“Think of SmoothLLM as a security protocol that scrutinizes each request made to the LLM. It checks for any signs of manipulation or trickery in the input prompts. This is like having a security guard who double-checks each question for hidden meanings before allowing it to answer.”
Only professional, human narrators are acceptable to me. With few exceptions (e.g., Jimmy Carter), I can’t listen to an audiobook that was narrated by the author.
Well, apart from the two Russian cosmonauts also on board. He was the sole American, not the sole human. Cassidy, however was part of the largest group in space, 13 people, when a Shuttle with 7 crew joined the 6-person ISS Expedition 20.
[Edit] The astronauts who have been genuinely alone and far from the rest of humanity were the Apollo command module pilots who stayed in lunar orbit while the other two crew descended to the surface.
Less than a year after the landmark Loving v. Virginia decision by the US Supreme Court, Harry Belafonte and Petula Clark made history when Clark touched Belafonte’s arm on US primetime TV: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/04/harry-belafonte...
"It has erroneously been described as the first instance on American television of physical contact between a black man and a white woman,[26] forgetting many previous instances, including Frankie Lymon dancing with a white girl on Alan Freed's live ABC T.V. show "The Big Beat" on July 19, 1957,[citation needed] Nancy Sinatra kissing Sammy Davis, Jr., on her 1967 Movin' with Nancy TV special,[27] and Louis Armstrong shaking hands with "What's My Line?" panelists Dorothy Kilgallen and Arlene Francis in 1953."
Thanks for the link. The first half of that paragraph is also interesting: “In 1968 NBC-TV invited Clark to host her own special in the US, and in doing so, she inadvertently made television history. While singing a duet of "On the Path of Glory", an antiwar song that she had composed, with guest Harry Belafonte, she took hold of his arm, to the dismay of a representative from the Chrysler Corporation (the show's sponsor), who feared that the moment would incur racial backlash from Southern viewers.[22] When he insisted that they substitute a different take, with Clark and Belafonte standing well away from each other, Clark and the executive producer of the show—her husband, Wolff—refused, destroyed all other takes of the song, and delivered the finished programme to NBC with the touch intact.[23][24] The Chrysler representative was terminated, and the programme aired on 8 April 1968, four days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., with high ratings, critical acclaim,[25] and a Primetime Emmy nomination.”
Despite the racism, I have always wondered why a majority of US ‘Top 40 Hits’ were by black artists in the 1960s. Soul, R&B, and Motown were continually at the top of the charts.
and the rest of the hits by white performers were either "heavily inspired" or literal re-performed versions of black songs that wouldn't be played or broadcast by white-only radio stations and TV shows.
It's not crazy that such blatant racism occurred in the late sixties, it's crazy that people pretend all the racists and the way they thought just suddenly disappeared. Lots of those people are still alive. My grandma and mom both grew up in a segregated south. Even as an elementary school kid, the way the civil rights movement was taught made it unbelievable that my mom was a kid watching MLK on TV.
it's probably not a coincidence that some of those people are voting in the oldest median age congress we have ever had.
I'm older than median around here but still firmly working age. A black man was lynched in my hometown during my lifetime. There was no trial.
One of the things most consistently infuriating about discussions of american policy on HN is how firmly committed we are overall to not reckoning with this. This is very recent history, they didn't just admit defeat or become wholesome ex-segregationists for the most part. The policies continue to have effects, and the intergenerational nature of wealth imbalance means even if they didn't we'd still expect to see consequences into the present.
I jokingly refer to the way the civil rights era is taught to elementary school children as "and then the last racist killed MLK." I don't think that's necessarily even an inappropriate way to first bring it up with young children. But I wish people here expected more of themselves.
It is not only that people even here on HN believe that discrimination of black people doesn't happen anymore, but worse there is a vocal group that thinks that white men are now the major victims. They quite literally state that white men (mainly if they receive pushback for racist/mysoginist statements) have it as bad as black people in the 60s.
As an external observer of American news, I don’t find it surprising when race is increasingly stressed, occasionally in not directly relevant context. E.g. there was a cnn headline recently along the lines of “Black and Latino man got in the car of White policeman and disappeared” with the races capitalised from source. No matter if the intention is against racism, the capitalisation and emphasis on races does not help from my vantage (and admittedly remote) viewpoint. Now if the story was definitely a racist one it would make sense but I did not get that in the context of the article itself.
I think we all tend to victimise ourselves. The people in advantage will do so even more.
It's a common but I think unhelpful observation that americans make racism worse by focusing on race more. I see it often in the comments here, people saying things like "why make it about race" or "we should ignore everyone's race."
The thing is it was already about race. Even if that cop disappeared those men for completely non-racist reasons (and we pretend their motivation is even knowable in that way), the racial history of american policing is such that it's part of the story anyway.
