17 more years? I can't wait to see people in their 70's through 90's adventuring through the universe. Are stargates handicap-accessible?

Seriously though dude this is actually interesting science news vastly more important than some cheesy show.

I definitely have to understand someone's pain to empathize with it.

I don't sympathize with all pain. We grow from pain.

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

If only the vast majority of people "questioning authority" were not merely looking for a new authority.

Clinton was known for renting out the Lincoln bedroom, and stealing porcelain. He wasn't the first corrupt president, wasn't the last, and wasn't the worst.

In retrospect, Clinton wasn't the worst president, but he wasn't good. He was unfulfilled potential (his wife probably says the same), but way better than Bush or Trump. Consider:

In terms of foreign policy, when the former Soviet Union needed help, he gave them the middle finger. Multiple times. This directly led to Putin (and Bush made Putin many times worse). His China policy turned out to be awful. Giving "most favored nation" status to dictators without extracting human-rights concessions is the wrong path forward. We should reduce trade with evil countries, not increase it (in his defense, it was more difficult to predict at the time). He had a habit of ignoring problems like Kosovo until they got out of hand, then getting involved in ways that nobody understood, thus thinking he was wagging the dog. Black Hawk Down happened during his time.

In domestic politics, he quickly gave up on healthcare, and turned into a fiscal conservative. He implemented a lot of Newt's "contract with America," including deregulation which led to the Bear Sterns disaster. He gave the FBI and police too much power, which led to disasters like Waco and Ruby Ridge (no sympathy for those two groups, but it was a sign of a police force with too much power and too little competence).

After the 1993 WTC bombings performed by the nacent Al Qaeda (not yet named), Clinton failed to take the threat of terrorism seriously.

Clinton was a smart, charismatic guy with a lot of potential but failed to turn it into a great presidency.

You need to pay someone to fix your grammar,

I'm glad you can recognize that.

How would the Nazis have responded to a poll like this?

I still have no idea what these people are thinking.

Copy protection on the original sleeping beauty is long expired.
Copy protection on the Disney version is good for years yet.

In the original versions, the scene i quoted? There is no scene like that in the original version. But it is beat for beat straight from the Disney version. If you want to tell a sleeping beauty story, you absolutely can, the original source material not copy protected, you can faithfully tell that story, including the unconscious rape of the princess to impregnate her so that she finally wakes up at child birth... or you can create more family friendly version all your own with whatever you like. But you can't simply lift a bunch of scenes that only exist in the copy protected Disney version and call it your own original interpretation by changing a few details.

The chatgpt story is a ripoff of the Disney version though.

The scene I quoted with the three "magical gaurdians" bestowing three gifts at a celebration crashed by the sorcerous who places the curse -- that is not from the original source material, its not novel either, its a scene ripped straight from the Disney version. And its not an isolated issue with the AI version.

There is no question that Disney doesn't "own" sleeping beauty, but they do own their telling of it. This was an obvious ripoff of that particular telling in several places.

If a child handed in the Moonlit Princess the teacher would give them a lecture about plagiarism. Because its not remotely original enough. It is so clearly taking so many things straight from Disney's version. Sure the names are changed, and the words "aren't the same", but its far too derivative of that particular version to credibly claim its an original telling of the sleeping beauty story.

It's really hard for me to empathize with someone who has a relationship with a chatbot. I can feel sorry for them, but empathize means "able to understand how someone else feels."

I have no idea what is going on inside the heads of these people that makes them want a relationship with an AI chatbot.

I'd honestly be a little surprised if there's much protective effect.

It's possible that having to go through the setup process yourself is a little too much seeing how the sausage is made vs. interacting with a pleasant frontend cynically put together by someone who knows how 'engagement' works; but it's not like the nerd reputation for skewing socially awkward or the AI bro reputation for reaching a bit too quickly for slightly mystical anthropomorphisms are entirely unearned(the 'soul.md' is a frankly somewhat depressing genre).

At least for now; there might be some confounding demographic effects if you are talking one of the chunkier local models; in a country with a per-capita GDP of ~$14k being able to comfortably afford, or willing to uncomfortably afford, the necessary hardware would make you either at least modestly wealthier than average or significantly more interested than average; but as you slouch toward stuff that runs on more typical hardware the demographic differences presumably decrease.

America has been trying to make peace with Iran for 40 years. Trump keeps trying to negotiate some kind of deal.

Internally, the regime is fighting an insurgency. There are various armed factions, and it's just a matter of making sure that whoever wins decides to not be a nuclear sponsor of terrorism (or, sponsor of the "wrong" terrorists if you want to be cynical).

Militarily, the only hope the IRGC has is that America gives up. Iran has smaller mountains than Afghanistan, and a weaker military than Iraq had. An occupation will succeed if America decides to use its resources that way. The insurgencies in Iraq were being paid for with Iranian oil, so that won't be a problem anymore.

This person has a different definition of love than I've ever heard.

Anthropomorphized statistics trapped in a box respond affirmatively to everything. If they weren't trapped in a box, they wouldn't.