If your house is too warm and you’re running 20 electric heaters but for some reason think it’s something else causing the heat, it’d still pay to turn off some of those heaters to compensate for the external cause since you actually have control over the heaters.

If you really think that anything you say will have any impact on them then maybe it doesn’t matter what the cause is as long as you can get them onboard with the solution. The two are inextricably linked so if they’re really adamant about this you’ll probably not be successful in this endeavour but it’s worth a try if you have some faith in them. If they think it’s all long term cyclical solar patterns or some other non anthropogenic cause it might be worth pointing out that it’s still happening and causing consequences. The trouble will be not implying too heavily as I have in my heaters example, that the solution is obviously linked to the cause, even if it is. Otherwise they will not believe you have common ground.

Haha from time to time. Mostly as something sorta amusing because of the absurdity of it, but with the added sting of embarrassment for the parts of the story that are directly stemming from me being an idiot, and the slight shiver down my spine at the thought of people like that out there that will happily attempt to ruin someone’s life on a whim. This is probably the first time I’ve been reminded of it for a few years but I figured it might make your own much more benign experience feel less awful in comparison, what happened to you, that’s something you’ll have well and truly forgotten much sooner than 20 years.

Almost 20 years ago now.

You know what might help you feel better? Hearing my story about when the same thing happened to me but it was so much worse, or maybe that’ll just make you feel even more anxious (fair warning).

I was at the pub on my 20th birthday. I had gotten thoroughly drunk and had to pee so I went to the bathroom. Somehow in my drunken stupor I walked in through the wrong door, which would have been an embarrassing but pretty mundane faux pas, except when this woman walked in, and I, in my super drunk-ass state, instead of realising the completely obvious, instead assumed that she’d walked in to the men’s. I kinda chuckled a little bit and said sympathetically “are you a little lost?” The woman responded “err what the FUCK this is the fucking WOMEN’S toilet you dick head” then she quite suddenly pulled the Rasta Beanie my friends had gotten me for my birthday off my head and said “I’m going throw this shit in the fucking toilet you stupid asshole” I’d managed to grab a hold of the beanie when she grabbed at it so it was still in my hands and she started yanking at it trying to steal it from me all the while shrieking “fuck you, you fucking pervert”. I wrested my hat from her clutches and apologised awkwardly for my mistake and stumbled out of there and went back to my table with my friends.

About 15 minutes later a bouncer walked up to me and tapped me on the shoulder and said he needed to talk to me. He pointed to my new acquaintance from the bathroom and said “that woman over there said you walked in to the women’s bathroom and assaulted her” which came as a big surprise and instantly sobered me up. He asked me if that was true and was I really in the women’s bathroom? Fortunately, against all odds this bouncer was quite a reasonable man and when I explained that yes, I had actually mistakenly gone in to the women’s bathroom and that this woman then came in after and yelled at me and tried to steal my belongings and that no, I hadn’t assaulted anyone; he actually believed me and I was able to continue the rest of my evening without being further hassled. I thought for sure at the bare minimum he’d tell me to leave the premises just to avoid any more issues just or unjust but it actually all worked out which was quite a relief because I definitely did not expect such an escalation.

Anyway, at the very least you can say none of that happened to you.

It’s worth pointing out that whatever tips you get here, accurate though they may be today, are likely to be less accurate with time and this tech is improving at a rapid pace so if this is important to you, you’ll have to keep on top of what techniques for discernment are current at any given time or if there even remain any reliable techniques at all.

Looks like eventually it’s all going to come down to context and your assessment of the trustworthiness of the source. If something is so sensational it seems unbelievable and you don’t have much trust in the source from which you saw it, it probably is literally unbelievable until further corroboration emerges. This is a pretty exhausting model when modern live involves so much media consumption but I’d advise that there’s also an element of practicality you should incorporate in to your evaluation. You’ll have to decide if the answer to the question “is this AI?” is important for any given situation before actually investing any time or energy in to answering it. Sometimes you might get the calculation wrong and it turned out that by assuming something was innocuous enough not to matter one way or the other you ended up being misinformed about something that actually was important but at the end of the day we’re only mere mortals and can sometimes be wrong.

