Yup, a democratic system should be judged on its outcomes, not its structure. If the decisions taken by a democratic organization do not strongly align with the wishes of the large majority of its members, then it isn’t democratic. There are plenty such examples playing out today. Besides, in representative democracy voting at the various elections is not enough to achieve highly aligned outcomes. By the time you get to the ballot box a whole lot of the fundamental decisions have been made without your input. E.g. who the representatives candidates are and what their candidate platforms are. This is how you get to “all the choices suck” and “vote for the least bad option” scenarios. Meanwhile the prebaked decions that lead to these scenarios are going to benefit the interested groups that made them. The effect of voting at the ballot box in such scenarios then becomes providing consent to satisfy those interests.

E: And of course any leftist can explain why and how those interests arise and how they capture the representative democratic system. And how that produces loss of faith in the system.

The next version of Debian won’t be more ambient and pervasive. It would be just the same as it is today.

Yeah, op is clearly ignoring some very important differences that have actual, material consequences that are pretty obvious. The argument is that there’s no perfect solution therefore they’re all the same/similar. Which isn’t a great argument.

I think they mentioned 20-30 days in their original announcement.

Agreed on all accounts.

Uhm, I seem to recall that social media was actually pretty good in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The authors used AI models as the users. Could it be that their models have internalized the effects of the algorithms that fundamentally changed social media from what it used to be over a decade ago, and then be reproducing those effects in their experiments? Sounds like they’re treating models as if they’re humans, and they are not. Especially when it comes to changing behaviour based on changes in the environment, which is what they were testing by trying different algorithms and mitigation strategies.

Me neither. I had 2.

If you observe snapshots in time you’d understand what the facts are at that point in time. If you observe the trends at a point in time, you’d understand what things are likely to look at a future point in time. To me the interesting and informative bit is the trend and its short and long term projections. E.g. that it points to peak oil consumption within a couple of years and that it points to reduction of the leverage of OPEC and the US over China along any downstream effects.

anyway, you’d think republicans would be on board with renewables for exactly the same reasons as china. it makes economic and national security sense if that’s all you care about.

Not for them, and not for the horizon they care about. They’re (and the US as a whole) heavily invested in fossil fuels, so economically for them it makes the most sense to squeeze as much profit from those investments as possible.