MLK said it best, so I’ll just quote him directly:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”

When moderates advocate for “kindness” or “civility”, they’re advocating for negative peace; the absence of tension. Vegans advocate for positive peace; the presence of justice. When activists advocate for positive peace, in the face of those who deny said justice, tensions rise and moderates fall back to this common trope.

Your mistake here was saying “puppies” too early. You have to lead with a couple paragraphs of how you’re a flexitarian who has a farm and humanely raised animals like pets and then slaughters and feed them to your family.

Then list off the animals you exploit, cows, pigs, dogs, chickens, cats and ducks. Then their brain gets hit with the dissonance of “wait why did I support this and then stop the second they said ‘dog’?” That jarring experience can work for the intellectually honest type.

Saying it too early means they can categorize your post as satire easily and not engage with it at all mentally.

They’ve already bombed the vast majority of Gaza and resettled people, and the next step is almost certainly another expansion of the settler state of Israel.

Most of the millions of people that live in Gaza have been resettled into a very small area. Whether Israel decides to nuke them or force them into neighboring countries as refugees is irrelevant to their end goal of settling the territory. The Palestinians are just “rats” that need to be removed.

I’m sure they’d prefer to nuke them and just get rid of their problem once and for all; a final solution of sorts. However they do have limited political capital in this conflict, and nuking the remaining civilians does have the potential to negative impact U.S-Isrsel relations. So there’s a real chance they opt for just pushing the “human animals” out of the territories.

Holy shit you’re right, I’m an idiot. Thanks for helping me shift my perspective.

If you didn’t have an agenda/preconceived idea you wanted proven, you’d understand that a single study has never been used by any credible scientist to say anything is proven, ever.

Only people who don’t understand how data works will say a single study from a single university proves anything, let alone anything about a model trained on billions of parameters across a field as broad as “programming”.

I could feed GPT “programming” tasks that I know it would fail on 100% of the time. I also could feed it “programming” tasks I know it would succeed on 100% of the time. If you think LLMs have nothing to offer programmers, you have no idea how to use them. I’ve been successfully using GPT4T for months now, and it’s been very good. It’s better in static environments where it can be fed compiler errors to fix itself continually (if you ever look at more than a headline about GPT performance you’d know there’s a substantial difference between zero-shot and 3-shot performance).

Bugs exist, but code heavily written by LLMs has not been proven to be any more or less buggy than code heavily written by junior devs. Our internal metrics have them within any reasonable margin of error (senior+GPT recently beating out senior+junior, but it’s been flipping back and forth), and senior+GPT tickets get done much faster. The downside is GPT doesn’t become a senior, where a junior does with years of training, though 2 years ago LLMs were at a 5th grade coding level on average, and going from 5th grade to surpassing college level and matching junior output is a massive feat, even if some luddites like yourself refuse to accept it.

In my line of work (programming) they absolutely do not have a 52% failure rate by any reasonable definition of the word “failure”. More than 9/10 times they’ll produce code at at least a junior level. It won’t be the best code, sometimes it’ll have trivial mistakes in it, but junior developers do the same thing.

The main issue is confidence, it’s essentially like having a junior developer that is way overconfident for 1/1000th of the cost. This is extremely manageable, and June 2024 is not the end all be all of LLMs. Even if LLMs only got worse, and this is the literal peak, it will still reshape entire industries. Junior developers cannot find a job, and with the massive reduction in junior devs we’ll see a massive reaction in senior devs down the line.

In the short term the same quality work will be done with far, far fewer programmers required. In 10-20 years time if we get literally no progress in the field of LLMs or other model architectures then yeah it’s going to be fucked. If there is advancement to the degree of replacing senior developers, then humans won’t be required anyway, and we’re still fucked (assuming we still live in a capitalist society). In a proper society less work would actually be a positive for humanity, but under capitalism less work is an existential threat to our existence.

Not all gamers are triple A gamers. I’d call myself an avid gamer (I used to put in easily 80 hour weeks gaming, now it’s almost always lower, but I’ll still go on gaming binges during long vacations or holidays).

The vast, vast majority of my time has been WoW and LoL. I have played other games throughout the years, but usually in the same genres (mmo/moba).

A lot of these games have entry fees of below $70. Right now most of my gaming time is cata classic, and that requires $15 a month. Over time that will obviously add up, but everything adds up overtime, and $15 a month is not prohibitively expensive for most people. Also it’s really only $15 for the first month, just by leveling in cata classic to max you make enough to buy a wow token, and can easily pay $0 a month every month by just using in game currency.

20 year olds are not generally getting night terrors from watching disturbing content on tiktok. They’re not losing sleep, or coming away with genuine psychological scarring. We don’t need government regulations to control media content for the sake of literal adults. And children in theory should already have their content moderated by the correct degree by parents, not the government.

