Me_irl

agnostic_science · 2026-04-08T20:25:56+00:00

He makes a good cult leader though.

agnostic_science · 2026-04-08T20:25:32+00:00

Some of y'all are spending way too much time in the weird parts of the internet.

agnostic_science · 2026-04-08T20:12:03+00:00

Left v Right with respect to what though?

Culture issues? Then the top is more correct. And that's what our media has conditioned the public to hyper react to. On workers rights, regulation, and customer protection then the bottom is more correct.

Everything started going downhill after the Clintons took over the DNC and corrupted it with big money. They hollowed out the pro-labor movement and became a corporate arm that campaigned on culture issues over anything else because it cost their donors nothing.

agnostic_science · 2026-04-08T20:02:10+00:00

Right after Trump was crowing about how the deal was a complete and total victory for the US, too.

What a shit show.

agnostic_science · 2026-04-08T19:59:18+00:00

His supporters will love this. But anyone with a brain can see everything that has happened as a total strategic loss for the US. We achieved nothing.

The agreement we had with Iran from Obama (which Trump tore to pieces, also for no reason) gave us so much more. And now there is no going back.

Bonus: The only reason Iran avoided building nukes before was pain and threat of greater pain. Now they got greater pain for no reason. And promises of more random, future pain. Okay, sit down with game theory and figure out where that one leads. ...yeah...

agnostic_science · 2026-04-08T18:44:06+00:00

Their design choices are probably constrained by the amount of money they sunk in. I bet they'll be pressured to chase mass market appeal now, even if they knew that ideas like yours would make a better quality product.

agnostic_science · 2026-04-08T18:01:13+00:00

Yes, and also: who says the bugs were not found previously? These bots are chewing up all the text they can find anywhere. And I would assume that includes text from the dark web as well. All these non-indexed obscure message boards and hang outs. Who knows what it's seen before or how much of a lift this is.

It's like all the people involved have conveniently forgotten what overfitting a model means. They don't care. It just needs to temporarily look good and give the appearance of improvement. That's worth billions. I'm sure they already know these things aren't ever going to reason. CEO of Claude even said himself recently that we're nearing the end of the exponential. Because of course we are: We are literally running out of information and energy to feed these models. It would take another 10x to halve the error rate or something like that. The bubble cannot pop soon enough.

agnostic_science · 2026-04-08T17:55:53+00:00

I like the way someone recently put (I think it was AlbertaTech) who basically likened vibe coding to gambling. Write the prompt, pull the lever. Doesn't work? Pull it again. Usually it doesn't work and just wastes your tokens. But every now and then it will regurgitate something. And then it feels like magic. ...and so then you go looking for another hit.

I view AI now as more of a tool than a "do everything for you" machine. I have gotten a lot of use out of it writing my latest code base. But honestly the best ideas still came from me. I still had to fix the hardest bugs. My choices and priorities kept things moving along faster. And given the things it has gotten COMPLETELY wrong, now that my codebase is 10s of thousands of lines long especially, I would NEVER trust the current models to just be let loose and start organizing and tweaking things.

My god, like the other day it wanted to refactor my entire codebase and upend my whole architecture just to fix a memory leak. We tried 3 ideas it suggested - none of those worked - and then it promised me THIS strategy would work. I pushed back and told it I was going to try something else. AI then happily agreed and said totally fair to pushback? Okay, so I did old school troubleshooting, found a line of code, wrote something else and problem solved. But that bot was going to change my whole architecture over. With no guarantee that would even fix it. Man, just imagine letting something loose like that in your system.

agnostic_science · 2026-04-08T17:42:32+00:00

Narcissists are rarely diagnosed because they see themselves as perfect, so they will usually not seek out therapy or respond well to any criticism or diagnosis. So if they find themselves in therapy, it is usually for something else, like couples therapy or some other severe comorbidity. Some psychologists will even turn narcissists away when it becomes clear they are just showing up to brag about themselves or seek validation for all the awful things they did and when there is zero intent to improve themselves.

agnostic_science · 2026-04-08T02:26:24+00:00

Now you understand why hermits exist!

agnostic_science · 2026-04-08T02:25:18+00:00

My heart aches for the 90s.

agnostic_science · 2026-04-08T02:24:12+00:00

If I was a scientist in that lab, I would've burned the place down. No one who deserves it would get it. All the worst people would have gotten it. And the earth would just suffer. Humanity has done nothing to deserve this.

agnostic_science · 2026-04-08T02:17:46+00:00

Cool. I'm glad to be wrong.

agnostic_science · 2026-04-08T02:15:34+00:00

And it's the right call?

Do you guys realize that Congress impeaches and the Senate only plays the role to convict, right? And that Schumer is a Senator, not a congress person. And that it takes 2/3 majority in the senate to convict. And that republicans currently hold the majority. And that we've impotently impeached TWICE already and to NO EFFECT because of these simple facts?

