Why do dumb people think it’s “all of the sudden”?

Whereas you prefer to avoid any kind of thinking in case it makes your brain warm up slightly.

These guardsmen were ordered to deploy against America

No, they were ordered to deploy in America, and ordered to protect federal buildings and “maintain order”. There’s nothing illegal about that order, or treasonous about following it. They’ve been used that way plenty of times before. Generally when they’re deployed following a natural disaster, one of the things they’re there fore is to deter looting. The whole “natural disaster” bit seems the main thing that the National Guard does these days. Then there are other times where they’re deployed to maintain law and order: the 1992 LA riots, the 1968 riots after the assassination of MLK, etc.

There’s nothing treasonous about that. And the orders authorizing those deployments aren’t illegal orders. If you were one of the racists who wanted to attack MLK’s march from Selma to Montgomery, you might have felt that the national guard preventing you from attacking the marchers were “race traitors” or evil, but history would have shown you were wrong.

In this case, history will probably show that the guard stood around looking tough, maybe made a few arrests. Some of those arrests will historically be seen as violating the first amendment, but some will be seen as normal, boring legitimate arrests. There will probably be some protesters beaten up, but that’s almost certainly going to be the cops rather than the national guard.

Maybe, at some point, an order will come down to load live ammunition and start shooting protesters. If that happens the soldiers who follow those orders might be considered “evil”, but I imagine many won’t follow that order because they’ll see that as stepping over the line.

Also, you really need to read up on the actual definition of treason.

These are evil people arriving to do evil things.

They’re members of the national guard. The typical enlistment period for the National Guard is 8 years. Many would have joined under Biden, and are probably still required to serve out a number of years. If they don’t, then they might have to suddenly pay back the tuition benefits or something. The military, Guard included, isn’t normally something you can just quit if you don’t like how things are going.

ICE employees? That’s another matter. You had to voluntarily join ICE, and many of them have joined in just the last few months. They knew what they were getting into. They’re wearing masks to hide their identities, and all the bad incidents I’ve heard of (people being shot by rubber bullets, being thrown down and injured, etc.) have been ICE not Guard.

Sounds infallible, you should use it to submit cases to courts. I hear they love it when people cite things that AI tells them are factual cases.

That stops it from making stuff up

No it doesn’t. That’s simply not how LLMs work. They’re “making stuff up” 100% of the time. If the training data is good, the stuff they’re making up more or less matches the training data. If the training data isn’t good, they’ll make up stuff that sounds plausible.

Just don’t think that turning off the sycophancy improves the quality of the responses. It’s still just responding to your questions with essentially “what would a plausible answer to this question look like?”

I think it’s both. It lowers your inhibitions and lets you do things that you wouldn’t otherwise do: dance on a table, go home with a stranger, call up an ex, etc. But, it also breaks the inhibitions on the various random thoughts people have that aren’t “hidden desires” but are just intrusive thoughts.

For example, “I didn’t want to sleep in a wheelbarrow”, sure. But, you did want to lie down. And, the wheelbarrow was right there. Once you were in the wheelbarrow, you didn’t want to sleep there all night, but you did want to relax for a bit.

So, it’s not like “I want this outcome”. It’s more like there were a lot of small steps between here and there, and a rational brain would have put a stop to things along the way, but a drunk brain doesn’t second guess a lot of those small decisions which result in one big outcome like sleeping in a wheelbarrow.

If you understand how LLMs work, that’s not surprising.

LLMs generate a sequence of words that makes sense in that context. It’s trained on trillions(?) of words from books, Wikipedia, etc. In most of the training material, when someone asks “what’s the name of the person who did X?” there’s an answer, and that answer isn’t “I have no fucking clue”.

