Unforgivable on all levels: morality, journalistic professionalism, and even on the level of just trying to be strategic in lying to make Trump regime look good. Even if you are an evil toady piece of shit, you dont have to be dumb about it! There are better lies!

The belief that voters under FPTP "find a way of getting what they want" is just mysticism. It assumes that people whose votes are being ignored, backing parties that don't get represented, are somehow brilliantly manipulating the system to get an outcome different to the one they're voting for.

this is a masterpiece

It is continuously shocking how the standard approach to understanding how LLM prompting works, by people who claim to be knowledgeable enthusiasts about LLMs, is as a form of prayer or ritual invocation, but they are convinced that it’s actually reasoning stuff like this out

In the "you can't make this up" category of LLM interactions... TL;DR Google Gemini claims that LLMs "often give themselves a 95%+ confidence score even when they are hallucinating" - which was itself a "hallucinated" claim - then later assigns itself 0.95 confidence in that hallucinated claim. 🧵

One of the best ways to evaluate your own understanding of a subject is to attempt to explain it to someone else. Through explaining things, we discover how much of the "totally obvious" world is actually full of ambiguity, mystery and contradiction. 1/

Those agendas and biases can be anything! Case in point: you think the fruit in the garden of eden was an apple because a guy translating the story into Latin wanted to make a pun.

Testing the fences for the midterms. Find the legal mines now, so you'll be ready when it counts. But. Nothing to worry about. Stop dooming guys. It's not like the courts have ever folded for the GOP in ways we've never seen before about elections and voting. Stupid worrying losers

Just so we’re clear, Trump decided to give himself and his family tax-cheat immunity. Congress didn’t do it. The courts didn’t do it. Trump is stealing tens of millions of dollars from taxpayers because the Republicans in charge of our government refuse to stop him. it’s outright theft.

Lord Alan Sugar: "Leaving Europe is the worst thing I have experienced in my whole time in business" What are your thoughts? 🤔

"Even if the straits [sic] stay closed..."? (Reality translator: Trump started an illegal war [2º to Netanyahu's Trump-Epstein kompromat], killing thousands of innocents [including children] & Iran now controls the *Strait* of Hormuz [there's only one, Hassett] & holds the world in economic hostage.

But no, Putin wants to win (and considers himself worthy of winning) within the framework of the flawed system he created, without changing anything. Therefore, they will work not on mistakes, but on the citizens of the Russian Federation,

I didn't paywall this because I wanted people to be able to read and digest all of the data and arguments. If you want to support independent political analysis like this, subscribe to Strength In Numbers today! www.gelliottmorris.com/subscribe Or make a donation: donate.stripe.com/28ocOV3Kp3TG...

Would you like to hear a story about a woolly mouse…? 🐭🦣🧪

Once upon a time, in the late 1800s, people in Japan got really into breeding mice. Coloured mice. Patterned mice. Even mice that danced. They became known as Japanese Fancy Mice, and that caught the attention of researchers in Europe and America, who imported them for study. 2/n

More SNEC takes from someone who knows more about solar modules than me!

BREAKING: The Senate just passed a bill to add an additional $70 billion to ICE and Border Patrol’s already giant budget without any reforms. The House must hold the line and refuse to give ICE a blank check to violate our rights.

It really speaks to her stupidity that she couldn’t “frog in a boiling pot” CBS News into a gradual and more subtle right-wing organization. But that would take skill and strategy developed by not having smoke blown up your ass about being a special and talented journalist for your entire life

And to the extent that it replaces scholarship or suffuses academic practice, it will eventually, and perhaps quite soon, become an impression of itself. In conditions of perpetual austerity, crisis in the humanities, etc., what that means is that we will have less and less access to anything else.

If you want an impression of academic writing, it can do that. And a good impression will, naturally enough, often include details you find in the original, not because it learned them the way the original did, but because it is doing an impression. If you want to do scholarship, it can't help you.

But it does none of these things. It doesn't distinguish sources from arguments or analysis from narrative or facts from possibilities. It does not "know" what a fact is or how it differs from an analytical concept. It produces text that looks like the text it was trained on. It does impressions.

Saying "genAI has access" to scholarship (or calling it a "research assistant," etc.) suggests that it too digs into a massive library. That it does what a scholar does, but faster and perhaps in a more dispassionate, computerly fashion. That it questions sources, gathers facts, compares arguments.

