ExFed

Ugh. That old, awful meme. All these years, I never quite understood what about it makes me cringe and wrench my gut so much... But maybe now I have the words: anyone who knowingly exploits the suffering of others ultimately has evil intent.

For being such an "America first" administration, they sure do spend a lot of money on immigrants...

Sure. But for once, just this once, can we celebrate a win?

False dichotomy. What next? All men are toxic because of their masculinity?

It takes strength to empower others. Men are strong when they empower others (including women). That's literally all that Talarico is saying. How is that incompatible with feminism?

You've just repeated the kind of rhetoric that gives rise to _anti-feminism; your definition of "feminism" is less about empowering women than it is about suppressing men, and I don't like it one bit.

Swamps and wetlands are very ecologically productive places.

They've drained the swamp an replaced it with a Superfund site.

I find it especially rich that Stephen Miller would call a scandal-ridden home-wrecker like Paxton as "God-fearing" when Talarico is a Presbyterian seminarian.

Christian Nationalists aren't Christians. They worship a twisted and selfish god unable to sacrifice anything to save anyone from anything.

My all-time favorite software engineering podcast is Developer Voices. There's some AI stuff in there, but entirely from the perspective of experienced programmers who like programming, but who also like the idea of learning how to appropriately use a new and powerful tool to help get the job done. Chris Jenkins does a really good job.

Agreed. The bubble has to pop eventually... Or not, and we really are marching towards our own obsolescence as a species.

LLMs are fundamentally limited, because 'what's the next word' shouldn't work.

Yes, you're right. However, for fear of coming off as an AI sycophant (I've yet to sacrifice my brain at the altar of our future AI overlords), LLMs aren't the whole picture. Plenty of research is dedicated to essentially combining the best of each class of AI algorithms into a composite model of intelligence. For instance, "Neuro-Symbolic AI" is really just the result of giving an LLM (good at translation, search, synthesis, bad at symbolic reasoning) a symbolic inference engine like Prolog (good at symbolic reasoning, no native ability for translation/search/synthesis). I've been coding for over 20 years, and I'm impressed at its results for software development.

This all is reminiscent of Moore's Law; even though we keep running into the physical limits of CPU clock speeds, transistor size, etc. we keep finding clever ways to work around those limits.

Of course I'm not saying we should; these models are, after all, models of intelligence, not wisdom.

Edit: fix apostrophe splice

And the fruits of big oil's labor are now ingrained within the fiber of American society. Go ask a few average Americans to give up their cars and let me know how it goes.

Trains in North America.

We had them at one point, built the nation with them, then so summarily decided that the automobile was better, that we built all of our infrastructure assuming that nobody would ever not want a car to go everywhere, making it doubly hard to convince people that public transit doesn't have to suck.