Sometimes you have to use complicated terms because you’re dealing with complicated ideas…

Other times it’s clear that the authors are just trying to pad the length of a paper and sound more pompous.

In Brazil we call this “enchendo linguiça”, which literally translates to “filling sausage”.

They also upload their stuff to Instagram if that’s of any help: https://www.instagram.com/pet_foolery/

Although I haven’t read Lolita myself I recently came across a great video explaining how many people misunderstand the book as being some sort of tragic romance. LOLITA: The Worst Masterpiece

It’s ironic that one of the most famous and successful writers in the world made this same mistake of trusting and sympathizing with the pedophilic murderer protagonist while claiming that she wants to protect women and children from the evil trans agenda or whatever.

As they state towards the bottom of the page this specific poll was conducted online:

On June 28, 2024, Data for Progress conducted a survey of 1,011 U.S. likely voters nationally using web panel respondents. The sample was weighted to be representative of likely voters by age, gender, education, race, geography, and 2020 recalled vote. The survey was conducted in English. The margin of error associated with the sample size is ±3 percentage points. Results for subgroups of the sample are subject to increased margins of error. Partisanship reflected in tabulations is based on self identified party affiliation, not partisan registration. For more information please visit dataforprogress.org/our-methodology

While it’s true that polls can vary widely and are sometimes unreliable, it’s worth noting that according to their 2020 retrospective conservative white voters tend to be underrepresented, while liberal voters and activists are overrepresented in their surveys. This is consistent with a previous analysis by FiveThirtyEight showing that in 2019-2020 polls substantially overestimated Democratic performance.

There’s a well-known relationship between abortion restrictions and worse health outcomes for women and children.

I’ve also read harrowing accounts from women who resorted to infanticide because they couldn’t get an abortion. While I couldn’t find the specific anecdotes I’d seen before, I found that the Wikipedia page on this topic has plenty of info showing that access to safe abortions does reduce infanticide.

The Stonehenge stunt was an ineffective attention grab. Vandalizing the private jets was an effective attention grab.

Like if some Just Stop Oil activist took a shit in the middle of a busy NY street that would get them a lot of attention, but it wouldn’t be even remotely positive or effective in any way.

They should stick to vandalizing the property of the biggest culprits of climate change. I and most other leftists can get behind that, and it actually puts a spotlight on the people causing the problem. The Stonehenge stunt just comes off as a petty attack on the public who has little to no say on climate issues.

made climate activists look stupid for decades to come over some nonsensical and ineffective attention grab

didn’t stop climate change

Yeah, seems about right.

They had the right idea when they spray painted those private jets. IDK what they were thinking with the Stonehenge stunt.

Kinda sounds like how worker cooperatives work tbh, but with Gabe still technically being the owner.

I remember reading a news piece a while back about how the founder of a food company made sure to transfer ownership to the employees before leaving. While we’re talking about worst-case scenarios, let’s also hope for the best and hope that Gabe has a similar plan.

I’ve always thought that the biggest difference between religious people and atheists is that we’re willing to just say “I don’t know”.

I don’t know if there was something before the universe, how it’ll end or if there will be something after, or if we’re in some kind of simulation, or whatever else. But I’m willing to leave it at that and I don’t feel the need to point to some deity to fill in the gaps of my knowledge.

only way I can make friends is when I’m adopted by an extrovert

It’s just some smug wojak. It’s one of the plethora of “thin beard + glasses” variants, and this one is based on Tighten.

According to a new report released Sunday, 3,309 cases of hate and violence against the LGBTQ community were reported to the Association for LGBTQ Equality in Israel in 2022.

Twenty-five percent of all reports of anti-LGBT incidents occurred during the months of November and December, after the elections and around the time the new government was being sworn in. This is an increase of about 11 percent compared to 2021, when about 2,971 cases were reported. The association reports that the increase is part of a continuing trend in the number of reports in recent years.

But Israel is totally an LGBTQ safe haven, guys…

Like what’s the threshold here? How homophobic does a group of people have to be to justify genocide? Can the same argument be made towards Republicans, since a majority of them are homophobic?

It is, in fact, very easy to code a game!

from pygame import game
game.load_player()
game.load_enemies()
game.load_audio()
game.run()

Depends on what you mean by general intelligence. I’ve seen a lot of people confuse Artificial General Intelligence and AI more broadly. Even something as simple as the K-nearest neighbor algorithm is artificial intelligence, as this is a much broader topic than AGI.

Wikipedia gives two definitions of AGI:

An artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a hypothetical type of intelligent agent which, if realized, could learn to accomplish any intellectual task that human beings or animals can perform. Alternatively, AGI has been defined as an autonomous system that surpasses human capabilities in the majority of economically valuable tasks.

If some task can be represented through text, an LLM can, in theory, be trained to perform it either through fine-tuning or few-shot learning. The question then is how general do LLMs have to be for one to consider them to be AGIs, and there’s no hard metric for that question.

I can’t pass the bar exam like GPT-4 did, and it also has a lot more general knowledge than me. Sure, it gets stuff wrong, but so do humans. We can interact with physical objects in ways that GPT-4 can’t, but it is catching up. Plus Stephen Hawking couldn’t move the same way that most people can either and we certainly wouldn’t say that he didn’t have general intelligence.

I’m rambling but I think you get the point. There’s no clear threshold or way to calculate how “general” an AI has to be before we consider it an AGI, which is why some people argue that the best LLMs are already examples of general intelligence.

Relevant playlist

Edit: I just added like 10 more videos lol