FaceDeer

So evidently, people either can’t tell when AI is being used or don’t care when AI is being used.

Trump says he’s going to tariff Canada to punish them for being on fire. So they’re doing something to help.

And if this sort of font became common (and actually kept working) then screen readers never would be able to read these. The point remains that accessibility is being sacrificed for the sake of some kind of general “anti-AI” movement.

Good luck to the visually impaired and their screen readers.

I was expecting that excuse to come up, it often does.

People who don’t vote are effectively voting “we’re okay with whatever everyone else chooses.” So when Trump wins those people voted for Trump.

More than half of the American electorate.

There’s information about Moonshot’s funding on its Wikipedia article. They haven’t IPOed, they’ve received about two billion in investment from various investment firms and other big companies.

Yeah. Unfortunately, one pretty much inescapable part of the solution to this wildfire problem is wildfires. They need to burn through the backlog.

Looks like China’s gone from being 6 months “behind” to more like 6 weeks “behind.”

Kind of pricey, but still the cheapest in its weight class. Could be they’re simply squeezing what profits they can out of it. I read that they’re planning to open the weights in August, at which point third parties will be able to compete based on whatever the actual cost of running it is.

And I said comparisons can be made.

If those cloud models are getting comparable results but using way more electricity, why would companies be running them? They like making profit, don’t they? They’re not some kind of Captain Planet villains chortling at being maximally wasteful.

Comparisons can be made using open AI models. I run some locally on my own hardware, I know exactly how much energy they use.

The energy consumption can be measured, very approximately, by the cost of the tokens. If you design agentic tools to make use of fewer, cheaper tokens then you’re likely also minimizing the energy usage.

Yup. The “you can’t make an omelette without killing a whole bunch of people” mindset.

The annoying part is that it’s not entirely wrong, IMO. At this point I think the best hope America has is for those Trump voters to feel the pain of the situation they have brought upon themselves, and for the Democrats to be pushed far enough to finally shake off the DNC establishment. America needs another Roosevelt at this point and there’s no way someone like that would have got on the ballot or been elected under the past few decades’ conditions.

Sure would have been nice if everyone had just been smart about all this and we hadn’t got here to begin with, but we go to the ballot box with the electorate we have rather than the one we hope for.

I think a lot of Americans did see Trump as an existential threat and that’s why they voted for him. He was the “blow everything up” candidate, Harris was the “everything continues as it is” candidate.

This is literally the most charitable thing I can say about a subset of Trump voters. They actually did have a point there. A lot of people voted for Obama because he was the change candidate and this time around Trump was the change candidate. Almost entirely bad changes, of course, but some people were so desperate for change that they figured it was worth rolling the dice.

Just a subset of Trump voters, mind. Most of them were probably just awful people who saw a fellow awful person on the candidate and went “me like.” But if a subset had decided not to vote for him we wouldn’t be here now so they were significant.

You can ask AI how code works too, though. And it’s always available, whereas the human who wrote the code may not be.

Several times now I’ve come across a project that looked interesting but wasn’t well documented, and I just dropped the Github link into an AI chat and asked it to tell me stuff about how it worked. What algorithms were used, and so forth. Really handy.

Just use one of these.

I would like to see the world finally move to Swatch Internet Time and resolve all this silliness once and for all.

A common cause of this kind of problem is lots of people simply default to whatever the “best” model is and throw every problem at it. The best model can handle those problems, sure, because it’s the best model. But it’s also the most expensive model.

A better strategy is a multi-model agent that breaks tasks down into smaller sub-tasks and then uses the minimal model that can manage each of those tasks. The high-level program architecture can be figured out by Fable 5 or whatever, but then each of the functions and classes can be written by a cheap local model like one of the Qwens, for example. An AI that’s been told to find correlations in a large corpus of documents could make use of a smaller model to analyze each of the documents to filter out the ones least likely to be useful and only actually “read” the most promising ones. And so forth.

This is something that’s an area of very active development. The harness is going to be just as important as the model, if not moreso.

It was something I read in a Reddit discussion. Rather than rely on that, I figured I’d go to the horse’s mouth and read the Kentucky constitution directly. Section 152 covers how to handle vacancies. Unfortunately it’s in old-timey legalese and is rather lengthy and complicated. So I had ChatGPT break it down for me.

Turns out there’s an interesting wrinkle.

The Kentucky constitution is quite explicit; “Vacancies in all offices for the State at large, or for districts larger than a county, shall be filled by appointment of the Governor”. A Senate seat counts as an “office for the State at large” because they represent the entire state.

The argument that the statute is unconstitutional is fairly straightforward:

• A U.S. Senate seat is a statewide elected office.
• Section 152 says statewide vacancies “shall be filled by appointment of the Governor.”
• “Shall” is mandatory language.
• The legislature cannot override a constitutional command through ordinary legislation.

The problem is the 17th amendment of the United States constitution, which was ratified years after this section of the Kentucky constitution went into effect. The American constitution supersedes state constitutions. The 17th amendment was about how state legislatures choose senators, and it says the state legislature may empower the governor to do so. Which apparently gives final say as to how senators are appointed to the state legislature. So maybe the legislature can make that decision now, even though the state constitution says otherwise.

Nothing’s ever simple. :(

I dunno, I’d recommend the governor at least try appointing someone. Stuff like this never gets sorted out until it actually goes to court.

If Americans have simply given up on the notion of rule of law or the primacy of constitutions then there are far bigger problems to address here than a mere Senate seat.

Why not try? Don’t just preemptively surrender, make the Republicans actually show themselves for what they are.