Election reforms. IRV, public campaign financing, nix the electoral college, proportional representation, etc.

Is that even a close call? If Trump called me a shithead I’d wear that as a badge of honor. If Mr Rogers called me a disappointment I would question my life choices.

Prior to the 2016 election, I was hopeful that the freedom caucus and the rest of the far right was getting too crazy for the general public, and that its support would collapse leading to a bit of a normalization of politics.

Wishful thinking, in retrospect.

I heated up some soup that I made a while back and froze. I make some good soup!

A 0x0 px jpg (trying to get an old webcam working, unsuccessfully)

I live in the suburbs of a decently sized but not super large city in WI.

• Convenience store: 120 m
• Chain supermarket: 2.6 km
• Bus stop: 5 m
• Park: 450 m
• Big supermarket: 3.1km
• Library: 1.5 km
• Train station: 58.9 km :(

When ChatGPT first started to make waves, it was a significant step forward in the ability for AIs to sound like a person. There were new techniques being used to train language models, and it was unclear what the upper limits of these techniques were in terms of how “smart” of an AI they could produce. It may seem overly optimistic in retrospect, but at the time it was not that crazy to wonder whether the tools were on a direct path toward general AI. And so a lot of projects started up, both to leverage the tools as they actually were, and to leverage the speculated potential of what the tools might soon become.

Now we’ve gotten a better sense of what the limitations of these tools actually are. What the upper limits of where these techniques might lead are. But a lot of momentum remains. Projects that started up when the limits were unknown don’t just have the plug pulled the minute it seems like expectations aren’t matching reality. I mean, maybe some do. But most of the projects try to make the best of the tools as they are to keep the promises they made, for better or worse. And of course new ideas keep coming and new entrepreneurs want a piece of the pie.

Two spaces after periods.