And those generated worlds will have a hundredth of the “interesting stuff density” as ones the small team had time to thoughtfully construct by hand. It’s like the tomatoes and blueberries they bred to be bigger and getting the same amount of flavor as the old smaller ones stretched out with a lot of water.
Even if you’re running the party like it’s a cynical numbers game there are two possible scenarios. A. You could try to win more votes by moving to the right and peeling off center-right Republicans. Mostly old people who were proud of being asociated with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher but ashamed of being associated with Donald Trump and Tommy Robinson. You do this at the expense of losing however many people on the left wing who are barely willing to vote for you now, who if they see your new platform is sucking up to Israel harder, backing the blue, and throwing trans people under the bus, will just stay home.
B. You could try to win more votes by moving to the left and motivating the mostly young people who currently aren’t voting at all because both parties just answer to lobbyists and let billionaires get away with everything and nothing ever happens so what’s the point. They will vote for meaningful, structural change. They will vote for whoever comes out as standing for the polar opposite of every single thing conservatives stand for, and promising to fight for it hard.
You can bet on either path working out- again, even being completely mercenary and strategic and not taking a principled stand on anything. One or the other group of potential voters has to be larger.
Here’s the thing, in my whole life I have only ever seen Democrats- as a party- try doing A. Again and again and again. We have seen 3 decades of results demonstrating how effective a strategy it isn’t.
Might B work better? I don’t know, no one does, because they’ve never once just fucking tried it.
So I don’t believe it is even a strategy at all, not a serious and good-faith one. It’s a ruse; an op.
But the Democrats aren’t the only ones doing it. Look around the world, right now everywhere’s got some gutless, triangulating, unilaterally-compromising centrist party that’s good for business and good for business as usual and polls well with the low-information normies but when it comes down to it they will side with the far-right against the far-left 10 times out of 10.
Correct. The border is the Nam-Shub of Enki translated into binary. There is no Frog in the picture. The phrase "It is "͔͔̆ͧ͊I̞̪̝̝͈ͥ̉ͣ͜ṫ̷̤̗̩̘ 🐸ï̦̀̋̍ͣs̻̝̀̽͡ �̴̫̪̩ͩ̈͌̀ͥ�̷̝̪̣̊͒̇̓ͩ̑ m̵̧̞ŷ̴̭̘̠̜͘ �̣̯ͥ͞�͙̟̇̀ͪ̊̃̑̊͠�̘🐸�̐̌"̷̤̏́ ņ̯̠̉́̾́o̶̫ͪͭͤ̆w͙̭̠̄͗ m̴̱̮̬̑͢ͅͅą̺̳̼̖̭̗̽͢k̺͙ë̷͍̳̟̀ͦ͡š̷̰̳̠͙ y̽̐̊ó̲̩̖̀̐ͪu̶̢̅ �̢̰͍͎̩̯̭͞�̵̢̬̺̞̖̹̠̿̊ͬ s̯̓ͩͦ i̷͂͞n̰͕͍̆̌̈́ t̙̃̀̐̏h̷̸̙̩̜ͯ̈̊̍ͫ͞è̤ �̧̘�̗̽🐸̡̡̓͗ͅ�̜̰̳͔̭̈́ͫ͌̆͑�ͣ�̻̳͆ͬ̇�🐸̬̹͢_̲̲͇͖̉̾͢�̱̦̪͙̹̀̓ͯ̈̚ͅ�̸̨͍͗�̷̹ͪ�̛͉̯͂ͭ�̻�.̯
I don’t think Jeffries needs to be impeached. I think the Democratic Party to act like their name suggests and ask the voters. They are allowed to choose their own leaders any way they want, right? So instead of having a closed meeting secret vote to keep the same guy as last time, hold a non-binding referendum and mail special ballots out to every registered Democrat. Everyone can rank their top 10 and bottom 10 choices for the next Speaker of the House. They don’t have to commit to going with the popular winner but they do have to publish the results, and it would look bad on the leadership if they don’t pick someone in the overall top 3.
Caramac
[ discontinued in 2023 ]
As of Oct 5, only 3,615 people have one. Pretty weak launch considering the size of the cult.
