adleyjulian's comments

Your response is myopic. Do you think large health insurers gave a shit about DoD unofficial contracting black lists or even if the DoD would even know who they're contracting with?

The impact of this is far more than just DoD procurement, which is already enormous.

Completely false. It's the first time a US company has been designated a supply chain risk. Now the likes of Boeing can't use them. Health companies with Medicare/Tricare contracts don't know and will hold off until it's fully litigated.

This is not the government saying they're going with a different vendor, it's the government saying everyone has to choose to either have federal contracts or Claude, they can't have both.

The line of reasoning is more like this: if you make and sell safe-cracking tools then it would not be unreasonable for the government to regulate it so only registered locksmiths could buy it. You don't want people profiting from the support of criminal acts.

The government could similarly argue that if a company provides communication as a service, they should be able to provide access to the government given they have a warrant.

If you explicitly create a service to circumvent this then you're trying to profit from and aid those with criminal intent. Silkroad/drug sales and child sexual content are more common, but terrorism would also be on the list.

I disagree with this logic, but those are the well-known, often cited concerns.

There is a trade-off in personal privacy versus police ability to investigate and enforce laws.

It has been solved. Get rid of all the windmills. Easy.

Reading what you said literally, you're making a strong statement that an AI could never be conscious and further that consciousness depends on free will and that free will is incompatible with determinism and that all of these statements are obviously self-evident.

At no point did I say LLMs have human intelligence nor that they model human intelligence. I also didn't say that they are the correct path towards it, though the truth is we don't know.

The point is that one could similarly be dismissive of human brains, saying they're prediction machines built on basic blocks of neuro chemistry and such a view would be asinine.

The majority of spend is in the last few years of life. A man dying of a stroke during the night at age 50 is much cheaper to the system than the same man living to 90 having fought cancer for 10 years.

I'm not advocating against health nor preventive care, however they don't decrease costs nearly as much as you'd expect.

> LLMs get over-analyzed. They’re predictive text models trained to match patterns in their data, statistical algorithms, not brains, not systems with “psychology” in any human sense.

Per the predictive processing theory of mind, human brains are similarly predictive machines. "Psychology" is an emergent property.

I think it's overly dismissive to point to the fundamentals being simple, i.e. that it's a token prediction algorithm, when it's clear to everyone that it's the unexpected emergent properties of LLMs that everyone is interested in.

RINO republicans don't look like rhinoceros. That the word makes no sense by itself means that you'd have to ask what they meant by it. If the acronym were "DUMB" or "CLOWN" or whatever then I don't think it'd stand out as much.

Also, you're right that it's often used in a way that wouldn't make sense grammatically if it were written out, but that's true for most acronyms I think; e.g. JPEG or GIF.

"Look at this funny Graphics Interchange Format I just sent you!"

> I would point out that they have faith in transhumanism like Christians have faith in Jesus

That's just wrong. Pacemakers are a form of transhumanism, improving the human condition through technology. When you comment on the difference between faith and reason, say transhumanism is based in faith, you're implying it's not reasonable.

Even if you're talking specifically of those that support cryonics like Alcor, or hope for mind uploading your statement is still flawed. Most don't have an absolute belief these technologies will come about, but hope they do and work towards bringing about that future.

Maybe the word you're looking for is hope. Transhumanists hope for a better future in the same way Christians hope they'll go to heaven.

> He is fulfilling his declared policy objective ...his actions are basically US (majority) people's collective action.

Process matters and laws matter. The federal budget is set by congress. If the executive branch is allowed to unilaterally withhold or redirect money then what is the point of congressional budgetary authority? If they had won a super majority then they would have also been able to pass whatever laws/budgets/etc. through congress (assuming they're constitutional).

People are not just objecting to what they're doing, but how they're doing it.

You can argue the gesture was unintentional, but to say it "look nothing like the salutes in documentaries, TV shows, and movies" is just a lie. Nothing like it? What would he had to have to have done differently for you to say it looked similar?

Some procedures are considered never medically necessary or only approved with prior authorization.

Acupuncture has a CPT code and can be billed; do you think a patients file is required to deny it?

Removing a skin tag is considered cosmetic unless it's causing significant issues or is suspected to be cancerous.

It's a question of what we want to measure. There's a metric that represents how much a claimant sees in unexpected costs due to denied claims vs impact on care from the insurer.

A denied prior auth results in no unexpected costs but perhaps a change or delay in care.

A denied claim to an in network hospital may result in the provider losing revenue but nothing for the claimant.

> What? Which ones? Undermined how?

There's a long list of conspiracy theories about the vaccines. There are chips in there to track people, they're actually sterilizing people for population control, it's the mark of the beast, it's made with aborted fetuses, etc. This impacted vaccination rates. I can't think of any that would have actually increased rates, maybe something about the rich hoarding the vaccines, but that's a stretch.

Also, they measured conspiracy mindset with the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire, which has general questions like "I think there are secret organizations that greatly influence political decisions".

They found that lonely teens, that then got lonelier overtime, had a higher rate of a conspiracy mentality in their 40s. It's hardly surprising but they also controlled for depression and anxiety, and found that loneliness still had a positive correlation with the mentality. I found that part interesting.

1. I don't see how a zoonotic vs lab leak origin should really impact containment efforts. If it had been a lab leak and Chinese officials knew, I don't see how or why they would have been more open to outside help.

2. The first death from the virus was in January and it was less than 2 weeks later the first confirmed case was in the US. I think we forget how fast this thing went from novel pneumonia in Wuhan to potential world-wide pandemic. Maybe a head start on shutting down the borders would have delayed things a bit, but there would have been zero appetite to shut down everything in January 2020.

3. There absolutely were conspiracy theories that undermined efforts to contain Covid. E.G. the vaccine heralded end times and was the mark of the beast, or people would start dropping dead from the vaccine and it was part of the Great Reset etc. Or that the bans on gatherings were intended to stop religion, Covid didn't even really exist and it was part of a plan to institute a new world order, etc.

It's a closed position. You have time to reroute the knight and it's one of the few clear plans besides doubling the rooks on the only half open file.

The knight on that outpost was a monster and it ended up winning the game for him.

Are you saying this is due to not having an interest in the people posting on Mastodon or due to a difficulty in using Mastodon itself?

I'm not sure if you're supposed to have an emotional reaction. The delayed reviews combined with the head of business operations leaving, the rumors of missed revenue targets and lower ad quality speaks to financial difficulties. People are worried about further lay offs and the all-hands didn't really assuage concerns.

Twitter as a business would probably be fine and cash flow positive, but it has a billion dollar annual debt servicing weighing it down.

Ground News uses bias ratings from Ad Fontes Media, All Sides, and Media Bias/Fact Check; they rate NPR as Center, Lean Left, and Lean Left respectively.

If you consider NPR to be far-far left then what is Jezebel, The Young Turks, Jacobin, or Democracy Now? That's not even getting into things like Socialist Alternative or pod casts like Chapo Trap House.

Between the ones I listed and NPR are sites like Slate and Vox which are to the left of NPR but not as far left as Democracy Now.