This naming scheme breaks down the moment they release another line of 12", 13", or 16" laptops. It’s a bad naming scheme.

It’s not perfect, but capitalism is the best system we’ve got. It is only through competition on the free market that we would arrive at a space program this efficient and innovative. Imagine if the government tried to do this! They would’ve blown up a 100 rockets by now with nothing to show for it, and it would’ve cost tax payers billions of dollars. The innovation of SpaceX is humanity at it’s finest. For thousands of years we’ve looked up at the sky, and wondered what’s there, and now, thanks to the engineering chops of Elon Musk, it is within our grasp. Imagine that, sending a person to space. Maybe someday we’ll even be able to put someone on the moon!

Paraphrasing, but: “testing can only show presence of bugs, not their absence”

It’s kind of indirectly related, but adding a query parameter udm=14 to the url of your Google searches removes the AI summary at the top, and there are plugins for Firefox that do this for you. My hopes for this WM project are that similar plugins will be possible for Wikipedia.

The annoying thing about these summaries is that even for someone who cares about the truth, and gathering actual information, rather than the fancy autocomplete word salad that LLMs generate, it is easy to “fall for it” and end up reading the LLM summary. Usually I catch myself, but I often end up wasting some time reading the summary. Recently the non-information was so egregiously wrong (it called a certain city in Israel non-apartheid), that I ended up installing the udm 14 plugin.

In general, I think the only use cases for fancy autocomplete are where you have a way to verify the answer. For example, if you need to write an email and can’t quite find the words, if an LLM generates something, you will be able to tell whether it conveys what you’re trying to say by reading it. Or in case of writing code, if you’ve written a bunch of tests beforehand expressing what the code needs to do, you can run those on the code the LLM generates and see if it works (if there’s a Dijkstra quote that comes to your mind reading this: high five, I’m thinking the same thing).

I think it can be argued that Wikipedia articles satisfy this criterion. All you need to do to verify the summary is read the article. Will people do this? I can only speak for myself, and I know that, despite my best intentions, sometimes I won’t. If that’s anything to go by, I think these summaries will make the world a worse place.

The best boys

I love how, for everyone, media literacy seemingly goes straight out the window the moment North Korea is mentioned. I remember a few years back every mainstream media outlet reporting that sarcasm was banned in NK, and that everyone had to get the same haircut as Kim Jong Un. Journalism at its finest.

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I’m kind of surprised at the number of people taking this post seriously.

Claiming that the genocide, apartheid, and colonialism perpetrated by Israel is in any way complex or nuanced is such a disgustingly smug way of revealing you haven’t spent even a moment thinking the situation through, or reading up on the history. Gross.

No

They ship with Linux?

For anyone, like me, confused by the title: no verdict has been reached, and the trial expected to last for about seven more weeks.

I think In all honesty that we have different notions of what the word leftist means, and I’m not super keen on a discussion on semantics. Personally, I attach a very specific fixed non-relative set of ideals and principles to the word “leftist” (an acknowledgement that capitalism is neither fair nor efficient, a focus on building a state for the proletariat, cooperation over imperialism, etc etc). From your comment I get the sense that you have a more relativist approach. Whether or not someone is a leftist depends (additionally) on the political context in which they operate. In this light, you call Biden, a staunch neoliberal capitalist, a (lesser) leftist in the same breath as calling Belgian Marxists leftists. I am in no position of telling you that you’re using words wrong any more than you are in the position of telling me I’m using words wrong.

But there are some things you mentioned that I do think are worth discussing, under the assumption that we would both label the mainstream part of the democratic party as liberals. Because they do not support the policies you would label as socially leftist. The last time universal health care was part of a mainstream candidate’s campaign was Obama’s first campaign (17 years ago), and what we ended up with was essentially a handout to insurance companies, a very far cry from UH. No major mainstream candidate since even mentions it.

Then there’s the support for LGBTQ rights. I would like to focus on the T part first. Not only was there no countermessaging from the democrats to Trump’s virulent anti-trans rhetoric; after the race was lost, the MSNBC talking heads and major democrat campaign strategists were on national television claiming that part of the reason Harris lost was that she wasn’t tough enough on trans people. The transgender support by democrats is skin deep, and ready to be dropped when it becomes politically inconvenient. If the transgender folks are that easy to drop, don’t doubt the other letters won’t drop either. To finish off this section I’ll leave you with a nice Biden quote from 2006: “marriage is between a man and a woman and states must respect that”

Another policy you mention is environmentalism. I won’t be verbose. Big part of Harris’ campaign was that she was more pro-fracking than Trump.

Next women’s rights. Four years of Biden, nothing done to fix Roe v Wade. All these words about supporting women’s rights and here we still are with 12 year olds carrying their rapist’s babies to term. Actually, we don’t even get words, there’s a nice website which kept track of whether the Biden admin used the term ‘abortion’ in a press release (they did, once, more than a year in).

I’m going to take some liberty into what else you might consider socially leftist positions, namely a pro-immigration stance, and an anti-war stance.

War first. You can go back to the Senate and congress voting records. Democrats consistently vote in favor of bombing the middle east. The Biden administration pumped billions into the Palestinian genocide. During the Harris campaign, Waltz said that the expansion of Israel was crucial to the success of America. During the recent Signal gaffe from the Trump administration where a group chat leaked where they were planning to bomb Yemeni schools and hospitals, democrats were outraged not by the fact that the US would be bombing civilians, but rather about the fact that it leaked.

Immigration next. The kids in cages at the border that we were all (rightly) upset about during the Trump admin? Not only did the Biden admin do nothing whatsoever about this, the number actually increased during his presidency. The messaging from the conservatives is simple: the immigrants come in, they’re criminals, they take our jobs, and we need to do something about this. This is of course false, if you look at the actual statistics, undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes per capita than citizens, and the addition of immigrants to the workforce (and to the market as consumers) is actually a boon to the economy. Did the Harris campaign do any countermessaging on this, citing the statistics, and looking at reality? No. A big part of her campaign is that her border policies would be tough, and that she was tough on crime.

I’ve taken the US as an example, but the same pattern applies in Europe, at least in the countries I’m most familiar with (Germany and the Netherlands).

Finally, you mention that the extreme right wing is similar to the extreme left wing in Belgium, and that conservatives are left wing on an economic level. I can’t speak much for Belgian politics. I went to the Wikipedia pages of the leftmost and rightmost parties I’m aware of (PvdA and Vlaams Belang) and all I can say is that I don’t see it. I see stark differences on policies on a social level (one being incredibly pro multi-cultural) and on an economic level (one being very pro union and worker, and the other somewhere between neoliberal and protectionist). But again I know very little of Belgian politics.

But I can say something about the conservatives portraying themselves as socialists. Please do not fall for it. This is a trick as old as Hitler. They put the “Socialist” in nazi only to trick workers into voting for them. They ended up privatizing more than any government before them (something I hope we can agree on isn’t very leftist), slashed minimum wage, culled unions, and put socialists in concentration camps. Not very left wing. Same with the current far right in power in the Netherlands. Portrayed (successfully) as economically leftist during the campaign, but every policy they’ve put in place is economically right wing. They tried putting a flat tax (unsuccessfully so), they’ve gutted public services, and they increased income tax while leaving corporate taxes fixed. They do this every time, do not fall for it.

It’s not leftist infighting if one side isn’t leftist.