“The leverage” to do what exactly? Put in someone who will be way worse? How does that help the left accrue power or accomplish our goals? If you think the Democratic Party’s takeaway from the left tanking a major election will be “we need to move left more” I have a bridge to sell you. We are not a majority, which means we need to form coalitions. We can’t do that with a reputation of blowing up everyone’s shit when we don’t get our way. We do it by showing how successful the party is when they listen to us and include us. No, this time we don’t have a particularly left candidate to vote for. Yes, it all sucks. But I have yet to see a concrete explanation of how picking or allowing “far right fascist” over “moderate” has any benefit in the short or long term. To my eyes, it just causes vulnerable people here and around the world to suffer.

The UN is supposed to be a toothless, executively dysfunctional institution, that’s a feature, not a bug. Its members are nations, whose entire purpose is to govern their regions of the planet. If the UN itself had the power to make nations do things, it wouldn’t be the United Nations, it’d be the One World Government, and its most powerful members absolutely do not want it to be that, so it isn’t.

It’s supposed to be an idealized, nonviolent representation of geopolitics that is always available to nations as a venue for civilized diplomacy. That’s why nuclear powers were given veto power: they effectively have veto power over the question of “should the human race continue existing” and the veto is basically a reflection of that. We want issues to get hashed out with words in the UN if possible, rather than in real life with weapons, and that means it must concede to the power dynamics that exist in real life. The good nations and the bad nations alike have to feel like they get as much control as they deserve, otherwise they take their balls and go home.

It’s frustrating to see the US or Russia or China vetoing perfectly good resolutions and everyone else just kind of going “eh, what can you do, they have vetoes,” but think through the alternative: everyone has enough and decides “no more veto powers.” The UN starts passing all the good resolutions. But the UN only has the power that member nations give it, so enforcement would have to mean some nations trying to impose their will on the ones that would’ve vetoed. Now we’ve traded bad vetoes in the UN for real-world conflict instead.

What that “get rid of the vetoes so the UN can get things done” impulse is actually driving at is “we should have a one world government that does good things,” which, yeah, that’d be great, but it’s obviously not happening any time soon. Both articles mention issues and reforms that are worthy of consideration, but the fundamental structure of the UN is always going to reflect the flaws of the world because it’s supposed to do that.

Of course anyone can vote for who they like, or not vote at all, no one’s saying otherwise. It’s Harris’s job to earn your vote, and she clearly hasn’t. But pushing third parties as the solution to any problem is going to do more harm than good until we get a better election system. It may feel better to vote for a party that more clearly aligns with your positions, but if they have no path to actually acquiring any power to make change, you’re doing nothing while feeling like you did something. Changing the policies of a flawed party that actually has power is much harder, and yes, there might be compromise or half-measures, but that’s an infinitely more productive path. (More productive than that is doing direct action outside of the electoral system entirely, but both things can be done at the same time.)

What does this have to do with anything? Yes, the Democratic Party is flawed. That doesn’t change the fact that voting Green will make my political desires slightly less likely, and will make my political fears slightly more likely, compared to voting for a Democrat.

They’re attacking Jill Stein because she’s running a campaign that will have absolutely no impact on the world except for enticing some number of would-be Harris voters to instead throw their votes away. If the Green Party were serious about change, they’d focus on races where they could actually win instead of actively causing harm to the party that is much more likely to actually do the things they say they want. Instead, they’ve basically outright stated that all they care about is hurting the Democrats. It’s a terrible electoral system that needs to be fixed, but until it is, third parties are always going to present a false option that effectively does the opposite of what their voters actually want.

It’s all a stupid game. Israel killed some people, so Iran “had to” respond to save face, and then Israel had to do the same. Once everyone is satisfied that everyone knows both countries have very big and girthy missiles, they can finally back down from a war no one wants (hopefully).

Archive Team looked at this about 10 years ago and found it basically impossible. It was around 14 petabytes of information to fetch, organize, and distribute at the time.

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/INTERNETARCHIVE.BAK

Do you think electing Trump will be read as “wow, the US is taking a principled stance on Palestinian rights” by the world?

