A candidate that expressed nuanced understanding of economic principles would have been less likely to win the election.

A candidate that instead promises answers that intuitively sound right. If imports are expensive, then obviously the big business owners will build domestic and give us more money. If you get rid of immigrants, then the business owners will have to pay more for citizen workers. Simple answers that are easier for people to believe in.

Attempts to explain nuance? That ranges from nerds overcomplicating things and/or those darned liberal elites trying to truck them.

This cuts both ways. In 2020 Biden won not due to a more sophisticated understanding of things, but simply because things were bad, and the other guy therefore was the obvious choice. So to overcome an incumbent, you just have to have people believe stuff is bad, and provide some believable explanation that you could fix it.

I don’t know what the final turnout figures will be, but if it is a lower turnout, I can think of a few:

• 2020 was the easiest year to mail in a ballot ever, and it got harder again as states reinstated various difficulties with mail in ballots.
• So many people didn’t have to go into work in 2020, they had more flexibility to vote however they needed to do it.

Yeah but the point was about what turnout was. We know who won but it’s a bit early to discuss relative turnout compared to 2020. It is likely lower, but the specifics will be a while.

As much as I enjoy shitting on McDonald’s

So you are behind the outbreak!

There are signs of three distinct interpretations in the result:

• On topic, the concept of cleaning a wild bird you are trying to save
• Preparing a store bought Turkey (removing a label)
• Preparing a wild bird that is caught

It’s actually a pretty good illustration of how AI assembles “information shaped text” and how smooth it can look and yet how dumb it can be about it. Unfortunately advocates will just say “I can’t get this specific thing wrong when I ask it or another LLM, so there’s no problem”, even as it gets other stuff wrong. It’s weird as you better be able to second guess the result, meaning you can never be confident in an answer you didn’t already know, but when that’s the case, it’s not that great for factual stuff.

For “doesn’t matter” content, it may do fine (generated alternatives to stock photography, silly meme pictures, random prattle from background NPCs in a game), but for “stuff that matters”, Generative AI is frequently more of a headache than a help.

I mean, not one a human would ever make.

First off, the word “rescued” would have immediately made the context of “protect the pigeon” clear.

Second, a “rescued pigeon” wouldn’t have a label on it, so it’s clearly mixing in something from likely a store bought turkey, but then the other steps don’t make sense either as those don’t apply either.

A traditional search approach would not have made the mistake either. It would either have failed to find anything or found actual on topic results. It’s “clever” enough to genericize “pigeon” to “birds” and hit upon text related to birds from a grocery store and birds that you hunted and mix all that together in a coherent language but with content that is nonsense.

In this case, hilarious, in other day to day situations, it’s maddening, as some professional colleague gets the same sort of nonsense but lacks knowledge to correct it and relays it as fact. Then when called out on the data was in fact so bad it wasted time, they just say ‘oh, lol, AI’ (they wanted to take credit for it if it worked, but can hide behind AI when it doesn’t).

Problem is in practice, I suspect something is pretty wrong in most teams.

Some common examples come to my mind:

• Management hears “talk about what you’ve done and what you will do” so great time to sit in and take notes for performance review, and it becomes a “make sure management knows you spent all your time and did really impressive stuff” meeting. Also throws a kink in “things I need help with” as there’s always the risk that management decides you aren’t self sufficient enough if they hear you got stuck, so you also need to defend why you got stuck and how it isn’t your fault.
• The people who feel like everyone needs to know the minutia of their trials and tribulations including all the intermediate dead ends they went down on the way to their final result. Related to the above, but there are people who think to do this even without the need to impress management.
• The people who cannot stand to “take it offline” and will stop everything to fully work a problem while everyone is still ostensibly supposed to stay in the meeting despite having nothing to do with the two people talking (sometimes even just one, a guy starts talking to himself as he tries to do something live).
• Groups that are organized but have very little common ground. An “everything must be scrum” company sticks a guy who does stuff like shipping and receiving into a development team and there’s no ‘scrum-like’ interaction to be had and yet, there he is wasting his time and having to talk about stuff no one else on that meeting has a need to hear either.

What van are you thinking? Work vans do this all the time.

I think it was more how weird the downscale looked for that one, along with being posted next to AI generated ones.

Yeah, 3 out of 4 AI generated fodder and the 4th is using some weird downscale that manages to also give off AI vibes… I can understand the impression myself…

Didn’t say that the concept of absurdist G-Mod stuff is new, it’s that the singular specific “skibidi toilet” thing is new.

There’s some difference.

So you have the slang that’s akin to “Rad”. Words used with sincerity to communicate. “Rizz” and “Sus” fall into this category and seem pretty ‘mundane’, shortening Charisma and Suspicious.

Skibidi is a bit different. It’s more like that generations “Wazzzzzzzuuuuuuuup?” It’s something they themselves consider “just stupid to say”.

Nah, it’s definitely a Gen-Alpha/Z meme. Millenials were more Badgers and Mushrooms sort of memes.

Yes, G-Mod is the medium for this, but this specific thing is new.

And Michael Bay I guess felt he must outshine the emoji movie…

I’d say it’s more people who are repeatedly told they are smart can be very stupid.

Many of then might even be “smart”, but the important part is having unwarranted confidence.

Complicating things is that society rewards confidence way more than it rewards competence. If I’m honest about a lack of competence in a certain area but someone else lies during the interview, good chance they are going to get the job over me.

The reality is that everyone can be very very stupid, and so long as each and every one of us is willing to accept and recognize our weakness we aren’t as likely to be assholes.

We have one side’s unilateral description of how they perceive the existing state of things and their changes. Folks are very likely to poorly characterize things in a way that would sound crazy to disagree. However the truth is usually somewhere in between.

I have had very very vocal user that decry very deliberate design that the wider user base wanted as a “bug”. If someone read their rant without the wider context one would think my team was unreasonable and producing bad software. Even after fellow users took time to explain why they wanted his request rejected, he was quite adamant that everyone else was wrong.

“Some stay dry and others feel the pain”

Hmm, still unclear…

Well, that’s the thing with the AI generated images. On top of looking generally ‘off’, they aren’t very good at making sense.

Hmm, did it look different from original? Wonder if I messed up and uploaded the wrong thing…

I can’t see the left ones and the top right is a bit hard for me to see. The bottom right for me is more legible in my first picture.

For those who want to see what at least protonopia might see:

And for those color blind people that might want a shifted perspective:

The time is coming for the most involved “go fuck yourself” ever.