Just announced, House Oversight Committee led by Rep. Luna is forming a taskforce to uncover secrets of JFK/RFK/MLK, UFOs/UAPs/USOs, Epstein, Covid Origins & 9/11
- JFK: Single-shooter incorrect and likely involved 2 shooters. FBI has thousands of pages of new documents
- UAPs: "We are not alone". "Let's see the evidence"
- 9/11: How much did the CIA know in advance
- Encourage whistleblowers to come forward
I tried voice chat. It's very good, except for the politics
We started talking about my plans for the day, and I said I was making chili. G asked if I have a recipe or if I needed one. I said, I started with Obama's recipe many years ago and have worked on it from there.
G gave me a form response that it can't talk politics.
Oh, I'm not talking politics, I'm talking chili.
G then repeated form response and tried to change conversation, and as long as I didn't use the O word, we were allowed to proceed. Phew
I find it horrifying and dystopian that the part where it "Can't talk politics" is just accepted and your complaint is that it interrupts your ability to talk chilli.
"Go back to bed America." "You are free, to do as we tell you"
Online the idea of "no politics" is often used as a way to try to stifle / silence discussion too. It's disturbingly fitting to the Gemini example.
I was a part of a nice small forum online. Most posts were everyday life posts / personal. The person who ran it seemed well meaning. Then a "no politics" rule appeared. It was fine for a while. I understood what they meant and even I only want so much outrage in my small forums.
Yet one person posted about how their plans to adopt were in jeopardy over their state's new rules about who could adopt what child. This was a deeply important and personal topic for that individual.
As you can guess the "no politics" rule put a stop to that. The folks who supported laws like were being proposed of course thought that they shouldn't discuss it because it is "politics", others felt that this was that individual talking about their rights and life, it wasn't "just politics". Whole forum fell apart after that debacle.
Gemini's response here is sadly fitting internet discourse... in bad way.
I have come to understand that "no politics"/"just politics" means no election campaign talk.
As almost everything that is personal is in some way political (when taking the meaning "what strategy to use for ruling over a city") even the discussion of what politics is can kill discussions. (Like it seems to have happened in your example.)
So my conclusion is you cannot separate "personal" and "political" into completely disjoint categories.
The rule seems to be in place to make discussions not veer off in direction of which policies to apply/to be in favor of which particular politicians (which is nowadays the biggest taboo for a corporate LLM).
I sometimes wish magically there could be a social network of:
1. Real people / real validated names and faces.
2. Paid for by the users...
3. Competent professional moderation.
Don't get me wrong I like my slices of anonymity, and free services, but my positive impressions of such products is waning fast. Over time I want more real...
There's nothing wrong with (and in fact much to be said in favor of) a "no politics" rule. When I was growing up it was common advice to not discuss politics/religion in mixed company. At one point I thought that was stupid fuddy-duddy advice, because people are adults and can act reasonably even if they disagree. But as I get older, I realize that I was wrong: people really, really can't control their emotions when politics comes up and it gets ugly. Turns out that the older generation was correct, and you really shouldn't talk politics in mixed company.
Obviously in this specific case the user isn't trying to talk politics, but the rule isn't dystopian in and of itself. It's simply a reflection of human nature, and that someone at Google knows it's going to be a lot of trouble for no gain if the bot starts to get into politics with users.
It's challenging because one person's "politics" is another person's "my extended family is being actively slaughtered in the middle east, how can I think or talk about anything else." Is the person wrong for that? The line for what is and isn't politics is incredibly blurry and is almost always drawn on the side of whoever already has the most privilege
That would still be politics, yes. What would be the benefit of discussing it at work? The particular example you give is one which is especially divisive. If someone feels emotionally affected by an issue to the point where they cannot focus on work they should take a leave of absence.
It's called being an understanding human. Unless you limit the topics to the weather and definitely not in the changing climate style, you will talk about real life quite often. And someone's real life may be a school dropoff one day and a grenade landing on their brother digging trenches in Ukraine the day after. If you hard nope out of tougher subjects, they're unlikely to talk much to you afterwards.
If you're unable to focus at work because of some personal trauma, then the best thing to do at most companies is talk to your line manager about it to explain the situation. That's entirely reasonable and I would think that most people will respond empathetically in that situation.
I don't think that's typically what is meant when discussing 'leaving politics out of work' though.
You could also argue that politics can't be discussed civally in normal conversations because there is a rule not to do it and Noone has the experience. If we all grew up in a environment where people civally discussed politics we might be able to do it. It really wasn't that long ago when mitt Romney defended Obama on stage as a good, honest family man, as impossible to imagine as that is today
Will people really agree to disagree and move on, though? That certainly hasn't been my experience. Over time I have found that some people can do that. For example, my wife and I actually very rarely agree on political matters, but when we do discuss them I know that neither of us will belittle the other or walk away thinking the other is a horrible monster. But that's rare in my experience. So I only talk politics IRL with people who I know have that ability, and it takes time to feel out who can and can't be trusted to do that. Thus, I don't talk politics in mixed company.
