Democracy is bad but still the least worst system. The thing that people seem to ignore the most is that checks and balances are what make it great. A voting public is important but not the only important check on the system.

E N G A G E M E N T

Obligatory

I just gotta take a moment to reflect on the glorious cinemetography in that movie and the picture perfect casting. What about Peter Stormare’s Lucifer, too?

Or like our 45th/47th president himself

Got sort of a Night Vale vibe to it I think. I’d love more of this kind of stuff!

I always think about this when this topic comes up. 9/11 happens and Bush says ‘Drill baby drill’.

What if we had a president that was like ‘hey maybe we should get over our addiction to fossil fuels and sever this toxic relationship with the middle east?’ All the lives and money and time wasted on wars, and the destabilization it lead to in the USA and Europe which pulled people even further rightward toward this autocratic environmental suicide pact.

I wonder how different things would be if 1% of the people in Florida got off their couch and voted Gore.

EDIT I get y’all and agree but the point is that if Gore had won but just a bit more they wouldn’t have been able to stop the count and send it to SCOTUS

Really I just lightly spray some canola oil in the pan and add sliced onions and heat.

I always say if you want to seem like a genius in the kitchen just sauté some onions

Will it be released before I can explore the galaxy in real life?

It’s the only thing worse than getting interrupted using the app asking for me to review it

Finally a feel-good story makes the news

Ripped map pages out of the phone book

IMO it’s even worse than that. At least from what I gather from the AI/Singularity communities I follow. For them, AGI is the end goal - a creative thinking AI capable of deduction far greater than humanity. The company that owns that suddenly has the capability to solve all manner of problems that are slowing down technological advancement. Obviously owning that would be worth trillions.

However it’s really hard to see through the smoke that the Altmans etc. are putting up - how much of it is actual genuine prediction and how much is fairy tales they’re telling to get more investment?

And I’d have a hard time believing it isn’t mostly the latter because while LLMs have made some pretty impressive advancements, they still can’t have specialized discussions about pretty much anything without hallucinating answers. I have a test I use for each new generation of LLMs where I interview them about a book I’m relatively familiar with and even with the newest ChatGPT model, it still makes up a ton of shit, even often contradicting its own answers in that thread, all the while absolutely confident that it’s familiar with the source material.

Honestly, I’ll believe they’re capable of advancing AI when we get an AI that can say ‘I actually am not sure about that, let me do a search…’ or something like that.

Mastodon has serious UX problems that even other federated networks don’t have. I’m pretty well tech literate and love Lemmy, for instance, but I just couldn’t ever get Mastodon to stick for me, like it just didn’t have the right feel and wasn’t fun to use. And if it’s not working for me then it’s never going to take off with a more general audience.

Bluesky is a lot better. It still has some issues that I feel keep it from fully replacing Twitter, especially Twitter before Elon screwed it up. But it does manage to keep me checking it, even though it’s probably only once or twice a week max.

Why does that work?

The worst to me is everyone now including a shitty bag to put the product in. Like it MAYBE makes sense to include a case for travel headphones or something but no I do not need you to include something for me to put the external SSD drive in.

THANK YOU

Dubbaya gets too much credit by which I mean I think he’s still been a worse POTUS than Trump was. Trump is a miserable lazy grifting criminal but W. actively made the wrong decision at nearly every juncture creating ripples throughout the world that we feel today and will feel for decades to come if not longer. Only Jan. 6 made me start to think maybe Trump could be worse for the USA and the planet - but that remains to be seen. Definitely all bets are off if Trump gets elected again.

I’m sure the corpos love this stuff too, getting their fanboys to promote their products and shit on their competitors absolutely free.

I thought the larger point was that they’re using plenty of sources that do not lie in the public domain. Like if I download a textbook to read for a class instead of buying it - I could be proscecuted for stealing. And they’ve downloaded and read millions of books without paying for them.