Kind: Reads

From COVID vaccines, to unsecured borders, to commie public schools, to an abusive executive branch, the right is scaring itself silly.

Teen girls' depression is skyrocketing—now we want to force them into childbirth

I'm worried they might finally get the answer they're really looking for by an author

A Creature Wanting Form my new book of short stories and poems should be shipping within a few weeks. For the next five people who buy a full price yearly subscription to Hell World I'll send you a free copy of that or one of my other books. Reply to let me know if you want to do that. Earlier this week I added my name to a letter addressed to the New York Times' management that was signed by roughly 1,000 current and former contributors to the paper and around 23,000 other media workers and Ti

How 'vile' MAGA Republicans are painting Ohio's environmental nightmare as a 'war on white people' by Alex Henderson, AlterNet

In East Palestine, Ohio, residents have complained of headaches, nausea, skin rashes and other symptoms following the early February derailment of a Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous chemicals. A combination of Democrats, liberals and environmentalists have been vehemently critical of Norfol...

Here at the New York Times, we believe that all sides of the story should be tolerated and explored, from white supremacists being actually kinda c...

There is no humanity, no subtlety, in a crusade. Just servants of light, and servants of darkness.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has exclusively provided a massive trove of U.S. Capitol surveillance footage from the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has downplayed the deadly violence that occurred that day and claimed it was a “false flag” operation.

A full-time substitute teacher was abruptly fired last week after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis complained about a video of empty bookshelves that the teacher posted to social media. The teacher, Brian Covey, posted the video on Twitter three weeks earlier, on January 27. In an interview with Popular Information, Covey said administrators at Mandarin Middle School in Duval County were aware he posted the video, which attracted millions of views, but never indicated it was a problem. Covey had worked as a full-time substitute teacher since early October 2022. According to Covey, he had recently been praised in a staff meeting by the school principal for bringing order and stability to a previously unruly class of math students.

The “Need for Chaos” and Motivations to Share Hostile Political Rumors

COLORADO SPRINGS, CO—Following a series of transphobic comments by the Harry Potter author, the nation’s top evangelical leaders announced Monday that J.K. Rowling had finally become bigoted enough to make it okay for kids to read about witchcraft. “While I always appreciated Ms. Rowling making the greedy banker…

Tired of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? Skeptical of the metaverse? The non-profit, distributed, community-oriented fediverse might be for you.

Explaining the bumpy and uncertain legal path toward protecting --- or ending --- a critical reproductive freedom in all 50 states...

Security experts baffled by move to require paid subscription to get SMS sign-in codes.

Ethan Zuckerman reveals a new classification system for social networks.

An open letter to the Times rightly called out the paper for its biased coverage of trans issues. Here's what the paper continues to get wrong.

Comment by gwern - I've been thinking how Sydney can be so different from ChatGPT, and how RLHF could have resulted in such a different outcome, and here is a hypothesis no one seems to have brought up: "Bing Sydney is not a RLHF trained GPT-3 model at all! but a GPT-4 model developed in a hurry which has been finetuned on some sample dialogues and possibly some pre-existing dialogue datasets or instruction-tuning [https://gwern.net/doc/ai/nn/transformer/gpt/instruction-tuning/index], and this plus the wild card of being able to inject random novel web searches into the prompt are why it acts like it does". This seems like it parsimoniously explains everything thus far. So, some background: 1. The relationship between OA/MS is close but far from completely cooperative, similar to how DeepMind won't share [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34804446] anything with Google Brain. Both parties are sophisticated and understand that they are allies - for now... They share as little as possible. When MS plugs in OA stuff to its services, it doesn't appear to be calling the OA API but running it itself. (That would be dangerous and complex from an infrastructure point of view, anyway.) MS 'licensed [https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/ai/new-azure-openai-service/] the GPT-3 source code [https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2020/09/22/microsoft-teams-up-with-openai-to-exclusively-license-gpt-3-language-model/]' for Azure use but AFAIK they did not get the all-important checkpoints or datasets (cf. their investments in ZeRO). So, what is Bing Sydney? It will not simply be unlimited access to the ChatGPT checkpoints, training datasets, or debugged RLHF code. It will be something much more limited, perhaps just a checkpoint. 2. This is not ChatGPT. MS has explicitly stated it is more powerful than ChatGPT, but refused to say anything more straightforward like "it's a more trained GPT-3" etc. If it's not a ChatGPT, then

Meta’s testing a new verification subscription on Facebook and Instagram that costs $11.99 per month on web or $14.99 per month on mobile. It’s rolling out in New Zealand and Australia before expanding to more countries.