Joke’s on Engvall. Put on a dunce cap and you’ll attract people like a fucking magnet.

Too many liberals desperately want to believe the GOP wasn’t already like this dating back to Eisenhower.

They want to believe in a loyal opposition, because it’s easier to justify bipartisan compromise when your counterpart isn’t a frothing lunatic.

There’s always Clarence Thomas

Gruesome Newsome’s veto pen is to the right of Reagan’s.

How exactly do LLMs do that?

If you hook an LLM up as an interface replacement for a manual/analog Power Plant interface and start asking the translator to intuit decisions based on fuzzy inputs, you can create a cascade of errors that result in grid failure.

If you’ve given an LLM’s pseudorandom output control over your electrical grid, no regulation will mitigate your stupidity.

This rule would prevent a business or public regulator from doing such a thing without proving out safeguards.

And the governor vetoed it.

it is just becoming possible to have an infinitely persistent entity

You’re just describing a library. And we’ve had those for millennia.

That said… we’ve had libraries for millennia! Imagine all the alternative universes in which Euclid’s Elements or Plato’s Republic or The Analects of Confucius or Naturalis Historia or On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres were lost before they could become cornerstones of human understanding.

Imagine a world in which we never developed the capacity for language or the faculty for written text.

And yet, despite stockpiling weapons for the next eight decades, never again.

Maybe that’ll change in the next decade, but hopefully we can keep 1945 as the last year nuclear weapons were used for a bit longer.

They killed Lincoln but they couldn’t kill the abolitionist movement. Congress ratified three of the most progressive laws written in a century and the Freedman’s Bureau took to the job of enfranchising and rehabilitating millions of black ex-slaves in the subsequent decade.

Pick up a copy of W.E.B DuBois’s “The Souls of Black Folk”. What he describes is, at it’s heart, a revolution in how our country treated men and women of African descent. It set the foundation for the next century of civil rights and paved the way for a modern era in which the core racist underpinning of the country are totally upended.

That kind of fundamental change would not have been possible under a Breckinridge administration, nor would it have been possible if the Union had been crippled into submission at Gettysburg or Antitem.

Lincoln was the tip of the abolitionist spear and critical to what came after. But he was not alone. And he was by no means the most radical voice within his party. His martyrdom became the bloody shirt that Republicans rallied under long after the war had ended.

There’s a certain selection bias to the “Weak Men, Hard Times / Strong Men, Good Times” just so historical analysis. You don’t talk about all the folks that die during good times or bad times. You just point to the old people and your brain slips right past the selection bias that allowed them to live and others to die.

Trying to blame this generation or that is a fool’s errand. What do you tell a population of Gen Xers who were dragged out to the suburbs and raised in these segregated hermitages for twenty years, then plunged into the capitalist meat grinder at the tail end of the post-war boom years? “Hey, you should have all just psychically linked up and formed a socio-economic Voltron to change a century’s old system overnight”? Who can seriously believe that? The deck was stacked against you and yet we still have a litany of Gen Xers who struggled - even died - in their effort to undo the damage of prior generations.

And what do you say to all the children of WW2 refugees who washed up on America’s shores and struggled to carve out a life for themselves in the graveyards of the First Nation’s people? Or the Cold War refugees - the Korean and Vietnamese and Indonesian and Taiwanese and Venezuelan and Cuban and Spanish and Russian and North Africa and… and… and… - who came into the US as children and were promptly indoctrinated to hate their home countries by the white supremacist majordomos of the American imperial class?

Its easy to blame yourself or your neighbors or your generation. Its hard to see the bigger picture and how each of us fit into it. Its hard to know if we’re doing the right thing, or doing enough of the right thing, or who is with us and who is against us given the sheer tsunami of bullshit in our information networks.

We’re playing the game on Hard Mode. And I don’t think anyone who cares enough to question and inquire about their efforts can really be held to blame. It’s the folks who have burned the ability to care out of their souls that hold us back. And that’s not a decision unique to a region or time period.

liberals often use the nebulous, ill-defined term of “Democratic Socialism” as an AES cudgel.

I see liberals try to equate any kind of public sector combined with a national election system as Democratic Socialism. Which gets you the Nordic Model - a collection of petrostates with an egalitarian veneer and a white supremacist underbelly - labeled “Democratic Socialism” on paper.

Meanwhile, actual social democracies in Latin America, Africa, and East Asia are denounced as authoritarian every time the Neoliberal (or outright reactionary) local politician loses an election.

I am stating that AES is democratic as is Marxism in general

Marxism is Democratic in theory. Leninism is more popular than democratic, as Leninists aren’t wedded to electoralism like their liberal peers.

But the critique I see most often among liberals is that markets are democratic. And therefore every AES state that fails to sufficiently privatize the economy is definitely facto authoritarian.

That’s the real definitional divide between Marxists and Liberal Democrats.

More artists are coming up through tik tok now than the radio.

The radio isn’t a thousand independent stations looking to fill air time with local talent, it’s a handful of mega-monoliths looking to maximize advertising revenue with the Most Popular Thing (that fits the corporate agenda).

This relationship shows that being attractive will improve a persons odds of being successful in music.

Blandly conventionally attractive, to boot. Could we even do Amy Winehouse in the modern moment? Could we see Eminem or Maryl Manson or Buddy Holly or Ray Charles or Billie Holiday topping the charts? Idfk anymore. Seems like it’s easier than ever to blacklist anyone who is even remotely controversial. Plenty of attractive people who will do the Brittany Spears thing for fear of being the next Dixie Chicks.

Maybe if personality can shine through in those videos it can overtake appearance.

Unfortunately, the personality that shines brightest seems to be the kind that singles you’re an asshole.

Just ask P Diddy and Kanye.

All strains of Socialism are democratic

Glances nervously at the ultra-nationalist strains

Some are more democratic than others, certainly.

emphasize the democratic factor as opposed to our current system

It is exhausting to hear people smuggly denounce AES states as dysfunctional, by citing their trend towards nationalizarion of capital and popularization of policy. Particularly when the same folks will scream bloody murder if you don’t continue to mechanically endorse their brand of corporate liberalism.

Technically the first one (clown costume implies he’s an entertainer), but I feel like either interpretation works

Oh yeah, I love people who stick SQL lookups in a For Loop. Even better, the coder who puts conditional if (but no then/else) clauses around a dozen raw text execution commands that fire in sequence. So you’re making six distinct lookups per iteration rather than answering your question in a single query and referencing the results from memory.

Internal screaming

Well, you don’t want to waste space by adding the same file path twice

Do you think music nowadays puts more emphasis on the appearance of the artist than before?

I think the question is backwards. What we have isn’t a prioritization of appearance but a reduction of advertised talent combined with a professionalization of cosmetics. When you’ve consecrated your industry around a bare handful of performers, you can pick out the fist full of people that check every box.

Beyonce, Swift, Usher, and Bieber cover all the bases.

But once you get outside that rarified niche of promoted talent? Do you really think Post Malone is famous for his good looks? Is Kishi Bashi just coasting on his pretty face?

I don’t really think so.

Young Mic Jagger was a snacc.

Christ, if you could see the abysmal efficiency of business tier SQL code being churned out in the Lowest Bidder mines overseas…

Using a few terrabytes of memory and a stack of processors as high as my knee so they can recreate Excel in a badly rendered .aspx page built in 2003.

Facebook Ads are on par with most of what Trump sells, and they’ve got a market cap of $1.4T