Outside of our lefty bubble, the propaganda is effective.

If you haven’t already built up distrust for sources like the NYT or the washington post, you will see articles from (who you believe are) trustworthy sources, downplaying the crimes around the world. Remember, the bulk of violence during the GWOT happened pre-social media. You mostly saw what was shown. You didn’t look deeper, or read sources by counter opinions because they were ‘probably propaganda’.

Stepping into 2026, nearly everyone has seen what Israel has done to Gaza. People still have the walls up in their mind, it’s Israel’s doing, Israel is the rogue state. The US wouldn’t do that, etcetcetc.

If you’re in the armed forces, chances are you signed up because you were kinda dumb. Not really the kind to read foreign newspapers, or any newspaper really. Maybe you grew up poor and didn’t really have the bandwidth to care about the greater world when you’re struggling to eat. A few years in you’ve seen the inner workings, the inefficiencies, the general disdain for humanity, but you understand it’s how the military is, tough to make you an efficient fighter or whatever. But you’ve still got a few years left on your contract, “they own you” is the mantra repeated to every boot in the country. Your frontal lobe is developing, starting to think a little more about your place in the system. At least we’re not in a hot war, right?

Well here come’s donnie, ole president of peace, starting a new forever war. You’ve seen the shit from gaza on your phone, it probably made you rub a couple braincells together but you can’t worry about it much. Don’t forget, the government owns you. They’ve changed your shift schedule 6 times in the last two weeks. You’re operating on 3 hours of sleep but it’s okay, you’re tough, you have energy drinks.

Oh shit, news came in, a girls school they say? Must have been an accident, must be fake news, it’s propaganda. [Those brain cells are starting to vibrate, the rubbing is creating heat]. The US admits it. The US claims it was a mistake. This flies in the face of all the propaganda you’ve been fed saying “We make sure we hit the right target, that’s why we have all this tech. we’re not like those terrorists who kill kids. We can stick a missile up a terrorist’s ass from half the world away”. You start thinking about it. You learn it was a cluster munition, it was a double tap. You still have two years left on your contract before college is paid for and you get a nice deal on a home loan with the GI bill. You can make it through to provide for your family.

You get the call it’s boots on the ground time. The dots start connecting, those two brain cells get an ember burning. You realize this is real, the mind games you and everyone around you have been playing stop hitting.

You call the hotline.

Back in college I took a couple machine learning classes. After the second I understood where the market would eventually end up. It’s a pattern matching machine, if you were to provide infinite data and infinite compute, you could have the machine do enough regression to match the presented surface of whatever the data represented.

I sat back and was like “oh this is sorta cool but sorta dumb”. You can’t create a novel thought process from this, you are limited by what data you can collect and label, and labeling data is an extremely time consuming process because it relies on humans. But also, you don’t really need labeled data if you don’t care about correctness. You can get away with feeding the regression machine a load of data and label more generally based on how close certain points are in a vector space. It’s how “sentiment analysis” works. You can take IMDB’s database of reviews that each have some words and a star rating, and use the star rating to categorize in “good” and “bad”, then average out the distance between certain words and the frequency they appear within the “good”, “mid”, and “bad” spectrum.

Suddenly, relationships show up, “lawyer” is close to “criminal” in the 3d space.

What modern LLMs do, is just layer this same system with a few short-circuits called context windows. It basically maintains a space of relevance within the broader context of what the model was trained in. For the IMDB example, lets say you’re asking a machine about action movies with x, y, z characteristics, the context maintains those to short-circuit the larger model to retain ‘focus’ and give you near-by relationships.

With enough data you can recreate language based on distance markers and frequency. But back to my original point, it’s the surface level of what it was trained on, a plaster mask. The mask doesn’t have the complexity of the muscles and skin it was formed on, it’s shallow.

That all being said, the ability to make a shallow mask is useful for cross-referencing large amounts of data. The disaster strikes when it’s treated as an all knowing god and used to do military strikes.

I keep seeing this news clipping about a guy who set a lady on fire getting released on bail and the hogs going wild.

How does this actually work/look like in practice? How does a judge end up letting them out on low bail for violent crimes? I feel like people are still getting stuck in jail all the time for drug possession. Is this common or is this a statistical outlier in the legal system?

He bought a ranger. Its 2’’ longer, 5’’ wider, and 2’’ taller than the Toyota Hilux. those two and a mitsubishi basically make up the “small ute” market over there.

