I have a direct example of this:

I was at the UFO museum in Roswell, NM and the guy that was giving a talk was a self-described Ufologist and this was after the government released the UFO footage. He talked the whole time about government coverup of past UFO crashes, etc.

In the Q&A, someone asked if the recent footage gave him hope that we’ll begin to learn more about UFOs now that the government seems more forthright with the information… And he got pissed at them for even asking. It was as if his whole retirement activity of uncovering conspiracies was challenged and his brain couldn’t handle it except by getting angry at an honest question.

His conspiracy seemed to be more boring than he thought (and spent decades “researching”) so he wouldn’t allow the truth to shatter it. It was fascinating to see in real-time.

Long, boring, hard to pay attention to. I read philosophy and theory sometimes but it’s few and far between for those reasons. I really have to be in a special mood to sit down and read something that dense.

Edit: I’m not the original commenter

Depression for me.

No. I wish I could stay awake forever sometimes.

Lol you don’t get to be rude if you apologize first.

That we’re able to dodge the incoming wave of fascism and peacefully skim board into progressive politics.

You can really put the pedal on the gas though with a well calculated Facebook group.

There are others that don’t get the coverage, but yeah, pretty fuckin lame anyway. If only for the fact that they don’t get the coverage.

This is such a drunk, stupid tech bro idea.

Focus groups aren’t meant to be used for gaining an understanding of a broad swath of the population. Focus groups are used for exploratory research, concept testing, and understanding the “why” behind opinions and behaviors.

If you want to generalize trends towards large populations, you’re going to need a large sample size. It’s statistics that suggests that many respondents will leave you with extremely low confidence in the outcome.

For example, if you are trying to judge the voting preferences of a population of 100,000 people, you’ll need 383 randomly sampled people in a survey to reach a 95% confidence interval. 13 is nowhere near the amount of people required to cover those that considered themselves “independents” before the debate.

That’s not to say this tells us nothing, but it’s by no means a predictive study.

*edit: I actually would say it’s harmful because I think that it portrays the narrative as if it is predictive, when it’s not.

I’m definitely not for banning books, but couldn’t you say the same thing about news media? Or Facebook memes? Those “get you to think”.

I’m not surprised. Alito is straight up huffing Newsmax like it’s paint but trying to hide it, Clarence Thomas is outwardly corrupt and unabashedly fascist, and the other conservatives are, weirdly, not as extreme and still attempt to maintain this air of professionalism and integrity in their profession. Don’t get me wrong, they don’t actually and in them we have a religious nut, an idiot frat boy, an egoist, and at the head, a conniving political operator. All of which are driving us closer to fascism in their own style.

But I get the feeling like John Roberts is embarrassed by Clarence Thomas and his clinically insane QAnon conspiracy wife or Alito and his “election was stolen” flag antics. So they’re going to see things differently.

Depends who you are. If you’re a person of interest to the Russians for any reason, I wouldn’t trust it.

People should have “the right to not be pregnant.”

I’m an AI researcher and yes, that’s basically right. There is no special “lighting mechanism” portion of the network designed before training. Just, after seeing enough images with correct lighting (either for text to image transformer models or GANs), it will understand what correct lighting should look like. It’s all about the distribution of the training data. A simple example is this-person-does-not-exist.com. All of the training images are high resolution, close-up, well-lit headshots. If all the training data instead had unrealistic lighting, you would get unrealistic lighting out. If it’s something like 50/50, you’ll get every part of that spectrum between good lighting and bad lighting at the output.

That’s not to say that the overall training scheme of especially something like GPT-4 doesn’t include secondary training operations for more complex tasks. But lighting of images is a simple thing to get correct with enough training images.

As an aside, I said that website above is a simple example, but I remember less than 6 years ago when that came out and it was revolutionary, so it’s crazy how fast the space has moved forward in such a short time.

Edit: to answer the multiple subjects question: it probably has seen fewer images with multiple subjects and doesn’t have enough “knowledge” from it’s training data to accurately apply lighting in those scenarios. And you can imagine lighting is more complex in a scene with more subjects so it’s more difficult for the model to use a general solution it’s seen many times to fit the more complex problem.

Hahaha, as someone that works in AI research, good luck to them. The first is a very hard problem that won’t just be prompt engineering with your OpenAI account (why not just use 3D blueprints for weapons that already exist?) and the second is certifiably stupid. There are plenty of ways to make bombs already that don’t involve training a model that’s an expert in chemistry. A bunch of amateur 8chan half-brains probably couldn’t follow a Medium article, let alone do ground breaking research.

But like you said, if they want to test the viability of those bombs, I say go for it! Make it in the garage!

I don’t think it’s lane surfing if you’re not changing lanes. Anyway, this comment section has made me realize that it always just depends. Drive aware, keep safe distance, don’t unnecessarily change lanes, let people pass (on the left) if they’re going faster than you, etc.

The best advice I ever got about driving was “be predictable.” I think if anyone really takes that to heart empathetically then it would be safer.

I find this scenario extremely rare as in most cases I’m envisioning, there is a middle turn lane separating the two opposite lanes. Either from a light or just as a buffer between the flows of traffic.

This is all to say, there aren’t any hard and fast rules and there are too many scenarios to cover with a blanket statement like “The left lane is for passing. If you’re not passing somebody, move over to the right lane. It’s not that hard people” (comment above).

victorz said it more succinctly below.

See this is a sensible response to people getting unreasonably PO’d about this. You drive in “the left” (whatever that means to your relative position) until someone faster comes along and they can’t move more left than you.

I get upset when some fuckwit is going 15+ over the flow of traffic and then that fuckwit gets pissed when he runs up on someone’s ass expecting them to be aware of every dangerous fuckwit out there.

Huh, I’ve never thought of this before… I like your example of chit-chat. Because for some instances, you could say that one engages in it to manipulate the other person into relieving their own anxiety from being silent around others. Or forcing the other person to give up their personal interests, or, more cynically, making the other person think you are interested.

I’ve never thought of communication like this before but now I’m going to manipulate everyone in real life into thinking I’m a know it all by telling them this lol