I don’t even think they stand to benefit. I think when he blows up the US their assets will lose value, and depending on how bad it gets they may start having to hang out in some other safer country like a Russian oligarch spending all his time in Western Europe.

I think it is just pure force of habit at this point, like “Biden’s gonna tax the rich fuck him let’s get behind this disaster instead.” I mean, it worked for other disasters like Reagan or W, but I think they haven’t really absorbed how big a disaster Trump 2 would be.

Yeah. It is fairly weird to me that it’s such a common thing to do to take the raw output of the LLM and send that to the user, and to try use fine-tuning to get that raw output to look some way that you want.

To me it is obvious that something like having the LLM emit a little JSON block which includes some field which covers “how sure are you that this is actually true” or something, is more flexible and simpler and cheaper and works better.

But what do I know

Apparently the only way the candidates will agree to do it is if the format is so stilted that there's no chance of anyone learning anything or seeing the candidates get challenged on anything. It's basically just a taking-in-turns version of a campaign commercial.

What, indeed, is the point. Like a lot of American politics, the whole "debate" survives as a pointless vestige of a thing (now long forgotten) that was useful and productive in its original form, but now is mutated to a useless and unrecognizable monstrosity, which you have to pretend is super serious and important if you want to be able to be on TV.

Yeah

1. Biden got a ton of good stuff done, but even if you don't agree with that, there is no possible way that an adult human being with any level of political awareness can claim that Trump wouldn't be an objective disaster on an absolutely globe-spanning scale, or that we should do anything in this election than vote for whoever isn't Trump. It's like one of those video game puzzles that's so clear and simple that it seems like there must be more to it. "Do you want to open and find out what's in the box? Or for me to thrust this running chainsaw into your coccyx?" "What's in the box?" "It's a friendly cat, but why do you need to ask?"
2. Biden at the debate looked old as fuck and that's a problem

It's sorta boring when you just lay it out, but IDK how anyone could disagree with either of those

Yeah. I mean it's hard to blame them--

You know what, fuck that, let's blame them. They have a responsibility. This is like all the German businesses that played along with the Nazis because it was easier and then had to change the subject when their grandkids asked them about the war years. Like yeah grandad ran a, uh, a pots and pans factory. Yeah. Just pots and pans. Now go play outside.

In ordinary times I think it would be fair to say well you know a bunch of them didn't focus on the bottom line and went out of business and everyone had to get new jobs, so hard to blame the ones still around. But this is kind of all hands on deck time. It's one thing if you don't want to write articles about the IRA and all good stuff about Biden. It's a whole different fuckin story if you want to write stories feeding into getting the guy elected who is going to fuck up your home and city and business and economy and the safety of you and your families, too, and then (I am sure) stand around like "we're all looking for the guy that did this" if it winds up coming true.

It is fascinating to me that the "Biden is in HUGE trouble in the election because of the debate" narrative is so unanimous in the media

In a way that "Trump is in HUGE trouble in the election because of his felonies" was not in any way

Even though from the tiny amount of polling that has apparently happened, the second one was a bigger deal to the electorate than the first one

Curious

It gave some sound bites for people to hold up as examples of why Biden is old which I'm sure we will be seeing on certain news networks from now until forever going forward

And gave a bunch of "objective" news outlets a good excuse to write a bunch of "DEMS IN PANIC AFTER BIDEN'S UNFORGIVABLE SHIT SHOW" articles they are for some reason eager to write

Other than that significant amount of fodder, I think nothing of value occurred

This is always a part of my prep sheet, is a little list of random names.

Philly is also the city that violently chased the Patriot Front out when they tried to do a march, like literally just set on them whacking them with big sticks sending them packing back into their U-Haul van and driving away shamefully. Like Han Solo unhesitatingly shooting at Vader the instant he sees him sat at the dinner table for his big betrayal speech. Be like Philly.

Oh, I know. I am just stating the message for the rest of the people.

The bad faith folks used to have these epic debates with me back and forth but I think they have mostly stopped doing that and I am heartened to think that maybe they decided that trying to say anything I was saying wasn’t true was an obvious losing battle and they were hurting their cause by even making the attempt.

At one point I messed around with a lore generator that would chop up sections of "The Dungeon Alphabet" and "Fire on the Velvet Horizon" along with some other stuff, and feed random sections of them into the LLM for inspiration and then ask it to lay out a little map, and it pretty reliably came up with all kind of badass stuff.

I think he said in the last book, in the little notes under some selected strips, that Steve Dallas was his alter ego.

OTOH this agrees with you and I think I was basing that just off that one-off statement and so maybe I am wrong

It is funnier knowing that Steve Dallas was Berke Breathed’s alter ego that he inserted into the strip to make fun of himself

This wasn't an intentional feature; they're actually trying to train it with fine-tuning to add this as an ability. It's one area that highlights the difference between it imitating the text it's been seeing, instead of actually understanding what it's saying -- since most of its training data is of the form "(ask a question) (response to question)" overwhelmingly more often than "(ask a question) (say you don't know, the end)", it is trying to be a good imitator and do the same, and come up with some plausible nonsense even if it doesn't know the answer.

Sickness, Puking, and Debt

Sounds about right

If "hey look at this poll of left handed middle income women in swing states, Trump is ahead 86 points" is bullshit

Then "this one focus group of 8 Hispanic voters thought Biden did great, time to stop worrying" is also bullshit

Wait to see the polls. I am anticipating them showing some loss for Biden because the average American would rather have a vigorous insurrectionist running the country, than a visibly old person with good policy ideas. I would love to be shown proof that I am wrong in that but this isn't it. I think Biden's great, but he does still have to win the election, and the debate wasn't a good showing for him, and one little focus group doesn't change that and doesn't justify the broad sweeping headline here.

Why would you hurt me this way

I took the phone to do a video chat with someone’s central Asian friend and he immediately said “Aw, shit, big fake American smile.” I sort of checked myself like yeah he’s right I do have a big fake bullshit meeting-someone smile on my face. Well now I feel like a dummy.

It gave me some cultural perspective.

GPT-4 generally doesn’t need fine tuning or anything no

100% agree