I wonder if they will adapt. People who are ignorant of how computers, software, and the internet work run into massive problems now, often without even realizing it. Making computers seem esoteric and difficult to understand serves the interest of those who would use those tools to scam, deceive, or otherwise manipulate people. I know it was a dizzying amount of information back when I got my degree, and it's only gotten more complex since then. I'm sure there are a ton of people who wish they knew more but don't know how.
A ton of adults in the US struggle with basic arithmetic, not because they're stupid, but because they were never taught properly. They don't try to learn, because there aren't a ton of resources for adults at that level and it's very embarrassing for an adult to ask for help with 8th grade (US grade for 12-13 years olds) math.
I'm going to have to do some research on this. The better adults (and children) who had shitty schools growing up can fill the gaps in their education, the harder it will be for billionaires to trick them with fancy gadgets like LLMs. Seems like a problem worth trying to address. The only thing I know off the top of my head is Khan Academy, and it's been years since I used that, I don't know if it's any good nowadays. Regardless, the current state of affairs is obviously... suboptimal.
Yes, very well spotted, there are a lot of differences between presidential and midterm elections. Here though, we are discussing a particular similarity between the '16 presidential election and the upcoming '26 election, which is Trump inserting himself as an issue into congressional races, and specifically the liberal commentariat suggesting that such a maneuver is a dream come true for the Democratic Party. In this particular respect, what you said sounds like an echo of '16.
Will it work? IDK, it didn't seem to pan out all that well in '18. It seems like Trumps ability to do Karl Rove-style "activate the base" turnout juicing doesn't have the same effect in midterms. Honestly I don't think Trump can help but make it about himself, whether or not it's good strategy. But Democrats have a history of being confidently smug and wrong about their chances.
MAGA is a mix of true believers and grifters. I think that's true of all cults, MAGA's just the one I have the most firsthand experience with. Sometimes it's hard to tell which is which. Generally, the true believers are the ones losing money and the grifters are the ones gaining, but occasionally a true believer makes it to the top. I think Marjorie Taylor Greene is one example, though IDK I don't know her personally so she might just be a competent grifter.
I can't imagine that it's cheaper than not doing it. I think the visuals are useful storytelling aids; they help me keep track of characters in a story, especially if a story has a lot of characters. I've never really thought about the passive animations, but if I had to hazard a guess I'd say it's either a way to keep the eye trained on a visual element (e.g., moving a character or object while that object is being discussed by the narration), a ploy to increase retention, or maybe the animator just likes having things animated even if they aren't performing a specific action at the moment.
I've never really been bothered by it, I think it's just a stylistic choice.
I could have been clearer. I am sure there are members of the DSA who oppose AOC for ideological reasons, but they have little in common with u/antifa_ceo, an account that exists, near as I can tell, solely to sow discord, dysfunction, and despair in leftist spaces. There are many such accounts on lemmy.ml, a site whose admin and mod team have a long history of claiming to be leftist while legitimizing dictators and censoring criticism of the same.
I realize you also have a .ml account, so I'll clarify that not everyone on the site is this way. Most .ml accounts are just regular folks, and .ml was heavily promoted on reddit so it became one of the larger fediverse instances. But it is a haven for pro-Imperialist astroturfers and I think you would be well served to find a different server.
No there aren't. there's a difference between Marxist-Leninist thinkers and trolls like u/antifa_ceo. The former are communists and generally cool folk, the latter are generally Anti-american (not exclusively, but largely) state-sponsered shit-stirrers whose only purpose on the fediverse is to stoke hatred within the left and keep them divided while Trump and co. burn their countries down.
You can either be a communist, or you can support the actions of Putin's and Xi's governments. You can't do both.
They don't really, it's just that's what you see in leftist spaces. Really they are just state-sponsered shit-stirrers interested in driving as many wedges between Americans (not exclusively, but America is a big target for geopolitical reasons) as they can. They are worse than zealots; they are unprincipled opportunistic FUD machines.
There’s a term for phrases like “it’s just a tool”: thought-terminating clichés.
Here you're treating thought-terminating clicheness as a quality inherent to the phrase "it's just a tool", not to the subjective motivations of the people using the phrase in a thought-terminating capacity.
I think, especially in discussions where strong opinions abound and form cliques, labeling certain phrases as "thought-terminating cliches" is itself a form of permission to forego any critical engagement with an argument. Or, to put it another way, to use a cliche to terminate thought. I think it's worth my time and effort to say, essentially, "hold on, I don't think we should immediately dismiss anyone who tries to distinguish the tools from the tool users, that line of thought has some important and useful ramifications for this conversation."
For the j > i case I think you're right, it sorts largest to smallest (or, backwards), but for the j < i case it grabs larger values from [0, i] that it initially moved to the top of the array and slots them back in, effectively (if roundabout-ly) correcting the backwards sorting of the j > i part of the algorithm. Sort of a "two wrongs that accidentally make a right" maneuver.
