Apparently the only way the candidates will agree to do it is if the format is so stilted that there’s no chance of anyone learning anything or seeing the candidates get challenged on anything. It’s basically just a taking-in-turns version of a campaign commercial.

What, indeed, is the point. Like a lot of American politics, the whole “debate” survives as a pointless vestige of a thing (now long forgotten) that was useful and productive in its original form, but now is mutated to a useless and unrecognizable monstrosity, which you have to pretend is super serious and important if you want to be able to be on TV.

Yeah. I mean it’s hard to blame them–

You know what, fuck that, let’s blame them. They have a responsibility. This is like all the German businesses that played along with the Nazis because it was easier and then had to change the subject when their grandkids asked them about the war years. Like yeah grandad ran a, uh, a pots and pans factory. Yeah. Just pots and pans. Now go play outside.

In ordinary times I think it would be fair to say well you know a bunch of them didn’t focus on the bottom line and went out of business and everyone had to get new jobs, so hard to blame the ones still around. But this is kind of all hands on deck time. It’s one thing if you don’t want to write articles about the IRA and all good stuff about Biden. It’s a whole different fuckin story if you want to write stories feeding into getting the guy elected who is going to fuck up your home and city and business and economy and the safety of you and your families, too, and then (I am sure) stand around like “we’re all looking for the guy that did this” if it winds up coming true.

It gave some sound bites for people to hold up as examples of why Biden is old which I’m sure we will be seeing on certain news networks from now until forever going forward

And gave a bunch of “objective” news outlets a good excuse to write a bunch of “DEMS IN PANIC AFTER BIDEN’S UNFORGIVABLE SHIT SHOW” articles they are for some reason eager to write

Other than that significant amount of fodder, I think nothing of value occurred

Why would you hurt me this way

GPT-4 generally doesn’t need fine tuning or anything no

100% right; unless you are using it a ton the API pricing is likely to be cheaper

You’re going to think I am joking but I am not. Multiple people have sworn to me that this works for a common failure mode of HDD drives and I’ve literally never heard someone say they tried it and it failed. I’ve never tried it. Buyer beware. Don’t blame me if you fuck up your drive / your computer it’s connected to / anything else even worse by doing this:

1. Stick it in the freezer for a short while.
2. Take it out.
3. Boot it up.
4. If it works, get all the data off it as quick as you can.

GPT4all can do it pretty easily on a desktop with a good GPU. I think it’s unlikely that anything can run locally on your phone (LLMs are notably hogs in terms of even pretty capable desktop PC resources; there’s just not a cheap way to do them). You could use colab or something via your phone, and there is probably a little howto guide somewhere that shows how to do a Mistral setup on colab. It’ll take some technical skill though.

You might just bite the bullet and do $20/mo for the GPT-4 subscription also. It can also do web searches, I think, although in practice it’s pretty clunky the times it’s tried to do things like that for me. I’m not aware of one that does the “search the web for answers and get back to me” thing really all that perfectly or smoothly I’m sad to say.

GPT-4 is apparently the model to beat. I haven’t seen all that much difference in practice between GPT-4 and 4o. I’ve heard various claims about various other models outperforming it (notably including Claude) but I haven’t seen the claims materialize over the long haul as yet.

I have however heard that Mistral can get quite close to GPT-4, run for free locally with the right hardware, if you build up a hand curated set of around 100 query/response pairs from GPT-4 that are what you want it to do, and then fine-tune Mistral against that training set. I haven’t tried it but that’s what I’ve heard.

I classify most of those people as shills. The people who want to talk about communism or anarchism or pro-China/Russia-ism, and lack of any interest or hope for US electoral politics as kind of an outgrowth of that but US electoral politics is not the main thing they are interested in focusing on, I classify as probably authentic tankies.

Like I say, of course, I have no idea. That’s just how I write it down in my head.

Jon Stewart for president with someone central to Biden’s cabinet who actually knows about politics and the stuff Biden was doing, as VP, to be able to give him on the job training on the actual politics part to match his sharpness level and his heart

I don’t care if he doesn’t want the job

I think Biden has done great stuff (domestically 🙁) and I would expect good policies from him and obviously a dead plant would be a better president than Trump, but his debate performance is kinda hard to put a good spin on

And therefore it is clear that what the world needs to see is a Jon Stewart vs Donald Trump debate

Fixed

John Stewart

Edit: Sorry I meant his brother, Jon Stewart

So, Gary Brechner wrote an article about this, like 20 years ago: Basically, that the combination of expense to build, and vulnerability to specific asymmetric threats, that huge ocean-floating warships represent, means that in the long term they are doomed as a serious military platform. They should go on the shelf alongside that thing the Nazis did with trying to build small-building-sized tanks, as something that just doesn’t make sense when all factors are considered.

