You’re legitimately looking at this too rationally. Because you’re absolutely right, but that’s just not the reality of the situation. The reality is that only about 40% of people are going to vote for Joe Biden no matter what. Trump doesn’t have a guaranteed majority either, but you need that final 10% (or more or less because of the Electoral College) to be convinced Joe Biden will deliver on the things they consider Trump for. And if that concern is that he’s not ‘strong’ enough to stand up to China or something because he’s too ‘weak’ of a president, you must not ignore that because you need these people to get the goal you desire.

Converting the other people in the country back to rational people just isn’t going to happen this election. It’s a process that might take generations to be reverted. You need this victory now to even get a chance at starting that process. And by showing them their concerns matter and you don’t just want to dismiss them, is part of regaining that trust and building a foundation to depolarize.

You’re right. That’s not democracy either. Real democracy doesn’t happen just at votes. It also happens in these kinds of discussions. And it adapts to new information.

I actually think a lot changed between that decision and now. I don’t think anywhere near as many people doubted Joe Biden back then because his actions in the last four years spoke loud enough. But as the vote gets closer, confidence isn’t measured in objectivity but in the effectiveness of appeal to voters.

Joe Biden might still be the best pick at the end of the day, but if that comes to be it needs to be because the concerns have been resolved and the opposition satisfied. You have four months and his candidacy isn’t even locked in. Other countries can fit 4 elections in that same period. A single good debate can swing votes, but if Joe keeps it up he will not swing back hard enough.

If you can admit the threat is very real and apparent, then you should be in favor of the best candidate the democrats can offer, not specifically Joe Biden. If Joe Biden was that candidate, it wouldn’t even be a question and only a small minority of dissenters would be of that opinion. But instead he’s already the incumbent, which is essentially the best boost you can get, and he’s still making people doubt him. Infighting isn’t resolved by slamming your fist on the table and saying “I’m right, and nobody else gets a say.”. That’s how the Republicans got Trump. Infighting is resolved by getting people together, by making compromises and forging alliances. If you aren’t going to treat democracy as the process to get the most people satisfied with the result, it’s no wonder things get more polarized every time.

It is self serving. That’s the purpose. You’re not taking their concern seriously, so they’re pulling the trigger and saying “Fine, then I’m voting for the thing you fear more than I do.” We don’t live in a perfect world. Flawed people are voting too. Rejecting their look on things might be morally just, but you might just lose the presidency over it. It’s just like getting into a fatal accident on purpose because you “had the right of way”. And some people are seeing this coming, so even if they’d never vote Republican they still see the losing situation not speaking up puts them in.

Nobody deep in the blue is going to stop voting Democrat over these things, stop pretending that’s the issue. The problem is that the people necessary for Biden to win are not your typical blue voter. They might dislike Donald Trump as well, but for whatever myriad of reasons don’t rule him out as a person they will vote for. They exists - if they didn’t there would be a critical mass of voters to win and the republican party would have been dead or you’d never have a Democrat as a president.

Most likely - they feel disenfranchised by both the Democrats and Republicans because their concerns aren’t being heard. And by not taking their concerns at least somewhat seriously yet again, you might piss enough of them off to lose the majority. And this attitude really isn’t helping in salvaging their trust. Telling someone they’re going to vote for a candidate they don’t trust or want whether they like it or not is NEVER a good slogan to run a campaign by. It only works on people that are well informed about what’s at stake behind the scenes.

What’s the problem with just being honest with each other for once. A better candidate more people could stand behind is what democracy demands. America’s two party system has always created unpopular choices, and everyone normally agrees with that. But when one side sinks to an extreme, suddenly it made the perfect choice on the opposite side? Why are people so afraid to open the possibility to unite behind a more coherent and capable Democrat backed by the same cabinet, who can dunk on Trump’s lies and rally people with a plan to actually make sure all the terrible things that happened get undone?

Saying you don’t want to vote for Biden isn’t an endorsement to vote for Trump, voting third party, or not voting at all. It’s a plea to find something similar, but better, that more people can stand behind.

Yes and it’s really getting to the point where it undoubtedly impacts his ability to perform without an aide basically at his side at all times. Imagine him telling another world leader something insane and the translator having to jump in correct him. Or worse, how can you be sure something he did mean to say was actually something he meant to say and not just another mistake? That kind of communication failure is very dangerous at the highest level.

