@skykiss

Mass protests, general strikes, obstruction of ICE roundups, and granting sanctuary...

One avenue that hasn't been discussed yet: A tax revolt.

April is coming.

If billionaires don't have to pay their taxes, why should you?

Mike Johnson defunded the IRS.
forbes.com/sites/kellyphillips…

grantthornton.com/insights/new…

How to make you pay taxes?

Tax collection is disabled; Trump won't pay government employees.

America came into existence from a tax revolt.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o…

New House Speaker Mike Johnson Ties Funding For Israel To IRS Budget Cuts

House Speaker Mike Johnson has proposed legislation that would send billions of dollars to Israel in exchange for equal cuts to the IRS budget.

^{Kelly Phillips Erb (Forbes)}

@skykiss

Resistance through tax revolts:

It's as if oligarchs bought a car but want the former owner to keep paying for gas, tires, oil changes, repairs & insurance.

Oligarchs, you bought the car, you pay for its operation.

Let me step back, though, and be careful about what I mean by "programmability."

Traditionally, in computer science, that's meant that the device or software in question can be made to emulate arbitrary Turing machines; in its strongest form, it even requires no worse than polynomial overhead.

Colloquially, though, one can program a TV remote or similar — that doesn't mean you can run DOOM on it (well, some of you can). It means you can intentionally affect its behavior.

I posit that LLMs admit neither the strict nor colloquial sense of programmability. The former could be argued formally in terms of the number of states that can be explored, using the busy beaver numbers, but that would be original research well beyond the scope of a few toots.

Practically speaking, LLMs fail even the TV remote sense of programmability — if there is some desired behavior you wish for an LLM to exhibit, there's no a priori way to decide what actions to take to achieve that.

Should you use "please" and be more polite to it, or should you use "fuck" to bypass its guard rails? Who knows! As discussed, there's no theory to help you here, so you're stuck without a map to track back to what "prompt" you should start with.

The problem is that some prompts *seem* to work. Because these things are trained on lots and lots of stolen labor, it's not too hard to find text that superficially resembles some task or another.

It's the whole thing where if you ask an LLM to multiply two small numbers together, someone has probably done that somewhere, so it "works," but it completely fails for larger numbers. "Reasoning" models can get around that by giving an escape hatch to eval, like the original chain-of-thought paper, but then why not just use eval directly?

But regardless, if you think of a task common enough that it has been solved in the training corpus, then it "works," right?

The next step of the fallacy is to conflate the strict and colloquial senses of programmability. If you can give an LLM "instructions" to multiply two numbers, couldn't you give it "instructions" to do anything else?

Well, no. That's a giant leap, and one that's fully unsupported by evidence. But it *feels* right, if only because you can again try out common problems and find solutions somewhere in the training corpus.

Computer scientists, as a lot, tend to have a pocket industry of proving that this or another toy model is equivalent to Turing machines. Billiard balls can be used to implement the Fredikin gate, which is universal for computation, and thus you can program your local pool table. Magic: the Gathering is infamously Turing complete, a fun fact to bring up during draft.

Those kinds of proofs are useful because the easiest way to show something can be programmed is to do it.

Es ist noch viel schlimmer: Merz arbeitet mit Erpressung (unterschreibt meine vollen Forderungen oder ich mache gemeinsame Sache mit den Nazis) und wirkt sehr gefühlsgesteuert. Es ist denkbar, dass ihm Trump'sche Rachegelüste nicht fern liegen. Eine Katastrophe für einen Staatsmann.

Übrigens: Ich bin mir 100% sicher:
Hätten sich die demokratischen Parteien erfolgreich erpressen lassen, würde er die Drohung bei jeder Gelegenheit wieder nutzen!

Da hatten zwei die gleiche Idee mit der Headline

wiwo.de/politik/deutschland/ta…

danke, dass Du Dein Engagement auch so öffentlich machst.

Man fühlt sich nicht so alleine, wenn sogar einige Künstler auf derselben Seite stehen 🥰

Nicht immer auf die Funkzellen-Abfrage-Zahlen der Polizei verlassen. Verantwortungsvolle Leute, die nicht auf der Liste der „zu deportierenden Volksverrätern“ landen wollen, schalten ihr Handy in den Flugmodus, und werden von der Polizei nicht mitgezählt.

Die Veranstalter sind mit ihren 80.000 Leuten nicht weit weg davon, und die wissen auch, wie man händisch zählt.

Prime Minister Justin #Trudeau says #Canada will retaliate by placing 25% tariffs on $106B worth of American products.

Trudeau says Canada’s retaliatory #tariffs against the #UnitedStates will start with 25% tariffs on approximately $20B worth of US goods on Tues, with $85B more to follow within 3 weeks, to permit Canadian #SupplyChains to adjust.

#economy #prices #inflation #cost #geopolitics #law #USpol #Trump