One thing that's particularly frustrating about all this is that any conversation with the growing contingency of distrustful people has been made very difficult by what I would call poor, avoidable, and illiberal decisions made by the federal government during COVID. (TBF, decisions during a crisis are always hard.)
Lab leak theory was dismissed and actively suppressed. Inflated claims were made a priori about absolute vaccine efficacy that any responsible researcher who have not made.
Moreover, the trouble with trying to shut down real disinformation, eg claims that vaccines were more dangerous than the virus, is that many people will view any sort of paternalistic behavior by the government, especially around speech, with suspicion. ("Why do they care so much about what I say? They must be hiding something")
In the age of social media, I think the study of public health needs to consider more seriously the effects of viral psychology. The irrationality and stubbornness of people needs to be expected when planning public policy.
Having lived through it myself, I found the government’s actions extremely mild when compared to something like what ICE has been up to. Zero people were directly killed by authorities because of Covid noncompliance.
From my perspective, it’s hysteria borne out of the difference in requirements for urban health policy vs. rural health policy, and the fact that rural people quite often travel through urban areas (e.g. airports).
Talk to anyone from Wyoming and ask what Covid was like during the worst days, and then talk to an ER doctor who worked in New York City.
Cynically, I want to blame it on the absurd lack of empathy of rural Americans and a complete lack of ability to imagine day-to-day lifestyles that do not match their own.
Were there a few scandals? For sure, I will not deny that. But I have the distinct urge to invent time travel for the hemmers, hawers, and devil’s advocates and transport them to New York Presbyterian in April of 2020.
Edit: I also have to credit rightwing media, of course, for capitalizing on the opportunity to manufacture a wedge issue that every American had an armchair opinion of. Chicken and egg, of course, but media ghouls will be media ghouls.
> Cynically, I want to blame it on the absurd lack of empathy of rural Americans and a complete lack of ability to imagine day-to-day lifestyles that do not match their own.
Doesn't that cut both ways, though? Controls needed to keep densely populated areas safe aren't always necessary in low density areas like Wyoming. Yet some of those controls affected the livelihood of many people in areas of the country that are often poorer than those in dense urban areas.
And, yes, if a rural person is traveling to an urban area, they would have to abide by the same rules. Same as an urban person traveling to a rural area should be able to relax some of the restrictions they had to deal with. But it was mostly all or nothing, helping the divide grow even larger.
> And, yes, if a rural person is traveling to an urban area, they would have to abide by the same rules. Same as an urban person traveling to a rural area should be able to relax some of the restrictions they had to deal with.
Isn’t this precisely what organically happened? Again, there were no federal agents armed with guns and pepper spray roaming the nation, enforcing Covid compliance. Rural bars, restaurants, stores pretty much all remained open the whole pandemic minus the couple of weeks where we weren’t sure if it was thousands or millions of people who would die.
People were “forced” to wear masks, which again, in practice, meant that once you got a certain number of miles away from an urban center there was no enforcement.
Plenty of Americans never got vaccinated. Their travel was restricted. Fair trade off all things considered. Urban people shouldn’t be forced to eat (i.e. live) where rural people shit (i.e. gallivant around as a disease vector).
> Yet some of those controls affected the livelihood of many people in areas of the country that are often poorer than those in dense urban areas.
This is very bad faith. The rural poor were completely unaffected by Covid measures. I traveled to Kentucky throughout Covid for hiking and pretty much never saw a mask. The rural poor also were unaffected by travel restrictions because the rural poor do not travel.
I swear the only acceptable policy for some people would have been no policy at all. Any active policy would have eroded “trust in institutions”.
I was more middle of the road. I live in a rural red red state. Then during COVID people would yell at my dying of cancer mother on chemo for wearing a mask while grocery shopping. Eventually the stores had to set special hours so people like her could shop without harassment. My politics have been greatly impacted. I was shown there is no compassionate conservative, that is just cover for 'fuck everyone who is not me and my in group'. Or if there are compassionate conservatives, they don't care to step in an impose compassion, so they might as well not exist. My mom died afraid to go shopping in her own community because she would be verbally abused. My politics are never going back.