It’s just content I find dumb

If you watch anything on YouTube that you don’t think is dumb, there is stuff on TikTok you also wouldn’t find dumb. I don’t use TikTok either, but I think you genuinely underestimate how much content there is, and overestimate how uniform that content is.

Considering the country that runs it (…)

ByteDance already stores U.S user data within the U.S, allows third party firms to scrutinize its data privacy policies far more than any other U.S media group, and has come back with a clean bill from groups like Citizen Lab (a Canadian research lab). No U.S userdata goes to the Chinese government.

Government officials know this, they’re just putting on a show. Leaked phone calls have made this clear, the actual issue is the lack of policing around the kinds of content served. ByteDance is not aligned with U.S foreign policy interests like Meta/Google are. They are more than happy to showcase the horrors of the apartheid, genocidal state of Israel, and that’s having a real impact on the literal more than half of Americans that use TikTok.

It’s clearly against the YouTube T.O.S

Videos against YouTube’s T.O.S of the October 7th attacks have been on the platform since October of last year. They’re much more strict about removing videos showcasing the much larger-in-scale violent acts done by Israel than anything done by Hamas. TikTok isn’t. This isn’t a coincidence, and the U.S needs TikTok to fall in line here.

If they don’t young people will continue to hold extreme views, like bombing tens of thousands of children in an open air prison that has been violating the GCIV since 2007 is somehow problematic. They need the American public to have the understanding that Palestinians are simply human animals; they’re savages that need to be put down. Not unlike native americans.

Towards the end of the culling, when enough of the population has died to no longer pose a threat, they’ll give them small territories like the U.S did with native americans and feign sympathy. Imperialism hasn’t changed.

When we say younger, we might just be talking about different age groups. I imagine 16-30, and in that age range you’re not likely to come away with severe psychological scarring, but you will be deeply upset and that’s a good thing (we shouldn’t ignore genocide, we should be upset by it). Being upset leads to change.

If you’re talking about like 10 year olds watching it, sure I can agree. They can’t really do anything about it. They can’t go out and protest, or advocate for change, or vote, etc. Plus they’re much more likely to have genuine scarring. Issues sleeping, night terrors, trouble concentrating, etc.

As for “that content is dumb”, I assume you’re talking about tiktok in general. And again, for some people it’s definitely not dumb. People get served different things. Tiktok isn’t a platform trying to do good in the world, like any other social media platform it’s trying to drive engagement. However, it’s one of the few social media platforms outside of the U.S media interest groups, and that’s why the U.S is either banning them or forcing them to sell.

The end goal is to censor all of that raw footage of genocide, because it changes views. When you can hide behind rhetoric and not show how horrific the mass bombings are, you get a lot more leeway. That’s good for Israel, and why AIPAC and other Israel lobbies are the main forces behind this push in the U.S. In the end, the ban is bad for humanity (will allow the genocide to escalate without public backlash), but will be good for Israel and U.S elites.

People who go out and counter protest actively have given it more than a cursory thought. They know BLM isn’t advocating for white genocide (okay, most of them understand this. There are some literal nazis/skin heads/white nationalists in the counter protesting groups that believe in The Great Replacement, but they believed this prior to BLM existing).

Yet they still go out and counter protest. It’s not confusion at that point. You can’t go up to an all lives matter reactionary and say “Hey! Did you know BLM doesn’t actually want to murder all white people? Are you a fan of BLM now?” and actually expect any progress.

Yes, genocides are emotional. Watching children being blown up is something that should upset you. That’s actually happening in the real world.

Emotion isn’t the only thing that should inform your decisions, but pretending like you shouldn’t be upset at watching kids being blown up, or begging for their parents, or whatever else have you is just foolish.

Is your argument that a genuine, good faith interpretation of “Black Lives Matter” is “Only Black Lives Matter”?

This isn’t how English works. If I say “I like your mom” to an SO, they wouldn’t interpret it as I don’t like them and instead like their mom. I don’t have to say “I like your mom too”.

Yeah fuck people who are against animal abuse and actually live out their principles.

Like you could at least say “preachy vegans”. This is still problematic, because it ignores that everyone is preachy about issues they understand are immoral (we’re all preachy anti-racists, anti-rapists, etc.)

But just saying “vegan” is wild.

I don’t use tiktok, but some people have unusually based tiktok feeds. They can get direct footage from the genocide happening in Gaza, for example. I never get that recommended on YouTube, despite my very obvious socialist leanings, watching pro-Palestine content, etc.

This is the actual reason tiktok is being banned (if they don’t sell) after the election. One of the largest lobbying groups in America, AIPAC, in probably the most well-funded policy categories (pro-Israel policies) backs most of Congress. They’ve determined tiktok has far too much influence on American youth, and has made the Israel/Palestine divide a young/old divide more-so than a left/right divide.