I also think another aspect of the "no politics" rule which is important is that it attempts to preserve spaces where people can just enjoy things. People need to escape from politics and just enjoy the good things in life together. This is important for personal mental health but also social cohesion, as it's extremely difficult to have positive relationships with those you only ever argue politics with. If we don't have spaces which enforce a no politics rule, you can't ever unplug from the madness and that isn't good.
I've actually travelled a lot (ground truthing pre WGS84 map datums and geophysical exploration) and both things can be true;
* locals everywhere discuss politics between themselves, many are able to discuss politics 'reasonably' but things can and do get heated, AND
* it's good advice as a traveller to not get drawn into political discussions with locals. Listen by all means, going further can be a bad move.
I recall a radiometric survey in Nor'Western India when an underground mini nuke was detonated near our aircraft .. that got rather tense, particularly when the others were detonated and Pakistan responded.
There's a big difference between "no politics" and "no party politics". If it involves people, it involves politics! But it's only party politics if it's discussion that references (possibly very obliquely) a political party.
It's too common that people say "politics" when they mean "party politics", and I know that's not a battle I'm going to win. But it's still necessary to remember that a strict rule of "no politics" is an oxymoron, being itself inherently political.
There has to be a better way about it. As I see it, to be productive, AI agents have to be able to talk about politics, because at the end of the day politics are everywhere. So following up on what they do already, they'll have to define a model's political stance (whatever it is), and to have it hold its ground, voicing an opinion or abstaining from voicing an opinion, but continuing the conversation, as a person would (at least as those of us who don't rage-quit a conversation when they hear something slightly controversial).
Indeed, you can facilitate talking politics without having a set opinion.
It's a fine line, but it is something the BBC managed to do for a very long time. The BBC does not itself present an opinion on Politics yet facilitates political discussion through shows like Newsnight and The Daily Politics (rip).
There aren't many mono-cultures as strong as silicon valley politics. Where this intersects with my beliefs I love it, but where it doesn't it is maddening. I suspect that's how most people feel.
But anyway, when one is rarely or never challenged on their beliefs, they become rusty. Do you trust them to do a good job training their own views into the model, let alone training in the views of someone on the opposite side of the spectrum?
I don't know if I trust them as such, but they're doing it anyway, so I'd appreciate it being more explicit.
Also, as long as it's not training the whole model on the fly as with the Tay fiasco, I'd actually be quite interested in an LLM that would debate you and possibly be convinced and change its stance for the rest of that conversation with you. "Strong opinions weakly held" and all.
I agree it's ridiculous that the mention of a politician triggers the block so feels overly tightened (which is the story of existencer for Gemini), but the alternative is that the model will have the politics of it's creators/trainers. Is that preferable to you? (I suppose that depends on how well your politics align with Silicon Valley)
I think it will still have the politics of its creators even if it’s censored with a superficial “no politics” rule. Politics is adjacent to almost everything, so it’s going to leak through no matter what you talk about.
Eh, OP isn't stopped from talking politics, Gemini('s owner, Google) is merely exercising its right to avoid talking about politics with OP. That said, the restriction seems too tight, since merely mentioning Obama ought not count as "politics". From a technical perspective that should be fixed.
OP can go talk politics until he's blue in the face with someone willing to talk politics with them.
One plus is that’s usually less pointless noise this way.
If the model says “sorry, no politics, let’s talk about something else” - there’s a tiny fraction of a minority will make a comment like you did and be done with it. We can all move on.
If the model responds as neutrally as possible, maybe “Obama’s chilli is a great recipe, let me know when you want to begin”, we end up with ENDLESS clutching of pearls, WOKE MODEL SUGGESTS LEFT WING CHILLI BETTER THAN RIGHT WING CHILLI!!! CANCEL LEFTIST GOOGLE!!!
And then the bit that actually bugs me, just to stir up some drama you’ll get the occasional person who absolutely knows better and knows exactly what they’re doing: “I’m Professor MegaQualifications, and actually I will show that those who have criticised the models as leftist are being shut down[1] and ignored but the evidence shows they have a point…”
[1] always said unironically at a time when it’s established as a daily recurring news story being rammed down our throats because it’s one of those easy opinion generators that sells engagement like few other stories outside of mass bloodshed events
I find it kind of useless due to the no politics and I usually quickly lose my patience with it. Same with DeepSeek. Meanwhile you can have a decent conversation with Mistral, Claude, pi.ai and other LLMs. Even Chat GPT, although the patronizing appologizing tone is annoying.
Of the two nncp uses transformers but isn't an LLM while ts_zip doesn't use transformers but is an LLM. Remember LLM just means large language model, it doesn't make any assumptions about how it's built. Similarly transformers just relate tokens according to attention, they don't make any assumptions those tokens must represent natural language.
I.e. anything you can tokenize can be wrangled using a transformer, not just language. Thankfully the same author also has a handy example of this: transformer based audio compression https://bellard.org/tsac/
It looks like Skanska is GC for the Project, and cites it as a 9 acre (!) lumber roofing system[SK], and that it uses 3.5M board foot of Douglas Fir Project Lumber[PL].
