Kalbear

I think on the Christians for Trump thing - it is a bit weird to me that so many Christians are entirely transactional in their politics instead of voting morally. I can't exactly fault them for that; it's not a bad strategy and in fact has gotten them more gains than virtually any other POTUS to date, in places that were apparently incredibly important to them. But it seems like a very weird set of things to square. Trump is by all accounts an absolutely atrocious human being;, especially by most morals Christians tend to espouse. In a more just world I would think that Christians would almost unanimously be against him and not just against him, but strongly so.

I'm sure he is. And my statement holds. A very sincere evangelical sincerely believes that if you don't believe like he does, you will go to hell. You will live in damnation and torture for eternity. Based on that sincere belief, there is virtually nothing that should be not considered when thinking about how to save someone's soul. Having a theocratic government that is repressive and restricts non-evangelical freedoms is not remotely the worst thing you can do.

It is wise - in fact, it's one of the only things that works - but it does tire you out. You do need some 'real' time. It's very similar to being an introvert; you can feel like you're extroverted in the moment, you can be outgoing and even do it autonomously (like, say, if you're drunk or stoned) - but afterwards you can need some breaks. This is also similar to masking and has similar pros and cons. You can take it further and work on improving things at a more base level, but being functional and the person you want to be in the situations you want to be in is far better than not. To sidetrack things, I've started doing the Sparavato treatment (ketamine nasal spray). The short term thought is apparently I really need to get high more often.

That is the conservative viewpoint entirely. Attacking them for hypocrisy is useless as there is no such thing. Anyone can practice their specific evangelical Christian patriarchy, and that's all the freedom they want.

Meanwhile, scotus delaying tactics work again, as SC district that was ruled gerrymandered too much will be used because it's too late to change. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/supreme-court-delay-prompts-federal-judges-act-south-carolina-redistri-rcna145267

Sam Bankman Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison. I thought a comment by Robert Reich was pretty accurate - the rich get punished only when they steal from other rich people.

Still has to be Requiem for a Dream.

It was done almost entirely offscreen.

Pretty much. I believe there's like a 3-page part where she has this weird-ass set of dreams and then is all 'fuck y'all'. That said, Madeline Pryor is 100% justified in going full villain, and not just because she has a fucking sexy costume

The scientist in me prefers agnostic to atheist.

I tend to agree, but that's pretty much a big part of his story. You need to show him be tempted by things and turn them down, and the drama is his heart wanting to go against his duties and morals. The morals always win, but it should always be hard as hell for us to see that. Conversely there's also value in Superman having to deal with threats he can't actually punch through. That makes the power level a lot more like Goku and whatnot, but Superman being clever is also kind of cool at times. I mean, Batman doesn't really have any arcs or changes either. He is unyielding and unchanging. I don't see why he's particularly more interesting other than he has better villains.

Superman doesn't need an arc. As stated elsewhere, Superman is a crazy fantasy about a person who has virtually unlimited power and is not corrupted by it.

Oh no, Joe Lieberman died. Anyway https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/27/politics/joe-lieberman/index.html

I'll try and explain a bit better.

Interesting that the Kate bullshit was Yet Another likely Russian disinfo campaign. It's remarkable how cheap and effective this has continued to be: https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-68637136

its not so exciting. https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/27/politics/kari-lake-defamation-lawsuit-richer/index.html

No, he's one of the most powerful people on the planet. He has a very good chance of being president of the US again, has millions of followers who are nearly fanatically loyal to him and him alone, has been able to drive a domestic terrorist organization without any real repercussions in the US, is covered repeatedly in every major news organization on the planet, has his own social media system and a lot of connections to other world leaders. As an example, he is able to simply tell congress not to pass a bill and they're doing just that, when previously they were going to go ahead with it. Being able to basically personally control that level of dysfunction in the US government is a lot of power. Ask Ukraine if that's 'wannabe' power. Ask Russia.

Just to be clear, that's on a rack that has 18 of them. It's not quite the absurd leap from a single chip that implies. Again, we don't need to challenge state of the art to cause major problems. AI modeling is already at a stage where the current paradigms of models can be used on training data to be massively problematic. And because it already is built to do scaling and fan-out processing all controlling chips does is increase either the price or time you have to spend. I think thinking about controlling these as a security concern is a category error. We typically think about that in terms of either making sure that people don't have access to the underlying technological underpinnings, or they don't have access to the actual hardware because it's so hard to duplicate. The former is not particularly special because NVidia has been so open about how their chips are made and done; the secrets that they have are in manufacturing, not in the technology. And getting hands on the chips matters a hell of a lot less when you don't have to worry about it taking up space; when you're trying to pilot a missile having 30 chips and processing slower isn't going to be a useful workaround, but that isn't at all the case when you're just putting stuff in a datacenter. Eh. I'm pretty sure that either that's already there in sufficient abilities or has nothing to do with the actual models in question. Throwing a lot of power at video/audio training isn't the primary solution, any more than it is with LLMs, because more power does not mean more contextual understanding.

It is a popular stock associated with one of the most powerful people on the planet. It is also something of a loyalty check.

You can either tax them significantly past that point in terms of consumption or require them to purchase power allowances (similar to water rights or other things) and have them have civil or criminal penalties for going over. As to how it would affect other companies - there is only so much power and resources to go around; this would mean that the biggest fish would not be able to simply take all the resources for computation that exist and not let anyone else work on them.

Ah, okay. It would potentially regulate the industry in terms of making them actually pick and choose interesting problems instead of just throwing AI at everything, but it certainly isn't going to make it not abusive or dangerous by itself.

So I"m not sure about them specifically, but there is an incredibly annoying thing where you basically have to both do a long rest and talk to those people in one specific place - after you've left Act 2, but before you get invaded by the Gith. Where you're overlooking Baldur's Gate at night. If you don't do a long rest there and talk with some of the companions there you'll be forever locked out of any future relationship stuff with some of them. I know that's true for Karlach, for instance. Might be true for them, too. WOO HALSIN YAY

Yeah, I think that kind of massively misses out what made it such a winner for @Ser Lany. The combat is the least special part of BG3, though it is fun in some horribly abusive ways. The relationships and the consequences are a big draw.

AI chips and systems are very power hungry - very similar to bitcoin, which makes sense given that they, too, are doing massive amounts of math calculations as fast as they can. That said it ain't gonna stop China or anything like that.

Zorral was claiming exactly that, which is why I responded. Furthermore there is very little study that indicates any kind of causal linkage, and in fact it seems entirely the opposite - those who are more inclined to violence like violent media. In any case, as I'm sure you'd agree, there are no easy fixes. The problems are humans.