Honestly the same as I reacted when I found out about gay and trans people - mostly not give a fuck because it has nothing to do with me. Though obviously I’d be drawn into the rights issues as people try to hunt them with fucking crossbows and shit.

I mean AI can produce a plot, but the real craft of like, the heroes journey or having a theme that comes back again and again in subplots and things like that. Humor. Irony and satire. Pacing - OMG pacing. It’s just not very good at those things.

If you want to write a Dick and Jane book with AI writing and art, yeah probably. But something like Asimov or Heinlein (or much less well known authors who nevertheless know their craft) I think an AI would never be able to speak to the human spirit that way.

Even at the most low-brow level, I can generate AI porn, but it’s never as good as art created by humans.

Fair enough. I’ve spent enough words making my point and anything else would be redundant. Time will tell. Probably within a couple of years - whenever venture capital gets antsy for actual results/profits instead of promising leads.

The noise is a big problem for all of us, not just artists. The entire internet is getting flooded with just awful content.

As I see it, the problem is the little piecemeal work that artists do to get by is going to disappear. AI can write clickbait stories and such because really once someone clicks it the quality of the article barely matters. I’m going to guess that isn’t the writing you have a passion for, but it might be the writing you or others do to put food on the table between writing your passion projects.

That’s a completely legitimate concern to see that work going away. As much as I fucking hate that stuff, I’d rather a writer get paid to exercise their craft than to have it written by an AI. I don’t have a good answer for that. Those jobs might legitimately go away. They are low effort, short pieces of bullshit like AI excels at. As a programmer, many of the easy parts of my work are also disappearing leaving only the hard stuff.

I don’t know. I don’t want AI to go away. It’s a useful tool for certain things, but it really complicates the journey from novice to master in several fields. I do know it won’t be able to meet the high hopes some folks have. Anyway, I’m trying to be upbeat without being dismissive of your concerns because they are completely valid. I wish you the best.

I’m familiar with that. Not in quite that way because our app is for roleplaying where there isn’t a prewritten story but we use a database to pull relevant info into context. You can definitely help it, but you need author chops to do it well.

Which means maybe this is a tool that could help good writers write faster, but it won’t make a poor writer into a good one. If for no reason other than you need to know how to steer and correct the output.

I’ve been using AI for about 5 years. I understand fairly well what they can and can’t do. I think you are wrong. I would bet money on it. They can’t reason or plan no matter how much context or training you give them because that’s not what they do at all. They predict the next word, that’s all.

I’ve used it a fair bit. The extra context helps with things like getting facts straight, but it doesn’t help with coming back to themes or the things that really make a story hit, you know? Even with the extra context, I still find the stories get worse and worse as they get longer.

I do think that a skilled author (better than me - I’m not awful but I’m no professional) could get a better output, but that doesn’t cut the author out of the loop there.

As someone who uses AI all the time to write fiction just for my own entertainment, AI in no way replaces actual authors because while it might be technically capable, it’s garbage at big picture stuff. No theme or plot or foreshadowing that spans more than a handful of pages.

AI cannot do the craft of writing no matter how good it is at prose.

Not that there aren’t valid concerns and all, but I think this is a fading fad.

I don’t write documentation because I’ll be lucky to deliver the app 2 weeks after the deadline anyway, and I won’t be given any more time to document things, I’ll just be moved to another project or let go because it’s the end of the contract.

First obviously you don’t want to let a car idle in an enclosed space. That’s deadly to anyone in the car/garage but also potentially to folks inside the house if it is poorly ventilated.

I would definitely want the car running in 111 degree heat, even when stopped for a train or in a fast food line.

On the other hand, my vehicle, a Chevy Volt PHEV will turn itself off after about 4 hours. While this seems logical, a lot of people who camp inside it or use it to power their camp gear find it really inconvenient to have everything turn off at 1AM. So they recommend a hair tie around the gear shift button to keep the car from turning off.

So there are reasons both for having an auto-off feature and for not having it.

We do eventually grow up at least

… into horny men

… but hopefully with a little more empathy and propriety.

Since my living expenses are like $90k, let’s just call it 100,000 years.

It doesn’t say, but as a parent of five kids, I’m going to bet the 2 year old fell asleep and dad didn’t want to wake her. Maybe I’m being too generous, but I guess I’d need more information to be so certain about judging them.

