FunkyStuff [he/him]

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2021

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  • Do you think the exodus has happened as a result of Maduro’s policies, or the American imposed sanctions? On what basis do you believe that Maduro is not favored by the public, yet the far right opposition is, the polls with very small sample sizes that showed results similar to what Gonzalez is claiming?

    The truth is that Maduro has popular support from every part of Venezuelan society save for the reactionaries who wish for private oil companies to run the country again. I don’t know if you speak Spanish or are from LatAm, but the difference in ideology between wealthier, English speaking Venezuelans and the less fortunate who only speak Spanish is enormous. The numbers that the right is claiming are only feasible if you’ve only ever talked with the upper crust of Venezuela, who see Maduro and Chavez as cruel despots who took away their rightful position in a stratified society. Same as the latifundio owners in Cuba, or the mob, the casino owners, etc. If that is the class of people you interact with, you might come away thinking all Venezuelans hate Socialism. If you talk with the workers you’ll get the opposite impression, and one group obviously outnumbers the other and is being suppressed by this attempted coup.



  • They have a journalistic responsibility to include relevant information and seek comment from relevant groups. The article doesn’t include any comment from healthcare professionals or advocacy groups, nor does it contain any information about potential consequences of the surgeries being banned. It fails to actually inform the public on the issue at hand, and the auxiliary information that is brought up just puts the medical procedure into question by positing it as controversial (yeah, controversial because of transphobes) and questionable. Presenting only a limited section of the issue, but making it seem like it encompasses its entirety, makes this article functionally the same as transphobic propaganda.



  • There is absolutely reason to capitulate: the fact that the Ukrainian Armed Forces have an average age above 40 and are absolutely scraping the barrel by conscripting any poor man they find. There is no universe where Ukraine pushes back the front to recover any substantial amount of territory. They have already attempted to launch counteroffensives in better conditions, and all they’ve achieved is to slow down Russia, never actually regaining any territory. The only reason they’re even in the war still is because NATO wants to sacrifice Ukrainian lives to weaken Russia, and corrupt Ukrainian politicians are making a quick buck by privatizing they country in the meantime. This is obviously not sustainable long term; in another year or two they won’t be able to recruit more people, or they’ll run out of artillery shlels.







  • It won’t be long (maybe 3 years max) before industry adopts some technique for automatically prompting a LLM to generate code to fulfill a certain requirement, then iteratively improve it using test data to get it to pass all test cases. And I’m pretty sure there already are ways to get LLM’s to generate test cases. So this could go nightmarishly wrong very very fast if industry adopts that technology and starts integrating hundreds of unnecessary libraries or pieces of code that the AI just learned to “spam” everywhere so to speak. These things are way dumber than we give them credit for.


  • You have a pretty interesting idea that I hadn’t heard elsewhere. Do you know if there’s been any research to make an AI model learn that way?

    In my own time while I’ve messed around with some ML stuff, I’ve heard of approaches where you try to get the model to accomplish progressively more complex tasks but in the same domain. For example, if you wanted to train a model to control an agent in a physics simulation to walk like a humanoid you’d have it learn to crawl first, like a real human. I guess for an AGI it makes sense that you would have it try to learn a model of the world across different domains like vision, or sound. Heck, since you can plug any kind of input to it you could have it process radio, infrared, whatever else. That way it could have a very complete model of the world.