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  • His unwavering support for Israel during their campaign of atrocities is despicable and shameful.

    If we're going to get Trump again it's in part because of the absolutely all-or-nothing brook-no-compromise attitude of voters. Like this, for example. Biden's support has not been unwavering, he's criticized Israel's actions. But not enough for you, and so he gets no credit whatsoever for any moderation he might have. And that's why you say he "feels like a Republican" to you, because someone can only be 100% totally on your side or they must be on the other side.

    I'd love for there to be a viable fully-progressive candidate who happened to agree with everything I believe in. I'd also love to have a pet unicorn. When elections actually roll around in reality, though, none of the candidates are going to be perfect. And unfortunately in many first-past-the-post electorates the system is set up in such a way that there are only two viable candidates. So pick the one that's closest to your views. Push for better candidates in the primary, of course, but accept that you won't always get everything you want.

  • Sorry, but no. You elected him. You don't get to no-true-Scotsman the responsibility of the American voters for this, enough Americans support this loon that he can indeed win elections.

  • Already this year, Republican lawmakers have proposed about 50 bills in 20 states that would restrict initiatives on diversity, equity and inclusion — known as DEI — or require their public disclosure

    Emphasis added. Wow, a thing that actually sounds like a good idea buried in among the usual Republican crazy. I guess a broken clock is still right occasionally.

  • It's also got a substantial helping of "here's how things are getting better, and will continue to get better in the future."

  • Supply military and financial aid, sure, but no boots on the ground.

    The US is failing to do even that minimal level of assistance in this case. No American troops are helping Ukraine fight, it's all been training and supplies. That's all that's been requested by them. And that's what the Republicans are blocking.

  • Ironically, it was a horrible treaty for everyone except the US. Trump nixing it was yet another own-goal. After the US pulled out, the remaining signatories reworked the TPP into the CPTPP by removing those "dream laws" and passing the rest of it without the US.

  • Because it will impact them economically, of course. People are less likely to invest in a country that is at risk of being sanctioned, whether "officially" or via unofficial boycotts.

  • I've only been fiddling around with it for a few days, but it seems to me that the default settings weren't very good - by default it'll load four 256-character-long snippets into the AI's context from the search results, which is pretty hit and miss on being informative in my experience. I think I may finally have found a good use for those models with really large contexts, I can crank up the size and number of snippets it loads and that seems to help. But it still doesn't give "global" understanding. For example, if I put a novel into LocalDocs and then ask the AI about general themes or large-scale "what's this character like" stuff it still only has a few isolated bits of the novel to work from.

    What I'm imagining is that the AI could sit on its own for a while loading up chunks of the source document and writing "notes" for its future self to read. That would let it accumulate information from across the whole corpus and cross-reference disparate stuff more easily.

  • So now there's a NewNew Reddit? That IPO is getting ever closer, guess they'll be thrashing around all the harder in the lead up to that to try to show some kind of path to profitability.

  • I'm thinking a potentially useful middle ground might be to have the AI digest the documentation into an easier-to-understand form first, and then have it query that digest for context later when you're asking it questions about stuff. GPT4All already does something a little similar in that it needs to build a search index for the data before it can make use of it.

  • And yet there are still hobbyists. We only "live under capitalism" to the extent that we have to, people still do things for reasons other than money.

  • I'm no fan of Bitcoin, but often the energy they use from hydro plants is energy that would literally be wasted otherwise. A hydro dam can't control how much water is entering the reservoir, so if there's more water entering the reservoir than is needed to generate electricity for the current demand then the dam will need to just throw the extra water away. Trying to transmit the electricty to remote markets can be an alternative, but that costs resources too and isn't always practical.

  • Probably, but Ethereum does a lot of things that Visa can't. Visa transactions are exceedingly simple. It was just the only generally comparable thing I could think of that I could get energy figures for, do you know of any better examples?

  • Current AI can already "read" documentation that isn't part of its training set, actually. Bing Chat, for example, does websearches and bases its answers in part on the text of the pages it finds. I've got a local AI, GPT4All, that you can point at a directory full of documents and tell "include that in your context when answering questions." So we're we're already getting there.

  • People who make content for money are suffering from a collapse in ad prices. There are people who make content because they enjoy making and sharing content.

  • Why is it "a lot for a virtual currency?" What's the typical energy usage of a virtual currency?

    In 2019 Visa used 740,000 gigajoules of energy, which is equivalent to 6727 households (google dug up a figure of 110 Gj/year for that). So this really doesn't seem like a lot for this kind of thing.

  • I’m not sure I get the point. Company is a broad term. I don’t see how MakerDAO is not a company.

    Company is actually not a broad term, it's a legal term with a specific meaning. MakerDAO is not a company, it's a smart contract. If you want to use terms that loosely it's going to be difficult talking about this stuff.

    Using crypto-tokens is simply a technologically vastly inferior way of tracking debts, not a new currency.

    But ultimately that's the thing that you're arguing here, so you can't simply state it as a premise. That's the classic meaning of begging the question.

    The apparent fraud is the only way this makes economic sense.

    That came out of nowhere, this is the first time an accusation of fraud has shown up in this discussion. What fraud?

  • Why does everything have to be about money?

  • Then I guess I won't see whatever websites decide to use it (until it's cracked). Oh well.

  • Unlikely. Some new approach to paid journalism will need to be developed. But that's already the case, AI's just driving the existing trend further.