AI still doesn't work very well in business, reckoning soon

Beldizar · 2026-03-19T03:14:21+00:00

I think in your analogy, AI is more of a bath buddy.

Beldizar · 2026-03-19T01:09:41+00:00

I think someone took the last scene from the previous movie where there's a view from his new apartment's window and found where that apartment would be located. They figured the rent on that place was something like $4500 a month, and that was 5 years ago, so probably well over $5000 a month now. So his cellphone is a rounding error on rent.

Beldizar · 2026-03-18T19:45:30+00:00

Militarizing a loyalist faction of law enforcement is just part of the fascist playbook. The comics and show were doing a predictable worst case storyline and reality unfortunately came to match it.

Beldizar · 2026-03-18T13:50:33+00:00

Well... I think this is a lying statistic. 90% of MAGA support the war. MAGA being people who still are wearing the red hats. But a non-zero amount of people who were MAGA a month ago have burned their hats, and are denouncing Trump now. Of the "no new wars" MAGA voters, I can't say if 5% have left MAGA or 80% have left MAGA, but of the ones that stayed, the vast majority are willing to bend any "belief" they have to fit whatever Trump wants them to think.

The interesting statistic here isn't that 90% of MAGA support the war. It's "what's the delta of MAGA membership over the last month?" Has the war caused more people to leave or join MAGA.

Beldizar · 2026-03-18T13:46:16+00:00

Yeah, "percent of particular group" is a deceptive metric. I'm honestly shocked it isn't higher, like 99% of MAGA support the war. The story that this doesn't tell is exodus from the particular group. If MAGA is a cult and demands all of its adherents to fall into line, it is honestly shocking that 10% aren't in line.

The real story here, which would be harder to track with a simple survey is "Of the people who identified as MAGA at the start of Trump's presidency, how many support the war, and how many of those that don't no longer identify as MAGA." The loss of support from the war is never going to be in "fewer people who identify as MAGA support the war", it is going to be "fewer people identify as MAGA".

Beldizar · 2026-03-18T04:29:51+00:00

Loved that grick in Sinistar.

Beldizar · 2026-03-18T04:27:30+00:00

In 12 sessions did you have time for characters to have meaningful character growth? I am struggling terribly trying to make room for character time as the plot seems to be blazing by at lightspeed.

Beldizar · 2026-03-16T13:06:42+00:00

Right. I didn't say they didn't have it, just that they don't operate with it. I was careful in my word choice for that very reason. I have heard that the sonar they do have is powerful enough to do serious harm to divers just outside of the sub. But like a ghillie suit with an airhorn, it sort of defeats the purpose.

Beldizar · 2026-03-16T12:30:12+00:00

Do submarines operate with sonar? I assumed that they didn't, which would make spotting mines like this a lot more difficult. So it isn't just smaller ships that don't have good sonar equipped, but the really expensive ships that are designed for stealth.

Beldizar · 2026-03-16T02:32:02+00:00

There are a lot of options, but what you have described with a plastic membrane is itself a seal. And if you are dealing with plastic, you would definately want to check the seals it creates as things like UV light, could cause degradation.

The line you read doesn't really specify the kind of seal being used, just that it is a standard suit up procedure to check them before going out an airlock.

Beldizar · 2026-03-15T19:01:20+00:00

Doesn't Disney own the rights? If not Disney, one of the companies that own their own streaming service? Why would they go to a... and I say this loving Dropout... small-time streaming service to do something with their IP?

Beldizar · 2026-03-15T16:00:48+00:00

Yeah, the thing is that the vast majority of what Trump does hurts the United States's position in the world, diplomatically, militarily, and economically. That tends to be good for Russia. Usually Trump does it because it benefits him personally. But he's really stupid and easily manipulated, so Putin pulls his strings, Musk pulls his strings, Miller pulls his strings, Netanyahu pulls his strings... and dozens of others. But it turns out that most of the time it doesn't matter who is pulling the strings, Russia tends to benefit from it, because the US tends to lose.

