I imagine CFPB is at the very top of the hit-list to get fully doge’d. Because fuck consumers, why would they ever need protection from anti-union, discriminatory billionaire oligarchs like Musk?

The only legitimate use I can think of for AI in podcasting might be for realtime translations so people who don’t speak the language of the podcaster can still listen. Even that makes me feel weird, but I think it could be done ethically-ish. Same deal for voice-cloning, I think that would be super-useful for realtime translations, so listeners still kinda hear the host’s voice, even translated. But every other use I can think of is ripe for abuse and won’t result in quality content.

There are lots of examples of reformed white supremacists/nazis/racists. Like I said, it’s hard work, not saying it’s easy. My grandparents also escaped Europe, dropping family members off in any country that would take them before ending up in the US. The trauma is in my blood, so I get the impulse to want violent revenge. But I firmly believe that in order to learn anything from the horrors of WWII, we firstly have to avoid violence at any cost. Otherwise we’re just making the same mistake they did, while trying to fix their mistakes. It won’t work.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/26/opinion/sunday/why-i-left-white-nationalism.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/books/review/eli-saslow-rising-out-of-hatred.html

https://jewishpostandnews.ca/features/the-cure-for-hate-how-a-former-neo-nazi-skinhead-turned-his-life-around/

https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-54526345

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/from-neo-nazi-to-hasidic-jew-former-skinhead-who-discovered-his-jewish-roots-to-speak-in-montreal

Those might not be the best examples, they’re not particularly easy to find, because it’s hard work and relatively rare. But it’s possible, and I’d argue the hard work is worth it to avoid violence.

Huge for not being proponents of political violence. Be it for the sake of history, our legitimacy as a nation, the sake of teaching our children healthy values and civics, and sure, for our feelings, take your pick. Sometimes being a good person and using alternatives to violence is much harder than defaulting to our baser instincts.

The whole idea of modern politics is for it to be how we resolve conflicts and make progress without violence. That’s the whole point. Politics is the antithesis of violence.

It got us the moral high ground of not condoning political violence, which is huge. If we respond to their violence with more violence, it won’t end in peace and harmony, it will only exacerbate the problem.

As a Jew I fully understand your sentiment, but it is a really dangerous thing to normalize. Everyone can change if they’re given the right kind of attention and put in a ton of work being deprogrammed. There are amazing examples of Nazis and white supremacists finally understanding the impact of their hatred. I’m not saying it’s always going to work, probably not even most of the time. But absolutes like this are not a constructive solution. Threatening death, violence, and/or refusing to even try to rehabilitate racists, bigots, and Nazis only gives them more power.

I think she’s partly right, but also, if she was the one who ultimately succeeded in getting Biden to drop out when he did, then isn’t it reasonable to expect that he would have dropped out earlier if she had pushed him out earlier? Which would make it her fault. Fuck, I don’t even know anymore. I don’t have a lot of confidence that the Democratic party will learn the right lessons from this loss.

I actually don’t think there’s any uncertainty. He’s been quite clear about what he’ll do. He’ll kill all federal cases and ongoing federal investigations, pardon himself for everything he can pardon himself for, and all of the state proceedings will be paused until after his term. In the meantime he’ll “investigate,” threaten, and bully anyone involved in the various state cases, and given his age it is incredibly unlikely that legal proceedings will ever result in justice for his myriad crimes.

lol ain’t the justice system grand?

I know you’re being cute, but for those who don’t know the whole story: after the jury found him civilly liable, the judge made a point of publicly clarifying that yes, he was found to have raped Carroll.

One source

Another source

Not only that, but Trump was found by a jury to have raped E Jean Carrol. Reminder: we already know Trump is a rapist.

In my experience, it’s less about the job and more about the personal preferences of the agent running the background investigation. I’ve seen contractors for low-level non-sensitive positions have entire job offers rescinded because they were honest about past weed use earlier in their life (not current). I’ve seen contractors breeze through the same process while flat out lying about their past weed use, and I’ve been told that lying is typically the best option, because the agents don’t have the time or resources to follow up. But if you’re caught lying on a form you’re fucked, so it’s a mix of damned if you do damned if you don’t, but also you might be totally fine depending on how the agent feels that day. On top of that, many of the agents are contractors themselves, so there’s very little incentive for consistency.

I’m not sure if communicating with felons would/should revoke whatever clearances they have, but you’ve still hit on a really important point: these men run companies that have billions of dollars worth of federal contracts, and if they were anybody else they never would have passed the required background investigation in the first place. For those who don’t know, federal contractors work on behalf of the US Government, and every single one of them has to pass a thorough background investigation in order to be cleared to work on a federal contract. Yes, even the cafeteria workers who run the food court in a federal building. Musk has smoked weed in public on camera, and while I couldn’t care less about that, anyone completing the federal background investigation form in good faith would have to report that, and it would automatically disqualify them from any kind of security clearance. If they didn’t report it, then that means they lied on an official form, which at the very least would disqualify them, and at worst is another felony.

There are two sets of rules, one for the billionaires and one for the rest of us. They can happily break all the laws that would get the rest of us thrown in prison, and what’s more, they can further enrich themselves through that unlawful behavior.

Wow, this is some serious chutzpah:

“Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials,” Bezos wrote. “You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other.”

Firstly, Trump is not a government official. He’s a private citizen, who is also a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist.

Secondly, don’t tell us that your principles are the only thing standing in the way of your corrupt conflicting business interests, without telling us what your principles are. Oh right, we can plainly see that you have no principles from your actions over decades of running an exploitative monopoly, and from the fact that you hijacked your own newspaper’s editorial page to tell us that ‘no no it’s still a legit newspaper I swear’ as you undermine its credibility with your own words.

What a disgrace.

Well that’s crappy timing, would have been nice if his sentence kept him in prison for just a few more days. Releasing him right before Election Day seems like an unnecessary risk given this guy’s violent rhetoric…

This is a good analogy, and is one big reason I won’t trust any AI until the ‘answers’ are guaranteed and verifiable. I’ve worked with people who needed to have every single thing they worked on double-checked for accuracy/quality, and my takeaway is that it’s usually faster to just do it myself. Doing a properly thorough review of someone else’s work, knowing that they historically produce crap, takes just about as long as doing the work myself from scratch. This has been true in every field I’ve worked in, from academia to tech.

I will not be using any of Apple’s impending AI features, they all seem like a dangerous joke to me.

This article does a good job of explaining how she was assigned to the documents case last year, and still applies to how cases are assigned in her district in general. There just aren’t a lot of judges in the pool of available options.

As of October 2024 Microsoft has a market cap of $3.109 Trillion. (Source). So uh, fuck that.