I’m sorry, you think that Trump is feared by America’s enemies? My friend, your enemies are the people he spent the most time cosying up to. He openly admires Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin for being autocratic dictators. He pals around with Saudi princes. On the other hand he almost irreparably damaged US relations with its closest allies. The world is only “scared” of Trump in the sense that they’re scared of how damage his constant blundering will cause on the world stage.

Also, how is the southern border in any way relevant to national security? Mexico is your ally. Do you think that the cartels are preparing to invade Texas?

What specific policies of Trump’s appeal to you in those areas? Particularly national security and foreign affairs?

Genuinely one of the all time best Black Mirror episodes

“Drink verification can to continue…”

It’s not quite that bad (remember, “lead” means the difference between voting intention for each candidate, not the total voting intention for one candidate). Of those intending to vote, 8 percent intend to vote for Trump (still way too damn high; fucking turkeys voting for Christmas), 77 percent are voting for Harris and the rest are voting third party. That third party vote is also too high, but it’s down to a combination of Harris being smeared (unjustly) as anti trans rights, and people who just refuse to vote for a party that supports genocide, no matter how bad the alternative is.

+1 on the Nebula subscription. It’s worth every penny. That and Dropout are the only streaming subscriptions I still maintain.

That’s more like it. And doubly so if you can’t read it.

Hard disagree: The above advice is relevant to everyone, even if you’re not struggling to survive. We are all victims of capitalism, and even those of us who are living relatively comfortably under this system need to recognize that the billionaire class are the enemy of all life on Earth. It’s not a good system for you just because you get the best table scraps.

If you stop caring about those who are barely scraping by just because you’re not then you’re a fucking idiot.

QC is worth catching up on. As Jeph got older his work got more mature, more overtly progressive, and aggressively more queer. It’s the only webcomic from back in the day that I still read daily, because it never fails to brighten my morning a little bit.

For anyone not familiar with this game, or anyone who’s only familiarity is through the trailers (which really focus on tone and visuals), I really want to recommend the videos by YouTuber Riloe, who has been playing early builds with the devs and chatting to them extensively about the game. They’re really well produced videos, and they really help to explain the tone of the game, the interesting mechanical ideas behind it, and what exactly this company is trying to achieve. Obviously, take with a grain of salt, the guy is clearly a fan and these videos aren’t really trying to be critical, so this should all be read as basically press releases;

This antishooter game is beautiful and horrifying

The living war ecosystem where you don’t matter

The beautifully dark warscape of the antishooter

I’m really excited for this game. Not just for the visuals, but for everything they’re doing with the mechanical design. The idea of playing as scavengers trapped between two warring factions is incredibly cool, and based on early previews it sounds like there are a lot of very clever design elements, especially in the AI, all built to back up that core idea. For example enemies intelligently prioritize targets; a tank won’t focus on infantry if there’s an enemy tank present, and even when it does target the infantry it’ll use its machine guns, not the main cannon. Enemies will focus on you if you make yourself the biggest threat, but if you’re smart and follow the flow of battle you can keep their focus elsewhere.

That’s really smart stuff, and by all accounts it works very well. I also really like what the studio is doing more broadly. They’re really trying to push back on a lot of the toxic practices in the gaming industry. I’ll be getting the game day one, mostly just to reward them for trying to do something different.

The same voters who are tuned off by Project 2025 are also going to be less than thrilled about the idea of a presidential candidate literally being in bed with a deranged conspiracy theorist.

So yes, more media exposure would be the answer. Get her views out there; the whole thing, unedited. Show people the horrific things she believes.

You would. He wouldn’t.

You can always be bummed out about ageing. It’s OK to mourn the loss of an identity that you’d grown into. I’m getting my first grey hairs in, and its not easy seeing that in the mirror. It brings a lot of complicated feelings. Humanity has spent our entire existence grappling with the finality of time.

But my wife? She loves those grey hairs. She thinks they make me look even sexier. Time is unrelenting, and brutal. But love doesn’t care about time. Love, and joy, and friendship and kindness… These things will happen at every point in your life, if you let them.

Yeah, most of the people I know who got into relationships young ended up getting out of those relationships sooner or later. I can only think of one exception. But the relationships I see people building in their middle age are so much stronger and healthier.

OK, serious talk for anyone under thirty who is really relating to this; you don’t even know who you are before you hit your thirties.

I’m dead fucking serious here. Under twenty, you’re basically still in the oven, and your twenties are basically spent figuring out who and what the fuck you are. Thirty is when the good shit starts. Thirty is when you start to finally have a grasp on who you are as a human being. Dating in your thirties is so much fucking better. You’re past the idiocy and the drama and you’re into the part where actual human adults learn to understand each other.

Please, please get out of this mindset that anyone over thirty is an ancient crone. You’re not even out of the fucking tutorial yet.

This is hilarious. So, basically, this guy wants the apes to buy him a car, because he has 37,000 twitter followers, and that makes him some kind of big deal? And he’s claiming that him driving around Austria / the EU in an apecoin branded car is going to turn their failed DAO around?

And apparently his last shot at this almost passed, except that a huge coin holder who hasn’t been active in ages suddenly reappeared to vote “No”, and that’s all it took to kill it because instead of democracy they have “Money == Voting Power”. And he maybe even could have got it passed anyway, but his big money backer lost access to his wallet?

What an incredible system they’ve concocted. I can’t wait until the whole world runs like this. So efficient. So easy.

If the intent here is to discuss games that are actually doing something new and different, Space Marine 2 really needs to be in this conversation.

At first glance it’s just a very, very polished third person action game, but the more you pay attention the more you’ll notice the excellent mechanical design of the combat. There are some very smart, very subtle choices that have been made in the gameplay mechanics that affect the dramatic flow and tension of combat in surprising ways. Someone designing this game actually thought about the pacing of fights, and that’s something you just don’t see in games all that often.

Also on a purely technical level there’s the extremely smart bit of coding that allows them to render ungodly numbers of enemies in screen at once, behaving as coherent swarms that move and flow together, and dear God is it incredible to watch.

The first game was a great Warhammer game (for the time). This one is just a great game, no qualification needed.

So you primary in Dems who will support ranked choice. This is .ml, surely you’ve all heard of entryism?

While truly defining pretty much any aspect of human intelligence is functionally impossible with our current understanding of the mind, we can create some very usable “good enough” working definitions for these purposes.

At a basic level, “reasoning” would be the act of drawing logical conclusions from available data. And that’s not what these models do. They mimic reasoning, by mimicking human communication. Humans communicate (and developed a lot of specialized language with which to communicate) the process by which we reason, and so LLMs can basically replicate the appearance of reasoning by replicating the language around it.

The way you can tell that they’re not actually reasoning is simple; their conclusions often bear no actual connection to the facts. There’s an example I linked elsewhere where the new model is asked to list states with W in their name. It does a bunch of preamble where it spells out very clearly what the requirements and process are; assemble a list of all states, then check each name for the presence of the letter W.

And then it includes North Dakota, South Dakota, North Carolina and South Carolina in the list.

Any human being capable of reasoning would absolutely understand that that was wrong, if they were taking the time to carefully and systematically work through the problem in that way. The AI does not, because all this apparent “thinking” is a smoke show. They’re machines built to give the appearance of intelligence, nothing more.

When real AGI, or even something approaching it, actually becomes a thing, I will be extremely excited. But this is just snake oil being sold as medicine. You’re not required to buy into their bullshit just to prove you’re not a technophobe.