They definitely didn't say that. You said that. And you said that because you would prefer to argue impossibility vs. possibility rather than more useful vs. less useful. You prefer this because for the first irrelevant question which no one asked (it is possible to use current census data in bad ways), you are obviously right; and for the second, relevant question (would allowing this data make it easier and far more useful for gerrymandering and advertisement), you are obviously wrong.

The only reason we ever started doing this was to track ex-slaves and their descendants, and after-1965 every other possible grouping of people started begging for a category that it could use to get government grants in some way.

The irony is that now, when censuses somehow desperately need to figure out if you're Armenian or not, they don't count the descendants of slaves at all, preferring to lump them in with every dark-skinned person of partial African descent, but sometimes not the Spanish speakers(?!).

The US Supreme Court made a good decision (on admissions, not on the need for the approval of redistricting maps in places that have continuously attacked slave and Jim Crow descended voters.) The government needs to get out of the race and religious science business. Elected and appointed officials are openly claiming jihadi eschatology as the reason that they're supporting Israel, and openly explaining how the culturally varied mix of people who happened to live in land that Zionists wanted, or the Chinese, are inhuman races that are a threat because of their inhuman behavior and their inhuman values. We've woven church and race deeply into the government again.

The idea that preferential admissions to elite schools was going to somehow offset slavery was laughable anyway. It was just a grievance engine that gave people on top an excuse to feel downtrodden during the one of the most and the first vulnerable times in their lives - when they find out they're too stupid or boring to get into the college they want. I've always been partial to the libertarian solution to the problem of US slavery - Murray Rothbard and others said that according to the Libertarian homesteading principle, slaves should have been awarded the land and the factories that they worked. That it was an injustice that would lead to (what was in his view) catastrophe, such as how the freeing of Russian serfs in 1861 without any of the land still controlled by their ex-masters led to the Russian Revolution 50 years later.

If anything, the length of that article shows how rarely em-dashes were used by most writers. They're like exclamatory versions of semicolons, a contrived sudden interruption, a sort of inversion of the three dot "…" elipsis. Maybe the em-dash cracked and fell on the floor.

The reason LLMs use a lot of em-dashes is because that's a format they've chosen for output. Thinking that LLMs have a lot of em-dashes because works in the wild have a lot of em-dashes is like thinking that LLM output has a lot of emoticons because a lot of essayists use emoticons to mark subject divisions in the text.

It's just a way of saying that you're too good for your neighbors. That's why it would appeal to liberals and libertarians alike.

The question is about doing something illegal, such as removing a covenant that was involved in a sale when reselling? If it is something that could have been objected to by the original seller (they would have had standing to sue) and they have not agreed to change the covenant (because they are dead), it seems as if anyone affected should be able to sue.

The breaking of the covenant is what is being sued over.

> Presuming the land is zoned for a datacenter, the datacenter is allowed to do datacenter things.

If my house is zoned for a possible datacenter, that doesn't mean that anyone can build a datacenter there - it is still my house. If there is a covenant that says that the land will be a park, that's the "zoning" by the seller being stricter than local zoning, which means that it also conforms to local zoning.

The zoning doesn't say "The land must be a datacenter."

edit: It would be bizarre if we can sue over terms of service as if they constitute law, but we couldn't sue over terms of sale. I can sue Facebook if they allow another user to violate their terms of service.

What is this supposed to mean? They're also two rolling carts steered by a human, and I'm going to make similar decisions for both when I'm e.g. designing a path that they have to move on, or trying to figure out traffic patterns around a construction site.

The people who know it when they see it are exactly the people I don't want making any important decisions. Just be specific and don't use rhetorical appeals to ignorance.

You would have had to guess, because it went unspecified.

If we're talking about algorithms to surface content, we should talk about them; although I'm pretty sure that has nothing to do with cable television. Cable television advertised in the way we are told than advertising is not bad: they created specialized channels, and took advertisements on those channels that people who were interested in those specialty subjects would also be interested in. They didn't track or attempt to manipulate individuals.

I don't know what cable television did that was special or above and beyond what a magazine or a newspaper supplement 100 years ago would have done. The only difference between TV and magazines is that you don't consume TV, it's simply pointed in your direction - and you can't skip around ads. This is notably not true about modern television, though. If anything, it has technically fallen backwards since DVRs (or even videotape in general.)

