Month: June 2023

Wipe Your Grocery Bags

I watched this, and see where the attraction is coming from.

(And for full disclosure, I do subscript to Reason, and donate to the Reason Foundation…)

Tossing off random names rapid-fire is not an argument.

Someone who sounds somewhat knowledgeable, find the nugget that supports your priors, and stick with it.

Han shot first.

But I really disagree on the foreign policy ideas.

His standard is that if whatever action is not in America’s interest, America should not be involved.

No.

If America can do something to help, it should.

Was the US wrong for helping the UN distribute food in Somalia?

No.

There’s also sections of the interview that speak to my inclinations about laws and regulations — they should expire. All of them. Everything gets deleted eventually.

Reactive force is often justified, and there’s many times where it’s not in pursuit of some other goal.

So, while I understand the attraction a bit better, I still think he’s coming in from the lollypop guild.

Show Me Where I’m Wrong!!1!

People will, and do, but you interrupt them so readily that it’s impossible to see if you’ve even really considered the contradicting evidence presented.

But the NeoHips getting behind him might well further the fewer-than-Marrou tack the Mises people have taken with the LP.

And the NeoHips can continue telling the world that they’ve been right about everything all the time.

They Were Wrong

The experts in Libertarian Party’s Russia Caucus said:

  1. Russia wasn’t going to invade Ukraine
  2. Well, even with the invasion, it’d be over very quickly
  3. The oil disruptions, would result in the complete collapse of the “Petrodollar” because Russia will start selling its oil in other currencies

So, haven’t slept a ton, but Elon captured it well:

Elon’s take

As I write this a little after 0900EDT, they’ve taken the military headquarters where Russia was managing its efforts in Ukraine, and is headed towards Moscow.

The vaunted corporate press was really slow to start following things last night.

Cable News is dead, Jim.

Many of the primetime shows aren’t hitting 500K in-the-demo (so adults 25-54) with their primetime shows.

The chick on CNN who hosted the townhall with President Trump has similar career prospects to those who bought the correspondence course on TV repair around 1990. Or travel agents. Or Microsoft Exchange administrators. Or…

Things move on.

So might I, though not necessarily because I have no more useful skills. Medical things might justify heading towards private disability. Pffft.

Imma go see what I can see about what’s going on overseas. Will probablyend up flipping around channels….

Re: Tagline

The tagline of this site is applicable again.

The too-cool-for-school crowd decided that the thing to do for private messaging would be use WhatsApp.

Yeah, about that.

Your messages are not irretrievable. Sorry, Hunter. No, Mister Lawyer, it’s not illegal. If the intended recipient got them, and stoed them somewhere accessible, they’re there to be snarfed.

CyberSekurity r hard.

Even if E2E encryption works, they do get stored.

Though it’s not straightforward, you can export ALL messages, and the contents contained therein.

These are not forever private if they’re stored somewhere locally.

If you’re trying to use them to avoid records being kept, that’s your issue.

Response w/out AI

Answering Mike’s concerns.

Bits inline….

I Wonder:

How would you cite an AI derived source? I can imagine my research methods professor saying that we couldn’t use that as a valid research tool. Something that would not be accepted as an academic source. In the early days of the digital age when we were both in college we could only use printed peer reviewed academic journal articles, magazine articles and other publications on microfiche. Only academic sources that we could put our hands on physically. Internet citations was a new thing and APA, MLA or the Chicago manual of style had not spelled out how to document a source from the world wide web. The internet was a “Brave New World” full of information that some in the academic world did not accept as valid or academic. Including my research methods professor. How would you cite an AI source if it pulled it’s answer from multiple sources to generate the answer? Will there be a custom url generated from that AI to copy and paste into the footnotes to direct you to their own sources of reference?

I think you’d cite similar to how you did early Intertubes articles. URL, date retrieved.

To add further support, I’d recommend making a copy (PDF? PNG?) That shows exactly what you saw as it was when you saw it.

In addition to the links being all broken when I link to soemthing like Twitter, I want something more permanent.

(Some of this is self-reflective since I periodically delete all of my Tweets. As I wrote recently, whatever I might have spat out years ago likely isn’t representative of how I behave or think now. Sorry Ms. SHRMP with your five-figure Federal student loans…)

AI has the potential to slowly erode the ability of future scholars to actually do the footwork and research of the subjects they are studying.

I generally agree. But that’s why you need to have something in mind before you turn to the AI to confirm your premises.

Will the questions the researcher asks the AI generate only a certain kind of response to reinforce the researchers world view of the subject?

Maybe? At the same time, it shows that hte researcher is actually thinking enough to ask relevant questions.

We already live in a world where academics and politicians only look to source material that reinforce the ideas they have or the ideas they want the general public to have. A person’s individual “bias” would have the researcher to use language in their questions to get a certain type of answer.

It’s not nice to pidgeon-hole MSNBC Viewers like that, Mike.

AI in the wrong hands would tend to make the general public more ignorant of the true state of the world and the issues we deal with today. All the while leaving everyone feeling empowered because they believe that AI has the power to present them with more information and a broader perspectives on the issues then they would be able to see left to their own devices. In reality the information presented would be to shape a certain view point and create a “group think” mentality that doesn’t have a clue or see the whole picture in the end. That would be by design of whoever controls the algorithm.

I see where you’re coming from. At the same time, I think you have to have a general idea where you’re going before you engage the tools. Then you use those tools to either help confirm your suspicions, or tell you that you’re full of shit.

I like it when someone proves me wrong about something, and helps me figure out where I was led astray.

But that’s not good for the dying media platforms.

So. Whatever.