One where I could learn from endless wells of knowledge just waiting to be tapped
Pops out of nearby well
Excuse me, did I just hear you suggesting we should improve society somewhat?
they are probably voting for him again right now
He’s not up for re-election and not on the ballot. Only a subset of Congress is. A Democratic majority in Congress would not mean we get a new president, nor does it make it possible to impeach and remove the current one. Also, neither snap elections nor no-confidence votes are a thing here.
It seems a lot of non-US people watching from a distance have higher hopes than they should about the significance of this midterm election, due to not really understanding how the US system works and/or thinking it’s a parlimentary system like a normal modern democracy.
Which is why the European / Canadian “OMG dO sOmEtHiNg you pussies!!! No…? Guess you’re all fine with fascism then…!” commenters are especially irritating because there’s really only one way he doesn’t stay in office until Jan 2029, and that’s already been tried unsuccessfully, and just gets you president Vance anyway. Or president Johnson, if you managed a two-for one. A different president before 2029 is not a possible outcome of protesting- any amount of protesting. Those “No Kings” events are just cargo-cult civil disobedience for liberal boomers to virtue signal at. They have no demands to make, no credible threat of escalation if the demands are ignored, and no reason for the regime to take them seriously.
Entirely backwards- asexual people don’t need to make excuses for it. But someone who’s forever alone with an attitude like the character in the meme is likely to pretend they’re asexual. Simpler that way. No one will challenge it because asexuality is something they don’t understand enough to argue about, beyond a vague notion it would come off as insensitive if they tried.
I wonder, do prions count as peptides…? 🤔
Can I put some in a tacticool camo print 5-Hour Energy bottle and sell it at Bucc-E’s?
MisfoldMAXXX™ Patriotic Prion Pack *
Proudly made in the USA with real Texas beef
* Not intended for human or animal consumption; entertainment purposes only. Not proven to increase testosterone or fat metabolism.
Fine, “clanker-wankery” it is then.
The Tibetans invented wind powered prayer wheels a long time ago, so it weirdly makes sense that Buddhists would rush to embrace this stuff too.
I think that the alternative, letting the wrong puberty run its course and risk severe suicidal ideation and lifelong self-image issues is much worse than not addressing the issue, citing “misdiagnoses” as the reason.
Christian-supremacist social authoritarians are the ones pushing transphobia in the US and elsewhere, and they always like to bring up the “what if the kids are just going through a phase and make a wrong choice and regret it later…” angle. It’s a bad-faith argument because they fundamentally do not believe it is ever possible for being transgender and transitioning to be the correct choice. For anyone, ever.
Their position is that all trans people are wrong and crazy and sick, and need to be saved by Jesus to come back to the truth that they are actually cisgender like everybody else in the world. Because they deny the existence of trangender people as a real thing, it’s something made up by Satanic perverts and cultural Marxists. Ideally kids never even find out trans is even a thing, because it would be illegal to talk about it. Failing that, they need to be psychologically tortured at a pray-the-gay-away conversion camp. If they still can’t be made normal, they need to be disowned and discarded; the woke mind virus got them.
You can chart up the statistics, here’s how many adults regret trying to transition as a teen, versus here’s how many adults regret not being allowed to transition sooner. Doesn’t matter. None of the people in the latter column “count”. It’s similar to trying to show how few instances of voter fraud there are vs. how many people are disenfranchised by voter ID laws. They don’t really care about the research, the logic, the fairness, the math. They care that their side is the only right one and that the only people being hurt are the others.
Also I believe conservative men want for transfem kids in particular to go through the ‘wrong’ puberty because it makes them easier to spot. The majority of their own sexual experiences are one-night hookups with drunk strangers. So they fear accidentally mistaking one for a “real woman”, because if they did that would make them gay. No, they want trans women to stay as a PornHub category where they belong.
They care more about that than teens killing themselves, because that’s just what being a right-winger is. The absolute selfishness is as core to conservative identity as the bigotry.
The wheels have fallen off some time ago but the bottom has not yet worn through from dragging it up to the curb each week.
