I think you missed the import bit: "transfer of information from your brain to my brain." Including some third-party necessarily adds more that was not in your brain. So by using an LLM, you are transferring what is in your brain + some sludge that may or may not be useful for the other person's brain.
The same was said about W. Also elected twice.
We then saw 8golden years, before the orange president.
So I would wait a bit before being able to say "good riddance, everything will be ok now, USA is saved"
Sssshhhh stating this for his whole life was one reason Warren Buffet got villified.
His point was he's an old guy. And Reagan was better than Nixon who was better than Bush junior who was better Trump ... but they all sucked and all of them were the worst thing ever to happen to America.
So yeah, Trump is the worst that has happened to America ... so far.
(and if you point out that "The American age ending" what so many people seem to want will obviously lead to democratic presidents sucking up to Putin as well ...)
Yeah, Buffet is right, the trend has been downward, although I think Bush Sr. might have been the exception. And I do agree that the American age is ending.
With trump tho, it just seems worse. Course the only thing I have to go on is evidence and "walk like a duck-isms" but with Bush jr and before, it seemed like these guys at least appeared patrotic and they didn't look so malignantly treasonous and I think they put forth the idea that while they were conservative, at least the pretense was that they honored the office and the constitution. so since that is gone the progress toward national decline now seems to be a deliberate operation on behalf of people who are no longer interested in democracy. This is new to me.
Yes but if Bush Sr listened to his wife, and additionally, his wife loved him enough to not leave him, thats something right? Or do you think someone with Barbara Bush's elevated love of america lost that love long enough to marry Bush Sr given that there's a theory that he was a bad person too?
I still offer the alternate theory that Bush Sr. was indeed a pause in the GOP's descent into the current realm of evil and contempt for the population of our country. Hell, I read trump doesn't even like his own voters and that rings so true haha
The GOP got so devoid of patriotism so fast it put the Democrats to shame.
I haven't been able to trust any political parties for a while.
After Obama, the GOP couldn't elevate anybody, all they could do is sink so low that only the worthless attention-getting blowhards were left standing.
I was in Texas before during and after Bush Sr was Governor, and distinctly remember the way he was not good enough for Texas before he became not good enough for America. But who is? The further back you go, a political figure is more like a normal person, usually.
The parties have always been the bad influence over the man until they got so bad that Trump made the boldest example as the party dropped the ball and let the man be an even worse influence on the party.
I watched both parties prove their incompetence in my lifetime and witnessed the outcome on a daily basis in real time. Confirmation all took place in the last part of the 20th century. Well first a warning shot from offshore when the Communist Party of Cuba proved their incompetence. Mao was an echo in the distance. Then after a number of years comes the GOP, China picks up the ball the first time, and not that many years later the Democrats. In there somewhere the Soviet Communists gave up the ghost, and where substitutes exist they're still pretty sketchy.
The Chinese Communists are incompetent as ever, that hasn't changed for the longest time, but now they look like a bastion of stability compared to the chaos other parties seek out or tolerate.
The thing in common with the shithole approach is when there's anything like a dictator no matter what they call themselves.
We may already have the hindsight needed to pinpoint the extent of the "American Century" as we knew it. Hard to drag it into the 21st century very far when the parties which built it haven't been with us for so long.
One thing nobody can deny from any party today, I've said it before and that's a big thing that makes people talk about the death of the American Age not just outside the borders or overseas but domestically. Every single day Trump comes on TV and hammers home the fact that Obama was the final President to be recognized as the "leader of the free world". And the party has packed the government with minions in lockstep who can only iterate "what's a Free World?" You can't paint a pretty picture here.
The American Age either likely paused, perhaps quite a bit before Obama, or definitely right afterward, and whether this was a near-fatal injury or a morbid conclusion, it's been quite a while and it's starting to smell too far decomposed for as many people to ignore as there were.
> The Chinese Communists are incompetent as ever, that hasn't changed for the longest time, but now they look like a bastion of stability compared to the chaos other parties seek out or tolerate.
Chinese communists are only looking competent for the same reason every other communist looked competent (but you need to be like 50+ years old to remember what that reason is):
1) they lie
2) they're actually pretty good at preventing people from talking (even the China CCP is now threatening the families of Chinese abroad)
Chinese economic figures (which they openly "partly" falsify, openly as in the government says as much, from oil supplies to youth unemployment) now look like China ever exceeding US economic output is a tossup, 50% odds at best. And that's the falsified figures. Maybe I'm old but I remember the Soviet Union when I was a teenager and I do feel a bit like "I've seen this movie before ...". At least they managed to stay out of a shooting war, but worryingly they keep announcing they're about to start one.
> Every single day Trump comes on TV and hammers home the fact that Obama was the final President to be recognized as the "leader of the free world". And ...
