And you’re ignoring history and the way the parties have always worked when they have the incumbent

Nope, that DID happen. But you are ignoring the obvious reality in this case.

lol, you believe this?

Do I believe that about four months ago the Democratic Party made a desperate move to replace the incumbent candidate and there were very few viable options at the time? Yes, I believe that, because we just went through it about four months ago. It’s pretty much political suicide to withdraw an incumbent candidate. You don’t plan that from the beginning, because that would be a stupid plan. It was very likely “planned” as in “plan B,” but it’s kind of idiotic to think that it was plan A. The primary was not hijacked, the incumbent is always the candidate. Primaries are always a formality for the incumbent party.

They ran Harris because she was the only viable option when it was clear that Biden was not. They did not run Harris thinking she would win at all, they ran her out of desperation because the incumbent was flatlining. It was not a choice, and it certainly was not one based on demographics. It was a “Hail Mary” and it failed as it was likely to do from the outset, and everyone who was paying attention knew that, yet had no choice but to hope for the best.

That’s been a common and roughly true trope for a long time, but I think we may have hit the point where high technology has been ubiquitous for multiple generations now and it’s probably not quite as true as it once was (that the younger generation is always better with technology than the previous)

I don’t disagree with that assessment.

I’m generally on your side of this argument but the number of non-voters is hard to quantify yet clearly had a major effect on the outcome, and a lot of the anti-Harris rhetoric from the left demotivated people into not voting at all (as opposed to voting third party). The third party vote counts are somewhat irrelevant to this line of reasoning.

Right there with you on that

What do you think being offended means, dude? Because this person you’re replying to is not offended. You ignoring the content of the comments and just hammering on really sounds like you’re offended, though. Because that’s what being offended sounds like.

It’s even worse on Threads, believe it or not.

X sucks, but Threads is even worse. 99% of everything I have ever seen on Threads is pure distilled engagement bait, and half the time expanding replies gets stuck loading. I wish I were exaggerating, but I’m not.

What are your recent “oh, this again”s?

It doesn’t progress your argument. You do not come across as the one arguing in good faith here, just so you know. You should think about why, if you are.

Keep up the good work

That’s great. The history communities on the other site were such great quality on average and I miss them. How do you have time to do all that?

Oh shit you mean like AskHistorians? Is there enough density now for that?

Personally, I’ve found that LLMs are best as discussion partners, to put it in the broadest terms possible. They do well for things you would use a human discussion partner for IRL.

• “I’ve written this thing. Criticize it as if you were the recipient/judge of that thing. How could it be improved?” (Then address its criticisms in your thing… it’s surprisingly good at revealing ways to make your “thing” better, in my experience)
• “I have this personal problem.” (Tell it to keep responses short. Have a natural conversation with it. This is best done spoken out loud if you are using ChatGPT; prevents you from overthinking responses, and forces you to keep the conversation moving. Takes fifteen minutes or more but you will end up with some good advice related to your situation nearly every time. I’ve used this to work out several things internally much better than just thinking on my own. A therapist would be better, but this is surprisingly good.)
• I’ve also had it be useful for various reasons to tell it to play a character as I describe, and then speak to the character in a pretend scenario to work out something related. Use your imagination for how this might be helpful to you. In this case, tell it to not ask you so many questions, and to only ask questions when the character would truly want to ask a question. Helps keep it more normal; otherwise (in the case of ChatGPT which I’m most familiar with) it will always end every response with a question. Often that’s useful, like in the previous example, but in this case it is not.
• etc.

For anything but criticism of something written, I find that the “spoken conversation” features are most useful. I use it a lot in the car during my commute.

For what it’s worth, in case this makes it sound like I’m a writer and my examples are only writing-related, I’m actually not a writer. I’m a software engineer. The first example can apply to writing an application or a proposal or whatever. Second is basically just therapy. Third is more abstract, and often about indirect self-improvement. There are plenty more things that are good for discussion partners, though. I’m sure anyone reading can come up with a few themselves.

May I ask how you’ve used LLMs so far? Because I hear that type of complaint from a lot of people who have tried to use them mainly to get answers to things, or maybe more broadly to replace their search engine, which is not what they’re best suited for, in my opinion.

Put simply, some states get more electors than other states to account for greater population, and each state decides how their electors are supposed to vote according to their statewide popular vote. Most states apply all of their electors to the winner of the popular vote in their state, while some apply them proportionally. Most do the former (“winner takes all”).

This leads to a discrepancy between the popular vote and the electoral vote, and it’s mathematically biased against states with higher populations. So, votes in the more populous states (which tend to vote Democrat) are worth “less” in the electoral college than those in less populous states, leading to Democrats winning the popular vote yet losing the actual election… which has happened in every election they’ve lost since Bush v. Gore, if I’m not mistaken. I’ll double check that and edit if I’m wrong.

Edit: Sorry, it did not happen for Bush v. Kerry, Bush won the popular vote in that one by less than 1%. However, in the other two (Bush v. Gore and Trump v. Clinton) the popular votes were actually won handily by Gore and Clinton, not by Bush or Trump.

Edit 2: This is also notably NOT made worse by gerrymandering, because the number of electors you get is equal to the combined number of senators and congressmen your state gets. Since all states apply their electors based on the popular vote result, it doesn’t matter what party alignments your congresspeople have, so gerrymandering plays no role here.

The mathematical bias comes from the fact that every state gets two senators no matter what the population is, and only your congressperson count is proportional to population, but both count toward your number of electors. So, less populous states have proportionally somewhat more “electors per capita” than states with higher populations.

I never said I thought training AI with the copyrighted work of others causes harm to others. If anything, I think training is analogous enough to human learning that it’s a gray area. However, I think there are different ethical concerns with AI training data than there are with piracy, and those concerns mostly arise from the profit being made from the models.