We know cats dream but not what they dream about. But it would make sense to me that anthropomorphic cats- cat-human hybrids, giant cats that walk around like people, people with cat heads- would be a very common cat dream trope. So something they have only seen before in the chased-by-the-catpeople trying-to-turn-them-into-a-catperson nightmares they remember having all the time as a kitten. They haven’t had one of those dreams for years. Feeling quite secure that catperson is not real and catperson can’t hurt them. And then…
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
-Upton Sinclair
Let’s be real though; that savings you were able to wipe out by overspending when the cost of living went up wasn’t nearly enough to matter anyway. The amount of savings that matters is in the low 7 figures. If you are very careful and disciplined and organized, and sacrifice most opportunities to live well on your time off, and lucky enough to avoid major catastrophe- you can* achieve that after an entire lifetime of selling your soul to the capitalist machine in 40-hour increments. So that for your final 10-to-20 years before dying of old age, you get to maintain a humble working-class standard of living without having to work, and that is a successful life. The American Dream.
*Or at least you could acheive it, under more favorable economic conditions than what we have now or can expect to ever see again in the future.
If you have a 401(k), is it really your retirement savings or is it just your surviving a layoff and not becoming homeless for however many months it takes to find another job savings? That depends entirely on how big it is right now. And if you have to use it for the latter while it’s still at its current size, the chance of being able to use for the former goes down significantly.
Also, if you paid off all your debts would you still have savings left over? If not, then you don’t actually have any savings.
Maybe young people are choosing sports betting over investing in stocks and bonds these days not because they don’t understand economics and finance, but because they do. A small, very high-risk chance of making enough money vs. a low-risk chance making definitely not enough money- that could be entirely rational.
Because if you’ve only saved almost enough to retire, you still have to work until you die to make up the difference; just at a low-paying part-time job. You know, the hardest, worst jobs involving the most actual work.
Ok that was a heavier rant than I originally meant to write in response to a lolcat shitpost on 196. Maybe more directed at the dozen or so boomer-coded, survivorship-biased, victim-blaming Marketwatch op-ed articles I’ve hate-read for whatever reason.
I didn’t recognize it but that’s because I forgot I read an article on this guy. Probably because he is forgettable. In fact I think this is at least the third time I’m reading about him and then forgetting he existed. Pop artist 60 years late to the pop art party, seem trying to get Beeple level attention but only willing to put Jeff Koons level effort into it. Annoyingly, with much success.
So now knowing who it is, that’s the third strike that sells the comic. He only has one figurine on display, and he probably wants to make an impression, so he thinks this one by a ‘cool subversive contemporary artist’ makes him look grown-up and a man of culture.
And the reason this is even tolerated is only because most people don’t understand how LLMs work. Like politicians and their “kill switch” idea if an AI “goes rogure” for example. That there’s like one persistent Claude entity, living in a big room at Anthropic HQ remembering and learning things from all the users it interacts with… Of course it’s not that, it’s an instance of a program that launches and runs the same function every time on whatever inputs it is fed. Sometimes it is set up to feed back old inputs each time so it acts like it has some memory of what your instance previously did. Training a model is sort of like creating a hologram and prompting it is sort of like taking a photo of the hologram from a certain angle.
They could of course train the next version of the model on everyone’s prompts to the previous version- and probably are. But that’s in no way necessary, and is already sort of a desparation move when they’re running out of input text.
If the trade secrets / PII you’re foolishly sharing with it are getting leaked that’s not an accidental, inevitable consequence of how AI works. It’s because the company hosting the AI is greedily harvesting and storing all your inputs, for no other reason than you agreed it could in the TOS you didn’t read, and then later oopsie they failed to secure it because they don’t really care and know no one will hold them accountable. Yor prompt is the same as any other text you sent in an input form to any website, the company has it and can decide to only use it for what it has to- or for everything it can get away with.
How about kinetic orbital bombardment. You know, “Rods From God.” Didn’t turn out to have much strategic military value, but would they be an effective deterrent against spammers, scammers, junk mailers and robocallers? One way to find out!