The Stanford Review is evidence enough that at least Thiel was already an utter piece of shit before this.

That's fine, there are a great deal of more impactful and meaningful things that people can do instead of voting. My point is that if someone's sole contribution is voting, they haven't actually done anything.

The ratchet effect works because vast swathes of people can't perceive of any way to affect change beyond voting, thus creating a single (recurring) major choke point for going through the 'correct' channels.

If all you do is vote, you can't complain.

Keeping the 'lower orders' squabbling amongst themselves is their best chance of maintaining their position, racism and other staples of the right tend to achieve this outcome.

Since many are pushing the narrative surreptitiously anyway, a few decide that they stand to benefit by positioning themselves as figureheads (and ultimately as prospective rulers/kingmakers) in addition to this.

Add into this the capacity for exploitation necessary for someone to become a billionaire; which often involves abstracting people down to numbers and the like in the first place; and...

My understanding was that any hitherto success of LLMs in mathematics was in its trying approaches and information from different fields where they weren't traditionally applied (within mathematics), they have surfaced potential links but haven't created anything in any real sense. Still, a potential legitimate use for them that I personally hadn't anticipated.

"[Don't] [let] perfect be the enemy of good" is such an overused and rarely useful phrase, most often little more than a blunt object used to insist that people accept tepid compromises rather than daring to demand genuine solutions.

Not that EVs are bad of course, but EVs for 'everyone' as opposed to mass transit isn't a solution (although of course it is a slightly less bleak shade of shit than ICE vehicles for 'everyone'), and doing that whilst enabling people who are already benefitting disproportionately from the status quo to benefit ever more dramatically is even less of one.

It's really easy to compromise oneself into complete irrelevance too, and rather easier to compromise oneself into complicity.

Edit: Not to suggest that the worst of this applies to you at all, it was just the nth time of seeing that phrase used frivolously.