Real newspaper writing style doesn’t beat around the bush.

SEO-optimization writing style does beat around the bush, because they have to try to “organically” mention all the keywords that might bring someone to the page. They also need to make it longer so there are more places to insert ads.

Google doesn’t try to stop you from visiting a website. It tries to answer your query directly, which may mean it’s no longer necessary to visit the website.

A more realistic scenario is someone asking, “hey, what’s 20 ounces in grams?” Then there’s a “website” that wants to invite you in and tell you all about unit conversion, and show you tables for how many tonnes are in a ton, etc. Meanwhile “Google” just says “566.99”. It started doing that sort of thing back in 2012, long before the AI boom started. Many of those info cards (like unit conversions) don’t use LLMs and are actually really handy.

Having said that, yeah, it’s devastating to websites that were free to use and ad supported and depended on traffic to survive. And, because humans are thrifty, websites that weren’t free to use mostly disappeared a long time ago. I don’t know what the solution is. But, I don’t think it’s “prevent Google from answering your question if it is capable of doing so”.

The current US admin may be more dangerous and untrustworthy, but I don’t think that will hold in a post-Trump world. I don’t think the US will get back to the point it was at before Trump, but I think it will dip back below the China line. China is much less chaotic, but they’re also much more menacing on average.

For example, as bad as the US is, I don’t think it has ever set up police stations in foreign countries.

Doing nothing is hardly a coup.

The VCs and Christofascists are currently on the same side, but have almost no interests in common. The VCs in particular care about the rule of law because it’s hard to invest in something that won’t start making money for years if you don’t know that the laws will be stable through those years. The VCs might like that Trump is removing some burdensome regulations. But, for example, the tariff chaos would have been horrible for them because from one day to the next who knows what the tariffs will be.

Then there’s immigration. A lot of the MAGA nazis want the US to be a purely white place with white, christian, men dominate. That means severely restricting immigration. Meanwhile the VCs want to be able to bring in all the cheap foreign labour they can, which means they want H1B visas to be easy to get. Those are directly opposing sides. If one side wins, the other one loses.

It’s hardly a coup when the backers all want different things, and they’re not getting what they want anyhow because Dear Leader is obsessed with settling personal grudges and doing whatever his dementia-addled brain thinks of on the spot.

IMO Trump and co. might have wanted to pull a full coup on the US, but they’re so incompetent that they haven’t managed to do that. Even though they’ve had the US house, senate, executive and judiciary on their side, they haven’t done what’s typically done in a coup which is to secure everything that could allow opponents to resist. Sure, they control the supreme court, but there are plenty of judges in lower courts who keep interpreting laws honestly and finding that Trump broke those laws. A competent coup would have jailed judges who weren’t on their side using some pretext, and used fear to keep the other ones in line. Trump routinely breaks the law and then is astonished when lower-level judges find that whatever he did can’t go forward because he broke the law.

Because of that, I think there’s a decent chance that they won’t be able to suppress the outrage in the midterm vote. They’re doing all kinds of underhanded things to try to make it harder for people to vote and to have their votes counted. But, people are much more outraged than scared. I think there’s a decent chance there will be a big turnout in the midterm elections and that the GOP will lose bigly. That might be enough to put the brakes on what Trump is doing, until the next presidential election in 2028.

There may be people pulling Trump’s strings, but if so, it really seems like they’re fighting over the strings and getting in each-others’ way, rather than acting in some coordinated way to control him. More realistically, I think that there may be people who have tied strings to Trump and want to control him, but he’s not going along with it. It seems like the only skill he may have in life is ensuring that people around him are loyal to him personally, and anybody who isn’t is gone. It doesn’t matter how good they are at their jobs otherwise, the number one thing that matters to him is loyalty. So, he’s surrounded by idiots, but idiots who are loyal. That means that people who are trying to manipulate him have to do it with flattery and praise rather than threats, browbeating, etc.

