Unless the elections are rigged any party has the same chances of winning
This is not an accurate statement. Plurality voting inevitably results in a two party system, due to the spoiler effect.
Until we switch away from plurality voting, voting for a third party helps the party you least align with. It's math. If you're thinking of a scenario where magically a majority of voters all vote for a third party, you're not taking this seriously; that is not a realistic scenario.
Now, if you live in Maine, Alaska, or whatever other places that have switched from plurality voting (a) I'm very jealous and (b) you're encouraged to vote any third party as you see fit.
To be clear, Doctorow discussed switching off AI and proposed that there would be little to no change on the world. I was just changing the technology to show the flaw in the stance.
I apologize to anyone I may have just gravely offended.
lol
I don't know how "non-techie" you are, but a good example is online games. When you're playing Fortnite, Roblox, World of Warcraft, etc you're not going to a web page, but you're on the internet.
I don't disagree that the term AI has shifted significantly in the last 4 years or so, but I was actually meaning it in the other direction, as in, there is more to generative AI (what people are calling "AI" these days) than just chat bots.
The world is full of people who insist that "AI is changing everything" but who – when pressed – have to admit that what they mean is that they're pretty sure that AI will change everything.
If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country's chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country's ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households, too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework again.
He is definitely pretending that change is either on or off.
Are CEOs jumping the gun on how quickly they adopt AI into workflows? Definitely. However, there's a big difference between "AI isn't at a threshold where it is disruptive" and "AI isn't disruptive". Or, to belabor the metaphor: CEOs are jumping the gun, but the race is about to start and they're on the correct track.
Speaking at the level of your target audience is wise, but there is a point where information is not just simplfied, but lost, and I think equating chat bots with AI in the broader sense is past that point. It would be like equating websites with the internet.
Hyperbolic insults don't help your case. If you did think critically about this, feel free to show your work and talk through your thought process.
Generative AI is just a tool. Using it is not much different than using a thesaurus while writing. You can quickly tell when someone has over-used the thesaurus, and it affects the quality of the output, but that doesn't make it bad to use a thesaurus.
I generally respect this guy's opinion (I probably use the term "enshitification" multiple times a week!), but pretending that "AI" and "Chabot" are interchangeable terms seems wildly reductive, and the subtle presumption that the process of changing is a binary changed/non-changed situation instead of a curve is just ignorant.
If the internet was "turned off" after 4 or so years not much would have changed, either.
A man's wife was in a terrible car accident and as she dies on the operating room table, some assclown dressed as the grim reaper walks up and stands there. Do you truly believe anyone is going to "have fun and laugh" in that scenario?
I'm not saying you can't laugh at the guy, but for fuck's sake hop out of your own head for a minute and consider other perspectives.
This is what I meant with my first comment. In a situation where there was no potential for harm, like in a sitcom, this is hilarious. In real life, it is not funny, because there's that risk of harm.
I don't see how that is relevant. Do you understand that simply because you would laugh it off doesn't mean everyone would? In a sitcom, everyone is acting so there's no potential harm, but in real life, if you can muster any empathy at all, it's pretty clear how that prank could make a bad situation even worse.
Very often people are having the most stressful days of their lives in a hospital and I see no value at all in making that harder for them for the lulz.
Yes, that's the one. "On a Pale Horse" is the first book in the series, and the one about Death. In the books, magic and science coexist and aspects of reality like War, Time, Death, etc are all offices that people hold.
The whole Incarnations of Immortality series is one of my favorites, but it's been a bit since I've read them.
There was a point where it was pretty simple not to use the internet, too. This analogy drives a question: were those people who rejected the internet at the beginning better off in the long run, when compared to people who embraced it?
Generative AI can be a very useful productivity tool. Choosing not to use an available tool is "easy", but is it wise?
I find myself agreeing with the person you responded to; you don't appear to be thinking critically about the implications of LLMs/generative AI. That, or you are speaking more literally than it seems, and you mean, literally, that it's easy not to use AI, without commenting on how wise that decision may or may not be.
To be fair, it's difficult to call a close primary election. In general elections, if the, for example, Republican candidate is behind and there are only Democratic leaning areas with votes left to count, you can safely call that election before all the votes are counted.
In a primary, it's Democratic candidate vs Democratic candidate, (or RvR) so there are no shortcuts to use to call it early. The only shortcut available is if one candidate is farther ahead than there are votes left to count.
It also looks like the AP hasn't yet called it either.
If the government asks, they typically need a warrant. (There are exceptions, but they're fairly narrow). Is there a specific example you're thinking of?
This scenario, though, is Snapchat volunteering the information. It wouldn't really make much sense to require the government to get a warrant to recieve a tip, would it?
And shouldn't we applaud the practice? Sure, in this scenario it was a false positive, but if this student teacher were actually planning to do what she joked about and Snapchat sat on that information, I suspect many of the people poohpoohing Snapchat would be angry that they didn't inform law enforcement.
I have no idea why people are using Snapchat in 2026; it was never as private or discreet as it pretended to be, as you could just take a picture of the "self deleting" message with another device. However, it sounds like people still using it need to demand E2EE direct messages. It worked for Facebook.
This is not an accurate statement. Plurality voting inevitably results in a two party system, due to the spoiler effect.
Until we switch away from plurality voting, voting for a third party helps the party you least align with. It's math. If you're thinking of a scenario where magically a majority of voters all vote for a third party, you're not taking this seriously; that is not a realistic scenario.
Now, if you live in Maine, Alaska, or whatever other places that have switched from plurality voting (a) I'm very jealous and (b) you're encouraged to vote any third party as you see fit.