@clonedhuman @BedSharkPal worth noting that those people have also spent their time since 2020 accusing Dems of rigging elections. Seems bizarre to me that nobody's looked into it. All the swing states when he couldn't fill a stadium? With the lowest approval rating of any president ever? With Elon paying people to send in their voter registration details? Yeah ok, let's not check anything before special elections and midterms...

@manicdave Even saying it's "trying" to do something is a mischaracterisation. I do the same, but as a society we need new vocab for LLMs to stop people anthropomorphizing them so much. It is just a word frequency machine. It can't read or write or think or feel or say or listen or understand or hallucinate or know truth from lies. It just calculates. For some reason people recognise it in the image processing ones but they can't see that the word ones do the exact same thing.

@9488fcea02a9 @ForgottenFlux I remember reading a whole article about how Samsung now just shoves a hi-res picture of the moon on top of pictures you take with the moon in so it looks like it takes impressive photos. Not sure if the scandal meant they removed that "feature" or not

@BananaTrifleViolin @dukemirage a huge proportion of the stuff people watch on Netflix/listen to on Spotify is really old media you could get second hand on CD/DVD for pennies. I mean how much is a Friends box set going for nowadays

@Curious_Canid @vegeta this is the case for the Amazon "just walk out" shops as well. Like Waymo they frame it as the humans "just doing the hard part" but who knows what "annotating" means in this context? And notably it's clearly more expensive to run than they thought as they've decided to do Dash Carts instead which looks like it's basically a portable self-service checkout. The customer does the checking. https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24133029/amazon-just-walk-out-cashierless-ai-india

@Raiderkev @MicroWave the Election Truth Alliance have found some weird numbers (as have Smart Elections) and are currently asking for people to sign a petition for Pennsylvania to hand recount three specific counties https://youtu.be/LBDqYxZoc14

@sugar_in_your_tea @Habarug there's an app called StreetComplete which gameifies this as well. Gets a bit addictive if you're not careful

Goes hand in hand with stereotypical attitudes of the US v Europe, imo: the land of lone wolf "entrepreneurs" goes hard on big branding and [social] media platforms whereas Europe is a bit more likely to respect back-office bureaucracy and a lot of its technical prowess is in "stuff that goes inside something else to make it work"

@overload @return2ozma we periodically sign up for it when my kids remember something on there they like watching. The children's accounts don't show ads.

@guyoverthere123 @CAVOK only by a 4% majority, heavily skewed to the older population. Ten years later, even natural demographic change would mean we'd vote to stay in with the same referendum now - but also we've had a pandemic that largely affected the elderly.

So when you say that you're talking to dead people.

@fake_meows @Polderviking they cut loads of things that are a small (comparative) expense that bring in, or save, a lot of money, or support the economy. Like the national parks and USAID, and *all science*. Those new expenses won't be realised for a while but in the mean time they're paying off sacked staff left and right, paying the DOGE team, and fighting legal rulings. It's a ridiculous way of going about anything.

@BaroqueInMind @bleistift2 pacifist because the org literally exists to stop everyone in it blowing each other up though

@Blaster_M @LodeMike "a pedestrian or cyclist is 44% more likely to be killed if they’re struck by an SUV rather than a passenger car. The situation is even worse for younger victims – a child struck by a SUV is 82% more likely to be killed than a child struck by a passenger car." https://www.forbes.com/sites/lauriewinkless/2025/05/07/suvs-make-traffic-worse-and-are-more-dangerous-than-cars/

@floofloof @FishFace the Quiet Riot podcast was discussing their utter consternation (surprise is the wrong word) that in the same year Starmer couldn't accept so much as a pair of trousers from a donor, and Reeves and Rayner were being leapt on for everything, Farage has accepted a £9m crypto donation (90% of Reform's funding for the year) and nobody has pushed him on what influence that has bought, or what went on with Nathan Gill and the Russian bribes.

@Fredthefishlord @QuarkVsOdo all his companies basically exist to siphon off government funding that should be going to something more worthy. In the case of SpaceX, look what's happening to NASA now. And with the Hyperloop, he openly said he promoted that to take attention and money to prevent the development of high speed rail

@Boddhisatva @vividspecter there was massive voter suppression this election. It's been mounting for ages but even worse this time. Loads of mail-ins chucked out; bomb threats; voter roll purges. A lot of people tried to vote (or even now, think they did) but were turned away or their votes weren't counted. Even on those numbers, things look sticky for Trump. https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/

@Raiderkev @MicroWave here are some of Smart Elections' findings. https://open.substack.com/pub/smartelections/p/so-clean

@Eruanna @Elkot I've been following the #TeslaTakedown stuff with interest - some of the protests seem to be enormous. Hopefully it is inviting people to dip their toe in the water, meet some fellow pissed off people, start organising, be visibly against what's happening... It all matters.

@frankPodmore @Jrockwar cars should be taxed according to size and weight, imo, if you're bringing road maintenance & wear and tear into it. Then beyond that fuel source can be taxed according to pollution levels, as it currently kind of is (especially if they actually *do* unfreeze fuel duty).

@Eheran @RaoulDook no. Didn't get 50% of the vote. Only 1.7% margin vs Harris. 11th smallest margin ever (including 5 negative, eg 2016).
When he claims a landslide it's because he wants to claim he has a mandate.
TBH the numbers are really weird. Getting that small a margin but winning every swing state is not likely. And every county that flipped, flipped one way to him, which hasn't happened since Hoover. Again, on that margin that's quite the feat.