Gabriel Bodeen @gabe@qoto.org

No one of the three factions could pass anything by itself nor hope to gain a majority, so coalition or compromise were the only strategically valid options for party leaders to pursue. But with a coalition of nearly two-thirds, they could very easily pass laws on matters that the coalition agreed about. Furthermore, the coalition was formed of only two factions, so coordinating the factions was relatively simple, much more so than for the many-party coalitions that sometimes occur in countries with proportional representation.

So this period was characterized by high levels of compromise, and political depolarization between the parties.
2/

US politics has been highly polarized at both ends of its history except the early-mid 20th century when the Dixiecrats ran one party states in the South. The rest of the country was contested in relatively free elections, so the GOP and liberal Democrats split the seats between them. Then the Dixiecrats & liberal Democrats formed a Congressional bloc consistently controlling about two thirds of the seats.
1/

@chriswood
(2) Also that article is nearly a year old. Extremely out of date with today's capabilities! It's a fast changing field. There are many new techniques in common use in today's models that didn't exist a year ago. It seems reasonable to assume there will continue to be new techniques in coming months.

@chriswood -
It can't yet improve itself, but engineers can improve it and are improving it rapidly. And of course software in particular is easy to invent self-play reinforcement learning tasks so that the machines can invent their own good quality training data.

So as a software engineer I fully expect most current software jobs to be automated within a couple years!

Ever since reading the #TerraIgnota books, the only political reform I'm excited by is joining the Utopian Hive. The only problem is to create it first...

All the "It's a coup!!!" chatter is so obviously, blatantly wrong that I kinda wonder if it's a psy-op to undermine opposition. It's damn hard to unite opposition around such utter bollocks. Surely no one who actually opposed Trump & Musk's wanton criminality would choose "coup" as the central idea, right? When words like "saboteur", "highjacker", "embezzler", "burglar", "infiltrator", "mole", "usurper", etc are accurate and all there for the taking?

@androiddreams - I hope this involves lucid dreaming after careful meditative preparation

@dnc - I briefly thought it was a brain

@fatsam - Interesting, thanks for the link!

I just learned today about the Vito Russo test for LGBTQ representation in film. It's similar to the Bechdel test for representation of women. Both are really low bars to step over, and very simple to apply. So they miss lots of nuance, but they're a reasonable start. Neat!
https://glaad.org/sri/2014/vitorusso/

@AnnaAnthro
I haven't read it - But who's the "we" in "we are not captains of our ships"? Speaking as an ex-neuroscientist, I've come to expect low quality arguments about free will from neuroscientists as they too often seem to feel no need to get acquainted with the relevant philosophy!

@dx
Yeah, something like that seems a good idea, though I'd make it more gentle. It can easily get too trigger happy with expulsions. Maybe the bad actor started out OK then changed. Or maybe the person who brought them in trusted them for "good enough" reason, but was wrong.

A gentler approach, after expelling the bad actor, might put the whole chain (the one who brought in the bad actor, the one who brought that one in, etc) on a warning list. Then leave it to human judgment.

Hot hot 2024! It was the hottest year on record, as I'm sure you heard. These graphs stuck out to me.
https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2024/

Hot hot 2024! It was the hottest year on record, as I'm sure you heard. These graphs that stuck out to me.
https://berkeleyearth.org/global-temperature-report-for-2024/

Ok ok, back on this app. Bluesky is a nice alternative to Twitter but its centralization has me concerned.

@knittingknots2 - Yikes!

It looks clearly like they're testing the limits of what they can get away with.

@olives
That could be very nifty. What's an improvement it could use in your opinion?