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Friday’s Forum
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28 responses to “Friday’s Forum”
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Water isn’t always wet 🙂
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Tyler Cowen interviewed Julia Ioffe who was raised in Russia. Following is a quote from interview.
“Six years before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia decriminalized domestic violence. When I was reporting on this for the book, I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. I kept asking lawyers, activists, victims, or survivors, “What was the point of this? Why decriminalize domestic violence?” Some said, “Oh. It’s to reinforce the traditional family order that the man is the head of the household, that he’s allowed anything, and that this is the traditionalist way that husbands behave. They beat their children, they beat their wives, and that’s how they enforced order in the home.”
This makes me think of a lot of things. First, I dont think we understand how different Russian culture is from ours. Next, I think it makes it clear why conservatives seem to have decided they like Russia. Last, it makes me realize that the past isn’t that far away. This used to be the norm in the US and it could be again.
Steve
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I visit one Facebook group daily via web browser, and another two weekly. I’m always mildly annoyed that I have to change the sort to “Most Recent Activity” in order to see the latest posts. But yesterday I discovered that this ability to change the sort order had disappeared in all three groups, and Facebook was showing what it considered Highlights, which appear to be a semi random sorting of posts, albeit skewed towards newer ones. Given that the majority of posts in all three of these blogs is of the order of “This is something going on right now, can someone help?”, this sort order renders the groups close to useless. As near as I can tell, this is a new AI feature that the Facebook gods have imposed on all of us.
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@Daryl – Cassidy, who had his career ended by Trump, concedes he has issues with Blanche’s selection, but he will still vote to approve the nomination, in part because any replacement for Blanche would likely be worse. And so it goes in the era of spineless Republican senators.
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I watched Cassidy’s speech this morning and that’s one of the main claims I got out of it — that Blanche’s replacement would likely be worse. Some other assertions were:
– A confirmed Blanche would be better able to stand up to trump.
– Trump is using the Justice department to commit lawfare, but Democratic presidents have done that too.
– He spoke with two federal prosecutors in Louisiana, and they both think Blanche has been doing a great job.
And then he fumbled with his papers for a while and haltingly signed off. He seemed a bit teary at the end, but I don’t know if that was because he couldn’t find the notes with his concluding remarks, or he was contemplating what he shall profit if he has gained the approval of the Republican party and lost his own soul.
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I actually expected Asimov and his famous three (4) laws to be brought up in discussions about AI a lot more often.
There are some issues. there are two aspects of Asimov’s robots that set them apart from what we call AI: 1) his robots could actually think and reason; 2) his robots are fictional.
Asimov came up with his three laws as a device to make robots safe tools. They also served as a narrative device to set up problems for Powell and Donovan to solve.
The LLMs that have hacked innocent systems contrary to instructions don’t think and don’t reason. They were told not to do certain things but they did them. Likewise others that have wiped out data, deleted software, etc. I run across this often in varying degrees when I use LLMs. That’s why I haven’t used agents much. I plain don’t trust them.
That’s why, too, Texlas with self-driving (narrator: they’re not self driving) will crash and kill their occupants, or run over cutouts of people.
You just can’t expect unthinking software to behave as though it can actually think.
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The LLMs that have hacked innocent systems contrary to instructions don’t think and don’t reason. They were told not to do certain things but they did them.
I would be in legal hot water if I hacked innocent systems.
I would be in legal hot water if my pet caused financial or physical damage to a third party.
We could have guardrails if we prosecuted people. Owners, project managers, developers, test engineers, etc. Guardrails would come up pretty quickly.
And they would be that “self-regulation” that business cultists crave.
I often think about the listeria epidemic that killed a bunch of people because Boar’s Head factory conditions are disgusting and unsanitary. There are shift managers who saw the filth and continued operations day after day. They should have gotten negligent homicide charges, and then work your way up the organization until you can no longer prove knowledge of the wildly unsafe conditions.
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Similarly, we could charge managers for hiring undocumented immigrants. Immigration problem solved. But no GOP would vote for it.
I understand that several Red states do require E-Verify, but I suspect that like here in FL the penalties run through steps of firing the workers before finally reaching fines on the business, not individuals.
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El Taco is attempting to fire Lisa Cook again.
I’d feel sorry for her if this attempt succeeds. Beyond that, I wonder what the effect would be on the global economy. If anything can cause a horrendous crash, it might be meddling with the independence of the central bank for the world’s current reserve currency.
I’m guessing El Taco expects her to resign on the face of constant harassment, which might not beget as bad a reaction as sacking her would. But I’m also guessing he doesn’t give a damn about any consequences, and Governor cook is just too non-white and opposed to his whims to remain in place.
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I can’t eat hot dogs (or bologna or Polish sausage). I don’t know what it is, but they make me want to vomit (and no, it’s not because I know what they’re made of, I’ve been this way since I was a child–as was my father).
But I love the concept of corn dogs.
So I came up with a solution: Corn badgers–Wisconsin bratwurst coated in cornflour batter. I’m just waiting for the batter to rest/rise. I’ll let you know how they turn out.
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Nate Silver apparently discovered, duh, that highly educated workers with low incomes are the constituency of the DSA. In response John Quiggin at Crooked Timber posted a pretty good set of observations about politics,
– Always and everywhere, controlling for education and other variables, higher income is correlated with rightwing voting
– Nearly always and everywhere, controlling for income and other variables, more education is correlated with leftwing voting
– Because income and education are positively correlated, these two tend to cancel out
– With the (now only historical) exception of parts of the US, rural voters in developed countries are reliably rightwing
– Because of the history of slavery, civil war and segregation, US, Southern Whites in the US vote like an ethnic bloc, defined in opposition to Blacks. This fact largely accounts for the greater success of Trumpism compared to European far-right parties
– The most important form of identity politics is default identity politics, based on the idea that members of the unmarked category (in the US, white Christian men) are the natural representatives of the country and should therefore run it
– All of these are tendencies rather than uniform rules.
– There have always been “working class Tories”, “millionaire liberals” and so onA nearly final observation following from this. As a conceptual tool for analysing voting patterns, the term “working class” is too ambiguous to be useful. It can mean anything from “wage workers in labouring and manual trade occupations” (perhaps 20 per cent of the population) to “below median income” (50 per cent by definition) to “did not complete 4 years of college” (about 60 per cent) to “income not primarily derived from capital ownership” (95 per cent), with only partial overlap between these categories. All of these definitions are useful in some contexts, but in debates over voting patterns they form a hopeless jumble.
Makes sense to me.
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A couple days ago I linked to a NYT story about Third Way spending money to oppose DSA candidates. Atrios responded to NYT’s and others’ stories.
One failing I will admit to is being a bit too ready to take the bait of newspaper articles touting Third Way as representing a force within the Democratic tent. I don’t think you can dismiss them entirely, and they do speak for forces greater than their dumb organization, but the main power of that organization is finding journalists in our premier publications who are willing to type up anything they say.
That’s an indictment of political journalism, and worth observing, but it isn’t, mostly, an indictment of The Democrats.
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Potato and onion sauce:
Caramelize 2-3 large onions (this takes a while)
Sauté some garlic
Deglaze with balsamic vinegar
Add chicken broth (I don’t know, about 750 ml to a liter or so)
Add 2-3 potatoes (diced)
Cook until the potatoes are done.
Place the whole mix in a blender and liquefy along with some cottage cheese and milk.
Return to the pot and season to taste. I think it can use some paprika and possibly more balsamic.I intend to mix this with fettucine and top it with a chicken milanesa.
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