I switched from Tuta to Fastmail. Tuta was mostly fine, but being restricted to only their client was really annoying. I can use Fastmail with Thunderbird/FairEmail/etc just fine.

I get what Tuta is trying to do with encrypted email, but IMO they’re better off joining up with Fastmail on better specs that allow for the things they want to do, instead of limiting what email clients you can use.

Because they understand just as well as we do that the way our voting system is set up means you have two options, and anything else is throwing your vote away.

Harris offered a few progressive scraps and then proudly showed off endorsements from the fucking Cheneys. People wanted real change. They’re going to get it, for better or for worse.

Biden’s policies brought “the economy” out of it better, at the expense of your average person.

There was no “tax the rich” candidate this election. Failing that, people voted for change.

If things didn’t suck for so many people, they would’ve been casting seeds onto stone. It’s much, much harder to radicalize someone that’s content. Instead, the messages found fertile ground. The solution isn’t to just ignore the issue and say “actually everything’s fine, look at numbers go up!”. It’s to give people hope that you’re actually fixing the issue.

It didn’t peter out, it got co-opted and suppressed until Trump capitalized on it. This is that exact same sentiment. People can’t afford groceries and housing, that was a huge issue during the election, so yeah we’ve finally reached a breaking point where people are pissed off about inequality and showed it. Anybody still pushing neolib shit is either braindead or benefits from neofeudalism.

If you’re just some dude, and you’ve got youtubers saying “you matter and you’re cool” on the one hand, and “cis white men suck #KillAllMen”, what do you think you’d be attracted to? That’s a generalization of course, but identity politics has got to go. We need more of this aesthetic on the left:

Not that exact poster obviously, but we need something that gives people a vision of the future and makes it cool. Until that happens, get ready for more Trump and his ilk.

He will bring lots of change. None of it good, but the DNC should view that as a crushing repudiation of their approach. They can’t even blame the Electoral College, they fucked up that badly. Hopefully they’ll learn a goddamn thing or two and run someone offering positive change.

It’s not really about that short of a timeframe. Here’s another example:

https://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/

Compare 1963 to 2022:

We’re living in a new Gilded Age, people know they’re getting fucked, and saying “Oh, but look at this number going up” doesn’t work anymore.

It doesn’t matter how well “the economy” recovered from Covid, when you see stuff like this:

https://inequality.org/facts/income-inequality/

Trump isn’t going to fix that, but Biden already didn’t, and FPTP means you get your pick of those two options.

IMO that’s way off base. People want change. They know they’re getting screwed, and the grifter is promising change. He’s lying and I think most people know that, but the fact that they’d take a convicted felon over what the DNC offered up is a crushing repudiation.

Bernie would’ve mopped the floor with Trump, because he also offers change. Someone like Obama would’ve too, even though there was a paucity of actual change during his terms.

We need to drag the DNC kicking and screaming off of the corporate dick it’s sucking, and get it left enough to offer real change, and people will vote for it in droves.

You’ll like this poem:

https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html

The start of it:

Gerard Nolst Trenité - The Chaos (1922)

Dearest creature in creation Studying English pronunciation, I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.

I will keep you, Susy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy; Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear; Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.

Totally. My comment was just a note that if you screw up like the alt text is humorously referring to, that’s a good tool for fixing it.

FYI if you get mojibake like in the alt text, this is a great tool for automatically fixing it:

https://github.com/rspeer/python-ftfy

Maybe a good speaker helps. I’ve tried them before and they’re good background noise for flights, but that’s about all I’ve gotten out of them.

The whole “it’s just autocomplete” is just a comforting mantra. A sufficiently advanced autocomplete is indistinguishable from intelligence. LLMs provably have a world model, just like humans do. They build that model by experiencing the universe via the medium of human-generated text, which is much more limited than human sensory input, but has allowed for some very surprising behavior already.

We’re not seeing diminishing returns yet, and in fact we’re going to see some interesting stuff happen as we start hooking up sensors and cameras as direct input, instead of these models building their world model indirectly through purely text. Let’s see what happens in 5 years or so before saying that there’s any diminishing returns.

Gary Marcus should be disregarded because he’s emotionally invested in The Bitter Lesson being wrong. He really wants LLMs to not be as good as they already are. He’ll find some interesting research about “here’s a limitation that we found” and turn that into “LLMS BTFO IT’S SO OVER”.

The research is interesting for helping improve LLMs, but that’s the extent of it. I would not be worried about the limitations the paper found for a number of reasons:

• There doesn’t seem to be any reason to believe that there’s a ceiling on scaling up
• LLM’s reasoning abilities improve with scale (notice that the example they use for kiwis they included the answers from o1-mini and llama3-8B, which are much smaller models with much more limited capabilities. GPT-4o got the problem correct when I tested it, without any special prompting techniques or anything)
• Techniques such as RAG and Chain of Thought help immensely on many problems
• Basic prompting techniques help, like “Make sure you evaluate the question to ignore extraneous information, and make sure it’s not a trick question”
• LLMs are smart enough to use tools. They can go “Hey, this looks like a math problem, I’ll use a calculator”, just like a human would
• There’s a lot of research happening very quickly here. For example, LLMs improve at math when you use a different tokenization method, because it changes how the model “sees” the problem

Until we hit a wall and really can’t find a way around it for several years, this sort of research falls into the “huh, interesting” territory for anybody that isn’t a researcher.

Gary Marcus is an AI crank and should be disregarded

Yeah, it’s not impossible, but it’s much harder and you get a lot less info. You can also counteract the JS-less tracking with Firefox’s privacy.resistFingerprinting, or by using the Tor Browser, which enables a lot of anti-surveillance measures by default. Here’s also another good site for discovering how trackable you are: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

They’re also working with browser developers to push htmx into web standards, so that hopefully soon you won’t even need htmx/JS/etc, it’ll just be what your browser does by default