I'm tired of hearing about approval numbers. People can disapprove of a politician and still vote for them, and unfortunately I think there are depressing number of Americans who disapprove of Trump but would still vote for him because they think anyone else winning would be even worse.

I'm starting a master's in a few weeks, and because most of the courses involve group work, I'm concerned about someone in my group sinking a project for everyone else by using an LLM for their portion.

And given the program, I wouldn't be surprised if there are more than a few AI boosters in the courses who will try it, above the normal number of such people you might find in postgrad studies.

Disclaimer: am Canadian, will be discussing using that lens.

On a daily basis, most people I interact with are about where I am. I probably have different reasons for believing and voting how I do, but if an election were to be called tomorrow, all my friends and most of my co-workers would be voting in roughly the same direction as me.

My family is a mixed bag. On the one hand, my father has never voted for anyone further left than the old Progressive Conservatives, and has even voted for the Christian Heritage Party on occasion. My mother also normally votes conservative, though she has confessed to be that she finds American-style conservatism in general and Pierre Poilievre in particular to be too odious to stomach and so I think she may have been spoiling her ballots recently. I don't know how my one sister votes, but her husband is a also an outspoken conservative, being a card-carrying member of the CPC.

On the other hand, my other sister has never voted for anyone further right than the NDP, and her husband is apathetic - he thinks all politicians are the same and doesn't bother voting.

Holidays are generally fine, as political opinions are generally off-limits, though inevitably at some point my father and brother-in-law (the CPC one) have an extended grouse session about the state of the country and how much they hate the Liberals.

I find Spotify is weird about lyrics sometimes. There's a song on my playlist that has obviously wrong lyrics assigned to it. The vocals aren't 100% clear, but you just need to listen to it once, and read the nonsense lyrics Spotify has assigned to it, to know that it's wrong.

Every single time the song pops up in my playlist (and I'm not driving), I flag it for review. It's been years, I must have flagged it dozens of times, and the lyrics are still wrong.

Now, this is not some huge pop hit. It's an obscure indie song from an artist with less that 50k followers. The is a not insignificant chance I am in the top 1% of fans of this song. But it still bugs me that such obviously wrong lyrics are left up. I'm pretty sure even Spotify's deplorable AI could figure this out.

I don't really know what's going on. Maybe they've understaffed the department that manages lyrics and they can't be bothered to fix something so obscure. Or maybe they only fix lyrics if the artist themselves contacts them. Either way, it bugs me.

Except the demon is also an idiot because she doesn't have a tail and is way less agile than she thinks she is.

I simply don't like the taste of many things. I've never been officially tested, but I suspect I may have extra sensitivity to certain compounds, such that no matter how many other things are in a dish, I can still taste that one thing that I don't like. I also suspect that I am more sensitive to all tastes in general, as there are many foods that have been described to me as "mild" that I find are quite strong.

Now, I'll still try most things once. There are limits, mostly involving spiciness,, but I wouldn't want to be thought of as ungrateful or close-minded. It's just that I've disliked far more things than I've liked when trying new foods.

I also resent the common refrain of, "You just haven't had good [food in question] yet!" Actually, I probably have, and I still didn't like it. It has nothing to do with how it is prepared or what other ingredients are in the dish, that food still has its fundamental taste that I don't like.

It's not food, but I like using wine as an example. It doesn't matter whether it's the cheap boxed stuff from the supermarket or some expensive vintage at a fancy restaurant, because both taste like overripe grapes in addition to whatever other flavours present, and I don't like the taste of overripe grapes.

Right, I'm mostly familiar with Canada (my own country) and the USA (by cultural osmosis).

Still, the legal burden on the grandparents to get access to their grandkids seems sufficiently high. It's far cry from the idea many people seem to have of grandparents' rights, i.e. the right of the grandparenta to see their grandkids supercedes that of the parents to control whom the kids interact with.

I'm always a bit amused when these sites and apps say things like, "If you turn off ad personalization, the ads you see won't be as useful to you."