I thought you were trolling, like in a “you have to double check if I’m bullshitting you now” kind of way. But it’s actually true… and unlike his Putin remark he didn’t seem to even notice he said it.

Kings never went away, they just changed to a different form and name to remain accepted in society, as the ones with the crowns ended up in the gallows.

There is no such sexual material in the book. An innocent teenage girl asked a raunchy question to a friend she had a crush on because that’s the kind of behavior teens display while they grow up and develop themselves. And she got shut down. Nothing graphical was ever shown. It’s showing only what was written by that same normal girl disconnected and hidden from the world as they hide from murderous tyrannical nazi’s. Raw and unfiltered thoughts and feelings of a normal developing teen, as the girl wrote it for herself, not us. As the Anne Frank Foundation said in the video “A book written by a 12 year old can be read by 12 year olds.”

On the odd chance you aren’t completely trolling. Anne Frank was a girl going through puberty. She had a crush on her friend and like any normal young person had to deal with scary, unknown, but very normal human feelings and desires of intimacy and love. It’s her own fucking diary, she didn’t self censor herself for prudes in 2024. She had a war and death hanging over her head at any moment.

And if you actually go look at the book, there is nothing graphic about it. To these prudes having these normal feelings and describing them in a diary is what they consider to be graphic. Here’s a Dutch talkshow host absolutely clowning on these people just by showing the passage the controversy is actually about (with English subtitles)

You can certainly try to use the power as much as possible, or sell the energy to a country with a deficit. But the problem is that you would still need to invest a lot of money to make sure the grid can handle the excess if you build renewables to cover 100% of the grid demand for now and in the future. Centralized fuel sources require much less grid changes because it flows from one place and spreads from there, so infrastructure only needs to be improved close to the source. Renewables as decentralized power sources requires the grid to be strengthened anywhere they are placed, and often that is not practical, both in financial costs and in the engineers it takes to actually do that.

Would it be preferable? Yes. Would it happen before we already need to be fully carbon neutral? Often not.

I’d refer you to my other post about the situation in my country. We have a small warehouse of a few football fields which stores the highest radioactivity of unusable nuclear fuel, and still has more than enough space for centuries. The rest of the fuel is simply re-used until it’s effectively regular waste. The time to build two new nuclear reactors here also costs only about 10 years, not 20.

Rather continue with wind and solar and then batteries for the money.

All of these things should happen regardless of nuclear progress. And they do happen. But again, building renewables isn’t just about the price.

Some personal thoughts: My own country (The Netherlands) has despite a very vocal anti-nuclear movement in the 20th century completely flipped now to where the only parties not in favor of Nuclear are the Greens, who at times quote the fear as a reason not to do it. As someone who treats climate change as truly existential for our country that lies below projected sea levels, it makes them look unreasonable and not taking the issue seriously. We have limited land too, and a housing crisis on top of it. So land usage is a big pain point for renewables, and even if the land is unused, it is often so close to civilization that it does affect people’s feelings of their surroundings when living near them, which might cause renewables to not make it as far as it could unrestricted. A nuclear reactor takes up fractions of the space, and can be relatively hidden from people.

All the other parties who heavily lean in to combating climate change at least acknowledge nuclear as an option that should (and are) being explored. And even the more climate skeptical parties see nuclear as something they could stand behind. Having broad support for certain actions is also important to actually getting things done. Our two new nuclear powered plants are expected to be running by 2035. Only ten years from now, ahead of our climate goals to be net-zero in 2040.

People are kind of missing the point of the meme. The point is that Nuclear is down there along with renewables in safety and efficiency. It’s lacking the egregious cover up in the original meme, even if it has legitimate concerns now. And due to society’s ever increasing demand for electricity, we will heavily benefit from having a more scalable solution that doesn’t require covering and potentially disrupting massive amounts of land before their operations can be scaled up to meet extraordinary demand. Wind turbines and solar panels don’t stop working when we can’t use their electricity either, so it’s not like we can build too many of them or we risk creating complications out of peak hours. Many electrical networks aren’t built to handle the loads. A nuclear reactor can be scaled down to use less fuel and put less strain on the electrical network when unneeded.

It should also be said that money can’t always be spent equally everywhere. And depending on the labor required, there is also a limit to how manageable infrastructure is when it scales. The people that maintain and build solar panels, hydro, wind turbines, and nuclear, are not the same people. And if we acknowledge that climate change is an existential crisis, we must put our eggs in every basket we can, to diversify the energy transition. All four of the safest and most efficient solutions we have should be tapped into. But nuclear is often skipped because of outdated conceptions and fear. It does cost a lot and takes a while to build, but it fits certain shapes in the puzzle that none of the others do as well as it does.

