I was unclear. What I oppose is distorting the law. I think that breaking the law is a necessary part of resisting the fascist takeover. Mis-interpreting or changing the law should be avoided, except where necessary to fix changes that were made by the fascists.

The problem is that Jackson is acting in good faith while Alito is not. I can’t actually blame her for that. We can’t prevent the destruction of the rule of law by disregarding the rule of law when it is inconvenient for us. There are a lot of areas where we need to break with conventional and tradition because of bad faith, but the actual law should not be one of them.

Which, to be fair, he was.

You can call yourself anything you want, and no one will stop you. Calling yourself a Christian, while violating every tenet of Christian teachings, does not qualify you as a Christian. I finally coined the term Hypochrists for people like that.

There are plenty of Christians who do follow Christian teachings, to one extent or another, and are generally trying to be decent people. Unfortunately, there are also large numbers of “Christians” who just use the name to justify their selfish behavior, hatred, and cruelty.

All large religions have, or have had, groups like that. Any social institution that can provide credibility is going to be abused as a tool to gain power by someone. It is appalling that the Hypochrists have become large enough, and powerful enough, to have taken over the popular image of what Christianity is.

Best comment I’ve seen in a long time.

I realize it probably won’t matter, but you can send her this link: NY Court Records: People vs Donald J. Trump

If she thinks it isn’t a real site, have her search for something like “new york court records”.

Sam Altman is a huckster, not a technologist. As such, I don’t really care what he says about technology. His purpose has always been to transfer as much money as possible from investors into his own pocket before the bubble bursts. Anything else is incidental.

I am not entirely writing off LLMs, but very little of the discussion about them has been rational. They do some things fairly well and a lot of things quite poorly. It would be nice if we could just focus on the former.

She is the classic “stopped clock”. The vast majority of what she believes and says is still vile and wrong, but the media is only reporting on her rare points that diverge from her fellow extremists.

Both of the events here in Madison involved marching to the state capital building for a rally. They were well organized, with an appropriate public address system, and a whole roster of speakers. Bernie Sanders called in to the first rally to address us.

There is a critical difference in the way we treat police vs firefighters. Both the law and their training teach police that almost anything is justified if it keeps them safe and that there will not be any consequences. Officer safety takes precedence of the public’s safety. Murdering a few innocent civilians is a small price to pay for that.

Firefighters are simply expected to risk their lives in service of the public. Efforts are made to reduce the risks, but they regularly go in to rescue people knowing they may not make it back out.

Both jobs involve operating in high-risk environments, but the police prioritize police safety and firemen prioritize public safety.

Shame and hypocrisy are both obsolete in American politics. Voters mostly assume that no one is honest and that everyone does terrible things. Neither is actually true, but truth is another thing that voters no longer demand or expect.

The saddest part is that those changes in attitude are why shame, hypocrisy, and truth are no longer considered important in elections. We have a president who now lies nearly every time he opens his mouth, is often called on it, but whose voters simply do not care.

Bad faith arguments about false equivalency have had a huge role in undermining our democracy. Yes, there are a lot of terrible people in politics. No, it is not universal. And the choosing the lesser of two evils is still important.

We need to get back to recognizing that while no one is perfect, some flaws are much greater than others.

We also need to push for genuinely good candidates in primaries. They exist, but they are frequently pushed off-stage early in the process by the mainstream party hacks.

He’s not entirely wrong. Calling Trump authoritarian does incite Trump to violence and terrorism.

Our tax dollars are being spent on corruption, parades, and “cool” special operations.

Trump’s worst enemy has always been, and continues to be, reality.

This is the perfect time for LLM-based AI. We are already dealing with a significant population that accepts provable lies as facts, doesn’t believe in science. and has no concept of what hypocrisy means. The gross factual errors and invented facts of current AI couldn’t possibly fit in better.

That’s the beauty of modern corporate capitalism. The upper tiers of management are shielded from any responsibility by their subordinates. Their subordinates then have a strong incentive to shift the responsibility elsewhere so it doesn’t fall on them. Paying someone else to take the responsibility does not actually benefit the company, except may be in the short-term, but it does benefit the people who get to make the decisions about it.

And if the service provider really screws up, and loses too many contracts, they either sell out to another company just like themselves, make further profit, and go back to doing what they were doing, or they shut down, form a new company, and go back to what they were doing.

The only people who can be hurt by all of this are the regular employees, who lose their jobs as part of the cycle, and, occasionally, the shareholders, who are never adequately represented by the board. It’s a prefect system where bad decisions only affect those who have no part in them.

“The Cloud” just means “someone else’s sever”. A lot of people who should know better just don’t get that.

It’s entertaining to take almost any internal memo or external press release and substitute “someone else’s server” every time “the cloud” appears. They all suddenly look insane.

The increasing levels of desperation are amazing.

I’ve always found that “DO NOT DO THAT” works pretty well. :-)

Because there is money to be made. It’s just that simple.