In some states, you can’t vote by mail except under specific circumstances, such as being a senior citizen or swearing that you’ll be out of state entirely on election day.

Removing the homepage entirely, replacing the entire UI with the shorts-style format of “view video right now, tap button to see next/previous video”. If you want a specific video, you must search for it.

I spent like 40 hours on XC2 and uh, idk I really liked the world design but wasn’t a fan of the effectively gacha mechanics to unlock new fighters. The story seemed to have a really slow start (which I’m not necessarily against) but the combat wasn’t my thing unfortunately. The Japanese voice acting is definitely a lot better than the English, and was worth waiting for the download on even though I didn’t end up playing that far in.

People developing local models generally have to know what they’re doing on some level, and I’d hope they understand what their model is and isn’t appropriate for by the time they have it up and running.

Don’t get me wrong, I think LLMs can be useful in some scenarios, and can be a worthwhile jumping off point for someone who doesn’t know where to start. My concern is with the cultural issues and expectations/hype surrounding “AI”. With how the tech is marketed, it’s pretty clear that the end goal is for someone to use the product as a virtual assistant endpoint for as much information (and interaction) as it’s possible to shoehorn through.

Addendum: local models can help with this issue, as they’re on one’s own hardware, but still need to be deployed and used with reasonable expectations: that it is a fallible aggregation tool, not to be taken as an authority in any way, shape, or form.

How about: Popularizing the idea of the wall in the first place, going mask-off calling illegal immigrants “murderers and rapists”, the “Muslim Ban” on air travel, moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, employing white nationalists as staffers, packing the supreme court with extreme conservative justices, giving permanent tax cuts to the rich, expanding the presence of immigrant concentration camps, cozying up to foreign dictators, stating he wanted generals like Adolf Hitler’s behind closed doors when his own generals refused to nuke North Korea and blame it on someone else, egging on a far-right insurrection attempt, directly pursuing strikes and assassination attempts against middle-Eastern military generals and diplomats, ending the Iran nuclear deal, calling climate change a Chinese hoax, calling Covid the “China virus”, spreading vaccine disinformation until one was developed before the end of his term, trying to start a trade war with China, discrediting his chief medical advisor on factual statements about Covid, saying Black Lives Matter protestors were “burning down cities”, wanting to designate Antifa as a terrorist organization, declaring “far left radical lunatics” part of his “enemy from within”, being an avowed friend of Epstein, sexually assaulting over a dozen women and underage girls, being a generally abusive sleazebag, also funding a genocide (Israel has always been ethnically displacing Palestinians), also building the wall, also not implementing healthcare reform (and being against what we have), also not protecting abortion rights (+ setting up the conditions that led to their erosion; see supreme court point above), and also denigrating anti-genocide protestors (but not as harshly since he wasn’t the one in charge when it happened).

I guess he’s not a cop though, so there’s that.

(minor edits made for grammar/spelling)

On the whole, maybe LLMs do make these subjects more accessible in a way that’s a net-positive, but there are a lot of monied interests that make positive, transparent design choices unlikely. The companies that create and tweak these generalized models want to make a return in the long run. Consequently, they have deliberately made their products speak in authoritative, neutral tones to make them seem more correct, unbiased and trustworthy to people.

The problem is that LLMs ‘hallucinate’ details as an unavoidable consequence of their design. People can tell untruths as well, but if a person lies or misspeaks about a scientific study, they can be called out on it. An LLM cannot be held accountable in the same way, as it’s essentially a complex statistical prediction algorithm. Non-savvy users can easily be fed misinfo straight from the tap, and bad actors can easily generate correct-sounding misinformation to deliberately try and sway others.

ChatGPT completely fabricating authors, titles, and even (fake) links to studies is a known problem. Far too often, unsuspecting users take its output at face value and believe it to be correct because it sounds correct. This is bad, and part of the issue is marketing these models as though they’re intelligent. They’re very good at generating plausible responses, but this should never be construed as them being good at generating correct ones.

