But between Biden's ego and the DNC's determination to stick with a wholly-owned establishment neoliberal hack at all costs - even if it means losing - I expected that they wouldn't take this golden opportunity.

Biden has objectively been the most progressive president since LBJ, and the most effective progressive president since FDR. And he did it with about the slimmest possible congressional margins, a situation which would have made it very easy for an actual "establishment neoliberal hack" to say "my hands are tied" and accomplish nothing of substance. Instead we got the biggest climate reform package ever, the biggest infrastructure package since the Interstate Highway system, a child tax credit that massively reduced child poverty, the most significant industrial policy in decades (CHIPS and Science), a veritable bulldog FTC chair with an aggressive anti-monopoly stance, and that's just for starters.

Not great when that show ended with industry collapsing the biosphere and destroying civilization.

The delivery was bad but it makes sense: A woman was murdered by an immigrant, he (Trump) went to the funeral and tries to demagogue it. Meanwhile Republicans are passing laws to criminalize abortion and prosecute women who try to travel to other states after they're raped by people they know. So Trump and his party don't give a shit about prosecuting rapes or protecting women, they just want to demonize immigrants and control women's bodies.

Edit: You also left out the preceding lines where he talks about Georgia and other states legislating a six-week abortion ban, which sets up the point more clearly.

Need to call a special fact-finding hearing featuring the editors of Merriam-Webster's, Collins, and the Oxford English Dictionary. Let's pencil it in for three weeks from next Monday.

M O I S T U R I Z E M E

IMHO 2012 was the one that really broke their brains. The tea party types tried to get various firebrands on the ticket, but end up having to support Romney. Hey, at least he's a squeaky-clean telegenic millionaire pushing the most severe conservative fiscal policies! Proceeds to get stomped by the Obama campaign so bad that Karl Rove couldn't believe it as it was happening. THEN the establishment GOP flirts with moving to the center on immigration. The backlash against that on the right, supercharged by the mainstreaming of mobile social media (plus social justice protests and the looming Clinton campaign) was what fueled the rise of Trump.

Science location, you rube.

It's just not practical -- no Minecraft server or map can realistically hold all the books in the Archive, or even just the 500k that were removed. Even if it could, you'd only be able to read them by literally taking your avatar to the book object and reading it in the tiny in-game interface.

The Minecraft thing is just a gimmick to promote awareness of press freedom and censorship, not a plausible way to deliver books to people. If the IA wanted to "set books free" they'd be better off using torrents or something like Libgen (and even then they'd still be criminally liable for making the files available, even if the publishers couldn't stop the files from being shared further).

It only contains a relatively small collection of banned reporting from various countries, not the whole Internet Archive, and only in the form of in-game books, not anything really usable IRL. It's neat but basically a promotional project for RWB.

If Biden wins, what do you expect to happen with all the MAGAs?

They will continue to exist, though weakened, and four more years of Democratic executive actions and appointments will steadily move the federal government further away from their position.

How would you prevent another Jan 6th? What if it succeeded this time?

Electing Democrats to critical state roles in 2022 helped a lot here. It's also useful having the election denier as the challenger, not the incumbent, plus we're all wise to their playbook. The multiple prosecutions of last cycles conspirators should also put a damper on things.

How will you keep Biden accountable?

Protests, op-eds, pressuring legislators, primary elections, etc.

Will you keep avoiding a fascist dictatorship every 4 years until the end of time?

Yes. Democracy requires active maintenance, from all of us, indefinitely. Giving up is how its enemies win.

It's not a "Boogeyman" or a "scare tactic" if it actually happened. Trump did appoint three justices, those justices were significantly more right-wing than the ones they replaced, and as a result they actually did overturn Roe v. Wade and a side swath of other rights and regulations. Maybe keep that very recent history in mind when you hear the same people who warned about it then warning about him trying to end democracy in America now.

Climate change is the single overriding issue for me. We are beyond out of time to avert damaging levels of warming, and even Biden's climate policies -- by far the most sweeping in the history of the country -- are barely adequate to begin steering us away from the absolute worst. If Trump gets in, and eviscerates federal climate policy, and stacks the EPA with oil lobbyists (again), and fills federal courts with science-denying assholes, and sabotages state and local efforts to decarbonize, and destroys all chance of global cooperation on this issue, and (most importantly) dismantles democracy so that it is effectively impossible to vote for a progressive ever again absent a second civil war, then we will be consigning the entire planet to "nightmare hellscape" levels of climate change with no viable pathway out. A second Trump term would add four billion tons of carbon emissions over the next six years. It would "negate – twice over – all of the savings from deploying wind, solar and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years". And that analysis doesn't account for increased emissions from Trump policies, just a reversal of what Biden has accomplished. Allowing Trump to win again would not just be national, but global suicide.

Yeah, it's basically a smart photo filter for color-correction, object cut-outs, masking, etc:

https://www.pixometry.com/en/pixometry-the-new-name-for-elpical-software/elpical-claro-pixometry/

This feels more like consolidating positions in an art department post-Photoshop because you don't need photo editors to dodge and burn physical negatives in a darkroom any more.

I do try to block ads, but tbh it's impossible to be mad at Google for pushing them. YouTube is a modern miracle of engineering -- no other platform on the planet hosts the scale of video it does, indefinitely, with instant access, for free. It is more than fair for them to recoup the massive cost. Personally, if they had a cheaper version of Premium without the music features, I'd pay for it in a heartbeat.

It's a fine idea but feels like it's maybe past its prime in terms of active maintenance? Like I checked out my old neighborhood in the suburbs of a large US city and the primary road through it (which the area is named after and has a very big visible welcome sign indicating that) was misspelled. I don't have an account and didn't care to learn how to edit it, but I did drop a note flagging the error. Then I browsed some of the other notes and noticed they were all multiple years old. Even Manhattan was littered with months- or years-old notes with only a handful of them marked resolved. Maybe they were just hard edge cases not easily fixed, but it gave the impression of a database that has not been broadly maintained for years.

I imagine it's because of the generative AI stuff. If they're using their servers to generate, they're going to be responsible for what it puts out, even if it's just responding to user prompts.

Lemmy might be less active but doesn't make you feel like every contribution is rewarding someone who actively insulted and disrespected you and ruined something you used to enjoy. Big plus.

If it is just a repackaging of ChatGPT's existing "search the web" function, I don't know why they'd bother. It can at best summarize a page of search results for a very literal-minded query, and even then it's often lobotomized by the fact that OpenAI has made it easy for a large number of top websites to opt out of having their pages accessible to their search crawler, which means you're only getting a summary of the search result snippet and metadata. A competent user of Google search can run rings around it in terms of research, even with Google's decline in quality. I guess it makes it faster to answer basic queries for recent information not in the training data, but that hardly seems worthy of a big event.

Just goes to show how one-note she's gotten, that even the owner of the platform who's no SJW and desperate to ingratiate himself to celebs is like, "can you give it a rest already?"

I scrolled through her feed to see how long before that was her last non-trans-related tweet and gave up after two dozen.