I get the metaphor but it’s not a great one for AI in mathematics especially. A statistical word generator is not going to perform reliable math and woe to anyone who acts otherwise.

I would call it an autistic sycophantic savant with brain damage. It’s able to perform apparent miraculous feats of memory and creativity but then be unable to tell reality from fiction, to tell if even the simplest response is valid, and likely will lie about it to make itself seem more competent to please you.

If you have a use for an assistant like that, then great. But a calculator - simple and cheap and reliable - it definitely is not.

Trump’s future public statement on the matter:

I have no idea where the $17 billion went. Who can keep track of $14 billion anyway, during this war (that is actually an excursion) (but is over) (but also will be soon). Such a nasty question, ask sleepy Joe Biden where the $8 billion went. If our SO-CALLED allies ponied up the $7 million Gaza would be rebuilt already. They came up to me, but strong men and with tears in their eyes, saying “Please, Trump, can we have the $2 million to feed my kids?” I shook my head, and said, “It’s coming in two weeks after the Board pays me back the $10 billion it owes me.” He said “thank you, thank you sir” and so the Board members better PAY UP or we’ll have to send a message (with BOMBS) and it’s “light’s out” for Gaza!

American taxpayers will help fund the project, according to a publicly available spending plan for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) released by the White House.

As per the spending plan, the NEH will dedicate $2m (£1.5m) in special funds and $13m in matching funds to the project.

The American taxpayer will “help” fund the project? Where are the other funds coming from? Seems like the NEH, a federal agency funded by… the taxpayer?

Or is this going to be Ballroom 2.0, another billionaire bribe monument to oligarchy?

Not sure why you’re getting downvotes. This is a very relatable experience.

I feel like the EFF’s messaging is just not going to get through to anyone still on Twitter.

The problem is that the fundamental catch-22 of social networks is that the content and the users reinforce each other. Self-hating/regretting Twitter/X users exist, but they are there because there are network effects, including organizations who still also use it, they are not willing to give up. Similar organizations are there because the users are still there. And yes, I do think they still see the people they want because of follows/subscriptions, even if alt-right fascism is also being thrown into their feed by the algorithm.

It sucks so many people haven’t left yet, but that’s why every choice to leave is worth celebrating, because it breaks down the long-term network effects every time, even at the cost of short-term value to the users or orgs.

Well, that’s mostly right, but MAGA douche Clay Fuller just won in the Greene replacement special election by an 11 point margin, in a district that Trump last won by 35 points.

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/07/politics/georgia-special-election-results-shawn-harris-clay-fuller-marjorie-taylor-greene

So a swing of 24 points away from the GOP, but some districts are beyond reason and influence.

Indeed. And, if only they originally subpoenaed her as an individual and not as the AG, they could just bring her in anyway because Congress has and exercised that power because of the information she had, not because of her job title.

Wait! Can this be right?! She was subpoenaed as an individual! Oh, that’s a relief, now Congress can just move ahead with her testimony without even waiting for Blanche or having to re-subpoena her (phwew, so much time would have been wasted)! I bet everyone involved is relieved.

Certainly seems to be a grift:

https://kotaku.com/resident-evil-jovovich-mempalace-ai-github-2000685786

I… Like, I really was trying to be sarcastic. I tried. Like, with the italicized words for over-the-top emphasis? Like, isn’t waiting until “0%” just too absurd to be taken seriously? Or putting in quotes “you useless hump, just lift up even one finger”…? Help me, what am I doing wrong?

Schumer’s just playing the smart game, waiting until Trump’s approval is 0% before raising any alarms.

Sure, politically unsavvy people will say, “Oh, a psychopath is at this very moment doing war crimes won’t our elected leaders represent us and stop him,” or “Please, please, you useless hump, just lift up even one finger to stop the most dangerous demented narcissist in the greatest position to do harm in the history of the world.”

But c’mon. Don’t be an idiot. You people are worried about “reality,” but this is more important than reality. This is politics. The most important thing is never ever risk any political capital on anything ever.

I’ve made this metaphor as well, and you said it perfectly.

But I was wrong. It’s not a metaphor. Trump is an abuser. He is abusing us. Mass media has given a sociopathic malignant narcissist abuser access to all of us, and deprived us of any legal route to escape him.

God, it’s actually Tuesday.

I guess we should be grateful that the cosmic beings who got the assignment, “create the worst possible world,” are terrible writers?

I mean, I’m here for the anger at Americans who support Trump, but did the article need a “/s”? It’s pretty obvious this article is a sarcastic take completely aligned with what you’re saying already, but you seem to be taking it at face value?

Imagine showing this to anyone at all in the US in 1980 or 1990, or 2000, or 2010, and tell them this is an official statement from America’s president. And then tell them in 2026 it barely even makes headlines.

It costs next to nothing to include Lemmy in a social media astroturf and propaganda campaign, and is even easier and more effective because the small userbase means people’s posts are viewed less suspiciously (case in point: Your entire “the userbase is too small lolol” argument here). I am absolutely certain a few people I interacted with during that time were astroturf, MAGA-in-disguise or propaganda accounts. Re-read the part of my reply about necessary but not sufficient causation, to address your “third party vote” argument (I said nothing about third party voters, note, but you also ignore depressed turnout).