I think a lot of intellectuals were forced to take Cambridge Analytics' marketing claims as truth because of the political positions they entrenched themselves in shortly after that scandal broke.

It's certainly caused a lot of 50s narratives about Vietnamese and Chinese communist mind control to come back posing as serious science, and a bunch of Key's "Subliminal Seduction"'s grotesque sexiness mixed in to make it nominally anticorporate. Although, predictably, it has generally been expressed politically as giving social media more ability or even responsibility to suppress the speech of average, un-notable citizens when they go against government narratives about controversial subjects.

That is not defeating social media, that is defining and institutionalizing social media as a trust and a means of government control. There is no reason we couldn't have had this same argument about telephones, other than that the average US citizen was less disdainful of their own civil rights back then - civics was drilled in as a religion, and it involved obligations the state had to you. Obligations that you are not allowed to give up if you want to live in a civilized, democratic country.

This was why we don't have government police whose job is to listen to random phone calls and periodically butt in to tell the speakers to change the subject, or arbitrarily cutting the line, collecting lists of people who need more intervention, or banning people from being able to use phones because they were seen at a political protest. If you ever wonder why the mails are so sacred, it's because the mail came about when people were prouder and had more shame than we have now.

If you want to regulate algorithms, regulate algorithms. Don't regulate "social media." If you have to argue about what it is, it is a useless term.

A preference for unfalsifiable babbling. As worthless as arguing what exact colors the word "pink" refers to. Just define a range.

It's worse than bikeshedding because then at least you get a bikeshed. At the end of this discussion, at best you get a synonym.

What's probably tiresome is trying to come up with a proof that it is not. Your frustration and the insult "pedantry" will not suffice.

If you had a real proof, you would simply include it, instead of performing emotion about being so lowered to even have to discuss HN being social media. The idea that people shouldn't argue with you because it might injure or tire you to be argued with is so 2022.

If you have something specific to say about the actual actions that are taken in what you call social media (but does not include HN), there's plenty to discuss - in fact the difference which you insult as pedantic is the most important thing to talk about. Why is one mediated talking to people good, and the other mediated talking to people bad? And if we try to make it an argument about something other than vocabulary, or even worse the vague-assed "changes in technology," it might accomplish something.

It's insane how this is enough to begin a thread on HN. Vague negative handwaving and insults (nerd-sniping, I guess?). That's not going to hurt whoever you think is doing evil, that's going to help them.

"Social Media" isn't a thing. It's a bag of techniques for mediating communication between people who are usually not asking for a mediator. Talking about those specific techniques and their applications is always going to be more useful than arguing about the referent of some term that you have no obligation to sign onto unless you find it useful.

But god if you're so tired could you just not participate?

What other people are saying is that this communicates almost nothing. What it does is allow people who are doing very bizarre things to food to hide among people who are doing pretty well known, well-tested, and ancient things to food. It's literally an argument to ignore the specifics, it's an argument for ignorance.

> 1. Ultra processed food is a media hype -> totally dismiss it

Don't let the media decide what you think, whether you want to go against them or you want to support them. Your faith or distrust in some media organization or segment has no effect on the truth value of some statement being made. They are adding commentary.

> 2. Ultra processed food is often used without proper classification and would be more useful to have well defined sub categories

Don't come up with words and then struggle to define them, or worse, argue with people about their definitions. Language is a tool. Discuss actual things, and use words to label those actual things. If they do not offer a definition for "ulta-processed food," do not help them. It is not up to you to come up with categories of food to fit the case they are making about "ultra-processed food." It is up to them to associate their health theories with the food they are trying to classify within them, both statistically and with guesses about the mechanisms.

Don't feel like because one can have a discussion that it makes sense to have one. If I make up a word, you shouldn't waste time debating its meaning, you should just ask me to give you a clear definition of how I'm using it.

Swedish Snus has been around a long time, isn't linked to cancer at all, and has no bad effect on your teeth and gums. Snus is actually associated with vast drops in cancer rates, because it usually replaces smoking. Snus is also no-spit - I think the difference between it and chewing tobaccos is that they are roasted and that snus is steamed. Makes a huge difference healthwise.

I don't have anything to say about the synthetic stuff, I'm not familiar. It's a bizarre industry that cropped up during a period where snus was trying to get into the market and the tobacco companies were trying to keep them out.