When a scholar has access to an archive or a library, what that means is that the scholar can consult primary sources and secondary work. They can analyze and contextualize evidence, establish facts or possibilities, look for relationships, and see what arguments have already been made about them.

One final thing. The reason I put "have access" in quotes is not just that it appeared in the comment that sparked this thread but also that "genAI has access to scholarship" is exactly the wrong way to think about the relationship between the text that genAI produces and the work it's trained on.

The answers it gives are based on real scholarship in the sense that real scholarship was consumed in training it to produce text that looks like scholarly answers, and not in any more responsible sense than that. Historical dramas are based on real events, too. After all, they look like the past.

At the level of the individual text about a given question, the absolute best result AI can give is an imitation of part of what people have already published, which they (unlike the bot) are responsible for as scholars. Every other outcome is one or more degrees farther from scholarship than that.

GenAI is designed to produce text that resembles its training data. If that includes academic work, it'll produce text that looks academic - not by consulting work but by imitating text. If you have an idea of how academic work looks, you'll find that AI produces text that looks similar. That's all.

Arguments like this remind me of undergraduate course evaluations asking students to rate the professor's knowledge of the subject. They can't, of course. All they can say is whether the professor looked and sounded as they imagine a professor ought to look and sound. That's quite a different thing.

If you can’t tell the difference between an expert and a bot, what that tells you is that you can’t tell the difference between an expert and a bot. It doesn’t tell you anything whatever either about the bot or about the knowledge that you’re asking the bot to give you because you aren’t an expert.

It generates text based on its training data. It does not thoughtfully select the best sources or fret about getting them right or go out to learn new things by talking to researchers or visiting archives or dropping in on a conference or two. It generates text based on its training data. That’s it.

Uninterested in leading a pile-on but no, AI does not “have access” to everything ever published. Not archival material, obviously, but not secondary material either. Nor across times nor languages. AI is not human knowledge personified. It’s exactly not that, in fact. It’s not even a search engine.

Once he's gone, I'm calling for a moratorium on his fucking face.

Congratulations to everyone who said it would get this bad. Your prize is watching everyone who disagreed now claim no one could have predicted it would get this bad.

Ossoff: Both of my Trump puppet opponents said that they would support this $1.8 billion slush fund for Jan 6 foot soldiers. I'm running against two Trump puppet Maga fanatics who are pro-war, pro-tariff, pro-cutting your health care pro-Jeffrey Epstein memorial ballroom….

"Polis had an opportunity to stand with working Coloradans, but instead chose to side with the dominant corporations using invasive surveillance data to pick their pockets.”

Chart of the day. The energy transition is happening in real time! 😍

I will fucking die mad that we let the stupidest people in society with medieval peasant brain ruin recognizing what should have been a moon landing level triumph

I'll remember it for the rest of my life, bright spring day and feeling like it was finally going to be over

Getting the first covid vax felt like the waters parting. Can't imagine feeling any other way about it. Wild that so many people now feel otherwise

If you think of them less as judges and more of a Republican Party protection cartel their decisions become a lot more predictable.

One of the greatest Kennedy Center Honors performances ever: Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart, Jason Bonham on drums, and Shane Fontayne on electric guitar. It moved Robert Plant to tears as he watched alongside Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones. (Edited for format)

Donald Trump has spent more than eight years promising a “better deal” with Iran. At this point, the only thing his administration seems to be negotiating is how long they can keep pretending it’s actually on the way.

Candy Crush is as harmful as gambling apps and the people getting rich off these in-app purchases (which are driven by extensive research on how to cultivate and exploit addictive behaviors!) should be shunned, shamed, and hopefully imprisoned.

🚨 Six articles of impeachment were just filed against Chief Justice John Roberts. The resistance is moving, and Congress needs to know we are watching. Send your letter right now: 👇 actionnetwork.org/letters/tell...

where’s that skeet of “women don’t like AI because they recognise that somebody not listening to you but agreeing with whatever you say is a threat”

One of my favorite things about capitalism is that people pay fortunes for an education that tells them innovation is key and to give people what they like and then they peddle derivative shit no one likes until someone makes something new and then they steal it and drain all the good from it.

You used to be able to google the time of the sunset, and Google would give you the exact time right on top every single time. Thankfully, with artificial intelligence, you can now ask Google what time the sun will set and it will conveniently tell you "I don't know."