It’s splitting hairs to hold it against him, especially since he likely uses it more than 99% of American pickup drivers.

It works but it’s also very inefficient and low yield. They could theoretically recover some gallium, but are they going to find anywhere near enough in purities required to make their targets?

It’s honest because most of the economy is an AI bubble with some creative finance accounting sprinkled on top.

Gallium has a very low melting point. It’s sometimes used in PCB rework by folks in the know because it will mix with the normal solder and keep things fluid for longer, helping remove components.

I would imagine that upon being missiled, the gallium would instantly melt and be scattered around in a 400ft radius.

It’d be like mining for platinum by sweeping the dust on your local freeway to scavenge the catalytic converter particulate.

At this point I’m automatically suspicious of any quantum-multi-dimensional-geometric talk of any kind. I have some friends who are a little woowoo already and I just can’t take part anymore. It all reeks of “I talked to chatgpt about this and it said it was deep”.

Wait, are you telling me the grand theft auto video game series has senseless violence, power fantasies, and parodies of the police where you show up and gun down possible criminals?

Wild

I yoinked 96gb of ddr5 on sale less than a year ago for 140 bucks. That same kit of RAM is approaching 600. Absolutely wild.

Yeah depending on age, it might call for a kickass spiderman watch

I’m a little OCD on keeping track of the time, not sure why. One thing I enjoy is wearing a watch. I’ll look at it half a dozen times in a row to make sure I read it right, but I also enjoy wearing it because I think it looks neat and I like seeing it and watching it tick.

Maybe a cheapish watch that the kid likes, and would want to wear rather than needing to remember to wear it, could help? A little dose of “that’s neat” while also seeing the time.

Planes get essentially rebuilt a few times in their lives. If it’s a good plane, metals aren’t oxidizing, engines well cared for, they can go for a long time.

One big thing that took a lot of planes out of the sky was emissions modernization. New engine refit can cost nearly as much as a new plane.

For this task in particular, this would be somewhat foundational to a design and a believable but incorrect value could incur thousands of dollars in mistakes and time later on, some far harder to debug than others. It’s essentially an age old battle between my brain and interacting with spreadsheets That I just need to get over. It would be cool if you could use llms in adversarial forms where they look to prove another llm wrong or verify output to some 3-4 9s of accuracy but I have a brain and can do that too.

I’ve worked on various hard problems that hit the limits of the llms pretty quickly. It’s frustrating because so much of the information that used to be on the Internet is gone now, and what’s left can’t be found due to how bad search engines have gotten, and even using the llm as a search engine just pops up the same webpages I’ve already deemed as unhelpful.

I’m currently considering trying to use a chatbot to semi-intelligently ocr a PDF to pull things out of a table and into a csv because it’s like 400 entries, but then I keep thinking about how I’ll have to check over that work and wondering if it’s even worth trying to automate or if I should put on headphones with something upbeat and knock it out in an hour or two correctly.

The lack of correctness and the inability to trust it basically makes it useless for anyone who wants to do stuff right.

It has a flattening effect. The things that come out the other end don’t sound human. They sound like the collective mouth of reddit and blog spam.

I don’t know why you’d use it for journaling. what feedback do you even need for journaling? Shouldn’t that be your thoughts and not your thoughts filtered through the machine of averages and disembodied?

Motivation to learn 2 computer.

10 year olds have been autodiadactically bypassing parental controls since parental controls were a thing. Why do we need to beg corporations for scraps just because people feel the need to be babied?

I’m so tired of this conversation.

“X requires bare minimum effort and curiosity in this age of information we live in.”

“But what about the incurious??? Where is their spoon from which to feed???”

If we’re being honest here, it’s probably not the games requirements but the requirements to run modem windows.

Why re-release the game for Windows XP when the main issue with playing old games is compatibility with modern systems.

If you want the game to run on a pregnancy test, go download the original.

I have a friend who trains dogs who is fully on Hasans side for this. People that don’t understand dogs past “doggo” are getting mad. The dog was okay, Hasan was essentially training what’s called a “place” command, for people who don’t want to crate their dogs. You have to reinforce before they finish the behavior(getting off the bed). She wrote me volumes about this.

Also an important note is podcasts aren’t forever. Some have more staying power than others but this is basically getting drafted into the NFL for people who are good at talking.