Google Docs, Sheets, and Forms should also get a mention. People forget that before that the only way to work together on documents was a shared drive with file locking while 1 person can work on a file at a time, complicated and unpractical. There are still no massively adopted replacements for these (Or they’re made by Microsoft, lol)

“You know you don’t need to bring a dead horse every time you want catering right, Jim?”

Ideas are great - but execution is king. Because execution is where most of your creativity actually makes a difference in how the idea is represented. If you have a good idea and a good execution, it’s very hard for someone to take that away from you. If you have a good idea, but execute it poorly, someone taking that idea and executing it better will leave you in the dust. But without the better execution that wouldn’t work.

Better execution isn’t always fair though - we often start out in life being unable to compete because of lack of experience, financing, and publicity. But it’s basically how the entire entertainment industry works. Everyone just shuffles ideas around, and try to execute it better (or different enough) from the previous time the idea made the rounds.

After finding good ideas, get people hooked on your execution, and they will not be able to get that anywhere else unless someone else comes along and does it even better, but with practice that can also be you.

If you’re here because of the AI headline, this is important to read.

We’re looking at how we can use local, on-device AI models – i.e., more private – to enhance your browsing experience further. One feature we’re starting with next quarter is AI-generated alt-text for images inserted into PDFs, which makes it more accessible to visually impaired users and people with learning disabilities.

They are implementing AI how it should be. Don’t let all the shitty companies blind you to the fact what we call AI has positive sides.

Yes, it would be much better at mitigating it and beat all humans at truth accuracy in general. And truths which can be easily individually proven and/or remain unchanged forever can basically be 100% all the time. But not all truths are that straight forward though.

What I mentioned can’t really be unlinked from the issue, if you want to solve it completely. Have you ever found out later on that something you told someone else as fact turned out not to be so? Essentially, you ‘hallucinated’ a truth that never existed, but you were just that confident it was correct to share and spread it. It’s how we get myths, popular belief, and folklore.

For those other truths, we simply ascertain the truth to be that which has reached a likelihood we consider it to be certain. But ideas and concepts we have in our minds constantly float around on that scale. And since we cannot really avoid talking to other people (or intelligent agents) to ascertain certain truths, misinterpretations and lies can sneak in to cause us to treat as truth that which is not. To avoid that would mean the having to be pretty much everywhere to personally interpret the information straight from the source. But then things like how fast it can process those things comes in to play. Without making guesses about what’s going to happen, you basically can’t function in reality.

Yes, a theoretical future AI that would be able to self-correct would eventually become more powerful than humans, especially if you could give it ways to run magnitudes more self-correcting mechanisms at the same time. But it would still be making ever so small assumptions when there is a gap in the information it has.

It could be humble enough to admit it doesn’t know, but it can still be mistaken and think it has the right answer when it doesn’t. It would feel neigh omniscient, but it would never truly be.

A roundtrip around the globe on glass fibre takes hundreds of milliseconds, so even if it has the truth on some matter, there’s no guarantee that didn’t change in the milliseconds it needed to become aware that the truth has changed. True omniscience simply cannot exists since information (and in turn the truth encoded by that information) also propagates at the speed of light.

a big mistake you are making here is stating that it must be fed information that it knows to be true, this is not inherently true. You can train a model on all of the wrong things to do, as long it has the capability to understand this, it shouldn’t be a problem.

The dataset that encodes all wrong things would be infinite in size, and constantly change. It can theoretically exist, but realistically it will never happen. And if it would be incomplete it has to make assumptions at some point based on the incomplete data it has, which would open it up to being wrong, which we would call a hallucination.

I’m not sure where you think I’m giving it too much credit, because as far as I read it we already totally agree lol. You’re right, methods exist to diminish the effect of hallucinations. That’s what the scientific method is. Current AI has no physical body and can’t run experiments to verify objective reality. It can’t fact check itself other than be told by the humans training it what is correct (and humans are fallible), and even then if it has gaps in what it knows it will fill it up with something probable - but which is likely going to be bullshit.

All my point was, is that to truly fix it would be to basically create an omniscient being, which cannot exist in our physical world. It will always have to make some assumptions - just like we do.