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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Little of both. Ronald Reagan tilled the soil, and the later Republicans fertilized it. Why wouldn’t foreign disinformation groups sow seeds in such perfect fields?

    A big chunk of the problem in US politics is the two party system enforced by first past the post. Very few people actually agree with 100% of either party’s policies, so the deciding factor for most people becomes either which party do I agree with more of their policies, or in some cases which policies do I feel are most critical and therefore drive the overall decision. This has been made even worse by Republicans strategically picking policies to try to drive a wedge in between them and Democrats particularly around certain hot button issues like abortion, gun control, and religion.


  • This is why the GOP has been working hard for decades to destroy public education in the US. They want to make sure that only the rich are educated because the uneducated can be easily tricked into voting against their own interests. Unfortunately it’s working.

    It’s mandatory in a functioning democracy for the public to be educated and well informed or it doesn’t work. Unfortunately it’s highly debatable whether the US still qualifies as educated, and the likes of Fox News and Sinclair are hard at work destroying the informed part.

    All that said the ease with which misinformation spreads these days does need some kind of counter, otherwise we open ourselves up to Soviet style disinformation campaigns where the goal isn’t so much to drive a particular narrative as it is to sow confusion and make people distrust all information. They drown the signal in noise, so everyone just makes decisions based on their gut instead of facts. Social media has given a false equivalence where any random person on Facebook is treated as just as reliable a source of news and information as actual reporters are. This is incredibly dangerous.




  • I did read all of it.

    tends to fight for himself, not for the American people.

    This was a great statement. More of this.

    I expect that he’s gonna, you know, I think he’s gonna lie.

    This is far too weak, and doesn’t come across as sarcasm when printed. Maybe in person hearing her tone it would, but printed it’s too ambiguous. I’m just absolutely fed up with people soft peddling around Trump. He’s a habitual liar with at best a poor grasp of reality, who has run cons and scams for nearly as long as he’s been alive. It was one thing when he was just a scummy business man, but with his turn to politics and dictatorship we can’t afford half steps anymore.


  • The problem is a “sarcastic jab” is only one way of interpreting that statement. It also comes across as a mild but politically deniable statement of the sort that politicians have been criticized for making for nearly as long as politicians have existed. This is just the latest in a very long line of responses to Trump that stop short of actually saying what needs to be said. It’s the equivalent of news companies peppering “alleged” and “accused” throughout their reports. Most of the time that’s a good thing, but Trump has long since burned through whatever good will he was due. Stop treating him like a reasonable functional adult. If you give him and his followers (as well as the boot lickers over on fox) any wiggle room at all they’ll take advantage of it.


  • No I’m criticizing a weak wishy-washy statement of the kind that has been made repeatedly for decades now and allowed Trump to happen in the first place. We need to stop treating Trump like an adult and start treating him like the petulant child he is. He deserves absolutely no respect. People need to stop being afraid to speak the truth about him.

    There are only two kinds of people in Trump’s orbit, morons, and grifters trying to exploit the morons, with Trump occupying the point in the Venn diagram exactly in between the two.


  • I disagree, this smacks of the same limp wristed response that Democrats have been using for decades now. That’s how we ended up in this situation in the first place. It’s beyond time everyone stop pretending the emperor has clothes and actually acknowledge it. Trump lies. He always lies. I don’t think he’s ever given a single speech where he hasn’t lied at least once. There’s a reason his lawyers will move heaven and earth to prevent him from testifying in front of a jury in all his legal cases, and it’s because doing so would be an absolutely guaranteed way to catch a perjury charge.

    So yes, she should have just said “Trump will be repeating lies during the debate, so we’re preparing to counter them. At this point everyone knows all his favorite lies, so we’ve got a pretty good idea of what we need to be prepared for.”

    That would have been an actually good statement that clearly sets expectations and shows an understanding of the situation. Soft peddling anything with Trump and the MAGA crowd just wastes time and makes you look indecisive.






  • CEOs have very little to do with the failure or success of most large companies. If they work very hard they can pull a company out of a death spiral, or start it down one, but failure or success takes years if not decades of steady improvement or decline. All the examples of “failures” given in the article are terrible and don’t demonstrate at all that those CEOs were bad.

    One of the worst problems with businesses in the US currently is this culture of fetishizing CEOs. They’re paid far too much for what they actually bring to companies, and people grossly exaggerate how much of an impact CEOs have on companies. If you want proof of his just take a look at literally any company Elon Musk is a CEO of. The fact that none of those companies (particularly Twitter) have filed for bankruptcy yet shows exactly how little a truly terrible CEO actually impacts things.




  • At this point the US has massively diverged from the original intent. The original intent was that only wealthy male land owners would vote. Further the entire US government is just a very slightly modified version of what the UK used just with a President in place of a King, and states in place of noble houses.

    There is unfortunately a massive sentiment in the US to uphold the founders as some kind of perfect ideal of democracy and that anything that differs from their original intent is somehow wrong. The reality of course is that they were flying by the seat of their pants and largely making it up as they went. In addition ideas and morals have changed greatly since that time. We should be far less concerned about what a bunch of people who died centuries ago would think about some law or ruling and far more concerned about what impact it would have today.

    So yes, the Electoral College was intentionally set up as an attempt to prevent direct democracy, but so what? The question should not be what did they intend, the question should be do we still need/want it?


  • LLMs are basically just really fancy search engines. The reason the initial code is garbage is that it’s cut and pasted together from random crap the LLM found on the net under various keywords. It gets more performant when you ask because then the LLM is running a different search. The first search was “assemble some pieces of code to accomplish X”, while the second search was “given this sample of code find parts of it that could be optimized”, two completely different queries.

    As noted in another comment the true fatal flaw of LLMs is that they don’t really have a threshold for just saying " I don’t know that" as they are inherently probabilistic in nature. When asked something they can’t find an answer for they assemble a lexically probable response from similar search results even in cases where it’s wildly wrong. The more uncommon and niche your search is the more likely this is to happen. In other words they work well for finding very common information, and increasingly worse the less common that information is.