There’s already a strong correlation between political leaning and age, which is problematic for the future of the fascist movement in America, but this issue falls outside the norm. You’ll find a lot of young conservatives calling for an end to the needless killing of civilians. They won’t call it a genocide because admitting Israel is a genocidal apartheid state is too far for them, but they can at least admit killing tens of thousands of children is not the right path here.

That kind of extremism (e.g not greenlighting any amount of culling of “human animals” Israel feels it needs to do) is unacceptable to the pro-Israel lobby, and they’re not used to getting this kind of pushback from the American public.

As someone who has primarily used spaces, I still use the tab key. I sincerely hope most space users understand that your editor can expand your tab key into spaces, and people aren’t genuinely going around spamming their spacebar 2->16 times for various indentation levels.

Glad someone said this, it bothers me even with human ages. Like there’s this perception that as you get older you simply gain knowledge, wisdom, world experience, etc. Not a lot of people account for biological limits for knowledge/memory, nor degradation from aging.

If some young intern decided to try to have sex with Biden, I think there’s genuinely a conversation to be had about if that’s statutory rape. I think you’d need a healthcare professional to rule on if Biden has the mental capacity to fully consent. Similar to a drunk person. They’re still obviously a person able to think/engage with the world, but they’re heavily impaired and unable to fully consent as a result. Age impairs cognition too.

Agreed on the trolley scenario, but that’s not exactly analogous. I’ll try to make an analogy that extrapolates the principle of our current scenario to illustrate what I’m getting at.

Imagine there are 3 candidates, two major parties and a third party. Both candidates in the major parties want to nuke the planet to establish an American world government. Our guy wants to nuke 6 billion people, their guy wants to nuke 7 billion people. Polls show that the third party candidate has the same chance of winning as polls in the 2024 U.S election show. The third party candidate is against dropping nukes on the planet to establish a global America.

Do you vote for the one who wants to nuke 6 billion people as a form of harm reduction? Or is there some line that a candidate/party can cross that makes voting third party the best option, despite how unlikely they’ll win?

I’m genuinely curious, would you vote for Hitler as a form of harm reduction? Obviously the genocide he did was bad, but say he was running against someone else who was also planning on committing a genocide.

The Nazis put money into infrastructure development, education (granted in this context it was also indoctrination, but there was genuine education being done too), expansion of welfare; better access to healthcare, public works programs, public health policies (though again, muddied with ideas about “racial purity”).

Imagine he was running against another pro-genocide antisemite, but who was against all the welfare/public spending mentioned above, and instead wanted to deregulate the economy, causing even more material harm than the Nazis.

Would you be telling people to go out and vote for Hitler as a form of harm reduction? Is there literally no line a person/party can cross that makes them not worthy of a vote; no line that makes the system illegitimate and participation in it/implicit endorsement problematic?

“they can’t learn anything” is too reductive. Try feeding GPT4 a language specification for a language that didn’t exist at the time of its training, and then tell it to program in that language given a library that you give it.

It won’t do well, but neither would a junior developer in raw vim/nano without compiler/linter feedback. It will roughly construct something that looks like that new language you fed it that it wasn’t trained on. This is something that in theory LLMs can do well, so GPT5/6/etc. will do better, perhaps as well as any professional human programmer.

Their context windows have increased many times over. We’re no longer operating in the 4/8k range, but instead 128k->1024k range. That’s enough context to, from the perspective of an observer, learn an entirely new language, framework, and then write something almost usable in it. And 2024 isn’t the end for context window size.

With the right tools (e.g input compiler errors and have the LLM reflect on how to fix said compiler errors), you’d get even more reliability, with just modern day LLMs. Get something more reliable, and effectively it’ll do what we can do by learning.

So much work in programming isn’t novel. You’re not making something really new, but instead piecing together work other people did. Even when you make an entirely new library, it’s using a language someone else wrote, libraries other people wrote, in an editor someone else wrote, on an O.S someone else wrote. We’re all standing on the shoulders of giants.

18 months ago, chatgpt didn’t exist. GPT3.5 wasn’t publicly available.

At that same point 18 months ago, iPhone 14 was available. Now we have the iPhone 15.

People are used to LLMs/AI developing much faster, but you really have to keep in perspective how different this tech was 18 months ago. Comparing LLM and smartphone plateaus is just silly at the moment.

Yes they’ve been refining the GPT4 model for about a year now, but we’ve also got major competitors in the space that didn’t exist 12 months ago. We got multimodality that didn’t exist 12 months ago. Sora is mind bogglingly realistic; didn’t exist 12 months ago.

GPT5 is just a few months away. If 4->5 is anything like 3->4, my career as a programmer will be over in the next 5 years. GPT4 already consistently outperforms college students that I help, and can often match junior developers in terms of reliability (though with far more confidence, which is problematic obviously). I don’t think people realize how big of a deal that is.