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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 19th, 2023

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  • Trump had a whole book of detailed plans for what he wanted to do after he got into office. His entire agenda from day 1 to day infinity has been planned out by the Heritage Foundation. You may have heard of this project. It is supposed to take effect in 2025.

    I don’t think they are good plans, and you probably don’t either, but they certainly were one of the plans of all time.

    Harris has no clear agenda. Compare her to someone like Bernie Sanders who loudly proclaims his entire playbook on social media every morning. Sanders makes it clear about what he’d do if he was in change. The difference is pretty obvious.



  • I believe EU leaders have already made this calculation. If you prove willing to bribe him this year, why wouldn’t he ask for double the amount next year? You can never buy a corrupt politician. You can only rent him.

    At that point, why not just take that money and invest in your own country’s defence instead? Defence spending increases your own country’s GDP and makes it so that you don’t have to rely on whether Trump remembered that you paid him off just last week before asking for more.


  • I think a big reason why people were not excited to vote for Harris is because she really doesn’t have any unique policies other than a general handwave in the direction of Joe Biden.

    I’m not saying she’s bad by any means, and she’s definitely a lot better than Trump, but elections in the US are won and lost almost entirely on turnout rather than the quality of the candidate’s proposed agenda. And people really just weren’t interested in waiting in line to vote for a candidate who promises only good vibes, while being bombarded with attack adverts reminding them that a dozen eggs now costs a dollar more than it did last year.







  • An LLM (large language model, a.k.a. an AI whose output is natural language text based on a natural language text prompt) is useful for the tasks when you’re okay with 90% accuracy generated at 10% of the cost and 1,000% faster. And where the output will solely be used in-house by yourself and not served to other people. For example, if your goal is to generate an abstract for a paper you’ve written, AI might be the way to go since it turns a writing problem into a proofreading problem.

    The Google Search LLM which summarises search results is good enough for most purposes. I wouldn’t rely on it for in-depth research but like I said, it’s 90% accurate and 1,000% faster. You just have to be mindful of this limitation.

    I don’t personally like interacting with customer service LLMs because they can only serve up help articles from the company’s help pages, but they are still remarkably good at that task. I don’t need help pages because the reason I’m contacting customer service to begin with is because I couldn’t find the solution using the help pages. It doesn’t help me, but it will no doubt help plenty of other people whose first instinct is not to read the f***ing manual. Of course, I’m not going to pretend customer service LLMs are perfect. In fact, the most common problem with them seems to be that they go “off the script” and hallucinate solutions that obviously don’t work, or pretend that they’ve scheduled a callback with a human when you request it, but they actually haven’t. This is a really common problem with any sort of LLM.

    At the same time, if you try to serve content generated by an LLM and then present it as anything of higher quality than it actually is, customers immediately detest it. Most LLM writing is of pretty low quality anyway and sounds formulaic, because to an extent, it was generated by a formula.

    Consumers don’t like being tricked, and especially when it comes to creative content, I think that most people appreciate the human effort that goes into creating it. In that sense, serving AI content is synonymous with a lack of effort and laziness on the part of whoever decided to put that AI there.

    But yeah, for a specific subset of limited use cases, LLMs can indeed be a good tool. They aren’t good enough to replace humans, but they can certainly help humans and reduce the amount of human workload needed.




  • You’re free to disagree with the way the American legal system is structured. I’m not here to argue with you, and in many ways, I actually agree with you wholeheartedly that Garland would make a terrible judge in my notion of an ideal legal system.

    The role of a judge in an inquisitorial system is to answer the questions “Did they do it? Do they deserve to be punished?”

    In the traditional English system, this is the role of the jury. The judge is just there to ensure everyone is playing by the rules of the court. And in that role, Garland is pretty suitable. And yes, a sense of fairness and impartiality is not strictly required. Just a sense of logic, which Garland definitely has. You can correctly describe that as a fault of the legal system.

    I apologise if you find this insulting.

    Think of the judge in My Cousin Vinny. Do you think that he walked into that courtroom every day thinking “these idiots definitely did it”? It’s very likely he did. But he also recognised it wasn’t his job to broadcast that to the court. He had to put on a mask of neutrality because he recognised that it is the jury’s role to determine guilt, not his. He doesn’t need to be truly impartial to the defence’s case; he just needs to make the correct evidentiary and legal rulings. Which he mostly did.

    Contrast that to the role of the prosecutor, which is what the attorney-general is. It’s the prosecutor’s job to come into court thinking “these guys are guilty” and convince the jury of the same.


  • Your position and view towards the law is admirable and very worthy of respect, but you are holding him to a standard that is not applicable within a legal system based on the traditions English common law, like the American one. You’re describing the role of a judge in an inquisitorial system, not an adversarial system.

    The role of a judge in an inquisitorial system is to answer the questions “Did they do it? Do they deserve to be punished?”

    In the traditional English system, the is the role of the jury. The judge is just there to ensure everyone is playing by the rules of the court.

    Of course, it is impossible for anyone to be truly divested from personal opinion and bias. We are all human, after all. The guiding design principle of an inquisitorial system is that judges are expected to be as neutral as possible, and then the legal system presumed they succeeded. An adversarial system, on the other hand, is aware of the inherent biases of mankind and attempts to design around them.

    Which approach is more valid is a long-running topic of debate in philosophy.


  • You do not need to “pursue justice” as a judge. You just need to allow others to pursue justice through you and possess an ability to apply the law. There are no political repercussions for judges that can harm their career. He acts the way he does because he doesn’t want political backlash about it. If he’s a judge, he has the ability to not care about others’ opinions of his rulings.

    The position of attorney-general requires a different skillset and mindset. An effective attorney-general is willing to take risks to pursue justice. Judges play a more passive role. That’s why he’s not a good attorney-general, but I still maintain he’d be a very good judge.

    Lemmy has the tendency to think that because a person is bad in one aspect, they must be bad in every related aspect as well. Of course, nobody will admit they think like that, but I pray you don’t.