This is probably a good methadone, though. It’s way easier to kick a watercolor addiction than an addiction to an app purpose-developed by a whole team of engineers to string people along with the minimum possible dopamine drip for as long as they can manage.

I’m sure it’s RAG at best. There’s no way I can conceive of that they’re actually training individual models for each user in a performant or economical fashion.

More likely, as you said, they’re just zero-shotting the relevant personal data into the context window. And honestly, I’d be a little surprised if they had a smaller model trying to evaluate relevance; a simple heuristic or basic frequency analysis algorithm would probably perform about as well and be a lot cheaper. The big final model can probably toss away the noise well enough.

Nice. Yup, I learned about the Tiffany Problem from Grey as well, but picked up the tidbit about Natalie from being married to one.

Really, your headcanon has some precedent in the books. If Wormtongue had written the history, he literally would’ve called Gandalf “bad news.” And in fact, Saruman’s actual name was Curumo. …uh, or Curunir. Or Sharkey, or Tarindor, or…

I mean, part of the problem is that every person (and place, and country, and river…) has like a half dozen names depending on who’s talking and what time or place they’re in. Gandalf himself is Greyhame, Gandalf, Stormcrow, and Lathspell in Rohan alone; and Mithrandir, Olorin, Incanus, and Tharkun to other people in Middle Earth.

Aragorn and Strider and Elessar and Estel and Wingfoot and Longshanks are the same person in different contexts. Galadriel is also Alatariel and Artanis and Nerwen. Legolas is Laicolasse and Greenleaf (all three of which, in fairness, mean the same thing in different languages).

And that’s before we even talk about what their names “really” were in the “original” Red Book of Westmarch, before Tolkien “translated” them to English. The “actual” sound that came out of Bilbo’s mouth when he introduced himself was Bilba Labingi, but Tolkien decided that the name Labingi “actually” would’ve sounded like the word for bag or sack to the “original hearers.” Likewise Frodo’s name is “translated” from Maura Labingi and Sam “actually” introduced himself as Banazir Galpsi.

Not “nearly.” That’s actually his name in the “pretranslated” language that the book was “originally” written in, within the fiction.

And “Tiffany” may sound like a very 20th-century American name, but it actually dates back to the early 13th century and is based on a Greek word that’s even older. The “Tiffany Problem” is a really interesting phenomenon in the anthropological/perceptual space based on that.

Tiffany ← Tifinie ← Θεοφάνεια = “God’s arrival/appearance”

It’s also more closely related to the name “Natalie” than you might think, at least etymologically.

Natalie ←Natalia ←natale domini = “birth of the Lord” (Latin)

Thanks for posting a link! I’ll take a look. Hope you’ll take a look at mine.

You didn’t answer my question at all. Why do companies and celebrities and people who are powerful and who have access to the best and brightest minds pay so much for an online presence?

I did. You didn’t read it, apparently, but I did.

To wit:

“They aren’t changing minds. They’re reinforcing and radicalizing the beliefs of people who are already in the bubble they’re in. And it’s far from useless!”

Literally the first paragraph in my response. They’re paying for ads in order to reinforce and radicalize and mobilize people to act in accordance with the advertiser’s desires.

Ads work. Majority of them you don’t even realize are ads. But they work.

Of course they work, but they don’t do what you think they’re doing. They don’t convince people to change their minds, they convince people to act: to buy, or vote, or be more strident in accordance with the beliefs the advertiser already knows they have.

The ads you see are carefully crafted to appeal to people who believe what you believe. That’s why pro-Trump ads in red areas didn’t say “here’s why you shouldn’t vote for Harris,” they said “you already know Harris is a bad choice, and here’s why you should make sure to go vote.” It’s a distinction so subtle that most people don’t notice it and think that the ads really are trying to change their minds, but that’s not how it works.

I started my career in marketing, I know how campaigns are put together. The discussions aren’t about how to make a group of people believe a thing, they’re about how to frame the conversation so that the people who already believe something act on that belief in a way that benefits the advertiser. So you get ads like, “you care about your dog, so make sure you feed them Dogfood Xyz.” You don’t get ads that say “here’s why you should care about your dog,” because the people who already care about their dog don’t need to be convinced, and the people who don’t have a dog won’t listen anyway.

How do you get people to care about a dog? You take them to a humane society shelter in person and introduce them to a dog.

People like you on the left are so oblivious to this stuff.

Paternalistic nonsense. Oh wise and great guru, please bestow upon me thy wisdom.

Also, bringing my political affiliation into this is laughable. I knew all of this back when I was an angry conservative, too. And what changed my mind to make me more progressive? Meeting people who weren’t like me.

I don’t get it. It’s so obvious and you all just keep refusing to see the answers right in front of your faces.

The conservative urge to say “the truth is right in front of your face, stupid sheeple!” “Oh, this thing that I believe and have had reinforced to me by people who directly benefit financially from that belief is actually really obvious, duh!”

If it’s so obvious, then surely you have evidence for me. Right? No? All the evidence is in my favor? Huh, how 'bout that. See, you can’t convince people of reality online. Exhibit A: this conversation.