It might seem that the submarinization of the Black Sea fleet proves him out, but as it happens, I coincidentally got to talk recently to an actual military strategy expert on the topic and this was his take:

• Deterrence is a relevant factor. Lots of expensive military kit is pretty vulnerable. The issue is, if you do start taking steps to attack it, what’s going to happen to you in response. That’s at the heart of keeping a lot of big powers’ naval forces safe, more so than them being invulnerable. Real no-holds-barred war is pretty rare in the modern world; most military kit goes around most of the time being used for force projection or little proxy wars, usually not full-scale war against peer enemies.
• It may be that the big ships are becoming more vulnerable as time goes on, yes, but it’s not like that’s new. Once it does go past the level of “we don’t want to do that / provide weapons so our proxy can do that because we’re scared of the response,” and proceeds to a real fuck-'em-up war, losing big battleships and carriers at a shocking rate has been part of war since around World War 2. They’re hard as fuck to defend and navies tend to be super cautious with where they put them as a result, and once it comes to a real war, they start sinking yes. It’s not like land warfare; it only really takes one day where something goes wrong to sink billions and billions of dollars worth of your navy irrevocably. Adding a new way that that can happen doesn’t necessarily change the shape of the war because it was already happening and was already part of the calculus.

I think, as some other people have said, that most of it is bad strategy and tactics by the Russians, of putting their big naval assets within range of the weapons that can fuck them up and for some reason not reacting (until very recently) when as a result they started sinking like pebbles in a pond.

Sure. My question is, why such a concerted effort to look for bad things about such a clear win?

Like would it work the other way? If the IRS was making life more difficult and expensive for everyone making W2 income under $79k, would you be out here saying well I guess an L is an L, but let’s remember it only applies to W2 earners and only some of them and anyway it’ll probably get overturned later on and I want to highlight the program’s important limitations and etc etc, instead of just saying “that’s a bad thing” like a normal person?

So you think it’s a good thing, just doesn’t go far enough / needs to be extended further in the same direction in the future?

The truth is, I have no idea and I don’t think it’s all that productive in most cases to try to sort it out or talk about it. I didn’t actually say anything at all about what the person was; I simply highlighted flaws in their argument and linked to one of their other comments and let the reader draw their own conclusions. In this case I think they were so self explanatory that I didn’t really need to indicate any of what my conclusions were.

But… to deal explicitly with my conclusions, I’ll say that in almost every case where there’s some kind of weird nonsense-logic, and then poking through the person’s history instantly yields some “let’s not vote for Biden” advocacy, I do personally tend to draw the conclusion that they’re a political shill. If I saw a bunch of geopolitical stuff or extended arguments about Marxism then that would tilt the scales in favor of tankie (although like I say, this is only my private logic about it, not like anything I would present as conclusive, because it’s basically impossible to tell.) Going into mainstream political forums and getting real vocal about how people involved with mainstream US politics are supposed to engage with it doesn’t strike me as real common tankie behavior.

I looked back in my history as an exercise in self criticism, and I found many many recent instances of me arguing with people I’m pretty sure are shills without bringing that accusation into it in any capacity, because usually, it’s not relevant and I think just dealing with their arguments at face value is more productive. And then, I found a comment from a few days ago where I called the Biden administration “fuckin assholes” about their support for Israel.

I won’t say that back further ago than that, you won’t be able to find me accusing someone of being a shill, because you will. I will say something about it in cases like this where it’s (a) hilariously obvious and (b) relevant to the conversation on a level that makes bringing it up productive, in addition to dealing factually with what they’re saying. But I actually don’t say it nearly as often as I think it. I won’t speak for how anyone else likes to do their internet arguments, but just as far as my conduct is concerned I’m pretty sure you’re just making up a convenient reality that doesn’t exist. Both of your main accusations here have nothing to do with the actual reality that exists in the real world.

I’m not sure why you’re committed to saying something “rebuttal-like” here, instead of just “yeah that guy’s full of shit” without any “but” attached afterwards, athough I have a theory.

(Also, this conversational pattern – where one person who is pretty clearly a shill expresses a statement, and someone does a rebuttal, and then the first person disappears completely and someone different instantly jumps in and starts conducting the conversation or attacking the rebutter – happens often enough and is slightly-unusual enough that I think that pattern is worth pointing out, also.)

So I thought to myself, well that’s a weird comment. It’s nonsensical in a couple of different ways.

1. Creating a program that does something good that wasn’t there before doesn’t somehow become a bad thing if there are ways in which it doesn’t do enough. Almost every real action which takes place in the real world represents some kind of imperfect step towards an ideal future, not like a “we got it perfect the first time and every single nook and cranny of the objective is satisfied by this, the first attempt we made to improve things.”
2. People who draw mostly W2 income actually aren’t “destitute” necessarily. I don’t even know where the connection came from. Most people who are struggling in life have simple taxes. Most people who are doing well have complicated taxes this doesn’t apply to. Your complaint, even taking the rest of it at face value and using some un-addressed population as a reason not to address things for the 140,000 people in the pilot program or however many millions will be addressed by this second phase, is backwards.

So I sort of wondered to myself: Why would someone be so aggressively negative in this specific way about something that almost any normal human being would look at and say “hey that’s good,” and for such weird and counterlogical reasons?

And so I looked three comments back in your history and said oooooohhhhhhhh okay I get it it all makes sense now.