• 0 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle
  • Bibi is obviously evil, but also a moron if he does this. Electorally, if Bibi wants Trump back in the Whitehouse, one the better strategies to do that is keep democrats divided on Isreal. In other words, Bibi hugging Biden drives progressives away from Biden, hurts enthusiasm, reduces Dem turnout, all good things for Trump. Bibi coming to speak to the Republican conference (he is already meeting with Republican senators today virtually) only serves to make support for Isreal more partisan by pissing off Dems and aligning them against Isreal. Not to mention pissing off Biden who he needs.

    I guess the strategy is to scare Biden and Dems into supporting Isreal more to stave off attacks from Republicans who would be viewed as more supportive of Isreal by voters? Sounds like a dumb move, public opinion is turning against Isreal, and an invasion of Rafaku isn’t going to make Isreal any more sympathetic to the average non racist and non biblical prophecy believing voter. Again, Republicans attacking Biden for not supporting genocide enough only serves to shore up Bidens base, and independent looking at the chaos and suffering in Gaza aren’t going to ding Biden for not being Bibi’s bitch.

    Would be a dumb move I reckon.




  • To me this just shows how broken Congress is. US social media companies have been collecting our data, building profiles of us, manipulating us with the content they show in various ways, harming teen mental health, and all of that for decades, but Congress did nothing. Facebook in particular was used as a tool to manipulate the 2016 election by Russia in various ways, but apart from some show hearings, Congress did nothing. But TikTok is alleged to do the same thing (remember nobody has actually shown proof that the CCP is like directing TikTok to promote pro-China content for Americans), and we get bipartisanship somehow. That vote was more bipartisan than a stopgap bill to prevent a government shutdown.

    And the reason is “China bad” is a message that voters agree with, and because Google and Meta are more than happy to reward these people for helping to kill their biggest rival in social media. At the end of the day TikTok users are forced onto less desirable platforms so their data can be harvested by American companies and all that, our brave congresspeople get to pretend to be “tough on China”, and Big Tech rakes the profits they were losing by being outcompeted in the market. So few in Congress, on either side, have integrity.



  • Republican media has convinced their viewers that Biden is basically constantly confused and just slackjawed and drooling constantly. They set expectations for him so low, when reality didn’t bare out their caracicture they had to pivot. I think the implication they are going for is Biden was dosed with something to make him seem coherent, basically the weekend at Bernie’s president. Dumb, but so are Fox News viewers, so I’m sure it’ll go over just fine with them.

    That said, it did seem like Biden was yelling a lot. The few moments where he slowed down to talk about some somber topic came as a relief to me. To put a metric to it, I saw in Politico that the written version of his speech contained 80 more explanation marks than last year’s speech.




  • That’s the bare minimum, we arm Isreal and veto resolutions against them at the UN giving them license for genocide, and then air drop a pittance of supplies since Biden won’t end the indescriminate targeting of civilians or force Israel to let aid in.

    Remember, Biden could end this all with a phone call.

    As the WHO points out, airdrops will provide far less aid then if Israel just opened up border crossings and let trucks in:

    “It’s absolutely not needed in Gaza. The simplest, safest way and most effective way to deliver aid to people is through crossings. Not just Rafah. It should [also] be Kerem Shalom,” he said, referring to the crossing with Israel known in Arabic as Karem Abu Salem.

    He added that the UN has been “more than ready” to supply Gaza with the aid it desperately needs but “a lot of our missions got delayed [and] denied [by Israel]”.

    Air drops will undoubtedly provide some benefit, but they will be no means substantially ease the suffering in Gaza. This is an optics play, plain and simple, Biden provides the military means and international cover for Israel to create the famine in the first place, then makes a big show of getting some aid (five months into the genoicde) in to Gaza (using the least efficient means) to try to appease his critics.

    Hooray I guess. I hereby nominate Biden for the Nobel peace prize.



  • I feel like if I ever become an audiophile, I’ll probably be looking at getting a separate music player with a DAC, a Tidal subscription, and a pair of kickass wired headphones. But for now, I’m mostly listening to podcasts and for music I use Spotify for it’s discovery features, and their audio quality is subpar already. Even if I had a headphone jack, I’m not really benefiting from superior sound quality but I am getting frustrated with tangled cords and getting caught on doorknobs. I’ll take the convenience of Bluetooth, especially while working out. And Bluetooth standards have been getting better anyway, in a few years it might be on par with wired.





  • Yes, it’s in the lawsuit and another article I read. Open AI said they used a specific dataset, and the makers of that dataset said they used some online open libraries which have full texts of books. That’s the primary basis of the lawsuit. They also argue that if you ask ChatGPT for a summary of their books, it will spit one out, which they are claiming is misuse of their copywriten work. That claim sounds dicey to me, Wikipedia and all manner of websites summarize books, so I’m not following how ChatGPT doing it is different. But I’m an idiot so who cares what I think.