ta8645

No, you're not understanding what an oxymoron is. An oxymoron is a figure of speech where two contradictory or opposing terms are put together, like "jumbo shrimp" or "deafening silence."

In the phrase "survive just fine," the words "survive" and "just fine" are not contradictory. "Survive" means to continue existing or to endure a difficult situation, and "just fine" means adequately or without problems. Together, they suggest the organization will continue to exist without serious trouble, which is a coherent and logical statement—not contradictory.

They will survive just fine without government funding. They are both beloved and will be supported by private funding.

I don't find anything you said very convincing. You are simply characterizing a transaction as nefarious, and perhaps conspiratorial. Of course, there are incentives and perhaps even misincentives around such sales, but that doesn't mean they are inherently bad.

There are mechanisms that are commonly employed to REDUCE the price of the stock, (ie. a stock split), and nobody bats an eye about that. Buying back stocks is a reasonable way to employ cash reserves, and protects the firm from exposure to foreign exchange rate, and inflation risks.

I will agree with you that the way executive bonuses are structured can be a perverse incentive that borders on fraud. But blaming the buyback of stocks itself, isn't grounded in any inherent economic misdeed.

Your pronouncement goes against evidence cited in the article:

"people have reported positive experiences with chatbots for mental health support. In an earlier study, researchers from King's College and Harvard Medical School interviewed 19 participants who used generative AI chatbots for mental health and found reports of high engagement and positive impacts, including improved relationships and healing from trauma"

And that is about the present, not even what may come in the future. Not all therapy is life and death, and there are already signs that it's a good thing, at least in some limited domains.

For most of human history, it has been completely normal. It was fine to make your own cave painting look exactly like the one you saw on a visit to a neighbouring cave. It wasn't til the early 1700 that there was any formal idea of copyright, and almost 1900 before it became pervasive.

Even today, nobody gets their panties in a knot if you sell a copy of the Mona Lisa. Everyone accepts that the copyright has long expired. In other situations (as in retro games) the only question is how long, and under what circumstances, copyright should persist. Reasonable people can disagree. Making it a moral issue is a bit tiring.

Except we've already seen people who do exactly that, and being wrong about the future over and over. I'll agree with you that it's fine (and helpful) to point out all the failings of current LLMS; the mistake is extrapolating that out too far and making a prediction about the future. Granted, it's just as common a human mistake to predict the future too optimistically, by believing there are no impediments to progress.

All i'm really arguing for is some humility. It's okay to say we don't know how it will go, or what capabilities will emerge. Personally, I'm well served by the current capabilities, and am able to work around their shortcomings. That leaves me optimistic about the future, and I just want to be a small counterbalance to all the people making overly confident predictions about the impossibility of future improvements.

Heh, it's that simple for someone who thinks the training regime and AI technology will not change further. The early horseless carriages had all kinds of stupid problems, and it would be very easy to pronounce them DOA. "Nobody is going to want to ride something so prone to breaking down", "a horse only needs food from the farm, not stuff drilled from the ground", etc. People don't have much imagination in such situations, especially when they feel emotionally (or existentially) attached to the status quo.

It means that you should be careful to not judge too quickly. Because there are many examples in the past of people clinging to the status quo and refusing to believe that new technology could actually supersede human capabilities.

> Let me now clarify - "silicon" does not have capabilities humans have relevant to successfully performing therapy.

I think you're wrong, but that isn't really my point. A well-trained LLM that lacks any malevolent data, may well be better than a human psychopath who happens to have therapy credentials. And it may also be better than nothing at all for someone who is unable to reach a human therapist for one reason or another.

For today, I'll agree with you, that the best human therapists that exist today, are better than the best silicon therapists that exist today. But I don't think that situation will persist any longer than such differences persisted in chess playing capabilities. Where for years I heard many people making the same mistake you're making, of saying that silicon could never demonstrate the flair and creativity of human chess players; that turned out to be false. It's simply human hubris to believe we possess capabilities that are impossible to duplicate in silicon.

A human may also possess malevolent tendencies that a silicon intelligence lacks. The question is not if they are equals, the question is if their differences matter to the endeavour of therapy. Maybe a human's superior hand-eye coordination matters, maybe it doesn't. Maybe a silicon agent's superior memory recall matters, maybe it doesn't. And so on.

