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> If you feed it the entire dataset before 1905, LLMs aren't going to come up with general relativity.

Link?


You don't need a source for that, an LLM with such little data is barely able to form proper sentences.

Similarly, "doubt" has a negative connotation in the US, but I see it often used as a synonym for "question" by Indian speakers of English.

> You weren't downloading videos over 56k dialup

I downloaded a shit-ton of anime over 56k via CuteMX in 2000. I used to start the download before bed and then watch the episode the next day after school.

Little 12fps postage-stamp-sized RealPlayer/RealMedia video files. I still have them if you want to check them out.


At -4C Boston was under literally 1 mile high of ice compared to the current skyline.

Only 8% of prisoners in the US are kept in private facilities.

But that 8% is almost as many prisoners as comparable countries have, total. The lobbying and sometimes outright corruption around private prisons doesn't care if it also feeds people into non-private prisons as long as it also feeds the private prison beast


That's can't be entirely it. Other nations have similar laws against drug use, and from what i remember reading only 5% of the prison population is in jail for non-violent drug related crimes.

US incarceration rates increased 500% in the decades following the enactment of war on drugs legislation, starting with the Controlled Substances Act in 1970.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...

More speculatively, I think the prison system has also taken over the role of the mental health institutions that were wound down under Reagan. Over half of the incarcerated population has a mental health condition, and likely are not receiving adequate mental health care while incarcerated.


You actually seem to have a compelling case here. I am seeing something like 20% of the combined state and federal prison population is in for drug offenses, but that raises some more questions. I could certainly believe that a lot of that is simple possession and the US is uniquely terrible in that regard, but certainly other countries must handle drug dealers as well. And it's hard to break out drug offenses into more detail. Are we talking kilograms of possession? Distributing drugs? (of course, some laws claim that possession, say, 10 grams implies intent to distribute which complicates things).

And even outside of drugs, while 20% of our prison population does account for a large chunk of the us's exceptional nature, it would still leave us #1 by a large margin if it didn't exist. Although Wikipedia does talk about another part of this is due to the _length_ of the US sentences, and how they are much longer on average then other countries, so that also contributes significantly.


Entirely? No, but check this out: https://www.unodc.org/documents/ungass2016/Contributions/Civ...

Also, remember that the 13th amendment to the US constitution retained the right for the state to use imprisoned persons for slave labor.

Here's a question: The other countries you mention... do they have mandatory 5-year minimum sentences for possessing as little as 5g of Crack Cocaine?


> I have my own life

... which is not truly separate from the society in which you live.

If life sucks for your countrymen, then you (not! the royal-you, I mean you: bluGill) will inevitably be stuck dealing with the consequences.

Neighborhoods & communities atomize. Crime increases. Fascism creeps in. The list goes on.


Things are not that simple. Spending money on the toys/experiences I want also increases my community. As does investing in the future. Helping the poor does increase society as well, but it isn't clear which investment helps society the most (there is no one correct answer).

> I am not going to read more because I don't like that she never ages.

Perhaps she's just having a really, really busy few years.


> A language or a library might change the implementation of a sorting algorithm once in a few years.

I think GP was referring to heuristics and PGO.


That makes sense, but I was addressing more than just potential compiler non-determinism.

> we never made GPT-4.5 the default model in ChatGPT

Just wondering: Why was it never made available via API? You can just charge whatever per token to make sure it's profitable like o1-pro.

I use it via my ChatGPT-Pro subscription, but I still find the API omission weird.


It was available in the API from Feb 2025 to July 2025, I believe. There's probably another world where we could have kept it around longer, but there's a surprising amount of fixed cost in maintaining / optimizing / serving models, so we made the call to focus our resources on accelerating the next gen instead. A bit of a bummer, as it had some unique qualities.

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