A black person reading the race-sanitized headline is going to immediately think "yeah and I bet I can guess their skin colors too" and on looking into it find out they were right and come to conclusion it was obscured out of intentional complicity.
There is no race-neutral way to report on or discuss many things in an american context because those things are not race-neutral. We can certainly wish it were otherwise, but when we try to enforce that fictional neutrality we both obscure and create other problems.
The capitalization thing is just part of an ongoing and unsettled reevaluation of what "races" even are, what their boundaries and prerogatives are, how they refer to themselves and how they are to be referred to, etc. I respect your discomfort with it and would point out that probably very few people are happy with the current state of this nomenclature, but that it's almost completely irrelevant to the problems themselves.
> A black person reading the race-sanitized headline is going to immediately think "yeah and I bet I can guess their skin colors too" and on looking into it find out they were right and come to conclusion it was obscured out of intentional complicity.
This works the other way too. People see an article about a crime that doesn't mention race and they'll go out of their way to track one down that does to confirm their bias that certain people are criminals. There's no reason for that though. Either way it's a very unhealthy way to view the world and worse it's entirely one sided. You don't see headlines like: "Black man pulled over by White cop, has friendly interaction, let off with a warning"
The media knows that fear and outrage generate views and ad impressions and that's what they push at us while we wonder why everyone is so fearful and angry all the time. It's not healthy. The news should report race in headlines where it's actually relevant to the situation and provide details and historical context in the text of articles. It does little good to stoke outrage and confirm bias at a glance.
>It's a common but I think unhelpful observation that americans make racism worse by focusing on race more.
Common, unhelpful, and selective. The whole idea of "race" is arbitrary and meaningless. Ask someone to come up with a specific definition of who qualifies as a member of what "race", and they won't be able to, because it doesn't exist. Obviously we are saddled with the barbaric vestiges of the past, but that doesn't mean that we are forced to carry them on, codify them, and pretend like they have any sort of objective meaning. All the identify fetishists, racialists, and those who insist on codifying the nonsensical racial nonsense from the past are part of the problem, do a disservice to society and prevent us from moving forward.
The most unhelpful opinion is "pretend history doesn't exist and pretend people formed their opinions from the collective worldwide knowledge of when I made this comment". It is of no use in the actual world that exist and just is an idealized version of what people who haven't experienced the problems wish to be true.
My real life experience is that people who benefited directly or indirectly from racism and inequalities from the past, want people to not question their status and would rather pretend that living memory is something that was fake.
Edit: Petrov, your entire post history seems to be riddled with whataboutism and seemingly bad faith arguments
Race is arbitrary but that doesn't mean racism is imaginary? Arbitrary things can have profound material effects on our lives, racism is actually a powerful example of this.
> It's a common but I think unhelpful observation that americans make racism worse by focusing on race more. I see it often in the comments here, people saying things like "why make it about race" or "we should ignore everyone's race."
> The thing is it was already about race. Even if that cop disappeared those men for completely non-racist reasons (and we pretend their motivation is even knowable in that way), the racial history of american policing is such that it's part of the story anyway.
> A black person reading the race-sanitized headline is going to immediately think "yeah and I bet I can guess their skin colors too" and on looking into it find out they were right and come to conclusion it was obscured out of intentional complicity.
> There is no race-neutral way to report on or discuss many things in an american context because those things are not race-neutral. We can certainly wish it were otherwise, but when we try to enforce that fictional neutrality we both obscure and create other problems.
Unfortunately, that's the entire point; it's not a coincidence that questioning "why make it about race?" is overwhelmingly from people who benefit from the history you mention. It's just another form of the same cognitive dissonance of that much-overused but often apt Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Class war disguised as a culture war. The old gits still play the same games.
And no I don’t care about ageism; not when the elders hid climate change from the young.
Tacit ageism against next generations constantly wrapped up in equivocation and appeals to authority embedded in long dead mens political documents.
Generational churn of post war shell shocked paranoids that went stupid drinking lead, huffed leaded gas and other crap before bans on industrial messes needs to go faster
At least one of my still-alive parents (vaguely) remember "colored" water fountains in some areas. They were just young children, but witnessed a bit of that. Their parents certainly witnessed it. People in my immediate family, in their lifetime. Not history book stuff. They were there. It's crazy.
>It's not crazy that such blatant racism occurred in the late sixties, it's crazy that people pretend all the racists and the way they thought just suddenly disappeared.
It's equally crazy that many people pretend that racism in 2023 is remotely as bad as it was in the 60s. That isn't to say racism doesn't exist or that it isn't a lingering issue for society, but there is no doubt that for the last ~25 years we have been moving in the wrong direction as far as perceptions go. Can anyone honestly say that racism and discrimination is worse in 2023 than it was in 2001? But since the very effective propaganda narrative pushed by the media and the DC blob seeks to divide people along racial and identity lines (to avoid any sort of class solidarity), many believe that "racial relations" are at, by far, the lowest point in decades!