“Lossless” has a specific meaning, that you haven’t lost any data, perceptible or not. The original can be recreated down to the exact 1s and 0s. “Lossy” compression generally means “data is lost but it’s worth it and still does the job” which is what it sounds like you’re looking for.

With images, sometimes if technology has advanced, you can find ways to apply even more compression without any more data loss, but that’s less common in video. People can choose to keep raw photos with all the information that the sensor got when the photo was taken, but a “raw” uncompressed video would be preposterously huge, so video codecs have to throw out a lot more data than photo formats do. It’s fine because videos keep moving, you don’t stare at a single frame for more than a fraction of a second anyway. But that doesn’t leave much room for improvement without throwing out even more, and going from one lossy algorithm to another has the downside of the new algorithm not knowing what’s “good” visual data from the original and what’s just compression noise from the first lossy algorithm, so it will attempt to preserve junk while also adding its own. You can always give it a try and see what happens, of course, but there are limits before it starts looking glitchy and bad.

That’s not how it works at all. If it were as easy as adding a line of code that says “check for integrity” they would’ve done that already. Fundamentally, the way these models all work is you give them some text and they try to guess the next word. It’s ultra autocomplete. If you feed it “I’m going to the grocery store to get some” then it’ll respond “food: 32%, bread: 15%, milk: 13%” and so on.

They get these results by crunching a ton of numbers, and those numbers, called a model, were tuned by training. During training, they collect every scrap of human text they can get their hands on, feed bits of it to the model, then see what the model guesses. They compare the model’s guess to the actual text, tweak the numbers slightly to make the model more likely to give the right answer and less likely to give the wrong answers, then do it again with more text. The tweaking is an automated process, just feeding the model as much text as possible, until eventually it gets shockingly good at predicting. When training is done, the numbers stop getting tweaked, and it will give the same answer to the same prompt every time.

Once you have the model, you can use it to generate responses. Feed it something like “Question: why is the sky blue? Answer:” and if the model has gotten even remotely good at its job of predicting words, the next word should be the start of an answer to the question. Maybe the top prediction is “The”. Well, that’s not much, but you can tack one of the model’s predicted words to the end and do it again. “Question: why is the sky blue? Answer: The” and see what it predicts. Keep repeating until you decide you have enough words, or maybe you’ve trained the model to also be able to predict “end of response” and use that to decide when to stop. You can play with this process, for example, making it more or less random. If you always take the top prediction you’ll get perfectly consistent answers to the same prompt every time, but they’ll be predictable and boring. You can instead pick based on the probabilities you get back from the model and get more variety. You can “increase the temperature” of that and intentionally choose unlikely answers more often than the model expects, which will make the response more varied but will eventually devolve into nonsense if you crank it up too high. Etc, etc. That’s why even though the model is unchanging and gives the same word probabilities to the same input, you can get different answers in the text it gives back.

Note that there’s nothing in here about accuracy, or sources, or thinking, or hallucinations, anything. The model doesn’t know whether it’s saying things that are real or fiction. It’s literally a gigantic unchanging matrix of numbers. It’s not even really “saying” things at all. It’s just tossing out possible words, something else is picking from that list, and then the result is being fed back in for more words. To be clear, it’s really good at this job, and can do some eerily human things, like mixing two concepts together, in a way that computers have never been able to do before. But it was never trained to reason, it wasn’t trained to recognize that it’s saying something untrue, or that it has little knowledge of a subject, or that it is saying something dangerous. It was trained to predict words.

At best, what they do with these things is prepend your questions with instructions, trying to guide the model to respond a certain way. So you’ll type in “how do I make my own fireworks?” but the model will be given “You are a chatbot AI. You are polite and helpful, but you do not give dangerous advice. The user’s question is: how do I make my own fireworks? Your answer:” and hopefully the instructions make the most likely answer something like “that’s dangerous, I’m not discussing it.” It’s still not really thinking, though.

Homophobia and transphobia, when you dig into them a bit, are often based in a fear that they’ll be on the other end of toxic masculinity instead of the one they’re used to.

