I've actually been following this project for a long time and it's none of the above. They're simply testing what a set of frontier models can do when given a goal and left to their own devices.
I agree this outcome is very painful to see and I really feel for Rob. It's clear people (myself included) are completely at breaking point with AI slop.
In this specific case though it's worth spending 30sec to read the website of AI model village to understand the experiment before claiming this was sent by Anthropic or assigning malicious intent.
This is the equivalent of releasing a poorly tested and validated self driving vehicle into general traffic. Of course nobody would ever do such a thing...
With who in control? A Russia, China and US alliance? This seems very unlikely to me. All signs indicate we're moving to a multipolar world as far as I can tell.
China owns an increasing majority of global GDP and Trump seems to be either taking a path of peace, populism and or stupidity by pulling America out of its global alliances.
That’s one possibility; a different one is that Trump considers China as the real contender for the US in the 21st century, and wants to pivot the US attention there (and out of Europe.)
I'm not a military strategist but if one believes that the real power competition in this century is going to be played between the US and China, it would make sense to concentrate on that direction. And if so, Europe becomes a distraction.
The US performs a two-fold security function in Europe: first, it protects Europe from extra-European threats. Second, it protects Europe from intra-European threats. If however the US exits Europe, both kinds of threats become a reality overnight. When you think of what Europe is going to do if faced with any of these situations, it becomes very clear that China has absolutely nothing to offer on either front.
The extra European threat is not protected by the us anymore. And what even is an intra European threat? US is gonna intervene in a German - French war?
Ideally there would be a 20 year plan to drawdown in Europe and a replacement security architecture. I don't think there's currently any strategic vision, not that Biden had one either.
The idea that Trump’s brain is capable of producing original, substantive thoughts resembling long-term geopolitical strategies based in reality is adorable.
That's not a good-faith argument, sorry. Please be intellectually honest by attacking the strongest version of Trump you can imagine, not the weakest, brain-dead, reality-detached version of him that's easier for you to attack.
I think this is spot on. The confusion for me comes from the fact that, as far as I can tell, I've never met a prig in real life. And yet they seem to be the biggest political issue of our time. Is it because I live in Australia and it's more of a US thing? Or is it because I'm not online as much maybe? I find it really confusing.
Yes on a pragmatic basis, if the coworker is male and gets upset at being referred to by "he", but it goes against your own personal beliefs to refer to him as "she", it's best just to refer to him by name and practise wording your sentences to be pronounless. And, where possible and not disadvantageous, to avoid situations where he's involved in your own work.
With this approach, he's less likely to make a complaint to HR about you (though he might notice the careful lack of "she", but that's much more difficult to make a substantiated complaint about), and you still get to stick to your own beliefs.
It's still somewhat vexing to have to do this, but at least it prevents you from getting in the crosshairs of HR.
If it goes against your personal beliefs to call someone what they prefer to be called at no expense to yourself, then you need some new personal beliefs.
What about neopronouns? Can someone just make up a new set of words like zi / zim / zis and expect you to remember them whenever talking to or about that person?
You already remember what standard pronouns to use to refer to each person in your life. They're words you learned right from the start of learning the language. The same isn't true of "neopronouns".
Probably that gender ideology played a sizable role in getting Trump re-elected. It was the topic of his most popular ad, and IIRC the plurality of swing state voters said it was the most important issue for them.
So getting people to use preferred pronouns was a bit of a Pyrrhic victory in my book.
>IIRC the plurality of swing state voters said [gender ideology] was the most important issue for them.
I don't think that you RC. Citation very much needed here.
The issue of neopronouns is largely theoretical, since almost all users of neopronouns also accept the gender neutral 'they'. The Trump ads weren't about neopronouns, and I doubt that most Trump voters (or indeed most Democratic voters) could tell you what a neopronoun is.
Using people's preferred pronouns out of he/she/they is just common courtesy. It's essentially what everyone, social conservatives included, already does whenever they take someone's word regarding their gender rather than looking down their pants before talking about them in the third person.
Eh, ok. [1] I guess there must be another reason Trump's campaign spent hundreds of millions of dollars broadcasting that ad. It was way more than they spent on any other ad.
You're moving the goalpost here and pretending that neopronouns is not that big an issue. But it's obviously just part of the gender ideology issue, which was clearly part of the reason Trump won.
I can see that there are still people out there with their heads in the sand. I wonder who you'll help elect next time around?
You said ‘swing state voters’. The survey you indirectly link to is talking about ‘swing voters’:
>Our definition of swing voters includes those who are undecided in the presidential race, have changed their voting preference since 2020 (voting Democrat in one election and Republican in the other), or are independents who either indicate they split their votes between Democrats and Republicans, or who hold either favorable or unfavorable views of both Trump and Harris.
The sample of voters is weighted towards swing states, but judging by the numbers for 'All voters', gender wasn't the predominant issue for swing state voters in general.
I don't think that neopronouns are a big issue outside of hypothetical arguments on the internet. You can certainly link neopronouns to a broader issue that people care about. But this thread was just about neopronouns (starting from your question "What about neopronouns?") before you brought Trump into it!
Personally, agree with calling people what they want to be called. That said, here's a thought experiment: What if someone is inconvenienced? What if someone feels uncomfortable using pronouns that don't match the sex of the person? What about uncommon "neopronouns" like "zhe", "xe", or "fae"?
We expect people to say things that make them uncomfortable all the time. I don't feel comfortable telling my boss that I'm the one who wrote the buggy code that caused the incident, but I have a responsibility to do it regardless. I might be expected to thank everyone involved in a project, even if I don't feel personally grateful to them. And so on.
