I think the point is that, since polygraph readings are pseudoscience, it's always the interrogator who picks what they "mean". If this is true, a smart test subject cannot mislead them, since there's nothing to mislead, as the polygraph is just a pressure technique and it means whatever the interrogator needs it to mean.

It's very hard to understand what you're arguing though.

You agree the CIA is not "broadly a force for good" (which I consider a big understatement). You also don't seem to disagree it's an organization whose activities involve, among others, torture, assassinations, extraordinary renditions, psyops, etc. Yes, sometimes to "prevent wars", other times to incite wars or to topple governments they don't like, or to help crush down rebellions they don't like, or to help rebellions they do like.

So why this fixation on pointing out that the majority of CIA analysts are pencil pushers and not directly involved in unsavory activities? They still enable them. And they willingly work for this organization, why make excuses for them just because some of them are nerds who wear a suit and don't personally torture anybody, and instead translate Farsi or Chinese?

As a reminder, this is the comment to which you're reacting:

> The guy trying to work for the psychological torture club got psychologically tortured a little? My heart bleeds for him

I mean, the comment is right. This guy in TFA did willingly belong to a psychological torture group, even if he's not directly involved in this particular activity. It's ok for us to react at the irony of the situation, that he feels tortured by the polygraph, given the organization he belongs to. They didn't even physically touch him, yet he felt "abused".

I'm sure you understand the slippery slope of comparing the CIA to all of the US government is just not right.

Your experience of "lizard people" vs "bureaucracy of normal people doing the legwork" seems to match Arendt's banality of evil, right?

Though Arendt seemed to imply those normal people were not very smart or imaginative. Just blindly doing evil stuff simply because they were told to.

Interesting. I have a very different experience with YouTube, to the point I consider it my favorite social network thingy. My search history and subscriptions are carefully curated, and I mostly get "more of the same", with pretty good recommendations for stuff that usually interests me. Also, zero "thirsty" stuff.

Logged out, YouTube is of course a complete mess.

Logged out, YouTube suggests me endless videos about MMA fighting or trash for children. I only use the YouTube app for commenting. I use Brave to avoid constant adverts.

I do notice though that YouTube is always trying to bias me in one direction or another. I have a friend whose feed is full of Trumpbait and stuff about how Putin is about to die and the Ukraine war is about to end. (Sounds fine except these videos have been saying that for four or five years.) Whatever one things about these things, the videos he gets are very propagandistic and have ridiculous AI thumbnails and titles. Usually of Putin or Trump scowling at something. He also gets suggested a lot of food videos (okay, I suppose) and often ones about Nazis and WW2 (a bit fetishistic, but to be fair he did history at university).

My non-political YouTube suggestions tend to be about popular music from decades ago. I emphasise "about". I notice the algo more rarely suggests actual music itself. I suspect this is because YT has to pay out money for music but not videos about it. I get some local history stuff (which is interesting but usually not about areas I know well). I very rarely get suggested much in the way of Scottish, Irish or Welsh content, in spite of viewing a lot of it. Never anything about what's happening with Scottish politics (always from a London perspective) or the parliament here.

This is very likely.

It reminds me of people who browse YouTube logged off: they see garbage, spam, rage bait, and sexy girls doing sexy stuff.

But I browse logged in and my carefully curated subscriptions mean I mostly get good quality, relevant recommendations, and almost zero rage bait or outrageous stuff.

> No, it's not. Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. It started about two years ago.

This isn't my experience at all. I get "sexy girls" reels, but infrequently and that's it. No other "thirst traps" at all, most of my feed is relevant to my interests too. Been on fb for many years now.

> For what it's worth, whatever LLMs do extensively, they do because it's a convention in well-established writing styles.

I think that's only part of the story. I think that while it's true what LLMs do is somehow represented in their corpus of training data, they also lack any understanding of how to adapt to the context, how to find a suitable "voice", and how not to overdo it, unless you explicitly prompt them otherwise, which is too much of a burden. Their default voice sucks, basically.

So let's say they learned to speak in Redditese. They don't know when not to speak in that voice. They always seem to be trying to make persuasive arguments, follow patterns of "It's not X. It's Y. And you know it (mic drop)." But real humans don't speak like this all the damn time. If you speak like this to your mom or to your closest friends, you're basically an idiot.

It's not that you cannot speak like this. It's that you cannot do it all the time. And that's the real problem with LLMs.

(Sorry, couldn't resist!)

Yes, but it's kinda sad, isn't it, that this robotic way of writing in turn teaches a new generation of people how to write?

Also, you forgot the extremely enervating: "It's not X. It's Y. <Clincher>."

Why laugh? Why can't a tool have good and bad uses, and why can't one be disappointed about the bad uses but embrace the good ones?

Ah, yes, the LLM Exchange Protocol.

I believe it's already in place, making the internet a bit more wasteful.