but there are "peaceful ones" like Buddhism or Jainism.

You could argue that there are some where historically the violence in less prominent, on a relative scale.

But I'd be surprised if you had a single example of an organised religion with zero historical violence.

Unless you want to "no true scotsman" through it.

So the most basic fallacy I was alluding to, from people who believe you can refine your faith by talking with an LLM is this: An LLM has no subjective experiences, because it doesn’t experience anything at all. This is one way how using the output from an LLM as a source of inspiration for your faith sets you up for psychosis. You start believing things that have no basis in reality or anyone’s genuine experiences. Rather, you may start believing in machine-generated approximations from which coherence has been lost.

Reasonable, though it could be argued they are full of subjective experiences, just all mixed together.

But i expect it's probably more about the coherence of the experience that provides the meaning in this context.

Coherence as in , one coherent explanation of a subjective experience by a person rather than a plausible sounding experience made up of many bits of experiences from a corpus of data.

But it seems your understanding was slightly different, in that people might develop their own sense of faith from experiences with an LLM itself rather than through the exchange of presumed experiences with the LLM. Do I understand correctly that you think some people attribute godlike qualities to the LLM, maybe through the presumption that it is an AGI? That would be a bit of a different discussion indeed :)

Not exactly, i think there are two different things here from my side.

The first:

I think people might attribute person like qualities to an LLM, the "ghost in the machine" as was mentioned earlier.

I wasn't trying to imply someone who knows what an AGI is supposed to be would use that knowledge to assign godlike attributes to an LLM (a "god in the machine").

Though , as a concept that would also be a valid example of "belief in the absence of proof".

I don't expect most people to know the terminology or have even an idea of what's happening behind the scenes.

The second:

The part i'm struggling with is why "faith" in something like ability for meaning to come from LLM generated text (god-like or person-like) is any less acceptable than "faith" derived from perceived meaning in seemingly random (based on the knowledge of the time) events, like thunderstorms or plagues.

They would both cover the idea of belief in something in the absence of proof, so how would someone decide one is less valid than the other.

TL;DR;

Capitalists gonna capitalise,

Fiscal gain is always going to be the reason behind decisions, even if it doesn't seem like it on the face of it.

Especially microsoft, with it's history.

I'll preface this with, this is just my opinion etc...

I say must, should, has to, etc with the conviction of my opinion, not proof of objective fact.

i have some insight into the subject/industry but nothing i'd be willing to verify with anyone, so make of that what you will.

It's less a specific thing to point to and more of a general "profit driven company is going to make profit driven decisions", even if perceived altruism was deemed the best fiscal decision, the primary goal is still commercial viability.

A full extra year of security updates requires resources.

Unless they are doing something wildly outside the norms of software development, that means development, testing, deployment, hosting, tooling, marketing/PR, support and more.

There's both CapEx and OpEx costs to that kind of endeavour.

For a product of any size that's a non-zero resource cost, for a product the size of windows that's a big number, perhaps not in the grand scheme, but it's a non-trivial amount.

That is historically not the kind of thing that microsoft would do/has done just for the altruistic benefit of it's users.

Feel free to provide examples to the contrary, i'd be pleasantly surprised.

So assuming it's not altruism that drives this decision, the only other conclusion i could come up with was commercial viability/profit/money.

That might be a failure of imagination on my part.

The projected cost of not doing this must outweigh the projected benefit of going through with it.

Be that in goodwill, user/customer retention, PR, straight up sales or something else, there must be a benefit that outweighs the cost of just dropping support.

I could speculate on specifics but it'd mostly be rehashing the thousands of articles on poor decisions (and poor timing) around the whole win 11 rollout and windows in general.

i don't mean this from an old man shouts at cloud viewpoint, i don't particularly care for windows(or microsoft) but I'm not a rabid hater.

Microsoft has some good products that i use regularly, despite their constant and repeated attempts to enshittify all of the end user experiences they can in pursuit of fiscal gain.