Zero patrons inside the stores cared/did anything. A business structuring things to prevent a scene is not compassion in my mind, just like pride awareness by businesses wasn't actual pride awareness.
Deciding whether someone's helpful actions or lack thereof is good or bad based on your perception of their internal mental state seems pretty fraught. How do you know why the business implemented this? How do you know what the other patrons felt about it? Do you regularly pick fights with psychopaths in public?
If a woman is being harassed, especially an old one, yes, I have always stepped in. That used to be a part of me I thought was conservative. But it doesn't appear to actually be a trait they hold.
I'm not litigating my mothers treatment here. I am expressing the damage done.
I am so sorry that happened to you and your mom. We've become so tribal there's very little space for compassion for the vulnerable as we are positioned to fight tooth and nail.
I lived in Manhattan in April 2020 and specifically know doctors who worked in the ER at Mt. Sinai. I think the vaccine mandates, to the limited extent there were any, were not paternalistic in a way that was unreasonable.
I would not say shutting down all discussion about a topic (lab origin) that ends up getting vindicated is a minor scandal. It's something everyone observed that erodes trust at a national level.
> I would not say shutting down all discussion about a topic (lab origin) that ends up getting vindicated is a minor scandal.
“Shutting down all discussion” - lol. I mean this is grossly hyperbolic. Were social media companies coordinating with the government to slow disinformation? Yes. Was it applied too broadly? Maybe. But describing it as “shutting down all discussion” is a disservice to people who don’t know as much as you and I do.
And yes, in the grand scheme of things, it is a minor scandal. Have you watched the news recently? Save your energy for issues that matter.
Harris lost by a couple percentage points in few key states. Perhaps the news you are talking about wouldn't be happening if trust in institutions hadn't fallen so low.
I don't think whataboutism is helpful here. I think the FDA was broadly well-intentioned, and this administration is not. But this article isn't about ICE.
You're right, this article is about the Trump administration going out of their way to pick political appointees who go out of their way to make us sicker in such a despicable way that even they cannot justify it.
It's wild to me that we keep talking about Biden/Kamala as if they are the ones responsible for the lost in trust in institutions when we have a Republican party and Fox news that blast that the government can do nothing right for the last 3 decades of my life.
Sure, the Democrats can do a LOT better for the common folk, but it's so misplacing the blame as to be mind boggling.
What I often hear is that it's not useful to blame conservatives, but conservatives can live 90% of their political lives by blaming others, shifting the blame even for things they actively choose to do on their own.
People reject science because of misinformation spread by conservatives?! Oh that's the scientists fault for not doing a better job of countering the conservatives!
"Lab leak" may or may not be true, but it's (a) going to be extremely hard to find evidence for given time and China, and (b) .. ultimately irrelevant? Are there people who think "COVID was a bioweapon and therefore we shouldn't mask up and get vaccinated"?
There are many people who say they view any sort of paternalistic behavior with suspicion. But one obvious example of paternalistic behavior would be banning vaccines that people want to receive based on vague concerns of unproven harm. An even better example might be creating a site called realfood.gov, instructing the American people that only some kinds of food are "real" and you should ideally only eat "real" food.
So if someone says they oppose paternalism in public health and yet supports the Trump administration's public health efforts, I'm not sure how to avoid the conclusion that they're lying.
It seems reasonable to me too. It's good and proper for the government to tell people that certain foods are better than others, even when the bad foods are popular. Eating a pile of candy every day isn't a personal lifestyle choice we're required to respect and encourage; it's bad for people who do it and bad for society to have lots of people doing it.
What I don't see is how anyone could argue this isn't paternalism.
They’re pushing back against the parent comment’s suggestion that it’s a reaction to government “paternalism” in general and much closer to just “paternalism I don’t agree with”.
HTTP can't ensure what happens in the application layer is safe or idempotent. It is up to the developer to ensure that the implications communicated by their api design are in fact true.
Yeah those servers need to be updated anyway to support the new standard
Also, anyone using these servers is not currently putting params in GET body because doing so wouldn't work.
Those that oversee evolving standards seem to take extreme cautious to not rock the boat, and so more and more gotchas for the sake of backwards-compatibility keep getting added to the mountain of random details new devs have to learn. Which will soon include the difference between a GET and a QUERY I guess.
