errorbar.bsky.social
Button-pushing by day, comics & theater by night. http://errorbar.net [he/him]
1,335 posts
183 followers
183 following
Active Commenter
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Well, I replied before looking at that commenter's feed and now that I have, I'll just say there is probably not a point, and arguing about it also wouldn't have a point
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99.9% of the marketing for general consumer use cases of AI is absurd, but they won't stop marketing it that way, because they're in an unsustainable business situation & the only path they can imagine is "if we get *everyone* to think this is necessary for *everything*, we might stop losing money"
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This kind of stuff sure is ridiculous and annoying, but consider the source: a tech columnist who's a massive AI booster. I would take any claim that this represents any significant subset of adults with a wee bit of salt.
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Bruenig has been doing the exact same schtick for 10 years. She writes a bunch of reasonably progressive opinions that you could get from any other better progressive writer... and then adds her thing about how progressives should try being anti-abortion. It's the only reason she has a career.
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In her very next sentence she goes on to say that nothing related to "choice" matters now because a dead person makes no choices. Of course to Bruenig, who is an anti-abortion zealot, abortion is the only thing on her mind in that context, but she still is clearly saying this body is fair game.
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Either I'm missing your point, or you entirely missed the point of the post you're replying to.
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This is the last time I'll reply to you: if you think anyone here is *relying* on lawsuits to save us, and resisting in no other way, you're wrong. You can choose to not follow any information about court cases; that's your business. People reading a post like this don't need to be yelled at by you.
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I don't "believe" anything "will" happen. This can fail. You're the one who's claiming to already know the outcome. Anyway, I get that you're here to post manifestos to people you have contempt for, & not really to argue, so I'll leave it at that.
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I would only add that this isn't limited to elected officials or media figures. I see a TON of this from social media randos - some who identify as Democrats & some who don't - with the same idea of "you're a naive sucker if you mentioned an issue that isn't my own top issue."
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The fight has to be kept up and it's horribly slow and there are no guarantees. But saying court orders can't do anything, & insulting anyone who mentions them, is just pointless nihilism-- giving up while nearly all of the balls are still up in the air. It's your prerogative to not care, of course.
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And I'm saying the situation there is more like: there are many lawsuits; court orders have come out of a few of those; the admin has argued and appealed over them, as the law allows even when their arguments are stupid, and so most of them are currently on a stay pending another court decision.
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Yes, I know what you mean about the lack of follow-up on the Jan 6 investigations. I'm not arguing with that. But you asked about court orders against the Trump admin, with the clear implication that there have been many court orders they've ignored in the last 5 months.
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Do you literally not want to be informed about court rulings until the very last stage of follow-through? I get that people are mad about the slowness & obstruction of everything, but this is relevant news, and if you don't want it then you don't need to follow a legal news feed.
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If that's an honest question (or if anyone else here is curious), one place to follow such information is here: www.lawfaremedia.org/projects-ser... —& the short answer is not many cases have reached that point, and most of the orders that were issued have been temporarily stayed by SCOTUS.
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Yeah, comments like that aren't saying "I can't take Bouie seriously because I think he's caught bad ideas from reading the Times." They're saying "if you don't get on board with saying the Times should be fully ignored & destroyed, then you're aiding & abetting them no matter what you say."
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No doubt somebody cheered at some point. And there was a band - not sure if there were bands plural. But precognition isn't an exact science
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I haven't forgotten 2017-2020 either. That was incredibly bad and horrible and damaging. And yet it still wasn't... whatever this is. In FIVE MONTHS.
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Besides what everyone else is correctly saying about the voters... Trump has just been fucking up and falling apart at an incredible rate & scale. Sure, people should've known how this would go, he said what he would do, etc... but it's something else to see it. No one has ever seen this.
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I'm sure we'll hear more, but at least this is less extreme than the earlier report which made it sound like they drove into the crowd.
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For what it's worth, the SF Standard published an estimate of 50,000!
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I guess maybe... I would've been passing Market+Duboce around 1:00 & there was maybe 1/4 or 1/5 of the crowd in front of me. But I didn't notice any sign of commotion in that area so maybe everything had just cleared away fast.
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I'm a little confused by the latest report which said the hit & run was at Duboce & Guerrero, which would be near the route but not on it - and at 12:30? Had the march even got up there by that time?
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It sucks that so many of these things have to be spelled out *again*, but I guess they do have to, and this is well done.
