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Seems like a bad example. The problem with Episode 8 was not lack of creativity. Episode 7 was a complete retread of "A New Hope" and a bigger offender. At least blue Jedi milk is new.

Episode 8 was a retread of Empire Strikes Back (ships chase through empty space while the main character trains with the old master on a wild planet). It seemed subversive just because ESB was subversive relative to ANH.

Complete with "this guy will help us" to "oh no, they betrayed us!"

Episode 8 was subversive because it had self aware moments "trolling" the audience throughout like Luke mocking the idea Rey (and the audience) thought he would pick up a lightsaber again.

It also has weird "subversive" dialogue about sacrifice being bad that doesn't really fit what's happening in the movie itself where sacrifice of two characters saves the day. Which is "subversive" in the sense that a movie with dialogue saying "this is a shitty movie plot" is subversive.

It also rips off the ending of Return of the Jedi by killing the main bad guy so is "subversive" in that it trolls whoever was stuck making episode 9 without a functional villain.


Canada is in a similar situation. A lot of high-minded talk about peacekeeping and neutrality, but constantly benefitting from being implicitly protected by US defence policy. The real test will come if/when Russia decides to challenge Canadian arctic sovereignty.

Just had to break a few eggs[1] to make that omelette.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor


Same as with the other omelettes. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)


Uh huh. Sure.

> The proximate cause of the famine was the infection of potato crops by blight (Phytophthora infestans)[14] throughout Europe during the 1840s.

Vs.

> While most scholars are in consensus that the main cause of the famine was largely man-made, it remains in dispute whether the Holodomor was intentional, whether it was directed at Ukrainians, and whether it constitutes a genocide, the point of contention being the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union. Some historians conclude that the famine was deliberately engineered by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Others suggest that the famine was primarily the consequence of rapid Soviet industrialisation and collectivization of agriculture.


You could've read a bit more of the article. Proximate cause != ultimate cause.

> Initial limited but constructive government actions to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new Whig administration in London, which pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine, but also because some assumed that the famine was divine judgement or that the Irish lacked moral character,[20


Do you think the disabled are being helped by letting bad actors trying to get a leg up over their peers abuse accommodations meant for them?

On pretty much every "culture war" issue the "left" fails to adequately grapple with bad actors and those that abuse empathetic policies to harm others or unfairly advance themselves. Long term this will be to the great detriment of marginalized groups because societal support for these accommodations will erode. It's really frustrating to watch.

Edit: If you want a recent example of this coming full circle, take a look at service animals. Sometime around 2021-2023 there was a wave of people claiming their pets as "service animals" or "emotional support animals" and bringing them everywhere in public. At first this was tolerated or even welcomed by businesses but increasingly animals are being banned from these spaces because of badly behaved pets. Those with genuine need for a service animal are caught in the crossfire.


> Do you think the disabled are being helped by letting bad actors trying to get a leg up over their peers abuse accommodations meant for them?

Of course it's terrible for the genuinley disabled. That said, I would rather accidently assist an able person than accidently fail to provide the required accommodations for a genuinely disabled person. The default should be acceptance.

Those who abuse these systems should be given an all expense paid trip to the surface of the sun. Ripping off the disabled is about as low as a person can get, and that is what they are doing.


> Long term this will be to the great detriment of marginalized groups because societal support for these accommodations will erode. It's really frustrating to watch.

Where I'm from there are hardly any accommodations offered for those who are marginalized yet they're stigmatized for using the little help that there is. Also it's usually a loud minority that's against it, as I haven't seen any majority form to abolish it via voting.

Aside from that those who are tasked with executing these policies broadly agree that going after every bad actor is not worth the false positive rate.

I know a couple who became parents young and are now going through college as a family. When they applied for scholarships in their respective universities, one institution accepted immediately, the other is still dragging out the process because for some insane reason there's both an upper and lower income limit for those who apply.

Someone somewhere figured this would somehow deter bad actors so now those who genuinely need help need to jump through additional hoops.


> Sometime around 2021-2023 there was a wave of people claiming their pets as "service animals" or "emotional support animals" and bringing them everywhere in public.

This has been going on for over ten years.


Ridiculous comparison. First, neither I nor anyone I know had a room where we could lock our parents out. Second, your parents actually care about you and if you spent 24+ hours in there without coming out they'd check on you (probably much sooner actually). No such luck in a dorm.

This is true about other things like reading speed as well. It still doesn't mean that time limits are useless. These are skills you can develop up to a reasonable level through practice if they're lacking, not something fixed like height. And if it takes you 12 hours to get through a 2 hour test because of these factors it's a sign that you're not going to be a very effective employee/researcher. Being able to read/write with some haste is not unrelated to job/academic performance.

> Being able to read/write with some haste is not unrelated to job/academic performance.

Yes, I agree. But my point is about handwriting, rather than writing in general. Handwriting speed is something that we are effectively testing with many in-class exams. And handwriting speed - unlike reading or writing speed - is indeed unrelated to job performance. It is also unrelated to any reasonable measure of academic performance.


It is an interesting point about handwriting as distinct from reading or writing alone. I appreciate it, thank you.

I would not concede that speed is not as important as doing it correctly in the context of evaluating learning. There are homework, projects, and papers where there is a lot of time available to probe whether they can think it through and do it correctly with no time limit. It's ideal if everyone can finish an exam, but there needs to be some kind of pressure for people to learn to quickly identify a kind of problem, identify the correct solution approach, and actually carry out the solution.

But they shouldn't be getting penalized for not doing a page of handwritten linear algebra correctly, I totally agree that you need to make sure you're testing what you think you're testing.


Well, I prefer this to people who bag up the poop and then throw the bag in the bushes, which seems increasingly common. Another popular option seems to be hanging the bag on a nearby tree branch, as if there's someone who's responsible for coming by and collecting it later.

I think this might be plausible in the future, but it needs a lot more tooling. For starters you need to be able to run the prompt through the exact same model so you can reproduce a "build".

Even the exact same model isn't enough. There are several sources of nondeterminism in LLMs. These would all need to be squashed or seeded - which as far as I know isn't a feature that openai / anthropic / etc provide.

OK, then the current models aren't as good as I thought/hoped.

I guess one thing it means is that we still need extensive test suites. I suppose an LLM can write those too.


One of Google's stated goals was "don't be evil". This stuff shouldn't be trusted - it's pure marketing.

That rule is still in Google Code of Conduct and Alphabet Investors' Code of Conduct, but reduced down to a footnote.

A lot of this stuff is in the realm of "lol" or even "lmao". There's a consistent failure to consider human nature and economic incentives woven through this essay. Probably the most objectionable stuff is in section 2 "Neuroscience and Mind" because the definition of "mental illness" itself is prone to all kind of historical and societal biases. Who gets to decide what a "normal" brain is? Is it the AI? Does the owner of the brain have any say here? Would a psychopath actually volunteer to be "treated"? Ultimately the danger is that "normal" will just mean "what's best for economic productivity". This is not a good or moral definition and is not founded in any kind of ethical reasoning.

Just remember you "lol" at Nobel laureates and Turing award winners that all agree unanimously that we are going there. You just lol. Not much to say to convince you.


You walk to Einstein and Laszlo. They tell you they are building nuclear. You lol. I come to you I tell you the scientists say they can do it. You lol. Your IQ is..

I work in fusion research, which is a way more realistic goal than AGI and yet is perpetually 20 years away, so please try to find a better analogy :P

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