It’s not about the pictures. I honestly think this is just an excuse to get rid of journalists, and a method for hammering home the point that “journalists bad. news fake.” I’m not even sure he’s actually seen the pictures I question.

With that said, I wouldn’t put it past him to actually be so vain that it is really about the pictures. However I think it’s more likely that he would have done something like this anyway, and just picked an excuse.

I’ve had a couple of those situations. In all cases it was a friend that I ended up getting horny with, and then we figured “why not?”. In all cases, the answer turned out to be that shit quickly gets complicated when people develop new feelings because they’re sleeping together.

Frankly, I have no issue with polyamorous people, but I honestly can’t understand how they get it to work. Every time I’ve slept with someone repeatedly over an extended period of time, it ended up fundamentally changing our relationship to the point where being with anyone else became an implicit no-go. I have no explanation for exactly why but those feelings just developed, no matter how much we promised each other they wouldn’t, and pretended they didn’t.

Good luck man… I’ve been through a couple of these variants but with my (current) SO of quite some time I feel like I’ve found the center. That doesn’t mean it’s never complicated, but it means we’ve learned to deal with and work through a lot of complicated stuff. I honestly believe the most important ingredient in getting to that center is the will to see the best in each other and work through whatever life throws your way.

However, naked with just socks is still more naked than just naked.

Empirical evidence that wearing shoes makes you more naked: The only thing hotter than a naked woman is a naked woman with heels.

Viking/Danish

Norse. And it’s more similar to modern Icelandic than anything else, perhaps most closely followed by (distant second place) Norwegian.

Well said, I see that I may have read your initial comment a bit too quickly and misinterpreted it a bit :)

On one level I agree with what you’re saying. On a different one I really dislike the “just do it” attitude, when we’re dealing with software that has been engineered to be extremely addictive. Of course, you could tell a heroine addict or meth-head that they need to “just decide to quit”, but it’s well established that that doesn’t usually help much. Of course, it’s true that, bottom line, they “just” need to quit. However it’s reductionist to the point of no longer being helpful to suggest that as a solution in itself.

With e.g. social media (and other addictions) we should be doing more than just putting it on the individual to cut out their addiction. After all, they’re just an individual that’s fighting a huge for-profit industry that’s set up around keeping them addicted. Asking them to fight that battle alone is setting them up to fail.

Am I the only person that’s extremely put off (and in a way intrigued) by Americans hang up with “race”. Like, even the fact that there are “official” races is very strange to me. In my country we absolutely operate with a concept of “ethnicity”, but that’s not set in stone, and is a kind of mix of “where do your ancestors come from”, “what is your phenotype”, and “what culture do you identify with”. The idea of having a “race” that is set in stone and that people actually care about is pretty absurd to me.

You can fine-grain nr. 2 even more: You can give access to e.g. modify files only in a certain sub-tree, or run only specific commands with only specific options.

A restrictive yet quite safe approach is to only permit e.g. git add, git commit, and only allow changes to files under the VC. That effectively prevents any irreversible damage, without requiring you to manually approve all the time.

You’re absolutely right. I mostly run a pretty simple local model though, so it’s not like it’s very expensive either.

Saying that it can serve the same purpose does not mean that I mean the two are equivalent in every aspect.

Just based on how you’ve responded so far it seems like you’re wilfully misinterpreting how I actually use an LLM for this purpose, especially with responses referring to LLMs causing people to commit suicide and offloading decision making or the thought process itself to an LLM.

It really seems like you’re wilfully misinterpreting what I’m writing.

That is correct. However, an LLM and a rubber duck have in common that they are inanimate objects that I can use as targets when formulating my thoughts and ideas. The LLM can also respond to things like “what part of that was unclear”, to help keep my thoughts flowing. NOTE: The point of asking an LLM “what part of that was unclear” is NOT that it has a qualified answer, but rather that it’s a completely unqualified prompt to explain a part of the process more thoroughly.

This is a very well established process: Whether you use an actual rubber duck, your dog, writing a blog post / personal memo (I do the last quite often) or explaining your problem to a friend that’s not at all in the field. The point is to have some kind of process that helps you keep your thoughts flowing and touching in on topics you might not think are crucial, thus helping you find a solution. The toddler that answers every explanation with “why?” can be ideal for this, and an LLM can emulate it quite well in a workplace environment.

Yes, absolutely, but there’s a huge span from completely removing the box to having “just” a chatbot.

For example, at my company, we’ve set up an agent that can work with certain design-files that engineers typically work with through a rather complex GUI. We’ve built a bunch of endpoints that ensures the agent can only make valid changes to the files, and that it can never delete or modify anything without approval. This saves people a bunch of time, because they can make the agent do “batch jobs” that take maybe 10 min in about 10 s. It’s not possible for this agent to mess up our database or anything like that, because all interactions it has with anything are through endpoints where we verify that files, access permissions, change logs, etc. are valid.

I think you’ve misunderstood the purpose of a rubber duck: The point is that by formulating your problems and ideas, either out loud or in writing, you can better activate your own problem solving skills. This is a very well established method for reflecting on and solving problems when you’re stuck, it’s a concept far older than chatbots, because the point isn’t the response you get, but the process of formulating your own thoughts in the first place.

Nah, you can run it in a box and limit its ability to interact with anything outside the box to certain white-listed endpoints. Depending on what you want to achieve, that can be more than safe enough.

Meh, they work well enough if you treat them as a rubber duck that responds. I’ve had an actual rubber duck on my desk for some years, but I’ve found LLM’s taking over its role lately.

I don’t use them to actually generate code. I use them as a place where I can write down my thoughts. When the LLM responds, it has likely “misunderstood” some aspect of my idea, and by reformulating myself and explaining how it works I can help myself think through what I’m doing. Previously I would argue with the rubber duck, but I have to admit that the LLM is actually slightly better for the same purpose.

I mean, there’s a good reason the first rules of firearm safety are to always treat a weapon as loaded, and to never direct the weapon at something you aren’t prepared to destroy. The key point being that you never know when some freak accident can happen with a loose pin, bad ammo, a broken spring, or just a person tripping and shaking the gun a bit too hard.

A gun should never go off by itself. You still treat it as if it can, because in the real world freak accidents happen.

Regarding the very last point: Won’t his kids retain citizenship regardless if they were born in the US, in which case they have a citizenship in their own right (not tied to their father)?

My impression was that you got a US citizenship if you were born on US soil, regardless of the status of your parents?