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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Well back when computers were being developed/ improved there was a pretty strong commitment throughout the Western nations to advancing and expanding education for everyone.

    In that paradigm, people would become more educated and better at critical thinking at a steady pace, probably on par with the rate at which computer programs advanced in their capacity to mimic human behavior.

    So, “can it fool more people into believing it’s a human” would’ve been a great test of whether the program was super advanced.

    Instead we’ve had 50 years of attacks on public education by Republicans that has been tolerated - or at least not fought hard enough - by Democrats. So not particularly advanced programs can fool a great many people. That does make the Turing Test moot, I think.





  • The F-35 would be good if they hadn’t wasted so much time and energy and weight on having a pilot in it. On board pilots are a complete waste.

    (Plus I bet dollars to doughnuts every F-35 we’ve sold to an “ally” has a secret switch somewhere to turn it into a drone.)

    It would be impressive if it didn’t have a meat sack in it that needs climate control and fresh air and not to turn to hard…

    there’s a reason the F-16 and F/A-18 are still the major US workhorses in the skies. (And of course my favorite the A-10 for blowing shit up on the ground.)




  • It looks like the “they’re both the same” disinformation from the hexbear side of the internet made a pretty strong impression. I’m not going to call it determinative by any means but it put some weight on the scale.

    I think attempting to court Never Trump voters and Haley voters was penalty the biggest mistake. They could’ve spent that time and energy trying to win workers, getting their messaging to be more “real person” instead of focus grouped.

    Like, the real solution was for Biden not to run for re-election at least, and at most to resign in February 2023 or right after signing the Infrastructure Law or chips.






  • This is an inaccurate claim by Sanders. Biden was the first President to walk a picket line with striking workers.

    With union negotiations, he was pretty balanced. He did come down on the railroad strikes some after both sides got stuck, but they did get improvements beyond what management wanted to give. With the ports, though, he stuck with the workers and forced management to negotiate by refusing to override the strike.

    Could the Democrats do more? Sure. But they’re still recovering from the fever that took the party over with Clinton in '92. There are a lot of people who believe that win was a meaningful approval of the pro corporate but not racist Democratic Party platform, when in reality Clinton only won thanks to Perot.

    I don’t know that there was any magic messaging that Harris could’ve deployed this time around. I’m not sure there was any likely alternative even from a short post-Biden primary that could’ve done better than her.

    Trump has everyone thinking he has some magic way to boost salaries and lower prices. And he railed against the elites more stridently and apparently people believed him.

    On the other hand Google saw a lot of traffic with people asking if Biden dropped out so who knows what could have been done to avoid Trump 2.