There’s been enough that “Do you play War Thunder” is a security risk question that the US military asks during job interviews.

And they just keep happening…

I mean, have you seen what we wear in the US? American flags are on basically every house and half of the shirts, hats, and pants.

I’ve been going through the pictures on my phone recently and found the perfect one from COVID:

The cars make it more realistic, anyway.

An article from just after Jan 6th happened. My phone says I saved it on Jan 8th, 2021, so it was literally a day or two after.

My understanding is that historically, the vote has been almost 50/50, but that there have been issues with the question that have thrown up doubts about the validity of the referendum conclusions. Stuff like giving the options of statehood or territory, but not independence, etc. Even the one you linked says that only around half of the population responded and over 200,000 ballots were thrown out for either being blank or invalid.

I had thought that a significant portion of the population had been in favor of independence, especially since we came in and basically destroyed their economy. They had been one of the largest manufacturers of pharmaceuticals in the world before the US, and now I think their biggest industry is tourism, which, as someone who has lived in a tourist town for decades, is not conducive to a healthy economy.

I love how one of the issues the Imperium has with the Tau is that they keep losing worlds to the Tau because they secede after the dramatic improvement in quality of life vs. life under Imperial rule.

It’s a delaying tactic. If the government shuts down, nothing can move forward. They can’t fire people and continue destroying offices because those employees all get paid through the shutdown but nobody can do any work. Any of the paperwork involved - pink slips, etc. can’t go through because there’s nobody there to send them or even read the emails.

If a shutdown helped the Republicans, then that’s what they would’ve been going for in the first place.

Every extra day it takes them is a day where things haven’t gotten worse for everyone and an extra day for the already fracturing Krasnov administration to continue to fall apart and eat itself.

When did I say that they weren’t? I said that I suspect that people who grow up under specific conditions are probably more likely to hold conservative beliefs.

In fact, I’d say that that is one of the examples I’m talking about. Think the white kid who grows up poor and hears his whole childhood from his parents and neighbors that it’s all the fault of those job stealing immigrants and those communist Democrats. He’s just as likely to grow up to be conservative as the kid who grew up wealthy or in a middle class white suburb where everybody looks just like him and who never faced any hardship and therefore can’t imagine a situation outside of his own limited life experiences. The first group blames their problems on The Other, while the second two can’t imagine that things are as bad as they say because the system benefitted them and therefore it must be good.

All run the full spectrum of conservative ideology, from indifference at best to the suffering of minorities to actively reveling in it. In short, my point was that cruelty and hatred are learned in these cases, not innate states of being, because one of the most effective tools against conservative beliefs is simply exposure to diverse groups of people.

Great question, because I had the same thought.

I think there’s a “nurture” factor in here, where people who grow up in “conservative” households, grow up benefiting from the status quo/without real hardships, or are just generally insulated from diverse groups of people when they’re young are more likely to hold “conservative” beliefs. Because one of the biggest fighters against bigotry is simply meeting people with different lived experiences than yours.

Fun fact: A study was done that apparently showed that the parts of the brain responsible for empathy are smaller on average in Republicans than the rest of the population.

The best evidence of this is the creator of Tumblr. He sold it and got a payout of like a hundred million dollars or something and completely disappeared from public life. He only ever appears in the news when he makes some big donation to a charity.

In short, AI is useful when it’s improving workflow efficiency and not much else beyond that. People just unfortunately see it as a replacement for the worker entirely.

If you wanna get loose with your definition of “AI,” you can go all the way back to the MS Paint magic wand tool for art. It’s simply an algorithm for identifying pixels within a certain color tolerance of each other.

The issue has never been the tool itself, just the way that it’s made and/or how companies intend to use it.

Companies want to replace their entire software division, senior engineers included, with ChatGPT or equivalent because it’s cheaper, and they don’t value the skill of their employees at all. They don’t care how often it’s wrong, or how much more work the people that they didn’t replace have to do to fix what the AI breaks, so long as it’s “good enough.”

It’s the same in art. By the time somebody is working as an artist, they’re essentially at a senior software engineer level of technical knowledge and experience. But society doesn’t value that skill at all, and has tried to replace it with what is essentially a coding tool trained on code sourced from pirated software and sold on the cheap. A new market of cheap knockoffs on demand.

There’s a great story I heard from somebody who works at a movie studio where they tried hiring AI prompters for their art department. At first, things were great. The senior artist could ask the team for concept art of a forest, and the prompters would come back the next day with 15 different pictures of forests while your regular artists might have that many at the end of the week. However, if you said, “I like this one, but give me some versions without the people in them,” they’d come back the next day with 15 new pictures of forests, but not the original without the people. They simply could not iterate, only generate new images. They didn’t have any of the technical knowledge required to do the job because they depended completely on the AI to do it for them. Needless to say, the studio has put a ban on hiring AI prompters.

• This is likely the first major outage of the company since Musk took ownership in 2022.

Didn’t Twitter go down multiple times for similar periods of time not long after Musk fired everybody? Or am I just hallucinating wishful thinking.

Plug that random USB stick you found on the sidewalk directly into the server and open up Link_ParkFullAlbum-LimeWire.exe

I don’t know the 5 9s reference, but the two 8s is 88, a Nazi dog whistle for Heil Hitler, as H is the 8th letter of the alphabet.

Despite the explosion, the only people injured (and killed) in that event were the 3 people in the car.

How about when Spain voted out their fascist Prime Minister and put him in the Spanish space program:

I think the ritual to siphon all Canadian aggression into Justin Bieber every year is beginning to fail.