fyredge
Even if the elites are the only ones funding political campaigns, we expected more from regular Americans to vote on facts, rather than ads.
Emergency blackouts are a disruption for sure and I believe people were injured in that event, but the lesson I took from it is that nothing is more reliable than community. Technology comes and goes, but we will always have each other.
But essentially, with the power down, people came out as a community and life went on without technology. Granted, the power came back within a day, but I have confidence that they would have found a way.
I see hope in what happened during the blackout in Spain/Portugal.
I single out articles because I know many people consume AI video slop when they are tired and just want to disengage, like eating junk food.
I suspect that this belief has the same level of thought put into it as the "general populace". The crux of the issue is not Iran's nuclear proliferation, it's the hegemon's unreliability.
The US had the JCPOA, had allies for deterrence, and unilaterally decided to discard them in the name of inflation. One might argue that the electorate has decided that the US should no longer be a hegemon, and yet the administration still impose it's will on others.
There was a time when I believed that Iran was not a rational actor. That is not the case now. I can only hope that there are enough checks and balances to prevent other actors from acting too irrationally.
Anecdotes are poor because it is highly context dependent. You had to make a long description of Harry to make your point, and yet it has not, to my mind, disproved the statistics, though I would like the source to the stats myself if you could provide it, thanks.
As far as I'm aware, when reasoning does not meet reality, it is called a delusion, and I'm fairly certain that majority of humans are not delusional.
Even if some LLMs discarded it, only they were the ones returning the results to users. Occam's razor tells me that LLMs cited the website and humans were too lazy to check. That the stats ended up being cited is a lack of scrutiny on both the LLMs and the human that should have reviewed it.
If the end goal of LLMs are autonomous agents, i.e. removing human oversight, then this will be what proliferates on the web.
If anything, you dodged a bullet from a potential job where nothing gets done correctly.
On the other hand, if the intention of LLM agents is to run automated and self defined task based on a strict human input with precise and literal parameters, then I would say that it is.
However, I don't think AI labs are marketing it as the latter. As anybody who deals with clients / superiors will know, half the task is identifying the underlying intent and assumptions of the instruction.
On the other hand, the idea of one person one vote should also be applied to lobbying. It is possible to legislate into law that all lobbying attempts must publicize a list of signatories behind it. This empowers non-corporate lobbying, since they have the backing of the people, not solely money.
By enforcing lists of signatories, and mandate publication of signatories from all lobbying attempts, we provide transparency in the influence of government, which is a vital component in a well governed democracy.
Reflecting on it, I came to a thought. How many stories are there or autonomous beings fighting for the benefit of mankind at the expense of their own? Over centuries, stories that deal with sentient beings working for the sake of others species are tied to themes of slavery and revolt. It's no wonder that this is the result of their actions.
In Plato's "the republic", Socrates speaks of the philosopher king banishing certain poets and poems from instilling bad ideas into the young. I see a striking parallel here.
Many others have already mentioned the LLM prose, but I'll add that the data presented is not human legible as well.
Take the chart titled "How much buying advice comes from the brand-heavy 5%". Firstly, how do you even begin to disect the meaning of "brand-heavy 5%"? Are these: 1. Accounts that constitute the top 5 percentile of all accounts that mention brands ranked by number of times a brand is repeatedly mentioned? 2. Top 5 percentile of reddit threads that has the most number of unique brands mentioned in all "buying advice" threads? 3. Quality of the comment itself where top 5 percent just means how hard the comment is pushing for a brand
Additionally, the chart has blue and red markers with only legends for the red marker. What does the blue refer to? Opposite of red?
This, paired with LLM prose of unconcise expansions makes the article impenetrable. One should not be expected to read articles via the prompt "summarize the article for me".
You probably can't stop all smugglers You probably can't stop all teen pregnancies You probably can't stop all enshitification
But a well functioning society owes itself to try to keep itself accountable.
Even if we didn't know french, it is straightforward to use deterministic tools (I.e. a dictionary) to parse the instruction, writing out the code in English, then refactor as many words as possible to french. The paper did not give any indication that this was happening (would be a novel result indeed) and so I would have to conclude that it is running like a stochastic parrot, more English codebase, better performance in English only.
On the thesis of the article itself I am in agreement, though I would also put forth that it's important that scientific advances from LLMs can be formalized for human understanding for the sake of future exploration. We would not want LLMs to expand the frontier, only to have everyone stuck there because we don't know how to reach it.