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(at a seder, where I didn't know anyone, I was just a guest of a guest)
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"Amid growing concerns about ideology in American science" omg I really don't know where to begin with this piece of verbiage. I assume during the McCarthy era he'd be mentioning "concerns about communism" like that was just a vibe coming from nowhere in particular
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I'd love for our current government to be gone too but I don't want Canada to literally be firing missiles into DC...
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Like, if someone says "oh, bless your heart" to a person who's being stupid, do you understand that that's openly condescending, or are you like "that's a mistake! their heart shouldn't be blessed!"
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You are complaining about a nonexistent "mistake." It's not Sewell's job to refrain from using a common form of dry sarcasm just because an open insult would be more satisfying to you.
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Could you imagine just for a second that your experience in "horse world" might not be a great basis for generalizing about what happens in other fields? Wage theft, and violation of minimum wage laws, are well known problems for undocumented workers. I can't believe I'm having to say this.
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"With all due respect" literally means "with whatever amount of respect you deserve." Your nitpicking is off base. It's a phrase that can absolutely and correctly be used with contempt, not a mistake.
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If you don't count things like "I will always vote for any and all legislation that would end abortion or lead us in the direction of ending abortion." I mean, I realize that "compared to his peers" is a low bar but Paul is still very far from laissez-faire on many right-wing core beliefs.
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What's this "didn't even try to make a case"?
democrats-foreignaffairs.house.gov/2025/3/meeks...
democrats.org/news/trumps-...
www.nytimes.com/2025/03/25/u...
www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/ne...
etc.
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Actually now it's working for me and I was able to rewatch from the beginning on Facebook.
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I don't think you missed anything - the Facebook livestream didn't work for me either.
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And you've at least twice posted this same inflammatory list of claims including the "commercial grade fireworks" thing (a very specific and peculiar phrasing). Why are you so certain that that's a fact, and yet so unwilling to believe this reporter, who you claim to respect? What is your source?
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Dayen's article does not claim that no violent act ever occurred in the previous day; he is saying that the current scene is not anything like the violent chaos you're describing. You are telling a person who actually went there, and described what he saw, that you know better.
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bsky.app/profile/erro...
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You are lecturing a person who was actually there, and repeatedly insisting that "shooting commercial grade fireworks at the police" must be a thing that happened because you saw claims about it online (contradicting other reports that simply say fireworks were set off). Why are you doing that?
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11/ And the same applies to the whole organization. DOGE didn't hire the wrong guy; they hired a guy who perfectly represents what they're about.
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Longer thread about this: bsky.app/profile/did:...
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10/ Sadly there are lots of guys like this. We've all met them. Some of us *were* them, but (if we have ethics and self-respect) we grew out of that and learned. For those who didn't... the sophistication of whatever tool they're using matters less than the character issue.
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9/ It seems like Lavignia halfway understood that and decided "Well, I can't really trust that this works *at all*, but whatever, someone else will be reviewing it anyway. At least I made it look complicated." Not an attitude you really want in any kind of team member for any project that matters.
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8/ So, with that kind of approach to management, it makes sense that an LLM would seem like the perfect employee/subcontractor. It is extremely unlikely to ever say "Hey boss, hold on, your instructions make no sense and I don't quite understand how contracts work or what the VA even is."
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7/ To be clear, that's not me being judgmental about someone else's skills; Lavignia was up-front about this from the start. He also openly said that he didn't like having to pay people, and that even though he didn't know how to do the work they were doing, he figured it didn't take them very long.
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6/ And he knew he had no expertise in how LLMs work or what they can do. Like a lot of the DOGE "tech" crew, this is not someone who ever had a deep knowledge of programming or computer science—just enough to get a basic idea in place and then hire people to do the rest.
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5/ Of course DOGE isn't that kind of good-faith enterprise—it has no goal of being accurate or prudent. Whether Lavignia understood that is unclear, but he certainly knew that he was coming in with no understanding of what VA contracts are about, and that the timetable for the "review" was nuts.
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4/ ...what would happen is the team points out the missing logic and undefined terms, & the manager says "oh yeah, sorry, hmm, I don't actually know how they think we can do this," & pushes back to the higher-ups, rather than blindly charging ahead & saying "not our problem, someone will review it."
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3/ And that kind of thing certainly happens in business. A manager who's been handed an already-unclear project and is in a huge hurry might write up an incredibly sloppy requirements document like this and hand it to the team. But if the manager and the team were competent and ethical...