Need to call a special fact-finding hearing featuring the editors of Merriam-Webster’s, Collins, and the Oxford English Dictionary. Let’s pencil it in for three weeks from next Monday.

M O I S T U R I Z E M E

IMHO 2012 was the one that really broke their brains. The tea party types tried to get various firebrands on the ticket, but end up having to support Romney. Hey, at least he’s a squeaky-clean telegenic millionaire pushing the most severe conservative fiscal policies! Proceeds to get stomped by the Obama campaign so bad that Karl Rove couldn’t believe it as it was happening. THEN the establishment GOP flirts with moving to the center on immigration. The backlash against that on the right, supercharged by the mainstreaming of mobile social media (plus social justice protests and the looming Clinton campaign) was what fueled the rise of Trump.

Science location, you rube.

Climate change is the single overriding issue for me. We are beyond out of time to avert damaging levels of warming, and even Biden’s climate policies – by far the most sweeping in the history of the country – are barely adequate to begin steering us away from the absolute worst. If Trump gets in, and eviscerates federal climate policy, and stacks the EPA with oil lobbyists (again), and fills federal courts with science-denying assholes, and sabotages state and local efforts to decarbonize, and destroys all chance of global cooperation on this issue, and (most importantly) dismantles democracy so that it is effectively impossible to vote for a progressive ever again absent a second civil war, then we will be consigning the entire planet to “nightmare hellscape” levels of climate change with no viable pathway out. A second Trump term would add four billion tons of carbon emissions over the next six years. It would “negate – twice over – all of the savings from deploying wind, solar and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years”. And that analysis doesn’t account for increased emissions from Trump policies, just a reversal of what Biden has accomplished. Allowing Trump to win again would not just be national, but global suicide.

I do try to block ads, but tbh it’s impossible to be mad at Google for pushing them. YouTube is a modern miracle of engineering – no other platform on the planet hosts the scale of video it does, indefinitely, with instant access, for free. It is more than fair for them to recoup the massive cost. Personally, if they had a cheaper version of Premium without the music features, I’d pay for it in a heartbeat.

It’s a fine idea but feels like it’s maybe past its prime in terms of active maintenance? Like I checked out my old neighborhood in the suburbs of a large US city and the primary road through it (which the area is named after and has a very big visible welcome sign indicating that) was misspelled. I don’t have an account and didn’t care to learn how to edit it, but I did drop a note flagging the error. Then I browsed some of the other notes and noticed they were all multiple years old. Even Manhattan was littered with months- or years-old notes with only a handful of them marked resolved. Maybe they were just hard edge cases not easily fixed, but it gave the impression of a database that has not been broadly maintained for years.

I imagine it’s because of the generative AI stuff. If they’re using their servers to generate, they’re going to be responsible for what it puts out, even if it’s just responding to user prompts.

Lemmy might be less active but doesn’t make you feel like every contribution is rewarding someone who actively insulted and disrespected you and ruined something you used to enjoy. Big plus.

If it is just a repackaging of ChatGPT’s existing “search the web” function, I don’t know why they’d bother. It can at best summarize a page of search results for a very literal-minded query, and even then it’s often lobotomized by the fact that OpenAI has made it easy for a large number of top websites to opt out of having their pages accessible to their search crawler, which means you’re only getting a summary of the search result snippet and metadata. A competent user of Google search can run rings around it in terms of research, even with Google’s decline in quality. I guess it makes it faster to answer basic queries for recent information not in the training data, but that hardly seems worthy of a big event.

Just goes to show how one-note she’s gotten, that even the owner of the platform who’s no SJW and desperate to ingratiate himself to celebs is like, “can you give it a rest already?”

I scrolled through her feed to see how long before that was her last non-trans-related tweet and gave up after two dozen.

idk, I think it’s worth stopping to recognize how incredibly fucking weird it is how there’s this whole segment of the population who spend an inordinate amount of their time and attention just absolutely obsessing over their hatred of trans people. Rowling is the public face of it but she’s hardly alone.

Heckjumpers

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/07/12/a-wider-perspective-on-flavor

Bad timing, IF it depresses pro-choice turnout enough to give Republicans full control of the AZ state legislature (and potentially the federal government) so that they can re-implement this ban or something close to it. Republicans only need 4 state senators and 9 state reps for a veto-proof majority, which they had as recently as 2012. The existence of the ban was expected to juice turnout on the left – hopefully people do not have short memories.

It just goes to show how intent they are on destroying any government mechanism that helps regular people, no matter how obscure, in order to afford more tax cuts for the obscenely wealthy.

Go tell a hungry child how unimportant free school lunches are.

To avoid charges of bias, how about direct quotes from their own manifesto:

Environmentalism “is not a political cause, but a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue. At its very heart, environmental extremism is decidedly anti-human

The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensi- tive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.

Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.

Rescind regulations prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, and sex characteristics.

Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s `radical chic’ to build the totalitarian cult known today as “The Great Awokening”

Eliminate the heat-and-eat loophole. States can artificially boost a household’s food stamp benefit by using the heat-and-eat loophole. The amount of food stamps a household receives is based on its “countable” income (income minus certain deductions). Households that receive benefits from the Low-Income Heat and Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) are eligible for a larger utility deduction. In order to make households eligible for the higher deduction, and thus for greater food stamp benefits, states have distributed LIHEAP checks for amounts as small as $1 to food stamp recipients.

the USDA should not provide meals to students during the summer unless students are taking summer-school classes. Currently, students can get meals from schools even if they are not in summer school, which has, in effect, turned school meals into a federal catering program. Restore programs to their original intent and reject efforts to create universal free school meals.

Eliminate the Head Start program. Head Start, originally established and funded to support low-income families, is fraught with scandal and abuse.

That was before the GOP became the party of sociopathy. I’m sure loving dogs will be the next symptom of the Woke Mind Virus.

ABC cites an odd claim:

Detectives allege that Darien used his Large Language Models, such as OpenAI and Bing chat, to create the recording. The charging document claimed that Darien has a paid OpenAI account, which gives users more features than the free version.

You can’t make audio using OpenAI or Bing, just text and images. I really hope they didn’t arrest the wrong person based on a hunch and office politics.