Ideally, children would be educated and trained better to think critically; making people harder to manipulate through emotion. But, pragmatically, yeah, marketing/propaganda strategies are useful and even necessary for progress.

Your article made me wonder if there were any theories about ethically appealing to emotion, and I found this (psychological/political) theory interesting: https://semihcakir.com/blog/the-affective-intelligence-theory/. As I understand it, it posits that when people have low anxiety, their thinking is just habitual, but when they experience anxiety, they open themselves up to new information.

Available jobs are below the worse time during COVID, and I’m pretty sure the number of CS grads has greatly increased (but couldn’t find a good chart).

Israel, Iran, or the US?

Used Teams for a bit. Seemed fine, just used it like any other IRC clone. Didn’t use it for video. Windows has a lot of annoyances; death by a thousand cuts. The Windows ecosystem also sucks: to the point where graphic card and mouse driver installers try to install spyware.

Idk, the author of “Civil Disobedience” did it. It’s a valid resistance method, or just a way to keep yourself morally consistent. Every kind of resistance has a good chance of bringing harm to yourself.

I personally didn’t file one year; kinda just kept putting it off because I knew I wouldn’t be able to pay my taxes (was a 1099 worker, and suffered some major financial blows that year); nothing ever happened, but it definitely was a risk. I probably won’t do that as an “act of resistance” next year, but will probably try extending as long as possible.

We let the rich, who aren’t necessarily the smartest people, get too rich, so they gained too much power. Worldwide problem though, as their influence doesn’t stop at borders.

Kinda weird GPT4-Chan wasn’t referenced. A guy fine-tuned GPT-J on 4chan, then deployed bots to write posts. I guess it was more of a stunt than academic or scientific, but training on 4chan improved the model’s performance on a truthfulness benchmark.

Kinda depressing that all of big-tech seems to have given up “innovating” (finding applications for publicly-funded research), and have become rent-seeking dinosaurs.

but it turns out all that cash was going toward a workforce of over 700 Indian engineers, rather than an AI.

I doubt much of that cash was going to their workforce. Should have though.

Guess I just prefer languages that do it this way:

class AClass {
  var aProp = 0

  fun aMethod() {
    aProp++
  }
}

Though I suppose confusion and bugs can happen when you do something like:

class AClass {
  var aProp = 0

  fun aMethod(aProp: Int) {
    // `this.aProp` is needed to access the property
  }
}

A lot of the immigrant labor has been at least slave-like for decades too. Under constant threat of deportation on their “employer’s” whim. Fairly common for “employers” to take documented worker’s documentation to hold them hostage. Reports of some farmers housing and working workers fenced-in, having them working under gunpoint. Some farmers have been caught buying and selling immigrants amongst each-other. I remember a report of a meatpacking plant calling ICE on its own employees to have them deported after they started asking for better treatment, then just hiring more immigrants to replace them. Hell, I even remember near where I grew up, you could see the shed-like shacks from the road on one farm where they kept the migrant workers; no electricity, didn’t look like they had any running water either.

I’ve always found needing to manually add a class instance parameter (i.e. self) to every object method really weird. And the constructors being named __init__. Not having multiple dispatch is kinda annoying too. Needing to use decorators for class methods, static methods, and abstract classes is also annoying. Now that I think about it, Python kinda sucks (even though it’s the language I use the most, lol).

In my limited experience of just living in bad neighborhoods, most gangs I’ve encountered are just small groups of kids that sell drugs, rob, burglarize, fight, and occasionally kill kids in other small groups. From talking to older people that were in gangs (well, they still consider themselves to be in a gang, but the gang doesn’t functionally exist or do anything), things were much different in the 80s and 90s. Guessing it differs depending on the city though (there aren’t really “territories” in my city; drugs are sold through apps/text).

They seem to be trying to emulate Russia, Hungary, or even Nazi Germany. So probably similar things. The US tech oligarchs seem to want something like Dark Enlightenment, while the other politically powerful sect seems to want christo-fascism; all seem to be white nationalist to varying degrees.

I’d guess it’s mostly the AI autocomplete stuff. I.e. you keep on typing until the AI guesses it right then press tab to save keystrokes. LLMs are really bad at making test cases in my experience; they, ironically, can’t do the simple but nuanced computations needed to figure out what the output should be given the inputs, or to recognize and test the edge cases.

There was a story a couple weeks ago about another person getting deported on expunged charges. I’m guessing some agencies still keep records after expungement (I’ve heard they still show up when getting security clearance), and they’re using that data.

Trump and Bukele are ideologically alike. Bukele wants more funding for his prison, which the US is providing. The prison is basically a black-site with journalists given very limited and controlled access. For all I know, it could be a deathcamp; they do use forced labor, so it is at least a slave camp. Also, they never release anyone from there, which further raises the suspicion of it being a death camp.

He could be insane and doing it for graft. He obviously sees himself like a mobster and tries to operate like one. My theory is he wants to individually negotiate tariffs to solicit bribes from businesses and foreign countries. It’s not exactly 4d chess. He just knows he has the power to pressure the richest and most powerful people on the planet, so he’s going to use that power to enrich himself and family. I don’t think he actually understands much about tariffs or much of anything though.

Also, the evidence of insider trading and market manipulation is pretty convincing to me. I don’t think that was the original intention, but Trump, or those around him saw the opportunity and took it.

They can require ID verification of all users, as is done in some states in the US to access pornography sites.

Stitching Nike’s.