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Sure, it's decreasing under Trump, but to pretend the richest, most militarily powerful, most culturally influential nation on the planet somehow doesn't have any soft power is... certainly a choice.

The problem isn’t that it pulled the data from his personal site, it’s that it simply accepted his information which was completely false. It’s not a hard problem to solve at this time. “Oh, there’s exactly zero corroborating sources on this. I’ll ignore it.”

Verifying that something is 'true' requires more than corroborating sources. Making a second blog post on another domain is trivial, then a third and a forth.

I’m not going to write out the entire logic train for an LLM to determine whether or not one of the billion documents scanned that day is new. Of course you’ll need more than one simple “does anyone on the internet anywhere also say this” check. It’s obvious to everyone that I did not mean this one thing would somehow be a bulletproof, complete method of determining if something is true or not. It’d just an incredibly strong signal of inauthenticity. Come on man.

A probably unacceptably large portion of the population DOES think they’re infallible, or at least close to it.

Totally. I get screenshots from my 79yo mother now that are the Gemini response to her search query.

Whatever that says is hard fact as she's concerned. And she's no dummy -- she just has no clue how these things work. Oh, and Google told her so.


That may be true, but the underlying problem is not that the LLMs are capable of accurately reporting information that is published in a single person's blog article. The underlying problem is that a portion of the population believes they are infallible.

They believe so because we have spent decades using the term AI for another category of symbolic methods (search-based chess engines, theorem provers, planners). In the areas where they were successful, these methods _were_ infallible (of course, compared to humans and modulo programming bugs).

Meanwhile, neural techniques have flown under the public consciousness radar until relatively recent times, when they had a huge explosion in popularity. But the term "AI" had retained that old aura of superhuman precision and correctness.


"Companies primarily consider profit" is not the gotcha you think it is. It's possible to consider profit via goodwill towards customers. A number of companies do this. This doesn't mean that you're inherently wrong, but this argument certainly isn't the right one.

Tons of people had cameras 20 years ago. It was 2006, not 1906. Besides, we've had pets for surveillance for hundreds of thousands of years. Literally nobody in history has thought "nah no need for security".

What a ridiculous way to try and be on a high horse.


Pets as surveillance... now we watch the watchers.

This was cool, but I got to one where it would load after every button you click. That's fine, but then I "lost" because it simply wouldn't load a winnable option in time it seems. Maybe I was moving too fast and missed the real button, but I still didn't tip in the end, so eh.

There is a small "skip tip" link below the button

I tip my barista and budtender a dollar every visit, personally. I love those people though. Restaurants get 20% unless they fuck up, then it's 15%, unless it was absolutely egregious.

That's it. I cut my own hair.


IMO restaurant tips (and other service businesses) are 15% by default, 20% if they do well, 10% if they do poorly. If they do especially poorly (like, completely ignoring the table for an hour while chatting with coworkers off to the side), they get $.02. If they do especially well, more than 20% (I've gone as high as 50% once).

This mentality of doing 20% by default for something you already paid is what got us in this situation.

People should be paid a living wage by default.


Once someone can tell me what, specifically, a living wage is, I imagine this will stop being the most annoying phrase on the planet.

Do you tip your local cashier in the groceries store? Do you tip the bus driver who took you to work? Do you tip a bank clerk who processed your application? If no, then this is a living wage.

Also not having "tips" prevents freeloaders from not paying taxes, which every other worker in the country pays fairly.


There can be a lot of definition but I propose " a wage where you do not need to annoy your customer for tip".

You understand that you are PAYING EXTRA for the especially poor service?

My barber earns his fat tip taming my unruly cowlicks. Barista and bartender? Definitely. Cashier at a convenience store? Oh hell no.

My barber earns his fat tip by being my therapist.

I get it. That's worth the compensation.

Have you taken into account that tips are no longer taxed and adjusted these arbitrary percentages?

>tips are no longer taxed

Tips (if reported) are always subject to 7.65% FICA tax. And there are several conditions that must be met before tips are excluded from federal (not necessarily state) income tax. (U.S. tax law). In short, many tips are still fully taxed despite false promises to the contrary.


As a European, I never understood why you'd tip automatically. I get that waiters are allowed to be paid less, but I don't see why that would be the customer's problem.

I also don’t get the logic of tipping a percentage of the cost. Asking for several cheap beers is more work for the waiter than a single bottle of expensive wine, yet the latter earns them more?

Because it's part of our culture and it's an easy way to show appreciation. You don't have to do it anywhere. Waiters also explicitly aren't allowed to be paid less. They must make at LEAST minimum wage. If they don't make minimum after tips, their hourly rate is raised each paycheck to equal minimum wage. It's literally not the customer's problem. You should probably learn how things work here if you're that curious!

> Waiters also explicitly aren't allowed to be paid less. They must make at LEAST minimum wage. If they don't make minimum after tips, their hourly rate is raised each paycheck to equal minimum wage.

That means they are allowed to be paid less than minimum wage. Wage is paid by the employer, not the employer's customer. If the employer can deduct the tips from the minimum wage, that explicitly means that they are allowed to pay tipped workers less and that tipping does not provide any additional income but instead only shifts the responsibility of paying people for their work to the customer. Tips are are nothing but gifts to the employer.

