• 11 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • President is two jobs. One is policy driven. One is being a leader. All president’s have to do both, but arguably the latter is more important as president’s can leave policy to aides and congress (and formerly the federal agencies, but that’s gone now). The president is a communicator. Yes most voters like Biden policies, but they don’t know they are Biden policies because Biden does not communicate that. In fact, in many congressional districts the Dem candidates are outperforming Biden while running on the same policies. You can’t blame voters already burdened with living in this capitalist hell hole for not devoting hours into researching candidate policies.

    In presidential politics, at the end of the day the buck stops with the candidate. Campaign aids and paid advertising and surrogates on TV can only do so much. You need the candidate to deliver, to speak directly to the voters, to make the case for why voters should choose them and their policies over the alternative. Biden is incapable of that.

    It’s Bidens fault.


  • This movement wouldn’t have any traction if Biden put on even a middling debate performance. We all saw Biden start to answer a question about abortion, then get confused and switch midway into talking about some woman killed by an immigrant. You don’t need a grand conspiracy, it’s a simple case of grandpa being too full of pride to give up his car keys. Except in this case the car is American democracy.

    Biden was a great president. He should have asked in his accomplishments and set up a new generation of dem leaders. Instead, he let his pride get in the way, ignored his own decline, tried to hide it by refusing interviews and non-scripted public events, even the softball traditional pre superbowl interview, and then had that disaster of a debate. Yes, I’ll still vote for the corpse of Biden if it means stopping Trump. But will swing voters? What about Trump to Biden voters in purple districts? What about young people and anyone already pissed about the genocide in Gaza? Is the “corpse is better than Trump” argument going to motivate infrequent voters to turn out? Better fucking hope so, cause Biden has us in this fucked position, is refusing to back down, so I guess we’ll find out.


  • Biden should have booked a tough sit down interview for the weekend after the debate to show he has the mental chops and ability to communicate the stakes of this campaign. Instead it’s been five days now since the debate and Biden hasn’t spoken publicly without a teleprompter. Hell dem governors and members of congress, including party leaders, have not spoken to Biden since the debate. Biden is doing basically nothing to calm people down. Hiding him and only rolling him out with a teleprompter in tow just plays into the republican conspiracy that Biden has had a significant decline. To the point that it’s starting to not seem like a conspiracy. If Biden wants to stay in the race, he needs to fix this, like yesterday. Is the reason he hasn’t done so yet because he can’t do it? If so, wtf is he still in the race??


  • Banning abortion used to be illegal too…

    The whole point of this is to get to the Supreme Court and chip away at legal precedent. That’s why they are framing “the Bible” (as if there was a singular book) as a “historical document” that serves as a foundation for the US legal system. It’s a way of saying, “hey we’re not teaching religion, we’re teaching history”. The Supreme Court has rejected that argument for decades, it was the basis for cases involving displaying the ten commandments in classrooms. But now we have a new ultra conservative supreme court that doesn’t give a shit about precedent. So the bet is, SCOTUS will reverse precedent and buy this argument.

    It looks like now that Roe is gone, the new Christian nationalist legal project is dismantling the seperation of church and state. So buckle up, even when dems are in power they are too chicken shit to do anything about this stuff.



  • Even if tik tok was nakedly controlled by the Chinese government, who gives a shit? I can go over to RT (Russia Today) right now and get fed Russian propaganda. Hell, until 2022 I could add it to my cable package. I can to this day still get it as a satellite TV option. If the concern is “foreign government may influence public opinion on a platform they control” then the US has a lot of banning to do.

    But we don’t because free speech is a thing and we’re free to consume whatever propaganda we want.

    We gave up that principle because “China bad” (and the CCP is, to be clear). But instead of passing laws around data privacy, or algorithmic transparency, or a public information campaign to get kids off of tik tok, the US government went straight to “The government will decide what information your allowed to consume, we know what’s best for you” and far too many people are cheering.

    Besides, the point your making is bullshit anyway given the kill switch mechanism Tik Tok offered.

    TikTok was banned because 1) China bad, and 2) Tik Tok is eating US social media companies lunch. Facebook and Twitter and Google throw some campaign donations at the politicians that killed their biggest rival, and the politicians calculate that more people hate tik tok than like it (or care about preventing government censorship if the thing being censored is something they don’t like). It’s honestly one of the grossest things I seen dems support lately.


  • That’s true, but I think what recent conflicts have demonstrated is that total firepower isn’t everything. Ukraine was significantly outmatched by Russia and hung on, even before western weapons shipments. Hamas, estimated at something like 30k fighters strong and armed with small arms and light rockets/artillery, continues to fight effectively against the US armed IDF. Then we have historical examples like the US war in Vietnam, or the US failures to fight insurgents in Iraq (with the tide only changing after deliberate hearts and minds political/social strategy).