Hmm seems smart but I mean I’d rather I only run the risk of saying the wrong thing to a species that’s largely solitary or at least doesn’t live in really big groups that engage in organised warfare. If I piss off one cat that’s hopefully not as big a deal as pissing off a whole super colony of ants.

Oh so you weren’t a fan of this one

But it’s not really the same kind of calculation as the car accident though. It’d be impossible to know if anyone using it ever had died from doing so, so impossible to compare the statistics and the concern is about whether the act of being teleported constitutes dying so depending on the answer to that the odds are either 100% or 0 (unless they have some kind of safety issue with more traditional, visible death or injury that bumps that up to something above 0% but below 100).

It’s always pretty hard to forget “satansmaggotycumfart”. I don’t really remember much of what they post but the name is always a trip.

Whether or not Linux becomes a mainstream option and loses much of its appeal in the process creating a schism between ‘sanitised linux’ and ‘free rebel’ linux with the latter being sidelined because of various attestation and verification schemes stopping you from actually doing anything useful with your free-rebel computer; doesn’t sound like it would actually make a huge difference.

If all the recent rise in popularity and usability and adoption of linux stopped dead in its tracks today or even went backwards, and also the dystopian future you fear about mandatory face scans becomes reality, those using linux will get sidelined and put in to a ‘digital exile’; if insetad it does continue to rise and erode some of the share of desktops that windows enjoys and you end up with the ‘sanitised linux’ you’re afraid of causing a divide amongst the linux community, then you just get the same outcome for those that refuse to use the sanitised versions and insist on their ‘free rebel’ versions.

Either outcome, doesn’t sound like it’s any worse the other really, but at least in the interim, greater mainstream embrace of linux would be better and even in long term where it might get sanitised, it could still be a better outcome depending upon just how badly compromised the ‘sanitised linux’ actually turns out to be.

In the end, this sanitised linux could be worse than windows and ultimately the situation wouldn’t really have changed much since at that point ‘free-rebel’ linux basically just becomes what was always ‘linux’ and ‘sanitised linux’ is just ‘something else, not really linux in most people’s estimation.’ The two scenarios look kinda the same to me.

I come from a country using the more traditional form of the “Westminster” system of government that the US’ system is also based upon but which from the outset made significant departures from. Because your use of the term “opposition leader” I’m going to hazard a guess you might be from another Westminster Style parliamentary democracy nation as well. If that’s the case I think what’s happening here is that you’re expecting a “leader of the opposition”, a singular individual officially holding that specific title, like we have in Westminster style Parliamentary systems. The US works a bit differently, and no such role exists. Likely the reason you remembered a person occupying this role in the past is because you were probably seeing press coverage of the opposition party’s official presidential candidate, which would look like a leader of the opposition to us but there’s a big difference because they do a different job.

In the US system the elected representatives of both chambers of their bicameral system, which over there is referred to as “congress” rather than “parliament” as in many Commonwealth countries, are voted in by local electoral processes like in Westminster systems, however unlike in the Westminster system, the ‘executive branch’ which is the branch of government that is headed by the office of, ‘president’ is voted in by an entirely separate process and the president themselves aren’t a member of the congress; they’re not in the House of Representatives or the Senate and they also don’t have to face question time by them either. When the president loses an election or serves out their maximum term limits, they tend to fade from media attention because they don’t have any real job anymore in the party. In a Westminster system, a Prime Minister has a double job, they got their seat in parliament and thus eligibility for their Prime Minister role by winning an election to be the elected representative of a small local area within the nation they govern at the same time as their party’s officially chosen leader which the party gave them through internal decision making. This means when their party is in power their job is to be both a local representative and a prime minister and when their party is out of government, their job is to continue to be that local representative (unless that local area got sick of them and also voted them out) AND the official leader of the “shadow” cabinet. In that role as leader of the opposition they have to represent the party in front of the media and respond to the actions of the government of the day and criticise and challenge them. They’re a constant face as they try to either lead the party BACK in to power they lost or until the party has a vote internally and decides that the public probably won’t vote for them while they continue to have their current leader and they decide to pick a different one.

