Not rude at all. The original question is why certain people behave in a certain way.

The first point addresses the direct reason why some voters would refuse to vote for Harris due to her stance on Israel. When people believe they are being harmed they tend to focus all their attention on the immediate harm. It’s not a logical choice but people don’t act logically in these circumstances.

As an example of this, I’d offer our response to 9/11. The entire nation came together to pass the PATRIOT act and start a war in Afghanistan. There’s no logic in passing a bill that was so long that no one in congress could have read it before voting on it. It’s hard to argue for the logic of invading Afghanistan. There wasn’t really an objective (besides “get OBL”, who we later ended up assassinating in an other country) and in retrospect it’s certainly clear that it caused far more harm than good. But we were in an emotional state. The people watching their relatives getting bombed in Gaza are in a similarly emotional state.

The second point addresses why Democrats attempts to convince them are failing so spectacularly. Getting someone to vote for your preferred candidate is an exercise in persuasion. Much has been written about the art of persuasion and “insult your audience,” isn’t generally a recommended technique. One counterexample is “pickup artists”. They theorize that by insulting or “negging” women they can motivate the woman to counter the insult by seeking the mans approval. While this does work on some small percentage of women, the vast majority are more motivated to find their mace.

2 reasons jump to mind.

1. When I listen to people who personally identify with the people of Gaza, it goes way beyond logic. They have a completely emotional reaction. Their choices are almost completely driven by the question of, “Who is doing what, right now?” Questions of, “Who will do what 6 months from now?” take a distant back seat.

2. Every time the topic comes up, Democrats dogpile on them and call them morons. People will often respond with something like, “Yeah but that’s OK because they ARE morons.” I won’t argue if that’s true or not but it’s pretty obvious that line of reasoning won’t win a lot of converts.

Maybe.

There have been a number of technologies that provided similar capabilities, at least initially.

When photography, audio recording, and video recording were first invented, people didn’t understand them well. That made it really easy to create believable fakes.

No modern viewer would be fooled by the Cottingley Fairies.
The sound effects in old radio shows and movies wouldn’t fool modern audiences either.
Video effects that stunned audiences at the time just look old fashioned now.

I expect that, over time, people will learn to recognize the low-effort scams. Eventually we’ll reach an equilibrium where most people won’t fall for them and there will still be skilled scammers who will target gullible people and get away with it.

Haha. Maybe.

I doubt the VCs will provide much followup funding if they can’t control the code base but weirder things have happened.

There are a lot of scams around AI and there’s a lot of very serious science.

While generative AI gets all the attention there are many other fields of AI that you probably use on a regular basis.

The reason we don’t see the rest of the AI iceberg is because it’s mostly interesting when you have enormous amounts of data you want to analyze and that doesn’t apply to regular people. Most of the valuable AIs (as in they’ve been proven to make or save a bunch of money) do stuff like inventory optimization, protein expression simulation, anomaly detection, or classification.

It’s otherwise a fairly well written article but the title is a bit misleading.

In that context, scare quotes usually mean that generative AI was trained on someone’s work and produced something strikingly similar. That’s not what happened here.

This is just regular copyright violations and unethical behavior. The fact that it was an AI company is mostly unrelated to their breaches. The author covers 3 major complaints and only one of them even mentions AI and the complaint isn’t about what the AI did it’s about what was done with the result. As far as I know the APL2.0 itself isn’t copyrighted and nobody cares if you copy or alter the license itself. The problem is that you can’t just remove the APL2.0 from some work it’s attached to.

This feels like one of those 90’s purity tests. I’ll play

1. I read daily.

2. I have native fluency in two languages and I’m learning a 3rd.

3. I’m terrible at playing the violin but I can do it and I can read sheet music.

4. My wife and I cook almost all our meals.

5. I’m not good at woodworking but I do most of the woodworking around the house.

6. I know next to nothing about painting. I’m bad at painting walls and my art painting looks worse than what my kids do.

7. I’m OK at writing.

8. No. I’ll help my wife in the garden but if it’s left to me, everything will die.

9. Come on. Who doesn’t like swimming.

10. Photography is kind of meh for me. That’s more my wife’s hobby.

11. I took the family to the path of totality this summer so we could see the solar prominence through a 10" Newtonian.

12. Hiking is fun for the whole family.

13. I fletch and put tips on my own arrows. I’m an OK shot with a bow.

14. I made a crappy BBQ fork by making some metal really hot and hitting it with a hammer. I’ve been experimenting with lost PLA metal casting.

15. We used to travel. Now we have kids.

16. I encouraged my kids to read comic books when they were learning to read.

17. I helped my kids make some pretty awesome costumes. My typical Halloween costume is a hat. That only counts as a costume because I don’t normally wear hats.

