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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Little of both. Ronald Reagan tilled the soil, and the later Republicans fertilized it. Why wouldn’t foreign disinformation groups sow seeds in such perfect fields?

    A big chunk of the problem in US politics is the two party system enforced by first past the post. Very few people actually agree with 100% of either party’s policies, so the deciding factor for most people becomes either which party do I agree with more of their policies, or in some cases which policies do I feel are most critical and therefore drive the overall decision. This has been made even worse by Republicans strategically picking policies to try to drive a wedge in between them and Democrats particularly around certain hot button issues like abortion, gun control, and religion.






  • CEOs have very little to do with the failure or success of most large companies. If they work very hard they can pull a company out of a death spiral, or start it down one, but failure or success takes years if not decades of steady improvement or decline. All the examples of “failures” given in the article are terrible and don’t demonstrate at all that those CEOs were bad.

    One of the worst problems with businesses in the US currently is this culture of fetishizing CEOs. They’re paid far too much for what they actually bring to companies, and people grossly exaggerate how much of an impact CEOs have on companies. If you want proof of his just take a look at literally any company Elon Musk is a CEO of. The fact that none of those companies (particularly Twitter) have filed for bankruptcy yet shows exactly how little a truly terrible CEO actually impacts things.




  • LLMs are basically just really fancy search engines. The reason the initial code is garbage is that it’s cut and pasted together from random crap the LLM found on the net under various keywords. It gets more performant when you ask because then the LLM is running a different search. The first search was “assemble some pieces of code to accomplish X”, while the second search was “given this sample of code find parts of it that could be optimized”, two completely different queries.

    As noted in another comment the true fatal flaw of LLMs is that they don’t really have a threshold for just saying " I don’t know that" as they are inherently probabilistic in nature. When asked something they can’t find an answer for they assemble a lexically probable response from similar search results even in cases where it’s wildly wrong. The more uncommon and niche your search is the more likely this is to happen. In other words they work well for finding very common information, and increasingly worse the less common that information is.


  • Existing law already covers that. Libel/slander only applies in cases that it appears you’re making a statement of fact. I can for instance say Trump gargles Putin’s balls once a month and as long as it’s clear from the context that this isn’t intended to be a statement of fact then it doesn’t qualify as defamation. Companies should be liable for what their AI outputs in the exact same way they’re liable for what their employees produce. If they want to not be held liable then they need to make sure their customers are properly informed that what they’re viewing might be complete bullshit. This means prominent notifications not a single line buried in paragraph 84 of their EULA.







  • SteamOS is based on Arch with customization by Valve to make it immutable and a few other tweaks. In theory Valve will release SteamOS Holo (the version used on SteamDeck) for usage on Desktop at some point, but that hasn’t happened yet. In the meantime you can achieve very similar results to SteamOS a variety of ways. Depending on if you care about immutability or not there’s a number of non-Arch distros and even a install script (astOS) that can install Arch configured in an immutable fashion similar to what SteamOS does. There’s also a number of non-immutable gaming focused distros the most prominent of them being Manjaro. Any of them once you install Steam will function very similar to each other and SteamOS.



  • It’s debatable if D-Wave is actually a quantum computer at least in the sense most people use the term. There’s a lot of unanswered questions still on exactly how to use and design a quantum computer and we’re not likely to get those answers until we can reliably produce and run systems with at least 8 qubits. Maybe DARPA and the military/CIA has such systems, but I don’t think anyone else does.

    Quantum computers are still mostly theoretical. We have some of the building blocks of one, but there’s still a few critical pieces missing. Quantum computers are in about the same place as fusion reactors are. Theoretically possible but not currently producible in a form that’s useful without a few more technological breakthroughs.