The problem here is the basic assumption that US becoming the leader of the free world had anything to do with the quality of US government. That's just not what happened. I love Obama, but ... he doesn't deserve the credit there. The US became leader of the free world because the rest of the world tried to fight to the death over debt, Aryan and Japanese racial superiority and near-completely destroyed itself in a 20-year series of atrocities that were far worse in reality than even the WW2 movies show, followed by a 40 year "cold war" where communists tore themselves and anyone they touched to shreds, hundreds of millions of victims across almost all of Asia and half of Africa.
In the US, we could elect Andrew Breitbart as the next president and we'd still be nowhere near that.
And, of course, the US indeed kind of stopped being the leader of the free world, and let's see. Open war in Europe, destroying about thousand to 1500 lives per day, as well as about 100 million in economic output daily. War in the middle east, I'm not even going to count since that's been a constant for about 1500 years now. Asia has several open conflicts for the moment somewhat smaller than the Ukraine war (except in area, and total number of people affected) but Yemen and Myanmar are in open warfare right now. Africa has about a dozen open wars, most of which nobody seems to care about.
Frankly, unless this stops, is there really any doubt the US will come out ahead again? The world is getting ready to tear itself to shreds again. EVEN with the total and corrupt disaster called Trump at the helm all anyone needs to do is just stay out of the conflicts for ... perhaps the first year once they really kick off?
And are these countries trying to stop that? No, needless to say, if anything it looks like it'll intensify. The EU is now spending about half a trillion per year to get ready for war ... That's half a trillion per year NOT counting the Ukraine war AND drafting laws have been reintroduced in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Greece (if I can give anyone reading this one bit of advice: if you're male, GET THE FUCK OUT OF THOSE COUNTRIES BEFORE THOSE LAWS ARE "activated". And if you're female, at least you'll live but let's just not pretend it's going to go well for you). Japan "self-defense" spending (it's still called that) is skyrocketing, and really half of Asia is doing the same, including India. Yesterday der Spiegel said open war between Germany and Russia is "a matter of time", and as I said before China is essentially announcing a military attack on Taiwan, for now without giving a date.
Ah yes, the golden age of extrajudical assassinations of American citizens, forever wars, the rise of the surveillance state, imprisonment of journalists amd whistle blowers, and the deterioration of race relations. Tell me more of this golden age.
> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn't hard, it isn't cruel. It's the basic logic of self-preservation.
Dehumanization of an entire ethnic group by comparing them to animals. Use of violent rhetoric to forcibly ethnically cleanse a region.
There's a word for people who employ this rhetoric. Can you guess?
It would indeed be surprising to hear people say this if you completely ignore the words and actions of the Epstein class and the overwhelming amount of pain and suffering they afflict on everyone else.
> There is a pretty clear and important difference between a program that does something wrong, and a program that just doesn't do something somebody wants.
Your argument hinges on all parties agreeing on what "wrong" means. Take a step back and consider that parties do not agree on a common definition of "wrong." Does "wrong" mean a gap between the spec and the implementation or a gap between a reasonable user's expectation and the implementation? If one party assert that it is clearly the former and the other party asserts it is clearly the latter, does that make the situation more clear or less clear?
There are some really obvious things that are definitely bugs. If login doesn’t work if your email address contains the letter “e” when the expectation is all valid email addresses should work, then that is a bug. It isn’t “indistinguishable from a feature”. If clicking a button in your accounting software consumes all the RAM on your computer and causes it to crash, then there is no universe or agreed upon definition that would consider that a feature instead of a bug.
Just because you can't get everyone to agree does not mean that the concept is not well-defined or clear. People can and do disagree over almost anything. That could just mean that one side is wrong and the other side is right, even if it is difficult to determine which is which... or simply difficult to navigate the underlying politics regardless.
Besides, in your example, either kind of gap could be a bug or a missing feature. It's a totally orthogonal question.
>Your argument hinges on all parties agreeing on what "wrong" means
No, it just hinges on common sense. "All parties" are never gonna agree on everything.
There will always be customers that demand whatever and treats its lack as a bug. Doesn't make it a bug anymore than me asking for a free glass of wine with my meal and not being given any is "injustice" - when the restaurant never promised any.
> But as a lifelong American, I've never heard anyone make a negative comment about Mexicans.
What an absurd statement on its face that comes from a place of extreme privilege. I am a brown-skinned man in America and I lost count of all of the times people that look like me have been denigrated and lambasted in this country.
>What an absurd statement on its face that comes from a place of extreme privilege.
Oh boy, here we go again. I even said "I don't mean to minimize any negative experiences you've had" and I'm still getting the privilege discourse. You are really determined to prevent the Democrats from winning elections, aren't you?
Even assuming I am privileged, then what I'm telling you is that privileged white people like myself aren't shit-talking Mexicans behind their back. Wouldn't that be relevant information? Why would it be an absurd statement?
>brown-skinned
That's not the same as Mexican.
When was the most recent time this happened to you in person? A recent, representative concrete example would be a lot more compelling that performative outrage.
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