A nation of toddlers all screaming for something different and being unable to come together on a single point.

Edit for the downvoters: Without parties, you’d likely face some serious problems.

Coalition-building becomes nearly impossible. Right now, parties help aggregate different interests and forge compromises between, say, fiscal conservatives and social conservatives, or between labor unions and environmentalists. Without that pre-existing framework, every single issue would require building coalitions from scratch among hundreds of individual legislators.

Voters would be overwhelmed. Instead of choosing between a few party platforms, they’d need to research dozens or hundreds of individual candidates’ positions on every issue. Most people simply don’t have the time or expertise to make informed choices at that level of granularity.

Legislative chaos. You’d essentially have a legislature full of independents trying to form temporary alliances on every vote. Look at how difficult it becomes when even a small number of members break from party discipline, and now imagine that as the permanent state of affairs.

Accountability becomes murky. Parties provide a way for voters to hold someone responsible for governance. Without them, when things go wrong, who exactly do you vote against?

The irony is that even in a “no-party” system, informal factions and coalitions would likely emerge anyway, but they’d just be less transparent and accountable to voters than formal parties are.

I dream just as big. My path to realizing them has only gotten more narrow.

thanks babe

I’m describing raising a child…

When someone online claims that LLMs aren’t AI, my immediate response is to ask them to prove they are a real and intelligent life form. It turns out proving you are real is pretty damned hard when it boils down to it. LLMs may be narrow AI, but humans are pretty narrow in our thinking as well.

I started a project back in January. It’s not ready for the public yet, but I’m planning for a early September release. Initially I don’t think it will be capable of much, but I’m going to be training it on various datasets in hopes that it is able to pick up on the basics fairly quickly. Over the next few years I’m aiming to train it on verbal communication and limited problem solving, as well as working on refining motor skills for interaction with its environment. After that, I’ll be handing it off regularly to professionals who have a lot more experience than me when it comes to training. Of course, I’ll still have my own input, but I’ll be relying a lot on the expertise of others for training data. It’s going to be a slow process, but my long term goal is a world wide release sometime in 2043, or maybe 2044, with some limited exposure before then. Of course, the training process never ends and new data is always becoming available, so I expect that to continue well beyond 2044.

You can kinda see this play out in the short story by Ted Chiang called The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate.

Yeah, I got the note air 4c and I can confirm it is amazing. However, it’s expensive. I don’t really have money to throw around like that, but I did some extra work and grabbed it. It’s phenomenal and I have no regrets. Great for reading, great for note taking, horrible for watching videos :) If its something that you’ll use, its worth every penny.

That’s true, and I overlooked that. I miss having a physical keyboard. I don’t want to shit on your purchase, if it does what you want, then great, it just doesn’t bring anything to the table for me.

Yeah, I have a Boox color tablet that I use for reading books and comics, but I also take A LOT of notes on it since I can use handwriting. This phone doesn’t bring anything to the table for me, but if there is a use for OP I’m not going to say it’s a bad purchase. I just don’t like the marketing behind it.

The e-ink display and expandable storage set it apart, but “minimal” can be achieved with some small effort by the end user of any smartphone. The idea that this phone will work magic for you and free up time in your day is just marketing. If you want your current phone to do less, then just uninstall the apps that are sucking up your time.

Cool. I just wanted to make sure my downvote and block was warranted.

Do you have any specific policies you are worried about?

Good clean living

For anyone keeping count, that’s about a day and a half per week.

As long as I can still get my truck stop boner pills I’m good.

They are called phosphenes, if you are curious.

That’s a whole other hydra head to deal with…

It’s a harsh quote, but it gets the point across: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” Carlin was right, and it applies here. Sure, half of us may be able to adequately identify what we should and shouldn’t eat, but there is another half that can’t. With proper education we can change that, but right now corporations educate better through commercials than schools do through lectures. We have to maintain oversight because the evil of capitalism will choose profit over people every time.

There are surprisingly few of them, they are just a very vocal few. I’ve blocked most of them now, and it’s made things much more bearable. Sometimes, though, I’ll catch a single downvote and I’ll imagine it’s one of them farting their virtue-signaling into the void.

I played dominoes with a bunch of Cubans that didn’t speak English, and I spoke very little Spanish. By the 3rd bottle of rum we all understood each other perfectly.