I think the issue is that this is not "dismantling the wheels of established power", so much as it is centralizing and increasing the power of the executive branch.
It's not getting rid of all these bureaucrats in DC and giving power back to the people. It's getting rid any sort of independence and removing the barriers to centralizing power under Trump so that he can grab even more power and control.
And just to be pedantic, Trump received 49% of the vote and Kamala receive 48%. And that's of people who voted. He received 77 million out 244 million of the voting-eligible population, or around 31%.
There may be a plurality of people who want the Executive branch under Trump to consolidate power, but it's not the majority.
I can see that, on the one hand he is removing what he thinks is bureaucratic fat while at the same time giving himself (or the position) powers to do so.
I personally believe the government of the USA is probably 10x the size it needs to be so i like seeing the cuts but I am well aware of the dangers you speak of.
The cuts in the federal government aren’t going to come from getting rid of the civilian workforce. It’s going to have to come from decreasing the military and cutting social security and Medicare. Do you think he would be willing to do either?
I wish I could find a link, but I remember a study that argued that large bureaucracies can actually impede authoritarian governments concentrating power.
The idea being that when there are so many levers to pull and a disjointed system managing them, it makes it effectively impossible for a small group to effectively wield power. It’s like a buffer against concentrating power into a single individual.
Not that I’m arguing for endless bloat to the US government, that comes with its own problems. I agree we need to rein it in.
But I think there is a freedom-centric argument for a slightly larger government bureaucracy than is strictly necessary.
Or thinking about it in reverse, the bureaucracy is currently preventing the executive branch from just doing whatever it wants. I know Congress and the Supreme Court should act as blocks, but to paraphrase Stalin how much infantry do they have?
A slow moving bureaucratic executive can act as a buffer against ineffective other branches.
Or for those that may support the current administration consolidating power, what if the tides turn? What if in 4 years whoever the liberal villain du jour is takes power? Are we making it so that AOC is the most powerful president in history?
You seem to assume that Trump will willingly give away his power in 4 years.
He most certainly remembers the January 6th failed coup and will likely spend the next 4 years making sure that he comes on top this time.
And yeah, if he fails, you better hope that the person which did succeed was liberal (and from I heard, AOC is not), because otherwise instead of putting back a system of checks and balances, they will just use the power that Trump concentrated to their own ends.
We do this as well with a lot of success. It’s cool to see others kinda independently coalescing around this solution.
What we find really effective is at content ingestion time, we prepend “decorator text” to the document or chunk. This incorporates various metadata about the document (title, author(s), publication date, etc).
Then at query time, we generate a contextual hypothetical document that matches the format of the decorator text.
We add hybrid search (BM25 and rerank) to that, also add filters (documents published between these dates, by this author, this type of content, etc). We have an LLM parameterize those filters and use them as part of our retrieval step.
I've tried a few things that seem to work. The first works pretty much perfectly, but adds quite a bit of latency to the final response. The second isn't perfect, but it's like 95% there
1 - the first option is to break this in to three prompts. The first prompt is either write a brief version, an outline of the full response, or even the full response. The second prompt is a validator, so you pass the output of the first to a prompt that says "does this follow the instructions. Return True | False." If True, send it to a third that says "Now rewrite this to answer the user's question." If False, send it back to the first with instructions to improve the response. This whole process can mean it takes 30 seconds or longer before the streaming of the final answer starts.
There are plenty of variations on the above process, so obviously feel free to experiment.
2 - The second option is to have instructions in your main prompt that says "Start each response with an internal dialogue wrapped in <thinking> </thinking> tags. Inside those tags first describe all of the rules you need to follow, then plan out exactly how you will respond to the user while following those rules."
Then on your frontend have the UI watch for those tags and hide everything between them from the user. This method isn't perfect, but it works extremely well in my experience. And if you're using a model like gpt-4o or claude 3.5 sonnet, it makes it really hard to make a mistake. This is the approach we're currently going with.
I think those people can, and often times should, be involved in the sales process. Espcially for big ticket B2B sales. But really those people just need to be available for demos, technical questions, etc.
If those people had to do their jobs, plus manage pipelines, plus BDR work, plus chasing leads that went cold, plus negotiating over contract language and price. . . well you get the point.
For big ticket B2B stuff, you really need a sales person (sorry Account Executive) running point. It doesn't mean that's the only person you talk to, or really even the person you talk to the most, but an AE needs to own getting the sale closed.
I will say prior to experiencing this myself I felt 100% certain that what you said is the truth. It just makes sense.
Now that I've had these experiences, I'm more like 90% certain that what you said is true. These experiences add a certain humility to the way I experience the world.
So in all likelihood, molecules like dmt will bind to certain serotonin receptors in the brain that cause strong and repeatable distortions in the visual field (even with eyes closed).
The human mind is great at picking out patterns and assigning meaning to them based on our experiences. So that shifting pattern in my visual space kinda looks like a face, I'm going to assign trickster machine elf to that visual pattern.
More likely than not that's what's going on. But there is probably some value in experiencing that.
Having said all that, the subjective experience of living that is very different. This feels incredibly real. As crazy as it sounds, it genuinely feels like blasting into a hyper-dimensional space and encountering a population of sentient entities.
That feeling is so real, that it leaves just the tiniest gap of "hmm, maybe I don't know everything after all. Maybe there's more to this story than I could've previously comprehended".
All to say is that while you're most likely right, I think it could be healthy to acknowledge that you're not definitely right. And leaving some room for uncertainty and exploration could prove beneficial, even for the skeptics among us.
I think the analogy still works in this scenario, though. Like once you've grown so much that your at capacity in your current setup, THEN you can invest in growing your business.
For this restaurant this adding a new room or a new location in another town.