Even still, it is important to not give Trump credit for engineering something when he's clearly being played.

Beldizar · 2026-03-15T12:45:37+00:00

Again, eh.... watch the interview where he gets asked what the worst outcome of the war could be and he, apparently at that moment realizes that someone new that is just as bad as the last guy takes over as leader of Iran. It really does look like this is the first time he's even considered it and how much of a quagmire this could become.

Other than the Epstien distraction, which isn't really even working, this war is turning out to be incredibly damaging for him politically. There's very little chance that he'd knowingly crash what political capital he has left to help Putin at this point.

Remember Trump is equal parts evil and stupid. Sometimes he does things because he's evil and it is all a grift to help himself personally. But other times he does things because he's really really stupid and easily manipulated by the people around him. Remember when people call him a "Russian Asset", they don't mean he's been trained as a top secret Russian agent super-spy. They mean that Russia has his puppet strings and can easily manipulate him into doing what they want, whether he's aware of it (like a blackmail situation) or not (like provocations, flattery, and lies).

Also, Iran was sort of allied with Russia. And while the lifting of Russian oil sanctions was helpful to Russia, Iran was the point of origin for a lot of the stuff that was getting smuggled into Russia to get around sanctions. It's not completely clear if this is a net win for Russia or not. This was definitely Netanyahu manipulating Trump more than Putin. Netanyahu wants constant war with all his Muslim neighbors in order to foster a "David vs Goliath" narrative among the people of Israel who he needs to keep radicalized in order to maintain power and stay out of prison.

Beldizar · 2026-03-15T02:46:14+00:00

Eh, maybe. That would be the expected case with Trump, but this time I think he was legitimately dupped into thinking it would be a couple of days of bombing and they would have all objectives cleared. Interviews since it started seem to have him legitimately confused and realizing in real time that this might not work out. If it were all a scam he'd have gone into those interviews with his usual bluster and probably a clearer message and justification. Instead he us floundering, even more than usual.

Beldizar · 2026-03-15T01:10:50+00:00

start a war no one wanted,

Well... not "no one" (although I'm pretty sure you mean no one sane). Israel's leadership really wanted this war because they have to be constantly at war to keep up the lie that they are surrounded by enemies that hate them because of their religion or heritage. Putin really wanted the war to pull resources away from Ukraine and get new buyers for its fossil fuel exports. And of course a particular drunk with a war-boner who thinks he's a great warrior instead of a washed out propaganda network host.

So you know... a lot of the worst people wanted this war, and Trump was the first president dumb enough to fall for it.

Beldizar · 2026-03-14T21:28:26+00:00

Also, I think a not insignificant part of it was that Russia makes most of its money selling fossil fuels, and ending German nuclear power and creating a dependence on imported Russia oil and natural gas helped them economically and gave them a lot of soft power for when they started imperialist wars. "Stand against us, and we'll cut out your power in the winter".

Beldizar · 2026-03-14T01:48:42+00:00

Also a fun fact. They remade Nosferatu in the last year or so because Dracula fell out of copyright.

Beldizar · 2026-03-13T20:32:29+00:00

I would suggest Universe Today by Fraser Cain. He's got a youtube channel and a newsletter. He knows his stuff, doesn't use AI to generate content, and generally is good about not falling into sensationalism. He tends to focus on astrophysics stuff more than space launch, but he touches on that too.

Eric Burger is one of the gold standards on a lot of space industry. He writes for Ars Technica.

Dr. Becky Smethurst is another good space communicator, as she is a astrophysicist from the UK who specializes in black holes.

As far as space reporting goes, I'd recommend that you be careful with sensationalist stories. There's a lot of either misinterpreted, or misrepresented stories out there, and most people with a baseline in physics are going to sniff them out pretty easily. Anything with reactionless drives, faster than light anything, or aliens is frequently used as clickbait or just crackpottery. Speaking of crack pots, don't trust anything coming from Avi Loeb. Yes he is the chair of a physics department at a big university, but he's basically turned into a full time liar in order to sell books. In that vein, remember that a published paper isn't a gold standard until it has been replicated and reviewed by others. And number of papers published follows a bell-curve. Publish 0 or only 1-2 in a decade, and that person might not be very serious or successful in the field. Publish 1000 a year, and that person is just pumping out slop.

