Wow, if they spending money on ballot curing, those internal Trump polls must have scared the crap out of them.

Yeah, these are popping up all over the place - all from different users with newly created accounts and no other post/comment history. Most definitively sus.

In addition to the point about Western mythologies dominating because of cultural exports, I think there is also the undercurrent of England’s original mythologies having been “lost” and so the English were always fascinated by the mythologies of the Norse (due to being invaded) and by the Greeks and Romans (as previous “great” civilizations they aspired to be).

Combine that with America’s obvious English influences and the influence of England as a colonizer around the world, and those mythologies gained a huge outsized influence.

I really enjoyed it. The cast was great, the writing was fun, and the production quality was really good. Not an “action” show by any means. It does solid service to the comic books and lore, but not a paint by numbers of an existing story.

I’d say yes, but he’s so much of a narcissist and so self-obsessed, I doubt it would’ve occurred to him. Especially as back then he was 90% tech bro and 10% weird idea guy. Those values, of course, have since fully flipped.

I think that’s sort of the point - if 2016 was our last “normal” election and early voting wasn’t prognosticative of election results then, there’s no hope it would be anything other than more variable and chaotic now.

The point wasn’t about a “return to normal” or else he would be saying it was an indicator.

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. There’s no way to reconcile what he’s saying with the video evidence.

Several citizens were permitted to run “test” ballots through machines assigned to their county, including Savage, who was spotted on camera folding the ballots into his pocket while confirming with an election official that they were “absolutely, totally real ballots.” Although they weren’t official ballots, the ballots did not say “fake” or “sample” and were being tracked and counted by the state.

That would be “ornithological” :)

He literally talks about that at several points. 2020 is a horrible baseline for looking at anything analytically because it was such an outlier because of COVID. Too many other variables in 2020 for it to be applicable for anything

What an odd take, and so orthogonal to what the article was about.

I probably didn’t explain well enough. Consuming media (books, TV, film, online content, and video games) is predominantly a passive experience. Obviously video games less so, but all in all, they only “adapt” within the guardrails of gameplay. These AI chatbots however are different in their very formlessness - they’re only programmed to maintain engagement and rely on the LLM training to maintain an illusion of “realness”. And because they were trained on all sorts of human interactions, they’re very good at that.

Humans are unique in how we continually anthropomorphize tons of not only inert, lifeless things (think of someone alternating between swearing at and pleading to a car that won’t start) but abstract ideals (even scientists often speak of evolution “choosing” specific traits). Given all of that, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to be worried about a teen with a still developing prefrontal cortex and who is in the midst of working on understanding social dynamics and peer relationships to embue an AI chatbot with far more “humanity” than is warranted. Humans seem to have an anthropomorphic bias in how we relate to the world - we are the primary yardstick we use to measure and relate everything around us, and things like AI chatbots exploit that to maximum effect. Hell, the whole reason the site mentioned in the article exists is that this approach is extraordinarily effective.

So while I understand that on a cursory look, someone objecting to it comes across as a sad example of yet another moral panic, I truly believe this is different. For one, we’ve never had access to such a lively psychological mirror before and it’s untested waters; and two, this isn’t some objection on some imagined slight against a “moral authority” but based in the scientific understanding of specifically teen brains and their demonstrated fragility in certain areas while still under development.

That is simply not true. Initially the replies to him were not antagonistic - he started taking that tone when the community asked him about the disparity between his professed beliefs and what he was posting and asking why he was supposedly voting third party. He then ran the table on the mods by engaging in a constant stream of spammy, low effort comments and you all did nothing. And the more you did nothing, the more frustrated and angry everyone became about him.

The mods should at least be able to recognize your hand in how UM played out, instead of blaming it only on the users engaging in “slap fights”. The mods chose to moderate per post/comment instead of also considering an account’s overall pattern of behavior.

The rules - as written - seem to indicate a level of judgement and assessment that has not been taking place, and user frustration is evident as many of us see how a pattern of behavior of trolling was allowed to continue for much too long because the user in question almost never went too far in any individual message but was quite clearly outside the rules when looked at as a whole.

I admire your stance on not doing a fast-and-loose approach to bans to protect individual voices, but your job as mods also involves protecting these communities from intentional and purposeful bad actors

This is sort of hilarious that he didn’t know who he was replying to.

Same! And if anyone disagrees, feel free to get in the comments! 😉

I understand what you mean about the comparison between AI chatbots and video games (or whatever the moral panic du jour is), but I think they’re very much not the same. To a young teen, no matter how “immersive” the game is, it’s still just a game. They may rage against other players, they may become obsessed with playing, but as I said they’re still going to see it as a game.

An AI chatbot who is a troubled teen’s “best friend” is different and no matter how many warnings are slapped on the interface, it’s going to feel much more “real” to that kid than any game. They’re going to unload every ounce of angst into that thing, and by defaulting to “keep them engaged”, that chatbot is either going to ignore stuff it shouldn’t or encourage them in ways that it shouldn’t. It’s obvious there’s no real guardrails in this instance, as if he was talking about being suicidal, some red flags should’ve popped up.

Yes the parents shouldn’t have allowed him such unfettered access, yes they shouldn’t have had a loaded gun that he had access to, but a simple “This is all for funsies” warning on the interface isn’t enough to stop this from happening again. Some really troubled adults are using these things as defacto therapists and that’s bad too. But I’d be happier if lawmakers were much more worried about kids having access to this stuff than accessing “adult sites”.

Really appreciate their coverage of pretty much everything - lots of detail, no fluff, and no over the top headlines.

And yep, fuck insurance. Helped make the entire point of US healthcare providing profit for big corps and not actually patient wellness.

Had the same thought :)

There’s also advantages to the DC metro area being a “company town” in that it attracts interested public servants with particular skill sets. The DC metro area has a huge number of folks not from here, so it’s not like there’s a “DC mindset” at the individual level. And the feds have been pretty good on telework (fed contractors, not so much)

No idea on the song, may have better luck identifying the singer, and working backwards from there? Maybe something by Fine Young Cannibals? Certainly the most notable falsetto that comes to mind for that era for me.

Yep, he’s creating yet another false equivalence (it’s what he does after all) comparing individuals personally going on their own time to publicly volunteer and whatever shadow-interference-and-misinformation campaign that Putin’s stood up for Trump. I just loved that Trump’s campaign couldn’t even be bothered to spell “Britain” correctly - the worst combination of venality and incompetence.