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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • You have a very naive view. The moment that - regardless of who gets elected - capital and lobbyism has a larger influence on policies made by those elected, than the program with which they campaigned, it is no longer a democracy. Same of course if elections are already heavily influenced by capital and lobbyism pushing favorable candidates.

    In such systems, a change of power by vote is still possible but it would require an overwhelming support for a new political movement to break the status quo (most recent example possibly being Hungary).

    That does not mean however that the system is a democracy anymore, neither before nor after such a change. After such a change, however, there’s always a potential to try and return to a democracy.

    Due to globalisation, megacorporations are currently able to leverage policies in basically every country, if only by pressure from countries they have currently under their spell. Accordingly, I am not aware of a single actual democracy in today’s world.











  • LLMs use a new way of data processing (focused on language rules) which is what brought the boost. Not more training data. More training data is needed for an LLM to reach “maturity” but it also increases cost due to resource usage. And current LLMs have already absorbed basically all of the internet and most books, and since the internet is now full of slop, more unpoisoned training data does not exist. That’s why more does not help anymore.


  • Machine learning isn’t going anywhere.

    As someone who despises the current slop hype with a passion, you’re correct on this. But only when you exclude LLMs. Because they are garbage with a net negative for mankind. Machine learning as a field however has very useful applications. Typically such that complement human assessment of data, e.g. re-viewing radiology images to flag potentially anomalous images for a second doctor to look at - not in place of the first doctor.






  • Spoiler: milk cows get murdered as well. A milk cow is productive for about 5 years, after which they usually get slaughtered for pet food. In that time, they need to have about 3 calves, to continue producing “good returns” amount of milk daily. Two of those calves are not needed to replace the cow, so they get - guess what? - slaughtered and processed to pet food.

    Stupid me grew up next to a milk farm and didn’t realize that until way later than I care to admit.

    Also, I still eat cheese (reduced amounts) and that’s a moral dilemma for me.