That being said, the win 11 rollout has been a shambles on many fronts.

huh, i knew they used bing under the hood but for some reason it didn't occur to me that the promotions and ads would bleed through.

https://noai.duckduckgo.com/

I'm not promoting DDG, I don't use it either, just saying that they do provide a no ai version (currently at least)

Also note that no LLM doesn't mean no "promoted" listings

PART 1/2

What’s an area where something can be done maliciously or by accident? Car crashes? Workplace injury? Incorrect tax claims? Taking something from a shop? All of these are, to my understanding (and with decreasing confidence, but all have evidence - crime stats for the first, to, HMRC estimates and this Ipsos poll respectively) more likely to be accidental than malicious.

Is there a similar poll for political decisions and outcomes ?

Genuine question, that's be super interesting, if so.

To me this is a general principle: human beings are social animals and have an instinct to be agreeable and cooperative, to live within socially-agreed rules, to tell the truth and not to fuck people over. Those who break the rules are the exception - otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense to have rules and to have society.

So my background assumption is that people are honest.

I think that's where our difference in interpretation stems from , i think humans have the instinct for survival and reproduction, that agreement, cooperation and social interaction provided a better environment for survival is incidental.

Honesty is possible in a situation where survival isn't on the line, in a life or death situation i think the person who would tell the truth knowing it will get them ( or more importantly, their family ) killed, is the outlier.

Outside of hyperbolous scenarios i think honesty is not the default in a situation where it doesn't have a social/survival impact.

Such as a politician lying for fiscal/politician gain, knowing that there isn't really any punishment for that.

because the nature of being in a society is that we point out and emphasise the times when people don’t abide by its rules; we have to use more robust methods to estimate its prevalence.

I also disagree with this, it's a nice ideal and we should absolutely strive for this, but it's just not how it works in practice, from my experience.

I think we disagree on what the rules are, it seems like you think calling out perceived injustices in fairness and corruption being met with punishment for the corrupt is what should happen.

In practice i think that only happens in the lower stakes, once you start pointing at people with wealth and power that rule quickly changes from "call it out and we'll punish the offender" to "call it out and we'll punish you for pointing it out and as a deterrent to others who might do the same".

That's not a society that honesty and inherent (relative) goodness as foundational concepts would produce.

Kickbacks to politicians in the UK are comparatively tiny though. Enough to motivate someone who’s already a grifter, but not enough to cause anyone but the extraordinarily stupid to be motivated by getting them.

That comparatively is carrying a lot of weight there and again i think we just disagree about this point in general.

You pushed back on this before but I genuinely think that the reason people think otherwise is because they just can’t believe that (for example) Tories actually believe that the country would work better by spending less on public services and benefits. The only remaining explanation is kickbacks by the direct beneficiaries of these policies. Even if your logic isn’t as formalised as that, I still think that on some level that is the feeling that makes you ready to believe that Tory politicians are so unlike the population at large - that is, massively more dishonest.

And again you are missing my point, that they believe or not it isn't the issue.

I can say with full confidence i absolutely do not care if they believe it, or if they don't, makes zero difference to me.

If a politician(or politicians) wants to run some shenanigans on PPE contracts, netting their friends x millions of pounds, it care not a whit if they believe in the general correctness of conservatism.

I will state it plainly, mark this as [POINT A] and point back to this, because it seems you are skipping this part entirely.

[POINT A]

If there is consistent historic precedent of a mismatch between stated intent and actual outcome by both the individual/institution and other related contexts then i will assume that behaviour will continue until proven otherwise.

It's not "i don't understand, so they must be corrupt" it's "they have a history of being shady and incompetent, so I'm going to assume they will continue to be shady and incompetent"

Their belief is irrelevant, their later explanations of their intent is perhaps cause for minor adjustment.

Feel free to rephrase the same assumption again, i will point back to this explanation.

I shall defer to your interpretation, absolute arbiter of meaning.

That proves it’s possible, not that it happened this time.

Yes, as I've previously pointed out, there are examples of this happening.

Can i prove it's a majority, probably not and it seems like a lot of effort so I'm not going to, but I'll wait while you provide the majority of examples proving incompetence over malice.

No, just because something is not objective does not mean that claims about at are baseless. Do you think that the article here “has no basis for saying it’s a bad idea”? Surely not. Politics is, more often than not, about questions that don’t have objective answers. You say there’s a provable downside, but it’s not actually provable; it’s still theoretical at this point. We don’t know for sure whether anyone’s data will be leaked, for example. It’s in exactly the same realm as the potential upsides - it is likely (but impossible to quantify at this stage) that some people will feel curtailed in what they can do and say online, which will be negative for them. At the same time, it is likely (but impossble to quantify) that some children will not harm themselves because they won’t have seen encouragement online to perform acts of self-harm.

