I thought the US would never elect a Republican again.

People said that after Nixon and Reagan. But it all exists in a vacuum. No real consideration of why any Republicans got elected in the first place or who voted for them the first time.

Also, you’re completely divorced from right wing media. The consumption of this fascist propaganda hasn’t stopped. The production of new fascist IP hasn’t slowed. Consolidation by new fascist business interests hasn’t been disrupted.

What do you think is going to happen in two years, when Dems are running the House and maybe the Senate? They’ll be getting screamed at by all the fascists who were screaming at them under Obama. It’ll be back to 2008. Twenty years, nothing fundamentally changed

Dubba was dumb, but not “rip out USaid” dumb.

No. He just put the Judges and Stewards Commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association in charge of FEMA right before one of the worst hurricanes in the nation’s history. Then he put John Bolton, a man even Donald Trump dunked on as a war-mongering idiot asshole, into the position of UN Ambassador. Oh, and he put Scalia - a man who recited 15th century poetry to defend a moratorium on gay marriage - on the SC. Oh, and don’t forget putting Jeff Gannon in the White House press pool.

most presidents (or at least their cabinets) understood that the laws and institutions of the country

You are off your fucking rocker if you think Bush 43 either understood or respected the laws and institutions of the country. We were dealing with a Constitutional Crisis every other week during the last two years of his Presidency.

Go back to Reagan, Nixon, fucking Eisenhower. Nevermind how corrupt and mendacious folks in the LBJ and Carter and Clinton administrations ended up being. It’s all the same shit, different days.

Trump feels worse because we’re so far removed from the Golden Era of the New Deal that we’ve forgotten politicians can even be “good” in a proper sense. And when even the gritty Cold War jerk-off of the 1980s are a distant memory, we’ve forgotten that we’re all supposed to be playing on the same team even if we don’t like the Head Coach. It’s the naked infighting that makes this modern moment suck so much. Sending gestapo in to drag women by their hair and shoot paramedics in the face is shit you do in Vietnam or Iraq, not LA or Minnesota.

Trump is Imperialism coming home to the Core. But the policies are as American as Apple Pie.

It’s not. That’s half the joke.

Trump climbed into the White House through a series of reasonably clever suck ups and betrayals. Modern AIs routinely lose at checkers - a game that was computationally solved twenty years ago.

Trump’s a used car salesman pushing Americans into a lemon. He’s not fooled by AI. He’s just sponsored by the AI companies.

Americans elect a moron to the presidency every ten to fifteen years going back to the country’s founding.

It’s not a matter of recovery so much as a hurdle that liberal democracy routinely stumbles over.

AI is developing extremely quickly. In another 2-5 years, they’re going to invent a computer that can tell you to flip over a cup to drink from it.

they famously started out by using pagerank

Pagerank was built on the Markov Model, which became the core of modern LLM graph design.

It was a precursor technology, not an independent system, which used Hyperlinks rather than word tokens to form associations.

they usually mean llms specifically and using that to replace actually going to the source websites is new

So much of the complaint around AI isn’t even the LLM part. It’s the weighting and censorship of certain sources and data, convinced with the masking of results behind natural language output templates.

You had the first problem under Pagerank already (Google Bombing and “shadow banning” of sources the company didn’t find reliable). The second is entirely a product of the interface and has nothing to do with the heuristics of the program.

Who can forget the hard-nosed political analysis of the PA Comics from the early 2000s?

Which, up until maybe eight or nine years ago, Google was pretty good at.

But then we went into this insane build-out cycle, where you were seemingly incentivized to be extra sloppy with every aspect of the business.

That’s not how monopolies work.

Gen-AI use is fine

It’s really not. There’s already enough procedurally generated GACHA crap. Plus the games that are barely more than T&A Simulator. Hooking this up to the AI pipeline and blasting it into Steam or some similar digital games marketplace is bordering on an act of violence.

It doesn’t make a gamedev any holier or respectable if they torture themselves by hand drawing 1000 unique titles and textures for bookspines for some NPCs bookshelf.

I mean, this is what really separates the Men from the Boys when it comes to game development. You come at this thinking “Aha, what kind of dumbshit would have 1000 unique ideas for tiles and textures? How could that possible add to a player’s experience?” And yet this is exactly what makes a FromSoft game or a Hideo Kojima title or a top tier FF title or old school Blizzard or Bioware or Ubisoft or Nintendo game stand out from the pack.

The loving attention to detail. The craftsmanship and creativity and invention, when translating an idea into a digital asset. The fact that it isn’t just a reskinned cracker box CTRL+C, CTRL+V’d a thousand times across a janky looking brick wall.

You begin to see a game’s age and lack of care when an expansion comes out and people are saying “X is just a reskin of Y” in the reviews. You see its strength when you’re on your 100th hour of Eldin Ring or your eighth Resident Evil game, in a location you’ve never been getting blindsided by a creature you’ve never seen before.

How do I tell them if I’m not on Facebook? That’s where they are.

Is Fox News still trying the ridiculous “Iran bombed themselves so they could blame the US” lie?

It worked on the Palestinians. Why not try it on the Iranians?

These are naturally evil people, on account of believing in God incorrectly. They lie about everything. Do you believe for a second that Iran even has a girl’s school? Muslims don’t teach girls anything. They rape them as children and then butcher the babies for their supper. They have big horns on their heads and they breath fire and they dig through the ground like moles so that they can refine uranium for Atom Bombs. You’re going to tell me we committed a war crime by murdering them? STFU, you Woke Idiot Tankie. Go back to Marxist college and suck Stalin’s dick.

Cranks up “We Are Charlie Kirk” album to 11

40 years ago, when the US Navy would should down an Iranian Airliner, we did it with old fashioned American know-how.

20 years ago, when the US Air Force bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, we did it with the latest in stealth technology.

Now we outsource the job of murdering civilians to a computer. Fucking shameful.

glances at the Saudis

Not even about the oil anymore. This is entirely fascists up their own assholes in a fit of self-destructive pride.

Since you’re the customer, no ads

I remember the streaming services making this claim when they first took off.

Ditching Google is good, but not for AI.

LLMs and their precursors were always how search engines compiled and ranked their search results. Google has been using some form of AI to build up its base of information for decades.

The absurd turn of the last decade was Google C-level pivot from engagement through useful results to engagement through bad results that force you to click around on the site longer. “How do we get more ad interaction?” became the question that dominated the development of their technology.

That’s what enahittified their website. Not “AI”.

Anita Sarkeesian on notice.

The number of these damned gaming commentators complaining about “woke in games” is exhausting.

Alternatives exist. There’s a guy I listen to named Felix Biederman who has done exhaustive rundowns of Metal Gear Solid and Dark Souls. He manages to get out 4+ hours of content an episode without worrying about “Woke” even once. Then you’ve got classics like PennyArcade which remain a bastion of politics-neutral gaming content and coverage.

But if you’re just cruising on the back of the algorithm… yeah. Your Asmongolds and Pewdiepies, who go full Hitler because it got attention through negative reaction, are predictably toxic. And then you’ve got the Mr. Beast style of producer who has turned slopifying the algorithm into a passion project.

You don’t have to tell this to me. You have to tell this to my entire extended elderly family.