Now, if it were trained on a whole new corpus of data that had “I have no fucking clue” a lot more often, it would see that as a reasonable thing to print sometimes so you’d get that answer a lot more often. However, it doesn’t actually understand anything. It just generates sequences of believable words. So, it wouldn’t generate “I have no fucking clue” when it doesn’t know, it would just generate it occasionally when it seemed like it was an appropriate time. So, you’d ask “Who was the first president of the USA?” and it would sometimes say “I have no fucking clue” because that’s sometimes what the training data says a response might look like when someone asks a question of that form.

A schwa is a vowel sound. It’s the sound English uses for unstressed syllables. It sits right in the middle of the IPA vowel chart, which basically means it’s the easiest sound to make. Your tongue is in a central position, and your mouth isn’t open wide or closed.

Many letters in English words tend towards being pronounced as a “schwa” when they’re not the key syllable in the word.

For example, if you say “I gave him a present” the first ‘e’ in “present” is emphasized and the second isn’t, so the second tends to be pronounced as a “schwa”. But, if you say “I had to present the documents”, it’s the second “e” that is emphasized, and the first one turns into a schwa.

It’s also why the English article “a” and “the” are both frequently pronounced the same way (as a schwa) despite using different vowels. The articles “a” and “the” are very rarely emphasized in a sentence, and words that aren’t emphasized have their pronunciation drift towards the easy-to-pronounce schwa.

It’s the first syllable in “salmon” that’s emphasized, so the second isn’t really pronounced as an “o”, (whatever that means) it’s pronounced as a schwa instead.

In Kiwi English the “u” in “focus” and the “i” in “kit” both have the same vowel sound and they’re both roughly a “schwa”. That’s brave.

More “samun”, (/ˈsæmən/) because the last syllable turns into a “schwa”, the default unemphasized vowel sound in English.

Nice, maybe I’ll visit one of these days. I love Mexico.

I don’t know Monterrey, but there are a lot of great places in Mexico. Because of the mountains, Mexico has a lot of different climates. Most of them are warm, many are dry, but if you go high enough up some mountains you can find snow. You can go to Mexico for food tourism, IMO the best food in the world. There’s also cultural tourism, visiting ancient ruins, or visiting native groups. And of course, beaches, so many lovely beaches.

As for Canada, Montreal is a nice modern city where you can get by in English. Quebec is a more scenic city, but mostly French-only. This time of the year Canada has beautiful trees and it isn’t cold yet. (In fact, right now it’s high 20s in the day, which is wierd). Vancouver is a fun big city. Victoria is another choice for a smaller and more scenic city on the pacific coast. For museums, art galleries, bike trails, decent hiking nearby, etc. there’s also Ottawa. Toronto is a pretty well-known quantity.

You can do an even better approximation of Florida by just going to Cancun.

Give it a rest dude, go touch some grass.

That only works if people use it.

For some reason, people have stuck with Twitter. But, the users of TikTok are not the same as the users of Twitter, so who knows, maybe they won’t stick with it.

the media just repeats it

The media reports on it, attempting to do so from a neutral point of view.

I actually appreciate that the professional media is still attempting to stick to a neutral point of view. If they abandon that, you get media like MSNBC and Fox News where every single news story is discussed from a certain political point of view. That just sorts people into camps that listen to the news source that agrees with their perceived notions, which then radicalizes them even more.

If people can’t agree on a basic set of facts, then there’s no point to having a democracy. A media that covers the facts with as little bias as possible is essential to that working.

That isn’t to say that I think the media is doing a great job. The big media companies that are owned by the oligarchs are doing especially badly. When Trump does something like this, responsible media that’s attempting to be unbiased should at least connect historical dots, like other times that presidents have threatened the media, and what the results of that have been.

So, Trump effectively nationalized TikTok, valued at $300b. He sells it to friendly oligarchs for $15b. So far, this is basically the post-USSR playbook, and how Roman Abravmovich, Alisher Usmanov, Vladimir Lisin, etc. got so rich.

But it might piss off his oligarch buddies if he drives all the users off TikTok making what seemed like a steal into something worthless instead.

Teen Vogue is killing it right now. For example How ICE Raids Are Making It Easier for Civilian Men to Assault Immigrant Women