Because of that, I think the US might survive Trump in some way. It will be diminished, and it will take decades to build back the trust the rest of the world had in the US. (And I’m not talking about blind trust, I’m talking about basic things like “The US generally takes its treaties seriously” or “If we negotiate a trade deal with the US it won’t just ignore its side of the deal”.) I do think that some values, like freedom of speech, will survive the post-Trump US. But, it won’t be in a position to police those values around the world.

Quebec has a surprising number of English speakers, and their dialect is interesting.

A coup by whom? Nobody is benefiting from it.

I think we’re going to appreciate how stable it was soon.

We won’t know how much power Xi had until he has to step aside. Saying he’s no more powerful than Mao, who ruled for more than 30 years and who ruled until the day he died, is an interesting choice.

The US pivoted seamlessly from an imperial power that was using communism as a reason to overthrow democratically elected leaders, etc. to a cultural behemoth that used its economic power to bend laws in foreign countries so that they privileged US cultural exports and tech companies. It maintained a large military, but if you compare the 50s to the 80s in terms of how much and how that military was used to recent decades, there’s a huge difference.

The Korean war and Vietnam were huge conflicts. They were drafting military-age men to fight in those “wars”. By comparison, the first Iraq war was smaller, and waged with a very wide alliance of countries. The second one was bigger, but still significantly smaller than Vietnam or Korea.

I think the US as a cultural and economic world power could have lasted a very long time. Some countries grumbled about Google and Facebook making it hard for local news organizations. They didn’t do much to stop these companies, only some small fines on occasion. The newest wave of companies, the AI wave, seemed to be happening the same way, with all the major companies being American.

I think most people from rich countries would still prefer the US to be dominant than China. The US at least talks a good game when it comes to freedom of speech, etc. China doesn’t even try to pretend to care about that. But, the US is chaotic and belligerent, whereas China is mostly using soft power these days.

I don’t think that’s true. Yes, the Trump admin is horribly corrupt, but a collection of states just won in court, finding that Ticketmaster was an illegal monopoly. There’s a chance that after Trump goes away / dies that whoever replaces him will take monopoly enforcement seriously. It’s a popular bipartisan issue.

Meanwhile, in China, what President Xi wants, he gets. At the moment he doesn’t seem to be doing the Trump speed run of corruption and personal enrichment. But, rule of law in China is limited because ultimately it’s whatever Xi decides.

Privacy is basically non-existent in China. Sure, the US tries to spy on its citizens, but often the FBI is reduced to buying data on Americans from private companies because they can’t spy on people directly. There’s a lot of self-censorship in the US, and oligarchs are buying up media to restrict what views are published. But, that pales in comparison to the Great Firewall of China, and the massive internal censorship network.

And, keep in mind, that’s what China does to Chinese citizens. When they show up in Africa they definitely don’t treat Africans the same way Chinese people are treated. They are happy to help Chinese companies do corrupt deals that would never be permitted in China, but when it’s Africans that suffer they really don’t care. The US was hardly an angel around the world, but at least it made tiny steps towards trying to curb things a bit, like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Trump may be speed-running overt corruption and self dealing, but there are still remnants of the old system of laws and rules that occasionally stop some of the things he’s doing. Xi is not as obviously overtly corrupt, but the Chinese system has never been in any way democratic. It has always been one where the people at the top get to dictate how the people at the bottom live their lives. Personally, I’d prefer a fighting chance against a corrupt mob boss style dictator who hasn’t yet fully corrupted the entire system, vs. being ground under the boot heel of a “president for life” who maybe was making decisions that he thought was best for his country, but who isn’t even willing to allow protests or mockery, let alone the free communication of ideas.

It’s disappointing when these are cut off at the Canadian border. Canada is influenced by both the UK and the US, and has been drifting towards the US over recent decades. Plus, Canada has some really weird dialect areas like Newfoundland.