Obviously there's no easy way to reason these cases from first principles. As it is, I'm aware that being affirmed in their gender identity is recognized as therapeutically important for trans people. On the flip side, I'm not aware of any condition that causes people to suffer significant distress due to using a particular pronoun. So in this case, I feel like it's a pretty easy decision.
EDIT: The "neopronoun" question was added after I replied, or I missed it. I have never met a person who expected me to use them, nor have I ever encountered a workplace environment where policies required their use, so I haven't formed an opinion.
I've never met anybody who used neopronouns either, I've only heard about it online.
I wonder if there are any long term effects of forcing someone to say something that they consider to be untrue? Taken to its most hyperbolic extreme, it could be used as a form of psychological torture, like something out of 1984, where Winston is tortured for not accepting that four fingers being held up is five, or "Four Lights" from Star Trek.
To get one to renounce what they know to be true and accept whatever you say without question is probably the ultimate form of control and subjugation.
For emphasis: "taken to its most hyperbolic extreme".
edit: more realistically, you could say that transgender or gay people might feel like they are compelled to lie about who they are in order to fit in, or in certain circumstances. Surely, if we recognize this as psychologically damaging, then we should recognize all other types of forced lying to be similarly damaging.
I don't think so. If someone shows you their baby you say "how adorable, how beautiful" no matter how ugly the baby is. If you haven't learned to accept that by the time you're an adult you're going to live a miserable life.
The analogy in my comment was about adherence to philosophical beliefs, in response to what appeared to be a suggestion by you that such beliefs should be ignored if someone else finds them to be an inconvenience.
Could you explain why you think your analogy works, please?
Your right to untrammeled adherence to your philosophical beliefs ends the moment that those beliefs result in conduct affecting other people. After that point, some form of balancing occurs.
So is it a problem to use the "wrong" pronouns for someone or not? You take people at their word on their gender every day. Why go out of your way to fret about what you call people only when they tell you they're trans?
No, to the whole sibling thread. He’s talking about the “pledge of allegiance” required to get hired in a university or like company, circa 2020. Also posts that imply you’re a monster if you don’t conform.
Sticklers for rules are the traditional definition. I think most of us have met a tyrant before, ruler of a very small kingdom. Often in a government position.
I'm still using the built in MacOS terminal. What am I missing? I mostly do webdev - maybe terminal features are more important for other types of programming?
Apple Terminal has a lot of problems. As others have mentioned, it lacks support for 24 bit color, enforces minimum contrast ratios without any ability to disable them (meaning you cannot set arbitrary color themes), is hopelessly bad at Unicode rendering (particularly with multi-codepoint graphemes, see [1]), and in general misbehaves in other myriad ways [2][3][4].
With both Ghostty and iTerm2 now freely available, there's really no reason to use Terminal.app.
Personally, my main reason to prefer Kitty over Terminal.app are (I believe Ghostty support all of them as well, so looking forward to try it out):
- “Kitty Keyboard Protocol” means that a TUI app can detect all keybindings. For example, if you install kkp.el in Emacs, then Emacs running in a terminal will pick up ctrl+shift keys, super keys, etc. on par with a GUI app. I believe NeoVim supports this out of the box now as well, so if you ever felt like binding Cmd+S to :w<cr> you now can.
- “Kitty Graphics Protocol” means that I can let e.g. Matplotlib show images inside a terminal, even over SSH connections. If you’re annoyed at pop-up GUI windows, or struggling with viewing remote images often, this is a nice workaround. There are even attempts at making terminal PDF viewers (like termpdf.py); IMO that’s a game changer, even though the app itself is still in a “proof of concept” stage IMO.
- Terminal splits. If you work a lot in a terminal, it’s nice to be able to full-screen a terminal and view many different shells or processes side-by-side. Last I checked, Terminal.app just doesn’t have this feature. Sure, you could use multiple windows or a multiplexer like tmux, but that comes with different trade-offs; for example, a native terminal offers smooth scrolling with a trackpad whereas tmux doesn’t. Personally, I use tmux remotely, but stopped using it locally.
- I see a lot of people mention 24-bit colors as a main reason to not use Terminal.app. For me, I’m actually pretending that I have a 16-color terminal, because I’m tired of having to theme every command-line utility individually, I’d rather they all just respect my 16 chosen colors instead. The only exception is my editor, just because there are unfortunately few good 16-color themes these days, so I instead change my terminal program to be consistent with my editor theme and then let every other TUI utility believe the terminal only supports 16 colors to match.
I appreciate you making an effort to visually display things, but FWIW I don't think that (or sibling) really gets to the root issue, which is less of capability then practical convenience and compatibility. Mac native Terminal perfectly well supports 256 colors (or arbitrary 16 colors with themes), which I've used, so you could absolutely make both sides look identical there. Unless someone is regularly viewing photos inside their terminal (which some do support and can actually sometimes be handy!) then it might not be immediately clear what 24-bit would bring to the table over 8-bit, regardless of editor or shell themes.
But in practice 24-bit was an easy lift for terminals under active development ages ago, and in turn made it trivial to have everyone across any platform specify exact colors more easily without any end user customization or arguments about "not quite what I wanted" in an 8-bit palette or whatever. Thus a lot of the ecosystem now makes use of it. Being able to replicate anything yourself, or get close enough, in a smaller colorspace is still extra grunt work for no particularly valuable reason, and could actually add up to be fairly significant work if one has a lot of more complex code coloring themes and such.
My example is precisely about practical convenience. If I try to do something very normal in Terminal.app, namely use a text editor with a theme, it will look like garbage.
You wouldn’t realize because 24-bit colors are silently dropped. You don’t get the full experience but you also won’t “run into any issues”, unless you start using something that relies on 24-bit color coding for core functionality, like my own log viewer.
