I'm coming from the same basic perspective as you describe, and always tried hard to see people in the best light and sympathize with their concerns, but am no longer finding that possible in this situation, and it is disheartening.
The only explanation for the core MAGA supporters that I can come up with is that it is a sort of loose coalition of people that feel disaffected and judged by society for various reasons and want acceptance - and vengeance. It includes many people that are, e.g. sociopaths and racists, and want someone to tell them that being like that isn't bad, it's actually "protecting American from inferior people" or some such thing.
There is just no way that people don't realize that Trump is a malignant narcissist that lies every time he speaks, and tries to sadistically harm anyone that doesn't support him. The only explanation is that people don't like him despite that, but because of it- him being so awful, and proudly like that with no hint of remorse, absolves them of the lifelong guilt and fear that they might be bad people also, and instead frees them to also be proudly like that themselves.
Recently I've been reading a book about the history of the Jim Crow era in the south, and the extremely widespread brutal terrorism and mass murder, and I can't really reach any other conclusion than that those people just laid low for a while while they regrouped and strategized, but they're just as prevalent, violent, and racist now as they ever were, and they're done hiding. They see the Confederate/Nazi/Fascist dream of a totalitarian white ethnostate in their grasp, and they are ready to make it happen - they aren't ashamed for wanting that, and they aren't afraid anymore.
I get that this is a really dark view of current events, and I really hope it is not true, but at this point, I think it is delusional to pretend that it's anything but the most likely explanation and prepare accordingly.
I found passage below near the conclusion of the article that mentioned McLibel interesting and decided to look up what it was on wikipedia:
>By the 1980s various protest movements gained traction... Between March 1995 and February 2005 the longest-running court trial in British history, dubbed ‘McLibel’, saw McDonald’s bring a claim of defamation against protesters associated with Greenpeace for their distribution of anti-McDonald’s leaflets outside businesses.
>Steel and Morris chose to defend the case. The two were denied legal aid, as was policy for libel cases, despite having limited income. Thus, they had to represent themselves, though they received significant pro bono assistance, including from Keir Starmer.
Seems everything is very connected, never would of guess just a reference deep I'd find him there.
I’ve been watching this space for a while and built my own puzzle with Cursor. Vibe coding speeds things up, but getting the idea, difficulty balance, and UI right is still tricky. Probably depends a lot on the type of puzzle (word-based vs. object placement, etc.).
HN leans a bit to the right due to it being mostly male and tech oriented, which tend to lean libertarian. If that isn’t enough of a safe space for you, your views might be a farther from center than you think
Agriculture is bad for biodiversity. The raison d'être of agriculture is to favor few species over all others. The goal of agriculture is to reduce biodiversity.
Please keep agriculture for food.
Simple molecules like ethanol can be produced with electricity, water and air (CO2 capture). No need to sterilize a patch of land for that.
Besides I'm not sure ethanol is much needed, electric cars do not burn ethanol.
I feel he's a poster child of what happens when you consume too much social media. Blaming immigration for cutting off access to corporate america for Americans ? I really want to know what the numbers are and what they would be if immigration is completely stopped. Hopefully someone will come up with a simulation for this sort of thing so we can put the debate to rest. Its weird that this data-driven guy have no actual data to back up his claim.
It's not quite the same but since the dawn of smartphones, I've hated it when you ask a question, as a discussion starter or to get people's views, and some jerk reads off the wikipedia answer as if that's some insight I didn't know was available to me, and basically ruins the discussion.
I know talking to an llm is not exactly parallel, but it's a similar idea, it's like talking to the guy with wikipedia instead of batting back and forth ideas and actually thinking about stuff.
Regarding context reduction. This got me wondering. If I use my own API key, there is no way for the IDE or coplilot provider to benefit other than monthly sub. But if I am using their provided model with tokens from the monthly subscription, they are incentivized to charge me based on tokens I submit to them, but then optimize that and pass on a smaller request to the LLM and get more margin. Is that what you are referring to?
Some of us knew we were in this information war, and we've been fighting it for 10 years. Remember in 2016 when Trump colluded with Russia to with that election? And everyone who knew what was going on at the time said Trump and Putin were allies? Those people were mocked incessantly for a decade. Authors like Seth Abramson predicted what's happening now years ago, just by treating the facts seriously, and for that he was treated like a crazy person.
I mean, they were caught meeting with a Russian spy in their campaign HQ, told us they got most of their money from Russia, and then told us for 10 years we were being crazy conspiracy theorists by claiming they were aligned with Russia. It's not a hard puzzle if you have the pieces.
So hearing today that "this is such a surprise" is especially frustrating, because this has been the topic of congressional reports written by Republican , impeachment trials, DOJ reports, reports from federal agencies, warnings from the FBI, CIA, and also international intelligence agencies. People like Christopher Steele correctly called this a decade ago and he was demonized. Australia brought it to the attention of the FBI.
Like... people knew this was happening, and warned, and not just nobodies like people on the Internet. What happened over the last 10 years is that Russia won the information war, and the general public decided to trust Russian state media over Democrats when it came to Trump's support of Russia. Which, I think at long last we can all admit this is the case without calling anyone a conspiracy theorist yeah?
That data sharing thing goes pretty far. Am I reading that correctly? Anything that is hosted in the EU, or sells to EU citizens, has to share _all (generated by activity, personal and non-personal, including meta-) data_ that the service itself can use (i.e. backup tapes are excluded), upon request, free of charge, without any obfuscation, and without much of a delay. For B2B and B2C.
