This is a mistake that should surface and get corrected in high school or earlier if the education system is working properly. Around 14 I bombed a writing assignment because my response was all personal feelings rather than reasoning and evidence. My teacher told me he agreed with me personally, but I did not actually complete the assignment as asked. I never did that again. Though I am not entirely convinced this wasn’t deliberate to create a culture war story.

I really agree that communication is where the American “left” is way behind. Both in terms of individual campaigns and as a whole.

The American “right” now has endless well-funded platforms to push messages and narratives. Podcasts, streamers, YouTube channels, news networks, social media accounts, etc. They also embrace AI to increase exponentially the amount of content they can shovel out. And they understand you need to use apolitical or quasi political interests as an entry point.

There are examples on the left of all of these, but not at the same scale and with the same financial backing.

You can see some case study examples on their consulting website.

Very true. I’m genuinely curious how many Trump voters didn’t find it likely enough last year to vote for him and only now do.

About 22% of all Americans (not just voters) voted for him in 2024. So there’s still millions of people who voted for him and believed he knew.

This is not a surprise if you actually talk to random voters, like while canvassing. People are just cynical about that government actually doing any of this, not if they are worth doing. If we can get a slate of progressives elected who truly accomplish some of these goals, that could start some real systemic change if properly communicated.

From an administration with low favorability ratings, two people with high unfavorability ratings. Foolproof plan. No notes!

Americans are not practiced in large enough numbers in protest, demonstration, civil disobedience, and solidarity for a large scale general or rent strike to be successful. There needs to be a ramp up period with increasingly more frequent and expansive demonstrations for that to become practical.

It is because Apple has been dominant in the premium smartphone market for years, including in China. Huawei have started to make a big dent in that tier in China after eating Apple’s lunch in the lower price categories.

This is a feature that Huawei brought to market before Apple, which was kind of a first. Until recently, they were just following Apple’s innovations. It’s early and I wouldn’t want one now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if smartphones-that-fold-out-into-tablets was the standard by the end of the decade.

And he never shut up about how embarrassing Biden apparently was.

If one of my friends showed me a collection of hats with their name on it, I would pull them aside and ask if they have considered getting professional help.

I imagine many of those are ordinances intended to regulate fraternities and sororities—or similar college student shared housing situations.

Part of the issue will be convincing the decision makers. They may not want to document a process for deviation x because it’s easier to pretend it doesn’t occur, and you don’t need to record specific metrics if it’s a generic “manual fix by CS” issue. It’s easier for them to give a support team employee (or manager) override on everything just in case.

To your point, in theory it should be much easier to dump that ad-hoc solution into an AI knowledge base than draw up requirements and budget to fix the application. Maybe the real thing I should be concerned with is suits using that as a solution rather than ever fixing their broken products.

I think there’s good potential where the caller needs information.

But I am skeptical for problem-solving, especially where it requires process deviations. Like last week, I had an issue where a service I signed up for inexplicably set the start date incorrectly. It seems the application does not allow the user to change start dates themselves within a certain window. So, I went to support, and wasted my time with the AI bot until it would pass me off to a human. The human solved the problem in five seconds because they’re allowed to manually change it on their end and just did that.

Clearly the people who designed the software and the process did not foresee this issue, but someone understood their own limitations enough to give support personnel access to perform manual updates. I worry companies will not want to give AI agents the same capabilities, fearing users can talk their AI agent into giving them free service or something.

Viruses and prions fall under the umbrella of germs/pathogens. They did not disprove germ theory. They still align with the idea that pathogens cause diseases. That’s still true.

What is interesting is how non-vocal many of these “concerned citizens” are when the criminal justice system does the same thing to normal people. It is why I have a difficult time believing the concern is really about justice and due process in many cases.

He is from the Cincinnati area, which borders Kentucky, and he spent some of his youth in Kentucky. Not a proper southerner, but from the gradient where North becomes South.

I saw a local restaurant with its branding on it the the other day. Well, there’s one restaurant I never need to try.

Yep. He wasn’t really reviewing the nuts and bolts, just the drive experience. I didn’t get the impression he got a ton of time with it and only spent an afternoon puttering around. It felt below his standard honestly for thoroughness.

The fragmenting of teams needs more attention. My group uses a follow the sun model that has our team split up across at least seven countries, plus a decent chunk are always contracted through a vendor. Add in remote workers, and it’s very difficult to see an effective way to organize.

It’s definitely become more of a thing in the past 10-15 years. When I was a kid, outside of ice cream there was just Del’s. The hot wiener trucks did not come our way I guess… or they didn’t want to compete with the brick and mortar ny systems.

I’m thrilled with the food culture we have now though. We punch way above our weight when it comes to food.