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staplefire

4 karma · joined June 23, 2025

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staplefire··on GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment
Strange because I used your exact prompt and GPT 5 gave the correct answer and immediately explained how the question was maliciously constructed.

GPT4o was duped though.

staplefire··on Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?
Accommodating for disability is cheesing the test score. Cheesing a test score is cheesing the metric. Cheesing the metric is always some form of lying, usually to yourself.

- You're lying to yourself about how good of a fit your are for the program.

- The professor/administration is getting inaccurate data about the teaching efficacy.

If you want to know if you can be a civil engineer despite your disability, the last thing you should do is correct for the disability in your primary success metric.

staplefire··on RFK Jr.'s Miasma Theory of Health Is Spreading
From the City Journal article[1] that this Atlantic article is responding to:

"The [traditional] pandemic preparedness playbook [that RFK is trying to remove] entails three basic steps.

First, catalog every existing pathogen by sending scientists to every remote place (bat caves in China, and the like), take biological samples of wildlife there, and bring them back to labs. ...

Second, evaluate the risk of each pathogen infecting humans by testing its ability to penetrate human cells—and sometimes even genetically modifying it to make this more likely. The latter practice is now called dangerous gain-of-function (dGOF) research. ... . The idea is to estimate the likelihood that the infectious pathogen will mutate in a way that could conceivably threaten humans.

Third, having identified which few of the countless pathogens studied pose the greatest risk, develop vaccines and therapeutics before they leap into human populations. Crucially, this step involves awarding large contracts to pharmaceutical manufacturers to develop and stockpile the countermeasures."

RFK proposes:

1) to strike these above goals from NIH pandemic preparedness playbook

2) Focus on "getting everyone to eat better and exercise," since healthy people have better outcomes in infectious outbreaks.

[1] https://www.city-journal.org/article/nih-jay-bhattacharya-co...

staplefire··on Court settlement calls for NPR to get $36M to operate US public radio system
Article 1, Section 8: The Enumerated Powers of Congress https://www.senate.gov/about/origins-foundations/senate-and-...

Congress does not have the power "To Establish a Public Press".

staplefire··on NIST Finalizes 'Lightweight Cryptography' Standard to Protect Small Devices
Right. Strength in a shadow contest like cryptography can be, best case, estimated to sixteen-bit orders of magnitude (+-65000x). Just because you can't break it doesn't mean somebody else secretly knows a game changing way to break it. So you keep padding with huge exponential hedges such that if they scan shave a dozen bits off the strength of the scheme, it's still secure under finite resources.

Playing close to the margin is super dangerous.