Almost sounds too good to be true. As far as I can tell:
* There is no clause for restricting this if it's hard to do. If it's _a lot_ of data, you still have to provide it.
* There is no clause indicating you can charge a fee for the sharing of the data (this seems fair to me; the prep and transfer costs, assuming you automate the process, are incredibly low unless it's, I dunno, some 'permanently live stream my entire life in 4k' service). Easier to just eliminate any attempt at malicious compliance by interpreting 'reasonable' unreasonably.
This is probably just nostalgia, as I was the right age to sink hours into the golden age of Ultima IV-VII when I was younger, but I still think these are the best roleplaying games ever made, and by an absolutely gigantic mile. Every time I try a new RPG, I initially have this feeling like, will this be like Ultima, will this be like Ultima, but I always end up disappointed.
The best way of describing what makes them so great is that they avoid everything feeling like one of those fake-cardboard-cutout Western movie sets. Every other RPG I've played feels like this, the infinity engine games like Baldur's Gate (I've only played 1, not 2) being the canonical example. Everytime I run into an NPC or situation in Baldur's Gate it just feels like the characters start talking through a script that was written just for me, the player, to setup some problem for I, the player, to solve. This is of course the very definition of immersion breaking, because this artificial setup draws attention to the fact that you're playing a game, you're not actually in a real believable world. Baldur's Gate has fantastic combat (an area Ultima VII is terrible), but I think the way that the story is setup and told is boring and uninspired. And that goes similar for literally every other RPGs I've played: Mass Effect ("Hi I'm an alien from a new race you've never met, would you like me to tell you everything about how my race fits into the universe?"), Skyrim (Besthesda, masters of the anonymous, faceless NPC), the Witcher/Cyberpunk (the CD Projekt Red games are actually masters of this style of game design, because they use it as scaffolding for easily the best writing ever in video games, but they're still hampered by inherent weakness of the format: That the world feels like a prop to setup quests for the player to knock down).
In contrast, the Ultima games feel like they create the world first, so that feels alive and believable. And I don't mean by writing a bunch of lore (writing has it's format already, books, use game mechanics to tell your story), but I mean by creating a world piece by piece, character by character, city block by city block, room by room, each piece of furniture, individual dresser by individual dresser. Environmental story telling, game mechanic story telling, storytelling native to the format of of games. The tavern goes here, the barber lives here, these three friends meet at this pub, at this time every day, and discuss this. Ultima does this for every town and every character in the game, for even the most trivial NPC. There's no anonymous, faceless, story-less NPCs acting as walking props like in every other RPG. And once that world feels like a real believable place, one that you could just sit and watch at have it be interesting, like people watching through cafe window--existing through an intersection of mechanics (how NPCs move, day-night-cycles, how they interact with the environment, e.g., the classic "using flour to bake bread"). Only then are the player-driven interactions then built on top of this world, e.g., if you hear a rumor that the shopkeeper seems to disappear for a couple of hours after their shop closes each night, well you can wait till 5 PM and follow them and see what they're up to. Since everything is scripted to this degree, it doesn't feel like you've entered into a pre-programmed scenario for following just this one NPC, you can follow anyone in the game this way, it just so happens that some NPCs might do something interesting after you follow them, like maybe you see them hide a key under a plant and you can go investigate.
This way of having the player-driven gameplay come directly from mechanics that existed first to make a believable world, just makes for more interesting games in my opinion than anything that has come after. A game that's just a series of scripted encounters for the player to knock down is just less interesting.
I don't disagree, there is that Dutch saying that trust enters the town on foot and leaves on a horse. When the media's pursuit of financial incomes results in actions that actively destroy trust (the WaPo non-endorsement and unwillingness to present important points of view is the current poster child for this) then they simply become 'independent and untrusted' which is of not much use.
For me, a more sobering example was that Twitter was gaining trust and it seems that in response Elon Musk bought and killed it. That felt a bit more like actively denying the emergence of new media. It was also an example completely counter to Friedman's view on shareholder value as, as an action, it destroyed shareholder value. Just as Bezo's actions have destroyed shareholder value in the Washington Post.
I bet you a beer Musk and Vivek will not be able to prune anything significant in 4 years, because a) neither has an understanding of how the money is spent b) actual cuts need to be approved by the same people who introduced the expenses in the first place c) they might not even stick around for 4 years.
The only explanation for the core MAGA supporters that I can come up with is that it is a sort of loose coalition of people that feel disaffected and judged by society for various reasons and want acceptance - and vengeance. It includes many people that are, e.g. sociopaths and racists, and want someone to tell them that being like that isn't bad, it's actually "protecting American from inferior people" or some such thing.
There is just no way that people don't realize that Trump is a malignant narcissist that lies every time he speaks, and tries to sadistically harm anyone that doesn't support him. The only explanation is that people don't like him despite that, but because of it- him being so awful, and proudly like that with no hint of remorse, absolves them of the lifelong guilt and fear that they might be bad people also, and instead frees them to also be proudly like that themselves.
Recently I've been reading a book about the history of the Jim Crow era in the south, and the extremely widespread brutal terrorism and mass murder, and I can't really reach any other conclusion than that those people just laid low for a while while they regrouped and strategized, but they're just as prevalent, violent, and racist now as they ever were, and they're done hiding. They see the Confederate/Nazi/Fascist dream of a totalitarian white ethnostate in their grasp, and they are ready to make it happen - they aren't ashamed for wanting that, and they aren't afraid anymore.
I get that this is a really dark view of current events, and I really hope it is not true, but at this point, I think it is delusional to pretend that it's anything but the most likely explanation and prepare accordingly.