Technically a put or a patch is also idempotent. The benefits are idempotent and safe (and semantically appropriate). Post (generally) communicates something is changing whereas a query doesn't
PUT is idempotent, PATCH is not always. The semantics of a PATCH payload are up to the server and standards like JSON Patch (RFC 6902, https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6902) allow non-idempotent operations like adding an item to a list.
They might co-occur, but they aren't the same thing. It's easy to communicate something in a way that (a) the recipient understands clearly; and (b) the recipient refuses to acknowledge despite understanding it. And in the other direction, you can persuade people to do things without them ever understanding what you want or why the things should be done.
okay... here's another way of thinking about it: claude, gemini and chatgpt are very good at communicating. but, would you marry claude? would you want claude to be your boss? would you want claude to be your coworker? a lot of people are choosing claude to be their intern, which is something.
what i am saying is, having people skills are the answers "yes" to all those questions. you can cynically call getting a job nepotism, or you can call it, well people like to work with their friends at the cost of measures of competency. and maybe, the core competency is being pleasant to work with or work for.
another place people struggle with this is executive compensation. if i told every DoD employee they could get a 10x better boss for only $20/y, every single one would, which is $58m in executive compensation. but the DoD CAN'T do that, and its leadership is TERRIBLE, so... do you see?
Regardless of the implementation, claude causes concepts to enter my brain, so it is at least one-way communication. Human brains have mundane implementations as well: chemical signals firing across neural synapses. No magic special sauce, at least not that we can detect
I would say you communicate to the model and you interpret the model's outputs. I would not say the model communicates back though.
I'm not sure that models are complex enough to have a consistent internal representation of a concept the same way that organic brains can to communicate. I'm not sure of any quantitative science backing this up though. Models don't know anything across iterations yet.
Most models do not have any persistent state or output that is separate from their input. They consume a stream of tokens and then output a probability distribution. The probability distribution will always be the exact same for that particular stream of tokens. There is no internal state, thoughts, mood etc., only prediction based on the input. "Memory" is usually just something injected into context by the harness and updated by usually a tool call from the model.
I'm sure there are research prototypes that work differently from this but I haven't seen any enter the mainstream yet.
Also, diffusion language models have a different evaluation order but I think they also do not really have internal thoughts or feelings because they also do not seem to have any sort of hidden state that encodes anything like that.
I think there are tradeoffs though, and this has been a thorn in my side during technical interviews where you are expected to think out loud because:
1. Sometimes you have a vague sense of the shape of the solution, and ime it can be helpful to sit with it for a while before trying to shape it into words.
2. Talking out loud forces structure but it also rate-limits how quickly you can iterate through ideas to find one that plausibly solves the problem at hand
As someone who has spent a good deal of time trying to build ereader software, eventually I decided to try to deal with the devil and build on top of RMSDK.
There is no way to get access to it. I don't mean the licensing cost is prohibitively expensive for an indie dev although I understand that to be the case as well.
There is no one to talk to. The email listed on their website does not respond to anything. Not even so much as a "Thanks for your interest" or a "We will get back to you".
I messaged a former colleague who worked there to try to see what the process is to get access to rmsdk. He said he tried to find internal docs about it and couldn't find anything.
I tried to find people on linkedin who might be associated with rmsdk and ask them and similarly found nothing.
Meanwhile publishers only distribute most of their titles with one of their known drm vendors ie Apple, Amazon, or Adobe. The other two are entirely closed off.
If this isn't anticompetitive trust behavior, I don't know what is.
The last time I looked into this, readium lcp drm wasn't something US publishers were comfortable distributing their titles with, although it seems like this may be changing, which is good insofar as readium is at least open source and free to build with.
Sure thing. I've actually been working on the spoiler-free resource angle as well. I can book a call to talk. Distribution is the killer problem here though.
Yay! Registrations to https://merrilin.ai are open and you can enjoy a free account for as long as I can afford to give it (I have no funding lol). The android app is ready for closed testing too, if you have an Android device, mail me at mail [at] stonecharioteer.com and I'll add you to the beta testing. ios is still a pain.
Why don't you do sign in with openrouter oauth, then users can create an account and assign a key to your app, with spending limits. It's trivial, plus if you get a decent amount of users your app will appear on the leader board and that's free marketing for your project.
