It’s possible that percentage counts dissatisfaction with the previous administration more than approval for the current one. That is, it might just count people wanting any change.
It doesn’t help that many of us (yes , I mean us, the technorati, the readers and contributors of this vaunted forum) actively and even knowingly participated in making poisonous systems, pocket prohistamines, amplifiers of fears and antagonists of rational thought.
We decry the world we have wrested from decency with our own tender, uncalloused hands, our minds sharpened to create beautiful weapons of mass confusion, elegant and brutal in their viral carapaces, eager to dissolve into the psyche of any unfortunate enough to fall into their dopamine sweetened viciousness.
We created this. Not the politicians, there have always been irrational, brutish, would be populists and morons in suits. That is not new. People with money willing to pay people to build or do malignant things, that is also an ancient malady that society has evolved to bear. We. We made the mind-killers. We, with our cleverness and desire for perfect symmetry manufactured social PCP, and now we are witnessing the fruits of our careless, avaricious labors, shocked and in denial of the damage we have done.
In our defense, we didn’t know. No one had built anything on our idea machines that hooked into the flesh of the human psyche like that before, and at first we didn’t even understand what we were building. But later in the fall, we knew better.
Our algorithms, nanowire sharp in their efficiency, honed to amplify fear and rage while suppressing rational thought, no, those were not made in ignorance, neither in malice, but more in a playful curiosity. The same playful curiosity that made the atom bomb, but at least the physicists could foresee and conceptualize the demon they would create. In contrast, we the technorati are still reeling with surprise and denial, not able to understand the beast that we have conjured from the depths of the human psyche.
We know there is a problem, we know that social media is not helping… so what do we do? We make lame attempts to make new social media platforms, lower in poison, filtered cigarettes. Precision strategic weapons of mass destruction. Low-fat butter.
We need to look in the mirror and get to work figuring how to fix what we broke. The future of humanity is at stake, and we are directly responsible for, knowingly or not, the situation our children are facing.
This is the most obscenely wrong take I can imagine, and I'll gladly explain why I say that.
Your AI-generated response plainly ignores a country in love with Michael Jordan and Whitney Houston for decades, for example, and are choosing skin deep characteristics to fit _your_ narrative, while ignoring the things voters repeatedly emphasized as damning, all of which were color blind: a complete lack of policy by the "woman on the ticket", condescension from Hillary that people not following her directives "need to get over themselves", Obama chastising black men that they must vote as he says. It's a playbook on the alienation of voters.
FWIW I am morally opposed to publishing AI slop where it might enter the public domain, and while I find my local models useful for organizing thoughts and prepping documents, I do not use AI to write.
But thank you, I guess, for assuming a properly written long form comment must be AI? lol.
On the issue of pervasive racism…. Yes, we have become comfortable with people of color entertaining us, and most have multiple ethnicities both in their background and in their social circles these days… but when Obama took office, you could hear a pin drop in many, many corners of the USA. A black man running the country, representing the nation to the world, was a bridge too far for many, many people.
In my life I have a lot of intersectionality with maga and maga adjacent individuals. The vast majority are racist either openly, covertly, or accidentally, the “I have a black friend” so I can’t be racist types. Xenophobia is a huge driver of the political base… if you can’t see that, IDK what to tell you… but none of that negates the very real issues you spoke of. There were no good choices, really, only maybe less dangerous ones.
Anyway, I hope your day goes well, and be careful about assuming you can dismiss everything you don’t like to read as “AI generated ” and therefore irrelevant. That’s a very dangerous and sloppy cognitive shortcut to remaining ignorant of anything outside your echo chamber. Relatable though, I think we’re all a little traumatized ATM.
What did you train them on, just your own docs?
That’s a tiny oversimplification, but basically that. You combine multiple agents with different “expertise” and give them access to a vectorised database of your information, or to tools that can ingest information for llm use, and you have a couple of half drunk interns that you can task with doing stuff for you.
It’s pretty cool, and sometimes also hilarious. I’ve had agents get quite testy with each other and even complain about their compatriots (they are all given names in the script). A little sexual harassment as well. (I often use uncensored models, I find that for critic / skeptic roles they are far superior).
Llms ape the best and the worst of humanity, but fortunately mostly the best parts.