/ˈbɑːltəkʊteɪ/. Knows some chemistry and piping stuff. TeXmacs user.

Website: reboil.com

Mastodon: baltakatei@twit.social

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It is not a contradiction to refuse your child’s desire for you to adopt a cat and to love a cat. If you force a parent to adopt a cat, they will resent you for foisting an unwanted burden on them. However, the cat has no say in the matter, so it makes no sense to resent or punish the cat. Your parent developing a loving relationship with the pet you forced on them does not absolve you of your imposition.


  • The main issue I have as an editor is that there is no straightforward way to retrain the LLM to correct faulty training as directly or revertably as the existing method of editing an article’s wikicode. Already, much of my time updating Wikipedia is spent parsing puffery and removing phrases like “award-winning” or “renowned”, inserted by malicious advertisers trying to use Wikipedia as a free billboard. If a Wikipedia LLM began making subjective claims instead of providing objective facts backed by citations, I would have to teach myself machine learning and get involved with the developers who manage the LLM’s training. That raises the bar for editor technical competency which Wikipedia historically has been striving to lower (e.g. Visual Editor).




  • I think the cognitive reset that psychedelics can awaken come in basically two varieties: delusions of grandeur or empathy. Elon Musk has benefitted from privilege, luck, and the immunity to consequences that comes from being a figurehead leader for people who expect him to make the right noises to support their cause. This lucky run has fueled his fantasy of making humans an interplanetary species like in his Iain M. Banks science fiction novels that he uses to name his SpaceX vehicles.

    In Elon Musk’s case, engineers at Tesla and SpaceX have shared his technocratic vision up until he tried to adopt Trump’s Maga base away from Trump (e.g. with his fascist Nazi salute). Engineers of solar panels, self-driving cars, and space vehicles have to have a minimum level of empathy to deal with the stresses of working in teams to overcome difficult problems; most probably genuinely want to help humanity by expanding capitalism to asteroid mining and Mars colonies; the Maga mob, though, have much more grounded ambitions of restoring their socioeconomic dominance over cultures not their own. Attempting to curry favor with both at the same time only works if your leadership inspiring improvements in solar panel, self-driving car, and space technology dominate news stories with success after success, building and maintaining momentum beyond what Trump can disrupt with his own media stunts like the tariff posturing. But Trump has succeeded in making the Maga faction feel victimized and dominated the news cycle so far in 2025.

    Elon and Trump are both salesmen, but the latter only has to break things to get attention. So, I am not surprised that Elon finds solace in mind-altering drugs to comfort himself from the realization that his support base simply is smaller than Trump’s.






  • “The F.D.A. will approve vaccines for high-risk persons and, at the same time, demand robust, gold-standard data on persons at low risk,” the officials wrote.

    During a “town hall” live streamed on Tuesday afternoon, Dr. Prasad said he thought the new approach to Covid vaccination was “a reasonable compromise,” leaving the shots available to many Americans “but also generating evidence.”

    Before approving Covid vaccines for wider use, the F.D.A. “anticipates the need” for new clinical trials in which participants under 65 are randomly assigned to receive the new shots or a placebo, Dr. Prasad and Dr. Makary wrote in the journal.

    In other words, Vinay Prasad (appointed by Trump to the FDA for claiming the political left was using the COVID-19 pandemic to end democracy) needs to see more evidence (people dying of COVID-19) before devoting resources towards vaccine development.

    I suspect Prasad is a podcast charlatan using his oncologist credentials to advance his career by stoking conservative resentment against mask mandates in order to gain popularity and name brand recognition to sell his personal philosophy books.



  • baltakatei@sopuli.xyztoFuck AI@lemmy.worldCritical thinking
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    1 month ago

    College builds civilization by staging collaborations of people dedicated to integrating threads of past information with one another to generate and share new information. Relying on LLMs to perform said integrations lowers the quality of the generated information unless you also have the same LLMs presenting their research at conferences, performing peer review, and other collaborative aspects of academia.