Isn’t this one of the LLMs that was partially trained on Reddit data? LLMs are inherently a model of a conversation or question/response based on their training data. That response looks very much like what I saw regularly on Reddit when I was there. This seems unsurprising.

Any Warcraft 3 players read the headline and automatically respond with “I’m not ready!”

That’s a good theory. It’s long been held that the more population dense area of the country skew liberal because diverse people jammed together learn to understand and get along with each other. You could make an argument that growing up on an internet with unfettered voices expressing themselves would be similar.

But the underlying racism that seems to fuel modern conservatism seems to be growing in all areas. I’m in California, which is about as blue as it gets, but like 40 percent of people voted for Trump.

I’ve been saying here for ages that the perception of boomers being overwhelmingly right wing and younger generations being overwhelmingly left wing is far, far from accurate. You can look at the demographic data from the prior two elections and see that, yes, there were more conservative boomers than liberal, but it’s not a big margin, and for younger generations it was flipped. Now it appears the younger folks are more conservative than liberal.

As a very liberal boomer, it’s been frustrating to get so many truly hateful responses, even recently, based on nothing other than the year I was born. I kept feeling like that level of intolerance didn’t bode well, and now I’m thinking that concern was validated.

Yes, Leckie writes SF. If you’re interested, I would start with Ancillary Justice, her first novel. It’s really good, and the first of a trilogy that’s all excellent.

I think you saw a post by me long ago where I posted my short notes about the books I’d read in that time frame. If you’d like me to pass along those notes for any of the books we talk about, like Leckie or the more recent Gibson novels, I’d be happy to.

And thanks for the offer. I’m good now, but who knows. An interesting time of change for me coming up: I retire in January after 39+ years at the same company, and sometime after we’re going to move from an area of southern California, where I’ve lived my whole life, to northern Washington State. Will be odd for sure.

Oh, good call, I did read those books and liked them quite a bit. Martine’s writing reminds me a bit of Ann Leckie, who I’ve read a lot of and like very much.

Hey, in know I’m just a guy on the internet who you talk about books with, but if you need to talk about more, I’m happy to listen. You might already have a good support network, which is great, but I know not everyone does.

I’m sorry to hear life is having challenges for you at the moment, I hope that resolves soon. A nice thing about a book is that you can put it down for days, weeks, months, whatever, and it’s still waiting for you when you feel like coming back to it.

I’ve been reading more Gibson lately. I read the first two books of the Jackpot trilogy (the third hasn’t come out yet) and the first in the Blue Ant trilogy. They’ve all been very good.

You take care and I hope things get better for you.

I guess you and I just disagree. Yes, for me there’s for sure a “not Trump” aspect to Kamala, but she seems like the most progressive candidate we’ve had for some time.

No one is saying it’s “the wrong time,” like the people who say we can’t talk about gun control after a shooting. What they’re saying is that a third party candidate is fundamentally a waste of a vote, or worse, in a two-party system. It doesn’t move the needle in the direction you want, it takes a vote away from the major party candidate who is closer to your ideals.

Would be nice to think so, but apparently they’re Trumpers.

I feel like, if demons were real, they’d be perfectly happy with Tucker.

I like the answer by some philosopher that we have a sense of object permanence. If your neighbor replaced different parts of his house over several years until they all were replaced, you’d likely say it was the same house because at every point in time, it was there. But if one day he knocked the whole things down and rebuilt it exactly the same as it had been, you’d say it was a different house because there was that moment when it wasn’t there.

Yep!

So it doesn’t matter on Southwest?

Yeah, and this is a much more frequent thing than crashes. I’ve been on planes multiple times when there was sudden turbulence and people without seatbelts lifted out of their seats. I don’t think any of my personal experiences resulted in someone hitting their head, but that happens. There was just video of one earlier this year.

I’m not going to say I’m okay with that privacy policy, so not reading the article, but the original complaint is quite a read.

At my company, is have to tell that guy he can’t wear that hat because we don’t allow people to wear political stuff. I’m not a fan of dress codes, but I’m a fan of that one.

I’ve said it other places, but you don’t get a sense of just how bad they are until you see one in person. I don’t know if it’s that they’re a bit bigger than I thought, or that I’m used to seeing fake images of all sorts of things, but even though I’d seen pictures I was surprised at how bad they are in person. They’re cartoonishly awful.

I still think we’re taking past each other. I’m not saying he won’t become president or whatever. There are other people who have done that without personally being great strategists or especially bright. I think Cheney was a lot smarter than the president he served under. Vance might be smarter than Trump, but I don’t think that’s saying much.

Cheney wanted to start a war in the middle east for personal enrichment, and he made that happen. That’s a huge deal, especially given he was just VP. Yes, terrible for the country, but really quite an accomplishment. I have seen no evidence that Vance has skills beyond just saying what he thinks people want to hear (regardless of accuracy).