“Yeah, bitch, Qui-Gon just kidnapped and used me because he couldn’t afford a ship part, and abandoned my mother with barely a second thought. You expect me not to dwell on this shit? You’re a bunch of monsters.”

…is how I always wished he responded.

Right on, that’s my bad. I read too far between the lines.

My family still has pretty significant generational trauma from surviving the Holocaust, so the genocide going on in Palestine is quite black and white for us. It’s wrong, Israel’s behavior is monstrous and immoral, and it needs to stop. The Palestinians never deserved this. We talk about it constantly.

Your question kinda implies that we all must have family deployed in a war zone though (unless I misunderstood), and that’s not the case. I’m American. I do have some Israeli relatives who I won’t ever speak to again because they support the genocide, but they’ve all aged out of the army.

Yeah, I totally understand the potential creepiness factor with coworkers, but I just try to read the room, and as far as I know, I haven’t creeped anyone out. I find the heart emoji should be used sparingly regardless of gender. My (female) manager recently wished me well while I was sick, and a heart emoji was the perfect response.

Don’t limit yourself like that. I use hearts, peace signs, horns, spock hands, thumbs up, whatever I feel like. There’s no need to add gender to this stuff.

You’re correct. The 90s has always been and will always be ten years ago.

Let’s say I open a medical textbook a few different times to find the answer to something concrete, and each time the same reference material leads me to a different answer but every answer it provides is wrong but confidently passes it off as right. Then yes, that medical textbook should be banned.

Quality control is incredibly important, especially when people will use these systems to make potentially life-changing decisions for them.

I want real, legally-binding regulation, that’s completely agnostic about the size of the company. OpenAI, for example, needs to be regulated with the same intensity as a much smaller company. And OpenAI should have no say in how they are regulated.

I want transparent and regular reporting on energy consumption by any AI company, including where they get their energy and how much they pay for it.

Before any model is released to the public, I want clear evidence that the LLM will tell me if it doesn’t know something, and will never hallucinate or make something up.

Every step of any deductive process needs to be citable and traceable.

That article feels unfinished, but at least the author pushes back a little. Those numbers cannot possibly be true. And if they somehow are, based on my experience cleaning up that code will take nearly as long as a person writing it from scratch.

Oh yeah, that last point rings true for my dad too. My family hired a health aid to assist with our relative who he’s helping care for in home hospice, and we fought with him for weeks to defer to the aid’s expertise. He believes, despite the fact that this is literally her career, that he knows better how to take care of someone on their deathbed. Despite not having gone through it before, or having any medical or healthcare experience. He would snap at the aid for showing him how to do something.

We ultimately had to have a heart-to-heart with the aid to apologize for his behavior and to teach her how to use his own narcissism against him so he would do things the right way.

I think he’d be a grandiose narcissist. He truly believes he’s the best and can’t be wrong. And when someone calmly and carefully explains why he is wrong about a particular thing, his mood flips 180 degrees and he blows up and gets super defensive. If we don’t give up trying to convince him, his mood gets even more sour and he essentially mopes like toddler. This can be for anything, even the most trivial bullshit that wouldn’t phase anybody else.

And he does all that while bragging to anyone that will listen that he’s open-minded and loves being proven wrong.

I’m not a psychiatrist, so this is all observational for me, but my father is a narcissist so I can at least tell you what he’s like.

In conversation, or any interaction, if the topic veers into anything that my father can’t relate to or isn’t aware of from his own personal experience, he immediately reframes the topic so it’s about him. This consistently happens in the middle of a conversation, and it usually interrupts someone speaking. The interruption is always unrelated to what the person was actually saying, so after he interrupts you can always see the person he cut off deflate and shrink away from the conversation. Because it’s clear he wasn’t participating in a two-sided conversation, he was just waiting his turn to cut in and take over.

He manages to come across as caring, but that’s only because he knows exactly how to act so he appears that way. But his motivation is only to be praised for his apparent empathy, because if you probe his behavior even a little bit, it’s like a switch is flipped and he goes into a full on angry defensive mode.

For example, a close family member is dying, and he is the only one available to care for them. And he is taking care of them physically, don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that, but whenever another family-member asks for an update on their condition, his framing is always about what he has done and how he has learned what to do in a particular situation, it’s never about the condition of our dying family member.

He takes credit for every idea and new concept he comes across, even if the person who gave him the idea is in the room with him. It sometimes even happens in the same conversation.

Anyway, those are just my personal experiences living with an extremely difficult and selfish father who is incapable of thinking genuinely about other people. I learned a lot about myself and him by reading Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents. Worth a read even if you’re not thinking about a parent.

Thank you. He gets more normalized any time someone talks about this asshole and doesn’t mention his extremist and wildly unpopular views. He is a terrible person, and not enough people know why.

This article does a pretty solid job of explaining how horrible he is, though I’m sure there are better ones.

Yes! I listened to a couple chapters when I didn’t have the book with me, and ended up going back and listening from the beginning. It’s a great audiobook.

The Darth Plagueis novel also added a ton of context to The Phantom Menace for me. It’s a long history of Palpatine and Plagueis that goes all the way up to the Battle of Naboo, so it really feels like you can see clearly Plagueis’ influence on Palpatine and his scheming. If I remember correctly, Luceno even does a couple of the scenes from the movie, with way more detail. I rewatched it after finishing the book and got a lot more out of it.

If you have a general interest channel that includes most/much or your company on slack or something similar, you could post links to articles that explain the problems with relying on chatbots or best-practices for using them in a professional setting, and hope the person in question sees it. That way you don’t have to call them out personally, and the whole company can benefit from a reality check on how these things should or shouldn’t be used.

Your whisky preference is indeed correct.

I like this idea a lot, but I wouldn’t want it to be an either/or setting. It’d be perfect if I could set my swipe gesture to hide on upvote, and the upvote button to just mark as read on upvote. Or even just a different swipe gesture for each, would be awesome. Usually I want a post to go away immediately, so I do a lot of vote and hide swipe gestures one after the other. But sometimes I’m weird and want to leave a post in my feed in case I want to go back to it.

For me, if I read a post in a browser instead of the app, and then switch to the app those posts are marked as read, so greyed out a little, but aren’t hidden in the app. I’ve noticed it a lot, and it’s kind of annoying, but it may not be exactly what you’re describing. Pretty sure they persist as read but unhidden in the app even on refresh, which maybe is a bug? Hard to say.

I recently asked myself similar questions about two friends I knew for about 15 years. I thought I had been close with them, but I quickly answered No to all of them (plus a bunch of follow-ups I asked myself), and realized they were never real friends, or at least hadn’t been for a while, they were just people who were accustomed to seeing me and sometimes making plans together.

I always felt anxious after hanging out with them, never felt like they listened to or cared about anything I said, never remembered my preferences or things about my personal life from visit to visit, never believed me when I said I knew something, etc etc. It’s easy to get used to this kind of thing and to think it’s normal and healthy, but it was so exhausting and frustrating for me that I finally gave up and haven’t talked to them in over a year.

Sometimes these types of questions are super helpful in evaluating longstanding relationships as well as new ones.