[-] astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz 2 points 2 days ago

Yes and no. Yes, we should explain actual policy stances without saying "this is single-payer healthcare" or "wealth redistribution" or whatever phrase causes conservatives to shutdown. However, there still needs to be a name for shorthand purposes. It's like a pronoun in language. It gets tiring fast to keep using a person's name rather than saying "she/he/they/etc." and that causes its own issues.

Ultimately, the outline of a solution I can see is to advocate for "common sense" reforms and explain them (first at a high level so anyone can get an idea and then at finer detail later on). Call the policy something 'Murica-esque that any truck driving, gun totin', farmer from Texas would get behind. Then stay as far away from what the rest of the universe calls the policy and deny that it's what the policy is. Those who know, will know and not care or roll their eyes, and the disengaged will go for it. For example, "This isn't socialized medicine! It's my own idea! The American Patriots Help Each Other Be Healthy policy!"

[-] astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz 3 points 2 days ago

Because they legitimately don't know what they're saying. They're just saying "them big college-soundin' words" without any clue to their meaning.

[-] astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz 45 points 3 days ago

This has been my biggest takeaway of the past ten years. The electorate wants more social democratic policies, but they are afraid of the name. Fox News has made the mention of "social" anything or "liberal" anything toxic to a not-insignificant portion of the US population, and calling these policies by their generally agreed upon designations (be it from political science, philosophy, or academia), that group will just shut it down because those words just trip something in their brains.

Anecdotal as it may be, I got my MAGA mother to agree that a single payer healthcare system was better explaining in small words what "a common sense, good system" would look like. She was totally on board. Will she vote for "Medicare for All," now? No, because "that's socialism!!!!!1!1!!1," but an identical program that got explained was "just common sense."

In the end, I've found that MAGA people fall into three camps: bigots, idiots, and the selfish. Bigots will never be reasoned with; they're there to hurt people. The selfish are too rich to benefit from any good policies. Idiots, though, can be reasoned with, but you have to reason with them in the language of a 10 year old. It sounds condescending (and to a degree it is), but it's the only way to get through to them.

It seems insane from an outsider's perspective, but I think that we could get some European-esque policies passed in the US if instead of using "normal" terms, we use super mega-deluxe 'Murican cowboy names and just play into the quirks of American culture.

[-] astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz 3 points 4 days ago

LLMs don't. There are tools that can fetch new information and then gets fed into the model as more tokens, but that's just a special case of what kescusay is saying about injecting text.

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[-] astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz 87 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

My new supervisor, the day I met him, was talking about how space data centers are a great idea ("because it's so cold up there!") and will be amazing when they're online. That's the moment I realized he was breathtakingly stupid. He may not believe in thermodynamics, but thermodynamics believes in him.

I guess I shouldn't have expected much given that he has a degree in finance and has worked in consulting for 10 years.

[-] astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz 111 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Any MAGA who fell for this is beyond stupid (plus utterly unfamiliar with the military). Her uniform is wrong (skirt WAYYY too high). No one wears dress uniforms underway at sea in general, ESPECIALLY an enlisted soldier (who would likely be nowhere near a ship, even more especially in dress uniform). The ribbons on her dress uniform not only change from picture to picture, but are also the wrong size (sometimes) and not even actual US ribbons. I've never seen a regulation name tag say "US ARMY" and not a name. The undershirt in her camis isn't regulation. And this was just a quick look at the photos and only tangentially around the Army at work.

Oh and that's before the visible glitches because it's AI. This is laughably low effort.

EDIT: Damn, they didn't even use a real ship as the background. It's supposed to be a destroyer, and there are no US destroyers with an aft-facing bridge or part of the superstructure forward of the bridge windows. Just truly WTF

EDIT 2.0: I just saw a couple other photos because I got curious. One has her as a one-star general 😂, and a couple others have her wearing a (shitty looking) Combat Infantry Badge, which is only awarded for being in combat. So, I guess women CAN hack it in combat! Hegseth must be in shambles.

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Non-paywall version: https://archive.ph/i3G1r

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"Republicans cannot know a moment of peace." This is the energy I've been looking for! I hope he keeps it up and protects Illinoisans who do have to take off work or get into good trouble with the feds.

[-] astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz 98 points 1 year ago

Can't pardon a lawsuit. Lawsuits are civil; pardons are for criminal cases. Those staffers could be bankrupted, which would be hilarious.

[-] astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz 110 points 2 years ago
[-] astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz 190 points 2 years ago

The key thing to remember is that a one day blackout won't have an effect on the corporations. What it will do is get more people comfortable with taking action. If you can go one day without buying from Amazon, two days isn't much more, and then a week, and then a month. The idea is to ratchet up the action.

Just like how fascism has a progression to slowly "boil the frog," collective societal action does, too. This isn't an end but a beginning.

[-] astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz 149 points 2 years ago

I'm an American. Germans, please don't do to yourselves what we did. Keep AfD as far from power as possible.

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[-] astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz 123 points 2 years ago

Hell yeah! This is great! I'm glad I'm not the only one sharing it around to friends and neighbors. True resistance is not the flashy stuff; it's a whole of society approach to stop fascists in their tracks. True resistance is the sum total of small acts to inconvenience and impede a fascist.

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Way to go Chicago! This was really great to see! I'm glad we are taking care of our neighbors.

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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz to c/politics@lemmy.world

Look, if these complete morons on the Right want to vote against their self-interests and America, they are beyond help, and all I will do is keep working my a-- off to make sure people understand this.

What we have is a failure to communicate on the Left.

The truth is these people support the America-attacking blowhard because he stirs their cold blood. He makes them feel good about looking backward instead of at all the possibilities ahead. He makes them feel good about thinking they are the only thing that matters and that they have somehow been cheated out of their dark, empty lives.

They don’t want to make America better. They want to make everybody else’s lives worse.

All they are is angry, and have finally found a lewd, racist conman who can put a megaphone to their tantrums, and deal the rest of America plenty of pain. He has no goddamn answers for them or us.

What we have right now is a MASSIVE messaging problem.

From the minute the Biden Administration took power it worked like hell to tackle a global crisis that was exacerbated by the previous administration. I mean, holy s--- even infrastructure got done, and do you know who has benefited most from that? White people.

If that didn't resonate, it’s not because it didn’t happen. It’s because too many people didn’t know about it.

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Gov. Pritzker is a Treasure (www.instagram.com)

Gov. Pritzker welcomed Jen Psaki to Chicago in the best way possible

[-] astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz 137 points 2 years ago

I can see the allure for places wanting to keep certain trouble-makers out as a precaution, but this gets so close to a privatized social credit score that it's beyond uncomfortable.

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Interesting research from Anthropic. I'm looking forward to reading follow-on work, and I really hope that this will be tested on open source models (like Mistral) to confirm the method.

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astronaut_sloth

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