Not only that, but I think this commenter needs to read up on causality, and what can or cannot stop an activity that has already occurred.

He got more than 50% of New Yorkers to agree on one of three options, in the face of an opposition supported by essentially all of the millionaires and billionaires in the city. If apple pie and pumpkin pie got together and formed a super-ticket, they’d still only get 47% of the vote—and that’s without taking any soft money from Big Rhubarb into account.

I’m not making that stat up, by the way. Apple pie has a 23% vote. Pumpkin has 24%. And he did it in less than a year, on small dollar donations.

It may not have been a perfect campaign, but if it wasn’t, a perfect campaign isn’t possible.

No, they’re saying that some hardware manufacturers report 80% as 100% (as you noted) while others do not. Just like some manufacturers report 5% as 5% while others report 10% as 5% with the realization that most people misjudge when they’ll be able to charge.

You get it.

Ooh, I like this one! I think it’s for the same reason that liquids like egg whites, sea water, and even some broths can be clear when at rest but opaque when frothy. And the reason for that is the same as the reason why a straw in a glass of still water looks like it’s broken: refraction!

So, when light enters or leaves a medium at an angle, it is bent by the transition between the medium it’s entering and what it’s leaving. And it’s not a lossless process; some of the light that reaches the boundary is reflected instead by the medium, some is reflected internally, and some is absorbed by the medium.

With a single large bubble, you wouldn’t notice this; the boundary is tiny, there’s way more of one medium (air) than the other (soap), and the bubble’s shape means that the light actually tends to bend back to its original trajectory again coming out. But if there are many, many thousands of tiny bubbles, with pretty similar amounts of soap and air, some sharing boundary layers so that light can enter and leave at different angles, reflecting light all over the place and refracting it from everywhere, you’re just going to get that reflected mess.

And even if the soap is dyed, that wimpy little amount of dye isn’t filtering the color of the light enough for it to overwhelm the combined color of all the other light in the room; which, in most cases, basically average out to white.

Since 2000, the improbability constant of the universe has been rising at a geometric rate. It crossed the believability threshold in 2015, shortly before Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the Presidency.

At that point, scientists had predicted that the satire cycle would cease to circulate, leading to a breakdown of the humorsphere; but scientists at The Onion headed a task force that managed to find a loophole in the Costello Impossibility Limit, and allowed them to theoretically continue writing and publishing satire until the improbability constant reaches the Costello Limit and all of reality just becomes fiction (predicted to be some time in 2033).

Anyway, because of that loophole (which is named the “Twain Track,” after Mark Twain, who pioneered some of the early satire that eventually led to this discovery), satire is no longer required to be false.

Well, the market will definitely contract. I would say at least one of the big AI players will go out of business or be acquired by a competitor over the next few years, and at least one of the big tech corps will sunset their AI model over that timescale as well. Nvidia stock is going to take a steep nosedive. I think the future for consumer AI is mostly in small, quick models; except for in research and data analysis, where just a few big players will be able to provide the services that most uses require.

They currently have enough money to keep going for a while if they play their cards right, but once investors realize that the endgame doesn’t have much to offer them, the money will stop flowing.

I’m probably going to be allowing most of my streaming subscriptions to lapse over the next year or two. Gonna stick with Dropout and PBS, but that might be all.

My apologies, I thought you were making the opposite argument. But I still disagree.

All other things being equal, educated people are statistically less susceptible to disinformation and fallacious arguments. If they weren’t, the fascists wouldn’t be trying to eliminate public education, and the electoral map wouldn’t correlate so strongly with education.

Foucault wasn’t wrong about right-wingers using educational systems for indoctrination, but that’s not the current GOP playbook. Their strategy relies on people being too anxious and uneducated to separate fact from fiction, and to provide the propaganda another way (specifically, via carpet-bombing media, social and otherwise, with disinformation). Why bother wasting time at the school district level when there are nationwide platforms where people line up voluntarily to get their ration of AI-generated, foreign-actor-crafted lies delivered straight into to their eyeballs?

Yeah, we’ve gotta fix the education system. And yeah, we’ve gotta get people to recognize where they’re being controlled. But I don’t think that eliminating the former is going to accomplish the latter; and clearly the other side knows it, too.

Looks like they originally animated him eating a sandwich but decided to put in a slice of deep dish pizza at the last minute.

True, though I think you might be able to use entertainers to overcome the rating drops long enough? I’m not sure.

Nice. I learned Qbasic to make a Pokedex.

Right-wing propaganda nonsense. Education teaches you how to evaluate sources and interrogate assumptions.

Once the bubble pops, we can go back to letting AI do what it’s actually good at—pattern recognition, summarization, translation, natural language processing—and stop trying to shoehorn it into every single thing.

I think we overemphasize water and should talk more about people’s hydration.

It’s definitely getting broader than that, with the way that wealth stratification continues to skyrocket. But I don’t mean “actually rural,” I really do mean “more rural.” A good amount of city real estate prices have priced lower-income folks out of the urban core in many (most?) cities, gentrifying the downtown and resulting in a reversal of 1980s White Flight as the working class move to now-cheaper suburban and rural communities.

I didn’t mean just farmers or whatever. I just mean people who haven’t got the money to live in the Trader Joe’s district.

That’s probably a good read on it.

Interesting. Some of them are just dip switches, too. I hadn’t heard about needing a cable, that’s an interesting wrinkle.

I don’t have any specific recommendations for you, but I will say that

• pretty much every modern Chromebook will be able to have Linux installed over ChromeOS. You might have to open it up and remove a write-protect screw.

• Linux is a surprisingly good platform for games these days, actually. Steam has done a lot of work to get it there.

• If you’re wanting lightweight specs, you’re probably going to find the best bang for your buck in an old Chromebook; however, I don’t know if you’ll see as many of those coming on the market, and you’ll want to watch out for old school devices. Those things get worked over pretty hard.

they’ll still be around

Hope not. As far as I’m concerned anyone who aided or abetted him is a traitor.