khepri

Or trying to look like they are trying. "Trying" kind of implies at least a tiny sliver of a chance of actually succeeding, which this, at the current political moment, absolutely does not have. Believe me, I'm all for them trying stuff, but this might as well be proposing eliminating the electoral collage, electing Senators based on population, or passing the ERA. I'm all for all of those things, but they are a total pipedream from our current position. I just really really don't think there is an appreciable number of voters out there who think that now is the time for democrats to be showing off their impossible Christmas wish list because "people will complain if we don't". What people are complaining about is Dems puttering around having meetings and proposing non-starter solutions rather than owning the fact that they got stomped this time and should now switch to organizing the type of ground-level resistance that worked such wonders for the republicans the last 10 years.

True. I really wish they would focus on things they can actually do as the minority. Like, this is performative, but I'm not even sure for who it's supposed to be performative. Do dems honestly think there's even a single voter out there with the attitude of "well I wasn't going to vote next year, but after seeing dems moonshot yet another dead-on-arrival amendment about a 15-year old court ruling I'm on board!"

Look at what republicans were able to accomplish on the level of school boards, counties, churches, state houses, election commissions, etc while they were out of power and steal their playbook for goodness sake 😒

Yeah, that was my first thought when I read this too. There were plenty of people for whom the internet in general, or later social media, was too complex for them to bother with. I think each generation of technology leaves behind a certain % of people who are past the point of being willing or able to learn how to use something new, and that isn't really a bad thing.

Yes, you have to have some notion of what "federated" means and how it works to make full use of federated sites. But it's just asking people to learn a little bit about a couple new terms, and spending a few minutes outside of their comfort zone while they orient to a new environment, just like when the internet itself or social media started. And I think we obviate the entire point of building something new by trying to make it completely familiar and friction-less for people. If that was the best way to build community, then the internet would just be the phone book and social media would just be the personals section of a newspaper.

Yeah, I wish the legal system didn’t have this deference to “the voters will decide” when it reaches the level of actual criminal activity. Like the fact that you are running for or currently hold some office should have no impact at all on whether we are all equal before the law or how the law treats us. Yet every court and law enforcement agency seems terrified of the appearance of influencing the outcome of an election to the point that as long as you are running for something you are essentially legally bulletproof if the election is coming up soon.

I wonder if they understand what they’re encouraging by making the punishment for protests harsher than the punishments for direct action…not that that’s any of my business…

Where I live we get lots of local candidates who are some combination of democrat-green-progressive-working family alliances. Building coalitions from the bottom up like that, and showing that people with “green” in their bio can really be elected, is the way to move things forward. At the national level, the two-party system is far too entrenched to have a third party be anything but a defacto spoiler that turns off their own supporters more that anything else.

So they slapped some reinforcement learning on top of their LLM and are claiming that gives it “reasoning capabilities”? Or am I missing something?

It’s pretty hard to imagine a way for groups of people with varying goals and interests to operate without some form of value exchange. This can either be barter, or some form of currency. Our specific kind of extractive capitalism based on creating endless cycles of debt and credit can certainly be replaced with any number of alternatives, but the idea of money itself is just too basic and useful to humans, imo.

I don't know about the disposal of rubber, but the production of rubber has historically enslaved and destroyed entire populations and environmentally wrecked whole regions of the earth in Africa and South America...

Just the way this is going to go I guess. Ukraine has to fight with one hand tied behind their back, because the US says so, because appeasement like that always works when autocrats invade sovereign nations... Imagine in the late 1930s the UK ordering, lets say Poland, to not set foot on German soil and only fight in Poland because otherwise (gasp) we might make Hitler really mad and he might do something crazy. So too bad for you Poland, but we'll just have to adandon support for you if you attack inside Germany, just how these things go...

Wait, are the cars themselves are twice as likely to hit pedestrians, or are the drivers of the cars twice as likely to hit pedestrians?

The old Chevy Sparks are basically golf carts with 4 doors and permission to drive in the roads. They are the least "techy" EVs I've seen in person as they are really just a battery swap with the minimally-appointed ICE version of the car, which is very sparse on the electronic doodads.