Hakeem Jefferies is already throwing winnable votes to MAGA Republicans in the House

Aren’t the Taliban broke, because Karzai spent two decades bankrupting the county while president?

Also, too…

Biden releases $7bn in frozen Afghan funds to split between 9/11 families and aid This article is more than 4 years old

Money would go toward humanitarian efforts for Afghan people (spoilers: this never materialized) and to US victims of terrorism, keeping it out of hands of Taliban

The last thing the US did before leaving was to clean out the country’s foreign currency reserves. This resulted in an enormous famine, skyrocketing child mortality, and a string of infrastructure failures as foreign trade ground to a halt.

Very similar to what the US did in Iraq and Libya after officially withdrawing.

Isn’t the current president of Columbia a Narco Lawyer?

However, since one was using LLM he was skipping the critical thought portion and just trying to use an LLM to fake engagement

This presupposes sincere engagement prior to LLMs. You’re assuming this guy wasn’t just regurgitating talking points cobbled up the old fashioned was, as though repeating lines you heard from Jordan Peterson or JD Vance on a Joe Rogan podcast.

Alternatively, that this person remains totally sincerely in their beliefs and simply leverage the LLM to recall obscure, vaguely remembered historical details. Or to clean up their poor grammar or clumsy prose.

LLMs have no impact on critical thinking in either case. At least, no more than spell check or a Wikipedia fact lookup or a brain saturated by other people’s professed views.

While flooding the field with bullshit low quality content isn’t new, this is a whole new level of disengagement.

The argument that someone is “using LLMs” becomes a superficial excuse to disengage.

And hey, maybe that’s good. Maybe less people treating the Internet as a real place with sincere people will convince folks to engage more in MeatSpace.

But “technology is making us dumber” is a line I see floated endlessly. It reads more as misanthropy and elitism than any real critique of the new technology

Saw someone proudly proclaim the use LLMs to write all their comments in online discussions

How is that any different than the million bot farms that already exist?

Like, shit posting isn’t a critical value added skill.

I can explain this one: repetition.

Several of them did not believe me even after went through a couple examples.

:-/

Again, nothing in this story explains why calculators are to blame. If anything, it illustrates how calculators are useful.

I mean, that’s a curious anecdote. But it doesn’t explain why they would have been better at the math prior to 1970

There are better AI options

You can take that up with management. I don’t get to pick what AI agent my boss decided to pay for.

We’re going to end up with civil engineers who don’t know how to calculate dynamic weight ratings

I haven’t seen any actual evidence of this.

That is all they are good for.

Wife is a lawyer. She needs to do complex keyword searches on massive volumes of legal documentation. She absolutely loves how quickly and easily Copilot parses and tabulates info based on her queries.

Total game changer for the kind of work she’s doing.

I work in IT. Love to cobble together scripts in languages I’m otherwise unfamiliar using Claude. It’s also excellent at diagnosing system errors and providing effective remediation.

We teach arithmetic, but are people better or worse at it than before calculators were widely available?

Better. Significantly better.

Well, for starters, if you want to translate a written work to another language, it has never been easier.

LLMs are excellent tools for modeling large languages.

We would still have to deal with the skill atrophy of AI use.

I don’t think you need to worry about skill atrophy if you recognize the skills as necessary and useful.

We still teach basic arithmetic in elementary school, even though we have calculators.

Even if AI is entirely green, publicly owned and widely accessible, it will negatively affect us.

Tools to rapidly parse, sort, aggregate, and distribute information aren’t going to affect us any more negatively today than they did 40 years ago or 400 years ago.

Maybe if we keep the AI but loss the Oligarchy…

Fewer every day.

Ironic

You think it’s bad now? Wait until the polls are closed

The War That Solved Climate Change

I beg you please stop misrepresenting the argument.

“Paper ballots are more secure!”

“Obviously, the textbook case that exposes all the problems with manually managing and tallying physical ballots is beside the point”

Okay, sure.

If you refuse to address this point

Electronically input printed ballots are the best method of tabulating an election result we have formulated to date.

There is absolutely no benefit to using pencils on paper. None. Zero. Zip. Bupkiss.

Your fetish for pencils doesn’t change with the election season. It just becomes blindingly apparent when election is fumbled badly enough to necessitate a deep dive into what went wrong.

fucking around with something not just pencil and paper

Pencil-marked central-count optical scan ballots had a 5.7% undercount rate in Florida counties that adopted the technique.

You can find out more here: https://www.usccr.gov/files/historical/2001/01-021.pdf

These were not unique to Florida, by any moans.