baltakatei

Alien 1: Wow, humans must go around saying “Kill me…” a lot.

Alien 2: Uh, rude!

Middle-aged human: No, no, that tracks.

No author credit given.

The main issue I have as an editor is that there is no straightforward way to retrain the LLM to correct faulty training as directly or revertably as the existing method of editing an article’s wikicode. Already, much of my time updating Wikipedia is spent parsing puffery and removing phrases like “award-winning” or “renowned”, inserted by malicious advertisers trying to use Wikipedia as a free billboard. If a Wikipedia LLM began making subjective claims instead of providing objective facts backed by citations, I would have to teach myself machine learning and get involved with the developers who manage the LLM’s training. That raises the bar for editor technical competency which Wikipedia historically has been striving to lower (e.g. Visual Editor).

I was familiar with how their single-nucleotide polymorphism fingerprinting worked in principle when I submitted my sample. So, I was not surprised when my report indicated majority Native American (both my parents were born in the Navajo Nation).

As for preventing misuse of the genetic profile 23andMe built, the primary legal protection is the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (GINA) which prohibits insurance providers and employers from discriminating against patients and employees based upon disorders that are correlated with their genetic information. I believe it is prudent for people to examine their own genetic information in detail. I believe the legal protection GINA offers is sufficient for SNP profiling. I also believe as genetic profiling technology improves, the principles of non-discrimination set by GINA should be peotected with additional legislation.

Sorry, I didn’t know there was a Nobel prize in economics. Is this one of those pseudo-Nobel prizes that has nothing to do with dynamite?

I think the cognitive reset that psychedelics can awaken come in basically two varieties: delusions of grandeur or empathy. Elon Musk has benefitted from privilege, luck, and the immunity to consequences that comes from being a figurehead leader for people who expect him to make the right noises to support their cause. This lucky run has fueled his fantasy of making humans an interplanetary species like in his Iain M. Banks science fiction novels that he uses to name his SpaceX vehicles.

In Elon Musk’s case, engineers at Tesla and SpaceX have shared his technocratic vision up until he tried to adopt Trump’s Maga base away from Trump (e.g. with his fascist Nazi salute). Engineers of solar panels, self-driving cars, and space vehicles have to have a minimum level of empathy to deal with the stresses of working in teams to overcome difficult problems; most probably genuinely want to help humanity by expanding capitalism to asteroid mining and Mars colonies; the Maga mob, though, have much more grounded ambitions of restoring their socioeconomic dominance over cultures not their own. Attempting to curry favor with both at the same time only works if your leadership inspiring improvements in solar panel, self-driving car, and space technology dominate news stories with success after success, building and maintaining momentum beyond what Trump can disrupt with his own media stunts like the tariff posturing. But Trump has succeeded in making the Maga faction feel victimized and dominated the news cycle so far in 2025.

Elon and Trump are both salesmen, but the latter only has to break things to get attention. So, I am not surprised that Elon finds solace in mind-altering drugs to comfort himself from the realization that his support base simply is smaller than Trump’s.

Is it sold already wet within their packaging?

If it were water soluble, it would have already dissolved before you opened the packaging.

Speak for yourself. Gestures to children triggering their own gag reflex for fun and profit

OP’s article is 3 months old, being dated 2025-02-11.

I’m pretty sure no one knows my blog and wiki exist, but it sure is popular, getting multiple hits per second 24/7 in a tangle of wiki articles I autogenerated to tell me trivia like whether the Great Fire of London started on a Sunday or Thursday.

What if it was reaaaaally fluffy down?

Relevant quote from Anathem (2008) by Neal Stephenson:

“You say of course there are criminals, but if you look at a particular person, how do you know whether or not he is a criminal? Are criminals branded? Tattooed? Locked up? Who decides who is and isn’t a criminal? Does a woman with shaved eyebrows say ‘you are a criminal’ and ring a silver bell? Or is it rather a man in a wig who strikes a block of wood with a hammer? Do you thrust the accused through a doughnut-shaped magnet? Or use a forked stick that twitches when it is brought near evil? Does an Emperor hand down the decision from his throne written in vermilion ink and sealed with black wax, or is it rather that the accused must walk barefoot across a griddle? Perhaps there is ubiquitous moving picture [technology]—what you’d call [video cameras]—that know all, but their secrets may only be unlocked by a court of eunuchs each of whom has memorized part of a long number. Or perhaps a mob shows up and throws rocks at the suspect until he’s dead.”

Either Butlerian Jihad or Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou.

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“The F.D.A. will approve vaccines for high-risk persons and, at the same time, demand robust, gold-standard data on persons at low risk,” the officials wrote.

During a “town hall” live streamed on Tuesday afternoon, Dr. Prasad said he thought the new approach to Covid vaccination was “a reasonable compromise,” leaving the shots available to many Americans “but also generating evidence.”

Before approving Covid vaccines for wider use, the F.D.A. “anticipates the need” for new clinical trials in which participants under 65 are randomly assigned to receive the new shots or a placebo, Dr. Prasad and Dr. Makary wrote in the journal.

In other words, Vinay Prasad (appointed by Trump to the FDA for claiming the political left was using the COVID-19 pandemic to end democracy) needs to see more evidence (people dying of COVID-19) before devoting resources towards vaccine development.

I suspect Prasad is a podcast charlatan using his oncologist credentials to advance his career by stoking conservative resentment against mask mandates in order to gain popularity and name brand recognition to sell his personal philosophy books.

Gotta stay sane somehow.

Missing the Mormon onesie.

If you subscribe to the definition of inflation that assumes renting instead of home ownership and homesteading in rural frontiers with challenging weather (deserts, swamps, tundra) rather than in gentrified places with pleasant weather (e.g. every existing metropolitan area).

The way I see it, unless people somehow shrink in size or a wormhole opens to another Earth-like planet, real estate prices are inversely correlated to population which continues to rise.

FYI, their Mastodon account is here.

Squealer did nothing wrong.