Agreed. If someone can’t be bothered to write two sentences, they really have no business being on a discussion platform. Because clearly they won’t be contributing much if anything to the conversation.

It was pretty obvious most Americans don’t care about Gaza, and didn’t let it influence their voting.

I’ve seen polling prior to the election that asked people about their most important issues when voting.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/651719/economy-important-issue-2024-presidential-vote.aspx

The Republican voter’s top issues were the economy, immigration, terrorism/nation security, crime and taxes.

Meanwhile, the Democrat top issues were US democracy, the supreme court, abortion, healthcare and education.

Basically, foreign policy was a non issue for voters. Gaza did not factor into most voter’s decisions at all. And of course it doesn’t. When you’re worried about putting food on the table, you can’t afford rent, your bodily autonomy is at stake and your country is going to shit… you’d be silly to vote based on Gaza. Because that’s directly voting against your own interests. Gaza should not have been a large talking point or even at all.

I think the reason a lot of Democrats stayed home was basically candidate fatigue. They just didn’t feel like voting for a candidate so boring and faceless. And she didn’t have nearly enough time to turn things around. Why bother voting when democratic leadership clearly isn’t taking voters and their actual issues seriously?

The thing that really annoys me is the people who are most enamoured with Chat GPT also seem to be the ones least capable of judging its accuracy and actual output quality.

I write for a living; a newspaper. So naturally, some of the people in our company - sales people - wanted to test it. And they were delighted with the stuff it wrote. Which was terrible to read, factually incorrect, repetitive and just not something we’d put in the paper. But they loved it. Because they weren’t writers and don’t know how to write an engaging article with proper sources.

I tested it as well. Wanted to form my own opinion and read up on the limitations, how to write good prompts, etc. So I could give it a fair chance.

I had it write a basic 500 word article about things to see in our city, with information about the tourist info office. That’s something a first year intern can do in his second week with us.

Basically, it ended up ‘inventing’ two museums that don’t exist, it listed info for a museum on the other side of the country, it listed an ‘Olympic stadium’ (we never hosted the Olympics) and it gave a completely wrong address for the tourist info, even though it should have it.

It was factually incorrect in just about every sentence. But it all sounded plausible enough and was written with such confidence that anyone not from this city might assume it to be true.

I don’t want that fucking thing anywhere NEAR my newspaper. The sales people are pretty much monkeys with Chat GPT-typewriters, churning out drivel instead of Shakespeare.

I absolutely love that article. You can just about imagine The Office in Taliban style.

Mazel tov!

Oh then I’ve misinterpreted your comment :D

(Lots of people don’t know the distinction between the EU and Europe)

(Edit: yes, I misinterpreted his comment)

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If you take the time to make / share something good, it usually gets little traction compared to bots, misinformation, astroturfed bullshit, etc. Your stuff gets lost in a sea of nonsense.

I used to make good posts on a favourite subreddit of mine. But because of poor moderation, the sub basically got drowned with low-effort stuff from drive-by posters who weren’t regulars. Mods refused to ban those posts, even though users really wanted them to.

The end result? I no longer post good content there. Why bother when it gets drowned out?

The other end of the spectrum is that some platforms are too heavy handed with moderation, taking any sort of flavour out of it. You need a bit of spice to make a platform enjoyable. Sadly, that’s also what’s been happening over at Reddit in general: discourage content that doesn’t fit the desired advertiser / IPO profile. Which again drives people away from posting things.

I used to love Reddit, but I’ve totally abandoned it. It’s not one particular reason, but the broad effect is that I and many others no longer feel welcome.

We lost a lot of good users; people who contribute to topics, make good posts and comments. We also lost good moderators; people who cared about the content quality and vibe. The Reddit-appointed replacement mods by and large are not people who ran or SHOULD run communities.

Add in the fact that both subreddit mods and Reddit admins are going hog wild with the ban hammer on both subs and users, and it’s hardly a wonder that users aren’t having it. They’re trying to turn it into a gentrified Disneyland and that’s not what we want.

I’m hoping we can grow the Fediverse and prevent it from getting fucked by people with bad motives.

Well, I for one remember. And will until the day I die.

When the aircraft was shot down, I was following the news on Twitter. You got to see everything. There were images of people still strapped in their seats, smashed into the ground. Little kids too. It was haunting. Especially when the looting started, and you saw videos of people taking things from the dead. It was surreal, especially considering there were 198 Dutch people on board; two thirds of the total. You could recognise typical Dutch things like supermarket bags, Dutch passports, clothing, that sort of thing.

Speaking for myself personally: I hope our jets, guns and ammo kill at least a 10 Russians for every victim on that plane. It won’t fix what was done. But we’ll make sure Russia remembers their ‘mistake’.

Deposit systems can only do so much. We have a new plastic bottle deposit system here in the Netherlands, with about a 70 percent return rate. And you can return bottles at every supermarket.

I don’t think that would work with disposablevapes. Not unless you have really high deposits and strict sales policies. A lot of this stuff also gets imported from China, so that makes it quite impossible to collect deposits on them.

I’ve been on the internet since 1995. I know what can fit up there with the average human. But yeah, I don’t think that’s the one you start with.

Can these ever really be clean enough for you to knowingly touch one? Nah.

Oh no, don’t get me wrong - I’m very much against banning things in general. You should be able to buy plastic straws, disposable vapes, cocaine and a machine gun at your local 7-11.

I’m just surprised that this isn’t something that they haven’t banned yet, despite being a pretty big issue.

Meanwhile, I’m forced to use shitty paper straws because plastic straws are banned. And yet THIS SHIT is somehow legal??

May every missile fired and every bomb dropped find their goal: a Russian aggressor. I hope Ukraine will put our country’s jets to good use. They certainly did good work with the guns and ammo we sent 👍

We remember MH17. Hopefully these fighters will pay that back tenfold.

Re: edgier Trek:

For me, I feel like we’ve had so much ‘positive utopia’ Trek, that more of the same just gets a bit boring. There’s also the fact that life today is different compared to when Trek first aired. We’re more aware of some of those sharper edges and want to see them represented in media.

From a practical standpoint, there’s also ‘we can, so we do’. When Trek aired on regular TV, you couldn’t drop an F-bomb, much less show actual gritty stuff. With streaming, there’s no reason to hold back. Which gives writers more room to explore.

As a longtime Trek fan, I’m certainly in favor of it. There’s plenty of things to work with; things implied but never really shown. Which is why I also liked more recent Trek projects like Strange New Worlds and Picard. They have a bit more grit to them.

Tarantino’s trek would not have been for everyone… but it certainly would’ve been a massive hit. Even if you hate his other work, you can’t help but be intrigued.

Geez, the fuck’s going on over there?

I don’t think anyone minds artistic nude or even full on porn, assuming there’s reasonable legal protections to keep underage kids away.