Whether they are gullible, corrupt, or simply pieces of shit and sociopaths... Why are they allowed to keep their job? And how can we fix democracy to make sure that they are held accountable?

Let's be clear about one thing: Hanlon's razor is bullshit. Globally, only about ~30% of humans think that "people are generally trustworthy". Even fewer think that "strangers can be trusted". So it fucking IS malice, and people are not trusting because they know that it is malice. In fairness you can look at nord-european countries for some counter-examples, but 30% is a good approximation.

I don't even care if politicians are stupid or malicious. They're probably both anyway because they're human. But what I care about is that they don't fuck with my hard earned civil liberties. So much blood was shed to get where we are... have we learned nothing at all?

Daily reminder that traditional AI expert systems from the 60s have 0 problems with hallucinations by virtue of their own architecture

Why we aren't building LLMs on top of ProbLog is a complete mystery to me (jk; it's because 90% of the people who work in AI right now have never heard of it; because they got into the field through statistics instead of logic, and all they know is how to mash matrices together).

Clearly language by itself doesn't cut it, you need some way to enforce logical rigor and capabilities such as backtracking if you care about getting an explainable answer out of the black box. Like we were doing 60 years ago before we suddenly forgot in favor of throwing teraflops at matrices.

If Prolog is Qt or, hell, even ncurses; then LLMs are basically Electron. They get the job done, but they're horribly inefficient and they're clearly not the best tool for the task. But inexperienced developers think that LLMs are this amazing oracle that solves every problem in the world, and so they throw LLMs at anything that vaguely looks like a problem.

Hey it's not like I feel superior or smug about it. I'm affected too, in my own country. The world is slowly but surely giving away all of its democratic rights. One by one...

But the problem is that all the uneducated, easily manipulated dumbfucks are letting "them" do it. As if they actually understood what they voted for. As if their opinion actually mattered. They're just pawns and nothing more. Sigh. Let me out already I don't deserve this.

I'd better start carrying fish nets with me. If this is how it's going to be then I'd rather go down trying.

In other news, MANHAAAAAAACKS

I'm usually not a bigot but that one is dumb

But Nintendo will never take down anything that is related to Showdown because it would highlight their massive hypocrisy!

It would set a precedent. People would go: "wait, but why did they never take down Showdown itself? Could it be that it's because they actually benefit from its existence? Then why did they take down X/Y/Z? Oh! It's because copyright law only applies when you want it to! It's all arbitrary and made up! You just need to be friends with the right people in the VGC and your pet project will be immune from all legal backlash!"

Or something.

Seriously I hate it so fucking much that Nintendo does nothing about Showdown, which blatantly steals a ton of game assets, and then nukes some random guy's fan project that no one ever played.

Good luck

Regardless it's creepy. Use DDG, a VPN, and never persist history if you're looking for shit like this on the web.

The people you can trust the least are not hackers or foreign agents (who don't really care about you) but your own government.

Much like you have to cope with hash or GUID collisions... that is, you don't, because it statistically never happens. Unless you're speedrunning super mario or something.

Besides if you have a program that's formally verified, you just need to do what NASA did for its Apollo missions and make all the logic redundant and gate it behind a consensus algorithm.

You can argue that all 4 computers might get hit by a cosmic ray in just the right place and at just the right time... But it will never ever happen in the history of ever.

So my point is that the real world is messy. But the systems we design as engineers are not necessarily as messy. And the interface between the real world and our systems can be managed, and the proof of it is that we wouldn't be chatting across an entire ocean by modulating light itself if that weren't the case.

Verification is useful when you're dealing with low level or very declarative stuff. You don't really have to "verify" a CRUD repository implementation for a random SPA. But the primitives it relies on, it would be good if those were verified.

The point being that all the code on the stack is not necessarily yours

The experienced ones can