Douglas Fir is 3.2 pounds per board foot, or 1.45kg [DFM]. So 1.45 * 3.5M = 5Mkg of lumber for PDX airport.
DF has an Embodied CO2 of 1.6kgCO2/kgLumber [DFC]. A little hard to believe? But maybe that's bc a lot of the mass of a tree is left in the ground. Worth following up.
1.6kgCO2/kgLumber * 5MkgLumber = 8MkgCO2 = 8KtCO2 embodiment/sequestration from the PDX roof project. (tho there's a lot more to the project that probably goes in the other direction)
Global CO2 emissions from commercial flights is ~60MtCO2/month [CF], so we need roughly 12,000 airports per month, 144,000/yr, to offset flight CO2 emissions.
There's 9000 commercial airline airports [NA] (tho obv many smaller than PDX, but they would also represent less CO2 from their flights), so 144,000/9000 is a 16x annual airport rebuild rate we'd need to offset CO2 emissions from the flights they service.
So yeah, this is absurd on the face of it.
But, how much of the mass of an airport is the roof? If it's like 1/100th the total mass, and you start building airports with all wood (foundation, runways, etc) you'd get to 16% annual rebuild rate to offset flight emissions. Still too high to be plausible. But another 10x somehow and you get to ~1% range of annual airport rebuild rate to offset emissions.
Based on the discussion in the descendent thread with morsch, it seems like the runways are the real story, at 1000x the mass of the airport roof.
But concrete is not so CO2 intensive. Lumber has a +1.6 sequestration factor of CO2 emitted vs built mass, compared with concrete at -0.8.
So we'd need runways made mostly of wood, or combined with a Woodcrete that was net sequestering, and then maybe there's a way to make even our most CO2 intensive industries net neutral so long as we rebuild continuously.
Also, since construction is about 40% of global CO2 emissions, if it could become a net sequestration as a whole, maybe it could flip the sign to -40% and offset most of the rest of our industrial emissions.
This also got me interested in what's a good number for rebuild rate.
Found a study that concludes the "Apparent ecosystem carbon turnover time [T]" is 43±7 years.
So maybe we should be rebuilding our built environment at 2.3%, or probably higher since species have evolved to be more energy intensive, humans especially.
> tho there's a lot more to the project that probably goes in the other direction
I mean, this is obviously why this is just a fun math exercise and not much else. Building an airport, even if you build part of it out of wood, is not net carbon-negative.
Just finished the full edit.. check it out. If the full airport is made out of wood, seems like it's getting towards plausible, or at least not obviously wrong
Most uncertainty is how much mass the ceiling is compared to rest of airport. Maybe it's more like 1/10th. Hmm
I'm not convinced the wood used in the Portland airport project is net negative in itself, once you factor in the emissions of harvesting, processing and transporting it. I.o.w. leaving the ugly old roof in place would probably have been better, in terms of CO2eq emitted.
I found a more authoritative reference, from the Institute of Structural Engineers, which appears to be a major international organization [ISE].
The Embodied Carbon figure they use is 1.64kgCO2/kg timber as a rule of thumb [ISE-EC], and agrees with what I posted above
For processing that yields built lumber, they account in stages, with % CO2 emissions added:
A1) Raw Material Extraction, 20-25%
A2) Transport to Facility, 8-10%
A3) Manufacture, 5-10%
A4) Transport to Site, 50-55%
A5) Construction, 10-15%
A1 to A3 reduce sequestration by 0.28, for a net of 1.36. They then say A4&5 account for 1.5x more emissions than A1-3, so .42kg total factor, for a net sequestration of 1.22kgCO2/kgBuiltLumber. They separate these as the transport is the largest variable between projects.
These figures are from Austria to UK. From the reporting, the PDX project is using mostly local wood.
So I think they're getting a net sequestration for the roof project.
It's really interesting that building with wood has this major sequestration factor. It'd be really something if we could build our way out of the environmental crisis just by switching to wood! :)
[ISE-EC] https://www.istructe.org/IStructE/media/Public/Resources/ARU..., p17: "The amount of carbon sequestered can be assumed as -1.64kgCOe per kg of timber when product-specific data is not available". I take the e to be emission, so a negative is a sequestration.
thanks. Also forgot to note size difference between those airports.. DEN is #4 in the US with 38M passenger boardings/year, PDX #33 with 8M. So maybe 4x larger
Just announced, House Oversight Committee led by Rep. Luna is forming a taskforce to uncover secrets of JFK/RFK/MLK, UFOs/UAPs/USOs, Epstein, Covid Origins & 9/11 - JFK: Single-shooter incorrect and likely involved 2 shooters. FBI has thousands of pages of new documents - UAPs: "We are not alone". "Let's see the evidence" - 9/11: How much did the CIA know in advance - Encourage whistleblowers to come forward
https://x.com/RepLuna/status/1889404082118398379