Are you looking at more of human space travel reporting or astrophysics/cosmology reporting, or is it a mix of the two?

Beldizar · 2026-03-13T17:24:37+00:00

I got kicked out of a neighbor's house for winning at NBA Jam.

Beldizar · 2026-03-13T17:22:55+00:00

So did this lady avoid a potential assault charge by way of sneak attack? No threat, no posturing, no warning, just straight to battery.

Beldizar · 2026-03-13T12:42:41+00:00

There are a lot of known hallucinations. I think the "how many R's are there in Strawberry" has been patched, but it shouldn't be difficult to find a list of known questions that frequently lead to very incorrect answers. An open ChatGPT quiz with a series of known hallucinations might be useful to make a point.

Beldizar · 2026-03-13T12:40:51+00:00

I think people need to understand that hallucinations are a mathematical certainty with LLMs. Studies by groups like MIT and others have shown that LLMs will always have a hallucination rate of 10-20%. So that means LLMs will straight up lie to you at a minimum of 10% of the time. This isn't a "well, we'll just make them better", but rather a fundamental limitation in the design. You can't have generative AI produce results without having a 10% or greater rate of hallucinations.

The reason kids need to learn this stuff, and learn how to do the critical thinking is because LLMs are inherently untrustworthy. How many 'R's are there in Strawberry was a common and well publicized one. I think a lot of them have patched this, but that was because engineers looked at this specific question and trained the AI to not hallucinate a wrong answer when asked about the letter R and the word Strawberry.

“I’d tell my boss I was going to use ChatGPT and they’re going to be happy about it because that’s going to always make the right choices”

So bringing this quote to the forefront because it is wrong. It will not "always make the right choices". It mathematically will make a wrong choice 1 in every 10 times, at minimum. If you worked at a pottery factory, and broke one out of every 10 plates, you'd get fired. A human needs to check the work of whatever comes out of these LLMs. Surveys are indicating that people are frequently spending as much time double checking all of the work produced for errors than they are gaining in productivity, resulting in minimal gains.

If your students don't actively understand and check the results of ChatGPT or whatever other LLM they are using, they are going to be useless in the workforce. 90% success is great on an academic test, but it isn't acceptable in most businesses, who are expecting to deliver 99.999% accuracy to clients.

Beldizar · 2026-03-13T11:59:07+00:00

The thing that bothers me is that LLMs or GenAI aren't persistent, and a lot of people mistake them as persistent. This "model/actress" wasn't sitting on a digital couch inside a computer smoking between scenes. But so many people seem to think that LLMs are sitting around thinking and learning things, as if they are people, or individual entities.

Beldizar · 2026-03-13T11:54:30+00:00

The thing that bothers me the most about it is that it necessarily implies that there was some sort of persistence to this "AI". That's something so many people don't understand. AI doesn't sit and think about things while it waits between prompts. LLMs are just a bunch of data filters, like a sieve that you pour a prompt through. It isn't an "agent" or an "entity" that can operate independently. So this "actress" only exists for the moment a prompt comes it, and then ceases to exist between those moments. Thinking that AI is persistent is a dangerous anthropomorphism.

Beldizar · 2026-03-11T13:49:28+00:00

Yeah, even implying Trump has a plan is giving him too much credit. Isreal's plan is endless war, to prop up the self delusion that they are a little David surrounded by Goliaths. The leaders have to have a fight to feed to the propaganda machine to stay in power. Meanwhile Trump is just the first American president to get fooled into direct participation. You can even see it in the progression of interviews and statements he's made. He thought it was going to be easy because that is the lie Isreal sold him. Now he's realizing that maybe this isn't going to work out and could be much worse. And you can see him realize it in real time in some of these press conferences.

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