??? Do they really though? I rarely see the sentiment that literally all ill-gotten gains forming the foundation of their nation’s power and stability should be returned (and definitely not from people benefitting). Mostly it’s just tossing a few cultural artifacts, some meager reparations, and cutting back on some luxury like chocolate because it makes them feel bad. That’s the same as freeing a few slaves after you profit off them for your whole life (and we established that makes you a demon).

Or are you arguing about injustices in classes? If everyone being exploited by the rich agreed to dismantle that system it would be done by now. Doesn’t matter if you’re poor, you participate in the problem.

You probably just want your exploitation to be marginally less than the guys on the bottom, you don’t care about the core issue. Therefore being opposed to the compete dismantling of our current economic system is regressive and 90% of earth’s population are demons

Every single democracy in Europe is younger than America’s by an order of magnitude. Most have gone through 2 or 3 forms of government since it was founded. You have the luxury of not “being the villains” because your governments haven’t been around long enough to have nasty shit stick to them. They were all emphatically on board with doing vile stuff to stop the communist boogeyman, they just let America’s guns to do it.

The American exceptionalism narrative was born out of WWII, because they really were the “best” industrialized country by virtue of not being a smoking crater. Every state that has reached or is on the path to being a modern nation has blood on their hands, America just hasn’t had the chance to symbolically wash them.

There are people today rightly pointing out the looting of the global South by the global North, and yet nobody in the north is volunteering to give it all back. What disgusting human beings, if they had any decency they’d give it back and ritually kill themselves

They absolutely would have if they had the resources to swing it

Ah, but your regressive and racist system built by rascist white guys 250 years ago entrenches the power of regressive and racist white guys. Therefore you are a bad person.

Let’s ignore the fact that every single poll shows more Americans favoring progressive policies. Let’s ignore the systemic disenfranchisement of everyone who’s not a rich white man (and their candidates still lose the popular vote every time). Any random person in San Diego is the exact same as someone living 1600 miles away in Omaha.

Why don’t we apply the same revulsion to, idk, Belgians? King Leopold II directly killed ~10 million people in his own private colony. Doing that 116 years ago is better than George Washington freeing his last 123 slaves when he died 228 years ago?

Is that not how dentures worked at the time? Any tooth you got was from someone so poor they had to sell it or who had it taken from them.

Modern equivalent would be displaying shoes made in a sweatshop. Yeah terrible practice, but so commonplace its generally not a huge reflection on the character of the owner.

And yet you use a phone, checkmate socialists

One bad thing doesn’t make a different but also bad thing ok. And in my opinion it is worse, imagine if their world view could only come from 5 second videos. Throw those history books away.

And I don’t know that it’s overstated and it’s not at all perpetual. Look at… everything these days. People “disagree” with fundamental facts and are blindly allowing our planet to be burnt to the ground.

It takes concentrated effort to build and maintain an educated populace. The wide availability of books and increased literacy directly caused the Renaissance, pulling down the status quo and giving us access to modern medicine and literally every right + luxury you enjoy today.

I mean it’s the same use; it’s all literacy. It’s about how much you depend on it and don’t use your own brain. It might be for a mindless email today, but in 20 years the next generation can’t read the news without running it through an LLM. They have no choice but to accept whatever it says because they never develop the skills to challenge it, kind of like simplifying things for a toddler.

The models can never be totally fixed, the underlying technology isn’t built for that. It doesn’t have “knowledge” or “reasoning” at all. It approximates it by weighing your input against a model of how those words connect together and choosing a slightly random extension of them. Depending on the initial conditions, it might even give you a different answer for each run.

It can’t ever accurately convey any more information than you give it, it just guesses details to fill in. If you’re doing something formulaic, then it guesses fairly accurately. But if you tell it “write a book report on Romeo and Juliet”, it can only fill in generic details on what people generally say about the play; it sounds genuine but can’t extract your thoughts.

