Over the Iran attack? I’m pretty sure he broke ranks years ago.

Yes. It’s crazy. That’s why the vast majority of us don’t do it.
It’s one thing to be a vegetarian for health or environmental reasons.
When you try to convince people that meat==murder, you come across as a wackadoodle.

That’s great news. The other 9 of the 10 biggest protests were were extremely successful at affecting change.

Since we made such massive progress on all the others, this is clearly a harbinger of social and political progress.

How would you react if you saw a similar exchange between MAGAs?

MAGA A: <some sweeping negative generalization>.
MAGA B: You don’t really mean that, right? It’s not all of them.
MAGA A: I’m just joking. Relax.

Would you take that response at face value or would you assume that the joke is a thinly veiled statement of their actual beliefs?

Fuck the whole HP franchise.

It was always shitty writing and the plot was garbage. The whole story was a thinly veiled glorification of British exceptionalism.

The only saving grace of that stinking turd of a franchise is that, in the '90s, it seemed like a good way to get kids to read.

It’s a nice idea but the military makes it really hard to do that.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1l84brm/is_it_true_that_there_is_only_one_documented_case/

I wouldn’t either but that’s exactly what lmsys.org found.

That blog post had ratings between 858 and 1169. Those are slightly higher than the average rating of human users on popular chess sites. Their latest leaderboard shows them doing even better.

https://lmarena.ai/leaderboard has one of the Gemini models with a rating of 1470. That’s pretty good.

I imagine the “author” did something like, “Search http://google.scholar.com/ find a publication where AI failed at something and write a paragraph about it.”

It’s not even as bad as the article claims.

Atari isn’t great at chess. https://chess.stackexchange.com/questions/24952/how-strong-is-each-level-of-atari-2600s-video-chess
Random LLMs were nearly as good 2 years ago. https://lmsys.org/blog/2023-05-03-arena/
LLMs that are actually trained for chess have done much better. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.17186

Like humans are way better at answering stuff when it’s a collaboration of more than one person. I suspect the same is true of LLMs.

It is.

It’s really common for non-language implementations of neural networks. If you have an NN that’s right some percentage of the time, you can often run it through a bunch of copies of the NNs and take the average and that average is correct a higher percentage of the time.

Aider is an open source AI coding assistant that lets you use one model to plan the coding and a second one to do the actual coding. It works better than doing it in a single pass, even if you assign the the same model to planing and coding.

The Israelis regularly murder journalists and civilians. The danger was quite real.

Sometimes it seems like most of these AI articles are written by AIs with bad prompts.

Human journalists would hopefully do a little research. A quick search would reveal that researches have been publishing about this for over a year so there’s no need to sensationalize it. Perhaps the human journalist could have spent a little time talking about why LLMs are bad at chess and how researchers are approaching the problem.

LLMs on the other hand, are very good at producing clickbait articles with low information content.

That makes sense. Not everything needs to be testable. There are many interesting and important ideas outside of science.

The main problem would be if someone wanted to set policy based on it. That includes the implicit experiment of, “If we adopt policy A we can expect outcome B.” If we haven’t tested that before turning it into a policy, the policy itself becomes the experiment, and then we need to be very careful about the ethics surrounding such an experiment.

It’s kind of like string theory. It has a bunch of interesting conjectures but nobody can figure out a way to test any of it.

Take the “selfish gene” (the idea predates Dawkins). One of the theories states that it may be evolutionarily advantageous for an individual to sacrifice themselves for the group if they share enough DNA. They lose the DNA in their bodies but save the exact same DNA in the bodies of their extended family. That’s a nice idea and you can get the math to work out in game theory models but how do we test if that’s why ducks sometimes lag behind when a hunter tries to shoot them?

That’s not to say it can never be tested. There are other cases where we needed to wait for technological breakthroughs until theories could actually be tested.

It was a “hail Mary” (pardon the pun).

In their view, Democrats are a guarantee that Israel will slowly but surely grind the Palestinians to dust. They were willing to risk Trump accelerating that for a snowball’s chance in hell at some other outcome.

Have you looked up the history of the word “moron”?

Glock is Austrian. They just love the US market.

“Whataboutism” can occasionally be an honest critique of a spurious argument.

When it’s just a link on it’s own, it’s almost always cover for hypocrisy.

That is completely true and also unlikely to matter.

I was born 3 decades after the end of WWII. By that point Germany and Austria had gone through great lengths to repudiate the policies of the Nazis. They had paid massive reparations. They had issued numerous official and unofficial apologies. The monuments of the Nazis were torn down in favor of memorials for their victims. That didn’t stop other kids from calling me a Nazi as soon as they found out I spoke German. To this day people are comfortable making Nazi jokes about random Germans (see Oliver Zeidler).

Similarly, we have evidence that the vast majority of sexual assaults are committed by a small number of repeat offenders. That doesn’t stop the repeated mantra of, “Not all men but always a man.”

Many people, particularly in Asia, are offended that the Nazis turned the Swastika into a symbol of hatred. Most people are aware that the Nazis stole the symbol but you really can’t wear one without risking a fight, even if you have the little dots in it.

It doesn’t matter if they should or shouldn’t be assumed to be complicit; they will. People around the world will see the Star of David as a symbol of death and destruction for generations.

You can add lots of things. I tend to throw in liberal amounts of smashed garlic and some mustard. Depending on what’s available in the garden, I may throw in some fresh herbs. Sometimes I toss in a little lemon zest or a finely smashed caper.

But none of that is needed in a simple vinaigrette.

Mustard will make it better but you don’t need it.
You won’t get as good an emulsion and it will separate faster. Once you pour it on some salad it will be pretty hard to notice that.

If someone is at the point in their cooking journey where they’re asking how to make vinaigrette, I keep it as simple as possible. TBH even the pepper isn’t strictly necessary. Many people don’t have pepper grinders and preground pepper doesn’t add much flavor.

Salt is the only one that I’d say is absolutely necessary.