It would be interesting to see which terms drift north of the border, and which ones stop at the border. How hard is the border when it comes to dialects? Does the fact that people live most of their lives on one side of the border mean that the language doesn’t tend to drift across it? Or do people hear their neighbours talk and begin to adopt some terms? My guess would be that these days it’s more influenced by what’s on TV or on the Internet.

Apart from all the obvious US policy failures, there are also the less obvious ones.

The current admin has no understanding of soft power. The US spent decades building trust in the Voice of America. Sure, it was US propaganda in some ways, but it was often much more truthful about the facts than the local government news. The people who worked at VoA cared about being reporters and wanted to tell the truth. They had bureaus around the world broadcasting in local languages, and it cost almost nothing. It was old fashioned radio, a technology that’s a century old. Something that might have been useful in Iran where the Internet has been cut off for months now. So, Iran can now get their narrative out to all the other countries nearby, and the US has no way of correcting / countering the Iranian propaganda.

The US also used to know the value of diplomats. The Trump admin doesn’t think expertise matters. So, the Iran deals are being conducted by the President’s son in law, and a buddy of Trump’s who’s also a real estate developer. Unsurprisingly, they’re not succeeding. Ambassadors have always been a cushy job, often given to big donors or friends. But, Trump has made it so entire embassies are effectively useless.

The kinds of damage being done in just a couple of years will last for decades. I don’t know if the US will ever recover from this. Many of the problems probably won’t even show up for more than 5 years. Instead of a US military base in a foreign country having a lease that’s easy to renew, the next time it comes up there will be pushback or refusals.

The US dominated world sucked in a lot of ways, but at least it was stable. My guess is that the next few decades will be a lot less stable. Maybe the end result will be better. I’d love it if Europe stepped into the vacuum left by the US. They’re doing a lot of good things when it comes to environmental laws, privacy, anti-monopoly, etc. If it’s China that steps forward, I’m less confident it will be an improvement on the US. Other than those two, I don’t really see any other country or bloc of countries that could try to do the necessary work.

This is an interesting story because:

• The AI transcription was perfectly accurate, even with medical jargon
• Not having to take his own notes allowed him to spend more time with his patients, and to listen to them more closely
• He felt less stressed and less burned out as a result
• It wasn’t de-skilling him, at least not in the way we traditionally think of it

It’s basically a best case scenario for LLMs and it still made things worse. Taking notes felt like a tedious thing that kept him from doing his job. But, he discovered that taking notes was part of his job, and if he didn’t do it he couldn’t properly care for the patients.

Maybe once he realizes why it is that it was failing him, he’ll be able to adjust his process so that he can take advantage of the machine learning system. It might be as simple as looking over the results immediately after the consultation and scribbling things in the margins so he doesn’t forget the key takeaways. Or, maybe the old note-taking process is simply the best one and the LLM can’t offer anything to actually help.

Yeah, you get to skip the hard part of learning and jump right to the part where it starts to get fun.

Country music started to suck not when it became political, there was always political country music. It started to suck when it became the refuge for conservatives and no other viewpoints were allowed.

But there was a real hunger in a lot of parts of America for representation, and country music did offer a landscape that was talking a lot about old-fashioned values.

…

I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that country radio, which remains very corporate, does have a lock on who can become a superstar and who cannot. And so, if you get sort of an organized fan backlash against a musician over their politics. their career is done. And the most – the high-profile example of that that people will be familiar with is what happened to the Dixie Chicks during the Iraq War.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/how-country-music-went-conservative

Country music from before 1970 can be good. There are occasionally things post 1970 that are also good, but they’re much harder to find because it has become a style of music that caters to conservatives, and they expect it to glorify their values.

https://birthplaceofcountrymusic.org/both-kinds-of-music/

IMO, the main thing I’d want from D&D IRL is to know my health as a number, to frequently have that number at the absolute max, and any time there was something that reduced the number from the max I could either get a good night’s sleep and it would go away, or someone could say some magic words and any negative health conditions would go away.

If your characters are always getting 8 hours of sleep in your D&D campaigns, you might be D&Ding wrong.