of actual journalism, and copying over ambiguous language (“shells”) instead of using more accurate terms (“seashells” <- a rather important distinction!!) to boot.

Think what you will of what Comey posted, this post & article are incredibly sensationalized.

Don’t feed the troll, folks.

And that’s making them larger and “think."

Isn’t that the two big strings to the bow of LLM development these days? If those don’t work, how isn’t it the case that hallucinations “are here to stay”?

Sure, it might theoretically happen that some new trick is devised that fixes the issue, and I’m sure that will happen eventually, but there’s no promise of it being anytime even remotely soon.

Ah, drat! Usually I’m the one reminding people of Hanlon. Hoist by my own petard!

Yes, and? The money Gates makes from capital he owns comes from somewhere, and I firmly believe that it comes disproportionately from the poor, as that is how America tends to work. So for all he may or may not donate, that money is circulating right back to him. It’s like if a slumlord “donated” $200 to you right before rent was due. You might find it preferential to not getting a de facto $200 discount on rent that month, but he’s still a slumlord and nothing about the “donation” makes him ethical.

As for being better than Musk, I really don’t care. “Better than a Nazi” is not a defense.

“You’re all cowards! How dare you not immediately jump up and recklessly risk the lives of yourself and everyone around you while I sit back and watch?”

Trump isn’t really leading this autocratic coup. He’s a tool of the people who backed and made up the Heritage Foundation and the like.

I never liked this kind of thinking. I heard the same crap from my parents when Biden was in office, and it sounds just as conspiratorial now as it did then.

Occam’s Razor: Trump and his cronies are just stupid fascist douchebags and this is a useful way to get power that is straight out of a typical fascist playbook. The idea that there’s some secret group “handling” him is a movie plot, not reality.

Yeah, I’ve seen this trick before. And I have a feeling he’ll be “earning” many billions in the same time period; how much I don’t know, but I’m cynical enough that I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer was “more than he donates.”

You’re just as dishonest as the last one.

Jesus Christ. I said what I said in the worry that you were suggesting fallacies were clear verdicts, and responded in order to defuse that possibility for both yourself (if it was indeed there) and, crucially, for anyone else reading. I wasn’t trying to annihilate your character.

But I don’t think anything I can do here anymore is worth doing, now. If this is what I get for trying to encourage sympathetic behavior, I’m just not going to participate at all.

This is incredibly hurtful. Goodbye.

In that case, I contend that is is not easy to spot a cuckoo, and believing that is leaves one dangerously prone to overconfidence. So while I appreciate that you don’t see these fallacies as de facto proof of disingenuous behavior, I still feel that you’re running the risk of false positives.

Fallacies are useful for evaluating the validity of arguments and positions, not for evaluating people themselves. Solitary comments can never let you evaluate a whole person, because no whole person fits in a text box.

I don’t believe doomer trolls are right-wing plants (though I acknowledge it’s a potential avenue of attack in the future). I don’t think they usually have ulterior accelerationist motives (though I have spoken with a few). I think for the most part, they’re just people who’ve given up, or otherwise mistaken cynicism for maturity, and seeing anyone else expressing optimism or trying to organize real-world resistance just pisses them off.

This is the attitude I want to see. Believing people are psy-ops, or bots, or being evil on purpose — none of that is necessary and almost all of it is conspiratorial thinking. It’s the kind of thing the right thrives on, and it’s gross.

But this? Saying there are people who have real issues and real grief, and that it’s driving them to bad but genuinely held beliefs? That’s sympathetic, it’s understanding, and above all else it does not divide us. This is what we need more of.

I understand why you’re frustrated, but you’ve got to realize that the presence of resources that can break you out of bad thinking doesn’t mean it’s easy to break out of bad thinking, nor does it absolve those who duped you into the bad thinking in the first place. Cults work for a reason.

Just as an example, consider how hard it is to:

• Find time to learn when you’re struggling to work enough to afford rent
• Find a way to learn that works for you if you’re disabled
• Consider your thinking to be in need of challenge when everyone you listen to tells you otherwise, and you trust them
• Listen to opposing viewpoints when you have thorough hatred for the people telling you them

This is just a smattering of ways a path out of broken thinking can be more fraught than it looks. There are plenty more, so even in cases where these specific ones don’t apply, that doesn’t mean the person in question is intentionally ignorant or malicious.

If you’re angry, be angry. I don’t judge that whatsoever. I only ask that you be angry at the people deliberately trying to make everything worse, rather than the those who they’re tricking. Get mad at the influencers, not the audience.

Very good post. I appreciate the time, effort and insight that went into this as well as and especially the fact that it is advocating for understanding others and seeing why they do what they do without accusations. Thank you for the write-up!

I had more I wanted to say on this topic when I first read it, but at the time I also had more energy. Had I not had other obligations, I would’ve written out my more detailed thoughts then. As it is, however, I’ll have to settle for the (relative) shortform, as I find this thread exhausting from the outset and the sheer quantity of incredibly angry back-and-forth here has only made it worse.

To suffice the ideas of mine that I still remember, then:

• I have a feeling that while you may not consider me specifically to be a “cuckoo,” that this post was still partially aimed at people like myself, since I’ve spent a fair chunk of time arguing to the immense faults of the Democrat Party, some of which was in discussion with you.
• If the above is true, I feel dehumanized and find this topic incredibly depressing.
• Regardless of the above, I find jumping to assumptions of bad faith on the part of those with whom you disagree on this topic understandable, but needlessly conspiratorial.

But to end my comment, I’d like to point out an area on which you and I can find common ground: Your point of “Seemingly doing nothing to actually mount resistance against authoritarianism” suggests you feel that the people arguing against voting / the Democrat Party are doing a poor job of offering alternative solutions. On this, I agree. Solutions for that scenario are hard to come by and often complicated, and where people do have things to suggest a portion of them are very flawed; voting Green, not voting, and the occasional implicit suggestion for violence, etc. All of those have huge problems that I know I don’t need to explain to you.

For that, all I can say is that I agree that leftists can do better and should. I’ve seen the good suggestions before. Things like mutual aid, education, organizing, joining events — all of these are very useful things that are significantly more important than one vote in a broken electoral system. Unfortunately, as you’ve noticed, frustrated and angry people tend to be bad at mentioning these things.

I only ask that you consider that these people are frustrated, angry, and restless, rather than actively fake.