18. I debate too much. My wife hates it.

19. I used to drink like a fish. I quit several years ago.

20. There are some MTG cards somewhere in the house.

21. I rarely watch any movies, animated or otherwise.

22. I went to a goth club once about 20 yeas ago and the girls I was going with insisted on putting black makeup on me. Makeup is hella uncomfortable. Never doing that again.

23. “Crypto” is a word that often means the speaker knows nothing about cryptography.

24. Don’t smoke.

25. Seals never hurt me. Why would I club them?

26. I once injected a marijuana and now I’m dead.

27. What is the difference between a Funko and a boblehead? Why would either of them constitute a hobby?

28. I’m not arguing. You’re arguing.

29. I don’t watch porn. I’m a connoisseur of sophisticated erotica.

30. I’ve taken way too many statistics courses to find gambling interesting.

31. Manosphere sounds like a dumb nickname for one of your nuts.

PS How do women feel about infographic makers that get confused between 15 and 16?

I keep wondering if information like this will change anyone’s mind about Disney.

It seems like all Iger has to do is throw a little shade at Trump or DeSantis and everyone instantly believes that Disney is some sort of bastion of progressive thought that doesn’t have a vile history of exploitation.

I hope you’re right.

Why is everything all Biden’s fault

Because he’s the boss. The president is always considered the leader of their party while they’re in office. That’s why Truman said, “The buck stops here.”

If an organization does something, the leader of that organization needs to accept responsibility or admit they’re an ineffective leader.

I’d really like to believe that but the cynic in me expects that as soon as Israel gets done with their genocide campaign they’ll pretend that they’ve turned a new leaf and all funding and military assistance will resume as though nothing had happened. There will be no lasting consequences for Israel’s actions so they will, correctly, assume that there is nothing to stop them from doing it again.

It’s a fluff piece. They briefly describe some of the circumstances but don’t explore any reasons behind them.

The one conjecture they do make, “some supermarket leaders may perceive low-income urban areas — particularly those inhabited by people of color— as higher-risk due to concerns about crime, vandalism or social instability” is contradicted later in the article. They cite 2 cases where supermarkets opened stores in these neighborhoods and operated them (one of them for 5 years). They would have had no need to guess. They had the balance sheets, income statements and cashflow statements so they would have known the answers down to all these questions down to the penny.

That said, the answer is fairly obvious. Companies want money. Companies close stores when those stores aren’t making them enough money. As the article states, these companies regularly open stores in poor neighborhoods, they just close them quickly. That strongly suggests that they think they might be able to make money and when they try the are unable to figure out how.

How did they even come to such a perspective? There are all kinds of physical handicaps in fiction.

Raistlin had a mysterious uncurable ailment imposed by Par-Salian.
Albrech has to forsake love to attain the Rheingold. Several gods and heroes are missing various limbs.

And blindness? Daredevil. Tiresias. Any number of blind kung-fu masters.

Sometimes they’re afflictions that are paid as a price for powers, sometimes their curses, sometimes their obstacles that heroes overcome. But disabled people have been all over fantasy literature for millenia.

You brought an economics argument to a rage thread. OP isn’t making a technical claim when they say “rent seeking behavior”, they’re angry and using it as a synonym for “greedy people”.

tl;dr I was wrong.

I used to go to a restaurant that I was sure was a front.

Years ago I was walking home from the gym and I got peckish. I was in one of the less fancy areas of Manhattan so I didn’t think twice about just walking into the first place I saw.

The second I walked in I decided it was a big mistake. This place looked fancy. Nice place settings, real wood furniture, etc. I was dressed like a bum and probably smelled bad.

But the head waiter came out and treated me like royalty. Fresh baked bread, a sauteed flounder that he filleted right at the table and all around baller service at a very reasonable price. I was the only person there but it was early so I didn’t think much of it. I figured that if their food and service was this good when they thought I was a bum this is the place for me. I dropped a 100% tip and decided I’d go once a week and if I ever found a date I’d impress the hell out of her when we roll into a nice restaurant and the head waiter greets me by my first name and treats me like a big shot (aside: the first and only girl I brought there didn’t like their vegetarian options but ended up marrying me anyway).

Ever time we went the place was practically empty. This was one of the less fancy areas of Manhattan but they were still paying Manhattan rent. The food was always top notch and did I mention how awesome the service was? Mooci, the waiter once came back from vacation and insisted that I try some of the moonshine from his Sicilian Mother. Constant freebies too.

We decided there’s no way they could be turning a profit and assumed it was a mob front. Some older NYers may remember when the story broke that SPQR was a mob front, so it seemed pretty likely.

Well a few years ago we went back after moving out of state. The restaurant was under new management and everything sucked. Crappy place settings, shitty generic food and I didn’t recognize anyone there. It turns out they weren’t a mob front. They were just great cooks that sucked at running a business and ran out of money :(