- semantic data integration/triplestores/linking facts in a database.
- feature extraction from imagery / AI detection of objects as an alarm
- push to human operators
You or I might expect this to be held to a high standard - chaining facts together like this better be darned right before action is taken!
But what if the question their software solves isn't we look at a chain of evidence and act on it in a legal/just/ethical manner but we have decided to act and need a plausible pretext; akin to parallel construction?
When you assess it by that criteria, it works fantastically - you can just dump in loads and loads of data; get some wonky correlations out and go do whatever you like. Who cares if its wrong - double checking is hard work; someone else will "fix" it if you make a mistake; by lying, by giving you immunity from prosecution, by flying you out of state or going on the TV, or uh, well, that's a future you problem.
I am talking about American support for a working legal immigration process, and enforcing that process. Not everyone agrees about exactly what it should look like.
I'm not talking specifically about the actions Trump is taking or the job ICE is doing currently. The current sentiment around ICE is very negative.
To me the obvious synthesis is that the Trump-sphere was lying about what immigration enforcement means, and the public is unhappy when they're shown what Stephen Miller and friends understand enforcing immigration law to mean.
I think it's important to assess the quality of the comments - they aren't bringing facts, just stating opinions; doing so quickly and agreeing with each other. You can test this out - pick a few names on the comments that disagree, ctrl+f, and you'll quickly find one individual with 29 comments at the time of writing all over the thread; with a handful of others with 1-4 responses.
This is not actually what the majority of people think and feel.
IE; from recent polling
> 55%+ of Americans have “very little” confidence in ICE, while 16 percent only have "some".
That's ~71% of ordinary US folks; and I would wager many international folks are very clear eyed about the situation.
But why don't you see a ratio of 7/10 of top level comments critical? It's reasonable to assume that about half of those people are just keeping to themselves or part of the political middle that feel something is a "bit wrong"; but not quite enough to go yell into the internet about it. For the others, arguing is tiring and doesn't seem to change much. Watching the situation induces feelings of dread, despair or helplessness.
On the opposing side, that 29% of people are faced with the fact that they might actually be the "baddies" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY), and a good number of them are flooding conversations to prove they are in fact "not"... because admitting otherwise would mean they are actually doing something quite morally or ethically wrong by their own or their community standards. Since that would be unthinkable! the only logical reaction is to post frequently in shrill defense.
If you keep that in mind - the relative psychology of each group - it's much easier not to despair if "everyone" seems to be saying the opposite of what you would expect.
In my comments, I add opinions after the facts. Nor have I been donwvoted to oblivion. IMO, the people who I reply to aren't really acquainted with the facts.
I on the other hand happen to be a "bootlicker", while their opinion seems to be that it's ok to interfere with police work, and that the person that got shot did nothing wrong..
This model defines a few different categories of how people respond - "Withdrawal","Attack-Self" and "Avoidance", "Attack-Other".
If you were to look at your comments through the threads here, would you be able to classify your responses as matching any of the categories above?
As a hint, you may be surprised to learn the person with multiple comments in question I was referring to isn't you. Yet you've sought this out and decided the most suitable response to why are two groups posting responses at different rates is to attempt to relitigate an imagined argument.
I don't live in the US and do agree that Trump is hectic at times. I don't really argue for ICE because of some emotional reason.
Trump had deportions of illegals on his agenda, they were creating trouble at certain locations (perhaps a tiny minority on US map), people voted Trump, he is keeping his promises. The protesters probably don't even know who is being currently captured..
They are protesting against the democratic outcome. But don't understand that when you're the minority, you can't have both the (1) "what you want", and (2) democracy.
ICE isn't doing police work (police are somewhat accountable to their local populace for keeping people safe), they're ostensibly (selectively) enforcing federal immigration regulation.
But please for the love of god explain how "not following orders" is grounds for immediate extrajudicial execution? because your
"their opinion seems to be ... that the person that got shot did nothing wrong"
definitely seems to imply that 'doing something wrong' justifies any reaction up to and including being shot in the head or magdumped in the back?
Lethal force wielded by unmasked, uniformed, badge-wearing, and bodycam'd police officers is already fraught with enough issues as it is... And at least they occasionally face investigation and punitive measures when they fuck up on the (admittedly very difficult) job and harm civilians unlawfully.
A woman not getting out of the car when being ordered to by unknown masked men bearing weapons is reasonable.
