Seems like the prayers didn’t work once again. Maybe next storm?

Good visualization but inaccurate. Space between galaxies in a cluster and even the stars in a galaxy is also growing. The difference is in scale. There’s so much distance between galactic clusters and the largest structures of the universe that added up that expansion amount is so much bigger. The balloon analogy with galaxies as dots on the surface is closer since the dots also do grow some, but the balloon would have to be huge to capture a good scale comparison.

Absolutely, if for no other reason, many will be back in society soon, after the election they could have voted in affects the world they rejoin. Some may say that’s the price for doing the crime, but prison should be about helping people become a better person and fix the problems that got them there, not a punishment. In an ideal world, of course.

Even a hypothetically true artificial general intelligence would still not be a moral agent

That’s a deep rabbit hole that can’t be stated as a known fact. It’s absolutely true right now with LLMs, but at some point the line could be crossed. If and when, how, and by what definition has been a long debate nowhere near resolved.

It’s highly possible that AGI/ASI could come about and be both super intelligent and self conscious and still have no sense of morality. But how can we at human levels even comprehend what’s possible? There’s the real danger, we have no idea what we could be heading towards.

I would guess that hiking or trail maps are probably much more detailed than a road map, so that makes sense that it would still be a thing, although certainly digital versions have made some dent in them. Electronics are a bit more susceptible to the environment and the need for power though, so maybe not as much for those reasons.

That was the next layer, but they can’t get to that point if the voting isn’t close. I don’t disagree that elections is one of the many reasons why the court got stacked, but way before the SC there WILL be corruption attempts at the voting level. See Steve Bannon’s commentary on how they’ve put people in place in voting areas and have formulated a plan to question voter authenticity. They know they can’t win with a fair election, so they’re finding more and more ways to subtly cheat. Or maybe not even subtle now, since they keep saying everything out loud.

And the best way to counter this is drown the attempt in voter numbers, so that even if ballots are questioned or tossed or people turned away, the number still are high.

Alternate question: do any of you (maybe a bit older than 35) remember the last time you bought an updated paper map for your area, or one for a road trip? They used to be at most checkout lanes in many stores.

I can already hear the “maps on paper? How could you find anything?”

Looking that way. Vote anyway. Let’s see if we can break a record of voter turnout and margin of difference. No more of this stupid late night “still 50%/50% results, too close to call” because everyone thought it was a done deal and they didn’t need to show up. Amazing how when everyone thinks that, there aren’t enough votes…

Reminder of why the winner of the 2000 election didn’t become President () When you have both an electoral college and first past the post voting system, close races get ugly and questionable. If a higher percentage of people would vote, we wouldn’t see such a close race.

I don’t think that’s the problem. Here’s an example of the distribution of voting, and it’s sort of what you’d expect from the stereotype. Note that Gen-X is close to 50%, a bit more to the right. What affects things more (and mentioned in the article) is actual voting, or rather the lack of voting from the apathetic or oppressed or mislead. If more younger voters don’t vote, the results skew to the right.

Add to that how different the commitment to party is between left and right. Left has lots of differing opinions and the infighting between Democrat and farther left 3rd party voters often result in either spoiler or no votes at all (which is why ranked voting would be a huge change). Right on the other hand, we’ve all heard the line about party first, no matter what. Liars, rapists, felons, still voting for the candidate because that’s what a Republican does.

I don’t know if the latter can be easily fixed outside of better education both in voting information and in general. The right really aren’t in favor of any of that though, that would hurt their numbers. Trump even said it out loud, they love the poorly educated.

The first part though is powerful. I’ve heard it said to young crowds many times that if more of them show up they can hugely affect the results.

I’m not denying my generation (Gen-X, and why I felt I needed to reply) has its share of MAGAs. Long ago when I first joined Facebook and started adding friends I found from high school I thought it would be cool to reconnect. It was disappointing how quickly I found so many of them were not the same left-leaning radical free thinking people I thought I knew back then. But MAGA mania isn’t solely in one generation, it’s a problem shared that will stay around if we don’t change some things.

It could respond in other ways if it was trained to do so. My first local model was interesting as I changed its profile to have a more dark and sarcastic tone, and it was funny to see it balance that instruction with the core mode to be friendly and helpful.

The point is, current levels of LLMs are just telling you what you want to hear. But maybe that’s useful as a sounding board for your own thoughts. Just remember its limitations.

Regardless of how far AI tech goes, the human-AI relationship is something we need to pay attention to. People will find it a good tool like OP, but it can be easy to get sucked into thinking it’s more than it is and becoming a problem.

Vote anyway. Be part of a sweep.

It takes a tragedy anniversary now to get complimentary breakfast? Wow.

Neither is bossa nova/samba (TOS) or a country ballad (Firefly).

It had its issues, but for the time it was good. Probably depended on the machine and what you were running. That was back in the days when making things work meant the right drivers, and the Win98SE CD usually made it work.

ME was so bad that MS forgot about it themselves. I bought a new laptop with ME installed that ran terribly, replaced it with 98 and it ran great.

Or the downvotes are coming from the MAGA viewers who are following the video’s directions to prevent its sharing.

McCrory would know about doing and saying things that later come back to bite them.

98SE, XP, and 7 each were relatively solid for their time. They all had issues, but were far better at being an OS than what we have now or are trying to be sold to constantly upgrade to.

I think just using it as instrumental would have been fine, for some reason having lyrics for the first time scarred some fans, even though it’s really not that bad.