Eh, I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Having worked in the federal government near the DoD, this is just trying to stress test the system. The timing isn’t great given everything that’s going on. SSS is already a break-glass option; it’s no one’s first choice, even the idiots in charge.
Honestly, this feels like trying to program ourselves out of a fundamentally social/human issue. I think that the best way to design a strong-lasting platform is to not over-complicate it. I would look to successful forums, those that are still running or ran for many years. How did they maintain their community?
Ultimately, I suspect that the answer ultimately comes down to the growth curve. Slow and steady growth where new users get assimilated into the platform’s culture is likely how this works.
I think your logarithmic curve is an interesting idea, and if you do implement it, I’d be interested to see the results. However, I don’t know if it will be enough to “maintain” a community. In fact, you may end up with the opposite problem if the algorithm is successful. You’ll have a community that doesn’t change where the oldest accounts rule.
President Donald Trump plans to claim in a Thursday night speech that newly declassified intelligence reports reveal a foreign nation’s plans to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, two White House officials told MS NOW on Monday.
No shit there were plans. Russia and China plan to interfere with every election the US has. The real question is if there is proof that they were successful.
Just saying there are plans is meaningless, but Trump and his toadies will trumpet this like his election denialism is actually justified. Utter and complete clown show.
My new supervisor, the day I met him, was talking about how space data centers are a great idea and will be amazing when they’re online. That’s the moment I realized he was breathtakingly stupid. He may not believe in thermodynamics, but thermodynamics believes in him.
I guess I shouldn’t have expected much given that he has a degree in finance and has worked in consulting for 10 years.
100% agree. Of all of the Kelvin cast, he felt like Bones. Karl Urban was a fantastic casting decision.
I came here to say this. I first saw Walter Koenig as Chekov, but I really loved him as Bester. I’ve heard that he lights up when people bring up Bester at conventions and such.
EULAs are part of the reason I almost exclusively use FOSS or just spin my own software (if time permitting).
The first time I encountered one was as a small child (like 5 or 6) when I was trying to install some game. The EULA came up, and I started reading it. Of course, I only understood a fraction of the legalese, but seeing some clauses that seemed to a child supremely unfair, caused me to hit “Do Not Agree.” Who would agree to such non-sense without having a full understanding or seeing crazy stipulations? The window closed, and I couldn’t understand why, so I asked my parents. They said that although you should read and understand any agreement, EULAs were different because if you don’t agree, then you can’t use the software.
It’s crazy to me that even as a kid, I could see how one-sided EULAs were. These companies aren’t even hiding their malicious intent, and we as a society have just decided to go along with it. I’m part of the problem, too (much as I try not to be). There have certainly been times that I hit accept even knowing that the EULA was taking advantage of me in some way, but I needed to use the software.
Anyway, there’s not much of a point of writing all this. Companies’ EULAs screw us over, and there is little we can really do about it, especially if the software is necessary in some way.
The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, has been accused by historians and rights campaigners of “grotesque stupidity”
I see they were being kind to him.
I literally don’t know a single veteran or service member who either respects him or even just likes him. Literally 100% across the board disdain. There’s got to be at least a couple who have positive views of him in the DoD, but no one I’ve met or worked with…
One of my friends once told me that when you go far enough left, you get your guns back.
Please read the citations. I’ve found Claude (and a slightly lesser extend GPT) to be right more often than not, but the leading LLMs do get things wrong with enough frequency that it’s worth checking.
Also, to be clear, I’m not fervently anti-LLM, but I do know how it works (as much as anyone who has read the academic literature). “Thinking” is at best a misnomer and at worst a marketing term. It’s just an ouroboros; the LLM more-or-less feeds its output back into itself to “check” it and “think.” It works surprisingly well, but it’s not actual thinking.
Something along these lines is why I’ve always loved Star Trek and didn’t get into other shows/movies as much (like Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel, etc.), especially as a kid. The crew of the Enterprise were just regular people, albeit hyper-competent, but still just people at the end of the day. They would combine their diversity of skills and overcome crazy situations. There was no savior or chosen-one, just people with skills and their own interests. It feels achievable for anyone to be an officer on the Enterprise if they put in the effort to be there. Not everyone can be a Jedi or a super hero. That’s not to say those other stories are bad, but I always felt that’s what made Star Trek special, and Picard’s humility, I think, really showcases it. It feels like he would say, “I’m just a guy doing a job.”
