Apparently the only way the candidates will agree to do it is if the format is so stilted that there’s no chance of anyone learning anything or seeing the candidates get challenged on anything. It’s basically just a taking-in-turns version of a campaign commercial.

What, indeed, is the point. Like a lot of American politics, the whole “debate” survives as a pointless vestige of a thing (now long forgotten) that was useful and productive in its original form, but now is mutated to a useless and unrecognizable monstrosity, which you have to pretend is super serious and important if you want to be able to be on TV.

Yeah. I mean it’s hard to blame them–

You know what, fuck that, let’s blame them. They have a responsibility. This is like all the German businesses that played along with the Nazis because it was easier and then had to change the subject when their grandkids asked them about the war years. Like yeah grandad ran a, uh, a pots and pans factory. Yeah. Just pots and pans. Now go play outside.

In ordinary times I think it would be fair to say well you know a bunch of them didn’t focus on the bottom line and went out of business and everyone had to get new jobs, so hard to blame the ones still around. But this is kind of all hands on deck time. It’s one thing if you don’t want to write articles about the IRA and all good stuff about Biden. It’s a whole different fuckin story if you want to write stories feeding into getting the guy elected who is going to fuck up your home and city and business and economy and the safety of you and your families, too, and then (I am sure) stand around like “we’re all looking for the guy that did this” if it winds up coming true.

It gave some sound bites for people to hold up as examples of why Biden is old which I’m sure we will be seeing on certain news networks from now until forever going forward

And gave a bunch of “objective” news outlets a good excuse to write a bunch of “DEMS IN PANIC AFTER BIDEN’S UNFORGIVABLE SHIT SHOW” articles they are for some reason eager to write

Other than that significant amount of fodder, I think nothing of value occurred

It’s bananas from start to finish

I can’t recommend it highly enough

Why would you hurt me this way

GPT-4 generally doesn’t need fine tuning or anything no

100% right; unless you are using it a ton the API pricing is likely to be cheaper

You’re going to think I am joking but I am not. Multiple people have sworn to me that this works for a common failure mode of HDD drives and I’ve literally never heard someone say they tried it and it failed. I’ve never tried it. Buyer beware. Don’t blame me if you fuck up your drive / your computer it’s connected to / anything else even worse by doing this:

1. Stick it in the freezer for a short while.
2. Take it out.
3. Boot it up.
4. If it works, get all the data off it as quick as you can.

GPT4all can do it pretty easily on a desktop with a good GPU. I think it’s unlikely that anything can run locally on your phone (LLMs are notably hogs in terms of even pretty capable desktop PC resources; there’s just not a cheap way to do them). You could use colab or something via your phone, and there is probably a little howto guide somewhere that shows how to do a Mistral setup on colab. It’ll take some technical skill though.

You might just bite the bullet and do $20/mo for the GPT-4 subscription also. It can also do web searches, I think, although in practice it’s pretty clunky the times it’s tried to do things like that for me. I’m not aware of one that does the “search the web for answers and get back to me” thing really all that perfectly or smoothly I’m sad to say.

GPT-4 is apparently the model to beat. I haven’t seen all that much difference in practice between GPT-4 and 4o. I’ve heard various claims about various other models outperforming it (notably including Claude) but I haven’t seen the claims materialize over the long haul as yet.

I have however heard that Mistral can get quite close to GPT-4, run for free locally with the right hardware, if you build up a hand curated set of around 100 query/response pairs from GPT-4 that are what you want it to do, and then fine-tune Mistral against that training set. I haven’t tried it but that’s what I’ve heard.

I classify most of those people as shills. The people who want to talk about communism or anarchism or pro-China/Russia-ism, and lack of any interest or hope for US electoral politics as kind of an outgrowth of that but US electoral politics is not the main thing they are interested in focusing on, I classify as probably authentic tankies.

Like I say, of course, I have no idea. That’s just how I write it down in my head.

