Corvos
16d ago
I was always taught that drinking bottled water is a stupid waste of money.
Corvos
16d ago
Indians, quite frequently. The problem is partly the legacy of colonialism and the heavy-handed way that the Indian government has stirred up anti-British resentment to escape responsibility for India’s relative lack of development. It’s also that western societies don’t really recognise or care about caste, so very high ranking Indians move to the UK expecting to be treated like the native upper class and don’t receive that.
East Asians, I don’t know. We didn’t have many in the UK until recently and my experience is all with first generation people or dealing with them in their own country; the ones I knew were pro-white if anything.
Corvos
16d ago
It’s not the same thing. Tay was set to continue learning after deployment and trolls figured out how to bias her input data and make her into a nazi.
Google, like Meta, releases models in a frozen state and has very stringent evaluation criteria for releasing a model. The input data is evaluated to give percentages by country of origin (less developed, more developed) and the race and gender of subjects. Look at the Bias section of something like the SAM or DINO paper. Quite possibly the original error crept in due to individually minor decisions by individual contributors*, but there is no way people on the team didn’t realise there was a problem in late production. Either they felt that the AI’s behaviour was acceptable, or they didn’t feel able to raise concerns about it. Neither of those say good things about the work culture at Google.
*I believe this is called ‘systematic racism’ by the in crowd.
To quote Jim Hacker, Prime Minister on an overbearing Foreign Office:
"Are they here to follow our instructions, or are we here to follow theirs?"
The FO makes some good points: politicians tend to be geographically ignorant, prone to black-and-white thinking, and have short time horizons. Nevertheless, the bureaucrats are also blinkered, prejudiced, incompetent and leverage their expertise to block off any feedback or reform that might make them otherwise. Ultimately that can't be tolerated.
Corvos
18d ago
In case you didn’t follow at the time, Gemini would literally refuse image creation requests that showed white people in a positive light, whilst simultaneously erasing them from historical images.
To achieve that level of effect, you have to have a VERY skewed training set, and follow it up with explicit instructions in the prompt.
The fact that they trained an AI like this, and that not one of the testing team felt comfortable saying that the model was obviously biased against depicting white people in positive or historical contents, shows pretty explicit racism in my view. Every BigCorp AI paper has a Bias section now, they definitely knew. And other BigCorp LLMs and image generators have avoided this kind of problem without legal liability. Pretty clearly nobody at Google was interested or comfortable bringing up concerns about the depiction of white people, and white people only.
Corvos
18d ago
Chance on Biden resigning before Jan 21, so they still get to claim "the first female President"?
By all accounts, he’s seething that she stole the nomination from him. Couple that with the fact that she then lost an election against a candidate he’d already beaten once and I can’t imagine him being in the mood to give her anything.
Also I doubt anyone except for morons will push for it, it’s symbolically awful. The first female ‘president’ will be a loser, a charity case. Even Liz Truss did better.
I'm asking you now for a number on Trump getting murdered or otherwise failing to assume power
1 in a 100 or so?
Corvos
18d ago
Not quite the same thing, but Yes Minister always used to joke that the Foreign Secretary and the PM get all their news from the television - official channels don’t put the information through for hours.
Thatcher, though now somewhat overrated on the right, won multiple elections and completely upended the political consensus. She succeeded at destroying the dead hand of the trade unions--an incredibly popular policy that Labour had promised and failed to implement--and was one of very few post-war politicians to have genuine convictions and enough political nous to push them through.
The people who hated Thatcher really hated her, but she was clearly beyond the vast majority of her peers. And I've met many, many working class people who loved and voted for her because she rescued them from the grasping hands of the people who pretended to speak for them. Any parallels to the modern day are left as an exercise to the reader.
Personally, I think this was a nice read. It's very rare to see real positivity in politics, even though today represents a somewhat unexpected victory for the man that many on this site were hoping would win.
Corvos
19d ago
She seems to hate public speaking and only does it when she absolutely has to. I’m not surprised she doesn’t want to do it on the most stressful night of her life, though I think it’s churlish.
Corvos
19d ago
I don’t think they ‘let’ the GOP do it. The reason that trans had so much traction was because people pattern matched it to legalising homosexuality and gay marriage.
The utter terror of having your life destroyed five years later for opposing ‘trans rights’ compelled public people on both the left and right sides to become viral vectors for the ideology. I think people have forgotten how much trans was pushed by conservatives, especially in the UK but in the US too.
In short, the form of the campaign ensured that it would take centre stage regardless of what anyone rationally thought about it as an election winner.
(The pattern matching between ‘trans rights’ and ‘gay rights’ then forced interested parties to double down because if it became possible one day to criticise trans stuff without being destroyed, the same might be true of LGBT issues more broadly. The taboo would be broken. Whether that’s actually the case I don’t know.)