I'm not sure why you asked about how i do predictive analysis and ask questions that ignore the answer.

I'm not saying this specific action can be proven to be a bad idea before it happens, i have, many times said that i judge these things based on what has come before and the outcomes of those things.

Read the rest of my replies for examples of how this works.

Boris you’re probably right but I don’t think Sunak went into politics to enrich himself or to seek power. The rewards you get in the UK are just pitiful - Sunak did a hundred times better by marrying into wealth, and anyone could do better by getting a job in the City.

Again ignoring the idea of power as a motivation, but sure sunak probably had/has other avenues to money (and power).

I know dozens of people who earn more than an MP even if you count all the likely dinners gifts and cushy consulting jobs they’re likely to get. Why bother going to the trouble of getting selected, getting elected, and then having to show up for whipped votes, merely for a chance at some perks, when you could do better with less faff elsewhere>

If you are judging the potential benefits of being an MP/PM solely by the salary they pull in you have already failed to consider all of the relevant information.

You yourself mentioned corruption, and again the kickbacks and favours are well established.

I genuinely don't understand how you think arguing this point and ignoring a large chunk of the salient information would work.

It might be interesting to listen to interviews with politicians from across the divide, preferably after they’ve left office. It won’t make you agree with their position, but it’ll make you see them in a different light when they’re able to explain their thought process (which the media culture doesn’t permit when in office) and the principles behind what they did.

You have to be trolling at this point, so I'll say it once more and then I'm just going to point at this line again in the future.

The things that they say and the outcomes that resulted from that don't match a lot of the time, after-the-fact explanations add flavour sure, but given how often this makes little difference i will continue to base my predictions on what they stated they were going to do vs what happened.

Reading alexanders biography isn't going to change the outcomes or the stated intents of the time.

Assuming he's not lying or spinning, which is a big if given his track record, then i might get some insight as to his stated intention, which i will still judge against the outcome.

This is the same method i would use for all political biographies.

If you say something is true, then you should be able to justify it..

If i say something is absolutely true, then i should back it up with absolute proof, this applies to everyone.

If i state something is my opinion (or it's clear that it is) then i should provide the information i can to show my working and how i came to that opinion, that gives others the opportunity to examine my reasoning and thought process and then perhaps question parts of it they disagree with.

This is how debate style conversations generally work.

Politics is not the realm of headcanon

I am legitimately unsure how you came to the conclusion that a discussion around politics (especially modern politics) has no room for the inclusion of the public opinion and perception of the politicians.

I mean, go up a few lines in your response for this banger :

Politics is, more often than not, about questions that don’t have objective answers.

You can't have it both ways.

Without objectiveness you are left with subjectiveness, also known as personal opinion and perception (headcanon)

If you want to pretend your interpretation of three descriptors is universal then i'm not sure discussion is what you are looking for.

Two potentially (probably) negative and one neutral, to me, but what do i know , you are the arbiter of correct interpretations after all.

The entire post was :

I’m just glad they got a power hungry, austistic lunatic in charge now, so everyone can see this is absolutely the end game, before this becomes normalized and people like me get called retarded for not wanting a car that can be remote deactivated.

Point at where the person said autism was bad and i'll drop it.

Yeah, I'm going with a tiny dedicated infra bootstrapping box with all the tools I'd need to bootstrap the main infrastructure.

Using a hypervisor (proxmox in this case) I have some prebuilt vms's and container images that I can use for the bootstrap instances so i'd not need to completely hand roll it again should it be needed.

I'm looking at cloudinit scripts to see if that's useful for this.

I really like packer but I'm hesitant to rely on anything hashicorp until whatever they have going on shakes out.

Then I just load up the bootstrap box with the main infra code and use woodpecker to deploy.

Code and config backed up, also mirrored to newly created infra forgejo instances, just in case.

If I can get a semi presentable cloud init based bootstrap system working nicely I'll stick it somewhere people can get to it, in case it's useful to someone else.