Jon Stewart for president with someone central to Biden’s cabinet who actually knows about politics and the stuff Biden was doing, as VP, to be able to give him on the job training on the actual politics part to match his sharpness level and his heart

I don’t care if he doesn’t want the job

I think Biden has done great stuff (domestically 🙁) and I would expect good policies from him and obviously a dead plant would be a better president than Trump, but his debate performance is kinda hard to put a good spin on

And therefore it is clear that what the world needs to see is a Jon Stewart vs Donald Trump debate

Fixed

John Stewart

Edit: Sorry I meant his brother, Jon Stewart

As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, there are places in the world where it works the way this guy wants it to. Redmond O’Hanlon talked about observing the results, someone falling off a boat and clearly going to drown, and O’Hanlon becoming incredibly alarmed to the people around him, like where is the rescue boat, isn’t someone going to do something for him, don’t they have some kind of safety in place? And they asked him, who’s going to pay for it? Why would someone set up a lifeguarding operation like that for no one in particular just out of the goodness of their heart? And they laughed at his naïveté about how the world operates, as he watched the kid struggling, going further and further away and out of sight as the boat continued without him.

So, Gary Brechner wrote an article about this, like 20 years ago: Basically, that the combination of expense to build, and vulnerability to specific asymmetric threats, that huge ocean-floating warships represent, means that in the long term they are doomed as a serious military platform. They should go on the shelf alongside that thing the Nazis did with trying to build small-building-sized tanks, as something that just doesn’t make sense when all factors are considered.

It might seem that the submarinization of the Black Sea fleet proves him out, but as it happens, I coincidentally got to talk recently to an actual military strategy expert on the topic and this was his take:

• Deterrence is a relevant factor. Lots of expensive military kit is pretty vulnerable. The issue is, if you do start taking steps to attack it, what’s going to happen to you in response. That’s at the heart of keeping a lot of big powers’ naval forces safe, more so than them being invulnerable. Real no-holds-barred war is pretty rare in the modern world; most military kit goes around most of the time being used for force projection or little proxy wars, usually not full-scale war against peer enemies.
• It may be that the big ships are becoming more vulnerable as time goes on, yes, but it’s not like that’s new. Once it does go past the level of “we don’t want to do that / provide weapons so our proxy can do that because we’re scared of the response,” and proceeds to a real fuck-'em-up war, losing big battleships and carriers at a shocking rate has been part of war since around World War 2. They’re hard as fuck to defend and navies tend to be super cautious with where they put them as a result, and once it comes to a real war, they start sinking yes. It’s not like land warfare; it only really takes one day where something goes wrong to sink billions and billions of dollars worth of your navy irrevocably. Adding a new way that that can happen doesn’t necessarily change the shape of the war because it was already happening and was already part of the calculus.

I think, as some other people have said, that most of it is bad strategy and tactics by the Russians, of putting their big naval assets within range of the weapons that can fuck them up and for some reason not reacting (until very recently) when as a result they started sinking like pebbles in a pond.

There are places in the world with no government. Africa has lots of them; that’s probably the best place to travel to if you want a much more immediate and easy and possible-in-the-first-place path to get there than the total non starter idea of destroying the US government. Central and South America have some too, in selected places, but it’s less complete or widespread than it is in Africa. You could literally be living your dream in like a few weeks from now.

Actually I think there are also some crypto based attempts at doing something like that (like floating ships or islands or something), and they’d carry a lot of benefit in terms of the people speaking English and being supportive of your worldview and all, but they have worked even worse than the land-based places with no government, if you can believe it.

If you just meant you want the nice things about the US and its government, without either the destructive things that it does alongside or the obligations that have to happen in order for it to exist and do those nice things, me too! It’d be great. Maybe when you go to Africa you can get to work on making that system. Let me know when you get done and in the meantime I’ll be here with my clean water and highways and taxes garbage collection and anti-bear-attraction regulations and military and all.

Sure. My question is, why such a concerted effort to look for bad things about such a clear win?

Like would it work the other way? If the IRS was making life more difficult and expensive for everyone making W2 income under $79k, would you be out here saying well I guess an L is an L, but let’s remember it only applies to W2 earners and only some of them and anyway it’ll probably get overturned later on and I want to highlight the program’s important limitations and etc etc, instead of just saying “that’s a bad thing” like a normal person?

So you think it’s a good thing, just doesn’t go far enough / needs to be extended further in the same direction in the future?