Forgive me, but the kid had talked to these bots for 2 weeks? And after taking the phone away mom sent him to therapy? That seems... extreme to me, how much damage did those chatbots cause in such a short time?

"Demsoc" is just a shorthand for "democratic socialist". Similar to how "ancap" is "anarcho-capitalist" and "nazbol" is "national-bolshevik".

Working under the assumption that something is likely true is not the same as having faith that it is.

Districts by their very nature represent voters.

I feel like you are misunderstanding representative government. There is value in districts, provided they are drawn apolitically. Without it, people living in sparsely populated areas would effectively have their unique needs unmet.

It's really important to understand why this is not the case. Districted voting essentially introduces first-past-the-post voting at more levels. Each level of FPTP creates a larger disparity between what voters want and who gets elected. This is in part due to gerrmandering, but that's not a required thing.

Every time you decide a district election through FPTP, you essentially create a rounding error, a disparity between the election results and what voters actually voted for. This FPTP system then reinforces the two-party system that the US and UK have a very hard time escaping. And as you may be able to guess, having a mere two major parties to choose from is fucking terrible for getting niche voters represented. It's why the US and UK see comparatively little regional focus and increased disillusionment with national politics in these areas.

Abolishing districts actually helps local representation(!). Because under proportional representation, if someone campaigns on serving the needs of a small group of voters, said group can vote for them and they will be elected. It lets anyone basically define their own "district" of voters, without political manipulation. If they fail to attract a sizeable enough share of votes, then this electoral niche is simply too small to be represented at the national level, and this group should perhaps petition local government instead.

We see this effect quite clearly in countries like the Netherlands, where there are quite a few national parties to choose from, and several focus on a specific group of voters (eg the BBB which focuses on farmers, or the FNP which focuses on people living in the region of Friesland.

I suppose we should normalize lemmy instances closing new registrations, to keep the user count at a manageable level for the admins.

He has genuine and severe mental illnesses. He's off his meds at the moment due to his paranoia about them.

It's incredibly clear when he's off his meds, as when he's on them he turns a lot more reasonable and not Nazi at all.

It's not AI. The oldest version of this image is from May 11th 2020, and the first widespread text-to-image model DALL-E came out in January 2021. That makes this image too old to be AI-generated.

It also doesn't show any strange AI defects the early models had, in case you may think it's from a very early proprietary unreleased model or something.

I'm fairly certain variations on the dead internet theory have been floating around well before 2021. Here's a variation of it on Reddit from 9 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/348vlx/what_bot_accounts_on_reddit_should_people_know/

Apparently the idea stems from the IRC days where the first user to join a channel would receive admin rights. So people wrote bots to stay in channels and only grant admin rights to specific users joining. Then came more novelty bots that would stick around in channels, even bots that "chatted" with one another. When you'd join a channel and ask if there were any humans around they'd answer "just bots", which eventually became a meme and then regular humans started saying that too as a joke.

That idea morphed into the "Everyone on Reddit is a bot except you" meme, which coupled with obvious bot activity on Twitter turned into the "Dead Internet Theory", which basically takes the meme seriously. One of the original versions of that theory is this one: https://forum.agoraroad.com/index.php?threads/dead-internet-theory-most-of-the-internet-is-fake.3011/

Some excerpts:

Large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content on the internet are actually generated by artificial intelligence networks in conjunction with paid secret media influencers in order to manufacture consumers for an increasing range of newly-normalised cultural products.

Yes, the Internet may seem gigantic, but it's like a hot air balloon with nothing inside. Some of this is absolutely the fault of corporations and government entities.

I think it's entirely obvious what I'm subtly suggesting here given this setup, but allow me to try to succinctly state my thesis here: the U.S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population.

In this way, the internet and social media, which was supposed to democratise media by allowing users to create whatever content they wanted, has instead been hijacked by a powerful few.

Quite clearly appears to be blaming a secretive cabal/corporarions/US government for the whole thing, so it's definitely blaming "the elites".

It functions more like a drawing tablet, with the ability to put something behind the screen allowing you to easily trace it.

IIRC this is because Spotify wants to generate translations for these audiobooks in the original voices. At least, that's what I think I remember from a long time ago.

Considering Argentina does not have enough dollars to actually pull that off, he has no real implementable policy.

Playing a game differently to make sure you're having fun is fine to me (presuming you're not messing up other people's multiplayer experiences or something, which isn't the case here).

Don't see why this would need to be controversial.