Ah yes, let’s let the AI qualify AI code submissions.

At that point, why not automate the whole process? Have an AI guess what kind of software you might be interested in, slop it together, evaluate and criticise it, suggest amendments, evaluate the amendment, include it, build the product, ship it, install it directly to your machine for your convenience, then proceed to operate it for you so you can automate sloppy execution of a sloppy task you never wanted to do, in a sloppy tool you never asked you for a purpose a random generator slopped together without your input.

ax+c

It’s a wonderful type of “sounds like contrition” statement while carefully dancing around the single, obvious, explicitly stated blocker. It’s kinda impossible to miss in his position. Man would rather try to widen residential streets around than do something about the single car parked in the middle of main street.

Well, more like bulldozer with gore-slick chains.

• the original tweet could’ve been written with this mindset (which, I should add, is the dominant mindset, btw), and should be taken at face value
• many of the readers will have this mindset, and will not have the theoretical tools on their belt to appreciate it for the rhetorical device it is, much less take advantage of it and learn something (they might walk away with anything ranging from “huh that is weird” to “it’s those darned republicans/democrats”)

Those are good points I didn’t consider.

On the first, I tend to lean towards assuming the best of people where possible, mostly because it helps stave off defeatism. That doesn’t make it likely, just less depressing.

On the second, I genuinely didn’t see that angle. Thanks for pointing it out. They don’t need to appreciate it as rhetorical device (and in fact, it may be more effective if they’re not conscious of it), but if it leads them to make up their own conclusions to reinforce existing assumptions, instead of being curious and open-minded, that would indeed miss the mark.

I guess to some degree, it’ll be a “shotgun” approach to hopefully get some people curious, even if you’ll never get everyone. I’m not sure a more direct statement of facts would have gotten the others either.

In either case, making an explanation (there’s more than one) explicit is useful, if only to open up space for people to disagree with the explanation.

That’s the conclusion I was aiming for, yes. In thr context of the device, the question is a setup and framing for the answer. By “prompting” for it, it seems less like preaching (which may turn people away) and more like a “genuine” and natural conversation. Interviews are occasionally framed in a similar way, but with an open question on the internet, it may seem less “staged” if that makes sense?

(I’m not sure those are the best words to describe it, but I can’t put my finger on the nuances so I’ll just call it a vocab/language barrier)

In fact I’d be willing to bet that the person who wrote the tweet disagrees with my explanation, specifically the part involving flavors of capitalism. I bet they’re advocating for something like the nordic model.

The Nordic model tends to be idealised to some degree. I understand how it would look like a significant improvement over some other forms, particularly the US, and I’ll freely admit I’m also subject to bias, but it can’t cure all the problems baked into the system.

From the glimpses I’ve caught, it doesn’t seem to solve all social issues either. The specific example I’ve heard of is racism, but I didn’t do a thorough investigation about other effects. Then again, I’m not sure I have a good solution on hand to effectively shift cultural stances like that either.

It’s a rhetorical device I forgot the name of. If I say “I don’t understand X”, that will have one of two effects on most people: either they also don’t know, realise that and hopefully get curious, or they do and know the point I’m aiming for. If they offer that explanation, it creates a Socratic approach to making an argument: Framing it as an explanation of a question the rest of the audience is hopefully also curious about.

You explanation is the second part of the argument.

That makes a lot more sense, yeah. Thanks for the nitpick and resulting enlightenment!

I’ll take the kittens. I’ll lose, but it’s a more dignified death than seizing up in panic and not even being able to defend myself.

I didn’t see any stables, just horses chilling wherever.

Stable owners hate this one trick to save 100% on your rent!

Honestly, I think they just self-selected for the ones not eating poisonous shit. I’m pretty sure the same applies on Iceland: The horses know what they can and can’t eat, because the ones who don’t know either learn or stop eating entirely.

We coddle our darlings way too much for their natural instincts. On the other hand, that makes us responsible for compensating.

Huh, this doesn’t entirely line up with my reading of ACOUP’s posts on the dilectus and the “Marian Reforms” (that weren’t a thing).

The Pedant mentions that Polybius describes the second and third steps of the dilectus as assembling explicitly without weapons, then being sent home again to muster again with full equipment. The assumption is that the equipment would be procured or fetched by the soldiers-to-be in the interim.

Scipio does build a “public armaments production center in Carthago Nova in 210, but this may be a one off” (Marian Reforms), and in the view of the Pedant, recruitment of volunteers was an occasional occurrence to sidestep the Senate if they refused to let a commander levy armies the “proper” way but didn’t turn into a regular way to raise troops until the Imperial era.

Maybe I’m reading those articles wrong or missing some complexities. You do list details I’m missing, so I assume I don’t know the whole picture.

Tons of vietnamese have horses in rural areas, I should ask them their secret to affording vet bills.

Well, I assume their horses will be less of a luxury pet. They probably pay less rent for the stables, treatment will be more DIY and the attachment to a working animal will be less emotional. I also don’t know how expensive their vets will be relative to the general cost of living and the utility the horse provides. I imagine they’ll have less overhead than our specialised clinics maintaining expensive equipment, dozens of specialised drugs and all the insurance and shit that goes with it in our system.

At the point we’re at, a new horse with less health issues would be cheaper than all the money we’ve blown on ours, and she doesn’t bring any utility. But we love her, and she’s not suffering so badly that it would justify putting her down. As long as I can afford it, I will sooner invest in trying to heal what can be healed, manage what can’t, provide the best life I can for her, own up to the responsibility I accepted when buying her, and enjoy our shared time.

