Readit NewsAt first glance, it’s easy to compare them to a charismatic “know-it-all” who sounds confident while being only half-right. After all, both can produce fluent, authoritative-sounding answers that sometimes miss the mark. But here’s where the comparison falls short — and where LLMs really shine:
(...ok ok, I can't go on.)
Dog whistles are where someone says something that their audience will understand to mean a specific thing, but will be inaudible or neutral sounding to people who are not in their audience. They are named that because they are like the whistles only dogs can hear, while most people cannot.
"Inner city" is a canonical example of a dog whistle. Where the literal meaning is the districts in a city in the urban center, but is often used to denote poor minority communities. (If the literal meaning is only "city centers", then would you describe Manhattanites as inner city?)
On the left, "tax the rich" might be a dog whistle that carries a similar literal meaning disjoint from the understood meaning within the community.
That's basically what I said, except you're missing that more often than not it's an intentional stretching of a literal phrase in order to cast aspersions on someone who didn't do the thing you're mad about.
For example, here was one of the top results when I googled "trump dog whistle",
> In February 2018, during Trump’s first term as president, the Department of Homeland Security issued a 14-word press release titled “We Must Secure The Border And Build The Wall To Make America Safe Again.” I and other investigators of far-right extremism attributed this phrase’s use to a clear dog whistle of the common white supremacist saying known as “the 14 words” – “we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
https://theconversation.com/musks-inauguration-salute-is-not...
Or this top result from the search "musk dog whistle",
> Omar Suleiman has called on Elon Musk to stop blowing political "dog whistles of Islamophobia"
> Yet, for the past week, you have blown every conceivable dog whistle of Islamophobia, by highlighting a select group of (horrifying) incidents supposedly in the name of Islam
In this case absolutely no examples were given, but that's the great thing about accusing someone of dog whistling - you don't need to provide any evidence! In fact, literally any evidence you can provide would only serve to weaken your accusation because by definition anyone who isn't whichever -ist you're accusing them of will literally be unable to decode the -ism in their phrasing. If it sounds obviously -ist then by definition it can't be a dog whistle.
Facebook's product is eyeballs... they're being usurped on all sides between TikTok, X and BlueSky in terms of daily/regular users... They're competing with Google, X, MS, OpenAI and others in terms of AI interactions. While there's a lot of value in being the option for communication between friends and family, and the groups on FB don't have a great alternative, the entire market can shift greatly depending on AI research.
I look at some of the (I think it was OpenAI) in generated terrain/interaction and can't help but think that's a natural coupling to FB/Meta's investments in their VR headsets. They could potentially completely lose on a platform they largely pioneered. They could wind up like Blackberry if they aren't ready to adapt.
By contrast, Apple's lack of appropriate AI spending should be very concerning to any investors... Google's assistant is already quite a bit better than Siri and the gap is only getting wider. Apple is woefully under-invested, and the accountants running the ship don't even seem to realize it.
Good grief. Please leave your bubble once or twice in a month.
Tiktok yes. X and Bluesky, absolutely not.
It feels like dog-whistle tactics. "Aren't the technology companies bad for the environment!" "What about the water usage?" "What about the electricity?"
For me the peak of this is complaining about water consumption at the Dalles datacentre [0]. The buildings are next to the Colombia river and a few miles away from the Dalles Dam [1] which generates an average of 700MW. The river water should be used for cooling, taking out some of the water, warming it up by a few degrees and returning it to the river; one might argue that this is simply returning the heat to the river that would have come from the water flowing downhill.
[0] https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2022/12/googles-wa...