My dude, I don't think I've ever willingly clicked on an ad in my entire life. "Personalizing" them won't change that.

From what I understand, Republicans, especially in Florida, put out political ads targeted specifically at Cuban immigrants. They play off the inherent hatred of communism in this demographic to convince them to vote against the "radical Marxist Democrats."

So say we all.

I'd say this is part of the "zeal of the convert" phenomenon, where someone who converts to a belief tends to be more fanatical than someone raised in that belief.

There's probably bias in this observation, as a couple of very loud people can drown out dozens of others and make a trend seem more prevalent than it actually is, but I also have personal experience here.

Conservapedia is absolutely wacky.

The curator, one Andrew Schlafly, once tried to write a new, improved, "more conservative" version of the Bible. But, Mr. Schlafly is neither a historian nor a linguistic scholar, and he couldn't consult the source texts. So, his way of "correcting the liberal bias" found in modern translations of the Bible was just to change the words in a modern English translation (probably the 1611 KJV EDIT: Apparently Schlafly prefers the NIV) to better fit his politics.

One of the changes I remember reading about was altering the words in The Beatitudes to be things like, "Blessed are the managers, for they provide for their employees," and such. He also deleted parts he didn't agree with, like removing one of Jesus' utterances from the cross: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." According to Schlafly, Jesus' executioners knew exactly what they were doing and thus shouldn't have been forgiven.

There are lots of reasons for women to keep their maiden name. In the case of my wife, she had two good ones:

1. She didn't want to become disassociated from her scientific publications.

2. She didn't want to complicate or redo any immigration paperwork.

The most profoundly puzzling thing to me is their insistence that magic words will somehow make authorities back off.

Like, they believe that there is this grand conspiracy involving the Federal Reserve and maritime law and birth names and whatever else. And yet they also believe that the forces behind this conspiracy must acquiesce if you just invoke the right language.

Do they never consider that an entity powerful enough to do all that could also just ignore their demands? Like, even if the conspiracy is true, why would its perpetrators just give up because some random person told them to?

It doesn't matter if you guys somehow manage to get adults back in charge in the next 2-4 years. There is nothing stopping another Trump-esque person from being elected again soon after and tearing everything down again. Until you guys purge MAGA and can prove you are in no danger of a relapse, we simply can't trust you.

In the “Big Book,” the foundational document of these programs, “Chapter 4: We Agnostics” tells atheists and agnostics that they are “doomed to alcoholic death” unless they “seek Him.” The chapter characterizes non-believers as “handicapped by obstinacy, sensitiveness, and unreasoning prejudice.”

This really jumped out at me. What a horrible thing to say about someone, especially someone looking for help.

Canada had "failed to cooperate" in curbing the flow of fentanyl and other drugs across the US border. The Canadian government says it is cracking down on drug gangs.

Hey, you hacks writing this: there is no massive flow of drugs going from Canada to the USA. Stop letting the orange rapist get away with this lie.

Despite other flaws, the biggest (or maybe second biggest) issue I had with Solo was Lando's backstory.

See, I grew up reading some very old, very obscure EU books about Lando. In that series Lando was an expert card player but a poor pilot, and a lot is made of how he won the Millennium Falcon in a game of Sabacc but has no idea how to fly it. The movie reversed this, making him a card cheat.

I'm probably they only person in the world who cares.

But maybe new series, if it ever comes out, will be about Lando and his adventures with Vuffi Raa?

This article only talks about the number of Copilot 365 licences that are active. It doesn't even consider the situations like my workplace, where everyone was given a licence but hardly anyone uses it.

I wouldn't be surprised if the actual usage rate for these licences is also very low, meaning the situation could be even more dire than the article makes out.

Anti-bullying policies at schools aren't meant to protect victims. But they aren't meant to protect perpetrators either.

They are instead meant to protect the school administration, notably from having to actually assign fault in bullying situations. They can simply say "zero tolerance," punish all parties equally, and wash their hands of it.