Never threaten.

Even if you have the ability to defend yourself against a bully that is motivated by piss and vinegar, that doesn’t mean you want a target on your back or for them to see you coming.

My guess is that many of the people who are willing to resist kinetically aren’t going to say anything or threaten anyone.

One day, a thug kicks down the wrong door and punches his own ticket. The next day the paranoia grips the jackboots and they start passing gun laws in a hurry.

Lots of cold dead hands after that and no one is willing to volunteer to be first in line to kick off that process.

Some will show up and do things only because they feel the support is out there to act and be seen.

I might make different efforts were I them, but they are at least paddling in the same direction I want to go. I just don’t have the energy to resent how they choose to spend their outrage.

Without even knowing what he spoke about yet, which I don’t, I can respect the conviction of a person who uses their platform to speak when they have rare access to that platform and there’s plenty to talk about.

Plenty of us are going on marathon posting sessions on social media and it’s to a much smaller audience. I have to empathize a little bit with anybody who feels exhausted or overwhelmed by the absurdity of everything but then gets up to speak for a whole damn day on one of the largest stages in the world

Even if the room is empty the audience is global. It may be grandstanding, but that’s part of the job. Getting attention to things you care about is part of the job. People put you there to bring attention to things that they hope that you care about.

If government’s going to work at all people have to give a shit about it and whatever this dude was talking about it’s clear he gives a shit about it.

A lot of people want a good tool that works.

This is not a good tool and it does not work.

Most of them don’t understand that yet.

I am optimistic to think that they will have the opportunity find that out in time to not be walked off a cliff.

I’m optimistically predicting that when people find out how much it actually costs and how shit it is that they will redirect their energies to alternatives if there are still any alternatives left.

A better tool may come along, but it’s not this stuff. Sometimes the future of a solution doesn’t just look like more of the previous solution.

These kinds of questions are strange to me.

A great many people are using them voluntarily, a lot of people are using them because they don’t know how to avoid using them and feel that they have no alternative.

But the implication of the question seems to be that people wouldn’t choose to use something that is worse.

In order to make that assumption you have to first assume that they know qualitatively what is better and what is worse, that they have the appropriate skills or opportunity necessary to choose to opt in or opt out, and that they are making their decision on what tools to use based on which one is better or worse.

I don’t think you can make any of those assumptions. In fact I think you can assume the opposite.

The average person doesn’t know how to evaluate the quality of research information they receive on topics outside of their expertise.

The average person does not have the technical skills necessary to engage with non-AI augmented systems presuming they want to.

The average person does not choose their tools based on what is the most effective at producing the correct truth but instead on which one is the most usable, user friendly, convenient, generally accepted, and relatively inexpensive.

A lot of those things have a business model that relies on putting the competition out of business so you can jack up the price.

Uber broke taxis in a lot of places. It completely broke that industry by simply ignoring the laws. Uber had a thing that it could actually sell that people would buy.

It took years before it started making money, in an industry that already made money.

LLMs Don’t even have a path to profitability unless they can either functionally replace a human job or at least reliably perform a useful task without human intervention.

They’ve burned all these billions and they still don’t even have something that can function as well as the search engines that proceeded them no matter how much they want to force you to use it.

Every particle accelerator that has been built has paid for itself in research value. There’s basically nothing that comes out of AI research except the need for a bigger model.

The comparison is poor. Particle accelerators are science, LLMs do not produce science.

That’s not to say that we couldn’t build LLMS that would be useful for scientific purposes but we’re not. That is not the function or the goal of the people building these things.

The volume of the power vacuum in the Republican party would likely be audible from Europe.

Neoliberals Don’t oppose fascists.

He will work with the fascist to come up with a compromise that the fascists can live with. That probably means sacrificing vulnerable groups and rallying around right wing talking points.

He is right wing. Gavin newsom is just right wing. the fact that there’s a uneven deeper more belligerent right wing out there doesn’t mean that he is somehow an alternative to it.

25 minute episode makes a headlines everyday until the next episode comes out which oddly enough isn’t each week because of how culturally relevant the episodes are the fucking president threatened their network.

I don’t know that there’s ever been a more culturally relevant show… Even back when they’re only like three channels.

I’m not talking about the openly bigoted chuds out there I’m talking about the regular rank and file Americans who decided there was no room to question the the horrors we expanded from the shadows and filled every corner of our media with.

Formerly kindly everyday american morons didn’t just watch it, they cheered. They scolded they youth for thinking we were entitled to the bill of rights. It was fucking bizarre who swallowed the bait.

After the 2000 election it was obvious that Republicans played by different rules than Democrats.

After 911 this country lost its fucking mind. Like millions and millions and millions of people just became fucking psychopaths. All of a sudden everybody was willing to split hairs on torture, child murder, forced starvation, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, double tap drone strikes The list goes on.

We became completely fucking insane. It was obvious at that point this is where we were headed. That was when I realized I needed to register as a Republican. Democrats don’t care about my primary votes if they even hold one but in my youthfully naive hope I entertained the idea that you could democratically affect anything.

Aside from the extra good feels of getting to vote against Donald Trump multiple times, The only real benefit is that I get visits from local Republican party officials and they think I’m one of them.

I always put on my home accent and complain about liberals but I don’t think they understand that they are just liberals of the God bothering type to me and I seek to dismantle them from root to stem. … … But please tell me about this canvassing operation you have in my town… What kind of cars are they driving? Just curious

Once again, this time everybody join in, “electric cars aren’t here to save the planet they’re here to save the car industry.”

Electric vehicles don’t really solve any of the problems that cars have. They just shift the resource and environmental problems into a different arena.

It seems to me that the most effective way of dealing with personal vehicles is to use renewable power to produce gasoline (Blue crude).

That way your gasoline is carbon neutral or even carbon negative until you burn it, can actually be kept sterile and separate and only mixed on demand so it doesn’t go bad, and never has any sulfur in it because it’s made from scratch.

It also means that all of the vehicles that currently exist can still be used which would dramatically reduce the amount of energy necessary to keep a functional fleet of vehicles and doesn’t need everything to be replaced including the infrastructure.

Peaker plants could be built to soak up all of the extra renewable power when production is so much higher than demand so there’s no need to worry about where you get the power to do this.

There are solutions out here but they require a kind of rearrangement of how we do business at almost every level.

It’s cynical, dishonest, manipulative, and completely unproductive.

Based on that alone I completely believe that Nancy Pelosi did the math and realized that Democrats could argue for this out loud maybe even vote for it but there’s no chance that it’ll ever happen so it’s a great chance for her to actually do politics with the voters which I thought she had considered beneath her.

Or this is the fall she was brought in for…

I’ve seen two this year.

I’ve seen More bald eagles land in the yard year than I have seen lightning bugs.

1994 a service called e world.

It was a funny little thing, My 2800 baud modem brought me tons of adventures and gave me a place to share D&D ideas with others.

It’s already not legal for ICE to hide their face and ID.

Laws are for poors, queers and browns, not for the red white and blue blooded American patriots

What’s the opposite of white noise? Because it’s that. That’s what I hear.

Much of the American Christian establishment is the type of Protestant that does not consider Catholics to be Christian.

I know that doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense but that’s how Americans “do religion”.

Baptists don’t care what the Pope has to say, seventh-day Adventists think he is actually the Antichrist. Most American Catholics don’t really care what the Vatican has to say and would resent the implication that they’re supposed to give a shit about the Pope’s opinion.

Americans just don’t do religion very well.