I can kinda answer that.

There’s a term used in tech called “empire building”. It’s where managers and execs promote their little slice of the company to persevere and grow their own career. At a certain level, it leads to someone that leads a division like AI having enough influence that they can say “let’s put AI into search”.

The sad thing about tech is that at a certain level, an executive rises above the customer in dictating what is best for a product. Data and stats can tell you whatever story you want to promote, so at Google HQ they’re probably worried about the negative press, but they’re looking at “successful” numbers of questions answered by AI and are patting themselves on the back. Both search and AI execs look good because they delivered something, and they’ll likely get a nice bump from their bosses in terms of rep.

The thing with empires is that they fall. Not overnight, and maybe not with the same emperor, but they do fall.

The problem the Republican party seems to have right now is that it’s caught in a bizarre cult of personality, where the only viable candidate is Donald Trump. Eight years have been dedicated to a man that likely won’t be around for another eight due to his age and lifestyle. Donald Trump can’t drop out, because to many he IS the Republican Party.

Put succinctly, if Trump were to drop out, could you realistically see him backing another candidate, without making it about himself?

In some ways it’s petrifying that Trump could win. In another, it’s hilarious to think that IF Trump were to lose, how would the Republicans recover in four years? Trump will never not make it about himself, and I bet he’ll put himself on the ballot for as long as he can, further eroding the right.

As someone from the UK, I absolutely do not think that 13% of the population can speak French to an acceptable level. I’d go as far as to say that 13% of the population can barely speak English to an understandable level…

I had been active on Reddit for close to 15 years, and left due to the API decisions. That move feels more justified every time I bump into Reddit, from being unable to view programming questions from a work VPN, to the emails begging me to invest in their IPO, to their exec pay fiasco.

Reddit is a shell of what it was, but I think this is largely due to stepping away from it. I know several people that use it religiously, and they don’t notice it as much as I do.

In a similar vein, Lemmy can have some absolutely batshit views too, and can also be incredibly toxic at times. We just don’t notice it as much because we’re used to it, but I bet some people new to Lemmy would see some posts/comments and think “eh, no thanks”. I won’t say that Lemmy is as toxic as Reddit, but the community size makes it more obvious on Reddit.

Wasn’t this always the angle, even when people called his age out last election? The argument was that Kamala Harris would step up, and that Biden didn’t want a second term.

Given Harris’ recent comments in the press regarding stuff she’d fix “if given power”, I wonder if she’s even on the VP card this time around? IMO, AOC might be a smarter choice for VP, since the left love her and the right loathe her. She’d bring a lot of younger disenfranchised people back around, and that might be enough.

Not American, so excuse the silly question.

What is stopping the President from dissolving the Supreme Court?

Yeah, that’s true. It amazes me how some of my team in NYC will make double what I make, but live like I lived when I was a student, and be amazed that I own a car.

*If you’re in the US.

Some interns in the US make more than experienced engineers in Europe…

I work at a FAANG company. I’ve also worked at startups and smaller national companies. They’re all morally bankrupt, just in many different ways.

Hell, I’ve worked for “tech for good” clients that have done reprehensible things that required legal intervention…

That’s…exactly why you would get involved?

TikTok might lose out on revenue. Why not sell your US arm for lots of money?

This is literally one of the most widely talked-about options regarding the ban of TikTok…

Everything is for sale when you are a $1T+ company. That’s why Amazon has the likes of Blink, Ring, Alexa, Anthropic, etc.

I’m interested in how this works in terms of pairing.

I have a lone guinea pig. I had two rescue pigs that were rescued from a bad situation, and one sadly died after 6 months. We’ve had two separate partners, but despite a lot of work in trying to partner them up he’s never been able to not fight a potential cage partner.

I want him to have a partner, but the stress for both of being constantly in fight or flight is concerning. We even considered rehoming at a rescue centre and giving a huge donation, but it would just pass the problem on.

I don’t know why Amazon hasn’t bought TikTok yet.

Lots of data, access to the Chinese market, a social media app under their wing, and an aligned work culture. Alongside the gains for ads, moving their shit to AWS, and retail gains, it seems like a better idea than throwing money into the AI fire.

I mean, I feel absolutely horrible after hearing some of the stories from the aftermath of that show, but fucking hell they knew how to get that look…

Surely this could backfire in so many hilarious ways?

• Teach the parts that conservatives don’t do, and teach your class to call out injustice everywhere.
• Teach the bible in Aramaic or Ancient Hebrew, and give the kids 30 mins of study time to learn whatever they want from it.
• Use it as an exercise to teach that many parts were written thousands of years ago, and doesn’t have current medical or societal advancements, so that many parts might be up to interpretation.
• Compare it to Islam, Judaism, and other sects of Christianity - and teach that they’re basically the same thing and that everyone should get along.
• Reference that the pope said years ago that even nonbelievers that led a good life would be offered a seat in heaven, so be nice and it’ll all be fine.

What the fuck are you on about?

I don’t particularly like Starmer, but he’s likely going to be the last Labour leader since the last faux-Tory, and likely going to win the largest majority for decades.

It’s going to work out really well for him, and that’s likely because the UK is far more right-leaning than we’d like to admit. Still, we’re absolutely nowhere near the US…

I’m surprised that this is even in question. Even Reddit gets this…

Respectfully, I worked for Alexa AI on compositional ML, and we were largely able to do exactly this with customer utterances, so to say it is impossible is simply not true. Many companies have to have some degree of ability to remove troublesome data, and while tracing data inside a model is rather difficult (historically it would be done during the building of datasets or measured at evaluation time) it’s definitely something that most big tech companies will do.

I’m fine with that, but let’s put some rules against this.

• Any AI models should be able to determine the source of their data to a defined level of accuracy.
• There should be a well-defined way to block data from being used by AI. If one of these ways (e.g. robots.txt) has been breached, the model has to be rebuilt without the data, and reparations made to the content owners.

It wasn’t just that, though. While I liked Corbyn, his ideological leaning meant that he would be incredibly easy to trip up on practically anything, from Brexit to the royals to the IRA.

They did, but you’d be a fool to think that he was electable to most of the UK population. Besides, basically every leader since Starmer and Blair have been fucked over by the media.