That's a good point, but our harness right now is very fine tuned towards kimi2.6, it's something we want to improve but it's just 2 broke dudes working on it right now.
That’s really cool! I’ve been thinking about how LLMs could help me with long running series. I read lots of stuff that’s thousands of pages long with a huge cast of characters and locations. Amazons X-Ray is okay ish but (1) not supported everywhere and (2) amazon.
It would be really fun to have a progress-aware AI that can give me a quick definition of entities like people and places. The other thing that would help is details about fictional mechanics. How exactly does FTL work in this universe? What were all the cultivation stages? I don’t need help with reading comprehension, I need a better way to flip back through everything and surface the key detail that was mentioned one time 500 pages ago.
Also, unfortunately my library lives in Kindle. Help me get it out, at least the DRM free stuff. I also use Royal Road extensively and pay for that. Would be great to have those live serials supported somehow.
You're in luck. I built this especially to target series and you can ask questions across books whether they're in a series or not. I wanted to be able to ask questions of books that aren't even related to each other together.
Royal Road looks cool. Do you know if you can extract them into an epub? I have a user who extensively reads Web Novels and I wrote a blog post about that just today. He converts them to epubs AFAIK and uses them.
That’s really cool! I’ve been thinking about how LLMs could help me with long running series. I read lots of stuff that’s thousands of pages long with a huge cast of characters and locations. Amazons X-Ray is okay ish but (1) not supported everywhere and (2) amazon.
It would be really fun to have a progress-aware AI that can give me a quick definition of entities like people and places. The other thing that would help is details about fictional mechanics. How exactly does FTL work in this universe? What were all the cultivation stages? I don’t need help with reading comprehension, I need a better way to flip back through everything and surface the key detail that was mentioned one time 500 pages ago.
Also, unfortunately my library lives in Kindle. Help me get it out, at least the DRM free stuff. I also use Royal Road extensively and pay for that. Would be great to have those live serials supported somehow.
First of all, it doesn't. The Silicon Valley market fundamentalist, future worshipping contingency is still very much alive and well here.
But I do agree and have noticed that the tone here is radically different than it would have been five or ten years ago. I've been around for a while here as well.
I think that's a sign of the cultural shift underneath our feet. Silicon Valley and the tech sector in general has almost no goodwill left. They've harmed too many people for that at this point.
I think the deeper issue is a chronic misunderstanding of what wealth is. Most people engage with wealth in the form of usable goods and services. A banana is wealth. A house is wealth. A dollar in my bank account or a share I own is, at the margin, entirely fungible into things I can consume, so they aren't meaningfully different.
This is an illusion. A share has value because it represents the hypothetical future productivity of an abstract entity that may or may not even exist in the future.
At the margin, you can take an Amazon share and buy bananas with it. However you absolutely can't take the entirety of Amazon and exchange it for a trillion bananas. Those bananas don't exist.
More importantly, you can't take the entirety of Amazon and transform it into housing supply. I think people are often too careful about "missing the forest for the trees" and then conceive of problems as overly abstract. The affordability crisis is, first and foremost, a housing shortage.
Young people can't afford homes. Millennials are hitting 40 and realizing they may never afford one. Being secure in housing is pretty damn low on the Maslow hierarchy of needs. Sure maybe we need a more progressive tax policy, but this myopic focus on billionaires distracts from the real problem which is a housing shortage.
1. The contractors move to where the money is. They will migrate to specialized work that will not benefit those who can’t afford “competitive” prices.
2. You can borrow 1T dollars in cash, effectively maxing out what the physical world will allow you to spend it on.
Lab leak theory was dismissed and actively suppressed. Inflated claims were made a priori about absolute vaccine efficacy that any responsible researcher who have not made.
Moreover, the trouble with trying to shut down real disinformation, eg claims that vaccines were more dangerous than the virus, is that many people will view any sort of paternalistic behavior by the government, especially around speech, with suspicion. ("Why do they care so much about what I say? They must be hiding something")
In the age of social media, I think the study of public health needs to consider more seriously the effects of viral psychology. The irrationality and stubbornness of people needs to be expected when planning public policy.
reply