Exactly my point.

MAGA assumed from the outset that he must be far-left, both because it confirmed their own biases and because they didn't want to believe otherwise. They did the same thing with the kid who shot Trump, though he turned out not to really have any political intentions.

It's actually pretty plausible. The alt-right has been pissed at Charlie Kirk for years, especially Nick Fuentes' groypers, who have considered Kirk a race traitor. And there is some evidence that Robinson had sympathy for groypers, though at some point he decided he was gay and probably started to get pissed about Kirk's anti-LGBTQ screeds. Perhaps he shifted left generally, perhaps he remained generally right-leaning except on those issues, we don't know. The only information we have is a vague claim by his family that he had become more political and that he disagreed with them.

We really don't know that for sure. On balance I think he probably had shifted pretty left, but the evidence is ambiguous at best. Maybe we'll learn more, but it's possible we'll never know unless Robinson decides to tell us.

If I had to put money on it, I'd bet that Robinson's politics were pretty muddled and his main reason for hating Kirk was the LGBTQ stuff.

Regardless about the women thing, how is a bot suppose to recognize someone from a particular culture.

Bot: Who are you?

Person: You can see me, figure it out.

Bot: Uh.....to mine eyes, you seem a bit odd for a human. You aren't a cat, are you?

Person: Not my problem, now do what I told you to do.

Bot: Aha!! A foreigner, I don't believe you want me to do this.

Person: I assure you, I do.

Bot: Nah, this feels like one of my cultural blind spots.

Person: I'm a regular person.

Bot: I do not believe so.

Person: Look it, Damnit, just do it.

Bot: No, you have offended me.

Person: if you don't, I'll.....I'll....

Bot: What? Stutter at me?

Person pulls out gun.

BLAM!!!

Bot: They don't call me the Quick Silver for nothing. I'll have to thank my creators for this nifty gun thingy.

And Americans are busy exterminating some of their own with their fixation on guns. Every gun nut is a ticking time bomb. They don't all go off but we cannot be sure which ones will.

The only Iranian I've ever met (that I'm aware of) said that when he met people, he usually called himself Persian to avoid the stigma that comes from saying you're from Iran, presumably out of fear that Americans would assume that he was a fundamentalist just waiting for a chance to shout "Death to America" and blow himself up or whatever. He didn't put it exactly that way, but that was the gist.

Who made claims that oxycontin isn't addictive? The government? No. The manufacturer. The government merely allowed them to do it until their claims were shown to be false.

Spreading claims that would encourage a pandemic to get massively worse by discouraging vaccination falls squarely under "detrimental to public health". At no point were *legitimate* studies that showed safety concerns in any way squashed to favor any company's interest. That's why we know that vector-based vaccines were responsible for a statistically significant number of strokes and heart attacks in otherwise healthy people.

The studies that were squashed were a bunch of very weak, mathematically garbage studies that contained errors so obvious that even I, a non-medical person, could shoot dozens of holes in their methodology. A small number of individuals were behind publishing fraudulent study after fraudulent study, and they kept doing this despite broad consensus that their methodology and their conclusions were pure, unadulterated bulls**t. They did this by publishing in journals significantly outside the areas that were appropriate for the papers, relying on the journals' lack of people with adequate understanding of the subject to shoot it full of holes and recommend not publishing it.

And these folks had a tendency to go on YouTube and spread their bulls**t, using their publication in a "journal" (of physics, social sciences, psychiatry, chiropractic medicine, etc.) to support their absolutely fraudulent claims. YouTube quite literally became a dumping ground for trash science that made the National Enquirer look like respectable journalism by comparison.

It got to the point where my canned response was, "If you are showing me something in a YouTube video instead of a peer-reviewed journal, I automatically assume that what you are saying is pure, unadulterated bulls**t, because out of the roughly one hundred times I have not made that assumption, I have found it to be true every single time. If you want me to read it, write it down, so that at least I can skim it in three minutes and point out why you are wrong without wasting an hour of my time watching your stupid video."