Not to get too deep into the politics of it but there’s no reason most people couldn’t get there if we invested in their core education. People just work with what they’re given, it’s not a personal failure if they weren’t taught these skills or don’t have access to ways to improve them.

And not everyone has to be hyper-literate, if daily life can be navigated at a 6th grade level that’s perfectly fine. Getting there isn’t an insurmountable task, especially if you flex those cognitive muscles more. The main issue is that current AI doesn’t improve these skills, it atrophies them.

It doesn’t push back or use logical reasoning or seek context. Its specifically made to be quick and easy, the same as fast food. We’ll be having intellectual equivalent of the diabetes epidemic if it gets widespread use.

LLMs work by extrapolation, they can’t output any better than the context you give them. They’re used in completely inappropriate situations because they’re dead easy and give very digestible content.

Your brain is the only thing in the universe that knows the context of what you’re writing and why. At a sixth grade level, you could technically describe almost anything but it would be clunky and hard to read. But you don’t need an LLM to fix that.

We’ve had tools for years that help with the technical details of writing (basic grammar, punctuation, and spelling). There are also already tools to help with phrasing and specifying a concept (“hey Google, define [X]” or “what’s the word for when…”).

This is more time consuming than an LLM, but guarantees that what you write is exactly what you intend to communicate. As a bonus, your reading comprehension gets better. You might remember that definition of [X] when you read it.

If you have access to those tools but can’t/won’t use them then you’ll never be able to effectively write. There’s no magic substitute for literacy.

The reason it feels like that is because it’s addressed to someone who you don’t know personally, even if you know them professionally. You never really know if a specific reference would offend them, if their dog just died, how “this email finds” them, etc…

And in the context of both of you doing your jobs, you shouldn’t care. Its easier to get day-to-day stuff done with niceties even if it’s hollow.

That’s just the tone tho. People trying to insist they give a shit when everyone knows they don’t is what bothers me. If you’re firing someone don’t sugar coat it.

In all of those examples, the user knows exactly what they want and the tool is a way to expedite or enable getting there. This isn’t quite the same thing.

If we were talking a tool like augmented audio to text I’d agree. I’d probably even agree if it was an AI-proofreader style model where you feed it what you have to make sure it’s generally comprehensible.

Writing as a skill is about solidifying and conveying thoughts so they can be understood. The fact that it turns into text is kind of irrelevant. Hand waving that process is just rubber stamping something you kinda-sorta started the process of maybe thinking about.

Burnie Burns? Weird choice but I admit it’d be an upgrade

Thanks for appreciating the struggle, I’ll drink to that 🍻

Even looking strictly at the voting population, Trump got less than 50% of the votes; more people voted “not Trump” than voted for him. That’s before you account for the majority of 90 million non-voters holding left leaning views (studies say irregular voters are as low as 40% republican voters) with either no acceptable candidate to support or living under voter suppression.

Did you know it’s possible to with the presidency with as low as 23% of the popular vote? Guess which color states have a massively oversized impact on the electoral college…

The people getting shot are not Trump voters at this point. More specifically, people that are opposed to absolutely destroying other countries are the first ones targeted.

Even if we all suffered perfectly evenly, only 22% of Americans voted for Trump. Please keep the other 78% in mind.

The dirty little secret is that nobody in any government has control without the backing of guys with guns. In the US, that’s the executive branch headed by the president.

If Democrats (and any handful of Republicans secretly hiding their shred of dignity) have any chance, it’s not going to be as a toothless opposition. Best case they’re ignored, worst case they have a terrible accident involving a high window.

Ensuring they have some semblance of support from the military would be priority #1, second would probably be hoping the Supreme Court would lend them legal support by not tearing up the constitution. With the backing of both, the non-treasonous remnants of Congress could pick up the pieces with some semblance of legal continuity.

Without the military, your only choice is to concede to the executive branch. You could stand firm and end up a constitutional martyr to fuel some civil unrest, maybe even form your own government in exile, but not much beyond that.