Viewing profile — walkabout

> It seems unfair to call out LLMs for "spam, scams, propaganda, and astroturfing." These problems are largely the result of platform optimization for engagement and SEO competitio…

> In aggregate, however, I believe in the US presidential elections end up voting for their own best interests, as they see it This is extremely close to one of the early "OK, but …

Spam, scams, propaganda, and astroturfing are easily the largest beneficiaries of LLM automation, so far. LLMs are exactly the 100x rocket-boots their boosters are promising for ot…

Yeah, I think you nailed it. A ban on playing against "the house" would do it. Taking a fixed amount from each pot (as at poker tables) for play among patrons would still be allowe…

> Although, if you believe in that theory, you should reject democracy and aim for some form of aristocracy or monarchy. Not necessarily! It means that the model of the typical vot…

One may smile while sharpening a knife.

We're on track to be a much-richer Russia. Which is a lot better than being like Russia, and also as poor as Russia. But it's a lot worse than being rich and also not like Russia. …

Voter behavior and motivation (and knowledge of the issues, and of basic facts about their own government...) is well-studied and has been for decades. Political scientists studied…

I have seen and enjoyed the first two movies but had somehow never even heard of the third one. It’s now high up my to-watch list, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Yeah I used to be for it on grounds of liberty but having seen a little of the actual industry it’s just purely corrosive, evil shit. It should be fought. I’d maybe be OK with some…

It’s hard to express how frustrating it is to try to allow kids access to tech and the Web (it’s kind of important that they have at least some access! And isn’t a bunch of this al…

It’s far easier to just pirate (nearly all?) GOG games. Like there are torrents with big chunks of their entire store on them, and I’ve seen allusions to an unofficial “store” that…

> Plus the whole professional CS tournament scene is sponsored by these predatory casinos I once had a glimpse behind the scenes of the online sports gambling industry (only for a …

“Democracy” in the sense of “a government with large amounts of citizen participation via voting, strong rule of law, and peaceful transition of power” (this is an entirely fine us…

Oh of course they were dystopias. But at least they were cool and there was a fair amount of competence floating around. My point is exactly that we got the dystopia but also it's …

It's kind of incredible the news is so crowded with insanity that "minimum two justices are simply taking huge bribes more-or-less openly, and as many as all nine are doing some th…

Dark, yes, but also cool and with a fair amount of competence in play, including among powerful actors, and often lots of competence. We got dark, but also lame and stupid.

The whole idea even accepting the core premise is OK to begin with needs to have a similar analysis applied to it that medical tests do: will there be enough false positives, with …

I already adjust my clothing choices when flying to account for TSA's security theater make-work bullshit. Wonder how long before I'm doing that when preparing to go to other publi…

We got our cyberpunk future, except none of it's cool and everything's extremely stupid.

An enormous proportion of Republican voters were already Trumpers as early as the ‘90s, but didn’t have a candidate yet, so had to settle for “vote Republican to keep the democrats…

They fucked up the design if they didn’t want factions (yes, a common term at the time for what we call parties) and did so in a way that makes it nearly impossible to fix in pract…

One nice thing about pointless witch hunts that go nowhere despite enormous efforts is that you can be sure a much-quicker process ending with something like actual consequences wo…

Say a prosecutor is elected and literally never prosecutes crimes. Any crime. Ever. Despite laws on the books stating they are, in some cases that have in-fact come up, required to…

Can you point to any parts of the constitution that, if ignored, would represent the US state based on that same constitution no longer functioning correctly, or not as a continuat…