This document establishes a policy for how LLMs can be used when contributing to rust-lang/rust. [...]

No comment on this PR may mention the following topics:

• Long-term social or economic impact of LLMs
• The environmental impact of LLMs
• Anything to do with the copyright status of LLM output
• Moral judgements about people who use LLMs

We have asked the moderation team to help us enforce these rules.

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Penile implant specialist with history of far-right comments led hantavirus presser:

Before he joined the Trump administration last year, Dr. Brian Christine was an Alabama-based urologist who specialized in penile implants. He has little public health experience and a history of far-right commentary and promoting conspiracy theories. He's said the Covid pandemic led to a wider government plot to control people, compared the Biden administration to Nazi Germany and suggested the Covid vaccine had little effect in stopping the pandemic.

He once hosted a YouTube show called "Erection Connection," a professional YouTube series on erectile dysfunction for fellow urologists.

A CNN review of archived podcast episodes, social media posts and radio appearances found that Christine repeatedly framed public health institutions, the federal government and pandemic-era policies as tools used to target conservatives and religious Americans.

Previously, previously, previously.

*New Report Reveals Coordinated Corporate Campaign Against Life-Saving Federal Heat Standard for Workers.*

California's rule requiring businesses to protect their workers, with rest breaks and access to water and shade, is a big help, and extending it nationwide could avoid thousands of illnesses (some of them fatal) per year.

Israel is about to start building an Israelis-only road through the West Bank, designed as an excuse to exclude Palestinians from all the other roads in a central region of the West Bank — and force them all out.

The boss of JP Morgan, a giant US bank, praises UK officials as "smart" when they reduce taxes for big foreign banks like his, and tries to threaten them with "investing less" if they might increase taxes for big foreign banks.

He is one of the arrogant rich men that Woodrow Wilson warned about. He is an enemy of Britain, and Britain should treat him as an enemy.

He is an enemy of America, too, for the same reason.

*The [English/Welsh] Greens need to learn the right lessons from the destruction of Corbynism.*

Republicans in Utah and Oklahoma want to shield fossil fuel companies from liability due to damage done by global heating.

*Three-quarters of UK millionaires would be happy to pay more tax, research finds.*

US citizens: call on Congress to put an end to the FISA law's permission for warrantless spying on Americans.

The FISA court was supposed to prevent abuse of this power, but it has announced that the constraints on its operation made that impossible in practice.

US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.

To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.

Please spread the word.

US citizens: Support H.R. 1137, the "No Kill Switches in Cars Act."

I think that if someone is convicted of driving under the influence, or something close to that, it is legitimate to attach a sensor-driven kill switch to stop per from driving while inebriated.

US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.

To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.

Please spread the word.

US citizens: call on Congress to Oppose H.R. 4801 and Protect Against datamining and manipulative fintech.

See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.

I urge you to edit the letter's subject and text to remove the term "AI" and replace it with "snooping and manipulative fintech" or something else that rejects the marketing hype. For good measure, you could critique the term "AI" -- I did that too.

US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue.

To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121.

Please spread the word.

Woodrow Wilson warned in his campaign in 1912 about the domination of the US government by a few rich people, and called for stripping them of their power.

At the same time, he pressured actively for racial segregation.

It is impossible to simplify Wilson to pure good or pure evil: we need to recognize both at once, in different areas of life, and judge each of them as it deserves.

The post was advertising exactly what it sounds like: A database of poop images, collected from an AI poop analyzing app that he had launched several years ago. Basically, 25,000 people had been taking images of their poop and uploading them to his app. He'd been collecting, analyzing, and annotating these images and now wanted to sell access to them. [...]

The poop database comes from an app called PoopCheck, an app made by a company called Soft All Things that purports to use AI to analyze images of one's stool in order to give you a "daily gut health score." [...]

The app also features a "community," of 151,317 "shared stools" at the time of this writing and a "leaderboard," where people can share images of their poop for commentary from other users and earn points for participating.

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At 1Password, we applied agentic tooling to a multi-million-line Go monolith.

(No I'm not linking to it.) Ok first, how in the everloving fuck did you allow a password manager to reach multiple millions of lines??

(I assume they're not even counting the entire embedded copy of Chrome that lurks inside 1Password.)

And now they sloppified it, so more people are jumping ship.

Welp, I warned you about 1Password's self-immolation in 2023 and posted a migration guide. You're welcome.

Please note: If you have come here to recommend a different password manager, I implore you to not do that, as I just do not care. This is what I did. If something else works for you, good for you. Write it up on your own blog.

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The Sierra Nevada tourist hub -- home to ski resorts, lakeside casinos, and roughly 25 to 28 million annual visitors -- is facing an energy crisis with a familiar culprit: the data centers powering the AI boom.

NV Energy, the Nevada utility that has supplied the bulk of Lake Tahoe's electricity for decades, told Liberty Utilities -- the small California company that services the region -- that it will stop providing power after May 2027. The reason? NV Energy needs the capacity for data centers. As in: the energy supplier for the Lake Tahoe region is telling the utility company that it has less than a year to find another power source.

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Previously, previously.

It's so weird, like: you sought me out at my place of business and the first thing you do is demonstrate that you haven't read my blog, ever.