Somehow, cigarette companies lobbied to get snus caught up in cigarette taxes, even without the actual health risk. They were only even required to put the weakest possible warning on the package, because the health effects of snus have been well-studied and they're not associated with anything serious, except for nicotine addiction itself (which makes it a good substitute for smoking.)

The big US cigarette companies marketed a few horrible "snus" lines, with the marketing and goal that they would be a replacement product for when a smoker couldn't take a smoke break, and they were weak. I assume these synthetic lines developed to avoid taxes in some way by pretending to be a sort of medical product rather than a tobacco product, like a nicotine gum.

Snus is actually a better Nicorette, I suspected that the nicotene replacement industry had something to do with the sabotage of snus. Snus is cheap, free of health consequences, and doesn't lead you to associate something as addictive as chewing with nicotine consumption. Snus just quietly sits behind your lip, the minis are undetectable by the people you're interacting with, and they smell nice so they don't ruin your breath. Why would you choose a more expensive synthetic alternative?

It's the universities that have failed. They've restricted admissions to a set of people who would learn no matter what the schools did, which is what makes them lazy.

When confronted with a set of students who haven't been provided with an enormous amount of childhood reading material, and the time, encouragement and social acceptance to indulge in it (the most faithful test predictor is childhood pleasure reading, the next best is parental income), they fail horribly.

The purpose of elite colleges for students is credentialism and networking, the purpose for the schools themselves is to force cultural conformity onto smart or extremely pressured students. They generally just tell you to go learn things by yourself. They have no particular insight into teaching, because they are supplied with students who don't need to be taught.

Absolutely not. That's like taxing shovels because people were digging with their hands. The result is just more people having to dig with their hands, the fact that 7/8ths of people who now dig with their hands will starve because shovels have been introduced is a choice that we are making. We are choosing not to feed them.

Creating an unnecessary pretense so that they can suffer before they are fed is psychotic. Pay them to go to school or to show up to healthcare appointments, not to do work that can be automated away.

No they weren't. Copyright at this point covers things for at least half a dozen generations back, and is intentionally made annoying enough that it is difficult to find out what is covered and what isn't. LLM companies didn't bother with any of that (they just pirated like your average online 13 year old), meanwhile archive.org got sued for pulling the music off ancient wax cylinders.

Clean up and dramatically shorten, restrict, or even eliminate copyright, and we can start talking about what's fair game or not. People were afraid to sing "Happy Birthday" in movies for probably 80 years, and the corporations that own all IP made it very clear at the time that they preferred for the status of "Happy Birthday" to remain unclear, and would send you a scary letter if you used it.

> probably going to depend on whether AI is a transformative use.

It's probably going to be entirely political, and decided through corruption. It's obviously a mechanical transformation. If rap DJ's got sued for cramming songs full of 80 extremely manipulated samples that you'd need a forensics expert to trace, and all sampled music had to revert to a form where they'd license a single song and re-release it with somebody rapping over it, LLMs are a violation. DJ's were doing an absolutely creative translation, and LLMs are not creative, they are Δ-following pinball machines.

As long as they are voting shares, I don't see an increase in the harm. I'd like to see a legislative framework about how that ownership is handled that allows Congress and regulatory agencies to make decisions restricting how these companies will operate, but without any regard to the constitutional rights of the corporate persons or their owners.

I'm sick of the government arguing with monopolies, then taking dives. I want it to be abundantly clear that government has the ability to restrict these AI utility companies freely (such as their ability to feed on their customers), while still limiting the rights that the state has over the personal use of AI by private individuals. Partial state ownership will make that possible. Hell, let half their boards be publicly elected.

But the only way to map the network in an LLM is experimentally. You have to prompt it, and see how the coefficients fall in order to construct your most likely walk through the training data.

I think that LLMs can and do come up with novel things through exhaustion, just by applying the relationships between some set of entities to entirely different sets of entities because an accumulation of earlier context pushed the probability of those entities being mentioned, and they were able to easily replace a selection of entities that were more associated with those nearer connective, relationship words.

I think that as such LLMs are good at generating metaphors, and a lot of innovation comes from going "What if As worked like Bs?" Just go through all the As and Bs, toss the ones that don't make any sense and test the ones that seem like they might.