Further, hope that like usual when the Republicans get in charge, they stop being unified and infighting ensues.

I’ve had limited experience with slack, but the whole way conversations map to workspaces at least got to be confusing to me, and I would have liked an experience based on me as a user, rather than having my user span workspaces and have to juggle them to figure out how to talk to whoever I’m supposed to talk to at the time.

For me “it just works” doesn’t ring true. Generally at least once a day, I join a call and it won’t let me unmute, and I have to restart Teams.

Scrolling through history is obnoxiously slow.

The activity feed is mostly useless, spammed with stuff that isn’t important and it’s the only place that vaguely tries to keep track of ‘Teams’ conversations.

In my company, I’ve been added to about 70 Teams and it’s pretty much impossible to interact with them, so as a result no one does, they all just start ad-hoc chats, since that’s the only thing that vaguely gets managed in a way people can follow.

When going cross-organization, it’s a crap shoot whether or not we can use text, voice, and screen share/remote control. I know this is generally due to obnoxious company ‘security’ policies and other solutions have it, but it is a frustration. One recent call with a particularly screwed up company had us on two different meeting platforms at once as well as on an old fashioned conference call, because text was only allowed on one platform, screen share on another, and no audio was allowed on either (despite both supporting all three).

Sure, Teams suffers, in part, because like all corporate tools it connects you to generally dysfunctional work communities. However it broadly does have it’s own annoyances.

I would say LLMs specifically are in that ball park. Things like machine vision have been boringly productive and relatively un hyped.

There’s certainly some utility to LLMs, but it’s hard to see through all the crazy over estimations and being shoved everywhere by grifters.

Well, Trump specifically may not try because the risk/reward isn’t really good for him.

As it stands, he gets to declare an unambiguous “victory” where he won at life. He got to be president with ultimately a clean sweep of the swing states and the popular vote and served as many terms as he is allowed to serve. Thanks to the rules, he doesn’t need to compete again, and he can stop even pretending to work after 4 years.

Meanwhile, a push to establish him as “dictator for life” might at best buy him another few years in office before his health will fail. Such an effort comes with high risk, of him going down in history as more of a “bad man”, of personal risk for being targeted by violence.

Now JD Vance might be game to make a go of it, he’s got decades left in the tank. Of course broadly speaking there’s a balance of power, with those currently in power relatively comfortable knowing that the vote serves as a nice way to get pushed out of office before people get pissed enough to put you in real physical danger. Plenty of opportunities to be self-serving with a pretty safe retirement should things start going awry. Fanaticism can drive people to go further, but I would like to think a pragmatic person with a sense of self-interest can see the value in a peaceful voting out versus having those same millions of people losing their political voice.

Trump and his cult have plowed millions into “47” merch that would suddenly become worthless to them.

No, His followers have plowed millions into it and Trump received those millions.

So while funny, you just have Trump get millions more for his “48” merch.

A candidate that expressed nuanced understanding of economic principles would have been less likely to win the election.

A candidate that instead promises answers that intuitively sound right. If imports are expensive, then obviously the big business owners will build domestic and give us more money. If you get rid of immigrants, then the business owners will have to pay more for citizen workers. Simple answers that are easier for people to believe in.

Attempts to explain nuance? That ranges from nerds overcomplicating things and/or those darned liberal elites trying to truck them.

This cuts both ways. In 2020 Biden won not due to a more sophisticated understanding of things, but simply because things were bad, and the other guy therefore was the obvious choice. So to overcome an incumbent, you just have to have people believe stuff is bad, and provide some believable explanation that you could fix it.