But again: she’s a luxury, maybe a step below actual sports horses with fancy lineages and tournament quality. I suppose if horses became more ubiquitous for transport, the affordability dynamic might shift, but for now, my remark should be taken as tongue-in-cheek and definitely won’t hold up to comparison with working animals.

Who is going to stop the 1500 lb animal?

Ours is closer to 600, but voracious, headstrong and has shown a poor intuition for what’s poisonous and what isn’t. If she decides that a plant looks tasty, strength alone won’t help you save her from herself. If you react in time, you can gently pull her head to the side, enough to turn her away but not so strongly as to hurt her.

On the history of this:

In the Republic, Roman soldiers had to provide their own equipment. They were counted and drafted by wealth classes, then expected to bring or buy their own weapons and armour in line with the regulations.

On one hand, this allowed the state to push expenses (and the overhead for collecting taxes to fund them) on the citizens instead. On the other, that meant that citizens were motivated primarily by duty to their city, as well as social expectations (nobody wants to look bad in front of their peers, particularly if you might depend on their assistance at some point), rather than a pure expectation of profit.

They did get a decent salary, so it’s not like that was a net loss, but having to shoulder the initial cost (and armour wasn’t exactly cheap, particularly if you wanted to rely on it for survival) meant not every family could afford to send their kids to war for money. For families that had previously served, the arms of the fathers could obviously be passed to the children if they were still in good shape, which would reduce the burden - if they could afford to shoulder it once, it would be lighter down the line.

There is also an intermediate option, where poorer or younger soldiers could serve not as legionaries, but as lighter velites, whose equipment would be much cheaper. They’d move out in front of the main body to screen the army and harass the enemy with javelins, then retreat before the main engagement happened. The loot from that service might enable them to buy heavier equipment and subsequently serve as heavy infantry.

The evidence isn’t entirely clear, but it seems that this shifted at some point, possibly along the shift from a draft army to professional volunteer soldiers, which was formalised primarily by Augustus. By the end of the first century CE, it appears as if state-operated arms production was the main source of soldiers’ equipment. This would enable poorer classes to voluntarily serve for money (and maybe a shot at some land of their own, at least until Roman expansion started to falter), as the meme describes, which places it somewhere in the Imperial era. As memes go, this one is fairly accurate.

…and there goes my boner

Son of a birch

Horses are economically viable and sound

Ours sure is causing way more in vet bills than our car’s lease, insurance and gas combined, while also unable to carry either of us anywhere. She’d also not go home, but to the next patch of greenery, whether or not she can eat it…

That was ambiguous phrasing, sorry. I meant that it’ll never work for filling their pockets, because the pockets will never be full.

In fact, banniing more people probably looks good on some report or other.

From a cynical data analyst’s perspective, that report will probably be the result of something like this process:

1. Identify problem: volume of malicious users (MU) cause difficulties with partners and regulators
2. Propose solution: signal efforts to remove MU to partners and regulators
3. Objective: Ban as many MU as possible
4. Key Result: X million MU banned (X being an arbitrary estimate because we don’t actually know how many MU there are)
5. Implementation: Train and use AI to identify and ban MU
6. Difficulty: Quality Assurance to check whether the banned users actually are malicious
7. Optimisation: Stonewall or chew out people demanding company resources be wasted on QA and simply define all banned users as MU (with all the money we invested in that AI, we can’t afford conceding inaccuracy)
8. Conclusion: report amount of banned users to partners and regulators.
9. If they should ask about the accuracy, cherry-pick from the training dataset to present users your AI correctly identified. Concede individual errors, frame them as the price of progress and assure that they have been taken into consideration for refining the algorithm.
10. Affirm your commitment to a safe platform, improved security measures, yada yada

I’ve not seen any examples this egregious, personally, but I also don’t make reports for executives, let alone executives of companies with such a vile business model. This is just a scaled up version of some shenanigans I’ve been party to.

Stop selling our future in a vain attempt to sate your craving for bigger and bigger numbers. It’s not gonna work.

They’re like the worst kind of dragon: cruel, destructive, greedy and in urgent need of a slaying.

*Edit: changed “stuff your bottomless pockets” to “sate your craving for bigger and bigger numbers” to better convey that they’ll never be happy and content.

Their pockets won’t ever fill up, their craving won’t ever be sated. “Number Go Up” may give them a brief fix, but it will never be enough.

Don’t forget the part where, in sparing you from reading those sites, it also strips away context clues that might otherwise help you gauge whether it’s a reliable source and whether it even applies to your problem.

I’d say if a tool produces predictable results, even if not fully deterministic, it qualifies as a tool. It might not be right for jobs were precision is needed, but the current LLMs and GenAI are perfectly suitable for their primary purpose:

Conning idiots into trading their skills and natural intelligence for a promise of convenience, scamming managers into fucking over employees for a promise of saving money, then pulling the rug, cashing in on the desperation of those who can no longer function without it, ruining a generation of students that don’t yet have the expertise to realise the full extent of the damage they’re doing to their own skills (including, as some other post brought up, the skill to not kill people with your MedGPT malpractice), causing unpredictable damage to a host of economies and industries, fucking over residents that don’t get a (democratic) say in whether they want to have a data center chugging their water supply, fucking up the climate, fucking the whole world…

In short: LLMs and GenAI are a tool to sell our future for a quick buck we’ll never see.

Fuck MBAs.

Sincerely, a data analyst that regularly has to deal with number-junkies so high on their own buzzwords they struggle to comprehend the petty constraints we people who actually want to measure facts are burdened with.