But to get a little meta: I’m engaging in good faith discussion and giving reasons for my arguments. And you come here, respond to me twice (edit: three times?) with condescending derision when I wasn’t even talking to or about you, and are making an illogical claim that a 50K userbase somehow means Lemmy is immune from propaganda (whether state or individual). You then downvote me, which I didn’t do to anyone I disagree with here. It’s childish and petty.

We are two people who probably want the same left-based outcomes and have disagreements on the method to get there, but you’re ranting to me about random things in this thread that I didn’t even say. You’re being extremely unpleasant, unkind and uncivil. I stand by what I said.

Second edit: Seeing your profile and comment about being banned, here’s a direct question: Did you go by the username UniversalMonk prior to the election? The MO, aggressive response style, and AI-generated profile stuff is almost identical.

Yeah, absolutely. That’s how it happens for a lot of people, and it’s super important not to assume we know what’ll happen for any individual. I’d say statistically, there’s likely a bias to generational ignorance, but that environment can individually create the opposite effect.

The reason why I’m not sure that statistical bias will be removed in the social-media era is that gen-alpha is extremely algorithmic-feed-influenced, and feeds are now very efficient in taking users down right-wing rabbit-holes. So 'Bama pawpaw’s racist/xenophobic views may end up influencing them by a circuitous route just the same.

That’s a strawman version of what I said and I’ll explain why. First, I blame propagandists and bad-faith posters. That means, foreign actors paying troll farms, accelerationists, MAGA-in-left’s-clothing. Second, multiple causes can be necessary but not sufficient to an outcome.

Did online propaganda of this type help Trump’s victory? Certainly. Was it a sufficient cause on its own? Probably not. But we’ll never know, hence the “probably,” which you’ll note is different from what you imply my comment said.

I realize I’m late so am just responding here for posterity, but - while I’m open to evidence - in my experience the people who were banned were clearly or very likely bad faith astroturf and propaganda accounts. They were clearly trying to split the vote, depress left turnout, and would just repeat LLM-generated junk rather than respond to any good faith debate.

And I think the bans were right in retrospect because the timed (not typically perma) bans expired and those people still magically disappeared completely from Lemmy after the election.

In the end, they probably did their job. Trump is in office destroying the country/world, and right now there are probably real people in this thread who think their “both sides” opinions are being censored in part because of the echoes of the noise those bad faith agents made way back in 2024.

I think it statistically is accurate that groups of demographically and geographically similar kids often grow up to have similar worldviews to their parents, but for humans, you can only condemn the individual, not the statistic. Plenty of them will see their 'Bama pawpaw and run in the opposite direction, sure. (Social media may help that trend or hurt it, as algorithmic feeds start to become so customized they replicate local prejudices.)

At least I think they are innocent until proven 18, at which time they can be judged.

For instance, he sought to deploy soldiers to carry out shows of force along the border with heavy weaponry; he ordered us to paint the border wall black so it would get boiling hot in the sun and burn the hands of anyone who touched it; he demanded the we install flesh-piercing spikes at the top — so that those who attempted to climb would be visibly bloodied, sending a message to the others; and most ludicrously of all, Trump toyed with digging a 2,000-mile moat along the southern border and filling it with deadly snakes and reptiles to devour the arriving asylum seekers. (Inquiries were also made from the White House about heat-ray devices that could be pointed at the migrants to make them feel like their skin was on fire.)

This may all sound draconian — and it was — but the President seemed to settle on a simpler demand than elaborate booby traps and military spectacle to scare people away from the border: just shoot them. Trump proposed, on more than one occasion, having authorities fire upon the migrants. What better way to deter them than to kill some of them? When told that using deadly force against unarmed civilians was illegal, Trump bristled, as if we were weak-willed.

“Yeah, yeah yeah” was the tenor of his response. […] While I was on a flight to New York, I watched live on television as the President responded to footage of migrants throwing rocks at border authorities. Trump erupted. He publicly declared that if migrants threw rocks, the American soldiers he’d sent to join our border agents wouldn’t hesitate to respond. They’d open fire.

“They want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back,” the President said. “We’ll consider — and I told them — consider it a rifle. When they throw rocks like they did at the Mexico military and police, I say consider it a rifle.”

If this sounds familiar (beyond 2019-era politics that we experienced, but have been washed away by scrubbing our memories with insane new stories a few thousand times), it’s because this is how ICE has been treating protestors for the last year.

We have an administration that is entirely psychopathological. Empathy is a concept that Trump doesn’t understand or value, and at each level of the reporting structure, sycophancy reinforces that psychopathy. People like Hegseth, Noem and Bondi (and the reincarnated phantasms of Trump’s id currently doing the latter two’s jobs) repeat and revel in that psychopathy because it was currency to show their loyalty to an unprincipled madman.

The thing that is so demoralizing is that the only people that matter in this world are Trump, Trump’s power-hungry throne-sniffers, and billionaires. Regular citizens, much less valid asylum-seeking immigrants like above, are already the untouchables that don’t even rate as humans to these people.