This is getting so frequent that I feel like I would save time if I actually memorized a prepared speech. "I have been asked to read the following statement."

A couple of weeks ago one of these kids kept throwing out all of these ridiculous sci-fi what-ifs leading me to say, "I really need you to understand this, Lieutenant Commander Data is a work of fiction."

Then later he says:

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

People keep describing things as "mask off" but this is just getting ridiculous.

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Three "fully functional" arcade games were installed Monday at the District of Columbia War Memorial. According to the group, the game features "furious tweet battles against Iranian schoolgirls, low-flow shower heads, and other threats to American freedom like DEI and The Pope, and an opportunity to collect several Trump style peace trophies."

"Just to save you time, the only way you can lose is by trying to hold Melania's hand. But it's The Middle East, so you also can't win either," the group said in a statement shared with HuffPost.

A plaque next to the machines states: "The Trump administration knows that the best way to sell combat is by making it a video game, that's why they've been pumping out the 'sickest' Iran War video game hype reels. But why stop at clips when you could go full throttle? Introducing Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell, a high-octane, flag-waving, boots-on-the-ground simulator where freedom isn't debated, it's deployed. No briefings, no hesitation; just pure pixelated patriotism. Strap in and play hard, because this game may never end."

The arcade games are expected to stay at the D.C. War Memorial, located near the reflecting pool in West Potomac Park, for a few days. The group also made the game available online. [currently not working.]

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Approval voting is an election method voters say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to each candidate and whoever gets the most ‘yes’ votes wins. It isn’t a popular or good idea. It’s mostly promoted by one guy, but the internet being what it is he’s managed to make the appearance that it’s a serious thing, based mostly on having gotten a real math paper published and once having convinced a very geriatric Kenneth Arrow to be interviewed who then acted like a gracious guest. I’ve now spent an unjustified amount of time arguing with this person and digging into what that paper says, so I’ll explain what’s wrong with it for your benefit.

When argued with this person does a lot of talking about ‘math’ and ‘theorem’. Those familiar with Arrow’s theorem might find this a little odd. Arrow’s theorem is a theorem. How could two theorems say contradictory things? It comes down to what assumptions you make. Assumptions may or may not correlate with the real world. Which theorem applies is an empirical question about which one’s assumptions are most accurate.

The core insight of Arrow’s theorem is this: Consider an election which there are three parties, the Alice, Bob, and Carol parties, named after their preferred candidates. They’re all close to the same size, and the Alice party’s preferred candidates are Alice, then Bob, then Carol, in that order. For the Bob party it’s Bob, Carol, Alice, and for the Carol party it’s Carol, Alice, Bob. This is a very strange and confused scenario which doesn’t happen very often in practice, but it can happen, and Arrow’s theorem basically says there’s no perfect way to handle it, although there are reasonable things which can be done in practice.1

The paper in question is spun as claiming that approval voting is a loophole around the no spoilers criterion. That criterion specifically says that if one candidate would beat another in a two-way race, then adding in a third candidate who doesn’t win shouldn’t switch it to the other candidate. Consider what happens in the difficult case described above when we’re using ranked choice ballots. Let’s say the numbers of members of the three parties are very slightly different and the tiebreak we choose happens to pick Bob. This is a problem because in a two way race Alice would beat Bob with 2/3 of the vote but now Bob wins because of Carol having been introduced even though Carol didn’t win. The same argument applies when either of the other two candidates win.

Intuitively it seems like moving off of ranked choice ballots should make gameability worse rather than better. It allows voters to express their preferences in every scenario and the vote ranking algorithm to use all of that information. It turns this is exactly what happens for approval voting: The simplicity of picking a winner masks yet even greater opportunities for voters to get what they want by voting dishonestly. Only if you assume the fallacy that by limiting what voters can express to approve/disapprove you’ve successfully forced them to limit their preferences to approve/disapprove does it hold up.

Consider the difficult case with approval voting. Let’s say the voters vote completely honestly. Or maybe they vote strategically based on some complex negotiation which happened ahead of time. Which assumption you make doesn’t matter for getting to the conclusion. One way or another, one of the candidates will win. Let’s say it’s Bob. Why won’t Alice beat Bob in a two-way race? The details are a bit involved (this was, in fact, the subject of a publishable paper) but it rests deeply on a fundamental assumption: Because the ballots are yes/no, the feelings of the voters about candidates are yes/no. In particular, it assumes that in a two way race between Alice and Bob voters who like both candidates or dislike both candidates will state so honestly, putting in a wasted ballot, instead of strategically voting yes to the candidate they like more and no to the candidate they dislike more. They’re supposed to say ‘Both candidates are great, don’t care’ or ‘Two evils, no lesser’. Any voters who do otherwise are Bad, Immoral, and defiling the mathematical beauty of the voting system. This is, to put it politely, an unrealistic assumption, and real world voting systems should not be designed based on it.

There are other arguments which could be made for and against approval voting but no-spoilers was chosen as the supposedly unassailable point in its favor so having debunked it I’m now going to declare victory rather than doing a comprehensive review of voting systems. Ranked choice remains the best option, with some tweaks like allowing voters to list candidates as tied in preference being legitimate practical improvements.2

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