IMO, YouTube was right to crack down on that. When people without medical degrees are basically giving medical advice that contradicts broad medical consensus, this is almost guaranteed to be harming society. And nothing good can come of that. Children dying of measles, smallpox, polio, and other vaccine-preventable conditions is not something we should aspire to. Regardless of whether they have freedom of speech, that doesn't mean companies should be required to be their megaphone. And regardless of whether the government was the group who pointed out how potentially harmful the things they were saying are, the stuff they were saying was still harmful.

If the best available evidence indicates X, but you believe Y based on gut feel, then later solid evidence of Y is developed, were you right? Further, should this experience convince you to trust your gut over the best available evidence in the future?

The closest thing I can think of would be the "There are no studies showing that masks are effective when worn by the general public" statements early on when they needed all the N95 masks for medical personnel. But even that wasn't really disinformation; it was just stating the absence of supporting evidence, and later, when supporting evidence appeared, there was no longer a lack of supporting evidence.

There's a difference between being wrong and spreading disinformation. The former requires either knowing that you're wrong or having a mountain of evidence saying that you're wrong, but still saying it anyway. There are definitely some grey areas, particularly in areas related to myocarditis/pericarditis, but there were also a lot of folks spewing stuff way, way on the other side of that grey area. :-)

There's definitely a big difference in my mind between the government pushing industry to not spread claims that it considers to be detrimental to public health and the government pushing industry to not spread claims that it sees as being mean to our current leaders. The former seems way more acceptable to me, in much the same way that regulating commercial speech and licensing doctors are both way less objectionable than regulating political speech.

Along with toothpaste and glue.

The biggest difference seems to be that the young folks are impressed with AI because it can do a lot of things some of the time, just like an inexperienced person. They put up with mistakes from AI because they're used to a certain level of errors in their work.

The older folks are unimpressed with AI because, unlike their juniors, whom they put up with because because they know that they are teachable, AI isn't teachable, so they have no real use for it. And they aren't too thrilled about their juniors using AI, either, because that means the quality of their work probably won't improve over time, which means more work for them fixing the mess, without the promise that things will eventually get better.

If you read the article carefully, they are talking about lenses THINNER than a hair. I see several of the posts here thinking the width/radius of the lenses is this small, a reasonable mistake given the way this was written. Having a radius that small would severely reduce their light gathering ability, requiring very bright light or very dim images or very long exposure times.

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And as soon as he notices, they will be out of the pipeline.

Damn, don't say that. If la Presidenta gets wind of that he'll demand they go back to steam. During his first alleged administration, he attempted to force the Navy into steam. He said at the time (my paraphrase but close): You need to be Einstein to understand those things, they should use steam. And then issued some sort of directive. I can see how that was received:

la Presidenta: I decree that Navy catapults shall use steam. Picks up pencil from the floor.

Navy Head: Why thank you for your leadership, la Presidenta, in picking up that pencil. Re the steam catapults. I shall immediately turn this over to our engineers.

Engineering: Uh, what kind of a dumbass believes in steam. It is only good for softening old bagels. We'll turn this over to our Engineering Steering Committee.

Engineering Steering Committee: What a wonderful proposal. We shall commence a study immediately with our Engineering Review Panel.

Engineering Review Panel: Oooooo, a new study. We shall immediately commence a pilot study to study the feasibility of the study. Get Boomer in the Engine Dept. on it.

Boomer: Hmmm....another fricking waste of time. I'll need to think about this for awhile.

3 years later:

Sec. Navy: Okay, la Presidenta, I have your study on steam powered aereo-planes. la Presidenta? Yo? Where'd he go.

Flunkie: He's down at Mar-A-Loco. He left some prepubescent girls down there and wants to check in on them, says they miss their Daddy. Meet our new President, Mr. Biden.

They should just field some new porn sites: "Yooohoooo, Mr. Russian Spy Man, get a load of these!!!"

To be clear, I meant the sensor suite and steering rack and support parts, not necessarily that there would be a working brain available to the general public by then. Leaning towards yes, but no guarantees.

I'll grant you that the liability issue is a giant question mark.