I agree, it has a lot of merits for addressing much of the dysfunction we have. At first I was pretty skeptical and jokey about it (how could a random sample be less effective than what we have now lol?!? and redistrict the lottery, losers! etc) and had a number of concerns but the review makes it clear the book author has spent time working this out in detail. It definitely crosses the threshold of worthy of investing my time to fully understand.

Overall, I can see liking this. But mostly I think the summaries should be public.

In general the problem with moderators is they can be fairly partisan. I don’t know if it’s still the case after the whole API … thing, but certain groups of moderators had access to bots that did what is essentially equivalent to the sort of thing. What tended to happen is the good mods would become overwhelmed and bring on a “power mod” and the powermod has secret axes to grind and political agendas that they bring with them into the sub.

Another problem I generally had with reddit towards the end of my serious engagement there is that a lot of things reported to admin started being evaluated by non-American English speakers who don’t have the cultural context to understand sharp turns of phrase and plays on idioms. Americans would understand the words mean the opposite of what they literally say, but you can’t expect ESL overseas contractors to understand these nuances. So I would be concerned that AI is similar… except for the fact that it’s not really a change from the status quo.

Would be nice if we also had AI summaries of moderator behavior and if these were visible to everyone. I wouldn’t be surprised if admin have (or soon will have) access to AI summaries of moderator activity and behavior. So that might be another shoe to drop. I can see it can be good if it improves modding for the good mods who just want to build communities. Basically it might reduce the need for the powermod protection racket.

According to him, it frees him to vote his conscience since it relieves him of needing to suck party cock. Murkowsky has also been threatening to leave the GOP caucus.

Can we just let X11 die with some dignity? I don’t know who this guy on the video is? Is he important? My impression is he seems like a generic popcorn feeder.

Go fork X11 or whatever, nobody is stopping you! Feel free to try and solve the puzzle of making X11 not suck while subject to the constraints of having to satisfy specifically those users who will not allow you to make any changes that inconvenience their rickety 40yo software that nobody cares enough to update to fix whatever is keeping it from running in Wayland (pro tip we’re not talking about open source software here, the things that break are closed source blobs). It’s well worth the effort rather than spinning up a container or kvm to run that proprietary binary.

Yeah these things are Rorschach amplifiers. It tells you a lot about the person writing the prompt.

What are people still doing on the Internet? There are Nazis on the Internet.

Do you know how bars get filled with Nazis? Someone notices a Nazi and someone shrieks that everyone’s a Nazi and people leave and let the Nazis take over. It’s fighting the Nazis that keep the Nazis at bay, not running away from them.

So odd that a lawsuit and bail is mentioned and yet no actual details. A variety of advocates and etc are supposedly outraged and up in arms etc. And yet no deets. Almost as if some website with Kiev in the domain might be spewing bullshit against Russia. Definitely doesn’t smell like desperate LLM bullshit.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/volodymyr-zelensky-trump-europes-moment-truth

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

That Online Corpus of Founding Era American English seems like a pretty cool database. This is five years old (pre ChatGPT) and seems to have relied on manual search (which itself seems like a vast improvement). I wonder whether large language models are being built to assimilate the entire dataset to answer questions about “original meaning” nowadays and how close to useable they are. It would be even more compelling to have longitudinal versions that can identify when changes in meaning occurred. “Based on all existing written words, it didn’t mean X at that time and that meaning first appeard 60 years later.” Newspapers and legal rulings/documents seem like relatively convincing data sources that have been well curated and relevant to the task. Particularly since SCOTUS post-Scalia has become even more insistent about original meaning. I don’t think it works well post-hoc but it will be interesting for these things to be interpreted when presented as arguments in new cases.

Generally the logic is that once the fetus has reached viability (i.e. capable of being removed and continuing life without the mother), then acts that result in death of the fetus are no longer necessary nor morally valid. It is reasonable to expect the fetus to be removed from the mother and provided life support at that stage.

The two women told detective Ben McBride of the Norfolk, Nebraska Police Division that they’d discussed the matter on Facebook Messenger

… why would they do that?