I don’t know what country you are from or how your voting system works. But I will guess that your country has many parties and after the election, a governing coalition is formed.

In the US voting system, similar parties get punished by stealing votes from each other. So, in effect, we have to form our coalitions before the election and choose the single candidate that will stand for all of us. So, you can think of the Democratic Party as the Democratic Coalition, made up of some truly left-wing factions, as well as some not very left-wing or even centrist factions, and so our candidate will be much more watered down than what you’d see in a different system.

“How do I help my uncle Jack off a horse?”

It is genuinely amazing. I have watched it multiple times since I first saw it! It feels like something that would be funny but should get old after a few minutes, and yet it never does.

The whole talk appears to be done in one continuous take!

Forget telling you, they should just start playing the movie and bill you

Ubermeets

At my first developer job 25 years ago, any time we made a change in the code we had to add a comment at the end of each modified line with our initials and the date, because we had no version control.

Yeah but your eyes are right next to your brain also

In a version that doesn’t even fully make sense. With databases there is a well-defined way to sanitize your inputs so arbitrary commands can’t be run like in the xkcd comic. But with AI it’s not even clear how to avoid all of these kinds of problems, so the chiding at the end doesn’t really make sense. If anything the person should be saying “I hope you learned not to use AI for this”.

You’re saying “vote for my guy or else” and then acting like it’s my fault hostage takers are going to execute me.

I did not say who to vote for or even that you should vote. I only made the point that it’s the people’s responsibility to educate themselves on what is possible and the best course of action. (Then when you said you hated the country I asked if that includes the people.)

But also, that’s complicated by the fact that America is a blight on the world. The world would literally be better off if this shit hole declines because it can’t fuck with everyone else in the world anymore.

This is embarrassingly naive. Do you think if the US gets turned upside down — aside from the people living there who don’t deserve to suffer — do you think that the US is going to just tuck away in a corner and the world will be a better place? It would take decades and an incredible amount of suffering before you’d have a US that could not fuck with anyone anymore. If you want to see a former superpower in decline, just take a look at Russia. The more they decline, the more they lash out. The more Putin consolidates power, the more suffering that is caused by the whims of a desperate madman.

You’re deluding yourself because you desperately don’t want the options you see ahead of you to be the only options. I don’t like the options either. But there’s no magical way to have the US get better fast or go away fast.

You make whatever choice you want. But at least try to be rational about it.

It’s called living in a society, my dude

Does that hatred include all the people who are affected by the consequences of our elections?

If the person who is better for the country loses then it is all of our faults. In a democracy it’s up to the citizens to know the candidates, understand the system and what people can and can’t do, understand how the election system works, and be aware of what the stakes are.

Political campaigns attempt to hold your hand and pull you in a certain direction because it’s in their best interest to do so, but the blame for what happens in January 2025 rests with all of us.

Neither can ChatGPT

It’s the container that count, not the content

That’s not what Mr Rogers taught me

Laughter can’t melt steel beams!

“I don’t really like X, but as long as they don’t then do Y I guess it’s okay”

They always do Y

It’s not a weird caste system. It’s just that people have always primarily just used SMS in the US, and if the people texting all happen to have iPhones, then there are some extra features tacked on (from the perception of the end user). Having been in many many large group chats for various activities and events, where it’s never 100% apple and just SMS, absolutely nobody cares at all. It’s just that maybe some teens and tweens use the colors to judge and exclude, which they famously find justifications for doing in every generation, and probably even that is overblown by the media.

There simply was never an incentive to kind of force everybody to move over to e.g. WhatsApp, and people don’t bother to do something like that en masse without a need to.

My post exactly decried a broken system. I called it a systemic problem! And in fact, it is the people who try to solve it by voting third party who are not realizing the system is broken such that doing so only hurts themselves. The only way to fix it is to figure out a way to have a new voting system. I even gave an example of an alternative one!

I think your response really underscores how we got to the situation where everything in politics is just soundbites and insults and pithy slogans. Actual reality can be wordy to talk about, but people like you can’t be bothered to read it! And then you reply with a new pithy insult like “Blue MAGA”. Take a second to think before you react!

If that dude’s outfit was animated and played noise, and the guy jumped in front of whatever I was looking at and wouldn’t go away, and sometimes he put random shit in my pockets or got me sick, then I’d hate that guy just as much as internet ads

The worst version of this I’ve ever seen is a site that enforced a password policy on the “current password” field on the “change password” interface. I had an existing password that violated their policy (either because they changed the policy or a technician created a “temporary” password for me, I forget), and I could not change it to a proper password because my current password would get rejected.