They aren’t changing minds. They’re reinforcing and radicalizing the beliefs of people who are already in the bubble they’re in. And it’s far from useless!

Try to think back to the last time you saw an ad that was (1) actually directed at you, and (2) trying to change your mind. I can’t tell you the answer for me, because I never see ads like that. Harris ran her campaign on that last fall, and it failed; partially because people have been lied to through screens often enough that they tend to only believe things that screens say when they’re saying stuff they already believe.

As you already know, we’ll do all sorts of mental gymnastics to make new facts fit with old opinions, probably because there was some kind of evolutionary advantage. The fact is, most people have already made up their minds. Changing those minds is hard, because people have a visceral reaction to facts, ideas, and opinions that go against their pre-existing beliefs—just like what’s happening to you right now. It can be stronger or weaker depending on how important the belief is, but in either case, the only time we’re likely to change our minds is in person; again, probably due to some evolutionary advantage (pack bonding, maybe?). Not online, not via broadcast, but in person; usually in small groups or even one-on-one (I’ve seen some evidence, though I can’t find a link, that voice and video calls—but not text messages—are almost as effective as in-person discussion).

Protests gain momentum when more people change their minds, and people change their minds when the people they know and trust and respect go to protests. It’s not the only way that fascists are overthrown, but it is definitely the least-bloody way.

That’s also critical! As I noted earlier, digital sources are fantastic for news dissemination but terrible for changing minds. Growing protest would not be possible without strong reporting; I don’t think there’s any way that either arm of this could possibly happen alone.

Ten years is not very much time, in protest terms. When I say “long game,” I really mean it. But we’re getting ever closer to critical mass. Don’t get impatient.

Nobody outside of leftist groups or media care about this.

Eight million people disagreed with you on Saturday. That’s a significant fraction of the adult population.

More to the point, history disagrees with you. No fascist regime has ever survived large-scale protests by a significant percentage of their population.

We’re in a digital world. These analog solutions don’t work anymore. You need digital solutions.

In an increasingly digital world, the only thing that does work is analog solutions.

Know what happens if you email a senator? Even a state senator? You get a canned auto-reply. For a while, the workaround was faxes. I’m not kidding, that got through. But then they stopped acknowledging those, too. The only things that work anymore are analog: phone calls and showing up in their office.

This applies to almost every political action, too. Digital marketing barely moves the needle; a lot of campaigns don’t even bother anymore. But door-knocking sure does. Phone banking sure does. Digital spaces are great for organizing and for dissemination of information, but the spaces are too siloed for any reasonable hope of changing anyone’s mind, even before you get to the astroturfing and foreign actors.

Even better, analog action demonstrably gets under Trump’s skin. And the more he shows himself to be bothered by it, the more he looks weak and impotent.

We’re all back to work.

Yeah, I mean, we still have to eat. But nobody’s under the illusion that one protest is going to do this; it’s about the long game, about the conservatives on the ground seeing that it’s not actually a “hate America” rally, and if the GOP is lying about that, what else might they be lying about?

So we’ll capture a news cycle here and there. And we’ll keep doing it until something changes, for better or for worse.

A lot of people didn’t even realize this was going on.

But a lot of people did. People who only believed the Fox talking points saw that they were wrong this weekend. And the fact that the people at the top are quiet about it means that they know they can’t fight it. Which means that at least they know it could work.

Sorry about that, let me know what you don’t understand and I’ll be happy to explain it to you.

I’ve never been so insulted!

I suppose.

“Rival” is definitely the wrong word here, right? That implies that they, like, steal each others’ mascots and compete in a big football game for some dubious prize once a year. If Alabama and Auburn literally shot anyone traveling between the two of them, that’d be one thing, but this is not a “rivalry.” It’s a cold war.

Great word, topological.

Hmmm. Since breakfast cereal is demonstrably soup, that makes strawberries, Cheerios, and Reese’s Puffs all vegetables. Good to know.

You’re correct! “Vegetable” is a culinary term. “Fruit” is both botanical and culinary. The “tomato isn’t a fruit” nonsense comes from people trying to conflate the two; if we called botanical fruits “grunkles” we wouldn’t have this problem.

Dangerous precedent to build your philosophy on.

If no one deserves anything, that includes people who already have money. Why not tax every billionaire at 1500% and give that money to other people? Stardust doesn’t become important just because it forms the structure of a billionaire.

But why stop there? Why have government at all? Why have law enforcement? Why not just do whatever we want to, to whomever we want to? Stardust doesn’t become important just because it forms the structure of a legal code.

Nihilism requires anarchy to be logically consistent. And if nothing means anything, that includes your property and personal rights. The fact is that, in order to operate in this world at all, we have to value some things, and at least most of the people have to agree on most of the things we’re going to value. On a basic level, that’s how complex life has always functioned. On a more esoteric level, that’s our species’ evolutionary advantage: society.

Right now, the West has decided that we’re going to value capital (and, in some cases, even just the idea of capitalism). Some people are saying, no, we should value people over and above capital; they’re facing a fight, not because nothing matters, but because the people in control have decided that only their financial enrichment matters.