Shooting an unarmed civilian who poses no threat to you is not reasonable. It only serves to undermine the entire apparatus of civil governance as well as the bill of rights that the US government was founded upon. It's shameful and disgusting.
And yes, you're accurately labled a bootlicker if you make excuses to the contrary about how it's _ackshually ok_ to shoot and kill people who don't listen to you because boohoo they made your job harder.
If instead you decide you don't actually want to make such an indefensible stand, and instead motte and bailey your way around the issue by trying to talk about obstruction of enforcement of laws, and fall all the way back to "well ICE is allowed to invade places to get the dirty immigrants, so really all the law-abiding citizens would be fine if they just got out of the way", then you're a coward who wont accept the consequences of their own line of argumentation.
Murdering people (Renee Good) who pose no threat to you is wrong. Full stop. Whether that person did something worthy of a misdemeanor, or arrest, or some other LAWFUL CONSEQUENCE is a different matter entirely.
ICE's continued and flagrant misconduct is a breakdown of the Rule of Law, which literally only works if the populace maintains enough trust in those entrusted to enforce and uphold the law. Destroying that (precious little remaining) trust in a politically motivated boondoggle to "own the libs" is a colossal fuckup.
While I do agree that this was tragic sequence of events, then the whistle protesters, carrying a gun and then getting between an officer and the woman is what brought it to the current conclusion.
Go protest in some square, don't protest at ICE carrying out its work. Should this event somehow disqualify ICE, you'll see the Trump opposers hugging every criminal in the country. "Full stop" (as if rhetoric devices ever strenghtened an argument..)
Protesting ICE while they work is constitutionally protected free speech.
You are saying that people should give up their most important rights simply to avoid inconveniencing the government. It is the grossest form of bootlicking I've ever seen.
It may just be that soon the protesters discover that you can simply go and hug a criminal as "protest" and then blame it on law enforcement should anything negative happen to them. I guess your interpretation would still be that it's "constitutionally protected free speech"? I beg to differ and also think the legalities of these situations will likely be hashed out soon enough.
Oh, that's one blue state; right? What do the rest of Americans think?
> The Economist/YouGov poll, 55 percent of respondents said they had “very little” confidence in ICE, while 16 percent said they have “some” confidence in the agency. Sixteen percent said they have “quite a lot” of confidence in ICE and 14 percent said they have “a great deal.”
> As a Health Center staff member ('Victim-1') attempted to open the door for the volunteer, WILLIAMS purposefully leaned against the door, crushing Victim-1’s hand. Victim-1 yelled, "She’s crushing my hand," but WILLIAMS remained against the door, trapping Victim-1’s hand and injuring it.
> On the livestream on June 19, 2020, WILLIAMS stood within inches of the Health Center’s chief administrative officer and threatened to “terrorize this place” and warned that “we’re gonna terrorize you so good, your business is gonna be over mama.” Similarly, WILLIAMS stood within inches of a Health Center security officer and threatened “war.” WILLIAMS also stated that she would act by “any means necessary.”
A member of the conspiracy admitted to the planning; they have text messages and detail of deciding who will risk arrest, after going over the fact they'd be trespassing and violating the FACE act.
Do you think the administrative and medical staff present in 2020 would agree with you? That the group that blockaded, threatened and assaulted in one instance access to health services are in fact the victims here of government overreach?
ICE are engaging in violence, warrantless forced entry to homes, at least two shootings that border on murder, they even tried to force entry into an Ecuadorian embassy.
They are detaining citizens at random, relocating them physically and in some cases releasing them; if they don't die in detention due to lack of access to medical care.
If you cannot see how these activities should be observed, documented, protested whilst still standing for professed Amercian values...
Edit:
Ah excellent, downvotes without reply because facts are... uncomfortable!
Or did you place about 2-5 paragraphs per heading, with little connection between the ideas?
For example:
> Perhaps what some users are trying to express with concerns about ‘sycophancy’ is that when they paste information, they'd like to see the AI examine various implications rather than provide an affirming summary.
Did you, you personally, find any evidence of this? Or evidence to the opposite? Or is this just a wild guess?
Wait; nevermind that we're already moving on! No need to do anything supportive or similar to bolster.
> If so, anti-‘sycophancy’ tuning is ironically a counterproductive response and may result in more terse or less fluent responses. Exploring a topic is an inherently dialogic endeavor.
Is it? Evidence? Counter evidence? Or is this simply feelpinion so no one can tell you your feelings are wrong? Or wait; that's "vibes" now!