Archive Team often uses the Internet Archive to share the things they save and obviously they have a shared goal of saving a copy of everything ever made, but they aren’t the same people. The Archive Team is a vigilante white hat hacker group (well, maybe a little bit grey), and running a Warrior basically means you’re volunteering to be part of their botnet. When a website is going to be shut down, they’ll whip together a script and push it out to the botnet to try to grab as much of the dying site as they can, and when there’s more downtime they have some other projects, like trying to brute force all those awful link shorteners so that when they inevitably die, people can still figure out where it should’ve pointed to.

This, and see also “minmaxing,” the process of optimizing something (usually your character in a game) to get minimum penalty and/or maximum benefit, usually ignoring anything like realism or storytelling and focusing entirely on the stats and numbers.

The .bin and .cue file are the parts of the actual game disc that you want. The .bin file contains almost all of the data and the .cue file contains some extra information about the structure of the CD. All the rest is Internet Archive stuff (and an image of the game cover of course).

To open it, you can convert it to a .iso disk image instead, which any Linux distribution can open as if it were a real CD. This blog post talks about how to do that. The last paragraph about mount you can probably replace with double-clicking the .iso file in the GUI I would guess.

I know TiddlyWiki quite well but have only poked at Logseq, so maybe it’s more similar to this than I think, but TiddlyWiki is almost entirely implemented in itself. There’s a very small core that’s JavaScript but most of it is implemented as wiki objects (they call them “tiddlers,” yes, really) and almost everything you interact with can be tweaked, overridden, or imitated. There’s almost nothing that “the system” can do but you can’t. It’s idiosyncratic, kind of its own little universe to be learned and concepts to be understood, but if you do it’s insanely flexible.

Dig deep enough, and you’ll discover that it’s not a weird little wiki — it’s a tiny, self-contained object database and web frontend framework that they have used to make a weird little wiki, but you can use it for pretty much anything else you want, either on top of the wiki or tearing it down to build your own thing. I’ve used it to make a prediction tracker for a podcast I follow, I’ve made my own todo list app in it, and I made a Super Bowl prop bet game for friends to play that used to be spreadsheet-based. For me, it’s the perfect “I just want to knock something together as a simple web app” tool.

And it has the fun party trick (this used to be the whole point of it but I’d argue it has moved beyond this now) that your entire wiki can be exported to a single HTML file that contains the entire fully functional app, even allowing people to make their own edits and save a new copy of the HTML file with new contents. If running a small web server isn’t an issue, that’s the easiest way to do it because saving is automatic and everything is centralized, otherwise you need to jump through some hoops to get your web browser to allow writing to the HTML file on disk or just save new copies every time.

If you run the Node.js version, that’s all handled for you. It’s only if you want to do the party trick of keeping it all in a single HTML file that you need to worry about a plugin or anything like that. And even then, the server version exports to a standalone HTML file with one or two clicks.

Edit to add: it’s the only substantial Node package I’ve ever seen with zero dependencies. Very lightweight and simple to run.

No. The headsets are disabled when the play starts or when the play clock goes below 15 seconds.

It’s not a fantasy because they’re bad ideas (they’re not) or we shouldn’t fight for them (we should), it’s a fantasy because you’re skipping over any of the actual work that needs to be done to make them happen: convincing more people to join you and demand more. Ask 100 people if the Senate and Supreme Court should be abolished and 99 of them are going to look at you like you have two heads. You can insist that you’re right and they’re all wrong all you want, but unless you work to get more people on your side, you’ll just be complaining into the void and setting impossible standards for politicians so that you can feel smug when they fail to meet them.

It’s a new model this year, as Nate Silver took his with him when he left 538. The new one seems to put a lot of emphasis on “the fundamentals” this far out, that is, it “thinks” that the general environment and economy and such is pretty good for the incumbent and that the polls might move in that direction by the time election day comes along. And since it’s fitted to historical data, it’s also implicitly assuming that this election will be similar to past elections (like, say, including a competent campaign by a candidate who can get out there and effectively communicate accomplishments and a plan for their term).

I personally think those assumptions are pretty clearly wrong this year and so I’m more inclined to base my perception of the race on pure polling averages, which are looking quite bad for Biden.

“The US President might be in cognitive decline” is a massive news story, as is “The only opponent to a fascist is one more bad night away from his campaign completely imploding,” and also “the President’s own party says behind closed doors that he’s in massive trouble, but is sticking with him in public.”