Interesting question on the fediverse. I tend to think that redditlikes aren’t, while twitterlikes are; so what does it mean if they’re federated? Does it depend on how you access the content?

Maybe it’s a spectrum. Bulletin board forums are on one side, then Stack Overflow, then redditlikes, then twitterlikes, then Instagram-like image sharing, then Facebook on the far other side.

To quote xkcd, “On one hand, every single one of my ancestors going back billions of years has managed to figure it out. On the other hand, that’s the mother of all sampling biases.”

And ok, sure, the more recent ones haven’t had to rough it, but if you go back just a few generations you get to someone who actually knows something about something. Still, I think I could suss out at least enough to keep going until I inevitably got injured or sick or mauled by a wild animal.

That said, I’m very aware that this might just be unearned and unmerited arrogance, like the guys who say they could take a point off of Serena Williams on the tennis court.

So, I think this story has two parts to it: one from years ago, wherein he moved into a place with his girlfriend and his best friend; and another from today, wherein he moved into a place with his wife. Unclear if it’s the same person as the girlfriend from before.

I bet we can figure out what it really is if he releases the Epstein files.

That’s what I was assuming.

Yep. I’m a Christian, and I’m pretty sure they aren’t.

Who said anything about foresight? This is entirely historical. Thanks for actually reading anything I’ve said.

I’m reminded of an old Clarence Darrow quote…

I’m saying they can only do it because the big innovation was “throw more money at it.” Yes, given a functionally infinite amount of hardware, electricity, legal free reign, and publicity, I could invent a machine that does at least one (1) impressive thing, too.

Remember, these models weren’t created to identify cancer in patients better than humans. They were created to do everything better than humans. And the fact that they are mediocre at everything except identifying cancer in patients (and a handful of other things) means that they’re failing at 99.997% of their goal.

That doesn’t mean that it’s innovative, or a breakthrough technology that deserves time to mature. It just means that you get more swings at the law of averages if you have a lot of money.

First of all, because it doesn’t matter whether it’s actually real or not, investment doesn’t actually follow innovation. The actual value of a company or idea has almost nothing to do with its valuation.

But more importantly, why do you think that’s the important part of this conversation? I’m not talking about its long term viability. Neither were you. You were just saying that it was a new innovation and still had to mature. I was saying that it was actually a much older technology that already matured, and which is being given an artificial new round of funding because of good marketing.

Are you trying to claim that the fact that there’s lots of money flowing to these AI companies is proof that AI isn’t just a bubble caused by money flowing to these AI companies?

Please let me know what major breakthrough has happened recently in the machine leaning field, since you’re such an expert. Throwing more GPUs at it? Throwing even more GPUs at it? About the best thing I can come up with is “using approximately the full text of the Internet as training data,” but that’s not a technical advancement, it’s a financial one.

Applying tensors to ML happened in 2001. Switching to GPUs for deep learning happened in 2004. RNNs/CNNs was 2010-ish. Seq2seq and GAN were in 2014. “Attention is All You Need” came out in 2017; that’s the absolute closest to a breakthrough that I can think of, but even that was just an architecture from 2014 with some comparatively minor tweaks.

No, the only major new breakthrough I can see over the past decade or so has been the influx of money.

AI isn’t “emerging.” The industry is new, but we’ve had neural networks for decades. They’ve been regularly in use for things like autocorrect and image classification since before the iPhone. Google upgraded Google Translate to use a GPT in 2016 (9 years ago). What’s “emerging” now is just marketing and branding, and trying to shove it into form factors and workloads that it’s not well suited to. Maybe some slightly quicker iteration due to the unreasonable amount of money being thrown at it.

It’s kind of like if a band made a huge deal out of their new album and the crazy new sound it had, but then you listened to it and it was just, like…disco? And disco is fine, but…by itself it’s definitely not anything to write home about in 2025. And then a whole bunch of other bands were like, “yeah, we do disco too!” And some of them were ok at it, and most were definitely not, but they were all trying to fit disco into songs that really shouldn’t have been disco. And every time someone was like, “I kinda don’t want to listen to disco right now,” a band manager said “shut up yes you do.”

“So be it. I shall be the Fellowship of the Ring.”

Especially during the Council of Elrond, when Merry and Pippin burst in and it cuts to his reaction shot. You almost expect him to spontaneously grow a pair of Ray-Bans out of his head.

The only thing that solves fascism is incredible violence.

That’s not exactly true.

• The deposition of the Greek junta in 1974 resulted in the deaths of 24 protestors (estimated) at the hands of a fascist tank, but no large-scale violence broke out. Infighting within the junta and the junta’s invasion of Cyprus caused far more death than the revolution did.

• The Carnation Revolution in Portugal that same year only resulted in 4-6 deaths, total, all caused by the reaction of the regime being overthrown; no one was killed by the revolutionaries.

• In Spain, just a year later, Francisco Franco died of natural causes; and while I wouldn’t call what happened over the next few years “peaceful,” it wasn’t quite two years from the death of Franco to the new government’s first successful election, and that time wasn’t marked by anything I would call “incredible violence.”

• Uruguay transitioned from a dictatorship to a democracy in the mid-1980s. It was a little over a year between the first General Strike and the inauguration of the first democratically-elected president of the new government (though some elements of democracy had been filtering back into the government for the previous few years). No one was killed by the anti-fascists.

• Pinochet’s incredibly violent rule in Chile ended with an election and a peaceful (albeit extended) transfer of power between 1988-1990.

Today, all of these countries have a score of 85 or higher on the Freedom House index.

There are other similar examples: Argentina in 1982, the Philippines and the People Power Revolution in 1986, South Africa defeating apartheid in 1994, even South Korea last December. Not all of those are great examples, whether because they didn’t stand the test of time or because they weren’t “quite as bad” to start off with, but it certainly seems that in the modern era, defeating fascism can be done nonviolently.

Will it be done nonviolently in the US? I don’t know. All I know is, every fascist regime in history has either fallen or is in the process of falling. It’s just a matter of time, and how many people die along the way.

theres going to be a lot of suffering and misery inflicted on us all

Definitely true. One way or the other, this isn’t going to be a fun time.

Whoooaaaaa I heard the next update is gonna be HUGE

The leaks say they’re adding millidays and a whole new second

So is cayenne, though. For someone with a high enough CON score, poisonous blood might as well be a seasoning.

In my name?!

Because if they announce that they’re running Trump again this early in the game people might get wise before they can get hyped.