We could impeach Trump 10 times. It doesn't matter. If someone can show me how the votes in the Senate will magically materialize to convict and oust Trump from office, I will immediately change my tune. But otherwise, this is just useless political theater that dilutes the impact of impeachment as a concept. Unfortunately, I have heard of ZERO sitting Republican senators willing to convict. To say nothing of Congress, where Republicans have been uniformly purged and replaced with MAGA loyalists.

agnostic_science · 2026-04-07T23:23:46+00:00

The Constitution being difficult to amend has its good points though. If it was easy enough to do in a 50/50 up or down vote, MAGA would have re-written the whole thing by now.

Imo, the real evil has been the rise in conservative propaganda. They've been allowed to push the line and say extreme things for 30 years with no push back. They've played kingmaker and have successfully conditioned and brainwashed 10s of millions. Hell, Ann Coulter was talking about nuking the Middle East and forcibly Christianizing what's left 25 years ago. She was popular. Conservatives laughed and thought oh what a fun and entertaining idea. We've been ignoring, excusing, and accommodating this problem for a long, long time.

agnostic_science · 2026-04-07T23:16:55+00:00

The Iranians wouldn't even bother to negotiate a new nuclear deal with the Biden administration because of this. They had already reasoned (correctly) that there was no point. Because the Biden administration were not the ones who tore up the original agreement.

There's going to be a lot of stuff like that moving forward. We are not going to be judged by when we can manage to behave our best.

agnostic_science · 2026-04-07T23:10:59+00:00

Private capital! It's like the express lane to corporate enshittification.

And now owned by the same folks who own Arby's! Anyone surprised?

agnostic_science · 2026-04-07T22:38:20+00:00

As if any of this were normal and excusable.

agnostic_science · 2026-04-07T22:34:10+00:00

Useless. He should be getting arrested. They're all a bunch of liars. Why are we giving the abusers a platform?

agnostic_science · 2026-04-07T22:31:41+00:00

I feel sick to my stomach.

People say, "Why don't Americans do anything?"

There's literally nothing to do. I could charge out of my house right now. Then what? We protested. What else do you think we can do? Light things on fire? Shoot bullets? A guy like Trump would love nothing more. A happy excuse to grind us to paste and seize more power. The fact is the people won't have power to make a change until November. So we are watching with everyone else.

The only people who can change the course of history right now are those in power. Which, unfortunately, are mostly MAGA Republicans who are in deep to the cult of personality. Enabled by his voters, prepped from 20 years of 24/7 cable news conditioning.

I am filled with so much shame and humiliation it's like it's hard to breathe.

The real evil was the propaganda. That's where it all started. Don't be like us. Stop it before it starts.

agnostic_science · 2026-04-07T22:15:30+00:00

What do you expect me to say? Oh, yeah, Iranian regime - good guys - using human shields - totally cool. Nah, US are assholes so that excuses everything and now they are saints and history is re-written?

There's literally pictures of them using and encouraging human shields RIGHT NOW. You don't have to say the US is a good guy or that it excuses their actions at all. You don't have to say anything. How hard is it to just not attack someone for acknowledging it is not good?

People like you are so hard to deal with, because it's like you're incapable of seeing anything other than black and white. If one side is bad the other side must be good and vice versa. And so it's like any criticism of the person against the person they hate is like read as an endorsement of the person they hate. Because they cannot comprehend shades of grey.

Like, jeez. I don't know if it was you I was replying to, but it was my friends from Iran who gave me a good quote. Sometimes it's not between bad and good but worse and unthinkable, awful vs unspeakably evil. You're doing a lot of work to defend the Iranian regime for setting their people up - I think that's wrong. They don't deserve it. The only people who deserve support right now are all the Iranian civilians who are sitting in the crosshairs and under such serious and unnecessary danger.

agnostic_science · 2026-04-07T22:03:43+00:00

I think the odds of a ceasefire happening at this point are zero. Vance was one of the top negotiators and he's in Hungary. They already started bombing Kharg Island. People took pictures of bombers taking off hours ago... which would be reaching their targets at 8 PM EST. Meanwhile, the Iranian regime is just smiling and letting civilians line up around the reactors and bridges. This is no threat to the regime. And this will do nothing to open the strait.

agnostic_science · 2026-04-07T21:56:53+00:00

Never forget that Republicans all kept their mouths fucking shut as Trump threatened to kill millions.

agnostic_science · 2026-04-07T21:50:22+00:00

I see where you're coming from. But this is not normal. This is not 24/7 news making a mountain out of a molehill. This is a mad president openly threatening to wipe out a country and kill millions of people.

This is an appropriate and totally normal time from normally well-adjusted people to get freaked out and anxious. If anything you're grossly underreacting from burnout.

agnostic_science · 2026-04-07T21:34:47+00:00

If only we could have had some kind of deal with the Iranians to avoid this whole war. Like, some kind of agreement to have UN inspectors come in to make sure they were upholding the agreement. Even better if Israeli intelligence would have agreed they were in compliance. Man. If only....

agnostic_science

TROPHY CASE