Republican Senator Lindsey Graham suggested at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend that Trump’s demand was a clever ploy to bolster declining popular support for the Ukrainian cause. “He can go to the American people and say, ‘Ukraine is not a burden, it is a benefit,’” he said.

I continue to be amazed by how frequently the entire spectrum from mainstream liberal regular conservative to Trumpist conservative fascist fall back on a line which is tantamount to “they’re not tricking you, they’re tricking someone else! Totally trustworthy!”

As an exercise, try to be conscious about your thought process, write stuff down. When your thought process leads to an action with a consequence or verifiable prediction, consider: did it pan out? Was that because of your thought process or a fluke? If something went wrong then what about your thought process didn’t help you?

This can help you to narrow down stuff like: did a possibility not arise to you, were you biased/overly dogmatic in some way, did you just not know some relevant information or a particular technique that could have helped you? Have you gotten out of practice with something? Was the situation even in your control?

And like wise if it’s good, what can you repeat? Did you apply some good critical thinking rule or something you learned? Are there situations where this wouldn’t have happened this way?

I find it’s impractical to do this for everything but worthwhile doing every so often and sometimes this can call out patterns in your cognitive processes.

Another one on mental clarity: do the apple test. Try to visualise an apple. At some point I struggled with this and got mediocre results but I was able to improve it by doing some visualisation based “meditation”/exercises and employing some techniques like verbally saying or thinking the word “apple” or a description of one and/or focusing on parts of it before attempting to call the whole apple into view. This had some carry over benefits like being able to visualise things in blender in my head better.

I no longer feel a sense of unrealised potential for myself I guess. That’s it, I’ve got what I’ve got.

Not a hamster but when I had gerbils, one had eaten half of the other. Not long afterwards the cannibal developed a severe middle ear infection which killed her even during treatment.

Some LLMs have specific jailbreaks which including in the document may cause them to act strangely in a way that is specific to the LLM. But it’s unlikely to be robust over time as they get patched/changed/etc.

Strictly speaking these all do something similar-ish at face value but actually quite different in terms of mechanism and target. I think the unpopularity of a lot of these licensing structures is also down to lack of legal verification in a lot of cases.

The illegality possibility does warrant careful consideration, but I suspect in many cases regimes which would oppose this kind of license would be making the use and enforcement of software fairly selective in any case. If it is made illegal, it’s made illegal by the respective government, not the software author or license writer.

A question is then raised as to what degree the implied open source requirement that open source should be leveraged by e.g. Nazis actually benefits developers and users. Or whether it is in effect a kind of appeasement as no doubt use which contradicts those values (and hence promotes freedom) is illegal already. Those uses which are orthogonal to that aim may be selectively targeted for arbitrary reasons such as the identity of the user.

I’ve been using this for a while. It’s good, lots better than postman’s annoying attempts to force you into their cloud nonsense.

Oh yeah the hosted DeepSeek has that

The very stretched use of the word “voluntary” here also leads one to inspect the meaning of “departure”.

I’m very much so on this team. Single digit hours are too early, frankly.

Hanlon’s razor. It’s pretty clear some people can be stupid and malicious simultaneously, or will even feign stupidity to hide malice.