The point is that if the rules aren’t grounded in science, it’s not science fiction. You can have the trappings of science, like space travel or whatever, but if people are moving objects and doing impossible acrobatics by using a magical force, it’s fantasy.

Though not mine, I personally think that definition works better than most. Still, if you pin me down, I’d say that there’s a spectrum, with hard SF (where everything is rigorously anchored to scientific principles) at one end, and pure fantasy (with magic and such) at the other. There are lots of things between those endpoints, with some being closer to one or the other, and some being very much in the middle.

Oh, it’s fantasy

I always liked the distinction (I forget who originated it) that science fiction is a story set in a world where the rules are defined by physics and fantasy is a story set in a world where the rules are defined by the author.

As other people have said, it would be way worse to have him him assassinated. If it’s looking like he’s going to lose, I could see the people who want the US unstable to prefer assassinating him instead.

I’m not at all bothered by “swear words,” and I’ll use them occasionally (mostly when I think it’s funny), but it’s somewhat rare. I just don’t find it very necessary most of the time. I can usually make my point just find without, but sometimes the emphasis seems right out, again, it seems funnier.

Loathsome, misogynistic convicted felon? Yeah, about right, though at 72 he’s a bit young.

It’s really infuriating. Every time he’s asked a question, and she gets a rebuttal, he just starts rebutting her rebuttal and they just let him. And half the time what he’s says has nothing to do with the question that was asked. They cut Kamala off pretty much every time.

“Watch for the voter fraud because we win without voter fraud,” Trump said. “We win so easily. Hopefully, we’re going to win anyway. But we want to keep it down."

Yeah, this is just him doing more to set up January 6 Part 2.

It’s kind of amazing how upfront they are about it

The Republican response is literally that they’re going to defund the IRS. If there weren’t 100 other things demonstrating that the Republican party serves the ultra rich, and not the people, it would be astonishing.

Yeah, I’m far from anti-AI, but we’re just not anywhere close to where people think we are with it. And I’m pretty sick of corporate leadership saying “We need to make more use of AI” without knowing the difference between an LLM and a machine learning application, or having any idea *how" their company could make use of one of the technologies.

It really feels like one of those hammer in search of a nail things.

What people mean by AI has been changing for as long as the term has been used. When I was studying CS in the 80s, people said the holy grail was giving a computer printed English text and having it read it aloud. It wasn’t much later that OCR and text to speech software was commonplace.

Generally, when people say AI, they mean a computer doing something that normally takes a human, and that bar goes up all the time.

That’s bullshit. Democrats all over the place are saying this is likely to be a close election and people really need to get out and vote to beat Trump.

The only sense it’s true that Democrats are taking about it being rigged are that actual, known attempts to rig it, like the fake electors scheme and the storming of the capital, along with the grotesque gerrymandering, all of which is verifiable.

LLMs don’t “understand” anything, and it’s unfortunate that we’ve taken to using language related to human thinking to talk about software. It’s all data processing and models.

Same thought. I see this headline and think, “Oh no…”

Young teenagers murdering people. So crazy.

Only if you make it clear that the guy is at the very least a Nazi sympathizer. Unfortunately there are a lot of people who would assume you were being pro Musk and pro Carlson if you just posted the image without explanation.

Plus you’re just giving the site activity. Deleting your account would be a much better statement.

That sounds really neat.

My family rescued a tiny baby squirrel that had been chewed up by a cat when I was little. My parents didn’t think it would live, but also couldn’t see not trying. It did live, and when it was fully back to health they insisted that we let it go in the yard, but it stuck around - lived in our walnut trees - and was very tame. It would come in the house, play fetch with a wiffle ball, hang out on our shoulders, etc. It was amazingly cute.

That’s the same thing racists say when they get to know a minority.

The way people talk about boomers here is pretty awful, and it wouldn’t be tolerated for any other group.

We don’t? Boomer with bird feeder who loves squirrels.

I don’t think it’s age related.

It seems like the problem goes away if you add a “the.” I had too much of the refried beans.