I’m glad I’m not the only one who has this thought when I use that sauce
THANK YOU! I studied AI in school, and it always bothers me when people think that LLMs are the only facet of AI. Between 2022-2024, I had a knee jerk reaction of explaining that AI is more than LLMs and that LLMs are really a small subset of the entire universe of AI, yadda yadda yadda. Now I’ve given up and roll my eyes as someone tries to tell me about the cool new Claude skill they built.
What’s funnier is people think I hate LLMs. That couldn’t be further from the truth; they are a fantastically interesting and innovative technology! “Attention is All You Need” is a great paper, and super impactful. I just hate that people are outsourcing their thinking to a chatbot and neglect the rest of my field of study.
Jennifer Griffin phrased this really poorly. (Fox News isn’t really known for intelligence…) Three ships were fired on, and they returned fire with retaliatory strikes, per USCENTCOM. https://www.centcom.mil/MEDIA/PRESS-RELEASES/Press-Release-View/Article/4480437/centcom-protects-us-warships-transiting-strait-of-hormuz/
So, the war isn’t back on, but it’s not off either. For a cease fire, there’s been a lot of firing going on. The US never should have kicked this hornet’s nest.
The only one that I can think of is research or clinical settings. It could be really useful for various social or psychological research or monitoring patient status. That’s not how it will be used for the most part but that is a place it could be useful. Like any tool, it can be used for good things and bad (how revelatory…)
The problem with the AI industry (and modern, unregulated capitalism in general) is that as soon as someone has a potentially useful tool, they look everywhere for every possible use with no regard for societal consequences. Thinking about the ramifications of using a tool doesn’t increase shareholder value. In fact, trying to only have your tool be used in a positive way actively harms shareholder value. Greed perverts all that is good.
It depends. I’d say it’s a scale of fairly easy to very easy depending on how you have everything set up and documented. Essentially, back everything up and install the new distro then put it all back. It will take some time, though. The first time I distro-hopped, I forgot to take a list of my installed packages, which made for some unwelcome surprises when I couldn’t find certain programs. That’s not hard to overcome, just keep a list of your installed packages. Even if you don’t, it’s easy to just reinstall them.
“The Host,” which is also the first episode with the Trill.
The job market in tech is not good right now, so they may not. I have a friend who is a dev and was getting heavily recruited by Palantir because he had a clearance already. The money was really good, and he was at the cusp of taking the job because he had been ghosted by other companies for months and only had a handful of interviews after being laid off six-ish months ago. Luckily, another place gave him an offer for a bit lower compensation, which he took. If that other place didn’t come through, though, I think he would have gone with Palantir so that he could get some income.
ETA: That said, Palantir is evil, and my friend was in that position because of the BS that is the US economic system, which is perpetuated by the people at Palantir.
That’s so cool.
I can’t think of anything more profound. Just…that’s so cool.
Not as far as I know. There was language in the 2025 NDAA to revamp the SSS, and there was reporting about automatic registration earlier this year. I’d suspect it’s just related to the NDAA. If you’ve ever worked in government, it takes forever to plan and execute anything, so I’d bet this was in planning for months (if fast) to years (if normal).
The last one was probably when we actually used the SSS for Vietnam, where it didn’t exactly work super well. But the US went to an all-volunteer force after that (primarily due to the inherent issues with conscription as a method of force generation), so fixing the issues weren’t practical.
Since 2022, there has been renewed talk in government and military analysis circles about the specter of a new world war, especially given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Europe is preparing the most for it. In fact, several European countries have provided guidance on how to prepare for large scale conflict. And even earlier, as GWOT was winding down in the late '10s, “Great Power Competition” was making large scale societal preparation more in vogue.
So, given all that, I wouldn’t worry about mass conscription. It’s pretty widely known to be a terrible method of force generation. The US also doesn’t need to conscript, even with the war in Iran. The economy is making recruitment much easier (retainment of experienced personnel is a different story), and quotas are being met.