Yeah, two awful authoritarian regimes are currently fighting and one of them is worse, but that doesn't make the other one good.

The first major issue that I've been 180 degrees opposed to him on. Unfortunate.

Uh huh. And at the same time, I'm frequently told "it's the deception that we hate! Don't claim you did something if an AI actually did it!"

That's how you guys ended up with a senile pedo after Trump's first term

You may not believe it, but Trump didn't actually win the 2020 election.

During the primaries, yes. By all means yes, use the primaries to get as good a set of Democratic candidates as possible.

In the actual ballot box? Hell no. Hold your nose and vote lesser evil. Those are literally your only options at that point. The game theory explaining why this is the case is quite simple, I recommend taking a look a this video. It's only 6 minutes long and will tell you why there's a two-party system in the US and why there will always be a two-party system.

If you vote for anything other than Democrat in the actual election then you're throwing your vote away. Kang and Kodos are unfortunately correct, you have to pick one of those two or you're throwing your vote away. Wishing it was otherwise is not going to change reality even if you wish really hard. Only changing the US away from a first-past-the-post voting system will do that, and you're not going to get that done in 8 months.

People will tell you otherwise. Those people are either liars, ignorant, or fools. I wish I could sugar-coat this, but this shit is too important for you guys right now. First put the fire out, then try to deal with the arsonist at large.

You must get the Republicans out of power. Only the Democrats can do that in this upcoming election, as lame and uninspiring an option as that might be.

"We'll do X for you."

"YOU'D BETTER DO X OR YOU'LL BE SORRY!"

"...Yes, as we said, we'll do X."

"HA! I WIN! I BEAT YOU LOSERS AND NOW YOU'RE DOING WHAT I TOLDED YOU TO! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!"

This is literally impossible to parody. If I had been asked to write an unrealistically over-the-top demented version of whatever I might imagine Trump would have written to convey this, I couldn't have got close.

As I said, I've pushed for getting rid of first-past-the-post in my own country. We're fortunate to have not entirely slid into two-party politics here yet, though of course there's an endless "gravity" pulling things that way due to FPTP. I'm well aware of how this works, the game theory behind it is quite clear and obvious.

But wishing the dilemma would go away doesn't mean you're not faced with it anyway when you step into that ballot box. In the 2024 election Donald Trump got about the same number of votes he did the previous time he ran, but Harris got significantly fewer votes than Biden did. The election went to Trump because people decided to pick option three - they either abstained or threw their votes away. That's the solid, real, actual, practical outcome that you get from that kind of view towards voting in an election like that. And so that's why I'm so strident in recommending that you hold your nose and vote for the lesser evil. Kang and Kodos were right, you only have those two options at that point.

I'm involved in local politics where I live. I volunteer, I pamphlet, I survey. There's stuff to do when there isn't an election going on and that's the stuff that contributes toward determining which two options are present. But it's a lot more work than just going into a room once every two or four years to punch a card or however you do it, so most people don't. That's why you never seem to see any change in those two options. If you don't like those options then that's what you have to do.

I often use "boost" as a way to mark stuff for later re-reading. It makes sense, if I want to read it again later then I probably think others would want to read it too.

To what tasks could you set a bot that does stuff with minimal competence let's say 90% of the time, and the other 10%, doesn't create even bigger problems?

Sounds like a typical human to me.

A chip like this would be perfect for an autonomous robot. Drone, humanoid, whatever - something that still needs to be able to handle itself when it's cut off from outside control. Always nice to have an internet connection to draw on a bigger, more capable "brain" somewhere else, but if that connection is lost you want it to be able to carry on with whatever it's doing and not just flop over limply.

There's two options, so that means it's 50-50 odds, right? Basic statistics.

Much like bankruptcy, wars are usually lost slowly at first and then all at once.

After four years I have learned to temper my optimism, but I still can't help but feel a bit of it kindle whenever something like this happens. The Russians are not an endless invincible sea of zerglings. Their lines can break. It's not out of the realm of possibility to wake up to amazing news.

Here's hoping.