    The whole “we have a lot of planes” thing is just defense contractor marketing. How that translates on the battlefield, especially when the civilian population despises you, is not great.

    A war like that would devestate Isreal and drag the US into a true quagmire. It would sap a tremendous amount of resources and leave the US more vulnerable to the china’s and Russias of the world.

    Not to mention our good old buddy international terrorism, which Bidens unwavering support of Bibi is already making us a prime target for. Shit would be fucked.


  • While I appreciate the focus and mission, kind of I guess, your really going to set up shop in a country literally using AI to identify air strike targets and handing over to the Ai the decision making over whether the anticipated civilian casualties are proportionate. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes

    And Isreal is pretty authorarian, given recent actions against their supreme court and banning journalists (Al jazera was outlawed, the associated press had cameras confiscated for sharing images with Al jazera, oh and the offices of both have been targeted in Gaza), you really think the right wing Israeli government isn’t going to coopt your “safe superai” for their own purposes?

    Oh, then there is the whole genocide thing. Your claims about concerns for the safety of humanity ring a little more than hollow when you set up shop in a country actively committing genocide, or at the very least engaged in war crimes and crimes against humanity as determined by like every NGO and international body that exists.

    So Ilya is a shit head is my takeaway.





  • “Now that the Jury has rendered a verdict and Mr. Trump is a convicted felon, it is time for him to end his campaign for president. It goes without saying that it is below the dignity of the office and of our politics for a major party to be represented in this campaign by a convicted felon. I am confident MR. Trump will do right by his party and our country by suspending his campaign so that someone more deserving can receive the Republican party nomination. I look forward to a spirited campaign with the eventual nominee this fall.”

    • Biden, in an alternate universe where democrats have spines.

    Instead we get this one line " look at us, we’re above the fray, we’re not getting in the mud" statement, so the news just fills the vaccume with whatever bullshit trump is spouting at the moment. I guess the Biden campaign thinks convicted felon is not an issue worth campaigning on? Good call guys. Let’s see how that is working (checks polls, Biden down by 5 or more points in 11 swing states), OK cool so we’re fucked thanks Biden.



  • Part of the problem with Google is it’s use of retrieval augmented generation, where it’s not just the llm answering, but the llm is searching for information, apparently through its reddit database from that deal, and serving it as the answer. The tip off is the absurd answers are exact copies of the reddit comments, whereas if the model was just trained on reddit data and responding on its own the model wouldn’t produce verbatim what was in the comments (or shouldn’t, that’s called overfitting and is avoided in the training process). The gemini llm on its own would probably give a better answer.

    The problem here seems to be Google trying to make the answers more trustworthy through rag, but they didn’t bother to scrub the reddit data their relying on well enough, so joke and shit answers are getting mixed in. This is more a datascrubbing problem then an accuracy problem.

    But overall I generally agree with your point.

    One thing I think people overlook though is that for a lot of things, maybe most things, there isn’t a “correct” answer. Expecting llms to reach some arbitrary level of “accuracy” is silly. But what we do need is intelligence and wisdom in these systems. I think the camera jam example is the best illustration of that. Opening the back of the camera and removing the film is technically a correct way to fix the jam, but it ruins the film so it’s not an ideal solution most of the time, but it takes intelligence and wisdom to understand that.




  • Bibi is obviously evil, but also a moron if he does this. Electorally, if Bibi wants Trump back in the Whitehouse, one the better strategies to do that is keep democrats divided on Isreal. In other words, Bibi hugging Biden drives progressives away from Biden, hurts enthusiasm, reduces Dem turnout, all good things for Trump. Bibi coming to speak to the Republican conference (he is already meeting with Republican senators today virtually) only serves to make support for Isreal more partisan by pissing off Dems and aligning them against Isreal. Not to mention pissing off Biden who he needs.

    I guess the strategy is to scare Biden and Dems into supporting Isreal more to stave off attacks from Republicans who would be viewed as more supportive of Isreal by voters? Sounds like a dumb move, public opinion is turning against Isreal, and an invasion of Rafaku isn’t going to make Isreal any more sympathetic to the average non racist and non biblical prophecy believing voter. Again, Republicans attacking Biden for not supporting genocide enough only serves to shore up Bidens base, and independent looking at the chaos and suffering in Gaza aren’t going to ding Biden for not being Bibi’s bitch.

    Would be a dumb move I reckon.