Tootfinder

Every time leftists talk about escalating against Trump, liberals point out that Trump is looking for an excuse to invoke the insurrection act. This is true. But they don't notice that he's the least popular president in history and the military has largely already made it clear that they won't be used against civilians. That risk assessment completely lacks context.
Trump could not possibly win against an insurgency because the only thing he could possibly offer to end it would be his own resignation. If Trump tried to escalate to civil war he would either lose or be removed.
More importantly, Trump compulsively escalates. He will continue to start wars because he thinks he's doing a good job and he's a hero. When he gets frustrated at some foreign enemy because he's actually completely incompetent and only able to win against incompetent and wildly unpopular opponents, he threatens war crimes.
I am familiar enough with history to fully believe that he ordered a nuclear strike last night and people said "no." Humanity has been saved multiple times by people refusing to follow orders, and you don't find out until years later. (This is also not the first story of a president dangerously deep in mental decline. Reagan lost the nuclear football.)
The longer this goes on, the greater the risk that eventually someone will actually let him do something unthinkable. But that's significantly less likely if he's trying to fight within the US border.
Just looking at things from a risk perspective, "he's going to invoke the insurrection act" is not nearly as big of a threat as democrats think it is, and it's about time they think realistically about this fact.

« In 1985, the COTI stood at 30 — the median male worker needed thirty weeks of income to afford a house, a car, health care, and education. By 2018, the COTI had increased to 53—a full-time job was insufficient to afford these items, let alone the others that a family needs. A generation ago, the worker could be confident in his ability to provide his family not only with the basics of food, clothing, and shelter, but also with the middle-class essentials of a house, a car, health care, and…

Bridging Distant Ideas: the Impact of AI on R&D and Recombinant Innovation
Emanuele Bazzichi, Massimo Riccaboni, Fulvio Castellacci
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.02189 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.02189 https://arxiv.org/html/2604.02189
arXiv:2604.02189v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study how artificial intelligence (AI) affects firms' incentives to pursue incremental versus radical knowledge recombinations. We develop a model of recombinant innovation embedded in a Schumpeterian quality-ladder framework, in which innovation arises from recombining ideas across varying distances in a knowledge space. R&D consists of multiple tasks, a fraction of which can be performed by AI. AI facilitates access to distant knowledge domains, but at the same time it also increases the aggregate rate of creative destruction, shortening the monopoly duration that rewards radical innovations. Moreover, excessive reliance on AI may reduce the originality of research and lead to duplication of research efforts. We obtain three main results. First, higher AI productivity encourages more distant recombinations, if the direct facilitation effect is stronger than the indirect effect due to intensified competition from rivals. Second, the effect of increasing the share of AI-automated R&D tasks is non-monotonic: firms initially target more radical innovations, but beyond a threshold of human-AI complementarity, they shift the focus toward incremental innovations. Third, in the limiting case of full automation, the model predicts that optimal recombination distance collapses to zero, suggesting that fully AI-driven research would undermine the very knowledge creation that it seeks to accelerate.
toXiv_bot_toot

