That there is no perfect defense. There is no protection. Being alive means being exposed; it’s the nature of life to be hazardous—it’s the stuff of living.

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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • Do you have any evidence to back this up?

    It’s reasonable to assume that the vast majority of their throughput is used for crime.

    The overwhelming majority of people do not leverage crypto in any way. Even crypto scam promoters almost exclusively focus on speculation and do not use crypto as money.

    And you do not need the payment for your order of bell peppers and toilet paper to be private. Let’s be real here.

    Over the 15+ years that we’ve had crypto, there have been only two viable uses. All others have failed:

    1. Criminal activity (including brutal stuff like enabling NK/Russia and drug cartels)
    2. Financial speculation (in of itself often a malicious activity where the goal is to dump your worthless bags on a mark)

  • The irony with all these oligarch statements is that if an employee applies their economic philosophy in a direct manner, the outcome would be that the employees’ sole goal should be to work as little as possible to gain as much money as possible while not getting fired.

    You want to optimize your return per hour if you are salaried. It would make logical sense that you need to lower the amount of hours worked to get the highest possible return on a per hour basis.

    You would also want to focus on approaches that make it difficult to fire you as opposed to focusing on organizational goals.

    I am not saying I agree or disagree with this approach, there are clearly many issues with what I am saying (other poor souls will have to pick up the slack for your laziness), just highlighting the inherent contradictions of oligarch propaganda.




  • Would be curious to read the LLM output.

    I find after reading a selection of LLM generated poetry/short fiction, you start notice signs of a generated text. It tends to be a bit too polished, without any idiosyncrasies and with almost too much consistency in the delivery.

    EDIT: So I read the short story. To be honest, I am don’t think I would be able to tell whether this was LLM generated or written by a writer. There are some subtle signs, but it’s very much possible that I am seeing these signs because I knew it was LLM generated.

    One thing to point out is that this is not really a short story, it’s less than a thousand words with honestly not much going on and there is lots of colourful descriptive text. I was expecting something in the range of 3K to 5K words.

    After reading the “short story”, I am not sure I agree with the methodology. Some of their test statements include “I was interested in the struggles of these characters” and “This story deserved to be published in a top literary journal”. The story is not long enough enough to make meaningful conclusions about such test statements.

    Their approach to willingness to pay also doesn’t make sense as it’s too short. Here is their graph for the TWP metic:

    This seems artificial, no one is going to pay 30 cents in a real world scenario for such a text (irrespective of whether you think it was written by a person or if it was LLM generated). The respondents might rate it at being worth 30 or 40 cents as part of the survey, but that’s not the same thing as actually going through with a purchase. I will note they didn’t simply ask for a value and they did have a system tied to the survey payout; but this almost seems irrelevant.





  • Some of the most telling anecdotes in Careless People involve Kaplan, who joined Facebook’s policy team in 2011 and was promoted to Chief Global Affairs Officer earlier this year. She writes that Kaplan, who was a deputy chief of staff in the George W. Bush White House, was “surprised to learn Taiwan is an island” and that “often when we start to talk about pressing issues in some country in Latin America or Asia, he stops and asks me to explain where the country is.”

    This almost seems difficult to believe, but considering the state of the world, I wouldn’t be surprised if it is true.

    By now, Meta’s failures in Myanmar, where hate speech and misinformation on Facebook helped incite a genocide, are well documented. Wynn-Williams, who early in her tenure flew to Myanmar to try to sell officials there on the company’s connectivity projects, describes her futile attempts to get more resources for content moderation in the country.

    She blames Kaplan in particular. She says she “started this long process of trying to hire someone for Myanmar in 2015” and found a human rights expert who fit the bill in May 2016, but Kaplan blocked her from making the hire in February of 2017. He allegedly told her to “move on and get over it.” She later concludes that “when it came to Myanmar, those people just didn’t matter to him.”

    In a just world, Kaplan and Zuckerberg would be required to do mandatory multi-decade community service work as live-in junior janitors at major Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh. For example, in Bhasan Char island.