I’ve probably done shit like this before although I’d never let the car out of my sight. And certainly not in 111 degrees. A/C doesn’t really work that well when the car isn’t in motion.

Are you arguing that this woman shouldn’t be able to tell her story - without naming names - because someone else might get angry and do the wrong thing, and then a bunch of other people might do the wrong thing with the wrong information?

People are supposed to get angry about shit like this - it’s how change happens. And people have to know about things to get angry.

The problem here isn’t the woman telling her story, it’s that mob harassment is a tool being used politically and this behavior you are worried about has become normalized. Twenty years ago, this would’ve led to a bunch of people contacting law enforcement and politicians to demand justice, but now everyone harasses people directly because our system isn’t responsive and because mob justice is treated as legitimate as long as it’s enacted upon the right people.

place of birth was in the United States.

What about citizens whose place of birth is not in the United States? Like naturalized citizens or children born in foreign countries to American parents - soldiers, perhaps?

Late edit: hell what about places that some folks are too stupid to know are actually in the United States? Like New Mexico. And Puerto Rico.

“Walk down a trail, add a little sauce, baby you got a stew BBQ going.”

Hah! Fair enough.

Religion is deliberately non-falsifiable. No matter what scientific proof you can come up with, at the end of the day they just say God is fucking with us burying skeletons of creatures that never existed and such.

The fact that it needs to be constructed that way is frankly all the proof I need to toss religion in the garbage, but everyone isn’t so cavalier about the disposition of their “immortal soul.”

Honestly immortality and the very nature of God are both abhorrent to me. If religion were true, the best I could hope for is to be cast into a lake of fire and be destroyed, so I kinda win either way. Worst case is all religion is wrong but so is atheism and I have to spend eternity with an entity who is less of a malicious cunt than the Abrahamic god.

That’s exactly my thinking. I’m no fan of China, but is this even relatively egregious? I mean it should be, but it’s hard to criticize from within our glass house.

I’m going to argue some points here, but I appreciate your perspective. This is more conversational than argumentative.

Uhm. I wouldn’t call gaining control of the house a “rout”… Just saying.

Compared to what they were expected to gain, yes, they were completely dominated. They had all their “red wave” speeches prepared and it all melted away in a historically bad performance. They expected to control both chambers and have a significant margin in the House and we see how that turned out.

and continued gerrymandering bullshit.

Man, gerrymandering pisses me off so much and I think it’s at the core of how partisan and fucked up things are right now. But I think there were a couple of significant wins on that front. Wisconsin, for sure. Seems like there was at least one other significant win. Florida? I haven’t been able to keep up with all of it.

Anyway your point is well made, they are doing everything they can to prevent people from voting - but I’m not sure how well those efforts have succeeded in specifically swing states.

In the other hand, covid deaths hit red areas and demographics at something like 2:1 compared to blue districts. At the tight margins you bring up, that can be a significant factor.

Do not turn a blind eye to just how unpopular biden really is

Dude has nothing on Hillary in 2016 (though that’s not helpful since she lost). The fact is, no one in the Democratic Party with national prominence is particularly well-liked. Bernie Sanders is probably the closest but for a litany of reasons I think that’s a no go.

The convention hasn’t even happened yet.

The convention is a formality in the process. It’s not supposed to be, but it’s just too late in the election cycle. It would be absolute chaos. We’ll be arguing about who while Trump is campaigning.

If Biden did the right thing and bowed out and supported whoever replaced him as the candidate, it would work.

Maybe. I could see it with Harris since she shares the incumbency. I worry about her ability to overcome misogyny and racism without a powerful and uplifting message like Obama had. I’d love to be proven wrong in this front, but the post-Obama era has lifted the veil on a level of racism that I didn’t even believe existed here 20 years ago, and I’m really concerned it has become even more mainstream since. I still think if Biden steps down she is our best chance.

Whitmer and Newsome both have to overcome obscurity, and Whitmer has the misogyny issue as well. Newsome I think has a head start there, but it’s going to take a lot of work and money to make either of them household names in Georgia and Pennsylvania. As a Michigander, I think Whitmer has been an outstanding Governor and would make a great President, but I don’t think she has the recognition right now.

Look, I think it’s too late, but if Biden stepped down I’d do my meager best to help elect whoever is the nominee, but I think out of all the risky paths in front of us, Biden is the least risky.

At the end of the day, I don’t care who the nominee is as long as trump doesn’t win.

Cheers.