Because Donald J Trump is their guy. He might well win.

The world tends to find that having an extraordinarily wealthy parent makes its own luck.

You have the right to be an asshole. Mods have the right to ban you for being an asshole.

Making out that they’re nasty for having some standards of behaviour in their area is calling good bad and bad good.

(Censorship is when local or national government put you in prison for protesting or ban your book or ban your ideas. That’s when your free speech rights are being infringed.)

You’re right.

Oh, I thought it was the CEO’s online reputation and the fact the people are hearing more and more that their after sales service is shit, eg being charged £17000 for a new motor which is apparently the driver’s fault for driving it in the rain. In Scotland.

https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/motors/couple-charged-17000-tesla-broke-27925815

Apparently the problem has been known for some time:

https://insideevs.com/news/534878/tesla-models-motor-fail-rain/

They’ll notice that they benefit from taxation so they’ll be happier with a higher tax economy and see that tax cuts hurt them more than help them.

That’s definitely also true, but republicans genuinely want everyone to hate taxation as well, so their interests very much align with the companies that want to fleece you.

Lots of countries have pay as you earn schemes where your income tax is deducted but your employer and sent to the government and you don’t have to even lift a finger, likewise the price on the item at the shop, by law, includes tax and it’s completely seamless for you. Republicans will never like such schemes because they want taxation to be hated by all so that they’ll go along with tax cuts that primarily benefit such folks.

This is great, but republicans are gonna hate it. They want everyone to hate taxes with a passion, so they make it difficult, time consuming and expensive to pay your taxes, and make government services as bad as possible so even poorer people who don’t pay much tax feel they get a bad deal out of taxation.

If ordinary people found it easy and convenient to pay taxes they might notice that they get more out of government than they put in and that rich people are bearing more of the cost than they are. If they thought that, they might support tax increases or things that horrify republicans like medicaid for all.

Idiots.

I’m happy to let mods carve out a bunch of niche communities with their own preferences. The fediverse is a big place. If you don’t like instances that are protective of LGBT+ folks you’re cutting it down a bit, but genuinely, you seem to be deliberately picking topics that troll the specific community you’re posting on, then you complained that they took it down. Post where your post will be welcome, stop complaining when you post where you already know it’s not. Reddit and twitter are pretty right wing and troll friendly. Maybe you’ll be happier there.

Well, whilst I abhor the violent terrorism that Hamas have committed and abhor the overwhelming overreaction and horrific vengence that the state of Israel have, as usual, immediately begun, it’s just not accurate to call what preceded recent events “peace”.

The people I know who have separately and recently visited Israel and Palestine variously called it “viscious apartheid”, “appalling”, “military occupation” and phrases like that. No one called it peace.

I think you erroneously assumed that because it wasn’t in the news, violence was not occurring, whereas I think it’s more accurate to say that it wasn’t in the news because the violence was so everyday and constant that there was nothing new to say about it. A child getting run over by a car won’t make the national news either, for almost exactly the same reason.

I don’t know who you are, or what you write, but thank you.

Pretty sure it’s just the racists.

As usual, the advice is not to rely on Google in any way.

Alternatively, install a Firefox or duck duck go browser.

Ah and now you beat me in debate by writing a shorter answer without giving credibility to my main point by engaging with it in any way. You’re such a winner.

You are clearly a Very Intelligent Expert and a Wise and Knowledgeable person, so I must bow to your greater, deeper and fuller understanding.

I was weak, pathetic and stupid for thinking that the safety concerns this raises were more important than the technicalities of this individual case. Please accept my humble apologies. I’m sure you’ll have further corrections for my naive fumblings and I await your Academic Input eagerly.

I’m not sure that’s an important question. In my view, even if it turned out correct, “This particular victim would have died anyway, so delaying emergency vehicles is fine” is a logical fallacy, an ethical error and a failure of empathy.

Well, sounds like you’re well on your way to hand-rolling your own product comparison tool that’s Powered By AI TM. You could make a popular price comparison site that initially filters out all that cruft and just gives you simple, clear, easy to read information about products.

Version 2 could have handy links to the cheapest websites.

Once it gets super popular you could offer retailers the chance to ensure their products and prices are correct. Perhaps a nice easy AI powered upload where you dump the info on whatever format you like, check it’s understood and go live.

You could later offer retailers the chance to host a store front with you, or maybe allow initially just one or two, very tasteful, clearly marked-as-advertisment links for strictly AI-sanctioned relevant upselling, you know, offer the warranty with the product, or the printer with the fancier ink alongside the ones that exactly matched the criteria.

Once your engagement with retailers is strong, and they know they’ll be missing out on a lot of custom, you can start maximising your income from them.

Or, wait did this whole cycle repeat itself many times over with many websites and many corporations?

Enshitification is real, and it’s already AI powered. We don’t know exactly why what’s in front of us when we’re online is the thing that is most likely to get us to keep scrolling and clicking and purchasing and maximising profits, but it’s reasonable to assume that on a lot of successful websites, some sort of AI system chose it for exactly those purposes.

It’s nice that you feel AI will get us away from the power of the multinational corporations, but I think it’s vastly more likely that the AI we use will fall under their control and they will be twenty steps ahead of us. They were the ones who popularised it in the first place!

(Personally, I tend to use some reviewing sites that I trust and in particular for phones, a spec agreggator so I can filter out the five year old products that amazon is offering me.)

You know that a LLM is a statistical word prediction thing, no? That LLMs “hallucinate”. That this is an inevitable consequence of how they work. They’re designed to take in a context and then sound human, or sound formal, or sound like an excellent programmer, or sound like a lawyer, but there’s no particular reason why the content that they present to you would be accurate. It’s just that their training data contains an awful lot of accurate data which has a surprisingly large amount of commonality of meaning.

You say that the current crop of LLMs are good at Wikipedia style questions, but that’s because their authors have trained them with some of the most reliable and easy to verify information on the Web. A lot of that is Wikipedia style stuff. That’s it’s core knowledge, what it grew up reading, the yardstick by which it was judged. And yet it still goes off on inaccurate tangents because there’s nothing inherently accurate about statistically predicting the next word based on your training and the context and content of the prompt.

Yes, LLMs sound like they understand your prompt and are very knowledgeable, but the output is fundamentally not a fact-based thing, it’s a synthesized thing, engineered to sound like its training data.