I would rather have 50,000,000,000bps

I’m sure that in in 2025 those are available in every corner drug store

lives in a shark at that value.

Well that’s certainly a choice…

It doesn’t see “strawberry” or “straw” or “berry”. It’s closer to think of it as seeing 🍓, an abstract token representing the same concept that the training data associated with the word.

Except many many experts have said this is not why it happens. It cannot count letters in the incoming words. It doesn’t even know what “words” are. It has abstracted tokens by the time it’s being run through the model.

It’s more like you don’t know the word strawberry, and instead you see: How many 'r’s in 🍓?

And you respond with nonsense, because the relation between ‘r’ and 🍓 is nonsensical.

Yes, at some point the meme becomes the training data and the LLM doesn’t need to answer because it sees the answer all over the damn place.

It doesn’t even see the word ‘strawberry’, it’s been tokenized in a way to no longer see the ‘text’ that was input.

It’s more like it sees a question like: How many 'r’s in 草莓?

And it spits out an answer not based on analysis of the input, but a model of what people might have said.

And Germany provides just the word for me in this case: Schadenfreude

Maybe if you threaten their sense of self-preservation, you might cause them to notice.

I think that’s really the unstated point of large protests. You get hundreds of thousands of people being present and obviously angry, but “peaceful”, you have to be doing the calculation of how many of those are on the brink of something more if their voices are not heard and things proceed or even accelerate.

Of course, on the other hand we are dealing with an administration that thinks an ethnic cleanse of Palestinians to set up a resort city sounds like a safe idea, so not sure there’s anyone really thinking about the risks.

Given the dire situation, I’d hope to see thousands in each protest.

Given the reality, for this to work, it really needed to be presented as a recurring protest if they want to at least have something on short notice with chance for it to grow in subsequent events. Hopefully by the 3rd or 4th protest it actually seems compelling.

As it stands, it seems exceedingly underwhelming. To those that followed nuance, they know that someone sprung this idea on the internet and this is the result of less than a week and a half of planning and the modest attendance is unsurprising. To those that just see what the protests looked like without context, it doesn’t seem particularly engaging. When those same people that saw the underwhelming attendance also see people saying that the news didn’t make this out to be the biggest thing ever was just because the news is suppressing dissent, they are disinclined to take it seriously.

I mean my news gave it a fair shot, but ultimately it was just about 50 people waving signs in the middle of a city where 50 people are not even a noticable increase of people usually on that street. I’d say my news was even being generous, by zooming in to try to make the “crowd” fill the screen, but there just wasn’t enough to go on.

We have to face facts that this was a pretty poorly planned event. Someone thinks of going for it on January 25th and expects to organize a national protest in all 50 states with boots on the ground with less than two weeks total in the middle of a school/work day?

If this were, say, the first of a routine series of protests, ok, then over iterations it might have a chance to grow. If it was to be some overwhelming event, well you’ll need more actual planning to get there. As a disorganized blast of thought for a one and done… it was not a good idea.

I’m not big on the video thing, but the Wikipedia article at least mentions most of this. Though you have to be aware of the broader dot-com context to know that getting millions from Compaq for a website in the late 90s didn’t mean anything much beyond luck.

In his specific case, he was going to retire next year (at 65) and felt he was going to have a relatively comfortable retirement (he was reasonably well off).

He objected to the existence of minority themed professional development organizations at work (there was one each for women, asian, latin, and black folks). The thing was, none of these orgs actually do anything, they just have speakers come and folks can go listen. But he wanted either none to exist or to have one dedicated to white men. He was offended by their existence and was big on replacement theory, even as these minority organizations had no real power and hadn’t made a dent in the 90% white male workforce. He also would brag about how he got a wife from a country where women knew their place and would take care of the house and listen to what he said.

His younger friend was also ranting about how the South should have won the civil war, and the black guy in the department asked him to explain. His friend didn’t bat an eye to explain that the south represented the natural order of things.

There may be some disenfranchised rural poor suckered by the MAGA while neglected by the left, but these dudes were 100% not this, relatively rich, entitled and super racist and misogynist.

But at best if you saw the very first mention of the ideation of going for this, you still would have had barely over a week of notice. This is not enough time for people to plan someone like this, especially during a school and work day.

The thing is if everyone said “fantastic! This will be huge” and the actual protests are underwhelming, well that serves to confirm the false narrative that a very small minority of people are upset.

Declaring high expectations and delivering low is a path to undermine your cause. Waiting until after the fact to explain why sounds like making excuses rather.

The protest in my region was like maybe 50 people. I don’t think this is because people are broadly happy, it’s because as many many people pointed out, this was poor planning. The optics of pulling off a huge protest in only a week would have been amazing, but just impossible in the real world.

This is a strong reason why I would think it would be a tactical error to mess with the elections. Elections are the pressure valve that people are willing to wait for. You can do so much harm and all is forgiven if you step down after an election loss.

Take away that mechanism, and you put all your leadership at huge risk, for minor benefit (history has shown they can get their way like 90% of the time anyway, the “left” will barely even say anything about their material goals and let them stand).

Totally on board.

Physical media meant straightforward ownership. I have it and I will have it. The distributor I bought from went out of business? I don’t notice, my copy still works. My distributor turns out not to have had the rights to sell it to me? Well that’s bad but it’s done and I have my copy. I start a series and I know I can finish it before the rights move to some other distributor.

Netflix early streaming days were magic. One service had rights to pretty much everything and was relatively affordable. Now each service has a tiny fraction of old Netflix and each one costs more than twice what Netflix streaming did. Frankly paying 3x the netflix price would have been fine if the trend continued except for pricing, but alas, here we are. Also, there’s no amount of money to pay to some of these services to make them shut up with ads, even with ‘ad-free’ offerings/plans.

But they are still running primaries? If talking about the presidential specifically, they did a typical primary in 2020 and sure in 2024 it was not done, but we’ve got people blaming “real primaries” against incumbents for losses in 76, 80, and 92 and neither party does it as a result.

Neither party runs presidential primaries when their guy is incumbent. It’s almost superstitious, that having someone ‘primary’ your incumbent is going to make them lose (because of losses under those circumstances by Ford, Carter, and Bush Sr.

Of course the cause/effect is backwards, they were primaried because their administration was at risk, they weren’t at risk because of the primary, but as superstitions go…

I think this is an area that is perilous.

So certain DEI initiatives are flawed in unfair ways. So there’s room for valid criticism.

However, more critically it’s a gigantic dog whistle. The magnitude of the flaws does not call for massive emails demanding everyone snitch at any whiff of DEI and sweeping offices to remove anything deemed DEI aligned and cancelling any hint of celebrating cultural diversity.

So on the one hand I can relate to a discussion of flaws, but in the broader context it seems more to serve the agenda of those blowing the dog whistle.