Just to have a bit of fun, I sent that link to ChatGPT to see what their take would be. After the requisite throat-clearing absolving itself while agreeing it’s an inappropriate use case, I got down to brass tacks:

Following election news is admittedly a pain in the ass, especially in an environment where empirical facts now often take a back seat to the letter after a candidate’s name, and shouting nonsense is often the core of a campaign. Take the Texas Senate race as an example: If you only watch Fox News, James Talarico is a radical godless communist whose main goal is to turn all kids trans before they even make it to high school, and the campaign ads in between will confirm the narrative, when the reality is Talarico is a Presbyterian seminary student who may know a bit more about Christianity than most voters who claim to be staunch Christians. Evangelicals hate when you point out the basis of the faith is loving each other.

And this, I shit you not, was the beginning of the response:

Following an election properly is a research problem with a continuously changing corpus. You have to keep updating the set of facts you’re working from, distinguish primary evidence from somebody’s characterization of it, and notice when something that seemed peripheral becomes important.

And the Talarico example is almost comically good for demonstrating why “relevance” isn’t a neutral filtering operation.

There is a real, documented religious story here. Talarico attends Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary and is training to become a Presbyterian minister; the Texas Tribune has reported extensively on how his theology informs his politics. His central theological argument really does involve the Christian obligation to love one’s neighbour and the idea that political action is, in part, about how we treat other people.

At the same time, he has said things such as “God is nonbinary” in a legislative speech, and Republican opponents have seized on that as evidence of his supposedly radical theology. The underlying statement exists; what it means theologically is a separate question.

Well, that’s an unexpected response, not least of which because I’ve been following the race pretty closely, and I’ve not seen this quote before, which I point out.

Talarico is a Presbyterian seminarian who has explicitly made Christianity central to his political identity; he completed a master’s degree in theological studies and has described his politics through Jesus’ commandments to love God and one’s neighbor.

And “God is nonbinary” is absolutely a real Talarico quotation. But it came from a 2021 Texas House speech about a bill concerning transgender athletes, where he was making a theological argument about biblical descriptions of God. He has subsequently explained that he was deliberately being provocative and meant that God cannot be confined to human categories.

So, I ask why the hell a quote from an unrelated situation from five years ago would come in response to a question about a candidate in 2026, and it admits there’s a fair amount of sources in current conservative circles presenting it as both current and relevant, so that’s what it went with.

Great when you already know enough to question; propaganda otherwise.

EGS is essentially using fracking techniques to make deep, hot rock more porous to turn water into steam more efficiently. In this case, they likely have former O&G people on staff for whom waiting 23 months from first drill to production is actually glacial.

I mean, that jackass move is how I found Beehaw! But the reality is, many old. users didn’t use apps in the first place. So while that was a clusterfuck, it wasn’t surgically targeted at the very people who produce the content that makes Reddit valuable. Cutting off access to old. will be the final straw for me, and I’m going to guess I’m not alone. I don’t want some cartoonish, ad-laden approximation of Reddit.

Only a rube actually pays for pianos. Not paying is called being smart.

Wow. Pay to get more ads. That’s certainly a take. I guess people really like their stickers?

Let’s dial back the punctuation and all-caps. If you’d like advice on specific software, I’m sure people will be happy to oblige. But SOLVE MY PROBLEM!!! is not the best way to convey that.

Has it not occurred to you that writers know both HTML and Markdown? This is the em-dash complaint on steroids. “My god, they’re formatting correctly” is less an indication on its own of LLM use than the low standards people now expect from writing. “We need errors or it isn’t real!”

There used to be people who fixed that for a living. We called them editors.

Fair enough. I love the spirit of your intent. But we’re already wildly self-selecting for people versed in any level of opsec by just assuming they know how to SSH into a headless Pi if something goes wonky, plus know *NIX terminal commands.

I would say that for general users, switching to Firefox and getting uBO is enough. That much is very easily done by the layperson (and honestly would be sufficient for people looking at cat photos and reading email). From there, we veer off into needing technical skills.

Firefox with uBO behind a pihole pointing to Quad9 and on a router-level VPN is sufficient for 99% of users. And the 1% know exactly who they are and will harden further.

I mean, at a certain point, you have to go with the angle of the current story. I know this is going to be a hell of a stretch, but that’s sort of like expecting any car review of a new Ford to include the founder’s anti-Semitism.

Why institute a robot tax when you could just fund the government with corporate and wealth taxes using existing structures? (Rhetorical question; we all know why.)

The U.S. did just fine without an income tax until the 1910s, and the circumstances under which that even happened are suspect, but that’s a tale for another day.

The sheer logistics of a “robot tax” ensure a lack of compliance. Are we charging by the hour while it’s in service (where are the service logs?)? Sheer numbers in the fleet? All options I can come up with are easily gamed; we end up exactly where we were, but lawmakers can say they “did something” instead of the more extreme action of doing something useful.

Yet again they trot out billions in losses for the MPA caused by piracy.

For reference, 100W panels were running 66 cents/W when I did my build in 2023. Larger panels have always been cheaper per watt, but it means prices have dropped by up to 80% in just three years.

gets up from rocking chair I never really got the purpose of dating apps, as I was still married when they came out, and when the ex and I separated, I had a Plan B inadvertently lined up via work. The latter and I did use apps on her phone, but it was just for the purposes of making fun of the banality of cookie-cutter pictures and bios while drinking on the porch.

The issue the GOP is facing isn’t new. They go apeshit when a pastor dares to teach the actual teachings of Jesus in a soft-spoken way.

Just add in an order of magnitude if Texas.

That was my immediate thought. Sadly, I seemingly only remember that on Sept. 20 each year.

The nice thing about xkcd is it’s been running for so long that a random one is new again. It’s the modern version of The Far Side.

Why would I do that on a low-volume instance? I still sort by New on Reddit.

Just save a new copy after each session. Sure, there are more elegant ways to track changes and version history, but if he literally wants progress reports, zip everything up when you send him the final.

The thing is, those of us old enough to remember dialup aren’t anyone’s target demographic, and the cohort that is has been conditioned over time to believe that the current situation is the natural order of things. They were raised to consume, not seek.