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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.








  • I love how he just uncritically and with absolute credulity accepts excerpts from a letter written by Zuck with no supporting evidence, no examples of what “pressure” looked like, etc.

    I can’t believe these people are still so butt hurt about the perfectly reasonable actions taken by the US and State governments and governments worldwide in response to a once in a century global respiratory DEADLY pandemic that killed millions and millions of humans.

    And as far as FB (and other social media) goes, fuck em. And fuck the users. Types of speech can be illegal. Defamation (lying about someone) and false advertising (lying about a product or service) can be illegal even though it’s definitely speech. These have “lying” in common, which to me implies there must be something about lying (specifically misrepresenting reality) that weakens typical 1st Amendment protections.

    But it’s clear what this guy is most sad about is the traffic he got while his article about Woodstock going on during a lull in the comparatively mild pandemic that was “active” at the time (no meaningful H3N2 activity in the US at the time) went away when FB rightly changed the algorithm to not boost his stupid irrelevant “analysis.”

    But people like the writer of this article are either too addled by conspiracy galaxy brain or too committed to lying for money to care that they could really hurt people with their bullshit.

    This guy needs to go to something less harmful like selling homeopathic tinctures or lying about the moon landing or flat earth or something.


  • I agree that they shouldn’t have to make excuses.

    There are people out there who are persuadable but currently buy the Republican anti union bullshit, though. For better or worse, one way to crack through that wall is to point out the ways that unions and collective action like strikes leads to better outcomes for every worker (not only union members), and every worker’s child.

    I’m aware there’s some pseudo science danger, but if the membership is informed and can vote their conscience individually, I’m sure they’d do better than not most every time. Obviously if there’s a pressure campaign or film flam man at the top lying or misleading it can all go to shit.


  • If a whole union votes to strike, it’s for a good reason and with a reasonable expectation from the whole union membership that the outcome of the strike is worth the interruption to everyone’s lives.

    Given the Wisdom of Crowds is an actual thing that really works, it shouldn’t be surprising.

    What should really be called into question is letting one CEO or a C-Suite or a Board of Directors make drastic decisions that will change the lives of thousands of people without any input from the greater community. Those people are only human.

    What was the name that one media company had their board come up with that was so stupid?


  • I read a pretty convincing article title and subheading implying that the best use for so called “AI” would be to replace all corporate CEOs with it.

    I didn’t read the article but given how I’ve seen most CEOs behave it would probably be trivial to automate their behavior. Pursue short term profit boosts with no eye to the long term, cut workers and/or pay and/or benefits at every opportunity, attempt to deny unionization to the employees, tell the board and shareholders that everything is great, tell the employees that everything sucks, …


  • There were enough Republicans who voted for Biden in '20 to flip Georgia, which is solidly “mainstream” Republican (e.g. Reagan Republicans).

    The article’s analysis of why Hillary lost is correct, and the diagnosis of the failures of Clintonism is also correct. They fail to point out that Clinton “won” '92 because Perot pulled away enough Bush votes in enough states to swing the Electoral College to Clinton, who only got 40% of the popular vote. That “victory” somehow convinced a bunch of Democrats that conservatism without bigotry (or at least less) was the key to electoral success. Clinton got reelected with the power of incumbency and BobDole being a fairly weak candidate. That cemented the conservatism lite in the Democratic Party for a generation, many of whom are still in the party.

    It’s changing though. Biden is not a classic conservative Democrat anymore, or at least his team and policies aren’t.

    One big thing they need to do is acknowledge that the system is rigged against the non wealthy, and that small-d democracy as it exists today in America is not up to the task of helping the non wealthy. Then they need to propose ways to fix our broken democracy, ask young people for suggestions for how to fix it, and write some binding policy proposals to implement those fixes.

    Because right now Trump and the Republicans are acknowledging that our democracy is failing non wealthy (straight white Christian) people, and the solution they’re offering is to do away with it entirely in favor of Hungarian or Russian style authoritarianism.

    The first part of that message will resonate, and the “help us fix democracy” part needs to be the 2nd half. Or Trump probably will get reelected.