I agree with your first paragraph, but unwinding that emergent behavior really can be impossible. It’s not just a matter of taking spaghetti code and deciphering it, ML usually works by generating weights in something like a decision tree, neural network, or statistical model.

Assigning any sort of human logic to why particular weights ended up where they are is educated guesswork at best.

I agree it cheapens it, but unfortunately it’s far too easy to imagine someone truly believing that.

You need to grapple with this and figure out how to acknowledge the damage the DNC did to the party in 2016. You are only continuing to hurt party unity by pretending it didn’t happen.

I’m not saying Bernie would definitely have won or anything. Chances are Hillary would have won in a fair election anyway. I’m saying the people were robbed of a fair election so we can’t know what would have happened. If you’re truly interested in justifying democracy you should be outraged by that rather than denying it.

But sure, a pithy “lmao” definitely does the trick too.

…In an unfair election with the organizing body tipping the scale all throughout the process. So no, you can’t point to the votes to wave away the corruption that influenced those votes.

Oh, come on. You can’t justify a corrupt process by pointing to the final results of the corrupt process.

Oh, are we allowed to point out media bias now that it’s against neoliberals? I can’t keep up with the rule changes, progressives have always been attacked for pointing that out.

Not sure who’s downvoting you for asking for clarification. I think the person you responded to misinterpreted the first figure in their second link. It says among validated voters, 48% voted for Clinton and 45% for Trump.

Nowhere in those links does it say the percentage of voters by party registration that voted, and I can’t find it in any other searching either. Your 60% turnout of voting-eligible population comes up all over the place though.

It’s been imported into English as just a standard word, no capitalization necessary anymore. Most English speakers probably aren’t even aware it’s originally a German acronym. We just say “flak” like we say “scuba” and “laser.”

I itemized for the first time this year so I couldn’t use it, but I did fill it out completely as a comparison point to make sure itemizing was worth it. It was pretty painless, not very different from free filing through various other companies.

It’s not.

We are nowhere near advanced enough to say that life, complex or intelligent, doesn’t exist anywhere near us. There is no reason to believe an intelligent spacefaring race would make themselves so obviously detectable that us stupid primates could see them. And for non-intelligent life, we’ve been able to confirm mere thousands of planets. We have a very long way to go before we can start talking about the meaningfulness of a lack of life signatures in the atmosphere.

We haven’t progressed far enough to be detectable by intelligent life in other star systems, even the closest ones. The filter can easily be in front of us. It could just simply be that interstellar space travel is too infeasible, so intelligent species never reach beyond their home system.

I generally tell people the only reason to do it is if your career pursuits require it, and even then I warn them away unless they’re really sure. Not every research advisor is abusive, but many are. Some without even realizing it. I ended up feeling like nothing more than a tool to pump up my research advisor’s publication count.

It was so disillusioning that I completely abandoned my career goal of teaching at a university because I didn’t want to go anywhere near that toxic culture again. Nevertheless, I did learn some useful skills that helped me pivot to another career earning pretty good money.

So I guess I’m saying it’s a really mixed bag. If you’re sure it’s what you want, go for it. But changing your mind is always an option.

Sounds an awful lot like the political positions I hear all the goddamn time in the US.

Using racial slurs isn’t only damaging and insulting to the person being directly talked to or about. I suggest adopting a blanket position against racial slurs in any context.

More directly, we can’t agree if Sunday or Monday is the first day. IMO Sunday is the first day. Calendars look better with the weekends acting like bookends.

They claim Hillary lost because she went a little left and it is the fault of… left wing voters? Hmm.

I do the same, metro commuting and a short trip to visit family (~50 miles each way) every couple weeks or so. I don’t even have to plug in every time I get home, I only need to make sure I am charged up at least to 75% for the family visit. Level 1 charging is more than sufficient, I’ve only ever used a charging station just to see what it’s like and try to use up some credit I got for them through my dealership.

For those without EVs: level 1 charging is just plugging into a standard 120V outlet. I have no special equipment at home, though I did need to confirm my breaker could handle it. For my 2023 Bolt EUV I charge about 1% per hour on the reduced charge setting (8 amps). If I do need to charge a little faster I can swap it to 12 amps, but I typically don’t need to do that.

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Then I’ll say this one more time since you seem to be having trouble: that’s your opinion, and other people see what you’re doing as an existential threat to American democracy just as much as MAGA.

That’s the point I’ve been trying to make this whole time. Your personal opinion on the only path to protect democracy happens to involve some steps that I think will also destroy democracy. And in the meantime I think we have very little time left to stand up against the anti-democratic practices of the Democratic party, and they’re continuing to inflame extremists in the opposition to give themselves cover.

By the way, for someone who is constantly yelling about bad actors in a discussion of US politics, you’ve got some pretty suspicious grammar in this comment.