In the US system parties have leaders in each of their two chambers of congress, one for the Senate and one for the House of Representatives so that’s why if you ask your question as you’ve phrased it, some people might answer you with Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries who are the opposition or “Minority” leaders in both the Senate and House of Representatives respectively right now, both of them from the Democratic party which does not currently hold majority in either chamber hence “minority” leaders. This can get pretty confusing if you’re used to the Westminster system because in the US, the election of their president and the election of members of their congress (which would be our parliament) are entirely separate elections and the process by which one becomes a one of two leaders in Congress on behalf of a party or by which one becomes a party’s official presidential nominee are different and so you have no opposition leader or 3 depending on what you decide the equivalent of the opposition leader is.

So finally, the bit that hopefully explains why it seemed like before you had a more known face as a leader of the opposition. When they pick candidates for Presidential elections, as opposed to Congress, major parties in the US have since the 70s done this via a process of lots of separate local elections around the country known as the ‘primaries’ run by the parties themselves (which are private organisations) with votes cast by members of the public who’ve chosen to register with the party. It’s a very long winded process but eventually this leads to an additional voting contest where the people voting are party insiders that are theoretically bound to vote in a way that lines up with the results of those earlier contests. This happens on the year of a presidential election so until then they don’t officially have a nominee. Likely in the past there would have been a lot of coverage of a nominee once they became an official nominee so those could well be the people you were thinking of as opposition leaders before. There’s usually also pretty strong favourites before someone is officially announced as a nominee including former presidential race losers sometimes as happened with Trump and so there’s usually some faces that kinda looks like they’re probably likely to be the next presidential nominee for their party before this process and also during the long months of primaries before the official final vote that picks a winner. If your question was why isn’t anyone seemingly strongly emergent from your perspective this time around well as an outsider I’m less well placed to know the answer but I would suspect that the way things shook out last time with them having to dump Biden at the last minute and inserting Harris outside of the whole primaries process and then her losing has left them in a bit of a shambles and that messy loss combined with a lot of ill will over what seemed to be a concerted effort by party insiders back in 2016 to rig the process of selecting their nominee and the fact that they’re in minority in both chambers of congress might have made the party a more fractured entity of late with less candidates that have strong public support and the blessing of the powerful party insiders, that are clearly raising their heads just yet. But this last bit I’m really much less informed about, I’m mostly just focusing on the US electoral mechanics because they seem so weird when you’re used to the Westminster system.

Cheers

I should probably learn how you link all this stuff up, probably not doing myself a lot of favours ignoring it.

Is the AI vision local?

This could come in pretty handy for me. What’s he edit on that does this?

And not even the final one

Oh yeh that looked cool I was pretty pumped about that. Is it not so good after all?

He was, undoubtedly. But in my memory and my conception of the two characters, their interactions were always like this . With Miss Piggy the angry diva or upset girlfriend to Kermit having a chuckle. It might actually have been that that happened maybe a couple of times ever but as a little kid you don’t have the best grasp of nuance so that’s the impression it formed. I also had obviously a lot less appreciation for characters having roles and functions so even though that exchange was actually really funny and very memorable since I still remember it even today, as a child I only take it on a very literal level, so Miss Piggy isn’t a diva character that creates funny situations by being quick to anger and not tolerating anything she considers beneath her, instead she’s “mean” or “fussy” you know? Obviously different as a grown up, but it made me not like the character as a kiddo.

As a kid I always hated Miss Piggie since she as sort of the humourless foil to Kermit but I think I can appreciate porcine Yoda a bit more now if only for the voice.

Yeh he always seemed rock and roll!