> and it's an easy way to show appreciation.

If something is socially expected simply as part of protocol and people only do it out of the social pressure not to deviate from the norm and be seen as assholes, then that is not appreciation.


I'm just explaining how people who: either don't think much about it or support it tend to view it. I'm not an apologist.

7.25 is not a livable wage anywhere really, so even at 7.25 they would need tips to live. It really is the customers problem to pay them - their employers get off on 2.13 mostly, and 7.25 if they're extremely unlucky.

And yes, I'm American. Of course it's culture, but more than that we want waiters to not starve to death so we tip. You can, of course, choose not to but I consider it an asshole move knowing what they're making.


Show my appreciation to what?

For their skill at accomplishing their job. Their jobs are primarily skill-based and customer-facing. A taxi driver who gets you where you want to go quickly and safely, a waiter who never lets your coffee cup get empty, a barber who makes you look... well dang, pretty nice!

[flagged]


If you have something to add to the conversation then just do that. Don't make bad faith interpretations and unsubstantiated accusations against people.

>If you have something to add to the conversation then just do that. Don't make bad faith interpretations and unsubstantiated accusations against people.

You mean like you just did?

Tipping culture in the US is absolutely rooted in bigotry[0][1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. That's not a "bad faith interpretation," it's well-documented history.

[0] https://www.epi.org/publication/rooted-racism-tipping/

[1] https://www.povertylaw.org/article/the-racist-history-behind...

[2] https://stop-tipping.org/history-of-tipping/

[3] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/07/17/william-b...

[4] https://inequality.org/article/tipping-is-racist-and-harms-u...

[5] https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/the-racist-histor...

[6] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tipping-jobs-history-slave-wage...

[7] https://time.com/5404475/history-tipping-american-restaurant...


The bad faith interpretation is claiming that tipping is racist, not providing any evidence for it, claiming that OP knows that it is racist and supports it for that reason.

>The bad faith interpretation is claiming that tipping is racist,

That's not a bad faith interpretation, the origins of tipping in the US are absolutely based in bigotry.

>claiming that OP knows that it is racist and supports it for that reason.

A fair point. GP certainly did not assume good faith or give the comment to which they responded the most charitable reading.

My apologies for being somewhat knee-jerk about it, but I have a really big problem with bigotry (I am absolutely not claiming that you or the poster to whom GP replied are bigoted) and believe that decent people should call attention to bigotry, especially when it's embedded in society as the tipping culture is in the US.

Bigotry is ethically wrong and harms the societies which it infests. As I mentioned, I feel strongly about that.

If I was less than charitable with your response to calling out bigotry (GP's attempt to do so was rather ham-handed), my apologies.


I also cut my own hair, but sometimes I’m lazy and just hit up the Barber shop.

She charges me $15! I tip +$25 and it’s still a cheap haircut.

My haircut has to be one of the simplest around, but 9 out of 10 stylists will leave me fixing it myself later. Once I paid $50+tip for the same cut at a swanky joint and STILL went home and fixed it. She doesn’t know what she’s worth.


You're not wrong, but I have had to do video verification over a phone once, and it seemed quite advanced. It would flash through a number of colors and settings and take probably 30 frames of you. I presume they're checking for "this came from a screen and not a human", but of course I have no idea how it works, so I don't know if it's truly sophisticated or not.

>Microplastics are bad

I was just listening to something the other day about how there is essentially no way to study this right now, and the most common method of microplastic detection in samples has been proven largely inaccurate.

Is there some reason we think microplastics are more dangerous than the other nanoparticles of inorganic dust we consume and inhale every day? Serious question - I’ve got enough to worry about and this seems… very low on that list?


Turns out both can be an issue if you’re not “firing on all cylinders”.

Both of what can be an issue?

Breathing dust in your environment, as well as microplastics.


I'll take that as a no

If there's not a constant stream of consciousness throughout the entire process, I'm just assuming that's gonna be nothing more than a copy. What else could it be? When "you" wake up, it'll be 100% convincing either way, so I assume you can only prove it going in. I'm not great at philosophy though.

Edit: biology is pretty efficient though. We might as well just start growing new bodies/parts for people, enhancing it over time. There are already functionally immortal species on Earth.


What is a continuous stream. I was knocked unconscious for a few minutes in 2007 when I came off a bike. Am I the same person today as I was in 2005?

On the other hand dementia eats away at memories and personality. My grandmother doesn’t remember having children (who are now in their late 70s), a husband (she had two), but does remember (mostly) life as a child. She wasnt unconscious though.

(It’s basically the inevitable same end game as the rom com “50 first dates”)

As you say it’s philosophical - a bit like Triggers Broom. Or 1 minute Time Machine in a way.

I like the answer to ship of Theseus (define the ship by the keel or whatever), If you were to replace every cell in your body are you still the same person? That happens multiple times over your life. What if you were to replace some cells with non human parts - a false leg, a pig heart. When do you stop being “you”

If you replace every neuron in your brain with a synthetic neuron, one at a time, a there a point you no longer exist. Is it a continuous reduction. What if those neurons are put together elsewhere, which is you. Both? Neither? A fraction of each?


A continuous stream during the process of transfer, I mean. You would have to be fully disassembled in someway to transport you in such a manner, so it’s not really like the ship of Theseus here.

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