TL:DR I don't think it's a thought-terminating cliche. I know it's long, I tried to edit it down, but I have a lot of thoughts on the topic.
I don't think it's a thought-terminating cliche at all; more of a framing device. I think there is an important difference between what I'll collectively call "AI software" (that is, tools) and the people who use them to cause harm, and I further think that conflating the two obscures the path toward correcting the harm.
I think Heidegger's human-tool gestalt is a good framing device for explaining how people use tools as an extension of their wills, and capabilities. Some of these capabilities allow people to harm others in ways that were previously impossible or impractical; tools that enable such capabilities are dangerous tools. There are many such tools: guns, nuclear warheads, hammers, cars, corporations, and so forth. I think "AI software", indeed all software, sits comfortably in the category of dangerous tools.
Tool availability also affects how we solve problems, as the author points out. That too is a consideration that is often deemed negligible by the "it's just a tool" crowd, I think to their detriment. How our tools affect us is a huge component of figuring out how tools fit into society.
However, just because humans are influenced by the tools at their disposal does not mean the human-tool gestalt is atomic. I think that treating it so obscures one of the means by which we can prevent harm, namely: to separate the person doing the harm from the tools they use to do it.
I think it's important to distinguish between different kinds of tools. There are LLMs and diffusion models, and then there are corporations that offer services based on these tools. The corporations are themselves tools, much the same way that multi-tool pocketknives are tools composed of many smaller tools. The people who operate the corporations are using these dangerous tools to hurt other people.
What, then, do we do with all these new human-dangerous-tool gestalts running around wreaking havoc? I think when a person is causing harm with tools, it's important to strip the person of their tools. I think this is as true for LLMs as it is for cars, and guns, and corporations. Remove the tool from the person, and their capacity for harm is reduced.
This can also be done proactively too, which is why we have things like licenses for dangerous tools like forklifts and cars. Whether or not we can do a better job at preventing harm with these proactive measures is a good question, and I think the answer is yes. I think it's good to keep in mind that the tools we use to restrict dangerous tools are themselves dangerous tools, and they should be used judiciously, but I don't think that something being a dangerous tool means that a total ban is the best approach, if it's even a viable approach. c.f. America's prohibition experiment.
So I land at "yes, the tools themselves are 'just' tools" but I don't think it qualifies as a thought-terminating cliche. Tools are neither harmless nor beneath our consideration in the conversation about building a better world. The fact that they are "just" tools isn't a dismissal or any sort of justification, but it is an important difference to distinguish, I think, in figuring out how to solve the problem of malicious tool users.
Indeed it is, Matt mentions in the video that it was originally conceived as a counterexample for students first learning about sorting algorithms, and I think in that instance it makes sense to take bubble sort and try to mangle it so the students have at least some frame of reference while debugging it. It just so happens that the mangling produced a different, weird but still valid kind of bubble sort, which I find charming.
No, the thing Bluefalcon mentioned: cases where people have been provided rehabilitative therapy instead of just being slammed in the punishment cage for a period of time.
Oh, hahaha. Well, I'm glad you liked it in that case. I've been practicing my hand at writing little impromptu social-media sized explainers for technical concepts, and It's good to get some knowledgeable feedback.
I've always assumed the joke was that it sounded like "grope", and I always thought it was a loose fit for this joke. A bit of a reach, if you will.
The sheriff’s office said the forensic anthropologist’s initial physical examination determined that many of the remains are likely ancient Native American in origin; however, several of the skeletal remains require specialized forensic testing at a laboratory to determine their origin.
Whew, close one. For a few scary moments I thought this might be some kind of sick white people skulls collector.
I wonder if they will adapt. People who are ignorant of how computers, software, and the internet work run into massive problems now, often without even realizing it. Making computers seem esoteric and difficult to understand serves the interest of those who would use those tools to scam, deceive, or otherwise manipulate people. I know it was a dizzying amount of information back when I got my degree, and it's only gotten more complex since then. I'm sure there are a ton of people who wish they knew more but don't know how.
A ton of adults in the US struggle with basic arithmetic, not because they're stupid, but because they were never taught properly. They don't try to learn, because there aren't a ton of resources for adults at that level and it's very embarrassing for an adult to ask for help with 8th grade (US grade for 12-13 years olds) math.
I'm going to have to do some research on this. The better adults (and children) who had shitty schools growing up can fill the gaps in their education, the harder it will be for billionaires to trick them with fancy gadgets like LLMs. Seems like a problem worth trying to address. The only thing I know off the top of my head is Khan Academy, and it's been years since I used that, I don't know if it's any good nowadays. Regardless, the current state of affairs is obviously... suboptimal.