LukeZaz

In part.

It can't go unacknowledged that bigotry was very involved in the outcome of 2016.

We all know Trump is worse. But none of that changes that competency doesn't make up for Hillary being an awful person and a worse candidate.

I'm very much in agreement with Eno here, actually. I could imagine a world very easily in which LLMs and image generators didn't just "have use cases," but was actually revolutionary in more than a few of those cases. A world in which it was used well, for good things.

But we don't live in that world. We live in one where it was almost entirely born under and shaped by megacorps. That's never healthy to anything at all, be it new tech or be it the people using it. The circumstances in which LLMs and generative models were developed was such that nobody should be surprised that we got what we did.

I think that in a better world, image generation could've been used for prototyping, fun, or enabling art from those without the time to dedicate to a craft. It could've been a tool like any other. LLMs could've had better warnings against their hallucinations, or simply have been used less for overly-serious things due to a lack of incentive for it, leaving only the harmless situations. Some issues would still exist – I think training a model off small artists' work without consent is still wrong, for example – but no longer would we face so much of things like intense electrical usage or de-facto corporate bandwagon-jumping and con-artistry, and the issues that still happened wouldn't be happening at quite such an industrial scale.

It reminds me how before the "AI boom" hit, there was a fair amount of critique against copyright from leftists or FOSS advocates. There still is, to be sure; but it's been muddied now by artists and website owners who, rightfully so, want these companies to not steal their work. These two attitudes aren't incompatible, but it shows a disconnect all the same. And in that disconnect I think we can do well to remember an alternate chain of events wherein such a dissonance might've never occurred to begin with.

You can't expect voter participation to be high when they believe their vote doesn't matter, nor if the candidate you want them to vote for is decidedly uncompelling. Democrats made the latter true and Republicans have worked hard to try and make the former true. What do we expect, in that scenario?

Voting more could have avoided this, yes. But the lion's share of the blame does not lie with voters.

you all

You mean conservatives? The people who by and large don't use this site?

I wasn't really ever suggesting that supporting Palestine would've outright won the election. I agree it was more complicated than that. Frankly, I think she lost because her campaign promises were incredibly weak and basically amounted to "Biden, again." Almost nobody wanted that, so of course she lost! My goal with my comment was simply to push back against all the voter-blaming I see, which I consider both insane and callous for the variety of reasons I've already elaborated on.

Anyway, for what it's worth, while it's true that most Americans still support Israel, that number is dropping fast and is drastically different amongst Democrats. Which is rather important for a Democrat's election campaign. Besides, let's not worry about what Trump's messaging would've been; if you don't give fascists ammo to shoot you with, they make it up themselves. Basing your strategy around whether he'll call you names is a losing move, because he'll do it regardless.

The messaging which relentlessly connected Harris directly to the genocide in Gaza is only what they deploy against you,

Gonna be blunt for a sec: Maybe we heard it a lot because hospitals were being bombed? Leftists tend to get mad about that kind of thing.

Seriously, Biden's admin sent Israel all the military equipment it could ask for, and Harris indicated several times she planned on continuing that trend. It's not a right-wing psy-op, it's war crimes.

There is no “safe” store of value, it always depends on demand

If you don't think "safe stores of value" exist, why did you pontificate on what you thought would become one?

Bitcoin transfers cost pennies on the Lightning Network [...]

Press X to Doubt. Defending Bitcoin in 2025 is certainly a choice.

There is a reason why Chinese people invested [...] in the housing market, allowing scammers to build ghost towns they never planned on completing… and then it all went crashing down.

You realize this happens everywhere, right? Housing is an extremely common investment choice, and ghost towns (or at least, a lot of chronically vacant homes) appear frequently as a result. I am once again left asking why problems like this only seem to get noticed when Chinese people do it.

Regardless, none of this changes what I've said; China is a superpower with a gargantuan economy that can't be ignored. And it isn't! Were it that the dollar died, China would be an enticing replacement for a lot of investors whether we like it or not. Many of whom would happily stomach the risk of government intervention in exchange.

The US sees the Euro as a competitor of the Dollar; for the US to buy a strategic reserve of EUR, it would definitely mean recognizing defeat.

I didn't realize we were still talking about the U.S. government's choice in investment alone! I had figured your initial comment had shifted this to being about the dollar's power writ large, especially given that the U.S. government's tactics as of late have been questionable on a good day and therefore not really worth speculating on.

But sure, the federal government is unlikely to give up on the dollar. That won't stop it from imploding if they keep fucking up, and it wasn't what I was talking about anyway.

You have constitutional amendments for this exact scenario.

Bold of you to assume any of that matters right now. Or ever, really. Cops can and have been shooting people stone dead for "looking like they might've had a gun." The second amendment has been a farce for decades at minimum.

Not that I think waiting for Congress to fix things when they're the ones least threatened by what's happening is a good idea. Just pointing out that the Constitution stopped mattering a long time ago.

I don't think Bitcoin qualifies as a "safe store of value" when it fluctuates like hell on a day-to-day basis and transferring it anywhere for any reason costs exorbitant amounts of money. Much as you or I don't trust China, I think the powerhouse of an economy that it has will make it awfully enticing for investment orgs, and I don't think the U.S. will have to "recognize defeat" for the Euro to replace the dollar, either. If the dollar tanks, it tanks.

Blaming voters for not being enthused about picking between two genocidal options is a one of the greatest losing strategies of all time. Nobody should be surprised at all that a chunk of the Democrats' base didn't have it in them to hold their noses tight enough for something that utterly vile — least of all Biden & Harris's campaigns.

They should have known. They were given opportunities to learn before the election even hit. They ignored them.

It was a massively idiotic move that either campaign could have avoided with a stupid level of ease, and they chose not to. Voters that didn't vote did so because they believe mass-murder is bad; whereas the best-case scenario for the Democrat's campaign is legendary incompetence, and the worst is outright genocidal malice and greed. If you're going to get mad at one, I recommend the latter.