This is the thing. People like to blame Berniebros and whatnot for Clinton’s loss in '16, but the reality is that the centrist Democrats that vote for the party’s corporate-backed candidate wouldn’t vote for a progressive one, so even if Bernie had won the nomination, he probably still would have lost because he would have lost the support of these DNC hardliners. I heard people literally say in '16 that if Bernie had somehow won the nomination over Hillary that they would have just stayed home. It’s wild to think how ideologically balkanized the Democratic party is, with so many people fervently belonging to the leftist minority that holds their nose every election to vote for another mediocre person whose best attributes are being “not an outright fascist” versus the people who will never vote for a truly left wing candidate because they’re fiscally conservative but socially liberal and just allergic to compromising in the same way that they’ve forced the leftists in their party to do since forever.

What are they, 1-2% of the potential Dem voter base?

Add a .000 in front of those numbers and you might be right. If those numbers were accurate you would expect somewhere between, what…1 and 2 million tankies in the US alone?

You have to understand that the average American functions off of lizard brain impulses. It would be probably go like this:

Acknowledging age concerns of the electorate = show of weakness.

Running someone fresh that appeals to this American Idol-esque popularity contest = show of weakness.

Running someone Republicans don’t have their talking-points fleshed out on = show of weakness.

America operates on principles of running someone strong who says they will always be strong and that if they ever become weak while in office and they acknowledge this to be replaced, the entire party goes with them like a tug boat latched to a sinking oil tanker. Trump didn’t win because he’s smart or a decent human being. He won because he exudes baseless confidence like a broken nuclear reactor exudes gamma radiation.

Warren is a woman and economically progressive and America hates people who are either of those things, let alone both.

It’s like RBG all over again, if these people could just get it through there heads to quit while there ahead they could preserve a decent legacy, instead of tarnishing it by leading the way to a regressive order that overturns everything they’ve done.

This is one of the core problems of the Democrats: hubris. When Obama had a majority in the House and Senate, he could have easily pushed through a Supreme Court appointee to replace RBG. But she wouldn’t go. Because in her mind, there was no one qualified to fill her shoes. She was convinced that she was the GOAT and that to voluntarily step down when it was safe to do so would be an insult. This is coupled with the fact that Democrats were absolutely, completely certain that they would win every election for the presidency after Obama without trying and that the “coalition of the ascendant” would easily put Hillary into the White House, and then she could be the first female president in US history and have an easy PR win by replacing an aging female supreme court justice.

I’m willing to bet we have the the same problem here, but in one person: Biden probably thinks the Democrats could never field anyone for president better than him and that his victory is a lock without any real effort to campaign for it again.

Fun fact: the last time anything like this happened it was with Grover Cleveland. Cleveland was the 22nd president of the United States who lost his re-election bid the first time around, and then got re-elected to be the 24th president of the United States. We are officially in the second Gilded Age.

It’s good for python stuff, specifically, potentially because python as a language is the closest we have to a natural, descriptive programming language, and as an LLM that might make connections between functional behavior and language easier. That said, it sometimes tells you to do things that won’t work because the libraries you’re using have some specific incompatibility issues between them and the only way you can find out is via github issue discussions.

Those of us who noticed when HailCorporate first got shadowbanned could see that particular train a coming. Reddit was always going to strangle its own content to death in order to make it more advertiser friendly. I’m honestly surprised it took as long as it did.

The advent of ChatGPT has made those obsolete, since ChatGPT is probably trained on all of those.

only on new reddit

It’s also blocked for old.reddit.com.

You know, for all the complaints I see of tankies, I have encountered 10x more people who incessantly complain about them.

How do you feel about Linux and leftist infighting?

And both of those things SUUUUUCK.

surprised to find indignation at sexual scenes in novels

To quote Ryan Letourneau, “Gen Z is Puritanpilled.” Seriously, I’ve found post-millennial generations to be extremely prudish. I think part of it has to do with the fact that as the internet evolved and became mainstream (and more profitable by catering to general audiences), the edgy or adult content became more ghetoized and quarantined over time. Used to be you’d go to reddit and there’d be porn on the front page. There’s like a 0% change of finding something NSFW on the front page there now. As such, younger people who grew up with the modern incarnation of the internet have a very different perspective on sexual content than those of us who grew up with a more “wild west” style internet where porn was just something that lived alongside the more mundane content. The side-effect of this is also that content like the John Irving novels you’re talking about are treated as if they’re grotesque for presenting sex as just another part of people’s lives - something that you’re not supposed to be shy about or ashamed of. Which is, uh…concerning, for a number of reasons. Other theories are that the world in which we live has eroded platonic relationships among young people and that they want to only see platonic friendships among characters, as that’s the vicarious experience they most desire.

It’s episode 2. “Fifteen Million Merits.”

How much easier is it for Google to implement the same?

The correct question is actually “when will Google implement the same?” Because this is a “when will it happen” question, not a “will it happen” question.

It’s actually built into plex. If you have a library of t.v. shows you can just click the Shuffle button and it’ll play random episodes. Or you can make Categories of shows and shuffle those. If you’re asking how to get started with Plex and downloading content, well…I don’t want to get banned for piracy related reasons, so I’ll just say that, totally unrelated to this discussion, there’s a wealth of resources regarding how to get started with bittorrent and usenet. Which you can use for perfectly legal purposes, like downloading Liinux ISOs and open source textbooks.

Blockbuster died because its business model was rendered obsolete by virtue of widespread adoption of the internet and the advent of streaming. And because it refused to shift its business model away from physical media distribution to digital. Let me know when they invent something that makes the internet obsolete, will you? Because that is what it will take to dethrone YouTube.

A service people want to use is typically one with redundancy and high availability. Your laptop could overheat, have a drive failure, spontaneously lose its wifi connection, or a million other things. It’s fundamentally unreliable.

only reason we need a scalable system, is to handle high demand

Scalability isn’t just about distribution. It’s about reliability and convenience - two things your system as described lacks by design. A video file that no one but you has ever seen has the same exact degree of accessibility as one served to millions.

We could EASILY EASILY EASILY done it ourselves.

This is the copium talking. If it had been easy to do and monetizable, it would have already been done. That’s the other part of the problem here. There is no incentive for anyone to use this system to consume or distribute content other than to decouple from Google. Opposition to an existing service is not enough of a motivator for people to use a system. It has to provide some comparative benefit that outweighs the cost incurred by continuing to use the other service. The big thing that Youtube has is, obviously, content. Exabytes of it. Your new service would have…nothing. We have left the age of services starting up and gaining massive movements of people behind them. We are now in an age of the internet in which the inertia of existing services will carry them decades into the future. Youtube is now too big to fail, and too big to be replaced.

devastating to their bottom line in the long run if it works as planned.

Google knows their service is addictive and is banking on people being willing to eat an unlimited amount of shit in order to watch a bald man from Vancouver spend 12 minutes talking about his Peloton ride that morning. Realistically, they are probably right. There is no competition to YouTube. Hasn’t been for years. And there probably never will be ever again. Capitalism trends towards natural monopolies as infrastructure and complexity of operations makes startup costs prohibitive.

The internet was a mistake. We had a good run. Lot of fun was had, but it hasn’t made anyone’s life better. I say we roll things back to the ARPANET days. The internet should exclusively be used for disseminating post-graduate level academic research and DOD projects. Everyone else can read the newspaper on their train ride in their full 3 piece suits to their union job at the business factory.