I put it to you that you are stringing together (to an outside observer using AI) a series of words in a consecutive order that feels roughly good but lacks any kind of fundamental/logical basis.
I put it to you that if your premise is that AI leads to a robust discussion with a back and forth; the one you had that resulted in "product" was severely lacking in any real challenge to your prompts, suggestions, input or viewpoints.
I invite you to show me one shred of dialogue where the AI called you out for lacking substance, credibility, authority, research, due dilligence or similar. I strongly suspect you can't.
Given that; do you perhaps consider that might be the problem when people label AI responses as sycophancy?
Well I do have a chat log somewhere where I say potential energy seems like a fake concept and GPT and/or Gemini got around to explaining that it can actually be expressed in equations reliably.. does that count?
"called you out for lacking substance, credibility, authority, research, due dilligence or similar" seems like level of emotional angst that LLMs don't usually tend to show
Actually amusingly enough the Gemini/Verhoeven example in my doc is an example where the AIs seem to have a memorably strong opinion
Notice how this was taking over a GitHub repository from an entire team of maintainers, through deceit; and now we are all a few weeks in and you have seemingly accepted the narrative that this is now one bad apple justifies every action taken before and since, with no questions answered, with a wave of inconsistencies (it's about the money/no, the treasurer is wrong it's not about the money!), etc.
No, it's not. I haven't weighed in on that at all in this thread. This thread is very specifically about Andre Arko's credibility and the credibility of projects that associate with him.
Regardless of what Ruby Central did, his own actions warrant every bit of criticism he's getting. Stop trying to redirect the narrative. There are other threads where that discussion is happening.
You can view Ruby Central as being in the wrong all you want and I won't argue with you, but that doesn't mean Arko is not-wrong as well. It's not zero-sum.
Arko explained why he changed the password; I agree that he should have communicated the change. Now, does that justify the hostile takeover of the projects? C'mon... folks, there was a hostile takeover of two projects. Will we, as a community, ignore that?
I don't understand how Matz accepted this as-is. Taking over these projects without addressing the takeover makes them toxic assets that will taint the Ruby community for a long, long time.
Look. I brought up Arko's credibility. I didn't bring up the Ruby Central folks credibility. That's a separate thread -- there's literally like 500 other threads to discuss that topic.
What you're doing is called a Whataboutism. I was responding to a comment about gem.coop.
Andre Arko is not credible and thus gem.coop is not credible. He can explain all he wants but his actions were plainly inexcusable. Whatever Ruby Central did is immaterial to the point of whether or not Andre Arko can be involved with services that we rely on.
Why is there (seemingly) no public offer to former maintainers to rejoin, or acknowledgement of wrongdoing having been done as part of this? It's practically zero cost to do that; as the Ruby core team is (largely) not the party that inflicted harm.
Politeness? Conspiracy to have done this all along? Cultural differences around public vs private opinions? Something else?
What would we think if this wasn't a software project but a hijacked community bus, being passed from party to party, pretending nothing is untoward about the whole situation while the passengers are still aboard? "Oh good, the new bus drivers are politely accepting the keys from the hijackers; all is well!"?
IE; just looking at their puff piece demo for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxKghrZU5w8
- semantic data integration/triplestores/linking facts in a database.
- feature extraction from imagery / AI detection of objects as an alarm
- push to human operators
You or I might expect this to be held to a high standard - chaining facts together like this better be darned right before action is taken!
But what if the question their software solves isn't we look at a chain of evidence and act on it in a legal/just/ethical manner but we have decided to act and need a plausible pretext; akin to parallel construction?
When you assess it by that criteria, it works fantastically - you can just dump in loads and loads of data; get some wonky correlations out and go do whatever you like. Who cares if its wrong - double checking is hard work; someone else will "fix" it if you make a mistake; by lying, by giving you immunity from prosecution, by flying you out of state or going on the TV, or uh, well, that's a future you problem.
To take a non US example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme
Debt calculations were flat out wrong
The unstated goal/dogwhistle at the time was to punish the poor (cost more than it would ever recover)
It was partially stopped after public outcry with a few ministerial decisions.
It took years; people dying; a royal commission and a change of political party to put a complete stop to it.
No real consequences for the senior political figures who directly enacted this
Limited consequences for 12 of 16 public servants - no arrests, no official job losses, some minor demotions.
If the goal of the machine is to displace responsibility; the above example did its job.