For a solo founder, this might be when you finally start hiring to free up your time for other tasks.
It's not necessarily never grow. It's about growing on your own terms when you can afford to do so.
So one of the most "out there" non-fiction books I've read recently is called "Alien Information Theory". It's a wild ride and there's a lot of flat-out crazy stuff in it but it's a really engaging read. It's written by a computational neuroscientist who's obsessed with DMT. The DMT parts are pretty wild, but the computational neuroscience stuff is intriguing.
In one part he talks about a thought experiment modeling the universe as a multidimensional cellular automata. Where fundamental particles are nothing more than the information they contain. And particles colliding is a computation that tells how that node and the adjacent nodes to update their state.
Way out and not saying there's anything truth to it. But it was a really interesting and fun concept to chew on.
Definitely way out there and later chapters are what I can only describe as wild conjecture, but I also found it to be full of extremely accessible foundational chapters on brain structure and function.
Alertness early in the day seems to do the trick for me. I think of deep sleep as reaction to how alert I was earlier in the day. So on days I make an effort to activate myself early in the day, I will fall into longer deep sleep that night (2+ hours according to my fitbit). If I just kind wake up and laze around the house without getting much activity, then I I get under and hour of deep sleep, even with the same amount of total sleep.
What seems to work for me is immediate sunlight exposure right when I wake up, 5 - 10 mins of being outside, 16 oz of cold water right around that time, 2-5 mins of an activity that gets my heart rate up (jumping jacks, burpees, jump rope). If I can muster it, a cold shower also helps.
There are other things like getting exercise, avoiding caffeine after a certain time, avoiding light exposure prior to bed, avoiding alcohol, sleeping in a cool room that I think also help. But for me it's the making myself super alert right when I wake up that has the biggest bang for my buck.
This is anecdotal, n = 1 kind of stuff though. And I don't do it every day, and it doesn't work 100% of the time. But I definitely notice that I am far more likely to get a lot of deep sleep when I do those things than when I don't. Hope it helps you in some way.
I've found a barbell shape to the response. People either seem to really like or hate it. Not too many people I know that are in the middle.
I will say I'm one of the people that really like it. I'm a big fan of the first Dune book and I think it does a great job of being true to the story. It's visually stunning and the score is perfect. My only gripe (and it's a big one) is that the cut the dinner scene. I don't understand that choice at all, but it wasn't enough to ruin the whole movie for me.
People that I know who don't like it think it's slow and that nothing really happens. And they're right. It also just awkwardly cuts off in the middle, so it doesn't feel like a complete movie. As a fan of the book, that didn't bother me too much because I realize it's just half the story and they can't make a 6 hour movie. But it is jarring, especially if you aren't already familiar with the plot.
And you are 100% correct that this would be better suited as an HBO miniseries. There's just way too much to cram into a movie. If you haven't checked out SyFy's miniseries and the Children of Dune miniseries, they are surprising good given the low budget SyFy had for it (compared to Villeneuve's budget at least).
I'm "in the middle"; it's certainly not a bad movie, but it also failed to really capture me. I still prefer David Lynch's Dune – yes, it has its issues[1] but it's so much more creative and bewildering than the almost sterile "Villeneuve look". I certainly don't begrudge Villeneuve for following his own creative vision, but I wish it was more Lynch-esque, minus the problems of course.
[1]: The DVD copy of Dune I bought at the store many years ago has a cover with visible JPEG artefacts. It's a perfect cover.
I agree the movie is really good and hits the author's main themes pretty well. I also like the dinner scene in the book, and it plays a key role in fleshing out the complex socio-political-economic world of the Imperium - but for a movie it really wouldn't be feasible. It introduces too many characters (the banker, the water-seller, the smuggler, the honeypot, etc.) and has too many side-stories and nuances - it would probably take at least half an hour of screen time to do properly, and trying to cram it down would make it meaningless.
Similarly, in the book the time period between the arrival of House Atreides on Dune and the subsequent invasion is much longer and has many other side-stories going on, all of which are eliminated in the movie. Including all that material would require a HBO Game of Thrones type approach, with each book consuming an entire season.
Deciding which material is the most important must have been a hard decision, but I think they did a very good job considering the limits of the movie format, and the overall atmospherics felt just right.
Personally I'd like to see a David Attenborough-style special on "Dune: The Ecology of the Sandworm Life-Cycle" but it's not likely.
I'm with you mostly on the "really like" side. Sound all the way around is excellent. Little details like the horn blowing dust when they disembark from the ships on Arrakis are great. Salusa Secundus in the rain was great. The overall visual style is great. Casting was mostly great.
I just wish some of the sets were a bit more dense. The room for the Gom Jabbar scene, the Bene Gesserit walking back to the ship, cone of silence scene, and especially the palace fight on the stairs. Kinda gave my Sky Captain vibes.
I also don't like cutting the tension between Jessica and Thufir, although if Thufir doesn't end up under the Baron I guess I get it.
Interesting - having read the book several times I don't get the reference to the dinner scene; will have to look it up.
The parts which bothered me were the Zendaya slow-mo flash-forwards being too long and too frequent with no substance, and Lady Jessica crying far more than reasonable for the character I remember.
It's not getting rid of all these bureaucrats in DC and giving power back to the people. It's getting rid any sort of independence and removing the barriers to centralizing power under Trump so that he can grab even more power and control.
And just to be pedantic, Trump received 49% of the vote and Kamala receive 48%. And that's of people who voted. He received 77 million out 244 million of the voting-eligible population, or around 31%.
There may be a plurality of people who want the Executive branch under Trump to consolidate power, but it's not the majority.
https://election.lab.ufl.edu/2024-general-election-turnout/