Wow, it’s almost as if someone being bad can be for multiple reasons!

Ideally, I agree wholeheartedly. American gun culture multiplies the damage of every other issue we have by a lot

One or more parents in denial that there’s anything wrong with their kids and/or the idea they need to take gun storage seriously? That’s the first thing that comes to mind, and it’s not uncommon in the US. Especially when you consider that a lot of gun rhetoric revolves around self defense in an emergency/home invasion, not having at least one gun readily available defeats the main purpose in their minds.

edit: meant to respond to django@discuss.tchncs.de

90 days to cycle private tokens/keys?

Days of the week in Spanish follow almost the exact same pattern as they do in English, with the exception of the weekend.

Specifically, Friday in Japanese translates to Gold Day, which also has a lot of cultural connotations with it being the lucky day of the week

Early voting is an option in many places too!

Voting early is usually less stressful, and you can schedule it easier (because election day isn’t a national holiday for some reason). Look up the dates early voting is running in your county, read up on what polling stations you can vote early at, and make a plan!

As far as changing minds though… yeah, everyone is pretty much locked in at this point. I just hope people in the US cast a ballot even if they don’t plan on voting for the president. There are so many downballot positions for local offices that one’s vote can have a huge impact on.

I think if people are resigned to not pick between outright vs lite genocide (understandably), the best thing they can do is research their local elections, make a list on who they plan on choosing for each office, and make the decision on the president (including the choice to do a write-in or leave it blank) when they get to the ballot box.

I’ve heard there are hyper-reflective stickers you can put on/near the plate that basically blind a traffic camera’s view when trying to read it

I believe the wording is “drinks which burn the throat” which naturally means:

• ❌ Coffee
• ❌ Alcoholic drinks
• ❌ Coca Cola
• ❌ Hot tea
• ❌ Chai lattes
• ✅ Sprite, other non-caffeinated soft drinks
• ✅ Hot Chocolate
• ✅ Kombucha
• ✅ Energy drinks???
• ✅ Herbal Tea (even while hot, but mostly if you’re sick as a home remedy)

Most of the focus is interpreted as “contains caffeine and/or alcohol” but the wording is vague enough that it leaves for a lot of weird wiggle room people try to argue (based on convenience usually). It’s quite silly

If they were conscripted tho?

Advertising is like the Kudzu vine: neat and potentially useful if maintained responsibly, but beyond capable of growing out of control and strangling the very landscape if you don’t constantly keep it in check. I think, for instance, that a podcast or over-the-air show running an ad-read with an affiliate link is fine for the most part, as long as it’s relatively unobtrusive and doesn’t put limitations on what the content would otherwise go over.

The problem is that there needs to be a reset of advertiser expectations. Right now, they expect the return on investment that comes from hyper-specific and invasive data, and I don’t think you can get that same level of effectiveness without it. The current advertising model is entrenched, and the parasitic roots have eroded the foundation. Those roots will always be parasitic because that’s the nature of advertising, and the profit motive in general when unchecked.

Here’s an article with a graph. Given that the figures are measured per 100,000 live births, one would need to find how many births occurred in the state of Texas in the years graphed. I was able to find that exact figure for 2022 in a document from the CDC (on page 8) which comes out to 389,533. Since the overall Texas maternal mortality rate was about 28.5 per 100k births for that year (per the news article), the total number of mortalities would have been about 110.

If you want I could go find the figure for earlier years as well, but this should serve as a general ballpark the numbers are in. Keep in mind that the maternal mortality rate only factors in live births, so does not include any pregnancy complications involving an unviable fetus.

That would be fine and dandy if most speed limits (in the US at least) were assigned intelligently and not just according to the 85th percentile, which just measures how fast people actually drive down the road, and assumes anything in the top 15% is unsafe and should therefore be illegal

I think the joke is that one would expect premarital sex to be between partners in a relationship, but technically any sex between two unmarried persons fits the definition? It’s extremely forced, to say the least