This kinda fits with the controversy surrounding RFK Jr.’s potential debate on Rogan.

Whatever. I’m pretty confident that there’s not going to be anything worthwhile discussed.

So I just don’t listen. Whatever. /GenX

42

I remember we when I was 42.

But the significance of it is from The Hitchhikers Guide series. The entire purpose “Deep Thought,” Planet Earth, itself, was to determine the meaning of Live, The Universe, and Everything.

After millions of years of work, it finished its research, and returned the answer — 42

I was reminded of this by reading this from Reason. The author who’d come in planning to write about the Dutch guilds as early versions of capitalist cooperation, asked several of the commonly-used AI instances when capitalism started.

All provided different answers, but none touched on what he wanted to write about.

I asked Microsoft Bing: “When was capitalism invented?” Bing said: “1776.”

An answer longer than 42, certainly, but still not correct.

It made me think of my time in college. There was a final in Business Law. One of the questions was pretty straightforward, and I eagerly went to work on it.

I used probably four Blue Books writing my response. Just me and my blue-black inked fountain pen.

I left the exam feeling great about what I’d written.

Being that it was finals, I didn’t see the professor in-person again. She did send me my grade via whatever messaging system the university was using in the dark basically pre-web days of the Internets.

Her response was something along the lines of “Well-reasoned using tort law. You should have used the UCC. C.“

I ended up with a B in the class, but it certainly didn’t give me the relaxing summer I’d been expecting; it still stings today about a quarter-century later.

But it ties back into the AI discussion because I think the author really showed the limitations.

So I wonder if there’s going to need to be two additional questions when you suspect someone’s used AI to do research.

While AI tools did you use?

Which questions did you ask? Verbatim. Justify how/why you chose those questions.

Bubuhbut they’re takin’ our jerbs!

No, there’s ways to use the tools. You just have to be savvy enough to ask the right questions, use multiple tools, and draw conclusions based on the varying results you collected.

This is not a one-shot effort.

But it also speaks to things like the scientific method where you publish everything you did so that others can reproduce your work.

THAT’S PROPRITERY INFORMATION.

No. No it’s not.

That sound you just heard was the sound of thousands of 80s and 90s MBAs’ heads exploding.

Everything Gets Deleted Eventually

Spent a good portion of the day today finishing up The Most Hated Man On The Internet.

What a douchenozzle.

At the same time, so you’ve got pics of your boobies on the Intertubes, okay. You haven’t shown those to me willingly, so I’m going to ignore them. You’re human; you’ve got them.

That they’re up there has no bearing on how I view you.

And no amount of litigation is going to make them go away. Very few things actually ever get deleted.

You can find pretty much anything.

I’m sure there’s shit I said on Usenet, or on mailing lists when I was a teenager that I no longer thing. Whatever.

“I really don’t remember that,” is an acceptable answer if someone asks.

That’s true for an asshole missive, or pics of your tits.

If it was last week, that might be a different story, but you have to allow people to present themselves for what they are now, not what they were.

Does that make me a bit inconsistent considering how I treat some commercial companies? Yeah. But I do treat individuals differently.

But the main message is that, no, everything doesn’t actually get deleted.

I understand this is a problem for those who want to carefully-tailor narratives; we have always been at war with Oceana.

But I do take extensive notes, hide things in places where they’re not easily-found.

But very little of it actually goes away.

Today is Fathers’ Day. I phoned my well-into-his-nineties’ grandfather, and texted my father-in-law.

Going to see my dad’s headstone is something I really don’t have the stamina for, unfortunately.

You Can Remain Silent

When you leave.

I’ve been following along with the news, especially the backlash retailers are experiencing with “Pride,” loosely after my apartment was flooded again at 0230EDT last Thursday morning.

I think things are kinda-sorta getting back together. We’ve got a lot of stuff that we’ve got to have hauled out, but we’re back home since Wednesday. Big thanks to my MIL for coming up to help with the cleanup and reorganization.

In amongst the chaos at home, I did watch the last episode of Vice News Tonight. I will have trouble missing it. They didn’t really say anything about that being the last episode. The episode, itself, focused on some guy who died in Mississippi under suspicious circumstances. Was he lynched? Um…he was not hanged publicly for the public to see. Nobody quite understands the circumstances of his death. But, that the Podunk law enforcement agencies haven’t spent considerable time and effort trying to find who lynched him means that he was killed like it’s still 1963. Nothing’s changed. (And that’s why it’s important that the cheerleaders for the party of Jim Eastland must come down to set things straight….)

I was more bummed about Kennedy’s departure from FOX Business. It was fascinating to see her transition from the token Republican on MTV to a Libertarian stalwart. In spite of her too-frequent dalliances with the NeoHips, I will miss her show.

Maybe I’d find something else. Maybe not. Whatever.

But back to the not paying too-close attention to the news, there’s been a bit of controversy over Twitter’s brief cancellation of What IS A Woman?. While I’m happy Elon Musk overrode his employees’ inclination to bury it, it’s still something I really just don’t care to watch.

Without the burial, there’s nothing subversive about trying to find it. I simply don’t care about the movie, or its producer.

But with the controversies about what Target has done with transgender swimwear, too, it’s something I care very little about. While I think what they’ve done is a bad business decision, there’s very little for me to do about it aside from shopping there even less than I do now.

If that makes me a bigot, great. What was your name again? Where do you like do you work? Where to you like to shop? Great. I’ll make sure I avoid those places, too.

But that’s about all I’m going to say about it.

See the title. I have the right not to participate. I have the right to deny you my business.

I’m not going to proclaim loudly either of those choices.

If you think that makes me a bad person, again, Whatever.