As salty as I am about it, there's also another way to think about this. For anyone who still has connections to folks on the right (which is perhaps unlikely for anyone on this server, I digress), the cult that has consumed them thrives on isolation and grievance.
The words "you were right" have the potential to cut through the programming and open up an opportunity for reconnection. The modern conspiratorial cult of the Right has been built partially around people who were told they were wrong or were crazy. In the vast majority of cases, they were wrong and even when they were right they completely misunderstood why, but we'll skip that for now. Liberals making fun of them (even the times when they definitely earned it) has pushed them further and further into their ideological hole.
The thing about those words, "you were right," in this context is that the way they offer reconnection also requires them to take one little step of betraying their ideology to accept them. So they must choose between maintaining allegiance to a pedophile or finally getting to feel superior after years of living in an illusion of persecution.
Under the ideology of the Right, admitting one is wrong is a weakness. It is admitting defeat. They have to "own the libs" by saying things, things that they know aren't true, in order to feel dominant. But these things are often so absurd that they end up being made fun of, feeling even more weak and pathetic, reinforcing their fear and alienation.
Offering what they're looking for can offer a way out, but only if they're willing to start to recognize the thing they've supported for what it is.
And they were right about some things. They were right that Bill Gates was a terrible person. I've had plenty of liberals defend him based on his philanthropy washing, but he's awful and always has been. The Epstein links make that blatant. They intuitively recognized him and didn't trust him, even if they were wildly off base about *how and why* he shouldn't be trusted... Even if their correct mistrust was leveraged into one of the most destructive conspiracy theories ever (vaccine denial and COVID vaccine avoidance).
They were right about Bill Clinton. He was always shady as fuck. Sure, the people who attacked him at the time turned out to be even more shady but that's not the point right now. He was connected to Epstein and that was always creepy as fuck.
And the Epstein thing was an open secret that liberals ignored for a long time. It was seen as some weird thing that right wing nutjobs believed about the Clintons. But it was true. Not all of it, and there has always been an antisemitic element to the right wing interpretation or Epstein stuff, but his whole pedophile conspiracy was always kind of real.
The whole "Illuminati"/deep state thing is a vast oversimplification, an attempt to make comprehensible an incredibly complex set of interlocking and emergent behaviors. But Epstein did very much want to remake the world, to create a new world order, and he absolutely played a part in it.
The Right wing nutjobs talked about global authoritarianism, Blackhawks flying over American cities, masked men with guns disarming and executing legal gun owners in the streets. That's all happening right now.
The "FEMA concentration camps" are not actually that far off. ICE and FEMA are sister agencies, both under DHS. I'd be more than happy to call that one "close enough" in order to hear some MAGA admit that ICE is, in fact, building concentration camps.
There was always a huge millennialist element to these things. They tended to be connected to "the antichrist." It was absurd, especially for me as someone who no longer identifies as a Christian. But I'll even acquiess that to a degree. The "the number of the Beast" is 666. That's just the sum of the Hebrew spelling of "Nero." Revelations focuses a lot on Nero coming back to life after his death. His death that involved a head wound, thus the line from Revelation 13:3:
> And I saw one of his heads as if it had been mortally wounded, and his deadly wound was healed. And all the world marveled and followed the beast.
The parallels between Trump and Nero are easy to draw, and Trump's ear wound feels pretty on-the-nose for this. I don't believe in "prophecy" in this way. I think that there are patterns, and useful patterns can become encoded in beleif systems. But I will, again, happily call this one "close enough" for anyone on that side willing to also acknowledge it. I'm happy to meet on that common ground, because anyone who accepts it must recognize that their duty is to fight against it.
A lot of these correct nuggets are embedded in a framework of religious extremism and antisemitism. The vast majority of the beliefs holding these together are wildly wrong and incredibly toxic. But by giving some room to feel validated, listened to, understood, can give some room to admit things that were wrong.
Cult de-programming starts with an opening. People have to talk through their own thoughts, hear their own inconsistencies. Guiding questions can help them untangle these things for themselves. And it all starts by having enough room to feel safe, to not feel cornered, to not feel stupid. Admitting mistakes means being vulnerable, and the MAGA cult is built on fear. It's built on exploiting vulnerability and locking it away.
De-programming takes a long time. It's not easy. It takes patience. But every person who comes out does so with a powerful perspective, a deep understanding, that can be turned back against it. The best people at getting people out of cults are former members. Some of the most dedicated antifa are former fascists who understood their mistakes and dedicate their lives to fixing them.

The key takeaways from the early part of the #chardet thread (I didn't read beyond the ~30 first comments, I have my limits).
1. People there love cosplaying lawyers. Except when the other side also starts cosplaying lawyers, in which case they suddenly divert to suggesting asking professional lawyers.
2. Almost nobody there is concerned with ethics or morality.
3. There's a lot of GPL haters there. Like, they seem the kind of people who don't really care about licensing at all, just used MIT in their projects because it was cool and they heard something about license incompatibility and now bash at everything that's (L)GPL.
4. People don't get that LLMs are statistical models and can't build anything from the ground up. All they can do is remix, which implies they use existing code for inspiration.
5. The maintainer who did the rewrite is a total asshole, and is perfectly aware of it.
Honestly, I'm truly waiting for the subsidizing to end and companies start charging obscene amounts for the use of LLMs. Of course, the reality is that we're totally fucked. We have a lot of projects that adapted a lot of #slop, and people who are being increasingly addicted to this shit. The moment they can't afford it, we'd be left with lots of broken code nobody wants to maintain.
And I definitely don't want to put my effort into packaging crap if its maintainers don't even bother trying.
#AI #LLM #NoAI #NoLLM