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Comment Re:Same code, less pay (Score 1) 137

Still, using functionally identical assistants makes this an interesting test.

I looked at avatars they produced and they are not the same quality. Perhaps innocently because of poor hair render, or perhaps intentionally to craft a narrative, the resulting avatars were vastly different in realism and attractiveness. Notably, female avatar had long and poorly rendered hair with a strange hairdo and odd baggy outfit. The male avatar had short hair, T-shirt over sculpted torso, and no facial hair. The equivalent male avatar would be with a long unkempt beard and wearing something like baggy hoodie.

Submission + - The Trump administration has barred Microsoft, Adobe from H-1B (politico.com)

sinij writes:

The Trump administration has barred Microsoft, Adobe and six IT companies from sponsoring H-1B workers for green cards, Vice President JD Vance announced Thursday. Vance made the comments during a press conference on visa fraud, during which he argued Microsoft is discriminating against Americans by prioritizing foreign workers


Comment I read methods... this is why. (Score 2) 137

Johan and Johanna To ensure high visual fidelity and anatomical realism, appearances were based on standard human models from Reallusion. These models were chosen for their neutral and highly similar appearances, aiming to isolate gender presentation as the primary visual difference between the two assistant representations.

In Figure 3 you can see the resulting bots. Dude looks almost normal, but female-presenting assistant is seriously into uncanny valley. This alone fully explains the observed result.

Comment Re:Looking back - there always been censorship (Score 1) 94

I keep going various historical rabbit holes (e.g., Kennedy, Nixon, etc.) and I think the difference between back then and now is that censorship actually worked. We, the general public, did not find out about most of things being censored. Maybe with exception of Iran Contra.So your impression of only bending things being censored is based on the mistaken premise that you had a comparable viewpoint/exposure. Today, almost everything gets out if you are willing to entertain it. Trump Jr.'s wedding scandal became known the next day. Trump crypto graft is not even a secret. Biden's dementia was widely known early on.

The point I am trying to make is that it always bordered on 1984, only now we know about it.

Comment Re:State is probably best stated by the comics (Score 1) 94

\Who has masked secret police snatching people into unmarked vehicles?

Actually, they are typically in uniform. The masks are due to doxxing and threats against family. Unmarked vehicles are common. Are some undertrained or lacking a proper law enforcement temperament, sure. No law enforcement agency catches all the unsuitable applicants, and the faster they grow the more unsuitable slip through. Such a failure does not change the validity of the mission. More importantly, the people being arrested actually committed a crime. Unlike actual fascism where criticizing the party can get you arrested.

Also take 15 minutes and read this.

Most of it is OK. Some things mistaken. For example "Any fascist attempt to gain power in America would not use the exact Hitler pattern. It would work under the guise of "super-patriotism" and "super-Americanism."" No, its not that simple. Firstly, appeals to patriotism and americanism are not exclusively a tool of fascists, non fascists can use those too. Secondly, Americanism is not your typical nationalism or culture. It is multicultural in nature, religious pluralist in nature, etc. In short, the "melting pot". An improved version of the author's statement would be under the guise of "super-moralism", of which "super-nationalism" is a possible implementation for a more homogeneous society. Plus there are both healthy and unhealthy manifestations of nationalism. The American men who destroyed fascism in 1945 were not lacking in strong nationalistic feelings. The more general point the author was trying to get at is moralism, in particular where the morally correct is defined by the party. This morality provides the rationalization for political violence.

Another example of a mistaken point would be "Fascism thrives on indifference and ignorance". Again an oversimplification, what is really at work here is trust in the party. The indifference and ignorance are largely a result of this trust. The indifferent and ignorance designed by the party to achieve party goals. The solution to such ignorance is skepticism, even of your own party, even of people you like. Information indicating your team is in error on a particular topic often comes from the other team. Hence the demonization, the desired result being to ignore different opinion, maybe even attempt to silence them.

With respect to my earlier comment, "You'll have to be clearer since both political extremes are calling the other nazis and such", much of the article's claims could be equally applied to both the far left and far right. Divide and conquer, scapegoats, super-moralism, intolerance for competing views, bigotry, etc.

Comment Re:State is probably best stated by the comics (Score 1) 94

If you don't like them that's fine, its the ban them from campus stuff that indicates the fragility and intolerance.

With respect to beating up on trans people, what is often considered punching is in many cases disagreeing. Again, we're really talking about an intolerance for disagreement.

Comment Re:State is probably best stated by the comics (Score -1, Troll) 94

Oh FFS.

This "private army intimidating people" is nothing of the sort. It is the administration doing EXACTLY what the 1996 law requires of it. The fact that everyone just ignored the law for 30 years does not make Trump the criminal now and it does not make what ICE is doing illegal. It makes what everyone did from 1997-2020 the CRIME.

If you don't like immigration law - then win enough elections to change it. What Bush did, what Obama did, what Biden did on the subject were actual crimes. My gwd DACA - holy crap an entire program made up entirely by executive whim based on wild interpretation of a few line in the code. Wow that honestly sounds a lot like what everyone accuses this admin of doing when it comes to things like tariffs. Funny how we only have laws when the LEFT does not like what President is doing, when the RIGHT does not like it miraculously the courts are unable to find any legal standing, and the legislature decides it has to play its constitutionally assigned role...

What is missing from the entire conversation right now is Trump is governing pretty much EXACTLY like Bush, Obama, AND Biden did. The attitudes about authority and rule making all the same. Even the rhetoric, anyone remember "bitter clingers", once again the real difference is nothing other than who it is directed toward.

The truth is their is no actual air between the leadership styles of Obama and Trump, the real reason he gets so much hate is because the opposition's heroes are opposite sides of the same coin.

Comment Long Road (Score 1) 46

JPEG-XL is a good format but I just realized yesterday that Google Docs on Android doesn't support inserting a webp image a decade after Google was pushing it. I had one from a website and needed to run it through imagemagick first.

Android supports it, all the apps using android image primitives supoort it, but one of Google's flagship apps still doesn't.

We used move much faster thirty years ago. If an app supported say GIF, PNM, and TGA when JPEG came out it was supported in the next release.

Hopefully this round will be better. It's probably a management problem ... maybe they will listen to their chatbot since they don't listen to their engineers.

Comment Re:State is probably best stated by the comics (Score 2) 94

Rights have limitation based on law, actual harm.

You just argued that you shouldn't have to take harm into account.

You conflate perceived harm and actual harm. Hearing an opinion you hate is not actual harm.

It would be cool if you had any internally consistent beliefs whatsoever.

Hint: 'actual' is often something different than 'feelings'.

Comment Abstract becomes practical over time (Score 2) 94

Or its something we have seen again and again in mathematics. Someone does some work involving some abstraction that has no practical application at the time. Then sometime in the future some other person realizes that the old abstraction can be applied to some 'new' domain. Its not terribly surprising that an LLM trained on old academic journals and letters could speed up such a process.

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