When I was in undergrad I had to write lots of essays by hand. I’d say about every other course in one of my majors had midterms and finals that were a single question essay to be completed in class during the testing period. I figured that was pretty typical.

The point I was making was that the people who are in power are in power because about half of all voters are fine with them being in power and about a third actively want facist rule. Ultimately thisis not a failure of government structure. It’s a failure of citizens. Maybe that will change as those who supported trump from ignorance experience the consequences of their decisions. Maybe not. But trump won the popular vote last election cycle and has always enjoyed a fairly substantial base. A base that penalizes conservatives who worked against him by removing them from power. You cannot ignore the role that the people played in bringing about the current state of affairs. We are getting what people voted for.

Btw the checks do still work. They work in lower courts as they apply the law without regard to partisanship. They, surprisingly, work in grand juries. And they work for non MAGA states to the extent that our federalized system gives more influence to local governments. Where they have failed is where maga politicians enjoy wide support.

That’s a nice bromide but framing the current constitutional crises as the result of a “lie” about checks and balances fundamentally mischaracterizes the issues at hand. For one it diminishes the compliance of the other branches which is clearly critical for enabling the abuse that we see. And it also overlooks the general issue that about half the national actively enables the naked corruption and ascendant facism of the current government.

The problem of the present moment is not the structure of the government it’s the tolerance of the population.

The checks still exist to correct those abuses of power. Just because congress or SCOTUS is unwilling to use them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

“Checks and balances” in the context of US federal government just means that each branch has the ability to check the growth of power of the others. It’s not “a lie” because it’s still true. Right now congress could, if they wanted to, impeach the president or pass laws preventing him from doing the things he wants. The SCOTUS could stop him too if they wanted to actually take up cases on the law instead of using the shadow docket to avoid making rulings.

Trump partisans hold a trifecta in government right now so they are not going to use their checks they have available to them. But one branch refusing to check another because its members were elected from the same stock of partisan lunatics is not the same as checks and balances not existing.

AI doomsday marketing wank has the same vibe as preteens at a sleepover getting spooked by a ouija board.

The post title makes it sound like Reddit is doing some sort of automated classification of user politics with some sort of ml technique. But the screenshot does not show that. It shows an llm summary of a users posting history . If the tool was run on a user that posted exclusively to a cat subreddit, the summary would have been about how the user likes cats. Despite the utility or accuracy of llm summaries, what the screenshot shows is far more anodyne than what this post’s title implies is happening.

The screenshot shows an llm summary of a users posting history. Is that what you mean by “determine belief values stance and more” ? Is there more to this? How is that summary different from scrolling through someone’s posting history to see what they post about?

PhD Level expertise:

Andrew German wrote about this. From his blog post I got the impression that this issue is mostly impacting compsci. Maybe it’s more widespread than that field, but my experience with compsci research is that a lot more emphasis is placed on conferences compared to journals and the general vibe I got from working with compsci folks was that volume mattered a lot more than quality when it came to publication. So maybe those quirks of the field left them more vulnerable to ai slop in the review process.

Is this really that precise? Reading through these 10 points, many of them seem quite vague to me. Phrases like:

[. . .] a structural renewal of a wider movement for social autonomy [. . .]

or

[ . . .] emancipatory defence [sic] of the need for communal constraint of harmful technology [. . .]

could mean a million different things, for example.

How can this be projection? Silicon Valley’s culture brought us fraudulent medical tech, cryptocurrency scams, industrialized wire fraud, illegal taxis, and DRM juice machines. A paragon of honesty and integrity if I ever saw one.

Word guessing machine.