People said the same thing about the horseless carriage in the early days of the automobile; they could cite evidence of the superior dependability of a horse and buggy. Things eventually changed. Let's see how things shake out from here.

There is great pleasure in having a family. Even for people who get no pleasure out of the act itself.

They can only buy back stocks from people who want to sell them. The people who sell them do so because they believe it's a good deal. The process puts cash in the hands of those sellers, who can then go on to invest in something else, keeping the market more liquid rather than the first company sitting on cash reserves. The price of an individual stock is pretty much meaningless, you must multiply by the total number of stocks outstanding to determine the market cap. So it is not the buying back of stock that represents any fraud.

If there is any fraud, it would be having performance bonuses tied to individual stock price, rather than market cap. But blaming the buyback itself, is short-sighted.

> Sex was great back then?

Yes, obviously; there was a much higher reproductive rate. It seems like you're talking about enjoyment or something else, but that really wasn't the focus of this thread.

Mad Max?

> All I want is ...

Understandable, for sure, but the number of users who want their own "simple" addition means it gets overwhelming pretty quickly. Helix has deferred work on most extra functionality until after implementing a Scheme extension language. Once that's done, adding features might be as simple as installing a plugin.

Hadn't thought of that, but it might not be a huge savings unless you were to go ipv6 only. If you're still going to support ipv4 anyway, the hardware savings might not be too significant.

Everybody can muddle along without IPv6, so it's easy to make it a very low priority. Especially for small shops that are struggling just to create a viable business. IPv6 needs something more to motivate it, a web destination or application that is only available on IPv6.

And my reply was to expand the context to show that there are people who feel otherwise. And yet you insist that my opinion is illegitimate and a "distortion". You've dug your heels in, and refuse to see that you had blinders on.

What name calling?

There was no distortion. You seem to want people to only take the desired implication, and not think too much more about it. But if you instead think for a second, you'll see that the analogy was crafted to send a message that is incorrect and limited. Rather than trying to create better analogies to handcuff a reader into your viewpoint, you might instead stop for a moment and see why this analogy wasn't actually as insightful as it might appear at first glance. And maybe even appreciate how my response shed light about that limitation. There are indeed people who get great entertainment out of machines that do heavy lifting, and they don't care how much a person can lift.

And you're failing to understand that people can understand the analogy, and think that it fails to capture the entire situation, and so extend the analogy to make it obvious (although clearly not to everyone) that the analogy is lacking, and not very convincing.

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> A Komatsu forklift doing the same is not ... [worthy of attention]

It is, if you're managing a warehouse; then it's a wonderful marvel. And it is a hidden benefit to everyone who receives cheaper products from that warehouse. Nobody cares if it's a human or the Komatsu doing the heavy lifting.

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Ideally yes. But if you're going to have a government with forced taxation, it should at least take care of the fucking people before it starts spending billions of dollars on non-essential activities.

Sure, but we don't have unlimited time and money. Prioritization is obviously a necessity, and therefore I think the OP's point stands. Considering potential tangible rewards shouldn't be seen as a taboo factor in that calculation.

No, it's not fundamentally flawed. It _may_ be flawed, but just because you imagine that the available videos are somehow skewed in one way or the other, does not mean that you're correct.

As I stated, if it was simply one source of the videos, with one agenda, then perhaps you'd have a stronger argument. But in fact, that are many more people who are interested in the videos that expose police corruption, and they tend to be more circulated than the others. That is the benefit of the FOIA; as citizens we can get access to police body cam videos, when anyone alleges that there has been malfeasance in a given case.

Such videos are not the only basis on which to make the argument I put forth. But you'll also find many sources of police videos that are not "released" by the police, but secured by FOIA requests. There are of course examples of videos with police planting evidence, or using excessive force, or other unfortunate things. But by and large, you'll see over and over, the police behaving admirably and in the public interest.

That's incredibly naive. Spend some time watching police body camera footage. By and large, the police are doing exceptionally well in hostile and difficult circumstances. We're all safer because there is a real counterforce to tough guys, mafias, and paramilitary strong men. They don't exist or are heavily controlled, because the police are a powerful force for good. Taking away the police would create a power vacuum that would be filled faster than you can imagine; and by people who will treat us all much worse than the police ever have.