I understand there’s generally nuance and all for various folks villified through history, but given the last decade of his life, his story became one of the easiest in history to break down into “bad person” without oversimplification or any vaguely acceptable case of moral relativism. More context is informative as a key part of learning of history, but it doesn’t ultimately impact ability to simplify it to “bad person”

The more nuanced data: https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Views_on_Hitler_poll_results.pdf

I was hoping that the ‘not all bad’ would be almost all of it. Unfortunately while it was half of it, a full half said Hitler was as good a guy as he was a bad guy, with an equal number responding unsure, which is likely leaning toward I don’t want to give a socially unacceptable answer.

https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Views_on_Hitler_poll_results.pdf

12% had the rather less ambiguous responses of ‘he was at least as good as he was bad’. While 12% of folks were of the maybe defensible technicality of ‘well, even the worst person occasionally will do the right thing’, another 12% responded as ‘unsure’, which I would suspect would lean toward “I don’t want to admit a socially unacceptable answer”.

The full poll data: https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/Views_on_Hitler_poll_results.pdf

Do you think of Adolf Hitler as. . . ?

• A completely good person: 1%
• A good person who did some bad things: 4%
• An equally good and bad person: 7%
• A bad person who did some good things: 12%
• A completely bad person : 65%
• Not sure : 12%

So 12% felt he was at least as good as he was bad, 12% fell into the 'well, even a horrible person can do something right, and 12% were somehow not sure…

I don’t know what the final turnout figures will be, but if it is a lower turnout, I can think of a few:

• 2020 was the easiest year to mail in a ballot ever, and it got harder again as states reinstated various difficulties with mail in ballots.
• So many people didn’t have to go into work in 2020, they had more flexibility to vote however they needed to do it.

Yeah but the point was about what turnout was. We know who won but it’s a bit early to discuss relative turnout compared to 2020. It is likely lower, but the specifics will be a while.

Unfortunately, at least here, that could still backfire, as the voting record indicates whether you voted in person or mail in, so they would know you voted in a different way than expected.

Suddenly, Republicans become a fan of mail in ballots, so they can “audit” their families votes…

I find it insane that with modern computing and displays, they still just render a vague check engine light despite being able to easily display the specifics.

They mostly didn’t have OSDs, they instead had indecipherable 7-segment and some fixed elements like ‘Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa’, with 2 or 3 buttons. The younger Gen-X/older Millennials got their reputation as ‘whiz kids’ in part by handling those interfaces on behalf of their mystified parents.

One, the volume knob is far quicker to respond than the usual ‘up/down’ slow volume adjustment on the wheel. The turn down the overly loud sound from the last driver immediately is nicer with a volume knob.

But with my car with hard A/C controls, I just reach down to the little ‘up/down’ toggle and tug it down a bit if I feel a little warm or bump it up a little if I feel too cold, or hit the big old button if I need to toggle it off to talk on speaker.

There are a fairly well known set of very common controls that will never be better and need an update. Coarse A/C adjustments, vent direction volume, and next-track are all no-brainers (unless you are Tesla…)

For example, here’s a layout that obviously has room and depends on touch for a lot of features, but preserves a reasonably sane set of audio and climate controls (and four miscellaneous functions)

With that you don’t look, you know pretty much immediately for the functions you would use.

There’s still plenty of room for touch/voice controls for those more nuanced/complicated things that don’t fit into button land well. Entering a navigation destination, managing any software updates, setting parameters like "should the car adjust cruise control based on speed limit signs, and if so, what adjustment to the limit should be applied?’

Particularly given the trend of ‘glue a tablet to the middle of the dashboard’. If you are going to do that anyway, bring up a modern successor to the DIN/Double DIN standard, where the mounting is standard and update to also include USB-C for standard power, audio, and data. Add some network profiles for standardized exchange of useful information (Car speedometer, car model, fuel/battery amount and efficiency profile, navigation information to drive dash/HUD, etc).

Eh, threatening to split the vote might in theory get some campaign promises, but such promises are likely to evaporate when things get down to it.

Meanwhile if you actually hold a persistent presence in the house or senate, particularly when it’s close, you got ongoing leverage. Hell, folks like AOC, MTG, Boebert have an absurd amount of national influence for being elected by merely a singular district.