Corvos
19d ago
Yes to both you and @SteveKirk, but this kind of cancellation takes a lot more work than “see thing I don’t like, press retweet”. It’s much harder for it to go viral because the R number is so much lower.
more excuses to send endless whatsapp voice messages
Not the world I want either, I’m a very text-focused person. But I think it’s now clear that you can have too much legibility in a system.
Corvos
19d ago
Rishi Sunak's Tories got beaten by Kier Starmer's Labour, and would have if they were running a re-animated Maggie Thatcher, Tony Blair converted to the Tories or an Angelic Winston Churchill descended from Heaven (ok well maybe not the last one!) Because the economy was shot and the Tories were in charge at the time.
I don’t think this is true at all. Rishi Sunak lost because he was a useless man in a suit who talked tough while doing very little and firing everyone who tried to follow through on the rhetoric. He alienated centrists who split to Labour and right-wingers who split to Reform.
We’re talking about a man who thought that resurrecting David Cameron from corrupt ignominy and extending compulsory maths were political triumphs.
Kier Starmer was and remains an incredibly weak candidate: a proven liar who literally couldn’t open his mouth on policy without either scandalising his party or the nation.
Even dragged down by a decade of mismanagement, almost anyone could have followed the Johnson strategy of pushing for change, getting foiled, and using that to push for a bigger mandate. To put it frankly, Sunak didn’t have the guts and he spent two years fiddling, losing not only his chance to accomplish anything but his ability to credibly promise to do something next time round.
Corvos
19d ago
Harris. Pace @SSCReader’s comment I think that the power of the media to set the facts that everyone but the very-obsessive cares about is very high, and similarly their ability to set the emotional tone. I don’t believe they can get people to believe just anything, but I do think they can get a bad candidate elected against an unpopular candidate in the face of the fundamentals.
Likewise the blue apparatus around making sure their supports vote is much more powerful than the red one, and I would expect that to get them another few points.
Corvos
19d ago
That’s one reason why, surely? It’s much harder to get cancelled or persecuted for something you said if it’s obscured and kept behind the loyalty test of listening to 4 hours of podcast.
Easy search for everybody turned out to be a disaster, unfortunately. So interesting people retreated to hidden sanctuaries (discord, chats) and less amenable modalities (voice, video).
Corvos
20d ago
Certainly I’ve found that diagnosing problems in Azure-based CI is an absolute nightmare because you can’t just go in and fiddle with stuff. You have reupload your pipeline, wait the obligatory 40 minutes for it to rebuild in a pristine docker, then hope that the print statements you added are enough to diagnose the problem, which they never are.
That said, it was still better than our previous non-cloud CI because it didn’t fail if you had more PRs than PCs or if you got shunted onto the one server that was slow and made all your perfectly functional tests time out. So I can’t condemn it wholeheartedly.
Corvos
21d ago
Presumably they discuss and either compromise, trade favours, or go with the opinion of the most senior & respected person in the room. It's entirely possible to make a flat / informal hierarchy work, it's just hard to break it out of serious deadlocks or disagreements.
Shamus Young’s review of Arkham City broke that game for me unfortunately. Once he’s pointed out all the ways that the story doesn’t really make sense, it’s hard to un-see.
Corvos
22d ago
I will push back slightly against ‘never’. Comma.ai was pretty much a one-man self-driving solution and that was on part with the big boys for motorway driving. Likewise Palmer Luckey invented modern VR pretty much single handedly. But it’s rare and usually only happens within niches the mainstream hasn't noticed are viable.
from now on. I'm pushing straight to main
The last guy I knew who pushed straight to master was a CTO and he bricked his company’s product while it was in active use by really serious clients.
I get that you’re exaggerating for effect and I’ve definitely known some very irritating guru programmers who insist that your one-man proof of concept prototype be audited like it’s intel assembly code, but stuff like docker and CI and PR requirements are used because it makes good things happen and bad things not-happen at a vastly superior rate.
Likewise we had a very good programmer who implemented a bespoke deployment solution based on ansible and a bunch of other stuff, and even before he left it had started to contort into a horrifying mess of spaghetti that was steadily losing features as they became unsupportable. We eventually ended up with a custom Debian for all_dependencies.deb because one of the tools he’d used had stopped supporting versions properly.
Forgive me, I didn’t mean to imply that drinking bottled water was stupid in literally all circumstances, only that it would be strange to but it when properly treated tap water is a viable alternative.
I would normally refill a flask or old bottle from the tap if I wanted portable water, but I drink bottled water in countries where the taps aren’t safe or if I’m suddenly thirsty when out and about.
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