45% of men 18 to 25 have never asked out a woman in person

I can’t speak for the whole 45% but some of us have heard stories from women about how that other 55% can behave. I think I’d rather wait for a lady to (never) ask me out then put someone in the position of thinking “Oh, is he gonna take it bad if I say no?”

May you live in exactly the kind of society you ask for.

You could say the same thing about rewiring a human’s neurons randomly

Can you? One is editing a table of variables, the other is altering a brain by some magic hypothetical. Even if you could, the person you do it to is gonna be cross with you – the programme, meanwhile, is still just a programme. People who’ve had damage to Wernicke’s area are still attempting to communicate meaningful thoughts, just because the signal is scrambled doesn’t mean the intent isn’t still there.

A statistical model strings a sentence together with a great big web of statistical weights, settling onto the next most probable word, one by one. People write with the intent to share a meaning. It is not the same.

That statistical (or “predictive”, if we’re gussying it up) model has no understanding in it - no more than any other programme. It’s a physical chain reaction, a calculation that runs until the sums even out to a state of rest. Wipe the web of statistical weights clean, and re-weigh them so the sums spit out the colour of pixels in a JPEG rather than the content of a .txt document.

Hell, weigh the web at random and have it spit out nonsense numbers. It’ll do that for as long as keep the programme up. It will never ask you why you took the meaning out of its task. The machine makes no distinction between the sort of calculation you run it – people are what project meaning onto the blinking lights.

“AI” in fiction has meant a machine with a mind like what people have. It’s had that meaning for decades. Very recently, there are programmes that do predictive text like what your phone does, but large. You can call the predictive text programme an “AI”, but as the novelty wears off, it’s gonna sound more and more like advertising than a real description.

isn’t it a combination of younger developers not learning to programme under the restrictions of limited memory and cpu speed, on top of employers demanding code as soon as possible rather than code that is elegant or resource efficient or even slightly planned out

They’re saying the way party leadership acts and the policies they support has impact on voter behavior.

Alright then. I’d like to see democrats be as obstinate to trump’s policies as we’ve seen Republicans be when Dems are in office. If democrats are serious about this, they need to pull support and funding from party members who can’t toe the line, like Senator Fetterman who broke with the party to pass the Republican’s budget.

Looking at the context of trump getting into office is part of how we address this. It’s still fairly likely that there’s gonna be an election in 2028 – going in with an understanding of what went wrong in 2024 only benefits us.

This attitude that we can only talk about immediate day to day events, that talking about strategy and constructively criticizing where Democrats fall short in responding to the Republicans – that only hurts us, dooms us to the same mistakes we’ve already made. It helps Trump and his cronies.

it’s not really “distracting” to take a step back and examine how we got here.

unless of course you’d rather not learn from mistakes

except he didn’t. it only happened because the party pressured him to after an abysmal debate performance in August. If he really wanted that, he would have said as much at the beginning of the year rather than campaign.

the people who cause problems in retail environments are not the people who would think to mask the intentions their body language communicate

that being said, people will still surprise you and it’s usually right when you stop expecting them to have any capacity to surprise you