I hear you, you have a point. On the other hand, though, a resurgence in popularity may mean new/better tools and options. I’ve been thinking about getting a Jellyfin/*arr setup going lately because of how splintered the streaming services have gotten, and the new tooling does seem very cool. More popularity means more contributors and more QOL features. Double edged sword.

Has it gotten better? I was around during its heyday. I haven’t done much torrenting since streaming became a viable option (because piracy is about convenience, etc.), so I’m out of the loop with bittorrent in practice today. I used to be able to just use TPB back when it was the best public tracker, but it started getting sketchier after the guys got arrested. Simple, had everything. Download with your client, and you’re done. Had to use PeerGuardian for avoidance, then VPNs, but it was always easy. Is it somehow easier now?

Torrenting has been around for just about forever, and was massively more popular/mainstream one to two decades ago than it is now. Trackers get taken down, but bittorrent endures.

And in doing so it would lock everyone using that service into a single UI. Structured data is better. You have an irrational fear of an extremely basic web technology.

That’s a very interesting idea. It might also incentivize creators because it gives them a more stable audience that’s at least a little insured against viewership changes on any single platform due to changes in that platform outside of their control.

Right there with you on that

It’s even worse on Threads, believe it or not.

X sucks, but Threads is even worse. 99% of everything I have ever seen on Threads is pure distilled engagement bait, and half the time expanding replies gets stuck loading. I wish I were exaggerating, but I’m not.

It doesn’t progress your argument. You do not come across as the one arguing in good faith here, just so you know. You should think about why, if you are.

Keep up the good work

That’s great. The history communities on the other site were such great quality on average and I miss them. How do you have time to do all that?

Oh shit you mean like AskHistorians? Is there enough density now for that?

Personally, I’ve found that LLMs are best as discussion partners, to put it in the broadest terms possible. They do well for things you would use a human discussion partner for IRL.

• “I’ve written this thing. Criticize it as if you were the recipient/judge of that thing. How could it be improved?” (Then address its criticisms in your thing… it’s surprisingly good at revealing ways to make your “thing” better, in my experience)
• “I have this personal problem.” (Tell it to keep responses short. Have a natural conversation with it. This is best done spoken out loud if you are using ChatGPT; prevents you from overthinking responses, and forces you to keep the conversation moving. Takes fifteen minutes or more but you will end up with some good advice related to your situation nearly every time. I’ve used this to work out several things internally much better than just thinking on my own. A therapist would be better, but this is surprisingly good.)
• I’ve also had it be useful for various reasons to tell it to play a character as I describe, and then speak to the character in a pretend scenario to work out something related. Use your imagination for how this might be helpful to you. In this case, tell it to not ask you so many questions, and to only ask questions when the character would truly want to ask a question. Helps keep it more normal; otherwise (in the case of ChatGPT which I’m most familiar with) it will always end every response with a question. Often that’s useful, like in the previous example, but in this case it is not.
• etc.

For anything but criticism of something written, I find that the “spoken conversation” features are most useful. I use it a lot in the car during my commute.

For what it’s worth, in case this makes it sound like I’m a writer and my examples are only writing-related, I’m actually not a writer. I’m a software engineer. The first example can apply to writing an application or a proposal or whatever. Second is basically just therapy. Third is more abstract, and often about indirect self-improvement. There are plenty more things that are good for discussion partners, though. I’m sure anyone reading can come up with a few themselves.

May I ask how you’ve used LLMs so far? Because I hear that type of complaint from a lot of people who have tried to use them mainly to get answers to things, or maybe more broadly to replace their search engine, which is not what they’re best suited for, in my opinion.

Put simply, some states get more electors than other states to account for greater population, and each state decides how their electors are supposed to vote according to their statewide popular vote. Most states apply all of their electors to the winner of the popular vote in their state, while some apply them proportionally. Most do the former (“winner takes all”).

This leads to a discrepancy between the popular vote and the electoral vote, and it’s mathematically biased against states with higher populations. So, votes in the more populous states (which tend to vote Democrat) are worth “less” in the electoral college than those in less populous states, leading to Democrats winning the popular vote yet losing the actual election… which has happened in every election they’ve lost since Bush v. Gore, if I’m not mistaken. I’ll double check that and edit if I’m wrong.

Edit: Sorry, it did not happen for Bush v. Kerry, Bush won the popular vote in that one by less than 1%. However, in the other two (Bush v. Gore and Trump v. Clinton) the popular votes were actually won handily by Gore and Clinton, not by Bush or Trump.

Edit 2: This is also notably NOT made worse by gerrymandering, because the number of electors you get is equal to the combined number of senators and congressmen your state gets. Since all states apply their electors based on the popular vote result, it doesn’t matter what party alignments your congresspeople have, so gerrymandering plays no role here.

The mathematical bias comes from the fact that every state gets two senators no matter what the population is, and only your congressperson count is proportional to population, but both count toward your number of electors. So, less populous states have proportionally somewhat more “electors per capita” than states with higher populations.